11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Megan Burns Ron Gilbert CC Significant to say/ stay seduced/ by language we built a house of spells a wording of what we meant to one another i sd i wd/ want but there was/ barely a dusting of truth i would you topple inside me/ a poem/ of us/ i form to not last i was always designing escape to not feel/ not like you imagine/ i was giving up feeling for knowing beyond mind giving up knowing/ for nothing/ beyond time what is an entanglement to traveling back time’s rainbow/ listen/ it’s all the same i saw you and then i knew you following clues/ traveled some/ you don’t remember who i am, you say next time/ should i/ leave sooner stay longer what i would do different we stay/ aloof/ the word/ we are when you are no longer in my mind i am forgot/ forgetting sign/ i tried to not write it well at all Source of Memory morning in a world at once crumbling and building transparent akin to beauty, a clumsy push forward, kept source for debriefing inside this atomic moment, this well played gone strange practice of breathe in suffering and release attach, this world if you insist is a dreaming that is meta-stable and context we must admit is boundless: we are the universe and have an intrinsic capacity to go beyond what went before. consider others as another you. as exactly you. this practice can change societies. compassion is your greatest protection and your greatest resource. Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She is the co-director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com) and has been hosting the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans for the last six years. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Dream Pop, and Diagram. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has three books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013) and Commitment (2015) published by Lavender Ink. Her recent chapbooks include: her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press, 2016), Beneath the Drift (Red Mare, 2019) and FUCK LOVE: I’m sorry someone hurt you (Shirt Pocket Press, 2019). Her fourth collection, BASIC PROGRAMMING, was published by Lavender Ink in 2018. Her forthcoming collection is called PLURALITY.
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11/28/2020 1 Comment Poetry by Tiffany Shaw-Diaz Ron Gilbert CC diode heavy is the unseen wine bottle when the earth is burning burning and dying lead are my arms and legs now tell me how i can fly with the wings you say i have there are an infinite number of sides to me and all are confusing in my gut i know there are luminous constellations and if i raise my heels high enough i can weave their fingers with mine anti-eulogy you weren’t supposed to feed me amaretto liquor until i blacked out when i was underage and if you didn’t know that before this i’m telling you now freedom your income your marital status your level of education doesn’t matter in the church of this meeting you are an addict like all of us Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is a Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Stars Award nominee who also works as a professional visual artist. Her poetry has been featured in Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Bones, NHK World Haiku Masters, The Mainichi, and nearly 100 other publications. Her chapbooks include: says the rose (Yavanika Press 2019), filth (Proletaria 2020), and tyranny of the familiar (Yavanika Press 2020). You can find her on Instagram and Twitter via @tiffanyshawdiaz or through her website: www.tiffanyshawdiaz.com. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Lucy Whitehead infinitehorizons90 CC Stag My rage strode in like a stag among unicorns, a flame in his eel-dark eyes, with his charcoal coat glistening, he moved silently between them. He shook his velvet antlers, like two oak trees piercing the sky, a shadow among the snow-pale bodies, only I saw him, like a ghost ship glide by. I watched the ripple of his muscles, his sure-footed march, understood his razor reflexes, knew the strength in pain- honed bones. He is waiting, he is wary. His jaws laced with silver bars for many years. One day he'll impale the world on his antlers and shake it til it listens. Lucy Whitehead is a disabled poet who writes haiku and free verse. Her work has been published in Amethyst Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Broken Spine Artist Collective, Burning House Press, Clover and White Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, Collective Unrest, Cypress, Electric Moon Magazine, Ghost City Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Mookychick Magazine, 3 Moon Magazine, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Parentheses Journal, Pink Plastic House, Pussy Magic, Re-side, and Twist in Time Literary Magazine and in numerous international haiku journals and anthologies. You can find her on Twitter @blueirispoetry. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Madison Gill Ian Sollars CC Healing is Not Linear The past still reaches out with cold hands from my dreams. But these days, I sleep beside the warmest body. His residual heat melts those icicle fingers before they can close around my throat. Once upon a time I set fire to my diary entries about you, burning with all I wanted to say to you long after the ashes were scattered. Now, I can’t remember a single word. Once upon a time I made a dandelion of my torn-out eyelashes, blew it into the wind and wished for your suffering. Now, I wish you a love like the one I came to know after you. Miracle love that sprouted despite my salted soil. Anesthetic love – erases the pain of every bruise I have ever known. You are no more real to me now than the yellowing memory of that mark you left on my neck the night before I never saw you again. An old wound since healed, leaving no trace. A bad dream I simply roll over, shake my head and forget. Suggested Friends I wanted the next time you saw my name to be on a marquee in whatever city you’re living – I hoped you would come to the show alone, crouch in the back by the bar, and listen to me read scathing poetry you know is about you because I mention that Sonic we’d meet at when the stars of my open hour and your lunch break aligned where I pined for your flitting tongue as it knotted each stem from my cherry limeade. And that Wendy’s far enough out of town we could hold hands in I wish would burn down. I hoped you’d be flattered enough to stop me afterward in the alley and ask if I’ll sign your copy so I can say no. Or offer to buy me a drink in the lobby of the hotel where you’re staying so I can say no. Or invite me up to your room so I can say no – not coughed up by the algorithm in ‘people you may know.’ I couldn’t rely on you for closure, so I had to make my own. Every imagined scenario in which I tell you ‘no’ making up for the way my traitor skin cells sweated Yes for you through my shirt. Sometimes I take out the box I keep the snake of your memory in and stick my fingers inside. The venom loses its bite with each passing year. Still like a drug to me, it hits my bloodstream and the jaws of the past unhinge to swallow me whole. It is a sweet sort of torture. It is the only evidence I have keeping what happened between us from disappearing into the tall grass of history. I deleted all your midnight texts, but I have kept the secret of us so long that to forget feels as wrong as remembering. When the internet served my face up on its unceremonious silver platter, did you even stop scrolling? It wasn’t so long ago when I was too weak to resist even a crumb from the feast of information on your Facebook page. When I gorged myself on the places you checked in, the people in your tagged photos. Now here I am: one click away from relapse and my mouth doesn’t even water. Now I know all my fantasies about denying you were too grandiose. I will settle for this small victory in clicking ‘remove.’ Your smiling icon vanishes into cyberspace and I feel lighter like I shed a skin. Madison Gill is a poet and journalist from Colorado. An alumni of Colorado State University-Pueblo, her poetry has appeared in print and online with such publications as Tiny Spoon, From Whispers to Roars, The Write Launch, Tempered Steel, and others. She lives on the Western Slope of Colorado where she is building a tiny home as phase one of her master plan to gradually retreat from society. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Greg Clary Nicolas Henderson CC Conundrum What do you say when the toughest guy you know, Chalk Eye, cries at your kitchen table? Offer an encouraging word? An arm around the shoulder? A drink of whiskey? But no advice. Gawd, no advice. Then like a swift, black cloud uncovering the moon, the moment passes. Grim gives way to grin. “Remember the time when we rolled that old Corvair and walked home in the snow to your Mamaw’s house?” This is how ends and beginnings end and begin. Brush With Danger She spotted me before I saw her with that Cheshire Cat grin, whiskey in hand, moving in her casual, easy, sashay. “Boy, if we’d ‘a stayed naked we might ‘a had a chance. But you had a bug up your ass. Other things to do.” “I did and I did. You were hard to quit with your fearlessness. Your truth. Your cathead biscuits.” Greg Clary is Professor Emeritus of Rehab and Human Services at Clarion University, Clarion PA. His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Dark Horse, North/South Appalachia, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly, Winedrunk Sidewalk, and Avant Appal(achia). His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Watershed Journal, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Trailer Park Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Waccama Journal, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1. He was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in northwestern Pennsylvania. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Yolanda Mpelé M I T C H Ǝ L L CC Sober my love, my romance who were you when you were not here ? who else did you promise the world to? The moon ? And other milky ways ? I like to boast about my healthy health, my readiness, my already set when the public is gone my act turns to melo, humdrum, sweet tragedy who were you when you were not here ? I won't tell you. my secret, my shame, my unauthorised biography you said you would have loved me (no matter what) but we wouldn't have even met I had another lover, stronger, stickier, shinier (but not made of gold) he was called alcohol and I lived with him and all his children, shame, sadness and loneliness the two of us loved to hang out at night laughing together, crying together, singing together you wouldn't have had any space my love you wouldn't even have known you were in a ménage à trois like in a vaudeville, i knew where to hide him, closets are everywhere and then one day it wasn't daytime but dawn. when demons are still sleeping. I met the one you have in front of you I married her on the spot she woke up dancing liquor makes her sick you see (that's why she took her time to manifest) she's always ecstatic I am me, you are her this dance, this call, this vibration she is me I am her present in the present together we waltz your turn, my love who were you when you were not here ? Yolanda Mpelé is a theatre actress and a translator. Born and raised in France, she studied languages and the performing arts in London, UK. She is currently part of the ensemble at NTgent theatre in Ghent, Belgium. She writes poetry in French and in English. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Apple Mae Pandian M I T C H Ǝ L L CC Selective Mutism I have looked for my words everywhere; they are missing. Perhaps I left half under your covers when we played house. I was the wife and “wives do not talk,” you said. Open your eyes. Feel the oceans roll at your fingertips. But only once I did care for the ocean, care for me drinking my last water, care for me drowning in your palms. But care has to end, like all the words. And rage, this orphan, this burning language knocked on my tounge one morning, courage by her side. I took them in like a brave mother, open my breasts for milk and bread. In the cupboards we hide from your hands, and I wanted to say stop! but stop! is a stillborn in the mouth, a tear at the back of the throat drying all alone. Out of loneliness I invented names, and each will say, ”Leave love here.” One grows a beard, the other digs a grave, screaming, “It was here!” I know. Happy was there; they buried her shoeless, brotherless, less than all she ever was. If silence will ever by my home then I must die for rage is not enough. Courage is never enough. Apple Mae Pandian, an undergraduate Psychology student in the University of Mindanao, is a writer of poems. She has first appeared in Trouvaille Review with her poem Lethologica. She is living in Davao del Norte, Philippines with her parents. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Jamie Swanson M I T C H Ǝ L L CC Y’all knew, don’t act surprised Y’all all knew And you forced me into stagnation, now here I can’t stop moving, like a river Undammed. It’s not always safe but I trust the shifting Earth to guide me to rest To find wounds air to breathe Ripping open still in need of fertile soil, and good water, drainage and sunlight They’ll seal, scar, and come to nourish in life / in dirt a spirit still / moving so completely yet remaining slight, simple, and aimless My body continues, craves and desires I am growing Into some body This body of bodies-- And no I’m not gay And no I’m not bi And yeah I’m still in your alphabet soup And yes I like sports And no I don’t wear jewelry And yes I wear make-up I like lip stick, but I don’t wear mascara Because my lashes already look divine / and I Don’t really do eye liner ‘cause my hands are shaky So I get my FRIENDS to HELP me ‘Cause they’re kind and beautiful … oh so so beautiful (thank y’all) And yes I wear stockings, dresses, skirts, jeans, tees, hats, no hats, heels, sneakers, boots, sandals, And yes I cook Yes I clean And no I’m no more or less of a nurturer No more or less of a protector Or a teacher Or a rationalirrational thinker just