5/12/2018 1 Comment Poetry By Eli Sahmon the morning i got a writing degree i heard local birds pop in the trees because there were too many feather-bubbles blown by small-cheeked children as painters dropped objects from the library roof into a dumpster they seemed to slow down as they fell toward the smack they were books my diploma explained in its white darkness i unraveled the smacks until they sounded like hands being amputated by cinderblocks of prehistoric cash the local dean said, poor dumpster i took hard notes until my phone shattered into the gray plastic of my dad’s hair so i asked what the fuck should i do now? and sat there relaxed on my feet so clever-looking i almost couldn’t stand it the librarians emerged and passed around a water fountain between themselves they said they were being recycled restored? i said recycled they said restored? i said i asked what i was going to do now doesn’t the ocean sound like enough? the ocean makes enough sound aren’t the ocean sounds enough? every seagull agrees they’re just always hungry their feathers are cold but they aren’t and they’re just always hungry poetry reading voice it might look like i’m standing here sweating confidence but i’m actually drowning in debt so unreal it’s warm as walking beside semi trucks on the highway their horns the most poetic sounds i can imagine i’m talking from paper which isn’t talking it’s too quiet to hear me i should be a video i should set the paper on fire and make up whatever i can’t read fast enough until my hands are ruined so i’d have to carry drinks with my arms for awhile against my chest or with my teeth or not at all and you’d all applaud as hard as you could for me to stop but i won't until you ball up this page and throw it at me to keep the fire going Bio: Eli Sahm received his MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He was a finalist for the 2016 NC State Annual Poetry Contest and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Your Impossible Voice, Occulum, Rabid Oak, Show Your Skin, The Indianapolis Review, and Cotton Xenomorph.
1 Comment
5/11/2018 1 Comment Poetry By Lauren BenderWe have to love what no one else claims You make yourself sick on so much nothing, holding this question like a candle that overwhelms itself with its own wax and dr- almost drowns. You tilt it to spill the excess, intestines clenching at the threat of not having light. You'll do anything so you don't have to search for her in darkness, your mother. Where is she, and was she ever able, even for a moment, to fall in love with her daughter? I will never know how to let go of needing satisfaction, which comes in different forms and on at least one occasion comes in cakes. Actual cakes, hundreds of them in the fantastic gloss I'll slather across the memory later, but six at the most. I was the queen of cake-walking at the carnival, winning and winning and walking each cake to my house, then walking back to school to win another. By the end, our kitchen table was covered with cakes, all their own flavors and colors, unique as snowflakes, tempting us to eat and be nurtured. No one gets so lucky without a degree of obsessiveness, and I wanted endless cake less than the drug of success. Besides, neither health-conscious parents nor their bored children were desperate to join me in my round and round musical quest for overdressed sugar, for a delicate prize to adopt and cradle home in the summer heat. Now what I can't remember is how you reacted to this attack by cake. How could you have known what to do? Did we finish them all? Did we graze and sample, share them with neighbors, keep them as table decorations for months? What a colossal problem I must have created, caking up our lives when you were booked solid with loss - your mother, your freedom, yourself. Was she ever, even for a moment? The only theory that makes any sense is that this happened nearby, as in somewhere in our city, my city, she surrendered you to the proper people, and on you went, rosebud lips and blond curls like a gift-wrapped American darling. But at a certain point I convince myself you were shipped by box overseas, direct from a windmill in the Netherlands where my overwhelmed grandmother is still standing, swaying, hungry for both of us. Good, Better, Best It had to be about winning, when you held an egg in a spoon and ran madly down a field, because if you were fast and never dropped it, you would be egg-in-a-spoon hero, like you had been cemetery-spelling hero, roller-skating-chicken-dance hero, three-legged-race hero, carnival-cake-walk hero, talk-back-to-your-parents-and-then- scamper-off hero, poetry-writing hero, and I-can-do-this-I-can-be-a-leader hero. Tomorrow is Monday morning, or another chance to be going-through-the-motions hero. You are an exceptional girl, everyone can see that, but in case they can't, you pick another thing and start to pursue it. Raise another egg and train intense eyes on the red finish line sprayed in the grass. the morning I was crowned, that evening I went to you, asked you to bless my hands, though you were not there, and I did not use those words; I said, to paraphrase, I had been given power. My cheeks flushed, I stepped back, waited for you to celebrate this victory, my growth, culmination of what you wanted. You were not alone. All my life I heard I would regret this, I would regret that. Anyone with actual power knows you take it. There is no passive voice; you take it because you want it, because you have believed you will have it from the beginning, and the only confusing part is wondering why so many situations allow no room for a coup. I needed you to tell me this was the end of insignificance, though you don’t know the end any better than I do. But the end of insignificance to you, at least, which is why I really asked you to love me, more than anything love me. I could not tell if you understood the question. Bio: Lauren Bender lives in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared in IDK Magazine, The Collapsar, Gyroscope Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Yes Poetry, and others. You can find her on twitter @benderpoet. 5/10/2018 1 Comment Poetry By Jessie Lynn McMainsBlue Ballads for (Un)Dead Girls I. How she haunts me. I could spit on my boot and slam a dance on rotten boatwood, and still I would see her, unluckier than a black catfish hanging over my head. I say shoo but she don’t spook easy. Ghost bitch, begone. II. See her sodden body there, singing from the reeds. She floats below the surface, her face an underwater moon, wobbling and blurred. Her flesh, pale as a fishbelly. The roots of rivertrees already twining bracelets around her skinny arms, claiming her as their own. She aches for it. See how swollen she is, how dripping wet. III. See her body there on the summer sidewalk. Next to the streaks of what seems to be gunpowder and blood. (Relax, it’s only melted cherry popsicles and firecrackers.) See her body there riding shotgun in the hot car. Her body on the bedroom floor. Her body in the bathtub. Her body blue and lovely beneath the ice of the pond. Her body, her body, her body. Has become a chalk outline of itself. IV. She’s a goner, a gone girl. She’s always gone too long but she don’t ever go all the way away and I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know, I know, I know, I know I know, I know-- V. For whoever is forgotten there is a riverbank. For whoever is forgotten there is a sidewalk. For whoever is forgotten there is a bedroom. For whoever wants to drown there is a river. For however she wants to drown there is a river. River of flame, river of pain, river of madness. Bathtubs, swimming pools, pillbottles. VI. Like most girls I dreamed of drowning. Longed to be swallowed by something blue. So I swallowed pills, flooded my veins with drugs that swooned me under, my oblivion. Wrapped razorblade bangles ‘round my wrists. Swallowed pills and sat under the bridge by the river, boozebottle in hand. Once I saw a foot floating in the river; a foot and part of a leg bobbing in the shallows. Once I collected bones I found in the mudreeds along the riverbank, bones bleached and sanded by riverwater. Fishbones, gullbones, swanbones, girlbones. I made a harp of hipbones and hair and my sister, she sang to me. VII. Oh my sister. Like you I longed for the things that terrored me, the serpents that wriggled at the edges of my darkest dreams. In my summernight bedroom, swimming in the heat that flooded through the window, I imagined killers slitting through the screen into my sleep. Imagined knives that could slice out the bones of a fishgirl and desperate hands plunged into the wetness of my guts. Dreamt of soaking in my own blood. VIII. I used to give my boys knives and ask them to cut me. I placed their desperate hands around my throat and gasped toward the choke that would stop up my lungs as sure as water. Waited for that moment of too-far, when they’d have to take my body to the river, feed me to the oil-drenched fish. They never got near it. Too afraid of their fatal potential to dip a toe into that desire. IX. They say if a man kisses a rivermaid, a rusalka, he can never cross back to our world. A caul grows