Ernesto De Quesada CC


​The Moments Between

We hold each other up 
in the darkness
when it threatens to collapse 
on us, an endless ocean pressing 
against the hull 
of a foundering submarine,
earth hovering in Atlas’s impossibly 
strong arms.

We spin across our 
universe as forces known but 
invisible pull us a hundred ways 
at once and we can do 
nothing but wave helplessly 
as we pass beyond each other's 
orbits, knowing our celestial 
paths will cross again soon 
in the frenzy of daily life.

Our days seem constructed of tension 
and hustle but there are pockets 
of stillness that sit 
in the moments between,
and when we are careful 
and quiet, these moments 
raise tiny heads and peek out 
from between breakfast eaten 
standing up and a thousand 
unread emails and demands 
of be here, now, but also there,
ten minutes ago.

If we give them time 
and space to breathe and be, 
nourish them and speak of their 
importance,
they will grow and spread, 
maple seeds fluttering through our
turbulent days
and we will have more 
of these moments 
between everything else 
to regard each other's preciousness,
and draw the strength we need 
to play Atlas to each other 
in the dark hours.

    ​  Ernesto De Quesada CC


​
My Dark Man

my dark man
burrows beneath these pages
like onyx in white coal
in my 20's I was a shaman
and he was just common
in my 30's he was welder and impresario
I was a curandero in the barrio
in my 40's we faced off
where the tundra meets the settlements
and shook hands
nothing needed to be said
so we talked about New York sports teams
how they're earnest but not hungry
then we stepped into each other
one for the ages
now I don't have to lug around
a canteen of flame retardant
and he doesn't have to worry
about pretending to be someone
he's not.


​
Ravi Singh (nee Neil Hackman) studied with Ted Berrigan and was editor of Out There Magazine in Chicago in the 70’s. He is Author of the novel Ivar & Freddie vs. the Lizards (White Lion Press 2003). Most recently he was published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and is Author (with Ana Brett) of The Kundalini Yoga Book - Life in the Vast Lane (raviana productions 2018).

​Real Life Begins When You Read My Palm by Singing a Song
 
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
 
-Emily Dickinson
 
 
I.
It’s not as if
you, singing so thrillingly, gesture to me
 
with your language,
but could you, in your trilling,
refer to me
                               sweetly?  
 
I need a one-to-one
correspondence, need to be signified
by your signifiers.
I need “two,” as uttered by you--
speaking for yourself, as yourself--
to mean both my hands, both my lifelines.
It’s been a long life,
 
                              long day.
 
II.
How hopeless is this scenario? You and I
own hope chests
in which we once-- each--
placed a feather.
 
Your lyrics hail them as flight feathers,
interpellate a certain shape
under our sun.
 
And how possible?
My feather and your feather
were once attached
to the same winged creature.
 
III.
A culling of evidence
calls for gliding flight
into the hopelessly possible:
 
my hand and your imagined hand
collaborating to make
a dark bird shape, proof of calm.
 
Further proof: our flight feathers
as each others’ ghosts, commiserating
in the cool of a lately betrothed lyrical shadow.
 
IV.
Your song-- my mind--
finds all the twins in me,
finds all of my asymmetry.
 
The blessed matching trousseaus of the universe
can then emerge
from behind each kindred solar plexus,
 
                               from beyond our kindred sun.
 
And self-evidence becomes a music box
turned upside-inside-down-out, which is my hope-filled chest
singing along with your Top 40 hit about palmistry, which becomes, evidently,
 
a DIY sundial kit
made entirely of feathers.
 
V.
Can the treasures in my chest fly? How fast?
 
Should I breathe?
 
I check the lyrics moving at the speed of sound-language, pushing the sun to a nadir,
then a zenith.

                I check the lyrics
as though you were writing me a letter, as though I had folded and saved the letter,
as though the letter
                               were buried flying treasure.
​
VI.
Your words don’t tell the story-- yet--
of my hope chest
duct-taped shut
for this move.  I didn’t need to pack
since I had never unpacked.
 
