January 2016 | poetry
In this late-autumn dusk
trees discard their leaves
like August’s junk lottery tickets.
She stands before the pool,
long since drained of water,
arms raised high, toes curled
over the edge of the diving board.
What makes her want to swim now?
Where was she all summer?
The quiet, clockwork stars
spin on their eternal vinyl sphere
as she closes her eyes, bends her knees.
She’s grown fat with sweet wine
she can no longer taste.
Her suit fits like a catcher’s mitt.
Grass grays in patches like stubble
on an old man’s face,
so she looks skyward, heavenward,
and launches herself into frigid night,
into emptiness cold as a new grave.
by James Valvis
James Valvis has placed poems or stories in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Ploughshares, River Styx, The Sun, and many others. His poetry was featured in Verse Daily. His fiction was chosen for Sundress Best of the Net. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle.
January 2016 | John Sweet, poetry
church on fire
says i’m sick of
this shit
says tell me a story with a
happy ending for a change, and so i
paint her one of tanguy’s skies
instead
i paint her one of
kahlo’s visions
i drive over to the north side
to find her father, but
no one’s seen him in
twenty years
no one gives a fuck about
the sixties, no one gives a shit about
lennon’s murder, about reagan’s
death, about anything other
than money or power
the past is empty nostalgia, the
future a fever dream of possibility
and i sleep on the couch
all week
i consider apologizing for
things i haven’t done
in the end i keep quiet
and the infection spreads
the sun barely clears the hills to the
south on the coldest days of the year and
the air is thick with the smell of
gasoline, of metal grinding against
metal, and she says
slow down
says that was the exit but the
trick is to get further away, out to
where the hills no longer have names,
out to where the trees rise up forever
dead from lakes of black water,
and the trick is to forget the children,
and the trick is to drive out past
even this, out past memory and
pain, but the truth is that the
trick always fails
the truth is that sex always
ends up feeling better
than love
isn’t this what you’ve been
waiting to hear me say?
upstate landscape w/ minor premonition
or all of those days spent
waiting for something to happen
all of those wasted hours caught
beneath a pale white sun, beneath a colorless sky,
and it was always early afternoon and it
was always the middle of november
powerlines stretched from dying
house to dying house and
empty trees never quite casting shadows
across barren lawns
the highway and the back roads
endless empty spaces packed tight w/
the ghosts of the past
nothing subtracted from
nothing
again and again
: :
the car out of gas on
fire at the edge of the highway the
swimmer alone late autumn or
early his wife missing
or sleeping
the children not yet imagined
and this car this wasteland this
all barren fields and powerlines all
empty stretches of interstate
mountains in the distance
and a man you might have
been always swimming
towards them
imaginary poem while waiting for rain
but this is only the day of
angels and we are only cities on fire
we are in the car for eight hours straight,
up and down side streets,
scoring and then using and then looking to score again and
what we smell like, i’d guess, is
slow meaningless death
what we believe in are better gods
or no gods at all
and the radio is tuned in to neverending static on the
morning your husband walks out the door
still gone four days later,
fucking someone’s sister in a leaky trailer and
together they are only a monotonous story with a
predictable ending
a suicide that drags on for seven years
and her children sit and wait outside the
bedroom door, and this boy no one knows is found
alongside the interstate, raped and beaten and dead,
eyes gouged out, coat hanger wrapped
tight around his throat
fourth of july in this
age of casual oblivion
religion forced down your throat and
deep up into your ass and whoever tells you that
voting will bring about change is a liar
power will always be power and poverty a crime and
we have been walking lost through this forest
for days now or for a month or maybe for
half our wasted lives
i have told you i love you and i have
told you i hate you and
neither one is anywhere near the truth
i have tasted your sweat and i have
drunk your blood and i have
offered you mine and
we are dying stars in broad daylight
we are dirty needles on piss-stained floors
the truth sounds better as a metaphor and then
better still as a lie and the windows here
are all broken, the walls filled with
dead and dying bees
end of july
walk out the door and drive through
100 miles of nothing and then
100 more and then start to see a pattern
believe only in what you can hold
fall asleep at the highway’s edge beneath
a relentless sun and
what the fuck were you thinking,
growing up, starting a family?
