July 2016 | poetry
The evening beryl blue
A wavy horizon puffing out clouds
Sanguine in her lasting coffers
My heart lies silent at the bottom
Of the jar of peace.
Ears lounge on sand,
Coarse as they may be
Toting cottony waves
And their aimless niveous roars
The wind lifts my hair
Levity sinks in the sand
A shell upturned, burnishing a golden
Corals stray awash unshapely
Yet their randomness beholds a design
Woven in the blindness of foaming waves
Warily retreating into the belly
Of the gurgling sea
I lift my chin, scan them accede
My sights lock as colors riot deep
Into my fist wet sand intrude
As my toes surrender deep
A sombre wave romances my chin warm
Then rushes to bathe my dazed soul
That time too shall come
When my ashes they douse
Harboring them in their sojourning fold.
by Sudha Srivatsan
Sudha was born and raised in India. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Commonline Journal, Tower Journal, the Germ Magazine, Carcinogenic, Indiana Voice Journal, Bewildering Stories, Leaves of Ink, Mused Literary Review, Subterranean Blue, Corner Club press, BlazeVox among others. Her work was also selected to be part of Storm Cycle’s 2015 Best Of anthology.
July 2016 | poetry
Only the best trickster gods
have wings. Beating away at
the dried browned grass,
they knead the air and earth together
in the stone bowl of a yeasty, wet spring,
fooling us with movement and stories
that only let us see shadowy parts of things.
There are layers and layers
of air and birdsong and grass
that only a woodcock can lay claim to
strutting in that flat dinner plate of prairie.
For us, each step closer is a snap of grass,
but the only way to know it is to lie on it
and to feel it’s sharp ceramic crack underneath you.
I can stand still, feel my feet in the fragile brotherhood
of all the things in motion—
fluid wings, the unsettled earth, the ungrown grass,
a frog-chorused April dusk against
that fluttery squeak of flight,
which is not so much an awakening,
but the audible refilling of the haunted earth.
by Paul Wiegel
Paul Wiegel is a Green Bay native and now writes from his home near the upper Fox River in Wisconsin. His work is forthcoming in The English Journal, Eunoia Review, and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal. He is the 2015 winner of the John Gahagan Poetry Prize.
July 2016 | poetry
I am more than interlaced fingers,
a tangle of limbs
As I get older, I am learning
the difference between
words that are blue and words that are
dark like the insides of people—
Clots and handfuls of flesh
that are more than my gender,
more than my wild ankles
with the bones round and clear like planets
The arsenal is the judgement of
my womanhood—
I was never a person with blood on her hands,
never the
domestic
type
A creation, I was an infant child born in the middle,
a girl in a brother’s clothing
Words have meaning, despite what
people say
Now is a time when the
punishment for everything is
death
by Kristin LaFollette
Kristin LaFollette received her BA and MA in English and creative writing from Indiana University. She is a PhD student in the English (Rhetoric & Writing) program at Bowling Green State University. Her poems have been featured in West Trade Review, Poetry Quarterly, Lost Coast Review, Slipstream Press, The Light Ekphrastic, The Main Street Rag, and River Poets Journal, among others. She also has artwork featured in Harbinger Asylum, Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Spry Literary Journal. She lives with her husband in northwestern Ohio. You can visit her at kristinlafollette.blogspot.com.
July 2016 | poetry
that dusk which is the start of deadly night
when darkness hides our evils and fears
and men surrender to folly and violence
that dusk, the gentle laying of a robe of pink
over a hot day of white sun or endless storms
that covered the roiling sky black at noon
with wind howling and rain lashing at faces;
that dusk the delicate hand of rest when the air
finally cools down the washes and gullies
where the heat still reflects, rocks warm to touch,
this breath of evening air relieves the oppression
and we can afford to move now before that dark
sky arrives, watch the light fade, a draining of all
the travails of the day, a promise that shadows
will melt, creation arise on the morrow, whether
sodden or sultry it will be as unprecedented as
a clean sun rising over all our waste and wild
spaces, dusk a distant matter of perspective.
by Emily Strauss
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Over 350 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
July 2016 | poetry
Soma
His torso entangled
unsure of its ends.
And there, Atlas
Heavenly heaving
again and again.
Deep bronze bodies smelted by Hephaestus
His, their sarcic art
Sheeted furnace Aristophanes fulfilling.
Ganglia
He stands on the curb
Alongside another
A brother
Of sorts.
Someone approaches, a brother of Other.
“Fuck that shit, bitch, get the fuck off my block!”
Glock cocked a god’s knuckle cracks
Saltpeter theogony, flesh behind
Spattering brother’s blood before
Pollocking the pavement
Viscera
Something within him
“Touch it”, it tells
He listens
Feeling the severed ligaments
They’re… wet
He keels.
He expels,
Pollocking the pavement
Sarcic art.
by Connor Fieweger
July 2016 | poetry
Serenade
Where have you been all my life
now that it’s nearly done?
Here on this island of our birth?
Where minds venture like hands
and pedestrians traffic in
solstice cold they import from
There to Here on overcoats into gin mill
noctilucence wherein
frigidity ensues
then overturns
itself.
Where they sit apart, that woman and man
once lovers, on the longest
night of the year.
Here they speak only in syllables but
there in the throwback booths fashioned
perpendicular, prismatic high-
gloss red
Where two slip into one
as we did once
risking scandal. Those two over
There—it’s obvious they are in
over their heads
having once been head
over heels.
Back then, Ramses II was believed
to have fathered
one hundred children.
Matrimony is like that.
Everyone was drunk
when first they met.
The woman was a girl in disguise.
Ricochet barlight on white of a beard.
There, poets were never made to adhere.
Where again, it’s your dime.
There, the scherzo’s on you, pal.
Put a couple of quarters in
Where once you might have wrangled a tone.
Request permission to employ vocabulary, sir!
Currying curious favor I, choir member, cant.
Right here, te quiero, quemamos. I want you. We burn.
Can I carry your books?
Are you generous or dangerous?
Beware, where poets dally, neologisms
being diagnostic for madness.
Where mushrooms grow and worms wind.
There goes thy long-reserved senility.
There, swans are mean, they mate for life.
Where you dream of eating
one, but I pushed the head of that last one
under, as into an oven, thinking
Now “it’s your turn, PeeWee.”
Where I once was angry,
I now swan around,
my heart,
the size of a fist.
There, Buoyancy took hold,
where no singing I do fails
to please me
and that is saying something for to go
there I know you
want.
There is still a market
for a woman who knows how
to diagram a sentence
in a corset.
Here she is.
Late June
Humidity grows high and heat holds it tight.
Pupils wiggle free of their seats. An angel cracks
A can open. A voice breaks. Triple plays transpire. Twilight
Corazon radio love, Sonido Suave and tank tops are back
With a vengeance. Sirens mesmerize. Quipping, some flirt. Beach
Boys oldies resound with static edges. Freedom screams,
Whiffle-snap nights herald the long-awaited reach
Of lilac and garbage-scented June. Waterfowl careen,
Raw-voiced over the harbor. A little spot outside
Goes a long way here, where a fire escape can save your life.
Rockaway Jamaica Bay gulls swoop, drop, dive
Over Gotham waters running various and rife—
Veils of low-hanging humidity June imposes
Promise July’s chain-link fences lousy with roses.
Maruccinus, You’re Asinine
Adaptation: Catullus XII
Marrucinius, you’re asinine, deft indeed, slick too,
at least when you’re sober, and your crappy de-
meanor otherwise leaves much to be desired.
Take your sleazy maneuvers, Klepto, like your
brazen pilfering of my dinner napkins!
You think larceny’s funny? Don’t believe me?
Go on, question your brother. Ask him. I dare
say your Pollio doesn’t find your antics
so amusing at all! And we know what a
great sport Pollio is. He can take a joke.
We know Pollio’d cough up a million just
cure your sinister penchant, fix or break you—
Come clean, cough it up. Give me back what’s mine.
Pronto. Fork over the linens you swiped, Lefty.
Come on, gimme the napkins, Veranius,
carried all the way from Spain for my table
by a friend who came to dinner here and left
empty-handed and this is why 300
mean lines packing a wallop are headed your way, O,
asshole dinner companion. Better act fast.
Send the napkins which Veranius, my true
friend, bestowed upon me back, that precious item
whose high-caliber fibers are well woven
close, tight into the fabric of my being.
Those linens you swiped did not come all the way
from Spain, Stickyfingers, so loser scum like
you could pinch them in between courses and
bites and pocket them the minute my head was turned.
by Michele Madigan Somerville
Michele Somerville’s collection of poems, Black Irish, was published by Plain View Press (2009). Her book-length poem was also published by Ten Pell Books (2001). A reprint of this book is expected late this year. She won Honorable Mention in the May Sarton Contest, sponsored by Bauhan Publishing (2012). She won first place in the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Contest, which was judged by Billy Collins. In the Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition, sponsored by Eason Bookshops, she won Honorable Mention. Her poetry has been published in Hanging Loose, Mudfish, The Nervous Breakdown, Mad Hat, Puerto del Sol, 6ix, Downtown Brooklyn, Eureka Street, LiveMag, Brooklyn Review, Purchase Poetry Review, Big Time Review, and Quarto. she also writes essays and has been published in The New York Times and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. she teaches in New York City, and is an avid painter.
