Poetry

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Music Vigil
A man lay dying in a shuttered room
unconscious, barely breathing, as his wife
sat near him, weeping. Someone whispered prayers
all night, until the unremembered dawn
broke through their darkness. Steps mounted the stairs:
a woman entered as he fought for life.
She crossed herself, and then began to sing.

And as the morning sunlight seems to bring
illumination to the forest, fills
what seemed like empty air with energy,
with unsuspected radiances drawn
from somewhere else, almost an ecstasy
of interwoven streams of light, instills
within the wanderer a sudden peace,

just so her voice brought those present release
from weeping and from grief, and in their place
a quiet joy crept in. They wept, but now
their weeping was transfigured in her song:
only spiritual beauty could allow
such transformations, opening to grace
as rose buds, warmed by dawn, open and bloom.

About the Poet
W.F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree, 2015), The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree, 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line, 2011), and a forthcoming collection The Book of Maps. A native of San Diego, he received his Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice, and PhD in Creative Writing from University of Houston. Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors’ Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), and the Potomac Review and LaNelle Daniel Prizes. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Gulf Coast and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. He currently works in Washington, DC and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW.

Autophobia
I went to the party looking for an adversary
but found it in my own fist
on the walk back home through a film
of vodka and sewer grate steam.
It was late but the neighbor kids were still
playing dodge ball in the parking lot, saying,
The target is his head, aim for his head,
picking on the little guy—probably someone’s
younger brother. In a home video I’m four
with a spray bottle and my mom keeps saying,
Spray yourself in the face, Jackson!,
and I’m laughing because I can’t see
the clouds of gore looming over 2014. Today I went
to therapy with a black eye for the third time
and I could tell my therapist was uncomfortable
asking about it, so instead I talked about
my childhood—about the time my brother rode
his tricycle down the front steps
and killed two teeth. My family thought
I’d pushed him, because somehow
violence bursting outward is easier to understand.
But what’s so incomprehensible about knocking shadows
out the back of your own head?
I was thinking about my sick friend
when I realized he was probably thinking about me,
his face in someone’s toilet bowl, his bruises
obscure self-portraits. He used to say, Why not drink,
why not smoke? You’re only dying slow
and on purpose.

About the Poet
Jackson Burgess is currently pursuing dual MFAs in Fiction and Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a Truman Capote Fellow. His first chapbook, Pocket Full of Glass, won the 2014 Clockwise Competition and is forthcoming from Tebot Bach. He has also placed work in Rattle, The Los Angeles Review, Tin House Flash Fridays, and elsewhere.

The Colors of Mirrors

.                                                     For Sophie Mitchell

When you’re horizontal, asleep,
all mirrors are precisely white:
They slyly pluck out this
or that secret, etching them
delicately so they remain secrets.

When darkness begins to leave,
quiet as a butterfly’s breath, they
turn almost as blue as a flatted
note you abandoned on a table
hoping it would stay unread.

In full daylight, they disguise
themselves as plain silver
tricking you into believing
you see only yourself and never
notice that you’re blind.

Come sunset, they sing loud
in oranges and violets. Always
just south of the right key to remind
you they’re watching you alertly
as a bent second hand

until you tread—softly-socked—
upstairs to bed. Then they
put on their watchtower faces
and perfectly white glasses.
They read you all night

and they laugh and laugh and laugh.

About the Poet
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies and has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net: Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. Lent 1999 is new from Leaf Garden Press His chapbook, Three Visitors won the Negative Capability Press Chapbook Competition in 2010.  Artifacts and Relics, another chapbook, was just released by Folded Word. His novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster.