5/31/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Mack Gregg Bill Tyne CC
FOUNDING FATHER Father died with his lungs full of language. Right before he died I managed to say, I miss you. Into the phone his wife held up to his mouth, he wheezed an almost inaudible, I miss me, too. When cleaning out his office, I come upon his label maker. It makes words by punching white letters into sticky tape of different colors. I drop it and dislodge the letters slightly, so their edges are marked by the ghosts of other letters. I am not usually like this. I am usually so careful to handle the objects in the right way. I cry to the side of the manuscript, into the receptacle the librarians have designated. So that it doesn’t overflow, I am careful to regularly empty it into the General Pool of Tears. As the rules indicate. As a child, I witnessed murder after murder and eventually did nothing. Eventually, I didn’t even cry. Instead I practiced smiling and waving from the top of my float in the parade: Elbowelbow Wristwrist. In order to learn to cry again, I had to become a historian. I had to sculpt a face that could appear on various lanyards, allowing me to touch old paper. Only then could I feel my fingers. What a relief, to stop the parade music. Nevertheless, I still hear it, the horn section. Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) depicts photographs of the white women who watched lynchings, smilingly, altered digitally to appear as if inside lockets. The labelmaker comes with most of the punctuation except for question marks. In the elevator, the ladies at the nursing home asked Father if I was his son. “No?” he asked. I always thought it was unusual that Mother married Father, her boyfriend’s brother, but it turns out everyone in Iowa hands their ex-girlfriends down to the next-in-line brother. My family likes to keep it in the family. When I was a child, Father trained me to be an accessory. He stuck ARM CANDY on my forehead. Although I peeled it off years ago, strangers sometimes still lick me there. MOVIES IN WHICH FATHER LOSES CONTROL: Honey, I Shrunk The Kids The Fly The Incredible Shrinking Man The Shining Whenever I’ve gone missing, Father has found me. The labelmaker is available on Ebay for 6.99. The Children have just logged on and started a bidding war in real time. They’ve decided to buy up every last label-maker in the world. Why do you like this so much better than writing on your phones? I ask them. Because its useful, they tell me. Together, they use the labelmaker to write a collaborative poem. Quickly, the places where it insufficiently presses a letter, its analog glitches, its divergences, become more exciting than when it works correctly. Look how this letter didn’t punch right! Look how this machine writes toward its own disappearance! PUNCHING ALLOWED A LOUD EPITAPH OF ITSELF Use the machine to name things what they aspire to become. I label my computer screen BROTH Punch out four lines in green, peel and stick them on my laptop-back just so. Opaque, they hide the glowing Apple.™ A gold pocket watch, inscribed with faces of various generations of Iowans. On the watch face, a white mother dotes over her son, my great (great?) grandfather. It actually burns my hand. My Children don’t want to touch it either. No thanks they looks up from their phones We just saged ourselves this morning. I recite the four green lines until my throat goes dry: We’re all writers or gone. Missing From the world like we never happened To have a skin. Only some unhappy wind Passing through[1] This recitation is how I am not-gone Through me in waves of sound, slowing my heart, a quiet epigraph that hazards the beginning of a mind. My best guest. Never to have happened, unless The poet puts a toe in, troubles the pronoun. This we is contingent and partial, as is my relation. As are my relations. The we is a fractured joint but the I is even less. My eyes follow the ripples across the surface of the Black Pool of Thought.[2] What I see reflected in the surface is vague, disappears when I look directly. I try various medicines to keep my vision blurred. I even try looking away, once or twice, but all I see around me is a static screen made of maggots. They are eating a corpse, the white maggots. My Children are Hungry. Their names are Candy and Candy and Candy and Candy and Candy and Candy and-- The period between gone and missing haunts me. I don’t want all that death. 1) A golden harp tuned to the key of depression. 2) Unhappy intimates accident, the vicissitudes of circumstance as the condition of living—our survival is an accident—is it a happy one? 3) The line break between “happened/To have:” like a 15-minute break in an 8-hour shift, when you sit on the floor of the fluorescent closet and massage your feet. After the break, the “To have” is a rebirth: a breath into a new possible, a little life held. Never to have had a skin is also hopeful? The ketamine dream of being disembodied. 4) What is it to “have happened” as a we? Putting a toe in. Troubling history. 5) Passing through: transition haunts The labelmakers arrive in the mail. They fill the house. And that’s it: The Novel is finally finished. Father drowns out my crying with Fox News. Now I’m swimming in a river of sage-smoke. Lethean, it rightly drowns me. Now I’m in the underworld and no. I do not want a bite of your Apple. Now I’m Nicholas Cage in National Treasure and I’m going to steal an invaluable document. If only I could remember my name, or why I’m here. All I know is, do not eat the fruit. Tropical plants keep growing out from between my laptop keys. I snap it shut. This is not supposed to be Jumanji. Hey, I’ve been lost down here, eating only the opera of philodendra & the leather of old books, which I’ve boiled in heated tears to make them palatable. I opened the book wrong and then I was in the basement. Something is pursuing me. I owe so many fines. All my fines and all my ancestors fines and my ancestors ancestors fines. The librarian tells me that’s why they left England: because of the fines. We have so many dead people’s hair to get out of. I turn around and I see the ghost who’s been pursuing me. It’s the body-shaped maggots again. I label it FOUNDING FATHER. It shrinks until it could fit inside a tiny box, then turns into nothing. I’ve been digging through its little clippings. Turns out, it invented a new kind of rose. It painted nude boys on the walls of its locked room. It even venerated its lover into a saint, not that any of this matters, given everything we now know. [1] Cameron Awkward Rich, Dispatch [2] Fred Moten: All thought is Black thought TRANS/VERSE For the moths I bring myself up by hand. I have to do it inverse; parent myself. First: I list my traits & the traits of my god. The point is to find, the book says, meaning in my life, step by step. A generous reader, I fascinate myself like a moth. This buzzing fluorescence is not without purpose, but its glimmer isn’t the moon’s. I inherit the moth’s broken navigational instinct open the window, and Google why are we drawn to light hit the Nat Geo paywall, then compelled to enter my email, address to gain admission; is this another porchlight or a revealing analogy (is there a word for a metaphor which, if you burrow in deep enough, illuminates the way out-- carries through --I have my doubts) In school they teach (of course) of the horse—no not the horse—the horse is what I draw in the margins, perfect/quarter/horse. I take the bus. I wish my dad would write a note so I could get off at my girlfriend’s house. Humping my pillow, thinking of Plato, me shackled to her shackled to her shackled to her and behind us, a fire, casting the image. The hottest part: I cannot turn my head. On leaving the cave, though, I don’t know-- I never trust a shortcut. Transverse Orientation: a moth’s navigation system, based on the light of the moon In an 1890 essay, “The Last Song of the Swan,” Helena Blavatsky prophesied the end of the world, taking the new craze of electric lighting as the swan song of civilization. In what was both an observation of content and of form, she wrote of currents of electricity passing through bodies in tandem, a pandemic circuit of fatal contact. From The Morning Post (Jan 21, 1890): Another fatal accident, arising from the System of overhead electric Lighting wires is reported today from Newburgh, New York State. It appears That a horse while being driven along Touched an iron awning-post With his nose, and fell down as If dead. A man, who rushed to Assist in raising the animal, touched The horse’s head-stall and immediately Dropped dead, and another man Who attempted to lift the first, received A terrible shock. When we were young, we’d hold hands as Kyle or Tim gripped the cow fence to catch a thrill. In this way we saved each other, lessening the impact by finishing the circuit. When Tim or Kyle fell asleep driving and plowed into a ditch I never thought to ask if he’d been drinking, but of course, we were all drinking, all of us, raising the animal. None of us were supposed to live like this. Modernity by nature messes up systems, our coding, such that the moths go full Icarus & burn up in the false light, orientation hacked. Blavatsky wrote on account of the moths. The moth is not a metaphor but a metonymy, a link in the chain (not the Great Chain (of being) a link in the relay of fleshy animate things absorbing the blow. Some days I feel like the horse. Today, I write small, big, the bliss or the pain of the present with only the vague awareness of my destination, Like the dream I had of walking away from the party, away from somewhere without knowing where I was going next. At the party they were trying to sell me a timeshare in a horse. I knew it would take me at full gallop. I knew, if it fell, I’d die trying to save it, my horse, and also Someone else’s. I needed to clear out the blockage, to swallow the medicine, release the winged thing beating against the back of my throat and wanting out. In line for security a child points and laughs at the dead body of a swallow; the mother laughs too, relieved death’s on the other side of the window. To know words like “window,” “death,” and the difference between a lamp and the real moon is to be human. I wonder if the birds laugh back at our broken navigation paths, our security line woven by acts of mass death, hijacked by the x-ray through which we are willingly exposed to death so we can get to where we’re going, arms raised like wings overhead. The TSA agent, seeing deeper inside me than any lover, is yawning. Now, he’s flustered, asking, do you want a man or a woman to pat you down? a woman, I answer, because of my thing for cops. Thank god there are still things they cannot x-ray, our little maladaptations or adaptations, which, in a dying world amount to the same thing. Now that we’ve figured out how the system works, whenever we get hurt, its on purpose. Six traits: 1. As a trans object ™ I sustain 3x the amount of radiation three times I pass through, first as a man, then as a woman, then 2. As a white subject ™ I sustain 1/3 the amount of radiation of cancer rates very low in my family our land, our bodies, property, unfracked & allowed to roam like this 3. In school I was never good at math, but at work I was a nimble counter of change one of the only times I have ever been at peace when I sat locked in a closet counting cash fingers numbed by the work stained by dirt unperceived by anyone as if I was my counting and that was all a body composed of neat stacks of twenty-five ones a body that added up to the same thing every time I counted Mack Gregg is a Ph.D Candidate in English at UC Riverside (Cahuilla land). Their work appears in Hot Pink Magazine, b l u s h, Pom Pom Press, Boshemia Magazine, and elsewhere. They aspire to be a vessel.
0 Comments
5/31/2022 2 Comments Poetry by Sarah Vardaro youthfulc CC
On The Evening Before Sobriety Victoria River, Western Australia My toenails were painted black, his blue, we loved like that & clashed, lacquered & feathered across the continent We had just met but he saw me, saw the whole road ahead the names of the trees, the lyrics to La Llorona, god When the river flooded the road we stopped, he read Voss & I drank whiskey in the roadhouse with stranded truckies I knew how to spin a yarn, take the piss & take it back tough but not tough enough, if I wasn’t so afraid I would - Ocean forever, infuse my youth with salt in that ancient land I wish I could have seen me carry the water & shake off the flies But I was always itching to drift into unnamed deserts, strewn with half-starved cattle & kangaroo ribcages pecked by crows How many kilos could I lose before — why can’t somebody love me for — & the birds — What did they sound like then? How can anyone keep burning in this rain? How long does it take to die? Ode to a Buckeye Salt Creek, Three Rivers, California All year I tended to my love ran my fingers through his greying hair nudged snakes and newts to the roadside and whispered to your knuckled branches I know what’s in there bare and forever in bud for what are you but the blooming and the unblooming? the long dormant pause of poisoned seeds and the impending obscenity of light’s wheel bursting white — I cannot remember how long your flowers stay I worry some mood will take me and sick sweet scent will not dust my fingers enough, so I stroke your green threads lined with tight furled fists and whisper I know what’s in there I caress everything in sight, prepare meals and tug on earlobes, this year when you come, I will be ready to love you Sarah Vardaro is an Australian poet. She is currently at work on a poetry collection that investigates the human relationship with the non-human world. Sarah has lived in California for the past decade where she works as a whitewater rafting guide. 5/31/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Marie Marchand Kyle Pearce CC
Make Believe No one believed the hairline fracture of my wrist except you-- the eight-year-old girl trapped in my eight-year-old body crying alone in the pink room holding your koala while outside the adults laughed over their dry vermouth. The doctor had to point to the shadowy sliver on the x-ray before my parents believed me. It wasn’t the first or last time I needed external back-up as proof. If emotions had x-rays, I’d have an easier time explaining myself. I could point to the ashen fissures, the inlets of brokenness and pain, and others would believe me automatically. The eight-year-old girl trapped in my fifty-year-old body is wondering: What’s it like? To be believed automatically? Marie Marchand is Poet Laureate of Ellensburg, WA. Her poetry has been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, California Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tiny Seed Journal, MOONLOVE, High Plains Register, and numerous chapbooks. Her new book Gifts to the Attentive will be published in mid-2022 by Winter Goose Publishing. As a mental health advocate and person with lived experience, she believes that poetry is a testament to persistence through struggle and the ultimate affirmation of resilience. 5/31/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Vincent Antonio Rendoni Bill Tyne CC
Tips for Shadowboxing Your Drunk Father First thing’s first: Cover thyself. Let him make the first move. You may not even need to take a swing. The goal is to last. Do your research beforehand: A couple of beers means a couple of rounds. Hard A burns bright, burns fast. Tequila means run. You may think this is for fun. It may even start out that way. You dance in the garage. Spar over a fire. Talk a little shit. Smile. This is how you bond. Don’t stop moving. Try not to get too close. Try not to graze the chin, cut the ear. Try not to show your speed, your youth. Do your best, the best you can. Know inevitably, skin will meet skin. He’ll go for the body then. A little gatling. A little bap bap bap. Eyes up now. Behind that fat is some muscle. Don’t underestimate him. Faded don’t mean defeated. His speed: Beware the hook, beware the cross. Look out for the corkscrew. If he connects, don’t take it personal. If he fights dirty, be bigger than that. He’ll hiss, but you’ll heal. This is about him, you know. The parts of him he sees in you. Don’t strike back. You know he can’t take it. You can’t take it either. But you can take more than him. Remember: The goal is to last. The break will come fast. Find your breath. Take a minute. Then forgive. You Mind Me nobody tells you when somebody dies a clock starts you race against it preserving photos anecdotes documenting smells remembering kindnesses cruelties tics & twitches oil for the lamp on the ofrenda because let me tell you, friend they’re not making any more of it & you get a little smug having prepared for this winter so well but time is the most fascist of gods harvester, thumb breaker, thug it eats your lunch fouls the water & makes you ask if any of this actually happened & it makes you less certain you heard what you heard when you refused to listen but apparently did three words for someone’s entire existence that’s it pitch, timbre, tone that’s it but the worst part or maybe the best (I’ll let you decide) is you knew these words this person was so much more than what they left behind Vincent Antonio Rendoni (he / him / his) is based out of White Center, Washington. He is a 2022 Jack Straw Poetry Fellow and the winner of Blue Earth Review’s 2021 Flash Fiction Contest. His work has appeared / will be appearing in The Sycamore Review, The Vestal Review, The Texas Review, Juked, and many other venues. He can be found online at www.vincentrendoni.com/writer and @warshingtonian. 5/31/2022 2 Comments Poetry by Susan Vespoli
Jennie Robinson Faber CC
