July 2016 | poetry
Only the best trickster gods
have wings. Beating away at
the dried browned grass,
they knead the air and earth together
in the stone bowl of a yeasty, wet spring,
fooling us with movement and stories
that only let us see shadowy parts of things.
There are layers and layers
of air and birdsong and grass
that only a woodcock can lay claim to
strutting in that flat dinner plate of prairie.
For us, each step closer is a snap of grass,
but the only way to know it is to lie on it
and to feel it’s sharp ceramic crack underneath you.
I can stand still, feel my feet in the fragile brotherhood
of all the things in motion—
fluid wings, the unsettled earth, the ungrown grass,
a frog-chorused April dusk against
that fluttery squeak of flight,
which is not so much an awakening,
but the audible refilling of the haunted earth.
by Paul Wiegel
Paul Wiegel is a Green Bay native and now writes from his home near the upper Fox River in Wisconsin. His work is forthcoming in The English Journal, Eunoia Review, and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal. He is the 2015 winner of the John Gahagan Poetry Prize.
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
