January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
The Old Dog finds its legs in the corner. He wants to take me for a walk, but I’m too weak. He knows that better than anyone. He’s been waiting.
We found each other the day I sank into my cups and carved up a drifter for sport. Together we buried the corpse underneath a wooden shed. I remember thinking how deftly his charcoal legs beat back mounds of frozen earth. Back then the Old Dog was only a pup with thoughtless marble eyes and fangs like sewing pins. He’s walked in my shadow ever since, placing paw after paw in my wayward steps. He’s seen me lie and cheat to cover up my crime. He’s watched me kill again and again. With each transgression the Old Dog took on weight and edges and heat. Now his claws glow like coals in a forge and his old bones land like anvils, cracking my ribs as he mounts my chest. His jaws close around my throat and I can taste his canine breath. The scent of eggs fills every cavity in my skull.
My Old Dog wants to take me for a long walk.
by Zach Lisabeth
Zach Lisabeth is a Los Angeles-based speculative fiction author. His work has appeared in the anthology RealLies (The Zharmae Publishing Press and he is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
*
Here, there, the way silence
tows you below the waterline
and though you are alone
you’re not sure where her name
is floating on the surface
or what’s left
grasped by a single wave
that never makes it to shore
splashes as if this pen
is rowing you across the stillness
the dead are born with
–you are already bathing, half
from memory, half by leaping
from the water for flowers
growing everywhere –for you
this page, unclaimed :a knife
dripping with seawater
and your throat.
by Simon Perchik
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Osiris, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Today I thought I saw an ex-love
driving an old Mercedes
with stinking exhaust.
He had a beard
and drove slowly
as if he had no where to go,
as if he wasn’t the younger man
I held captive
in my memory.
Years ago,
right there in the dark—
we became birds
standing on a wire of resistance.
He was a flight risk.
I had a nest.
Ex-loves are panhandlers
of the heart.
They beg for remembrance—
loose change in a cup,
memories clink and spill.
Who can survive on this change?
At the intersection of Washington Boulevard
and North Roosevelt Street stands a man
with a sign that reads:
Bet You Can’t Hit Me
With A Quarter.
I pass him every Monday morning.
I’ve yet to throw a quarter his way.
Sometimes he smokes
and it’s so cold
I worry his hands are too numb
to pick up that quarter—
thrown hot from some hand.
by Sarah Lilius
Sarah currently lives in Arlington, VA with her husband and two sons. She is a poet and an assistant editor for ELJ Publications. Some of her publication credits include the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, BlazeVOX, Bluestem, and The Lake. She is also the author of the chapbook What Becomes Within (ELJ Publications 2014).
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
before
I’m stricken down
by overwhelming
heartiness
Lindo,
remember
my hands flagging
down my elbows
when I suddenly bent
them at asymmetric angles
and thrust them toward my second rib
to cry out a phlegmy Milwaukee born
Hrrrrraaghh!
I’m stricken up
like that often
you know-
I’ve watched you
you flinch with a smile
three seconds before it comes
knowing all
about the blended
and aimed reverence
laced tolerance
masking irritation
and dismissal I shove
into every
boisterous afternoon
I spend with you
by Steven Minchin
Steven enjoys capturing things he’s seen almost as much as things he has not. To date he has quite a collection of both. He makes Facebook his artistic warehouse and periodically promotes dead people there, elsewhere his work has appeared in Mad Swirl, Heavy Hands Ink, Short, Fast and Deadly, vox poetica, and Crack the Spine.
January 2015 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
what becomes
you are breathing on the
frozen ground with broken ribs you
are smiling and we are higher up
between venus and the crescent
moon in the last seconds before
first light we are falling we are
praying are laughing at the
idea of someone else’s pain
are laughing in the tall grass and
she is turning away with
broken hands a bleeding mouth and
i have known her i have held her
and he is at the wrong end of
the gun
he is no one or at least is no one
we know and she is laughing
as the trigger is pulled
he is laughing and they are
breathing with their lungs full
of iridescent poison full of
broken glass and this is the
moment when she speaks my
name
this is the taste of
her salt on my lips
we are alone here together and
moving deeper
into the heart of salvation
a luminous song
baby shot in the head outside a liquor store,
held up like a shield by its father and
no one can tell you when this desert began and
no one can tell you where it ends
the maps are all drawn in black on black
the politicians all laugh
it can go two different ways
you see
and the dogs believe in violence and the
whores believe in money and
both will always lead to power
and the bay is dead and then the father
but it’s a long ways away in
both space and time
a warm summer evening on
the opposite coast and i’m 26
i’ve given up on heroes and i’ve given
up on god and what it feels like is freedom
a small surrealist game to be played in a
back
yard
garden
with polished stones and
bleeding hands and naked lovers
a pile of skulls left at the water’s edge
and the mother says he never
really wanted a child and
the humor in pain is sometimes difficult to find
the joy found in terrorizing others is
what makes us human
seems like what you’d actually want to
be is something
more or something less
an answer
life wasted crawling towards water beneath the
sky blue sky and these
last days of winter and this taste of dirty frost
this 10 below zero this neverending wind and all of
the furniture from
the burned house spread out on the lawn
jesus in his unmarked grave
dreaming lightning bolts
understands the kingdom of god is a
fairy tale for suckers and fools
knows in his endlessly dying heart that a man who
wants for nothing is a man who can never be trusted
diogenes
and nothing and
nothing and then ten
below zero at five thirty in the morning
no FOR or AGAINST
no TOWARDS or AWAY
am just trying to remember how to
breathe and how to be
am through believing in gods
in heroes
from room to room
with absolute clarity
need a gun or a window or the
doorway to a different kingdom
need to be a fist
a believer in those happy
days of open wounds
a priest waiting to
fuck or be fucked
i would give you hope if i could
just for the pleasure of
taking it away again
the bleeding horse sings one last song over the graves of 500,000,000 nameless victims
and if all you are is a ghost or
even if i find only one small place that
isn’t enemy territory
if the dogs have all eaten
their fill of corpses
call it a victory without
naming the war
let me rediscover hope
let me drown in the
ocean of your beauty
it’s enough that what we have will
still matter
even when nothing else does
by John Sweet
john sweet, b. 1968, winner of the 2014 Lummox Poetry Prize. opposed to the idea of plutocracies attempting to pass themselves off as democracies, and to all organized religion. not too impressed with television, either. collections include FAMINE, INSTRUCTIONS FOR DROWNING and the upcoming THE CENTURY OF DREAMING MONSTERS.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Standing As Instructed
My mother still
under her sky-blue shroud,
with her head turned to the side.
I lie down beside her.
With my face close to hers,
hers unstirring,
I take her face in my hands.
Her cheeks, two peaches
left on the ground
after the frost,
grow warm and her eyes
open—her blue-green eyes
so rich with enigma.
She smiles
and the dew
of her single breath
awakens the closeness
we never had
and that I find
only in a poem.
My mother still
under her sky-blue shroud.
I stand
ten feet away,
as the funeral director
has instructed,
for reasons of sanitation.
Summer Vacation In Europe
Light glints off
my father’s ivory suit
in pointed rays like swords
that outshine even
the intense summer sun.
Thus armed, he orders
the day’s essentials
from restaurants, hotels.
I long for his gleam.
My mother’s is hazy,
dustier,
as she explicates
walls of paintings and frescoes
in every museum and church.
I linger behind,
a reluctant tourist
in the dappled region
of age fourteen,
where, as in the arched womb
of a huge cathedral,
the perpetual dawn or twilight
smells of stone and mystery,
and glimmers flutter
high above
like white birds
caught under the ceiling.
by Betsy Martin
Betsy Martin works at Skinner House Books in Boston. She studied at Harvard University, where she earned an AB in English and American literature; the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and the Middlebury Russian School, where she graduated with an MA in Russian language; and Brown University, where she received an MA in Russian literature. When Betsy happens by a window in her busy schedule, she enjoys bird watching with her husband and playing the piano. Betsy’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alembic, Assisi Journal, Barely South Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly (Best of the Net nomination), Existere, Front Range Review, Gemini Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Helix, Limestone Journal, Louisville Review, Magnapoets, Minetta Review, Organs of Vision and Speech, Pirene’s Fountain, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, and Weber—The Contemporary West.
