2/2/2019 3 Comments Poetry by Andy Pérez Alexander Rabb CC CHARLIE this is for the boy i loved so much i let his name become a bone in my heart, the boy who breaks dawn into symphonies, a night that lasts a little longer. his nails cut crescents, bloodless moons into his clenching palms. he is not the kind of boy who can make a fist out of such fingers. i take him into the rain, him and his violin and say play me something, amor see: how easy it is to love him with his fingers trembling on the strings, how his liquid lull catches in the droplets clinging in the hollow of his throat. yes, he lets me at his neck. i have scraped my teeth over that sacred dip for nights on end. the sky hangs so low, so still around us, i am sure god has turned his face away for a moment. he has given me a night in which his song stills even light. see, how beautiful a boy on the cusp of drowning. four months later, he will look himself in the eye for the first time and swallow all of his father's heart medicine. i couldn't love him enough to stop his body becoming a husk of soil, an underground strain. i couldn't love him enough to make his heart a song. i am standing in a room of boxes at midnight, shirtless and swaying to a tune on the radio. it aches something of his hands in the stilled street, something swelling, cracking inside of me. i open my mouth to sing and am choked by feathers. look, still the song-bird of slivered moons rising from this little grove, the marrow he left singing. again, i lead him by the hand into the stuttering of the rain, the swollen streetlights, the aching moon. again, he lends me one more hour to live. one more song that softens my bones, leaves me trembling. charlie, i see you like this: keening, curled over your violin soaked in light. A LIST OF THINGS I HAVEN'T TOLD MY HUSBAND 1. it starts with a humbling at the knees. summer hardened into flesh. 2. the way my father's eyes dimmed as he beheld the bloody, pulsing cut of a child. the runt of the litter. 3. I wish he'd drowned me when he had the chance, not four years later when I could choke myself awake again. twenty four years ago, a drowning child. now, a man, hands wrapped around my own throat. 4. my sundays spent, knelt & repentent before a man I've been trying very hard to love or forget, whichever will hurt less. kid fists clutched at the waist band of his unbuckled jeans. 5. you think I have spent far too long on my knees. you have no fucking clue. 6. I still haven't forgiven myself. 7. the time I let a man build a summer home inside me for five bucks & half a sandwich. the two, three, five ten twenty nameless men sticking between my teeth. 8. it was enough to put food on the table. clothes on my back, just to be shed in the alley behind school, letting a man pull the breath from my throat and not praying. so very not praying. 9. the sheer fucking hunger of his hands, in the very marrow of him, singing a famine song for the hollow-cheeked kids at the lawn table inside, house wrung with jésus, maría y joseph. he leaves me clutched in my mother's arms, reluctant grasp of a woman who knows she lost the battle a long long time ago. 10. our family history is soaked in salt. 11. how she knelt by me, all through the night, suddenly very still. the bruises on her knees. how do you tell a woman like that? the sun rose bloody, weak. watered down wine. 12. by the time I am eight, I know my body was never built to stay together. 13. these days I look down at hands I still don't recognise. pulling the trigger. digging through sand & sand & sand. 14. sometimes, I didn't mind my father's hands. just something to hold me here, pushing my head under the blue-breaking waves cresting the age-stained bath, an ocean only for a child. the water is not salty, in my mouth I still taste it. flick the memory over my tongue & swallow it down. a man cannot hold so many ghosts in him & still walk unhaunted, head unsevered. still leave footprints. 