October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Simulacra 889
My words do not skip, whoop, or wheel across the page
There is nothing like it when things get rolling
My father sitting in the kitchen
With a bottle of whiskey
Bare-chested and drunk
And exquisite look upon his face
An intense satisfaction that was experienced more than understood
Life was exploding around me
Blasting away at the hypocrisy
What I have accomplished in this world is meaningless
The search for a meaningful life is the utmost in futility
We only fool ourselves into believing in fairytales
This is the eastside mother fucker
Nothing here will take you back home
This is not a story of hope
We are familiar with great foolishness
Those who cannot embrace the negativity of truth
The light is found hiding in the darkness
People will find it hard to grasp the evil of the soul
The soul surpassed the mind
The soul dominated the mind and placed the mind into slavery
Thoughts become controlled by the soul
With lack of use, the mind grew weaker
she could understand everything
even when I began in the middle of a sentence
telling how things happen
three bottles of mad dog
and I’m singing merry christmas
climbing up water towers
buying 200 hits of microdot
it was then that I realized that there was nothing to fear
slipping something hot into the moon
tipping the scales
taking the blidfold off of justice
feeling her up under her robe
the two hemispheres of her brain
seeking the end with a full gaze
you have been contaminated by the luxury of five dollar ideas
another incarnation of the bottomless pit
wanting to restore all of your appetites
hundreds of corpreal miles
making love to the mother and the daughter
modulations of a freakish nature
I am squeezed out into measure
there is tension and inflation
a line of women waiting for us to finish
they both had nipple rings and a pierced belly button
in the summer they were blonde
and in the winter brunette
I am proposing the end of the soul
Religion has oppressed the history of reason
There is no reason to think when all of the answers are provided
Thus, the mind mutated into this non-thinking entity
Religion created the birth of the weakling
Each of us has one foot planted in the essential
I revive and restore
We no longer have to look backward
Our gaze should be firmly established on the future
Removing the effect of religious determinism
The absence of a horrid determination
Removing the means of the repressive productions
You were freed to be truly yourself
Not some fabricated caricature of your true self
I made you free to live according to your own wishes
Not the dictates of some manmade deity or deities
There is no utopia in heaven or on the earth
Martin’s work is solidly based on the concept of poetry as a social construction. Through our interactions with others, we create and recreate meanings that allow us to make sense out of a chaotic world full of contradictions. Martin considers the art of writing poetry as one small way of collapsing the confusion of experience into more meaningful patterns of social thought. You can find more of Martin’s thoughts at: http://martinfreebase.blogspot.com
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
The Aforelife After Death
Winds chilled from the first fresh season of flowery green soft summer
rain;
leaves;
sky.
I’m going away from here, and still can’t say.
I’ll arrive there, though,
where it is,
this I can tell.
There I was before
birth
I sensed that, and will go there,
I once thought
but know
now.
Reflection
Hauled up in a dirty motel room,
performing brain surgery on myself again.
In a room without mirrors–
in a room constructed of mirrors.
Thank You God for letting me exist
for a short time as
one of the sane.
Thank You for letting me see what this is like.
Thank You for letting me stare at Your horrifying blue sky
without terror,
and Your hideous world without pain.
While I am hopelessly lost
in love.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Eating Our Words
They ought to float
Away like cigarette smoke
To contaminate someone else’s curtains.
But they don’t.
They hover over our heads
Like filthy haloes.
Everything we think
Comes under their cloud.
How can we disperse them?
They suffuse our clothes
Like tobacco odors. Turn our fingers
The color of dying chrysanthemums.
We shout them even louder
To speed them away
Out of our mouths.
But they fly back
Insistently as silver planes
Disgorging their terrible cargo
Just when we are feeling happy
And carefree as civilians.
They know their rightful place
Spreading into our lungs like cancer
Infiltrating every future conversation,
Causing our hearts to fail.
If we try to write them off
The paper chars and smokes
Before we can seal the envelope
And mail them back
To the land we emigrated from.
Joan Colby is an award-winning author with over 900 poems published in journals including Poetry, Atlanta Review, GSU Review, Portland Review, Rockhurst Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Karamu, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, Mid-American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, Minnesota Review, Western Humanities Review, College English, Another Chicago Magazine and others.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Sulk
Clouds hang low in the heat, heavy bellied animals.
