Art Credit: “Untitled” by Alfonso Barberio
SWISH
Projects playgound—
jump shot arcing
from star to star
Evening shadows steal across the low concrete buildings, the cracked-slab courtyards, over fast-food wrappers and bottle shards. He feels the air on his face, cold and sharp, as he looks up at the day’s last colors: Crimson streaking thin clouds, pale blue fading to violet, soft as smoke. His basketball, a low-hanging moon, rests beneath his palm. He closes his eyes, imagines it again: the court, the tiered crowd, the ticking clock, the ball rolling off his fingertips and rising over every shout and whisper, every wide eye, rising and rising and then falling falling falling into that final sound of entry, passage, deliverance…
longest night—
a boy’s chalk outline
facing all the stars
About the author:
Rich Youmans’s haiku, haibun, and related essays have appeared internationally in journals and anthologies, including Modern Haiku, Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun, and Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun (Tuttle Publishing). His collection of linked haibun with Maggie Chula, Shadow Lines, won a Merit Book Award in 2000 from the Haiku Society of America, and a forthcoming collection, All the Windows Lit, was a 2015 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award winner. An editor and publisher by profession, he currently oversees the communications of a U.S. trade association representing jewelry designers and manufacturers. He and his wife, Belle, live on Cape Cod.
Art Credit:
“Untitled”
Alfonso Barberio or OFF is a tattooer and night street artist. Born in in 1993 in Battipaglia in the South of Italy, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. His travels have given him the opportunity to meet many artists and people who have influenced his works. Since childhood, art fascinated him. Street art was his first love at the age of 13, and today this passion is developed in tattoo art, which is currently his profession. His works are born from the adrenaline that runs through his veins riding the streets in the night, and he brings passion to walls, paper, and to skin. @off_theink on IG.
