January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
There are some days when more strength is needed than others
and today is one of those days.
I do not know
why it happens but sometimes I awaken
and feel that Hell
is at the cusp of my bed,
And if I step too hastily I shall fall
for millions of miles
into the mouth of the nether-gods.
So I tiptoe around it.
I stand and I stretch
as though I have the limbs of a giant.
Yes, of a giant—but I shall need those limbs
today, because today is one of those days.
I forgo the oatmeal
and drink dragon’s blood instead,
“Yes, there it is,” I say, taking it from the cupboard,
in the canister behind the herbs
labeled The Blood of Dragons.
I tread lightly to the basin
and brush my teeth with Caligula’s ash.
I shower in the spittle
of an ancient deity (though choosing
one is always the difficult part).
I go to my closet and open the heavy doors hewn
from blackened wood and choose my armor.
For I must wear something that withstands
the fire of negativity;
the sharpness of stupid tongues;
the putrid mind; the living World.
I flank myself in an armor stitched
with Medusa’s hair,
and my helmet, usually made of wool or felt, is
now made from the bone
of Pegasus’s skull.
I go to my looking glass
and behold the wonder I have made
of myself.
I forgive the spectacle
of it all,
“Because I shall need it much,” I say.
I decide to forgo my vitamins
and down a handful of fingernails
pulled from the hand of Richard III.
This dissolves well, I find,
with a shot of Shakespeare’s bile.
Yes, I think, now I am ready
to face the day!
But before I pass over the threshold,
I stop and do the sign of the cross
thinking it can’t hurt. After all,
I shall need it much today.
—Gabriel “G” Garcia
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
When armed with an arsenal
Of ideas bigger than bombs
And words that are piercing as arrows
Quivering
With swelling anticipation
Like the tide, it crests
When faced with a blank white page
You wait for the explosion
The crash of the ocean wave
It destroys the castles you have built
But you call it
Creation.
—Emily Faison
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
every night
the moon slurs, smiles
leering compliance, consenting
out of the corner
of her face.
at midnight,
I am less, after just one more test.
regretted by the bashful
sun, at midday, his light lets learning in
from a drunk,
swallowing sex — drinking down below
all morals, creating cause, causing effect,
from all unwritten words, learned, taught, spoken, now unlearned,
in the lush lavished unloved love of leaving after love.
sinking in sleeping, in thoughtlessness, in godlessness, in this.
Thoughts of a romantic on a bar stool
Chasing confusing conversations through a perplexing patron performing a grand
symphony, dancing around the idea that we all precipitate ideals, intertwined in
the vastness of human decency, which struggles below the weight of each word,
willingly wasteful, during listless listing,
slip and sip to
life’s many intricacies as my illustrations
interpret illusions on behalf of our subconscious, detailing the horizon, as chasing
the light in the day that you can never capture, before birthing the benevolent
breaking of beliefs, with thoughts of thirst to lust, to love, to long for all that can
not be between you and me.
Why you should drink slow
anyone who makes a coaster
Lonely
is a friend of you and
I
yet in between your draining
Drink
your stirring speech is
Slow
and then you perch
In a performing presence
presenting your questions of hell
you try to confirm your reservations
With a sad proclamation.
We all go out like we all come in we all go out alone.
Craig McCarthy’swork has appeared in The Normal Review and other national periodicals.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Damp
Those little dream brothers were made of chicken feathers,
and I had to blow their dream parts forcefully from my nose.
I was lobbing bottles of vitamin water at their cute little feet.
You’ll need help to rise now and
some dreams won’t take you back,
as if there were something determined in their breath.
We were after love that night, but wet and mysterious was close enough.
You carried several husbands in your peekaboo pants, and
This just pisses me off, I admitted loudly,
but you were also the ocean with everyone
coming down to you to watch you breathe,
and you will not have to pretend you know this.
Deep in the night when the night’s closer, someone thinks
you might understand I always wanted to help you,
and I always wanted to be you helping me,
and suddenly it’s dusk with candelabras of birdsong
lighting my ears, and it’s best to tell them everything because
you’ll feel better, and the wandering brothers won’t listen anyway.
Confessions of a Delinquent Narrative
Of course, the surprise ending knows I will arrive,
but the beginning doesn’t know where I’ve gone,
thinks I might start again. And I might, but not
to set up house and drink endless tea.
Sometimes I do feel as if I know where I’m going
though I cannot take you there through
the door I’m still building, and I can’t stay
here any longer without erasing myself.
Sometimes I open what’s not even there.
It could be a deeply questionable freedom I live in,
beneath the could of it. I’m suffering from
a surprisingly difficult stroll, and the color
of little bird panic in the wings of my heart
won’t bleed a seductive smile made of merely
smoke and daisies. Let not the unbound be fenceless,
shedding their dark beneath the breath of progress.
Tonight I want yogurt blossoms and imbeciles in
the dark trees as happy as tongue depressors. I’ve already
lost a couple of porches and reasoned with absentee clouds.
I’ve an unreasonable love of falling leaves and wet hair.
I’ve decided the Italians must once have thought
“modern dress” meant “attached to sullen hillsides,”
and I’ve decided I’m a territory unexplored by innocence,
unexpected beauty, toast, or a fresh glass of water.
Still, I might be less literal than I thought. I might be
raining beachballs containing ideas for new machines.
I might be plucking eyelids from the blind parents of
dirt-bikes and chastising the unplanned fun that bled us.
I might be joined to the confused by the undecided and,
if it’s not a part of the plot, each pound for an ounce
of thought, I might contain a warm milking stool with
ambitions to speech, and I might walk away from myself
out onto the road of participation and complicity
in a rage of taking back, of feet, of direction,
as if I might have been the goal and not
merely the forgotten territory of progress.
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
