4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Ivan Peledov whatcanyouseenow! ghosts and stuff CC What What I miss most is a bunch of unsound landscapes trimmed horizons sucked into the gaps between ramshackle mansions I can’t find a crack in the sky nor food for a foot I take heed of the lakes insane like butterflies and sunflowers radio stations are crumpled masks for divine sleep flat tires and hiccups blow up each asshole I love evaporate manifold puddles that soon become their eyes I am to hear rare drops of water inside the roadkill good music always means death to the listener In the Silence of Molten Tea Spoons It’s time again for bananas to swear under the dirty rugs of the sky, when ghosts ask themselves if they breathe or not and guinea pigs cross the Atlantic in droves. Allergies amplify the wallpaper, but backyards kill the winds, mock celestial noise and widen the wounds of the residents. Firefighters usually appear at the parties out of the blue with a man that has a crocodile tail on a leash. It’s time to look for a $22 bill in the pockets, to sing like a horse with a dead rider, to watch the stars frying at the bottom of the world, tasteless. It is the duty of mirrors to quarrel with the void. Ivan Peledov lives in Colorado. He loves to travel and to forget the places he has visited. He has been recently published in Human/Kind Journal, PPP Ezine, Ponder Savant, and Goat’s Milk Magazine.
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4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Catherine Zickgraf whatcanyouseenow! ghosts and stuff CC Safe After 3 days free on the street, I was returned to parental custody. Then they punished me for my escape-- age 13, to places safer than home, like a motel, a garage floor, under a laundromat table, like Dave’s kitchen eating rigatoni with his family-- Father demanded I surrender the t-shirt I always wore, a souvenir from performing in the 7th grade play. He claimed it symbolized my rebellion and deceit, said I would not eat till I handed it over. The next day, I couldn’t protect it anymore. He threw it in the fireplace—I watched it fade just to get a damn tuna sandwich. Help I realize that since I’m often sick, you and our teenaged son are uncomfortable with me leaving the house alone for a few minutes to clear my head. It’s your say since it’s your money. I haven’t had a job in 20 years. Your house. You choose who can’t visit, who must slip around cameras to say hi. If you’re furious with me, it’s because I’m bad. I meekly disagree because I’m hyperemotional. Why don’t you like me? I’m sorry for this fight. I’ll be quieter by the time you come back from your angry walk to the river. Eve Said Don’t fuck this up. You get to be a poet by profession with a collection of cookbooks. You live in a damn garden. I want that life. I want to have what I want with no consequences-- that shit you put on Front Street. Doesn’t matter if you hide if you speak it into mics under spotlights. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before. But you’re my homegirl and I’m telling you now: don’t go fucking this up. Bookcase Sitting in the corner makes you map the living room floor. You find places where tomorrow you can hide. Eye level just above carpet level, you see things they don’t see. The curtains breathe in and out Summer Sundays. When you’re assigned to rewriting verses from Second Peter, you repeat a word down the page, then repeat the next. And the meanings fall apart. When you lie beside the bookcase, you stare at the covers. A Great Revival in the Southern Armies during the Civil War. Scientific Proof for the Great Flood. Ten heavy Theological Dictionaries of the New Testament. Spending the afternoon in a corner sucks, yet your mind runs the landscape whenever you sit still and you open wide your eyes. Catherine Zickgraf’s main jobs are to write poetry and fold laundry. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her recent chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press. Read and watch her at caththegreat.blogspot.com 4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Haley Davis i wen† lef† CC
