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1/30/2022 Poetry by Jessica Heron Tristan Loper CC
Seaside I. I share the pride of place with these men, their monster trucks, skull stickers and blue lives flags by walking the edge of the ocean and urinating wherever I please. I hold it in so long it starts to feel like a disease. My back to the sea, I take my time to admire newly planted dune grass, cookie-cutter houses of the rich, the mango raspberry sun setting. Done. I slice my feet through sand when you catch my eye, small sea bird. Someone not from around here would think you’re nestling, your feet tucked under your underneath plump feather-breasted vocalizations deep. But I see you waiting it out. I know the other side of these dunes like sunglasses plastic knows the tanned man’s temples. I didn’t park near him. He would bare his teeth if he knew I peed in his ocean. In my car I click the driver’s seat as far back as it can go, relax my muscles in this dominion. I contemplate doing my nails until an officer notices I haven’t paid to park here. Chased by the meters, I move my car every 15 minutes. II. You see, I belong nowhere. My body can’t be trusted. I need a dermatologist a deep massage, a lobotomy paralytic nerves I need meds and meds for the meds’ side effects and when no meds work I conjure myself to the side of the bay bridge. I need a shower I need to walk the dog I need my dog I need a safe place quiet as a feather, where traffic is a whisper and all panic is subdued by order. I know this is nowhere. I’ve been on these sands through all these years I still haven’t found it yet I am so much older and more desperate hunting this thing down - I’m feeling sick again. Jessica Heron’s work can be found or is forthcoming in The Horror Zine, Hole In the Head Review, Black Petals Horror/Science Fiction Magazine, and the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project (November 2021). You can find her walking New Jersey’s parks and beaches most days, and at @signature_trash. Jessica is a Poetry Reader for Catatonic Daughters. 1/30/2022 Poetry by W. Joey Thornton anoldent CC
Winter Visit He welcomes me into his home. Tells me to call him by his first name. It is warm and honey yellow. In the kitchen he serves us darkly rich Middle-eastern tea brewed with mushrooms. I drink it. I become an amateur mycologist. The room brightens. Sky blue and heather. We talk of poets and vegetarians. He tells me they’re both hard lifestyles to live authentically. Around his formica topped kitchen table, we share thinly sliced deer’s heart. Sharp iron and knives. In the street a storm scratches the air. Cataract vision leaves the streetlights hanging disembodied in the night’s sky. He shoots a gun wildly into the darkness. Laughter. I ask him to write a brief eulogy for the deer, but his voice is silenced by the aluminum shards of the snow. W. Joey Thornton has undergraduate and master's degrees in Music: Vocal Performance from Central Washington University. His current writing interests touch on health, disability, horror, aging, the bleak and beautiful. His work has appeared in Central Washington University's Manastash Literary Journal. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Clayton Arble David Prasad CC Silence And Light I woke up in a car with a woman I didn't know. It wasn't her car. It wasn't my car. “Drive,” she said. “Where?” “Anywhere.” The headlights told us where to go. We filled the minutes of silence staring at the road. “What do you think brought us together?” she finally asked. The answer was a secret neither of us knew, but I felt safe in the world of that car. We watched the yellow lines flash by. The darkness was always ahead of us. “Whatever it is, it has something to do with light.”  Clayton Arble is a poet from the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. They are currently in their second year at Hampshire College where they study literature and creative writing.
1/30/2022 Poetry by Shannon Wolf Tristan Loper CC
Unconditional for Lilly Marie I haven’t been writing much lately. My body keeps the score, as they say, of all the ways and days I’m failing. I have it all, you see and so I spend my time, like money: in abundance. Watching time ebb away, watching the leaves on the trees change from ever-ever-green to hot-to-the-touch red. And I try to muster up the feeling in my legs to walk a straight line from my car door to the classroom or to the grocery line. Wrists quaking under the weight of my unfinished lists. I see myself from outside my skin: canceling dinner plans, watching my legs splay on the sofa, ignoring my phone because I don’t have a smile left in a pocket somewhere to pull out and put on. It is strange that every day can be a happiness, yet there is still a seed in my brain, begging for water, ready to burst. I hate nature poems. I like poems that feel like a person, that feel like a fight. I like to picture two lungs squeezing and releasing like the day was too damn hard. Of course, it is easy to write this, now, when I am escaping the mist, when I am pulling free, knowing quietly I will return. It is just easier to be crazy, now I know that love will never leave. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Denver, Colorado. Her debut full-length poetry collection Green Card Girl is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. She received a joint MA-MFA in Poetry at McNeese State University and also has degrees from Lancaster University and the University of Chichester. She is the Co-Curator of the Poets in Pajamas Reading Series. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge, No Contact Mag, and HAD among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Ashley Wagner sagesolar CC
Follow Old Bay (A Play in Three Acts) for Dad I. I’m afraid I’ll lose you before our time is up. II. So let’s spend what time we’ve got tipping back tall glasses of Coke sweating in our palms under the velvet-blue August sky. I have a deck now where we can sit in the shade of my red-brick building as the sun dips below the holy dome of St. Philip and James. Forgive me, some boards are loose. You’ll have to parallel park two blocks away. The humidity in this city is near enough to drown a man. But of course there will be crabs galore! I’ll set out tins of Old Bay, drape newsprint over the table, draw a pot of butter on the new stove, and we’ll talk of the trivial things as the heat works it soft. Your work-hard hands could crack claws in two. You could show me how to clean out the gunk and the gills, find the pearly meat beneath, gleaming like clam spit, a morsel of treasure. Tell me about trapping crabs at Harold Harbor as a boy, about lunch breaks in your thirties: two joints and a sandwich at the foot of the Embassy. All I can offer in return are poems I wrote far from home, from Maryland, from you, where roads had names like Blue Jay and Conifer and tiny women in slippers sold bonsai from a van. Spice-lulled and full, we could settle into silence when words no longer serve us. III. It’s not naïve to want to make the world a better place and I want to start here with you: two chins drawn skyward, two of a kind in their joy; two mouths, just alike, telling tales of what went right. Ashley Wagner is a queer writer, reader, and roller-skater living in Baltimore. She is the poetry editor for Ligeia Magazine, and she is currently working on her first collection of poetry, EAST COAST BLUES. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Janelle Cordero Kaarina Dillabough CC
Nintendo 64 My brother was kind to me when he didn’t have to be. I remember playing video games on our Nintendo 64 in dad’s basement, Diddy Kong Racing and Golden Eye, and my brother let me pick my character first. It didn’t matter what character I was because I always lost, but that’s beside the point. I liked the new worlds we entered, the grainy 3-D graphics and perpetual sunshine. I liked the serious clicking noises we made with our blue and red controllers, and I liked how sometimes we’d stand on the couch and scream and cuss at the screen instead of each other. Most of all, I liked knowing I was somebody’s sister in whatever world I found myself in. Now I’m hundreds of miles away from my brother, and I think of him kindly this morning. Whatever he faces today, I want him to win. Be Careful When I turned thirty I started telling everyone to be careful: kids in sandals and tank tops riding scooters in front of my house without helmets, grocery store clerks climbing ladders to restock the top shelves with soup cans and cereal boxes, drivers who pass me on the country highways going twenty over in their lifted pickups. But I’ve got it backwards. Be full of care, I should say. Step slowly and methodically from one moment to the next like a teenager trying to sneak in after curfew. Know where the dangers are, the squeaky floorboards and motion lights, the dog sleeping on the cool kitchen tile who will bark if she’s startled. Treat this life like a gift. But all of this is too much to say in these moments when an accident or misstep could occur. So I say be careful, over and over, like an inadequate prayer that I can’t seem to forget, that I rely on even after it’s failed me. Janelle Cordero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in the seventh most hipster city in the U.S. Her writing has been published in dozens of literary journals, including Harpur Palate, Hobart and The Louisville Review, while her paintings have been featured in venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. Janelle is the author of four books of poetry: Impossible Years (V.A. Press, 2022), Many Types of Wildflowers (V.A. Press, 2020), Woke to Birds (V.A. Press, 2019) and Two Cups of Tomatoes (P.W.P. Press, 2015). Stay connected with Janelle's work at www.janellecordero.com. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Ella Rous Tristan Loper CC
