3/29/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Kimberly Wolf doophallus CC My mania grabs the mic Hello, good evening, everyone, everywhere I know we’re all coping but I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about MY demands desires I know we are really loving the sudden fixation on bread specifically the construction of it but hear me out: what about a road what about a road that has many twists it starts outside our door and it definitely does not end it can’t end it doesn’t want to end because if it does we get bored the road stretches for days or for however long we can keep the car on the road stay in your seats please I have to say something I’m sure it’ll be important what about we drive to a mountain so big we could just dissolve what about a mountain so beautiful we die wait wait what about at the end of the road there is a bar that’s open eternally and we have one thousand dollars and it’s ladies’ night and everyone who cares about us has gone missing and doesn’t that make us free? there’s a bar at the end of the endless road we can do anything there are a hundred people inside and they all want us they don’t care about the wasps in our chest they are strangers to us and okay what if they all had the face of our lover would that make it better wait please I have so much non-sense to make just a little longer please I promise I swear this is going to be funny one day this will be so hilarious Kimberly Wolf is a bipolar mom living in Texas who wants to know the name of every bird. She enjoys driving halfway across the country to see a mountain. You can find her poems in Nymphs and Trampset.
0 Comments
3/29/2021 4 Comments Poetry by Raquel Luciano emilykneeter CC Litany of Bone-Crushing Facts i. I could not tell if I felt sick because of the alcohol or because of his relentlessness against my body. It’s 5am. My tires are collecting dirt from the asphalt for me to bring home. I’ll hide it all in a jar. I want to go home. I’m falling asleep. Stop. Can you call me a car. My slurry words replayed like a pop song on the radio without all the volume. Pulp Fiction on VHS on a vintage television on repeat suffocated me. It might have been 6am. I only know that the sun was awake. I only know that bottom-shelf tequila and cologne held my lungs and refused to let go. My front bumper grabbed onto someone’s back bumper at a stoplight because, of course it did. The man must have taken pity on my running mascara and smeared pink lipstick. It was my fault. I kept it moving. It must have been muscle memory, creeping into my driveway while everything was upside-down. ii. I texted him first and I was drunk and I wanted it at first. It is a gray area. It sucks that I was so drunk. My male boss reminded me of these bone-crushing facts. iii. He was cheating on his girlfriend when it happened because, of course he was. I told her everything. She was only interested in the cheating fact. iv. In third grade, a boy with ears bigger than his bald head shoved his hand down my shorts on the school bus. I kicked him where I knew it would hurt. Got him suspended from school. I wish she was still in me, that spunky take-no-shit little girl. v. I don’t even know his real name and I knew no one would be interested in slandering a popular local DJ over a drunk girl making up stories. I kept all of my dirty shame in the jar. Which is not to say I didn’t tell anyone, I did. It is just easier to tell it like any other story. To leave out certain details. The closet mirror. The feet. The way he demanded to finish like he deserved applause and I deserved to live with it. Red, White, Pink, and Clean Little scratches noticeable enough to warrant questions, but never deep enough to stain the tub. We left no trace of the transgressions committed behind shower curtain shadows. You were the beginning of my fear of commitment. I was always too lazy to take you out of the pink and white plastic that surrounded your hairy silver edges. I was always too lazy to press hard enough to land myself on a cold bed. Sometimes, I hid you under my pillow like a secret crush, when being clean was too much work. In tenth grade, I took a Psychology class. I thought it might help me understand why I punished my body. When Mandy pointed at my left wrist, she cackled like I had etched a joke on my arm. I pulled my sleeves up further, let my wet face burn the scars hanging off my skin, I reveled in my pitiful red spotlight. I guess there was something funny about her mocking me while learning about why I might not be as smooth as her. I tried drawing butterflies on my veins to scare you away. You hunted them down every time. I told you about the girl who laughed and you suggested I try my legs. My grandmother used to warn me not to shave above my knees or else I would look like a whore. She never mentioned the tender skin where my thigh meets my pelvis. That’s where we made bloody bubble baths. Your teeth fed on my softness as the water changed from clear to dirty. You and me, we conspired to keep me covered in thin scabs that read, NO BUTTERFLIES ALLOWED. When people ask me why I stopped shaving my body hair, why I threw away every blade in the neighborhood, I don’t tell them the truth. The truth is something like: I don’t want sharp reminders in the same place I’m trying to get clean. Raquel Luciano is a future educator and a student at the University of Central Florida. She lives in Orlando with her girlfriend and their five crazy cats. She loves singing bad karaoke. Find her on Instagram @raq.poet. 3/29/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Cara Losier Chanoine ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser CC
