October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
My Mother is a video nasty,
a lurid analog nightmare
transcribed with bloody fingers
onto VHS, shoved in a thin
cardboard box with age lines like soggy skin,
then sealed in urban legends:
tight, taught cellophane.
They speak of it in whispers on
discussion boards.
How the tracking is off on every copy,
EVERY copy. There is a gnarly buzz
scratching through the opening credits.
The last 15 minutes are legendary.
She removes her face with her finger nails,
pulls it off like a thin rubbery plastic.
A secret face, white
microwaves of intense mockery,
focused as a lighthouse beam.
Papi dies the hard way, the Clive Barker way.
Hangers like hooks, fish hooks,
tear him asunder.
He is hunks of raw, red steak.
Ribs flower from
torso as marrow oozes like a thick pollen.
This is an important shot, the commenters say,
the reconfiguring of his sex. KubrickFurry asserts
Ann’s monstrous feminine is conservative. RandallFlag
retorts there is a lacanian message obscured by this corpse
flower: the trauma of child abuse embodied by the real.
I am dodging face suns, hauling ass through the
barbed chain bramble that was my home.
Avatars debate over impossible architecture: men and women
sparring with verbal chainsaws as I run through
a five and a half minute hallway, chased by a faceless medusa
in a dream of jagged ambien singed into the glass eye of a
Kodak camera.
No one understands the ending.
They say I have to live,
fight my sister in the sequel.
They say the irrational is the milieu of cult films.
I say burn every copy of this ring virus.
Smash it.
Crush it.
Never let your mother watch it.
— David Arroyo
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
look at old kansas in the corner
everyone laughs
they always do
stared into the sun for too long
went blind went crazy
went way too fast on icy roads
and drinks to dowse a burning mistake
he says –
i remember the black and white days
back in goodland
the spencer girls in tight cotton dresses
walking back from church
in the sweet heat of summer
shutters slapping the old henderson house
most nights i could hear them
before you were born
the sky was sepia
you’re hearing ghosts – old kansas in the corner
he sits slouching with a bible and a bell
the old man knocks one back and spins faster
in the world of whiskey
he says –
i dug the earth for fifty years
i’m a fifth generation to plow these fields
but the crop is thin these days
the red plains yawn under the new sun
like beasts yoked for labor
— Kevin McCoy
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
“Therefore put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness
and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save
your souls. (James 1:21 RSV)
I scratched, pinched, bit my way through today
as if I didn’t come from a long line of God fearing folk
but from Darwin’s monkeys being provoked with pokes of fun
by human aliens all safe on the other side of the hellish cage.
I dug a deep trench hiding safely behind garbage bags of self pity
then started a sunrise war with my defenseless family,
went on to battle an army of co-workers until lunch hour found me
picking fights with unarmed cashiers, shoppers, fruit vendors,
with noses lifted so high in the air they could probably
identify by smell the flowers in heaven but not tell me..
I missed when I tried to kick a snarling dog
on the leash of a snarling man both of whom barked
at me with mouthfuls of long, white teeth, crooked
like the interlacing necks of hungry trumpeter swans
I saw later while sitting on the bench but didn’t care to feed.
Beating it home, I blasted the horn, shook a mean finger
at a gang of elementary kids playing dodge ball in the street
then couldn’t find a song on the car radio that
didn’t fill me up with great big foul irritation.
Saying prayers while I brush my teeth and my husband snores
I ask God why he gave me the burden of so much anger today
even though I know He didn’t, will mercifully forgive and help me
once I accept the blame, humbly drop to my knees to pick up
the empty cartridges of my wicked weapons of words and deeds,
that I pray have left no permanent wounds in the lives of others.
All that I have won today is a flag of guilt slapping me in the face
with the filth of my own hands; a flag at half staff with it’s metal pole
jammed deep into the shallow ground of my soul.
— Carol A. Oberg
During her writing career Carol has published widely with Blue Mountain Arts, Inc., was one of three featured poets (10 works) in Ancient Paths, issue 16, and has also published with Carcinogenic Poetry, The Avocet, Extract(s), and in the fall issue of The Fourth River (Chatham University). This poem was first published in Ancient Paths in 2010 and was nominated for a Pushcart Award.
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Methylphenidate is the name I use
To lull my child to sleep,
Swaddling her diaper rash in vinyl chloride.
I haven’t slept in days but no matter, red eyes
they suit me like latex gloves.
[What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Or else,
The pricks of a thousand chemicals
grow you new tumor friends
to show your family and coworkers.]
Paraben is the name I write on my mailbox
to ensure everyone knows not to write.
I’m not home, but I am
Inhabiting the home.
Breathing in lingering Febreeze fumes,
my mouth pressed against the armchair arm.
While the baby’s red mouth squalls.
Hetrocyclic amine is the name I say
on my child’s first birthday,
to call her out from hiding under the stairs.
I wrap my arm around her chest
and urge her to pet the neighbor’s snarling dog.
While his wife frosts a high fructose cake
and counts out Styrofoam plates.
— Meagan Maguire
Meagan Maguire is a 22 year old poet living and occasionally working in Portland, Maine. She enjoys reading, running, and informing people there actually is another Portland besides the one in Oregon. Previously her work has been featured or will be featured in The Alarmist, The Golden Sparrow Literary Review, The Eunoia Review, Words & Images, and Marco Polo Arts Mag.
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
for Susan
It’s the voice that puts
me to sleep,
something like a waltz,
the dancing to the end of love,
Leonard Cohen’s hoarse slow
tempo moving through the heart
like streets without names.
At night I stumble
into other people’s dreams.
I could simply leave
through the keyhole
but there is food
on the table,
a woman combing
her hair who looks
so much like
my first love.
— Vladimir Swirynsky
Vladimir’s 20th book of poetry Poetry: The Tedious Mining Of The Words is due out in October from New Kiev Publication.
October 2013 | back-issues, poetry
For the Ghost in My Bed
Negotiating the sheets, playing my feet —
an instinctive prelude! You’d been once
a wholly authentic person: fingernails, aquiline nose.
Now there’s a chilling patience
to you: half-exposed, half-sparkling.
We build our nest like a sleeve of jazz. There’s company
and a cake and some words no one
means or hears. We speak a language
of soft bullets, a code of violet rats. Where truth
is not dissolved it is kept fuzzy. You (my soft friend)
watch me eat. Tonight overflows
with stars and wishes not for
the good to start happening but for
the bad to finish. The scary may remain
with a person (however
discreet). I’d been lonely
a lot as god sent
very little. There are those
in this bleeding world who need
ritual but now I have you
my ghost and we let
what’s terminal coexist.
Love
The night of the party, at three am, nobody knows if you’re using the bathroom or lying in a ditch five hundred miles away. You call 911 and hear she’s leaving home after living alone for so many years. You call Sanctuary but you can’t use electricity today. Shabbat Shalom. The ditch looks like you can fit two or three people inside. Writing this means you’re not healthy anymore. It’s a pretty good party. Everyone’s drinking gin buckets. The last time they made gin buckets you lost your underwear.
— Christine Reilly
Christine Reilly lives in New York and teaches writing at the Collegiate School. She used to work at Tin House and Gotham Writers Workshop. Christine has been published in over fifty journals. She received my MFA from Sarah Lawrence and my BA from Bucknell.
