Better Than Starbucks
Poetry and Fiction Journal
. . . if you love diversity and creative writing in any and every form, then you’re in the right place . . .
May 2022
Vol VII No II
Published quarterly:
February, May, August,
and November.
International Poetry
Featured
A Requiem in a Time of War
Do you hear them falling?
Do you feel as if the ground is trembling? It should —
the weight of each blood drop should shake the very earth.
Alas, the proof of this follia is nothing so grand, which we might heed; it is dust.
Dust of all we built, dust of all our dreams.
Do you hear them falling?
Open your eyes; these are not soldiers who fight.
They are the people of this land, held by honour and a fierce, fierce pride.
Maybe they are soldiers, after all.
Do you hear them falling?
They do not march to war; they wait, quiet, teeth bared at the dark.
Defiance, an impossible defiance, as the wind carries upward
that same old war-song of histories forgotten (who wants to live forever anyway),
their final revolutionary étude.
And we,
we, who are witness,
are helpless but to sing our own meagre lament, this dirge
of endless sorrow and endless triumph,
a litany of tales to break your heart.
War is without victor.
We never pray to kind gods
and war is ever without victor.
Ribhav Thakur is an amateur Indian poet and verse is his way of expressing emotions too complex for mere prose. His credentials in English Literature are roughly none, as opposed to his qualifications in other fields, which are far more exact in their nihility.
Ripple
with thanks to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, the Grateful Dead, and Haim Watzman
“And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
Genesis 1:2
I was walking
On the wooden footbridge
Over the marshes
In the Hula Nature Reserve
One late-summer Friday morning
When I looked down and saw a
Ripple in still water.
I was astonished.
What, I wondered, could it be?
What could produce a
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow?
I pondered the question.
It must, I reckoned, be
The spirit of God
Moving upon the face of the water.
What else could it be,
Here,
In the African-Syrian Rift,
The crack in the Earth
Into which the Heavens
Pour their secrets,
And now,
In the month of Elul,
When the King is in the field
And the Divine Presence is accessible
To all who yearn to be touched by It?
I trembled in awe.
And a turtle poked his head up
From under the water
And grinned.
First published in Nine Mile Magazine.
Pesach Rotem was born and raised in New York and now lives in Yodfat, Israel. His poem “Professor Hofstadter’s Brain” was nominated for a Best of the Net Award.
Dublin ’16
I
Before they add the 3
I catch a comedy
at the Olympia Theatre.
Shun Row 1 for 2
in hopes of evading notice.
Avoiding participation.
But night of, the seat in front
of mine remains unfilled.
So our eyes still meet.
II
By the time I detect
my shadow, we are across
the street from my hotel.
I speed up. So does he.
Gravel crackles beneath our
feet. Through glass, security
catches my eye; straightens.
Sweeps me in as I approach,
shuts the door after me
without hesitation.
We exchange nods.
III
Bedside, a pair of cheap
foam earplugs in neon yellow.
I pick one up; flatten it between
my index finger and thumb.
It springs back, swells with
drunken revelry beyond
the window. I plug my ears
and close my eyes.
Allison Thung is a writer from Singapore. She writes so she can remember and forget. Her poetry has been published in Eunoia Review, Better Than Starbucks, and The Drabble. Website: www.allisonthung.com.
The End of Summer
The smell of smoke and acid thins
on the wind as warm breezes
blow softly, taking them away,
from the desert.
Far away to sea.
The lost spoils of war lie
scattered all around. Buried in the
shifting sands. Lives shattered
wait in hope for a better
day. It will surely
come our way.
A child of the new generation
that yearns to hold onto this new
thing yet undefined looks up at
the skies and smiles.
He knows.
First published in Dove Tales.
Shirani Rajapakse is an award-winning Sri Lankan poet and short story writer. Rajapakse’s work appears in Litro, Silver Birch, Linnet’s Wings, Mascara, Moving Worlds, Berfrois, Buddhist Poetry, and About Place.
The last of what we will take
We’d woken up a thousand times, reeling from the stench of the future,
and travelled to meet our absence there, like old friends,
part a personal folklore missing limbs for floral embellishments
and mustard yellow tincture for open gashes,
part the dreamy soot of some land we swore we never came from,
yet which sharpened the apices of our faces.
And we would return
with beaded beetle heads for irises, drowning as they rose, the only living
things among the crusty fossils
of (what had been) our animorphic [sic] existence.
And we would remind ourselves
the last of what we will write (and take) of one another:
remembering is when you canoe into the hollowed clavicle of a leaking
memory, shutting the whistling air in
with the vacuous immensity of your longing, a mercenary vessel phasing
in and out as humans do, between deaths,
and sealed passageways.
Kalyani Bindu is an Indian writer and researcher, and author of Two Moviegoers. Her poems and essays have appeared in Better Than Starbucks, Ethos Literary Journal, New Asian Writing, Variant Literature Journal, Madras Courier, Muse India, Modern Literature, and others.
