July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I drive a car
of irreplaceable parts
going south.
I crawl out of town at night,
a girl with a limp on my arm,
not knowing which belt
or hose is cracked,
leaking like a fistful
of fluids.
The headlights reach down
where the pavement
is supposed to be.
I have a feel for the tires
as they pitch
into the shoulder.
Then slowly guide them out and away
from the deeper ditch below,
hot with toxic runoff.
If a computer can get a virus,
then my car has asthma.
It gets winded at stoplights
like a chain smoker
who just finished sprinting uphill
to the hospital.
There is nothing my car needs
that isn’t lying
out somewhere on the dark road ahead,
at a gas station or rest stop
filled up with strangers like us.
We live one mile at a time
on boiled coffee and canned meat,
nursing overheated engine blocks
to speed our planned obsolescence.
by Greg Jensen
Greg Jensen has worked with homeless adults living with mental illness and addiction problems for the past seventeen years. In addition to being a poet, he is a dad, husband, and avid bicyclist who works on the Seattle’s original Skid Road.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Two nights after the breakup
Drunk
I dial your number wrong
Suddenly, through fate and pulses
Twitches through air
I am connected to a stranger, you
Minus one number, or maybe two
Transverse.
Your name sloshes around, lulls out of my mouth
Half-cocked
Loose on my misshapen tongue
Even after hearing an older woman answer
I carry on talking to you.
She doesn’t hang up, doesn’t break our connection
And in her reply there is a furry, conspiring, lilt
She is fluent in slurry and beg
In sludge-mumbled anger and desperation
And all that ugly language that love
Reduces us to. Or is the booze?
I thought I heard her say
“don’t do it”
I stared at the phone, glowing apps
But her voice could have come from antiquity.
“don’t do it”
maybe she said
“sleep on it”
Maybe she told me to shut the fuck up
Then hung up
Sending that connection looping back
A rubber band, snapping,
Racing back to where it lived.
by Jennifer Ihasz
Jenn Ihasz. is 42 years old and recently went back to college to study History and English Literature.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Involution
In the early mornings
when the world sleeps
we stretch the thin membrane
hiding our sneering beast
from a world of ironed shirts.
Territorial claims at the bus stop.
An unaware prey (still sleeping),
is awoken by a hyenas’ mad stare.
The bus driver, half pig,
greets all and no one with grunts.
He is on schedule but actually never left the station.
The metro is buzzing:
everyone is collecting nectar
for the sacred weekends.
And when the grasshoppers awake
later in the day,
Ironed shirts rule once more.
Only the occasional ragged dogs
rummage through the garbage
in search after some spilled honey.
The Invisible Hand
Move along and continue to consume.
There´re still people over there to impress.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
New cars, jewelry, champagne and perfume –
Adopt the lifestyle and scent of success.
Move along and continue to consume.
There is no dusty scheme to exhume.
The wheels must turn to create progress.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
Dampen angst, down to a moan, and resume
The search for solace with food in excess.
Move along and continue to consume.
Limping charts and numbers reeking of gloom.
Suppress, forget and invent things to possess.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
There’s a dead emperor and no costume.
Calm down people, there´s no need for distress.
Move along and continue to consume.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
Mattias Renberg lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He has studied creative writing in both English and Swedish. He has previously been published in Over Yonder, an anthology by Rofous Press.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Yes
hungry helicopters
circling in the sky
killing the little
pieces of my sleep
my tired brain
wasted a long
time ago
on this battle
of existence
on this world
we called wonderful
and here is only
one cat on the floor
and there is only
one bottle of wine
and here I am
alone
come and
get me
before
they do.
White Communion
I am watching
the smoke from
the chimney
the fog the whiteness
of everything around
and I rise from the mud
and step on the rocks
like some modern Lazarus
I stand up and look there
where my dreams can’t
find me
hidden even
for
my nightmares
that I am him
Something in a flowerpot
the night is coming slowly like an old
gray cat and I am
looking for matches to set the moon
on fire
the hunger of the mind
insist to carry on
she knows how much to fill my glass
and after that to stand up and
to pour water from the kettle
upon the thing in the flowerpot
my love is dying of thirst like
wheat in August
the streets are gloomy and silent
welcoming my steps upon the faceless
sidewalk, reminding me your silence
during the times of war
the world turns slowly like gymnast
going nowhere with all the things upon it
and the silence the silence, yes,
just for a while
while the audience applaud the bones
of Chopin
I can continue to paint but I will leave this
to the old dead dogs barking in my back yard
between the roses and the stones
she bents down over the flowerpot
and she says:
you are quiet
ah, you are so silent
my eyes believe in everything
and the honorable ladies sleep with
the picture of Paul Newman
waiting for their eternal repose
the water is pouring upon the green thing
just like the wind parts the curtains in the sky
but the world lies down on its back
and lies down on its back and waits
for me to penetrate it
but I sniff at the stench and the rottenness
of the centuries and pull back
talking to him:
child, ah, you are only child
and outside on the streets
little girls are playing,
not yet turned themselves into women
strong enough to bring down each and every
man
me?