15. I have been trying very hard for a long, long time. 16. he pressed every inch of skin to the mattress, the same place he will fuck his wife into oblivion in an hour or two. the stains, he will tell her, are from a paper cut. nothing more. what to do with the living wound of the child? the salt-sealed lips? 17. in the lessons of flesh & hunger, I found my skin was a thing I could crawl out of. 18. I couldn't tell you why I was so quiet. silence, after a time, festers in the wound of the throat. atrophied & apathetic & blind. salt rot. 19. I'm still waiting to come home. 20. I buried my mother the same way I discovered gravity, the weight of it a comforting heaviness pooling around my ankles. we are all held down by something. a dead mother. a lack of love. a father with vietnam inside him. a life spent trying to crawl into graves, thinking thank god there is something to keep me here. thank god I don't have to do this forever. 21. we are still choking on all this sand. gritty & irrefutable between us, lingering in the dregs at the bottom of your glass as you take my hand, lead me inside to thrash. 22. I don't know how to love you right. I'm sorry I just don't. 23. once I cracked open your chest & found nothing but salt & sand & sadness. 24. I'm sorry. 25. I'm sorry. 26. I'm sorry. 27. I just don't want to die anymore. 28. I take it all back. the men & the fucking & the senseless graves, the blood-blessed, brief & devastating floundering between your arms, the stumbling drunk & profound on fisted words, I don't know how to speak after so many years of silence a lifetime of men choking ghosts into me, leaving me bloody & alone in a bath-tub wine-dark sea, please. just let me love you, please. 29. I need to tell you something. BLACK DOG I'm sorry I miss you like this. Your girlfriend, white-knuckled, waiting in the car. Picking her fingers apart and tossing the bones in the air, leaving them scattered and stark over the dash board, saying she can predict the future. See? See? People take themselves apart for you. I'm sorry I can't butcher my heart for you, can't feed the scraps to the junkyard dog scrabbling at the door, I'm sorry we're all pinned beneath delineated ribs. I can't give you promises; I still need my hands. The picket fences, the pomegranates, the girl rattling her nails in our truck. I’m sorry I can't give you what you want. The list of things I lay out: Forgiveness. Flesh. A knife. I want you to take it and gut me. Leave me strung, emptied, hardened by your hunger. I want to see my rib cage picked clean, white and gleaming: you've been asking, for a long time, of my heart. I lay out the knives on the counter. See? You have a diagram of what to do. I can't tell you everything, I've tried the words, spindle-black corpses- they just don't work. I've tendered my flesh. Just take the knife. You know now, the swallowed seeds at the centre of me. This is the part where I'm clawed open and kept by a dark man with dirty fingernails. I need to let something inside me, emptiness is not complete without the craving and cramming. The pomegranate seeds, bursting at the seams, fruit turned monster, entrails, the insides of a dog. His tail stirring in the dirt, tongue lapping at my hand. The man chewing me up, spitting me out the door to a sad black dog offering me the only tenderness he can. I have 6 regrets, 6 times I swallowed too soon. 6 times I let the knives go blunt. I fed the wrong dog. I fed the wrong dog. This is the part where you go mad without me, an ecstasy of grief. Then null. I don't come back from this. The seeds are swallowed, I'm sorry you can't just plant another tree. I'm sorry I loved you so much. I'm sorry you let all the crops die and I'm sorry we never stop starving, I'm sorry I couldn't keep food on the table instead of rotting in the fucking closet, I'm sorry I needed you to hurt me and I'm sorry you couldn't. I'm sorry gave you everything but my hands. The damn dog's still starving, and I'm sorry I have no more sadness left to feed him. Just go, ok? Your girlfriend's waiting. Andy Pérez is a latino combat veteran and "crazy artist" since ‘85, paramedic and poet when inspiration inconveniently strikes. He lives happily with his cat and husband.
