5/26/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Cheryl Aguirre stanze CC White Mistletoe Humble before my fathers I walk, Queen of the onion flowers. Diazepam is a palace. Floating nausea, Milk of the Jimson Weed Ivory trumpets resting Laurels on my lap, Thief of the tree. We touched chastely beneath Hanging pearlescent leaves. Attuned to veins, Sucking and throbbing The viscera hidden. Thrum, kiss, a parasite Gentle viscum album Attached to the wrist, It cuts, it bleeds. Cheryl Aguirre is a queer biracial poet based in Austin, Texas. You can find their previously published work in Ghost City Press, decomp journal, and The Whorticulturalist. You can follow them at @drowsy_orchid on Instagram and @Wheat_Mistress on Twitter.
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5/26/2021 2 Comments Poetry by Walter Bargen fluffisch CC
To Reach She is in the next county, which is only across a creek that sometimes floods the low-water bridge which is really a concrete ford. Usually it leaves him staring over and into another dry country he believes he knows. Mornings across the valley clouds settle, keep hidden what he has committed himself to forgetting this day: rolling hills covered in oaks, fields just cut and hay baled, an ocean a thousand miles away spooling waves, and then back to the squared surround of sunlight where he sits, the ground laced with nervous leaf shadows. He tries to say more, to deny conclusions that are less obvious beginnings, each breath an abandoned kingdom, the heart hammering its red nails, and he thinks one less day for everyone involved. Note To the Next Reader Not unfound but unbound, and everywhere knots unravel, abandoning the ins and outs of braded rope with their once about the tree trunk, the rabbit jumping through the hole, the half-hitch, the square, the slip, and all the sailors’ complex twists and doubling back done to be undone. And moorless, bookshelves a chaos of drift. Elsewhere, a general slippage as playground swings settle on the beat-bare earth below their stable steel triangulations as eleventh-floor window washers step down safely onto sidewalks, the Hansel & Gretel trails left by lost cargo from emptied flatbeds rushing along highways, their tie-downs festive, manically whipping ribboned waves, leaving wakes of speed with no concern for the loss, the lost, or anyone returning safely. Everyday an unbound adventure no matter the plan, open suitcases trailing straps just ahead of fields of destruction, flags free of their metal poles and the ceaseless winded clacking of cables as these hallowed scarfs swirl through the riddled air, unbound by blood and bullets, splintered, unfettered, not unfree, a triage for all our stories taking wing, taking time, taking our lives across the blue earth of the unfound world. This is not an unbound world until we turn the page. Walter Bargen has published 25 books of poetry. Recent books include: My Other Mother’s Red Mercedes (Lamar University Press, 2018), Until Next Time (Singing Bone Press, 2019), Pole Dancing in the Night Club of God (Red Mountain Press, 2020), and You Wounded Miracle, (Liliom, 2021). He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009). 5/26/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Bobbie Lee Lovell fluffisch CC She says her lack of discipline is a coping mechanism. The earth keeps shaking beneath her, so why bother with plans and protocol? Her calendar is a hoard of maybes. She binge-watches a reality show about the super morbidly obese, understands how food can become the only reliable thing, that pizza and chocolate are faithfully delicious. This is an epiphany: means becomes end. She has swallowed the Acme earthquake pills Wile E. Coyote intended for The Road Runner and cannot stop shaking in a way that compounds rather than offsets. She once sold out for love, but love was a box of sparklers in a cold house during a Midwestern winter: ooh-ah, then gone. She ordered a lifetime of Thanksgiving dinners, got a bag of in-flight peanuts. Now, all she wants is a smaller appetite. And stillness, blessed stillness. How to Find Your Strengths Wake up. Listen. Open your arms to the world. Open your mouth to whatever flies in or out: bats or butterflies, truth or lies. Then stop talking. Lift all the heavy things and see which ones stay aloft. Juggle the others until they crash-land. Attempt a diving catch — just once -- then get up and walk away. Fly away. Commit serial escape until you discover a new continent. Realize it has already been discovered, and that you have everything to learn from the natives. Look every person in the eye. Turn yourself inside out: be that kind of brave. Shake it all loose, shake the colors from the gray matter. Take inventory if you want. Say a prayer if you want. Then give it all away — every last bit -- and take note of what you have left. Bobbie Lee Lovell won the 2020 Janet Dee Wullner-Faiss Memorial Prize for Poetry, is the author of Proposition at the Walk-In Infinity Chamber (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She lives in Wisconsin with her two teen children and has a career in graphic design and print production. bobbieleelovell.com 5/26/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Bunkong Tuon fluffisch CC Mirror One night, I stood in front of the mirror, feeling so alone, ugly, and angry at my brown teenage body, so dark in a sea of whiteness. I thought to myself: What good is this mirror that brings only suffering! I’ll break it with my fists and welcome seven years of bad luck. It’s better than what I have now. diary entry before high school graduation skip classes to skate all day and all night. no girl. no sport. music is life. in your head you make up characters acting out conversations you wish you had. alone always alone. everyone is white. everyone is your enemy-- even Mr. W who stays after school for study sessions you never show up for, who called your home one day and spoke to a grandmother who didn’t speak English. you are hyper- ventilating, manic depressive, suicidal. the other day you went to the library in search of meaning, but the characters don’t look like you, don’t have your stories. graduation’s tomorrow: scared shitless afraid no skills so unprepared for this fucking world. Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel, And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (a chapbook with Joanna C. Valente, Yes Poetry). He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, NY. He tweets @BunkongTuon 5/26/2021 1 Comment Poetry by John Brantingham Nicolas Henderson CC
The Churn We live in a loft in the back of the old post office in Ontario, built in 1926. At night, my dead whisper to me that this is not an ancient place. It is not even old. They whisper that no place on Earth is. They tell me the ground is churning, slower than water, but replacing itself still. Spring The row of offices down the road that have been abandoned since March must have a pipe burst, so we call it in and wait three days before anyone turns off the water coming through the wall like a spring or a faucet. In these days, the wild neighborhood cats are drawn here. They drink carefully while watching for cars and dogs and people. When they see me, they bolt. Birds have begun to congregate on the wires above. I think of the coyotes. How they must congregate at night. Red Bird The building down the road standing empty since we moved here used to be owned by the Raven Brothers or at least that’s what the sign painted directly on its wall says. Whatever music that might be found in car repair is gone. In the afternoon, a neighborhood kid throws a racquetball hard just below its fading red bird again and again, catching it before it touches the ground. He wipes the sweat from his eyes and concentrates on improving his throw. John Brantingham was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has eleven books of poetry and fiction including his latest fiction collection Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College. 5/26/2021 0 Comments Poetry by David R. DiSarro Daniel Wehner CC Home The day- long thirst for quiet, kids to bed, finally I can imagine amongst these artifacts these innocuous things - a dry toothbrush, a ring, a handwritten note, a drawing - that you are here, alive and breathing. But then our daughter screams, the Big Bird dream again, and she scuttles into our room, rests against my chest, like how you would. She says she misses Mommy. I can’t explain why she can’t see you, not tonight, not again, and she falls asleep there, eventually, almost cooing, a small silhouette of you. David R. DiSarro is currently an Associate Professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. His work has previously appeared in Conclave: A Journal of Character, The Wilderness House Literary Review, The Hawaii Pacific Review, Shot Glass Poetry Journal, among others. David's first chapbook, I Used to Play in Bands, was published by Finishing Line Press. He currently lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his wife, Beth, five children, and three rambunctious dogs. 5/26/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Dave Roskos Daniel Wehner CC
POEM for George Chewkanes 1/14/1976 - 10/11/2020 the last time I saw George he was working at The Windmill in Belmar, hooked me up with a free chili dog. It was around midnight & still Open the young guy working with George clearly looked up to him & was listening to his every word as they cleaned up the place & got ready for closing time talking about Recovery & working their shift in the ghostly mostly empty brightly lit Hot Dog Stand made of glass at the crossroads of two highways across the way from a river named after sharks. --Dave Roskos 10/14/2020 "enough! or too much!" --Wm Blake too many bird brains too much bird shit too much auto exhaust too god damn hot not enough dissonance not enough, nvr enuf money & a monkey in a peekaboo head-dress shimmied a war whoop across the concrete dust that littered my stoop & loitered in mid air w/o a challenge or care w/ saxophone bleeps & the smashing of snares & they beat w/ hammers to the hum of a stammer & rime w/o reason or work, just cause they like how it sounds --Dave Roskos July 3, 2002 the autonomous watchmaker sets her alarm water drips off copper pipes sweating dysfunctional disease in the dew drops last renderings, done with our wanderings we embark meandering melancholy moorings drugs stashed beneath the floorboards the face of the forward-thinking brake-lite frowns fictitious a white rat is put up for adoption a tortoise shell kitty takes a car ride the autonomous watchmaker sets her alarm nothing can undo our love for one another or do us harm create your own world & live in it hand out one dollar bills indiscriminately in the street wash one another's feet the bright blast of the broken bleat gurgles from the slit throat of the sacrificial goat --Dave Roskos June 2011 Dave Roskos is the editor of Big Hammer & Street Value poetry zines. he also publishes chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlets & books as iniquity press/vendetta books. several books including FALL & ALL, Poems for Losers, and LYRICAL GRAIN, DOGGEREL CHAFF & PEDESTRIAN PREOCCUPATIONS. 5/26/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Danielle Low-Waters barbara w CC Memory in Retrograde (after Olivia Gatwood) You tell me you don’t love me and I hear you the first time. Maybe I wish it could be different, but when you say it, I understand what it is and isn’t. I don’t go searching for proof in what it was or could have been. I don’t wait for your answer to change. I’m not tempted by my phone buzzing late night with a different story or the devil nestled in my clavicle whispering whiskey thick that you “could fall in love” with someone like me. I don’t spend the next eight years falling in and out of bottles and beds with you, read myself into your horoscope, pull strands of you from my memory, or search for you in the spaces between my teeth. There’s no one else dreaming softly in the space I’d carved out for you in a bed that was never ours. I don’t fall into a safety net of a man with tomboyish good looks. I don’t seduce someone’s wife and break up a band in the process, because I love music too much, even if it’s bad boyfriend music and I am not selfish, even when I want to be. I move away. Go to school somewhere I can hear the ocean on a coast I’ve never been to. Take risks. I connect myself to people in a place I have no connection to. No one calls to tell me my father is sick. I already know. We speak regularly, we share language. I ask him questions, he tells me truths. Sometimes the truth is painful. Sometimes it’s art. I fly home when he dies. Sit up front at his funeral. My mother is there, between my brother and me. All our hands clasped. Holding on, but clinging to nothing. No one talks about his greatness in ways we don’t recognize. I fall in love with women. I know it’s over, before we’ve squeezed all the air out of it. While we still remember how to breathe standing up. Before the words bleed us. I know when the cracks are large not to pour myself in to hold it together. I don’t slip a piece of what’s broken into my back pocket. I don’t go searching for ghosts in old words. I know when staying is good and leaving is better. Before the signs are neon and flashing. Before the street lights come on. Depression Wears Your Favorite Shirt I found her, curled up on your side of the bed and laid my head in her lap. She stroked my hair, knotting romanticized visions of the worst times technicolored as a greatest hits. A skipping record of all the possibilities what-ifs and if-onlys held. We put on a fashion show of clothes you left. She told me the Rolling Stones shirt was the one and I should never take it off. She turned up the volume of all our songs. Played them, on repeat and told me to lean against the speaker, so my bones could feel each note. Neither of us could remember how to cook, so she poured double time double shots and lit my cigarettes back to back. She suggested the guest room when our sheets needed washing. The couch when the sun was too bright. And the floor when my heart was too heavy. She held me, dark and dreamless against cold linoleum. Crying so hard the neighbors could feel. Danielle Low-Waters is a Queer Poet, expired film enthusiast, obsessive playlist maker and professional development coach with a commitment to social justice. Her work appears in the forthcoming Constellation Anthology edited by Yrsa Daley-Ward. She currently lives in Vallejo, California with her wife and two dogs in a 110 year-old home filled with art that makes their mothers uncomfortable. Follow her on Instgram@wanderngstar. 5/26/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Kevin Miller fluffisch CC
A Mind of Winter in the latest note, surrender or relent or review your most grievous decisions, pretend you might amend the wrongs, say it’s a twelve step program and you need to apologize for mistakes you have made, in fact start with the ones without alcohol for an excuse, the core bits where complete asshole is yours, un- assisted, solo, so many own goals you have net burns from each try to start again— a man cleans up after himself. You might lead the league in amendments, you with a constitution for change, all prep work for most improved human built into you first seventy-one years. A friend writes he wants to lean toward silence in the new work, you find a way to have nothing to say, you pause and nod, amen. Kevin Miller: Miller's fourth collection Vanish received the Wandering Aengus Press Publication Award in 2019. Miller taught in the public schools of Washington State for thirty-nine years. He lives in Tacoma, Washington. 5/26/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Bianca Grace Dane CC Ode to My Chronically Ill Brother When the neurons were burning down your body, you would morph into the blue power ranger and pretend I was Rita Repulsa, so you could save yourself and the world. I’d roll my eyes and hope one day you would be healthy enough to plan your escape, wear the blue spandex suit at Disneyland. Your body recovers slower than the Pokémon lesson you gave while we lay on the trampoline like Arcanine and Pikachu, under the midwinter sun. You evolved into a full-time patient. The exploding pain in your fingers detonated when you dared to play the bass guitar in your rancid bedroom. I was certain your phone trekked to the Lost Galaxy when my calls went unanswered, for the third time in a week. I didn’t know you were buried in another doctor’s office adorned with certificates to match your perfect stitched up scar. The sorry I missed your calls exposes my possessiveness and I demand to know why I haven’t heard your voice in seven sunsets. The sorry I missed your calls is intoxicating euphoria injected in my veins. I know your heart is beating and mine wouldn’t beat as strong if we didn’t share the same planet. The sorry I missed your calls, another diagnosis. I become breathless thinking about the next genetic condition that could pop up in my own body like a surprise birthday party I never asked for. Even when my emotions fly off the chart hanging at the bottom of your bed and the oxygen mask covers your face, no communication is a vital sign that you are trying to survive. Bianca Grace is a poet from Australia. She writes from her living room which is overloaded with photos of memories which she draws inspiration from. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Selcouth Station and Ample Remains. |
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