Poetry

(Matrimony)

Massage Parlor Honeymoon
He was last seen heading toward
that chancel near the pipeline
in Dawson Creek.
Under a moonful of rumor
And a spoonful of dream
The guests arrived,
the trucker, the welder
the clone band drummer
and a guy covered in grease.
The doors were opened wide,
the guests were met
and all were expected to feast
with intentions black as crows
on a highway of flattened fur.
House rules, honey.
Here’s all the things we’re not going to do.
No kissing the bride,
nothing in the hair,
the lights stay on.
Can’t trust the likes of.
Now fork it over, you.
A necktie licked one wrist,
His belt welded the other
To a bed of unanswered questions.
Her tattoo was a sneer of boredom
On the biggest misunderstanding
That ever straddled a Sunday.
Thoughts to yourself, whatever
Your name is.
Ask nothing of stalled migration
Through unspoken want
And the torn fabric weaved
Of what was reached so deep for
In this glittering nave,
where secrets blow
like dust in the breath of forgetting.

(Sin)
Face Focus Burnhole

Here now in this brush
On this wet sheet

Full Moon stokes the rage
Of a whiskered queen,
A ship of fire
Plunges over the edge
Of a flat earth as
Full Moon sails through the tip
Of a ballpoint writing
To the news
Then cuts through the mail
To become the news
As reason and logic
Fall from the sky
In shattered parts.

Full Moon leans in the old arcade
Of the ticket taker’s wish

Lives in codes
Stamped on spoons
Magnetic strips, encrypted slips
And numbers carved in stone

Reckon your metered soul, Full Moon,
And book yourself in business class
Then fly through a careful choice of words

To that foreign land.
Press your gaudy finger
On the down button of chance
And descend to a level
Where you need a special card
To get off
Then kiss, breathe,
thrive, Full Moon
In everything you spawn
In everything you spill.

(Redemption)

About the Poet

John-Ivan Palmer’s literary work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Nth Position, Wild River Review, Wisconsin Review, New Oregon Review, and Other Voices. The Drill Press published his novel, Motels of Burning Madness, in 2009 and he has received the Pushcart Prize for fiction.

Dear Millennium, on the Nine Orders of Angels

Never easily recall the names, dear millennium, 
                                                of nine angelic orders –
first, ophanims in ocular celestial wheels, 
beryl-colored 
                                           ablaze to the unaided eye,
or else too close to the fire to see a forest aflame, 
                    blinded in a mentholated sequoia grove.
Second, who are the virtues – 
                                                celestially distinct 
                                from angelic hosts, third?  Seraphim, 
archangels, fourth and fifth.  Do you recall?
A dyslexic girl says,
                                     No-name angel at a taxi corral
rich enough in rags, hatless, without a suitcase, 
shone with a clean jaw.
                                                      I offered every penny
out of my purse.
Blessing me, he vanished, coins 
                                spinning light in light.  O heal me.
                                                           Selah.


On God and the Hydroponic System
1.
In this millennium, we say, cloud-based
for an empyrean of shared data. 

2.
Engineer of everything, God sees us 
                err in the same faults over and over 

on a disrupted shore of consciousness,
soul-engine wherein a weight is lifted 
                                                through the heart.

3.
In blindness, we do not confess our sins,
will not even circulate in recycled water  

or say yes
to yield – or combust.

4. 
Hydroponically speaking, we cannot engineer
a system of grace on our own,
                                as an act of our will.

5.
God is a hydroponic engineer who aerates 
                      heads of butter lettuce
in aqueous solutions  
                                                out of nil.  Selah.



On the Proprioception of Beauty Not as Pharmakon  


On language as proprioception, or a ghosting sensation.  
                                                In other words, langue
    as embodied phenomenological experience, a glottal mesh  
          linguistically mediated.  Happiness, for instance – does it exist
autonomously, without estrogenic parole
                              in a hormonal rush of cherry blossoms? 
Say if the cherry blossoms vanish, the frothing corpus 
                                                                              disarrayed by El Niño,
a tousled grove of seasonally affective moods, of absence 
                     as nonattendance or a privation of beauty?
      If caplets of pilled toxins reduce fever, shall we say this is febrifuge,     
                                         or rather, antipyretic?  Is beauty 
pharmakon for pharmakon, poison and cure?      


A Quarterly with Salt, Ferries, and Light 
A quarterly should vanish each season,
every three cardinal phases of the moon,
with reprints and back issues on request. 
A quarterly etches a monsoon’s portfolio,
tinkling brass as mini-cymbals for a band.
A quarterly gladly plows up the mundane 
in an obituary, in memorarium. A quarterly
is glued to a spine or a Japanese retchoso.  
A quarterly is ___.  A quarterly is bamboo.
A quarterly accompanies ferry passengers.
A quarterly dispenses sagacious minerals,
sea-foam green, mixed with salt for a bath.
A quarterly can be designed with glassine
and wax with the engravings of a philatelist.
A quarterly should offer quinks and inklings.
A quarterly is not flung over the verandah.
A quarterly has a circulation of a thousand
or more.  Or less.  A quarterly eats quinces,  
postcards.  Salt and light.   A quarterly 
is a quarterly is a quarterly –

About the Poet

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored a novel,Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017).  Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe 2002) and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press 2014). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Lee’s work appears in literary journals such as The American Poet, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, IMAGE: Art, Faith, Mystery, Journal of Feminist Studies & Religion, Iowa Review, and Columbia Poetry Review and was recognized by the Prairie Schooner / Glenna Luschei Award.  She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.  Currently, she lives in San Diego and serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Lover Gone Away
Another love disappears, ghosts
echo loss, even derision.

The record holder for shortest affairs
I entreat these misalliances, small

Wonders of dreamscape over reality,
bones with no underpinnings to salvage.

Love or friendship slip away, the knot
always too tight or too loose to hold

Him to seasons, and this hearth where
love bolds and binds passion.

How to hold him close again
his feelings less than passionate?

I know this cooling off rattles
our soured relationship.

His departure, maybe preordained,
hugs the winter season, not me.

Snow shies away from ground, flakes
large but porous too damp to stick.

They disappear like him tumbled dry
of emotion, melted where once my tongue

Left flakes, each unique, my gift. Now
this scene thrives on empty –

Singes of farewell strike my tongue.

More Clouds 

White clouds, a pop-up box
of tissues, stain blue horizons—
white to pewter, stormy black.

Sly clouds translate
into hail, tornados, thunder.
Weathermen predict these odds.

nbsp;
They interpret content of clouds
like a novel, uncover piles
of once white towels now soiled,

ivory, crème, smudged
suspicions, just cloudy choices
to end this report.

Thanks to Wordsworth–
we weather clouds,
lonely, cumulus, ever
wandering.

About the Poet
Lee Landau writes with raw honesty and tenderness about interactions in a unique, personal landscape: her relationships with family, their dysfunctional backstories, and the many phases of grief that tumble through her poems and life. She addresses an internal audience of the departed, the dead and dying, and highlights unexpected losses.

Laika the Space Dog

Alone, she entered an abyss
bejeweled with blue giant suns,
white dwarfs, black holes, quasars
and nebulae like clouds of gnats
in the deep, the clockwork spin
of galactic arms across all dreams
as Laika, the Soviet space dog
was launched into heaven
for the Motherland and reached
the tonnage of night without food
or water and died, memories stirring
of chasing fireflies through sweet grass,
her hot breath lost beyond worlds,
Earth’s scent wisped to her brain
until her last thoughts began:

Look, there’s a darkness
and the blue globe is dimming.
I wish I could take the Earth in my mouth
and run with it across the stars
where my grave is laid in a bed of stars.

Here without hares or foxes
life is bigger and blacker
than I thought it could be, my paws
like wings floating in this gray car
where I’ll die lonelier than snakes
and drown in night’s deep river,
crossing the boundaries of touch
without stone or soil to walk on.

People sent me to the forever
where no flowers open smells,
only glittering specks blossom
and sleeping I dream of dogs
running over glaciers, chewing antelope,
chasing shaggy brown beasts, their tusks
like sharpened moons—I carry
my kind’s history to the end of ends.

Howling towards shadows’ outer layers
my ghost is fleeing to the world.

Dying I will come back, Yes, I’ll taste
tender air and amber sunlight
back from immensity. I’ll climb
the rainbow’s stairs earthward
back to green shoots and streets
cobbled with hardness, back from the timeless
seabed of space to the churning ground. Back.

Poem for Bobby Fischer: 1943-2008

Nothing soothes pain like human touch—Fischer’s reported last words

The universe scrolled on, stars like spurs
in heaven and northbound geese swept
over Reykjavik where he played
C4 for the first move of game six
and where he died bearded and schizoid
as King Lear, an anti-Semite loved
by his Jewish mother. At fourteen
he was the American chess champion,
a high school dropout, and afraid
the government read his thoughts
through tooth fillings. Yet

he stood like a kraken risen
above white whales drumming in the deep,
a god rounding islands with his will
while galaxies burn and wheel
their dreaming work on his grave raging
Icelandic poppies from the earth,
the sun’s wellspring soaking glaciers,
his rooks, knights, kings and bishops dance

in memory, before we, like all
who lived, wither heroically
vulnerable in our last nights
while our tears rust into frost
and the ocean rolls over its deep bed of stones.

About the Poet

Eric Fisher Stone lives in Fort Worth, Texas where heI graduated from Texas Christian University and work at a PetSmart. He is an incoming graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and Environment. His poetry has appeared most recently in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, Eunoia Review, New Mexico Review, Uppagus, Yellow Chair Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and Third Wednesday.

Our Dear Creatures

The morning before the first faith, light is moving pharmacologically;
you choose not to consider the furniture;
the earth gives fever to our enclosure/forgets to breathe— uneasily
the chest that expels the sparkless ruin abandons itself to visible:
we’ve found the aftertaste of condemnation pinioned
around the dripping framework of delicate and venial knives;
of our thoughts replaying a Nehru blazer in velvet paisley blue,
fitted— neck loosely collared like guilty fondness in the backyard—
you discover chicken-wire, the first thoughts of incarceration,
footprints of giants permanently cast. We grope for veins of pleasure,
blindly exchanged like last night’s eventual riches,
protected by small nests slithering across botanical sand rifts
hoping to make sex and crazy babies together but it seems we both doubt
the motility of such sounds/waiting to be plucked like strange florets;
our dear creatures retreat/to later skulk back; don’t mention the position
of earth— foreign lands may sometimes obscure your guerilla vision
removing surest eyes/ I’m a smiling hostage to my own checkered plan,
an event dismissed by the greater requirements of background love;
outside the oppression of lubricant the world runs more loudly,
unwilling to do anything more than arouse without coming any closer:
in a stillness; we struggle to subconsciously/reveal translucent fruit
and optical crown, wearing the ribald face of shredded decency,
the curl and forward bend of your intimate body harshly maintained
by rejecting the wanderings of rogue surface waves running deeply.

Velvet Wolves

Inside you are two loves—

composed of velvet wolves
and predictable visibility
sinking beyond all inclination.

In the bleak museum
hundreds of feet within you

we spend hours leaning
beneath the rockabilly shirts
and mistaken claims

the pictures you refuse to return.

This sounds like a harpsichord—
whatever it is that’s going on between us

silk and gabardine fit perfectly
the duality
of our confused history

until a polar swarm
cuts across our branch-swept path.

Love is jealous of every other creature

real or imagined,
that dares to share its name.

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, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

Tending by Succulents

Aloe, sedum, fox tail agave,
painted echeveria
and their baby-plump cheeks,
their water-storing tissues,
a hillside tutorial on thriving
sunbeam-leashed or less.
Hardihood, longevity, reaction, analysis,
I see them coat the fat like rind,
the veins a secret trailing
my lifeline and pinned thorn-point
inward. Drying out to the brink,
pushing blooms through
near loss, I will only think the name.

On a hike I never venture—
rattlers under rock—
spiny glimmer, green satin, pearly
tips, sleek skin, warm center, swollen
flesh strike love pierce my chest
like primal life and make of me
a desert.

The Overlook

Rail-side, people bend
like angle rulers to ogle
the lower-stream fish rush
and its fleet of fins
and its snippets of shimmer
baiting the river to rise
halfway and offer more,

or they scan the landscape
as if it were Atlantis
dug up and displayed
so that some eyes fill and others
fall somber. One fan twitpics it
“not a fiction, but true”
#IHeartNature.

Skyward, flocks of chatter
dive through blue
as a larger bird swallows
its distant kin,

wings, beaks, feet pushing

off canyon like fog

on a panorama settling up.

About the Poet

                                    Uncut Footage
                                      1.
                        He Lets Her In
 
            She said her name was Tracy Evidence
            but I would not believe that. I am called
            Case, Justin Case. Both of us were burdened
            with criminal misnomers. Blond as snow
            her spell dimmed the room. “Now,” she said, “convince
            me you are blood and bone. Stretch out your tall
            shape. Brush my face with your eyes.” So I turned
            my back. Kept silent. Watched a taxi’s slow
            progress through traffic. “No one’s coming, miss,
            if that’s why you’re waiting. Your cool face stalls
            time but clocks keep ticking. Something I learned
            before you were pulled out of air. You know
            my name. I’ve heard yours. Why not just commence
            your tale. Pauses bore me and I might fall
            asleep. Kiss me back to life then and return
            your gun. I smell oil. You don’t need to show
            it off. I’ll do the polite, hear your hints
            and you can trust my form. I’m no Ken doll®
            to play with. I’ll tell you if the words burn
            blue and true. Close those dark eyes. Talk. Now. Go.”
  
                                                      2.
                                    She Spells It Out
 
Her hands draw crisp minarets in the air:
 
                        I pass a fish across the sun.
                        I wait for two days, then wait one.
                        I turn my eyes from what might come
                        And I remember all you’ve done.
 
                        Now watch me scrape scales off the moon
                        Then listen closely. Hear its tune.
                        The light fades out while white sands bloom
                        And your harvest comes with dark at noon.
 
Now look: her fingers fold to sketch a square:
 
                        You’ll chase a trail of white lip gloss
                        Over unsettled, suspect sheets.
                        You will not touch the scar you’ve lost
                        Blazing a trail with white lip gloss
                        That drops from her purse. Your careless toss
                        Leads from mirrored walls to empty streets.
                        You’ll chase your tale. The bright lip gloss
                        Is settled. You’ll suspect her sheets.
 
Palm shadows shape a tree, its branches bare:
 
                        They lean and stretch their lost (slipped?) kisses. Now look—
                        Their skin takes fright and they miss
                        With eye and tongue. What’s at risk
 
                        Is this morning, as a blue evening
                        Closes, broken. Without cues
                        Songs begin for just those two,
 
                        Beyond our ears. They hide their bright silence
                        In half notes fenced by a white
                        Sheet. Over that wall, their night.
                                                        
                                            3.
                                    Elsewhere
 
                        Apostle spoons settle in red velvet.
                        Their case is open. Dust never sleeps. Clocks
                        click, stuck on a minute. A featherweight
                        page sighs, falls back into the leather book.
                        No one is in the is room, so that sunbeam
                        may not exist. A perhaps cat once preened
                        here. Stray hairs give her away. Old smoke—
                        Yesterday’s ghost—hovers. The curtain inflates
                        then drops soft against smudged glass. All the locks
                        are open. This emptiness is at rest.
           
                                                            4.
                                         Around A Corner
 
                                    Two eyes, blank as steel, shift loosely
                                    as lazy toys from a school carnival.
                                    They see nothing. They reflect less. But once,
                                    maybe an hour ago, they were alive
                                    as water, looking through a mirror to see—
                                    What? Here’s a mute witness. Your arrival
                                    is empty. Move along. There’s not a chance
                                    of recall. Some one came. They peeked, then died.
 

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 various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies: Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. He has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). He has written several novels: Knight Prisoner (Vagabondage Press), The Magic War (Loose Leaves Publishing), and A Book of Lost Songs (Wild Child Publishing, forthcoming). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.

On Exoskeletons and Mammals

Every morning before sun washes the porch in pinks and yellows, I let the cat in. Most days he comes from the bushes, bounces off his paws up the steps, a low greeting rolling from the base of his throat like tires on gravel. But this morning he stopped to mew proudly over the lobster shell rotting on the welcome mat. It glowed red in the pre-dawn dark, buzzing with black flies.

I stared at this offering, so far from sea. This skeleton, ripped from the raw back of another, dragged through trash, and deposited at my doorstep. I thought of my own armor, of its softness in some places, of its hardness in others. I thought of the mornings when I push and pull an Emory board across the callouses coating palms and fingers, sanding away epidermis until what remains is just thick enough to keep the blood inside. It doesn’t take a fisherman or a grateful pet to drag me from the sea and lay me bare—only opposable thumbs and good intent.

About the Poet
Max Orr is an English teacher living with his cat and his climbing partner in Columbus, Ohio.

They never left

When I dream,
my house spawns new rooms,
piled with belongings not my own.

Second kitchens and secret doors,
bedrooms crammed with unfamiliar furniture,
photographs of strange faces,
all fill me with dread.

But it’s the aquariums,
stocked with healthy fish,
(I’ve never fed them; how do they live?)
that make me wake screaming.

For I know that someone else is here,
and always has been.

And I wander the house waking,
looking for the doors
that aren’t there.

Past is Present

A game trail barely visible wends through
the dark woods;
Footsteps erode it over time into
a broader path.

The dirt track became the path to Grandma’s
house in the forest;
deemed too dangerous for younglings, parents
cut down trees, let light in.

This broader path beckoned commerce, settlers;
farmers cleared land and sowed it.
Wagon ruts invited accidents, so
cobbles smoothed the way to market.

The market became a town, the town changed
to a city, and the cobbles were paved;
but the road remembered deer tracks, paw prints,
and refused to move in a straight line.

Sitting there in their cars, the drivers sighed,
inhaling exhaust and cursing curves;
but some thought they could smell green leaves,
or the scent of fresh-cut hay.

And stuck in traffic, dreamed
the road’s memories,
of farms and dark woods.

About the Poet
Deborah Davitt grew up in Nevada, but earned her MA in English at Penn State, where she taught college composition. She currently lives in Houston, with her husband and son. Her poetry has garnered her Rhysling and Pushcart nominations, and has been published over twenty venues. Her short story work has appeared in IGMS, Compelling Science Fiction, and other venues. For more about her work, please see www.edda-earth.com/bibliography.

Feathers

Recall that morning
when there were so many feathers
blowing against the window
we weren’t sure for a minute
where we were or what the season was.
At first it seemed like snow,
but no, not in July.

Feathers, we mused. Maybe a firecracker
misfired and scattered a mourning
dove’s nest (dreadful thought).
Feathers, we laughed. Maybe they’d all come loose
from a goose-down pillow hung out to air,
carried away in a gust.

Recall over breakfast of coffee and eggs
it occurred to us that a fox
might have been in the hen house
but then we remembered we no longer
had any chickens in the coop
nor, sadly, children on the swings.
Recall how old we felt.

Recall toward evening we learned the swan
in the pond down the hill was dead.
Whoever aimed had probably not heard
the silver song amid her plummeting wings.
How sadder still than old were
fragile feathers blown against the window.
Why.

Dreams
(A villanelle)

One by one the blue cups broke.
She watched them shatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Her reveries evoke
a lively time of children’s patter.
One by one the blue cups broke.

Outside she listened to spring frogs croak
and raindrops splatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Sometimes when she slept she woke
to hear the loud accusing chatter.
One by one the blue cups broke.

When air was thick enough to choke,
she thought she saw the ashes scatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Cold, she donned a heavier cloak
and told herself it didn’t matter.
One by one the blue cups broke
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

About the Poet
Marsha Foss returned to her home state of Minnesota after 37 years in Maryland.  She has degrees from the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins University.  She lives in Saint Paul and enjoys being connected to the area’s amazingly vibrant writing community.  She has had pieces accepted by Glass: Facets of Poetry and Down in the Dirt.