Perspiring Boy Scouts plant small crisp flags squarely
beside every mailbox in Cedar Creek, vans slowly
trailing with fresh reserves. When they are done,
they shed their clothes—piles of khaki snake skins,
then jump into to the pool to splash and bob,
screaming Marco and Polo at their lung-tops.
I watch them from the adjacent baby pool, as
my daughter pours water from one measuring cup
to another. She frowns and pours a little water
on her stomach and toes, before reaching again
for a blue bucket to fill—precise in her rituals,
so much so it often pains her. My efforts
to help only vex her more. Nothing left but to
glance at my thighs underwater, which I do
casually, distractedly as if the white behemoths with
their wide groves of stretch mark were something
which roamed along the ocean floor in another age.
My mind runs then re-runs over a recent slight.
I conjure it up again, all the real and imagined
indignities, so lost in pride I don’t know how long
my daughter has been leaning against me now, pouring
water on my knees, the right then the left and right.
Left
I have heard when angels finally arrive
the tongue turns shorn stone. The air is
struck dumb, and stripped trees are helpless
to do a thing but toss and maybe dance.
Some come here for a few days then leave
with bright shells fastened to the insides of
plastic pails. They drive tired burnt bodies
inland satisfied they have seen something of
Immensity. But some of us are wintering,
still pacing the coastline, walking far off
enough from you now wearing such a bulky
coat it doesn’t matter whether it is a man
or woman who carries sorrow in their hands
pushed deep in their pockets—it doesn’t matter—
one’s age or station, when there’s so much
old weather rattling round the head.
I am staying. I am staying.
I have not yet had a word.
Before
The train in my heart gathers
speed for the mountains,
it takes one last pause between
shattered rock and mottled leaf.
The passengers inside sigh,
wanting to crush the ground—
to see what wine and word spring
up from the rich mulch-parchment.
I could tell them to take cheer.
But I know too well how light
like this can set one weeping,
turn one fool, make one sigh
for all the lovers whose limbs
still lie unknotted—caught
deep down in the dark grain
of unfathomable waters.
Chlorine
The populist had a dream the swimming pool
was filling up, more and more families arriving
in their mini-vans friends of friends getting out
with towels and goggles. The populist watched
Grannies with their skirted suits ply the shallow
end with Styrofoam rings, gently fanning the water.
The populist grimaced as babies with improper
swim diapers floated, un-innocent lilies in the arms
of their baseball hated gossiping mothers. When a little
girl dropped half her orange popsicle in the water,
a small colored iceberg trailing its dye, he screamed
The scream died in his throat before sound emerged.
The populist was not really a populist. He should
have known it. The way he polished his shoes. Cut his
grapefruit segments aft to fore and fore to aft.
The way he lamented (for days) that referencing
The Stones of Venice would have been so apropos,
bringing up an intersection that may have been
quite possibly very illuminating. When a boy
with a livid green something pulsating in and out
of his left nostril ran to do a cannonball into
the deep end, the populist woke up sweating
then looked around his empty room,
grateful and ashamed. Then he showered.
Instead of driving, he took the number eight
bus to work, planning to brush against
an especially brutish looking elbow for penance.
Jenn Blair has been published in Copper Nickel, Kestrel, the Tulane Review, New South Review, Rattle, Blood Orange Review, and Santa Fe Review among others.
October 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Gina Douglas
My maternal grandmother and my father both told related stories about me when I was a child first learning to talk. I don’t think my Baba and my dad ever heard the other one’s story, nor did they ever put their stories together into the real story.
My ol’ man used to proudly tell about the first two-word combination I put together. He thought it was real clever. We were in the grocery store, I was seated in the buggy. I pointed at what I wanted and said the words. The item was animal crackers, the kind that used to come in a small rectangular box, with pictures of circus animals in cages on the side of the box; and a piece of rope to make a carrying handle. I referred to this as a “cookie-purse”.
On the Jewish side of my family, Baba used to tell how she was too clever by half. I liked animal crackers, but the little boxes from the drug store across the street were not a good value; compared to buying a big bag of the same brand animal crackers at the grocery store. But kids will do the darndest things, and when she offered me a plate of animal crackers from the big bag, I wouldn’t eat them. Go figure?
They never put their stories together and realized that, in regards to the cookie-purse, I didn’t care about the cookies, I wanted the purse.
