The Very Last Drop
 
on the last day, when the world finally ends, I hope
I’m sitting in my car, driving somewhere nice, thoughts of the day ahead
filling my head with anticipatory joy. I hope my favorite song
is playing on the radio, and I hope that I have just enough time to sing along
all the way to the end of the song.
if the world was to truly end on a perfect note, then I
would have a cup of coffee by my side
hot but not too hot, and just enough to last until the very
 
last second. I don’t really care how it all ends,
 
so long as I don’t know it’s coming, so long as
I don’t have to think about it, have to prepare for it, have to dread it
in any way. I don’t want to live through
global starvation, a prolonged, senseless war, weeks of
television shows featuring children dying somewhere else.
I want the end
 
to be something nobody saw coming but the sandwich-board
prophets, standing crazy on street corners, waving their dirty fists
up at the sky as if
some god up there
 
was glaring down at the earth, making maniacal plans
 
to destroy everybody and everything we’ve taken so comfortably for granted.
I want to end up like those mammoths dug out of rock ice in Russia
found completely intact, flash frozen, with food still in their mouths
caught by disaster in mid-chew, mid-thought
completely surprised.

​

Bio: Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Big Muddy,The Cape Rock, New Ohio Review, and Gargoyle, and her published books include Walking Twin Cities, Music Theory for Dummies, Ugly Girl, and The Yellow Dot of a Daisy. She has been a featured presenter at Write On, Door County (WI), North Coast Redwoods Writers' Conference (CA), and the Spirit Lake Poetry Series (MN). Her newest poetry collections, A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press) and I'm in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.) will be out late 2018.
​

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass
 

An address flashes up on the screen, their next job. Rob turns to Annaliese, starts speculating about traffic flow and road blocks and alternate routes to save time. Annaliese is not listening. Her own address. Louisa. Fuck.
 
‘So maybe if we take that arterial road down by the fire station … what’s it called again?’
‘Rob, it’s fine. I know where it is.’
‘Yeah, but there might be a shortcut through —’
‘I said, I know it.’
 
They drive in silence, no lights or siren, although every alarm bell in Annaliese’s head is sounding. She and Rob haven’t worked together long, only two or three weeks. He told her on the first day that he was married with a couple of kids, both boys, their names and ages escaping her as soon as he said them. Annaliese had told Rob that she was single, lived alone.
 
‘It was her neighbour who called,’ Rob says, reading from the information that has been sent through from the call centre. ‘The partner works nights apparently, long history of —’
‘Okay, listen Rob,’ Annaliese snaps, ‘you seem like a pretty decent guy. You’re good at your job, you want to do the right thing.’
‘Of course.’
‘I want to handle this one myself. And I don’t want to tell you why.’ Annaliese fumbles in the pocket of her paramedic’s jumpsuit and pulls out a twenty. ‘Go and get yourself a burger or something. Take the ambulance round the drive through.’
‘Take the ambulance? What about the patient —’
‘Go!’
 
The patient is passed out on the bathroom floor, a pool of vomit congealing on the pretty blue and white Spanish tiles beneath her open mouth. Annaliese had laid those tiles with her own hands. She and Louisa had argued about the colour, the size, the spacing, everything there was to argue about when it came to tiles. Louisa is already lying in the recovery position so Annaliese doesn’t try to move her straight away.
 
‘I only came round to bring her some dinner,’ Mandy the neighbour explains, wringing her hands. ‘I made a big casserole and there was so much left over, I just thought … I’m sorry. When I called the ambulance I didn’t realise it would be you.’
‘You’d better get back to the baby, I suppose,’ Annaliese says. Mandy nods, blushes, heads back next door.
 
It isn’t an ambulance job. Annaliese drags Louisa into the spare room, where they’ve been sleeping while Louisa paints the main bedroom in fits and starts. So many renovation jobs started, none finished. Annalise looks around at the boxes of tiles, the curtains yet to be hung, the paint dried on brushes that Louisa never washes properly. It will all end in a rush, she realises, when they will inevitably have to cut their losses and sell. Their dream home will be patched up in neutral tones for real estate photographers and house hunters, young couples eager to put their own mark on it. Annaliese hates things being left unfinished. It’s the only reason she’s stayed with Louisa so long, so far past the logical end. But there’s never going to be a right time to jump, she realises now. This whole thing isn’t suddenly going to stop spinning.
 
