January 2016 | poetry
Observations In Lieu Of An Elegy
Scooter Monzingo is dead.
The weather is crisp, the streets
Are exceptionally clean.
His wife is amazed at how
Natural he looks, the way
His fingers gracefully mesh.
It is six o’clock. In Rome,
In a cheap villa, a young
American housewife is
Seducing a gigolo.
She insists his name is Frank.
What an ugly word! Franck thinks.
It is six o’clock. Demure
Millie Hobbes is pawning her
Gramophone. She has plans, big
Plans. Someday her neighbors will
See her and say, Who would have
Thought it? She can hardly wait.
It is six o’clock. Rainstorms
Lash the coast of Uruguay.
In a crowded marketplace,
A slow-eyed senorita
Has begun to menstruate
For the first time. People stare.
If he were alive today,
Scooter Monzingo would say
4,800 words,
Move 700 muscles,
Eat over 3 pounds of food,
And breathe. Which is average.
The Miracle
Who could ever imagine this breach
Of sun? Not even the priests
Grazed by the moon and eager
To serve could say for sure. Oh,
They fasted, wept, and prayed. With
The passion of despair, they
Brought hundreds to the knife. Lord,
The stench. Baskets stuffed with soft
Steaming entrails. But nowhere
Was an answer to be found.
Encouraged, then, by what they
Could not see, they counted up
Their blessings in disguise. They
Danced, they sang, they fell back on
Tradition and, praising all
Such miracles of mystery,
They blessed the bloody fields.
by Paul Lubenkov
After a lengthy career as an executive with Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film, I have returned full circle to my first post graduate job: College Instructor. Although it is certainly intimidating to return to the classroom, it is incredibly rewarding to be able to give back. Poems recently published and accepted for publication in The Sierra Nevada Review, The Stillwater Review, The Outrider Review, River Poets Journal, Falling Star Magazine, and The Tule Review.
January 2016 | poetry
A morbid fear of guns
whose array of co-morbidities
encompass
suppressed rage
post-traumatic stress disorder
delusional disorder
and panic disorder
this complex specific phobia
and avoidance
displacement
and transference
Or how else do hoplophobiacs
get from point A
to point B
without a gun permit
with a gun
without a firing mechanism
and without bullets
and the hallowed halls of Congress
clogged with lead?
by Patrick Theron Erickson
Patrick, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself, a former shepherd of sheep, a small flock with no sheep dog and no hang-dog expression. Secretariat is his mentor, though he has never been an achiever and has never gained on the competition. He resonates to a friend’s definition of change; though a bit dated with the advent of wi fi, it has the ring of truth to it: change coming at us a lot faster because you can punch a whole lot more, a whole lot faster down digital broadband “glass” fiber than an old copper co-axial landline cable. Of late Patrick’s work has appeared in Poetry Pacific; Red Fez; SubtleTea; The Oddville Press; Literary Juice; Poetry Quarterly; and will appear in the Fall 2015 issue of The Penwood Review.
January 2016 | fiction
Hot in the schoolhouse we study mathematics, geography. We are told many times that the maps teach history too. We learn of the African Union; we learn of the Empire of Mali, and are told that it was long ago. We learn of Portugal, and of the British in swathes of dull red. Sometimes the sea sweeps into the mangroves, and sometimes the forest bears fruit.
Stephanie, my pen friend, writes that she is entranced with the idea of the hippos, and asks me to send a picture. Hippos are hard to draw. Last summer I saw a fisherman too close to the water: he was torn in half, one part disappearing into the frothing pool and one part spat into the mud. Occasionally we make masks and pretend to be animals: cows, sharks and other harmless beasts. To like a hippo you must have to be very far away. In the mud and the water, I thought the colours of the half-swallowed man looked like the map in our schoolhouse: red, blue, brown.
I try to imagine where Stephanie learns geography; I try to see what a city would look like. Stephanie sends pictures with buildings like picked-clean whalebones thrown into the sky. Outside the schoolhouse, our mathematics rulers double as weapons, sometimes as spades. Later, in the evenings, I like to carve, carefully working at a new mask while the red sun falls into the sea.
by Phil Robinson-Self
Phil Self lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and considers the weather to be not as bad as people say. His fiction has featured in Flash Fiction Magazine, Paragraph Planet, The Pygmy Giant, Apocrypha and Abstractions, and elsewhere. On balance, he would probably like to be your friend.
January 2016 | poetry
In this late-autumn dusk
trees discard their leaves
like August’s junk lottery tickets.
She stands before the pool,
long since drained of water,
arms raised high, toes curled
over the edge of the diving board.
What makes her want to swim now?
Where was she all summer?
The quiet, clockwork stars
spin on their eternal vinyl sphere
as she closes her eyes, bends her knees.
