April 2018 | poetry
Audio from some movie playing in the next room
You wake up to the sound of it
Without remembering having it on before you fell asleep
Sound of an unfortunate sequel
In an unnecessary series of films
Rom com or dramedy or buddy cop action
It continues in the background of the morning, like wallpaper
You wonder if you can’t understand it because you didn’t see the first one
Doug McClure*’s performance is earnest but unconvincing
*You can substitute the bad actor of your choice
Should have had his lines fed to him, like Brando
Fed to him by Brando might be more effective
Feeding him to Brando might’ve been most useful
More spam than ham, though
You wonder if someone turned it on as a joke
Climbed in the window, or set it on a timer
But it doesn’t seem to matter
Its unbidden endurance fits in the wasted hours
Fills the emptiness of your thoughts
As I fill the softness of my easy chair
Technicolor lack of action clouding your eyes
Charged by the static of stasis
You cannot turn your head away
From the hours that steal you from your dreams.
by David Lawton
David Lawton is the author of Sharp Blue Stream (Three Rooms Press), and has had his work published in numerous journals and anthologies. David is a graduate of the theatre program at Boston University, where he was also a Guest Artist in the graduate play writing classes taught by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. For ten years he was a background vocalist in the New York underground band Leisure Class. At the band’s de facto headquarters in the Chelsea Hotel, he befriended Beat godfather Herbert Huncke and San Francisco poet Marty Matz, and was inspired by their embodiment of the written word. David also serves as an editor for greatweatherforMEDIA, and collaborates with poet Aimee Herman in the poemusic collective Hydrogen Junkbox.
April 2018 | poetry
never planned for much, really
money is nice
not spending much of it
gets to pick roles now
monogamy being one
still lives on south side, one bedroom
no car
has to show up
jamming with friends
playing transports
former second stringer
to starter at rolling stone
his soul releases its fears
stage fright still problematic,
inherited achilles heal
like his immigrant family
son of serious evangelicals
rebelled, as all do,
abandoned the faith
after screaming arguments
acting like it never happened
on his way to hell, then
malevolent storm destroyed his home
with him in it, reformed
demons driven out
ran away to just be
actor he always was
able to transport even others
to his frank reality
making them see
what they are not supposed to
“An artist is somebody who produces things that people
don’t need to have.”- Andy Warhol
by Dan Jacoby
Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University, Chicago State University, and Governors State University. He has published poetry in Anchor and Plume(Kindred), Arkansas Review, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Bombay Gin, Burningword Literary Review, Canary, Indiana Voice Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Red Fez to name a few. He is a former educator, steel worker, and army spook.. He is a member of the Carlinville Writers Guild . Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015. He is currently looking for a publisher for a collection of poetry.
April 2018 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
your body is still your body,
even though they took
everything from you,
like the famished hare
who pulls even the bitterer berries
from the wilted stem.
they came easily, jarringly,
and pried everything that you carried
from your tired, trembling arms
while the assorted leaves were
making their slow descent;
or while they went moldering
from green to that quiet blaze
before dismemberment or rot;
or while they succumbed
to their crushing, to a grinding down,
like the fronds falling suddenly,
pressed flat and silent
under the buck’s fierce footfall
—he did not see them,
he did not care,
their delicate fibers
were not of his concern.
and why would he look away
from the horizon’s early smoke?—
they were flattened, twisted and gnarled
for the rest of their short life
while the unmarred fronds grew
strong and straight and long
around them.
is there a resilience
that can be learned?
the carnivorous heron
holds wide its wings
to hunt. the false shade
a canopy of disaster
for its tired prey.
when the southerly wind
tears its wild way around the orb
you too will understand how
the heronshaw differs
from the hungrier hawk.
by Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator from the SF Bay Area. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Apricity, The Stillwater Review, IthacaLit, Gathering Storm, Broad River Review, ellipsis…literature & art, The Fourth River, Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, and others. She twice received the UC Berkeley Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Lyric Poetry for her poems “Song of Advice or Valediction” and “second lament,” and the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in Poetry for her poem “The Haunting.” Alani is currently working on a novel set in Portugal, many translations, and a collection of villanelles. You can find her at Twitter and Instagram at @AlaniRosa.
April 2018 | poetry
When dad’s grief
unbottled itself,
when he could not square
his guilt over the dad
he could not love,
when his beast of a past
coiled him, a rattler
ready to strike,
he would tell the story.
I still try to picture it,
my grandfather,
deep lines in his red face,
trademark overalls,
a Fedora tipped
over one eye,
ordering a whiskey
from a line of bottles
behind bored barkeeps,
the bar’s stale gloom,
barely visible through
the smoke of Camels
fingered by old drinkers
schlumped on stools,
regulars like him
who wished he’d
get on with it, shoot
the bitch and bastard,
or shut the fuck up.
No one this night noticed
how his pocket curved,
saw his old Army pistol,
a loaded Colt .45,
that minutes later
just outside their reach
would bare
its yellow heat
into the bar’s plate
glass, didn’t guess
how whiskey still
in hand, he’d smoke
the orange circles
of streetlights
and red neons
flashing nickel beer
and Budweiser,
or how bar mirrors
would reflect a man
slurried in a slough
of his own making
melt down on a
cracked sidewalk,
alone with the years
that tripped
him there,
his boy left behind,
frozen in time
no feeling in his blue feet.
by Janet Reed
Janet Reed is a 2017 and 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nassau Review, Chiron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Avalon Review, I-70 Review, and others. She is at work on her first collection and teaches writing and literature for Crowder College in Missouri.
April 2018 | nonfiction
This is not a metaphor for anything. I am talking about a very real pungency. Smashed yellow cherries on the concrete sidewalk. It’s check-the-bottom-of-your-shoe season, it’s did-I-step-in-dog-poop season, it’s no-you-didn’t season: it’s Gingko Season.
It’s that one spring in Brooklyn where we finally discovered that the Chinese restaurant on the corner had been using the construction dumpster by our house to get rid of their old fry oil, mouldering baby corn, yellowed tofu corners, slimy strips of chicken fat.
You can’t call 311 on a tree.
It’s the constant whiff of judgment: who threw up here? It’s the smell of some young person’s humiliation: partially-digested macaroni and cheese soaked through with liquor and bile. It would not be an exaggeration to say I always gag when walking under a gingko tree. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I almost always automatically ‘tsk’ when walking under a gingko tree. Its effects are both physiological and psychological.
There is no solution to this problem except to be glad that gingko trees are one of my problems. And anyway, gingko season doesn’t last long: soon the cold air will take the edge off the stench, soon the pulpy sidewalks will be layered over with snow. Soon enough, I could live somewhere else entirely. The gingkos would still be here, steady canopies with a million little fluttering leaf fans. The gingkos would still be here, obstinately performing their ritual above our heads.
by Olivia Dunn
Olivia Dunn is a Visiting Professor of English at Skidmore College and a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared recently in The Pinch Journal, SHANTIH Journal, Tinker Street, The Nervous Breakdown, River Teeth, and McSweeney’s.
