January 2015 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
what becomes
you are breathing on the
frozen ground with broken ribs you
are smiling and we are higher up
between venus and the crescent
moon in the last seconds before
first light we are falling we are
praying are laughing at the
idea of someone else’s pain
are laughing in the tall grass and
she is turning away with
broken hands a bleeding mouth and
i have known her i have held her
and he is at the wrong end of
the gun
he is no one or at least is no one
we know and she is laughing
as the trigger is pulled
he is laughing and they are
breathing with their lungs full
of iridescent poison full of
broken glass and this is the
moment when she speaks my
name
this is the taste of
her salt on my lips
we are alone here together and
moving deeper
into the heart of salvation
a luminous song
baby shot in the head outside a liquor store,
held up like a shield by its father and
no one can tell you when this desert began and
no one can tell you where it ends
the maps are all drawn in black on black
the politicians all laugh
it can go two different ways
you see
and the dogs believe in violence and the
whores believe in money and
both will always lead to power
and the bay is dead and then the father
but it’s a long ways away in
both space and time
a warm summer evening on
the opposite coast and i’m 26
i’ve given up on heroes and i’ve given
up on god and what it feels like is freedom
a small surrealist game to be played in a
back
yard
garden
with polished stones and
bleeding hands and naked lovers
a pile of skulls left at the water’s edge
and the mother says he never
really wanted a child and
the humor in pain is sometimes difficult to find
the joy found in terrorizing others is
what makes us human
seems like what you’d actually want to
be is something
more or something less
an answer
life wasted crawling towards water beneath the
sky blue sky and these
last days of winter and this taste of dirty frost
this 10 below zero this neverending wind and all of
the furniture from
the burned house spread out on the lawn
jesus in his unmarked grave
dreaming lightning bolts
understands the kingdom of god is a
fairy tale for suckers and fools
knows in his endlessly dying heart that a man who
wants for nothing is a man who can never be trusted
diogenes
and nothing and
nothing and then ten
below zero at five thirty in the morning
no FOR or AGAINST
no TOWARDS or AWAY
am just trying to remember how to
breathe and how to be
am through believing in gods
in heroes
from room to room
with absolute clarity
need a gun or a window or the
doorway to a different kingdom
need to be a fist
a believer in those happy
days of open wounds
a priest waiting to
fuck or be fucked
i would give you hope if i could
just for the pleasure of
taking it away again
the bleeding horse sings one last song over the graves of 500,000,000 nameless victims
and if all you are is a ghost or
even if i find only one small place that
isn’t enemy territory
if the dogs have all eaten
their fill of corpses
call it a victory without
naming the war
let me rediscover hope
let me drown in the
ocean of your beauty
it’s enough that what we have will
still matter
even when nothing else does
by John Sweet
john sweet, b. 1968, winner of the 2014 Lummox Poetry Prize. opposed to the idea of plutocracies attempting to pass themselves off as democracies, and to all organized religion. not too impressed with television, either. collections include FAMINE, INSTRUCTIONS FOR DROWNING and the upcoming THE CENTURY OF DREAMING MONSTERS.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Standing As Instructed
My mother still
under her sky-blue shroud,
with her head turned to the side.
I lie down beside her.
With my face close to hers,
hers unstirring,
I take her face in my hands.
Her cheeks, two peaches
left on the ground
after the frost,
grow warm and her eyes
open—her blue-green eyes
so rich with enigma.
She smiles
and the dew
of her single breath
awakens the closeness
we never had
and that I find
only in a poem.
My mother still
under her sky-blue shroud.
I stand
ten feet away,
as the funeral director
has instructed,
for reasons of sanitation.
Summer Vacation In Europe
Light glints off
my father’s ivory suit
in pointed rays like swords
that outshine even
the intense summer sun.
Thus armed, he orders
the day’s essentials
from restaurants, hotels.
I long for his gleam.
My mother’s is hazy,
dustier,
as she explicates
walls of paintings and frescoes
in every museum and church.
I linger behind,
a reluctant tourist
in the dappled region
of age fourteen,
where, as in the arched womb
of a huge cathedral,
the perpetual dawn or twilight
smells of stone and mystery,
and glimmers flutter
high above
like white birds
caught under the ceiling.
by Betsy Martin
Betsy Martin works at Skinner House Books in Boston. She studied at Harvard University, where she earned an AB in English and American literature; the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and the Middlebury Russian School, where she graduated with an MA in Russian language; and Brown University, where she received an MA in Russian literature. When Betsy happens by a window in her busy schedule, she enjoys bird watching with her husband and playing the piano. Betsy’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alembic, Assisi Journal, Barely South Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly (Best of the Net nomination), Existere, Front Range Review, Gemini Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Helix, Limestone Journal, Louisville Review, Magnapoets, Minetta Review, Organs of Vision and Speech, Pirene’s Fountain, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, and Weber—The Contemporary West.
January 2015 | back-issues, fiction
He had only caught you a few times, sneaking up from behind, each step as stealth as a tiptoeing cat, shattering the silence with a WHAT ARE YOU DOING that booms in your brain but, in reality, is barely above what school teachers call your “inside voice.”
