January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
If there was a new way to dance, I hope
the first step is to give your last dollar
to a stranger. That you firmly hold
your partner’s hands and hips
while talking softly in the shower.
Instead of tapping your feet,
you’d pray for someone who isn’t eating enough.
You wouldn’t learn to breakdance, pop-and-lock, twerk:
but you’d savor a fresh cup of green tea and honey,
get sand beneath your toes while practicing
handstands on the beach, and take time for naps.
A new kind of dance, where there are no missteps
because there is no wrong way
to laugh heartily at a good joke,
kiss lovingly in a downpour after missing a train,
or watch a child learn to read.
In this dance, the music never stops
because cats don’t stop purring,
the wind will always blow over the grass,
while mothers coo at their babes, brothers argue
over who gets to be which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
as sisters joyfully sigh.
And in this new dance, no one is sitting. Everyone dances.
Every young man too shy to move
is greeted by a pretty smile.
Every elderly couple who thinks that
their dancing days are long behind them
find themselves singing while making
cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving with perfect rhythm.
And every girl who is timid
because they’ve danced with boys who have stepped on their toes
will find someone to write poetry with on planes.
by Max Henderson
Max Henderson is a doctoral student in physics at Drexel University. Originally from Coatesville, Pennsylvania, he researches neural networks and quantum computation when he’s not too busy watching Adventure Time. His poems are about making mistakes while drinking a good, dark beer. He has been published online in Black Heart Magazine, Crack The Spine, the Ampersand Review, and Citizen Brooklyn, and has work in Crack The Spine’s Spring 2013 Anthology.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
They started seeping in slowly. None of us noticed. One or two, here or there. Easily explained.
The doorbell buzzed and opened to a dreadlocked orange vest at the bottom of the stairs.
“I need to read your meter”
He starts forward. He wants to cut through the house.
“I got a big dog in here.”
He doesn’t argue, just gives me a blank stare.
“Drive around through the alley.” I say, as he climbs in his truck.
He comes in the back gate. It took only a minute for the reading, nothing unusual. Except it was then that I saw them. The buzzing swarm. He shoos them away as he slips back out the gate. I follow them. Droning and crawling inside the porch beams. Squeezing in between the slats. Dark vibrations shuddering under the eaves. Hundreds or more. At dusk I creep and hit them hard with creamy white oil from a lethal black spray bottle. I sleep content till dawn. Then through the window over the coffeemaker they come. Bigger. Mad. Sickly. I spend more hours with the spray. Up on a ladder and down on crooked knees. I seal the holes with insulating tape and foam. But the carpenters are boring holes like cheese. I hear the tapping of their bodies against the tape. Louder. Harder. Inside desperate to get out, outside hell bent to get in. I hear them zipping, darting, honing. Sharpening. Meter man locked the back gate. Everything is moving. The house is alive and coated. A massive hive. The first sting starts the flood. I am puffy, soft and porous by the time I go down.
— Elizabeth McGuire
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Self Non-Explanatory
When anyone asks me,
I invoke the great-great-uncle
with the walrus moustache
who was lost among the wilds of New Guinea,
believed eaten by cannibals.
Sometimes I even recall a movie I once saw,
retelling it so dramatically,
hands waving, voice loud,
I’m all the characters at once.
If people wish to know who I am,
I divert them with fading photographs in albums,
books about Europe in the nineteen century,
a piece of music played the night before
an army went into battle.
Do they really want to know
the places where I scratch,
the baseball team I root for,
my favorite character in “Friends”
Dig up that great-great uncle if you will
but I prefer to remain buried.
Wait for that movie to be rerun on TV,
just not the one where my leading role
was reduced to a minor character.
I’m indifferent to the soliloquy,
prefer the conversation of others.
There’s so much that isn’t me
and that’s a great place to start.
In Cell Phone City
The woman driving the car is on her cell phone.
She’s in heavy traffic, at least all but her voice, and her ears.
Her hearing is well out of reach of the blistering horns.
the grinding engines, the guy beside her streaming
cuss words into the smoggy air.
And her tongue has no interest in making comment
on the world around her: the rear bumper of the
Nissan crawling a foot or so ahead, the lights
swaying above, as slow to change as Galapagos turtles.
