October 2012 | back-issues, poetry
A Heart After Childhood
Grainy snaps show her circled by smiles,
sons and local spirits, with ample hoist
through the hot effulgence of summer light.
Photos did no justice to her knotted neurons.
She quit childhood too early with a heart
like an empty sack. A girl, she abjured thought
of her future, as short on time as expected.
A photo cache weighted forgotten albums.
Marriage scarred her edges: her dissonance,
her children entertained her. So often weather
lilted curls, muted voice, or silenced evening wings.
History in song and pictures passed around her.
After barren years, she saw better how
things should have gone, but she did not act:
new generations grew smiles amid the old.
All around her bore the pall of somber fate.
She sulked. She raised intolerance in status.
She bored her friends, off center of respect.
At last, she lined her walls with mollusk shells
sent her to excite the hollow breath of song
and sat alone until her body in disuse ached.
She wanted much more, but pretended less.
Until she dies, this account is unauthorized.
by Keith Moul
Painted Face
Like a planet in a cold orbit, rarely
did he need the sun. Stay on course,
rotate at an awful pace, shed your ice
into the unlived silence of black space.
He fished catfish to see them dangle
helpless on a line. Waste their fish souls,
eat them panfried, wash them down with beer.
At private moments, with his lover in his arms,
he dreamed punishments for enemies.
Pile them on a heap, take your spoils,
mark your face with battle blood you won.
Passing within a whisper of home he did not hear.
Coming into old territory, he did not veer.
Leaving his mark on bushes, he felt gods in stars.
Steal children in pairs, in ritual gag them, then watch.
by Keith Moul
Rebellion Takes Up Conspiracy With Mankind
Howard Thomas had grown engagingly human.
He nurtured Harry S. Truman, his heretical cat.
Howard, who had many, often invited
friends to visit him for bracing conversation
about what it meant to be engagingly human.
Howard provoked his friends to act feline;
occasionally, his friends engaged with claws.
More than ten feline friends are hard to herd.
But Howard rationalized that his humanity
could resist even the bloodshed of rebellion,
that as long as his friends stayed in his parlor
and did not spread their cat insurrection outside
the rest of Mankind would embrace their differences.
Harry S. knew better. Harry S. would have preferred
that his instincts led the cat skirmish, from atop a cabinet,
a favorite place. Harry S.Truman got exact terms
he wanted when human rebellion
took up conspiracy with Mankind.
Afterwards, Howard came to believe
that humanity will not be engaged
nor be well served by soothing purrs.
As a hermit, Howard expanded
the biography of notable cats.
Harry S sought other comforts.
by Keith Moul
Keith’s poems have been published widely for almost 45 years. Recently two chaps have been released: The Grammar of Mind (2010) from Blue & Yellow Dog Press and Beautiful Agitation (2012) from Red Ochre Press. He also publishes photos widely. In fact, in 2010 a poem written to accompany one of his photographs was a Pushcart nominee.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
so arctic
inside,
they stand
Matryoshka dolls
listening
for tiny words
echoes
of hope
in each other’s
eyes
but then
the breeze
comes
blowing red
into their
noses
forming
creases around
their eyes
it feels
so cold
here
because
they can’t
feel
each other’s
thoughts
anymore.
by Andy Kubai
Andy Kubai is a writer and dreamer living in Austin, Texas. He is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing from St. Edward’s University, and a well-examined life. His fiction and poetry have been featured in the Yahara Journal and Inkstains and Heartbeats (as lifeencoded). He is working on a collection of loosely connected flash fiction.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
An Old Man’s Day
Now is not the time for love. She’s only been gone a year. I wear black to mark her death. I visit her grave every week. I cannot bring a woman into this.
She brings me coffee at the café and offers me breakfast, though I never eat. I drink my coffee and read the paper, looking for my wife’s face in the pictures. It’s never there, but I have to look.
I walk through town now and watch the cars on the street. All it would take is a simple mis-step and I’d be done. I’d go to my wife at last and we would be happy.
It’s time to move on, my therapist says. You need to find someone new. But I’m not ready. My apartment is full of her photos. I can’t take them down. They keep me safe.
On the bus, a woman sits next to me. She asks where I’m going. Home, I say. She nods. Me too. We sit silently for awhile before she asks my name. Isaac, I say. She is Miranda.
The sun has fallen now. Streetlamps are hazy in the fog. I walk the last couple of blocks to my apartment and pour myself a glass of wine. I sit and stare at my wife’s face on the wall.
Miss you, I say. I want you back. The silence is heavy here. The apartment grows dim with the night air. I finish my wine and go to bed. At least in my dreams I’m never alone.
Ordinary
She is an ordinary woman. She works a job and comes home to her ordinary home and makes an ordinary meal. Her son is late from practice at the pool and she waits for him while washing dishes. He comes home and they talk about ordinary courtesy. They do not yell or fight, but they talk of ordinary things.
When we were in love, she did all of the ordinary things and I watched her working all of the ordinary hours of the day. At night, we went to bed and had ordinary sex, but it was an obligation. We were married. This was what married people did.
Now we are not a couple anymore. We do not talk or touch. We see each other at our son’s meets and games, but we stay away from each other as best we can. It’s awkward as a broken stool. We balance on the legs left to us and do the best we can. This is an ordinary divorce, only without the ordinary fights.
An ordinary night falls and she goes to her bed and lies there thinking ordinary thoughts. I miss her. It’s that simple, but she has no time for me. Our ordinary lives have gone separate ways and we have nothing left, but ordinary loneliness.
by William L. Alton
William L. Alton was born November 5, 1969 and started writing in the Eighties while incarcerated in a psychiatric prison. Since then his work has appeared in Main Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs among others. In 2010, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published one book titled Heroes of Silence. He earned his both BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon where he continues to live.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The storm brought the ocean into our home.
Even after the worst of the blowing was over, mother’s body couldn’t survive in the cold and the wet for long. I could only wrap her in a quilt, put her to bed, and wait.
The rainfall had become gentle, and the thunder sounded like a back cracking as I stood over her, knee-deep in seawater, watching her breath slow.
Tiny fish swam between my toes. I remained motionless, my skin puckering as I watched her breath slow, then slow, then stop.
When she died, there was a flicker of lightning, and her soul went into this mouse.
She stays dry by hiding in the ceiling and lives on the cracker crumbs I leave for her on a rafter.
I’ve started a shoebox apartment for her, for when the water goes down. I have a folded sock, which will eventually dry, for a bed, and a threadspool for a table.
Her body, I’ve kept just as she left it – in case she gets homesick.
The rain is now a mist. I sit in a saturated armchair and play solitaire on her quilt by candlelight, waiting for the water to go down, as teeny, tiny fish swim between my toes.
by M. N. Hanson
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Wine Tasting
Breathe,
but don’t inhale.
Taste and swish,
but don’t swallow.
The experience
lasts a moment,
then discarded
into a silver bucket.
So dignified,
so proper,
delicate ladies
with perfect hair
spitting blood
red mouthfuls.
Falling in Love Outside a Ryan Adams Concert
Into a swirl of smoke and music,
awkward chatter fades away.
Cigarette smoke mingles with,
Just put your arms around her already.
A woman laughs.
Pretense of scalped tickets
falls away, as we move closer,
pressed together in the rain.
by Laura Baker
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Cove
Where the
Black rock
Is soaked
In silver spray,
Moonlit
My guttural baritones
Are
Bowed strings of longing
Come in to my cove,
My black wings
Encircling
I cannot
Promise
A halo
But you and I, we
Could circle the fire
Let the howl
Of the wild
Rip the skin
From the waters
It will never
Tear the tears
From closed eyes
So please,
Burrow
And Settle
In the crook
The cradled bay
And I will set us in stone
If you will stay
Silence
There is no better sound;
the greatest opus
The caught breath
between thrusts
As her father calls
from beyond the walls
And a gulp slips away down a throat
The smoking gun
A peeling onion
and the tears of realisation
tearing out the truth talking noise clutter
It is guilt.
Pulled through in puppet strings
A thread long
A tight wire – line straight, an endless
unravelling of the mind inside
It is the music of tension,
the eternity of waiting
It is taking
the talking for a talking to
Away beyond the sidelines
Downstairs behind the kitchen door
and out through the garden, the garage,
the secret corner and the sly cigarette your father
will never show unto your mother
It is the monolith
in white block
One giant eraser ready
for the painting over
The one coat non drip glossing over a canvas
A cosmic napkin wiping the crumbing
of the messy eating of language
and the swirling amateur chaos of colour mixing
A palette trashed
A square punch to a whiteout
A collapse from a breakdown
And the blurring, the peaceful nothing
Of a hospital bed in morphine
With a sawn off shotgun
and a hearing all sewn up
A hearing
O, finally a hearing
without a judgement;
A hearing we don’t have to listen to.
by Greg Webster