because of my biology For I am /precisely\ That which my biology and its chemical processes create, which is fucking queer and excitable and oftentimes, sad And yes I’m buying a glock-19 for when the transphobes and white supremacists thrust them selves further into fearful rage OOOOOOHHHHHH I DANCE I dance like an animal / in my own stink! erotic craving and courting I repeat / but no one movement / is ever the same When I dance I disappear I see myself When I dance I can scream and hold and cradle and comfort, give and / Then I can take and force and break and grind and wait and search The next beat comes and I shake tremble, grimace, and smile, riding waves with my feet firmly planted When I dance I bear witness to miracles / eyes closed miracles in sound / the vibrations that shake us all From the heavens and the skies / From the earth Shadow / and Light into bodies and into mine back out again Riot / and Rest I travel and never leave home and where I stray / the beat comes in sanity and confusion I make it dirty and sensual tear-jerking, lip-biting, fear-shirking, eyes-lighting —My body is aglow-- Then I breathe / and I wait / for the next beat to speak and listen and listen and listen and shake! to feel still in a world always trembling It starts with breath Air into lungs and gut / to break out in shoulder rolls and pops a back arched and caved in hips winding / beckoning and waving unwavered thighs and feet stand at the root / mobilized into something spiritual into the ones / who give breath the oneness / who is breath they who takes my open hands and spins me, one moment into many If it’s a flirtatious twirl or a stumbled foray into confusion I could never know / but I will materialize hips grinding and hands / open asking for more Mind / and Body beckoning breath, beating full of life laughing and lusting as gods, control lost, never to be wanted for again For several years, Jamie (they/them) has been writing as a source of healing and therapy. Writing has made stronger their connection with the natural world, spirituality, political struggle, and their body. Currently, Jamie writes in a number of styles and plays music while earning money in the service industry and freelancing. Some of their work has been published in the Virginia Bards Central Review. 11/28/2020 2 Comments Poetry by Jennifer Fox JJBers CC Noise I walk through the mall at 3:30 on a Saturday seeking gym shoes and inspiration from people snapping gum and selfies dancing to TikTok videos as they laugh and yell and shove salted pretzels and tongues down their throats a real motley crue of characters too young to appreciate the reference. But all is still. Storefronts are gated with FOR LEASE signs peppered across them clothes racks lay on the ground beside empty shelves and scattered papers and naked mannequins who stare up at me with sad eyes and missing legs. The ones left behind. And for the first time I can hear the hum of fluorescent lights and the squeak of my worn shoes against the linoleum still sticky with slushy residue marveling at all that was lost in the noise and wonder what comes next now that it is gone. And I sit, and I listen, And I wait… Jennifer Fox is a western New York native and is currently earning her MFA in Creative Writing at Lindenwood University, where she works as an editorial assistant for The Lindenwood Review. Her work will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Disquiet Arts. 11/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Alan Parry Nicolas Henderson CC Solemnities the house, with its sharp fall of stairs, still smelt of lemon & lavender we congregated in the parlour dressed in fetish black & mallard Rev. Kelly offered a tray of devilled eggs around, while Tomos fingered Gwahoddiad on the pianola & slow as a funeral each of us stood in song Anamnesis iron frosted windows like the blueberry on her fingertips – she stands by herself, recalling tandem bike rides, how he gnawed on root ginger & sang silver songs – more than time Apple Gin september – two pm – walking to buy wool i see a miscreant tree tormenting children up ahead – i hit it with my cane a dozen apples fall like red-skinned moons – & Nan fills her bag – we steep them in gin that evening Alan Parry is a poet, playwright and poetry editor from Merseyside, England. He is an English Literature graduate and English teacher. Alan enjoys gritty realism, open ends, miniature schnauzers and 60s girl groups. He has previously had work published by Dream Noir, Streetcake Magazine, Black Bough Poems and others. He cites Alan Bennett, Stan Barstow and James Joyce as inspiration. His debut poetry collection, Neon Ghosts is available from thebrokenspine.co.uk/shop. |
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