Louisa’s snores settle into a predictable rhythm and Annaliese leaves her to it, grimly confident she’ll survive at least another night. Rob still hasn’t come back, and Annaliese goes into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The place is a bomb site. A gaping hole screams between two cupboards, waiting for the dishwasher they are saving up for. The wall above the stove top is pocked with glue, where tiles have been chiselled off one at a time. The floor is bare concrete and a stack of wooden boards lies at one disused end of the room.
 
Annaliese feels something sharp underfoot. Last Christmas, as a bit of a joke, Louisa’s sister Rosie gave them a bottle of wine in a glass box, with a sticker on it that said In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. Louisa’s finally taken a hammer to it. Must have been the last bottle in the house.
 
Out on the driveway, Rob beeps the horn. Annaliese slowly rises from the milk crate she’s been sitting on. There’s a beep in her pocket, a voice message on her phone.
 
Babe, it’s me. Listen, I think Mandy might have called an ambulance. Would it be yours? Hope you haven’t left already. I’m actually fine. I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. Can you cancel it? Okay, love you, bye.

​

Bio: Alicia Bakewell is a short fiction writer living in Western Australia. Her work has been published by Flash Frontier, Ellipsis Zine and Fictive Dream, and she was the winner of Reflex Fiction’s Spring 2017 competition. She is trying to give up writing poetry. She tweets nonsense @lissybakewell.

​the underdogs
 

the feelings never fade. 

you know the ones…
 
the dreams of becoming “one of them”
thinking your life would be better if you were…
 
you wonder if you’ll ever escape the need to fit in
but what does that mean anyway?

– “FIT IN”
 
aren’t we all in this together? 
or so they want us to believe…
 
i guess the world wouldn’t be quite right
 without the Misfit

we are popular in our own right – 
 
we are the ones wearing the beanies
and the tight pants… black of course
 
you know the kind – 
 
we stay in on friday nights
they go out and live for the night
 
we can’t live without our tea and book
they prefer vodka…straight
and the company of their own
 
we’ll never be one of them…and that’s okay
we’ll fight the good fight and live to tell why
 
                                                - the anthem of the underdogs

​

Bio: Jen Persichetti holds a Bachelors in Journalism and is a member of IAPWE - International Association of Professional Writers and Editors. Writing has always come naturally to her. It is her first love....she can’t get enough. Jen decided to pursue writing because nothing brings her more joy than to put pen to paper. A collection of Jen's work has been growing over the years as personal journal entries. She hopes to share them with the world one day...Jen is striving to make that aspiration a reality.  

      ajdusatko CC


​1 in 8

I'm 1 in 8 -
appreciate the irony,
was afraid of babies
in my teens timidly dating,
in my twenties finally married and getting a Masters
in Elementary Education.
 
Now I'm over thirty, husband is over forty,
where is our child: our precious daughter, our son?
Our frozen chosen - in the fertility lab,
30% chance of success
- each time they tear out my body and soul?
In our unfinished adoption paperwork?
"Sorry to disappoint, but
as caregivers for a live in adult
you need a 3 bedroom house and 300% consent".
 
I'm 1 in 8
The other seven couples on the block
are having their first, second and third.
Should I get a dog? Or a bird?
Are my poems my children, a consolation prize from the Lord?
 



A Flower Grows In Vitro
 
A Schrödinger's cat
Inside my belly
Is neither dead nor
Alive
 
This two week wait
Of daily tally
Lost in smiles
And cries.
 
Big fat positive
Big fat negative
Rubbing my belly
After injections
 
He/she/twins
Are a petal
An IVF flower
Of Love




My Prayer
 
Two weeks later
A double pink line
 
Eight weeks later
A heat beat
 
Forty weeks later
A first cry
 
Today I am praying
When they put him/her inside...

 


PIO Injections
 
Oil dripping on the needle,
Scared and hopeful,
I turn my other cheek.
Needle glides inside,
I scream, I wait, I rest.
 
Tomorrow I will know,
If there will be more
Needles and pills,
Or if this journey has come
To a screeching stop.
 
The radio is on,
The TV is on.
We feast on ice cream,
I tear up a poem.
I cry, I wait, I rest.

 


Eulogy for the Unborn
 
Blood
is gushing
between my legs.
Our child
 is dying
before we've met.
A magnified photo
is all I have
left…
 
Medical bills
arrive,
reminding
of the precious
sweet and helpless
little person,
created
and stored
for the three happy months.
 