“Yes, I’ll be there at eight. Mandy’s baby is due any
day now. Roger doesn’t want to make a commitment.”
Suddenly, her accelerator foot makes the wrong choice.
Her Toyota thumps into that unfortunate Nissan.
It’s 7.30 in the morning. The accident occurs on time.
The other driver is hovering over her car, waving his fist.
Could be his way of making a commitment.
— John Grey
John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in International Poetry Review, Sanskrit and the science fiction anthology, “Futuredaze” with work upcoming in Clackamas Literary Review, New Orphic Review and Nerve Cowboy.
October 2013 | back-issues, fiction
I’m writing this from Jeff’s Lazy-boy sofa. The cracks in the brown leather makes it look like an artifact from Constantinople, untouched by human hands for thousands of years. It’s almost as if he sculpted a casing of his bum’s shape in an impulsive moment of creation, like dentists do when molding impressions for night guards. The absence his real bum feels, exquisite, in a way — kind of makes me want to jump up and down on it. But I’m not going to vacuum the petrified mango chips in the pull-out bed unit. I’m not.
There are days where all I do is wait for you. Your silence. Is that the answer? When I read your preface to “How to Share the Skies,” I imagined you floating between Triangulum Australe (my favorite constellation), calling from the space station with your lyrics in progress: ‘But I’m already here. Like a translucent leaf. Half lit by sun.’
Remember that poem I wrote in Ohio during the private coaching hour? ‘Flowers in Winter’? It’s like that. Not Jeff’s elliptical in the dining room. No. It’s what he calls the swear word. The word that is not okay to talk about in our house. S-Oo-U-L. This makes me feel like a kindergartener again, always trying to hide my incompetence. Like what Oprah said in the summer issue of her magazine about how carnations are bogus. “This I know for sure,” she wrote. “Living a lie is a dangerous thing, like the dentist who loves veterinary science and resents himself for it, while sealing the tooth of fifteen year old kid in khaki shorts and flip flops.” When I’m at my dentist, I think about eggshells in the garbage disposal. Slipping my hand inside. Running from the sink. Facet left on hot. Blood on the white IKEA rug.
Sometimes, I give this wheelchair bound homeless woman a quarter, hoping she will reveal herself as an angel, instantly leaping out of her chair in humble service. My life has left me, I will say. And she’ll tell me exactly how to call it home — what train to catch, the best luggage shop in town, which socks to buy. The blue. It’s more likely she’ll just ask for more money while ranting on about the Vietnam War or past lives. She believes pain is inherited from generation to generation and that she was born at the beginning of time as a single celled animal. I can’t distinguish if this woman’s story is worthy of an e-mail to Oprah or not. Or if this will move beyond your agent’s spam filter. There is nothing I know for sure.
— Gregory Josselyn
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Letter to Rome
Back home, opening
an old letter
I received from you,
the front of the envelope,
post marked 1931
address washed out,
sent unspecified like
artifacts to archeologists.
The neatly folded paper
inside, written upon
graph paper of rectangles
I imagine it bears
news like I got a week after
I left you. Paul committed
suicide. maybe I love
history so much
because I like to see
that people get through
horrible events and
seeing blood, toothless
nooses, brackish intent.
I miss you.
Train
The modern art is an opening act
for the Sistine chapel.
After the school of Athens
and the heavenly patriarchs
there are women painters,
artists questioning paternity,
maybe just before the stairs
a painting shows the train
tracks into Auschwitz No
names it’s called, the white
lines leading into
darkness, the darkness covered
with numbers. A9448, A3769, subtle in the
foreground, glaring as your eye moves up
into the gloaming.
A foreboding yellow spot
on the top of the canvas reminds
of death.
The dead who have no names,
yes, but also the living that
were turned into numbers.
Most of the people around
move quickly towards fame,
the show’s zenith,
unsure if they recognize this image.
These very same who walked over
the swastika mosaicked
on the ground of the Hall of
Constantine the transience of
signs. Alteration, like with a dress,
has possibilities of beauty or disaster.
Rebirth not always positive.
Now we move from dark into
light and “remain silence please.”
— Maddie Boyd