Nightlife doughnuts cookies whatever you call it when you pull the e-brake in a fast-moving car on a stretch of snow in an abandoned parking lot and spin out in the circumference of a messy circle we were fifteen and sixteen and nineteen and there was never anything much to do especially in the winter when the darkness ate up all our hours and called for mischief like a junkie’s thirsty veins it was the best we could do the most alive we could feel in the closed-down dark after all the businesses were shuttered and we were left alone with all our young blood insatiable beneath our skin Your Own Accuser Have you ever woken up feeling like a knife fight because all the people you used to love came to you while you slept, bringing with them all the ways in which you failed them? Is the taste of it like a battery leaking in your mouth? Does it make you mourn the lives you used to live? In the half-life hours of the morning, do you yearn for absolution? Green Monday there is a bomb that blooms green in the street rips up the asphalt and settles, like the green pallor of death-rattle sickness like a green day in April built from runners’ tangled legs and Jackson Pollack vomit stains green like spoiled, severed limbs like the tarnished fixtures of tea chests in the harbor this is the shrapnel that the skin heals over green like when you open your eyes at the bottom of a pool-- and it burns like that, too whenever someone puts their thumbs in your scars pinches the pale of your bruises as a reminder like you could possibly forget like that busted-open street isn’t branded onto the insides of your eyelids green paint on red canvas, red blood tipping green leaves in April this is how some people learn what to hate it greens all the villains and paints the heroes in red white and blue and it must be simpler for them but there is no logic in chaos no formula for safety and sometimes maybe we’d like a world with more certainty but we cannot separate it back into primary colors this precarious green thing balanced upon the precipice of two extremes now a green dusk sets upon the street and the ghosts of amputees lurk in the long, green shadows but people walk here like they can’t see the scars Cara Losier Chanoine is the author of 'How a Bullet Behaves' and 'Bowetry: Found Poems from David Bowie Lyrics' (Scars Publications). She is a four-time competitor at the National Poetry Slam and her work has appeared in DASH, Red Fez, The Threepenny Review, and other publications. 3/29/2021 0 Comments Poetry by T. Clear Alexandre Dulaunoy CC Our Lady of Flotsam O she who keeps watch over the rubbished, the odd shoe, the cracked crockery flung in rage, the zipper pull, chunks of airborne, waveborne styrofoam. Vigilant mother-of-pearl, of cockle & scallop. All ruin, all glorious sand-glinted treasure is welcomed into her o-holy-arms. Tides strew a briny indulgence at her feet. She makes incarnate the shred, the bit, the fragment. Grants goodness to the twist-top, the peach pit, the tangled line. Gull beaks beseech her name, crab hulls praise the stones which tumble upon her strand: forever and ever an ocean of discard. T. Clear is one of the founders of Floating Bridge Press and Easy Speak Seattle. She has been writing and publishing since the late 1970’s, and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Northwest, Sheila-na-Gig Online, The Rise-Up Review, Red Earth Review, Terrain.org, The Moth and Common Ground Review. She is an Associate Editor at Bracken Magazine, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Independent Best American Poetry Award. 3/28/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Tucker Lieberman emilykneeter CC Obviously I Want Fire I go on a long dark walk to forgive myself. Obviously I want fire, but I have to forgive. This is the hour. I must recite everything from memory, but can’t. I can’t remember. The dawn breaks. Now, here, pea soup fog. There it is, the frog, haunched: the crunch of insect, little plate glass shattering, lattice wing falling, my breath just now becoming a structured activity: hold, count. This is the forgiving. Now a spot to catch on glass, a thing to clasp, a photograph to hold a candle to, a century stored in photographs. Now I remember. Recite. If this is the end of the world, obviously I want to be talking to you. If this is our world, this is the only one in which I can talk to you. Can I talk to the part of your brain that is listening and isn’t mad? Or, can I talk to the part that is mad, if that is the only part with which you are listening? Enough with guilt. Let feelings be “about,” not “for” or “against.” Let emotion not be leashed to pull the sled of judgment. Judgment pulls itself. Emotion will come if it likes the sound of its own name. “On by,” I tell the dogs, go on by that thing at the side of the road. We are not chasing it nor being chased by it. I tend a flame, carry a torch