Poetry

Meditation on Three Spaces
He is always looking out the peephole
at the hallway’s off-white walls and
hoping no one will be out there.
But at the same time, he is lonely,
the sameness—that moment,
a dead cat in a parking lot—
is like nothing left to understand,
a lump of coal bathed in the moon.
Someone could be coming
up the stairs and he would not know
until his head, then his chest and arms,
and then his legs stepped up to the landing,
and that would be the beginning.
The space between them then would be
denser than the sky that hangs
thin without reason to the earth,
as if it could be peeled like a rind
to get at the wet truth underneath.
The lost cosmonauts still float
into the giant pupil of space,
and must have died realizing that
they were only inside the things they saw,
not the things that mattered. They
will drift for a billion years of nowhere,
and even they will cease to be,
as on earth, all traces erased,
before and after photos showing
they were clearly never there.
Maybe no other place exists but
the woman who let him spread her out
like a canvas stretched beneath him.
Years ago, he thinks. He wanted her
to make something of him, as well,
an image, or a self, or an other,
even a blank page waiting for words,
so many words that he would not know
one from another or where one ended
and another began. The world is
an agony of waiting rooms, a promise
of stitches, and a healing now, a healing
this time, but not every time, so he knows
something is coming. A parking lot sits
wrapped in wire outside his window,
the wisp of oxygen like blood
flowing beneath his pear skin.
Footsteps. The punched gut of waiting.
He thinks, I am small now, a painting
of pinpricks seen from across the room.

An Honesty
Be monogamous with a paper doll,
buy a pair of ice skates, or build
a firefly’s home in a mason jar,
and you will see how possible
the world unmakes us. Always
her other cutout selves will yearn
to tear away, the skates will blade
each other to ribbons, and if
you forget to poke holes in the lid
the fires will all extinguish. You
are barely here, and what else
could she do? Days fall in shambles
of sameness, and the cotton candy is
spun with spiders. As if someone
wants you falling all over yourself,
leaving a trail of blood on the ice.
You are no dynamite lover, for sure,
and what you capture won’t last
unless you smash the jar. If these
are your first best intentions, you
might try gluing that jar back together,
cutting the strip of connective paper,
applying bandaids. Whatever you decide
will be wrong in most situations, and this
is all as useful to you as a map
of Constantinople. Smile and consider
the past that wasn’t what you wanted,
the present that wobbles at the touch
of your hand, the future that might
never come. The path that was chosen
by people you’ve never met. Petroleum
and pesticides, plastics and wars.
All you have is the firefly you made
yourself let go. That counts, right?

About the Poet
Todd Heldt’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Anti-, and many others. His first book of poetry, Card Tricks for the Starving, was widely ignored in 2009, and he has a novel available for your kindle here: goo.gl/luWVq. His first feature length film, Critical Nexus, was an official selection to the San Diego Black Film Festival in 2014. Todd was recently nominated to not win a Pushcart Prize again this year. He lives in Chicago with my wife and sons, and mostly feel ok.

Sunset Scumbles the Ochre

Kayak’s Hull with Blush,

as we sit on the dock, sipping

Burgundy from clear plastic cups.

Love is so subjective anyway,

like shadows on the dazzling azure sea.

In fact life can look peachy one day

and be blood red fury the next.

To me a broken quahog is beautiful.

She likes seashells perfectly scalloped

and bone dry. I am attracted to

the colors of the mallard, its neck

sheened purple and green.

She stays clear of that palette.

Color is just a thought.

Even the loyalty of a Golden

Retriever is, by nature, blind.

About the Poet
Grey Held  is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing.  His  first book, Two-Star General, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press. His second book, Spilled Milk, was published by WordPress.

Honor Among Thieves

is wildly, vastly, confusingly overrated. IMHO. Was there a focus group

I missed, for God’s sake? Or a convention of felons who gathered

in the illegal dark gym of a Teamster’s Hyatt in New Jersey to work out

 

the uncompromising details? And agree, actually shake hands on this

impalpably ironic bull? LOL. Less likely than winning trifectas back to back

on consecutive Tuesdays with rain both days. It’s not so much our thing

 

you know, all in the silent family. We’re loyal to money. Take that to the bank.

But don’t expect no check. We don’t do business that way. Know what I mean.

Silence is the best loyalty, and loyalty is a silence no one can afford to forget.

 

About the Poet
Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore Maryland where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank. His book, The Stars Undone, was taken from a larger manuscript about the Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson. Four poems became the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, composed by Eric Ewazen of Juilliard, and performed four times to date. His 2016 publications or acceptances Aberration Labyrinth, Allegro, Clade Song, Conjunctions, Crack the spine, Dead Mule, Five 2 One, Gingerbread House, Gloom Cupboard, Gnarled Oak, Kestrel, Little Patuxent, Louisville Review, Magnolia, MPQR, OffCourse, Quiddity, Red Eft Review, Southern Quarterly, Steel Toe, Stonecoast, Literateur, & Triggerfish.

 

To The Sky His Druzy Forehead
The crevice lip to cheek makes
soft as chalk.
.                       The emergency
isn’t mine I step back from—
the neighbor taken by police
from his house like hair
from a chin.
.                       What poison
had he manufactured for
his wallows, the rumored wife
not seen for weeks? Which one,
knowing this, was gentle
and tipped his head to put him
in the car?
.                       Twenty-four years
of weather visits our awareness
with nothing but the clear, globed roe
of words unpassed
.                              —a silent music,
as between two spoons that never touch.
By some point it seems too quickly
we replace the people in our days;
the strangers all are vapors
and on dark occasions, rhyme.

 

Solitude More Than Any Other Style Keeps the Time Exactly
An owl moves its navy eraser
in a world of its own purpose.
There’s a second horizon
where the stars start
to appear. That there should be something
to eat, and that the meteor of ambition
is beyond me are just hunches,
and often belated, lighting my face
with a fool’s glow of hindsight:
she must have given herself
to the chewing of the waves as as
to a suitor known the minutes
to a kiss. Solitude, more than any other style
of travel, keeps the time exactly—is paid
in prey for its parabolic swoop. I step solid
in the knowledge of the slippage
at my back : turn to look : the train’s
one headlight seems to bring
the tunnel with it—sidereal, meek,
and keeping pace. It pulls beside me
for a cosmic minute, then beside me for its past.

 

L-M-N-O-P
The difference between meaning biscuits
and well-meaning biscuits is inestimable

insofar as four letters and a hyphen find
a socket as where a doorknob at my back

turns pushy and brassy and attaches
and we know it exactly—

one is gnostic and tagged by accident
while the other disappears, neither true

nor untrue, a space between me and a hole-
in-the-wall in which the leaning balances.

 

About the Poet
Alec Hershman lives in Michigan. He has received awards from the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts, The Jentel Foundation, Playa, and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design. More of his work appears in recent issues of Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Mantis, Western Humanities Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. You can learn more at alechershmanpoetry.com.

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. 

Tornado

1893

In the downpour and darkness,
it swept southeast for six miles,
cutting across the Kansas prairie,
leaving not a house, barn, tree,
or headstone standing in its path.

At the Hutchinson farm, seven horses
were killed and Mrs. Hutchinson
lost her life. Her arms and legs were found
in a treetop a mile away from where
she had prepared the evening meal
an hour before.

As soon as the storm had passed,
the awful hunt began.  All night long,
with lanterns in hand, neighbors searched
for the dead and dying.  The last body
was discovered the next afternoon.

And on a Sunday three days later,
the Union Pacific ran special trains
to Williamstown for people
to see the damage.

About the Poet
Terry Allen lives in Columbia, Missouri and is an Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he taught acting, directing and playwriting. He directed well over a hundred plays during his thirty-eight years of teaching.  A few favorites include: Candide, Macbeth, Death of a Salesman, and The Threepenny Opera. He now writes poetry and has been published in Fine Arts Discovery, Well Versed, I-70 Review, Freshwater Poetry Journal, Boston Literary Magazine, Garbanzo Literary Journal, Bop Dead City,Third Wednesday, and Star 82 Review.

Atropos the Fate Dismantles Her Own Altar
Replicas of my shears rust in museums.  Thieves out-think
code to touch the blood of those blades.  As though memory
of war could make them brave. As though legend explains –
bad luck to say it – death.  In case

your myths are sketchy, I’m the Fate that snips, the ultimate
Fortune. Tarot card with an edge bent down.  I watch

another launch, private sector invading Space with a ship labeled
Youth Unlimited.  Better to re-seed the mountaintop.  Better
to sign on for the invisible circus of the brain.  My metal

is as illusory as the vision that hangs in the sky for a silver
tremor after the blast. When the pilot has two beats
to bank away.  No one hand could sabotage so many breaths

in a nano-second.  A city’s arteries under a mega-flower becoming
flame, the confounder of paper and scissors.  Don’t you realize
I took my own life eons ago? Fascinated by my power
but needing practice?  Scientist injecting herself with disease
so sure of her miracle cure.  All Fate

is collective.  The end disproved by one selfless citizen
or cell.  Ghosts are a comforting legend: sisters in an attic
mixing thread with destiny. Come, Children,

look at guns under glass.  At Oppenheimer and the Curies.
Then tell me if you believe in an old woman with a jackknife
in her pocket.  Each of you fingering the trigger up your sleeve.

Transmogrify
South-south-west to north again
wind tonight batters hemlock,
the maples.  I listen
to old puzzle games: branch
to bone
and back, unveiling
faces: my miscarriage, my
least used Muse, the mask
of the thief
who kidnapped me young.  South-
south-east to west
again.  Firs bend.

Once at a Casino, I saw a Medium’s
show.  The billboard read: ‘Transmogrify.’
I was loaded
and lucky, looking from
the other side.  North to south
and back again when
I saw the cheekbones
of a just-past-middle-aged woman re-form
into the brow of a child,
drowning.  Astonished parents
wailed. The audience
moaned nooooo-waaayyyy.

I was struck
by how much we dare to re-assemble
each other: me and my
sister’s boyfriend kissing in the toolshed
that windless
summer re-creating not my worst sin
but the outline
of a gypsy in a head-scarf
whose profile might become
lovers or a do-over
dream, north-
north-west and back
again, one mutable
bone.

About the Poet
Joanne M. Clarkson’s fourth poetry collection, “Believing the Body,” was published in 2014 by Gribble Press. Poems have appeared recently in Rhino, The Baltimore Review, The Healing Muse and Fjords Review.  She was awarded first place in Northern Colorado Writers Annual Competition in 2015. Joanne has  Master’s Degrees in English and Library Science. She has taught and worked as a professional librarian.  Her life-long hobby has been reading Palms and Tarot, taught by her psychic Grandmother.  See more at http://JoanneClarkson.com.

Two Views of the Sky
Motors churn for the hillside. Outside
the glass           up        sky floods, rolls
on cirrus flicks, feathered souls, new
wave keyboard notes—enough clarity
.           to tip it back in a blue
.           bottle, enough stretch
.           to sprint the next care.
.           Enough azure to rise.

I know not the different types of clouds, still,
to think what’s given me. Is depth in my eyes
to see what she prepares? And the human catch,

to look for elsewhere desire—the other side, now
bleeding streaks in purple          and break-light red.
You could grab your own running blood and pour
it in a glass                    taste the particles running
the heavens. This is not for display. This is home.

I turn. She creeps along the aisle with cane, between
two skies, down the steps. Off the bus, into the street,
words lisped about cans on the ground, and the fixx.

About the Poet
Timothy B. Dodd is from Mink Shoals, WV.  His poetry has appeared in The Roanoke Review, William & Mary Review, Big River Poetry Review, Crannog, Two Thirds North, and elsewhere.  He is currently in the MFA program at the University of Texas El Paso.