October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The Migratory Patterns of Lovebirds
At dusk, I watch the wind seduce foliage through
the binoculars of an aesthete, taken by how the
petals dance like flames thankful for a brief life.
The days are shortening. An explosion of silence
will arrive soon, the temperature will descend to
indifference. In the wake, tree limbs will resemble
my own fingers: slender and anxious to dress
in whatever is willing to hold them – hopefully
your hand curled around my finger like the foot
of a bird round a branch – but you have made flight
for the weekend, or a season, in search of a warmer
place to nest than the space between my neck and
shoulder. At least, this is what I tell myself when
I feel colder in your absence than is justified by
reading the thermostat. I presume you would call
me a sap for this thought, like a tree claiming it still
feels the beak of a woodpecker drilling its heart for
sweetness. It’s just that I’ve come to see loneliness
as breezes poured too suddenly into emptiness not
ready to receive it, such as my ears at mention of
your name inside a question of whereabouts. Answer:
somewhere over the horizon. But roots like me have
difficulty in moving. Grow to be depended on as
they grow, their anatomy stretched from reaching
for things that aren’t there. Things that lay over the
earth-bend, like you, for a weekend or a season. And in
accordance with the verb of this season, I will fall for
you near September’s end. You will soar over the
horizon until a revolution of instinct completes itself
and lands you in my arms again. You will perch there
and rest. I will support your weight without snapping.
We will pinch the wings of time together with our lips,
so it, a hummingbird with precious nectar, doesn’t fly
off without our consent, because all we are trying to
do is make this last. Make this the last time the willow
weeps a bayou. Make this the last time calling your
name brings a pigeon instead of a dove. Make this
the last time your feathers have itch for movement,
as lovebirds weren’t meant to be migratory. They’re
meant to couple like lines of poetry according to the
meter of their drumming hearts. For some time, your
heart worked without making sound. Gave you life
but no music, forced you to question if you were the
very genus of adoration. But understand you are what
you believe, a marvelous creature blessed with flight
and the luxury of not needing to use it. You, who taught
me that if gravity pulls at each with even temper, the
difference between leaves and feathers lies purely in
my mind, so I think my shoots into aviators, since that
makes us the same kind: two inkblots in the binoculars
of an aesthete changing seasons can’t erase from sky.
Dead Leaves
for Cameron
If autumn is metaphor, it insists the loveliest
things in this world are those leaving it. Dying.
If my life is poem, my little brother is metaphor.
Lovely. Leaving. Dying. For the sake of aesthetics,
we can call him November. It’s fitting flesh. He has
reddish-brown skin and half his heart is in a grave.
in plotting his own demise he forgot I would be home
come December. Maybe I’ve been the end of him
from the very beginning. Even our mother
dressed us in synonym. He always struggled
in his English classes; he couldn’t define
himself outside of his relationship to me,
so now he thinks of life as a prison sentence.
We only talk through telephones these days.
I recall every call vividly. One in particular,
sounded like a wrist being slit, a voice running dry,
my brother contracting into himself
like an unspoken secret. A tender laugh
caved between his cheeks. A blush surfacing like smoke.
He burns for the sake of another’s happiness, since he
understands you can’t be a martyr and die
of natural causes. So, he curves his mouth
into moth wings. Kisses the heat. Swallows his
pills with a lava flow of vodka. Monk-like.
He’d been squinting at his prospects long enough
to turn the golden-twine of a noose into a halo.
People aren’t leaves despite how easily they fall.
How foolish we are to consider suicides stunning.
Awestruck by their cold and colors,
so neither finger or protest is raised;
I can only wonder to myself where folk
go once they’ve fallen to the ground.
I imagine he ‘d say they don’t ever reach heaven,
that he couldn’t find the Lord even while high.
I imagine that’s the essence of depression, but he knows.
Melancholy holds more mass than Catholics do.
He is the heaviest prayer that I have ever lifted.
He needs help, but doesn’t feel easy asking for it.
Not from me. But I understand, because we’re
brothers down to the blue- jeans we’ve shared.
We both bow out when bowing down goes awry.
We both draw into ourselves like wrinkles.
We both know telephones aren’t happy places.
I wish he would see we have more in common
than the surname chaining our hearts together.
I tell him this, but he can’t see
a locket through the skin.
I tell him his skin should not fear the touch of splinters.
I tell him they are the price of building beautiful things.
I tell him that his spirit is beautiful. I tell him he is black.
I tell him that his spirit should be skeptical of tree limbs.
I tell him to remember. I tell him to always
remember: dead leaves lives behind.
by Cortney Lamar Charleston
Cortney Lamar Charleston was raised in the Chicago suburbs by two South Siders, but now lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and its premier performance poetry collective, The Excelano Project. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Rattle, Word Riot, Lunch Ticket, Storyscape Journal, Chicago Literati, FRACTAL and Kinfolks Quarterly, among others.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
This Might Be The End
I took a pen from the bedside table at the hotel
the one off the highway near the salt marshes,
the highway with two lanes, lined with the swell of seawater rot.
The floodwater had just subsided and the air was biting.
Lots of things had been lost.
I drove there with my windows open in slithering April humidity,
snuck up on the neon sign, crawling ashamed into what would be
too late for introspection.
Met by brown eyes, by fingers drifting out like seaweed.
Suddenly you realize that you’re really there, and
maybe the floodwater has not quite subsided, and maybe
we’re floating corpses, dreaming our last dreams
before the synapses turn to salt.
Death is a thought more beautiful than love, because death cannot be undone.
On the fourth floor, the wallpaper was the color of coral.