what the fuck were you
thinking, giving yourself away?
bought a house with no roof, no walls,
water in the basement
pulled the plug on your father
spoke quietly about your grandmother’s suicide
in a roomful of strangers and none of them
listened and why would they?
this is the 21st century
age of emotional famine
age of indifference
wake up in the middle of frozen lake in
early february with a head full of
broken glass and think about summer
try to remember how you
ended up here
open your eyes for once in your life
by John Sweet
john sweet, b. 1968.opposed to organized religion and to political parties. ideologies in general, altho he DOES have a soft spot for the concepts of surrealism and post-punk. 30 years spent wrestling w/ the idea of writing as catharsis. most recent collections are THE CENTURY OF DREAMING MONSTERS (2014 Lummox Press) and A NATION OF ASSHOLES W/ GUNS 2015 Scars Publications, e-chap).
January 2016 | poetry
Enlightenment in the Parking Lot
You curl up in the corner of the washroom
without concern about the urine on the floor
and you hear hot voices and cool riffs
leave through the door of the village barn
where they celebrate your getting hitched
to husband number three. While you were pensive
and wondered, he stumbled drunk
into your best friend holding on to her tits
to soften his fall. You lick salt and hug yourself
not caring about the bruises, then you lift
yourself, slowly, because your body is heavy,
and you walk out unseen through the back entrance.
You kick off your heels, your head clears some
and when you get to the parking lot
you’re not sure where you’ll be driving,
but you know you won’t die again.
imperfect recall
in the car whistling
shrieking metal on metal
big woman shuffles
a soprano voice and
sharp cuts crystal
shatters on flagstone
I have insurance
abandoned fields fierce
orange mushrooms push
open the wound on a fallen trunk
old man furtively pisses
out old afflictions mosquitoes
throng and settle on
the heat coming off me
smears of blood on my cage
suppose it’s mine
then it was summer
night air police sirens
one-hundred-and-seven days
needed to return
now bare trees smeared
glass brittle with frost
tattered images
by Rose Mary Boehm
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a poetry collection (TANGENTS) published in 2011 in the UK, well over 100 of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a good two dozen US poetry reviews as well as some print anthologies, and Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. She won third price in in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (US), was semi-finalist in the Naugatuck poetry contest 2012/13 and has been a finalist in several GR contests, winning it in October 2014.
January 2016 | poetry
Remember this.
Remember tonight.
Remember the rain
hitting the window,
the train’s whistle
cutting through the wind while the night moves southwards.
Remember.
Remember this.
Memorize this.
These were the words she uttered,
warm and wet, softly and lazily,
while a brief summer storm washed away the dirt
on your bedroom’s window.
And you promised you would remember everything,
and you tried, you tried hard.
But even then you were already starting to forget.
Time goes by, and you learn.
You learn, for instance,
that the soul is a complex system
and solitude is its only constant.
Yes, these last nights have been long,
quiet,
monotonous.
Yes, you know well that she does not want to forget you;
you do not want to forget her either.
But who knows…
perhaps you are forgetting her already.
Perhaps you are forgetting her, little by little,
as you write these clumsy lines
of nostalgia and oblivion.
by Juan Cruz
Juan David Cruz Duarte was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1986. In 2010 he immigrated to the United States in order to get a PhD at the University of South Carolina. Some of his essays, poems and short stories have been published in the Colombian literary magazine Escarabeo Revista literaria. Cruz’s poetry has also appeared in Jasper Magazine. He published a collection of short stories (Dream a Little Dream of Me: Cuentos Siniestros) in 2011, and a short novel (La noche del fin del mundo) in 2012.
