MAD & MOONLY
SUMMER 2018
EKA SAVAJOL
TRAIN POEMS FOR TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
NJ transit NY bound
you’ve got a voice of good vibrations
& I’ve got a ticket to ride and a tourist smile
this young guy’s decked out in Ralph Lauren
got jordans in baby size
I’ve got a dying phone in my pocket I can hear you whimper from
& you’re cold on a balcony going west
people say plays on words have to mean something
but it’s hard finding meaning
finding hardness in meaning
finding hardness, no meaning
not meaning to offend
your pirate smile of a tiny dancer in the eye of a white maggot in an apple
the maggot topples down towers,
Godzilla,
fighting Wall Street by making it whiter.
I’ve made the biggest mistake of telling you I’d get there by midnight
but I’m sat in a pumpkin
petting rats that once were horses
calling the birds “fine young men”
hearing them sing from
snowy balconies in a clouded red nighttime.
NY train New Haven bound
with my stomach digesting itself
& my socks soaked in rat juice and slush,
I leave Blue Roses at ground zero
I leave Blue Roses in a flat space among a crowded sky
I leave Blue Roses backwards and forwards
I leave Blue Roses leftover blue roses of soft bruises along the neck
I leave Blue Roses softly, telling Blue Roses that my field will be empty until monday blue roses,
until monday red rains
I leave Blue Roses till Monday.
OTTAVIA PALUCH
what colour is this brick road of ours?
When you begin
it is where this
colourless brick road originated.
Stained like tea, the world is its biscuit.
It was never truly yellow,
a fact we unearthed long ago, for
nothing has or ever will be so
pure.
Now you stood ever so vulnerable on this said road and
as your feet dug into the cracks in every expiring brick
that existed because of my shortcomings
your brain subconsciously filled the void
while my pencil filled in the colour that longed to exist
and like you, it pretended to belong.
I'm never sure if it does.
later in the ashes of life’s uncomfortable remains
you speak about
both wanting and needing to learn how to slow down,
about craving the patience to
appreciate the now
about wanting a newspaper world
where everything is ink and paper, no blemishes,
no colour
because even in black and white
there is always too much grey
nearing the end of the road, the cracks in its brick are almost seismic
and we separate as you begin to decipher the colours of the sky.
Fearing you’ll never find the technicolour city
we look instead towards how frail the polychromatic everything
has become
in our presence.
Eka Savajol has won multiple awards for his slam poetry, and co-founded a student-run theatre company. He draws inspiration from Marsha P. Johnson, worms, and the antics of physicist, Richard Feynman. Eka can usually be found at the Walgreens closest to his home in Houston, Texas, buying Toblerone bars.
Ottavia Paluch is currently fourteen years old and lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. She enjoys watching hockey, scrolling through Twitter, and trying to look intelligent by listening to Radiohead, U2 and other lovely alternative rock bands. Her work is published in Body Without Organs and forthcoming in Navigating The Maze's 2018 poetry anthology.