The seven
stages of grief
pass swiftly.
Was IVF
worth it?
My second unborn
is in Heaven.
And I am
writing…

Bio: One in eight couples suffers from infertility. Most men and women suffer in silence, a few of them document their journeys on personal blogs. Yevgeniya Przhebelskaya has found her voice by writing poetry. Her poems have been published in magazines in Russia and in USA. Yevgeniya is a founder and facilitator of Bergen Poetry Workshop, and an Administrative Assistant at Leonia United Methodist Church. She earned a Masters in Education from Hunter College, CUNY. Yevgeniya  hopes that her experience of suffering and healing will encourage people around the world. .Yevgeniya’s poems were published in Ancient Paths, A Blind Man’s Rainbow, Time of Singing, and The Penwood Review. Check out her poetry page at https://leonia.church/2018-archive/poetry-by-yevgeniya-przhebelskaya/

         Carolina Tarré CC


Little Woman Calls This Love.

 
Little Woman sits in bed knitting. Little Woman does exactly what she’s told. Little Woman never leaves the house, and she likes it that way. Little Woman’s husband is only 5’7 but when he hugs her he could crush her with only the weight of one thumb. They have been together for twenty years and he hasn’t squished her yet. Little Woman calls this love.
 
Little Woman’s husband’s name is John. Little Woman’s name is John’s wife. Little Woman cannot remember her birth name, she insists she never had one, she has always been John’s Wife.
 
Little Woman has a little girl. She has a birth name, for now, but everyone calls her Ugly Girl. Ugly Girl and Little Woman don’t get along. Ugly Girl takes women’s studies courses at university and calls little woman battered and brainwashed. Little Woman tells her she won’t understand until she finds a husband, which she won’t unless she puts the fork down.
 
Ugly Girl eats chocolate cake by the fistful. She is terrified of being small.

​

(your own) blood of the lamb


Take sacrament as sacrifice and carve a message from it. Here,
there is a body waiting.

Let’s say: I’m writing about the violence / say the violence isn’t me / say there isn’t blood in my teeth /
say there’s never been anything but blood in my veins.

Say, a body is what we call it so let’s call it
good & get lost in its violence–

creation morphs into destruction
the same story over & over, but tell me again: which came
first?

Violence, too, is what we make it,
so this time let’s call it holy & watch chaos ignite.

All blood runs the same, but
                      all blood is not seen as the same.
Say, it’s not for a lack of trying.

Shed the skin of holy & you’ll find blood. Shed the skin of good & you’ll find blood.
Find a body to carve a passage into & you’ll find blood. Ignore the stains on your bones & call this your greatest sacrifice:

a message written in the bodies of others.




mother may i say


A father & animals
   dancing, let’s see if they know how to 
 bite–
               & of course they do. It’s the first lesson anything with teeth
   learns. The first lesson anything dangerous learns is how to strike where it
         stays. The animals are jumping again & the father joins them in       
                   laughter.

A mother in the forest & she’s watching, but her teeth are
   dulled & is this for me? 

Shadows build themselves up in her presents & gods cannot compare to this–
to a mother’s rage nothing is
equal.
       
          (listen and strike where it hurts–
                       in the teeth & choke on shadows and mother, did you dull
  your own teeth for me? 
                        did you do this
        for me–)

     The boys dance with the animals, where laughter is abundant &
this must be happiness and–
                 sharpen your teeth before they see: don’t get caught.

There are girls in the shadows filing down their teeth until their gums bleed–
rounded out edges & no longer pink like girls should be: 
                      red is a mother color.

  The animals are biting again & they look like the boys
               do, indistinguishable: rabid and alive, but remember–

 the first lesson anything learns is how 
     to hurt. The girls are in the shadows & dull teeth make good mothers & the boys–

         are laughing, again and they have never stopped. Motherhood is soaked in blood & the boys
                     smile, all teeth.

  The animals dance & we cannot
      blame them.




70% chance of salvation and 30% chance that maybe I’ll feel myself again


There are plenty of bodies, here. Pick one &
call it the closest thing to home you can.

Your body is not your body & you are not your own so
find something you can claim and
carve something from it.

