Poetry

Hooligan’s Pity

A car turned over the ledge of a cliff,
burning a hole in the lake.
The lip of my dog is cut from a fight
he picked with another dog,
and the scab is hovering on his whiskers,
as if contemplating a suicide to carpet threads.
The straw of my iced coffee knows
it’s more sugar than coffee down there,
and I should be ashamed.
A life on couches is only a sadness
that doesn’t have the will to walk outdoors.

 

I, Narcissist

My friend said I wasn’t fat, but she was, and we
would go on that way, back and forth.
.               —LaWanda Walters, “Goodness in Mississippi”

This mirror, bound devil,
hangs on red walls.

I sift through dreams
and multiply them
.             like miracles.

Bring to me
that which we deem beauty
and let it linger.

I know well that you are
the colors of the sky at 7pm.

I know well that I am
second to that, though I would
be last to admit it.

You know me, you know me.

I do not know how
to speak and look and love
the way you do.

The way you are
.              is a way,

and I am
a vagabond traveling
what space I will.

And isn’t it suitable
I would find,

as I look into puddles,
myself?

 

About the Poet
Daniel Lassell is the winner of a William J. Maier Writing Award and runner-up of the 2016 Bermuda Triangle Prize. His recent work is featured or forthcoming in Slipstream, Hotel Amerika, Atticus Review, Split Lip Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Columbia Journal Online, and The Poet’s Billow. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

If only Ken Burns

could get his hands on this footage. Telemachus,
aged eight years, already thickening, athletic
but still uncertain in his movements. The big neighborhood
ballgame against the brutes who would become
known forever as the suitors. Third inning,
towering popup to left. T. calls for it
the whole way, but Odysseus snares it barehanded
just inches above the boy’s outstretched glove.
Not hard to see how such a move might confirm,
I don’t really trust you, son.  A boy can spit
into the dirt for comfort, rub at it with his cleated sandal,
but these are the moments that burrow deep,
that fester, only to surface once the boy becomes
a man, armed with a ninety-plus per hour sinker
that dives like a trained falcon — a gift honed alone
chucking rocks against rocky hillsides during long
and fatherless summers beneath the white Ithacan sun.
Odysseus. Broken king. PTSD. Bone-heavy, slower now
of wit and reflex, already an hour or two deep
into his cups. Does he understand his son’s words
carry more of a threat than an entreaty?
In his hands the prince carries two weather-beaten
lumps of broken cow-leather. Hey, Pops, he says,
what say you and me have a quick game of catch?
And holds the gloves out, not quite in offering.

About the Poet
Justin Hamm is the author of a full-length collection of poems, “Lessons in Ruin,” and two poetry chapbooks. His poetry has been awarded the Stanley Hanks Prize from the St. Louis Poetry Center and has appeared in Nimrod, Sugar House Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and New Poetry from the Midwest.

This morning, the park

full of trilling bright bluebirds
empty of people;
cerulean brushstrokes flit
from tree to tree, sixteenth-notes
blooming on a staff
of a dewy cast iron fence;
silence like a gate
ajar, waiting for warm wind
to blow open shade to day.

 

Missing

Long gone belonging, a silver earring, loop
hooked around itself, fashioned after its twin,
or maybe before – longing so long it curved
to meet itself so the longing would stop, or be
infinite, dispersed throughout itself like blood
inside the fascia of a wire, electricity feeding
itself instead of sparking at either end.

To miss is to long too long, unbent, uncurving,
to miss is to follow the road and not stop
to consider the ocean, the dome of the sky.
To miss is to lose oneself, like a waterfall
forgets how to fall in the winter, silvered
into a mimicry of itself, a frozen forgetfulness.

 

About the Poet
Kris Bigalk is the author of the poetry collection, “Repeat the Flesh in Numbers” (NYQ Books).  Her work has recently appeared in the anthologies It Starts With Hope, Down to the Dark River, and The Liberal Media Made Me Do It.  She directs the creative writing program at Normandale Community College in Minnesota.

International Color Chart

“Tahitian Sunset,” The Musee d’Orsay the morning after the Millennium
When the doors opened there was no line of tourists waiting,
the same was true of the stairs inside. An empty room of
Renoirs opened on an empty room of Van Goghs opening
on an empty room of Monets. The room of Gauguins held
two guards playing hide and seek. Who says French civil
servants are rule bound, having no sense of humor?

 

“Bristle Grass,” Lodi Gardens, Delhi
According to the sign on the grounds of the garden
Lawns are maintained by the Archeological Survey of India.
In the background, a cow harnessed to an industrial
green lawn mower pulled it leisurely across the vista
while a sister cow followed, chewing contentedly from
the trail of clippings.

 

“Dove Beige,” Bharatpur National Park, India
Our young guide led us through the forest to the home
of the holy one, a shallow cave, where we found the man
draped on his bed, a doe and fawn at his feet. An orphan
that had adopted the man, this fawn now grown with a child
of her own, this scene as ordinary as the birds nesting unmolested
in the electrical wires in the hallway of our hotel back in Agra.

 

“Million Dollar Red,” Reference Desk, Santa Ana Public Library, California
She approached with girlish reserve, a professional
redhead soliciting information about penal code
647. Reaching for the tome, her coat spread, the
trademark thigh high boots and velvet shorts unveiled,
while her body huddled over the statues, engaged
in an act to coax intercourse from print.

 

About the Poet
Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he gardens, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons with his pal, Harry, over drinks at Nick’s on 2^nd. His work has appeared in the North American Review, Pank, Southern Poetry Review and is forthcoming in the Tampa Review and Gargoyle.

Las Floridas

right now I’m
kinda messed                                       stairs
.               below                           moon
.               up                    us swimming in ourselves         shells               O
me now open
..                                                                                       all day
I hear here words & wind                              smooth
.                                                           sure
air full                                                             pure

let’s break                                           alas
call for best of both sides                                 jive
.               .                imagine the lives lied & living
lived
.                                                         did
.              lied                  yeah                   know it well

.   swallowed multifarious meanings                                            blurred

.  melt a ring                  dear     stars                               April

.                 sun shone down on us all today

.                                                                                    baby

.                 sure shone down                                     sure     pure

 

you sd I ain’t no poet yo soy un libertine

 

About the Poet
Steven Alvarez is the author of the novels in verse The Pocho Codex (2011) and The Xicano Genome (2013), both published by Editorial Paroxismo. He has also authored two chapbooks, Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus (2014, winner of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Poetry Prize) and Un/documented, Kentucky (2016, winner of the Rusty Toque Chapbook Prize). His work has appeared in the Best Experimental Writing (BAX), Berkeley Poetry Review, The Drunken Boat, Fence, Huizache, and Waxwing.

My Boredom With Film

Dither at the fairgrounds, where black-faced clowns
used to slide away from broncs flopping past,

and the ice rink skidded with homemade skates
so that the children could grow to be as nostalgic.

The photographers could come back in and look
at what does not suit a proper frame, like a cow

dressed as a bull, and the losers winning the race
before the trumpets play a military tune like blasts

from dynamite off the top of a coal-rich mountain,
which becomes a ski-resort, then a film set today

as I sit directing from a plane zipping back and forth
to scout the site for the classic American western

where all the nations divorce the two coasts when
these meteors and diseases start falling like ashes

happening in a far eastern funeral or a wiccan bonfire,
and the crescendo of the piece is lauded by critics,

but I pound my chest and cry blood at simple vision
instead of human complexity in my work, so pop,

but unnerving to the sensitive who revolt at prints
and galleys and merchandise, too. The crowd and

the very smart just shout and brag. A snoozer hit.
Here comes a smarmy sidekick to give the work

more depth than the script imagines, and a glimpse
at what the history drew from, then drew away from.

 

About the Poet
J.S. Clark was born in 1979. His writing has appeared in brickplight, Slink Chunk Press, News From Nowhere, Section 8 Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, USA.

