April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
bikes
she is all the red square cathedrals
dipped in honey.
krasnaya, they say archaically.
to my ancient soul
she is an lp’s grooves, that smile
upon fresh rained pavement or,
gliding under the silvery stars,
cosmos borealis.
she rode her turquoise bike away
on a rainy day near the end of the world.
she had an empty wire basket on the rusted front.
five of us
we’re them’s enabler,
so the dealt is done.
burrow deep our friends,
the sun is hot salt.
them doesn’t like us,
like grapes who eats one?
we knew magic. them
died, smothered from love.
i, in time
i read somewhere that time
or their time or her time so
this magnificent quote, i thought
was not the same to any one person
and when i came across
i should take my time
how my time was different from your time
caught on a crisp autumn breeze and no more
slip by the most fluidly, scarves
and live for the times that seem to
subject to time than am i.
run away wheel
pitter patter, pink matter,
can you hear the hamster breathe?
pretty lights up resuscitation’s reach
tunnel’s end beyond reasoning up
throw god shaped lightning bolts control-
ed by a rodent spinning out of sight.
pity stares past sight,
look, pay attention, hamster matter-
s aren’t about control,
but correcting the way you breathe
and blank and bring up
how Reich sounds three things away from reach.
hamsters race along sulci reach-
ing down into depths, sight-
ing scopes to clean up
rainbows of red and red matter
that chokes, rainbow roots breathe
for you. what lies? control.
you have black holes in you that control
singular processes like when you reach
deep in your lungs for air, breathe
in singularities hamsters see under a microscope’s sight
so they can tell how the dark matter-
s. so please hurry up.
hipster hamsters know what’s up,
but up can be down if the control
room gets messed up, what’s the matter
with death riding bengal tigers that reach
for food that’s not a sight
unseen in a neuronal ocean that can breathe.
hello house. hello hal. just breathe
pops, read something to keep up
the spirits bought in a paper bag sight-
ed by cops dressed as hamsters who control-
s how now? brown cows reach
for golden status to be false matter.
vital is breathe you while mind in kept, matter
that hamsters own your to up sanity for try a, reach
than perfect more sight no knows control
small birds
i am sitting at the top of a building in the rain
there is always the now if the then was kept forgotten
the cold salt
a small bird wakes in the nest
eyes open
i like his skin too cool
the small bird cries out on the edge of the nest as the wind whips around
my heart is pattering and he sees it
i am he and he is i
it patters in time with the rain
harder and harder like the ground the bird hits
i lose them to rain down on him and he feels their sound
the pattering heart holds me still and devours me
the shadow deafens him to the birds song
the skin too cool reaches me and I am fed
i am the bird
i am the man
now i can lie like the birds and their young
by Jacob Valadez
Mr. Valadez is an aspiring writer who is currently attending the University of California San Diego as an undergraduate.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
You and me and brightness
You and me and pink and
Purple widening circles.
The pale skin on your neck,
That red cowlick like Tin Tin’s,
Your eyes, wide and blue.
Someone sings in a high,
Clear voice. We come close
To kissing, but don’t.
by Catherine Simpson
Catherine Simpson is a cellist who lives in Santa Barbara. She has been previously published in the Big River Poetry Review, Right Hand Pointing, Spectrum, Step Away Magazine, and Into the Teeth of the Wind.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Waterfall
Breaking before our eyes into a sound,
as whoosh and swish of the ocean tide.
In constant as rhythmic strokes
branches crack and are thrown into the stream.
I stood among the trees and watched,
immobile in the cooling shade,
the leaf surfaced, face up beneath the bridge.
Woooh, the wind howled,
Cut limbs falling, the crack they make,
each dropping from its trunk as though for once
the last branch of winter made us trim.
Lost for violence of mid-air branches,
soft current dragged on as wind chimes
blew at the stretch of the dam.
Wading water into land, downward
as the deep blue sea, at times where
the light reflected a bend.
Slowed the surface calm waters,
evergreen trees lined the banks of river,
as natural forces contained the seed of life.
Collapse
The windows are blown out.
Abandonment offers silence,
our yard grown wildly immeasurable
in green, red, yellows, and browns.
Long recollection of a story roars out.
Sagging doors creak, left ajar, stuck in hinges,
we meet halfway.
Closing the door to those that left for good,
ways of going away, leaving our forsaken home.
We used to have our meals and slept upstairs,
the wooden floor makes hisses at us.
Spiral staircase leads us nowhere now,
quiet whispers we murmured before bed,
shhh – everything is truly silent.
by Samantha Seto
Samantha Seto is a writer. She has been published in various anthologies including Ceremony, Soul Fountain, Blue Hour, Carcinogenic Poetry, and Black Magnolias Journal.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
you are
the spring in my limp
the depth of my shallow breaths
the shattered melancholy
of my being broken
memories
from before I knew you
sweet smoke
my dad loved to hide behind
dark eyes of an early crush
summertime grass warm
against my bare feet
first real kiss
black-veiled mourner
standing alone
beneath gray rain
clenching teeth and fist
dropping muddy earth
into my grave
smearing what’s left
across your face
hiding your crying
downcast eyes
enduring the disappointment
in all that I am not
by Danny Earl Simmons
Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and an active member of Albany Civic Theater. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals such as Naugatuck River Review, Avatar Review, Burningword, Pirene’s Fountain, and Verse Wisconsin.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
[what you’ve done here]
what you’ve done here,
you’ve done in the rain.
bitter, brick building,
the rapture of memories:
old and young men.
you cried on the stairs,
listened in the lobby,
kissed by the narrow back door.
they settle into mildewed
hardwood floors
walk the grass, oak trees,
soggy mulch in empty flower beds.
what you did there,
you did in the presence
of a thousand leaves.
We Were Nuclear, Darling
I got fixed up at the barb shop, the ink
don’t fade anymore than on paper, a thousand
satin-faced silhouettes I drew on résumé linen,
watermark strapping mouths like duct tape,
our words keep us down like soot always falls to the bottom
of bourbon, unfiltered eight-year brew.
We saved the needle for another day,
ascended onto high stools and hummed unversed jazz in the lamp lit corner.
Eleven beers sent us straight down the bent road,
the alley out back where steam crept under the doors
of a hundred bistro’s kitchens. Somewhere, we got hassled
by lipsticked strangers prying answers in the street—but none to go around, gave
a litany we swapped words to recall, gapping episodic
memories from Catholic childhoods.
I’m just this decade’s lost and lonely boy,
too far from Portland—where The Sex Pistols hang like opiate in fixed-up long-gones
the punk underground of fame where Caruso’s still a legend for
I’m in love with you in love with me.
We were nuclear,
split atoms on the freeway,
burned down towns just out past train tracks,
memories of unfulfilling midnights and unsolved rhythms in Radiohead songs,
how we stepped on one too many cracks in the concrete
and you remarked that all the dirty bums looked like sailors.
Again, we saved the needle for another day, put it in my pocket for some late second,
too late to call the decade a waste of our predictions, on the damp lit street,
the savor of places that are gone, places that I barely remember.
Drunk in the City, Remembering Home
My dad talks too much when he drinks,
and the pain I’ve felt is feeling
like a child, asking a hundred questions.
how can I judge when a man’s
become another man?
I threw him every wrench.
We found our only common ground in the bottle
and motorcycle. We’ve got leather vests
could keep out all the things we feel.
Nothing’s as sweet as feeling nothing
Papaw died two years back
and we still cry
never together
but in the lull
that falls at night,
three in the morning
when I’m drunk
and he’s driving to grab coffee
before work.
We dance,
in some ways, in some lives, we’ve lived
more than most. He’s shrunk four inches
slaving in the plant. I’ve shrunk too,
forgotten the way
a shingle scalds my hands, how
a twelve hour shift burns the ends of cigarettes
down to filters, down to the only life
we’ve got left
by Benjamin S. Sneyd
Ben Sneyd is a writer an assistant editor at The Tusculum Review.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
At the Southern Museum of Archaeology, I find
Homo heidelbergensis, the last common ancestor
of man and Neanderthals.
A skull with a sloping forehead, pronounced brow ridges
and no jawbone, a skull that, coupled with a heart,
once contained techniques of ecstasy,
esoteric knowledge of joy, gained,
perhaps, near a gentle soughing stream or
at dawn, sunset, night under the stars or
after a successful hunt or
at his joining with his woman or
at the birth of his children or
at the death of an enemy—
I am much more simple, now.
Tonight, the android Gypsy woman in the glass booth
will awkwardly lay out my cards and discern my future through plastic eyes
and with a resolute smile egest a slip of printed paper
telling me generic-happy-specifics.
I really cannot ever make myself believe
a common augury. Chinese fortune cookies
do not change my life though I have tried.
Benny, a homeless street prophet at 5 Points, tells me
every time he sees me “You are bound for greater things.”
Elijah, my fundamental Christian neighbor, constantly warns me about
a hell that “invades the land of the living and takes prisoners.”
The cards will yield no ready clues.
They must be interpreted by an adept,
a possessor of occult knowledge
concerning past and future.
Heidelbergensis is the first species of the Homo genus
to bury its dead.
I am a middle way Catholic.
I like historical criticism too much, or
I want to like it. In the Church galaxy, hell is a “mystery”
beyond my ability to understand, to understand
the rightness of it, the justness of it
and how God can yet be love.
I believe in geologic time, carbon dating, archaeology.
Homo heidelbergensis could probably ferment a beverage.
He knew about certain mood-altering roots and herbs and flowers.
Did his people suffer from addiction? They had no package stores, no bars,
no coffee shops, no rave clubs.
In Nazi Germany, alcoholics and addicts
were deemed to be “life unworthy of life.”
They were sterilized during America’s early 20th Century eugenics purge.
Now the health insurance companies and hospitals say
it is a disease, a heritable disease
expressing itself on the level of genes.
Chemical dependency is a malady, an unfortunate state
which comes upon us. Like diabetes.
Recovery nets billions of dollars per year in America.
The illegal drug business nets 350 billion dollars per year,
worldwide. And so on. (Alestair Crowley called himself “the Beast 666.”
He died a heroin addict. Did he also require heroin in the afterlife?
Did he need to detox there?)
The next right thing.
I would readily see the lesser secrets.
I would readily see the greater secrets.
I still need help to do this,
to look for the defining arcana
in a random array of circumstances. And
I will learn to interpret the circumstances.
by Bryan Merck
Bryan Merck has published in America, Blast Furnace, Camel Saloon, Conclave, Emerge Literary Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Literary Juice, The Rusty Nail, Stoneboat and others. He is a past winner of the Southern Literary Festival Poetry Prize and the Barkesdale-Maynard Poetry Prize. He lives in Moultrie, Georgia with his wife Janice.