until I realize I’m feeding whatever it was, and that this is about me because it burned up the cardboard box in which I held it, and that I was the box, and that now I am the sky. What was it. Was it in the photograph. Here, this is a new seed. Let me water it. Let me think. Let me someday stop. Let it outlive me. I wanted fire, obviously. Now I want life or what comes at the edge of life after the long dark walk, beyond forgiving myself. Let me welcome my Virgil who leads me into the fog. I am not embarrassed. Neither must you, Virgil, ever be embarrassed; there is always a reason you were brought back. Tucker Lieberman is the author of Ten Past Noon (2020), a biography of an early 20th-century New York writer. His bilingual poetry book inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh was a finalist in the Grayson Books 2020 contest. His poems have appeared in many journals including Animal Heart, Dream Noir, Esthetic Apostle, Gingerbread House, Prometheus Dreaming, Raven Review, Sisyphus, and Snakeskin. www.tuckerlieberman.com 3/28/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Lynne Jensen Lampe Bruce Guenter CC Never Stay Where Grief Is Free Our breakfast at the shed—bottles of Bud Light stand hip to hip along all four walls, empty. Shame muscles past dirt-streaked glass, a fall from grace, another truth for me to swallow with fried egg and toast. Angry, you ask for more of everything except wonder. When we were fourteen, we visited World of Wonder, a fenced lot somewhere in Texas—its spotlight raked stars, erased constellations and you yearned for a different summer, one empty of friends and western diamondbacks that swallow doves whole. Even now, you sleep where rivers fall silent, where no other bodies break your fall. You scrawl a message to me: No wonder solitude costs less than the Holiday Inn. A swallow of water from an old army canteen but no light for a smoke—you dig around, come up empty, add a postscript: What if I can’t lose you? • Disappear: a transitive verb, fear its object. You are not the young bodies left among deadfall. I am not the parents who raise photos like empty pockets of tears, yet I choke back wonder, fear what will happen if you abandon your light to the mourning dove and the swallow. Grief is a country, its anthem a swallow of vinegar and fear. Please let me sing you beyond it borders once more until light marries water, prison bends truth, hands fall from hips unread. The night never wonders what happens when the boulevards empty. • Years litter the shed, generations of empty-- an old Peterson’s field guide marked at swallow, the metal cot where Lulu birthed me, a wonder of beer bottles. The creased snapshot of you at the state fair after the swing-ride’s fall and spin stole your bravado. Even in this dim light I see the vomit speckling your chin, the light- ning urging us to shelter in an empty car. Rain sings on the metal roof until nightfall and no one missing us. Freedom swallows the hours between backseat and home and you show me the bruise on your thigh. I wonder which fist inked this pain tattoo. I wonder who else admires its yellow-blue light and more than ever, I want to be you. But dangerous is no better than empty, not when envy sends its soldiers to swallow resistance. I barely escape as footfalls disrupt our river of bodies and tires. Offal of love, ever dare me to wonder if solitude costs less than solace. Bank swallows burrow deep in the quarry wall. Moonlight stitches my mother’s apron into empty sacks that shadow the shape of you. • Seeding clouds with doves and thunder, you scissor both wrists on the first day of fall, then call me before you run empty. I rush to the shed, too late to stanch wonder, floor and mattress stained red. Lost light leaves nothing for the snake to swallow. Wind whistles the bluff where swallows dig nests, a colony of gunshots in sand. You soul-slip as death pockets your tears, unlight embroiders your name. Maple leaves free-fall onto the tin roof, desert their steeples of wonder. It’s finally come time to empty. Under the cot, a postcard of an empty fairground, a field of bruises, a hard swallow of time. Like the shed, a place of wonder where layers of dirt bury memories of you. Rain creases the clouds until nightfall and cold wind begs to lease starlight. • No small wonder, grief: my body empty of light, thirsty and calling freedom. I swallow the song of you, sleep where rivers fall. Lynne Jensen Lampe has poems in or forthcoming from One, The American Journal of Poetry, Rock & Sling, Small Orange, LIT Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Her current project relates to conformity, sanity, and family. She edits academic journals and books in Columbia, Missouri. Find her on Twitter: @LJensenLampe. 3/28/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Ben Montague emilykneeter CC March The sun came out for one day. It was a ruse. I knew it was a ruse so I covered the windows & turned on every light in the house. Made it yellow. We chilled for a while like sour sisters & I smoked in-doors which always makes me feel better & worse so exactly what I was looking for. Ben Montague is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They work mainly in the realm of video and installation, with a preference for using dark comedy to handle trauma and mental illness (both personal and intergenerational). 