Poetry

Dark Water

Light decides to float on its back around the surface instead of looking inside. You should have seen the way Grandma ran and dove all in one motion
when you went under. One minute you’re flashing Little Mermaid floats, the next you’re vanished in a way that makes me question object
permanence. But you bobbed back up before any of us could even get to you. Hands in the air as if to say I am the drowner, not the drownee here.
Still, I wondered how we would have found you in all that copper water, lead-heavy and stamped with everything it wants to devour.

About the Poet
Kailey Tedesco is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee and the editor-in-chief of Rag Queen Periodical. She received her MFA in creative writing from Arcadia University. She’s a dreamer who believes in ghosts and mermaids. You can find her work in FLAPPERHOUSE, Menacing Hedge, Crack the Spine, and more. For more information, visit kaileytedesco.com.

Autumn Day
I enter the sylvan shadows,
full of a sense of mystery,
seeking to visit my present
and embark upon the
un-happened event.

Lichen on the rocks,
moist damp moss,
lap at my feet, as leaves
flutter to dank ground,
piling on flora compost,
crisp under foot, yet so
woodland moribund.
Suddenly my soul stirs.
It heaves into the past,
full of life-force.

The un-happened event had
not happened. I could emerge
from my box, my casket-to-be,
a case-box study of willful worms
angry at leaves of received wisdom,
hungry to destroy present and past.
That would leave my world a compost pile,
a warren of decaying status quo ante
under attack by a vast ant army
far more numerous than we
inhabitants of the Anthropocene.

If high tech can teleport me to
my un-happened event,
I can fend off the worms and
restore leaves to their mother trees.
I can nuke the ants into Eternity,
bring hope to all people. But this
is selfish rumination.

Time and Eternity co-habit this
forest. Everything must be as
it was. My time has not come.
The theology of worms and the
dogma of ants say it is so.

About the Poet
G. Louis Heath, Ph.D., Berkeley, 1969, teaches at Ashford University, Clinton, Iowa. He retires in May, 2016. He enjoys reading his poems at open mics. He often hikes along the Mississippi River, stopping to work on a poem he pulls from his back pocket, weather permitting. His books include Mutiny Does Not Happen Lightly, Long Dark River Casino, and Vandals In The Bomb Factory. His most recent poems have been published in Poppy Road Review, Writing Raw, Inkstain Press, Verse-Virtual, and Squawk Back. He can be contacted at gheathorov@gmail.com.

Sketch
Feel this here: jaws snapping
in the dark,
the owl hoots out the shape
of the night,
fresh wind stirs,
time slowly stretches,
the moment stands still,
stillness stands momentarily,
stars appear on the lid of
transient world
and nothing else –
the future looks deep in
our eyes and there are depths
to look into.

About the Poet
Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections and two chapbooks, published in USA and Europe. He has won several European awards for his poetry and he’s nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Net. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.

Forklift Congé Chaos Buds Average Llama Prim
By Hillel Broder, Katie Hibner, Daniel Jones, W.F. Lantry, Ian Rice, Richard King Perkins II, and James Valvis

You can ladle me up with the bees.
Goodbye ferocious meadows, fencelines, raucous birds.
How your eyes painted light into every corner of darkness
though we cracked a kind smile, the clouds conspired otherwise
I’ll just leave this here.
When a man can’t give his liver he’s not going to give his heart.
An occasion peeled from the window.

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. 

Conversation with a Faucet

My father taught me to relate directly

to the faucet––

not through the mediation of a cup or glass.

 

He’d put his mouth right to it when he was thirsty,

stooping down, as if to kiss it,

something that I liked to see,

since I believed that was what workman did.

(His father had come from Europe as a carpenter.)

 

As I stare now at the faucet––

the stubby one in the little bathroom off the kitchen––

I know what it will say to me

before I even turn the handle:

 

Alan, it will say, I am not the sun,

nor am I the moon with its tides,

but there is something I can teach you.

My sources aren’t anywhere you can see,

but under the earth dozens of miles,

the way things you’ve forgotten

or never dared to reveal

can appear in what you might say now––

free of cloudy sadness or hate

and sparkling with lucidity.

 

That’s true, faucet.

In certain ways, you are an image of myself––

shut off completely, or perhaps mostly,

and then gushing generously,

as if going from depression to mania.

But do me one favor, please:

Don’t refer to your origins.

Let them listen to you

and then guess where you came from

from what you’re saying

with your silvery voice.

 

About the Poet
Alan Feldman is the author of several poetry collections, including Immortality, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2015.  This year his poems have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Hanging Loose, upstreet, Salamander, Cimarron Review, and (online) in Cordite, Across the Margin, as well as on Poetry Daily. 

Greater Canyons Will Fall
The land falls away, leaving only a squid rising from the ocean’s cellar—tiny frozen puffs squelching onto the dry kelp of winter. I adjust a diadem of frenzy bolted inside my forebrain, randomly shrinking thoughts. As my eyes rise, satellites are uplifted into a moonstruck orbit. Indifference is pleased at the healing of recognition. The honed bluntness of my words, acutely angling from me, repairing vestigials into furrows of sutured essentials. This will only happen once: A dissention of thought tumbles elephantine upon the promenade of my vena cava and stands impatiently in the overhang of my lungs. The sphincter of fulfillment, nectarous entrails. The suffused enunciation of epithets. Unreflected, Unechoed. A karmic certainty.

You can rush in. You can apply opaque. And no, it would always be gone and yes, you wouldn’t let go of me temporarily. Yet it is windless in day, together in the mountains leaving the calm of the thoughts pushing its valuables—you try to take my lips from me and inject me with healing serum and I object. Here, love is illimitable. There isn’t anything that grow that doesn’t need something. You can’t thrive just anywhere consuming everything. But no.

Here you are. I found you like the first orange wedge I gave away. I offer you grapes and mint leaves and someday I’ll stand in the garden eating strawberries or cucumber, displaying them on a sleeve or stocking. Yet it is wonderful as a parent; bees lining to center stage to absorb accolades and infrequent humiliation, as your youngest follows her parents in bright imitation, with hugs and swimming eyes, finding old words for smart and adorable to misapply to the verb of parent. It is all binding in the apple skin and orange peel, and dull wrens in the rain-breeze of my contentment, Yet there is nothing in the mist of me, this night, if always since I was captured, totally here, even now, unseen and present. Then you consider me gone, leaving lemonade in a glass pitcher. Tupperware. Milk jug. A form of plastic shaped like birth. The weakest of all appear; so that the unloved can close their eyes and sleep.

What you’re looking for is a new faith in Panama, timid and circumspect. It could be a small crater—
without the tenacity to become a lake. Below you, hands held in an inverted steeple, an untraditional sign: A sigil departs a predictive quay where songs from the original voice less now from that which many silence. A demon disfigures in the fog of a child found playing on the idyllic sidewalk of rejection.
Or a soft powder blanks the sky where fish spat. On home doors, the soles of vortex withhold from a barn swallow given to honesty, its cage, or worse—its cigar-box coffin— with panoramic end. The shallower it remains, the more we are bored by the shape of the sky. A self-guided fog enjoys its noted disarray— has an epiphany, and destabilizes random thinking. A depth so violent and profound, that no added force, no dying star, can agitate it further.

Morning certainly, but still dark enough to occasionally blink at the sky releasing fragments of light. White doors on the newly molded condominiums will be emptied shortly with worn purpose. Reflections are absorbed by trees. A few leaves can be found, but no one questions the randomness of purpose directing the countryside. It is a fearsome thing to call anything ugly. Leaves repattern themselves without warning, taunting sacred earth and the once-humans it incorporates, chipping away at cold statues, passing through pores to arrive at the Dead Sea. I will lie and tell you this is a desirable end. Later, these same thoughts will sink me. A certain wariness punches into me heedlessly, stunning my thoughts like a skeptical cricket, in a woodland emptied of glass leaves and poppies. Here are the small chasms in the center of the wilderness waking up. And the greater canyons will fall silent again in the yellow dirge of nightfall.

 

Wishing Cistern
Images of horizontal women
and catatonic lovers

high flying birds
electrical chemicals

a sacrilegious mushroom,
marigolds at war is in my heart

forging mellow blueness
claiming a humanity they have no right to claim.

A gift stolen from the dark earth
kaleidoscope reality incognito

eager metaphysical elevation
from a fastback’s flattest depth

astral intervention found in ripples
warring on an abstract roadmap

an uplifting trance of voice and touch heals
Jayne Mansfield stumbling on a foggy highway.

 

About the Poet
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Writing for six years, his work has appeared in more than a thousand publications including The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The Red Cedar Review and The William and Mary Review. He has poems forthcoming in Hawai’i Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State Review and Texas Review.

Kingsbridge Dawn
While frigid sky drifts blue
muted clocks promise oblivion,
a voice wakes before the others
to talk the sun through its weary rising

Mingling major and minor keys of
daycare rooms,
between the night’s rumble of the Deegan
and the morning’s urgent horns.

Mingling keys, major and minor,
a voice empties on the sun streaks
of rented eggshell walls, sun cracks that
survived the sharp Kingsbridge skyline,

Blanketing her brother’s body,
and warming treads in
tilted hallways and onto
tarred, spotted sidewalks.

About the Poet
Hillel Broder is a teacher of English literature and composition. He earned his doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He lives with his wife and four children in the Bronx.

Raised in Captivity Microchip Zoos and Pressing ENTER

In a crumpled-paper-night carbonate silica shifts in the slats
the child wakes in absence of TV glow, to etch
shadows for the plasmodium

and teddy bear stares, a threadbare coded by window
after window judge of self-repeat, species
in cotton ball bloom— ursus-ursus
headlights and peek-a-boo (he browser
gives answer, “anything you want”

wrapped in dark chiffon. Dear God, click
on my profile, anything On the wooden
floor the Ark’s fissures caulked with the lux of a door ajar—
bosoms heave, future widows metacarpals
are separated into ontological piles

sit in deep grooves Ursa Major kneels
offering salt from a bygone pretzel
where star charts cannot reach, sodium is licked
from the palm, tastes but slip self-medicated.
in-text citations, lost filaments
on the motherboard

Galoshes are worn to tread
puddles fossilized thumbprints splash
via the browser left by ancient
broods. Cuman, Pict, Lombard, Magyar, Algonquin

Birdcalls in a mother’s channels struggle
to find the mainframe eyes sweep
the fragile path glacial ruts to indecisions,
ochre extracted binding an unknown
god at dawn from the iris, a grainy screen.

About the Poet
Ian Rice is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program. He is currently teaching in Sarkad, Hungary. His poems have been published in Menacing Hedge and FishFood Magazine. http://ianrice001.wix.com/ian-rice

Crossing the River at Flood Stage

crossing the century-old truss bridge
I still see the tower from last night’s dream

what caused the tower to sink into the stony ground?
the sky’s golden haze conveys the notion
that the tower will rise, fully amplified, once
I step off the other end

it is also a matter of stepping past procrastination

how many times did I say I’d come back
to this field where
in my youth
I’d walk to disappear?

*

to enter this tower is to become the field
of tall grass with its four-chambered cave
sequestered under the granite boulder

*

today is dangerous, but rare

ignoring the orange cones and the yellow
“do not cross” tape
the wooden planks of the bridge want to tear free
and tumble

water surges, rattling the old
bolts in the metal

caught in the truss frame web
the bridge seduces me with a sway
like the throb of a lake
with its lone fisherman in a boat

*

I’m absorbed in the sound of the river

that resounds
in the wind-thrashed trees

*

imagine being swallowed
into a world that reveals black
as a color of all colors

if you gaze long enough you’ll see
the rousing iridescence
similar to the oracular portals in the peacock’s plume

*

what of the tower?
dreams slide like mercury from burning cinnabar –

the tower unravels
from bedrock: becomes the field

*

to cross this bridge is to become the tower

*

as the embankments of the river – including the town

with its outdoor theatre
and its one café –

including the hospital on the hill
where I was born –

now dissolve

my former self sheds with each step forward

About the Poet
Michael Spring is a natural builder a martial art instructor, and a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine. His poems have appeared in: Atlanta Review, Flyway, Gargoyle, Midwest Quarterly, Spillway, Turtle Island Quarterly and West Wind Review.

Coming of Age
You’re a lilywhite egg forked out of picture books,
shrouded in pipe cleaners and masking tape.

You bob in the foam of the rabid altar,
both fear and lust over the crayon sharpener built into the back.

I used Raw Sienna to outline Mother Goose’s corpse on your tongue.
You try to thrust it into the mainframe, tell me you belong nude in the roaster—

I remember how, despite your full-body rash,
you were always trying to work out hip bones on the Etch-A-Sketch.

I push you away; I’m just a mother-head—
a Capitoline Wolf warming the weird eggs
hunched on her ejecta blanket.

You Decide to Meet My Muse
To see if the rumors are true.

Yes, she really calls herself Madame Ampersand,

invites you to brunch in her sepulcher

with raccoons on the doorjambs.

She recalls performing her own lobotomy

with a ballpoint pen—

the story boils your hormones,

makes them squirt out your pores like fondant.

A black licorice flag waves out her eye-hole—

a memento from bedding a Jolly Roger.

She prophesizes that all my dreams will come true:

I will be bred into iron.

I will be doled out to the willowy congregation

like deer meat.

She makes you promise to take a lap around the playground,

distracting you as she censors

the new memories blooming on your eyelids.

About the Poet
Katie Hibner is a confetti canon from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, glitterMOB, Powder Keg, Smoking Glue Gun, and Word for/Word. Katie reads for Sixth Finch and dedicates all of her poetry to her mother, Laurie.