2/25/2018 Dropped by Jason PowellDropped Years ago I went over to my parents house and my nephew was there playing with my father. He was three years old at the time (my nephew, not my dad). My mother was in the kitchen leaning with her folded arms over the kitchen counter looking into the living room watching them and smiling. My father was tossing my nephew into the air and catching him again. When my nephew was in the air he'd laugh and squeal and then he'd land in my father's hands and he would look happily and expectantly at my dad with his fingertips in his mouth. Then he'd be airborne again and life would be hysterical once more. I watched a couple of these revolutions and then I went into the kitchen and kissed my moms cheek. I said to her about my nephew, "that's a brave little boy. Daddy's throwing him pretty high. I'm surprised he's not afraid." My mom kept leaning and watching and smiling and said, "he's not brave. He just doesn't know there's any reason to be afraid. He's never been dropped before." I think that explanation of happiness or the lack of it explains so much in my life. Bio: Jason Powell is a New York City Firefighter in the FDNY and an avid people watcher. He spends all of his free time and (some of his work time) writing and reading and eating chocolate covered pretzels. 2/24/2018 Poetry by Joe Amaral Edgar Hudon CC Moral Injury At my aunt’s funeral, a cousin approached me. Said her son just started working the ambulance as an EMT. His first suicide call was last night. He phoned his mom at 2:AM sobbing, describing the situation in vivid detail: the nylon rope denting the man’s neck-- his bulging, cartoonish eyeballs and purpled cheeks. I told her I’ve been a paramedic for thirteen years. Sadly, I don’t have many firsts anymore. But that’s not true. I recently cut down a Mexican cowboy hanging dead on an oak tree in full serape and sombrero. Clad like an old soldier in full regalia as dawn flamed over hillcrest. It was like a summer painting. Morning light, false promise of new beginnings. I pull compassion out like a claim when sent to witness. Or bluntly acknowledge how fucked up something is without letting my heart seize in coldness. This is how it goes. What I see on the street is not a lie. I am here to speak for those whose eyes have frozen. I am a floating rib, a punctured lung. And when blunt force trauma impinges upon a person toeing the boundary line of death I don’t slink or run away. I breathe for him. I try to fix him. I know I can fix him. Why can’t I fix him? 1ST R E S P O N S E I nudged the gun off the nightstand, hooking a finger to move it away from the beaten woman. It was heavy as dark thought. She had old, yellow crescent moon bruises under both eyes- a black one on her cheek fresh as soot. A shotgun sat propped in the doorframe. The kitchen a hoarder’s nest of dirty bowls and bullet castings. Melted aluminum in rigid globs poured all over the countertop from a man who made his own ammunition and liked to punch his wife. Dispatch sent an ambulance and a fire truck. The scene was unsafe. We called for police. Every shadow in the hallway was her husband emerging armed and dangerous. We stood the woman up, belted her on the gurney, watching every entrance and exit. A single shot ripped out. We ran down the driveway, yelling on our radios, pushing the woman forward into the rig. Cops arrived with blazing lights, encircling the trailer as we fled across the street. The woman started shaking her head, said he finally killed himself. She was pretty stoic about it. Strong. Then she asked if the ambulance ride cost anything. I have Medicaid, she declared. I don’t really want to go to the hospital but I guess I can’t go home neither. She sighed then laughed. I don’t have any money, nada. I told her not to worry about that now, let’s tend to your injuries, get you the help you need. She gave me a smile and a pat on the cheek. I can’t wait to get the bill, she deadpanned. I have insurance but I know nothing in this country is free. Primal Media File away your preconceptions of me. The stereotypes I perpetuate in imaginary tameness. I will get upgraded, leaving my bones in a wireless heap as water spurts off my firewall. I bleed you like a heart surgeon slicing into the unclamped mystery of vasculature. Freed. I am utter instinct- the unfenced coyote regarding the leashed dog with sadness. The wildflower in the weed patch. I shed my soul, leaving cosmic traces of it in seashells: anaerobic echoes of magic. I dip into your