October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
This Might Be The End
I took a pen from the bedside table at the hotel
the one off the highway near the salt marshes,
the highway with two lanes, lined with the swell of seawater rot.
The floodwater had just subsided and the air was biting.
Lots of things had been lost.
I drove there with my windows open in slithering April humidity,
snuck up on the neon sign, crawling ashamed into what would be
too late for introspection.
Met by brown eyes, by fingers drifting out like seaweed.
Suddenly you realize that you’re really there, and
maybe the floodwater has not quite subsided, and maybe
we’re floating corpses, dreaming our last dreams
before the synapses turn to salt.
Death is a thought more beautiful than love, because death cannot be undone.
On the fourth floor, the wallpaper was the color of coral.
I coiled my hair behind my head, you whispered to my toes.
My smooth white belly, my fingers pink and trembling.
I smelled nothing but the crusted salt leftover after evaporation.
Maybe I was dehydrated, I tell myself. Maybe I just need this moisture.
You grabbed the sheets, I grabbed the pen.
Held it in my teeth, bit down on it as if it was all supposed to hurt.
You kissed my wrist instead. You kissed my fingertips.
This is where marriages end—in beds and in banks, signing forms with hotel pens.
Inviting the dreadful weight of him, the weight of knowing
that there are things in life which can never be completed.
I wonder if people die like this, imagining other ways to end a life.
Right here, this is where marriages end—when you close your eyes
and suddenly you’re like threads,
knitted together. Even if you’re pulled apart, they can all see dozens of tiny holes
where once there were guilty seams.
Later, you’ll try to brush the lint away, but it will cling to you.
Later, you’ll be drifting down the highway in the dark.
Someday, the floodwaters will rise up again
and you’ll be on the bridge.
A poem to the one I love
I wish
and in wishing, disintegrate
my lips quivering
how light your footsteps
I pause
what’s left of a honey-coated trick
somehow I leaned into you
kissed the palm of your hand
we were outside, horns slick in the rain
I wish
and in wishing, unravel
falling into my penance wherever I can find it
in kitchens and under stacks of paperwork
until I go to sleep
Wishing is a broken wing
a crack in the mirror, a barely visible scar
I swallow the wishing and the wreckage of the wishing
floats in my mouth
I spit the splinters onto the floor
and sweep them away
He knew nothing of my transition
nothing of the wishes I exhaled into his mouth
by Cassandra Morrilly
Cassandra Morrilly was raised in rural Ohio before receiving a BA in English from Seton Hall University, followed by an MA in Literature from the University of Colorado. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her pack of ravenous terriers, and works for Regis University.
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 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.
