11/7/2024 Poetry by Kristy Snedden Ian Sane CC
I Am Sick I am sick with bitter bile. Crouching is my second nature. Where is the corner behind my desk? In my hand bones are memories of the mad flight to the New World and the wars that followed. My fingers shiver over land we stole. A cannon ball rolls across the field until it explodes the blue heron fishing the creek but the people on the hill are watching letters in the ticker symbols on their screens or counting followers while they wait for Door Dash. I can’t find a prayer. Crouching is my second nature. I am sick with bitter bile. Kristy Snedden (she/her) has been a trauma psychotherapist for forty-plus years and writing poetry since 2020. Her work received her an Honorable Mention in the 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recent recipient of the Small Orange Press Emerging Woman Poet prize. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in various print and electronic journals and anthologies, including Contemporary Verse 2, storySouth, Door Is A Jar, Pensive, Anti-Heroin Chic, Power of the Pause Anthology, Green Ink Poetry, and Snapdragon. In her free time, she loves hiking in the Appalachian Mountains near her home in Georgia or hanging out with her husband listening to their dogs tell tall tales. 8/1/2024 Editor's Remarks Joseph Gage CC
There are so few things I look forward to as much as I do sitting down to write these editorials, which are but all the emotions kicked up in me by all of the incredible and aching soul-work that you all share with us each season. Usually I have a pretty good idea of what it is that I want to say here, but all of my words seem to have moved up ahead of me quite a bit and I have lost sight of them. They'll return when they're ready, I know. So let me just say, in the absence of my own, that I am so grateful to have found yours. There are some things we could never say to anyone before, there are some things we could never even say to ourselves. It helps to feel that there are places where we can say the hard things. Artists aren't always known for keeping the circle warm and open. That could be said for any of us though, in any configuration. We try hard to keep our ear to the track running through the other, but we get in our own way a lot too, lose hold the thread, the muscle and music of the moment. Hopefully returning, more often than not, to warmth and to opening. Home base. Reading the work that you each share helps me immensely. It helps me pay more emotional-attention, listen-deep and wide, and hold more space for all the things that I'm not holding nearly enough space for. Often enough I'll be going through something painful that a submission will hold an answer to, or a soft metaphorical-shoulder to lean upon. Or someone shares with me that they too found an answer or a kind shoulder in our pages here. Whatever else I am in lessens in intensity when I turn to this work, to this place. I am grateful. I am awed. I am but such a small part of all this. Thank you all for making this place a real home, among the many that we must find and make for ourselves and each other along the way. We are here, always, for soul and heart, and there is so much of it in this issue. And pain. So much pain. There's a line I read recently of Winnicott's that I love: "If we have these problems, we shouldn't rush too quickly to try and solve them. It's better to see if we can try and work with the problems we have." Joyce Carol Oates once said that people ask the wrong question when they ask her "how" she is able to write so many books. They almost never, she said, ask me "why". Stories, for Oates, are the way she works out (and with) her problems. Is that not the truest thing? We create to better partner with our problems, digest hurt, hold our losses close, move through old rooms, into open fields, into a bitterly beautiful half-light. Mostly we don't know what we're doing but that we are doing it because we have to. Not just because we need it, but because others need it too. There's no choice. It is that serious, that necessary. It's been such a hard, dark year. Nothing certain, nothing safe. You might think soul doesn't stand a chance in this long dark night of a world, but I must tell you it does, it does. As you move through this issue I think you'll see a little of what I see: such open field brimming with sadness and song, muscle and soul, laughter and light. Mostly, I hope that you'll feel less alone in whatever heaviness you're feeling these days. That all these poems and stories will ring the bell of bells for you. Until we meet again, friends. Thank you for these words. For this very special, warm, and open place that you all have made into what it is because of who you are. A place where soul can shine, and truth and heart stand a fighting chance of beating back the dark. In service and gratitude, James Diaz Founding Editor Anti-Heroin Chic 8/1/2024 Poetry by Maria Giesbrecht Henry Söderlund CC
How to find yourself After Isabelle Correa Listen to the sound of a watermelon cracking as it grows. Find a hole in your brain the size of your heart. Take a walk. Test the theory that it hurts to explore. Turn off your TV like it’s a faucet. The soul is full. Wear your first heart- break like a g-string. Show it off. Never return a library book you masturbated to. Pay the replacement fee. Thank the clerk and get the hell out of there. Get the hell out of there. This morning, I wake up and play with my feminine like a match. The resting bitch face, the stench of morning breath, somehow disappears once my underwear catches fire. We are all godly, I think, until our feet touch floors, our mouths creak open like tombs, our faith, first strong like black, waters down to grey by noon. There is no rest for the human in us. So take a little time, make a little fire. I don’t do Father’s Day cards. I do Father’s Day thoughts. It’s kind of like wishing someone a good life and then not caring if they’re fucked in the head like a chicken on a farm. But, he might only be one feather away from flying, I think, one year away from dying, so I cough up compassion, bow my head and wish him well. And it’s not nothing. Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose writings explore her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her work has previously been published in Contemporary Verse 2, Talon Review, and is forthcoming in Queen's Quarterly. She is the runner-up for the 2022 Eden Mills Poetry Contest and a graduate of the post-graduate Creative Writing program at Humber College. Maria is the founder and host of the writing table, Gather, and spends her days nurturing creative folks to write urgently and unafraid. mariagiesbrecht.com 8/1/2024 Poetry by Natalie Eleanor Patterson Justine M CC
Portrait of the Body with Blood Rising Even now remnants of that life settle like evidence on the ash field of my body: dog hair on the breast of my blouse gray cascade of fur from my anemic throat hunger like a sheet that can’t be lifted rusted with a mottled stain Even now there is longing that violet contusion of desire pressed red in the mirror your little finger snaking inside me like a hollow knife & bruising my hard blood into softness cutting a little slit in my belly & licking your tongue to the eggs in bright clusters & rising from between my legs like a bloody sun over the halflit field your teeth stained a red so close to black My Baby My baby wears all black says that we both die inside of every dream he has —Nicole Dollanganger My baby poses with a semi-automatic calls me baby but not like that My baby drives drunk on the third date my eyes fixed on the road as if it would steady her My baby in the chemical solvent of morning rising & falling like a dirty sheet over our unmade bed The smell of her underarms sharp & beautiful & terrifying like the bile that lingers in my mouth My baby in my dream lifts a semi truck & tosses it at me like it’s nothing Hand on my neck like a dull blade thick with rust & fur I tucked away my tremble to make peace with my baby My baby says you make me feel like a child molester My baby says I don’t have that gun anymore Violence never touched me but it lived with us in her history in the animals too waking in the acid dawn with a dog- bruise on my breast I hate you like a gin baby hates its mother which is to say I love you & I wish you dead My baby says I’ll take care of you My baby says I look at you & almost see a child A Red Bruise Shaped Like a Bird after a line by Emily Skaja In our closest moments the wall between us only ever thinned to a membrane the waxwing casing of your stomach lining red light shining through like a bruise In the topography of Real Life we’re always eating breakfast & when I sleep I’m never not dreaming the phantasm of your face a right version of you In our closest moments my hair crumpled like wet Kleenex sickness gathered like frost on a windowpane dirt gathered like sickness under your fingernails In the view from here I’m drawing lines around everything that’s fallen out of the story Who was it that said the way we are is the way we love? In a memory of Real Life or a dream an injured rabbit frees itself from the trap only by luring another animal in to take its place among the torn-up trees Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, CALYX, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press and a PhD student in poetry. Find her at poetnatalie.com. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Alixa Brobbey Henry Söderlund CC
Duck, NC Because I love you: mascara. Blush. Cotton-swished ankles. The beach after sunrise. That first beer can, then cap after bottle cap. You want to sift this sandy stretch before time’s marching swallows her. So I am shoving plastic disks into this blue helium star we rescued, this morning’s makeshift garbage bag. Before I knew to love, I had to learn to love, my brown eyes blinking from my sister’s face. And then to teach her to love, ply her with milky pull tabs, bejewel her with them, call them kindness rings. Girlhood wonder: how she still craved my rings after she knew I made them up, like crusted sweets, like poems, like hand clapping games. We were so small, and those mornings so big: burnt toast & spilled milk. And now those days swallowed by so many bottles of milk, new silvery spoons, tiled counters, hobbled stools. All that’s left: this bottle cap damp in my hand, how it binds me to those plastic tabs, and now, binds me to your boyhood beach, and to you. Alixa Brobbey spent portions of her childhood in The Netherlands and Ghana. She has a B.A. in English and J.D. from Brigham Young University, where she won the Ethel Lowry Handley Poetry Prize in 2020. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in Rattle, Brittle Paper, Weber—The Contemporary West, Inscape Journal, The Albion Review, The Susquehanna Review, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Eartha Davis jxj CC
cuimhnich ormsa the body as a fleshed forever. the body as a bloated tide, eddying into some porcelain hope. the heart as a temple. the heart as a church where our lost loves still pray. loss as a mountain-sized universe. loss as a dangling tear. birds as orbiting music. birds as shards of love letters. (birds & I, remembering…) 's e abhainn an cridhe The heart / knows infinite ways / to describe a / river / when it holds / a hand / it holds / a people / the gentle bleating / of a bird’s / birth / we think / (softly) /of bodies / rewriting themselves / melting in / want / an orchard / surrendering its / pulse / plucking forests from / naked / courage / & we think / (yes) / that self is / other / that tree is / other / an embryo / of a distant / kind / remember: doves / donate feathers / so they can nurse / a planet / palms / shed holding / so they can pillow with / offering / a drizzle of / worship / & remember: / go in / in / in / in / let heart / seek the curvature of / her first / chest -- Eartha is a woman of Ngāpuhi heritage living on Wurundjeri land. She placed second in the 2022 Woorilla Poetry Prize Youth Section, was nominated for The Best of the Net Award in 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Creative Writing New Zealand’s Short Story Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology, Wildness, Cordite, Rabbit, takahē, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Baby Teeth Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Circular Publishing, Revolute, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, and ELJ Editions, among others. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Jessica Manack Flickr CC
WHAT I’D TELL YOU IF I COULD I wish I could name what happened so I could bury it now that it’s dead. I wish I’d imprinted on anyone else. All I know is that when my body awoke, you were there. The sun illuminating only us. Why do people always ask about our first kisses? The ones that were forced on us, that we gave to the undeserving? I’d rather be asked about my last kiss, the one I meant, the one I was good at, fingers threading so it didn’t have to end. Girls are little spiders, working the fibers, weaving, joining. I remember you telling me about the God’s Eyes you’d make at summer camp. The way they were supposed to remind you that God was always watching, whatever you did. The way you learned the world was full of temptations you needed to avoid. The way you said, whatever there is to taste, get out of my way, I have been put here to taste it. I LOVE YOU Under every bridge is a secret museum, graffiti ghosts of each kid who first found courage there, first felt the urge to impress someone, trying out the wobbly songs of themselves, SUMAC and MFONE and RAEL*S, all those little whorls and squiggles like the first steps of toddlers, sooty petroglyphs showing them grow sure of their footing. Without asserting ourselves in words, do we even exist? Did I exist? I was so tired I wasn’t sure. And when you looked at me you could see it, how tired I was of how tired I was making myself, and you said, Honey. Not Sweetie or Dear, but “Honey. You just need to go for a long walk.” No one ever told me to do anything good for me. People blew smoke in my face, offered me beers or pills, sandwiches of French fries piled high on hunks of butter-drunk bread. And so I tried it, walking down along the river, feeling my feet undo their knots, work out their math. Under the bridge, I watch a train pass across the river, a slow line of coal cars doing their duty, full of the dreams of the kids who’ll never make it out of the mountains, the kids from Rupert and Rainelle who can’t find the path, unlike this spiderweb of options in which I’m paralyzed. Maybe you meant I needed to spend time as a ghost, exist in the interstices, train my tongue to praise. Maybe you knew someone needed to greet those dreams, so I take my hat off and nod as they go past, blow a kiss as they cough along the tracks, tell them, I hope you make it all the way to the Pacific, clean the soot off in that blue water. Tell them: May someone someday wish you health, and may you warm yourself in the glow of that implausibility. GIRL RACER Too well she knew the life outside the law, the thrill that shines in moonlight, the fight between monotony and pride. The rides she’d taken in childhood, legs dangling next to a cursing father, a grumbling uncle, red-faced, impatient, their licenses long-revoked, were nothing she’d replicate now. Their radios sang to the clink of the Jack resting on the dash, on the rocks, of the bottles she found under the seats while digging for pennies. She loves the feel of the road too much to seek it in an altered state. Still, she’s never totally safe – unless she’s doing ninety she feels like a snail. What she wants is the play of the chase, to be naughty and spotted on radar. Until her rearview dances with spinning lights, the world pales before her, stretches thin, grey strips of chewing gum. But to run is to court them, to be caught is to do the right thing, to erase the past and give herself up to the law, already gripping her license, certain that this is the place, this moment the time. Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of GASTROMYTHOLOGY (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024). Keep up with her work at: http://www.jessicamanack.com 8/1/2024 Poetry by Susan Browne Flickr CC
The Deal The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong in my body & in my mind, so they gave me lithium. They thought I could be bipolar. Possibly schizophrenic. I was 25 & afraid all the time. The diagnosis made it hard to breathe. My boyfriend gave me a book by a philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti & went to play Frisbee. I didn’t blame him. What could he do? I seemed to need something other people didn’t need in order to live. It amazed me how people could live. Life felt flat as a postcard in a rusty rack in an abandoned bus station. Swimming was the only relief besides crying. I brought the lithium to the beach & was about to take a pill but dropped the bottle in a garbage can instead. Not even the gulls were interested. I made a deal: If I still felt this way in five years, I would kill myself. Five years seemed short enough that I could bear it & maybe long enough to heal. Slowly, I got better. I read the book by Krishnamurti. He said loneliness is just loneliness. Something like that. Once you go all the way through it, you’re on the other side. Something like that. I read the chapter over & over. Went to hear him give a talk in an orange grove in Ojai. His voice was a beautiful body swimming all the way to where there is no side. I moved north. Stood in the small yard one morning & looked at the flowers without being scared. The yard was half in sunlight, half in shadow. I wasn’t thinking metaphor. Only how precise it was. I kneeled in the patchy grass. Little Altar The Milky Way is bigger than we thought. At least 100 billion stars. We can’t fathom things that large, though forgiveness doesn’t take up any space, so quiet, you don’t know it’s happening until one day you’re walking down the street & there’s more room inside you. Are we bigger than we think? Are we like a safe with a steel door & when it gets blown open, there’s nothing, except the Milky Way? I once lay down in the parking lot of a bank where I’d deposited a 30,000-dollar check from the company whose faulty tire killed my mother. I curled around the trunk of a little maple trying to grow in the gravel. The tree & I breathed together, the leaves making a comforting sound in the breeze. Cars came & went, I heard their tires, my eyes filling with sky. I was part of it all, even what I blamed, the Silver River, the Backbone of Night-- other names for our galaxy. I had a choice. I would get up in a few minutes. Or a lifetime. Street Psalm I now live in the town where I lived 37 years ago & I’m walking down Bidwell Avenue, a narrow street by the creek, sound of dark water over rock, scent of fennel & as the pavement turns & turns, I can feel it in my body, my youth, the house like a small barn, paint weathered, porch where my dog slept in the sun that swung its gold arc over oak & cypress, little red house with squeaky floors where I told a good man no, where I was alone so I could think a clear thought, where I read & wrote, each word a divining rod as I began to build a life with my waitress apron & bicycle that took me across town where duck hunters slapped my ass & chowder slicked my hands, street where I told my pervy grandfather to get out of the car & I drove my mother & grandmother around the neighborhood as if that would change anything then drove back, after all it was his car & I almost crashed into him, a whiskey-eaten mammoth melting in the middle of the street, oh, hell, get in, the almond orchard where I ran through tunnels of dust & light, row after row like infinity or possibility, hope’s sweat glistening & now I stand in front of a fancy house where my old place used to be & a woman comes out to water her flowers, saying good morning & I say hi & walk on as if it’s nothing, a street in a world of streets, billions of lives & dreams, the sky with a few clouds like ghosts doing the backstroke. Susan Browne is the author of Buddha’s Dogs, Zephyr, and Just Living. Her fourth poetry collection, Monster Mash, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2025. Awards include prizes from Four Way Books, the Catamaran Poetry Prize and the James Dickey Poetry Prize. She lives in Northern California where she teaches poetry workshops online. http://www.susanbrownepoems.com 8/1/2024 Poetry by Elizabeth Walters Billy Bergen CC
Hang in There I know some days are rough Some days are tough And most of the time You feel like you've had enough I know you're mad And often sad But I promise one day that you’ll be glad That you held it together And gave it everything you had. Through thick and thin, One day you’ll win. One day you'll find your way... On the horizon is a brighter day. Don’t Wait Don't wait. Tomorrow isn't promised. You might not have another day. Don't put off ‘til tomorrow What should be said today. Don't wait. Life's short. Plan for tomorrow, But don't forget to enjoy today. One day you’re here, The next day gone. Life's short. Don't wait. Live each day like it's your last. Before you know it, Your time will have passed. Before regrets fill your mind, Live in the moment Each and every time. Life's short. Don't wait. Time is nobody's friend. It passes you by. It blows in the wind. Time is nobody's friend. It waits for no one. You simply cannot win. Life's short. Don't wait. Elizabeth Walters, an artist and author based in California, has recently embarked on a journey to share “Poetry and Art for the Rest of Us” with the masses. Coming from a blue-collar family, she was never exposed to “real” art or poetry in her youth. Elizabeth earned numerous academic and merit-based scholarships and worked her way through college, teaching art to children and adults through programs that provided opportunities for “under-served” communities to create art. She also spent 2 years as an art guard, which is what impacted her most. She spent countless hours “guarding” an almost empty gallery... too many of the exhibits were “too esoteric, or too academic; they were underappreciated by everyday people.” In 2005, she graduated Summa Cum Laude with University Honor’s and Honor’s in major from the University of Houston with a Bachelor of Fine Arts – a distinction only 12 graduates earned that year. During her years at university, she participated in the Undergrad Exhibition in 2001, ‘03, and ‘04, and in 2005 had a Solo Student Show. After spending the past 20 years creating wonderful buildings, she is now ready to focus on sharing “everyday, uncomplicated, and straightforward art and poetry with everyday people.” 8/1/2024 Poetry by Anya Johnson Joseph Gage CC
To the Teeth Fear too, nipping at the heel. Fear bruising my arms with fingertips of smallness. Pressing down, glancing back. The receding figure of delight. Something I’ve coined anxious immobilization to pathologize freezing of the bones, clicking of the joints. A bad back. A case of hyper-kyphosis my PT called incipient widow’s hump––I thought that unkind. Depression, (Freud called it anger turned inward). So, anger then. Mounds of it. An artillery of anger aimed at young people, at old people, people who have too many children, who chew audibly, who stroll, who clip coupons or ask polite, probing questions. Seasonal depression (that’s just science) except I like winter when there could be wolves anywhere, when you can howl and howl and no one hears. Fatigue––how the days revolt! Think of the Sahara. I’ve never been, but my sister went on retreat in Morocco. Clay tagines, dune-surfing, endless loop of shopping malls. In Marrakech they said she was a real Berber woman, her long blonde hair snaking in the eager sun. Of course she rode a camel. Poor beast, if I rode you I would weep. the most intimate thing didn’t involve a man’s cock in my mouth or a man licking sweat off my sleeping back or a man holding me like a measure of water, his forehead pressed against mine so I was blind when he came, or my first orgasm, my calf seared on the tailpipe of his bike, the idea of pleasure forever fused with the smell of burnt flesh–– it was wrestling the duvet into its cover, marrying the loops and ties to their corresponding corners, getting it wrong, us on opposite ends of the bed, the whole mess twisted in the middle our torsos inside the linen, reaching. Goodbye Horses And you say, “All things pass into the night” And I say, “Oh no sir, I must say you’re wrong I must disagree, oh no sir, I must say you’re wrong” - William Garvey You told me your heart might stop at any moment, white tee incandescent, Parliament a fixture between your fingers. You must have given me your number then, posturing through the shakes, the infancy of our twin rehabilitation static as an ocean. I want to say you had a tape-deck, slate blue station wagon, mint gum, “Goodbye Horses” on repeat. I loved the defibrillator on your chest, its thumping edges, how it left an arcade claw on my breast when you came inside me; your alien rib-cage, the crime scene scrawl of your torso, how that pulsing body slid through the halfway house window, a powder-blue Christ-on-the-Cross hung over the bed; how you took me to the Mermaid Motel, a mirrored pay-by-the-hour palapa, how we fucked theatrically, management pounding at the door when our allotment ran out; how we stayed as long as we could, our colt-like, fearless bodies reflecting back at us, the refraction of your hair-trigger heart, from which I would never recover; how it was all of three weeks. You came back to me a month or two before you died and I believed, with more faith than any god could inspire, that you’d stay. I climbed a tree to see how you felt before the drop, the shades of blue you might have seen, the recoil, that sharp angle to the ocean; how I was not on your mind, how the obit plucked a strangers’ quote, how she said, I didn’t know you but I saw you jump––paper flew out of your pockets like snow. Anya Johnson is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. Her fiction, poetry, and essays can be found in Hobart, Stone Canoe, Scaffold Lit, Counterclock (Emerging Writer’s Award, runner-up), and on poets.org (John B. Santoianni Award, winner). Anya holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the current Poetry Editor for Exposition Review and an Editorial Assistant at Fonograf Editions. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2024
Categories |