Elevated into the high rafters of heat,

TBR pays homage to the last of the Beats-poet Gary Snyder, who turns 95!

After dinner I hear the music of the ceremony  across the street.

You board another train, but it’s another season, maybe even another year. You travel quietly. Pairs of eyes sit across in varying degrees of kindness.

Plant mother to plant mother, I get it The sun shines on, dutiful and tired And I am tempted to break

On Hamlet’s flute old bones of Elsinore shook and shuckered up the graves they died and dyed the earth in.

The dead mattered more than the living.  One night, the fire alarm didn’t go off.

And the rain swept in a little fast for her liking but there was no helping it was there And nobody picked up the phone when she called

Air flavored like Fralinger’s             Saltwater Taffy my grandparents sent             from up north: vanilla,

Is our fear of emptiness a fear of being or non-being? We wake in a house of galaxies

Contemplative jazz reveals the intricacies of human hearts without being overly dramatic, or sappy.

Four poems from Bhaswati Ghosh's collection Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen.

You drown each taco in a habanero sauce that alarming shade of orange exclusively reserved for traffic

Your terrific postcard—that bloke swinging her / hips high to the harmonica, swindling / p.m. to a.m. My masala and sugar steep between / my thighs.

a boy had become pinned between a screen and a hard place            since then I only ever listened with one ear so I could hear it coming

Desire coats the room, his scorching tongue licks her dainty neck. Her wax begins to wither—blistering from an unwavering torch. Too consumed in blazing fervor.

Consider a distance measured in black wires or one in buoys, their slow dissonant arcs of red over the water.

I’m letting fish and turtles Swim to the edges of this coastal river

Ours was a space, gray amoebic and moss-soft.

The last time we met, he read me a line about how life is good though not fair.