July 2016 | poetry
I am more than interlaced fingers,
a tangle of limbs
As I get older, I am learning
the difference between
words that are blue and words that are
dark like the insides of people—
Clots and handfuls of flesh
that are more than my gender,
more than my wild ankles
with the bones round and clear like planets
The arsenal is the judgement of
my womanhood—
I was never a person with blood on her hands,
never the
domestic
type
A creation, I was an infant child born in the middle,
a girl in a brother’s clothing
Words have meaning, despite what
people say
Now is a time when the
punishment for everything is
death
by Kristin LaFollette
Kristin LaFollette received her BA and MA in English and creative writing from Indiana University. She is a PhD student in the English (Rhetoric & Writing) program at Bowling Green State University. Her poems have been featured in West Trade Review, Poetry Quarterly, Lost Coast Review, Slipstream Press, The Light Ekphrastic, The Main Street Rag, and River Poets Journal, among others. She also has artwork featured in Harbinger Asylum, Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Spry Literary Journal. She lives with her husband in northwestern Ohio. You can visit her at kristinlafollette.blogspot.com.
July 2016 | poetry
Soma
His torso entangled
unsure of its ends.
And there, Atlas
Heavenly heaving
again and again.
Deep bronze bodies smelted by Hephaestus
His, their sarcic art
Sheeted furnace Aristophanes fulfilling.
Ganglia
He stands on the curb
Alongside another
A brother
Of sorts.
Someone approaches, a brother of Other.
“Fuck that shit, bitch, get the fuck off my block!”
Glock cocked a god’s knuckle cracks
Saltpeter theogony, flesh behind
Spattering brother’s blood before
Pollocking the pavement
Viscera
Something within him
“Touch it”, it tells
He listens
Feeling the severed ligaments
They’re… wet
He keels.
He expels,
Pollocking the pavement
Sarcic art.
by Connor Fieweger
July 2016 | poetry
that dusk which is the start of deadly night
when darkness hides our evils and fears
and men surrender to folly and violence
that dusk, the gentle laying of a robe of pink
over a hot day of white sun or endless storms
that covered the roiling sky black at noon
with wind howling and rain lashing at faces;
that dusk the delicate hand of rest when the air
finally cools down the washes and gullies
where the heat still reflects, rocks warm to touch,
this breath of evening air relieves the oppression
and we can afford to move now before that dark
sky arrives, watch the light fade, a draining of all
the travails of the day, a promise that shadows
will melt, creation arise on the morrow, whether
sodden or sultry it will be as unprecedented as
a clean sun rising over all our waste and wild
spaces, dusk a distant matter of perspective.
by Emily Strauss
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Over 350 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
July 2016 | fiction
Arlo was strolling down Pike Street one morning when he saw a woman sitting on a bench in front of a sex shop, madly trying to light a cigarette. She looked to be in her early twenties, was tall and slim with azure blue hair, and her milky white skin was adorned with tats and piercings. She looked vaguely familiar so he offered her a light and they chatted it up a bit.
Her name was Oona, and he found out that they were at the same Poetry Slam event the month before. She told him that she just moved to Seattle, used to work as a dominatrix, and that her wife, Didi, was a tranny. She also revealed that she once lived in a coven and was a witch.
Afterwards, he took her shopping at a place that carried a wide assortment of the dark, Goth clothing befitting her persona.
They met several other times that month, always followed by more shopping sprees. Arlo could see what was happening but it almost didn’t matter because he just wanted to be in her presence, at whatever cost. He liked to buy her needful, shiny things. She liked to get those needful, shiny things.
During the following months, Arlo fell into the role of servant to Oona and Didi: running errands, delivering takeout food, chauffeuring, and helping them furnish the apartment they shared with another tranny. He truly enjoyed this role.
One day, she told him that she unexpectedly inherited some property in New York and would be moving back there within the week.
Arlo felt hurt and lost without her. Eventually he figured out a way to sooth the pain and kick-start his life back up again; he would immortalize her in print.
by A.R. Bender
July 2016 | poetry
Jimmy was a dreamer, a handsome James Dean kind of guy.
Jimmy decided at 17 he was in love, so he eloped with his child bride
and kept it a secret until nobody would question her age.
He loved his bride and she loved him. They had a baby
daughter who was a dreamer too.
Jimmy had tiny flecks of gold in his eyes that looked like the sun
had burned right through them. Sometimes he wore a patch.
Jimmy loved to dream but he loved his child bride and daughter
more than any dreamer would think possible.
When Jimmy was 20 he was drafted in the Korean War.
He didn’t like war so he pretended he was blind in one eye
and when that didn’t work he bought a sunlamp and stared
into the light for 29 minutes a day
Jimmy was never really blind in either eye but his dreams
began to be slightly blurred.
When the army said he could still see well enough to kill
a man, Jimmy went off to war.
Years went by and he sent love letters home to his child bride
and daughter who were both growing up, alone.
Some of the letters spoke of the things he missed most
from back home. All of the letters had a pencil sketch
of wild horses running through a field.
When Jimmy returned from Korea he was different. He stayed
out all night and played cards. He drank a lot of whiskey
because his dreams were more like nightmares.
He went to strip-clubs and bars parading around with prostitutes
or cheap whores according to his child bride.
He started talking about the men in his platoon.
He wore a fedora with a long duck feather wedged beneath
the black satin ribbon.
Jimmy loved Winston cigarettes.
Sometimes Jimmy drew horses but they weren’t running free
anymore. They looked sickly, their heads hung down, their tails
never flowing in the wind.
Jimmy’s mother was concerned. She asked the doctor
to straighten Jimmy out. She ordered electric shock therapy
to get rid of his nightmares.
Jimmy told his daughter he was being followed. He said people
slipped things in his drinks. He said he chewed bubblegum
to get rid of the taste.
He started hallucinating. His dreams were not dreams anymore.
Jimmy couldn’t tell the difference between his child bride
and a cheap whore.
He acted funny, told his daughter not to look at his eyes.
Not to stare at the sun and never trust anyone, especially
other men with fedoras who started hanging around after
hours leaving ashes on the steps.
Jimmy liked to smoke but those ashes weren’t his. Jimmy
feared for his life and his family’s lives too.
He began to lock the doors feeling paranoid.
He wrote crazy stories in a secret black binder.
One night, Jimmy took an overdose of sleeping pills
His daughter found him with his eyes closed.
Jimmy didn’t need a patch anymore.
When they buried Jimmy they draped his coffin
with an American flag. His daughter kept it with his drawings
of horses, the ones with their tails whipping through the wind.
Years later someone told the family that Jimmy was in a special troop.
That the government had given him LSD in something they called
* ‘Operation Midnight Climax.’
Jimmy had been part of an experiment that went terribly wrong.
Jimmy had been playing Black Jack at a safe-house
set up by the CIA.
Jimmy died an unsung hero. But his daughter never doubted
his dreams were real, even when they became more like nightmares
than dreams.
Some days she turns on the sunlamp for 29 minutes and lets
the warmth surround her face. She wears a patch on both
eyes to protect her from the light or anything else she doesn’t want to see
She says Jimmy’s dreams are still alive in her. She runs
her fingers over his pencil sketches and reads herself to sleep
with the crazy stories he wrote in the secret black binder.
She dreams of horses and unsung heroes and all things that sound
too impossible to be true.
On his birthday every year she takes out the folded American flag
and drapes it over her bed. She puts on his feathered fedora
and smokes a Winston cigarette then chews one piece of bubblegum.
Jimmy would have liked that.
by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a seven-time Pushcart nominee and four-time Best of the Net nominee. She has authored several chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems:Hasty Notes in No Particular Order newly released from Aldrich Press. She is the 2012 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition for her manuscript Before I Go to Sleep and according to family lore she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com
