the flooded forest

July 2015 | back-issues, poetry

I went wandering again last night

through the submerged trees

caught in a summer flood

half delighting in their watery feet

 

and though the forest was submerged

by some trick of the dream

my path was clear and bright

a winding sunny way through

 

wild flowers and buzzing bees

the occasional dragon fly

zooming through emphatically

like a winged exclamation mark

 

delighting in its own beauty and speed

and as I walked, I wondered

where my path was leading

the dream was not clear

 

at this point — colours fused into green and blue

my walking became floating

my hands became leaves

and my feet moved like branches

 

caught underwater

flowing in a weedy elegance

all emotion channeled into being

nothing more than a tree

 

in the flooded forest

filled with the dream of light in water

fulfilled by being –

no purpose, no hesitation

 

just gratitude and

leaves in prayer

reaching upward

touching the sun

 

by Seamus Brady

 

Seamus Brady lives and works in Dublin Ireland. Publications include Dark Mountain Journal and in an upcoming edition of the Trumpeter Magazine (Deep Ecology).

Cerebral Atrophy

July 2015 | back-issues, fiction

They came in a pack of four. The wolves from the Justice Department descended on my father once the disease became too advanced to conceal. Sometimes he recognized them for the enemy they were but there were instances when he thought they were old acquaintances and he wanted to reminisce about incidents that they had no prior knowledge of. I did my best to keep the predators away but they snuck in disguised as doctors, deliverymen and caretakers.

They came in a pack of four. The extended members of the family pretended to visit but really wanted to assess the situation personally. They insisted on holding their “visits” where they could whisper so low that my father had no idea what they were saying. They looked at each other more than they looked at him and some, I am sure, had never met him before though they all insinuated otherwise.

They came in a pack of four. The batteries arrived in the mail accompanied by a handful of wires in an unmarked envelope as a warning of things to come. My hands shook and everything spilled to the floor. The meaning was that the guests from out of town were more worried about the local boys than they let on. If you’re lucky, you get one warning.

They came in a pack of four. The sleeping pills with all the warnings, side effects, and harmful drug interactions were in individualized boxes but there was no shortage of them.  I made sure my father’s prints were on every box, every label, and every piece of inner wrap. I put all of them in his mouth – four at a time – and forced him to drink them down. I held his hands and watched him leave.

by Michael Gunn

 

Michael Gunn has been previously published in Shotgun Honey.

Rit Bottorf

July 2015 | back-issues, poetry

The Track

This track is bloated with the grotesque and mad

in their low-wage dresses and top-dollar perfumes,

whoring their hearts for Vegas magic

as angels trumpet perverse songs of praise

for the thoroughbreds racing through the crimson mist.

But under these halogen skies

my faith is restored by the men of the raceway

and their eternal recklessness,

carrying oxygen tanks like embattled soldiers

stepping through a nuclear blast,

kissed by the sun’s flame

and sculpted by a forgotten God

into the last lineage of the holy and sane.

 

 

Gut

 

Under these gaslight lamps marauders plot and pivot and hustle,

starving for the invention of disorder,

speaking with corroded tongues. Indigo bubble vests

thick as whale blubber on the stoops they perch

amidst this decaying paradise of lost souls and poverty

and lucid dreams of journeys through place and time

where men like this cease to exist and are replaced

with inanimate objects born of crest and creed. For the quest

goes without saying and such is evident by the strollers

occupying the crumbled lots and resurrecting their walls

with disdain and merry and lies through the ears of those

not born with reserves nor a gambler’s eye

but rather see this conquering of lands as a black hole

that only grows deeper for the void of life it creates.

 

by Rit Bottorf

 

Rit Bottorf lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and daughter.

For An Evening

July 2015 | back-issues, poetry

the window is open

to the sound

of the water

sighing

 

the light

from the waning

moon

speaks softly

to the corner table

 

you left

a glass by

the kitchen sink

pale pink tracing

the line

where your lips

had been

 

by A.M. Clarke

 

Ken Haas

July 2015 | back-issues, poetry

Everything

A woman in Frankfurt whisked me

off Taunusstrasse when I was eighteen,

vowing that if I bought her a drink,

we could go directly to her room upstairs

and “do everything.”