I coiled my hair behind my head, you whispered to my toes.
My smooth white belly, my fingers pink and trembling.
I smelled nothing but the crusted salt leftover after evaporation.
Maybe I was dehydrated, I tell myself. Maybe I just need this moisture.
You grabbed the sheets, I grabbed the pen.
Held it in my teeth, bit down on it as if it was all supposed to hurt.
You kissed my wrist instead. You kissed my fingertips.
This is where marriages end—in beds and in banks, signing forms with hotel pens.
Inviting the dreadful weight of him, the weight of knowing
that there are things in life which can never be completed.
I wonder if people die like this, imagining other ways to end a life.
Right here, this is where marriages end—when you close your eyes
and suddenly you’re like threads,
knitted together. Even if you’re pulled apart, they can all see dozens of tiny holes
where once there were guilty seams.
Later, you’ll try to brush the lint away, but it will cling to you.
Later, you’ll be drifting down the highway in the dark.
Someday, the floodwaters will rise up again
and you’ll be on the bridge.
A poem to the one I love
I wish
and in wishing, disintegrate
my lips quivering
how light your footsteps
I pause
what’s left of a honey-coated trick
somehow I leaned into you
kissed the palm of your hand
we were outside, horns slick in the rain
I wish
and in wishing, unravel
falling into my penance wherever I can find it
in kitchens and under stacks of paperwork
until I go to sleep
Wishing is a broken wing
a crack in the mirror, a barely visible scar
I swallow the wishing and the wreckage of the wishing
floats in my mouth
I spit the splinters onto the floor
and sweep them away
He knew nothing of my transition
nothing of the wishes I exhaled into his mouth
by Cassandra Morrilly
Cassandra Morrilly was raised in rural Ohio before receiving a BA in English from Seton Hall University, followed by an MA in Literature from the University of Colorado. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her pack of ravenous terriers, and works for Regis University.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Dublin’s rowdy streets surround me, shops shackle me to my routines, Rome’s old Kyries rape me, England’s imperialist memories break me, America’s black and white fifties families flash ever before my eyes. I find the key, gasping for breath, no more breakdowns or suffocating, flying-driving-running through dirty demonic Dublin pubs, roadlines-shrines-bright green fields yield to desolate dead Skellig Michael and the end of the earth apocalyptic Aran Islands, searching-grasping-finding-…What? Delphic Self? No anything but, knowledge and college already teaching me Joyce’s universality of particularity. Then what? Why go on in the caged rat race? Selfless saintliness led to several nearly successful suicide attempts. So why- balance? Really, back to ancient Aristotle again? No no, this time no balance, no monastic saintliness, no hedonistic selfishness, all of it banished like Baudelaire, ripping apart and reveling in the ravaged earth like Rimbaud, drunk on wine, drunk on water, drunk on poetry, drunk on sodomy, drunk on virtue, drunk on vice, drunk on creating, drunk on destroying.
by Ross Knapp
Ross Knapp is a recent college graduate with degrees in philosophy and literature who’s also an MFA graduate student in creative writing and poetry. He has an experimental literary novel and various poetry publications forthcoming. Originally he was planning on law school or a PHD in philosophy before deciding to pursue poetry and writing as a career. Some of the poets he admires most are Sappho, Virgil, Li Po, Hafiz, Francois Villon, Dante, Keats, Whitman, Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Pound, Crane, Millay, Thomas, Sexton, Lowell, Ginsberg, and Plath.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The moon’s red-faced hymen is crestfallen;
eclipsed by a trilogy of cloven sol kisses.
Our universe is not one.
Mechanical bulls are wrangling in ‘The House
of the Rising Sun.’ The sorority girls are all bowlegged
from bar shopping their reversible jeans. Their frat
boys left snipe hunting for lost birds of paradise.
‘Where have all their trappings gone—
long time passing?’
‘Stoned People’ are awakening in their old sweat lodges—
changing cubic zirconia cornerstones into granite ballast
rocks and new altar tops.
Near Nowata, Oklahoma, a shaman rolls the tombstone
blocking Cutfinger Cave over maggots passing through
on a sacrificial cat—
and the spirit of Chief Pokegon wanders.
by Kevin Heaton
Kevin Heaton is originally from Kansas and Oklahoma, and now lives and writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in a number of publications including: Guernica, Raleigh Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Vinyl Poetry, The Adroit Journal, and Mixed Fruit. He is a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Beached What Found in NYC is Dead
-CBS news headline, 12/27/2012
What is it on the shore among the cockle shells and sea grass,
the beached thing, swelling, gulls pecking at the sores: this question
straining to breathe under its own gravity. The biggest questions
exist uneasily here. I love when they call me ‘wera,’ she tells me.
and of course, I don’t ask. Somewhere along the coastline, Zihua:
the wind tastes like the rim of a margarita glass, the Mexican boys trill
their r as they say it. They teach her to cha-cha and to tango. They wake
still drunk and naked on the beach, seaweed reeking, and the sun stuck
in the dunes like it won’t ever rise, black dog chasing the gulls,
orange morning slowly pouring itself over her salty yellow hair:
a mosquito in amber, maybe, or some other time-stopped thing—maybe
the flash-frozen moment of a first kiss or a goodbye. There is more than one way
to be stuck. A question is an auger, boring into the amber. Don’t ask.
Queens, New York: I’m there, walking Palmer Drive in search of a question,
and she’s telling me across three thousand miles, wera, wera, wera—she trills
like they taught her, no sign among the waves of the Rockaway
of the thing ending its life on the shore, before it even knows what it is.
by Brandon Getz