A life of flapping flight--
heretofore, no breaks for gliding--
facilitates the hasty and permanent storage
of that which reminds me
                                                              love is love.
 
Love refers to a feeling. That referent
is the feeling-destination
I may reach by following
an arrow of shadow, a lined palm:
a scolded, flapping hope,
enfolded,
                              destined for meaning.
 
VII.
If I have sweet missives to myself set aside,
I don’t remember.
What if I cannot bear my own kindnesses?
I would rather hear a crooning beloved
 
                                                             referring to me.
           
My lungfuls could never lift your lyrics skyward, nor could my cardboard box
ever prepare me for marriage.
 
Yet I hear meaning proposing marriage to language
 
in between your verses,
could unpack my breath any time.
 
VIII.
The search for my inhalations
never brings more clarity than that offered by the shadow

the feather casts at noon
 
when the feather stands tall
 
and tells time
               and tells time in the last verse.
 
In the last verse
you sing about a palm reader.
 
I don’t need my palm read.
I need it held.
 
Your song tells me,
 
                             the sundial tells me.
 
I was born on a Thursday.
 
Today is Thursday.




On Rebirth as a Palindrome: A Sullen Utopian Turns Twenty-Four/Forty-Two

I wasn’t hiding in that hospital
the morning I became
a circuit (edifice) (baby) again.
I yelled, circulated. In plain sight, I slept in a tray.
 
I’m a year-more built up
or torn down, cascading toward adulthood
or middle age,
 
constructed like a tent
under the tablecloth.
 
A circuit is a circuit is an edifice/baby
but the norm-seeking hordes can hope:
this circuit will be a good girl.
 
                              A woman but a girl,
 
keeping house in a tent
prone to cascading collapse at any time.
 
A girl but a woman.
 
I was born to be a flow, born to be connected, to grow taller, stronger.
 
Yet I became a resistor, a riddle:
unmarried, childless, infantilized.
 
No one achieves insight by studying me, though I may be
society’s illustration of how not to conduct oneself,
how not to conduct electricity.
 
I prevent the flow of current,
refuse to create
                               more humans to feed.

From the outside, this looks like spite. 
 
Sometimes, a spiteful woman
just survives under a table, nothing fancy.
No one reaches toward me. To be fair, no one can find me.
 
I don’t know if I would say that I scar
as I wait for the collapse,
but there is plenty of tissue
to re-grow. A riddle-woman becomes more puzzling,
vulnerable, hungry. Her (my) body takes the brunt of the ohmic heating.
 
In my makeshift shelter, I become a palindrome, if slowly.
 
My new body reads backwards and forwards,
as old and young.
 
I’ll be listening to the dinner conversation
for clues about when I might make a run for it,
 
or when resistance to my existence
might be overcome.

I’ll be watching all the feet.

      perfect day dream CC



​Still Life

Morning and the clocks have changed
and our sons talk apocalyptic - which way
would you pick to die? The kitchen table
invaded by monsters. Things are noisy
and it’s still not dawn. Outside birds awake
and I try to name them: wren and robin,
cardinal and finch, all early morning flit
and chatter. I grew up in quieter houses -
only the din of tv, the humming Santa Anna,
suppers with vegetables steamed of sound.
I crunched ice between my teeth instead
when I wanted something loud. What
I controlled then the same as what
I control now    - nothing -
                and we’re late for school
as always, my keys rattling in the lock.
In the car, there’s an argument: zombies
or daggers. I pick falling houses, the wicked
witch crushed under the foundation.




Inheritance

In the new country, my grandmother
and her sisters carried their heads
like anchors, woven canisters meant
for immeasurable grain. One married
a different man for every decade of her life.
One’s brain got erased by waves. One
wore a doll strapped to her chest for years
and years like a baby. My grandmother
planted flowers instead: zinnias and azaleas,
white magnolias snipped from trees.
She called them out by color, standing
in her nightgown in the daylight, her hands
perched like birds on her round hips.
She was sturdy in those moments,
a fat statue on her Florida porch.
But she was no different than the rest
of them: crazy women raising crazier
daughters, their Ukrainian names dropped
at the border. In college, I visited an exhibit
on genocide and cried like a baby. Where
does crazy come from? For years,
my grandmother’s parents grew food
they couldn’t eat. Rationing, they called it.
Punishment. My mother’s sister beat her
when she went crazy. My mother swallowed
too many pills when she decided she didn’t
want to live. I take Zoloft in the morning.
I drink too much beer.  At the exhibit
there were pictures: bodies and bodies
and bodies that couldn’t escape.




Air Boss

Those weekends you wore a fancy suit,
your uniform traded for civilian clothes

I didn’t recognize - though you woke early still
to polish your shoes as if on instinct.

I would get up with you those mornings
to sit in the garage as you ironed your jacket,

one hand smoothing out the creases,
the other smoking cigarette after cigarette

in the hazy morning light. Your job - they called
you Air Boss as if anyone could control air -

was to tell the show planes when and where
to land, to communicate through headsets

and hand gestures with the pilots up in the air.  
I thought you were a magician then, orchestrating

tricks between layers of atmosphere. But
I skipped the last show you directed -

by then you’d showed me the den of screens
where you watched the blinking curlicues

of the planes. I knew then there was no
magic to you. The trick was hollow

like a log. The weekend of your last show
I stayed home alone instead, pacing

the empty halls like a bird above its prey,
like a rescue plane circling tragedy.




Blueprint

In my spare time, I make a house
of horrors, charge admission, spruce
it up with cobwebs, replicate the spider
that once bit me on the torso while I used
the spare bathroom in the hall. Red lines
spread out from the center, symmetrical
inversions like a child’s painting of a flower.
In the bedrooms, I put in torture chambers,
BDSM whips and chains holding missing limbs
and fingers. Loudspeakers play the blues,
a hall of mirrors nearby to reflect the sadness -
circus ones where you always look fat.
In the main bath, a mermaid swims in a tank
of blood water. In the dining room, there’s nothing
but onions and sludge. The coffeemaker
in the kitchen is broken - though the red light
still turns on to confuse you. Outside, you find
yourself naked in front of all your friends.
Someone videos you with your tits out
and whispers they’re no good anyway.
If you try hard enough, it could just be a dream -
dead soldiers floating behind the house
on hologram horses. There’s a pill you could
take to make yourself smaller. The exit
is in the corner.  On the blueprint,
I highlight it in yellow, a point of egress
for those who still believe in escape.




Cycles

At the end of each summer, the myrtles
in our yard shed their bark in rough curlicues
the way snakes lose their skin upon growing.
The ringlets get lost in the moss beneath them,
pools of useless tendrils. No one’s ready yet
for raking - the leaves are green, the air
still incessant and wet - and so for months
they sit like lost things waiting for burial.
Is August the month for grief? It’s too hot
to wear tights with this dress. Our myrtles
flower only where sun has touched them
directly, the undersides baring no flowers
and by September one or two less layers
of bark. When I die, I want top shelf liquor.
I want French songs. I want someone
to call me crazy. When we return home,
the shedding is almost complete, the flowers
done blooming, the bark disappeared into
the ground like wavy lines of yarn in carpet.
I still know nothing about plant life, am still
confused about things like the life cycles
of frogs or how bees take pollen and make
honey. When my children ask why the bark
peels, when they take the molting skin between
their fingers like batons, the only answers
I have are ones I make up on the spot.

​

     tubb CC


​Malahat


The Malahat was gravel once
no guard rails
people took a change of tire
and a good jack and a picnic lunch
and mother covered her eyes
on the steep curves
soft shoulders
did not enjoy the view
of Brentwood Bay
just wanted to get there
winding back down
to sea level safely
having passed the ordeal
of the lofty Malahat
where people flew annually 
just near the summit
to their deaths
in old Fords.

​

     tubb CC



IN PLACE OF MY MOUTH, A ROADSIDE CROSS

The one that replaced the flares at the accident scene
where you wrapped your pickup truck around a tree
when you were so heavy with sleep that you ghosted

across the lanes and out of my life.

My mouth tries to form the letters of your name,
but your birth stone catches in my throat, keeps me quiet
as a funeral—every day is the February you went away.

I see you walking home through the corn fields
with red clay on your palms from digging up
the cedar box I used to bury our wedding rings.

Just like Jesus returning to the disciples,
you ask me to touch the holes in your hands,
proving you are my real savior in the desert of grief.

Out in the pasture where you proposed, I camp
under the tree where we carved our vows into the bark,
and use the starlight to find the scars of those words

in the hollow where only our hands could reach.
We promised to find a cure for so much pain.

I’m calling for your help, but all I can see are hand painted
letters crawling up this white cross. I’m calling for your help,
but all I have are prayer candles with burned out wicks.

I’m not ready to read your obituary—I swear I still see
a cloud of dust as you pull into our gravel driveway
in your truck, stepping out of a halo of Marlboro smoke,

walking up to me in the flannel shirt I bought you.
I still feel you brushing the hair behind my ear,
and the shape of your goodnight kiss on my cheek.

I’m calling for your help; I need your love
in this desolate country where I see your shadow
flicker in the windows of your workshop, but all the lights

are off and spiders boarded up the door—everything
here was made by your hands and there aren’t instructions
on how to use these contraptions without you.

They call me a widow, but all I can say is your name
written on the cards in front of the cross, and our wedding
date in the old red barn in front of those witnesses.

My mouth is a memorial—you’re alive in the museum
behind my lips. I’m calling for your help, please send a sign
other than the omen of this roadside cross.

Please tell them the flowers by the highway
are from our wedding— I don’t know who to trust.

Say you will take off your Sunday best and return to me.
Skinny dip in the pond with me. Rise again from your coffin,
and walk into that water as you hold my hand.

I’m calling for your help—please don’t leave like a messiah
and make me worship at the altar of your disappearance.
Come home to me so we can keep our vows.

​

     /Ana/ CC



Inside a Raspberry

for seventy years / we slept / inside a raspberry / feet plaited together / warm as dog breath / we
collected our snorings / built a child / she slept between us / dreaming of a barn / a scarlet
sturgeon / swimming in the air / the walls of the raspberry / tiny rubies / when I scream in the car
/ at the wallet I’ve forgotten / at the hands of the body / that obeyed the forgetting / when I tear
the small hairs / out of my heart / & braid a rope / & make a loop / I try to remember / what
hasn’t happened yet / with my brain / which is shaped like a raspberry / or an animal / that has
washed up on shore / & is small / & is god / & is shivering 


​

     Dan Zen CC



coins of the year

chrysoprase
sky, my hand drops
all its leaves, light
crumbles into grass
and pieces, each face equals
its shadow in a season
dug up, in a season with
my mother on it, someone
fixes a box of baby teeth and
somewhere behind the now-blue
sky the moon waits to continue
its story all over the
bathroom sink, I’d give any
finger to hear it
though it is obvious
that Babel has been over
for so long, in a bedroom
with a window the color
of my life a girl relays
to her dying grandmother how
she counts the coins
of the year, which metals
are which
twilights, in which piggy
bank winter stashes
pennies, how expensive January’s
lights are but Orpheus
interrupts in his slippers
he made cry, wind
spreads dark and is lost
in dark, You must go
where I cannot, though he
still doesn’t realize I
have never left
the underworld, instead
I left my childhood
room, now painted empty
and playground and when                                             
I turn down that street I
hear nothing, voice
hiding in a depth
not mine, I am
but not the night closed
over the trash can
lid, what slipped there
is still falling under a few
stars, falling down
through all the words
for remorse

​
​
Lindsey Warren is a recent graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program.  She has been published in The Fox Chase Review, Broadkill Review, Icarus Down, Rubbertop Review, Marathon Review, GASHER Journal, Josephine Quarterly and Hobart.  Lindsey is the recipient of a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship and has been a finalist for the Delaware Literary Connection Prize and the Joy Harjo Prize.  She splits her time between Ithaca, New York and Newark, Delaware.

     tubb Flickr CC


River Heroin

I am here as they pull out a woman, stiff and quiet as a doll, from the river. I stand rather rigid
myself, wondering. Of her rigor mortis and of the fish. The selfish still swim, even though our
town has no rivers, but we do have so much sorrow in our wake.  

Later, I walk into small church never far away, one where she and I had sung as children. I swim
up silent shiny aisle, under painted surface of low heavens. In nearing distance, the tabernacle,
far as the past. Diminishing emptiness in between, except for the coffin.

At end of her funeral, flowing outside, up to sky I hum to her a temporary goodbye. She had died
in a back alley from some insidious disease. And even now I am begging for sunlight of the river.
I want to toss my guilt toward that water and close my eyes. I want to explode. Let it be a hit
somewhere with a splash, proving life still exists, still has impact beyond the sting. I want it to
pinpoint where heaven is, something I may never be divine enough to do, and I open my eyes
hoping to see forever the ripples.

What I see, and what I hear speak behind me. Church bells, and the heels of her hearse crackle
the street as she quietly steps away. I hear her turn from the river, and so I do my best to follow.




Procession

Our lives in the city are finite, and our sufferings do end. So much disappears or just goes back to
clay. This latest funeral lines the street and makes its way. Cars follow through the red lights.
Observers, we turn and wait our greens.

Seems people brake with age quicker than their brick face estates. And all the while, the hardness
of the city returns to the softness of a backyard garden, the one we are on our way home to, as
we fill the hallowed ground. There, from all the holes the flowers arise and need tending, the
loves need mending, and the hearts need sowing, as if each is tender as the amaryllis, and yet
somehow even more enduring.

Sometimes it takes the deadness of a red light for the seed’s skin to break apart and reveal all that
streams from what was thought to be just emptiness.

​
​
Joe Bisicchia writes of our shared dynamic. An Honorable Mention recipient for the Fernando Rielo XXXII World Prize for Mystical Poetry, his works have appeared in numerous publications including Anti-Heroin Chic. His website is www.JoeBisicchia.com.

First time I cut myself

With a small broken shard
Edges trenchant
I sat on the gravy stained sofa
Next to the bed--
He had lurched me on.
Rubbing sweaty fingers on the flat--
The shard prick little.
His unforgiving hands in eyes-
Fingers run faster.
Rubbing turn to stubbing.
His hands on my breathing corpse--
Paralysed
Rib cage shook, once.
Lungs burned
Eyes blackened
Side of cheeks hardened.
Life went away,
Tingles danced on nose,
River in irises stood cold and unmoving.
Memory held--
Hands still hitting.
My Rains stop listening--
They embrace my eyes.
Flowed uncontrollably.
Shards now kept between the fingers and wrist.
Shards of broken heart pained--
I was fourteen
And he had given me death--
For Three minutes
My corpse got beaten still
Breath of life clouded got out of my body.

The shard edges
Touched the ache too
His memory in mind pained harder.
Blood gushed,
Screams broke out through--
My rains.




Prisoner

I am a prisoner in my own head--
the monsters who locked me inside are my own kin.
The world outside my prison is unpredictable and petrifying--
so impeccably my monsters hold me hostage,
never leaving me out of their sight,
never letting me back to my free ground.
It's been a while since I've touched the trees,
suspired the unblemished air,
drank the exuberant water--
I think I love it here.



​Agampreet Kalra is a writer and poetess from India. Her life revolves around writing, reading, staying up late, talking to her dog and drinking coffee. She write poems, blogs and short stories and some of her work has been published in Moonchild Magazine and Forthcoming will be published in  An Elephant Never and The YANYR anthology of The Rhythms and Bone Lit Mag. She’s a blog contributor to Rhythms and Bones, Staff Writer for WeRedefy and Content Developer for Delhi Poetry Slam.