Louis Dennis

July 2020 | visual art

African Iris

African Iris

 

Louis Dennis

Louis Dennis lives in Huntington Beach, California. He originally learned photography in a chemical darkroom and feels blessed by the advent of digital imaging.

Max Heinegg

July 2020 | poetry

Digging in the Wrong Place

 

Compromised, they call the card. My 16 digits mined

by algorithm or bunker genius fiddling,

for $1633 at Best Buy; the robbers have

all my numbers save the back code to complete

the inspired transaction, the Take back one kadam 

& so they are. Far enough away from the Nazis for now,

 

Boston thinks it’s annexed the assholes today

in a gazebo. Nazis in a gazebo?! Only Indy could flip

his revolver & trusty whip into a suitcase, beeline

a passenger plane & catch ‘em sneering in their insignias,

gathered like poison in standing water. In the film,

the strong backs open empty sand while our hero squints down

 

upon the twisting floor, asking Why did it have to be

snakes? Don’t waste breath waiting for a revelation

of perfectly directed sun. The diorama is none,

& we can’t count on the wrath of God to gather

His phantom forces to melt their brainwashed

faces one at a time, down to the skulls.

 

 

Miners in Taijuan

—from photographs by Stan Grossfeld

 

Perhaps brothers, these two pitchy

instruments savor warm water

in a metal bath. Beers at arms’

reach, a coal accord for labor.

 

In the outsider’s monochrome

any untarnished aspect of

the image is silvered. Sympathy

is less than the universal,

 

but still the color of deserved

rest, arms that rip the underground

asunder, later burn chunks to

boil rainwater from the sky’s well

 

while factories feed, the country

busy raising a colossus.

If Providence doubts its welcome,

these two tender invitation.

Max Heinegg

Max Heinegg’s poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, and been a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek Review, December Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Cutthroat, Rougarou, Asheville Poetry Review, the Nazim Hikmet prize, and the Joe Bolton award. Recent work appears in Thrush, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, and Love’s Executive Order. Additionally, he is a singer-songwriter and recording artist whose records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com

The Hidden Room

July 2020 | fiction

The woman had no set schedule. She came and went of her own accord and when we saw her it was like a glimpse of some elusive animal. She had soft flips of hair and wore furs and costume jewelry, dark sunglasses, always wheeling a carry-on. Sometimes we didn’t see her for weeks and then there she was, strolling past the ostentatious clock stuck at a quarter to three, the old men in faux leather chairs reading The Wall Street Journal, the fake ivy planted in plastic urns.

The manager wanted us to clean the room the woman had occupied secretly since who knows when. It was a hidden room behind a wall, and to get to it, you had to remove a patch of carpeting big enough only for a cat. When we peeled back the carpeting, we saw a small square entrance. We chiseled away at the entrance and saw the lair for what it was, a room the size of a large closet with clothes, boxes piled to the ceiling, a cot with a simple pillow.

The manager in her Talbots suit and Tiffany bracelet was anything but sympathetic as she rummaged through the belongings with an attitude of disgust. She uncovered old blankets, sheets, a stewardess’s uniform with a pair of gold wings attached to the lapel. In another box, there were extension cords and blow dryers and large hot rollers with protrusions like sea creatures.

We did not realize there could still be secrets behind the walls. We thought that these had all been eradicated with the razing of the asylum, back when they used to bring in the crazies confined to chicken crates. But we cannot deny—some of us found things: a small trunk under the pigeon-infested rafters filled with photographs and pressed flowers. A collection of glass bottles with poems curled like messages. The remnants of a leather strap. These were different from the hair ties, half-filled plastic water bottles, and gum wrappers we found in the common areas when shampooing the rugs or mopping the floors.

We hauled away some of the boxes. Some were full of Christmas presents, neatly wrapped and with bows. Others had dolls pressed up against cellophane windows; dolls in velvet dresses with names embroidered on the lapels—old vintage dolls with glass eyes peering out at us apprehensively, as if we were doing something wrong and they were concerned.

Later, in the parking lot, we divided up the gifts and unwrapped each one: miniature china tea sets and tiny spoons, glass figurines, the makings of a toddler’s chair. We thought, perhaps, she was dead. Or was she a ditz, forgetting to give presents and have children? We laughed uneasily, thinking of our own children, and remembering the rows of granite markers with chiseled numbers back by the recycling center where the land slopes gingerly toward the cornfields.

 

Laurette Folk

Laurette Folk ‘s fiction, essays, and poems have been published in Waxwing, Gravel, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Mom Egg, pacificREVIEW, Boston Globe Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first novel, A Portal to Vibrancy won the Independent Press Award for New Adult Fiction. Her second novel, The End of Aphrodite, is published by Bordighera Press. Laurette is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program. Her website is www.laurettefolk.com

Alysia Kaplan

July 2020 | visual art

Moving Towards a Phenomenology of Home

Moving Towards a Phenomenology of Home

 

Alysia Kaplan

Alysia Kaplan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rochester, NY. She has exhibited her work both locally and nationally. She holds a BFA in Contemporary Illustrative Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Hobart William Smith Colleges. Language of image, juxtaposition, layering, and re-recording expand meaning and perception. I immerse myself in this concept and apply in my art encoded information, and the creation of non-linear and abstract associations involving the “perceptual event” of experiencing signs and signifiers—as static and moving images.

This is not a rock-bottom poem but it was on the well-lit downward spiral

July 2020 | poetry

I remember I tripped

and skinned my knee on the curb,

beneath the neon signglow

and as my last bottle shattered

on the pavement beside me

and I looked at the hole

in my slacks and the wet bloodsmudge there

I said, interiorly, you clumsy fuck,

and exteriorly, just plain fuck.

Some pretty folks in day-glo evening dresses

looked on, judging a bit.

 

And as I sat there, failed son, spinning,

mad at my fingers for not being needles,

mad at my saliva for not being bleach,

mad at my feet for not being steady

(but how could they, really), mad at

my beer for not staying, miraculously,

in the bottle, I looked up at the

signs in all their bright rainbow,

and I remember tripping, dissociating,

thinking, interiorly- “I wonder what

the noble gasses make of it, being

caught in those tubes, hocking

beer for a living?” and,

exteriorly, just plain fuck.

 

And this led, inexorably,

to a little more negative self-talk

outside the bar, mad at my

creatively dressed audience,

for moving on, judgment complete,

and at myself again,

for not even knowing then

that there were blessings

that could be counted,

even while coagulating,

by whatever sordid light

there was to count them–

 

argon, like from the argonauts,

neon, sounds like Creon in a way,

xenon and on and on and on…

krypton, like from that Superman

stuff (wonder how he felt about

good’ol Jor-El!), radon, all the

nobles, Jay-San, no that’s not one,

all first-born sons probably,

debased into illuminating a

standard issue failing-to-please-

daddy-issue drunk thinking,

interiorly, how the nobles

have fallen so low, and finally,

exteriorly, a howl at the moon-

where is that spark

that will light me

up one night?

 

Michael J. Galko

Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He has been a juried poet of the Houston Poetry Fest three of the last four years and is a 2019 Pushcart Award nominee. In the past year he has had poems published or accepted for publication at descant, San Pedro River Review, Gargoyle, Gulf Coast, Defunkt Magazine, Riddled with Arrows, Poetry WTF!?, and Sonic Boom, among other journals.