You do not answer and he does not need you to answer because he saw. On the edge of the bed—your side of the bed, not his, you remind him—you are hunched over, your back curved like a crescent moon or maybe a crescent roll with your feet dangling a foot above the floor, clipping your toe nails not into the trashcan, like he asks, but onto the carpet where your feet, not his, you remind him, step each morning and each night.
It’s what you do in the dark, you tell him.
The lights are all on, he says.
I can bring you a trashcan, he says.
That’s not the point but you let him anyway. You feign laziness. When he leaves, you return to clipping your nails over the carpet until they align perfectly with the edge of your fingertips. When you are done, you look down at the chipped nail polish-adorned toenail clippings—sharp confetti. Spreading them evenly across the carpet before you, your toes run through the razor sharp blades that will disappear when you vacuum on Sundays, only to be replaced by a fresh brood days later—virgins filed in millimeter-sized rows across your toes, steadily progressing towards execution.
by Melissa Darcey
Melissa Darcey is a writer based in San Diego, CA. She has a soft spot for Jane Eyre, coffee, and her orange cat, Milo. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Gravel, Extract(s), Litro, Black Heart, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Abaddon
“You wouldn’t abandon ship in a storm
just because you couldn’t control the winds.”
— Thomas More, Utopia.
Last call for the patriots,
last stop for all apostates;
the last train to freedom is
now boarding from Abaddon.
Every time it rains
the fixtures blinker out;
no coincidence, this:
the governance installed the sky.
There’s rows of voices
over all the houses;
advances in bipartisanation
amplifies people’s dependence.
No, this isn’t really hell,
they got it wrong, it’s overdone;
hell is a better composition,
its design is still untried.
If you read the manifestos,
it’s evident life’s counterfeit;
unknown ideals speak truth to practice,
panacea, comrade, can be obtained.
Now, this “perdition” is a travesty,
it’s ersatz, faux and fraudulent;
real hell’s supposed to purify,
not profit small-time bureaucrats.
They got their knobs, test-tubes and dials,
vast screens to engineer nightmares;
these are cheap tricks, mere brummagem,
effects lacking organic woe.
I want a hell that’s fair and square,
where punishment’s unbigoted;
I have it here, inerrable,
in documents, with principles.
If people would just cogitate
and sublimate their fallacies,
then they’d see this nether world
an apotheosis to behold!
Last call for provocateurs,
last stop for all demagogues;
the last train crash to eidolon
is boarding now from Abaddon.
Permanent Austerity
“These are the waning days
of aristocratic socialism,”
she lamented with a shrug.
“We heard the speeches
as the ice cubes melted
and I fear our marching orders
won’t resemble plangent posters.”
’Twas then the scullery maids and
stable hands dismantled chandeliers.
“I’m inclined to agree, dialectic theory
has devolved into a grotesquery
of polity,” I assented with a survey
from my broken monocle.
“We all embraced the slogans,
shibboleths as well as anthems
but, in practice, I concede, the enemy is us.”
’Twas then the valets and chauffeurs
voted themselves out of existence.
“It’s curious to note, if not
a little indiscreet,
Lenin in the Kremlin
has domestics and a chef,”
she said with minor malice
and a misanthropic laugh.
“The fastest telegraph in this umbrageous
Soviet transmits from servants quarters
of the General Secretary.”
“Marat, too, had his housekeeper,”
I noted cynically, “and why would we expect
dictatorship without starched collars
for a bureaucratic caste
‘engineering social progress’?
Sooner the state withers away,” I chuckled,
“the better chances for shareholders.”
’Twas then the doorman and au pair
quit their posts, with ready rifles.
Anatomy of a Catastrophe
“These are barbaric days,” she said,
pointing to the effigies
and criminals in the stockades
whose crimes were but a lack of rent.
“Tight credit is the cause of this,”
I interjected sententiously,
observing all the foreclosures
which turned the commons into sludge.
I shuddered at investments lost.
“I, for one, blame the court
for lavish wars which made a sport
of brinkmanship over rare gems
not worth their weight in guts,”
she said, and not without embarrassment.
“Yes, it’s true, diplomacy
has been misused by bunglers
who curdled treasuries in vain,”
I did rejoin, most ruefully.
“The problem, as I see it,” she continued,
“is this culture of ineptitude,
rewarding hordes of savages
who disrespect propriety.”
“Ah,” I nodded fatalistically,
“here is where I disagree:
the issue of the state’s decline
owes to factors of finance;
morality is petty cash.”
“This is where sexes diverge,”
she added with a mild reproach;
“business aims the industry
of state conquests, I will concede,
but first and foremost, I aver,
psychology directs commerce
and dominance is revenue.
Patrician excess, nonetheless
has made a botch of chancery.”
And so we stood, near pillories
where internees moan for reprieve
as soot enveloped villages
once renowned for piety.
These are dark days, and the malaise
owes to the government the most
we did agree, while neither side of the
debate could quite admit, the evil was
democracy.
by Craig Kurtz
Craig Kurtz resides at Twin Oaks Intentional Community where he writes poetry while simultaneously surviving the dream. Recent work has appeared in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Conclave: A Journal of Character, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys, East Jasmine Review, The Kitchen Poet, The Literati Quarterly, Maudlin House, The Recusant, Teeth Dreams, Three and a Half Point 9, Tower Journal, Veil: Journal of Darker Musings and Zouch Magazine.
