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.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Toast to the Aftermath
Our angels have traded their binoculars for krugerrands.
They send their regrets along with brochures from islands where the dollar
still buys luck.
Our keepsakes packed in knapsacks, we recite conspiracy theories by heart,
migrating under the cover of trees.
Collect warnings like family recipes and hide them in the grass.
Dilute panic with apathy. Shake. Then serve the mix on ice.
Before global mayhem, a morass of days must be endured.
Work: winding the time around your hands like an endless yarn.
Try to stay alert.
The last ships departing will look like toys through the haze.
These signs will prepare you for cataclysms
for which you cannot prepare.
Another round, please, for the uncertainties that now nag no more
than a foaming fizz stings the tongue.
Watchers
Years ago
they cut down
the dead oak
I had watched from my window
to build a house
over there.
So full of crows then,
their dark complacency
from rotting branches,
their blue-black
staring, endless, at me,
the oak’s branch tips
extending upward like fingers
of a child reaching
for comfort or answers,
the oily crows
waiting for something
from me.
Years,
and still they watch
from a void over there,
dead oak gone,
a blank sky with its ghostly
imprint smeared
blue and gray,
a child reaching her hand upward
waiting for permission to tell
her awful secret.
Georgia Kreiger lives in Western Maryland, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in Earth’s Daughters The 2River View, poemmemoirstory, The Orange Room Review, Literal Latté, Poet Lore, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Outerbridge, Backbone Mountain Review and others.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Elaina Perpelitt
The nauseous breath of change blows bravely
into my warring heart, saying gravely
I have a greater calling
outside my parents’ house where the garden
dies annually, a sickly warden
of youth, ever stalling.
I pray to a different God today
than yesterday, a funeral away.
This God sends me spinning
into adulthood with a Dev’lish wink.
Not ready, I bend over the kitchen sink
a child, a coward, a beginning,
seeing nothing but distorted distortion;
potential fleshing out of proportion.
But then!
I see a vision perfected.
One day
I’ll come back with mask of sagging skin,
stomach settled, and I’ll see the garden
Die and be resurrected.
Elaina Perpelitt is a student at Chapman University. When she’s not writing film and play scripts, she’s writing poetry and novels.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Dream Disease
You be the building and I’ll be the fire.
She’ll be the one on the funeral pyre.
All night and day I will dance around you
and climb you, as I try to escape these
twirling images. At the moment I no longer
want to deal with these words that drip
like blood, each one a little city etched
with a smoky memory or two of something
mildly to severely traumatic. Sometimes I
just don’t want to wake up to a face, I want
to wake up to birds chirping and being blown up
by shotguns and songs about big black rivers, a
paisley haze. Every day I grow more tired of
your tiredness, of your wavering abjection, of
the way you and your country try to suppress it all
with drugs, staving off dreams like they are disease.
Snowy Hell
Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers
and could not climb out for a while
because the stems kept breaking
and the petals started rotting
and I got sick from the smell.
Later I woke up on a cold California
beach, dragged out by someone who cleaned
me up with bleach, dragged out by someone
who had arms enough to reach into my
jagged heart that’s space deep.
Here I am I guess, people tell me I’m pretty
but I suffer from an ugly private paralysis.
Here I am I guess. Please give me your best.
Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers,
I started playing solitaire, got distracted
for hours. And then the stems kept breaking
and the flowers started rotting and I got sick
from the smell, and then I woke up on a beach;
someone had dragged me out of that snowy hell.
Drea Jane Kato was born in the great state of California and was raised Buddhist by a gypsy-like artist mother and a Japanese farmer who currently grows pineapples in Hawaii. She is a Capricorn, Dragon, INTJ, HSP, Atheist, singer/songwriter, abstract painter/artist, iPhone photographer who likes yoga, fasting, and the beach. She has been published in magazines such as The Blue Jew Yorker, My Favorite Bullet, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Beat, Ditch, Pomegranate, ReadThis Magazine, Otis Nebula, and Alternativereel.
October 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Danny Earl Simmons
Her words slide
across the page
like a lap dance
and grind against
the very base of you.
She writes
like a runaway
without options;
uses what God gave
and what men take.
She digs on the sweat
and the panting
and the smoke
and the rush of blood
to the head
from the whiskey
she pours down your throat,
and you open wide.
She knows
she’s an addiction
and winks
at the weakness
of you,
reduces you to words
you read over
and over again.
Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He has loved living in the Mid-Willamette Valley for over 30 years. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and pops in when his work schedule allows. He works for Knife River and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Albany Civic Theater.