over his eyes, turns them to milky opals forever seeing everything from underwater. But what of us? Girls who love rivers too much, who bejewel ourselves in the flash of fish scales. X. What of us, girls? We who braid willowbranches and weep, who dye our hair muddy blue, who name almost-daughters Mississippi, Colorado, Shenandoah. We whose bodies are bait. Who wade knee-deep into the rivers of our immolation. XI. We pray to Elise, Our Lady of Windowsills, and Sylvia, Our Lady of Stoves. And yes, we pray to Anne, Our Lady of Garages. But most of all we pray to Virginia—Our Lady of the Rivers, Our Mother of the Stones. XII. I heard her moan, I heard her bones. Under the bridge I see her face, ghost-bright. Her pretty fingers nibbled by minnows. My heart becomes a choking stone, stopping my throat. XIII. She died of an overdose. Of desire. She Houdinied herself, stayed below too long. She swallowed the river whole. She started the car, turned on the stove. She baited the boys and made them killers. Made them kill her. Did I say kill her? She’s alive. She’s just so good at ghosting. She’s such an ace at that old disappearing act, she even fools me sometimes. The Teenage Witch’s Sonata the teenage witch is in love with fire and smoke / writes the name of her crush on a scrap of paper and sets it ablaze, molecules of ash balleting through the close air of her room / the letters of his name curling into flames, licking dangerous close to her fingertips / her crush has lovely lips and fingers but he’s a mere mortal and she prefers the trickster gods who gave her fire, so / she sends the name of her crush up in smoke, a small signal billowing toward the stars / the teenage witch is in love with trickster gods and the rockers and poets she’s canonized / a private pantheon of lonesome-eyed blonde boys, jet-haired babes in leather, tattooed shirtless soul-growlers / puts their pictures on her altar, adds adornment: silver glam glitter, dried red roses from a birthday bouquet sent by a junior high sweetheart the teenage witch puts holy candles among the sparkle-pop detritus of her bedroom shrine / white for protection and red for desire, scented ones stolen from Target, and jinx removing, yes / jinx, the gods made her fiery strange; jinx, you can’t talk until she burns your name / the teenage witch lights them, sparks the joint her hippie friend rolled in exchange for a hand-poked peace-sign tattoo / pulls the smoke into her most holy places, the back of her throat, the pockets of her lungs / watches the candles melt, the flicker-dance of flames / soon the close air of her room is heady with the reek of patchouli and bergamot, wax and weed / and she is leaping, she is twirling, she is dancing an ash ballet among the stars the teenage witch knows words are charms and music is voodoo / scribbles her secrets in notebooks collaged with iconography of her saints / her guitar is both broomstick and wand, it moans and screeches, under her hands electric, between her legs a ride to punk rock queendom / at her piano she’s an ivory enchantress, stroking ebony keys, unlocking sad minor sounds that reach up through the past, tugging moonlight from today / the teenage witch is a weird bird whose closest friends are tricksters and poets she’s never met / she climbs out through her bedroom window onto the roof in the springtime dusk, surveys the landscape of her sleeping kingdom the teenage witch is no arsonist, she just wants to set everything on fire / takes a sip of apple brandy, falls in love with its sugar burn / empties the guts of a chamomile teabag into a square of notebook paper, rolls it and licks it closed, sets it between her lips / a lighter flick and the world sparks and blurs, god-smoke particles marry the fibers of her thrift store shirt, ash rains on the tarry roof / the sky purples toward night / the teenage witch sits, a smoldering ember, a smoky blur of long bird limbs and red gold locks of hair, remote and pretty / the moonlight sears her holy / with its pale, ancient flame Jessie Lynn McMains is a poet, writer, zine-maker, and small press owner. Her words have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Left of the Lake Magazine, L’Ephemere Review, Burning House Press, Shakespeare & Punk, and others. She collects souvenir pennies and stick & poke tattoos, and is perpetually nostalgic, melancholy, and restless. You can find her website at recklesschants.net. "I am lost by design", sings Alanna Eileen in The Mirror and the Mime. In this moment we already know the landscape here will be deep, its path winding. The musicality which is threaded through both of Eileen's two haunting EP's, Absence and Keepsake, is layered like artful strokes of paint to canvas; pulsations of heart and sound reverberating between the vulnerable chest cavity and the floor. Hushed phantom tones of emotive swirl make tipsy the entry into Eileen's soundscape. Displaced, yet sure-footed, these are soft, mournful compositions of the in-between. One imagines a light step through dark space, a poet's heart clearing way through underbrush toward an unknown shore laid out against the thick fog of one's travels. Songwriting become equal parts processor of reality and repository for longing. There is an almost sacred element at work in Eileen's lyrics. "The sky is more than I know how to see". A painter's heart in awe of the everyday. "It’s such a mysterious procedure", says Alanna, "there’s a touch of alchemy or magic to it. It feels like a gift, almost, because it can’t be planned. It’s like a storm brewing." Rain broke loose from the soul tarries along the edges of the unknown, and in that place these songs hesitate to name their maker. Yet "something always remains," grafted onto the mystery is that place where the light and dark share their kindred stories long into the night, and in that night one can only but hope to pocket these tokens from the wayside, reminders, for later, of all that has been lost and all that has been found. The song - here - is a canvas of endless possibilities. *** AHC: The shape of your path towards songwriting, take us down that road a bit. What/who were some of the first seeds planted? What has called you, throughout the years, to this astonishing place of sound and soul making? Alanna: My father was a musician, so some of my earliest memories involve music being performed live. I was always encouraged to sing. When I was sixteen, someone gave me a guitar, and songwriting grew in conjunction with teaching myself how to play. It took me several years to feel like I could actually write songs. Now, it has become invaluable; writing songs is how I cope with the world, with feelings and events. I’m called to it because it’s the way I process reality, and I feel like I couldn’t live happily without it. AHC: There is a very painterly aspect to your songs, each one feels carefully layered and labored over. There's a tone and taste of canvas behind your mesmerizing songs, it's no surprise to learn that you also paint as well. Can you tell us how/when this passion first came about, before, after or around the same time as songwriting? Do you feel a connection at all between the songs and the paintings? Who are some of your visual inspirations; painters/photographers? Alanna: Music has been my passion for many years, but visual art has always been there as another outlet. I'd say they've existed symbiotically for most of my life; they feel dissimilar, but they interact. Visual art is often the first avenue of creativity we all have in childhood. Some of my earliest memories involve sitting down with a piece of paper, pouring over a sketch, completely absorbed. It preceded music-making, for sure. I think the connection between music and visual art is that they are both expressions of the same creative energy. Even though music is my primary focus, painting is something I intend to do a lot more of in the future - I dream about studying it in-depth and having exhibitions and so on. I'm also developing a strong interest in photography and sculpture. As for visual inspirations, some of my favourites include Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Odilon Redon, Sally Mann, David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrew Wyeth, Tove Jansson, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesca Woodman and John William Waterhouse. AHC: Literary qualities thread throughout your music, I have the impression that literature influences your work, am I correct about that? Who are some of the writers that have haunted the margins of your own path and vision? Alanna: Yes, literature has been a deep love of mine for a long time. I started writing prose and poetry many years before I attempted songwriting. I love the works of Hermann Hesse, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Blake, Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Knut Hamsun, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and countless others.
AHC: Absence and Keepsake are your first two EP's. Both very haunting records. Can you take us back to the moment in time that crystallized these works, what was filtering through your heart and mind then, the sounds, colors events that birthed these works?
Alanna: For me, they both feel like products of a young mind attempting to grapple with new experiences. They are a collection of moments I endeavoured to crystallise in song-form. I’ve moved on from the time in my life that birthed those songs; I feel very different now, older and more assured. The songs on Absence and Keepsake were written between August 2014 and June 2016, but recording Keepsake marked a change in my life and my writing evolved rapidly after that experience. Absence makes me think of many things, it feels awash in blue tones - it reminds me of Melbourne, where it was written, and the tropical humidity of Far North Queensland, where it was recorded. Keepsake was composed in Melbourne - with the exception of 'Stay' and 'Elias' - but all it reminds me of is New Zealand, as that is where we recorded it. The songs aren't about New Zealand, they are very much in the same realm as Absence, but the way they sound, the production, everything - it all takes me back to the time spent recording it, as opposed to the time spent writing it. The journey of going to New Zealand and seeing that landscape for the first time and everything else that followed was quite potent and life-altering. AHC: What do you think makes for a good song? As you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak? Alanna: Almost nothing gives me as much joy as when I’ve written a new song; I feel an enveloping sense of well-being and happiness when it works - but it’s such a mysterious procedure, because it can’t be forced or predicted. Without wanting to sound pretentious, there’s a touch of alchemy or magic to it. It feels like a gift, almost, because it can’t be planned. It’s like a storm brewing. I don’t know what makes a good song; I know I write countless bad songs, songs I battle with and invariably toss aside, because they seem lifeless or disjointed. A good song makes you feel something, it has a spark in it. You want to play it again and again and live inside the little world of words and melody. But I don’t know why. AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, a slightly imperfect vehicle through which to translate our innermost feelings, states of rupture/rapture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener, however imperfectly? Alanna: Yes, absolutely. That’s an excellent description, and that’s precisely how I think of it. It’s a form of therapy I couldn’t live without. Truly, it’s how I cope with reality - by transmuting feelings, observations and thoughts into songs. I know it’s the same for many songwriters. AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road? Alanna: My early life was characterised by lengthy road trips with my father - we crossed Australia eighteen times, went up and down the east coast and all over the island of Tasmania in a dusty, unpredictable vehicle with a kelpie pup in tow. We would busk on the street and play gigs in outback pubs. These were my first experiences of playing music live, and also the inspiration behind my initial songs - being on the road for days on end, I’d make up lyrics in my head as we drove. The road was an integral part of my growth as a person and an artist. Other fond musical memories include shows I’ve played in New Zealand, where the audiences are almost always amazing, and performing in Ireland in 2014.
AHC: Do you have any words of advice or encouragement for other musicians and singer-songwriters out there who are trying to find (and sometimes stumble into) their voice and their way in this world? What are the kinds of things that you tell yourself when you begin to have doubts or are struggling with the creative process? Or what kinds of things have others told you that have helped push you past moments of self doubt/creative blocks?
Alanna: Self-doubt is probably the most detrimental thing. I’m naturally shy, so I’ve struggled with confidence for a long time. It’s been hard for me to share my work, my thoughts, anything at all. But as you mature, you begin to worry less. My advice would be to honour yourself wholly and respect who you are. Go to the core, always, and speak from that place. Be fierce, be compassionate and be honest. Loyalty to your own truth is paramount. It isn’t easy and it’s something I’m only just learning to do. But I think it’s vital. AHC: What's next for you? Are there any new projects in the works you'd like to mention? Alanna: I have written a full-length album and I’ll be recording it in the US later this year. It has taken me almost two years to write it and it means a lot to me, all my energy is going into it now. I plan to release it by mid-2019. Alanna's two Ep's Absence and Keepsake are both available for purchase via Bandcamp. Visit www.alanna-eileen.com/ for more. Follow Alanna on Facebook and Twitter. 