January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Two censuses back
Our home held three:
An infant was added
To you and me.
A census ago
We counted more:
Persons in household
Numbered four.
This latest census
Our data was new:
Three residents remained,
But where were you?
by Barth Landor
Barth Landor has had poems in Clapboard Journal, Spectrum, Inscape and Grey Sparrow Journal (named the Best New Literary Journal of 2011-2012). His poem ‘Tree’ was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011, and the online journal Lowestoft Chronicle published two poems in 2012, including ‘Grotte de Niaux’, nominated by them for a Pushcart Prize.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Weird Scenes Beside the Chevron
The two next to
the blue dumpster
cradling drums
of Steel Reserve,
greasy with worry
– you’ll find them anywhere
When we slow down for gas and caffeine
It’s the defiant palms I’m looking at
a second time, in towns
with names I’ll never know, settled
around redundant strip malls
blistering along the Pacific Coast Highway
These wild-haired beasts tower, they loom
We admire them on TV from afar
but, slashed through with their shadows,
we’re reminded of sands
slipping quickly through an hourglass
of some Endless Summer’s possibility
This holdover Boomer hokum persists, somehow
even while actual people live, here,
walk to work here, buy milk, here,
guzzle malt liquor next to dumpsters, here,
give up on whatever dream we could name, here
I turn my eyes straight ahead- the road, turning the key
by Chris Middleman
Arc of Dreams
Each time I sold Donald Passman’s
All You Need to Know About the Music Business
I saw the copy as a perfect-bound totem;
Here was another set of bloodletting parents
financing their gauge-eared Meredith’s
vague Vans-sponsored notion
of graduating to a stage where action
burns brightly; a stage shared by heroes
where she could act out her love
The love, of course,
never turned out to be creating, or
even helping finance good art;
nor was it a taste for dismantling a system
stacked so stupidly against vision
One way or another, at rainbow’s end
was typing mass PR emails,
answering phones for deceiving dinosaurs
wearing t-shirts instead of suits,
sitting in on “rap sessions” discussing the
optimization of monetization of YouTube clicks
While never having listened to Television
Never having heard Cybotron
Never getting played on freeform FM
Never getting crowned a hero by some kid
after a show, in a parking lot, at the bar
And one day, she’ll have to bow out
of the all the excitement of free merch,
festival passes and promos
for the birth of her little Emma, whom
one day, shall be enrolled in the School of Rock
by Chris Middleman
And in NPR, We Are Redeemed
A sheep rancher whispers into a
microphone held out in some dappled pasture
that the United States lost its taste for mutton
after so many canned rations were slavishly
gobbled during World War II; we dress ourselves
in December with a mess of shredded Sprite bottles
Though the market seems to have
bottomed out for this man whom the mind’s
director casts as an epileptic caterpillar of a
moustache wriggling beneath a brown-brimmed hat,
the hope is that immigrants and parents
in poorer neighborhoods that can’t afford
the food they prepare at work could be enticed
to make mutton a staple of their diets
With parting clouds, the dollar value of
this potential market is recognized
and we finally understand them as human
by Chris Middleman
January 2014 | back-issues, nonfiction
The brightest star in the constellation Cancer is beta Cancri, or as it is commonly referred to, Al Tarf.
The biggest bruise was just above my collar bone on the left side.
The second brightest star is Arkushanangarushashutu, the longest name of all stars in the galaxy. It means, “the southeast star in the crab.” It is sometimes referred to as Asellus Australis.
I couldn’t see his face. My eyes had begun to swell from the brick wall I was slammed into. I don’t remember that hurting.
The constellation is often referred to as the dark sign as its stars are so pale.
For months I was silent. My therapist told my mother I was in a walking coma.
The fourth sign of the zodiac is Cancer. It represents the home.
My boyfriend didn’t believe that I was raped. He told everyone I was a slut.
Cancers are ruled by the Moon. The Moon, astrologers say, dictates the mood as well as impulsivity.
I ran away. The bruises on my skin were gone but my insides were still swollen. I went to the Sea of Cortez.
The element associated with Cancer is water.
I lived on a beach called Los Cerritos outside of Todos Santos. I slept in a tent. I ate plums for breakfast, fish for lunch and rice with Italian dressing for dinner. I read Henry Miller. I married a Colombian man
Cancers are not compatible with Capricorns.