digital ocean. A fearless shadow, an ominous ripple-- a dorsal spike of species unknown. Entwinement We have separate wings made of the same nest, flying opposite directions around this globe until we meet along its roundness. You weep at the corpse leaf, the silver water that winters on icicle and eave, in our wind- blown house. Searching the smooth muscle of memory for a pinprick of blood welling-- the first place you lost me. I think I will change, but, I only regenerate- you hear echoes from impassable slopes and decide it’s not worth the climb. Days elide platitudes; mist reveals and re-veils as dawn-iced light dimples the soil in its never-ending creep. I will thaw and begin trickling down the mountain to feed the creek where you hunch over hardened stones slick with what we are unable to keep. Afraid to swim, to separate, we anchor ourselves together still breathing under all this crushing weight. Bio: Joe Amaral works 48-hour shifts as a paramedic on the central coast of California. He loves spelunking outdoors, camping, traveling, and hosting foreign exchange students with his young family. Joe’s writing has appeared in awesome places like 3Elements Review, New Verse News, Panoply, Poets Reading the News, Postcard Poems and Prose, Rise Up Review and Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. 2/21/2018 Poetry by Clara BurgheleaThe arithmetics behind the hug When out of numbers, we could count the heartbeats and the way they softly translate into hugs. One at dawn, cracking the shells of the day, two more at noon, in the steaming warmth of the senses, half a hug, as you command the core of the day Into submission, a couple of hug-free hours, embedded in thought, bearing resemblance to the tarried clouds. As for the rest of the longing embraces, too many to tally, too few to save, they shall fall silently between the starched sheets, to shelter from all the harms of the subtraction. Scapular love Of bones, mostly. The way they rise beneath the flesh, opinionless, like the sling of a restless bow, yearning for the straight arrow to deliver the palm-to-face moment of the day. Its fashionable tingle, way deep, within the innocent marrow, sweet to the tongue, bitter to the eye. Only in sleep is Time at ease. Wholly in the solace of the child, bones grow unhindered of the coating pulp. So you will never know what lurks behind the blades, when the cage is anointed with blood. Accrual of habit Love never changes midweek. It takes a long weekend to ruin the random understanding of its death, the agony of longing and all those broken embraces hanging midair. I wish I could settle on a kiss as my first move, but then, there are cinders in my mouth and a great heaviness coiling at my feet, and the taste of burned dreams seems honied, as well as bitter. Still, today is a young Wednesday, so let us agree on a trace of gentle tenderness and speak less through the week. Bio: Clara Burghelea is Editor at Large of Village of Crickets and an MFA candidate at Adelphi University. Her poems and fiction have been published in Peacock Journal, Full of Crow Press, Quail Bell Magazine, Ambit Magazine, The Write Launch and elsewhere. She lives in New York. 2/21/2018 Poetry by Colin DardisInfinite Infants The music is on: the start of your paradise weekend, turned up to hurricane levels to blow through dusty minds, cobwebs of the working week. You believe in a heaven behind drugs, a realism away from nine to five cubicles, with death waiting each morning on top of steel countertops. Reincarnation comes in pill form for the kids: the up-tempo distraction ate like rats on placebos, yielding to crazed coma/soma states, scooping up the heavy beats with both hands, laughing at those broken flies who do not know how to turn on their wings, sucking at hearts with spider teeth and eyes unknotting the tangles in their kidult webs until the speakers blow. No one admits to being casualties of the club scene, breaking up the dance, each disposable mind chaperoned by what you cannot run from. Gather those ugly druggies crucified on the dance floor in the name of amusement. Heaven has become clouded, weeping for all the infant fallen so quick to mature and yet so premature in dying. Lost to the Night I am Sid Vicious in the Hotel Chelsea swimming in a drug of sweet winter; tasting like oblivion as I wait, lost to the night. The night of black bra and panties with lunar white resting on her belly, the seas of the moon filling with junkie blood, and stainless tears. Her skin appears