October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Dublin’s rowdy streets surround me, shops shackle me to my routines, Rome’s old Kyries rape me, England’s imperialist memories break me, America’s black and white fifties families flash ever before my eyes. I find the key, gasping for breath, no more breakdowns or suffocating, flying-driving-running through dirty demonic Dublin pubs, roadlines-shrines-bright green fields yield to desolate dead Skellig Michael and the end of the earth apocalyptic Aran Islands, searching-grasping-finding-…What? Delphic Self? No anything but, knowledge and college already teaching me Joyce’s universality of particularity. Then what? Why go on in the caged rat race? Selfless saintliness led to several nearly successful suicide attempts. So why- balance? Really, back to ancient Aristotle again? No no, this time no balance, no monastic saintliness, no hedonistic selfishness, all of it banished like Baudelaire, ripping apart and reveling in the ravaged earth like Rimbaud, drunk on wine, drunk on water, drunk on poetry, drunk on sodomy, drunk on virtue, drunk on vice, drunk on creating, drunk on destroying.
by Ross Knapp
Ross Knapp is a recent college graduate with degrees in philosophy and literature who’s also an MFA graduate student in creative writing and poetry. He has an experimental literary novel and various poetry publications forthcoming. Originally he was planning on law school or a PHD in philosophy before deciding to pursue poetry and writing as a career. Some of the poets he admires most are Sappho, Virgil, Li Po, Hafiz, Francois Villon, Dante, Keats, Whitman, Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Pound, Crane, Millay, Thomas, Sexton, Lowell, Ginsberg, and Plath.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The moon’s red-faced hymen is crestfallen;
eclipsed by a trilogy of cloven sol kisses.
Our universe is not one.
Mechanical bulls are wrangling in ‘The House
of the Rising Sun.’ The sorority girls are all bowlegged
from bar shopping their reversible jeans. Their frat
boys left snipe hunting for lost birds of paradise.
‘Where have all their trappings gone—
long time passing?’
‘Stoned People’ are awakening in their old sweat lodges—
changing cubic zirconia cornerstones into granite ballast
rocks and new altar tops.
Near Nowata, Oklahoma, a shaman rolls the tombstone
blocking Cutfinger Cave over maggots passing through
on a sacrificial cat—
and the spirit of Chief Pokegon wanders.
by Kevin Heaton
Kevin Heaton is originally from Kansas and Oklahoma, and now lives and writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in a number of publications including: Guernica, Raleigh Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Vinyl Poetry, The Adroit Journal, and Mixed Fruit. He is a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Beached What Found in NYC is Dead
-CBS news headline, 12/27/2012
What is it on the shore among the cockle shells and sea grass,
the beached thing, swelling, gulls pecking at the sores: this question
straining to breathe under its own gravity. The biggest questions
exist uneasily here. I love when they call me ‘wera,’ she tells me.
and of course, I don’t ask. Somewhere along the coastline, Zihua:
the wind tastes like the rim of a margarita glass, the Mexican boys trill
their r as they say it. They teach her to cha-cha and to tango. They wake
still drunk and naked on the beach, seaweed reeking, and the sun stuck
in the dunes like it won’t ever rise, black dog chasing the gulls,
orange morning slowly pouring itself over her salty yellow hair:
a mosquito in amber, maybe, or some other time-stopped thing—maybe
the flash-frozen moment of a first kiss or a goodbye. There is more than one way
to be stuck. A question is an auger, boring into the amber. Don’t ask.
Queens, New York: I’m there, walking Palmer Drive in search of a question,
and she’s telling me across three thousand miles, wera, wera, wera—she trills
like they taught her, no sign among the waves of the Rockaway
of the thing ending its life on the shore, before it even knows what it is.
by Brandon Getz
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The Grim Reaper sits in a tire swing
hung from the branch
of a huge old maple
set back thirty feet from the sidewalk;
his scythe abandoned casually on the ground
near a rose bush
growing around the trunk of the tree.
Lazily swinging back and forth,
he’s humming softly to himself,
the tips of his deep purple boots
just skimming the bare patch of ground beneath the swing.
“ Nice night,”
I offer, hoping to sound neighborly.
“Indeed it is,” he replies magnanimously.
“It’s my night off,” he adds,
as if he feels an explanation is in order.
“Well, you’ve got a great night for it,”
I answer, doing all that I can to keep
from picking up my pace.
“What’s your name, by the way?” he asks,
seemingly as merely an afterthought.
Pretending not to hear,
I then do pick up the pace a wee bit.
I hear his guttural chuckle,
but don’t let myself turn around.
Instead, I throw up my right hand
In what I hope will be construed as a
“See ya, have a good one” wave.
“I’m Edward,”
I hear him shout after me plaintively,
causing a pang of guilt
to tug at my conscience.
The Grim Reaper likes to swing?
And his first name is…,
Edward?
by Roy Dorman
Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for 60 years. At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer. He has had poetry and flash fiction published recently in Burningword Literary Journal, Drunk Monkeys, The Screech Owl, Crack The Spine, Yellow Mama, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Every Day Fiction, and Lake City Lights, an online literary site at which he is now the submissions editor.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Pylons of hay prop up the sky.
A tower of straw as a model
for structure, and deep in its shadow
the very hands that made this image of field
permanent
reduce the field with a word, and the stars
collapse.
It seems we’re forever:
mining the soil for what it means to be flat
while being
flattened by dreams that believe themselves mountains.
In time everything green learns to grow
horizontal.
As we die in our image while the image
endures.
No closer to meaning, the light angles penitently
around,
enslaved by what it conveys,
aching to be nothing again.
by *********************@***oo.com“>John Sibley Williams
John Sibley Williams is the author of eight collections, most recently Controlled Hallucinations (FutureCycle Press, 2013). He is the winner of the HEART Poetry Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and Board Member of the Friends of William Stafford. A few previous publishing credits include: American Literary Review, Third Coast, Nimrod International Journal, Rio Grande Review, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
His memory
was a mortuary
for the time capsuled
thoughts that
recessed – to erase
the condescension
that presided
over the torment,
that buried beneath
the sulfured
insubordination.
Their sardonic
disposition
grinned
as they froze
like winters
remorse,
while their
malevolence
anointed
fiction and
constructed
the masquerade
of fabrics built
within his presence.
Their thoughts
were pistols,
but they
shot their trite
under their
muscles,
where
they pinched
like needles,
and sedated their
fallacies with
laughters
beyond the
steel curtains,
where grinders
decimated
his heart.
When he
pleaded
for help,
they vanished
like spirits,
but when
they called,
he stood
there like a
stubborn weed,
refusing to
be torn from
the graveled soil,
as animosity
vanquished
their sanctioned
apparitions.
In his presence,
he may not
feel the taint,
even when
it surrounds him,
but when they
depart they
grab their
scissors
and cut
through
their honesty
and saw
their truths
as if authenticity
had dissipated,
and resentment
reigned
until he felt the rain
of suspicion
linger like
a lobotomized
incision.
Images
project their
sardonic
smiles
and they
resurface
like debt,
with deception
smeared on
the lies
they closeted.
They departed
after their shifts,
but their
bodies rifled
stronger signals
than the cell phones
they possessed.
by Christopher Ozog
Christopher Ozog is a 22 year old poet residing in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He Has previously been published in Burningword Literary Journal and The Commonline. To learn more, visit his twitter at “@expressiveozog.”