Adam Abecedarian Adam has become a c l o u d dances biblical excerpts feet and toes going high & low in his shoeless body-less jig as I sit in the kitchen at 4:00 a.m. lamenting loss. My son no longer on the physical plane. Quiet here in this room where so many years ago, he carved a turkey. Today under vast watch of the sky, he is ash an X. Axed from life by a young bully cop – three bullets zipped from gun to neck to zero breath. Adam Duplex Adam carried his bible in a Ziplock tucked in his backpack, read it for hope, believed, hoped, packed raw oats, nuts, fruit, a water jug, believed he could kick methadone, heal those on the street; kick processed food, quit cigarettes, quit caffeine, no white flour, sugar, no more dark clothes, just white tee-shirts, button-ups, light jeans. Prayed, found a church, a mega church with a band and a pastor in jeans. When the band played, he sang, raised his hands in the air, and I sang next to him, felt the energy in him and in the air of the place, like we’d entered a river, non-church-going-mom-me and him, zealous Adam with his bible, carried into a flow. Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, Arizona. Her work has been published in Rattle, Anti-Heroin Chic, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, Mom Egg Review, and others. Her full-length collection about addiction in her family, Blame It on the Serpent, is available from by Finishing Line Press. All proceeds will be donated to addiction support and recovery organizations. https://susanvespoli.com/ 5/31/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Michael Battisto versageek CC
what wasn’t poverty my pocket full of pigeon feathers, i copied poems from books i could not buy. i worked nights locked in a warehouse with men who would not have cared if i came back the following shift or died in a car crash. i gave my mornings to the waking city, listening to every tongue, of every bell, instead of sleeping. i watched a company of escaped parakeets on the neighboring telephone wire, chittering to each other in trinkets of human speech. my usual breakfast was stolen bread. i asked questions to stray cats and paid attention to their answers. in winter, when all the city’s voices could be seen, i won dollars at street chess, i walked till i was warm, and sometimes, when only the cold sky was looking, in an alley i played a transparent piano. Michael Battisto has work that can be found or forthcoming in The Normal School, HAD, Poet Lore, Flypaper Lit, The Shore, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere. He has lived in many places, but now he lives in Oakland. You can find him on Twitter @mbattisto3 or @michaelbattisto.com. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Kelly Sue White Boris Kasimov CC
“I died in that house on Friday.” he said it plainly its weight pressed my self- centeredness out of my chest leaving empty feeling the space at the bottom of the exhale who was it Jesus appeared before? Mary and she didn’t believe or recognize him i am not Mary and he, legs twitching from detox, is no Jesus but there is something here, his breath in cold puffs against the passenger window So that none of us will ever die terribly but stay always like this Ross Gay libby says something about needing a cigarette Deana hands her one with a light cups her hand around the flame wind blocked need met let me remember her summer brined and breezy as her hand holds eddy around libby’s flame june rivered out warm and coppertone - scented safe turn my face from the foil the frayed rope of august let me remember Kelly Sue is a poet, recovery advocate, artist and mom. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her two kids and her partner, Dave, two dogs, a fish, and a Guinea Pig. Kelly's work was published in Mosaic, and others forthcoming. After 24 years of starts and stops, she graduated in 2020 from the University of Virginia. She is in the MFA program at Randolph College, just beginning her publication journey. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Lynda Skeen Maria Eklind CC
Conglomerate Rock Brother, we have been in this creek bed for generations, broken off from our parental mountains and washed downstream, squeezed between other fragments and falling sand while time poured, trickled, then dried up around us. We are what’s left behind after the soft parts have washed away. Tonight, crows caw in the cooling air, eucalyptus leaves rustle upside down, wind growls in the empty core of the bamboo. A new storm is brewing. The dark sky promises more change. Such energy it takes to break down, to build up. Broken Open After the amethyst shattered, a ray of light exploded through her newly revealed crystalline beauty, and through her tears, she said to the grace that had always been inside her, "Thank you." The Color Pink Now she’s just showing off. Pink. Wrapping my aversion to her in the blush of spring trillium here in the woods. Cradling my hesitation as if it were a baby wrapped in a soft cotton blanket with silky trimmed edges. Distant pink wafts in the wind from a nearby rose bush. With bottomless kindness, Pink offers me respite from exhaustion and anxiety. Shows me that she’s been here all along - in the wool squares of the Navajo rug on my wall, the smooth rose quartz on my altar. She says she is not the weakness I fear, a denial of darkness, syrupy sweetness at the expense of truth, washed out emotion, sentimentality, girlishness, or unprotected vulnerability. Pink roars with courage in my heart as I hear gunshot over the hill and feel an old wound of fear open in my chest. “Stay here with me,” she says, “you can feel more than one thing at a time.” The mix a swirl of wonder, of the unknown, even as I hyperventilate with panic. “Stay with me,” she says, “don’t leave yourself.” I thought I had an aversion to Pink. She shows me she has never left, invites me into a primal embrace, the sky transitioning into whatever comes next, my heart suddenly big enough, strong enough, safe enough, to take it all in. Lynda Skeen lives in Ashland, Oregon. She is grateful to be sober and able to enjoy the beauty around her, running around in the forests as often as she can. She has been published in a variety of journals, including ONE ART, The Halcyone Literary Review, North American Review, Lucid Stone, and The Hyacinth Review. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Christina Brown versageek CC
Tell me again about that one time you almost became everything you’ve ever wanted to be. Tell me about the self doubt your father planted in you when you were a child that you keep watering, even now. About the ex girlfriend you wanted a forever with even though she never believed in any of your dreams. Tell me about your dreams. The ones where staircases fold into cars without steering wheels or emergency brakes. Tell me about the ones where I meet your mother and she loves me. Tell me about the ones where you come home from work and I am here, barefoot and ready for you. Tell me about all your favorite movies, the ones with sad boys who realize they’ve been in love with the wrong girl all this time. Tell me how afraid you are that you’ve been in love with the wrong girl all this time. Tell me about what the future could have been like if you’d become a teacher or an artist instead of whatever it is you do now. You could have been something, I know. Tell me again about the first time you saw fireflies in Baltimore, and were disappointed by how dim and fleeting their lights were. Tell me again about the first time you held my hand in Los Angeles and thought my city wasn’t as shiny as it looks in the movies. Tell me again about how everything you thought you wanted tasted better when you drank it from someone else’s mouth. Christina Brown is a poet and educator living in Long Beach, CA. She is the managing editor at Pear Shaped Press and cohost of The Bi Pod: A Queer Podcast. In her free time, you’ll find her writing pop culture think pieces no one asked for, experiencing deep, short-lived obsessions, and trying not to kill her houseplants. Her first poetry collection, Girl Teeth, published by innateDIVINITYpress, is available now. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Melanie McCabe Christopher Sessums CC
The Body, Broken The body, broken, is a new thing, cleft and then seamed-- the faulty excised; relics, rewired. The old neighborhood, but houses hide breathers of a different cadence. Decrescendo. Doloroso. It is a mystery -- cracked, end-tied -- the cover closed on subplot; all of the machinations of minor characters left to stew. Yet you hear them, restless in their stories, words muffled by walls. You know they are not finished being unhappy -- that they will see things through without you. Housing Market Okay, then -- so I am not any longer a brick house, but something closer to clapboard. Pretty enough in my day, but now, buckling with warp. Pocked. Beneath another slapdash of paint, very nearly stucco. At fifteen, I didn’t know the goldmine I lived inside of, the jackpot I could be with just my mouth and thighs. I was stacked, that’s a fact, but more like a deck of cards that wasn’t mine. More like odds in a casino game I didn’t know the rules to. I was a gem then. Sparkling. I had curb appeal. And yet, you could have had me for a song. Melanie McCabe's latest collection of poems, The Night Divers, will be out from Terrapin Books in August. She is also the author of two previous books of poetry, What The Neighbors Know and History Of The Body. as well as a memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, and many other journals. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |