New  Phoenix Now Issue 2

Phoenix Now Issue 1

 Free fantastic, student-created magazine

Group Poem by: Jason Kolodzyk Brandon Haut Tasha Levy Hollerup Richard Plevak III Elise Boucher

“Narcissistic_culture.com”

1. He writes his own news with large, sullen eyes that swallow

whole towns, larger than lives,

    And blends what he “knows” with the things that he thinks through the

headlines and news-feeds and patterns of ink.
But it is nothing, in the scheme of things. Nothing that his sullen eyes
have seen and nothing that his clouded ears have heard.

That make him write with such fervor,

Such passion as the candle burns down to dim.
2. She smells his passion, inhaling fumes from the soaked, bleeding coffee filter,
discarded with his crumbled thoughts, his day’s work undone.
What did it all amount to?  They, the people, read him, but, she thinks,
do they hear his empathic scream?  Is it worth listening to?

And yet, she sits–day in, day out, scratching notes, messages, tapping keys,

Focusing on the dripping clock, on her taxi and her fiancée. And she thinks,

Is this the only place I’ll go? Or can I upturn the shredded paper soil

and late-night roots, and grow beyond the page’s fog?

3.  They stumble in circles like whirlpools, pulling the mists behind, eyes clouded and cold
and drowning in the ice they make, the shards that stab their hearts
Life-force dripping into the soft snow forms the words of their struggle:
This cycle will not end
It will be born again with you, with another, unknown
Pain and love will always be visible to us
    It is the pattern that pulls them together, threatening to tear them apart– again

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