October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Damage, today I’m obsessed with damage.
The cored-out heart of the rose, not the bud
or the bloom, but root to flower—
whatever’s maimed, blemished, blistered, harmed,
this skin the talon, the thorn has hooked—
morning’s minion, ha—
and those shreddy clouds the sky assembles
only to have something fun
to tear into pieces. I remember Vuillard’s painting awash
with parlor knickknacks, his floral decor so chintzed
you can’t tell carpet from chair from curtain, can barely see
the old woman dying quietly in her rocker.
Down the street, in the corner shop the hollowed slabs
of ribcage swing. From the café radio
Janis Joplin’s ropy voice,
almost present, then static, then gone.
Something gleams from the hubcap, saying,
It’s evening, you lived so long,
what have you done? Answer it back, oh hubcap,
some things can’t be lived through—
the bolus we grow around—but there is
some endurable affliction,
the abscessed hoof sliced back until it bleeds;
we pack in the mud and wait and hope
enough foot grows back to nail on a shoe.
The long days are marked by waiting by the phone,
by the door, by the mailbox, and the sense
that the days themselves are passing.
by Helen Wickes
Helen Wickes lives in Oakland, California, and worked for many years as a psychotherapist. In 2002 she received an M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her first book of poems, In Search of Landscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. Her poems can be read and heard online at From The Fishouse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI Online, Amarillo Bay, Arroyo Literary Review, Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, The Citron Review, Confrontation, Corium Magazine, Crack The Spine, Eclipse, Evansville Review, ginosko, Pirene’s Fountain, RiverSedge, Sakura Review, Sanskrit, Santa Fe Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Stand, Talking River, TriQuarterly, Runes, ZYZZYVA, Zone 3, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Collagist, The Hollins Critic, Jet Fuel Review, The Journal, Natural Bridge, Qwerty, Santa Clara Review, Folly, Forge, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Limestone, PANK, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Cloudbank, Bryant Literary Review, Eclectica, Ellipsis…, Southwestern American Literature, Willow Review, FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry, Hanging Loose, Prick of the Spindle, Boulevard, Soundings East, Verdad, The Coe Review, Concho River Review, Crucible, The Jabberwock Review, Kaleidoscope, Pleiades, PMS poemmemoirstory, SLAB, Visions International, The Griffin, Salamander, Splash of Red, Epicenter, Barnstorm, Poetry Flash, In the Grove, Freshwater, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Weber: The Contemporary West, West Marin Review, Whisperings, Softblow, 5 AM, the Bennington Review, Picayune Magazine, Delmarva Review, The Tower Journal, Sagarana, and the anthology Best of the Web 2009.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Daniel said once that the clouds in Kansas look like giant gray brains.
Their thoughts all big and drifty and slow like ruminant sky gods.
Brains that hover over wheat fields and ineffable highways stoned
on the grandeur of their high seat until they die a raindeath or blow away.
Tonight though the sky looks hungry. Not brains but intestines.
A stomach twisting and digesting whole football fields of nimbostratus and dark Latin.
Birds scatter from wires leaving utility polls behind to hum and spark in the lesser acids.
We hear via radio of a possible tornado along I-25.
A black esophageal funnel that may or may not swallow.
The dogs come out with me onto the deck and bark death threats at the sky.
Low rumbles of famished drought-stricken thunder.
Water sits bubbling on the stovetop, forgotten, next to a package of dry spaghetti.
Only the wine makes it outside. A blood-red South American scud cloud
in a heavy glass tumbler. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, they say.
And though I am no sailor, the wine pulls me further and further into the clouds.
by Michael Young
Michael Young lives in Fort Collins, CO. He studies microbiology by day and edits Rust + Moth by night. He has been published in Aries: A Journal of Creative Expression.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
I am frantically searching
for a sharp knife: I need
to cut the sulfur from my skin.
From this river side, I can tell you
the signs of infestation:
1) the growth of tubers, and then
2) the spread.
3) When every bank of the river is covered
in tubers, the river will die.
We invented herbicide to combat this.
Sulfur, like cancer or tubers, is small,
spreads quickly, and is nearly impossible
to be rid of once it catches your skin.
Have you ever used herbicide only once?
The tubers will return. What’s unnerving
about cancer is being given blinders
and told to gallop. Try to ignore death
when it appears on the edge of the roads.
I have sulfur hiding under my skin, or
sulfur growing like tubers. It’s seeding,
turned my bloodstream yellow, and
I know this will be the end of these rivers.
by Noah Dversdall
Noah Dversdall is a young writer from Dayton, Ohio. He works as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Absinthe Dream
You share with me a bottle of special absinthe
I drink a sip
(Of that special substance!)
I feel the world slip.
The bottle clatters on the floor,
The glass window behind me shatters a thousand score,
And all of my reality is reduced to shredded tatters,
As I see the ashes fall,
As I hear the howling wind call
From a black void that swallows us both-
-in a pitch-black stasis
Where we can stare
At each other’s faces-
I hear you breathe,
I hear your heart beat,
As we embrace,
As we kiss,
As we touch,
As we feel our warm bodies together
In this cold realm where time has stopped,
Where deadlines, obligations, stress, rivalry, anxiety, and uncertainty,
Are nowhere to be found.
But if this moment ends,
I will wake up,
From dreaming,
Broken and screaming,
Falling and crying
And burning and dying
In a cacophony of fire
Raging out of the broken rubble in a twisted spire
That will consume you and me
In a black, lifeless, and torrent-ridden sea.