3/28/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Dorie LaRue Bruce Guenter CC Aunt Mabel’s Cup of Passion Under the protection of bankruptcy Uncle John eased into an alcoholic and one morning after threw the Easter ham straight into Aunt Mabel's blue-heavy hydrangea bushes. Drunk, Uncle John stole his neighbor's lawn mower and sold it to a stranger and one moon-void night filled his wife’s gas tank with sugar. Really no one's uncle, and Mabel no one's aunt, but it was she whom the whole church adored because, but for the capriciousness of God, went we. And her eyes behind her legendary specs, constantly considered, in a sweetly tenacious way, the lilies of the field, though truth be told her cup made Christ's passion look more like a walk in the park. Aunt Mabel worked in the canning center, slinging slabs of beef “like a man.” At church, her lenses resembled cut glass crystal designed by the globs of fat slung all week, which, if left unsmeared by the teasing boy, did not entirely obscure her view of the stained-glass Jesus's tap dance on water, the vestibule cloyed with flowers from someone's bright garden, the front pew of children, like bobbing daisies, none hers. She was our hero, a sufferer more real than those in our Catholic cousins’ Lives of Martyrs. Codependant, they call it now. Never mind I ended up too busy with college and marriage and divorces to much remember her because her telltale symptoms were mirrored in my own floor to ceiling misery, weeping at Whole Foods, pointlessly plotting revenge, an Ahab anger at God, love-shorn stories with the saddest endings flapping out of my mouth like ugly jay birds. Once I came home by bus and plane and my bored brother’s Dodge Dart. Aunt Mabel was dead, John’s storm-wracking vapor trail eclipsing her prolonged plod. If I remember it was winter that visit. The road was a little dim although the headlights were on, bright, that moment night first seeps around the beams, asserting its doomed desire to hone and control. I think we were passing their long scrub oak-lined driveway devoid now of curses and specious cures. The clouds must have parted just at that moment and the moon lit up the trunks right angled to the iced over gravel, like a strip of coastline, and above, but just for a second as I said, limbs whipped in nervy dance. At that point, I shivered, or as they say in the South, a rat ran over my grave. That old gal is pushing daisies, my brother said, out of the dark in his side of the car, like there were daisies in winter. or hydrangeas round as full breasts in someone’s blue bottomless gaze. It’s not spring, man, I said. Choose another cliché. It was dark enough after that for the yellow blade of a comet or even a shooting star subtending like a tiny leaped fish to punctuate something, but nothing happened. No one ever tells the truth about love. Dorie LaRue is the author of two novels, Resurrecting Virgil, and The Trouble With Student Affairs; and two collections of poetry, Mad Rains, and An Enemy in Their Mouths. She obtained her Ph.D. in English at the University of Louisiana. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, and teaches writing at LSUS. 3/28/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Eileen Farrelly Bruce Guenter CC Burning You call me when your house is on fire ask my advice - what to let burn what to save. We talk it through then you hang up the phone and you are gone But I’m still here watching for smoke signals across the valley nursing my own small flame until I realise it was my own house that was burning all along Eileen Farrelly lives in Scotland. Her poems have appeared most recently in The Gladrag, Marble and the Writers’ Café Magazine as well as in various anthologies. Her microchapbook, Tryst, was be published in January 2021 by Nightingale & Sparrow Press and her first chapbook Some things I ought to throw away will be published in 2021 by Dreich. She is also an artist and printmaker. You can find out more about her work at www.ellyfarrelly.co.uk 3/28/2021 2 Comments Poetry by Kim Nuzzo Tyler Cipriani CC 1. i see an old man just this side of his dangerous miles. i know his existence. but can’t grasp it. his desert, his grief. his faith half open. i don’t want to look at him. he will cross the dry land dressed in marigolds. weep in the morning for no reason. like a child of an overlooked creature. wants to yell that goodness is frail. 2. I'm hoping the pigeon boy is alive somewhere and that he is telling his story. Always going for the sweet spot. There are people who play a different drum to put their world back together again. He plays in the valley of bones. He shines in a corner of the dark world. The boy sings a wild song to the Spirit but leaves the “spirits” alone. With subtle grace and his satchel of words he crosses the sun. Kim Nuzzo is an actor, poet and visual artist from Fruita, Colorado. He is a resident actor with the Zephyr Stage which specializes in presenting original works and he has traveled throughout the country performing in the original one man show, Multitudes, which he wrote with his wife, Valerie Nuzzo, about the life and times of Walt Whitman. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |