January 2016 | poetry
Quietly with sly energy,
it circles a black hole
in this jungled universe.
feral mind feline creeping
pauses in pursuit, too ready
to nap another day away.
Oh this mind like the attic, bearer
of all rejects: artwork, furniture,
broken toys, cobwebs, dust motes
claim stale air.
Emotion is turned off, more a leaky pipe
for some replacement part
now on backorder, while the mind
Remains confused, eschews
uncorked sadness, challenges
action, the what if and what is
as it appears in the present.
The cat’s tail like an antenna picks up
a mouse dead behind the old
sewing machine table, stalks its remains
Through a packed jungle of unwanted
leftovers; none show rhyme nor reason.
Could that mind, more likely instinct
Than feelings lie among that pile
of castoffs already in play
between two large cat paws?
by Lee Landau
This poet writes with raw honesty about family events, those dysfunctional backstories. She shelters emotion from the snowy winters of Minnesota that spark her imagination. She writes about obsessions, both large and small that tumble through her poems. Publications include BlueStockings Magazine at Brown University, Wisconsin Review, Breath and Shadow, Avalon Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Ice Box Journal, Rockhurst Review, Vending Machine Press, The Monarch Review, Else Where Lit.
January 2016 | poetry
Moon jelly in the sea noodle
Shimmer of flying fish morning
Laughs to itself the sky has landed
Along the beach water dripping off its hair
Sometimes the world might
Come in a little ahead of the game
Today it looks like it was going to rain
Airwaves change a seagull into a musket ball
The lovely girl I’m too old & fat for
Sets her halo down
Next to her umbrella
It must get mighty rainy in heaven
& there’s still a star in the sky
A little pinkish around the edges
Gotta change this reality
Hold onto life by its tables & chairs
Typhoon voices too loud to be heard
Words bouncing around in the back of my mind
Rainfall rattles the windowshades
The wind seems laboring
Up a long flight of stairs
A car horn honks my name
The cannonade of an endless heart
A new window has opened
Spider webs are forming
The ceiling is falling
The Eiffel tower in miniature
Infrared balloon bubbling
Between the starfish high
In the mountains
& what only time will tell
The world loves itself in a special way
A man doesn’t have to worry about
The sunlight on how it is. The shadow
Of the door swung its shadow. She kind of
Knew something was going to happen
It was a ruby chandelier shot thru a wineglass
Falling back into empty spaces
Handwriting too indecipherable
To remain undecoded
A book too complicated
To remain unfinished
Bricks ripped away
In the underground restaurant
To make it seem more rustic
There is a solidity
Even in dreams
With its last breath the mountain
Yodels down the ravine
Nothing but rock formations
Shaped like cathedral spires.
by Kurt Cline
Kurt Cline is Associate Professor of English and World Comparative Literature, National Taipei University of Technology. His full-length book of poetry, Voyage the Sun, was published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Poems and stories have appeared, most recently, in BlazeVOX, Danse Macabre, Shotglass Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, HuesoLoco, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Scat, and Clockwise Cat. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness; Concentric, Beatdom Literary Journal; and Comparative Civilizations and Cultures.
January 2016 | poetry
Trying out for the Senior Class Play’s
romantic lead opposite my girl but coming in second
to the ever-popular handsome hunky Everett
then having to watch him romancing her
on-stage from backstage for weeks.
Waiting for my wife in this busy hair salon
with all the clipping, combing, coiffing
and fussing with hair length, color, body . . .
with the incessant small talk all these people wasting
so much time it’s hair for crying out loud!
As a youngster he was an altar boy
carrying the cross or The Holy Book
to the altar, his face stern with religiosity.
Today he’s in the ICU waiting for the doctors
to decide if he should stay there or go to hospice.
by Michael Estabrook
Retired now working around the yard and writing more poems or trying to anyhow. Noticed 2 Cooper’s hawks staked out in our yard or above it I should say explains the disappearing chipmunks.
January 2016 | poetry
They give me no peace,
constantly flying over
at all hours.
Right on schedule,
with the precision
of a quartz timepiece.
The drone unmistakable,
they buzz by,
far too small
and too low
for commercial aircraft,
yet unassuming enough
for covert military intelligence.
Manned or unmanned, it
makes no difference, as
my house sits outside
any published flight plans.
This much I know.
That leaves me
as their sole purpose
for being HERE,
their target.
It leaves me,
also, the only one bothered.
Hell, the only one
to even acknowledge
the strangeness of
their presence.
But like everything else,
what can I do?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
So as always,
I grit my teeth,
force a smile,
and pretend I
don’t notice.
It’s harder than it looks.
by Matthew Armagost
January 2016 | poetry
You said
I could be anything
So I became “Me”
But then
You said
That “Me” was too
Cliché
Predictable
Counterfeit
So I became
A sunflower
stretching with every fiber
of my being
toward the sky
toward the light
But you didn’t like that
You said
I set my sights too high
So I became a tortoise
stagnant
relying on my complacency and
not my accountability
But you quickly grew bored of me
You said
That I took things too slow
So I became a feather
bending and waning
vulnerable to impurities
and
emotional cacophony
lilting.
But then
You said
I was too soft
I traded hats with a thousand strangers
and nothing seemed to fit
your rules
So I became a cardboard box
With my edges fraying
And a sticker marked FRAGILE
Slapped on my left side
You put me in storage
And let me become
Worn
Weathered
Broken
And when you took me out again
My sticker had fallen off
And I wasn’t FRAGILE anymore.
The edges of me started to disintegrate
Until
I was just matter
Even though
all this time I felt like
I Didn’t.
by Piper Wood
January 2016 | poetry
You’re in the pickup with Scotty B and buzzing with anticipation cause you’re about to score and this makes your skin tingle thinking about the rush of dopamine and potential for sudden violence that comes with every deal and to feed the synergy you reach for the volume on the stereo just as the song ends and the void of sound takes you back to the bar
where amid the neon and dinge of a dive turned trendy you caught the lean through the corner of your eye before the kiss between two guys who looked like college kids enjoying a night on-the-slum and unaware of the culture shift when you leave the sandstone and iron of Okie Yuppie U.
Your first instinct was fear so you scanned the bar while telling yourself this is Tulsa and waited for the slur you’ve heard so many times it has no impact anymore and your mind went back to the night you and Scotty B were good and lit and laughing and you placed a hand on the curve of his ribs in a manner that made his spine stiffen as he shrugged away and this instant had you at the brink of fight or flight until Scotty B pretended nothing happened and you let your fists uncurl.
This is Tulsa. And you can’t understand the way things are changing because you know it never will for you with your line of descent traced through generations of Hank and Merle and Cash on vinyl and your father singing Garth’s ode with the bulls and blood and dust and mud and in the silence between songs you turn to Scotty B and twang out the drawl real nice when you tell him used to be they called this shit Horse back in the seventies and that’s the best name for a drug they ever was.
by Geoff Peck
Geoff Peck received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Dakota. His fiction and poetry have appeared in over a dozen journals and he has been nominated for Best New American Poets after winning the Academy of American Poets Thomas McGrath Award.
