Jon Weaver paints

Arches National Park - Utah

J.J. Campbell writes

shoulders

i'm not sure 
why i find the
bare shoulders
of a woman so
damn sexy

i'm sure there's
some horrific
chapter from
my childhood
to blame

so, to the
amazing
black woman
wondering why
the fuck i was
lost in a stare
today at the
grocery store

now you know

(shoulders by  Santiago Carbonell)

Christopher Hopkins writes

Renaming stars

A sea of ancient deity.

The forever evolving things.
Our sea of burning dust.

       We named them as gods
       and from their place we found our path.

While the whitening eye of the moon
feels its way,
touches of the dead light falls on all the living.
How some buds flower by the moon.
Others wait for the wash of morning
to bring their colours out,
when Nyx has been forgotten,
and the stars have been renamed as other things.
       The forever evolving things.

These flashes of days,
this very moment,
hurtle, out into space,
light years away.

One day,
               maybe we could catch them up,
running faster than light can take,
and walk amongst the days again.
To look at ourselves,
             by the light of stars and moon.
             Wonder how we found our way,
             by the forever evolving things.

How we didn't even know their names.

Light Blue Starscape -- Kenneth Ober

Rik George writes

Flesh and Conceits

Elizabethan poets wrote their rhymes
to catalog their women’s charms
in strained conceits, or else the times
produced strange women, wigged with wire,
with jeweled lips and ivoried arms,
cold robots to set a man afire.
I prefer your flesh to take to bed
in all its humanity. Warm skin
beats ivory; jeweled kisses wear
the lips away. I like your head
with hair, not wires. Crescendoing
to spill my seed in your warm place
I glory in your hips’ wild swing
and the rush of blood that flushes your face.

  -- Sorayama Hajime