5/8/2018 1 Comment Poetry By Amy AlexanderHow Do You Feel at the Moment? Like I’ve got nothing to lose or at least nothing that would devastate, I feel a feast in my kitchen, and also, like I have to hide the one thing that would stop my heart. I tried never to think about the bones on hungry pavement I hear it’s called anxiety, I just thought I was bent to expect the worst, something about coming from an alcoholic family, it’s a turnabout to the American Dream, instead of expecting to rise, it’s falling that’s your focus, and the prize is a lot of material for writing a poem, a lot of things to say about how not to build a home What Do You Need More of in Your Life? This one is a tweet, or a cute update even when the number one sense in me is to hate a slice of cake I frosted by myself “I need more of this in my life!” writes the MILF, that’s mother I’d like to do, I don’t say that word, I just think it a lot, these days, I flirt with all the things I’m not supposed to say, my Mormon mom’s not here, anyway, to tell me to say fudge, instead, or heck, then why do I feel her hands around my neck? “I need more of this in my life!” a cute outfit I want to fit into, I write, and not the real shit List All Your Small Victories and Successes In the carpet forest, a copper shoe, paper flowers pressed with glue, a Smurf, with stethoscope in the air, a fan that moves in the sun’s stark glare, strawberry dolls with sweet shampoo, ceramic rabbits and a random clue to the spot on the mountain where my brother hides porn, and whiskey and Halloween candy corn, seed beads and safety pins in a jar for sixth grade friends, a foil star from staying still when I wanted to run a tiny victory parade for a girl who’s never won What Would Make You Happy Right Now? My heart keeping its head down, doing the work it’s supposed to be up to, a coordinated jerk that moves my aired up blood to my brain helps me think straight so I don’t have to feign that I’m okay, a heart that doesn’t threaten to jump out at everyone like a bloody alien baby with a hump whipping down Alien tunnels to cause corporate trouble, really, I’m happy to be laying low, the crumble not happening today, not right here, right now, maybe later, but I’ve been taught not to crowd my thoughts with what I'll be able to do tomorrow, or not, if my heart leaves, and the rest of my organs follow What is Going Right in Your Life? At the job interview, I couldn’t really say that surviving childhood was, far and away, my single greatest accomplishment to date, and what I need to know, now, as I struggle to intubate my real voice, and start saying what I really want, is why that went down as the single worst thing I could invent, the worst response from a bad candidate. The list, of course, of prizes for bad branding goes on for miles, the world is demanding and walking away from a kidnapper and not dying is, in no way, an accomplishment. No resume needs that trigger, and being alive is no Cum Laude Bio: Amy Alexander has been published or has work upcoming in several journals, including Quarterly West, The Cream City Review, The Coil, Cease, Cows, and a special book project from Likely Red Press. Setting: Everyone Last night I changed my preferences online to women, I’m open to the possibility finally that soft coned breasts and puckered nipple tips might excite me, a searching tongue with a new kind of softness against my thigh. I’ve kissed girls before and it makes me nervous for I believe my own parted lips consist of 100 different nerve endings called woman and the fusion of female is a powerful electricity. Bio: Isabelle Kenyon is the author of poetry anthology, This is not a Spectacle and micro chapbook, The Trees Whispered, published by Origami Poetry Press. She is also the editor of MIND Poetry Anthology 'Please Hear What I'm Not Saying', shortlisted for a Saboteur Award. Her poems have been published in many poetry anthologies and included in literary festivals, such as Anti Heroin Chic, Literary Yard, Bewildering Stories, The Inkyneedles anthology, the Great British Write Off, the Wirral festival of Music, Speech and Drama, Poetry Rivals, and the Festival of Firsts. The title of Kini's album may immediately call to mind Virginia Woolf's treatise, no doubt some of the words found there cannot but resonate with the soundscapes emanating from Kini's unique musical battle cry; “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” Kini composes color-sensations from the edges of the mind, which is where experience most often dwells, along the side lines and back roads of our psyches. Listening to the album one has the impression of an improvisation of the senses, back to basics - everything is imaginative before it is conditional. The intense and potent musical interweavings of A Room Of One's Own etch indelible crossroads of possibility on the mind. Rare is the album these days that forces great questions upon us, Kini, however, manages to do just that. "We must kill the false woman, preventing us from breathing" Kini sings in I Too Overflow, a song which wrestles with all of the false and impossible containment's forced upon us. How can we not seep at the edges, psychical/bodily overflows of our being? Kini remarks of the