9/1/2018 0 Comments Layers By J.B. StoneJ.B. Stone is the author of A Place Between Expired Dreams And Renewed Nightmares (Ghost City Press 2018). Stone has fiction and poetry featured and/or forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Cadaverous Magazine, Ghost City Review, Occulum, Peach Mag, BlazeVOX, Flash of Dark, Breadcrumbs Magazine, Rye Whiskey Review.
0 Comments
Vanessa Maki is a writer (& other things) who is queer & full of black girl magic. She has work in various places such as Entropy, Susan/The Journal, Rising Phoenix Press, Sad Girl Review among others & is forthcoming in Sorority Mansion among others. She is founder/EIC of yell/shout/scream & rose quartz journal. Her debut chapbook “press ctrl-alt-delete” is available on Payhip. Follow her twitter & visit her site. corrine klug Flickr I Want to Be a Witch by Yuvia Hernández Cháirez (Translated by Toshiya Kamei) Mom, I want to be a witch in a fairy tale who knows witchery, astronomy, and other tricks. She can fly to the moon like an astronaut or a bird in the sky. A witch who can see what happens on the other side and trace colors in the starry sky. Mom, I want to be a witch, ugly and old, but brainy enough to stay clear of the trap of life. I want to be someone everyone looks up to, someone who can touch the sea without letting it go. Mom, I don't want to be a princess in a fairy tale who has to wait for her prince to make all her dreams come true and doesn't try to live beyond the daily grind of housework with kids clinging to her skirt obedient with no thought for tomorrow. Don't give me that look! I don't want to be a princess because I want to be a witch because I want to fly to the moon on my own wings. Mom, I don't want to be a princess I want to be a witch in a fairy tale. I want to be free to fly through the sky like her. Yo quiero ser bruja Mamá, yo quiero ser bruja, como la del cuento que conoce las brújulas, la astronomía y otros inventos. Que puede volar a la luna, como los astronautas o como los pájaros del cielo. Una bruja con poderes para ver lo que pasa en otros lados y poder trazar los colores en ese cielo estrellado. Mamá, yo quiero ser bruja, fea y vieja, pero con cerebro; el suficiente para no caer en las redes de la vida y poder ser alguien a quien todo mundo admira. Poder tocar el mar sin que éste se le escape. Mamá, yo no quiero ser princesa, como la del cuento, que tiene que esperar al príncipe para poder realizar todos sus sueños, que no pasan de entrar a una vida llena de quehaceres, con niños colgando de la falda; sumisa sin pensar en el mañana. ¡No me pongas esa cara! Yo no quiero ser princesa, porque quiero ser bruja, porque quiero llegar hasta la luna con la fuerza de mis alas. Mamá yo no quiero ser princesa quiero ser bruja como la del cuento y como ella, ser libre de correr por el firmamento. Yuvia Hernández Cháirez lives in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She is the author of The Lost (2007), De la luna y otros vicios (2007), and A Dreamer’s Realm (2007). Yuvia blogs at http://pandanotebook.blogspot.com/ SPARK IN A GLEAMLESS NIGHT TIN pillbox dreams grow dead things on me (essential organ—heart beats steadily) cold steel slices virgin Mary in two and she laughs, embroidered in hues of blue sea salt ocean eyes hiding the good stuff under her tongue-- she won’t give it up! she just comes again and again, wounded sparrow bird in flight, red iron wings embedded eyeballs rolling, she tells me lies-- planting rosebuds on those endless hills, those amphetamine hills. look how I die : rain-soaked Belmont king-sized, left out to dry only to be shot through the carnival ride-- it wilts inside. nobodies like me wilt inside. slow burning roots grow drowsily, without promise of aching swelled bellies-- sweet toothed, ready to pop. THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH! in another life, I was best friends with my mother. I saved her and she saved me from men with cold eyes and thorny crowns, she kept them away with switchblades and the flick of her wrist. we tied cherry knots in the dark and cried. we ate pomegranates and pressed flowers in alice munro books, our fingertips stained pink. with lilac and tangerine skin blues in my mouth, I sunk to the bottom and that was the bitter end of it. I bit my tongue so hard the whole ocean turned red. I wanted to be real, I wanted to be a mermaid, beautiful and soft, sinking sinking sinking down baby! always sinking. my thighs weren’t ever sore anymore, and nothing hurt. she pierced my ears with a rose thorn. when I died, mother scattered my ashes in the Indian ocean. we both just wanted to be where the cowboys were. HOT ROD ANGEL lanterns in hell buzz like death and bluebells. my snake bite baby dissolves in hot trips of red and blue, like black leather Wild Ones singing the arsonist’s lullaby. barely breathing, I sit still and heavy on the river’s edge, waiting on Lucifer fallen mystic, my old man— his burnt halo glows, he lights the sky up with tears. I want to be there with him, way up high, when he bites into the strawberry red exploding into his mouth, fingers sweet and sticky. then he will turn to me and say: you’re a miracle you’re a star but my Southern Comfort dreams don’t mean shit to him. I throw parties for dead things when he touches my face in the dark. in the end, my heart valves shrivel and rivers of Babylon run dry inside. Neshan Tung makes collages and writes poetry to get by. She is currently at the University of Calgary, majoring in English. Neshan takes inspiration from graveyards, Marlboro men, peach schnapps, achy and swollen hearts, disco balls, dream work, knives, and strangers who smile back. bronx. Flickr Objectification It happens over time. When you finally realize its impact, the cumulative nature of its treachery, the dehumanization of your being, you step away, neutralize the nonsense. Like clay, you're formed and shaped, smoothed, spun by others who orbited old-line thinking, a social system whose wheel produced shapely, attractive vessels. Raised watching beauty pageants, where top 10 lists were written and compare and contrast comments resonated across the room, you learned early on what's valued in a woman: her face and body. Not caring much for glamour, you responded with frowns and messy hair, preferring your brother's old shirts, you imagined a world unbiased on lookism. As you got older, you covered your budding physique with bib-overalls, though this type of clothing rarely sat well with a certain male relative, Why on earth do you wear those damn, baggy things! Show off your figure! Embarrassing comments and ogling eyes triggered something in your subconscious, told you to eat, gain weight, hide your shape. As time progressed, you fell for the system. At seventeen, you were given diet pills in preparation for commercial modeling school. After a lifetime of being dismissed, pigeonholed as nothing more than an ornament, an empty vessel, you stepped away, returned to the potter's wheel. You've come full circle, having listened to and rejected the overt and indirect messages of a woman's worth is tied solely to her appearance. Once again, you're a lump of clay, moving around the wheel head, but this time backwards, as you undo the smoothing, yield to the real, most beautiful version of the no-nonsense you. Jeannie E. Roberts has authored four poetry collections, including The Wingspan of Things, a poetry chapbook (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), Romp and Ceremony, a full-length poetry collection (Finishing Line Press, 2017), Beyond Bulrush, a full-length poetry collection (Lit Fest Press, 2015), and Nature of it All, a poetry chapbook (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She is also the author and illustrator of Let's Make Faces!, a children's book dedicated to her son (author-published, 2009). She is Poetry Editor for the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. Fuzzy Mannerz Flickr
Bear River A line is drawn there against the business of man. The frowning spruce watch over mercurial greens where the bay breeds a full-bodied river to a libertarian sea. In the inkpots of the creek behind, autumn spends freely, tossing gold coins afloat with blithe buoyancy. Carmine maples gather close to the water rooted in spiraling eddies, portals to endless spinning yarns where man has so small a part and hybrid bodies of rock and tide born to sensation hide far below the irrelevant sun that keeps the deerskin hunter square-shouldered among his provident trees though he cannot perceive the parallel monologues that speak his absence over the wave-rutted beach haunted by fossilized breath and propulsion, tumbled jasper, calcium turbines and abandoned stairwells. Silence always a gulping of space, a transparency in which hoariness reunites with youth and secrets blown apart diffuse their ciphers back into the pervasive hush. Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist ( Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indifinite Space.. Alfred Grupstra Nothing’s gonna change my love for this, this song, this is everything. This is hormones running in circles and being awkward in school discos. After the RSC visit - when we helped with sewing, and on the door, and I saw the leading actress backstage with her top off, when we thought the shows might not even go on without us, we, the thirteen year olds doing drama - there was a disco in the studio. There were often discos, for one thing, for another. They were always full of pop and tongues. The first slow dance. The way I fancied ‘Claudio’ and also Jimmy Hill but kissed Ryan. You ought to know, by now, how much I loathed it. It wasn’t what I expected and I kept my eyes open wide. One thing I’m almost sure of: when I whispered I’d seen the blue angel with nothing much on, he barked ‘her tits are nothing much’ so I knew, above all, that I’d never ask for more from a guy who didn’t share my joy at the sight of the body of a woman I barely knew, but who showed me what backstage could be, what it would be to be so totally not bothered, so very ok with just anybody seeing you. She was still and stary, this star of the stage. She came in, after the kiss, and smiled. I’ll never ask for more than that. Her dreamy smile after the wet and weird- ness. If I’d closed my eyes, I might not have seen her see me. Nothing about any of it was shameful. The world changed and I was guilty only of thinking more. (After ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You’ by George Benson, performed by Glen Medeiros!) Sara Barnard (she/her) is from the UK, has lived in Spain and Canada, and is now based on a sailboat (currently in Central America) with her husband, child, and laptop for company. The last few years have mainly been about parenting and PhDing. She has recently had work accepted by Bone & Ink Press, Glass Poetry Press, Hypertrophic Literary, and Ink & Nebula. Say hi on Twitter: @Sara_Barnard 9/1/2018 1 Comment Poetry By Kimberly Burwick Ben Seidelman
Lavender – a woolheart, a wildeat, all soil in one pure word – as in: being weaned, as in: the milk-of-the-dead is the dead, as with cows, mothers, stages of wheat: seedling, tillering, boot-swollen before early milk, early dough, losing green color, the brightwall of bastard veins in a brassy wind, you see a deer and say it’s a she I know how a girl deer ruins the apples Your condition – I limit myself to the terror of quail almost indentured to harmony, the grind of sunrise like an abrupt return to the steadiness of size, layout what is light and which artery is Lord, so large – use this winter to still all winters, geometrically we are flushed and sudden and nothing but acres Kimberly Burwick is the author of five collections of poetry, the latest of which is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press (2019). She was born and raised in Massachusetts, and now resides in Moscow, Idaho. She is currently Clinical Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University. 9/1/2018 0 Comments Poetry By Annmarie Lockhart Peter Alfred Hess Flickr See-Through You run your finger along the blue line on the inside of my wrist, the oxygenated iron that steels me. Feel my history, read my stars. Look at me. My lips linger on the pulse beat, beat, beating in your neck. I can taste your infrastructure, the calcium and sea water that held you together, then and now. Look at me. It was a dry heat. It was an ice storm. It was a sirocco. It was a monsoon. It was a long time ago. It is now. Tap me a tattoo, an incantation to ward off shadows and specters. Sing me our secret song, offer it up to the ceaseless rain. Leave moonlight til morning. Look at me. See me the way I see you. An Angle on Atlantic City in January The glare might lead you to believe in the monochrome absolutism of the landscape but do not fall for the ruse. Look closer. Blue speaks for the shadows and black sharpens the edges. Orange squeezes the juice from the weak sun. Brown stamps the grain of years into wood and mud. Gray smears the clouds and green deeps the chop on the water. We don’t rest on benches. We gather, random crystals that bump and fit. We know the intimacy of snow flakes and sand grains. We pile in dunes and drifts. We wade this perfect shore. Annmarie Lockhart is the founding editor of vox poetica, an online literary salon dedicated to poetry, and Unbound Content, an independent poetry press. A lifelong resident of Englewood, New Jersey, she lives, writes, and works two miles from the hospital where she was born. You can read her words at fine journals online and in print. 9/1/2018 0 Comments Poetry By Liz N. Clift Ben Seidelman
Fiber Arts Braided red thread, a promise, a lead tied around the lover’s wrist, reminder of the way heartstring pull taut and loose and taut again even in grief, even in learning to speak again as I instead of we, as in I would love to come to your house for Christmas. Ignore the dewy angels in your friend’s eyes, molasses voice. The thread will weather, will fade like the bruises that once rocked your hips, the ones you begged for. You could once say choke me without fear. You could say hold me and find a beating heart beneath your ear. Christmas is garlands and tinsel, piano music mistaken for tears, silver gloves gripping a steering wheel against the sparkling world, the car static. If you knew it would end like this Your heart is not a fledgling, it will survive this fall. The thread a reminder to weave others into your life, to let them make your life richer, because you are tapestry and when it frays you must mend or let go. Radioactive Somewhere else I kissed him night air wood smoke and dry leaves, the weight of his hand on the small of my back an invitation. Somewhere else I wasn’t afraid of rooting my heart to his, or at least trying, the rootstock was good. A gold dust moment, worth nothing except the way it catches light as memory. The what-ifs, the maybes, the could haves the way he is water and stardust so very much alive. I want that moment frozen, like our breath stilled in the air. We’re fire and air and already dying. We’re the cigarette burning to filter and ash. Liz N. Clift holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in RATTLE, Passages North, Hobart, and others. She lives in Colorado. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |