8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Mark Danowsky 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 Mark Danowsky is a Philadelphia poet, author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press), Managing Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Editor of ONE ART poetry journal.
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8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Michelle Reale 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. Montana Leigh Jackson is a student in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has been featured in semicolon lit, Ghost City Review, Turnpike Magazine, ENTROPY, & others. She finds peace amongst words and within thunderstorms. Find her on twitter: @montanaLjackson 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. 8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Rodney Wilder 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? Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in places like FIYAH, FreezeRay, TRACK//FOUR and Poets Reading the News, as well as Stiltzkin’s Quill, his most recent attempt at grimoiring all the geeky incense left lit in his ribcage. When not fawning over his poet-friends at various Portland open mics, he likes analogizing things to Pokémon and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer. Find him on Instagram at @thebardofhousewilder. 8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Anna Nunan 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. 8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Jim Trainer 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. Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void, progenitor of stand-up tragedy™. Jim Trainer publishes a collection of poetry every year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer's Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net. 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. Ashley Bullen-Cutting is a writing human from the UK (please do not remind him of this fact). His poetry and prose has featured in over a dozen journals, and sometimes it gets read. He is currently the fiction editor at Barren Magazine. @abullencutting 8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Yessica Klein 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. Yessica Klein is a half-Brazilian, half-German writer and artist living in Berlin, Germany. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University (London, UK) and was shortlisted for the 2017 Jane Martin Poetry Prize (Cambridge University, UK). Her poems and artwork have been featured online and in print, most recently at 3:AM, SALT., elsewhere journal, porridge magazine, Beacon Quarterly, hotdog magazine, the Museum Of Futures, and many more. 8/8/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Carla Sarett 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. |
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