9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Robert Beveridge Matthias Liffers CC THREE MEN FROM THE EAST She never believes me when I tell her how beautiful she is in my eyes, stunning as a barley field in July, green just gone to amber and almost ready for harvest. A celebration of every bowl of gruel we’ve eaten, of every bowl we haven’t had yet. We both remember summers nestled in crooks of the tree across the road, how there seemed no better way to pass the time than watch stalks sway in the breeze, imitate them, talk about the nothings so vital to fourteen year olds. Today I walk behind the tree, hop the fence, walk through the park to find her where I always do, section 34, row D, and tie a sheaf a barley, the only flag that makes sense. And I tell her once again how beautiful she is, and I know she doesn’t believe me. Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Blood and Thunder, Feral, and Grand Little Things, among others.
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9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Russell Zintel Robert Couse-Baker CC
Dear, The Moment Back to work after the world stopped An old woman said this wasn’t the scariest thing she’d seen This virus, in her lifetime She said it was the atomic bombs in 1945 She said it was everyone hiding under desks Not knowing if the world would split apart inside a tree that formed For all those far away to see And for its inhabitants, interrupted chimps, to never see She was old, close to the most at risk For the virus getting her, it was the scariest theoretically To her sort of person Something far more violent and undiscerning lurked, too Wearing no Ralph Lauren, only smoke and ash And the wind to which we all Dwindle, rock and return A strong wind like no other but what arrives Right before waking A weather format dashed against false senses She ate the cold, second half of her medium rare burger One or two fries and wasted the rest Fries I threw out my shoulder cutting on the ancient hand crank In the basement below our feet A tomb for me and back-stocked paper goods She looked down into her bill without a word Signaling we were done talking I walked back into the kitchen to begin Again, my next era, soaked in grease Later that evening, I received a text from a close friend From way in the beginning of the back of things His cat had wandered off into the woods and died So you know I knew this beast He wrote a thing about his dead cat, it was beautiful Where does it go? He asked, referring to all frail ends Across species When we get lean Closer to the last thing we’ll look like Before we’re nothing The wind takes it, he concluded, some wind, anyway The woman left the dining room, I heard her elope to closer To her already close end, as I stood Near the swinging doors, stirring Forgotten chili Doing the small favor of letting A dash of blistering heat Into our icebox, July, 2020 Shining Diner Feeling creative in a bad way, ever since I went off meds Working the line less time than usual, still too much, still burnt out on coffee Gotta try that yerba mate shit It’s expensive, god damn Stoned behind the line until the summer day mixes with the grill heat And both are gone, forgotten, a wormhole into the skin There’s a camera in the kitchen Makes me want to eat a sloppy sausage and peppers While glaring into it At that old toenail who didn’t wanna give me fifty more cents an hour Though I know in my heart I shouldn’t If I want to remain a wage earner at all, here Sometimes I put ketchup on the plate, make a shape of it and think about blood They can’t knock me for that, even if they’re watching For what looks like plating technique And contemplating the humblest of ingredients That doesn’t mind being shed needlessly Orders go up, many left to cold or proceeding past temperature No one complains Come on down to the diner We close at 8 The blood on the walls is just ketchup That comes from our dreams, the front of house staff From the camera eyes, obsidian against History’s ochre flow The corners of the eighty-year-old ceilings Let from previous ownership Where does the ketchup come from? We can’t explain it We close at 8, stick around ‘til half past A ghost clocks me out at night The same As if I were To do it, myself Russell Zintel lives with his partner KT and lovely feline along the Hudson River, where they garden, cook a lot and try to live as well as possible. His work has appeared in Banango Street, decomP Magazine and Ash Tree Journal. He is ever at work on a full-length collection. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Sheila E. Murphy Ffion Atkinson CC A Chestnut Cap How invisible to be young. The remnants of a thousand choices deign to hold the skin in place. A swelling around thought until new breathing dresses precedence in finery. The frost will rise to light. Embrace thus present tense, as the thin switch takes some petals to the land. A thought of walking where the sparrow tones form repetition thin to summer as plump snow in the opposing season. How does now become instinct? One learns to discard the compass. Observe and then let go. Around me lives the window. Of my making speaks the stalwart guide into a perfect microphone. As though one bore capacity to rinse the night and come forth clean. How many daylights fold into pure dream? Cinders in the driveway, here comes morning fresh from sleep Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. Her book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Also in 2018, Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory. Luna Bisonte Prods released Underscore in that same year, featuring a collaborative visual book by K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). She earns her living as an organizational consultant, professor, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Lindsey Heatherly Ffion Atkinson CC Honey for Houseflies You wave the back of your hand and strap up your jaw leave honey out for houseflies and cover your ears as you pray You read your biography and smash the pages into your skin Maybe the words will stick this time You cry when you forget and you know mountains do too So you collect dandelions and crush them into your chest You wait for them to take root and spread among your desert heart But there are places even weeds refuse to grow Lindsey is a writer born and raised in Upstate South Carolina. She has words in or forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, X-R-A-Y, Emrys Journal, Red Fez, Schuylkill Valley Journal and more. She spends her time at home raising a strong, confident daughter. Find her on her website at https://r3dwillow.wixsite.com/rydanmardsey or on Twitter: @rydanmardsey. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Elizabeth Bluth collective nouns CC Impressions of You in My Body his hand on my hip traces the bone in the darkness i see only his outlines above me i have been wanting this he is gentle surreptitious even but you loom in my body’s memory prone with his weight pressing against me you your breath on my shoulder gripping my hip bones taking i stare into a deep nothingness static numbness fills me you have invaded my body violated my intimacy without even being present someday i will forget you and find peace To Feel Alive, But Only Just I only exist within a small chasm in my own body, separated by a layer of dark space from actual sensory feeling as if there are two parts of me: the body I wear and the conscious spirit inside. I cannot push through the wall I built around my internal self. I am numb to everything, calm on the surface, but inside I scream and shake. I am somehow both trapped deep within and watching myself from the outside, but with no control over how my body reacts. Everything vibrates. It is as if I experience tinnitus on a cellular level. A murky covering separates any rational thought from penetrating through the veil that is my depression. A kitchen knife. An exacto blade. A razor from the shower. A thin paper cutting blade from the scene shop. I cut. The sting of the sharpness slicing open my skin is the only thing that cuts through the depressive cloud I’m bound in. My inner self breaches the surface for a few moments. I am alert and terrified. I do not want to hurt. But the physical pain draws my attention away from the internal damage that is clawing away at me. And then the wall returns. My clarity once again dives back into the murky deep. I am numb, but alive. And yet is this really living? Elizabeth Bluth is a writer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in LIT Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, American Writer's Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others. She has a BA in Theatre and Creative Writing and an MFA in Fiction from The New School in NYC. Ffion Atkinson CC EPIGENETICS Jennifer Connelly said it in The Labyrinth It’s not fair! But when she sold her soul for powdered dopamine in Requiem for a Dream we forgot that little girl so enamored with David Bowie’s codpiece; who really didn’t understand a thing about unfair. They say Holocaust Survivors have DNA permanently altered by trauma that their grandchildren’s genes bear this damage, this evolutionary hiccough; the very blueprint of life irrevocably marred even generations later by the evil in the world. My own children playing happily on the floor; is their DNA free from evidence of my childhood suffering, intergenerational trauma stopped in its tracks? or did the CPTSD warp my genes so much that my great great great great great great grandchildren will house these blemished double helixes like a scar? It’s not fair that innocence is soiled by events before it even comes to be; and it’s not fair that I was abused when I should have been allowed to grow and it’s not fair that David Bowie died before he was ready. But life is still a marvel and my children are a gift To find joy ecstasy when things are unfair is a life well-lived. And this will not end with a Requiem. Because our song is an anthem. Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and cats. She is the author of “More.”, a forthcoming poetry collection from Wild Pressed Books. Shannon is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate Fiction, trampset, and elsewhere. Follow Shannon at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @mrsgreenstein. She comes up when you Google her. Martin Brigden CC To My Children at Christmas For Christmas this year I am giving you my heart. Besides you and your mother it is my only treasure. Inside is all I have felt and learned from standing outside and knocking on doors that would not or could not open. That was pain but it’s all right now. I understand and I hope you will too. It helps to remember that sometimes we are the ones inside unable to open the door. You’ll probably think this is corny but I can live with that. I thought about socks again this year but I figure you have enough. I've been an addiction therapist for twenty years and have worked in hospitals, prisons, methadone clinics and now in private practice. I've seen a lot of people get sober and experience a life second to none, as I have. I've also seen some of the loveliest young people I've ever met die from opioid overdoses. They sometimes visit a space between my fourth and fifth ribs. It feels sad when they come but I don't want them to stop. 9/27/2020 3 Comments Poetry by Natalie Marino Robert Couse-Baker CC After Endings Her room is a jar of molasses, piled calendars mark the gone years. My grandmother sits up in her bed covered by afghans soured by coffee stains and she never opens her window anymore, its surface too opaque to reflect the sugar in sunshine. My grandmother lives in the blue of the television, her last loves its many Mexican soap operas. I do not understand and I do understand. Her husband left her and she lost her pink house. She waits for Don Juans who are not coming, smoking cigarettes and painting her nails again. Exhale, Inhale If only I knew what sad means. Instead, I live inside melancholy, a sticky cactus, with velcro fingers inside a blue desert rejecting water. I light my photographs on fire to burn the black memories but the mirror’s glare always gives me a headache. I stitch a blanket silencing song, and wait for bright balloons. I wait to exhale, and then inhale the jasmine hope of morning dew. Natalie Marino is a writer, mother, and physician. She has work in Barren Magazine, Feedlit Mag, Idle Ink, and Indolent Books. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Thousand Oaks, California. Karl Schultz CC I have a dream I have a dream that people will stand for what they believe in, no matter the race, sexuality, financial state, or situation. I have a dream. I have a dream that people "wont be judged by the color of there skin"--Dr. Martin L. King Jr. I have a dream. I have a dream that we will march from dusk til' dawn in a large group shouting "No Justice, No Peace" as our great and even great-great grandparents once did. I have a dream. I have a dream that we as american citizens will live up to the statement, that "all men are created equal." I have a dream. I wish people would realize that the world isn't cupcakes and rainbows, but that we live in a cruel and disappointing world where only the people that are ready for it can take it head on. I have a dream. I have a dream that separate but equal will be no more, that we will know that we are more alike then we are different just like a cupcakes and cake. I have a dream. I have a dream that people will listen to that rule that we were all once taught at a young age, "treat others the way you wish to be treated". I have a dream. I have a dream that we will put down these weapons and come together as one to stop our people from saying, "I cant breathe", just because someone had there knee on our necks. I have a dream. I have a dream that police brutality will be awol, that we wont sugarcoat the truth, & that the word "Gun" loses it trigger. Bra'Dazia S.L. Ward is an African-American poet and forthcoming activist. She lives on the Eastern Shore and is currently seeking publication. 9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Paul Tanner Michael Cory CC resolution, sure she wants to return a bra. you tell her she can’t. why not? she says. you tell her it’s company policy. why’s it company policy? she says. you tell her, hygiene reasons. what hygiene reasons? she says. you saying I’m dirty? you tell her: no. yes, you are! she says. you’re saying I’m dirty! that, and: get me your manager! so you get your manager and he tells her it’s company policy not to refund underwear. hygiene reasons. yeah, I get that! she says. but that’s no reason to insult me, is it? is this true? the boss asks you. did you insult this customer? give up: she wants to believe you’re picking on her and the boss wants to believe you’re a bad worker, so just give up: tell them both: yeah he’s vindicated as a boss she’s vindicated as a victim and you get ten minutes leg rest sat down in the manager’s office while he gives you a disciplinary. everyone wins, eh? the supervisor’s day off I’m stacking shelves and I feel a finger prod my shoulder. I turn and he’s there wearing his own clothes, holding his kid’s hand. roll your sleeves back down! he says. you can’t show tattoos on the shop floor! get a life, I tell him. it’s your day off. fine, he says. today, I’m a customer, and you’ve just insulted me, so I’ll be making a customer complaint! he smiles and off he goes towards the manager’s office, dragging his kid behind him … his kid is glaring at me. the glare, it says: I’ll own you one day. I’ll inherit you from my daddy. not your own kid, but YOU. it’s like he knows I won’t give them a son to push around, like he knows I have the decency to not breed. not in this world of theirs, I don’t. the happy co-worker I don’t know how he does it. every shift he’s smiling: when the boss makes us do overtime he’s smiling. when we get out late, unpaid he’s smiling. when a customer threatens him he’s smiling. I’ve seen a woman take a swing at him but he just shrugged it off. my god, he even whistled the other day: it was a 12-hour shift with queues to the back of the shop, 8 pallets of stock to get out and only the two of us on the floor and he was fucking whistling. he must be plotting something big. I only hope that I’m not in the day he sets off his bomb or shoots the place up or that he is in the day I do. Tanner congealed in Liverpool tomorrow. He’s been earning minimum wage, and writing about it, for too long. His novel ‘Jobseeker’ is doing alright on Amazon. He was shortlisted for the Erbacce 2020 Poetry Prize. His latest collection ‘Shop Talk: Poems for Shop Workers’ is published by Penniless Press. His star sign is Libido. Hobbies include pillage, cribbage and the occasional spillage. |
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