Sunday Morning Copper veins throb behind the bathroom wall and pound a quarter-sized hole in my forehead’s middle. The Home does this out of love, it seems, the free cranial carving. I press a thumb in, scraped and kissed by bone and brain-goo, suck the head-pie filling from my nail and stumble down its stairs, scatter light and cats across the linoleum I picked for myself. Wall pulse shudders the living room, stigmatas another hole through my palm when I drag fingers on its drywall. Wound me enough to keep me inside The Home searching for a needle and thread, superglue, and staple gun. I think this space is mine, mine to with what I please, but occupancy does not equal ownership or domination over dominion. It is easier than you think to build a trap that you will catch yourself in. The Home pins me to our dining table like an exotic moth found dead on the doorstep, tips the wood with ease to pull me up onto the mantle and burrows slow in my spine. The Home does me like so many homekeepers/wreckers before, forwarded to new addresses. It’s Normal to Fear the Ocean I tell myself, considering the plummet into the cordierite waves twenty feet below. Fully clothed, plus wallet and phone, I don’t move, of course I don’t—except when the wind, exquisite and violent, pulls me against splintered railing and whips my hair into my eyes. For that blind moment, I’m airborne, but my grippy yellow sneakers still pinch the wood. In that choppy second of darkness, I miss the dolphin a pier-stranger spots. Did you see that? he asks. Tell me you saw that too. Haley Davis is a poet and occasional writer of other things from Arizona. Her writing concerns gender, apocalypse, nature, and how awesome and beautiful it is to be queer. Some of this work can be found in QA Poetry, Boshemia Magazine, The Tunnels, and Arizona’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology. You can find Haley on Twitter: @haleythepoet 4/12/2020 0 Comments Mirror by Steven Croft Nicolas Henderson CC Mirror At the hometown bar of good ol' boy locals your name reversed on the Lowe's tag you forgot to take off in the bar mirror lined with pour-spouted bottles, bookended by whitetail buck's head and largemouth bass, a female classmate with rings climbing the helix of one ear sits down, looks at you. You remember her as quiet with a shy smile. You're surprised to see her here where you've started coming after work, soothed by the muted talk and soft clinks of glass, low lights and neon, two months home from the Army. Her white hand in the mirror moves to your forearm and you turn to see the same shy smile, and she says she has been looking for you and blushes. You don't remember her friends really so conversation is awkward, slows quickly. After awhile she quietly asks what the war was like, and you stare through the mirror into the coughs and yells of your team, slowly beehiving through mud-brick interiors of Fallujah, finding hidden turbaned assassins, trading shots in dark rooms, coming back out into a street's shake 'n bake white smoke of battlefield phosphorus where some angry local scratched your name on a bullet: American, that sears through your bicep like a circular saw and drops your rifle in the sand. And you do something unexpected, by her, by you, you roll your sleeve to show an ugly memento from a world ablaze -- easier, better than words. She rests her head of dark hair on your shoulder. Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. An Army veteran, he left Iraq and the Army to find a job in a public library where he has worked for the last thirteen years. His work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Poets Reading the News, San Pedro River Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Willawaw Journal, Gyroscope Review, and many other places. 4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Theresa C. Gaynord whatcanyouseenow! ghosts and stuff CC
The Power of Release I'm walking up the path to the Cloisters, the one by Fort Tryon Park near Jewish Memorial Hospital where we spent an afternoon having my chin stitched up after that nasty fall I took in the hallway of our art-deco apartment building on Arden Street. The trees are still standing their ground except for the few sick ones that now lay dead and broken in fragments across the trail. The clouds are still moving steadily across the river and I'm naming them with the same knowledge you passed along to me. I'm still sucking on watermelon candies and Tootsie roll pop, but I miss the chocolate shortbread cookies you used to get me, the ones that made me smile when I was feeling down. The child is stirring Dad, against the winds that run wild moving empty swings. The world might go to war and I'm scared even as I think about that blue-winged dragonfly we once saw low-flying then darting upward in winter. And I dream about the wonders that will bewilder once this story is told. Maybe that's why I seek some kind of blessing through poetry. I stop and take in the scenery of the woods and the stonewall that brings your memory from afar with the same fleeting happiness I once had while smelling a pink carnation. If I write with velocity it's because I'm mindful of the fact that I'm dying. Cancer may not be eating away at me as it did you but I can feel my body shutting down slowly and without compassion. Mamma Della says she's got some kind of gris-gris bag waiting on me at the Botanica. You remember Mama Della, don't you dad? The Santera who said she was under the protection of the thunder god Chango. The one who kissed my forehead after Elegua claimed me as a child of his own. As I reach the end of this path I feel perilously unanchored. Yet I still remember to release while I take in small breaths. Impending Doom The horizon shifts and I feel it in the form of a vertical movement, my soul an independent system aligned to the impending feeling of doom, transferable between dimensions, related yet separate and independent. My life’s force takes me to the next level where I await the ‘crash’. There are bridges that collapse as I take a step beyond my own consciousness, and I’m aware of the electrical sparks that suddenly shatter in my internal environment. In actuality, I’m riding it out, and once the process is complete I’ll be okay again as he dawn stretches out rolling hills, fertile, wide, as black drapes open to the morning light. Today the confusion comes from vulnerability, From finally reaching the point of knowing that everything that begins must come to an end. It’s the threat of rain that has me choosing my words so carefully, as I pace anxiously between realizations and understandings. I fear something more personal, beyond self, beyond mortality. I fear abandonment, the routine symbolized in the lethargy of life that weighs us down, stains our souls with solitude, as I pick up handfuls of cold sand, letting it settle, frozen, between my fingers. Theresa likes to write about matters of self-inflection and personal experiences. She likes to write about matters of an out-of body, out-of-mind state, as well as subjects of an idyllic, pagan nature and the occult. Theresa writes horror, as well as concrete gritty and realistic dramas. Theresa is said to be witch and a poet. (within the horror writing community). 4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Johnny Longfellow Valerie White CC The Jukebox Played Surrender Ya’ surrender your last dollar take back the quarter From the edge o’ the bar ya’ stumble ya’ stagger To the corner where she stands there prettier than ever Underneath the ceilin’ fans spinnin’ like dancers The jukebox the beerlight plays off o’ her shoulders Surrounded by the others the loveless the lovers Seemin’ handsomer smarter somehow wittier than you are The leerer the gawker her admirer from afar Who wades through the amber the glimmer o’ Budweiser Sayin’ hey there bartender how ‘bout another But kisses ain’t promises an’ bartenders ain’t creditors An’ that’s one bitter chaser whatever your pleasure To fin’ all your longin’ glances receivin’ no answer From the one who ya’ hel’ once but not any longer Feelin’ further away the closer ya’ are to her An’ colder colder than when the last call lights flicker As ya’ sidestep ya’ swagger towards the bar door Where ya’ shiver an it’s winter your breath in the air ‘Til back in your bed with your clothes on the floor Ya’ pull your pillow in closer an’ whisper this prayer Hi God it’s Johnny I don’t know if Ya’ remember The last time we spoke was ten years ago if not longer An’ though it’s been a while I still sorta wonder If You could help me out now that I’ve lost ‘er I was a drunk when we first met now I’m even drunker An’ I feel like I’m drownin’ in some very deep water Deeper ‘n’ lower this time I’m really goin’ under An’ I need You before I drop another heartbeat further ‘Cause I’ve never felt lonelier or angrier guiltier For anythin’ I’ve ever done to anyone before I didn’t wanna hurt ‘er I didn’t wanna leave ‘er Jus’ what I thought made a savior created a martyr So give me some sign some knowledge that You’re up there By listenin’ to me now by answerin’ this prayer To forgive me all my debts as I forgive my debtors ‘Cause I’m tired an’ I’m drunk an’ God I surrender Drivin’ on the Black Ice Love . . . shriekin’ on a hairpin hot rubber squealin’ Over soft shoulders breakneck speed exceedin’ The point past the distance o’ my overturnin’ Suicide doors openin’ but no room for jumpin’ Dead air on my stereo speakers blown ‘n’ crackin’ ‘Cept on a.m. radio some evangelist is preachin’ In Jesus you can find all that you are seekin’ Hammers nails ‘n’ crosses for your own crucifyin’ Drivin’ on the black ice frost heaves upwellin’ With St. Mary prayin’ by dashboards lights glowin’ Across three lanes o’ highway tires hypdroplanin’ Guardrails on the edge my only grace o’ savin’ (Tremblin’ I’m sobbin’ cryin’ out rememberin’ Your strokin’ my forehead promisin’ whisperin’ From the futile arguin’ no cats ‘n’ dogs fightin’ As I lay there helplessly noddin’ yes believin’) Fearin’ from this death ride I may not be returnin’ White knuckin’ through the thunder ‘n’ the lightnin’ Gettin’ off the exit on the nexus reemergin’ Out o’ my alignment bearins loose ‘n’ wobblin’ Burnin’ up the breakdown at sixty ‘n’ acceleratin’ Teardrops on my windshield once again are fallin’ Lookin’ in my rearview I thought I saw ya’ wavin’ The image o’ your figure recedin’ disappearin’ An’ so go all o’ my crashins 'n’ my burnins Stoppin’ at a crossroad a fork o’ my own choosin’ Left or right no turnin’ back shiftlessly I’m idlin’ Knowin’ that I’m lost searchin’ I’m still drivin’ Johnny Longfellow is the editor of Midnight Lane Boutique. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry has been published at The Five-Two, The Literary Hatchet, The Rotary Dial, The Sonnetarium, and elsewhere. You can read more of Johnny's published verse by visiting "Heeeeere's Johnny . . . Longfellow, That Is." 4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Carla Sameth whatcanyouseenow! ghosts and stuff CC LA Stories: Urban Mountain Lion, South African Transplant for Milo You didn’t want to come here. Los Angeles took you. Down to the basement, near Parker Center and the Deja Vu Strip Club, next to the new marijuana mall. Where tourists take photos and buy souvenirs while freshly tatted dazzling dispensary girls sell them strains with names like “Flying Monkey” and “Ganja Goddess.” Cornered but wild, like P-56 the four-year-old mountain lion. Not killed, you are trapped, tagged and set free to roam, not quite feral, uncertain of your role. So you maul the sheep and eat the llamas. Grow grey-skinned from being locked away in the dark dank basement. Dream of safe savannahs and freedom and foraging that won’t get you stunned. Or killed. Like the coyotes that saunter brazenly, morning, noon and night, across Pasadena lawns, you roam, restless, discontent, wondering where the hunger will lead. Bruised Arms Purple, gold, red and yellow. Blue too, where the elbow bends, the space where eczema grew. When you were six, your teacher said you caused yourself to itch. Mrs. Ovens was her name and some teachers tied kids to chairs and taped mouths shut. The screeching rip could have been Kenny Wade’s lip or a scream from him or a classmate. When I was 36, my arm covered with needle marks, tightening bands to pop out veins, unseen by squinting eyes, tapping arm. I scream ouch use the butterfly, reserved for little children’s hard to find veins. Blood mixed, ingested, taken and given. Medical voodoo transfusions prescribed. Pooled blood, red blood cells. Bully bruised arms, all in search to bring a baby to life. Alternative ending: Veins collapsed, worn out, rejected. Began with once, then a hundred times, later turned into forever chasing highs, floating into sky, leaving earthly bruised collage. Dreaming Sobriety I’m like Dorothy flushed with joy, awakening, surrounded by Aunty Em and the lot. Yes, and you and you were there I tell my older sister and my son, Raphael. All three of us looking for a rehab where we could check in together. Dancing down the rambling road to recovery. At the first place they interview Rafa while my sister and I wait droopy, long hours vanquishing determination. I grab a staff person rushing officiously by and demand: “Tell me the truth, it’s not our first rodeo, why the long wait? Did you just fire someone?” You see it’s looking mighty empty. A snarky smell, piss yellow walls. Lone poster of empty beach. “Yup, honestly Ma’am, the place is fallin’ apart, best keep looking.” We scratch our heads, wonder who will take all three of us, And the money? Not looking for equine therapy or sober surfing, but still, we are a package deal and recovery doesn't come cheap or “three for the price of one.” Feel the weight of inevitable failure. Awash with dingy sweat, butts sink, stuck to chairs. “How about Beit T’Shuvah?” my question pops out like a perky jack-in-the-box. The Jewish recovery synagogue with the Rappin’ Rabbi and the soulful choir led by the lovely soprano who my son’s friend is smitten with; he’s mad about any girl that can sing or speak a foreign language. They don’t turn anyone away there for lack of shekels. Then I realize, shit, it’s Friday night, can’t check in on Shabbat. We begin to fade – greenish sickly cast – when our oddly un-demented mom, Rafa’s grandma, pipes up, (Yes, she’s there too. And you. And you.) “Who says, there’s no money?” Then she goes dark again, her words vanish like a dust devil sliding into the horizon. “Well now I just feel like having a drink,” to my older sister. “Go ahead, no one would blame ya” she pats me on the knee. Carla Sameth’s debut memoir, One Day on the Gold Line, was published July 2019. Her work on blended/unblended, queer, biracial and single parenting appears in a variety of literary journals and anthologies including: Collateral