January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Two censuses back
Our home held three:
An infant was added
To you and me.
A census ago
We counted more:
Persons in household
Numbered four.
This latest census
Our data was new:
Three residents remained,
But where were you?
by Barth Landor
Barth Landor has had poems in Clapboard Journal, Spectrum, Inscape and Grey Sparrow Journal (named the Best New Literary Journal of 2011-2012). His poem ‘Tree’ was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011, and the online journal Lowestoft Chronicle published two poems in 2012, including ‘Grotte de Niaux’, nominated by them for a Pushcart Prize.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Weird Scenes Beside the Chevron
The two next to
the blue dumpster
cradling drums
of Steel Reserve,
greasy with worry
– you’ll find them anywhere
When we slow down for gas and caffeine
It’s the defiant palms I’m looking at
a second time, in towns
with names I’ll never know, settled
around redundant strip malls
blistering along the Pacific Coast Highway
These wild-haired beasts tower, they loom
We admire them on TV from afar
but, slashed through with their shadows,
we’re reminded of sands
slipping quickly through an hourglass
of some Endless Summer’s possibility
This holdover Boomer hokum persists, somehow
even while actual people live, here,
walk to work here, buy milk, here,
guzzle malt liquor next to dumpsters, here,
give up on whatever dream we could name, here
I turn my eyes straight ahead- the road, turning the key
by Chris Middleman
Arc of Dreams
Each time I sold Donald Passman’s
All You Need to Know About the Music Business
I saw the copy as a perfect-bound totem;
Here was another set of bloodletting parents
financing their gauge-eared Meredith’s
vague Vans-sponsored notion
of graduating to a stage where action
burns brightly; a stage shared by heroes
where she could act out her love
The love, of course,
never turned out to be creating, or
even helping finance good art;
nor was it a taste for dismantling a system
stacked so stupidly against vision
One way or another, at rainbow’s end
was typing mass PR emails,
answering phones for deceiving dinosaurs
wearing t-shirts instead of suits,
sitting in on “rap sessions” discussing the
optimization of monetization of YouTube clicks
While never having listened to Television
Never having heard Cybotron
Never getting played on freeform FM
Never getting crowned a hero by some kid
after a show, in a parking lot, at the bar
And one day, she’ll have to bow out
of the all the excitement of free merch,
festival passes and promos
for the birth of her little Emma, whom
one day, shall be enrolled in the School of Rock
by Chris Middleman
And in NPR, We Are Redeemed
A sheep rancher whispers into a
microphone held out in some dappled pasture
that the United States lost its taste for mutton
after so many canned rations were slavishly
gobbled during World War II; we dress ourselves
in December with a mess of shredded Sprite bottles
Though the market seems to have
bottomed out for this man whom the mind’s
director casts as an epileptic caterpillar of a
moustache wriggling beneath a brown-brimmed hat,
the hope is that immigrants and parents
in poorer neighborhoods that can’t afford
the food they prepare at work could be enticed
to make mutton a staple of their diets
With parting clouds, the dollar value of
this potential market is recognized
and we finally understand them as human
by Chris Middleman
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
We’re sitting at an outdoor table
on the Broadway sidewalk watching
the rhythmic pause-and-go of traffic
through the Saratoga streets,
the hum and squeals of engines and brakes,
the hydraulic groan of the 473 bus as it unloads
its cargo of townsfolk and tourists,
their chatter filling the summer air
in the absence of birds. A boy sits
at the bus stop with a silent guitar in hand,
ignored by those coming and going.
We watch people board the bus
as you sip your Bloody Mary,
savoring the olives in your mouth,
turning them over like words
you’d rather hear than speak.
The waitress brings our food
and sets it down like the silence
between us. The small pink creatures
of your shrimp cocktail remind me
of the things I’ll fail to say––
laid out before us, untouched
and wholly intact yet
so obviously dead.
The boy still sits at the bus stop.
His guitar is still silent, its case
open at his feet like an empty wallet.
Passing pedestrians pay him no mind.
No one is giving me any money
he complains to no one in particular,
but he isn’t playing anything.
by Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco was born in the Bronx, New York, though he’s lived in Florida for most of his life. He graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a B.A. in English Lit. He’s also studied creative writing at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College and film at Charles University in Prague. He currently resides in Miami, Florida.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
My fingernail, your pancreas,
your palm, starving tribes in the Sudan.
