Notable works by Genevieve Payne, Caren Lee Brenman, Changming Yuan, Tracy Franklin, Allen Quin Yuan, George Stratigakis, Chester Fid, Zack Nelson Lopiccolo, Clinton Inman, Brandon Roy, Wesley Bishop, Pamela Gemme, Sarah Stinnett, Joseph Farley, Michael Maher, and James Dye.

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Genevieve Payne-

Circle of Illumination

I do not want to make a memorial of it
—no passive stone—nothing that my reflection
can fade into and then out of.

Nothing. Nothing to make us cry out
like the Canadian geese who are burned
into the skyline as they fly far
above and away from home.

I hope that is okay with you.

It was early September, the first week
or two of the school year. They announced you
over the intercom. How you had been found
not alive. That is a direct quote.
I wonder how you felt at that moment,
if you heard it. We heard it like a drum.
We heard it like thunder. We
heard it like worms on our skin.

I wonder if you can still hear. There are people
who seem to think you can, although why
I do not know. Even before the pine trees
and the train tracks—I wonder
if you ever heard anything at all.

Heartless like a plague, we felt. We would
have taken it all back; snatched it up
like coins from a counter top, the words
and all that. But it would just been more unjust
taking. I think we realized that. Instead we gave;
gave you a speech, gave you a silence,
gave you a place in a field of stones. I wonder how that feels.

You were unhappy, apparently. Or apparently unhappy.

But what is it about happiness anyway?
Happiness isn’t a memorial of you. Not a gray
stone. Not grave words, or images of
doves, or inked skin. But maybe it is.

And happiness was not you. But maybe
it was. I do not expect for happiness
to always look the same.

We have come a long way from you.
Maybe we are like the Canadian geese after all,
reading the seasons, the sun, and the
circle of illumination; knowing when to go on.

But there was a rhythm to your decision,
reflected in the rhythm of this stupid earth on
its stupid axis; after all, September is a time of declination.

And two years later, it’s that time in the rhythm
again. Nothing remains fixed like it was, and nothing
is changed. And nothing is real until there is a stone.

I hope this is okay with you. I have not visited your stone.

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Genevieve Payne’s work has appeared in Enclave and Verbal Seduction.

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Caren Lee Brenman-

Socks

I stand at the dining room table taking one sock,
to tuck inside the other, quickly stretching
the cotton over, forming a knot
like a rag doll with dangly tails for legs.
Keeping busy folding our laundry,
playing house as our sister sleeps in the other room.
The last time we all lived together,
the three of us watching Laugh-in
or standing around the pink curved counter,
you mixing Nestle’s Quick
to go with our bagels and cream cheese,
had us moving through our young days
a unit of three lined up in size order,
for photos in front of the 16th street house,
a tree in Connecticut and at your Bar Mitzvah,
dark hair shining and our crooked teeth smiles.
Horrified at my sock technique
you take over,
folding the socks length wise
then rolled, so that each pair sits
like a baked good waiting to be eaten.
It is the wrong reason for a reunion.

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Changming Yuan-

Curse in Verse: An Ischemic Tradition*

As if this had been a family curse
You have all the symptoms of ischemia:
Palpitations, short breaths, irregular heartbeats
Although no test results show you
Having a physiological cause of the problem

While your family doctor keeps wondering
Why you do not have enough blood
Flowing around behind your Chinese chest
You know your heart muscle as a sponge
From which you have squeezed out
Too many of your blood-rooted words
Like your father, like your son*

* While my dying father Yuan Hongqi has never been able to have his creative writing published, my 16-year-old younger son Allen Qing Yuan, who suffers greatly from bulged disks, has already had his poems published in four countries.

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Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and co-author of Three Poets (2011), is a three-time Pushcart nominee who currently teaches in Vancouver and has poetry appearing in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Drunken Boat, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine, Mad Hatters’ Review, RHINO and nearly 380 other journals / anthologies in 16 countries.

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Tracy Franklin-

Somatoforms

I want to throttle the fakers.
I know that’s wrong, know they are ill
in a different kind of way,
know others must have done all kinds of damage,
but I just can’t care enough to have compassion
yet.

I see their hand wringing, hear their whining,
read their many, many forum posts
that are always, always some nothing
that is something along the lines of “Am I going to die?”
and it takes all my self control to ignore them
and hurt them most
instead of making them cry and making myself feel better.

Because there are people who actually do hurt,
people who are terrified,
people who can’t move,
people who are going to die,
some of them soon,
and these attention seekers who can’t handle
the occasional crick in the neck,
having to get up early,
life (and I get it, I do; I am not altogether without sympathy),
are saying that we don’t matter.

They’re using up our resources,
spitting out our doctors
and leaving them dry and empty
of things like trust.

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Tracy R. Franklin is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including A Little Poetry, SubtleTea, and Pen Himalaya. Her first full-length collection, Angst, Anger, Love, Hope, was published by JMS Books LLC in November 2010.

After many years of increasingly debilitating symptoms, Franklin was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder known as potassium-aggravated myotonia in early 2010. She frequently writes about the diagnostic and social difficulties faced by those with invisible illnesses.

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Allen Qing Yuan-

Fading, Fading to Black

My shadow engulfing heart
It’s grip, tight
It screams glaringly in snowy silences
Like a distant storm on fall’s fingertips
It aches, but i can’t stop
Even if i fade to black
Under this
Everlasting sky
Fading, Fading to Black

My shadow engulfing heart
It’s grip, tight
It screams glaringly in snowy silences
Like a distant storm on fall’s fingertips
It aches, but i can’t stop
Even if i fade to black
Under this
Everlasting sky
Even at the backyard of the world’s night

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Allen Qing Yuan, born in Canada and aged 16, currently attends Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School in Vancouver and has had poems published or forthcoming in Cannon’s Mouth, Istanbul Literary Review, Madswirl, Zouch and elsewhere.

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George Stratigakis-

Pause and Prayer by the River at Sparti

The wafting Libyan breeze
lifts the eucalyptus leaves
till tiny seeds rattle, then shiver
waking the giant from an epoch’s peace.

The moon is a sun dimmed by night;
shadows flit and crickets savor life;
worn pebbles dry-grate and scrape
while numbed tendons tingle and ache.

The shadows of an elm fall full
furtively fondling a remnant pool;
in the dark in its roots flickers an eel
darting, plucking a random meal;
long ago wondrous men shaped their bliss
in currents stronger deeper than this…

The eucalyptus stands tall.
‘Flow! Live!’ voices sometimes call:
‘May the leaves’ soothing silver flutter
give wing, solace, and ardor
and the crickets’ nightly song
woo pilgrims to this site ever long.’

_______________

Twenty-Eight Million and Counting

Start writing they say
you never know where you’ll end up or
what you’ll find along the way.

(Some add, “You’ll get past the block.”)

But it’s not a block really, is it?
It’s about picking and choosing
or–better yet–
about selection, and commitment, and
value and discovery
of what is true.

It’s about—

Is the matter worthy of minutes and hours and
signals scurrying through synapses and
the charring of brain cells and
time lost forever once used.

Or do we deck ourselves in our finest
to bring our most precious to an altar
snared by the heights and trappings of a priest
who is a shell with a nothing abyss beneath?

Twenty seven million, 941 thousand, 760 minutes gone
and counting…
less than that remain.

It’s about the regret of after,
about the traumatic stress that’ll come,
when I realize how trivial the noun was
that I gave my precious minutes to, or worse,
how base.

It’s a struggle–a war, really, of life and death–
that so few take on
to keep from the depths that people often fall,
to seize and cling to and exult on
the slightest spark of progress made
during our time here on the planet.

It’s about lifting the human spirit,
and whatever I do,
–whatever we humans do–
should come back to that,
shouldn’t it?

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George Stratigakis was born in Sparti, Greece. He has taught at the Center for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Studies in Athens, and Northeastern University in Boston. He has translated Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories and A Moveable Feast into Greek, and translated Greek lyricists into English. His poetry has been published in The Innisfree Poetry Journal.

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Chester Fid-

Why the west is dangerous

Coked up construction worker hiding in a condo
Los Gatos howls for your soul
On angel dust he pulled up emergency break
The devil slithers on the highway

Vengeance for a lost soul
My old land lady tugs my leg in drunkenness flirt
On Sunday, she’s saving my soul in a rock and roll auditorium
abandoned actor plays Jesus
Kidnapped in East San Jose, my tough Mexican fuck nut – struts -
wants to kick me in the face

Go for it

There are many who want to fuck me
For the glory shines from my anus in California
We wake in mist and clouds
prisoners on a mountain

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Zack Nelson Lopiccolo-

paper airplanes

i stood in the shade, making paper airplanes
because if i stood there long enough
maybe then i could be paper-pale
like the few friends i had.
the only connection i could make
was my brilliantly colored eyes,

but like a matchstick those compliments
were drowned by the two slugs
that draped their heavy slime over
the bushy brows of Neolithic human resting
dormant. because even in my palest moments
the skin was still coffee stained.

i sat in my dark meat and olive brows
wondering if i should go home
bathe in bleach, mix the white
powder from mom’s closet
and the drywall dust from dad’s shoes
and pat it on my bleeding skin
so that i could be the prime-cut
of turkey, pale plump and juicy.

i learned that dark meat
was dryer than LA basin, tougher
than jackrabbit, and that the jet-engine
air made me a stealth-bomber
floating high above the pale
frailty of the paper planes.
they were in my shadow,
and i could sneak on them.

they’d never know how
i built my wings how each
fabricated limb was made
from drywall and shim,
L-metal, and paint, pigeon feathers,
and instant noodles.

my MSG flavor was too rich for
their upscale, uptown taste.
seeing them up there in raised
trucks, and fancy cars taught me
that one day these frail pigeon wings
would rise above the doves, rise
over their ghostly presence, and rise
in a cherry-fever on two redwood legs,
finally understanding that paper
comes from trees.

*Originally published in Indigo Rising Magazine

_______________

meteor showers

the stars cover the sky like a million plastic cut outs,
as we stand for hours lighting with flashlights so they
shine on us like helicopter spotlights. the shower
of flaming marshmallows crashes with our pupils
and i can feel the rush of energy tremor over me
with our hands colliding like meteorites into
the pillowyness of the comforter we’re laying on.

i want to graze your lips with mine like chap-stick.
slow and with the right amount of pressure, so i don’t
over do it and have all that extra snail sludge sliding
down our faces like second grade slobber.

now. this is the moment while your gazed off into the cities
of the universe, my fumbled nose trips over yours.
i love that champagne giggle. so i’ll keep on the highway
to your lips. it’s like the downy bear and a silk worm designed
you for a new form of soft, and sultry, and sexy, and shit
if i know what else, but i do know i want to attach
my lips to yours like a starfish to a rock.

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Zack Nelson Lopiccolo is soon to be a graduate of Creative Writing and Literature from California State University of Long Beach. He was born and raised in the LBC, but loves to travel points elsewhere. After a year of adventures he plans on applying to Creative Writing MFA programs to continue in an unpredictable path through life, and strengthen his writing. He also loves canned green beans.

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Clinton Van Inman-

DRESSED RIGHT

They said that you were dressed right
In your blues, your red and white,
The fresh cut flowers were neatly laid,
The flag was folded as the band had played.
We stood and watched with Sunday’s best
In places not for playing you would rest,
Momma fell sick, said it was the heat
When they lowered you under our feet.

They said that you were dressed right
With your blues, your red and white,
But none of those names engraved in stone
Or those flags waving for some proud cause
That gives the grownups much applause,
Or even your medals matter—because you are gone.

_______________

WITH GRACEFUL SWEEP

The river curves with graceful sweep.
Along its banks the willows weep.
Their slender boughs are bending low
To kiss the sun’s reflection far below
And yield their mystery to the stream
That carries away its boundless dream.
Perhaps the pulse or lasting splendor
Will express some secret or oft desire
Beyond all rule and mindless measure
My words too will press even higher.
Without poetry our world will perish
Leaving not a plank or rack behind
To show one royal act to cherish
Some idea that history is not blind.

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Clinton Inman is a high school teacher in Hillsborough County, Florida. He is 65 and a graduate of San Diego State University. He was born in Walton on Thames, England. Recent publications include The Warwick Journal, Poetry Magazine, One of Four, Down in the Dirt, May, June, July, The Inquistion, The Journal, the New Writing, The Hudson Review, Essence, Forge, Houston Literary Review, Greensilk Journal, BlackCatPoems, Munyari.com, and the forthcoming issue of Grasslimb in August. Hopefully, these will be published in a future book called, “Caliban.”

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Brandon Roy-

Analysis of an Old Church

The stain glass church is closed.
No trace of God, no trace of the
divine. An empty building, no people,
no lies, no false promises. Only brick
and glass.

_______________

Mabuk Kepayang (Lost Lost)

The drunk old lady next door
collects bottles in shadow
boxes. She has no need for
love, friends or family.
She has the drink.

She accepts the language of
theatrics. She numbs herself,
uninterested and will not
go to bed. She lectures the
air and works on trust.

Sometimes she plays poker,
she reads magazines and
mixes experimental concoctions.
Ignoring the warning labels,

She doesn’t try to fool others.
She is a paradox crapped in
messy hair. She used to be so
pretty. She ignores the facts.

She goes outside and sits.
Smokes her cigarette, drinks
her liquor and speaks her
truth. No one goes near her.

_______________

Pagkawala (Loss)

-for Donna Mae Buenaventura

Birth, not death, is the hard loss. – Louise Gluck

Come close-

Let saints whisper prayers for those that are gone.
We find comfortable in the silencing the heart

A baby bird has gone to her nest
Deep inside she will live on

Let only truth be spoken, with any further
A song of innocence and youth

Do not cry for her
She smiles for you

Now, she rides high in the heavens
After her loss, there is no other

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Brandon S. Roy is the editor of the Panulaan Review. He has been published extensively over the years.He doesn’t really like talking about himself.

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Wesley Bishop-

Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

God can be
Anything
Anytime
Anywhere

And that is the problem.

She can be a loving mother,
Aiding her children, a comforter
To the afflicted.

He can be a wise father,
Guiding his followers, a voice
Of sanity to the lost.

He can be jealous, she can be envious,
A curser and tyrant of a thousand ills.

It can be the rallier of politicians and mobs.
A gravitational force of oppression.

God can be
Anything
Anytime
Anywhere

And that is the problem.

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Wes Bishop’s poems and short stories have appeared in Write Me a Metaphor, The Cynic OnLine Magazine, Atheist Connect, and Muse Cafe Quarterly. He currently lives in Dayton, Ohio with his wife Allison where he is an ESOL instructor for Project Read AmeriCorps.

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Pamela Gemme-

On Becoming My Mother

I saw my day dream,
my mother’s face in standing water.
Far- flung mother-hood, the gashed
walls of her theatre.
I forgive the verbed
inhibitions of my doubted
blood. Blame is a freak
occurrence for mothers.
I can repeat her, perchance,
I am akin now. Free. Softly,
I sound- out my married name.

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Pamela Gemme has had several on line and print publications. She lives in Leicester, Massachusetts sometimes wishing it were Leicester England. She is employed at what some would consider a real job managing your tax dollars. For Pamela, writing is being without end.

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Sarah Stinnett-

Berklee

Number of students: 4,131
Percent that is male: 71

I am like the Green-Cheeked Parrot
smuggled into our American cages from Mexico,
endangered species # 9
I am a rare female specimen
in the cages of Berklee,

Berklee College of Dudes.

“Yo Dude!”
I aint no dude, home fry.
Kilts flew out of style with Green-Cheeky
before we clipped their wings.
You all sneaky,
thinkin’ I wouldn’t notice you
noticing me
wearing a skirt.

President Roger Brown says,
“I will present a report on the state of the college.”

Rogie,
it’s dire. It’s desperate,
I’m separate
from the other chicks in the coop.
Hear it from my mouth
I’m flying south.

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Sarah Anne Stinnett was born into a family of artists. Poet, visual artist, thespian, and musician, she has plunged head-first into a multitude of disciplines of expression. As a senior at Berklee College of Music, Sarah has had her work published by FUSION Magazine. Simultaneously, she has been actively involved with the community of poets at Emerson College. In the spring of 2011 she received the honor of representing Berklee’s student body by reading original works at the college’s convocation ceremony.

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Joseph Farley-

Medium

I have seen the dead
and they have spoken to me
in photographs and films
and words written
long ago.

Their lives were like
and unlike mine
but we all shared sorrow
and joy
though the mixture
was never the same.

I hear their prayers.
I listen to their dreams
and consider where
they have gone
now that their ashes
have long joined
soil and wind.

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Joseph Farley edited Axe Factory for 24 years. His books include Suckers, For the Birds, and Longing for the Mother Tongue (March Street Press).

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Mike Maher-

Raphus cucullatus or Everything Turns Away

Coyotes and wolves are nearly identical
except the coyotes have developed the ability to adapt,
to learn to eat garbage
and sleep under your shed.
Tom says pigeon parents push
their young off bridges just to see if they are ready to fly.
And if they aren’t?
It is no surprise they are related to the Dodo,
millions of miniature Prince Prosperos leading their people to doom,
tiny Icaruses splashing into seas of New York City taxicabs,
though it is doubtful Breughel would take the time
to illustrate their unnoticed fall
nor Auden or Williams to sit down and illustrate the illustration.
This is hardly a dreadful martyrdom,
but is it an example of evolution, modification,
a malevolent twist of Darwinism,
of how most adaptations are less than beautiful,
far from practical?
The man with a coyote under his shed will most likely say
“What is that damn coyote doing under my shed?”
and not
“What have we done to the world that coyotes are relegated
to sleeping under our sheds?”
And that is why,
when Tom tells me about the pigeons,
a girl in the room,
quite possibly with a coyote of her own in her backyard
and obviously unaware of the significance of these tiny birds,
merely says,
“What did they do before there were bridges?”

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Mike Maher is the founder and editor of Sea Giraffe, an online literary ‘zine. He currently reads, writes, edits, and walks his dog in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains. His poetry, fiction, and personal essays can be seen in publications like The Smoking Poet, The Ofi Press Magazine, Calliope, and Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure. While earning his BA in English from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, he served as the Vice President and Forum Editor of The Stroud Courier, winning the Jim Barniak Award for journalism twice during his time there. He also won the Martha E. Martin Award for poetry while at ESU.

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James Dye-

Specters

At the eleventh hour,
the devil sings the blues until midnight,
the raven’s chance to hunt for souls.
A door opens to cerulean ruins.
Lucifer plants his lips on a cigar, sucks in,
and walks through a smoke ring.

The open door is a vision
of noiseless darkness billowing.
The music of spheres is in shambles.
I wish an end to the darkness.

The only light is glowing angels
watching me through a window in the sky
that only I can see
on the other side of a marble path.

Beyond the pale, the devil blows dark smoke
and ruthless wizards rehearse plays.

Muted actors glide by
with painted scowls on their face.

The ground is dust, bones and DEAD bodies.
The devil plays a tune on an acoustic
as clear as a bell, mellifluous and romantic,
and in his expression I almost see daylight.
a chimerical heaven lulls me into shadows.

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Charles Clifford Brooks III:

6 am

Running a hand over feral hair
waking is a drop kick-to-the-balls.
December dons
a grey suit.
The ceiling sags.

