1/31/2021 Poetry by edie roberts Jo Guldi CC i’m so good at problems once on a dare, i put my body into bridge pose and let everyone in the room kiss me there is a true story in my mouth foaming up the mountain knives in the kitchen soft asleep i give up i hold a cup and the faucet mouth coughs out a river healed with disinfectants i increase the risk of malign growths by doing nearly anything there has to be a way to convince you i don’t mean any harm even when i say i don’t care there is no fixing my front tooth is chipping away and i’m sure that means something is wrong inside of me manifesting itself were my tongue can trace it it takes more than guts to ask for help in America it takes a sense of worthwhile that needs constant attention i am laughing about mid-life like i’m sure that has come and gone by anxiety surfing the whole time when the singer asked what we thought at age 25 i thought my father died at 49 i thought it’s hard to think beyond that rosily i make jokes about my body in mutiny my mind like whatever i don’t want to make myself a little button crimped and pinned into holding it all together together we can make a dent in a cop car if we stand in front of it and brace for impact draught when i am walking i am trying thinking hips first like head a horse to a watering hose watch it lap happily i am thinking gushing crystal out i am looking at a sun ribboned mirror thinking explosions summer is the favorite consenting brutality and if you succeed to lead your hips the men tell you your legs deserve a mouth with big dicks in it they are trying to be sweet they say a cackling spit glows and rotates do you need a ride do you need some help do you got a man do you have a means to when i am walking i am thinking how to be held against the giveaway of frame and what are the consequences of successful deceit i am a body for a dumpster i am a body made of confusion and my delusion is a glint blind and mirrored antagonism when i am walking i am thinking of the spit glowing sweetly and me on it for successfully leading with my hips and when i am sitting i am thinking of the hips that lead and the split of them gushing crystal out i am thinking hips first to lead a horse so thirsty it can’t think the grass is green i am wondering how long i can park a shitty camper in the alley before the city notices knocks on the window tells me to leave my little piece of canned ham too fuzzy hot in the condo kitchen home is no where for long how about that dream america, you look stupid new manifest destinies escape from society little queer wonderlands escape is not to move your sick into the country and let the earth hurt to heal you escape is not turn back time and farm yourself to salvation the big rot sucks the life out and it follows you like a child in the time it takes to unlearn the landlord inside each of us has too much invested to walk away i’m not here to tell you your visions of the future are syndicated and crass but i would like to know what you tell yourself ![]() edie roberts is a gender mess blessed with excess anxiety and midwestern disposition. they currently live in Detroit, MI and dream of fully-automated leisure utopias and the end of scarcity. their books include Ain’t Life Grand (pitymilk, 2020) and Everywhere You Go (bathmatics, 2019) among others. follow along at https://edieroberts.wordpress.com/ - twitter @squabtasticcc 1/31/2021 Poetry by Natascha Graham Bart Everson CC
When Gillian’s Here They’re loud tonight. These voices that clamour. Gillian’s here. Standing by the kitchen window with the sky behind her - as sullen and moody as she is, shot through with the deepest blue of the darkest night. She’s been standing there for a while now, and she hasn’t said a word. She’s running the tip of a finger over a burn on the side of her hand. Just at the base of her thumb. She’s done it getting a cake out of the oven. A week ago. One she’d made. Which isn’t something you’d imagine she’d do. But she did. She does. And it tasted good, but the scars still there, and in this cold winter, in this kitchen that’s stayed dark for too long, the scar turns purple, milky, and she worries at it, Because she doesn’t want to look up. Raised simultaneously by David Bowie and Virginia Woolf, Natascha Graham writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as writing for stage and screen. She lives with her wife in a house full of sunshine on the east coast of England. Her play, How She Kills, was performed by The Mercury Theatre in August 2020 and broadcast on BBC radio in September. My second play, Confessions: The Hours, has been performed by Thornhill Theatre London, and both have been selected by Pinewood Studios and Lift-Off Sessions as part of their First Time Filmmakers Festival 2020. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction essays have been previously published by Acumen, Litro, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Yahoo News and The Mighty. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Hayley Mitchell Haugen Colby Stopa CC While I Was Sleeping I did not hear Kathryn screaming, six doors down and cold in her flannel nightdress, calling for help from her dewy backyard, her silver walker shining by the watchful eye of the moon. Long before the police came, I had already closed my windows, checked for strangers behind my shower curtain, retired behind the locked door of my room, and lay there, dreaming of my own sweet comfort, because that’s what I do while I am sleeping. Two days later, while I napped in the afternoon heat with Oprah on, they came again, the police with their shiny weapons drawn against the pain of our houses. They called for Sheila, across the street with her beautiful, dark-stained garage door and trellis roses. Come out, they said, don’t do it. I woke up then and wished those police would poke their long nightsticks into the deepest closets of all our houses, that they would upturn beds and dusty bookcases and accuse all the sick and crazed and suicidal among us, cleansing our houses each by each until they found him, in that corner house just out of sight of my own, the man I call uncle who once molested me, my fifth grade friend, my little cousins since then for twenty years, while I’ve feigned safety, while I’ve feigned comfort, while I’ve been sleeping. ![]() Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a Ph.D. in 20th Century American Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She is currently Professor of English at Ohio University Southern, where she teaches courses in composition, American literature, and creative writing. Her chapbook What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To appears from Finishing Line Press (2016), and poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Rattle, Slant, Spillway, Chiron Review, Verse Virtual and many other journals. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length collection. She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online: https://sheilanagigblog.com/ and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Susan Vespoli Colby Stopa CC Food Bank After a summer of living in his car, after the DUI, the stint in Tent City, decades of denial, fits of angry texts, shakes and sweats over a barbecue grill, a broken window. After near-death drug deals, lying passed out in a fellow junkie’s house, his sister sobbing into her phone, me behind a bathroom door in another state trying to calm her. After years of 12-step meetings (mine), tying my life to mantras like let go or be dragged, letting grief be a marinade to soften me ala some paraphrased Rumi poem. After praying to my dead friend Jamelle, asking her to look for him, look after him, wherever he was. After searching strangers’ faces for his for over a year, he resurfaces, altered. After he found in a black sack in his dad’s garage, the book, Message to a Troubled World, written by my great grandmother, channeled through an Ouija board in the 1940s. After he could quote passages from the book like scripture. After the methadone clinic. After looking for a church. After handing water bottles to those holding cardboard signs at street corners. After scavenging backpacks from bulk trash, gifting them to those he met along the canals, those who carried their belongings in plastic bags, he now stands in a place where he tells me he’s never been this happy, serving others, the answer, a place where he finally feels he fits— in a room stacked with milk crates and boxes with graphics of bananas, metal shelves piled high with iceberg, red bell peppers, striped melons, cukes and squash, row upon row of Kashi, Kraft mac and cheese, Campbell’s cans, jars of Skippy and grape jam, the crew of volunteers clad in khaki pants and Pure Heart t-shirts, their arms and legs in wheel-like motion, food to box, box to the next arms in a line that forms outside the door. My son grinning, his open hand sweeping the room, pointing to produce, day-old pastries, dairy, meat, eggs in the walk-in fridge, beams of Tuesday sunlight scattering through the glass, falling on all in the scene, his face and eyes wide, effervescent, lit. ![]() Susan Vespoli writes from Arizona. She's had work published in spots such as Rattle, Mom Egg Review, Nailed Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Susan Barry-Schulz Jo Guldi CC when my imaginary therapist asks me how I’m feeling I say mostly just disappointed in baseball players who banged on trash can lids in neighbors for using so much fertilizer in the blue-green algae blooming in the lake in the way my body is spreading out in all directions in the way that marriages can sometimes end not happily ever after in the way that surgeons minimize after effects in the way doctors don’t believe women in how insurance works in the way that multiple people keep calling my mother claiming to be her grandson in urgent need of money in the way they wait for her to guess his name in the way that someone stole all the mailman’s Christmas tips in how everyone bought the books but no one read them in how all those red flags are still flying on the streets of this old town in how more than 70 million people how I need you to look me in the eye and explain it to me The Physical Properties of Some Milk Chocolate Candies I want to tell you something about m&ms not just where they melt and where they don’t, but other things like how much space they take up on my tongue. Or how much time it takes to finish off one family size bag in a pandemic. Lately it seems like so many things surrounding me are all a scam. Insurance, passwords, teeth cleanings at the dentist. How many times can one man win the state of Georgia? I admit sometimes they change their colors depending on the season, but believe me m&ms will never leave you empty handed. Honestly, we were never that great to begin with. ![]() Susan Barry-Schulz is a licensed Physical Therapist. Her poetry has appeared in The Wild Word, SWWIM, Shooter Literary Magazine, Barrelhouse online, South Florida Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, Panoply, Bending Genres and elsewhere. She grew up outside of Buffalo and now lives in a lake neighborhood in Putnam County, NY with her husband and one or more of her 3 adult children. It all depends. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Angela Gabrielle Fabunan Jo Guldi CC Mirror’s Water I am the reflection of my mother in the stagnant water. Who said I am my mother? Me. But I am not her. I could never be her reflection: I am the water. I had a dream about a wedding. All that they ever told me was that I would never go anywhere. That I was too infatuated with gold, that I was not good. In my dream, I was walking down the aisle. But the prince was absent. Who needs a prince when a woman can rescue herself from the wedding, eat the cake, run off with the dowry. There is a pain in my heart that is not the pain in her heart. Useless to compare really, there is her pain, and there is mine. What is mine is not hers. She is not even my mother. My mother, the perfect picture of a fifties wife, always swept something under the vacuum cleaner, would do laundry by hand, and would not make a fuss, she’d do it for me. She loved me. And I her. When the betrayal happened, I was young. She spun the story like Rapunzel. I was forevermore wary of women like her, taking shape, taking my form in front of my eyes and convoluting it. They’d dress me up as their favorite dummy, and they’d exact their revenge of their very own voodoo doll. It wasn’t by coincidence that my mothers all look alike. They all stare at me with that sad look of pity. As if they knew, as if they always knew, that I have always known them for who they are. For they are who they are: women like me. We women who get caught up in stories of each other, then prick blood from each other’s webbed fingers in search of the prince. You who do not believe in stories, not even in mine, you who would like to believe evil is still in the grey, tell me what happened with my guts, my blood, and my glory? I think, you would say softly, if you were here, it has turned into a soiled wedding dress you don’t deserve to bear. In the dream, the wedding dress evaporates into a million dark mouths to kiss my everlasting dream to be something like a mother. Hollow and hallowed, the dream in the shape of a mother. Forget the princely counterpart, you beg of me, the one that was only ever sometimes mine. It is me, in the mirror, smiling sinisterly at me. You, there, in the mirror, tell me what I did wrong. Everything. My mother, the first abandonment, has shiny curls she could still twist in my back. The loss, our loss, a displacement and a cavity. My mother and me, in the mirror staring back with something I am trying to unravel myself: I was born formless but of form, my origin is my beginning to transform, but every cupped water is the water molding itself to my hands. Shift the form, and I shift the water. Shift the water, and I change form. Iha We were made from the banana tree, look at your palms, iha, you who’ve grown in this city of eyes like the pineapple, feel what it feels to be alive, peeling fruits for every ounce of juice you have in you, how it will never satisfy, or be satisfied, or how a plant like you needs water only as much as they have, not more, not less, but an empty sky held up by your sewing, by your tending the garden with care, who taught you how to dance like that, who taught you to impress with a tambourine, your aunt Judalyn’s time on the stage about to be over, and soon, you will rise like the dough with which we make bread that will never go stale, have no fear, under the guidance of the Maestro, your fate will be sealed. ![]() Angela Gabrielle Fabunan was born in the Philippines but grew up in New York City. Her first book, The Sea That Beckoned, was published by Platypus Press in 2019, and her second book, Young Enough to Play, is forthcoming from UP Press in 2021. Her poems have been published extensively in Asia, the UK, and the US. She lives back and forth Manila, Olongapo City and New York. One day, she might settle somewhere once she ends the search for a home. Her website is agfabunan.journoportfolio.com. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Jordan Trethewey Jo Guldi CC Town Drunk It appeared to everyone in town Garnet lived solely on cheap lager. Only the few who glimpsed inside the drafty, two-room dwelling he kept with an ancient, toothless mother, knew protein came from snared rabbits transformed into soup. In this way, country alcoholics have it better than counterparts forever sauced in the city-- rodents are much more desirable there, especially if boiled on a wood stove with carrots, celery-- a dash of salt and pepper. Against the odds, Garnet remained upright on two legs, and two wheels, performed odd jobs for liquor store liquidity; cycled converted railway beds, chainsaw on parcel carrier precariously balanced with case of Schooner in front basket. Imagine a scarecrow whose stuffing is removed by fearless crows for their nest; flannel shirt, olive drab pants hang loose on a T frame, one hand manages the handlebars, one tips back refreshments. A sweetness pervaded Garnet’s yeasty persona. True—others took pity, hired the villager most famous for his incredible capacity, paid him to mow a lawn, or limb a tree. Even in this febrile state, he remained committed to an ailing mother, elderly home-bound friends like my grandparents, with whom he gossiped and played cribbage. When you passed him on your bike he always smiled in recognition, yelled, Howdy! through sawdust-sprinkled beard, transcending his bleary-eyed appearance. Each Halloween, Dad drove us to a real haunted house, revealed his costumed kids to sunken ghouls grinning with glistening gums by the fire. Was this ritual to honour their past work relationship when they carpooled, before Garnet’s ambition to drink outweighed desire to work? An unspoken thank-you for entertaining his elderly parents? They beckoned us forward with shaking hands, one at a time. Stuffed pillowcases equally with entire contents of a box snack-size potato chips, knowing we would be the only spooks to dare haunt their door that night. I wondered how two adults can live together in such cramped confines. Answer: Garnie spent little time there other than to cook, pass out, and make sure his mother still drew breath. ![]() Jordan Trethewey is a writer and editor living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He is also a husband, father (to two kids, a black cat, and a Sheltie) and beer-league softball player. Some of his poetry, fiction and non-fiction inhabits on-line publications such as Visual Verse, Fishbowl Press, Red Fez, The Blue Nib, Terror House Magazine, Califragile, Jerry Jazz Musician and Spillwords. Jordan is an editor at redfez.net, and openartsforum.com. His latest book, Spirits for Sale, is available on Amazon. His poetry has also been translated in Vietnamese and Farsi. To see more of his work go to: https://jordantretheweywriter.wordpress.com. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Alex N. Douglas Arruda CC
Confession We both hate when you have to cut my nails. I’m trying to quit but my mouth is already sick with the taste. I never meant for your wrists to ache or to be the cause of your pain. Sometimes I wish things never went my way. You wish you can lend me your head. You don’t understand why I’ve been trying to jump out of your hands instead. I’m not good when things make sense like our closeness lying together in bed. And I know I once said I was planning on a surrogate but when strangers compliment our face, I forget. A river runs right through our palms. The reader said the mouth rests in our hearts. But you made yours so small and I never grew any more after that. I wish nothing was ever your fault but I don't know how to give up. I want you to live until the very end just like a little kid. Where your body ends and where mine begins, the thinnest lines wrinkle and stretch. Please forgive me for all I did. Alex N. is currently an undergraduate student in New York City. Their work tends to take the form of poetry, song, and/or horoscope. They can be reached through twitter or instagram, @mukbangbby. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Cheryl Latif Bart Everson CC ash tuesday a truncated sestina cleansed at last of burial ash you return to tell of angels falling from the sky the fire where you lost yourself as day turned to night in brittle madness streets brushed with unspeakable dust clouds embers burning the city silent how your subway car suddenly shuddered silent the ground above heaving as towers fell to ash. trapped below, none of you knew. only embers of wild confusion igniting distrust. even there, with no sky you tasted the coming madness humanity’s dark night. you helped a pregnant woman to the street like night joined the tide of muffled footsteps, silent exodus across the bridge toward what? this madness knows no borders. eyes burning with tears and ash you walked blind 9am daylight wiped clean from the sky dawn of a new era hissing like embers. back turned on a vision once sought, embers of love swath the night like neon in the sky rain down in silent questions: what was true, what was ash. on the third anniversary of 9/11 body language a tart wash of sun streams through the double paned glass summer’s inconsolable push like a child’s desire. a pat a hush not nearly enough to quell fear want. empty echo early morning reverie. ‘neath a rising tide of silence scratch of pen to paper: commiseration of ink and sweat about the cost of a single step. these vain attempts to dress wounded hours expose the frailty of language while regret eats through the day like acid. this acrid spell burden of expectation scraped raw each bend stretch a reminder simple poetry of sinew and tendon lost to the confused grip of past and present the innate way fate twists meaning. what’s unwritten has different value lessons embedded in cells like rings within mighty redwoods hidden save for the cut of the logger’s saw — but who could translate wood to paper strength to vulnerability it’s all a foreign language now *body language first appeared in the 2008 Magee Park Poets Anthology, published by the Carlsbad City Library. ![]() Originally from Southern California, Cheryl Latif emigrated to the Pacific Northwest in 2001 to live under a sky that speaks several languages. Her poetry was first published in Between Sheets, a Cal State Stanislaus literary magazine (1978). She didn’t submit again for some time. Now her work has appeared in a variety of local, regional and national publications such as New Millennium Writings, The Comstock Review, Spillway, How Luminous the Wildflowers, Magee Park Poets and more. While in San Diego, she curated/hosted a weekly poetry series in San Diego that featured poets from across the nation and across the pond. A copywriter by trade, she relishes fooling with words. 1/31/2021 Poetry by Susan Darlington Kaarina Dillabough CC HOSPITAL VISIT IN WINTER He told me that winter was the time of death; that ice pierced the heart of every living thing and snow pulled a shroud over the barren earth. But looking at him lying in the hospital bed - arms desiccated twigs and skin that’s bruised with leaden skies - I tell him it’s the time of hibernation. That trees will be born anew and birds will cluster on boughs to become silhouettes of leaves. I don’t know if he can hear me but I swear that meltwater starts to trickle from his eyes. ![]() Susan Darlington’s poetry regularly explores the female experience through nature-based symbolism and stories of transformation. It has been published in Fragmented Voices, Algebra Of Owls, Dreams Walking, and New Feathers Anthology among others. Her debut collection, ‘Under The Devil’s Moon’, was published by Penniless Press Publications (2015). Follow her @S_sanDarlington |
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