to have found peace, while I want to spin her round my earth, roll her love right through my sky. The orbit is over. We die. Ouroboros Borough sing into the chaos all the mute thoughts of drug-riddled pimps gameshow minds looking for the biggest prizes search under the rocks of fools drown the milk but ignore the milk stool while laughing at the sky you whore yourself only onto your own desires masturbation is an ultimate goal post pictures of empty self-fulfilment rub in this achievement align the eyebrows correctly and stare into your nicotine coffin Bio: Colin Dardis is a poet, editor and arts coordinator from Northern Ireland. His work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and the USA. Colin’s personal history of depression and mental illness is an ongoing influence on his work. One of Eyewear Publishing's Best New British and Irish Poets 2016, a collection with Eyewear, the x of y, is forthcoming later this year. www.colindardispoet.co.uk www.poetryni.com 2/19/2018 Poetry by J. DavidRecovery Journal: Jan 7th Now-a-days the nicotine is a bee with wings pulled off-- no buzz but I still need the sting. A hold-me-over cigarette to dull the insomnia. my god I used to sleep so well I carry the night into first shine I say goodmorning lover because I am still unsure of what to call your teeth if I am already swallowed. no more hard stuff I promise. I’m off the shit now I promise. I can make it this time Bio: J.David is from Cleveland, Ohio; likes Phoebe Bridgers; and hopes to one day become lovely. The Ministry of Loneliness Artificial human bones are permitted on domestic flights according to the official memo released on Valentine’s Day and the television is saturated with snowboarding teenagers, the purge of high school students, primordial tears of politicians. You tell me you found a dead body when you were eight years old, the one the police were looking for down river, you thought she was a tree stump but the shredded linen blouse required a second look, your sister threw up the scrambled eggs and half-cooked bacon your mother served that morning. Your father said her eyes were gone, swallowed by radioactive crabs and turtles who savored the juicy flesh, she jumped, you tell me 50 years later, and you never found out why. I want to insert an ice pick into my frontal lobe, the sanctuary of my tear glands, it’s no mystery to me that she wanted buzzards on the highway’s edge, that she pushed herself through the concrete surface of water, that she wanted to die without stranger’s saliva or bullets on her skin. Bio: Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily. Her work has recently appeared in Into the Void, Quail Bell,Calamus Journal, DecomP, Five:2:One, Barzakh, and others. She can be found on Twitter @bethgordonpoet. 2/18/2018 Poetry by Paul SuttonINORGANIC If only this poem would write itself. Proof I'm no poet – no one at your memorial service believed I was. Science scares me now – how I'd vanish into my head; it was as if ‘dead like that.’ Did that kill you, the daughter you never saw, songs of loss in Irish bars – tearful generalities – your little girl growing up on her own? It's not so wrong to judge. Let's worry for children, the damage they suffer: their absolute need for parents. Your service, the talk of fluorine chemistry, intricate successes. And who am I to write of failure – drifted, wasted – angry as a wasp at a window? Long first-term afternoons, Inorganic lab, Oxford blue into violet. Whirring magnetic stirrers, heart-ache colours, transition metal ions – surely that's magic? Somehow it’s passed me by. Imagine a hot afternoon, somewhere in America, sidewalks and successes, places with tenure and funding and citations of publications. And then, think of a girl who wants to see her father – when he can't ever see her. She's not invisible, but the strongest spectroscopy won’t bring him to light. Well, that’s it – all in the past – who can count the bits? These constant seconds, views from windows, odd thoughts on old conversations – ‘we’re the loneliest men alive!’ you joked – the morning our finals started. No way to say I remember. (for Sean McGrady, 9th April 1964 – 12th August 2017) Bio: Paul Sutton, Born in London, 1964. Five collections - most recent from UK publisher Knives, Forks and Spoons Press: "The Diversification of Dave Turnip", March 2017. "Falling Off" (KFS, January 2015) was Poetry Book Society Recommended Autumn Reading, 2015. US Collection "Brains Scream at Night" (2010) from NY publisher BlazeVox. James Says James says I remember this horse I say I do too This is the playground horse we used to ride when we were kids that carried us far away What’s it doing here in this small strange park of dark leaves and ghost white doors? We’re all grown up but the horse is exactly the same We hold hands tightly and look over our shoulders It was a long time ago but our mothers may be coming through those old doors looking for us This may be their ‘bad time’ James says I’m afraid I say I am too The horse says I remember BIO: Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Her work appears in many diverse places — from the Buddhist Poetry Review to the Origami Poems Project. Her poem ‘The Stag’ won first place honors in College of DuPage’s 2017 Writers Read: Emerging Voices contest. Tricia lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois / in a town called St. Charles / by a river named Fox / with a Poetry Box in her front yard. 2/16/2018 Poetry by Donna L GreenwoodAbsent You always looked politely bored, Smiling but absent As you pencilled life into the Creeping vines entwining The lines of your book. How rude, I’d think, while sanding The sparkle off youthful eyes. At the end of class you would resurrect And sit on the edge of my desk and tell Me how your parents were At their wits end. If only you would eat. If only you would tell them why. And I would nod wisely. One day you drew a butterfly And flew it all around And you told me it was a thank you For listening. The others Don’t understand, you murmured. I didn’t understand. I’d just learned How to give the illusion of listening Whilst planning a lesson. And then a girl-shaped hole appeared And poured black all over the day. Your wet-eyed friend wept And whispered you’d died. And I laughed. Because young girls - Especially those with frosted eye-lashes And freckles like gold-dust - Did not just die. For a short time, in the staffroom, We talked about the futility and the sadness And the waste of young blah de blah life Whilst doodling our own red scribbles Over the work of girls who would soon Disappear from our lives - Just as you did- Only they will leave as solid And vital as trees And you will merely be A memory Fluttering and flickering An ever diminishing light Until you fade away Like a child’s breath On a frosted pane. Insomniac I awaken Imperfect. The mOOn falls And spills milk-light Onto white flesh lying On pillOwed slab. Eye-lids stretching Over skull My hO hO hOpe feathers And shreds intO White paper Skin on wrOng bones. The mOnstrous sky Holes my mind and Rips out a shrill lucidity The terrible brightness Sears my heart and Shrieks it into flames And tears apart the Child InnOcence And sucks out her sanity And devOurs legs and eyes and lungs. My mOuth twists into O O O But I CannOt scream down The spectacular hOrror Of nOthing - rioting through The night and gObbling up The last remains Of Cer tain ty. BIO: Donna L Greenwood is a writer of weird stuff who lives in the north of England with her anti-social cat and slightly more sociable daughter. Paolo Margari Candidato CC The light was not for me You've done as well as the sun is accepting; unlike me in times of lightning Irregular twilights, accident zones; three dead, one wounded, a dawn, where coyotes sing alone. Who knows why things must rotate, our selfish orbiting heads, filling up more than their circumference Worth - our time, on Earth nothing if not fervent; inane - I did not do as well as you, In following the rules, 1am is the blackest hole, purpled suction of The needle draw. The water, not clear - platelet crimson, dawn felt nothing for me; came not for me - With Devil straw, inserted, blessedly, I considered it then; forgive me, son, for it seemed like a friend. I do as well as I am able, without knowing your older face, nor how it compares to your brother’s I take no chance in saying sorry knowing I was not, most things a dad should be. But I can sleep, perpetually in darkness, knowing the boy I often wronged Has survived, dare I say, flourished, in life; even in the blinding, white glare of daylight. Bio: Elisabeth Horan is a poet/mother from Vermont, who enjoys working with horses and spending time with her two young sons. Her column Arsenic Hour is featured at TERSE. Journal. Her first collaborative chapbook comes to life this March at Moonchild Magazine. She teaches English at River Valley Community College. Follow her @ehoranpoet and [email protected] |
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