Baron Chandler Flickr CC



In Which I Compare My Children to the Apocalypse on a Friday Night

My daughter tells me she is lighting a cigarette in Category 2 winds, she tells me that the water is rising but she will not leave her home, she is listening to Morrisey, she is listening to Hendrix, she is smoking on the deck while her boyfriend offers her fresh baked chicken, processed potato skins, documentaries on Netflix about drownings and electrical outages that happened years ago.  Her sister survived last year’s hurricane in Florida where I had an out of body experience, two days in the car with my chain smoking friend and her haunted cell phone that lit up at every mile marker ending in the number three and I rose above the mannequin at the corner of Eucalyptus and Cowboy Way, her oversized Barbie face and sun-stripped hair seducing me to buy home-grown tomatoes, above the car that no longer shifted to reverse, forcing us forward without rear brakes for 500 miles, above Boris the strawberry-eating pig that my grandson’s other grandmother could not bear to slaughter. All this to say that my girl children should be dead but they are not, they are lightning trapped in bones, they will never lie down in still waters, they will walk from rooms, they will stand in front of boarded windows without flinching or blinking, they will lift the pool cage from its roots, they will bury me in a shallow grave and tell stories of their childhoods where I am a witch in mother’s clothing, they will bring out the Ouija board from beneath the bed, they will join hands and summon me back to the shores of the living.


​
​Beth Gordon received her MFA from American University a long time ago and was not heard from again until 2017 when her poems began to appear in numerous journals including Into the Void, Outlook Springs, Drunk Monkeys, SWWIM and After Happy Hour Review. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is also Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.  

Caspar Diederik Flickr CC


​
Restlessness as Trauma or Coping Mechanism

get up, get up they can’t ignore you
if you are moving, swallowed gold like seafish,
I am every darting scale my body loses to the light
get up, get up you look best blurry
best with half body on the next frame
get up, get up they might just love you
if you learn how to dance, quarter slip
grace out your ear.
you can get what you need if you just melt
& mold, like candle wax child,
every good daughter burns.

get up get up he cannot find you if you slip
into the school like lost letter,
paper in the wind, if you
silver sliver sardine run like the rest,
hide in your wide hands like the visible sky.
get up, get up the beasts and their noses are coming,
& your feet are calloused & bare,
your legs know invisibility like tripwire,
like look for the camouflage in girl,
get up get up, he can’t gaslight
if you are already smoke
constantly vibrating like sound wave,
get up, get up I am pulsing
in no defined location.

I’ll drive my car
as far south as I can afford
let the road to make me
sun off the tide: lost light,
search for me,
but do not find a thing.
this is what everyone wanted,

I know it.

​

Chestina Craig (she/her) lives on the California coast with her cat. Her work has been published by The Rising Phoenix Review, Sea Foam Mag, Button Poetry and others. She has presented her work at The Presidents Commission on The Status of Women, The Young Women’s Empowerment Conference, & more. She has a degree in Marine Biology, loves to meld science and art, and sometimes pets sharks or hangs out with octopi. She hopes that one day she will only be required to wear gauzy clothing, study the ocean, and get paid to have too many feelings. Her chapbook “body of water” came out October 2017 with Sadie Girl Press.

  Khánh Hmoong Flickr CC



​SurfSun
 
Searching out an early obsession to test the wiring and yes, intact. Jealousy 
functioning on spec this evening. Pictures of a wedding, kissingthenana, 
vacation waterfall. Off the edge, do you see the air fall with you? 

She’s still beautiful, the partner, beautiful enough. Even if a surgelacks 
old power, needing to feel it bows me years down to a kitchen floor,
high and pushingthebatteriesfor outage. She liked to be hit, choked 

during sex I know becausehetoldme. It’s not warmth that defines a desert 
I know because my throat as well. Searching Peter’s name next on the internet, 
check him for dead or jailagain. Can’t remember since when this habit but probably 

even with himthere. Before that, bracing. Her name it’s been so long as to seem 
rare butreally. In a hurricane, wind never reaches the storm’s gut. I let him chop my 
hair age 26, shaved a strip into my groin becauseporn and pulsed in the center to wait 

for it. Roofsliftingoff. New years age 31 a forgotten twenty of blow in my jacket 
like mana. Tonight, in huntingher, Marisol is gravity again making the sand fly.



