The Zingara Project

Tag: Constellations

  • Predictable Patterns by Laurinda Lind

    I can’t stay centered on the winter solstice
    even in its most ancient aspect and certainly
    not its spendthrift one but when I was young,
    boxes of attic bulbs determined December

    along with trees that don’t belong inside
    and won’t stay up, but mean it isn’t always
    going to be this dark and cold, we’ll see
    ground again without snow. After years

    of take-apart trees and malevolent demented
    light strings I have failed in the Christmas
    category, either neglecting the tree till
    it shredded to the touch in April and could

    be scattered in the yard over leaves I never
    raked in the fall, or not putting one up at all
    so my daughter would come home from
    college and sigh and put it up herself, and

    once opened all my CDs. Stuck them on
    the branches where they shone silver like
    a Jetsons tree, assuming they would still
    have trees in that century, that the seasons

    will mean something after this terrible time
    where we are now, this dark we are not
    sure will take us through to spring, no
    matter how much tinsel we throw to it.
    —

    Laurinda Lind’s poems are in Another Chicago Magazine, Blue Earth Review, Blueline, Comstock Review, Constellations, Main Street Rag, and Paterson Literary Review; also anthologies Visiting Bob [Dylan] (New Rivers) and AFTERMATH (Radix). In 2018, she won the Keats-Shelley Prize for adult poetry and the New York State Fair poetry competition.

  • Solitude by Vinita Agrawal

    In slumber I am not alone.
    Awake, I am.

    In a crowd, I am stranded
    In solitude, found.

    People meet and mix
    They have reasons.

    My reasons are dead.
    I stretch empty from sky to earth.

    I am a sliver of light
    trapped between closed doors.

    Air that cannot be breached
    and moulded into a hug.

    In myself, I am all that is lost
    I am everything that needs to be said.

    —

    Author of two poetry books – Words Not Spoken and The Longest Pleasure, Vinita is a Mumbai, India based, award winning poet and writer. Her second manuscript was selected for publication by Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, USA. Her poems have appeared in Asiancha, Constellations, The Fox Chase Review, Pea River Journal, Open Road Review, Stockholm Literary Review, Poetry Pacific and over a 100 other national and international journals.  She was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2011, awarded first prize in the Wordweavers Contest 2014, commendation prize in the All India Poetry Competition 2014 and won the 2014 Hour of Writes Contest thrice.