I left my husband in the middle of the night. I needed to go home.
Karkinos, the giant crab who helped the serpent Hydra in the battle against Hercules, was crushed beneath Hercules foot. However, as a reward for the strength, and willingness to fight, Karkinos was given a place amongst the stars.
by Jacqueline Kirkpatrick
Jacqueline Kirkpatrick is currently an MFA in Creative Writing student at the College of Saint Rose in upstate New York.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
We’re sitting at an outdoor table
on the Broadway sidewalk watching
the rhythmic pause-and-go of traffic
through the Saratoga streets,
the hum and squeals of engines and brakes,
the hydraulic groan of the 473 bus as it unloads
its cargo of townsfolk and tourists,
their chatter filling the summer air
in the absence of birds. A boy sits
at the bus stop with a silent guitar in hand,
ignored by those coming and going.
We watch people board the bus
as you sip your Bloody Mary,
savoring the olives in your mouth,
turning them over like words
you’d rather hear than speak.
The waitress brings our food
and sets it down like the silence
between us. The small pink creatures
of your shrimp cocktail remind me
of the things I’ll fail to say––
laid out before us, untouched
and wholly intact yet
so obviously dead.
The boy still sits at the bus stop.
His guitar is still silent, its case
open at his feet like an empty wallet.
Passing pedestrians pay him no mind.
No one is giving me any money
he complains to no one in particular,
but he isn’t playing anything.
by Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco was born in the Bronx, New York, though he’s lived in Florida for most of his life. He graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a B.A. in English Lit. He’s also studied creative writing at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College and film at Charles University in Prague. He currently resides in Miami, Florida.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
My fingernail, your pancreas,
your palm, starving tribes in the Sudan.
My esophagus, Joan of Arc’s enflamed hair.
Your mother’s lungs, La Brea.
Your neck, a lighthouse’s spiral staircase,
my eyes, a beacon over turbulent waters.
Your conscience, below the surface;
my fingers, holding it there.
My heart valves, the locks along the Erie Canal,
reining things in, keeping things from getting out of hand.
My lungs, an orchard ripe for plucking,
my genitals, coals from the bottom of the fire,
my uterus, invasive, like mint, getting its fingers everywhere.
My disappointment: the iceberg, a lightning strike, a barbed hook. A super nova.
Yours: the Titanic, the Gulf oil spill,
a family of beached whales. No—a black hole.
by Emily Hockaday
Emily Hockaday’s first chapbook, Starting A Life, was published in June 2012 with Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Newtown Literary, Pear Noir!, The West Wind Review, Plainspoke, and others. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU and has served as a judge for NEA’s poetry out loud program.
January 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Marlene glared down the alley at the two pins in their corners, her eyes narrowed over the ball like a snake’s before it strikes. She stood tall and still and substantial, in her black pants and the white shirt with pinstripes and Marlene stitched in red over the left breast.
Then she moved, power under grace, just the barest hitch to her step, and this being only the sixth day out of the hospital. Today there would be no fat-ass comment to upset her four-step sequence. Today was about the clarity of the pins.
Between steps two and three she began to lean and lower, torso approaching horizontal, right arm back with the ball, left forward for balance, and if she felt the bruised ribs you couldn’t tell to look at her.
On step four her right arm swung forward and she didn’t so much roll the ball as release it—opening her hand as you’d free a bird. Marlene slid to a stop just short of the line and hung there, balanced on her left leg, her right raised behind her and folded in a delicate ‘L.’ The ball rolled straight until the english she’d applied took hold and curved it left, a pin-seeking missile. She liked to call it that: english. Most just said spin.
The ball kissed the inside of the seven pin and sent it caroming into the left wall and bouncing back and across in an arc, where it took out the ten and both pins dropped from sight into the back-alley abyss.
The sound it made was sharp and satisfying: de-ba-cle.
“Nice shot, hon,” Candace said.
Marlene blew cool air on her fingertips, then turned back toward where Harold used to score her and said, “Take that, motherfucker.”
by Richard Bader
Richard Bader’s work has been published by National Public Radio and by the rkvry Quarterly literary journal.
