July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
The Western Hemisphere is asleep
with one great eye cocked open
fastened to the burning stars that used
to guide women and men to their future
and at first glance one may mistake
it for dead and not be far wrong
the body collapsed in front of a barren
library huddled under incalculable layers
of coarse blankets and buffalo hides, with
one prehistoric hand trust bravely forth
clutching an ash stick that looks more
suited for fertility rituals than walking
a cigar burns incongruously out the
side of the fertile mouth with lips
that bloom like wild mustard through concrete
and just to the north the obscene mustache
cured by the smoke and in danger of
catching fire itself or disappearing
and the beard, a dangerous whirl of knotted
wool and shadows is littered with objects
gathered off the street, flecks of leaves
and black earth, dried and brittle remains
of lottery tickets, chards of shell and bone
pages torn ruefully from literary magazines
some still smoldering as if recently issued
from a smoke stack, and if you look deeper
an underground canopy teeming with dark
insectile faces, a cosmos of imaginary life
and death, ten thousand years of tearful
wondering, bald eagle feathers, discarded
rattlesnake skins petrified by the vacuous
terror and loneliness in the one good eye.
by Stephen Moore
Steve Moore formally studied theoretical physics and abstract mathematics but now has no time for such nonsense. Since college, he has wandered restlessly about North America and Europe, and has lived in such disreputable places as Liverpool, England; Carrboro, North Carolina and most recently Carrollton, Georgia where he currently resides with his family. He is a now full-time student of urban planning and father of two precocious kids. His free time is spent working on his poetry, short fiction and long unfinished novel. His poem, ‘Love in the Time of Vinyl Siding’ was recently published in the 2013 edition of Eclectic, the Arts and Literary Magazine of the University of West Georgia. His short story, ‘Incident at Oscuro’, appeared in The Fabulist’s 2010 anthology, and his poem, ‘The Bride’, was one of the winning entries in the 2009 Cardiff Academy International Poetry Contest.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
This Door was locked by David Berkowitz
The pig tooth hangs from a vintage nail
the scissors cut and paste Tempe, Arizona
job for a cubicle cowboy
makes one detestable,
numbers never dialed
written on stained Post-It notes
she called me an asshole
and I call her dead
no cigarettes
plenty of blue pills
sweep the memories
under the bed
the sand warps under midnight pressure
unpaid bills
by the
people under the stairs
stare at a spider
watch a meteorite shower at 5 a.m.
don’t have a drink
you can’t afford it
go anyways
charge it
pay later
who fucking cares
do I have anything to live for anymore…
while contemplating,
I can’t answer that dad,
I can’t answer that mom,
I can’t answer that stranger in the gas station.
Me and the Darkness and 40oz’s of Freedom
I was walking home drunk down Moreland Avenue around five in the morning. I didn’t have any money for a cab and I had no one to call. I heard footsteps behind me for quite a while and looked back occasionally and saw someone walking behind me. I finally got paranoid enough that when I saw a small brick wall next to the sidewalk I was walking down I casually sat down and lit a cigarette hoping that the person behind me would walk past me and leave me the hell alone so I could walk in drunken inspired peace. An older black man approached me as I sat there on the small brick wall. He asked me how I was doing. I said “pretty good, but this fucking walk is killing me.” He didn’t say anything and just reached into his jacket and pulled out a scratched and faded gold wristwatch. He asked if I would give him five bucks for it. I said “what the fuck” and reached into my pants and pulled out a crisp five dollar bill and handed it to him. He said “hell yeah buddy, now I can get a drink” He handed me the watch and I put the scratched and faded gold watch on my right hand and finished stumbling home. I noticed the next day that it didn’t even work and it smelled funny.
Clean Bugs, Dirty Carpet
Me and the wife were sitting around the living room after we finished our TV dinners. It was the usual Hungry Man roast beef with mashed potatoes and corn with a brownie for desert. The wife was flipping through endless channels when she stopped upon the local cable access channel. They were flashing pictures of recent guys arrested for soliciting prostitutes in the county, trying to embarrass them or some shit. I had a mouth full of a potatoes and corn when I saw my drunken mug shot from last week flash across the TV screen.