Make art out of flesh and craft silk from
bone. Engrave worthy in all but the word. Write holy in blood but paint it on backwards
so the angels don’t mistake your creation for their own.

Do not create a name. Do not curse a body into being by giving it 
a title.

Watching yourself watch yourself & it’s like
looking from the outside in. Like smiling and watching it reflect off yourself
& back.

Fingers trace fingers but don’t leave
a trace. The blood chips. 

Pretend it’s something lighter than it is. Pretend in here 
doesn’t translate to over there and that 30% means closer
rather than further.

So many names left to take & can you match each with the
weight on their shoulders?

Reach out & watch a body reaching back–
you’ve forgotten what yours looks like
when you’re not staring at it from the outside.

​

Bio: Mary is an 18-year-old aspiring poet and writer who has recently been published in Kingdoms of the Wild and Moonchild Magazine. She is currently working towards earning her degree in English, and spends her days dreaming of writing beloved poetry and living in the mountains with her friends and family close by.
Twitter: @rhymesofblue

How Melancholy Is Going


Wind pulls snow across the road
in vaporous streams, like ghosts
fleeing the broken dawn.

I used to run away a lot,
but ill equipped never made it far.

The exposed sun is gaudily bright,
glinting on the sharp dressed ground,
and the frighteningly cold bay water
squirms like a virus.

As usual, I seek the anonymous
shadows beneath the old trees,
that space in which I can
spill and spread my cracked treasures,
bits of bone and nursery rhymes.

What I’m not allowed to take
I don’t,

but the rest is polished to bruising.




Slip Away


Smooth new skin
under a white night dress,
a bright morning to follow.

I had twelve dreams
and that was the last.

In this night theater
memories scurry like mice,
trip piano wires
and search the floor for scraps.

I lay with my scars
in air left cold by rain
seeping through a cracked window.

I ask the night to tell me
what I didn't know,
and it answers on the darkening screen
this is when I let you go.

​

Bio: Alison Harville's poems have appeared in Tower Journal, The Café Review and the anthology Under the Legislator of Stars. She is a resident of the Seacoast area of New Hampshire and a member of City Hall Poets.  She can be found online at @RubyAli_GMW.

           Photography by Cory Marshall Spangler



​          Sometimes the heart sounds like something dying. In the split second between one beat and another, such silence feels like the end. But another beat comes and transformation is never as far behind as it feels in those long hours of the rut. Our strength is our ability to create from impossible ledges of self, to break out of restraints that only ever in-authenticate our soul-telling and get in the way of the flames of truth. 

Following the release of last year's Little Thieves, Perry struggled to find a way to share her work more authentically, from the bottom up. Discouraged and disheartened by the constant efforts to turn her art into a brand, the endless press cycles of getting oneself "out there" in front of audiences that may or may not even have the stomach for the soul food that has been painstakingly prepared from the internal reservoirs of one's being. You can't over market truth without losing some of it along the way. The creative heart gets locked in smaller rooms than one can afford to be in when the art is the mission and the gift is the telling.

"The whole concept for Totality", Perry says of her latest EP, "was a creative remedy for the depletion and disappointment I felt in the wake of my last release." Perry and her husband, having spent a lot of time on the road, and living from their RV, set up camp in their friends living room in Colorado, where, inside a blanket fort with a microphone, Perry began singing into the totality that marked her year. Loss and recovery were stories that needing telling, and there are never easy words at hand for such a thing. But the artists' mission is quite literally the impossible, to dip into painful stores of the self.  As Robert Hass once wrote,"You feel pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song." It is bare and agonizing life at first, and then it is the song that gives us distance, healing, hope, happiness.

Hardwood Floor, the first track on the album, has the feel of old folk pouring out of barn doors in the dead of summer. It speaks to an overcoming and the slow trusting of new legs. This is a walk you've never walked before and it takes getting used to, these new and good things that can happen on the other side of struggle. "You don't have to go back to a hardwood floor," are Perry's first words and a deeply felt prologue to this richly layered album. "It's been coming for a while, you can feel the change in the air." 

The song, Perry says "was written as a gift for my husband as he was struggling through a particularly painful period in his recovery from addiction.  It was my way of saying "Be gentle with yourself.  You're changing.  This part will pass."

"The past year", Perry says, which informs every muscle of this EP, "was a year defined by recovery, suicide, immense joy and love, immense loss, and an intense reckoning with the self." Jung once wrote: "That which you most need will be found where you least want to look." And it is into that place that Perry dug, bare handed and intent on finding what was corrupting the soil. New seeds mean new yield mean new hope. Hope isn't a brand, it's a flame and nothing can contain it when it is well fed. Creative truth stokes those branches and our listening ears take it in like a medicine. 

"In contrast, Perry says, "Medicine Man" was a song I wrote very recently, as part of coming to terms with my own recovery. I've been sober for almost two and a half years, but feel that I'm only now beginning to have a true understanding of how much healing I still have to do. It's been an uncomfortable truth to face, agonizing at times. The resulting song is a conversation with myself in the face of that truth, a simultaneous accusation and acceptance.

"Without You" is a love song, plain and simple. It's the kind of song I used to think I was not capable of writing: something that wasn't weighed down by its own vulnerability, but actually feels good and light because of it. My music has always tended towards heavy. I've discovered that once you're pegged as being a "sad bastard singer-songwriter" it's kind of hard to separate yourself from that caricature. Hopefully this song shows that even sad bastards can be fun sometimes."

Perry's haunting cover of Chris Cornell's When I'm Down, the epilogue of totality, is an incredibly meaningful recording for two reasons. It is an attempt to reckon with the inconceivable, unbearable loss of one of Perry's close friends who sadly took their own life, and to speak this loss through a song that has carried huge emotional weight for Perry throughout the years. In addition it was recorded with Bryan Gibson, who spent the last five years with Cornell as a touring duo. The difficulty of covering the song in a way that didn't feel exploitative weighed heavily on Perry's heart and mind.  

"I was conflicted about recording "When I'm Down," Perry says. "I think a tribute of that nature requires pause and contemplation. I remember the day after Chris' death was announced, a band I knew released a live video of one of his songs through a major music outlet.  Maybe the sentiment was earnest for them, but it seemed so exploitative to me; like a quick and easy way to capitalize on a loss that had generated a lot public attention. I didn't want to do anything like that.  But I played a show in Chicago a day or two after he died, and quickly picked out an arrangement of it just before going onstage. I stumbled through it that night, and it ended up becoming a pretty important part of my live show for the rest of the year. Bryan Gibson (my cellist and close friend who spent the last four of five years of Chris' life touring as a duo with him) and I actually talked about covering it together before he ever even met Chris. Bryan and I had been out of touch for a while by the time Chris died - he had started a family and I had been traveling for a couple of years.  But I had lost a close friend to suicide a few months earlier, and was still very deep in the grieving process. I reached out to Bryan as soon as I heard the news  and that put us back in touch. When I finally decided to record the song, I asked if he would play on it with me. Had he said no, I don't think I would have tracked or released the song at all.  I felt like it could only be done with the two of us together, and that if he wasn't comfortable with it, I should probably take it as an indication that it was something better left undone.  Fortunately though, he wanted to do it.  I can't speak for Bryan, but I believe it was cathartic for both of us."

​
​
​It is the hardest of losses to grapple with. You are always left wondering what you might have missed in the other person, signs of struggle and pain that were kept hid, just below the surface. Could you have done more, could you have done anything? We ask ourselves all sorts of questions to which there are no answers. The grief is too huge for answers. The song, sometimes, is big enough to carry us through the hurt. Friends, family or lovers, the loss of them is always with us and that time of day, where we feel them enter into the room of our heart, will come and go and come again.

It is said there are no straight lines in water, only infinite bending and turning. Every road will fork into shadow and back out again. Perry's is a desert-burning voice that has taken getting lost as an indication of getting found. The only way out is right through the heart of what hurts. Fearless is Totality's twin, not absence of fear, just less. We are, after all, born in the hurt that we are. 

Totality bears the weight of what it means to live with the complexity of who we are as human beings having human experiences that we don't always know what to do with. Perry's rare gift is to be able to make sense of this endlessly confusing human flow we call our lives. Authenticity is just that place where the heart speaks for itself, the inner singing voice of what holds true. It's a bittersweet spot. We don't always shine when we're in it, sometimes we quiver and shake, and sometimes we dance in joy, to a song like Without You, where profound words still flow in the midst of the feel-good, "I know what it is you're tying to say when the words don't come out right."

Listen to Totality on SoundCloud & Spotify or purchase it on itunes.
Visit www.elliperry.com/ for more.
​