The room’s view:
an empty playground,
pigeons,
beer bottles,
brittle grass.

Smelling of tea roses
and worry,
time is perpetually blurry.
Christmas is nothing
but ghosts.

_______________

Three for the Going Again

1)

The night took down
its azure complexion
as she swore me off.
I hear those who kissed me before
scoff all the Confederacy
she fits.

My sweet Mason-Dixon
cinches her belt
with a Mother Mary buckle.
Be brave, tug together
your sacred, rarely-worn
weathered jacket.
Leave this gambler with
no good hand.

2)

Why am I doing this?

Because I’m yours,
because the spectators
are telling scary stories,
because this January blizzard
has locked me away
from relief.

She is Heloise
without a neutered Abelard
whining.
She gave up Petrarch
so Laura
will lose nothing having
given up
his love letters.

3)

I cannot cry
over discontent
within my liver,
kidneys,
my vacant iris.

I plague her.
I have pushed
my sad darling
to miss these hips
and fingertips.

I am a worn out
recliner she kept
but never sat.

Skim your tear-wet paws
over the brail
of my wrists.
Old reflections
speak to me
in dreams,
She is the only witness.

_______________

Late Saturday

With guts full of thirst
for a compassion fate
we are divided
by an asylum
in Washington State.

From the front door,
neighbors keep pounding
and pounding.
To let in those guests
is not release,
never a girl.

It’s been 39 days.

I struggle,
feel bound,
squeezed shut in the lungs
of some petty beast.

The air is hemmed with hyacinth.
In thick blue and pink petals,
perfume triggers
the whisper:

I don’t know where she is.

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Cliff Brooks is a Pushcart nominee who has a History degree from Shorter University. The Joe Milford Poetry Show and Vox Poetica will feature new work from his books Whirling Metaphysics and The Draw of Broken Eyes to be published by Gosslee in spring 2012. He currently haunts Athens, Georgia.

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Annmarie Lockhart:

Fall Nor’easter

banshee wail rides
the rising wind
dark night blots
out the last light

this fairy wronged
and spited shrieks,
sounds a warning
and in response

trees wave their
branched arms
deflecting, the
valley holds its

breath, waiting for
her to yell herself
out, spin herself still,
spread thin, and slip

away

_______________

It All Revolves Around the Sun

Disorderly conduct, birthdays,
endurance, and every rat who
races: Some freeze to death
when the sun sits high
in the summer sky

and some live in whale fat
and snow huts, ice fishing
in the dark that is midnight
and noon and every hour
in between.

Three drops of water from
the slow-drip faucet and
nothing of thirst is slaked.
Yellow moon teases, taunts,
kisses a golden

cast of lonely on this bruised
and bordered body. At the
autumnal equinox ripening
and rot are equidistant
outcomes.

_______________

Not a Metaphor

Three red drops, fat and wet
on the veined marble floor: source
mysterious, but there is no fiction in
the splash, though it was a metaphor
when I wrote this yesterday.

_______________

On the Menu

Sometimes a steak
is really a mushroom
tasting of dirt instead of blood

and a tomato
is paper soaked in water
and salted erythrocytes

and bacon
is the decadent
flesh of complicity

leaving nothing
to eat but peanut butter
and raisins with chocolate

_______________

Step on a Crack

I walk through minefields
of forked tongues and
forks in the road, with
an intuition map,
listening as the quiet speaks,
telling of intimacies untold
and betrayals pre-sold,
calling out to you across
the tracks, stepping on cracks,
calling out to you
and the horse you rode in on
and the dog you’ll ride out.

Slipping through cracks, slinging
arrows, careless with precise words.

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Annmarie Lockhart is the founding editor of vox poetica, an online literary salon dedicated to bringing poetry into the everyday, and the founder of unbound CONTENT, an independent press for a boundless age. She has been reading and writing poetry since she could read and write. A lifelong Bergen County NJ resident, she lives and writes 2 miles east of the hospital where she was born.

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Joe Milford-

PRIMORDIAL VESICLE

so that we come to know we all migrate into putrid and wanton gestation
so that we come to know the cruciform as only one notch in the old ancient always tree
so that we come to know that our constellation is made without our permission
so that we come to know that we must document those stars and how we orbit them
so that we come to know we are turds eating turds in carbon cyclic composition
so that we come to know our cave-vulva birthburn into flesh layered pupa
so that we come to know that great eels and worms crawl our DNA pulsating
so that we come to know that we are cleansed through fire not water through salt and sulphur
so that we come to know the brain is a jellyfish anthive spore-filled landfill of looms
so that we come to know that the afterlife’s roots taste like the hell’s tongues of dribbled whores
so that we come to know medusa ganglia writhe our sargassic morphic fields hunt of Artemis
so that we come to know that we host hosts of imposters and truths in our cellular structures
so that we come to know there is no afterlife there is only everlife its forms always violent animals
so that we come to know this grit spun about the collider will find godparticle or slag-colander
so that we come to know our journal is but flesh of word interrupted by crucifixions
so that we never forget that the grotesque is the stickman being cracked open to ooze its stories
so that we never forget our keys before descending into the belly of the thousand coiled ears
so that we never forget our gelatinous self before the bony made us forget how to translute
so that we never forget the garden of earthly delights as we ride the subway langlinguage
so that we never forget we appear to each other’s souls as something covered in Vaseline
so that we never forget chess is only how you stagger through the Mayan soccer deathgame
so that we never forget we make our larvae the soft crutches for ideas of acid and lye
so that we never forget minions talk us up as they suck as down into the arid vortex of fuck
so that we never forget that language was held in a skull like blood and was spilled at our birth
so that we never forget the mandolin heard when we left our bodies and the trombone entered
so that we never forget joist and jest lathe and lust fester and foist boil and brutal love and crystal
so that we never forget we ride the great steed and are the great steed simultaneously brethren
so that we never forget many wings touching the top of the cave while guano made museums
so that we never forget that the jaguar eats us while birthing us the blood on its canines is us
so that we never forget caliphate versus infidel tongue versus pussy with hungry ghosts hovering
a kaleidoscopic weave allowing me in smalltown GA to merge with Lascaux through spidermind
a kaleidoscopic weave allowing Vallejo to use Clayton-medium as homunculus-voice from abyss
a kaleidoscopic weave allowing American steaming fast-food bowels to be lacerated and emptied
a kaleidoscopic weave writhing up ancient totem phallus exchanging vegetable, animal, human
a kaleidoscopic weave of vegetable, animal, human, mineral, celestial, chthonic, astral intelligences
a kaleidoscopic weave of quetzal, jaguar, bison, swordfish, seahorse, all burning to bone nautilus
a kaleidoscopic weave in the core where Kali dances and the black goddess maze of vulva pulses
a kaleidoscopic weave of sutra and mandala all of us omen-makers our invisible Anubis-helmets
a kaleidoscopic weave through a Boschian landscape populated by bird-headed men harvesting
a kaleidoscopic weave where we pull the veil back drink from the wound in Ourobouros scales
a kaleidoscopic weave into which we spelunk infinitely reading the cave-walls of the spiral
a kaleidoscopic weave to escape UFO abduction fear which is only visitation of our past animals
a kaleidoscopic weave helping the reptile cortex fuck the mammal cortex to birth human pigment
a kaleidoscopic weave of fin antler hand scale feather leaf spine talon flipper wing tongue finger
a kaleidoscopic weave of your grindstone my anvil your decanter my alembic this apothecary

_______________

TATTERED SCROLLS AND POSTULATES

5.

i built a circle of wolves around our lot and the house is transparent so our children learn.
do you know how blurred your lenses have become. that’s why pilot’s goggles are your fetish.
integers, increments, wreathes and cockles’ coils. staple walls for nothing. corrode comes greased.
satyrs run as far as they can and then the rain forests are burned down and men hunt them.
my DNA abacus spirals back to the mitochondria and waits for a mate to make me perfect.
i was his liver. vultures ate me everyday. he would carry me into the office. terrible display.
i was given a stone by a man and the man said a man was contained within the stone. I threw it.
coyote, with your jowls chaffed, we will feed you. come to the sliding glass door. Eat. Lick lips.
i saw all scarecrows dismount and lunge in a hurricane towards promisedland and neverland.
stop glimmering–the moths flock to you–i can’t penetrate their shifting webs of wings.

6.

held up by the neck as a whelp in some terrible blinding light and checked for adequacy.
when the only two vehicles left at your disposal are the taxicab or squad car.
pockmarked with geysers stricken with bullet-holes viscous with ampules. you in the hallway.
i was tossed like a chewed bone. left not for dead but for life to find my marrow. suckle it.
millet grist powder silt resin for the words to imbue with lustre liquid and molten tongue-blood.
and though poetry was a planet of obsidian onyx we chipped sharp sherds from it to fling.
trolling deep in undercurrent, evil fish, a light hangs from its spine to let it see what it must eat.
the time i spent scraping at my bar-code my UPC i should have spent escaping commodity.
i scrawled your voodoo names and secret words onto wooden pine knots. they in the coffee can.
phase 1: specimen. phase 2: study of specimens. phase 3: hunt them. phase 4: free the specimens.

7.

which instrument to play in the valley, on the cliff, by the ocean, underwater, in the coffin?
i was stoned out of my gourd through high school but that did not work vs. the 9-headed hydra.
would you believe me that the Gates to the Ardent World are can openers, Q-Tips, thumbtacks?
in the bucket, down the well, you pendulum, reciting the names of all the saints you know.
the prom queen is running from the angry swan the record-spinner is coked-up. summertime.
covered myself in roadkill and laid in the field watching them circle slowly closer and closer.
when you scream the moray eels jet out the killer bees swarm out the mustard gas permeates.
your gutturals call language up from earth and your trills call language down from the sky.
i wanted the woman inside my mom’s oil lamp–her trapped behind those beads on their wires.
all of writing is the robbing of graves. ancient owl stares you down the gun-barrel of oak branch.

8.

after thousands of years of losing our teeth against the glass we finally cut through the aquarium.
too many candles in the trees too many christmas lights in the pond too many barren angels.
the deer keep leaping into the onslaught of metal misconstruing it as a river trying to dowse.
flurries came through the homestead and i took the scalpel and opened my chest to melt them.
i collected silver calamities and tried to keep them in swisher sweet boxes but they melted.
i was inside the whiskey bottle screaming and no one could hear and he threw it shattering me.
if we could have an orchard of orchids and fly through it like ghosts i’d sign that lease.
my mom thought it was a great idea us sunburned picking strawberries for stepfather.
in this flooded and dead Georgia, i wonder where the snakes have all gone. makes me nervous.
moon shining on the shovel and then i knew i should not be here. i am knee-deep in unsayable.

9.

gliders flew over the graves and forests and landed on our lawns with letters of stone.
she is on the phone and i see her genuflect and know it is a man who may or may not pay.
a sharp shrapnel dancer spun about my cuts and made a beard for me of church-glass.
glimpses is all they are—water-striders speed across a cold Tennessee eyeball inlet in blue stones.
your pipe has not yet changed many colors. come here more often. back porch by woods.
that time on the phone i saw the squirrel killed by car while talking of the Marvin Bell poem.
inside the ancient dresser from the flea market i found a copy of Francis Bacon from old library.
everyone keeps asking about what i am using the shed for out back and i can’t really say.
young whelps skinning the last sheen off the hardwood floors with their birthday scamperings.
tight ivy wrapped most of our stories so they had to be loosened with a longlasting campfire.
i don’t have to be wiccan to know the solstice and the equinox i have the Farmer’s Almanac.

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Chenelle Milford-

All I Know So Far

you made my bones sing today
I bounced to the hilltop
and kidnapped a star for you
the star rippled and buckled
and wriggled away while we
swam through construction sites
and piles of instruments
you fired your synapses and hit
my spinal cord—it curled up
in my gut and tried to kick
its way out while my veins
screamed for your adrenaline
our symbols cracked and faded into
the weeds that went on for miles
until there was no more research
to be done and you coveted
the look on my face when you said
something serious and the look on my
face when I couldn’t look at you
the look on my face when you took
me by the strings and flew me
like a kite on the beach

_______________

Human-like Gods

letting blood anthropomorphic
god like truth speaking machine
beam saw table saw no distinction
hot glue melting plasticizing skin
blistering wilting not a cloud in the sky
but no visibility in the inventory
industry and change your mind
leap faith prostrate clean break
fresh start beat the teeth clenched
string pulled all we need to know
in bed with us from the beginning

_______________

Human Implements

What is hand over face if not a heart-drug
Heart cannot beat off years of infidelity
So hand will beat off heart until sheer utility
Takes over and tools do the jobs of self-

Importance punches life in the womb where
There is no fetus there is no impetus there
No harbor to be held or hunted the hunter
Leads the pack down a path of constructive

Criticism contriving and controlling all that
Does not fit the selfish mold of men and poets
And historians and mathematicians who held
The keys for eternity but did not want to aid

Blood-let the wrong hands cannot pleasure
The right way when there is no lubrication
There is a communication breakdown when
Worlds don’t coincide or leave anymore room

_______________

Tipping Point

What if I wanted to bible you
And you could scripture me
Would you take me on a picnic
And speak to me with that
Radio voice—you can deflect
Acceptable as long as you still
Read me my rights

_______________

Haymaker

By the time the towel hits
The throat, the left side lip
Is already frozen. Teethcuts
Inside the upperlip itch under
The mouthcunt you hate so.
Can’t stop cracking swollen joints.
You try but cannot explode
The ringfinger with the fakering.
The armdream hoop-earrings
Rip right out of their sockets
In footshaped chin-contusions.
A pale canvas and a nice palette.
So many different green shades,
They block out the sun.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chenelle C. Milford, a native Californian, is the manager, web-designer, consultant, all-around aficionado, and archivist of the Joe Milford Poetry Show. She is the founder and editor of the literary journal, Scythe. Some of her work is displayed on journals such as New Aesthetic and Menacing Hedge. She now resides in rural Georgia with her husband and three daughters.

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Other notable work by Caroline Samples.
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Christina Matthews-

Salmon

And it was as if, pushing so close to the current,
a rush of humility overtook me, a rush like flying
in human dreams: flying through a grate in a sidewalk, or
flying naked between tree branches with no wings, no
fins, no arms, through the earth, bulleting.

Up the falls, up the falls—and I suddenly understood
the phyllo of existence, how seeking different shelters
protects us all from a tornadoing, mad descent.

I’ve searched from creek to river, swim with little control,
no scales I am fully aware of, or how they shine
for the eye. You see, there is no direction I am mapping,
only one from a water greater than myself.

And I do this in order to live on,
move swiftly over the undercurrent knowing nothing
else breeds another day like all the new lives
swept into nature’s traffic.

Today, I am a salmon. Tomorrow, perhaps,
a more commanding white light.

_______________

Epidermis

We are serving you dead,
the country of your body.
We’ve been here all your life,
the inevitable army so close—
a skin, a history repeating.

What has been keeping you
alive, ignoring the terror,
while all of us slowly slough off?
How is it you haven’t noticed
until now, the peel of the sun-work,
the wintertime abundance of dryness
in front of the TV: more dead,
more dead?

Such a trivial thing, the lost flesh,
unimportant death after unimportant death—
until it’s your loss.
You, who are so selfish,
without seeing what it truly is:
shedding against the second.

It’s a good thing we go on like this
forever—loyal soldiers awaiting unmarked graves
in the night. We’ll keep emerging
from the trenches, from the base of wrinkles,
with no blood vessels,
like war toys, traveling dust.

_______________

Sidewalk

There you are, walking down the street.
Shifting against a long row of planted pines,
light pushes around peeling bark.

One of the many eyelids in the sky slowly winks
and covers briefly
the bright red pupil’s driving glare.

I’d say Spring increases travel,
all the weary bees, a clash of errands plays
sharp sound against sharp sound:
cawing children perched on benches,
screeching brakes from passing Buicks,
knocking heels fading on concrete,
and the ever-squawking
doors of city buses.

All the music holds here,
and somehow, I see.
You check your wristwatch. Grab a coffee,
find vacant things to do, things to do.

The buds on the hyacinth, belly-up,
refuse to notice you—
fattening on their own time,
swelling into a life of wait.

Keep your sight on your feet, the cracks
a part of me,
all the varied widths, varied widths,
short steps and long,
and bustle towards the sky .

_______________

Hydrangea

What troubles me is the beginning of the end.
The garden’s soft flowerheads haunt me, nod in the wind,
their slow bobs of silence summon the spirit of poppies.
They sleep. And my fluorescent night-scares flutter
like moths trapped between skyscrapers.

What troubles me first: basic sleepless concerns.
It starts with the present, with all the glinting lights
to be attracted to, winged fears find no warmth, no glowing
white sheets, no soothing stop, they swarm the city-side in neurotic
zig-zags, fly in skitters without landing on any kind of heat-heart,
any sort of strobing calm, electric green.

What troubles me next: the way I’m suddenly in the past.
I’ve followed the mind’s chaotic highway all night
circling away from bed and back.
The bright blue tap-water: illuminated drops from the faucet—
reflecting my lost ones, their shadows walking the walls.

What troubles me most: the future. Tilling the unknown.
The pale-blue skies always become the morning’s eye stains.
My pale-new thoughts are still the sharp-whittled buildings.
These pale-pale words split the wide city, and my pale-hued stems
stiffen in the day’s first rain with the question of later weather.

_______________

Spleen

How generous of you, creating voices for all things, unveiling
what is noshed under flesh and earth: the ever-silent singing
one dark melody here, the same dark melody there, O dying.

But why should I, unimportant organ of your body, speak
so unnaturally? Surprises you. How an elusive blood ravine
tucked out of sight somewhere between stomach and diaphragm,
like the soul between hands and paper, tussles over the gift of language.

Whether or not you choose to hear, I am not silent.
I never have been. I’ve been fighting infections of the mind, body,
and of the spirit— white-pulped, today and the next, thriving,
pulsing for a final art, O dying, O dying— lasting art.

What a curse bestowed upon me, this never-ending rapture of death.
Transferring life one cell at a time, and you moving one word at a time,
I and you, tallying long nights throughout the days,
two blackbirds peering up, bleak in tall grass.

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CHRISTINA MATTHEWS currently resides in Macon, Georgia, by way of Syracuse, New York. She teaches English Composition and Creative Writing courses at a local university. Her work has previously been published in numerous literary journals and magazines. Her most recent work has been published in The Adirondak Review and The Houston Literary Review.
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Caroline Samples-

Determinism

“Nature likes to hide itself.”
—Heraclitus

The world is paved in gravel. All homogenized, all
meeting a certain grade requirement. When water sinks
and settles so thinly, what comes of it?

Nature digs.
Violets root where they can, sprout from cracks between rocks.
Purple as shadows, purple as sunken throats. How strange
that they flourish in crevices. Strange, how they tunnel to grow.

We tunnel, too. Our flower boxes
color the sills of barred windows in alleys.
Children dig through snow, pulling pinecones
and bits of broken bottles from the gutters of streets.

And at night, they think of how it would be
to burrow, like fleas, into the fibers of sheets. To stay,
pressed between body and bed; to hide in the ash of dead skin.

_______________

On the Atlantic

Two figures face each other on the gray beach.
I watch from the fifteenth floor balcony, and from here
they are elongated statues in thin primary colors.

They don’t move, but I can almost see the pull between them,
those soft striations reaching from one body to another.
I decide there’s something hopeful in the way they stay so still.

I sketch them in a notebook. After they leave and are replaced
by runners, by old women with dogs, or solitary surf walkers.
I will remember them. I will hold them up to the horizon

where they’ll bend and tremble in the wind. Only paper,
but when I return home, I’ll mount them on the wall by our bed.
Each night, when you pull your body far away from mine,

they’ll build sand castles against a bleached sky
and dance around. Colors melding and separating.
Blush and blue, to watery purple and back.

Each morning, they’ll stand a bit closer together on the page,
until one day, only a horizontal stripe remains.
A purple tremor on the penciled horizon.

_______________

Washing Dishes at Night

My palms do not match. On the right hand
the life line and love line run parallel
as if Life is dancing against a mirror
and Love is its reflection.

But my left hand has only one line.
As if warning that I will never have love,
only movies alone,
dinners alone,
a cold side of the bed.

Maybe two lines made life and love
so closely intertwined
that I will never have one
without the other. At night
my legs will tangle under sheets,
even in sleep, feeling for that other body.

Or maybe I will never have both
at the same time. Like so many
women before me, I will give up
myself for someone else.
For anyone else. Maybe my left hand
is telling me I will never
know when I stop living.

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Caroline Samples is a Buffalo, New York native who currently resides in Macon, Georgia. She teaches at the nearby Fort Valley State University. Her recent work can be found in descant, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Oak Bend Review.
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Tannen Dell-

The Park

The mist
turns streetlamps
into stars, ones that could
be reached illegally by ladder
and Babylonian determination.

The pine trees
Baulk as if a toddler
reached to their boughs
with a plastic shovel and a
tear for my burning cigarette
crying fire on a rusty lid. If birds

weren’t so
ecological this
side of Oregon I‘d
leave it and walk the stars

into a mourning bruise,
into porcelain flowers,
into blended earth-scape,
Where Andromeda feasts on fog.

_______________

No Noon for the Moon

Like weather fucked branches
I storm through your glare
I lash back with nails
I repent and you smile

I storm through your glare
When tugging off collars
I repent and you smile
Like from my dew lungs

When tugging off collars
My pupils stare dune-ward
Like from my dew lungs
I catch a wet breath

My pupils stare dune-ward
When constellations fight
I catch a wet breath
And I’m left in your wake

When constellations fight
I lash back with nails
And I’m left in your wake
Like weather fucked branches

_______________

Blackboards of Discovery

There is a room with a blackboard; it is energetic, full of coffee, inertia thoughts and gravity.

He will be shot
He will be famous
He will remembered
He will misrepresented

“In time, new trees will grow my love and we’ll dine in the forest.”

_______________

Grin to the Dawn

An idea,
when divided
makes quarries of you.
A land fill of anti-depressants is what you breathe. Watch as what you see is brimmed with shining receptors. Notice. Your pupils recharging phone batteries and taste the bitter varnish on your lips, your taste buds sigh and your throat fuses an active bomb. Light up a smoke and hope the flames catch in your lungs-
One
Two
Four
Eight.
A multiplicative boom goes up into shrapnel words and holocaust sentiments. You transmutate your world into concentrated synergy, without a host.

_______________

Cliffs of the Sphere

The sky is a busy street, blurs my page and eco-dome in blue. Why is it I am so tolerant of rain like a child questions incessant in patterns like math in an owls talons, buried in rusty triggers and cogs, hung on a sill, a sill by my bedside leaning to the outward ying-yang of eleven dimensions superimposed in the rainbow praying mantis wings dipped in fossil fuel and left to dry on the eye socket skillets of my three-pronged idealism?

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Tannen Dell is a writer from Tigard, Oregon. He edits at Indigo Rising Magazine and PCC’s Alchemy/Alembic. His goals are: bringing more art programs to schools, continue to write and never run out of Coffee.

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Other notable works by Lynn Levin and Jude Goodwin.

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Antonia Clark-

Comedian

This is serious, they keep saying
no laughing matter. But he can’t stop.
Even when it hurts to breathe. Irony
being both beautiful and humorous.

He lines the bottles up on the sill
over the sink, the pills in a row
on the table, pushes them
into a a smile, then a scowl.

Most are small and pastel. Only
one that’s hard to get down,
huge and oblong and furious yellow.
I can cut it in half for you, she says.

But he says, leave it. Let me
choke on it. Killed by the cure–
Now that would be funny.

_______________

Northerly

The wind’s out of the north,
no mere breeze or flurry,
no whistling gypsy.

No white-faced, puff-cheeked
cartoon blowing up women’s skirts

breaking up the party
with a phony tornado warning

or a shrieking banshee
spreading bad news like smoke.

Not even your everyday guster,
whipping dry branches
to tinder, their oaky havoc thrown
in the face of a gunmetal sky.

It’s a wannabe wind, a would-be
ripper that gallops, charges,

slams.

A big-mouthed blowhard,
a boorish and unwelcome guest
who stirs everyone into a frenzy
and then leaves, all in a huff.

_______________

We Agree to the Deal

Despite carping
and complaints —
the high cost
and low coverage,
loopholes and
hidden agendas,
illegible devils
in the details
of fine print -—
we nod, accept
the weak handshake
of the future
without comment,
hoping against
hope that tomorrow’s
no false promise,
dawn more
than a mirage
on the horizon.

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Antonia Clark works for a medical software company in Burlington, Vermont, and is co-administrator of an online poetry workshop, The Waters. Recent poems have appeared in The 2River View, Anderbo, Apparatus Magazine, The Cortland Review, Soundzine, Umbrella, and elsewhere. She loves French food and wine, and plays French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.
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Lynn Levin-

Idylls of Mayfield

America during the days of Leave It to Beaver –
was so gentle: even the war was a Cold War. Wally
never worried about finding himself, and Ward
knew he was blessed with well-adjusted kids and beautiful June
who always looked up to him. Oh orderly suburbs! Oh Mayfield!
whose major troubles came from the mind of Eddie Haskell

who wouldn’t quit giving Beav the business. Eddie Haskell
who got Wally to break curfew and urged Beaver
to sign up for the modeling agency. Remember Mayfield’s
soup bowl billboard? Beaver scaled it the night of Wally’s
teen party and got stuck in the bowl. I bet June
was hysterical. “Next time don’t take foolish dares,” counseled Ward

who parented per Spock, spared the rod. And Ward
never forgot that he’d been young once. Eddie Haskell
wasn’t as lucky in the dad department, but did he flatter June,
“You look lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver!” Sure Beaver
understood that Eddie was two-faced, but he was Wally’s
best friend. I never figured out why in all of Mayfield

Wally couldn’t find a better best friend. Anyhow, life after Mayfield
wasn’t easy for Ken Osmond. He could only look forward
to smarmy-guy roles and finally became a cop on the LAPD. Was Wally
scratching his head about that, thinking how ironic that Eddie Haskell
was making other people follow the rules? After Beaver
Jerry Mathers earned a B.A. in philosophy and a bundle in real estate. June

would have been proud. And Eddie was right. June
was a vision in shirtwaists and pearls, always dressed to go out in Mayfield
though she never went anywhere. Staying home for Wally and Beaver
seemed to fulfill her. She had that kind of grace and in Ward
a decent guy who managed a smile whenever Eddie Haskell
came to the door. Yet how could that boy not envy Wally?

Clean cut, smart, well liked, a letterman in sports, Wally
was ripe for Eddie’s corruption and certainly June
kept an eye out, maybe pitied him too, for I suspect Eddie Haskell
felt bad about himself the way the less loved, less talented may feel
bad about themselves. The Cleavers found fate kinder. They had Ward
who listened and fixed what he could fix so that Beaver

and Wally could have a happy childhood in Mayfield.
Sometimes I wished my parents were like June and Ward
but I always laughed when Eddie Haskell messed with Beaver.

_______________

Mooncakes

As one keeps piecing the lone star
or pounding the 5K
declaring after lengthy self-application
a kind of enthusiasm
for those things, so I have eaten
and learned to love mooncakes –
the sweet satiny mucilage
of their amber goo
centers filled with lotus seeds
boiled, mashed, cooked
with much sugar and oil.
Fashionable not to like them
yet I admit to mooncakes
a mild addiction. I buy them
during the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival –
ingots in their cellophane sleeves
lined up on the counter
at the bakery on North Tenth
their delicate pastry skins pressed
with the flowers of wealth
the ducks of happy marriage.
I slice one with a bone knife
eat it from a black plate
alone, no one else
complaining of my taste –
I have taught myself that small pleasure.

(“Mooncakes” was originally published in Ping*Pong.)

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Lynn Levin is a poet, writer, and translator. Her poetry collections include Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards
finalist in poetry, and Imaginarium (Loonfeather Press), a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in Boulevard, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other places. She teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.
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Jude Goodwin-

Love, and the kicking of it

It took years, starting in detox
many times into detox
holding different hands
sneaking out for a smoke then run
run across the wet lawns
find a bus. After that it was rehab.
and groveling (my
father’s word). Rehab
then off to Half Way,
dragging a duffle of
journals, New Dawn,
New Day – I carry polaroids
of it all on a key ring,
next to a fob inscribed
with the number seven.
It’s a new number
every year, and a cake.
And I’ve learned things:
how to walk along the Squamish
River, ride my bike
straight down The Plunge,
I’ve learned about sashimi salad
and there have been
some good books, very good
books. At night as I lie
awake I remember the feel
of their pages, their rough
edges, the smell of their ink.
It took years but I believe
I’m over it all now, the phone calls
have stopped, I’ve lost track
of the old gang. In Recovery
they gave me a grey blanket
and I still have that today.

