2/1/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Arwyn Sherman Jack Blundell CC salmon I’ve been asked to name the thing inside myself that hates me and all i can think of is how awkwardly big your mouth is but only when you kiss me when its just you and your denial framing small words out of a regular mouth Unapologetic boy with broken glass hands and communion apologies / useless and dissolved against the tongue. I am this dissonance, the fatigue of coveting / jigsaw puzzle with the corner pieces shredded / a bloodied elk with corn stuck between her teeth, hunted with trust and pressed clean on metal washboards—the economy of meat / blood stains on the living room floor We are apostles that worship the space between fruition and desire we are comfortable with wanting it is all we know Blessed be those who ache for nothing / who desire not the sinew stripped bone from the deer skeleton nor the living doe plucking berries carefully from the forest / Bless them in their detachment I am far too rooted to be an accomplice / far too buried in careless men’s deviance to feel free. serenade Look at my small house, my fingers that broke and bled to claw this corner of the universe from my tired bones Look at me I am easy, sing me terrible lies, sing them until they are pulling me out of the car out of the home your wife keeps clean for you The drive home is empty I am scared of dying alone and in the dark There is a tin box with enough flint for one fire, maybe two if rationed but the box is welded shut but my own dumb hands My pathetic heart and useless availability I’ve only known love as suffering I do not know what love as kindness is I cannot accept it as anything but pity Arwyn Sherman lives in rural Maine with two cats and a toad.
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2/1/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Gloria Monaghan Clinton Steeds CC The Man Who Did Not Believe in Watches Set himself on fire on a dry day in October when the last of the small green leaves hung tenacious, and dark branches said may I? and can you? For a minute he let me stay, drifting away that autumn day after his father hit him senseless, old familiar betrayal. Eventually, went away from all of them in the fire of his mind internal explosion. I’ve seen it before (that is after) in the vacancy of green eyes; no one there. Pumpkin, we were all in love once. Obfuscate the past and you are free. Gloria Monaghan is a Professor of Humanities at Wentworth Institute in Boston. She has published two chapbooks and three books of poetry. Her chapbooks include; Flawed (Finishing Line Press) and Torero (Nixes Mate). Her books of poetry are The Garden (Flutter Press), False Spring (Adelaide), and Hydrangea (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, 2River, Adelaide, Aurorean, Chiron, Nixes-Mate, First Literary Review East, among others. In 2018 her poem, “Into Grace” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her book False Spring was nominated for the Griffin Prize. 2/1/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Izabella Santana Fred Postles CC You have a high threshold for this kind of pain. The kind that slides down your body, split the seams. let the whiskey and liquid wishes pour out. The kind that would start a fire in the person next to you, but you like the burn. It’s familiar and will die on its own so long as they never know. I only know how to belong when I am being abused. The kind that is silent, holding onto the wind you can hear it when the leaves call. When the green grasses burn. Because everything burns eventually. Pain is unsustainable. Tell them your hurt. Tell them you feel small. You always feel small. How do we build a foundation out of forest fires? Sift through the ash for a new layer of soil. Let the earth soften under your touch. Let the smoke slither between your fingers and tolerate absence. Because one day someone will show up. You have to believe someone’s hand will be gentle enough to replant a garden that always feels neglected. Don’t be afraid when the pain goes. Don’t be afraid when the chest softens and sunflowers grow in all the broken cracks of your body. Because this is what peace will feel like. It’s the closest thing to magic. And in the midst of all the chaos, he bought me vanilla ice cream. Ice cream can make the world feel a little less sad. We’d spend late nights sitting at the bus stop, a distraction from a family imploding. You are amazing. Words I’d heard but never believed because no matter how many times it is said, the voice still exists. The voice you shaped in order to validate your anger. Validate your hurt. Validate that the less space you take up, the better it is for everyone. So how do we survive this? How do you survive trauma that’s planted in the middle of your chest, a tree growing since the day you were brought into the world? You find pockets of light. There has to be a balance because why else would we be here? To share ice cream with a ghost. To be told by a stranger you are kind. To navigate a world burned to ruins and show people paths exist outside of exiting early. You can’t help but smile when eating ice cream, can you? When I first told my story to a friend, he’d told me his. Both never brought to light because each story would be received differently. One in 4 girls are sexually abused before the age of 18. One in 6 boys. We forget that other stories are told but contained in a box, shoved under the prospect that men do not experience assault. How do we change the conversation? How do we make space to believe all victims. How do we change the language surrounding abuse in order for men to come forward too? Dismantle the notion that men are not allowed to be sensitive. We are all human- a basic human right is to feel and breathe life into our stories. Where has the humanity gone for these young boys? Why are their stories buried under ours? Why doesn’t anyone believe me? Because I want to write into these memories Not just the ones carved out of broken Bone and scarred skin I want to write into the way our Chests break Open- each rib sliced in the middle Until our hearts pour Into our hands. Write into the way our tongues click And teeth shatter These are the happy moments Alive and breathing, We e x i s t Izabella (She/Her) is a 23 year-old college grad with a Bachelor's in English- Creative Writing and working on her last semester as an MFA candidate at SFSU. Currently residing in San Francisco, but originally from Santa Ana, California. While working on her MFA, She’s interned for Omnidawn Publishing as a Marketing Assistant and Fiction Editor. Previously won awards for The Scholastic Arts and Writing awards- second place in poetry, and memoir with honorable mentions in poetry and journalism. Izabella also received First Place in Columns (2-year college division) as a staff writer for Santa Ana College's el Don from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (2015). In her spare time, she enjoys reading, perfecting her coffee-making skills, and collaborating with friends on other art projects. 2/1/2021 2 Comments Poetry by Emalisa Rose Clinton Steeds CC
to Deb with Mai Tais and Marlboros She pined over Paul I went for Ringo. She was crazy for Brian; my guy was Carl. Both of us battled for Peter. We were rubber souls, pet sounds, lava lamp lushes, hurdy gurdy girls dancing the hits to the old 45s in her pink polka-dot palace, tempting the boys to come onto us. I was skinny and pimpled. She wore buck teeth with braces. But I poemed and she painted never knowing the gifts we’d been given back then. I was probably in love with her; both of us awkward but beautiful. We just didn’t see it. At the time we were art --undefined. When not writing poetry, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting and painting. She volunteers in animal rescue. LIving by a beach town, provides much of the inspiration for her art. Her poems have appeared in The Big Window Review, Beatnick Cowboy, Spillwords and other journals. 2/1/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Renwick Berchild Jo Guldi CC Indomitae Call with me. Let us catch lightning bugs in our opened mouths. Take on the hills, cut off our right breasts like Amazonians, draw our bows, make the Greek winds flux and invert, blow off our manes; let’s go, unshaved and ugly--Hail Freedom! Women, I beckon you, to throw your men. Our feet are cracked and hardened, in need of pumice stones, but they know the roads better than timberwolves, better than caribou, better than stray cats. Sainthood? Not for us. Mother Teresa, bless her, but I don’t care. I’ll wrap my motherhood in a plastic tarp, dump her in the river, a careening seed off a sugar maple crashing into the Mississippi. (She’ll spin wild before she hits, and I’ll relish in the whistling.) She’ll not tell of my extravagance, my sex filled dreams, unholy thoughts of beating in children's brains, dying for the crib to tip over and plunge into the mud-plagued snowdrifts outside. Women, if we rode together, 3.8 billion steeds straight to the steps of the Vatican, nuns tossing down their habits, supermodels ditching their lingerie in the streets, ten million copies of Lolita in a bonfire, quartering baby dolls and tossing their limbs about like confetti I’d bet God would be shaken. I bet men would piss their pants, Artemis would come crashing through with her wild dogs, turn the rapist boys into bleating deer and have them devoured alive. Hsi Wang Mu would wake up, bare her tiger teeth, flick her leopard tail, leave her jade palace in the Kun-lun mountains and come scream-stomp-seizure-spasm with us. Women, my girls, sisters aplenty, I love the thought of us--The Battering Ram. Swirl Benjamin Franklin has wooed my grandmother with his three-piece silk suit and shiny bald head. I never wanted a living man she says, weaving her fingers through her corkscrew white hair. I want to ask her about sex; I remember girlfriends on the bathroom floor holding up mirrors to their vaginas, shaving their forearms, grabbing hold their stomachs, hands squeezing at the clumps. Prisoners who make knives out of paper and saliva, spit and cut, spit and cut, like Indonesian swifts building nests inside a cave. My grandmother’s spacious eyes are crystal balls. In them I can recall the howls of veiny men, with crocodile tears hot red, lamenting over untilled soils spilling into my bedroom. Area rugs swallow up the dirt they left. How many women long for dead men? For massless, wispy vibrators of bellies, chests, calves? Spooky kings laid out flat over their peach chambers and striped rooms, soaking their crying blood up like mops with embroidered ends. Why does grandmother long for a ghost? Her fingers grip the sewing needle, her hands chop potatoes for dinner while grandfather reads in his chair, she files her fingernails, she tweezes the whiskers from her chin, uses a glinting razor to strip smooth her hairy legs —to wield what may stab and prick her, she aches for a specter’s lithe hand to brush her closed curl, caress her creaking knees, cup her squeezed head, softly softly swirl the nape, of her tired, bent neck. Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review, and her poems have appeared in Headline Press, Whimperbang, ISACOUSTICS, Spillwords, Vita Brevis, The Stray Branch, Machinery India, Lunaris Review, Streetcake Mag, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. 2/1/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Koss Jonny Hughes CC In Other Countries Max called me—her acquaintance’s son suicided in Canada—flew from the UK to do it. Her voice quivered as if suicide had never entered her head. Fact was she had thought it herself— with surgical scissors. She would later show me how she paused and wondered how deeply one could cut-- before what? And so, the magnitude of ending one’s own story tends to render a seismic chill in us living. I remember when my childhood friend Curtis drowned with his father in some Canadian rapids. Took forever to get his body back to the States. A body is a property once it is spent (sometimes even before). And with no goodbyes or a funeral, he remains alive in my dreams, only he is forever fourteen, trapped between here and dead. Because he doesn’t know he’s dead, he smiles through his big- ridged teeth and looks just like his last school photo, still, his sun-bleached hair swept to the side, standing in front of a fake blue sky. Six for (Postpartum) walled in by white towers clad in ice gowns strapped to a steel slab electrodes matted to hair she knows what mercy isn’t goals / scourge the body’s disease in repeated jolts her memory reduced to powder they called it healing their shocks to pneuma in all the ashy clippings everything becomes apartheid cost / memory gone / lost job / persecution the devil’s bullies come and go in their flimsy clothes and habits, pulling each stitch from her patched counterpane as she wraps each ruptured bit how to pay the landlord how to feed her children when every dollar’s spent she knows, she knows choice is not a bludgeoned spirit nor a body and what her body gave her has now too been plucked if only one could choose death just as god intended she travels to her mind’s ocean a beach before weeds corrupted land warm sand covers her body as sea expands into sky pebbles evaporate water she made her decision as the sun lit their burners Suicide Suit A life should leave deep tracks —Kay Ryan I still wear your suicide suit. It fits me like a Trojan. I have filled it. Expanded like a rubber lung. Erupting seams. Eating. No Julie Newmar Catwoman in this spandex. Meow. But yes indeed. Pussy still got teeth. When I wear it, I’m invisible. When I remove it, I’m still invisible. Comfort cuisine. Jesus-face pancakes. Grilled cheese. Dollar-truck stop sandwiches. One for me and one for you. I’ll keep you alive with food. Your friend said she wanted to hold a service, then didn’t answer my messages. The disappointments didn’t die with you Max. Shitfaced, I read you Kay Ryan in my yard while you listened from a jar on a shelf. Yes. Tracks. Max. The neighbors in the golf cart showed up. Conjoined evangelicals preaching through their TV-frame roll bar. If god can’t save them from queers the roll bar will. Safety in twos. In golf carts. Did you hear me? I picnicked you in the yard while I read to you in your suicide suit, while they judged our hare bare gay souls while the sky spilled black ink, as my styrene plate blew across the yard like a spaceship. She said she respected your (choice), a fiction, especially when it’s yours. Life is fiction, a play. Death is essay and messy. Your girlfriend who was not a girlfriend harassed me on Facebook and blamed me for your death. She told me you were coming to visit her. ( ) You did not die. I wear your suicide suit, inside, I’m invisible. Outside too it is cold. Who did you shoot your picture for? She said you were coming to see her. WTF. I only called her to be nice. We never actually met. I still wear your suicide suit. It fits me perfectly, although it’s a bit tight. One ear sags. The tail makes my ass itch. It’s been a year since you died. My yard is packed with weeds. Your lavender grows despite me. Despite you. Your tracks hatch around the plants in flattened trenches. Three talking cats showed up in my dream Plump and hunching, yet spry. I recalled I forgot to feed them—ever. They told me it was fine and not to worry. They understood forgiveness is what makes us human ( ). They had mice and food from the neighbors, they said. Like what food? I asked. Like heads Of mice. And everything they loved that was mice. We stepped out the door to view the delivery gift basket; I tried not to judge the mice parts or smell cat breath, all of which they were pleased with. They were happy in a way only cats could be. Happy with what the world gave them in or out of a dark wicker basket. Happy with their catness. Back inside, human guests knocked at the door; cats fanned out, two on the sills, one on the couch top, content, not saying a word. Find work by Koss in Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Spillway, Diode Poetry, Five Points, Outlook Springs, Lumiere Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and many others. She also has work in or forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2020, a Diode anthology, and Kissing Dynamite’s Punk Anthology. Her book, One for Sorrow, is due out in early 2021 from Negative Capability Press. Find her on Twitter @Koss51209969 or http://koss-works.com. Jonny Hughes CC On Silence Silence fills my empty spaces like neglect. I think of the ways jealousy feeds two people—children standing under a tall table. How hunger waits in the parts so far from your belly you can’t remember full or empty. How you eat pain to fill pain and the word pain doesn’t touch the feeling. Language fails the way sound and color and food never do. How a single violin, the fade of purple to pink to blue, how potato chips have more to say than adjectives. If I were honest, I’d explain this silence as cold next day chicken or pie from the tin, fingers smeared with dip. Everyone tells me I’m not old enough to hurt this way. I have something to say plainly, about violence, something about rocking a child in darkness, something small here is choking on the silence, our country dusked in ash. “And they came home and longed again.” from Elizabeth Bradfield They trade paperbacks: The Price of Salt and Dwelling Song. They write a poem, line by line, full of winter: terror of the homebound. They try to tie a prayer into clean cloth with a twist of string, the way some men string up rabbits for gutting. They paint their nails every day only to chip away at shine. They listen hard for silence but hear only babbling. In the abandoned mall crumbling from root and frost, they gather and wait. When the third grader spikes a fever, they wait. Before they wade foot first into the waters, they sing for their lullaby mothers. They cry in the grass and gutter. No one comes. No one comes. They send messages home in cracked bottles, across cans and twine, and they long again and again against waves that push them back to shore. Allison Blevins is the author of the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Her books Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2023) are forthcoming. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and a Poetry Editor at Literary Mama. She lives in Missouri with her spouse and three children. For more information visit http://www.allisonblevins.com. A former John and Renee Grisham fellow, Joshua Davis holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, and an M.A. from Pittsburg State University. Recent poems have appeared in The Poetry Distillery, The Museum of Americana, and The Midwest Quarterly. He is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at Ohio University, and he lives near Tampa. 2/1/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Lydia Tai Jo Guldi CC Black Cloves and Bad Habits “This really isn’t a habit you want to get into,” said the blonde, wavy-haired stoner lighting a cigarette As I clutched my second pack of cigarettes I ever had, naive, with lungs not yet filled with a black tar coating Black clove Djarum cigars My tobacco of choice Standing outside the wooden fence that surrounded our high school “This isn’t really a habit you want to get into,” I told the first-time patients to the psychiatric ward Where I sat in a hospital gown, legs casually crossed Picking at a scab on my arm where the knife had incised earlier last week And I laughed and wondered how long I’d been so cynical “This is a habit I’d like to get into” Your arms wrapped around mine weeks ago Lying in a pile of navy blue sheets Pressing kisses into places And making me feel blessed A certain calm takes place Nicotine gum comes at a price but it’s cheaper than the hospital bills That came late to my Aunt Sally who died of lung cancer last year And the cigarettes triggered asthma and lowered the effects of Schizophrenia medication Which didn’t stop me from lighting up whenever he came around He was a smoker since the age of fourteen And he liked guns and hated the gays and I could never So we split in September and then I went To a psychiatric ward again for the second time that year Which is where I had met him, in June I came home, and I’m calmer now I need to be alone, and enjoy My fleeting young adulthood You’re only memories left in photographs on my phone “It’s a habit I should get into” I told my therapist “What is?” She replies I say, “Loving myself” Lydia Tai is a twenty-seven year old Taiwanese-American female. She is published in Big City Lit and the Creative Drive Podcast. She is an advocate for those with mental health issues and has written all her life. She lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. 2/1/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Audrey L. Reyes2/1/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Bianca Grace katie chao and ben muessig CC Obituary with Your Name in It The rusty smell of blood lingered across the freeway the instant your ghost was born. Fragmented body parts grieved as they landed north and south bound at the slaughter scene. The truck driver’s panic attack was an earthquake that thunderstruck an entire town. You handed a life sentence of flashbacks that taunt him every time he flicks the ignition on. The local newspaper splattered your story in bloody ink but they never wrote your name. But your family did, your neighbourhood did, your friends did and I did. Flynn, I vomited in my chest of drawers aching to know why you chose a coffin over your son. The psychedelic drug of suicide loiters as the hallucinations of your face stalk me at work. Dad was there filming for the news but he didn’t know it was you. The mountains of soccer trophies you won watch over your son as he dreams of you standing in your red and blue uniform at the end of his crib. Your life fills a cardboard box that he opens every day so he never forgets who you are. Flynn, for 10 years I saw the dark shadows you couldn’t escape no matter how fast you ran. In your will you wrote all our names. We each inherited a piece of your pain. Bianca Grace is a poet from Australia. She writes from her living room which is overloaded with photos of memories which she draws inspiration from. |
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