April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Summer after chlorine saturated summer
we pretended we were cholitas,
twelve year old lambs in disguise.
I wore swap-meet Adidas breakaways over unshaved
legs and blue gray Venice Dolphin’s swimsuit.
Seventeen, our lieutenant, tiptoed lightly,
a damp towel tightly wrapped around her curves,
sang Mariah Carey’s Fantasy.
She’s Mary’s baby, her adopted baby.
Seventeen, thick with double D breasts, a hot
wanton waist and straight hair I secretly longed for.
I whisper to her – hard candy.
At fifteen she’d played with dirty dice, chupando
sandia lollipops; tamarindo con chile,
I swam laps in the pool, her voice carried;
high and sweet melting handlebars off cholito
low-rider bikes, swollen sloppy lips, saccharine
kisses, a rub down of adolescent stiffies.
She never played water polo with us.
Practicing her synchro routines, a sexy under water flamingo,
she danced for a boy I liked. I watched as he bit
her right shoulder, a small burn mark on my lips.
At night I wore flannel pajamas to her sleepover party.
She wore nothing and played digits with her boyfriend.
I reached for my inhaler.
Years later I held her hand, too much like my own
small and soft,
we buried her mother. Her father too.
She calls me on my birthday.
I love her. She’s tattooed, tired and beautiful.
Real hard candy.
Her belly was full that night.
Drops of honey dew spilled out
dimples and sparkle eyes.
She smiled when she cooed, sweet baby lamb.
Mother. Seventeen.
by A. R. Castellanos
Born and raised in Los Angeles, A. R. Castellanos writes poetry, fiction and memoir that draw upon her vibrant and tenacious ancestral heritage in Guatemala and California. Her conjured worlds encompass feral spirits, otherworldly legends, and the disconcerting realities of domestic workers in Hollywood celebrity homes.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
I sat among the books and the shelves rattled and shook
The covers flying open as the words wrestled their way out, shattering the air with a collective shout,
Settling down into a song the words took shape, rising and falling each one struggling to find it’s space
The melody began, drifting, dancing
Lazily the tune took me like a stream, each turn and bend showing me a new dream
The harmony joined in, as I looked upon the banks and saw the rolling hills and fields ready to be filled with whatever my mind could make
The stronger words decided to have their turn, as the stream gained strength and a river was born
Dropping me down in frigid waters, and the song was gone and the only sound was the chatter of my teeth
Then I burst through again, and drawing breath, riding the crest of the wave, I found myself at the sea and knew I could stay afloat
As the sun warmed my skin, I heard the sweet hymn once more, and looked out and saw forever stretched across the shore
by Crawford Krebs
Crawford Krebs is eighteen years old and lives in South Carolina.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Self-help book publishers
Looking for old answers
In new packaging
Of crafty cover art
Catered to mid-life upstarts
Caught up in life’s heist
Stealing unpredictable
Trust fund diamonds
Hiding from the sun’s glare
Seeks futility’s self-awareness
Posing as repressed confessions
Yet still contributes to yearly profits
by Charlie Weeks
Charlie Weeks is the type of guy who writes with any liquid poison soaking in his mind. He has been recently published in lit mags such as the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg review and Summer edition of Haunted Waters.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
In every family photograph
I see what isn’t there,
the change in my face,
my father’s gestures,
my mother’s hair.
I search through the box of photographs
for evidence. The fights we didn’t hear.
The book and its damning inscription.
Do I imagine the rift in the photograph,
the four of us on the couch in Texas at Grandpa’s house?
Mom is holding me still
her hands on my upper arms
as I lean toward the edge of the frame.
Eddie is resting against Dad,
his whole body balanced,
a weight on my father’s knee.
Dad leans away.
Mom looks dazed, her smile as static
as the turned up ends of her plastered hair.
I read an article years ago about how you could
tell which Hollywood stars were breaking up
by paying attention to body language in candid photographs.
Do I imagine our demise
in the way my parents lean away from each other,
in the way my brother tries to hold them still,
in the way I struggle to escape?
by Lori Gravley
Lori Gravley writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She earned her MFA from the University of Texas at El Paso. She has published poems and essays in a variety of journals, including Flights, Ekphrasis, and Mock Turtle Zine. She has work forthcoming in Crack the Spine and I-70 Review. She lives just outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio between a meadow and a cornfield.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
hide with me
in the unfinished corner
of creation
from Hannibal,
Busta Rhymes,
and Google
Matthew McConaughey
will have no power
until sundown.
we will play yahtzhee in the dark,
the dice with convex dots
so we can feel something
there are lightning bolts
in our eyes and we can split trees
by looking.
let’s read
the curvature
of the horizon
to each other
fingers thrust into the copper blood soil
your face deep in citrus and silver.
it’s dark but for your thoughts
and the full clouds.
by Akiva Savett
Akiva J. Savett’s poetry has been published in a chapbook entitled Preservation and appeared in The Orange Room Review, Poetry Quarterly, Kerem, Circa, The Red River Review, In Parentheses, Four And Twenty, The Eunoia Review, Etcetera, and was published in The Washington Post’s “Autobiography As Haiku.” He teaches English and Advanced Placement Literature at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He holds an MA in English from University of Delaware and lives in suburban Maryland with his wife Alison and two children.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
A man who confessed to being insane enough
a man who confessed to being insane enough
to live with beasts. that’s not fair to the beasts.
what he meant was human beings.
you could tell because he was obsessed with fire
rising between the trees, & there’s no beast
who comprehends this as obsessable— it is to be fled.
so he meant human beings. in any case,
he wasn’t the only prick in the world insane enough
to do what he confessed to, but we all brag in different
cadences; mostly he just makes me think: so what? &
beautiful… that’s beautiful…
i’ll tell you what: we only suffer
long enough to die alive. that’s all.
that’s enough reason to be insane. i, for my part, still prefer
beastly people to human beings, the living to the dead.
by Steven Fregeau
Here & Now
The age of silked pimps
Has ended; the age of the thug
Has begun.
The proof is in
The uneven thumping upstairs,
The angry shouts,
A fallen window,
Footsteps stamping down the ceiling plaster,
A broken bottle,
A slammed door unevenly shuddering back open into the hall,
A man’s feet on the stairs,
His jeans & Tshirt blurring through the December bushes,
His beater car peeling off,
& her weeping in the room above my bed
As the muffled radio pants for breath in the bathroom.
A cat peers in my window
& I throw a sock at it
Because it flirts with skunks
& the summer stink lingers
Like the smell of an unfaithful wife.
It is Christmastime & I have no work.
I hear the worst of it in the daytime.
Everyone else is at work.
They have families & ambitions of love.
Sometimes love isn’t enough.
Sometimes it is enough that the radio upstairs goes silent.
Sometimes the thugs
Make sense,
& that truly does hurt.
by Steven Fregeau
Steven lives in Canton, OH and enjoys red wines, whiskeys, art, poetry, music, etc., and time spent at dive bars talking to people who manage to get by in life somehow (neighbors). College was the biggest mistake he ever made successfully. Oh, well.
