April 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Look at it this way. They forced you to wear a hair net. Because your locks were too long for the rusted chicken-fried-steak trailer, that grease-pit concession-stand prison uglifying the edge of the racetrack. As if the orangutan with rotted-out teeth on the other side of the counter, the dude standing there with chewing-tobacco drool, slobbering all over himself, drenched in day-old sweat, the dude on his fifth can of Stroh’s, hell bent for the grandstand with his skeletal meth-head girlfriend to watch modified cars drive around in a circle for two hours–that dude–like he would give a shit if one single hair from your head wound up in his chicken-fried steak sandwich. Look at it that way. They forced you to wear a hair net. They got what they deserved. They all got what they fucking deserved.
—Gary Singh
Gary Singh is an award-winning journalist with a music degree who publishes poetry, paints and exhibits photographs. As a scribe, he has published hundreds of works including travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. He is a sucker for anything that fogs the opposites of native and exotic, luxury and the gutter, academe and the street.
April 2014 | back-issues, poetry
People eating people, symptom of our times,
like curbside recycling or socialized health care,
back to nature, slow food – just look at my neighbor –
enough for me and you, or at least for me, enough for
what comes around to go around. Remember good
old Uncle Jimmy? A real tough guy, they always said,
but hey, that’s what stew pots are made for.
—Jeffrey Park
Jeffrey Park’s poetry has appeared most recently in UFO Gigolo, streetcake, The Camel Saloon, and the science fiction anthology Just One More Step from Horrified Press. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school. Links to all of his published work can be found at scribbles-and-dribbles.com.
April 2014 | back-issues, poetry
My Mother is Buried
My mother is buried on wind-swept
high-ground in a tiny ignored
cemetery.
The grass-spare plots are surrounded
by immaculate plowed fields
that never see a crop.
Every month I buy artificial flowers
at Wal-Mart and stuff them
into a cone filled with green
styrofoam, then
I get on my knees and pull weeds
away from the base of the tombstone.
Usually, I set up a lawn-chair and read
her poetry.
As far as I know she never read poetry
in her entire life, but she did
read the Bible so I always include a few
psalms.
Mostly though, the poetry is for myself
hoping that somehow that is okay.
Lately I’ve been reading her Blake.
Sometimes I read Herbert or Hopkins
thinking that maybe she would like
them better.
If I am there late in the day I usually get
drunk and have to sleep awhile before
I drive home.
One warm summer night, last July, I fell asleep
(passed out) and woke up at three a.m.
to a gray fox trying to eat the yellow
and blue plastic flowers.
Sky over Indian Hills
Silk-screened pink sky tucks behind
the four mesas, the
four of them a worm-hole to the west, and
Comanches, only a hundred years gone.
I lean against oak trees with purple-brown
leaves, some falling like dead dark
snow, while my heels dig
into the sand of an overgrown peanut field.
Sky darkens but still is dominant,
the earth a postcard. Fleeting memory is a
plaything of the infinite and soon the stars will
laugh at the tiny trees and miniature creek.
Hills darken and are gone, pink gone too,
everything consumed by hungry time
and heaven.
I sit long into the night,
coyotes in the distance,
leaves rattling in the woods.
I think that means birds but it might mean
wild hogs.
I go back to the cabin that I have left well
lit, the brightness reminding me that I am
alive and important. Just a ruse really.
I know that in the morning the sky will
be blue and the Indian hills will
be the focus of the sun.
—John T. Waggoner
April 2014 | back-issues, Bill Wunder, poetry
She hops down from the dump truck’s crusty side
and climbs up into the earth mover as graceful
as a gymnast, pony tail bouncing
behind her John Deere baseball cap.
She wields the blade
of the machine and in minutes
levels a great mound of soil
into flat-out respect.
The admiration in which I held my ex-wife
comes to mind. How
when the pipes leaked
she slid under the sink
wrench in hand, saving the day
while I just held her flashlight.
But this is about a woman
who moves the earth
with just her fingers
on the leash of a great yellow beast,
and though she’ll never know,
holds me in the palm of her hand.
—Bill Wunder
Bill Wunder’s poems have twice been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and in 2004 he was named Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His poems have been a finalist in The Robert Fraser Poetry Competition, The Mad Poet’s Society Competition twice, and The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards three times. He has previously been featured in Burningword Literary Journal and was included in Burningword Ninety-Nine, A Selected Anthology of Poetry 2001-2011.
April 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Most things are not the end
Of the world. You know this.
But on this day
You can’t hold the world’s atoms together
Not with the muscles of your mouth
Still making the shape
Of the last thing you said to him.
Not with blood under fingernails
From hanging too long
Like a gymnast spinning a slow koan
Against gravity.
The last person you loved
Was an avalanche, dear
To you once in a way
That flattened the landscape.
Where does love go after
You press it into the ground
With a face full of blood and
vomit in its hair?
It would not be the first thing
Ever to rise from the dead.
You’ve done it yourself more than once,
Taught yourself how to die and come back
Between eye-blinks
Without anyone knowing.
—Jenny Williamson
Jenny’s work has been featured in 24Mag, Wild River Review, Poetic Voices, and in Philadelphia’s Writing Aloud series. Jenny also received recognition from the Academy of American Poets and NPR’s Young Poets Series.
