Amaryllis Holloway-Turman

Candle of Hope

Response

Hope by Aimee Fullman

Inspiration piece

an echooooooing call
that lights a path through darkness
until morning comes

Piercing Eye

By Amaryllis Holloway-Turman

Response Piece

Direct Gaze

By Kathleen Jordan

Inspiration piece

Face to face, eye to eye, direct gaze

Not into a monitor, or a cell phone but in real time real space

Interactive and revealing. The eye. The face. The position of the hands

The body posture. The tone. The choice of topic spontaneous

Unplanned, unscripted, direct gaze

Face to Face. Real contact.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Lauren Flax

Inspiration Piece

Those Eyes

Amaryllis Holloway

Response Piece

Those eyes

brilliant colors painted on the back of a butterfly

Those eyes should not move me but they do

Those eyes

seem to pierce my soul with the precision of a surgical steel blade

Those eyes, like a mirror, reflecting

but instead of seeing my image, there are my deepest secrets

Startled and embarrassed, I scan the crowd

realizing that I am the only one who can see

Those eyes openly mock me

Is it an illusion? Is it real?

Is my overactive imagination pairing with a guilty conscious to condemn me for years of well kept secrets

As I lay down to sleep in my dream I still can see

those eyes.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

David Turman

Response Piece

Curtaneous
© KJ Hannah Greenberg

Inspiration Piece

 
Of, or relating to the cursory; splinters of chits.
 
As sensible as growing out a hangnail, as piling up vacant utilities,
Maybe, as spectacularly funicular as Medusian tresses on a bad hair day.
 
Such times, as when buses launched ad campaigns, all available rocket thrusters
Readied different sorts of freedoms, hungered enemies, bothered civilians.
The riots’ eyewitnesses saw more than concrete, glass, steel, tract housing, collapse.
 
Those afterblast’s gaping grimaces humbled, then mortified, our pilots,
Defanged even those weaponed action figures, whose sartorial particulars meant business.
In an era when politicos grew from chemical vats, ever glowing with uranium, curium, berkelium,
Observers testified that the resultant red glare, at dawn, yet showed bombs bursting.
 
Suddenly, leaders’ plastic rictuses seemed more troublesome than could be accounted
By mere innocent, greedy floundering; people began to measure relative radioactivity.
In the rarified air of extreme contamination, stubborn galactic orbits stopped mattering.
Other worlds’ invasions could occur or not, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Spacers would, forevermore, be considered conquerors non gratis as long as locals stood trial.
 
Proportion to their propensity for dancing away cultures, for frittering over genocide,
Monsters no longer enjoyed the hospitality of human fear;
Atomic catastrophes, ruined farmlands, additional remote apocalypses required
That unfriendly “visitors,” as such, were ignored, processed like commonplace waste.
Human response to chaos is finite; numbness sets in after handfuls of continents ash.
Fermented opinions, like fallout’s winds, assure mutual destruction, leave no extra sentiment.
 
Survivors speak of creation, both because it’s nice to recount pleasntries, plus
Children ask after histories. Youth remains disgruntled with fancied narratives.
Even smaller, isolated units, every single hydromel dribbled to attract fey folk,
Risk ridicule in order to march, with words, against social injustice, imaged or otherwise.
Also, most important, evolving, post-holocaust sorts fall to apoplexy, to total loss of reason
Beyond their fabulous forecasts. The whole gets trampled upon by the remnants.
Defense structures’ dust, relative to magics performed by cultural genies, stays superficial.