April 2016 | poetry
Thoughts and prayers
The emptiest of gestures
Just a collection of letters posted for the world to see
A world so far from your thoughts
You’ve never prayed for
Really
Doing nothing never looked so useful
Click post
Move on
Feel good
The ring of notifications solidify your conscience
Your good deed done
Without wiping up one ounce of blood
Brushing away one tear
Circling one brass casing
The incendiary and screams are too far away to even silence you to attention
Your thoughts and prayers will have to suffice
They just have to
They must
For what am I to do with this horrific sight?
Held in my hands
Glowing on this tiny screen
Louis Raio
Louis Raio is a Poet, Photographer, Artist and class Clown. He’s a 32-year-old man-child living in his parent’s house. He takes pride in finding beauty in the absurdity of the world around him and takes part most times. He’s a top contender for The Heavy Weight Championship of Procrastinators and isn’t afraid of an entire pizza. He has self-published two books of original poetry and defies anyone to buy a copy! Coming from a large family he understands the importance of finding a good place to sit. He has a terrible fear of flying and death, two horrifying things that are not mutually exclusive. His OCD and Anxiety are fuel for his creative mind and will either make him the life of the party or the reason it ended early. Love him, because he loves you.
April 2016 | poetry
At low tide, they write words
in the dark, damp sand
pledging their love forever.
Later that evening,
while enjoying each other’s company
over a candlelight dinner,
high tide quietly relieves them of the commitments
of those sandy etchings.
The following morning,
without much ado,
they murmur good-byes;
each moving on to new beaches.
Roy Dorman
Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for over 60 years. At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer. He has had poetry and flash fiction published over the last couple of years in Mulberry Fork Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Cease Cows, Birds Piled Loosely, Drunk Monkeys, Crack The Spine, Gap-Toothed Madness, Gravel, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, One Sentence Poems, Theme of Absence, Yellow Mama, Black Petals, Near To The Knuckle, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Fiction Press, Cheapjack Pulp, Shotgun Honey, and other online literary sites.
April 2016 | poetry
Life is a museum of light and
Darkness, and we are all mere
Exhibits, stored in clear glass
Boxes, with labels describing our
Identities in short-hand, and
Vintage Latin phrases chronicling our
Insecurities, and life is a museum of
Light and darkness, and we
All exist in its corridors and
Alleyways, waiting to be noticed, so
That we can make the mark for the
Next and final curation.
Noor Dhingra
Noor Dhingra is a 17-year old high-school student from New Delhi, India. An avid reader and writer, she often loses herself amidst the beauty and strangeness of words. She hopes to someday author books of her own. Apart from her love for literature, she is also extremely passionate about art and enjoys sketching and painting.
April 2016 | poetry
Fuck the Dead
I woke up and forgot how to write a poem
and decided that writing poems was stupid.
I couldn’t think of anything to love
and decided that love was stupid, too.
I went outside and the streets clanged with loneliness,
the people dulled and drunk with suffering;
some blatantly so, others
going through the motions of hiding it.
I decided that suffering was stupid because it was useless,
more useless even than poetry,
and I suddenly felt outside it all, bigger than
the living and their hand-me-down sufferings,
better than the smugness of the dead.
Fuck the dead and the living alike, I thought, what
good are they to me?
I wandered through it all like some stillborn ghost,
a thing unto myself, inscrutable and alien,
but within an hour I was tired of that,
so I fell in love with the next useless thing I saw
and wrote a stupid poem about it.
The Way You Cry for Things Beautiful and Gone
In truth there’s not much
I believe in anymore
but I sometimes go through the motions
nonetheless
like how we still try and be beautiful
in the few perfect hours
we stuff down our shirts
when the managers aren’t looking
the way we still try and be pretty
as we wait for the next disaster
to find us in the places where we hide
it’s a game we play to pass the time
but it’s not like back when joy
would lie beside us in the grass
like a great gentle beast sleepy beneath the sun
these days we hunt it down like vampires
we drain it and nail it to our walls like
a trophy to show our friends
and I’m writing this down
in an Italian cafe on Columbus Avenue
a man at a nearby table drinks wine
and watches girls, just as I drink wine
and watch girls
and the jukebox plays Italian opera
sad and beautiful like so many things
I can’t understand
it makes me want to cry
the way you cry for things beautiful and gone
and now that some wine is in me it’s easier
to cry for things, and I remember that the sad dumb beauty of everything
was made for us after all, we just have to let it
into our hearts like music
and now Sinatra’s on the juke and he’s got the world on a string
as a pretty black girl in a leather skirt walks by
and the man at the nearby table grabs the waiter and orders
more wine and I trust in his wisdom and do the same.
William Taylor Jr.
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including The New York Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and An Age of Monsters, a collection of short fiction. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. To Break the Heart of the Sun, a new collection of poetry, is forthcoming in 2016 from Words Dance Press.
April 2016 | poetry
I had to move more
on my own before
the wind would ever
consider me a ship.
I was born far away
from the ocean. I
had to break myself
to spill into the sea.
Darren C. Demaree
Darren’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, The Louisville Review, Diagram, and the Colorado Review.
April 2016 | poetry
Roadkill
car
blood slither, vomit, road shoulder, broken
car
antlers, up a hill, looks eighteen, frosty grass,
shivers, entrails, air like needles, hyper ventil
car
late cameo in glass, commuter, brake musing,
nausea, back road helplessness, call the police?,
grounded, mom’s breakfast, sausage goo,
failure, puffs of air, coalescence, coughing,
car
another payment, another day, another dollar,
dad’s glare, bruises, schoolhouse rumors,
irresponsible, grandma’s prayers, doctor visit,
whistling wind, ashen clouds, naked trees
Looking Through a Hole in the Brick of the Bingo Hall
I see an excited man standing, everyone else sitting,
in the fourth row through the tobacco haze
He looks at his card, finger tracing,
eyes looking up down up down while a
toothless man somewhere in the back lifts
a bottle to his lips
The plastic balls click in the drum like
forgotten change at the laundromat
The man, hand raised, shouts over
four laughing ladies and the room
hushes to hear his case
R.M. Cymber
R.M. Cymber is a graduate student at Fontbonne University in St Louis, Missouri. Some of his works are featured in Scrutiny Journal, The Provo Canyon Review, and Crack the Spine Literary Magazine. His poem “Manna” was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize. He is also an editor at River Styx Literary Magazine. Currently, he is writing poetry and short stories.