She’s grown fat with sweet wine
she can no longer taste.
Her suit fits like a catcher’s mitt.
Grass grays in patches like stubble
on an old man’s face,
so she looks skyward, heavenward,
and launches herself into frigid night,
into emptiness cold as a new grave.
by James Valvis
James Valvis has placed poems or stories in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Ploughshares, River Styx, The Sun, and many others. His poetry was featured in Verse Daily. His fiction was chosen for Sundress Best of the Net. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle.
January 2016 | John Sweet, poetry
church on fire
says i’m sick of
this shit
says tell me a story with a
happy ending for a change, and so i
paint her one of tanguy’s skies
instead
i paint her one of
kahlo’s visions
i drive over to the north side
to find her father, but
no one’s seen him in
twenty years
no one gives a fuck about
the sixties, no one gives a shit about
lennon’s murder, about reagan’s
death, about anything other
than money or power
the past is empty nostalgia, the
future a fever dream of possibility
and i sleep on the couch
all week
i consider apologizing for
things i haven’t done
in the end i keep quiet
and the infection spreads
the sun barely clears the hills to the
south on the coldest days of the year and
the air is thick with the smell of
gasoline, of metal grinding against
metal, and she says
slow down
says that was the exit but the
trick is to get further away, out to
where the hills no longer have names,
out to where the trees rise up forever
dead from lakes of black water,
and the trick is to forget the children,
and the trick is to drive out past
even this, out past memory and
pain, but the truth is that the
trick always fails
the truth is that sex always
ends up feeling better
than love
isn’t this what you’ve been
waiting to hear me say?
upstate landscape w/ minor premonition
or all of those days spent
waiting for something to happen
all of those wasted hours caught
beneath a pale white sun, beneath a colorless sky,
and it was always early afternoon and it
was always the middle of november
powerlines stretched from dying
house to dying house and
empty trees never quite casting shadows
across barren lawns
the highway and the back roads
endless empty spaces packed tight w/
the ghosts of the past
nothing subtracted from
nothing
again and again
: :
the car out of gas on
fire at the edge of the highway the
swimmer alone late autumn or
early his wife missing
or sleeping
the children not yet imagined
and this car this wasteland this
all barren fields and powerlines all
empty stretches of interstate
mountains in the distance
and a man you might have
been always swimming
towards them
imaginary poem while waiting for rain
but this is only the day of
angels and we are only cities on fire
we are in the car for eight hours straight,
up and down side streets,
scoring and then using and then looking to score again and
what we smell like, i’d guess, is
slow meaningless death
what we believe in are better gods
or no gods at all
and the radio is tuned in to neverending static on the
morning your husband walks out the door
still gone four days later,
fucking someone’s sister in a leaky trailer and
together they are only a monotonous story with a
predictable ending
a suicide that drags on for seven years
and her children sit and wait outside the
bedroom door, and this boy no one knows is found
alongside the interstate, raped and beaten and dead,
eyes gouged out, coat hanger wrapped
tight around his throat
fourth of july in this
age of casual oblivion
religion forced down your throat and
deep up into your ass and whoever tells you that
voting will bring about change is a liar
power will always be power and poverty a crime and
we have been walking lost through this forest
for days now or for a month or maybe for
half our wasted lives
i have told you i love you and i have
told you i hate you and
neither one is anywhere near the truth
i have tasted your sweat and i have
drunk your blood and i have
offered you mine and
we are dying stars in broad daylight
we are dirty needles on piss-stained floors
the truth sounds better as a metaphor and then
better still as a lie and the windows here
are all broken, the walls filled with
dead and dying bees
end of july
walk out the door and drive through
100 miles of nothing and then
100 more and then start to see a pattern
believe only in what you can hold
fall asleep at the highway’s edge beneath
a relentless sun and
what the fuck were you thinking,
growing up, starting a family?
what the fuck were you
thinking, giving yourself away?
bought a house with no roof, no walls,
water in the basement
pulled the plug on your father
spoke quietly about your grandmother’s suicide
in a roomful of strangers and none of them
listened and why would they?
this is the 21st century
age of emotional famine
age of indifference
wake up in the middle of frozen lake in
early february with a head full of
broken glass and think about summer
try to remember how you
ended up here
open your eyes for once in your life
by John Sweet
john sweet, b. 1968.opposed to organized religion and to political parties. ideologies in general, altho he DOES have a soft spot for the concepts of surrealism and post-punk. 30 years spent wrestling w/ the idea of writing as catharsis. most recent collections are THE CENTURY OF DREAMING MONSTERS (2014 Lummox Press) and A NATION OF ASSHOLES W/ GUNS 2015 Scars Publications, e-chap).
