Written Submissions

We are missing a few electronic submissions, but will hopefully have them posted before the 19th.

You will critique submissions #1-47 and if you are missing a number, please check back for it later.

Thank you SO much. If there is a problem with anything related to the website, etc. Please e-mail us.

riverbendreview@yahoo.com

ALSO, for the calendar to the right, the GREY days have a submission, and the WHITE days do not have submissions yet, but will soon. Please check THIS post for updates. Any questions?

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Lullaby

 
Lay your sleeping head, my love, 
Human on my faithless arm; 
Time and fevers burn away 
Individual beauty from 
Thoughtful children, and the grave 
Proves the child ephemeral: 
But in my arms till break of day 
Let the living creature lie, 
Mortal, guilty, but to me 
The entirely beautiful. 
  
Soul and body have no bounds: 
To lovers as they lie upon 
Her tolerant enchanted slope 
In their ordinary swoon, 
Grave the vision Venus sends 
Of supernatural sympathy, 
Universal love and hope; 
While an abstract insight wakes 
Among the glaciers and the rocks 
The hermit's carnal ecstasy. 
  
Certainty, fidelity 
On the stroke of midnight pass 
Like vibrations of a bell 
And fashionable madmen raise 
Their pedantic boring cry: 
Every farthing of the cost, 
All the dreaded cards foretell, 
Shall be paid, but from this night 
Not a whisper, not a thought, 
Not a kiss nor look be lost. 
  
Beauty, midnight, vision dies: 
Let the winds of dawn that blow 
Softly round your dreaming head 
Such a day of welcome show 
Eye and knocking heart may bless, 
Find our mortal world enough; 
Noons of dryness find you fed 
By the involuntary powers, 
Nights of insult let you pass 
Watched by...

Life Imitating Art

Beijing Talks stalled. Chinese fire drill? Or greatest threat to national security ever? You decide. Next on FOX News.

The audio from the television set harmonized with the laboring of the air-conditioning compressor to form a slow, dull vibration. Entropy was the order of the day- the inevitable decay of order into chaos. Distinct speech was unrecognizable. The righteous indignation of the intellectuals-for-hire was reduced to so much white noise, electronic detritus. Joseph Kessler saw the image on the screen, now distorted beyond all recognition, reflected at the bottom of what remained of a gin and tonic. As he sat there, Bogart-esque in his meditations, he could feel every nerve, every synapse even, synchronize with this vibration. He would have been in Nirvana, but for the blinding headache and deepening sense of existential angst.

“So, what do you want your last words to be?” His reverie ended with all the abruptness of a defibrillator-terminated near death experience. Having reentered the here-and-now, Kessler was greeted by Julia Kaczynski- long time acquaintance and source of sexual frustration. Her voice was tinged with the kind of affected, world-weary cynicism worthy of any film noire femme fatale.

“What...

Untitled

Doom

The final war ends with one last resound,

When stars and the earth together collide.

Soldiers without names lie dead on the ground

With naught but battle hot blades at their sides.

The King, now dethroned, will evil replace

With dissension marked by his scaled skin.

And in vengeance, death will the earth deface,

For forced existence as the spawn of sin.

If bards and fools left hold freedom of tongue

Their lyrics will be of the darkest sort

A worser tale than we from Eden flung

Mankind’s dreaded fate will be their report:

“The Kingdom of Heaven is split in twain,

Death and destruction are all that remain.”

Jealousy

My hands they burn

with clenched-fist love

rivulets of bloodlust

slipping through my fingers

from moondrunk half-crescents,

like my precariously hoarded heart,

and my self-proscribed rationality

      -all lost in the haze

      of trauma-induced incapacitation.

Bound

Were you the leaping flame,

Winding insidiously into the essence, the weakness

The tinder heart

Every movement silhouetted, echoed, shaded

A delayed caress

The bright aching burning center of the fire

Deepening the Shadow: that wavering emptiness.

Be it the burning wick, or the pure funeral pyre,

Be it the forest fire or the desolation of a crumbling home

The spontaneously combusted lover

Burning up and burning down in fury, love

Or absence thereof:

Frustration ignited.

One step away, one behind

Shadows exist only in the wake of truer things

Epitomizing the burnt out hollow, the used thing

Essential and ignored

A shadow makes it real, grounding it,

The third dimension, self-sacrifice.

Twisting and curling

Smoke spiraling into existence

Jut as incidental

As

Me

Temple

Empty avenues stand before me

Their height s and depths all open-

Every step a measure in Grace.

“O how the mighty have fallen”

Who now are so declined.