3 Comments
2/2/2019 4 Comments Fade by Brendon Booth-Jones Alexander Rabb CC Fade If I plucked the plastic seashells away from my ears and stopped straining for God’s garbled whispers, could I learn to be fluent in whale-speak? The sunlight might wreck itself in the glass vase. My lips might sleep at heaven’s throat. But here I am with my dedication to distraction, and here they are with their shiny algorithms. Have you ever abandoned ship? These days, for a fiver, you can sip the soul of a dolphin in any given nightclub toilet for a year-long minute. Yes, but have you huffed the acid-breath of vomited dreams in the mirror? Strobe light and bass in your bones, a pleasant terror. And then you exit night’s nostril and scatter your youth into the umpteenth dawn. Do you remember that long winter when I painted self-portraits in the liquid black of your pupils? Sometimes a song would open like a floral afterthought: sweet but fading fast, like the scent of trees in the rain. Now mostly what I taste when I kiss your neck is a remote sadness. But maybe it’s the lack of sleep that gets me, days strung together like fake pearls. Brendon Booth-Jones is the general editor of Writer’s Block Magazine in Amsterdam. Brendon’s photographs, poems and prose have appeared in the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018, Amaryllis, Botsotso, Neologism, Odd Magazine, Verdancies, Zigzag and elsewhere. Esko Kurvinen CC
Making Love to My Toes Girl glares sullen for a moment, thinks: this shit job, this hotel, these people make so much noise about nothin’ and I bet no tip gonna be left in my room tomorrow. Slam bang outta here like they own the right to vacation and I just want to see Jesse before she goes home to her mom’s who thinks we don't have no reason to be seeing each other. But I see her ass bent over real firm and her tits spilling out of that funky hotel uniform. Looking real fine. Yeah we’re maids, but we made, real good love in that big suite last week. Just cleaned the sheets that’s all and hell we deserve some fun after picking up shit yeah shit there’s a shit on the floor in that other room. I don't know why some people think staying away means being the biggest pigs sloshing mud about these rooms. People bring sadness, breaking glasses, yelling thunder, vomiting oaths, don’t even shut the door, they so mad. And I know my Jesse and I won’t be doing that never. Her lips make thighs tremble, her sighs tell my heart I can finally rest. Quiet hushful. No bad smells. No mean manager slinging threats write me up for five minute late when I tuck in my little boy goodbye, no tears when I see you mi Nena! Mi amor. You must know te adoro, my Jessita, press my hand to your heart; can’t you hear the beats? Your mom mustn’t send you away to Damn Palmdale, Lawndale, “some-dale” California. Only way you going there, we go together but why when our icy turquoise lake is where I bath you. It’s fine, our work at the Mountaineer Lodge here in Lake Louise. They’re not all creeps. Some leave a tip, they dump their dumps in the toilet, garbage in the basket. And girl? Girl! I love you so much, I’d follow you anywhere picking up anyone’s shit. Just kiss me now but don’t you vanish on me. Because one day here in this hoary hotel, without you, would asphyxiate me. I’m so tired, my feet wouldn’t take me anywhere without your handsome hands making love to my toes. Carla Sameth is a writer living in Pasadena. Her debut memoir, One Day on the Gold Line, is forthcoming July 2019. Her work on blended/unblended, queer, biracial and single parenting appears in a variety of literary journals and anthologies including: Collateral Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, Brevity Blog, Brain, Child & Brain Teen Magazine, Narratively, Longreads, Mutha Magazine, Full Grown People, Angels Flight Literary West, Tikkun, Entropy, Pasadena Weekly, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and La Bloga. She writes about addiction, trauma and resilience with a sense of humor and connection to her readers. Carla was selected as a fall 2016 PEN In The Community Teaching Artist and has taught creative writing to incarcerated youth through WriteGirl. She teaches at the Los Angeles Writing Project (LAWP) at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) and with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). She is a member of the Pasadena Rose Poets who present “poetry within reach and in unexpected places.” Carla has an MFA in Creative Writing (Latin America) from Queens University. Previously she “brought home the oatmeal” as a single mom, running her PR firm, iMinds PR. Danielle Moler CC [Climbing Plants] Paper thin skin And bruises without origin and sacks for eyes and stomach