A Viking Eulogy
I will not let her name be forgotten
In a field of whimpers and whispers,
Nor will I let her memory dissipate
Into nothingness as I grow bitter and senile,
And I will not let her be confined
To a rotting obituary page
That flatly states that she died in a mess of metal and gravel.
I will give her a Viking Eulogy,
The story will say she had healing hands
To soothe a troubled soul,
And her soft voice would lift hearts,
And put a poor creature’s fear to rest,
And her hugs were tight and filled with love,
To anyone who held her dear in regard.
She was a Priestess of Peace.
I will give her a Viking Eulogy,
I was a lost man
Until she found me
Sitting on a stone bench.
I told her I was a broken piece
And she fixed me up for a day,
She told me to forget about the person
Who broke me, and I did.
She will have her Viking Eulogy,
I will not let her be forgotten by the ravages of time
Because her grave stone will break down from disuse
A thousand years from now.
I will sing of her Viking Eulogy.
by Kristopher Miller
Kristopher Miller has been published in Sifting Sands, Tenth Street Miscellany, Down in the Dirt, and others. He is also the self-published author of The Maze’s Amulet, an urban fantasy novella and the poetry anthology Poisoned Romance; both these books are available digitally on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
I Saw A Woman
The trees continue
recycling their timely poems
year after wind-blown year.
Soon the tenement glow
is shadowed with ice.
The bare limbs of timber
click and knock
in the windy woods
like two bucks
locked-up and tangling
over the deepest hunger.
This room is silent
and the wind is deaf.
Kids walk the ridges
carrying sticks
owners of imagination
on small wooded acres.
At the first scent of woodsmoke,
residents of alleyways,
speakers to animals,
converse between the lonely
and the gravel-bound.
Tonight the sunset
reminds me of someone.
I had never seen a face like that.
She possessed the room.
It had a special glow.
My stomach leaped to my chest.
Her red choker was a song
her hair a field. And that face.
I could barely stand to look,
I couldn’t bear not to.
Now the trees go blind
with shadow
and the pumpkins take on
the spirit of the sunset,
while I dream the dreams
of love and death.
The Poetry Room
There is a man
walking slowly
in a dark field.
He enters an empty room
closing the door behind him.
There are no windows.
He lies down on his back
detaches his face in the darkness
and places it on the floor.
The spot
where his face had been
begins to glow.
A blue luminous liquid
pours rapidly outward
filling the room.
He is completely submerged
in a translucent pool of blue
gradually darkening.
Muffled bubbling pleas
that sound like questions
catch his ears on fire.
The darkened room
thickens and burns
turning to sand.
The walls of the room
(now a sand filled vault)
become heavy iron grates.
A small boy
can be seen
kneeling on a beach.
He brushes sand away
from engraved lettering
on one of the grates.
He cannot read.
A constant breeze
turns his attention toward the ocean.
It is almost dark.
Where the water meets the sky
there is a strange glow.
February
one needn’t be
caught in the density
of canyon river eddies
to learn of impossible currents
of dark cold depths
a day passed in seclusion
winter’s stiff-armed oppression
unnamed and desolate
as an old abandoned warehouse
rotting in the rust-belt
soon the sun
sets in motion its oral tradition
translated and transmuted
by the poet and the priest
before the cold orange aura
tucks the trees away
under a blanket of night
whose certain temperament
moves toward everyone
everywhere at all times
Barry Yeoman
Barry Yeoman was educated at Bowling Green State Univ., The Univ. of Cincinnati, and The McGregor School of Antioch Univ., in creative writing, world classics, and the humanities. He is originally from Springfield, Ohio and lives currently in London, Ohio. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Red Booth Review, Futures Trading, Danse Macabre, Harbinger Asylum, Red Fez, The Wayfarer and Two Hawks Quarterly.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
“Among the graffiti one illuminated name: yours”
– Basho
Poised in beauty at the woozy edge
of this drunken swamp,
a mile deep into woods
like an enchanted pilgrim silently
climbing the ambrosial pathway
to heaven’s gate,
you startle me
with your earnest meditation,
oh sweet Buddhist orchid,
oh soft demented flora,
oh silent saint of contemplation,
oh sweet honey flower
of woodland mystery. I come upon you
growing here in this heap
of leaves and rotting humus
like a floral spit of liquid sculpture
rising elegantly
from the omphalos of dirt.
You remind me of my wife
as she ascended the stairway
of her youth
into the bridal registry
of her womanhood,
a stem of buds awakening her,
some painted white and purple,
a cough of feathers inside her,
a vase of flowers.
You remind me
of myself as I have risen
lonesome and flummoxed
in the drunkenness of my evenings,
worry and woe twisted
tight around my temples
as if I am still the bewildered groom
approaching my lover
with vanishing at my core,
something panicked and hopeful
inside my belly,
a graft of flying birds.
You remind me
of an altar of sylphs,
colorful spirits of the air
promising not security, not seduction,
nothing at all except for
being, expanding…
And erupting
from your saint stem,
three pink-and-white
orchid birds – I see them –
freeing themselves
in lopsided
emancipated flight,
as if enflaming themselves
up through the squalid air
in majesty, from the woven collar
of each sunburst axil,
each cradle of becoming,
as if the body, ours,
emaciated
like an orchid stem
with hunger, with vanishing,
could actually
bloom and exhale
winged beings,
three-bird orchids –
me you and us
from the aroused
unfolding of its
reaching,
right here at the edge of a swamp
in the woods,
just because.
Ken Meisel
Ken is a poet and psychotherapist and a 2013 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being Scrap Metal Mantra Poems: (Main Street Rag Press, 2013). He has been published in magazines such as Rattle, San Pedro River Review, Common Ground, Cream City Review and Boxcar Review.
