July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
An old man with Alzheimers
bit by a rattler in his front yard
Freckled kid swinging on an old tire
Rope gives way and he falls
breaks his leg
I watch both events from my kitchen window
I go to the Arches
and stand under a rock arch
worth millions of tons of rock
and think: Is this the day
this arch gives way?
It never has
but on one day
I saw an old man snake-bit
and a swing give way, kid break his leg
And I saw bees burn with false sweetness
and I saw my fat, slovenly sister stand in front of the cemetery
and eat a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream
out of the container
all by herself
by Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois
Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois was born in the Bronx and now splits his time between Denver and a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old, one room schoolhouse in Riverton Township, Michigan. His short fiction and poetry appears in close to two hundred literary magazines, most recently The T.J. Eckleberg Review, Memoir Journal, Out of Our and The Blue Hour. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, published by Xavier Vargas E-ditions, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. A print edition is also available through Amazon.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Grips
You seem to be falling out,
like fading away, playing
fool/goof/phantom/drunken joke
to grown up little boys and girls
across sad broken south Philly homes
that chug and churn like the machines
of the past regurgitating old
memories onto old faces and wrinkles
of the mourning night too
close to sunrise to remember—
too locked in twisted horns
with dead things, meaningless things
that need to be let go— a drowning
universal truth slugging its way
at your temple—a a a—
just to let you down and you brood about
these things that can’t change
next to open window and open veins,
when you’re supposed to be the one
that lives and blazes and burns—
Incoherently I’m incoherent
137 miles in hell and away
like fading rivers pulled under heavy roads
of gray dawns—I’m connecting these thoughts
drying out—
You seem to be losing your grip
on where your reality resides—
Some Change for the Time Man
Anchor me down with the past…
I’m a floating helium-centric
goon of the heavens babbling
incoherent love songs to the sick—
oh well, it was a mighty cause
when I fought it, when I remembered
what it was, but now I’m ground
up in old groundhog day
senility starting 8 hours behind
the sun and escaping into the night
only to sleep never to live
never to live—I’m a lay about—
society bites me, keeps me moving,
I’ve fallen so far from my feet—
they’re dragging toward the gorge,
an endless plastic coffin filled
to the brim with only the faces
I’ve known, the ones with
concentric circles spinning round their
golden heads—that’d be us Joe—but
they stick the swords to our backs and the
planks vibrate to the frequency
of the queen’s machine—
there’s no footing, there’s no branch
only falling—
Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia dreaming of the endless road ahead, carrying the idea of the fabled West in his heart. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row. His chapbooks Trapped in the Night and A Magical Mistake are forthcoming in 2013.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
the coffee shop overfilling and ringing
with mirth and memorable conversation,
floating and finding ownership in the
crooks and crannies of the enclosed room.
no longer smoke but steam.
spent words between friends and strangers alike.
the aloneness cuts through and slices
the moments like a dark dagger cutting
through the thick fog offered up by the
grand imagination of nature. the hunger for
life is measured by one’s own cravings and
constitution to offer themselves up to the
magical moments we have with each other.
by Steven Jacobson
Steven Jacobson was born and raised in the Mid-west graduating from UW-LaCrosse, WI with a double major in Physics and Mathematics. His poetry has been submitted to Access Press, an online newspaper, featuring selected poetry. He has attended (8) classes from the Loft Literary Center, promoting all levels of creative writing.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
there’s a guy in the restaurant booth just behind me and he’s trying
to score. he’s telling the girl sitting in the booth with him all about his
trouble at home, about how he’s going to finally confront his girlfriend
and just ask her what the hell is wrong, because she’s been acting
really weird lately, and he needs to know if maybe she’s pregnant
which he seriously doubts because they hardly ever sleep together
anymore, if she’s had a nervous breakdown and needs
professional help, or if she just doesn’t care about him
anymore. the girl in the restaurant booth just behind me hums
sympathetically, says this situation must really be hard for the guy
says he’s been a really good guy to stay with a woman
so obviously troubled for as long as he had. I hear her ask
the waitress for another drink, make it two, and I
am suddenly so happy that the man sitting in
the booth with me is my husband, because
it would be so easy, so horrible
to be a part of that couple sitting just behind me.
by Holly Day
Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are “Walking Twin Cities” and “Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch.”
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Field And Stream
Wisps of acrid smoke shimmer in
the shy rays of the rising sun.
Crows like motes in a bleary eye
circle, hypnotized by the smell of burnt
flesh and glint of twisted metal.
A broad stream runs through the field
and in its icy depths a slender figure
struggles, her rose-tinted gills fluttering
weakly, born down as she is by the
unforgiving weight of modern arms.
The Aggregate Man
She likes to introduce him as a man
of many parts – her little joke –
occasionally she goes on to demonstrate,
enumerate the provenance of his
various bits and pieces,
Here’s something we picked up in Cairo
not quite a perfect fit
but one can’t have everything
and, oh yes, this doodad cost a pretty penny
but we just had to have it.
Because his movements tend to be rather
jerky, not quite suited to cocktail-party
mingling, she prefers him
to stand in the corner once the show
is over, out of harm’s way.
So there he stands now, motionless,
his mismatched eyes
shifting almost imperceptibly, tracking
the random motion of bodies
and admiring their component parts.
Baltimore native Jeffrey Park lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school and teaches business English to adults. His poems have appeared in Requiem, Deep Tissue, Danse Macabre, Crack the Spine, Right Hand Pointing and elsewhere, and his digital chapbook, Inorganic, was recently published online by White Knuckle Press. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com.