song that it is "a proud acknowledgment of my own tendency to overflow, with fear, anger, frustration, idleness… We all do, but society says it’s ugly to show that you do." Music makes of such supposed ugliness a beauty inborn, what is seen as a weakness is more accurately our most allied inner-self. There is turmoil in us all, here we find music that pokes through so many artificial layers of concealment. Turmoil is a room of many fertile dimensions. As the world speeds up to dizzying effects, Kini uses such bombardment as a way to peel back layers of meaning from the overflow of daily life. The songs of A Room Of One's Own are fierce, haunting and their odd beauty speaks indirectly to Nietzsche's words that “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Without the overflow there is no flow. Our lives are uncontainable things of great mystery, thankfully so. Keep up with Kini Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Twitter | Soundcloud | iTunes | Spotify Keep up with The Sublunar Society Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Soundcloud | Twitter | YouTube | Vimeo | Instagram Keep up with Shameless Promotion PR Website | Facebook | Twitter | Soundcloud | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email 5/5/2018 0 Comments Poetry By Jeff BagatoTaking Home the Pictures We’re on the lam for you OJ, scraping the Mexican border to see Christian Slater stabbed on a hotel room television The mountains shrug up around El Paso like a whore in a wetsuit, those truck drivers trying to get by; apple juice in the morning, 3 in a 2 bed hotel room Passing into New Mexico on an empty stomach, praying for tumbleweed or the Spanish tongue I can’t think with car talk on the radio-- where are all the pigs? I want to be arrested; we’re psychotic: let me list our crimes and the thought crimes I would admit to: taking pictures of the dying and those waiting for the skeletal hand Ouija Gets Bent Running with scissors works for some people, while others lose an eye, but Ouija scrapes along one step at a time, putting together those answers and predictions to all your earthly woes, except for that one evening when she got into the Bacardi and the limes, trading shots for passages of gold like Ann Landers on a bender; then the words flew faster, jumping and hopping like Ouija was walking on hot coals-- these predictions aren’t following the future, they’re going to make tomorrow’s tomorrows beg for retribution, upending time, overloading the quantum field like goosing a samurai; then it all comes down like a sword splitting your skull at the hairline so there’s honeydew for breakfast-- Ouija got bent, the letters curved under her legs into hieroglyphics of human dementia, symbols that can’t help you remember because they’re too busy trying to forget Sorry No Obi Minor points of law aside, what’s it take to jump the walls along the highway, get down among the beasts and spray your freedom name on the pylons holding up those bridges leading off to nowhere more than another mall, another jail, another stage for acting out your final scene? You can collect compact discs all your life, but if you lost the hype obi on your favorite, what’s it all worth, and who would want it now, all ugly and deformed and hiding in the dark under a pile of other unwanted plastic; the planet’s dying, and we keep hoping somewhere this stuff can build us a dome against the lying vacuum of the stars, where you’re baked before you can buy another breath, or a last look at the light of imaginary day. Bio: A multi-media artist living near Washington, DC, Jeff Bagato produces poetry and prose as well as electronic music, and glitch video. Some of his poetry has appeared in Empty Mirror, Otoliths, Chiron Review, Ygdrasil, and Outlaw Poetry. Short fiction has appeared in Gobbet and Horror Sleaze Trash. His published books include Savage Magic (poetry), and The Toothpick Fairy (fiction). A blog about his writing and publishing efforts can be found at http://jeffbagato.wordpress.com. 5/3/2018 0 Comments Poetry By Shan Cawleymoving out saying goodbye in the bedroom- the time capsule for all of my failed relationships waft into the living room its breeziness stained, tattered and so guilty the witness to sin, a bystander by inaction. the kitchen and its dirty floors, the broken stove i look at the window i used to climb into; fear eludes me still. through the threshold i go, the home i called my own a monument to remember my past lives by. commentary on streetcars by bukowski streetcars- infatuation, institutions, aging finding comfort in god while small what is the difference
catholicism, streetcars, girls instead of numbers, use instances and situations as timestamps Bio: Shan Cawley is a poet based out of Morgantown, WV. Her first full length collection, kingdom now, is set to be released this summer by Maudlin House Press. You can follow Shan on Twitter and Instagram @shancawleywvu. Photo by Brianna Fierro |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |