July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
He took his car and swerved
down
the side of the mountain,
up the side of the mountain, overlooking
the valley of trees, miles of green and farther away, the city.
He drove fast and we screamed joy. No music. Just the wind, high-pitched, shrieking, racing with us around bends, curves, inclines.
You flew.
Mustangs,
Thunderbirds,
Winged horses
Fell from the sky.
Long before crumpled metal and flames, they were fire, lava furies taunting the darkness with their light. Solar flares against the twilight universe.
She screamed when the blue-clothed messengers came. Inaudible sounds.
Molten feathers cannot achieve flight.
Porcelain seemed wrong to contain you
so I took handfuls and threw them into the pale blue from an incredible height
and watched grave dust line pristine clouds
until the invisible gathered it
and took you away.
Azure Arther
Originally from Flint, Michigan, Azure Arther learned early to deal with economic struggle by manipulating her experiences into fodder for her creative fire. Now a resident of Texas, and a grad student at the University of Texas, she placed second in the graduate level of the 2013-14 TACWT contest. She has been writing since she was five-years-old, and laughs at her first ten-line story, which was about three puppies.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Eurydice
What would he say if he could see me like this:
stinking of nicotine, sitting in the dark
across from the fucker with fat fingers
who’s never seen anything like me before.
Would he kiss me
Or tell me to brush my teeth?
Nowadays I can drink a carafe of wine and not feel a thing.
I got all the mean, deep feelings a girl could want.
Does that count for something in a lover?
What would he say if he could see me:
“Just because you went down south for a few days,
it doesn’t make you a bohemian.”
Would he bring lilacs?
Would we drown in the silence?
Would he find anything irresistible left inside of me?
Maybe I can still forget about him.
There’s always that distant possibility.
The Man I Loved
He drifted out with the tide.
He burned away on the end of a cigarette.
Or maybe he went out for a carton of milk
And never came back.
It was a harmless kind of disappearing.
Kate Douglas
Kate Douglas is a writer and performance artist living in New York. As a playwright, her work has been produced at Ars Nova and Joe’s Pub. She is a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters’ Lavina Kohl Award for Excellence in Literature and the NJ Governors Award in Arts Education for her short play Treading Water. Her poetry has been published in Contrary Magazine, among others.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
small promise the mountains back deep
in distant dawn as too
now a truck slows from great swell
small and low, within
bladder is full and cells nervy enough
sing freedom
for empty gravel, for roads which run
and the dark differs
as all altitudes once, done and knowing this so
the brain springs
so settles this indifference as the shake sure
comes as the tuck back
and at just-almost, where green of the grass,
frost covers, all eyes for
and for boots dusty, red and glad
simply for the cover
a cap is pulled as the colder gets and gone
still as waits, the door is open
past hay patch and shot rang, and not far off
awaken have the birds
Mark Magoon
Mark Magoon writes poetry and short stories, and secret songs for his dog. His poetry can be found in print in After Hours and Midwestern Gothic, and on the web at DIALOGIST, Ghost Ocean Magazine, and The Nervous Breakdown. His creative nonfiction piece, Chef!Chef!Chef!, can be found at Burrow Press Review. He lives in Chicago with a wife far too pretty.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Today was hot and sticky in the way
only august could be, and as I cut cilantro and strawberries
I thought of how plants only flourish when you take care of them,
and that the halves of strawberries look like hearts
when laid side by side
I’m sorry that my grandma taught me how to
be patient at a young age,
and in retaliation I became reckless with
everyone around me.
So please know that I never meant to push you away,
I only wanted to see how far I could run before you chased after me.
I’m sorry that my mother trained me how to
be passive-aggressive
by always getting her way without ever asking for it.
So please, don’t be upset when I can’t make a decision,
because we both know that I’ll chose you every damn time.
I’m sorry that my dad was never around,
and let me down more times than I can count on my fingers & toes,
a contorted game of Pick-Up-Sticks,
ignored.
So please, bear with me as I try to make our time count,
Tallying up every moment your lips touch mine
If the wrinkles in my sheets were the miles between us,
I’d pull them until they lay flat, bringing you a little bit closer
and wishing for the thousandth time tonight that it was you
in the space in between my
sheets
and the heat between my
thighs.
Tatiana Goodman
Tatiana is a student on the west coast with a love of travel. She is beginning the study of psychology.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
It’s Strange
It’s strange,
What we can turn ourselves into:
Put yourself on a bender, become an alcoholic—
three days, maybe four.
It’s easy— just a little effort, that’s all it will take.
I’m lucky, I suppose, that it’s just booze:
Imagine what I could do to myself if I really got adventurous?
There’s so much out there to get twisted up in—
Drugs, guns, girls, gangs;
Revolutions, continental drift,
Exotic animal testing and tasting;
The Ice ages, war reenactments, bartending classes;
Time travel, the Butterfly Net Racket, MIA rescue, aquarium diving;
Making movies, the Halloween mask syndicate, the Asian market toilet dash—
The Air Turbulence Temperance League?
So many dangerous occupations—
And all the hazards of just waking up and breathing in.
So, what’s so bad about just sitting in this comfortable chair,
Counting the drinks I’ve had,
Making comets of the songs I sing,
ghost stories of my own history?
It’s a Wonder
It’s a wonder,
how I lived so long without
the sound
of a harmonica and scratching strings
on a slightly out of tune guitar.
It’s a wonder
that it took me so long
to hear the words
buried under the noise of that song
that I always said I hated.
It’s a wonder
how I haven’t started yet
and that I am still here,
drawing circles in a notebook
and tapping my rhythmless fingers
onetwo, onetwo, onetwo—
The tiniest, hollow thud
on a tabletop
could fire off earthquakes
in a silent room,
in a silent house,
that knows nothing at all
about the rhythms of regret.
Andrew LaRaia
Andy LaRaia is a Literature and Writing Teacher in Istanbul, Turkey. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, where he studied with Richard Bausch and Alan Cheuse.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
webbed, goose-white
nut-broadened bird.
He could green-water
scum-break and wet-
feather-waddle from the shallows.
He stumbled through lives, wives,
fragrance and faux pas,
yet by boat or bank, under bridge,
elegant he was, easy
legged, otter-elan,
loafing, lollygagging
log-light, drifting
towards senility
with a watery grace.
Once he challenged the current
near Dubuque and came across
a quarter-mile downstream,
and once he pushed it north
against the choppy grind,
kissed the lock’s locked door
and felt the wild whiskers
of a big-bellied cat
checking his calves for lunch
and with dawdle-not
fear kicking his feet
like a steamboat’s paddle
went south and never returned.
Jeff Burt
Jeff Burt works in manufacturing. He has work in Rhino, Nature Writing, Windfall, and Thrice Fiction, and forthcoming in Mobius and Storm Cellar.