Rachel Mindell lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of Like a Teardrop and a Bullet (Dancing Girl Press), and her poems have appeared (or will) in Pool, DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, BOAAT, Forklift, Ohio, Glass Poetry, The Journal, Sundog Lit, Tammy, and elsewhere. Rachel holds an MFA and MA from the University of Montana. She manages content and promotions for Submittable, and teaches poetry to young people.

    Matt Callow Flickr CC



​Ether City, Michigan

We spend a lot of time wanting,
But that's not what makes us.
We're all wanting.
Specifics vary, but the gist is the same:
Full stomach, sound sleep,
Someone to be the other part of us.
Less suffering,
More things, more or less.
So that's not it.

We spend a lot of time lost.
I'm not sure if that's it, either.
Some of us know that
Lost ain't so bad
Or so unusual in these parts,
Where the woods are dark
And the moon is clipped
Small and thin
Like a woman who's
Just a wisp

We spend a lot of time gasping for air,
(You've seen the program
About all that junk
Floating around)
All that junk we inject into the air
Like heroin into a blue vein.
All you want
Is to break even.
You can't even remember
What it's like to be high
Anymore;
No point in chasing after it,.
You'll never find it:
You cooked that vein
Long ago.

We spend a lot of time looking back.
Looking forward is one hell of a lot worse:
There's no road,
No signs, no lights.
You fall forward, you land on your face;
Fall backward, you've got some cushioning, some experience with
That direction.
Forward is - near or far -
Where the end is:
Who would want to run in that direction?

We're all groping
With hands and sticks and words
And all we end up finding -
For the duration of a snapshot and a slug of Jack - is
Each other.

Ain't that something?




You Remind Me Of The Rain


You remind me of the rain on a steel-gray day;
A hand touching the damp windowsill,
Distant.
The surface of the bay is black and flat
When the rain stops. One could call it quiescent.
 
What I hear now:
Trees too wet to rustle,
Wind a weak whisper
After so much bluster.

Don't you think I listen for the sounds
At door and window,
For tires slowing
For the final turn on the wet blacktop
Into the forlorn driveway,
Tufts of grass, a weed or two
Pushing through the cracks?
One could call them tenacious, persevering.

No, I suppose not.

You remind me of the rain on a steel gray day;
The sweet wet smell of
Grass and wood and rusting bicycle,
Autumn hiding behind a tree;
One could say sulking.

You remind me of the sun
And the moon and all those things
Missing from the sky
Since the day you took them  
With you.

Mostly though,
You remind me of the rain on that steel gray day.



T.A. Young's short story, "Stooped", was published in The First Line magazine, summer issue 2017. He lives and works in New York City.

 Michael Mueller Flickr CC



The Rough-Skinned Newt     


Did it skitter away from the hissing sticks of our fire?
Did its tail tickle your wet ankle?

Was the flash of its underbelly the color of melon?
Did it disappear under the upside-down rowboat?
                                
Did I tangle my chilled fingers through yours?
Did the rowboat’s keel glitter with rain?
    
Would you wrap me up in your yellow slicker?
Would we follow the newt beneath the boat?

Would we lie there on moss as if it were sheepskin?
Would we speak of the newt as true believers

might converse about ghosts?
Would I put my lips to the stiff hairs on your neck?

I did.  I would.

​
​
Penelope Scambly Schott, author of a novel and several books of poetry, was awarded four New Jersey arts fellowships before moving to Oregon, where her verse biography, A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Several of Penelope’s books and individual poems have won other prizes. Her individual poems have appeared in APR, Georgia Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere.

   Lauren Treece Flickr CC



-nature is taxonomy which all small bones resist –

give me leviathan trace, give me roiling sea-beast, give me
un-nameable terror that lurks, give me

chucked rock, split on a beach, with something
unseen inside, something makes no sense

of unknown birds held inside boulders, of teeth
enough to fill pockets, enough for new mouths

bestiaries laden with despicable tongues
double-spines, impossible articulation

outside the cabin door, allow a thump,
a set of footprints never before trod,

bring me cinder-hot salamanders, birds
hatched in fire that scream in smoke, mammals

that hunt by intuition, feed on stray thoughts, solid
footprints that lead down centuries, into the basement of

what might be – every one of us an expert in myriad bones
in bringing meaning up from the dirt and singing to it,

rubbing it with our thumbs, coaxing it into life, of fashioning
our world again to hold it. Let nobody sing taxonomy

it is a lost system: expect the bones to speak in tongues
expect the artefact to shiver away from your hands

​

Alice Tarbuck is a poet and academic living in Edinburgh. She is part of 12, a women’s poetry collective, and her first pamphlet, Grid, is published by Sad Press.

  Lauren Treece Flickr CC

​

  Mike Maguire Flickr CC


​The Silence of Being

Native soil
Old roots
Worn stones
Saguaros march
Birds gather
Raven floats
Canyon ash
Hummingbird surveys
Dead branches
Red hills
Tears swell
Eyes sting

She drinks from the well,
Swallows ancient
Language, earth fire.




No Address


Silence broken by pigeons
On wires singing a sad song in the mists –
 
She can’t fit through that window anymore.
            The panes melt in the flames.
                        The eternal spring gurgles.
                                    The mailbox disappears.
 
No address brings wandering as the pepper tree sways
In one last whisper.

  Photography: Simon Fessler


​Christian Kjellvander

Wild Hxmans

Christian Kjellvander is no newcomer to the music scene. His Alt-Country band Loosegoats had 5 albums between 1995 and 2012, his 9 solo albums and multiple singles from 2002 to now, plus an album recorded with his brother Gustaf and other band mates as Songs of Soil, not to mention many appearances on other band/performers albums. So why is it only now that he is reaching my ears? This makes me angry because talent like his should not remain so far underground. I now have the task of tracking down his back catalog!

Christian’s new album is an evocative and ethereal work. Lead track, “Strangers in Northeim” and the following song, “Curtain Maker” are very reminiscent of Low, Red House Painters and late Talk Talk. Guitar solos not unlike what Mark Kozelek would attempt. His baritone is so lush and thick it’s like a warm blanket you’d wrap yourself in on a cold night. He lets the songs breathe. The organic path each track takes makes you feel like a child at story time where you are hypnotized by the words and wonder how it’s going to end.

Don’ let the down tempo of the first few songs lead you to believe the whole album is that way. He peps up for “The Thing Is” with some great electric guitar work and keyboards with a very ‘mellotron’ sound to them (possible they are). It’s truly the highlight of this album.

‘Halle Lay Lu Jah’ has some amazing wordplay and would make an excellent single. “That’s an ugly horse. And you’re an ugly human”, “You dabbled in it, like children dabble in evil. How did it go?” Pure anger delivered in a calm intonation a la Mark Lanegan’s later solo work.

​Album closer, “Fake Guernica” is romantic and gentle with some edge. The whole thing glides so smoothly you’ll swear you just started it when it ends. You’ll also put it back on and listen repeatedly. This is definitely an album that came out of left field and knocked me for a loop. If I had a star rating system I wouldn’t have enough stars for it.

   wakingphotolife: Flickr CC



A Horror Story

We almost run into a family of deer,
but she jerks the wheel at the last moment,
an afterthought.

The car jolts.

The drive is short, and she uses it
to tell me about her husband who died,
her thoughts on religion,
the late appearance of spring this year,
and the early burst of warmth in February
that melted the pond and put an end to the ice skating.

She basks for a while in the accomplishment
of her family flocking home to take care of her.
She’s unaware (or maybe too aware)
that only the day before, her son had told me
that his life was still back in St. Vincent.

We continue down the path,
swerving. Each corner turned reveals
something new—horses warm in their stables,
a shock of trees, blackened by melted snow,
while the fields
and the sky darkening quickly
without the presence of streetlights.

​

​
Persephone

I think back to home,
where the sun was too bright,
and every day was a warning.
How many times was I told
to be careful where I walked?

I slip pomegranate seeds
into my mouth, wait
until the world is watching,
and bite down.

In an instant,
the world turns,
and the sky is beneath
my feet.

Above me, the ground closes in.
The cool darkness, a relief.
I feel each shovelful of dirt
as it settles against my skin
even before I can taste the fruit.

I think back to home
—as I rise, I am overcome
by the blinding light
of a brilliant, red sun.

​