 

Though I knew little then of the expanse

being offered, what crisscrossed

the hitherto lofted mind were the likes

of bodice and orifice, syrup and stirrup,

cold cuts, no buts and eyes shut,

sauerkraut and thereabout,

tether, feather and fur.

 

So, after a shot each of Jägermeister,

when she asked did I want another,

I assured her that no, no, I was quite ready

to retire to her fine apartment

and do everything.

 

To which she replied,

as if we had no understanding at all,

that just one more beverage

would put her in the perfect mood.

 

In due course, I bought her Liebfraumilch

and Riesling; Schnapps; Sekt and Apfelwein;

Löwenbräu and Doppelbock;

Kirsch; Bellerhof and Bärenfang;

coffee and tea; soda-water with lime.

I kept paying even after it was clear

I would run out of deutsch marks long before

glimpsing even the mirage of an areola.

Kept paying, giddily at first,

then the way Vegas junketers do,

though in the end it was hard not to think

of my great aunts and uncles

behind all that barbed wire, how they

kept working and praying.

I had come here in particular

to ask big questions of history,

make inquiries of guilt and forgiveness.

Yet as I stumbled from Bar Karl-Heinz

into the dusk of a world still combing

its anger and shame, I saw that

even though everything

had stepmother eyes and woodcutter hands,

hair the color of Eva Braun’s before the bleach,

I wanted it,

wanted it fondling the buttons of a blouse

rummaged from a corpse, wanted it in a room

with lampshades and ashtrays, wanted it

drinking cut booze while doubling mine,

wanted it just for a moment,

but wanted it all.

 

 

Edith Did

During Geraldine Ferraro’s run for vice president

as a congresswoman from Queens in 1984,

one burly heckler on the campaign trail questioned

how Archie Bunker had ever elected her,

to which she replied, “He didn’t; Edith did.”

Which happened also to be my mother’s name,

and when Edith Baines took sidestage

in the top sitcom of the seventies, Edith Lang

sat right beside her, making it easy for us

to notice what they didn’t do: object or judge

or burst balloons, say this is what I want

or say no to their outrageous men,

hide the racing form from their fathers,

or miss Days of our Lives. Instead

they wore their brassieres, practiced being

unembarrassed, learned to type, played canasta,

and boiled the parts of meat that could be eaten

no other way. And they understood.

The black neighbors, the lesbian cousin,

their hairsprayed heads would not be pictured

on the book jacket for The Greatest Generation.

Their superpower was not invisibility,

but optimism; Fred and Ginger twirling in air,

that cigarette ash on top of the scrambled eggs

always pretending to be a cherry.

Long before all of which, the sailor my mother

had met in an ice cream parlor prewar

came back dirty, darkened, craving a son.

And although the odds clearly favored delivery of

another just like him—man with two separate hearts,

one to love her and one to deny her—

when he insisted she don his favorite nightgown

(the chiffon of lace yoke and floral applique),

with one dry eye and a cauldron of hope,

Edith did.

 

by Ken Haas

 

Ken’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, Alabama Literary Review, Caesura, The Cape Rock, The Coachella Review, Crack The Spine, Existere, Forge, Freshwater, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Healing Muse, Helix, Lullwater Review, Moon City Review, Natural Bridge, Pennsylvania English, Pisgah Review, Quiddity, Red Wheelbarrow, Rougarou, Salt Hill Journal, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal Of The Arts, Soundings East, Spoon River Poetry Review, Squaw Valley Review, Cottonwood, Stickman Review, Studio One, Tattoo Highway, Whistling Shade, and Wild Violet. His poetry has been anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and the Marin Poetry Center Anthology (2012, 2013). Ken has participated in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where he studied with Bob Hass, Brenda Hillman, Dean Young, Lucille Clifton, and C.D. Wright, as well as numerous other workshops led by Sharon Olds, Dorianne Laux, Joe Millar, Ellen Bass, and Richard Jones.