A Note From the Editor
I want you to read to me
so that I can begin to understand.
I will eat each of your words dipped in smoke
and inhale.
I will kiss you on exhales, each transference a little less
sharp for having come through me.
You can not stop me or frighten me with
your artfully arranged ambivalence anymore.
You've showed your hand.
I think you meant to.
Last One in the Pack
I can almost go
an entire day without putting
you between my lips.
Almost.
I can forget in the 7000
menial tasks of any moment
that my body and brain
need you or it gets grumpy.
So when I remember you exist,
I smile.
I pull you out and light you up
and that first draw,
oh,
it gets me every time.
Rest between my fingertips.
Latch onto my hair.
Slide around my tongue,
my throat,
right into my lungs,
and back again.
Inhales are never as slow
as I'd like them to be,
intend them to be,
but that exhale,
it's years in a moment.
Don’t you get fiery with me,
as my breath draws you closer.
I know how you race yourself
to the end.
Don’t fret.
I’ll toss you away,
but I always come back.
I need to.
Upon Waking (Dreams pt. 4)
“Just let me hold it.
We’ll see if it fits in my hand,
if I can coax glass of shifting sand,”
he said.
And with a wet thud and a hard bounce off
of doctor’s-office-clean, clinically pristine kitchen tiles,
he dropped my goddamn heart
and I became a cliche.
He wrote me as sunshine from light years away.
I brightened and let him.
When icicles dream of heat,
you listen.
I mistook his melting for emotion,
crossed atmospheres in a fiery rush
to get close enough to press a cold blush
into my boiling surface.
I had to.
He had asked.
I squeezed my collective stardust
into the room next to his igloo,
six centimeters I could have burned through,
but I could see him expanding into a puddle,
his limbs trembling outwards,
slithering away from the sun he’d turned me into.
So I set the dimmer on my shimmer.
Spoke more softly than I’d been born to,
started eating myself to keep him solid, shiny, new,
and woke up hungry.
I creeped into the hallway,
bare feet splashing through melted dreams,
toes catching on the Van Gogh swirls
leaking through his closed door.
Blues, golds, a few reds pooling on the floor,
oils and inks started crawling up my leg hair.
Two palettes floated by.
I know one used to be mine.
I yawned,
blinked the morning off of each eyelash,
and sighed loudly enough that lightning flashed
through the crack in his doorway.
“You woke me up,” he accused,
grumbling and not quite awake.
And for the first time since
my atmospheric relocation,
I saw just how much of himself
had melted in my lucid hands.
“I’m sorry; I love you,”
someone said.
He might have closed the door again.
I don’t know.
I flew away before I forgot
what I looked like glinting through his crystals,
back when we created prisms
dreaming together.
Sam Ferrante is a poet, editor, and facilitator born on Long Island, college-fed in Western New York and Paris, and then poetically raised in Buffalo, NY, Ireland, and Australia. A former member of the Pure Ink Poetry team in Buffalo and a regular competitor in Dublin's Slam Sunday, Sam was a Co-Creative Producer at Melbourne-based Slamalamadingdong in addition to serving as a Melbourne Spoken Word board member and a founding facilitator of the Melbourne Spoken Word Workshop. Sam has been published in Ghost City Review, Blowing Raspberries, and The Dirty Thirty Anthology. She has been privileged to feature at The Owl & Cat Sessions, The Dan O’Connell Hotel, La Mama Poetica, Girls on Key, and White Night 2016, among others. She was also the founding Editor for online magazine,CrowdInk. Her debut book of poetry, Pick Me Up, got rave reviews from her Mom.