Poetry

The Thunderstorm Thief’s Weekend Assessment
Infrastructure: minor
security breach. No assistance
needed. Visitors and babies
obscured by portable cover.
Potted ferns—the perfect place
to hide duffle bag. Three
flashes will alert the sky
to intrusion. Blankets
will be necessary to prevent
scarring. Conclusion:
in and out before dinner.

Skittles and Hollow Points
The appetite of a courtroom
shakes
.           like a late-
night television
.                          host.
An opening
monologue renders the moon
not guilty,
and our eyes are healed.
.       Our minds,
.                               transmitted
to oblivion, focus
on a bad joke about a gray hoodie.
We close
.              like little red,
our chests heavy
with scarlet.  We look candy-
coated and start to wonder what
letter will cross the screen

when we’re gone.

About the Poet
A.J. Huffman has published twelve full-length poetry collections, thirteen solo poetry chapbooks and one joint poetry chapbook through various small presses.  Her most recent releases, Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink), A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press), and Familiar Illusions (Flutter Press) are now available from their respective publishers.  She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2500 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, The Bookends Review, Bone Orchard, Corvus Review, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

My Antithesis

I. The Beachcomber

Still unfit to be tied, I’m down at the shoreline
gloating over my escape from fossilization.
abalone images, open these rills;
I’m diving to reach your matrices.

Undercurrents roll shells; hand-to-foot shapes emerge.
mollusk tracks, three toe holes bore through the shell,
one pushes against the shell for leverage.
I will need this design.

Stretched on my brain, Penfield homunculus
circumstances move us forward, leaning, flexed
to grasp sandy gems, connect ideas to the hand.
Through my gills I hear the call for familiar form.
Can’t their minds swim in quantum physics,
like Shakespeare’s vision of this “baseless fabric”?

Three-cornered stones spin over the lake.
I follow, entering opaque pockets stuffed in the clouds.

I still live to ride in those shadowy nests:
a tree-climbing fish’s dream.
Being macropterous has never been easy,
but it has its advantages.

Others may judge this scene as merely a trompe l’oeils.
No matter; so they can’t find the rungs.
What if the Universe is like a hologram?
Let go of small ideas about information density;
look past the images flickering on the wall of the cave.

II. The Push

Is this too slant for you? How far have you climbed?
Level, fake turf is easy for surefooted, psuedo-sciolistic,
football-catching somebodies riding “scholar”-ships,
fat deals, never experiencing violet waves of vertigo
– breathless confinement – or the cornea shock
of being delivered up too soon in the early mind.

III.  The Core Refitted, the Ocean its new shell
(noli me tangeré)

Always the call for closure; you’ll sell more books.
Yet these vespers; and who listens to what is not spoken?
There is a form I see, strange to share with anyone, yet

I’m not ashamed anymore of this stony-hearted squid
that keeps washing up at the end of my beach in my dream.
Its tenticles keep growing back, reaching the velate core,
squeezing out the phrase that betrays my profession.

Just before walking on the shore I hear the blasphemy
announced like a taboo incantation, in spite of my
pressed suit, GPA servitude, vertical profile,
–an incriminating record of my own voice:

“I feel most at home with wordless things.”

About the Poet
Lloyd Milburn has been teaching composition and creative writing for over fifteen years in the Rochester, New York area. He earned an MA in English after completing a creative writing thesis with William Heyen’s advisement. In addition to having work published in Permafrost, Willow Review, Ithaca Lit, The Sandy River Review, and Talking River Review, he is currently nearing completion of his first two books of poetry. His lifelong love for music and a personal interest in synesthesia inform his writing and music.

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.

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. 

Burying the Cat

It’s rough digging, the roots and rocks halt
the spade, and I’m reminded of the “joke”
the nosy old neighbor told me oh now three times
(“See now that’s why they call it West Rocks-bury!”).

Her husband, but blind bones now, told her that.
In a cardboard box beside us stuffed with
grave goods (toys, her food box) she stiffens and
we feel sad and silly, adults mourning a cat.

A cliché, the torrent makes November
that much colder and the squelch that much
louder. These dumb rocks—rocks I toss
among the dying grass only to bury

again, like a dragon hoarding gold, rocks
that as a child I’d gather in July
to blind some giant pond; or if it still could see,
make its pupil dilate, scatter all the dark.

 

About the Poet
Andrew Szilvasy teaches British Literature outside of Boston and lives in the city with his wife and two cats. He earned his MA in English Lit at Boston College. Aside from writing, reading and teaching, Andrew spends his time hiking and brewing beer.

Dissolving the Ismic Phantoms of Particularity

… and looped into a point, into to all the psycho-plastic
modernisms, the panglossular monstrosities in their splendid
pre-pre-posit cosmo-loony-logical caboodled kit of relativity
between its cardboard walls, looking where to stand, seeking
some situs heavy with the drip of old columns fluting in spring
rains and classically soporific like old recluses in a warm room,
lapped in contextual pale-blue shirts over lank arms, shoulders
squared under years of not finding themselves amid the marshes
of rough indigo scarred by mosquito swamps, while the jeeps
come out with barrelfuls of amber dust dimpling the tomato fields
and simmering in slow evening must, the best muster passed
among the understructures of your parents’ grief, dragging their
coffers across the hills, their nihilations manifest in dying
photographs locked forever by an absent key. The dark chanteuse
with the pristinely yellow hair begins to sing—Is that all there is?
A hurdy-gurdy sax wails in the dark, the pressure to keep dancing
climbs the mountains of sweet booze and the slick skin trades
of suburbia cumulating like timepiece sand. Even the caryatides
have shaken off their pediments and run into the tavern of the naked
damned. The dream is past at the beginning of the century—Down
with all apodictic rigors of mortality! Down with the lying visions
of the waking state! The sediments of comprehension churn and
slip away like the fine muck of a subterranean slide, while all else
slogs amid the gloomy mausolea of new texts, kaleidoscopes in heat,
turning on tables bookended with treasure-hoards where words
and wordlings are the only hope, fine-tuning the mask that keeps
the eye from turning mad, not a face yet worn out or outscorned
for its redundancy, dwelling inside the circle but preaching through
an outside chink, planting a mindless pennant in the quaggy mass,
announcing every whiff of nothingness, the whatnots behind it—
or beyond …

About the Poet
Askold Skalsky, born in Ukraine, currently resides in Hagerstown, Maryland. His poems have appeared in over 300 magazines and online journals in the USA as well as in literary publications in Canada, England, Ireland, mainland Europe, Turkey, Australia, and Bangladesh. A first collection, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu, was published in 2011 by Horizon Tracts in New York City. He is currently at work on a cycle of poems based on some of the works of Gertrude Stein.

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.