My esophagus, Joan of Arc’s enflamed hair.
Your mother’s lungs, La Brea.
Your neck, a lighthouse’s spiral staircase,
my eyes, a beacon over turbulent waters.
Your conscience, below the surface;
my fingers, holding it there.
My heart valves, the locks along the Erie Canal,
reining things in, keeping things from getting out of hand.
My lungs, an orchard ripe for plucking,
my genitals, coals from the bottom of the fire,
my uterus, invasive, like mint, getting its fingers everywhere.
My disappointment: the iceberg, a lightning strike, a barbed hook. A super nova.
Yours: the Titanic, the Gulf oil spill,
a family of beached whales. No—a black hole.
by Emily Hockaday
Emily Hockaday’s first chapbook, Starting A Life, was published in June 2012 with Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Newtown Literary, Pear Noir!, The West Wind Review, Plainspoke, and others. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU and has served as a judge for NEA’s poetry out loud program.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Requiem for an Empire
“Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.”
—”Clenched Soul,” Pablo Neruda
I remember you with my soul clenched,
realizing the ground has given way.
This façade crumbles, a life envisioned
becomes a ruin before its construction—
our vast empire founded on untruth and decay.
I remember you with my mind blockaded,
every exit patrolled by the ghost of us.
Trapped within this hostile land
I hide in the shadows of monuments
dedicated to a god that no longer exists.
I remember you with my body broken,
blood that would have spilled for you
wasted on barren earth, boiling in the heat
of the sun that once polished your face,
but now blisters my eyes as I remember.
As I gaze upon our remnants,
sand claiming what was once ours,
I recall those earth-ending words—
they caught like bones in your throat,
until they lurched out, laying waste.
I stand here, in remembrance of our empire,
devastation ruling my heart, your name
treading the edge of my tongue
as I force myself to stone, yet crack.
I am all that has survived—
A crumbling statue at the center of nothing.
by James Thomas
Reconciliation
They wake despite themselves,
backs still turned, each spine an abatis against intruders.
First-sleep is broken by the witching
time of night; Circadian servants rebel against their ruler.
Neither remembers why they’d fought,
or is certain that they ever had, confounded by dreams.
Wheel and pinion turn in unison:
mechanical precision, oneiric delirium.
Wordless mouths blindly advance,
mashing together with sacramental stress.
Hands pass over skin like braille
their serpentine bodies in blissful anguish.
Order’s simulacrum born
of bedlam: zealots under goose-down.
They offer sacrifices
to each other, prayers, seeds.
Unburdened and disarmed,
they end, captivated, entangled,
And drift
to sleep—their spirits cleansed, their flesh unclean.
by James Thomas
Post-Mortem
I dream of a corpse lying before me—
rigid and staring, eyes fogged over,
mouth tightened to a grin—
a warm gesture from my dead-ringer.
I smile back at this cold me, my knife
sliding down his chest like a lover’s
hand, lustful precision arousing flesh
to reveal its taunting secrets.
He opens up to me—a host of maladies
malign my inquiries—each adamant
about their role in my friend’s demise.
So I ask my corpse, “what killed us?”
His grin is less welcoming now, ribcage
glistening in fluorescent light, I dig
for answers. My knife nicks his liver,
like an eagle’s beak, over and over.
In the silent room I hear my own heart
beating back the stillness of death.
For an instant, it seems his heart beats
in time with mine, but no. I continue.
I grasp his heart, press it in unison
with my own—a last-ditch effort
of a man wishing to become
Lazarus, but my prayer falls unheard.
I set my tools aside.
I glance back at my pale face—the eternal
grin mocking my fear,
happier dead than I will ever be.
by James Thomas
James Thomas is a Senior at the University of North Texas studying Creative Writing.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
She mumbles into tubes
and silver scissor.
They cut
her hair:
on the floor old dull needles.
I think of my mother
braiding my hair
half-asleep, her fingers weaving
in the dark.
Above the floor are
a mother’s fingers moving in and
out of the silver hair. The nurse sweeps
it into a bucket, the hand’s ghost,
the girl’s hair, their endless
inexorable braid.
by Brittany N. Jaekel
Brittany is currently studying communication disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and hopes to pursue a PhD in the field. She graduated with a dual degree in creative writing and psychology from Northwestern University in 2011, and writes poetry when she has a moment to spare.