a litany of desire The harvest moon has its teeth in me, but I want Ouija, I want Salem, I want skin closing on mine like the summer’s peak. I want tarot readings until the past comes undone and I want death upside down. Sideways. I want better stories: ones where I get through to you. I’m trying to get through to you, like a body in the water or a hand passing through a mirror over and over again, but no gold mine or perennial. Give me the ocean so I may drown with my mouth forever closing, like holding godhood or smashing the eggshell sky on a plate. Little bits of stars raining everywhere. I want twin souls and solstice and the blood forging us from pain and I want your laugh fading into the dusk. I want you back, baby. Forget it. Ella Rous (she/her) is a first-year student currently attending the University of Texas at Austin as a Plan II and psychology double major. Though her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Red Lemon Review, and Sledgehammer, she is best known for being vocally queer and for her zebra patterned platform crocs. Her twitter handle is @creatingella. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Annalee M. Elmore eren {sea+prairie} CC
When I Was Born My Body Was Opaque as the knives of your teeth still shining from the warmth of your womb, you bit the fleshy string and told me to become the crawlers that coat your floorboards : present but silent once, my friend told me she never belonged to her body my body ached because she believed that then i watched my body stand still, feet subject to sap & stuck as worm in cocoon my body the luna moth greening in moonlight tails pinched off mid-flight my body the remnants of your body Annalee M. Elmore (she/her) is a writer and visual artist living in Memphis, TN. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis and the Art Editor for The Pinch Literary Journal. She was awarded the 2021 Deborah L. Talbot Poetry Award and was nominated for the 2021 Best New Poets anthology. Her writing has been published in Blending Magazine and The Academy of American Poets. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Al Ortolani cuatrok77 CC
The Poorest County in Kansas I built my daughters a rabbit hutch, scrapped together from scabbed lumber along the wall of the garage. I nailed them with sixteen penny nails from the bottom of my toolbox, and then, tacked the roof with eights from broken pickets in the burn pile. Many I had to unbend with my hammer, tapping them on a brick until they resembled the straight lines they once held. Chicken wire and steel cloth was a problem. The hardware store was closed on Easter, the churches pew-filled, the shops shut on the bluest of Blue Sundays. The rabbits, one white, one black, had arrived that morning in a cardboard box, nesting in a gym towel. I drove the alley in my pickup truck, hunting cast off wire. Finally, behind a row of duplexes, picked over for copper tubing and galvanized steel, I found a small roll of garden fencing, saved from rust by the angle of a fallen roof. I doubled the wire on the bottom to keep the rabbit’s feet from falling through the gaps, eyeing enough space for their pellets to drop into the berm they’d build throughout the spring and summer. When it cooled in autumn, I raked them into the tomato bed, behind the crepe myrtle, back where the paint is peeling, where even a rabbit’s hill cools until used. Cricket Shoes There’s something out of reach in October, so far beyond me that I cannot put a name to it. It waits on the path through the trees, the damp leaves rich with gold and orange, in some cases the stems standing upright, also bright, also colored. Thoreau said, the leaves teach us how to die, but I am not so lucky, for I have learned only to want more. Even more of the falling, the inaudible gasp of the leaf letting go from the branch, the brief twirling as it catches the light, the loosened shoelaces, the wallered-out eyelets, the cricket taps its shoes before the first freeze, the tune singular, as much laced to earth as tied to hope. Would You Would You If your friends jumped from a bridge… The answer of course was yes, jump, always jump, arms and legs flailing into the sky without a moon. The water below, below the bridge, below the moonless sky, split by a stone, the guess of depth. Finally, a silhouette on a bridge alone, standing, turning the truth. Alone on the railing, with the truth, the bitch of the truth, not knowing the leap, the splash, all the while the accusations from downriver rising like a nation, up from the muddy river, the voices of ducks, carp, and cottonmouths. Al Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award. After 43 years of teaching English in public schools, he currently lives a life without bells and fire drills in the Kansas City area. 1/30/2022 Poetry by Tobi Alfier jessica mullen CC
Parking Lot Bytes I She had short hair and man’s shoes orange, without adornment she walked to her car and stood there arms crossed, looking around. What were we supposed to say? II Always a package of Marlboros lean against the light post it teases him; he hasn’t had a cigarette in 30 years, though he’s had many drinks. III Sunday weather, Sunday clouds, cool and breezy, still the sun ricochets off windshields… It’s blinding. IV Once there was a gray van with a gray dog inside sitting in the driver’s seat. When the owner came out he was also gray. Hair to shirt to shoes, demeanor to match. V All the regulars and permanent homeless wanderers have nicknames given to them by us. When we found out Carol’s name was really Beverly we still called her Carol. She has hair like Carol Channing. Voice too. Rage in the Shadows Floating on an island of quilts, listening to the rain sing us to sleep, we hear the screech of wind-blurred unplaceable voices from not far away. Twenty-four years and I don’t know the neighbors, but I hate the bitch who’s been coming and going the last few weeks. She’s nothing but trouble, I know it-- Dirty hair pulled back careless, bourbon-blushed cheeks, narrowed eyes no matter in sun or shade, always thinking how to hurt. Somebody’s screaming get the hell out-- louder than the wind through the camphor tree in our front yard, louder than the waves which override the weather with their viciousness. We stay cuddled-up, hear a car start, tires peel out and skid—the slippery street and wet leaves an exclamation point on anger unresolved. Motel nights are booze in a paper cup, hotplate that violates the hell out of reason and we don’t care—she’s gone. Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Cholla Needles, Galway Review, The Ogham Stone, Permafrost, Gargoyle, Arkansas Review, and others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com). |
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