6/19/2018 Poetry By Donna DallasBeastie I wanted to write about those bitches about how they followed me onto the bus every day after school and spit in my hair about how they waited on my corner for me to walk by and they hurled rocks at me or chased me for blocks to cut me to hurt I was gonna put on paper how they crank-called me just to call me names Slut Lesbian Dyke Cunt I was gonna admit that…… yeah I stopped going to school I stopped going outside altogether and when they couldn’t get at me they would ring the bell and pleasantly call upon me as if we were old friends even study partners but I wouldn’t come out of my room I was gonna say how it took a life time to walk out the front door again and I thought the passage was safe but they no sooner found me and came at me all of them I wasn’t sure if I should admit that I wished them dead every one of those ugly bitches that bullied me because…..well….. …….I never actually knew why I knew only simple things back then the boys liked me the girls liked me I liked me then I never liked me - or anyone again after the first beating when six girls jump on you and pummel your face you give up and pray to fade away into air I was gonna say how much faster than me I thought they were back then much smarter stronger because they knew I was a threat and the only way to smite a threat is to rub it out completely Dust I’m etching stories onto our cave walls buffalo and stick figures cut into the prehistoric rock old as silence I’m dead a thousand years I come back to scratch some words onto paper and later neatly plug them into a document seal the story in a file I was carving up Saber Tooth tigers and serving your lazy ass even back then when we were barefoot and naked I didn’t wax and we fucked like mad dogs babies came out dead or alive it didn’t matter the feast was us the story the same fast forward through a crack in the limestone I am here again running through malls looking for a rock to carve the story I keep re-living Foraging fuck give them a story they all want to know you tell them the time you hovered over the train tracks bone thin with the shakes out your ass and Barry Onter decided to take his life right then threw himself straight onto the tracks in a split second before the train came on him full speed rocked that mother fucker dead and all you could think about was what you could do with all that cash he probably had in his wallet you didn’t get a chance to look through the wallet half his body was scare-crowed up on the train window and the other half dragged along the tracks into bits of pulp………what can you say???? as you pour gin into juice to control the shakes this will most definitely get you through a potential relapse or collapse or perhaps you should just stop cold turkey like they did in the old days? why you gotta gin down a craving for a mad high I don’t know but in the end you still a fucked up honkey from Queens never had a chance at bum so story goes you got all strung out from crack you say fuck it get on Greyhound with your $148 you scavenged from your half dead cancer-ridden grandmother you go down to Sanford – where was that? Florida? Where the fuck? Yep tell them how you met that stripper Lucrasia – was that her stage name? Jesus she was really played like she’d been run over maybe X-stripper but you two found each other and holed up in Mocahee’s Motor Inn for days maybe weeks you were almost clean before then but she was using: a perfect combination of you + her = FUCKED and here you go again down the merry road of a lover of heroin of addicts of the dream the amazement the ahhhh fuck it and baby we miss you we miss the you that you once were but it ain’t you no more and we can’t accept those collect calls calling to collect money we can’t give to users who still use when people dying on the tracks for nothing and you still going strong and able Bio: Donna Dallas studied Creative Writing and Philosophy at NYU’s Gallatin School and was lucky enough to study under William Packard. She has also been lucky enough to have been published by Anti-Heroin Chic prior. In addition, her work can recently be found or forthcoming in 34th Parallel, Vending Machine Press, The Opiate, Sick Lit Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Beautiful Losers and Public Pool. 6/18/2018 Poetry By Marisa Silva-Dunbar Marisa Silva-Dunbar’s work has been published in Poetry WTF?!, Better than Starbucks Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, Words Dance Magazine and Gargoyle Magazine. She graduated from the University of East Anglia with her MA in poetry, and has been shortlisted twice for the Eyewear Publishing Fortnight Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 6/14/2018 Poetry By Tara A. ElliottCuriosity for Pandora How could you help not loosen that lid to see what was inside? O first woman-- contrary to the tale, it was not a box but a jar sealed so tightly with wax, that when you pried the lid from the clay, the half-moons of your fingernails splintered. The awful evils of this world clambered up the slick sides to escape their darkened confines. How quickly they all slithered out from the mouth-- all except hope, lost in the body & left clinging to its sides. Dread for Thetis I know what it’s like to be distracted, to be drawn away from endless task; even when that task is immortality-- How carefully you must have dangled your sweetbabyboy down into the swirling eddy of the dead, first pursing your lips to breathe on his dimpled face so he would draw in the air of this world, then grasping him by his left ankle to soak his foretold soul. His father never once understood what you were trying to do. I know what it is to hold my son in my arms & want more for him than I could ever give. How your fingertips left their graceless mark-- there is no word for a mother who has lost a child. Bio: Tara A. Elliott lives with her husband and son on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she teaches English. She is the founder and director of Salisbury Poetry Week, serves as a facilitator for Salisbury University's Lighthouse Literary Guild, and is the co-chair of the 2019 Bay to Ocean Writer's Conference. She is honored to have been selected as the 2018 Maryland Humanities' Teacher of the Year. Her recent poems have been published in MER, The TAOS Journal of International Poetry & Art, and Wildness, among others, and are forthcoming in Triggerfish Critical Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. 6/12/2018 Poetry By Rachael Gaythe psychiatrist tells my mother The psychiatrist tells my mother she has not failed, even though her children are broken. For once she is credited as the bonesetter despite our limbs shattered while in her direct line of sight. Don’t they know that our genes arrived ragged, full of holes that no amount of winter mending can patch up. Our brains light up in entirely the wrong way. Valleys of darkness where there should be a brightened skyline shrinking away into withered nothingness, effervescent reds bleed into languid blues. My mother has never called herself an artist but look at the vibrant mural she’s painted inside our rattling skulls. Look at how she sculpted us from fragments retrieved from in between stained sheets and drug down stairs smashed to bits from the slightest exposure to the uncaring outside. We are fragments pulled together with scotch tape lovingly puzzled together during commercial breaks. My therapist once theorized that my mother is without any identity other than her children’s sickness but look at how she creates while holding onto a wrongly guilty conscience. The psychiatrist tells my mother she is not responsible and on the outside she smiles and nods but on the inside she doubts and she doubts and she doubts Bio: Rachael Gay is a poet and artist living in Fargo, North Dakota. Her work has appeared in Quail Bell, Rag Queens, Déraciné Magazine, Eunoia Review, Daily Gramma, Literary Orphans, FreezRay Poetry, Bitterzoet Magazine, The Bookends Review and others. More of her work can be found at witchinghourpoetry.tumblr.com. 6/10/2018 Poetry By Scott Simmons carloscappaticci CC The Last Strike Sometimes on a whim I’ll go play a game at the bowling alley late at night. Yet the game is never of any significant interest to me. I’m just there to search for an old familiar face I won’t ever see again. All of my confidence just seems to roll straight to the gutters since she left. Muscle memory and the stench of beer are the only thing I have left in this alley. I’d much rather have her back but I mostly just want to tell her goodbye. I know deep down that for our own sakes we’ll always have to remain as a split. Because love isn’t a game that is won very often. We met here almost a lifetime ago and I’ve been haunting this place ever since. Although I swear that I still see her reflection on the ball. Dead Today Alive Tomorrow I stared straight down the barrel of a gun last night, And I did it the day before yesterday too. As well as again on New Year’s Eve. The rifling was immaculate and the bullet almost sang to me, but I’m far too much of a coward to pull the trigger. I put the revolver back into the box and I lit up a cigarette. At least I could still manage to kill myself slowly. Smoke filled my lungs and I turned out the lights. One Last Song I heard the ghosts of the past echo through the radio. A mix of heartache and misery had followed all of those overplayed songs. Although it was still a certain nostalgia trapped inside those damn F.M waves. It often made me think of her and the person that she used to be. And just how much she has faded away from me. The sweet girl I had once known has finally grown up and she left me in the dust. Her dreams were washed away and tears ran down across her cheeks. Until long black hair waved in the wind as she sped away without ever looking back. I enjoyed all of our music until the day we drifted into mere static. The distance between us had simply became too great. And like everything in life we just ended in silence. Bio: Scott Simmons is a young aspiring poet and humorist from Texas that has been featured in Duane's Poetree, Horror Sleaze Trash, and The Rye Whiskey Review. He also dabbles in art and he is the editor for The Dope Feind Daily. 6/10/2018 Poetry By Katie Lewington Frédéric Poirot CC A-Level Results whether it is on Facebook in the national or local newspaper children, well, teenagers are pictured leaping for joy as they have received their A-Level results to be able to get into their first choice university and i remember - have many regrets i am twenty-two struggling with the basics it is difficult not to believe that i am an unemployed loser with a minimal education cut short by ill mental health that was never diagnosed in school i hated life was mapped- school, college, university for everybody but me because even then i didn't think my life was going to go as planned it is hard not to be bitter but we all have choices at some point you have to make them and quit blaming perpetrators and circumstances you can only be angry for so long before you become the person at the end of the bar bitter, drunk crunching on pork scratchings and scowling at the people that dare laugh, or raise their voice near you decide from now on in my life is mine to be controlled. She's a people around her cycle like a cyclone dancers creating the aura of a lead you think wow blimey i imagine she is popular but i am not sure her eyes shine too brightly and her smile is too stretched like get out of my way you crazy idiots! i want to be me You lose yourself in other people The Afternoon Crowd beer glass left abandoned on the side of the table /beside the slot machine / half moon lemon / in a tumbler / slumped against the side / ordering drinks between songs / the live band sets up / instruments / tests the sound / cobwebs of froth on the empty beer glass / beginning to disappear Bio: Katie writes with her particular brand of poetic insights, based loosely on the subjects of belonging, loss, mental illness, and hope. You can read more snippets of her writing on her blog, instagram, or in her books available on Amazon.com. Katie also runs a book blog, where she reviews small press books, and interviews writers. Blog https://23poetryhub.wordpress.com/ Twitter lewington_katie Instagram Katielewington Donations ko-fi.com/klpoetry Jimmy Pro Found Inspiration At A Now Defunct El Paso Watering Hole 1430 Myrtle is gone from the city charts, but it still has a warm place in local barflies’ hearts. Jimmy Pro landed up here a decade or so ago. Foraging the Borderline, he was drawn in by the allure of Marilyn and the adjacent sub barrio, resplendent with its decaying funk. For a lensman in search of poetic inspiration, the dingy bar was a perfect place to conjure up a late afternoon, laconic stare; to unwind from shooting; and to jot down a few trigger riffs, teased out by ice cold Lone Star. Happy Hour can often be a poet’s salvation until it just isn’t. Jimmy spent most of a decade sifting along The Line, honing his images, both electronic and literary. His voluminous photos further sharpen the clarity of his incisive poetry. “The Border Elegies” hang heavy with Jimmy’s prickly historical view of our enigmatic southern boundary. For sharp, visiting insight, de Tocqueville doesn’t have jack shit on Jimmy! El Paso, for Pro, was the citadel for his wandering self assignment. Its gritty West Texas ambiance and resplendent culture titillated his most deeply held, creative instincts. Comfort, contentment, and creativity anchored him here like a rock for nearly ten years. But the place that he warmly refers to as “The City Of The Future” is changing. He recognizes this gentrification, having sniffed its putrid spillage elsewhere in places like Gotham City’s Chinatown. Now, even this traditional barrio is tainted by ever seeping progress. This insidious creep is what finally took out a mini neighborhood icon like Goldie’s. The place earned a sketchy score of 83 on its last Health Department sanitation inspection in May, 2013. Marilyn was still smiling, welcoming customers in for spicy tacos and tawdry conversation. But Goldie’s shelf life was nearly spent. Cheap beer down here is plentiful, and real estate near downtown was beginning to have some serious, long term prospects. Jimmy finished The Border Elegies, but just in time for his joint to suffer the wrecking ball. When I finally showed up, he took me to another downtown dive bar, The Tap. Here, may be found, possibly, the best juke box in Texas. I was also really inspired by the endless flow of cold Tecate. So I churned out a hot story about a mythical gunfight and our eventual escape down an endless alleyway that formed a seedy, urban slot canyon. Some editors liked it, and I even provided a dramatic supporting photo for publication. I never got to quaff a brew with Jimmy at Goldie’s, though. But if I had, a yarn featuring Pancho Villa buying a round for the boisterous house might have spewed forth. Pancho would have probably met up with Marty Robbins, you know, “out in the West Texas town of El Paso”! They could have had a bar shoot out with the relentless Federales who had been hot on Pancho’s trail since early in the 20th century. Then, I would have provided a cool image to support my storyline. Likely the same hip photo seen here. I am just proud to have ever off centered Goldie’s in my viewfinder. For his part, Jimmy Pro is content to have found poetic synergy in a small barrio icon, now lost to time. Gone from the charts ...but never, ever from our hearts. William C. Crawford is a writer and photographer based in Winston-Salem, NC. He was a combat photojournalist in Vietnam. He has published extensively in various formats including fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs, book reviews, and essays. He had a parallel career as a social worker and community organizer. There, he wrote biting editorials on behalf of the powerless such as abused children, the frail elderly, and victims of enforced state sterilizations. He is known as Crawdaddy to his yellow Lab, Scout. Website jenga d CC
Comfort Creature RAIN. TRAFFIC SLOWS. Snake up the motorway. Sky clears. Weather delays the next day way back from the gig. Sun coquettish, behind clouds, shines down in widening rays, widening, widening fickle summer season. Leave with hope. Love the one who is far away. Rain some more. * * * IN she stumbles. Her name: Eiddwen, she says. Meet her in the unisex W. C., mop-bucket – filthy brown water. It’s also a storage closet for the PA, cables, microphone stands, backline, etc., etc. There’s a toilet. There’s a sink. There’s a miscellany of crates by the door. The young expressive face, small mouth girl, twenty-one, curly hair, bunched up shirt, twenty-two, melodic laugh flushes cheeks, taunt skin over jaw, tan arms, t-shirt says, nubile. Sip drink. Swallow irony. Cat eyes take in very little. Legs totter torso left right, right left. Arms still & steady the body by the tiled white wall. Are you a vegetarian? Open lights. Shine down benevolent fluorescence. The band is playing right of centre, outside the partition door. Stare Mr Lockeyes. Stare. Make small nothing. Easy listening that’s in the sky now, helicopter up. Get high. Stay up there unaware of everything going on down here at the bottom. Behind the door there’s music. Creature is starting into a rousing rendition of Chocolate Jesus. Be thin. Spread your arms out to touch both walls at once. Steady on. Close quarters. Have a wee. Hear it all. Clink. Whistle. Stool shuffle, shuttle, glasses tinkle with cutlery against plates. Cheer. Everyone is crammed in. Lights set to pink & purple, ready. Go. Eiddwen follows. Watch Creature play from behind. He has to move aside with his guitar slanted down to allow enough to room to pass back into the bar from the toilet. Inch. Inch by. People pack in. Hear them ordering by the bar. The back of the country vibrates it’s so loud. Travel. TRAVELERS, the name of the venue, there’s no sign. It’s tiny. Miss it. * * * CAPTIVATE CREATURE. Stretch strings. Drip sweat. A night out for music en Bristol? Creature slaps strings. Finger pick folky guitar tunes: a medley of hammerons and pulloffs. Hear (surprise!) the softest, sweetest birthday song sung by a choir voice bursting from the throat of this rake of a man who resembles a promiscuous brown bear or an aroused, feral lumberjack. Excess fat, stage right, swivels lewdly. Go. There. Goon swoon with the rest of the swaying bodies. Play. The beard hides bite. Bork low hanging jowls. Slop dark dax-coloured shirt. Shit-spill on jeans. That guitar, once a tree in a field, now—hear. Hear how straight it must have been. Pine for the longest straightest pine. Cut it down. Get it over with. Just make it painless. Create. Destroy. Make an instrument. Make music. Make mayhem. * * * BUTT ASIDE. Slide down. Watch Eiddwen, across the table, legs underneath, smiling. Find out that she’s friends with Char Cardwell who plays camogie with Meghan who knows Nadine who knows everybody. Creature slays Detroit City. Eiddwen says: There’s this short story, don’t remember the title, a young girl is staying with her father. Go on. Probably read it. Mouth the words. Write the lips. Make it out. Each day she asks for dime under the pretense of buying ice cream. Scream ice cream. The temperature in the bar rises. Fog windows. Her father fishes the dime from his coat pocket and gives it to her but the girl never buys any ice cream. Introduce me to your brother for eggplant at your place. She replaces the dime in his coat pocket, asks for it again the next day and the next. May not be remembering correctly but she meets characters in paintings. A fat woman in a fur coat? Maybe you know it. Read the story ten years ago and can't find it. Conversation, normally interesting, melts in music. Bio: Christopher McCarthy is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. His work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Red River Review, The Cadaverine and Fresh Voices. In 2015, Flat Singles Press published his chapbook, Vancal. He lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut with his wife Stefanie. 6/3/2018 Poetry By Bridget DixonWhy When My Mother Said Only Bad Things Happen After Midnight, I Should’ve Listened Curfews are set as security and it’s too bad your arms wrapped around me weren’t enough because if that were the case I never would’ve left them Doors have locks to keep people out and I wish I kept one on my heart but even then you would’ve picked mine open and let yourself in Phone calls and texts can go unanswered this late too but I blurted words like on my way and be right there without a thought Bruises display the hurt you caused me but I mistook them as healing spots when you said you were fixing me, simply knowing they were only consequences of your love Cheap alcohol isn’t the ideal drink before bed still every shot goes down smoother than the last, call it the late-night effect I learned to forget these rules My One Time Serenity It’s a two-lane highway 70 mile per hour drive back home. I’m watching lampposts towering over the road. Flickering and reflecting in my rearview, here and gone in seconds. A few miles later crossing over the bridge that shades the shallow creek. Creek or river, or cesspool, or whatever it may be. I’ve never had the desire to swim in its murky waters. Little to no one is on the road this late. My nerves are settled in the backseat with my anxiety. I own the roads for just now until the sun returns and all the commuters stir awake. I can choose whatever music I want without interruption of any passengers because this time— there are none. I finger through the countless artists and songs pirated on cassette tapes searching for the “right song”. The one that hugs your heart and soothes your mind. Panning my surroundings, truckers are parked left and right on either side of this lonely highway. This is the long stretch before I’m back in my bed and I usually enjoy how it flies by but tonight I’m lowering the speed to coast and enjoy it all. I want to remember this moment for no significant reason other than the sight directly in front of my eyes has me captivated. The moon has diminished to an orange sliver, an orange slice with a backing glow of white china. She’s sharp but still fuzzy around the sides. A defining haze that separates her from the lost stars sprinkled in the sky. Plucked like perfect spring chrysanthemums for a centerpiece. I’ll adore her watching over my return regrowth You’ve planted these seeds given me all the water I need then you took me out of the sunlight and told me to find it some where else. Bio: Bridget Dixon lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. She works on campus at the University of Southeast Missouri State, where she studies English: creative writing. Between balancing school and work she likes to spend time with her roommates, three ill-mannered cats and her best friend. She’s a veg-head, Star Wars geek and a wine connoisseur (so she likes to think). She has publications at her school’s university press, poetry in a chapbook for 2017's Eclipse titled The Path of Totality, and for the third installment of Philosopher’s Stone Poetry and Prose based out of L.A. She's currently interning as lead editor for Lemon Star Magazine's weekly blogs. 6/3/2018 Poetry By Mark Youngstructural remodeling is not permitted To the Japanese it is a sacred month, when war & fighting are forbidden. So, too, are sleep deprivation & psychosocial stressors. Soon we will be offering physical abuse as a luxury, a new way to stimulate the creative process. The fumble gene encodes a fly homologue of pantothenate kinase. With it, one can tackle the problem of gays in pro sports, can over- ride typical associations with vegetation structures, can offer a more quantitative explanation of exchange currency trading basics without needing to know about the current trends in women's clothes. Without it soldiers lose battlefield aware- ness, can no longer decide with any degree of certainty what objects to be ignored by their current robots, if it was a pleasure to shoot that couple. Bio: Mark Young's most recent book is les échiquiers effrontés, a collection of surrealist visual poems laid out in a chessboard pattern, just published by Luna Bisonte Prods. Due out later this year is The Word Factory: a miscellany, from gradient books. |
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