When Three is Better than One!

Audiences tend to extoll the solo performance by a creative person and celebrate that accomplishment.  However, there are times when a group built on individual creativity comes together to provide a different and intriguing experience.  So, as summer starts to stretch its legs, we thought three would be better than one!

Baker/Miller/Lalit Murali

Enjoy the poems from Ethan, Joyce and Nitin.

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Ethan Baker:

Black Hole Language

Contained in alabaster, wrapped

with humming

glass sheath, words

diminish from molasses

tongue, falling

dead to sleeping

ear as the white

noise corrupts

the echo, exhaling

fragility. 

Ethan Baker (photo provided)

Ethan Baker graduated cum laude from California State University, Long Beach in 2014 with a degree in English: Creative Writing and Literature. His work has appeared in the student-run magazine called the Union Weekly and in aaduna’s spring 2017 issue. In his spare time, he writes for his own blog: ethanabliterature.wordpress.com. 

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Joyce Miller:

‘i rami’

A noseeum landed on a word on a screen on a poem:

‘branches’ lay underneath.

Tinsel winged, its thin sturdy body remained

immoveable under assault by breath.

Determined, with a leaf

of paper, I sloughed it off

to a room of students alighting

on Italian exams with dark pens,

and foreign-winged words.

Joyce Miller (photo provided)

Joyce Miller received her Master’s degree in Italian Studies from The Ohio State University.  Her fiction and nonfiction work have won awards, and she received first-runner up citation for a novel in the Faulkner-Wisdom literary competition of 2011.  Her fiction has been published in Ohio Voices and aaduna (summer 2014 issue.)  

***

Nitin Lalit Murali:

Fate

He was a teetotaler, but his wife drank,

now and then, a little gin to relax her

after a hectic day, counseling teenagers with

existential problems, unnecessary, unwarranted,

undying, that one day they went to a party
with their 12-year-old, and she was a little tipsy,
but he kept his discipline, and as he drove back,
passing winding curve after curve, the son
asking questions, the wife’s laughter making
him smile, he kept his discipline, but
reality often pivots the rules we make like a
top spinning, a car spinning after a truck
nicked the edge, memories spinning, lives loved
slipping, he woke up, his life spinning,
spiraling down, and moments
paused for a long sequence,
and a new cycle began, watching everything
he had coast in the grey and touch
the blue, cold river,
his discipline slipping, and he visited a shrine,
his sanity slipping, hoping to look for the
dead still waltzing, walking, waiting,
but found nothing, no Cadmean victory,
and red droplets of anguish, turned a fiery
orange, and he lost his discipline, relationships
with widows, their children unattended to,
uncared for, flings with married women,
their husbands too old and prosperous,
and then finally a glass, no…two…three…
four…ten glasses of gin each day, justifying
it with the nostalgia of that last moment with her,
walking down winding curve after curve,
haggardly, horribly scarred by the pockmarks
of fate, looking up in anger, yelling, “You’re
responsible! You’re responsible!” Looking down
in self-loathing, whispering, “I’m responsible,
I’m responsible,” looking back in senselessness,
asking a mute, “Why?” Having lost work and purpose,
and finally drifting in and out of consciousness…

(Published on Lalit Murali's blog and nowhere else)

Nitin Lalit Murali (photo provided)

Nitin Lalit Murali is from India. aaduna previously published his poem “For Alisha” in the spring 2016 issue. Nitin blogs regularly at https://fightingthedyinglight.com.  He struggles with BPAD and OCD and his writing is sometimes sorrowed, nonchalant, dark, horrific, satirical, erotic or happy. He tackles eclectic themes and writes both prose and poetry. 

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