January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
I don’t sleep anymore.
And when I’m on the train
I look up the tall woman’s
skirt and find an outlet
I don’t have the correct
connection to plug into.
Man stares at something
long enough to kill it;
he hunts for things not his
own, and, underserving,
greedy for their teeth—
their particular song, a luster—
spoils just about everything
along his way. And the car
goes dark, jingles a little bit
before it goes silent, before
the recorded announcer
announces to be careful,
that it might begin to rain.
by Britt Melewski
Girl #275
I will run my car
For eleven years straight
Into a concrete abutment
To keep you inside me
For another minute I will
I will do anything
You ask me so please
Ask me what colors make up
My love ask me
Which is my favorite flavor
Of whip my obsession
Is ketchup please
Not you you are different
when you call me
Baby I melt into a paste
That you can spread
I am somebody not only
Some body but the one
You swallowed skinned
Strawberry the one
Who held your fist
And cracked your knuckles
While I kissed you
I did I kissed
You your shoulder
With its wealth of muscle
And salt I replay it
Now I replay it to
Your song replay
Repose our mouths
Our bodies coming
Together bones flesh
Secrets creaking in song
by Britt Melewski
Inmate #386426
When they first brought you to jail,
you were bound to the black chair on wheels
with its sheen straps—the squeak it makes
while it glides across the bleached linoleum
at intake.
When they tied the mask clasps
around your neck, they bore witness
to your chalky breath—the knot wound
tightly across your pulse.
But in your torn Nirvana
T-shirt, and beekeeper eyes, you shrugged
and allowed them each their job.
by Britt Melewski
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
At the end of the beach
where rocks are impassible
and sea unswimmable.
I am the passively standing stone
points extended into the waves.
Weathered in daily battle
knowing stoically the war is lost with time.
The ocean is immortal
but sand is boulders defeated.
The water swirls and shakes me.
At the end of the beach
with dead pelicans pealed open.
Crows and seagulls gleeful
dripping citrusy flesh fruit.
by Josh Bliek
Joshua Bliek is a literature student in his local community college. Although previously unpublished, Joshua is optimistic about his future as a poet and a critic and works daily towards developing his own unique voice.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Two censuses back
Our home held three:
An infant was added
To you and me.
A census ago
We counted more:
Persons in household
Numbered four.
This latest census
Our data was new:
Three residents remained,
But where were you?
by Barth Landor
Barth Landor has had poems in Clapboard Journal, Spectrum, Inscape and Grey Sparrow Journal (named the Best New Literary Journal of 2011-2012). His poem ‘Tree’ was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011, and the online journal Lowestoft Chronicle published two poems in 2012, including ‘Grotte de Niaux’, nominated by them for a Pushcart Prize.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Weird Scenes Beside the Chevron
The two next to
the blue dumpster
cradling drums
of Steel Reserve,
greasy with worry
– you’ll find them anywhere
When we slow down for gas and caffeine
It’s the defiant palms I’m looking at
a second time, in towns
with names I’ll never know, settled
around redundant strip malls
blistering along the Pacific Coast Highway
These wild-haired beasts tower, they loom
We admire them on TV from afar
but, slashed through with their shadows,
we’re reminded of sands
slipping quickly through an hourglass
of some Endless Summer’s possibility
This holdover Boomer hokum persists, somehow
even while actual people live, here,
walk to work here, buy milk, here,
guzzle malt liquor next to dumpsters, here,
give up on whatever dream we could name, here
I turn my eyes straight ahead- the road, turning the key
by Chris Middleman
Arc of Dreams
Each time I sold Donald Passman’s
All You Need to Know About the Music Business
I saw the copy as a perfect-bound totem;
Here was another set of bloodletting parents
financing their gauge-eared Meredith’s
vague Vans-sponsored notion
of graduating to a stage where action
burns brightly; a stage shared by heroes
where she could act out her love
The love, of course,
never turned out to be creating, or
even helping finance good art;
nor was it a taste for dismantling a system
stacked so stupidly against vision
One way or another, at rainbow’s end
was typing mass PR emails,
answering phones for deceiving dinosaurs
wearing t-shirts instead of suits,
sitting in on “rap sessions” discussing the
optimization of monetization of YouTube clicks
While never having listened to Television
Never having heard Cybotron
Never getting played on freeform FM
Never getting crowned a hero by some kid
after a show, in a parking lot, at the bar
And one day, she’ll have to bow out
of the all the excitement of free merch,
festival passes and promos
for the birth of her little Emma, whom
one day, shall be enrolled in the School of Rock
by Chris Middleman
And in NPR, We Are Redeemed
A sheep rancher whispers into a
microphone held out in some dappled pasture
that the United States lost its taste for mutton
after so many canned rations were slavishly
gobbled during World War II; we dress ourselves
in December with a mess of shredded Sprite bottles
Though the market seems to have
bottomed out for this man whom the mind’s
director casts as an epileptic caterpillar of a
moustache wriggling beneath a brown-brimmed hat,
the hope is that immigrants and parents
in poorer neighborhoods that can’t afford
the food they prepare at work could be enticed
to make mutton a staple of their diets
With parting clouds, the dollar value of
this potential market is recognized
and we finally understand them as human
by Chris Middleman
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
We’re sitting at an outdoor table
on the Broadway sidewalk watching
the rhythmic pause-and-go of traffic
through the Saratoga streets,
the hum and squeals of engines and brakes,
the hydraulic groan of the 473 bus as it unloads
its cargo of townsfolk and tourists,
their chatter filling the summer air
in the absence of birds. A boy sits
at the bus stop with a silent guitar in hand,
ignored by those coming and going.
We watch people board the bus
as you sip your Bloody Mary,
savoring the olives in your mouth,
turning them over like words
you’d rather hear than speak.
The waitress brings our food
and sets it down like the silence
between us. The small pink creatures
of your shrimp cocktail remind me
of the things I’ll fail to say––
laid out before us, untouched
and wholly intact yet
so obviously dead.
The boy still sits at the bus stop.
His guitar is still silent, its case
open at his feet like an empty wallet.
Passing pedestrians pay him no mind.
No one is giving me any money
he complains to no one in particular,
but he isn’t playing anything.
by Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco was born in the Bronx, New York, though he’s lived in Florida for most of his life. He graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a B.A. in English Lit. He’s also studied creative writing at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College and film at Charles University in Prague. He currently resides in Miami, Florida.
January 2014 | back-issues, poetry
My fingernail, your pancreas,
your palm, starving tribes in the Sudan.
My esophagus, Joan of Arc’s enflamed hair.
Your mother’s lungs, La Brea.
Your neck, a lighthouse’s spiral staircase,
my eyes, a beacon over turbulent waters.
Your conscience, below the surface;
my fingers, holding it there.
My heart valves, the locks along the Erie Canal,
reining things in, keeping things from getting out of hand.
My lungs, an orchard ripe for plucking,
my genitals, coals from the bottom of the fire,
my uterus, invasive, like mint, getting its fingers everywhere.
My disappointment: the iceberg, a lightning strike, a barbed hook. A super nova.
Yours: the Titanic, the Gulf oil spill,
a family of beached whales. No—a black hole.
by Emily Hockaday
Emily Hockaday’s first chapbook, Starting A Life, was published in June 2012 with Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Newtown Literary, Pear Noir!, The West Wind Review, Plainspoke, and others. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU and has served as a judge for NEA’s poetry out loud program.
