July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
This blood is a waltz at dawn.
A soul splinters on the ground,
a thousand red vessels smashing
to pieces. The doctors take pictures
instead of putting it back together.
A human soul—the honeysuckle
leaking out. The janitor comes
instead, leaking capillaries brushed
away beneath a Bauhaus mop.
by Ruohan Miao
Ruohan Miao lives in Arizona. Her work can be found in Cicada, Aerie International, Cargoes, and Navigating the Maze. When not writing, she can be found marveling at the vastness of space.
July 2015 | back-issues, nonfiction, poetry
The Dying Sister
You fell in slo-mo like a mimosa petal caught in a small breeze, sprawling, nearly soundless, on our parents’ speckled linoleum. I, five years younger, didn’t know you held your breath to make yourself faint. I didn’t know you’d whittled yourself down to taut skin over sharp bones by spitting meals into your napkin. I cried because I thought you had the “C” like Aunt Ceil. When you slept until 4:00 p.m. and Mother put a mirror to your parted lips, I never expected breath. Those “slashes” on your wrists, grazes that didn’t need stitches, healed to pearly stripes.
Black widow spider, you wove us all into your worry-web, yet went on to outlive a husband and three live-in men. How old were you when you first fell in love with death?
Somewhere I remember you and me leaping from your twin bed to mine, the bottoms of our nightgowns ballooning, your chestnut hair flying up from your shoulders. You, airborne, born of air. We had to grip your arms to stop you from throwing yourself into Father’s open grave.
When a doctor would tell you to see a psychologist, you’d switch your doctor. I changed my phone number, returned your letters unopened. Then Mother would say, “But she’s your sister.” I would phone, and soon your silky thread would begin to spool itself around me.
Hatching your latest death, you bought a mobile home in a trailer park smack inside a hurricane belt. I startle at loud noises, as if your house had just blown here from Florida and thunked down in my yard.
Last night I dreamed you were laid out in a coffin on palest blue satin, your hair in tendrils on the lace-edged pillow. Dry-eyed, I felt myself take full breaths.
by Rochelle Shapiro
Eating With Ghosts
Here I am, eating with my son, daughter, husband,
reminding myself to chew, to not cup my hand
at the rim of my plate to shelter my food,
as if my dead father could reach for it again.
In Russia, he sucked on bark, even stones.
Here I am, asking everyone about their day,
leaving some food on my plate
to please my mother’s ghost.
“This way you won’t get broad in the beam.”
Her hand pinches the small fleshy roll
at the waistband of her girdle.
At night, when everyone is in bed,
you can find me in the dark kitchen,
bending into the open fridge,
the glow of its cold bulb,
eating leftovers with my fingers,
choking on unchewed food.
Shh, don’t tell.
by Rochelle Shapiro
Rochelle’s novel, Miriam The Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. Her short story collection What I Wish You’d Told Me (Shebooks, 2014) is just out in audio. She’s published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek-My Turn. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines such as The Iowa Review, The Doctor TJ Eckleberg Review, Stone Path Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Stand, Inkwell Magazine, Amarillo Bay, Poet Lore, Crack the Spine, Compass Rose, Controlled Burn, The Griffin, Los Angeles Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, The MacGuffin, Memoir And, Moment, Negative Capability, The Louisville Review, Amoskeag, Pennsylvania English, Rio Grande Review, RiverSedge, Peregrine, Gulf Coast, Existere, Passager, and Willow Review. Her poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and I won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability. Currently, she teaches writing at UCLA Extension.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Notes To Myself
When you are an American in a Middle Eastern country,
do not walk alone;
your bare arms will betray you,
your sandals become stone.
Walk lightly;
the shadows behind you are not yours.
Anyone can change in the blink of an eye.
When in another country,
do not fall in love with a countryman.
It is your children who will love you least:
your sons who watch you with knives.
When you travel by bus through the mountains,
the roads seem always upward;
only the brightness of children pulls you along.
When I tell you this,
I am shaking the travel dust from my body;
I know it is the edge where you thrive.
Do not go there, just as I have done.
Even in my own country,
it is the past I live on.
When Water Leaves Us
What fool marches upward for streams,
thirst made from the dimmest of dreams?
They labored up the small hill,
buckets knee-high:
Jack, shirtless and chilled,
Jill, narrow and strong.
The well was cracked and dry.
Vines ran through the stone and earth;
famished roots mined deeper into the ground.
The lad tumbled down,
the lass soon after.
They lay in the shadow of the sky,
their bodies made of clouds and doubt.
They were young enough for hope.
The buckets stood on top of the hill—
an empty sound.
Who knows the secrets of rain
from a make-believe sky?
Who knows when they will fall again?
by Ann Robinson
Ann Robinson’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Coachella Review, Chagrin River Review, Compass Rose, Connecticut Review, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The GW Review, Fourteen Hills, Freshwater, Hiram Poetry Review, Inscape, Jelly Bucket, Natural Bridge, New York Quarterly, Nimrod International Journal, Passager, Poet Lore, The Portland Review, RiverSedge, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Serving House Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Storyscape, Streetlight Magazine, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Weave Magazine, Whistling Shade, Willow Review, and Zone 3, among others. Her book of poetry, Stone Window, was published by Bark for Me Publications in 2014. She has been the recipient of the John Spaemer Award for Outstanding Fiction, a Marin Arts Council grant, a Pushcart nomination, and a scholarship to study at a Hofstra University conference.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
It is winter
a street sweeper sweeps
leaves up from Main Street
I’m sitting with my notebook
writing a poem about the symbolism of phlegm
remnants of furtive strategies
the morning tries to wake me
the cars to support me
the cold ground to go around me
an idea passes by about a man
addicted to self-help–he reads two
to three books a day
paralyzed by memories
I stop to wipe my nose on my sleeve
*
It is winter
the Post sports a picture
of a boy juggling kiwis
before I enter the office
a dwarf steps out of the drugstore
someone suggested he came from the subconscious
I argued he was a messenger
I ask him if he tends bar
request his business card
*
It is winter
and fall
I’m not degenerating
actually, almost fully marinated
I flex out my fingers
squeeze into a fist
unhitch the gate
unscrew the top of a baby bottle
squeeze in some carcinogens
insert my bristle brush
twist and tug
with only a tinge of despair
by Alan Katz
Alan attended the Tupelo Press Writers Conference on Barter’s Island, Maine, where he studied with Jeffrey Levine. He writes at the Brooklyn Writers Space, a collective in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
My Enemies
on W.S. Merwin
My enemies slide through the crowd oily as snakes
They are Death dressed in a coat of smiles
My enemies are part of the war in which they
do not care for the enemy
but kill their comrades in the trenches
My enemies continue to live
undisturbed in darkness
gently they inhale and
exhale
My enemies are suffocated by the obscurity
chasing them everywhere
upon the seven continents and
the dirt is afraid to pronounce their names
If Krakatoa erupts – those are their ovations
The shaking of Japan turns wild the cheering in their souls
My enemies without faces live inside the stone
in the speech of the water where they try to talk to eternity
before they turn into dust
My greatest enemy has many names which he goes out
in the night to practice
My enemies have never been loved
with tiny steps like Japanese prostitutes
they enter the rooms one after another
In these empty houses they are bloody clots in the corridors
My enemies all of them came out of the paper mill
where I produce matches
for their paper hearts
they are the nightmares of the people I dream about
in those nights when my soul
takes a break
My enemies in their dreams fly in the sky
the cocaine lines of the airplanes are their
smiles
My enemies pronounce words resembling worms
which dig deep in the dirt of the wasted lands
and they wander blind
In the morning the sun rises only for their half-shadows
At the end their skin will begin to bark their fingers will bloom
under the gravestones
without names
She
She loves to play with my feelings.
Without any obvious reason she acts insulted,
unwilling to give me any explanation.
She looks at me for hours with that air of superiority,
then she walks across the room and when I reach out
slowly, she quickly moves away.
Sometimes we do not talk for days.
I ask her what have I done to deserve this?
Was I checking out another one of her lovely sisters,
did I kick her out of my bed, or maybe because
we no longer take baths together?
Silence. She looks at me and turns her head.
She turns her back on me, too, then walks to the window
and for hours observes the trees outside.
What should I do? Well, I left it at that.
Eventually she will come to her senses. After all
she is just a stupid cat.
by Peycho Kanev
