9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Nikki Bausch Matt Anderson CC Caffeine Crash Chaos You continue to lament, “I know I met Edgar last week.” When he was Filip, When he had Hashish (don’t need that). On a greasy, concrete staircase, Where you wake up in dreams, And you don’t know where you are. “I didn’t ask for this,” you say, “I am a good barista.” Finding out they brought you back Makes you feel nothing. “I’ve forgotten how to write the Stories My own stories. I need a day off.” Always the Muse, But never the Artist. “I wish Masaryk would have written me back. Fuck. This Ouija Board is defective.” The world owes you nothing. “Duh. But without this, I will never have closure. I cannot sleep and I am cold.” Would you rather be a dancer or a fetish model? It hits you, like a semi. They said you got a bump to your head. “It’s been so long since I’ve been to the café.” You’ve only had coffee today. “I know, and I’m crashing.” Nikki Bausch is from St. Louis, Missouri. She was pursuing a Masters in German studies at the University of Vienna. However, she has had to prioritize other things because of the pandemic. She is a visual artist and her written works have appeared in UM--St. Louis's Litmag, The Honest Ulsterman, Perhappened, and elsewhere. She also writes in German, and does translations of Czech texts to English.
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9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Leah Mueller Aaron Smith CC
One Cent Wherever I go, I find solitary pennies, abandoned as worthless, or carelessly dropped, forgotten in haste while changing apartments, wedged between the couch cushions, rattling inside the dryer, hiding under the stove, left beside the sink in a puddle of water, oxidizing green ooze. In my copper town, church doors gleam in midday sunshine, more radiant than gold. That same mineral, scorned as rubbish, buffed up in its Sunday finery. The mine unveils its treasures at random: a door here, a fencepost there, finally an entire row of copper, rigid as soldiers. A far cry from pennies, but still the same bloodline. I clutch the coins inside my purse tight, because someday I might need one for that $1.51 purchase, or to make a wish at a fountain, for something I don’t really want. Just another way to lighten my load. I turn away and walk towards home: a little poorer than before. Nevada Suicide Prevention Friends catch her by the shoulders on the edge of a casino balcony, drunk and reeling above gaggles of tourists. Cocktails in hand, the revelers gaze: first, with curiosity, then malice. Vulnerability brings out their sadism. They point and laugh. She tries to hurl her body into their upturned faces. Hands steady her momentum, but only for a second. She breaks free, bolts downstairs, darts between the roulette tables and slot machines, runs like she can never stop. And she can’t stop: legs move by themselves, like frantic pistons. Nothing waits at home for a safe return. No job, apartment or money, just the emptiness of flesh, and her mind, cluttered as the evening news. A trip to Vegas for her twenty-third birthday. So far, she hasn’t won a dime. Friends signal the bartender for another round. Leah Mueller is an indie writer and spoken word performer from Bisbee, Arizona. Her most recent books, "Misguided Behavior, Tales of Poor Life Choices" (Czykmate Press), "Death and Heartbreak" (Weasel Press), and "Cocktails at Denny's" (Alien Buddha ) were released in 2019. Leah’s work appears in Midway Journal, Citron Review, The Spectacle, Miracle Monocle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. Her essay "Firebrand, The Radical Life and Times of Annie Besant" appears in the book, "Fierce, Essays By and About Dauntless Women" which won first place in the non-fiction division of the 2020 Publisher's Weekly Booklife contest. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Yanita Georgieva Staffan Cederborg CC When They Ask About the Explosion The day my city was destroyed I browsed the isles at Waitrose pondering if I should buy more cheese. As my sister looked out from her car onto the deafening red, the mushroom cloud, the foreign rubble, I was wondering if I can fake a migraine, sign off early. My best friend texts me: I have never felt more scared, and I remember how we heard a bomb one day and he said: well it’s done now so we might as well get coffee. I want to smash the windows of my London flat so at sunrise we can both be sweeping. I want to turn off all the lights in this jammy bastard city, trigger earthquakes, cut the jasmine from my throat. I want to dig you out of the debris and piece our city back together. We are stuck in an ungodly split screen, each wishing we were someplace else, both gargling with this sticky goo that’s left behind. it was just one blast, but everything’s changed. the kissing steps are shard mountains. the pigeon holes we reached in to hold hands in secret have their own GoFundMe page. your great-grandma’s house with the green shutters survived two wars but not the shockwave. we never got to see the roman baths but at least we did two victory laps, clutched each other and two plastic medals here beside the silos, before they burned down to a crisp. back in East Beirut, people still took phone calls, won at trick – card games, planted single olive trees for the grandkids, just in case, and here you are, bent over the glass you shovelled to the side, planting one too. Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian journalist based in London. She has spent most of her life between Bulgaria, Lebanon, and the UK, and writes because she is scared she will forget all the important stuff. You can find her poems in Tint, Rusted Radishes, and Pushing Out the Boat. 9/27/2020 1 Comment The Card Game by Michael Minassian Anthony Easton CC THE CARD GAME Every Friday night my father and his friends gathered at a different house to play poker-- the pots building up fast, dollar bills forming a centerpiece on the table. In those days, everybody smoked, ashtrays full next to sweating cans of Ballantine beer, and in the summer, a low murmur from the radio and Mel Allen’s voice calling balls and strikes, hits and outs at the Yankee games. The wives gathered in the kitchen around a black and white TV, and when our turn came, I sat in an armchair next to the front door keeping an eye on the poker players: bankers and teachers, my dad, and the priest from St. Mary’s Church. Our next-door neighbors always the last to arrive-- the husband clutching his anger locked inside a coffee can of change-- his wife wearing her sadness like the long-sleeved shirts covering her bruises-- my mother’s silent glare like a gambler’s last stand. MICHAEL MINASSIAN’s poems and short stories have appeared recently in such journals as Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, Poet Lore, and Third Wednesday. He is also a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist (2010) and photography: Around the Bend (2017). His poetry collection, Time is Not a River, published in 2020 is available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com Tripp CC cochlear nerve, you old root stranger, forgive me the pause, how it crawls under me to reach the center of something broken the moment your speech breaks time space a rollercoaster haunting my chest dragging out unwanted bitterness stranger, you cover your lips once again mumbling rapid whisper that tenses this old root, these nerves struggling to create connection, flimsy threads that cannot catch this speech of yours that runs breaks into a riot of flowers forget-me-nots falling off as potpourri as you wish it wasn't this hard to reach me, annoyed by the third uh and my transparent confusion but this nerve clings and drags its hands against the doors ashamed he would beg if pride let him until flowers stopped interrupting, all petals out of your windpipe, suddenly your speech slowing down to understanding this old nerve, this need, this claim to silence breaking your voice apart wrapping itself inside my ears, until it crowns my temple, rips it apart. victoria mallorga hernandez is a peruvian taurus, trickster, and poet. currently, she's an associate editor at palette poetry and editorial assistant at redivider mag. her first poetry collection, albion, came out with alastor editores in 2019. her work has been featured in revista lucerna, molok and el hablador. you can find her as @cielosraros in twitter and instagram. 9/27/2020 1 Comment My Mother by Deeksha Makhija a.pasquier CC My Mother My mother doesn't speak much but her silence speaks a lot to me. On days, when I cry a lot and feel like no one understands me, she just comes and tries giving me a light hug, because she understands I cry even more when someone hugs me tightly She thinks she doesn't know much about birthdays but every year, she surprises us with one chocolate, and silently watches us unwrapping it For her peace doesn't mean sitting at the mountain top or witnessing a sunrise at a beach, but reading a newspaper every morning on the balcony I and my mother differ a lot, she doesn't understand my love of going to places; and I do not understand her love of not going to places, but she smiles at my happiness of packing my traveling bag with excitement My mother has been battling cancer for years now so on days, when you see me hopeful for things don't laugh or question my hopes, just silently understand where they come from. A Spoken word Artist, who loves to collide words with words. Deeksha is often found constantly looking into eyes, and diving into them. A part time alien and a part time human being, who is called a weirdo by her sister. Talking to strangers and later writing them letters is her way of staying happy. You will see her smiling whenever she spots soft kitties drinking milk, music in the middle of noise, and clouds when they are about to drizzle. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Emily Joy Oomen Robert Couse-Baker CC Leading Women in Romantic Comedies Greeting Me as Friends Believe it or not, we all talked about things other than men. I found Sally from When Harry Met Sally in a comfy armchair at a café after she finished interviewing someone for The New York Times. We talked about journalism and how she taught me that having wild hair is sexy, it is ok to marry when you’re in your 30’s, never having kids and is perfectly fine, and to always say what you want (even if it’s complicated). I found Mindy Lahiri from The Mindy Project on the subway in a colorful frock on her way home from work. She gave me a happy meal full of contraception and told me to have fun. Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City invited me to her 50th birthday party. When I arrived, she hugged me as soon as she saw me, and told me to never be the girl who takes her glasses off to look beautiful. Then she gifted me sparkly magenta frames. Lara Jean from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and I lay laughing about love notes on a pink duvet cover that matches her personality in her house that smells just like our friendship: chocolate chip cookies. “Hey,” she says to me one moment, “Always let your heart speak. You never know where it will lead you.” During a one-on-one with Monica Wright from Love & Basketball, she passed me a basketball with the words ‘stay true to yourself’ carved into it. Kathleen Kelly from You’ve Got Mail and I met through an email-based book club that is a part of The Shop Around the Corner. The independent bookstore was revitalized through crowdfunding in 2015 fueled by the enragement of the death of independent book shops. Even though we are the only two left in the book club, we enjoy it thoroughly nonetheless. Rachel Chu from Crazy Rich Asians and I met at a swanky Singaporean bar in New York after her office hours. While telling her how I feel stuck, she reminded me that the unexpected can happen. Erica Barry from Something’s Gotta Give and I met at her fancy Hamptons house which I have no idea how she can afford being just a playwright. We talked about wine and how you are never too old to fall in love. Emily Joy Oomen is a journalist and multi-media poet. Her work has been featured in venues that range from the Athens International Video Poetry Festival to Vice to Buzzfeed to Entropy. She has work forthcoming in BBC. Her current work-in-progress is a full-length manuscript, titled Artificial/Reality, which explores artificiality and reality in this digital age. You can find her on Instagram @poetic_espresso.
9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Laura Ingram Chiara Cremaschi CC Creation Myth of the Honor’s Student (Fifteen) At fifteen I’d soak in the bathtub until my skin pruned purple, swaddle into a sweater, eyes shut, and pretend I had just been born, wailing at my reflection, the first thing I’d encounter. I’d stay to see me standing there, so thin, scrape the sugared pink top of my sadness with my teeth, swallow it like a wad of bubblegum, even knowing it’d be seven years before it would pass through my body, my body born as the runt in a litter of stars, my body delivered in the penumbra, doused in earthshine, conceived as a lump in the cosmos’s throat. I am my own daughter. At fifteen my hair came out in handfuls and I hadn’t had my first kiss. At fifteen girls stopped their sacred rituals of painting their eyes like evening over porcelain sinks to ask me What’s Your Secret and I’d pretend to not know what they were talking about, dumping my sandwich in the wastebasket on the way out. At fifteen I’d come home from school hungry enough to eat the yellow yolk of sun with a slice of buttered sky, go to bed thirsty for mother’s milk of Andromeda, holding onto my hipbones like handrails as I descend the staircase to dreams. Laura Ingram is a tiny girl with big glasses and bigger ideas. Her poetry and prose have been published in over sixty magazines and journals, among them Gravel, Tallow Eider Quarterly, and Glass Kite anthology. Laura's first book, a collection of poetry, was released May 2018 with Desert Willow Press, and her second book, a children's story, was released August 2018 with Nesting Tree Books of Raven Publishing. Laura is a creative writing undergraduate and part-time editor. Harry Styles once gave her his water bottle. Ffion Atkinson CC Fluttering Memories The mascara-smudged eyes of garden pansies resemble mine after sleepless nights when I’d lick salt off the back of my fist, pour tequila down my throat, and slam down slippery shot glasses, in triumph. Years when I was a stranger to myself, my only escape from a life sentence I hadn’t committed a crime for but someone else had. I wonder what he told himself, if anything. My fragmented childhood memories never enough proof for more than my own imprisonment. In the front garden of his semi-detached house, flower stems were nestled deep in the dirt. From his spot in the shade, he must have watched their tiny bodies swaying in the breeze; their features fluttering in the wind, oblivious to his peering eyes, to his plans to pluck them from their safety, caress them until they wilted. Secrets weighed heavily on me: my denial claimed I was more than fine, like pansies which refuse to stop dancing despite being shackled. Moments of hazy reprieve proved futile, served only to temporarily camouflage the fact that my freedom was an illusion. A release date never granted. Marilyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa’s low-residency program and is currently a Staff Writer at Longleaf Review, a Creative Nonfiction Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine, and an Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor at Pithead Chapel. Her work has appeared in The Tishman Review, (mac)ro(mic), Ellipsis Zine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. Originally from Toronto, she now divides her time between Canada and Portugal. You can find her at www.marilynduartewriter.com and on Twitter @MareDuarte28. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Luke Kuzmish a.has CC
East Ave north pass the store where they used to sell my stolen toys next to the Greek burger joint closed on Sundays every house is just a junk store the numbers half gone from old bars packed with the things that fell through someone’s fingers at 8th St the light just blinks yellow because the streets don’t need anything else my heart swells and trickles approaching my grandparents house where I spent my first five years and many afternoons after swallowed by unpaid taxes ruminated for the next poor family unfamiliar with smiles a lady crosses the street at the corner of 5th where Jo used to live her house smelling of cats and anxious, paranoid delusions she meets her boys riding their bikes on a winter day that is cloaked in spring’s hope the coke plant has signs disallowing cameras and knives they shut down last year but black mud will never forget to the boat launch watch an old man who is hunting for something in the rocks on the sand his knees bent like wilting funeral orchids watch the water from a felled tree try to find my communion with God amongst the families and their dogs I lick my thumb clean the mud from my shoes trying to recall if I came here to rekindle something or to bury it dead Sadie Sadie's voice is broken glass at least it was last time I heard her pray found her escort listing last night where she's willing to negotiate your tithe where she will wash your feet with the grease of her hair where I almost mistook my own mistakes for a different brand of light homelessness #1 "do you want to buy this knife?" outside McDonalds on 12th street after 10 PM on a Sunday you had a silly panama hat I didn't buy your knife I needed whatever you wanted for it more than I needed something sharp "do you know anyone who wants to buy these antibiotics?" "do you have a phone? my girl might trade me" I let you borrow my phone smoke my hand rolled cigarette born from butts on the ground watching your fevered steps your mouth muttering nonsense under your blonde beard few hours later you tell me about bucket drumming for spare change there was futility ringing in my ears but the situation we were in warranted grasping on to anyone who might come up when you are down a few hours later we're standing in front of the gas station smoking cheap cigars trying to hustle your knife to someone with a Cadillac I followed you back to your encampment 10 blocks and across the tracks you tell me you want vengeance I wish I had someone to blame you offer me the bed "i'll sit in the chair, i'm not even tired" I sleep for a few minutes til you tell me about the bugs I can feel the mattress is wet your camp mate eats a donut watches me as the sun comes up he tells you "don't bring back trouble to the camp" I had so much to learn about trading away innocence Luke Kuzmish is a writer from Erie, Pennsylvania. His fifth collection of poetry, “My Name Does Not Belong to Me” is slated for publication in 2020 by Weasel Press. |
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