Kyle Brown CC


Eat the Fish

Came here full of love
I came to hate much later
Schooled by the best teacher in the world
Experienced cracked knuckles until they bled
Tasted good
I've seen things differently from shadows
Blinding light makes colors dance and hurt
Bright future dimmed by darkness within
Mute words understood for the noise created
Caucophany
Ssshhh
I am the ant

​

True View
​
Hands grasping at memories of things no longer there
Arms meant for holding, hang uselessly at the sides
Shoulders once held back and proud
slump forward, crushed by the weight of the chip

A back once wide and strong
twisted and broken from years of tolling the bell
Legs that carried you up mountains
atrophied from the marathon of running away from life

The eyes haven't changed
Just the view of you

​

Bio: Rocco Marinelli currently resides in the Adirondacks of Upstate, NY. His work has been published by the NY Literary Magazine, Little CAB Press and RumbleFish Press.

The Behavioral Science of Everyday Objects


The chair holds


the story of Cinema Paradiso,
                 a seat for the history of cinema


the lovers, clutching the stile as if the
                 last straw on earth, before an orgasmic flood


the burning ass
                  above the flame of corporate deadline


the writer staring at the blank screen,
                   (a man in debt, out of excuses)


the security guard at the hour of sleep,
                  rocking to an invisible thread of poverty


the king on one side
                  and a thousand citizens on the other


the political leader on air,
                  suavely defending student killing


the sinner
                  at the sacrament of confession


the uneasiness of a rare visitor
                  at the old age home


the visa applicant
                 at the embassy table


the job applicant
                 at the interview table


the convict
                 at the interrogation table.


the ghost of a tree stump, where you
                 read your childhood comics


the Rockaby seat of Samuel Beckett
                 that oscillates between life and death


the throne of a superstar at the salon
                 for, say, a Robert Downey Jr. cut


the lonely man returning home
                 from his wife's funeral.


The chair reminds the bare torso of
                 a slave stooping for his master,


the way fragile clouds bank
                on the stillness of lakes to look weighty


trees engage in a seated protest, their
                green placards drowning in concrete,


their dead leaves settle on the earth,
                a gigantic coffin.



Bio: Aditya Shankar is an Indian poet, and translator. His poems and translations have appeared or is forthcoming in the Indian Literature, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Little Magazine, Canada Quarterly, The After Happy Hour Review, Terracotta Typewriter, The Four Quarters Magazine, Verbalart, Hudson View, CHEST, Chandrabhaga, Muse & Murmur, SAARC Anthology (Songs from the Sea Shore), and elsewhere. Books: After Seeing (2006), Party Poopers (2014), Tiny Judges Shall Arrive (Translation, Forthcoming). He lives in Bangalore, India.
​

Convalescent

​
Pavement seams
in garden brick
blister with moss
A handsome intruder
between blocks

Suspended
in yesterday’s rain
I recline under a blanket of lilacs
hold a hand mirror and a pin
drain cankers
lining my mouth

The ooze – body honey
I stick the point
in an island of moss
The release
something green
A burst of spore
tells me what to feel


​

Like Nowhere Else
              Provincetown 1985-2017


A thin, unblemished boy,
pretty space between lips, young
enough to curl under any
raised wing. Beard-burned mouth
sucking toward a swallow in Race Point nests.

So many profiles in dune,
visible from the sea.
Short hairs cling damp to the divot
of my chest –
I catch your unbuttoned eye
in blue harbor storm.

We gloss the liquid spelling of names,
language of sweat,
a razor burn beneath balls.
A first crust, imperfection on a neck.
Sandiest shine, fist of corn silk
separated from scalp.

On Commercial, flags flap
above metal beds,
blessings of the fleet. The red-spotted bill of a gull,
a forgotten cue as grey wing-feather
settles into ground.

Why does periwinkle shadow
climbing a grassy hill
off Cemetery Road smell of blue
cornflower, my youth
at a tilt? Beneath pine boards
silvered survivors stroke.

Tarred hands cling to pylon,
maintained bodies wrapped
in parchment, a repeat visitor walks
in latex pitch.    




Please

just let me bury
my face in the round
of your body
hum that
muffled sound
the woodwind
of your marrow
just let me
arch in the crossed
patterns of your hand

​​

Bio: Robert Carr is the author of "Amaranth" a chapbook published in 2016 by Indolent Books and a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominated poet. His poetry has appeared in Arts & Understanding Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, Radius Literary Magazine, Pretty Owl Poetry and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts and serves as an associate poetry editor for Indolent Books. He is also deputy director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Poetry, book reviews, and upcoming events can be found at robertcarr.org.

