July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The Study Of Latin
In Latin Club, we created togas
From bedsheets and translated Cicero,
Tales of the Punic Wars, how Caesar
Conquered all Gaul in three words.
Sang Dies Irae, Dies Ila.
The priest raised the chalice
To the crucifix over the altar
Where Jesus hung in ceaseless agony.
We stood, knelt, genuflected.
We blessed ourselves.
We, the Latin scholars, repeated
The beatitudes. Gloria in Excelsis.
The organ aired its tones
Like holy laundry.
In time the priest was turned around
Like a doll on a pedestal to face the congregation
And speak in their common tongue.
I’ve forgotten almost
All that Latin
Thinking how I could have
Studied Spanish and would now be able
To read Neruda in the original.
The Child Who Ate Words
Words.
Congealed, coruscated, corresponding
To a frozen branch overhanging barb wire
Blistered with teardrops. Or a redtail hawk soaring
Over winter-blasted pastures
Or the old oak flooring
Creaking its hundred year lament.
Vessels of phrases cascading
Like the lower falls of the Yellowstone
Or choked in retention ponds
To invite the drowning child
Or perpendicular as the hickories
Ragged as beggars. Or indiscreet
As a woman in a negligee
Watering the lilies.
Surrounded by taunters,
I licked my ice cream cone
A vocabulary of sweetness.
Acknowledged their cant,
You swallowed the dictionary
Vanilla, vermillion, vanquish,
Venomous, violent, vamoose.
Presentiment, palpable, precocious.
by Joan Colby
Seven books published including The Lonely Hearts Killers, The Atrocity Book, etc. Over 980 poems in publications including Poetry, Atlanta Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The New York Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Epoch, etc. Two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards (one in 2008) and an IAC Literary Fellowship. Honorable mention in the 2008 James Hearst Poetry Contest—North American Review and the 2009 Editor’s Choice Contest–Margie, and finalist in the 2007 GSU (now New South) Poetry Contest, 2009 Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize, 2010 James Hearst Poetry Contest and Ernest J. Poetry Prize Joan Colby lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois with her husband and assorted animals.
July 2012 | back-issues, fiction
I carve holes in the femur bone of my former enemy. I have sucked the marrow out and cooked his tender flesh for consumption. His organs and muscle I have ground into sausage. I cook the sausage and feed the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. The media heralds me as a generous hearted humanitarian. I am a minor celebrity in my community. I have eaten dinner at Gracie Mansion and have had my portrait done by famous artists that live in the city.
The holes are for a flute. I play strange and beautiful music through my enemy’s leg. The music is dark and sensual. The music is forty thousand years in the making. My Germanic ancestors carved similar instruments from the bones of bears. I am no different from them. There is no more dangerous animal than man.
I make another flute from my enemy’s other leg. The rest of his bones I grind into powder. I mix the powder with cocaine and snort my enemy into me. I absorb my enemy’s powers in this fashion.
I play passionate and sad music on my two red flutes and have no intention of recording my songs. Nothing is permanent. Change is the only constant. I exist in the ether; eternal and illusory.
His teeth I surround with oven bake clay, one at a time. I sculpt tiny animals with the clumps of clay and bake them. I create a glaze with some of the left over blood and all of the little animals are red. I surprise the neighborhood children with my gifts and their mothers adore me. I have two dates with divorcees next week and get away with murder.
by Michael S. Gatlin
Michael S Gatlin just finished his second novel and was recently published in Splizz, Dharma Lick, and Tomato-tomato. He owns a bar in Manhattan called Verlaine—because he couldn’t bare hearing people mispronounce Rimbaud.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
It won’t just be the handshake of the ocean. It will also be the empty string of the guitar. and a woman’s voice will sound like the skin of a turtle, wishing. She will not only be wishing but pregnant also. Along with a boy she will carry a marzipan apple and the island of Krk. They will travel out of her soft center to meet the busy sun.
by Gregory Zorko
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
I
And as it walks across the land
With bright sparking legs
The lightning leads the thunder
II
The static of lightning
Between two hands
And they cannot touch
A thing
III
The old oak tree still stands
Dark and slightly bent
From the crack of the lightning
IV
The animals know what it means
When the lightning comes
V
He strikes with lightning
Because then there is fear
Without a face
And with force
VI
It waits
Shooting among the clouds
The lightning baits its prey
As a cat
VII
As lightning does
Quick and brilliant
We have come
And we go
by A.M. Kennedy
A.M. Kennedy is a graduate of the University of South Florida. She lives in the perpetual sunshine of Florida where she enjoys writing a range of fiction from dystopian to horror. Occasionally she is aided by her two loveable muts and insidious feline.
July 2012 | back-issues, fiction
A child finds lost earrings in the sand and puts them in her mouth. A seagull picks the corpse of a small-mouth gruntfish and crystal jellies and egg-yolk jellies lie holding in their inner folds the balance of life and decay. Seaweed pops on the rocks. Dry stubbly grass pokes from broken shells and reeds stand up ecstatic in the wind. Sand candies it all. The waves come in lashing their glass nerves at the slope before pulling back across the bay and I run to the water, take a blind fall in the wash. The blessed cold cleans me. She comes carrying my son. The baby smiles watching his parents kiss. Chip vinegar stings my lips. Toes curl down in the sand. Nature forgets itself. She feeds him as it goes dark and together we watch him roll and gurgle on the rug. Up she leaps to find something to drink and my son turns his head to her shortening silhouette. And then I see something unfamiliar in him. Someone I don’t recognise. There she comes, waving her arms so the light of a cigarette traces neon nests in the night. A large wave rolls in. We grab everything and retreat behind the line of seaweed but a bag of clothes is left to the water and I run to retrieve it, and when I return I see them together and my heart knows that it is all a lie – that he is not my child. I put my arm around her waist and she holds the bottle away from my mouth and pours. I gag as the red wine runs down my chin and she kisses me again. The baby smiles.
by Joe Evans
Joe Evans is a TV Producer who lives and works in London, UK. He writes short short fiction and novels. His flash ‘Simple’ appears in the April edition of ‘Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine’.
