2/2/2019 0 Comments Poetry by Juliette SebockGame of Thrones Emily tells me her boyfriend reads it to her, Runs a red pen through the bad parts: Rape, Murder, Biting through a bloody heart. I want to be like Emily. But I'm drawn to it Because sex sells (and incest makes it interesting) And the violence blocks out the depth or it all, The truth in the allegories of politics and capitalism, Buzzwords behind an iron throne. Subtlety There's no gun pressed to her head-- He didn't play too much Grand Theft Auto --but she's terrified. The omniscient "they" Say you bring more abuse on yourself Once you've been called a victim. When he raises his voice, She cowers, Feeling like his fist after impact-- She can't change the channel. Juliette Sebock is the author of the poetry chapbook, Mistakes Were Made. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Cauldron Anthology, Royal Rose Mag, Marias at Sampguitas, Reclaim: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, and Paper Trains Literary Journal. She is the founding editor of Nightingale & Sparrow and runs a lifestyle blog, For the Sake of Good Taste.
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2/2/2019 0 Comments Gasoline by Courtney LeBlancGasoline The man who grabbed / my ass on the train / gasoline / the man could have passed / as Santa / calling me honey / gasoline / the man who sunk / his fingers / inside of me / before I could push / him away / gasoline / the man who tried to fuck me / with an empty beer bottle / when I was sixteen / gasoline / the man / who called / me sweetheart / in a meeting / gasoline / I’m peeling / back my skin / revealing / the flint of a match / crawling through my blood / my bones / I’m ready / to burn / this fucking frat party / of America to the ground. Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press), and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She has her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and her poetry is published or forthcoming in Public Pool, Rising Phoenix Review, The Legendary, Germ Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Brain Mill Press, Haunted Waters Press, and others. She loves nail polish, wine, and tattoos. Follow her on twitter: @wordperv, and IG: @wordperv79. 2/2/2019 0 Comments Slice by Toni G.Slice At first, she talks in circles, as if her tongue needs exercise by running a few laps around the topic. Then she defines it; non-suicidal self-injury. At the point of exhaustion, she focuses, tries to look me directly in the eyes as she clears her throat to begin her well-rehearsed speech. I keep my mouth shut and my head lowered. I’m not ashamed, but I’ve learned this pose helps with the process; helps the counselors feel as if they’re making headway. She asks to see my scars. I hesitate to turn my wrist upward and when I do, she gasps; her mouth a tiny circle of surprise. She prods me to tell her why I did it. I respond that I did it for love. My answer does not sit well with her, she rephrase the question waiting for a more acceptable response. She moves on to drilling me about my feelings while I was ‘engaged in that kind of activity.’ What was your process she asks, her fingers doing the hundred-yard dash on her apple iPod screen. My lack of response trips up her flowing digits, bringing them to a halt on her touch screen. I don’t raise my eyes to meet hers. The quiet of the moment is both uncomfortable and calming for me. She clears her throat signaling me that more questions are on the way. I can guess her questions before she voices them. I don’t respond to any. I don’t tell her that after the second slice, I no longer felt pain. How could she understand that each cut became an entryway into peace? Every line moved my heart a little further away from you; a little closer to reality. The hour drags on, but I don’t tell her a heart can be resurrected after it’s carved up and left bleeding. I don’t say a heart can heal after it breaks. Toni G. is trying to prolong her life by writing poetry. Additional work by her may be found at Right Hand Pointing and elsewhere on the net. 2/2/2019 3 Comments Poetry by Julie GreenoughDo You Remember The Ash Trees It was that forest. Winter no snow. Tired sunlight, red fingertips, crackling footsteps, the leaves. Suspended bits of paper, silver orange, velvet backs. They changed the color of that forest. Proof these trees were only sleeping. It was that bug. Emerald. Taunting from the gravel, glinting in the renewed heat. Just a beetle, humming. Floating away, leaving just unwanted knowing. It was you. Beaming at the trees, begging to know each name through your scarf. Offering up clouds of steam in your dimpled pursuit. You never asked, which tree, the winter leaves belong to. You never knew, there was something missing. ________________________________ Ash tree: a dying species of North American tree that does not shed its leaves in winter. You Asked Me What It’s Like To Be The Oldest Me and my brothers go raspberry picking in late June, the undergrowth beside the gravel road thick and dark, full bodied trees hiding hissing cicadas. We crunch our way up the hill, leaning over the ditch, trying not to get pricked by the underside of the leaves, or mistake an unripe blackberry. The