Journal, Anti-heroin Chic, The Nervous Breakdown, Brevity Blog, Brain, Child & Brain Teen Magazine, Narratively, Longreads, Mutha Magazine, Full Grown People, Angels Flight Literary West, Tikkun, Entropy, Pasadena Weekly, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and La Bloga. Carla’s essay, “If This Is So, Why Am I?” was selected as a notable for the 2019 Best American Essays. She writes about addiction, trauma and resilience with a sense of humor and connection to her readers. Carla is a member of the Pasadena Rose Poets, a 2019 Pride Poet with the City of West Hollywood, and was a PEN in The Community Teaching Artist, She teaches creative writing at the Los Angeles Writing Project, with Southern New Hampshire University, and to incarcerated youth. Carla has an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte (Latin America). She lives in Pasadena with her wife 4/12/2020 0 Comments Pony by Jeremy Nathan Marks One Trick Pony CC
Pony It is still a common practice at fairs to tie ponies to turnstiles so children may ride them they wear blinders walk in circles we pay their owners the price of the ticket It’s called domestication While I am here to take the world as it is rain falls hard on my parasol at the pier the wind’s bluster tears at that canopy until my hands feel they cannot hang on This is interpolation So I wonder where do I meet that pony when do her poll crest and withers experience the sky with wide open eyes like an umbrella alive to its potential how does she stay awake to her function without becoming an object These are my questions In the pupils of that little horse I meet my desire for God between hemispheres of dark we both walk. Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. Recent poetry, prose, and photography appear/will appear in Apricity, Right Hand Pointing, Red Fez, The Blue Nib, On the Seawall, Dissident Voice, Mobius, Rat’s Ass Review, Muddy River, Literary Orphans, Floyd County Moonshine, Barren Magazine, 365 Tomorrows, New Verse News, and Unlikely Stories. 4/12/2020 2 Comments Poetry by Lindsay Launt Christine Kuncke CC Collections We spend time collecting our thoughts but never with the intention of letting anyone into our museums. Halls echo with memories. Save an entire floor just for missed opportunities- and another wing for the best daydreams and hours of hoping. But with the doors locked, this space is nothing more than the realization that there is no room for anyone else. Epitaph I want you to choose your words carefully because I will be buried with them in whatever mangled, twisted interpretation I choose. I will – eventually – weaponize them and blow apart this entire interaction as soon as I’m done holding them hostage, Close enough to feel their heat but far enough that I don’t get attached. I need you to regret every word of it so you will not hover above me, a ghost to my grave. Creation I without caution invented you in my head. Explain away each flaw, justified each shadow. Projected what I wanted and never saw through to the truth, to the damage being done. Holding on to this image feels so real. And for you, walking away is so easy, because this portrait looks nothing like you and it is easier to not even try to match my brushstrokes. Imprint I can’t affect you any more than you let me. If you Give me permission to come inside, perhaps I’ll stay. Sink into your favourite chair, let it take the shape of my bones. If only for a brief time, I can still leave a mark. But if you fear the skeletal remains that you cannot banish to a closet, then this was never more than dust, easy enough to let collect, but unmistakably removable once you regain the strength to exhale. Lindsay Launt is originally from upstate New York and now seeks refuge in Annapolis, Maryland. She teaches biology, but in her free time, finds inspiration in horrendous Tinder dates. Most of her writing comes to her in her dreams, and most of her editing involves drinking and pacing in her modest two-bedroom apartment. 4/12/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Trevor Eichenberger S A Kindstrom CC What Kind Of Faggot Are You? Are you a cherry blossom or evergreen? The online quiz determined that I would be a giant sequoia, but the German in my last name translates to oak. What I’m really asking is what would you grow to be if they didn’t sliver you down to sticks and feed you into the fire. Trevor Eichenberger is a queer Midwestern writer. He is currently enrolled at Nebraska Wesleyan University where he is pursuing a BA in English. His work has been featured on the Allegory Ridge website and in Impossible Archetype and other journals. He enjoys Cranberry Vodkas and listening to Lana Del Rey. |
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