and breasts. I’m not tired yet I’m not tired yet I’m not tired yet says a woman who’s only flowers are words and who wilts below a sunflower quilt for two hours and two hours and two hours-- Caught on dog hair from a terrier Who licks the quilt because he cannot lick The soles of your feet and memories that make you cringe. You thought you were a moonflower. And you remember when you were thin. so white so white so white that you forget where you began-- where you began in swamp-like heat that pulled your breath from a chest weakened by pneumonia at six and cicadas chirping like the whirl of bar chatter late into the night-- and you used to catch spider crickets that jumped too high and made you scream and made you scream and made you wish you were braver you were braver than you are now when you threw a plastic picnic table on a colony of wolf spiders-- listening to their shells crack like crabs that you hate but caught in nets on your grandfather’s dock in the summer where morning glories grew up wooden beams in your grandmother’s garden-- white like magnolias over the old brick church whose leaves crunch like cardboard under Mary-Jane clad feet and you wonder how now you are crawling out from under live oak roots and calling for those vining plants like morning glories like honey suckle like bleeding hearts in the gloaming pink, delicate, and broken by design you pull so hard that maybe you can finally climb you can finally climb without fatigue in your arms in your chest pulling out one haggard breath to hide beneath a sunflower quilt for two hours and two hours and two hours-- Jane M. Fleming is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her poetry and prose has been previously featured or is forthcoming in Entropy, Drunk Monkeys, Pussy Magic Magazine, Silver Needle Press, and Moonchild Magazine, among others. She blogs at lunaspeaksblog.wordpress.com and can be found on twitter @queenjaneapx. Tiffany-Amber Moton is a 23 year old New Yorker with a penchant for writing love poetry on bar napkins and oversharing to strangers. After studying politics and writing at Pace University, she self-published her first book, A Lonely Trip Down the Rabbit Hole in late November. Tiffany hopes to continue writing poetry about difficult topics and sharing it with others for the rest of her life and has plans to continue publishing until she finally runs out of things to say. (Never.)Twitter: @Tiffanypasse Website: WordsByTm.com Stellar Loss the night he died frosted stars heaven deep pulled at her sightline held her upward gaze anchored her red-raw eyes to the brightness of light years here she saw the gentle trajectory of his leaving it seemed to say he is not lost just sailed away years on they remain joined maintenant on a stellar plain maintenant (French) = now root: main tenant (French) = ‘hand holding’ Ceinwen lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and writes short stories and poetry. She has been widely published in web magazines and in print anthologies. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University in 2017. She believes everyone’s voice counts. In a Graveyard at Sunset While the sun’s smoky red curtains close across the sky, I can’t stop thinking of him. I remember the summer they buried him, the same summer he and I slept in the same bed, the same summer he started smoking and drinking recklessly, with joyful abandon, I believed. During our final nights that summer, while we sat holding each other under pine trees in the backyard, moonlight like rain winked in his black curly hair-- a garden of light smelling of lavender shampoo, which I had bought for him weeks earlier, at the same time I bought the gun he later used on himself. Come back, I whisper. Come back, though he never will, though even now, as the red sky darkens, I imagine him floating overhead, and I swear, I swear, if I reach out, I can touch him once more. Jacob Butlett is a gay author with an Associates of Arts in General Studies and a bachelor's of arts in Creative Writing. In 2012 he earned a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold Key for his fiction; in 2017 he won the Bauerly-Roseliep Scholarship for excellence in literary studies and creative writing; in 2018 he received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poetry. Some of his work has been published in The MacGuffin, Panoply, Cacti Fur, Gone Lawn, Word Fountain, Lunch Ticket, Fterota Logia, Into the Void, and plain china. 2/2/2019 3 Comments Poetry by Barrett Warner Alexander Rabb CC As the Sky Holds Up the Earth Once a small white feather blew around inside my car for fifty miles before escaping. Finding water is more an act of patience, a small tumbler under a gutter down spout. Buried cats can survive two months by licking condensate off metal pipes. Wild animals are in perpetual high school, with broken hearts and fights and math club. Listen to the raccoon’s warbling shriek for a lost mate, or the way a hawk’s cry is shrill for its body. Even the smoker’s hack of a bossy fox or the vibraphone of antlers on trusted bark. All of us are dreaming to be owls capable of holding up the sky with a wing. Everyone Wants to Know: How Did You Get Tuberculosis? I tell a story about a hot walker at Pimlico who rubbed a horse that wasn’t there, swirling a curry and brush with both hands into nothing, the way Van Gogh painted night. He picked out its hooves, gouging into air, and washed its feet like he was Jesus with a badge to gallop gate to wire. I say, Thanks, Adam, for giving me your cough. It’s a cookie cutter explanation meant to soothe fears. It works like ginger ale. Adam led the horse around the shed row, stopping at a bucket hung from a nail to let him drink. My God, that horse was thirsty. He only wanted to run and sweat and piss and drink and walk. Adam broke nerve endings in his eyelids while trying to find a vein that wasn’t busted. That’s how it is, you describe someone who can’t fully open or close his eyes any more, and all that really matters is the living ghost in his grasp who could crush or kill him instantly. I only have general impressions of why things happen, or whom or what or how much to fatten my quinella. Distance is hard for a horse, but it’s what saves him. Still, for six more months you should cover your mouth if you want to kiss me. I Thought Being a Dreamer Meant You Could Sleep a Lot Damn it! I meant to love and be loved, but I was hungry or I didn’t know what to say, and my muffler was making a funny noise. You think you have problems, I say, kicking a fender, throwing the key at a bird. In the trunk, metal parts in a vinyl bag, but absolutely no charred chickens twirling on a rod. No Prosecco. Nothing in that trunk but the carpet I’d meant to drop off at the cleaners last year. The heron grabs the key and flies off, circling the pond, and drops it on a turn of turtles sunning themselves on a log. I kick off my shoes, toss my shirt at a branch. Go ahead, arrest me for setting unrealistic goals. Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco, 2016) and My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014). His poems currently appear in Beloit Poetry Journal and Rabbit Catastrophe Review. undoing my mistakes sitting with you should be easier. i hold my hands out to you to part this sea. my blessed shore is adrift. i try to speak to you. my words hang limp, lumpen earrings. i sense you grow tired of wearing them. i caress your skin, gently as i can. touch leaves roses on your skin, but they wilt away to the thorns. i try to embrace you. i am wooden to the touch, oaken arms all grey shade, little softness for you to reach i kiss your forehead. your eyes don't light up like they used to. we were always bound to the twilight, weren't we? i try to wipe away your tears. diamond shreds blur your view of the horizon. helpless, i wish i could undo the strain of this earth. i tell you i am here for you, forever. we sit apart, together. relearning intimacy. when you rest on my shoulder, our wisteria blooms. Prem Sylvester is an Indian writer who turns into words the ideas he catches a whiff of from time to time. Sometimes people read these words. His work has appeared or is upcoming in Memoir Mixtapes, Rigorous, and Rising Phoenix Review. 2/2/2019 0 Comments Paradise by Brennan Sprague Danielle Moler CC
Paradise The next-door widow walks by the lamplit window & halts your heart. She unfolds her blanket & is lost in her want. I want her to be happy. I want the end to feel like the beginning. I want the want to exist as something other than want. A want for the sky to approach us & offer the deal of a lifetime. A tunnel to lead me to you, to lead her to her husband gone. His saxophone used to waft from his window like jasmine. She stood downstairs in front of the television not worrying about the concept of want. I want that all the time. For all this endless arriving & leaving to bloom into being, into something other than harsh static, something resembling permanence, a flicker of forever—anything to turn off our televisions and instead of darkness, the well-oiled machine of paradise, glistening. Brennan Sprague (he/him) is a student at Monroe Community College majoring in creative writing. His work appears in Ink & Nebula, Barren Magazine and Gandy Dancer. He enjoys his two golden retrievers, dream pop & poets spanning from the beginning of time to our current age. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |