Kaoru CC



Sometimes it would be nice to speak to you in titles
 
Sometimes it would be nice to speak to you in titles
 
I’m already tempted to end this poem

               Exit, pursued by the devil
 
I kind of wish this was a call and response
 
             or I want you to be able to do a write-in
             request for a better line

Instead of “fuzzy little wolf-like thing” 

               how about live wire, the 3rd rail, your friend

Some can say, “One of my houses” 

              I can say, “One of my therapists”

Mom says, You can’t take it with you

              so I am an aspirational minimalist 

Dad still calls me out in casual conversation 
    
               when I use the wrong form of a word 

My brother is quick to tell me 

               This is one of those times it’s ok to...

If you were still here

               I would be different 

Sometimes it would be nice to speak to you in titles

​



[Excerpt] 

Apology Tour 
 
Here I go again on my own
Goin' down the only road I've ever known
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone
An' I've made up my mind, I ain't wasting no more time
 
                                -Whitesnake
 
The night wants nothing from me
The night needs nothing from me
I tell myself, again
 
                             ***

The young man in my car tells me
If you’re not under the influence
It’s just hope…boundless hope

On our way to retrieve his impounded Subaru with expired tags
he continues, Under the influence you recede into a space
Where you can address reality
Past, all the bad things, without dwelling hopelessly
 
                           ***

On the in-store muzak they’re unironically playing What About Love
 
                I can’t sell you
                What you don’t want to buy
  
                             ***
 
Unlike A.I. we are limited by scale

                             ***
 
A man in the supermarket walks by

On the back of his black t-shirt in white lettering:

                WHEN IN DOUBT
                EMPTY THE MAGAZINE
 
                              ***
 
They say never go to bed angry
But when you’re alone
No one is present to say
Never go to bed depressed
 
                              ***
 
On break, I learn what others in service are up to
 
A joke about throwing something
I pretend I mishear
Say, Did you say you’d throw him on the grill?
(internal sigh of relief that I receive an unscripted response)
That’s right, we believe in Capital Punishment here at McDonald’s
 
                              ***

Last time I had a shift at Walmart
I left something behind
Walked across the store from my workstation
To where we keep our supplies in the warehouse
371 steps one way
 
                               ***

On the phone I over-share this thought
About growing up with rich people
Then going on to be treated badly by poor people

                               ***

On the drive to therapy, I notice new signs
 
                MACHINE GUN RENTALS
 
Quick math: Sandy Hook was 6 years ago this December
 
                                ***
 
A regular tells me he bow hunts from a seated position
 
Has a chair that swivels 360°
 
Turn real slow, he explains
How how puts salt licks out to draw game
 
I learn his friend butchers for free
 
                                 ***
 
An insider tells me they lie to customers about the birds.
Shoppers want to know what happens to The Birds of Walmart.
Protocol is to tell concerned shoppers that they’re captured
& released.
Really though, early mornings they’ll briefly close the otherwise 24-hour store
& a low-level employee will go around with a pellet rifle
Gunning down house finches, sparrows, whatever flies by
 
                                 ***
 
Henry Ford may have once said,
If two men drive more than 40 miles together
They inevitably establish a certain level of camaraderie
 
On a long drive with a Nigerian student
Eventually he says,
People would kill to be poor in America
 
                               ***
 
The ground hornet lands
On the fence post
With bird-like precision
 
                                ***
 
I tell another guy I’m Ubering about a job I know about
Working for the local ambulance company
 
24 hours on, 24 hours off
 
No one gets why it has to be that way
 
                                ***

At the store for locals
A mom yells at her daughter, maybe 4 years old,
You need to control your urges woman

​
​

                      corrine klug CC



Ruggine

The energy you can spend pulling knives out of your back can leave you breathless.  I
traveled to a country once where my mantra was “connect”.  Instead, I tripped over my
own feet and fell, twice, off of cane-backed chairs. Neither one a soft fall.  I became the
local entertainment by default.  I was there, the air was stagnant and the people in town
took their opportunities when they presented themselves. A man who I wanted with all
my heart to adore took the soft skin of my arm and twisted until it hurt in a pleasant way. 
He left me a souvenir.  We are all masochists.   I came home realizing some decades
inspired more nostalgia or hysteria than others and I thought of how I would never be
who I wanted to be.  There were things I could never have, and yet I wanted them all the
same.  I had dresses in my cedar closet that I thought would transform me, their hems
different lengths,  and their colors begging for my attention. They hung from wire
hangers like sad symbols of the fire sale they came from.  They smelled of destruction
and remorse. There are antidotes for nearly everything and in that country I learned how
repetitive motion could soothe frayed and jagged edges, but won’t win you any favor
among the locals. Fare bella figura. Let them run you through. The wise, if they like you,
will tell you that rust begins forming before you can see it.   Deterioration, long before
​you can feel it.

​


​Nostalgia

I called you down in a field of dust and bone; your parents spread thin and coarse. 
I sifted ash through my fingers, heard the echo of every song we ever sang by heart.  The
incidence of bone pierced me in all of my vulnerable tendencies, which were many.  You
caused a few and kept count on the colorful abacus I was never  allowed to touch.  I made
peace with the jaundiced view your mother narrated to us , as she read the world through
the large magnifying glass that  we’d steal and start small fires with . Later, a cardboard
dime store kaleidoscope held our interest on days of interminable heat and sun, days
when my own mother yelled in or out, in or out with exhausted rage and we chose out 
because it felt like infinity.  We made divinations turning the cheap thing in our hands,
reading  the colorful plastic beads like the tawdry jewels  of vaudeville.  I predicted your
father would arrive home every night, even if only in bodily form.  For your mother,
deranged with her jazzy lingo I never understood , and her barely concealed derision of
my ancestral religion,  I proclaimed varicose veins and a smoker’s cough that would
forever shudder the fragile scaffold of her body.  Years later, she would become
persistent in my dreams: leave my family alone. The memory of it makes the only ribs I
have left, ache like a tooth rotted to the nerve.  I long for certain extravagances that I
could roll into a soft space, but the truth is , I couldn’t name them if I tried.



​
Michelle Reale is the author of Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press,, 2019) and In the Blink of a Mottled Eye (Kelsay Books, 2020) among others.  She is the Founding and Managing Editor of OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

                       corrine klug CC
=


the moral of the story is that you get to have one

i hear the same story again and again as the years slip past me. it goes like this: 

once there was a girl who wore her bones on the outside. once there were secrets that
whispered through the spaces between her rib cage, turning her insides to stone. 

once there was a girl. 

in the shadow of my heart, i carve the words into my lungs. breathe them in like gospel.
how it must be to live within a perpetual thunderstorm, to curl your fingers and have
clouds wrap around your throat. to drown again and again as the days float past you. to
feel like this: 

once there was a girl who had a spirit so loud it filled an entire room. once there had
been dreams that sang lullabies, that filled her palms with possibilities and straightened
​out her lifelines with hope.

once there was a girl.

​

                          Edna Winti CC



John and The Teenage Couple

While everyone at the group home 
races through dinner in fifteen 
minutes or less unable to forget 
their years spent in Willowbrook, 
the other patients who snatched 
the food off their plates, John 
takes hold of the serving dish 
and fills his plate carefully, neatly 
separating meat from vegetables, 
mashed potatoes pushed far away 
as possible. He whispers to ten 
with each bite, lets the food 
tumble past his Adam’s Apple, 
stabs another forkful, pauses 
on the way to his mouth, surveys 
the room for signs of danger before 
bringing the food past his lips.  

At neighborhood stores, he stands 
in front of the floor-to-ceiling,
refrigerated glass case or stocked 
shelves, rubbing his hands, mulling 
over this life and death decision 
until he reaches down, grabs a pack 
of Yankee Doodles.  He walks 
to the counter glowing. Hello, 
my name’s John, what’s your name.
The guy behind the cash register, 
head burrowed into his cell phone 
grunts, dollar fifty. John digs 
his wallet out of his pocket, 
holds it close to his chest, picks 
a wrinkly bill from its sleeve. One 
by one, he places pennies and dimes 
on the counter, counting the amount 
out loud as a teenage, hand-in-hand
couple saunters through the door. 

The girl in tight ripped jeans, nipples 
pressing against her cut off tee, lingers 
up front, running her fingernails 
across breath mints and gum, trying 
to make eye contact with the guy
behind the counter as her boyfriend 
roams the aisles stuffing his pockets, 
sliding a pack of cold cuts under 
his shirt, inside his waistband.
I watch John slow down even more 
while the folks waiting in line turn 
to me. But I know John wants to do this 
on his own. He doesn’t like anyone 
touching his money and he’s hoping 
the cashier will discover he’s mentally 
challenged, find a bit of pity and decide 
he deserves free Friday night cup cakes.

​

​
Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of New York City and has managed group homes for the mentally challenged in Brooklyn 
for 40 years. His work has appeared in Rattle, BODY, Juked, New Ohio Review and Trailer Park Quarterly. My full length books 
include One Wish Left (Pavement Saw Press 2002) and Until The Last Light Leaves (NYQ Books 2015). My new collection, What
 Kind Of Man, was published by NYQ Books 6/ 2020.

                          ​corrine klug CC



On KoЯn’s video for Falling Away from Me & the tears

Jonathan Davis genies into the room, & the violence stops.
Jonathan Davis, pyramid-studded bellow-god to
welted children, lends this one his outrage, & the
belt never lands. & the bruise fades into a
nightfall of like refugees, each
this pentecost’s darkward fire.
& there they are:
the tears now two decades removed from their
terrorist soundscape. The muffled violences’
plastic-bag-over-face asphyxiant through which I
wring the prayer of being mothered & being
scared & made to listen. // The first to love me //
An anguish of bedroomed wounds. // The first to love me //
A nightmare of unfinished responses. // The first to love me //
                                                                                   The first to love me.
This is where I beg
the hated thing & his hands
away from my mother. Invoke
my pillow a lachrymal Rorschach,
speak in the held tongues of sonhood & panic as I
plead Jesus into this constant apocalypse. But
unlike the battalion-mouthed avatar
stomping domestic violence deceased beneath Pumas on MTV,
Jesus does not genie into the room. The violence
subsides. As eyes of the storm, shatter-swathed & promising,
always do. A slammed door Morsing the diabolist’s exit. & I,
boy momentarily spared turned salt at the fear of what
ineffaceable triptych these bedroom doors might be
protecting me from. & childhood,
nourished on & despite like this. Scrawling the ensuant
two decades like a seismograph lagged liar. Crier of wolf.
Because I can now say I love my father & mean it.
I can now be present without fearing a reason to dissociate &
shrink myself untargetable. Pray my mother unbattered. Hate 
her abuser unforgivable. I can code this terror past-tense. A fact
that does nothing to stanch what trauma would still
convince me I’m bleeding out from. Its pincer attack of
constriction & plummet; anger & depression, two
heads of the same limping beast. & these, the tears
upon revisiting a song I once hid inside like sanctuaried static.
The tears, evidence of being two decades gone & two
decades no closer to the bruise’s shelf-lifed fade. I remember
praying that Jesus would genie the wound a scar. I remember
Jonathan Davis roaring my terrified a womb of indignation, &
knowing that he raged on another’s behalf. A situated wrath
wailing shelter to my prayer for the savior. Where Jesus did not
opt for rescue, but instead, co-suffering,
wailed me held & endurant ember. My mother,
undouseable torchlight. A pentecost in the grievous making,
to be strewn, wounds & all, toward what other
bruise-dark nightfalls there are to be something to.
Where, despite the reverb still miming obsolete
hurts into belly & throat, I can call their echoes a chain
lived broken. Where the violence stops.
& me being here today.
& my mother being here today.
Is that not a kind of hand
genied to the rescue? In a way?

​

                        corrine klug CC



Night Sneaking

The streetlamps are a different colour at home
so everything fits in the orange stitch of patchwork black,
playing out in the morning midnight margin.
That jaundiced city swallowing me on the downhill,
the bulb that left the fuzzy image of a sun on the 
bathroom window, hands on a cistern. Always sounds 
worse than it is. Not like the white beams on the metro, 
it’s casting a park bench solid gold, a park bench partner 
radioactive glow and for the most part that’s what I remember. 
Or the square of light stain static on the bar top, burning a hole 
in the varnish and swinging between that unseen pain of 
being unseen and all the things I swear are inscribed on my face.





Living Anyway

the shock of living had worn off
the tepid shower, the missed bus
the embarrassing itch and the mysterious aches
cinema darkness, hallway darkness
a burnt tongue roadside vomit
the dirty and complicated sadness
the fear of God and of men in general
hitting the water, burning a hole
and never looked at you with an ounce of mercy
and tweezers and fake rules and crazies
that always want and never got
and the handful of statistical certainties





Purse Relics

A cigarette butt, a bloodstain, a birthday, 
               all the shards I collect of you. 
My hoarder hands and my hoarder heart, 
               a shrug, a blink, a brush.
A shift of the hips as if I never felt it
               and you carry so much of me in your back pocket.
An ashtray purse, an ashtray voice,
               you touch me once and every itch comes back.
Lungful of dust, a Pompeii pilgrim
               who could’ve sworn there was something holy here.





Cavity
​
a sweet tooth too big for my jaw, every word a weight
my mother’s fist the size of a human stomach, a scale staring
bathroom tile white as a plate, a portion more than a palm
makes the aunties talk, makes bathroom cubicles changing rooms
makes shame grow like bread mould, like fruit rot
a gut the size of God swallow you whole gag you back up
those fingers yanked every one of my milk teeth, socket bleed salt
put the problem on the table made me promise to stop
cut the apple cheeks on enamel white as a plate, white as a knuckle
gut the fridge, spit the bones into the bookshelf 
stuff wrappers in the pages, pressed flowers then
my entire garden on the kitchen counter
syllables cutlery, a silver tongue
all knives and knives and knives
sitting, spine curled, like a fist

Anna Nunan is a Politics and Sociology student at University College London. She is from Ukraine and Australia. 

                       Ross Griff CC



ANOTHER DAY OUT

knowing I’m not alone
I write this in the dark
at dawn
the frosted windows glowing
the world and me, we heave
it’s either growing or the weight of my time
is pulling me to the tides
of sod and mud that buy back all our lives
I’m at a point with loss
teetering
almost fully swung and snapped from the axis
of youth that yelled, was buoyant
youth that defied
cut back against streets of the home town
curling with hiss and steam
to take my brothers with lesser dreams
so many, dead and gone
these ghosts that phantom the screen
buckle at caste and role
rumble up and fissure the straight line
it’s your memory, that’s left the
door cracked, the
rolling wind, the doves
and warblers strange and alive
in this green, this wild and
bitter dawn. 





ITHACA for Katy

said she’d text
when she’s on the train
gets a notice to vacate on the 5th
would be gone by the 1st
but no one can take her dogs
til the 2nd
when her dad died she was left with him
and her momma didn’t care none
she took her rifle, with a broken clip
“I wouldn’t kill him anyhow.”
left the truck in the trees
took a photo of her Daddy an’ me
(outside the Merriam with a bottle--
whiskey and hair!)
knew she’d feel better up north at the shelter
where she could get help and meds
left the door wide open
and the photo album
and the box of shells
bruised like the bag of fruit she doubled back for
her last orange from her daddy’s groves,
the last time she’d be in Florida and alive. 

​
​

                      ​ Ross Griff CC



Autumn’s Vacuum

Distress. Chased down with ambivalence. Listen to Autumn’s night vacuum,
bat-streaked but silent. Above, a hideaway moon turns aside. The bag is heavy.
Laden with stolen diachrony. Shoulder it slow. Trees huddle close. In on it, or
within on it. A wood wide web. Catching breakaway sounds. How far in is
enough? Seclusion and obfuscation are relative. The world is heavy with
contradictions. A firefly careers close, a will-o'-wisp wish to be blown on the
wind. Brightness suddenly feels criminal; openness diametric to intention. If a bag
is left in the woods with nobody around to see it, is it, indeed, still a bag? Inside?
​Shh. You’ll wake it. Assurance is a terrible bedfellow.

​

                       Andrea Addante CC



​
I Am Part Of The Universe & The Universe Is Part Of Me


though we watched a shooting

star together, that was not

our favourite moment. yours was

a hand job whilst stranded in a cave

in Port Bou, the high tide and the storm

keeping us attached. mine was something

so ephemerally precious that I 

can no longer recall, the hours in which

we did not kiss, the seconds before you

arrived home, a song of tingling keys

by the building door. former lovers:

we are not our own feelings

let alone another being’s mess.

outside our old kitchen window,

the night buzzes with no promises

but silence. 

​

                       Lei Han CC



​Severed Hand


I kept my doll in college
Hidden under my socks
A rubber doll my mother found
...in the Salvation Army, of all places.
Her hand held a lipstick
Lost years ago.

Oh, I clung to her far too long, far too long
But I don’t need a severed hand to show me 
All the girls I was.

Everyone I’ve ever known 
Is sitting here with me
Around my kitchen table
They’re sitting here with me.

They are the bed I lie on
Beneath the sky we saw as children
The sky whose light comes from dead stars.
Where the living and the dead dwell together,
Where the living and the dead shine as one,





goodbyes


I've been saying goodbye and goodbye and 
a lifetime ago I said goodbye to my brother
but goodbyes never happen once

One goodbye in Berkeley California
where he lived with his skinny, blank-eyed girlfriend,
with her junky debutante manners, and his cat, but
I forget the name of his cat

although I never forget cats, even
my Siamese runt, Gudrun who slept
around my neck, she lived only
a month before the boys next door killed her.

I must have said goodbye to my brother with his cat,
before I said goodbye in Times Square, 
on a corner, somewhere 
where I got angry, about drugs, 

he'd broken his promise, 
people are always breaking promises
and our last phone call, his voice slurry,
he asked me to buy tickets to a Dylan concert, so

we weren't saying goodbye at all
but that was a lifetime ago, and
at my brother's funeral, I delivered his eulogy,
or that is what people say.

I thought I was saying goodbye,
but goodbyes keep on coming, 
they won't let go.



​
Carla Sarett's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Prole, Third Wednesday, Halfway Down the Stairs, Boston Literary Magazine and elsewhere; and her essays have been nominated for Best American Essay and the Pushcart Prize.  Carla lives in San Francisco, and has a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania.