July 2017 | poetry
The rules are shaped and branded
On to genes, down generations,
Passed round in
Story and in song,
To make forgetting harder.
Ideas are bubbled up
On home-fired cauldrons,
Fuelled by a thousand years or more
Of thermal layered grievance
That have no taste, no smell, no colour:
Yet, still, they stink.
A virtual reality of light and heat
And sound that causes
Temperatures to rise and red mists form
Round ancient borders
Where battle lines are drawn
And citizens are armed against each other.
Upturned tables, scattered pieces
Mean no peace for people powered by hate.
The frenzied game plays on;
Until the victor stands elated,
Knows records are at last set straight
And neighbour’s scalps are buried deep.
He will not sleep,
For ghosts of so called civil war
Will always rise again, to haunt.
Caroline Johnstone
Caroline is originally from Northern Ireland, now living in Ayrshire, Scotland. She has just started writing poems again, and writes mainly on philosophical, political and life experience themes. She has been published in The Galway Review, Imagine Belfast and The Snapdragon Journal and was shortlisted for Tales in the Forest. She blogs for Positively Scottish, helps the Women Aloud NI with social media and is a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland).
July 2017 | poetry
I always wanted to wear the pants
James Dean wore, and Rebel
taught me he was all wick and no wax—
ghost-riding his way off the bluffs—
because you know that he didn’t
make it out of that car wreck,
not really, not in the cold, rehearsed
way his total soc counterpart did,
when he cowered before the onslaught
of fragrant light beams or
fictions, projections on canvas,
but never the real fear, real
darkness, no. Instead: two tons
of steel clasping him like a baby
bird in a broken nest. That day,
pretending to fly off the cliffs,
he gripped tight the wheel—
white knuckles, greased hair,
creased brow and grimace
grown around the stubby butt
of a cigarette—he gripped tight
and slammed the gas as though
the treads could peel back the future,
the Porsche 550 and 49 Mercury,
the lot and US Route 466
playing tug of war like two groups
of children unlikely to ever let
the sun go down. And James,
having seen the future and the past,
bit down hard on the smoldering
tobacco and shut his eyes, because
in that moment he was unsure if
he was about to die, or push through;
and the potential was in the engine,
potential in the pedal, potential in his feet,
in the rawhide stink of leather, in the smoke
and heat of gasoline, in the bristles
of his comb; and now that he no
longer knew which car he was in,
he flinched, and death caressed him
with metallic fingers; and the sun setting
across the desert flats flickered over
the crumpled flesh and steel, and
the bystanders squealed and cried
with excitement, and the ghost of
James Dean walked around the car
and wondered if he were the dream,
or his body. He looked down and thought
stop pretending. Always the actor, always
the hardness of perfection, of dying young
enough to have been everything and nothing
at all—broken bones, crumpled steel,
oil strewn across asphalt and dust, salty
tears, baking sun, acrid smoke, and on
the wind tossed side of perfection,
his cool hair fluttering, timeless.
Noah Leventhal
Noah Leventhal is a gumshoe literary detective. He recently graduated from St. John’s College -Santa Fe, New Mexico where he managed to avoid nasty juniper allergies for three out of his four years. He enjoys dissolving dream into reality, even when he is talking or eating food with his fingers.
July 2017 | poetry
Recalling a melodious pitch,
or forms of movement, thus
Swarms of creatures the mind adventures,
the swooning of the thrush
And while I beckon hitherto
ineffable thoughts I ponder:
the motive of a person’s word and deed
when that one says, what’s wrong dear?
Further, have I not known
the brilliance of mind on earth
The one that makes me move in glory,
and relinquish undue search?
If not, I will declare
I must continue onward
And love that which is from above—
those objects and things we ponder
Memories that wander
stay of place in some sweet nexus
a taste of pondering eminence
a taste of Nature’s Sexes
And while I sit, I wait
for Heaven’s inspiration
to be greater than the vile amorous
to rejoice in my long sation
Memories that wander
stay of place in some sweet nexus.
Lance Gracy
Lance Heath Gracy is a retired infantry Marine, current graduate student, teacher, and tutor. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of the Incarnate Word, and has published there in the local literary arts journal. He is in pursuit of an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas-San Antonio. He has a passion for evangelizing truth through various means, but has an interest writing poetry in particular. He lives alone with his German Shepherd, named Dennis, and enjoys reading, studying, running, gardening, and time with fellows.
July 2017 | fiction
When the birds and bees die off because of chemical misuse, where will procreation be, who will make love? Only the Doomsday Clock will keep moving and gasping.
Every field is being stripped. Big Dude tractors, and grain hoppers the size of two car garages. Harvest is part of mid-America; it’s what we do; it’s how we feed the world.
A slow and steady rain follows two days of harder rain, chides us for cranking up our diesel tractors and ethanol plants here in corn country, and causes this climate shift which accounts for alien-warm Midwestern winters with too little snow and too much gray. We call these downpours toad-stranglers.
It’s here where thighs turn thick as oaks in an abandoned field, where the waist takes on a tractor’s tire, and where breasts grow a valley between sagging hills. We don’t kill ourselves anymore like Karen Carpenter did because we know we must live with our choices. One too many flavored coffees and we forget how we once loved the pain, would do anything for a compliment. Now we find little shame in comforting ourselves in a weeping world where the only true love lingers along a crowded sky.
My gentleman farmer ages with the seasons. At fifty, the wear is evident. At sixty, a tractor becomes a ten-story building to scale. He wanted to climb Devil’s Tower once, but that was before his days ran together into a jumble of moments called Time.
See this mishmash of days, see it clear, this is life, this here and there. To forget to fight, to uncurl the fist, to close the lips, is not surrender. Peace comes to the quiet heart. And to pray upon the fertile land for an end to war is virtuous.
Chila Woychik
German-born Chila Woychik has bylines in journals such as Silk Road, Storm Cellar, and Soundings East, and was awarded the 2017 Loren Eiseley Creative Nonfiction Award (Red Savina Review) & the 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award (Emrys Foundation). She craves the beautiful and lyrical, and edits the Eastern Iowa Review.
July 2017 | poetry
Another of my father’s dense metal hand tools
That he’d never find or use again
once we took them from the shed.
That caught the exact size of things
by reach, touch, sight —
not needing inches and eighths
or arid calculation.
That turned perfect circles without
even trying.
That had a not-so-well-oiled joint
twisting between two sharp points, important
only in how far one was from the other.
That my brother and I blunted
by spiking it into rocky dirt and tree trunks
while almost always missing the
tiny, half rotten backyard apples
we aimed to impale.
That, after an unmeasured arc,
stuck, for a moment, just above my knee.
Lee W. Potts
Lee W. Potts has an MA in creative writing from Temple University and is a former editor of the Painted Bride Quarterly. His work has appeared in The South Street Star, Gargoyle, The Sun, and The Painted Bride Quarterly. He lives just outside of Philadelphia.