I am thinking about the paintings of Caravaggio
looking at the left hand (the one with the brush)
and remain silent.
Small revenge
I don’t care about the metrics, the iambus
and the rhymes – I have read the classics and then
I’ve put them back on their dusty shelves:
we write about something that comes from the guts
and the nails as the flowers outside
explode…
The poetry, can I say that I don’t care?
I prefer to drink alone in this room in front of
one candle
as the shadows in the corners sits and show us
their ugly faces;
ah, I know that the words are greater that we thought
and we will fall in their holes,
we will spill ourselves like ink upon the Chaucer’s paper:
let me be myself while I read the classics,
let me be afraid in airplanes,
let me be bored in churches,
let me be silent before the tigers in my blood:
these words are too tuff for us to misspend them
just like the big boys during their time.
The rivers are flowing through me
and I burn like matchstick lighted by the words
of all Shakespeares …
And today I am closer to insanity,
I am watching the black birds on the wires,
waiting for our degradation,
for our small defeat while we walk upon the land of
Dylan and Frost, especially on the thin ice
of Frost…
…find me one small torch,
not too big, just big enough to set this night on fire
and I can hear outside the young girls laugh,
never heard about the hunger of Villon or the madness of Pound,
please feed me so well and I’ll never again use their words,
let me find a little warmth,
allow me to find my sunflowers
shaking in the wind
and under the sun
and the God of the Word not Death.
The night
The moon talks to me
and tells me stories of tortures
and burned love;
sad songs are pouring out from
broken window
and here is only the smell
of stale wine and cigarettes;
outside
dogs are wailing in the dark
and nothing is real more than
it should be,
the dark stillness of time
is hanging like a broken clock
and finally the night
locks me in.
Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections and two chapbooks. His collection Bone Silence was released in 2010 by Desperanto, NY and Уиски в тенекиена кутия (Whiskey in a Tin Can), 2013, Американски тетрадки (American Notebooks), 2010, Разходка през стените (Walking Through Walls), 2009 were published in Bulgaria. Peycho Kanev has won several European awards for his poetry and he’s nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Net. Translations of his books will be published soon in Italy, Poland and Russia. His poems have appeared in more than 900 literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Columbia College Literary Review, Hawaii Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Coachella Review, Two Thirds North, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Fan Death
from Grotesques
I turn the fan on night-times, so
I remember how to breathe while
sleeping, and so never
wake up dead. They think babies might
do this, they call it SIDS. Another country,
across the world, believes the same act
will fell their population, call it
fan death. Somewhere else they lock
cats out of bedrooms so they don’t
suck up souls lost in slumber. In a shack in Florida,
a young girl has her own habit: curl up
in a corner, pull the cotton sheet above
her head, and count her father’s footsteps
on her fingers, hoping that tonight
they fade into the hall. She hasn’t put together
that his steps form bassbeats in her more
twist-inducing dreams, that a nightmare is
two hard-soled shoes dropping closer
while in her sheets she turns. Most times
the sound’s not in her head, but a positive:
some nights, it is. Just a recording below her subconscious
beating background in her sleep.
Those nights she squirms, but she rests.
Any Body
from Grotesques
Close your eyes & any
body’s any other body, un-
light-marked: flesh warm in
the dark yields, tentative,
unsure. All skins brush the same,
raise undistinguished goosebumps
through the night. No one tells you who
you are as you drift by the crowd. One
hand graces someone’s back,
the other one a moth paused on some familiar shoulder,
owner indifferent, name unknown.
Zeno’s Paradox
(where destinations can’t be reached)
from Grotesques
The only way to suffer sadness is by
stretching onionskin elastic over
hipbones, shrinking down. I
will whittle to perfection,
thin as a whippet, as
a curling, snake-
like whip.
E. H. Brogan is a graduate of the University of Delaware with a B.A. in English. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Scissors & Spackle, Corvus, and others. Recently, she won a Brew Haha Short Story Writing Contest for memoir. This summer she is joining Kenning, a literary journal, as a blogger & community outreach. She is also a moderator for an online community of over 200 poets.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Snapshot With Suet
Say, has anyone found the old lorgnettes, those folding opera glasses?
Nice keepsake my musical sisters agree, sorting our dead Mother’s things.
Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore they yodel from Tosca.
On to the photographs, my favorite, 3 x 5 b/w, over-exposed edges on fire:
Flyway birds fill the trees, snip buds, litter ground with cuneiform. Late storm, no school. Hurry, we’re losing light, yells urgent brother Michael. I labor in webbed snowshoes, reach for boxes hung in rows above my girly feeder, a high-heeled boot laced with fat, table scraps. Suet for juncos calls Dad, leading pregnant Mom sidesaddle on our snow camel, three humps. Why not? Falling off unhurt, the little sisters, squint, point, hurl wet snowballs at hooded
Mergansers?
No, Grandma and Aunt R in capes, ambushed states our kid brother. See pointing at me, the fat teen Thunder Thighs lumbering across the frame.
I remind him that, inside Mother on the camel, he was not yet born, alive.
Big diff. The huge snow humps, chameleons he insists despite cloven hooves and cud. Who’s that? he asks about the agile boy in yarn hat, trailing seed from sack up frozen hill.
Not you I quip, suddenly too sad to dwell on Michael, his kindness and early death.
So where’s Dad?
There leaning in his deep great-coat, holding up the coffee can of suet while little sisters trip in snow pants, hand-me-downs one size too big.
Those two, now mothers both, still giggle, chorus. Fighting, we fell off the sleigh. The tracks, two thin lines, see they say lower left. Beaded caps stiff with snow, we brushed off our collars, hollered Wait!
But cold, you big kids and the parents lost interest in the game.
Of what?
What else? War, no, Peace. The sisters trump each other, interrupt. We were twin serfs, no, Serbian princesses kidnapped along the Hindi Kush, our camel caravan of sequins and silk high-jacked by hooded bandits.
Musquediento, your Highnesses! We greet in accented Flodge, our secret childhood lingo, curtsy, bow, dodge — all of us laughing now, ready to sit down and relax, napkins in lap, with tea-cakes and whiskey chasers.
Hail, hail we toast the slanted blur.
Tall Dad?
Or giant windfall? Michael’s climbing tree, the ironwood downed by storm, nailed coffee can flattened on one side for suet.
Say, when did juncos last winter here?
I bite my lip — Michael’s eighth-grade feeders, off-camera memories. Mine.
Morning Scrabble
At my brother Michael’s gravesite, others toss handfuls of earth, stones, flowers. I throw small wooden squares with letters, stuffed in my purse and pockets, pieces from his favorite childhood board game — winning words, our excuse for wagers.
Before they dump out drawers at home, let’s see what’s left to play: O B T X R U D Z E S C H I F N A T M A …W. WOMBAT, RATFINK, tags for schoolyard FOES. FAUX, FINCH, short DEFT words like ZED and UR earned quick points. Easy vocab, RUDE, RAIN, SHINE, AFTER, we learned, ate money vowels that better earned their keep in CRUDE, INTRUDE, SHINER, SHAFTED, RAFTER.
For final rounds, our house rules allowed TV, DC, RSVP, abbreviations used as words, also REV (Reverend), RIP (Rest in Peace), even B (Born). No one ever dared to score with D, not even rash Michael, too soon wed to older ex-nun ATAR with STUN gun agenda for success.
Forced ROSE, our ruddy brother skipped FRAT fun, shortcut youth to TUX and BOURSE with her, TRIM in black FACE veil beside his casket — me FAT, DAFT, BORE/BOAR larded with loss, SNIFfling in the nave, WORSE, wanting to RUN like stocking, grasp threads, hasp, catch breath, barge, take charge — my own worst FOE in durable WORSTED serge, suited dirge, first word of MATINS (old Latin office), Dirige, direct us O Lord — gloss at his morning grave, high-point words I lack for grief.
Charlotte M. Porter lives in an old citrus hamlet in north central Florida. A published poet, she was a top finalist for the Rose Metal Press flash fiction chapbook contest in 2012. Her creative nonfiction, as Wanda Legend, has been cited by New Pages.
