April 2017 | poetry
When they were small, I’d line them up
before we’d go into the grocery store,
spit on a tissue and wipe their faces,
straighten their hair, inspect.
They say now I was marking them.
I’ve watched how ravens raise theirs.
By fall, big enough to fly for an hour,
the parents lead the grown ones
away from the nest up the mountain forest
as they squawk and loop,
following to a new silence.
The old book of cobbled myths
prescribes how fathers
should rub the newborns with salt.
The patriarchs dictated,
they must mark the children,
perform the ritual
as a sign of their covenant with god,
disinfect the corrupt tendencies of the heart,
so that the child would be truthful.
But it is no guarantee.
Though you believe they never will,
when they lie to you the first time,
you ache as though you’ve been cut,
as though something has broken,
never thinking you could ever close
such a wound.
You try to construct the lesson of forgiveness.
You think for days
that it is a fault of your own making.
But the lies are critical,
it is the way we learn to forgive,
the way we learn
that our eyes give us away.
Mark Burke
April 2017 | fiction
After my father’s third wife left him, he tacked up a paper target onto the center of the cathode ray credenza and pegged a picture of my latest step-mother over it. He towed the fridge into the sitting room, packed with Pabst. Beside it was a cinder block-sized container of BB pellets for his pump action rifle.
From an inflatable arm chair he took aim and shucked beers until the picture was pulp and the vacant cans were an avant-garde sculpture. I came out of my room to use the bathroom when an errant BB whanged off the television’s curved glass, struck me in my solar-plexus and fell harmlessly to the floor.
I never told anyone, but for a while I thought I was bulletproof. My father wasn’t. He let things get to him too easily. But genetic inheritance is hard to hide. Hollow-points ricocheted off Superman’s pupils. Lois Lane’s devotion never wavered. My action figurine bulged with immutable, plastic muscles.
Decades later, when my fiancée broke up with me, I thought about my father, dead from a discharge through his ear lobe more potent than a BB. If I pinched the same trigger he had, would the bullet still bounce off?
Brandon Hartman
April 2017 | poetry
I.
Blacksmiths re-arrange
silken threads
Tailors forge
horseshoes
Where do you form, irony, to then become formless?
What whistles these are, from disintegrated yokes afar?
Fourteenth century subjugation, still prepared for trade
A hankering globe feeds on soluble and insoluble fibre,
O prodigal atoms of billowy attestation.
II.
An undulant weather is characteristic of rectified revisions
Continents and natural components perish simultaneously,
What well behaved skin of decorum, unwatched, undresses?
A lexicographer could coat tribes in cycles of gestations
Hence sap inside barks must be both; reminders and properties
The wonder, a superficial matter camouflage of damp interiors,
What perishes,
cartouches of
Ancient pharaohs
say geologists.
III.
Now, I will listen to them through mutations of my speech,
I will unlearn their ghastly spells when graveyards un-disguise,
Bleak moments
odorless air
practised inception
creation born.
The world communicates, where were you born, are headed to?
Leaves stiffen as they are spread out on bare grounds, everyplace —
These fitful events.
IV.
The exact value who can decipher? Value vexes fathomless froth.
Death descends upon a clear birthed moment while it undrapes
The broadcloth
over a carcass,
peruse discarded
companions and boots,
Death fetches and encourages filtered fibres of breaths.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is pursuing her second postgraduate degree in literature at the United Kingdom and has been awarded the GREAT scholarship. Her work has appeared or is to appear in Ann Arbor Review (MI, USA), The Rain, Party & Disaster Society (USA) and in poetry anthologies such as Dance of the Peacock (Hidden Brook Press, Canada), Suvarnarekha (The Poetry Society of India, India) and elsewhere.
April 2017 | poetry
Since you left,
this apartment got smaller.
Like you packed away
the space you existed in,
and carried it off with you.
A whole world by your side,
in a purse.
What you left
are echoes of questions
drifting in a fog,
hoping you’ll return to rescue them.
Just like me.
I don’t feel like a mother bird,
after her baby has flown.
I feel like the nest.
Abandoned, up on a branch,
watching birds flying by,
knowing that none of them are coming here.
None of them are mine, any more.
Dazzler
Dazzler is a British-American poet living in Arizona and Washington State. Having survived corporate and Academic lives, he now spends his days dedicated to poetry, family, and black labs.
April 2017 | poetry
After Margot Canaday’s The Straight State
1
At Ellis Island
they found the immigrant’s body
indeterminate.
Protuberant breasts;
also a small, atrophied penis,
testicle undescended.
“Now,” the interrogators asked, “back home,
“did you sleep in the room with your brothers
or the room with your sisters?”
I always slept alone.
2
The interrogators stamped the folder:
UNDESIRABLE.
They sent for the father,
who made the crossing.
Meanwhile, this determination was
reached: “He is male.”
They shaved the head,
gave the immigrant
ratty trousers, cinched with string.
The father arrived
and did not recognize
her, stranded before him
awaiting either official
entry or deportation.
“If you took him home,”
they asked the old man,
“how would you treat him?”
As I always have.
3
They
undid the string
and let the ratty trousers fall.
They showed the man the small,
atrophied penis, the undescended
testicle. And asked him to explain.
(Their mouths glowed like incinerators.)
It is true,
she becomes a man for a day or two
each month, when the moon is full.
They asked, “How could you tell?”
At those times, there is always deep sorrow in her eyes.
Justin Vicari
