11/1/2018 Poetry By F. J. BergmannAcolyte from Love, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014 They told her the smoke would totally change her, “mess with her head,” and then they all giggled. She had been careful to wear the mandatory uniform: torn jeans, low-cut blouse, the crown of invisible brambles, the absence of a smile. When was a tree not a tree? When it was in a forest. They gave her a bloodstained robe, and she put it on, already adrift in fumes festooning the air with furtive tongues. For hours she floated in a sky the color of a blue- green algal bloom. Soon they would ask her to invest in the black pyramid, to drink pomegranate juice from a lead-crystal goblet, to choose the shape in which she wished to manifest. Her new skull will have prongs, mispronounced ridges, and far more effective teeth. Affluence from The Artist and the Arbiter, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014 You met him at the hunt ball. Neither of you wore pink. He chatted easily of warmbloods, silver flasks, stone walls. He smiled all the time, showing teeth white as high powder. You had borrowed the tails that didn’t fit, buttoning your vest to hide a stain on your ruffled shirt. You longed for style, security, and affection, for which sex was a nearly adequate substitute. All of which would be withheld in due course. He owned stakes winners, played polo, belonged to exclusive clubs within clubs, as if his life were a filigree ornament at the center of nested Fabergé eggs, jeweled and golden. Even the bathrooms of his summer residence were art museums. He stayed up all night, scenting the air for new diversions, and you did your best to keep up. But you drew the line when he snorted them until most of his nasal septum was eaten away. And then he discovered what it took to put him to sleep. He makes such an elegant ghost. Delicacy from Pink, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014 You have scales instead of skin, a rosebud where a heart should be, an insatiable hunger that won’t let you observe without analysis, anatomization, butchery. All you need is a stainless steel table and a knife so sharp you could sever your own hands, almost painlessly, with its invisible blade. You don’t know what it is about the fine details that fascinate you, but you have always believed that an autopsy is more important than a remedy, intensified your focus on relationships that are over. Something about love makes you want to dissect it until it has been reduced to sublime molecules that you have no further use for. Something about hope makes you take it apart, feather by feather. Fetch after Sisters, Kelli Hoppmann, oil on panel, 2014 Everyone has a demon twin about whom they tell no one. Your mother must have known, you are sure, but she flitted from party to party, decade to decade; occasionally, gently nudged by that fourth glass of Malbec, she mumbled about how some things just didn’t work out and at least they had you. By then you were going to parties yourself, sometimes in nothing but pallor and tresses, glowing with the fumes of liquid skies. You can’t tell whether trees are dead as long as you only look down at the roots, careful not to consider shadows cast by empty branches. Your mother said that you would eventually find yourself, and for once she was right: you did, in a black-light-filled room that could as easily have been a mirror. Your other half wore a skull for a face, and all the haggard sophistication you had longed for. It smiles with its empty sockets. “My, what a lovely … dress,” it says slyly, looking anywhere but at you. F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. She has competed at National Poetry Slam as a member of the Madison, WI, Urban Spoken Word team. Her work appears irregularly in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov's SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A Catalogue of the Further Suns won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest and the 2018 SFPA Elgin Chapbook Award. Elegy for Brother Rudolph The last time I saw him, at our nephew’s bbq, he pulled his collar wide to show me his lesions, his chemo port, the ridges of his breast bone like a turkey carcass after days of picking, but he partied on around the fire, singing the songs he’d written, stamping his feet, joking, and sipping beers until they and the pain meds overcame him, and he settled for a lawn chair to watch the sparks rise up to the stars, claiming they were all kin to one another, the stars, the sparks, the ash at the end of his cigarette, the cancer, the grown people who’d tried to break him when he was just a boy, the guards and inmates who towered over him, or later, when he was a wiry slip of man, the tourists who tossed their change like trash at his open guitar case on River Street, the wife who left him, and his three children, who he walked out on for the barrooms, the prisons, the crack, those three hollows he couldn’t close. Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her work appears in venues including The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Poet Lore, North American Review, Guernica, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She's currently at work on her second memoir. THE CURSE OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE You forgot to put your shadow away. Gray morning swallowed and dragged it due west past hidden islands and abandoned wrecks. Now only cracked mirrors unveil your face-- A torn card from a very wicked deck. It’s hard to shave, to walk into dull day meaning it. This naked sidewalk is paved with broken glass. No shadows. Your cool mess is looking for something past the fog line. Another life, you sailed. Clung to the rigging. Sang chanties. Then you drowned—you know that much. You’re still cold now—shadows of clouds singing above you. Lost as Peter Pan, you touch each crack. All your charts are printed on dark times. Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War just appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing .A Full length collection of poems will released next year by Encircle Publications. He studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. Three of his chapbooks— Three Visitors, Lent, 1999, and Artifacts and Relics—and the novel, Knight Prisoner are available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. He lives with his wife the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. A meager online presence can be found at https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/ 11/1/2018 Poetry by Rebecca FryarRiver Wind shakes this river like clothes on a line, Wrinkles the sheet of sunlight, Cuts the cloth with a ragged edge Playing seamstress to the weaver Elusive tranquility. There’s a world of doing away from here, Where life fades the days, weeks and years. Peace like a river is sunlit fabric, Woven from water, Darned up with dragonflies. Spider This is the time of the spider, When the dew falls heavy, And the mist spins webs between the trees, Thick as dreams. The moist promise of frost breathes in the wind, Rattles the cage, And the occupant, Stoic and unmoving Waits for eternal night, With the patience Of the bridegroom Under earth, Headstone empty beside him. Rebecca Fryar is a poet and writer living in Arkansas. Most of her poems reflect the natural beauty around her and connect it to a story, triggering the emotions that these places inspire in her, and hopefully, in others. 11/1/2018 Poetry by David BanksonTogether The world fogged its lights and draped gray in our eyes like shuddering clouds above a darksome land. The day heard the city awaken and broken as the land fractured apart from front to back, the reflection in your eyes gray catbirds deep in a shadowed forest. I forgot you walked these grounds before, the clouds in your wake, the shaky yesterdays hungry for your smile, a darkness for two, the growing fog and you, before I happened along. Before that, candles fizzled into a sulphur wisp. After all this time we're stumbling here, where a milk-and-water past tolls. I remember you glowed like a phantom: your fog to my smoke, your eclipse to my night, a fulcrum for a world of tomorrows. The price of love is the wave embracing the beach, some left behind, more removed each time. Time and again, whispers of crest and sand. At dawn, looking out at the waves, I see a skyline that fuses foam to horizon as a singular scar--murky, but implicit. At dusk, the waves come clean in low tide in its come-as-you-are bond. I am unbottled by this whisper, this thunder, this buildup-and-release. This edginess. This steadiness. This incurable pounding thirst. David Bankson lives in Texas. He was finalist in the 2017 Concīs Pith of Prose and Poem contest, and his poetry and microfiction can be found in concis, (b)oink, {isacoustic*}, Artifact Nouveau, Riggwelter Press, Five 2 One Magazine, and others. 11/1/2018 Crescendo By Monica KaganCrescendo Warm life-blood pumps through her veins. Muscles dance to the electrical impulses flitting through her body. The sleek oil glides liquid-smooth through the engine. The car swerves around the mountain pass selling its metallic soul in the moonlight. Waves of molten metal unleash a crescendo: Red and white jagged sculptures desecrate the cliff. Monica Kagan lives by the sea in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa with her wonderful cat. She is a reader at FICTION on the WEB. She is also a contributing writer at Rhythm & Bones Literary Magazine on their blog #Necropolis. Her work appears in Fourth & Sycamore, Bonnie's Crew, and Rhythm & Bones, among others. Work is forthcoming in Crack the Spine, formercactus, Bonnie's Crew and Twist in Time. Twitter: @MonicaOFAH 11/1/2018 the womb by Linda M. Cratethe womb i hunger to be reborn in the womb there is warmth, comfort, food, ease i want that warm darkness; to slide away all that devours me i want to be carried by another for that protection to envelope me-- death doesn't hurt life does i want to know a place between them again black sky with the promise of hope give me those inky black feathers, the womb is a gift i want to receive again; to lay a place that is not want where voices are a comfort not the chains of pain that cut in webs of agony found in the spiderwebs well acquainted with longevity of living in a world born of nightmares instead of dreams. Linda M. Crate's poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has five published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), and splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018). 11/1/2018 Poetry by Ray Ballcontinuing to name things that are yellow after my five-year-old niece stops playing the game Sunlit leaves in autumn and a lemon peel perched on the rim of a glass brimming with a pleasant but nondescript wheat beer una sartén de paella compartida con amigos exist in the same color family as choler. Yellow bile. Yellow belly. They flew yellow flags when ships needed to be quarantined. oh! The knitted wool of imaginary prevention! Vast expanses: sunflowers and canola. Before I was afraid all the time, morning light dissolved into kernels dancing across the cornfields where I ran telephone pole drills. Dendroctonus rufipennis At a party, a friend of a friend asks do you have children? And you respond There are thirty times more dead spruce than five years ago. They turned red and then a discomfiting dun after climate change birthed a destiny of beetles, manifest. Smaller trees can flourish in a forest of ghosts, but that doesn’t always mean that they do. Ray Ball, Ph.D., is a history professor in Alaska. She is the author of two history books and her creative work has recently appeared in Cirque, L'Éphémère Review, Okay Donkey, and The Cabinet of Heed. She tweets @ProfessorBall 11/1/2018 Session 1 By Michael AkuchieSession 1 why are you here? — i am many things. save for an explanation. do you believe in hell? — i quit believing in myself. i am hell packaged in a teenage life. i burn brighter than the dreams i abandoned. you smoke? — la... la... la... i burn a smoke to update my body on how many wreckages it must become. i liberate my body so it ascends to peace. do you ever stop to think about God? — inside a church, i find no place to stand. my mind turned its back on worrying about rapture & who starts the consuming fire. what do you represent? a boy withdrawn from society. a frozen lake where water once ran through. soulful song no one claps for. what is your name? i have a body. scars. memories. soul. i killed my name to be something. why are you a room of darkness? because light is slavery. ask sinners. i do no wrong by hugging the cavern on light's body. i am neighbor to light. arms apart, colours different. Lagos based Michael Akuchie writes poetry with an exiled mind. His recent works are on Praxis Mag Online, African Writer Online, Ngiga Review and elsewhere. He studies English at the University of Benin, Nigeria. 11/1/2018 Poetry by Adrian Ernesto CepedaMon Amor From a 1959 photograph of Emmanuelle Riva You deserve someone nakedly loyal like a submissive lover who listens to your softest seductions and immediately craves the hunger of your fiery tongue. Someone who trembles with just the idea of losing the match that yearns the most hypnotic flame inside you. Even thinking of you reawakening arms reaching out first thing with morning giggles, wanting you bed hair, no make-up always uncovering blushes reigniting your smokiest fire between your thighs without even asking, someone who submits like an eager poem, and someone who loves to present you the time to spotlight and bloom—as you enchantingly rhyme, vibrations alone. Symbiosis From the 2012 photograph by Rick Garrett Is this how love feels like? he asks leaning in lips ready to kiss me again. I try not to look up, my head on his chest not wanting to confess, instead I teasingly stir, pondering the fate of two bodies becoming physically connected no longer alien after first contact, linked together by the spark of longing to retaste desire. To reignite that fire again and again, not thinking in dates of expiration, as his lips touch mine, sometimes as our tongues unite again, savoring each other, I don’t know where he ends, and I begin— instantly our most intimate greeting becoming one giant mass, a bonfire flesh flame that might incinerate us, why are we so combustible from within? But we love reigniting to feel the naked rekindling touch taking us over, rippling climactic torches simmering grins from the match that reappears engulfing us again as our heat blazes closer and closer inside, outside, somehow between our smoldering intensity I came to love how softly he mouths my name. Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of the full-length poetry collection Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press and the poetry chapbook So Many Flowers, So Little Time from Red Mare Press. His poetry has been featured in The Yellow Chair Review, Burning House Press, Frontier Poetry, poeticdiversity, The Wild Word, Rigorous, Tin Lunchbox Review, Rogue Agent Journal, Chanterelle’s Notebook, The Fem, Rigorous, Palette Poetry, San Diego Reader and Lunch Ticket’s Special Issue: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing. One of his poems was named the winner of Subterranean Blue Poetry’s 2016 "The Children of Orpheus" Anthology Contest and two of his poems “Buzz Me” and “Estranged Fruit” were nominated for Best of the Net in 2015 and 2016. Adrian is an LA Poet who has a BA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and he is also a graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and their cat Woody Gold. You can connect with Adrian on his website: http://www.adrianernestocepeda.com/ |
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