sun is too hot, but we are satisfied by the plunk, the pink and red berries filling our clear popcorn bowl. We never get far, Aaron picks too fast, overlooking the ones that hide in the shade, Ethan is diligent, but eats half of what he picks, Asher never checks for bugs. I am obsessed with perfect berries, I hold the bowl, playing quality control I discard the bad ones, the half eaten, the unripe, the ones with spiders. We pick until we are sticky and sunburnt, and I snatch the bowl from their hungry fingers, there’s plenty left on the bushes. Today is the first day of June, and I can’t tell you who holds the bowl, or if they even still go. Boyhood Two boys make a fire, wedged against the underbelly of a cleft stone jutting from the sand. I freeze, calculating age. Rain settles against us as I watch them staring back, curly hair and hoodies, they are young. Each dismisses me, taking turns tending the flame, driftwood for one, cardboard for the other. I pace between the ocean and the boys deciding how much further to go, but the tide is coming in and I remember I am alone. Turning back, the flame peeks out from the rock, smoke merging with the mist, I squint for the shapes of strangers. The rock fades back into the cliffs, and I ache for the boyhood I never had, to partake in the coming and goings of the unafraid. Julie Greenough is a an Appalachian poet finishing her undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech. Her poetry has appeared in Heartwood, and The Broke Bohemian. 2/2/2019 3 Comments Poetry by John HomanFan Girls Standing outside the theater on a spring day. Girls lining up before the show. Young women in all manner of cute outfits. The lights dim after the warm up band, Three singers eventually appear on stage, Welcomed by a monstrous squeal. Excitement rising through the night. Jumping together to the kick drum. Screaming the lyrics. Hands in the air. Humans believe themselves advanced, Rejecting superstition for logic. Replacing myths with reason. Certain ancient things remain. A proper tribal rite, Moving to the rhythms, In that place, Between darkness and light. Chanting the holy words. Trances giving way to ecstasy. Collecting graven images, On tiny rectangles of light. Why Don't You Like Me? There is no way to know for sure. Moving through your day doing the best you know how, fighting the usual demons: lack of motivation, selfishness. You thought you were raised well. You thought you played well with others. You thought you were sensitive. Somewhere, someone can't stand you; in the very room where you sit today entering numbers and words into the black keyboard with white letters. Your actions annoy them. They silently judge you, just like you have done to others. I'm sorry to break it to you but it can't be fixed. What endears you to some, irritates others. The whole world will never like you no matter how hard you try. Embrace the fact you will only be loved by part of the world. Making those who truly love you even dearer. John Homan is a poet and percussionist from the small town of Bend, Oregon. A graduate of Indiana University, John's work has appeared in Chiron Review, Mojave Heart Review, and Misfit Magazine among others. John lives in Elkhart Indiana with his wife, daughter and two cats. 2/2/2019 0 Comments Cocktail by December Lace December Lace is a former professional wrestler and pinup model. She has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, TPG, Empower Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Pussy Magic Lit, Lonesome October, Erie Tales, Awkward Mermaid and Rhythm & Bones YANYR Anthology as well as the forthcoming Ghostlight, The Magazine of Terror, 24 Unread Messages, The Cabinet of Heed, Three Drops From A Cauldron, and Rhythm & Bones Dark Marrow. She loves Batman, burlesque, and things that go bump in the night. She can be found on Twitter @TheMissDecember, http://decemberlace.blogspot.com or in the obscure bookshops of Chicago. 2/2/2019 0 Comments Photography by Chuck Taylor Chuck Taylor has suffered from sleep apnea for twenty-seven years and after six months struggle finally mastered a CPAP breathing machine on his third try. He is sleeping better. His photos have appeared in a number of literary magazines, as have his poems, essays, and stories. He is happy to be a writer and photographer and a father, among other happinesses. 2/2/2019 0 Comments Photography by Nancy Jasko Nancy lives in a small neighborhood in central New Jersey near a bay. She enjoys early morning walks to the beach with her dog and taking photos along the way. She graduated Rutgers University with a BA in English and the University of Florida with a MA in Special Education, but she currently spends her days in the role of sales coordinator in a local home repair business. BOYS WHO READ SALINGER They give me cigarettes, pick me up in their car when I ask them to, buy me coffee, refill my mug. They show me poems they’ve been reading, the notes they take on them; the highlight marks, the lines they feel are applicable to their life—always obvious links to love and cliche patterns of self-destruction. They tell me they’ve always related to Holden Caulfield and I suppress what feels inside like both an enormous yawn and a laugh: another white boy who thinks he’s Holden Caulfield, holdin’ onto his sadness like it’s depth, like it’s poetry, something to show to someone. But didn’t I once say that I wanted you to show me anything? One thing after another for eternity? It was in a car, in a dream, the car wasn’t moving, a place where I could be with you without wondering who you are, if you make sense next to me. They read aloud to me a Bukowski poem and not a single word of it registers. I only hear the tiny waves of their voice—timid, self-conscious ripples in a boring pond. Though there’s something sedative about their boringness; still I think I wouldn’t mind jumping in it, that boring pond. Their full neck still leaps out at me when I look at them, like the starkness of a sign, like driving your car into a tree, the powerful trunk of their neck. Their blue eyes still sting a little like looking up at bright lights fast. When I’m in their car—as they drive me back to my house, listening to music they let me pick out, driving under the dull violet milk of the sky—I feel like I could dissolve, as if I were the boring pond, evaporating into the air contained in their car, like an air freshener. Once, as we smoked cigarettes outside in the cold, you said to me, “You never actually feel the socks on your feet until someone says: think about the socks on your feet—and then you can feel them,” like some ersatz philosopher, an eager kid who just learned something, a boy who reads Salinger. Oh, but what’s so wrong with Salinger anyway? “I don’t feel anything,” I said to you. You said nothing, and I wondered if what I had said was true. We walked back inside, slowly letting our bodies become bodies again. He took me home and I felt a pleasure from the simpleness of this act that felt something like security or safety. In their car I look at the boring pond of them the way one looks at something they used to take advantage of as a child but now, older, appreciates in a new way. A way that feels suddenly urgent, as if already seeing it as a memory. I walk away from them up to my front door, wondering what the memory might mean, feeling the socks on my feet. Matthew Meriwether is a writer and performer currently living in Fort Wayne, IN. He writes and performs music under the name Fresh Tar, and is recently the author of Knock Knock (The Dandelion Review, 2018), a chapbook of narrative prose. His work has appeared in BOAAT Journal, FLAPPERHOUSE, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. 2/2/2019 3 Comments Migrate by Sheila R. Lamb Danielle Moler CC Migrate She leaves the Shenandoah in a haze of green and fog. The humidity is dense, rich, like chocolate she can barely stand to taste. She craves the dry grit of the desert. There is no explanation for an impulse based on the mention of sage and dust. 7000 feet. The cold air pierces her lungs like a stabbing knife. Three days to drive back from the east coast green, across rolling hills, through the flat middle, to the red canyons and arroyos. She passes rock formations so old that they cry for water to change their shape. The red rock gives way as the elevation rises into Ponderosa pine. In this forest, there is space between trees. Cinder and sand sift together. She breathes in the juniper, the rabbit brush. Dryness so sweet it stings her eyes. Ragged pot holes jolt her along the road. Route 66 sounds romantic but it is a rarely cared for, one-lane appendage to the interstate. Ahead, is a clearing, where there is single surviving building of the route's pre-interstate heyday. Jack’s motel. She will turn around there. She will not keep going. She will not go to the ranch. She'll choose a new route. A new direction. She promises herself that the motel is where she will stop this journey in reverse. A long time ago, at the old motel, she’d pounded on the door. "Can I use the phone?" she’d cried. There was no cell service at the ranch and her husband had ripped the land line from the wall. The old Route 66 motel was the closest building within a mile of the ranch. Old Jack had turned on the light. Saw the blood on her face. Let her in. She knows enough not to return to someone who hits you. What irks her, what catches in her throat a thousand times a day, is that she'd stayed long enough for it to get to that point. All the things that happen before he hits you in the face. The flattering jealousy, the minuscule commands, the daily directions of how to be, how to act, overshadowed by love or something akin to it. It takes time to get to that point. After Jack held a Ziploc full of ice to the back of her neck, the nosebleed stopped. A late-night run, she’d told him. I fell. It wasn't a matter of protection, but she didn't want the sympathy, the drama of police, of shelters. The knowledge that she must leave rather than her desire to go made her close her eyes and stab her finger on the national map laminated to the motel counter. Her random roulette landed her on the east coast, on a small town nestled in an expanse of green. Her cross-country escape from the ranch. And now, she retraces her steps, to where she began. She returns because of the man from Las Vegas. He’d mentioned it as she set his coffee in front of him. She was working at a Virginia diner that served park visitors, the random spot she had chosen from Jack's hotel map. Strange, she thought, to drink coffee after a day of hiking in the Shenandoah's humid green. Water, beer, sodas were the usual orders. It was one of those hot September weekends where summer let it be known that her extinction date was still two days away. The man didn't mention the Strip, the casinos. What caught her attention, what he’d said, was, "Red Rock. The dryness, sage, dust, he said. So different than here." He waved his hand toward the window which framed a thickness of poplar, ash, and oak. "And the burros," he’d said as she refilled his coffee. "The burros are cool." Her insides twisted with a longing she’d tried to forget. The elk strikes before she can react. A heavy thud on the hood. The crash of breaking glass. The hatchback 180's and for a flicker of an instant she recalls the driver's ed. rule of turning into a spin. She just as quickly realizes she has no control. Vertigo. The airbag against her chest. A throaty cry. A massive pop, like a balloon, like her eardrum has exploded. Then all is still. The car passenger side leans against a pine tree trunk. She shifts slightly beneath her seatbelt, the pressure of the airbag gone. In front of her is the massive head of a young bull elk, necklaced by windshield glass while the rest of its body lay across the hood of her car. This close. The head of a wild animal. Blood drips onto the steering wheel. The antlers are an inch from her chest. The elk pants. She can see its dry tongue. Smell its grassy breath. She presses back against her seat, trying to maximize the space between herself and the antlers, the animal on her dashboard. All else is silent. Snow falls in light, airy flakes, like feathers. Late September is different at 7000 feet. She slides her hand slowly toward her cell phone, which rests in the console cup holder. Her fingertips touch the smooth screen. Fingerprint done. It glows. The elk huffs. Blinks. Long lashes surround his brown eyes. Cell service is scanty along this part of the National Forest, but she can call emergency. She will not call the ranch. One day, she'll write a how-to brochure on how to dial a smart phone when pinned by an elk. Step one, move slowly. Step two, bring the phone into your line of vision, just enough to see the numbers. Step three...the elk cries, a bark. It is a terrifying sound. His distress, his pain, is in front of her. In the wild, elk bugle for mates, a sound like a trumpet. The bugle is a distinctive sound, meant to be heard for miles. They call when they migrate, their seasonal pilgrimage from canyon to forest. They call to the herd when there was food or shade or danger. This bark isn't for mates or communication. It is fear. The phone clatters as she drops it into the cup holder. Too much. The animal swings his head. The antlers, maybe a six-inch span, graze her collarbone like an amber burn. When she had lived here, at the ranch one mile away, she and her ex-husband collected shed antlers along the perimeter of their south forty. Most often she picked up a single antler. Young elk continued their migratory trail with a lone antler, lopsided, rubbing the uneveness against tree trunks. She saved single ones hoping to one day find its partner, its twin. This elk is young. The antlers, solid bone, may be his first set. He'll shed them in the spring and grow a larger set each successive year. The windshield cocoons his head like a prize. He breathes a whisper over her face. She breathes it in. He strains against the glass. Tiny shards escape the jagged spider-web around his bloodied neck. They drop to the dashboard with a tink. Light snow, barely a dusting, lands on his body splayed across the hood. Stay still. Stay still, she tells herself. She, the one who always took flight. She, with the elk, unable to move, even though they both long for nothing more than freedom. When the elk dies, because at some point it must, she will call for help. She will get her car towed. Get it fixed. If it's totaled, she'll buy a train ticket. South. East. West. Away from the ranch. Away from this stretch of old highway that has pulled her back. If she knocked on the door, her ex would take her in, she would forgive him, again; that familiar routine. In the morning, when the rabbit brush blew their seeds like dandelion tuft, they would walk the ranch's border, and search for what was now right in front of her. The elk thrashes with a raspy, worn cry. She pulls her knees up to protect herself and her ankle becomes tangled in a locking puzzle of antler, deflated airbag, and steering wheel. The elk's tantrum against the windshield deepens the gashes on his neck. Pushes the glass in further. His brown eyes meet hers. His head relaxes on the dash. His eyes stay open. Silence. Random snowflakes gather on the edge of the windshield. There is no need to search the prairie for shed antlers. She knows better than to return. Even with a matched set in her hands. Sheila R. Lamb received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her writing has appeared in Rappahannock Review, Monkeybicyle, JMWW, and elsewhere. She lives, teaches, and writes in the mountains of Virginia. |
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