July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
small promise the mountains back deep
in distant dawn as too
now a truck slows from great swell
small and low, within
bladder is full and cells nervy enough
sing freedom
for empty gravel, for roads which run
and the dark differs
as all altitudes once, done and knowing this so
the brain springs
so settles this indifference as the shake sure
comes as the tuck back
and at just-almost, where green of the grass,
frost covers, all eyes for
and for boots dusty, red and glad
simply for the cover
a cap is pulled as the colder gets and gone
still as waits, the door is open
past hay patch and shot rang, and not far off
awaken have the birds
Mark Magoon
Mark Magoon writes poetry and short stories, and secret songs for his dog. His poetry can be found in print in After Hours and Midwestern Gothic, and on the web at DIALOGIST, Ghost Ocean Magazine, and The Nervous Breakdown. His creative nonfiction piece, Chef!Chef!Chef!, can be found at Burrow Press Review. He lives in Chicago with a wife far too pretty.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Today was hot and sticky in the way
only august could be, and as I cut cilantro and strawberries
I thought of how plants only flourish when you take care of them,
and that the halves of strawberries look like hearts
when laid side by side
I’m sorry that my grandma taught me how to
be patient at a young age,
and in retaliation I became reckless with
everyone around me.
So please know that I never meant to push you away,
I only wanted to see how far I could run before you chased after me.
I’m sorry that my mother trained me how to
be passive-aggressive
by always getting her way without ever asking for it.
So please, don’t be upset when I can’t make a decision,
because we both know that I’ll chose you every damn time.
I’m sorry that my dad was never around,
and let me down more times than I can count on my fingers & toes,
a contorted game of Pick-Up-Sticks,
ignored.
So please, bear with me as I try to make our time count,
Tallying up every moment your lips touch mine
If the wrinkles in my sheets were the miles between us,
I’d pull them until they lay flat, bringing you a little bit closer
and wishing for the thousandth time tonight that it was you
in the space in between my
sheets
and the heat between my
thighs.
Tatiana Goodman
Tatiana is a student on the west coast with a love of travel. She is beginning the study of psychology.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
It’s Strange
It’s strange,
What we can turn ourselves into:
Put yourself on a bender, become an alcoholic—
three days, maybe four.
It’s easy— just a little effort, that’s all it will take.
I’m lucky, I suppose, that it’s just booze:
Imagine what I could do to myself if I really got adventurous?
There’s so much out there to get twisted up in—
Drugs, guns, girls, gangs;
Revolutions, continental drift,
Exotic animal testing and tasting;
The Ice ages, war reenactments, bartending classes;
Time travel, the Butterfly Net Racket, MIA rescue, aquarium diving;
Making movies, the Halloween mask syndicate, the Asian market toilet dash—
The Air Turbulence Temperance League?
So many dangerous occupations—
And all the hazards of just waking up and breathing in.
So, what’s so bad about just sitting in this comfortable chair,
Counting the drinks I’ve had,
Making comets of the songs I sing,
ghost stories of my own history?
It’s a Wonder
It’s a wonder,
how I lived so long without
the sound
of a harmonica and scratching strings
on a slightly out of tune guitar.
It’s a wonder
that it took me so long
to hear the words
buried under the noise of that song
that I always said I hated.
It’s a wonder
how I haven’t started yet
and that I am still here,
drawing circles in a notebook
and tapping my rhythmless fingers
onetwo, onetwo, onetwo—
The tiniest, hollow thud
on a tabletop
could fire off earthquakes
in a silent room,
in a silent house,
that knows nothing at all
about the rhythms of regret.
Andrew LaRaia
Andy LaRaia is a Literature and Writing Teacher in Istanbul, Turkey. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, where he studied with Richard Bausch and Alan Cheuse.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
webbed, goose-white
nut-broadened bird.
He could green-water
scum-break and wet-
feather-waddle from the shallows.
He stumbled through lives, wives,
fragrance and faux pas,
yet by boat or bank, under bridge,
elegant he was, easy
legged, otter-elan,
loafing, lollygagging
log-light, drifting
towards senility
with a watery grace.
Once he challenged the current
near Dubuque and came across
a quarter-mile downstream,
and once he pushed it north
against the choppy grind,
kissed the lock’s locked door
and felt the wild whiskers
of a big-bellied cat
checking his calves for lunch
and with dawdle-not
fear kicking his feet
like a steamboat’s paddle
went south and never returned.
Jeff Burt
Jeff Burt works in manufacturing. He has work in Rhino, Nature Writing, Windfall, and Thrice Fiction, and forthcoming in Mobius and Storm Cellar.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Here’s to staying up late
and watching Pulp Fiction
instead of staying up late
because your mind is cycling with stress.
Here’s to eating the best
oven pizza you’ve ever had
after days of not being able
to keep food down.
Here’s to harsh cigarettes
and a longneck lighter
on a metal table
while winds howl at the moon.
It’s talking about it
so you don’t need to drink about it.
Knowing and being known is
saying “fuck” instead of pretend smiling.
It’s being touched without jumping,
and unbraiding and fading
with heavy eyelids
that can safely close.
It’s not about waking up,
it’s about falling back asleep
after a glance to ensure
not everyone disappears.
Hearing one person say,
“You aren’t as dark as I thought.”
Hearing another person say
that they pray for you
and hearing yourself say;
“I’m not a whore.”
Here’s to all that.
That’s what today is.
Amanda Ramirez
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
GHOST PLANE
FOR HELIOS AIRWAYS FLIGHT 522
Logic unhinges. Hallucinations
shuffle down the isles. A stray laugh
rises. Oxygen masks are little more
than decoys; we keep them strapped
to our cheeks, but can’t recall why.
Children hush, turn a dull blue.
Pilots slump across the controls
like scarecrows. The first nervous
dozen are luckiest, but after hours
of circling, we all quiet. Some swoon,
mutter as if gripped by nightmares.
A flight attendant breaches the cockpit
just as the engine is choked by flames.
Does he pant his last breath into a bank
of blinking lights, or meet the mountain’s
grey gaze? Do wildflowers flow down
the slope like a braid over a bare
shoulder? And does he reach out
to touch it, run it through
shaking, mortal fingers?
MASTER BIRDMAN
An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry.
– Orville Wright
Stockings roll down; hair is unpinned.
Slim digits slip into my flying gloves,
cradle a helmet perfumed by hair tonic.
I draw gasps but slink out at daybreak.
Air’s the absolute, bears both gulls
and my crude craft, “a beat-up orange
crate.” Air wordlessly waits, its vastness
a dare, a glove swatted at my cheek.
So I must glide updrafts, plummet
to graze the ground with one fingertip.
The body submits, but it’s bloody, bones
heavier than hollow. So, it must breach
like a birth, sputter into a final spiral.
They’ll say I drowned, that it took hours
to fish me out by the suit I always wore
to fly. But they’ll do worse, grasping
the bars of a hospital bed, gulping
pudding from a plastic spoon. Better
to perform an aerial spin, misjudge
and get what they always expected—
swallow jellyfish and krill, midwifed
into blackness by silent, damp beasts.
WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
IN THE VOICE OF A MINOR DIETY
Feet wrapped in grave-gauze, I hunch to suck ink
off newspaper corners. So, tell me—war is spreading;
the latest madman pumped the morning full of bullets;
the ocean laps the toes of the Rockies. I used to float,
barely break a blade when I crossed the lawn, the choir’s
harmonies like bellows, a child’s sleeping chest. Then
I shrunk to a shadow, words an untidy clump of yarn
in my mouth. Pass the latest screen and light me from
below like a ghost story; give me the artless and brief,
no epics to draw up earthworms like a thunderstorm.
You’ve stuck too many grubby, doubting digits in my
direction. I’ll enter with the beggars, virgin-hungry
as a volcano; but I’d stop all this ill wishing, scanning
the horizon for quaking, if you’d just dig a coin from
your pocket, flick it, tenderly, down the storm drain.
by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett migrated to the Bay Area, after completion of her MFA at The New School. She was awarded the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry upon graduation from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Oberon Poetry, Meridian, Lumina, CALYX Journal, and Prism Review. She recently completed her first book, Congress of Mud.
