​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

​
​

                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. 



​

              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.
​

               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.

​
​

             ​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.
​

​

              ​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.

               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.

​
​

                 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.

                 ​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

                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.



​