                                             Photo: Paul LF



       Unlocked, Jenn Vix's latest E.P. opens just like its namesake, a door that may have once barred entry now lies in splinters, musically and lyrically there is well worn muscle at work here, tried and tested experience translates into a sound, a voice that withstands all of the beatings a life undergoes, metaphorically, and whatever those are, here Vix puts her personal travails into universal mode, singing right out of the gate and with a guitar more flame thrower than instrument "I feel alive today, something good is taking me over, I feel joy again... it's springtime in my mind, I've been through a winter so unkind." If that's not poetry, what is?

Complicated Man is the next room we move into, a soulfully searing tale of a domineering man with "a plan to have you in his hand", vocally, here, Vix becomes equal parts Plath and Sexton, a woman who has had enough of men that are like wrecking balls, the song like a torch set to kindling that was always ready to burn, when the hand drops the truth is laid bare, the truth never sounded so good.

"I've got a lot of nerve, I love to tell the truth" Vix sings awash in 80's reminiscent, darkwave skin tingling electronica, reiterating again one of the central themes of this E.P., that truth, after so much silence, screams, and its voice doesn't need permission to do so. "I'm not here to shoot the shit, you should know I'm done with it."

Unlocked ends much like it begins, coming full circle, stepping over the strewn bones of so many barricades, Vix commands the spaces she navigates here purposefully and with caution to others; don't take on someone else's shit, don't stand in anyone's shadow, you are pure light, you are already a fire and you must burn lest you smolder.

Unlocked is available now via Bandcamp 

Keep up with Jenn Vix
Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Soundcloud | YouTube | Twitter | Instagram

Keep up with Shameless Promotion PR
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Soundcloud | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

NIGHTMARE 

She’s her daddy’s disgrace,
She’s down, she’s displaced.
Beaten by the sea and drowned by the dock.
Her lungs full of salt, her lips bleeding red,
She wonders what it’s like to eat the sand.

She’s mommy’s rock,
The spotted apple,
Rotting by the roots until,
Her core softens.

Caught in her own display,
She keeps her nightmare at bay.
Dancing in her own despair,
Tangled in her own hair.

The thorns dig at her shoulders,
Her spine made of stone.
She screams into the sadistic unknown,
Permanently dreary and just as forgotten.

Wishing she could live in nonchalance,
Unafraid of being the babe that no one loves.
Dancing her own despair,
Strangled by her darkness.

​


THE TUNNEL 

She escaped with an extinguished heart and a setting frown,
Her face colourless except for the purple in her eye.
Her daddy’s knuckles digging into her leathery skin,
Her ma’s daily newsletter tattooed in the back of her throat.
As she began her descent, she kept her head down,
Instead of back towards the pale, lit moat.

With a swag full of bricks, she trudged into the dark.
Inhaling second hand smoke until the source was all she wanted,
With each step down, her swag dented her spine,
Dragging her deeper, pushing her further from the light.

With a rough weightlessness, she fell to the gravel,
Grazing her face, bruising her closed eyes,
With a pulsing mind, her thoughts began to unravel,
Swirling until her final decision frazzled.

The reminder of past broken bones and burned ego,
The sore knees and empty chest,
With a relieving groan, she slipped off her backpack,
The last of her past flowing off her elbow.

With a grey libido and a vague sense,
She pushed herself up to face the blinding glare,
and with hesitation in every step,
she travelled towards the beckoning freedom from despair.  

​


PARADISE 

The lukewarm sunset cloaked her back,
Easing the weight and breaking tenderness,
Swirling the strands of hair,
Lifting the dark thoughts away into the air.

The salt flew from the waves,
Sticking to her skin like freckles,
Sinking into her caves,
Beginning to clean in smooth circles.

With an eager smile, she pinched her dress,
Dropping the fabric in the invasive sand,
The water tickled her feet,
Lapping at her palms as she leaped,
Sinking into its mouth, knee-deep,

With a lifting breath,
She took her last step,
Back into her robe,
And back to face her malevolent home.

​

Kyle Brown CC


Depression Diner

Always left on read,
                zero new texts
because I always leave my phone on ring,
                 Y do I do this to myself?

Contrary to popular belief,
                 Xanax is not easy to find when you need it.

Don’t tell anyone I said this, but if
                worry hard enough and it will come to you like
Ecstasy at a rave; 
                 very glassy cliché of club kids everywhere
find it on your friend & say “thank
                 U very much” if they ever come around again
guarantee, bet on it, just flat out hope,
                 think of something else besides the
hurt your liver could be feeling
         
   “Sundae, you need a sundae order a sundae instead”
I need to do that mom – trade alcohol for sugar,
                 raves for writing.
Justify that in your notebook again, this time to the right
                 quite like handwriting practice, just down the page & hook a little left.

K, I hear resets your brain –
                  press rewind and it’s back to 0:00 or 12:00    
like depression hasn’t been my fave for 10 years like
                 “oh my god, it started when I was 12, right before
my birthday didn’t it:?”
           
                  No, that’s still too fresh.

Not like any scar fades
                  (mom told me that & yes, it’s true)
“Omg it’s never going to stop – I’ll buy my therapist a new house”
                   like, how is that not true?
Personally, I don’t see a way out of this
                   (kicker is my doc agrees)
Quite the relationship I guess
                   (just kidding).

Real talk:        
                   I know depression is my best friend
She isn’t moving out.
                   Here to stay like:
too many receipts in the drawer or a
                   guarded jar full of quarters by the window.

U don’t want to know what this is like;
                   feels like drinking magma;
Volcano to the face
                   emptying out to you, searing off yr skin, yr everything.

Yet I
wonder what my friends are doing. They don’t get
                   depressed, they just take an
X & let it dissolve all slow & sublingual
                   could be something else,         
yet I need something,
                    but I could consider something
zesty or bitter.
                    Anything

madamepsychosis CC


 The Night Tom’s Heart Stopped

    The only thing I remember is me taking three Xanax and him falling to the dingy floor of the kitchen that almost always smells of fish food. And I started to laugh. I didn’t realize he suffered from a heart arrhythmia. In the morning, my father woke me up, dragged me from the vomit-bed I slept in and threatened to drug test me. I insisted I only drank too much. He accepted the faux-honesty and when we got home, he told me to go sleep off the haziness that followed me into the next day. So the night Tom’s heart stopped, I watched from the pockmarked couch in his living room and laughed at him, unmoving on the floor.
     Tom is only eighteen, three years younger than the rapper, Lil Peep. Lil Peep died of an Xanax overdose. I don’t know much, but I do know about Xanax. I know Lil Peep took Xanax cut with fentanyl. That he didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. At least half of the dealers where I’m from cut their Xanax with fentanyl, and you can’t tell. There’s no way to. Fentanyl may as well be heroin in pill form but I guess it’s more of a cousin than a counterpart. This is dangerous for the kids in my area. For some of us, Xanax is an escape. For some of us, Xanax will be what kills us.

   Where I’m from, Xanax abuse permeates teenage life. I remember the time I caught a conversation in the back of my ninth grade English class. Half-asleep, I turned and found two kids fumbling with pills in a small plastic baggie. They each took one out and slipped the riveted pills onto their tongues.
    Ninth grade was when I first tried Xanax, or any drug for that matter. I figured a pill prescribed for people with anxiety and depression couldn’t be harmful as say, cocaine. Jake convinced me to try it. He stole some from his mother. These days, Jake faces up to twenty years in prison after violating parole, now charged with the possession of marijuana and cocaine and destroying DNA evidence. Jake came into my life in the sixth grade and remained one of my only friends through middle school and the first two years of high school. On weekends, we stayed in his asbestos-room most of the day and played Call of Duty. One time, we spent twelve hours creating a city in Minecraft. It was one of those days when we decided to take Xanax. We sat on his floor mattress. We both took two bars, which was too much, and we ended up watching YouTube videos and repeatings, “Llamas in pajamas” for an hour before passing out.

    In the case of Lil Peep and my friends, unresolved mental illness factors heavily into peer pressure and the willingness to put one’s body at risk. Lil Peep’s music talks all about suicide and depression. Tom did a stint in a mental hospital. I did a stint in a mental hospital. Both of us tried to kill ourselves. Only an hour before he died, Lil Peep posted a picture, his tongue outstretched. Xanax sat on his tongue, the Xanax that killed him. The caption read, “When I die you’ll love me.”

    My father told me that if I ever did drugs, he would disown me. I’m not sure why I still partake. I know why my dad told me this.
The vicious reality of opioid addiction is that most people begin with addiction to a prescription opioid like OxyContin. When users can’t afford Oxy anymore, they turn to heroin. Every year, fifty thousand people die of overdose. Thirty thousand of those deaths are opioid overdoses. When I was in ninth grade, my brother became one of the thirty thousand. And my father doesn’t want that fate for me. I don’t think drugs are cool. Drugs make me feel good in a way I can’t. A way that I lack in my day-to-day life.
    Think about Egypt. The Nile River flooding, then receding, leaving behind fertile farm land. Think of addiction like that. Think of flooding as the action of taking pills. The receding as the depression that sets in post-comedown. Think of the cyclical nature. Think of the cyclical nature of dependency.

    My ex-girlfriend is from Staten Island. Staten Island is a hotbed of the opioid epidemic. My ex-girlfriend’s father is addicted to prescription painkillers. My ex-girlfriend’s father beat her mother unconscious with a detachable showerhead in a fit of withdrawal. My ex-girlfriend does coke. My ex-girlfriend tells me her friends from Staten Island have two things in common: they know someone who is addicted to an opioid and they have all tried to kill themselves at least once.

    When I was in the hospital that time, I met Harry. Harry talked with a thick upstate South Carolina accent and was the only other person in our unit over the age of sixteen. We talked about rap music, about girls and boys and how we got there. He told me about his addiction to Xanax and Ativan, how the drugs made him feel alive, how at this point he can’t really think without the drugs. He told me he wished it was all different. He told me he misses the time before the drugs.

    Tom always called people who did drugs, “Bartards,” a pejorative that combines “retard” and “bar.”. The relaxed state Xanax puts you in is a slow burn. Detachment sets in. It feels like nothing is quite there, like when you reach out to touch something, it feels all wrong. Smooth is rough. Rough is smooth. Loud is quiet. Nothing is really very loud. I had a friend named Molly who ingested her weight in the pill most weeks. I have a memory of her before all of that, when we played hide and go seek, even though we all felt too old for the game. We hid together behind a torn-up building, crouched close. I smelled the Cheetos on her breath, felt her short choppy breaths on my face. She leaned in closer and said, “I don’t want anything to change.”
    
    The last time I saw Jake, he was high, smoking a cigarette outside of his house. I could tell from his glassy eyes he was not entirely there. He offered me a cigarette and I took it, lighting it and taking a deep drag. We stood for a long time not thinking about much, kicking the dirt, small talk drifting through the air like the smoke of our cigarettes.

    I like to imagine what it would be like if we all never started doing drugs. Never ending up with the dark rings under our eyes and emaciated face the summer between our ninth and tenth grade year. What would it be like if the craving wasn’t burned into our minds, like when you look at the sun with your eyes closed, and before everything is back to what it used to be, blinking and blinking and blinking.

​

Bio: Jackson Dickert is a writer from Columbia, South Carolina.

Thomas Kristensen CC



For My Goddaughter

perhaps you must be a butterfly,
knowing darkness before your
flight.
the damp unfurling of your wings,
in the warm light of a new dawn.

we thought you were flying,
no one saw this coming.

you will be stronger for the wait,
brighter through the flame you thought might
burn.
no one can singe you now, what might have
dimmed you makes you shine.

no one saw it coming,
you have wisdom now

gained through pain and searing, not a moth
drawn to every light form with no 
guide.
most glorious of colors in flight,
you gaze at you with newborn awe.

no one saw this coming,
that you fly higher than before


​
Bio: Chrissie Morris Brady lives next to the sea on the south coast of England. She lived in southern California for several years, where she gained her degree in Psychology and worked with recovering addicts. Chrissie has been published by Dead Snakes, Scarlet Review, Dissident Voice, Mad Swirl, Writing For Peace and other poetry publications. She also blogs about her declining health. Chrissie lives with her teenage daughter.

Too Frail to Mock

Reality is too frail
to mock at this hour.

Our feelings do not run strong or long enough.
We are at the mercy of a gigantic echo.

The word Already rings throughout the echo.
It opens sentences and closes whole worlds.

In our one moment in the sanctum,
we gather our voice and call out:

“Wait, we think we’ve found the answer:
It’s either the Irish Blessing Cross or own urine.”

Like that, the little you
screws things up for the big you.

​


The Last Sounds

The nearby men discuss alternatives to lotto.

Venus got a brand new flytrap.

They are shouting.

I may not puke.

But I remember how.

I wish I were that guy over there.

He doesn’t look too happy.

But he’s all the way over there.

​
​
Bio: Colin Dodds is a writer. His work has appeared in more than 250 publications, been anthologized, nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, and praised by luminaries including Norman Mailer and David Berman. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. See more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

Tristan Loper CC


Advice for Tiffany

1. Stand here; hold this sign; try not to get hit by a truck. $15/hour.
2. Why are you shaving your legs? Don’t shave your legs.
3. You should be trying to find a guy like Noah; that’s the type who will be rich
some day. Get in on the ground floor.
4. And then if this poetry gig doesn’t pay off, you can always fall back on your
education degree.
5. Nobody likes an angry woman, Tiffany. Nobody.
6. You’ll see, I’ll love you even more if you say yes to this.
7. You’re going to have to keep your opinion to yourself. Take it to the grave,
maybe.
8. Steel your heart.
9. The trees dance in the high wind, tossing their leaves like glam rockers agitate
their brain tissue for some kind of sensory solace in a season of turbulence.
Hold still. Keep your neck straight. Listen to the signals from your heart. Go
toward the light whatever its source. Do it. Do it now.
10. And then we can all go to the lake together, like we used to.




My Mother is a Tardigrade

She can withstand such temperatures, pressures, radiations, go without food or water
for more than thirty years, then rehydrate, forage, reproduce.

Though not extremophilic, she may as well be. She hangs on. She is still friends with her best friend from high school, with people I consider problematic, people I would have given up on, people I have.

My mother has survived six pregnancies, four live births, two ungrateful daughters who moved far away to live their own lives.

She is directed ventrolaterally, while her hind legs are used primarily for grasping the substrate.
Her rhabdomeric pigment-cup eyes are blue, but one has a brown spot on its edge.

Her sensory bristles are sensitive, artificially curled. She and her sisters wish they were parthogenic. Eggs left inside her shed cuticle attach to nearby moss. Her young are born with their full complement of cells; then by hypertrophy, each cell enlarges. She has molted now at least eleven times.

My mother survived despite her children’s colic, croup, crankiness, cruelty even unto laughing at the ball on the end of her nose, her not reading French, her Sears Roebuck modeling pose.

My mother is a tardigrade; she has been reported in hot springs, at the top of the Himalayas, under layers of solid ice, in ocean sediments, at the bottom of bogs. She can suspend her metabolism, entering a state of crytobiosis. Due to a unique disordered protein which replaces water in her cells, she adopts a glassy vitrification. She becomes a tun.

My mother has survived hate mail handed to her at a dinner party she was hosting, from her oldest daughter and quietest critic.

Even in outer space, after exposure to a hard vacuum, my mother can be revived.
Earth’s hardiest animal, tardigrade, moss piglet, kleiner Wasserbär.

My mother is a tardigrade, and I am my mother’s daughter.




Titles without Poems: A Portmanteau

Confessions of a Secondhand Smoker
Forensic Listening for Beginners
Where I Went On My Last Masturdate
On Finding Out Angelina Jolie Had An Elective Double Mastectomy
The Year of Having No Opinion
Wildly Gesticulating Monkey Arms
Monetize This!
Wet Sonnet Contest
Battered to Death by Anecdote
Elegy for Espresso
How To Deal With Your Pleonexia
On Being a Stereotype Threat
It’s a Bug for You, A Feature for Me
You Want Me to Have Sympathy for the Overdog
Your Borborygmus Keeps Me Up At Night
Who’s Loading the Label Gun?
What I’m Supposed to Be Ashamed Of, But I’m Not
Sorry, But Your Soul is Substandard
Things About You I Will Not Miss
You Are the Anti-Rapist
I Can Only Cry When No One’s Watching
My Arms Gone Stiff Holding Myself Away from Your Unassuageable Unhappiness
On the Map of Hurt Feelings You Are Portugal


​
Bio: Originally from Minnesota, Julie Hart has lived in London, Zurich and Tokyo and now in Brooklyn Heights. Her work can be found in PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology and at juliehartwrites.com. She is a founder with Mirielle Clifford and Emily Blair of the poetry collective Sweet Action.