Brett Stout is a 33-year-old writer and artist. He is a high school dropout and former construction worker turned college graduate and Paramedic. He writes while mainly hung-over on white lined paper in a small cramped apartment in Myrtle Beach, SC. He published his first novel of prose and poetry entitled “Lab Rat Manifesto” in 2007.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I drive a car
of irreplaceable parts
going south.
I crawl out of town at night,
a girl with a limp on my arm,
not knowing which belt
or hose is cracked,
leaking like a fistful
of fluids.
The headlights reach down
where the pavement
is supposed to be.
I have a feel for the tires
as they pitch
into the shoulder.
Then slowly guide them out and away
from the deeper ditch below,
hot with toxic runoff.
If a computer can get a virus,
then my car has asthma.
It gets winded at stoplights
like a chain smoker
who just finished sprinting uphill
to the hospital.
There is nothing my car needs
that isn’t lying
out somewhere on the dark road ahead,
at a gas station or rest stop
filled up with strangers like us.
We live one mile at a time
on boiled coffee and canned meat,
nursing overheated engine blocks
to speed our planned obsolescence.
by Greg Jensen
Greg Jensen has worked with homeless adults living with mental illness and addiction problems for the past seventeen years. In addition to being a poet, he is a dad, husband, and avid bicyclist who works on the Seattle’s original Skid Road.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Two nights after the breakup
Drunk
I dial your number wrong
Suddenly, through fate and pulses
Twitches through air
I am connected to a stranger, you
Minus one number, or maybe two
Transverse.
Your name sloshes around, lulls out of my mouth
Half-cocked
Loose on my misshapen tongue
Even after hearing an older woman answer
I carry on talking to you.
She doesn’t hang up, doesn’t break our connection
And in her reply there is a furry, conspiring, lilt
She is fluent in slurry and beg
In sludge-mumbled anger and desperation
And all that ugly language that love
Reduces us to. Or is the booze?
I thought I heard her say
“don’t do it”
I stared at the phone, glowing apps
But her voice could have come from antiquity.
“don’t do it”
maybe she said
“sleep on it”
Maybe she told me to shut the fuck up
Then hung up
Sending that connection looping back
A rubber band, snapping,
Racing back to where it lived.
by Jennifer Ihasz
Jenn Ihasz. is 42 years old and recently went back to college to study History and English Literature.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Involution
In the early mornings
when the world sleeps
we stretch the thin membrane
hiding our sneering beast
from a world of ironed shirts.
Territorial claims at the bus stop.
An unaware prey (still sleeping),
is awoken by a hyenas’ mad stare.
The bus driver, half pig,
greets all and no one with grunts.
He is on schedule but actually never left the station.
The metro is buzzing:
everyone is collecting nectar
for the sacred weekends.
And when the grasshoppers awake
later in the day,
Ironed shirts rule once more.
Only the occasional ragged dogs
rummage through the garbage
in search after some spilled honey.
The Invisible Hand
Move along and continue to consume.
There´re still people over there to impress.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
New cars, jewelry, champagne and perfume –
Adopt the lifestyle and scent of success.
Move along and continue to consume.
There is no dusty scheme to exhume.
The wheels must turn to create progress.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
Dampen angst, down to a moan, and resume
The search for solace with food in excess.
Move along and continue to consume.
Limping charts and numbers reeking of gloom.
Suppress, forget and invent things to possess.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
There’s a dead emperor and no costume.
Calm down people, there´s no need for distress.
Move along and continue to consume.
Never mind the elephant in the room.
Mattias Renberg lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He has studied creative writing in both English and Swedish. He has previously been published in Over Yonder, an anthology by Rofous Press.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Yes
hungry helicopters
circling in the sky
killing the little
pieces of my sleep
my tired brain
wasted a long
time ago
on this battle
of existence
on this world
we called wonderful
and here is only
one cat on the floor
and there is only
one bottle of wine
and here I am
alone
come and
get me
before
they do.
White Communion
I am watching
the smoke from
the chimney
the fog the whiteness
of everything around
and I rise from the mud
and step on the rocks
like some modern Lazarus
I stand up and look there
where my dreams can’t
find me
hidden even
for
my nightmares
that I am him
Something in a flowerpot
the night is coming slowly like an old
gray cat and I am
looking for matches to set the moon
on fire
the hunger of the mind
insist to carry on
she knows how much to fill my glass
and after that to stand up and
to pour water from the kettle
upon the thing in the flowerpot
my love is dying of thirst like
wheat in August
the streets are gloomy and silent
welcoming my steps upon the faceless
sidewalk, reminding me your silence
during the times of war
the world turns slowly like gymnast
going nowhere with all the things upon it
and the silence the silence, yes,
just for a while
while the audience applaud the bones
of Chopin
I can continue to paint but I will leave this
to the old dead dogs barking in my back yard
between the roses and the stones
she bents down over the flowerpot
and she says:
you are quiet
ah, you are so silent
my eyes believe in everything
and the honorable ladies sleep with
the picture of Paul Newman
waiting for their eternal repose
the water is pouring upon the green thing
just like the wind parts the curtains in the sky
but the world lies down on its back
and lies down on its back and waits
for me to penetrate it
but I sniff at the stench and the rottenness
of the centuries and pull back
talking to him:
child, ah, you are only child
and outside on the streets
little girls are playing,
not yet turned themselves into women
strong enough to bring down each and every
man
me?
I am thinking about the paintings of Caravaggio
looking at the left hand (the one with the brush)
and remain silent.
Small revenge
I don’t care about the metrics, the iambus
and the rhymes – I have read the classics and then
I’ve put them back on their dusty shelves:
we write about something that comes from the guts
and the nails as the flowers outside
explode…
The poetry, can I say that I don’t care?
I prefer to drink alone in this room in front of
one candle
as the shadows in the corners sits and show us
their ugly faces;
ah, I know that the words are greater that we thought
and we will fall in their holes,
we will spill ourselves like ink upon the Chaucer’s paper:
let me be myself while I read the classics,
let me be afraid in airplanes,
let me be bored in churches,
let me be silent before the tigers in my blood:
these words are too tuff for us to misspend them
just like the big boys during their time.
The rivers are flowing through me
and I burn like matchstick lighted by the words
of all Shakespeares …
And today I am closer to insanity,
I am watching the black birds on the wires,
waiting for our degradation,
for our small defeat while we walk upon the land of
Dylan and Frost, especially on the thin ice
of Frost…
…find me one small torch,
not too big, just big enough to set this night on fire
and I can hear outside the young girls laugh,
never heard about the hunger of Villon or the madness of Pound,
please feed me so well and I’ll never again use their words,
let me find a little warmth,
allow me to find my sunflowers
shaking in the wind
and under the sun
and the God of the Word not Death.
The night
The moon talks to me
and tells me stories of tortures
and burned love;
sad songs are pouring out from
broken window
and here is only the smell
of stale wine and cigarettes;
outside
dogs are wailing in the dark
and nothing is real more than
it should be,
the dark stillness of time
is hanging like a broken clock
and finally the night
locks me in.
Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections and two chapbooks. His collection Bone Silence was released in 2010 by Desperanto, NY and Уиски в тенекиена кутия (Whiskey in a Tin Can), 2013, Американски тетрадки (American Notebooks), 2010, Разходка през стените (Walking Through Walls), 2009 were published in Bulgaria. Peycho Kanev has won several European awards for his poetry and he’s nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Net. Translations of his books will be published soon in Italy, Poland and Russia. His poems have appeared in more than 900 literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Columbia College Literary Review, Hawaii Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Coachella Review, Two Thirds North, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.