Bladders Eponymous Leave Bouquet Kaleidoscopic Waterlight Upstaging
By Sara Backer, Hayden Bunker, Timothy Carter, Joanne M Clarkson, Timothy Dodd, Gary Heath, James Jackson, and Kailey Tedesco

A fresh sag sits across his instruments
The tree god lost many leaves laughing.
The stars drowned me in their swarming
Some tell the tree to lift its roots
The wedding was a breeze.
Turning words shift the rose window
& her pale thighs splintered the waterlight clean from the white faucet
(the question returns in the form of a squirrel)

Note: This is a different version of an exquisite corpse with no restrictions. Each poet contributed a word for the title and a line for the poem. Everything will be organized according to whoever responded first. The resulting poem can be a little chaotic, since each poet does not know what has been written or what will be written. 

The Water Cycle

I.
These flowers carefully gathered are,
for the moment, my organs.

And I couldn’t tell if I was real

until a butterfly
landed on me.

II.
My body to be carried down to the river
to be dutifully contributed to memory—

yet you didn’t even notice how I was floating,
watching from just above the trees.

III.
Rain is a tension of surfaces,
clinging to windows and wet branches.

Your eyes, full of weather.

Memories rolling in
from great distances

dark clouds over the heavy arms
of a few neurons.

IV.
My face
looked up at
my face

in another sky.

V.
Dreams seem to be great instances
seeping through your ceiling.

Your face splashed with handfuls of rainwater.

VI.
Do not confuse as I confused
this body with that

which is ceremoniously dumped
in the river.

There is no need to bury water.

Rain is attention
to surfaces.

Careful the rocks are slick
with thought.

About the Poet
Tim Carter is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. His work can also be found most recently in The Seneca Review, Copper Nickel, This Land Press, and Willard & Maple. He frequently plays straight pool with old army vets and walks around the frozen city.

Becoming Seraphim
The ghost laments in the burnt-out foxglove.
Eats the ash-filled apples, the phantom fruits.
The blueness of death filling the air
Like early spring.

His body fades, and he feels the wind
Expand his organs.
They burst like bulbs at high voltage,
Like blood clots to the brain.

In their place the simplicities of light,
Of hidden fractals,
Vanished joints that form new systems
Of bone,

Astral marrow, cartilage the color
Of forget-me-nots,
Nerves like new philosophies,
Hesitant at first, then ending civilizations.

Among the conifers, the brackish undergrowth,
The memory of stilted fields,
The ghost is growing hexagonal wings
Bright as camphor,

Is setting dark, unnerving eyes
Like hot stones in his panicked sockets.

About the Poet
Seth Jani currently resides in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). His own work has been published widely in such places as
The Coe Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Gingerbread House and Gravel. More about him and his work can be found at www.sethjani.com.

In Morph We Trust
There’s something cathartic
about moving. The boxing
of evidence. Transforming
what had been memories
into fresh dumpster feed.
The burning of bridges.

*  *  *

A roach awoke
after a dream-free night
as a man, amazed
by the status quo,
quantum comfort zone,
the empty essence
of equivocal miracles.

*  *  *

Existence of ever-changing
places and faces is designed
by an Uncertainty Principle
which snakes like history
around a sixty watt bulb,
crawls into cozy corners
with rogue regrets crusading
for a Manifest Destiny
of ethically ordained hedonism,
dances across dignified dust
caressing hardwood floors
with Painted Desert denial,
sparks longing in the egos
of languidly lost strangers,
crowns the king of chaos
with the curse of hope.

*  *  *

A man awoke
after a dream-filled night
as the wind, calmed
by the strange change,
instant anxiety escape,
the gravitational immunity
of ethereal substance.

*  *  *

The fatigue and pain
of moving alone provide power
for catharsis. Every sore muscle,
each bleeding knuckle, all
the ascended stairwells, together
they set us up for a fall.
They negate filters and dissolve
shields, leaving only what is.

 About the Poet
Mike Davidson is an attorney, former Assistant Cook County Public Defender, and former college English instructor whose writing has appeared in several journals. He is a a past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award in Poetry.