_______________

Murder Wrinkles

I’ve read recently
about murder wrinkles
and think I saw them once
on a woman about my age.
We’re always pictured
either desperately content
or desperately not,
either wearing bird watching
jackets and gardening gloves,
or red lipstick and long
cigarettes. And dark glasses.
I think about that one
while wandering the parking lot
looking for my car. And about
Leonard Cohen. How did he love
all those women and end up
alone? All those breasts,
and red mouths, and bird
analogies, all those rivers and
petals. Seven decades
and there’s still no one to say
“Why don’t you turn on the radio
Lenny, and sit by me awhile.”
I’m looking for Leonard
Cohen at the new Bookshelf
but it’s Monday and the place
is usually empty like this,
just a few robins around
the self-aware section,
clutching their cloth shopping
bags. I forget I’m not wearing
bellbottoms and tie-dye
anymore, with a flower
in the buttonhole of my blue
sweater. Murder wrinkles.
I googled it of course.
Turns out, everyone wants
to know.

_______________

Because of the falling

she tied long yellow
ribbons to her fingertips

added white linen with a high
thread count, and

on an afternoon when the sun
tilted across the park

she spread her arms
and the earth let go

at last, while her family
swarmed the grassy areas

raised their glasses
in celebration

watched her become smaller
through the amber lens

of champagne. She’s gone
to a better place. They all agreed,

and waved. The message spread
like wind along the river

and people looked up, folded
their papers and lunch bags

lifted their hands from their cats
and shaded their eyes.

It was a long time before she dared
to land, with only a few friends

available to wrap her,
and bring her tea.

_______________

Oh Couch

I love this couch -
ugly,
but long enough,
it fits me.
People with kids need
couches like this one
for naps
during cartoon hour
and dogs
need couches like this.
And blankets
like to gather here,
the fleece, the ancient knitted.
It can be crowded
when something good
is on the telly or on the hearth,
it can be
orange
when something pumpkin-
like is lit and glowing
near the far end,
but it can’t be angry.
This couch
can’t make its pillows hard
or fold its arms
against us.
It’s the thankful couch
and it takes me
lazy, fat, or drunk,
in tears or wrestling
for the perfect spot.
It takes me
and we wear plaid together,
share the smell of paraffin
and patchouli oil.
Oh couch of couches,
mud coloured, dog
haired, coin
thief, remote
concealor,
all things end
with couch and I.

_______________

Window Party

There’s a window party
tonight, the women laughing
must be made of glass.
There are men shouting
like mud men
across the garden
in number twelve
hands on each other
and breaking chairs.
Sleep doesn’t care
sleep says this
is now a pool party
all wrestlers and red
lipped Bettys down
below sound, deep
green and round
their noises jiggle
the face of the moon
and now they’re gone.

_______________

Red

We stood in the rain today,
the November rain,
probably together although
I couldn’t find your face,
didn’t recognize you
in uniform and away
from the dance floor.
People carried wreaths
to the cenotaph, I held
an umbrella for someone
elderly. The pipers played.

Is this Canadian? The pipers
in their red plaid kilts, the red
poppies on all our breasts,
the red combusting maple trees
above all our damp heads,
you in your red tunic
and stiff boots, not looking for me.

We stood in the rain today
and any one of you
could have walked up to me,
slipped your arm around my waist
and I would have fallen a bit
to feel you there – so I held my place,
a woman alone, believing
that peace might come
to the world someday, and if it does
we’ll be standing together like this again,
listening to the pipers play.

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Jude Goodwin is an internet poet whose poems can be read in print journals including Cider Press Review, Burnside Review, Comstock Review, and CV2. Her poems have repeatedly won and placed well in the IBPC: New Poetry Voices competition, were twice shortlisted in the CBC Radio Literary Awards, and can be found online in journals such as Eclectica and the Pedestal. Jude lives in Squamish BC, Canada where she runs a small publishing and design shop.
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Other notable work by Mark Bennion.

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Jim Richards-

Adam’s Song

Tommy was the first pet I had in Eden,
par·a·keet seemed to fit—small parrot
with long tail, the color of apple, new leaf,
and lemon; harsh, irritating song.
I called it “screaming” at first but my softer side
said, “Song, Adam, song.”

Eve taught me about mu·sic—a medley
of sounds and tones, as of the wind.
Cain taught me that some music is hard
to hear: “Father, I have killed Abel
and buried myself where frozen stars
draw black flowers from my grave.”
That was a song.

I clipped Tommy’s wings the day of Abel’s death,
with scis·sors—a cutting instrument, two pivoted blades.
I gathered the yellow, green, and dark
red shadows in the valley of my palm.
Eve sang a music I could hardly hear.
I inserted one-by-one into the warm earth of Abel’s grave
the cool feath·ers—lighter than flowers, less afraid
of flying; colorfast and hardened by a harsh song.

_______________

Buffalo Jump

This horned skull I found
at the cliff’s base
is so like a giant shell
I raise it to my ear

and hear the hundreds
of bison drumming
through the sage, see
the chosen fall—dust

to dust—onto the holy
ground, feel the thunder
of their landing, wet
nostrils blowing blood.

When reverent blades
begin to rip through fur
and skin, I check the sky
for a revelation of beasts.

_______________

Elegy for a Soldier

As a boy, he loved when deep white
filled the full yard, and made it glow
in the dark at dinnertime. He watched it
while he ate, the way some watch fire,
and couldn’t wait to bundle up
and go it alone through the snow.

Outside—his ears numb with the acoustics
of winter—he burrowed through drifts
and heavy powder like a soldier wounded
and left for dead. He crossed the enemy’s country.
He killed. Mother and Father watched him
from the window, and the dangers he imagined

were confined to a square of yellow light
on the snow. To know what it was to fight,
to die, he would have stayed out till dawn.
But his mother’s voice kept calling him in
to a fire and a warm cup he could hold
between small, reddened hands.

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Jim Richards completed a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston in 2003 and has since been teaching at Brigham Young University–Idaho. His poems have appeared in the Texas Review, Perspective, and Literature and Belief. He is currently serving as the poetry editor of Irreantum.

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Mark Bennion-

Grass

Merges with the squirrel’s grin.
Wisps of it in teeth. Rises from crew cut
to reveal ponytail,
then waves in the wind,

claims, “This is how we do it. This is how
we return.” Bows again as if to make stronger.
Bows again as if on stage.
A blade, a blade, a blade—
each one, child or convict, rearing up.

Spindle after spindle points the way,
or hides the unseen snake
from the sandbox child.
Crowded, yet defers to dandelion curls.
Lifts weeds to sky. Nostril ping.

Going to dew. Available: its beard
of loam, its spinal fluid, the swelter
that wears it down. Stolid, blind,
or stammering. The soft spin
of a badminton net . . . all the routine.

Again; surging, tickle on the neck,
prayer that stains the knees. The night
crawlers underneath.
The flare of end zone comatose in winter.
Sunbathers offered to the light.

_______________

Imagining You the Morning After My Birth

You cradle me in the yellow haze
after a fitful night. Your stomach
still ablaze with uterine contractions
as I learn how to eat. The St. Mary
nurses coo and question, juggle IV’s
and needles, medicine and bed sheets.
You look for yourself and your parents
in my swollen face, measure this fist against
your pointer finger. There are shivers

of hunger passing between us, muscles
that will take another three trimesters to heal.
With one hand you trace the cartilage
and sinew along the ridges of my nose
and chin, with the other you prop up
my neck and witness my effort to swallow.
From the other rooms come staid, doctored
voices and intermittent moans. You’d pray
for these women—your sisters now in their terror—

in their offering of blood, lungs, and bone,
but it’s all you can do to remember
the next visitor as your head begins to nod,
bobbing to the even rhythms of sleep.
I hear your regular heartbeat and open one eye
toward the hunch of your shoulder
and wrinkled hospital gown. Your hair is matted
with the strains of yesterday’s sweat, the strands
of blond tucked in by exhaustion as you take

this moment for yourself, this necessary
point of departure, like a ship heading
for the sea. In days to come I’ll receive
the newspaper praise and starboard attention
from my brothers. Yet in the core of wrinkles
and puppet fingers, in the jolts and stops
of this flesh and the scarred emblems
of your body, we know the real star
of the past nine months—a constellation

I am just now beginning to see.

_______________

Denial

What is easy to know
arrives alone and incandescent,
long after a sermon or fight.
The mind grows clear as water
beneath the mid-May sun.
And then, at night
when sorrow and guilt
dangle on cerebral pulleys
so the curtain can’t descend,
release and movement
open doors and keys
are common as salt.
Despite the clarity
and crumpled friction
the face hitches to TV.
Ears burn for Drs. Phil
and Laura, for the thrum
of Internet speed, the routine
of New Year’s Eve.
Hardwired mechanics
hunch the body before long
to stoic indecision
or a slump before a slot machine.
Somehow I still trick myself
in the recess between mental
gifts and physical lethargy
to hike over what’s known
to what I may regret—
the rattle of opening night,
the Chorus’ painted face,
rows of bodies
with their yawns and yaps—
to the banner of what could
but does not change.

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Mark Bennion’s poetry has appeared in Aethlon, RHINO, Natural Bridge, and other journals. His first book of poems, Psalm & Selah: a poetic journey through the Book of Mormon, appeared in 2009 (Parables Publishing). In 2000, he graduated with an MFA from the University of Montana, and for the past ten years has taught writing and literature courses at Brigham Young University–Idaho.

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Other notable works by Christina Marie Speed and Kay Middleton.
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Rae Spencer-

In the Suburbs, Night Rises

Dew trickles out of grassy lawns
Pours from iris shadows and sighs
In the splash of water spilled
Across a hot driveway

So night begins as a swirl on the ground
As song exhaled from green ponds
Drummed from a deep, wide throat
Of amphibian lust

Which thickens into musk and dusk
To muffle the robin’s bright cheer
And damp the cardinal’s red aria
Into grey sparrow refrain

While crickets strike sparks in their legs
Raucous wicks in the neighborhood dark
Which might be confused with stars
Or lovesick lightning bugs

This is strange, ember music
Its raspy chorus wild
And its thick, humid rhythm
Calls wild into my past

Where frogs sing down the sun
And insects warn of changes coming
And birds’ wings beat
And blood passes to breath passes to bone

Throbs into sleep
Where night rises
Between memory and dream
Like silence

_______________

Winter Burial

Wilderness knows winter
Passes like a poet’s words
Capable of bringing
Only the smallest of deaths

More suited to miracle
Bears giving birth
In laborless slumber
And frozen grasses
Enfolding summer

Trees in deep repose
Steadily recording
Lifetimes
In circular cipher

Stark landscapes
Of skeletal beauty
A long inward breath
As prophets might say
The promise of life

And the promise of death
Which should be proof enough
Of miracles
For even a doubter’s soul

Wilderness knows death
As something other than ending
Such lives do not stop
With the last trembling gasp
And the heart’s final beat

A circle has no endings
Only metaphor written in pulp
Wilderness knows
Some things without question

Bears will wake hungry
Grasses grow lush
And trees will remember
They will write your death
Into their hidden hearts

And you will not die
Any more than winter
Despite all your poets
And their beautiful words

_______________

Salmon

Consider the flashing weight of salmon
Bearing their bulk upstream
Silver to white to red
Sliding slippery into a fall
Then leaping

With no other way to see salmon
Except through the eyes of a man
They are frantic
Needful
Flush with the substance of lust

Rushing past salmon-fed bears
Heedless of hunger
Saving no strength for fatigue
Sliding slippery into a fall
Then leaping

This yearly migration of mass
Fin-scale tides of pink
Salmon muscle, ends
On stony banks where it began
In oily vaults of roe

_______________

Spell Out a Robin, for Cheer

The robin red-breast
Of my Virginia phase
Has none of England’s robin-red

More like a red-headed youth
Like two sisters and a brother
My mother and husband
All of them orange

And none of them urging
Cheer up! Cheer up! Cheer up?
Cheerily!

Neither these Virginia birds
The herds of bachelor robins
Who all winter long
Hold their summer tongues

And I call my Tennessee mother
To tell her how robins
Have followed me here

We always worried where they went
When the valley rimed with ice
Streams grayed to slush
And the lawn fell silent

Deserted by robins
Until their return heralded May
Here, only their voices migrate

Wintering in some riotous place
Before thawing in bright demand
To squabble on the fence
Breasts flushed with temper

Provoking mates to sing
Cheer up! Cheer up! Cheer up?
They’re cheerily fat, shiny with rain

And stalk a blindly buried prey
In alert, comedic dance
Dashing across the weeds
To wrestle out a feast of worms

Busy with the business
Of spring’s arrival
While I, like my ginger kin

Simply settle in
Mature into a tedium
Into the cheerless task
Of everyday survival

_______________

Salp Bloom

Suspended chain, linked clone
To clone, coiled seine for the paradox
Of cold seas in splendid bloom

Antarctic carbon sieve, straining
Pelagic balance shifted by season
And sun into transparent wonder

Gelatinous sac of muscle and gut
Scrolled colony adrift in waves
Of plenty, equipped with bundled

Nerve enough to call brain, eye
Enough to see, ravenous enough
To scour oceans empty

Until swallowed by dense death
Rapid wealth sinking to starved depths
Still awash in hunger, still hollow

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Rae Spencer writes poetry and fiction. For her, writing is a way to merge the fixed world of science and math with malleable inner realms of dream, memory, and imagination. Raised in Tennessee, she now makes her home in Virginia, where she is a member of the Albright Poets. Her poetry has been published in online and print journals, receiving Pushcart Prize nominations in 2009 and 2010.
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Christina Marie Speed-

Alphabet

I blew the letters
into the universe
last night.
Fire razed my palm, and

all two-hundred-sixty-four of them
thrust bright on riddled breath
into the hollow black-blue,
ripe with stamina.

Riding scorched wind
energetic shapes
tumble designs geometric –
eager for shape.

I, in ribbons,
thread rough meaning
from the recesses
of my cosmos

while the alphabet I created
spark first words,
burn epoch,
feeding the heat.

_______________

Assist, Cancel, Strip, Force

doctor mixes him with her
petri dish and agar make zygote
plus turkey baster makes baby

silver aircraft stand as
snowflakes drop swirling kisses
plumes of de-icing fluid rush

hugging ancient fuel
trapped miners
scrub walls, breathe in black

orchid, paperwhite
hothouse blinded creep
spreading bright blooms

_______________

Weight

Energy claims the road where
I leave solutions,

Foraging for a detail, a wisp – something
To grasp even if breath claims

The potential
Folds among minnows furious and

Ascertaining in the yaw
Bones crunch under the weight

Of disengagement –
The salt in the wet street, a spark, a cry

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Christina Marie Speed writes poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Caper Journal, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune Online, and The View From Here. She is also a co-editor for the Literary Reflections department at LiteraryMama.com. She lives with her husband and two sons in a sunny fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn, New York.
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Kay Middleton-

Opacity

You live in that city smoggy and gray
rise superior and early, except on the days
when you don’t, when you
shrug on the cloak of haughtiness
examine audacity
like an old muckraker who
measures degrees of opacity.

You are a member of the cathedral,
robed and singing in the choir
voice tenebrous; tones
churlish and coarse as ground glass
an apex in the reforest of ideals
more map than atlas
less veracity unabashedly.

You live in that town of gossip and graft
shutter windows, pull drapes against the draft
and legitimacy of day
flicker in florescence depress
pretend, tend your preferences
count little copper coins and
measure degrees of opacity.

_______________

Because I want to be Lucille Fay LeSueur

That’s why.

I want to look distraught or disinterested
a cigarette angled from the corner
of my red mouth like a soldier relaxing his rifle.
I want to remember the chill I feel as I drop
my shawl and turn shoulder to your camera,
again. My body does not quiver with exposure
nor the distrustful glare in other women’s eyes.
Survivor you see beyond that lens, I will do
what I need. I will change my name to Joan
and you will judge forever. These are the roles cast.

I want to feel the trains vibrate my body enroute
to Chicago, Detroit, New York and Culver City.
Cold cheese sandwiches on mid-western white
bread travels well. When sound comes to the pictures
my sultry voice seduces you to the box office
and I pretend I am a prostitute giving myself
away on the silver screen. I triangle and dance
with daring, dashing men of the day
and pretend to love them all but never stay.

I want to wear the silvery silk turban, crown
for the “Queen of the Movies”, bowed shoes,
pencil-arched brows and Adrian-designed gowns,
a dress that flows and folds like the theater
curtain over the stage of my body. A glittering
luminary, the name Joan Crawford lights the night
for nearly half a century from the marquees in every city.
That was before Mommy Dearest changed the angle
of camera and light—shattered Joan forever.

I want to be Lucille Fay LeSeuer.

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Kay Middleton writes, reads and bakes her own bread in Norfolk, Virginia. She often sits at the table of the Albright poets, having become a member after writing an acceptable limerick. A 2010 Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been rejected by some of the finest publications on the planet and published in a few.
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George Moore-

Inside Wat Pho

This is not the simple absence of noise,
nor that absolute pressure in your ears,
it’s not the jump of the heart,

but that silence that infect spaces
set aside for history. The Chinese lions
at the gate. The Thai gentlemen in top hats.

This composure is that of stones
forged in volcanic eruptions, which in turn
become islands, hissing as they join the sea.

He’s on his side, reclining, as if the word
were itself partially asleep. The figure
resting on an elbow, like an Asian Atlas

only differently, holding up his head
and not the world, although still in the world.
This silence is audible; it’s mouth open

like a cave. The shrine rests on the old city,
Ayuthaya, a gold body in quiescence, visitors
deaf, or singing in low voices, mingling

histories. A smile like a sheen on wet stone,
hair the pattern of pebbles in the yard, soles
of his feet mother-of-pearl swirls

counterpoised with a turbulent world.
Silence here rings in your ears, and it is
desire that fills the sky with noise.

_______________

Greek Isles

after Andreas Embirikos
“The purpose of life is our infinite mass.”

When we visit we become that part of ourselves that was. So abruptly. Like rock once fashioned into steps by the hands of slaves, undoubtedly, before they would be fed, before another day would pass over, and the gods would return to survey the work. Now, that is, today, the language of gods has changed. The spelling is worse, the names confuse immigrants with invaders, and the genders are often up for grab. It is wholesale slaughter, not just here but in all the warehouses, among the barbie dolls and the imported silk imitations of the National Flag. It gets harder to separate out the islands from the sea painted around them. We should never ask anything of the disinterested, give no indication that they have been heard, nothing important can be done without them. Fish, grapes, the tomato, all have material memories. The islands, at last, are a kind of imprint on the sea of the mind, the visitor’s emptiness, the loss real children feel when they open their doors onto the street to find the festival was there, but at a different time.

_______________

Tradition

You cannot take anything with you when you escape. After all these years, bending to the wheel, you must cobble together only an image of the road, millennium bifocals, the cat without hair, a brother lost to the rest of the family. Anything more would be rude or unhealthy, a box larger than the things you carry into storage. You’re a bear in a cave, a fish trying to imagine its way upstream, or a dog on a bordertown street. When you were born, you dragged a world behind you. Name haunt you, like footprints on an island beach, you must read quickly before the storms strip your tropical dream of its memories. You dream all this up from deep inside a closet, a space that reeks of sweaty sneakers and old winter coats. The darkness is as false as wool and inside weather. When you hear good things about an ancestor, you can’t believe it. Weren’t they born into an aristocratic 17th century? Have we forgotten the colonial invasions? Are there idols yet to be destroyed, or is this only a wished-for memory of what might have been, way back before the human sacrifices? The world is always a world of skulls. The armies are forever coming at a march, surrounding the enclave where you labor on your door carvings, your windows spotless but frosty from the ancient unclean glass. You greet the world with a cup of coffee, and think, this is it, this is all my time. But the aroma has brought in the workers from the fields, the women with their dirty weavings, and the children, willing to sell anything.

_______________

Past Paroxysms

The ideological miasma, that is, swamp gas not creating saucers but a sickening sense of now, the present mistake, pushed into the twentieth century like an oversized head into the abandoned hospital room. Such a still birth, mistaken again for an insect, prepared to outlive the race, but it devoured the planet instead, in short order, in under a day (in cosmic time, or by the mirrors). Violence was an end in itself, like swimming. Like a rope that reaches just so far down into a bottomless well. Surely you would climb out? The absolutists, the bolsheviks, the demos, the fascists. Everyone blaming life on something else, the dehumanized remnants of a latent century. The dialectical processes that started with cave fire pretty much ran their course with the first atomic collapse of sense. Who thought the ladder would always have a chute? And if that won’t get you into bed, nothing will. Intellect aside, fried eggs are better in the moment than some vegan misrepresentation of my leather jacket. Why is it we always dream of growing up into a stalemate of time? Talk about movies. Just one inch further, as the Buddhists say, the thought becomes the word becomes the act becomes the regret becomes the divorce becomes a manic reaction to simple things become jail time–or a quiet spell in the country–becomes the next generation. Birth is not simply a physical after-effect of misrepresentations of care. I did what I could. You didn’t do as well. That was last century, entering the present, always blaming the earth for the ideas its inhabitants generate. Postmodernly, we should forget all the violence of the purgative periods of recent history and start again, marriage of blind puppies. You read Hegel again in a café, and I’ll pick you up.

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George Moore has published with The Atlantic, Poetry, Northwest Review, Colorado Review, and a good deal internationally this last year or so, in Blast (Australia), Antigonish Review (Canada), Dublin Quarterly, Semaphore (New Zealand), QRLS (Singapore), and Anastomoo (Tasmania). He spends part of each year doing artist residencies in Europe, and this May was on the island of Rhodes, Greece, at the International Writers and Translators Center. Previous years he’s worked in Portugal, Iceland, Spain and Canada. Some of his poetry has been in collaboration with visual artists in the last few years, with installations and exhibition in Spain, Canada, and Iceland. This year George has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a “Best of the Net” award and the Wolfson Poetry Prize, and last year for a Pushcart, two “Best of the Web”, and The Rhysling Poetry Award. His collections include All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (Pulpbits 2007) and Headhunting (Mellen, 2002). He teaches literature with the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Jacob Newberry-

Elegy

Sit near me as I write to you, here beside palmettos, potted on an 800 year old roof, where I am waiting.

Let the sounds of Jerusalem remind me you are everywhere: the morning’s calls to prayer, the cats that wail like panhandlers in the streets, the noon bells from the church of Calvary.

Let me forgive your passing when the sparrowhawks fly just over me, the wind reaching me from their wings.

Stay with me as I grieve and overlook the city, the expanses white and silent in your absence.

Let us descend and cross the valley as you did, as it is written, to the olive groves.

Let us linger there, our hands darkened with soil, my sorrow quiet when you hear my prayers.

Let us return and visit the markets, where women display cabbages on blankets beside our path. Let us walk the ramparts and bless the sellers of pomegranates.

Let us go to the street where you were killed. Let Kidron and Zion be as buttresses, to steady my feet while I follow the road where you died.

_______________

Deep Sea Fishing

My father took me deep sea fishing
off the coast of Alaska when I was seven.
The men, the hooks, the open sea –
all part of a plan to toughen me up:
he wanted to pique my interest
in the sweaty, masculine endeavors of men.
Once aboard, his plan began to work.
My interests were especially piqued
by the captain’s thrillingly large arms.
They ornamented a massive, sea-sculpted body,
the veins in his forearms pulsing,
the muscles of his biceps releasing and contracting
as he and the fish locked themselves
in an ancient, glistening, moistening rite of barbarism.
As the fish fought for its life,
I was supposed to cheer for a quick surrender,
but I only wanted the pulsing, throbbing
battle to continue.
My father took this for softness,
and although he was happy I seemed so fixated
on the sweaty mechanics of the struggle,
he insisted that I be the one
to club the poor thing to death.
The fish flopping around the deck,
the captain smiled as I chased and beat it
into a coma with his thick club,
too big for me to wield properly.
I was overcome, perspiring masculinely,
seated silently on the deck,
rapturous in the afterglow of his hard
earned approval.
And my father, poor dear,
ecstatic to see my softness ended,
thanked the captain for a job well done,
insisted we’d be back next year.

_______________

Noam Chomsky Wrestles Dick Cheney

Round I

Sufficiently oiled, Chomsky circles Cheney,
studying the angle of attack.
Grey tufts of chest hair jutting
out his V-neck sleeveless spandex one-piece,
he’s all certainty, winking
“Uncle Noam wants you.”
The wisps of ear hair blow softly as he falls
to the mat, taken down by Cheney’s
unexpectedly limber scissor kick.
Cheney beats his chest.

Round II

Chomsky is bleeding slightly from his nose,
but he bounces like a freedom fighter.
He laughs a little when Cheney takes his shirt off,
oils up his hairless chest, points proudly
to the surgery-scarred landscape of his torso and heckles,
“When you lose, I’m installing a new dictator in Venezuela.”
Chomsky runs around the ring to tire his opponent out.
The bell sounds on a draw.

Round III

Cheney no longer seems invincible, as running
has overworked his bionic heart.
Struggling for breath, Cheney looks quickly
to his corner for help. Chomsky sees
his moment has come, so with a cry of
“Liberate this, bitch!” he slams his head into Cheney’s.
They briefly embrace, oiled chest against oiled chest.
The empire topples to the mat.

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Jacob Newberry is a second-year student at Florida State University, pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in poetry. His poems have been published in Rattle and Pinyon, among others. He is the Poetry Editor at the Southeast Review, as well as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine Juked.

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Katie Kopin-

My Sanctuary

My sanctuary lies in a musty church basement.
It is decorated with uncomfortable metal folding chairs and smells of strong, black coffee.
My sanctuary doesn’t have a choir.
In fact, instead of hymns I hear anthems of despair. Anthems of desperation and, at times, surrender.
I don’t find angels either.
The voice of God sounds exactly like the stranger sitting next to me.
In my sanctuary i find my fellow tribe members. And they will keep me safe from the visions in my head for a short while.
I am sheltered from the monster that whispers, “This time you can handle it.”
This church basement holds
laughter and tears
hope and redemption
death and life.
My sanctuary is no longer in the shape of little white pills.
Now my sanctuary is in me.

_______________

Swimming

The sun cuts like a knife
through the watery surface
and the bottom of the pool suddenly
becomes a place where
brilliant diamond-shapes
come to dance.

someone calls my name from
across a vast expanse
and i leap unabashedly into the atmosphere
secure in the knowledge
of being caught.

Because i am little i do not feel
the iciness of the water as it hits my skin,
for i am wearing an imaginary cape
(if you didn’t notice)
I do not taste the salty chlorine,
for i still have remnants
of hot dog stuck in my teeth.
I can’t feel the sting of water
going up my nose
for i’ve learned enough to
hold
my
breath
upon
impact.

Inhaling deeply i lie on my back
pretending to be a dead log.
The balloons of air tucked deep in my stomach
will be my secret supply of oxygen.
i push my belly above the surface
showing the birds and squirrels
my neat trick

If i wanted
I could roll around in any formation,
wiggling my toes
and somersaulting into oblivion and
watch the blue underwater world spin
round and round like the dryer.

So when did i learn fear?

today
i rip the plastic-y smelling water wings
off my arms
and step to the edge of the world
and i don’t care
if someone is there to catch me
when i leap into the air
because i remember now
what i once knew as a small child:
that
i
can
float.

_______________

Haiku

Drip Drop Drip Drop Drip
You are the watering can
to my thirsty soul

_______________

The Difference Between Us
(for Weatherwoman)

The crisp in the air today made me think of you…
She knows She is a Poet, a fluid syllable–the primary color of fire–
that cannot help but be an element for all things lesser.
A river without a source
that undeniably churns us all along,
for stones and mire must acquiesce to the force of the inherent tide.
I long to be a Poet:
a newborn musical chord whose birth signifies
a consummation of soul and sound
so amorous that we wonder
why it has never been in existence before.
Instead comes a tune that sounds familiar
to one I heard a long time ago– yeah, now I remember,
it’s a cover song.
The original was better, anyway.
I am only a Writer:
disjointed syllables haphazardly strung together
by scotch tape and hope.
I am one of those sad colors of the spectrum
that will never be associated with fire
but rather Campbell’s pea soup.
A Writer’s words disagree and refuse to move.
Maybe if i just braid their hair
and brush their teeth, I think,
no one will notice.
Polishing old penny loafers,
enticing you to taste a spoonful.
Oh Poet, you are the possessor of your creation,
not just a malingering tributary.
You are a sedimentary star
whose words move when she says.
This Writer is made of paper-mache–a hardened shell–fragile, and whose purpose
is merely an afterthought
of a substance that once was there.
I would like to know, Dear One,
how do I get there from here?

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Katie Kopin currently teaches high school English in a mental hospital for teenagers in Detroit, Michigan. She has always wanted to be a writer, but is just beginning to submit her work out into cyberspace. Katie is 31 and has never been published before. Additionally, she is a drug addict with eight years clean.

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