October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Gravel crunches as I pull into an almost empty parking lot
Cut the engine, watch it shudder a weak protest
Slump back in the torn leather seat
And light a cigarette
Eyes jumping to and from the few scattered cars
Like an old detective film
Make sure the coast is clear
Office door creaks open just enough for me to slip through
See a lonesome burning smoke in a overflowing ashtray
Call out a “Hello” in a shaky voice
Then stammer an “Is anyone there?”
He lumbers out, another cigarette stuck in his unshaven face
Caters to my demands, passes a worn silver key
The door shuts itself on the way out
Unlock room 23 and make a beeline to the mini bar
Drink a fifth of Gin and stare at the peeling paint on the ceiling
Breath in deep and try to subdue qualms
Misgivings are unattractive
Though more faithful for certain
Drain the remaining 1/4 and toss the bottle at the trash
And duck out for a six-pack of Bud from the corner store
The knock is soft and drawn out, almost ghost-like
Before the door opens and she enters
Unsure steps and uncertain smile
Watch her clumsily undress behind a curtain of blue smoke
Fumble nervously with your keys
Take one last swig of beer
Then hold her like you would a dying child
Wake hungover the next morning
Wearing nothing but a tee-shirt and a headache
Blindly reach out to the bedside drawers
In search of the remains of last nights crumpled soft pack
Strike a match and light
Focus gets shifted to the fire fly like ember
Meekly smile and turn over to find her gone
Office door is stuck tight
Spit out a string of expletives while banging on the smudged glass
Stubbly smile soon appears behind
Eagerly ushers me in, exclaiming that he saw
A pretty young thing leaving earlier on
He bums a cigarette and raises his grubby hand in hope of a high-five
I leave him hanging
Damn New Yorker has trouble starting
Splutters and then purrs
Under a murky grey impressionist sky
Press last limp excuse for a cigarette against a solemn mouth
Bid farewell to a road-side motel
That rings a little close to home
Gravel crunches as I pull out of an almost empty parking lot
by Benjamin Blake
Benjamin Blake was born in the July of 1985, in the small town of Eltham, New Zealand. His fiction and verse have appeared in numerous journals and magazines including, The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, Morpheus Tales, Black Petals and Danse Macabre. He was a contributor to the 2012 anthology, A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine. He is the author of the poetry and prose collections, A Prayer for Late October, Southpaw Nights, and Reciting Shakespeare with the Dead. He currently lives in a cabin, somewhere in the New Zealand countryside.
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
(M. Ondaatje)
The rain fell like applause
it fell all night
and it fell like applause
though for whom or why
I do not know
it fell and it fell and
I couldn’t help but wonder
if perhaps it was for the moon
this hollow moon
or the trees drained of birds
there was rain
and the applause fell like thunder
broke like glass
on an iron floor
since the birds had flown
the air was full of something sinister
there was something sinister
in the applause
which fell all night
like rain like
night like
applause
the rain fell like applause
though for whom or why I do not know.
by Jamie Thomson
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
red drop
blur down
hover first, then
rush with helicopter
sound on mute, between
a Monday and the lavender
bush, aligned aside a
moment you forgot to even
notice; still, on wings, it
seems to rise in up and
down motion, the hope of each
becoming squeezed inside
the beat of wings, a
quantum fine that lasts for
you a glance or two but
for the hummingbird
a lifetime.
by K.C. Bryce Fitzgerald
K.C. Bryce Fitzgerald has been writing stories since he learned to read. A native of Los Angeles, he is inspired by the daily truths of the world around him. In addition to moonlighting as a bartender, he is an avid writer and filmmaker whose production company C4 Films specializes in visually groundbreaking, character-driven storytelling. He has had several screenplays featured on Hollywood’s prestigious Black List and was recently the featured author in Burningwood Literary Journal. When not sending rich producers and literary agents gift baskets, he is hard at work perfecting his craft. He has currently written numerous short stories, two books of poetry, a debut novel, and many screenplays.
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
This isn’t about a man evaporating to skeleton,
or joe bargaining with air
from a combat zone
as his father lies on the crucifix bed,
moaning so coherently the sins of the world
coalesce, come forth in black chugs
of foam, intestine, final whispers of God.
Not the twenty-by-twenty-foot crater
where the memory of joe’s name lay
less than a week before,
and the surgically sliced face of Khobar Towers,
and the blood, and the globs of flesh
that may someday be you or me.
Not even the memory of morning drill
at Rocky Mountain Arsenal—numbered
chairs matched to numbered masks,
assigned lanes, impromptu sirens,
seven-second scramble to don
writhing rubber faces before nerve gas
can drop the body in a heaving break dance.
And after, stepping outside, the ice fog lifts
as from a lunar landscape,
iridescent sun rising between snow plain,
mountain and smog crest.
This is what joe means—three changes
of clothes (enough in his college days),
three pairs of shoes with no holes (enough
for old age), a quiet room with comfortable
bed and covered mirrors.
by Will Harris
Originally from San Antonio, Texas, Will Harris was born into a military family and spent most of his public school years outside the U.S., particularly in England and Germany. After serving two military staff tours in the Middle East, he left the military but returned to live in the United Arab Emirates. He and his wife visit the U.S. during the summer months. Will’s writing is forthcoming or has been published in African American Review, The Austin Writer, Cold Mountain Review, College Language Association Journal, Colorado-North Review, decomP, Eleventh Muse, Existere, Mantis, MELUS, NEBULA, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Storyscape, The Trinity Review, Voices in English, Wascana Review, Word Riot, Writers’ Forum, and The Zora Neale Hurston Forum.
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
The Eloquent Insufficiency of Poems
—James Woods, The New Yorker
They may begin with a stutter and a pause—
the interruption grows,
reality first distends then explodes
in silence, like a spider’s web struck on purpose
by a trowel.
The sun isn’t better seen
by the shredding of the filmic screen
but the heat I feel more intently is like a burn
rubbed sore
because pain is such a pleasure.
In a delicate moment
the beautiful web is sundered, over-revised and gone;
you search for but can’t find
its worm-like thread on the ground
where the earth is turning the color of excrement.
The Free Market
What shall we eat—high carb or low carb?
I want to tell you something you already know
but don’t know how to say—
the uncommon speech of the everyday, always a new routine.
Science is so imperfect and cancer in our gut so common.
Here’s the pitchman selling his speech
his thoughts like a harvest of grain,
each stalk a new solution, each harvest the same.
The MRI says it all, our shrunken lobes paddling in CSF
like poisoned fish, unnaturally thin and swimming out of habit.
We will die on the coasts swelling with melted frost
one limb at a time, charity floating away on a raft
of good intentions. You speak and I hear the cant of can’t,
how hopelessness echoes from shore to shore.
It’s late in the day; the orange sun seduces the sailor
with its adjusted color and a heat hotter than hot
spelling frost. The commentaries you read and trust
are cold eyed. The damsel in distress at the countertop pulls on
a chemise that will make her thinner, even serene
and the would-be boyfriend thinks her a queen, not rot.
I’m standing against all advice, to make it new or do it again—
life caught in the net or, if literary, trapped in the seine.
We are baking lies like Christmas pies and eating them
like a drug. The Greeks fell for ambrosia not heroin.
by Michael Salcman
MICHAEL SALCMAN, poet, physician and art historian, was chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, and Rhino. Poetry books include The Clock Made of Confetti, nominated for The Poet’s Prize, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011); Poetry in Medicine, his anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases has just been published (Persea Books, 2015).
October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Nothing more than a beaten baby,
fleeing down the aisle in my
virginal gown of naivety.
He wore my hope proudly.
Pinned to his chest like a
red rose boutonniere.
Concluding whispers of the
tired and disillusioned
pursue me as I try to prove them wrong.
Oh! Oh, no. I’m not
the stereotype of predictable
failure to thrive.
Through gritted teeth, I
learn to duck
and stay up late
Learning the dangerous buttons
and resisting the desire
to push them.
With a light step and a
careful eye, I execute
years of delusional bliss.
Life inside a Stepford skin
wore down the glorious
angles of imperfection:
my birthright and bliss.
She came with a dagger
forged in the ecstatic
flame of unexplainable
familiarity.
Immediate love. Fierce
unexplainable connection.
She cut through the skin
freeing the woman. I
was meant to be.
Always was. Hidden
brief and singular,
willful and ignorant,
But no more! She
rescued me. And I
rescued her. And
I am she, and
she is me.
by Rachel Holbrook
Rachel Holbrook writes from her home in East Tennessee and is anxious to leave her mark on the literary world. She was previously unpublished.
