When armed with an arsenal
Of ideas bigger than bombs
And words that are piercing as arrows
Quivering
With swelling anticipation
Like the tide, it crests
When faced with a blank white page
You wait for the explosion
The crash of the ocean wave
It destroys the castles you have built
But you call it
Creation.
the moon slurs, smiles
leering compliance, consenting
out of the corner
of her face.
at midnight,
I am less, after just one more test.
regretted by the bashful
sun, at midday, his light lets learning in
from a drunk,
swallowing sex — drinking down below
all morals, creating cause, causing effect,
from all unwritten words, learned, taught, spoken, now unlearned,
in the lush lavished unloved love of leaving after love.
sinking in sleeping, in thoughtlessness, in godlessness, in this.
Chasing confusing conversations through a perplexing patron performing a grand
symphony, dancing around the idea that we all precipitate ideals, intertwined in
the vastness of human decency, which struggles below the weight of each word,
willingly wasteful, during listless listing,
slip and sip to
life’s many intricacies as my illustrations
interpret illusions on behalf of our subconscious, detailing the horizon, as chasing
the light in the day that you can never capture, before birthing the benevolent
breaking of beliefs, with thoughts of thirst to lust, to love, to long for all that can
not be between you and me.
anyone who makes a coaster
Lonely
is a friend of you and
I
yet in between your draining
Drink
your stirring speech is
Slow
and then you perch
In a performing presence
presenting your questions of hell
you try to confirm your reservations
With a sad proclamation.
We all go out like we all come in we all go out alone.
Craig McCarthy’swork has appeared in The Normal Review and other national periodicals.
Sitting in a dark room
breeds thoughts of the soul
not to be indulged
the bliss of life lies
in the simple
the penetrating sunlight
pierces through the abyss
illuminating all the shadows
dank dark crevices
new life springs from death
to be reborn anew like
a butterfly its cocoon
The raspberry bush
expanding full of life
seemed to offer
endless tart bounty
they were best picked
right from the vine
no need to rinse
or put in a fancy bowl
the red juices stained
your finger tips
a mark of remembrance
for their gifts
the gentle wind rustled
the leaves whispering to
the berries almost
begging for you to remember
Those little dream brothers were made of chicken feathers,
and I had to blow their dream parts forcefully from my nose.
I was lobbing bottles of vitamin water at their cute little feet.
You’ll need help to rise now and
some dreams won’t take you back,
as if there were something determined in their breath.
We were after love that night, but wet and mysterious was close enough.
You carried several husbands in your peekaboo pants, and
This just pisses me off, I admitted loudly,
but you were also the ocean with everyone
coming down to you to watch you breathe,
and you will not have to pretend you know this.
Deep in the night when the night’s closer, someone thinks
you might understand I always wanted to help you,
and I always wanted to be you helping me,
and suddenly it’s dusk with candelabras of birdsong
lighting my ears, and it’s best to tell them everything because
you’ll feel better, and the wandering brothers won’t listen anyway.
Of course, the surprise ending knows I will arrive,
but the beginning doesn’t know where I’ve gone,
thinks I might start again. And I might, but not
to set up house and drink endless tea.
Sometimes I do feel as if I know where I’m going
though I cannot take you there through
the door I’m still building, and I can’t stay
here any longer without erasing myself.
Sometimes I open what’s not even there.
It could be a deeply questionable freedom I live in,
beneath the could of it. I’m suffering from
a surprisingly difficult stroll, and the color
of little bird panic in the wings of my heart
won’t bleed a seductive smile made of merely
smoke and daisies. Let not the unbound be fenceless,
shedding their dark beneath the breath of progress.
Tonight I want yogurt blossoms and imbeciles in
the dark trees as happy as tongue depressors. I’ve already
lost a couple of porches and reasoned with absentee clouds.
I’ve an unreasonable love of falling leaves and wet hair.
I’ve decided the Italians must once have thought
“modern dress” meant “attached to sullen hillsides,”
and I’ve decided I’m a territory unexplored by innocence,
unexpected beauty, toast, or a fresh glass of water.
Still, I might be less literal than I thought. I might be
raining beachballs containing ideas for new machines.
I might be plucking eyelids from the blind parents of
dirt-bikes and chastising the unplanned fun that bled us.
I might be joined to the confused by the undecided and,
if it’s not a part of the plot, each pound for an ounce
of thought, I might contain a warm milking stool with
ambitions to speech, and I might walk away from myself
out onto the road of participation and complicity
in a rage of taking back, of feet, of direction,
as if I might have been the goal and not
merely the forgotten territory of progress.
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
A line outside the liberty bell,
bars you can still smoke in,
cyclists covered in tattoos; my five-foot-one sister playing
dress-up in her brand-new, oversized Albert Einstein Hospital coat.
Everyone gone, to the shore.
(Fourth of July weekend.)
Gray, cobblestone streets nearly empty, melting before dusk.
It’s my last day here. A crowd gathering for the presidential motorcade
Jolts me out of sleep.
Kids laughing on the sidewalk below, the day disappearing.
Love’s at the door, with lightly freckled cheeks and a guitar case on the floor.
Muscular arms bursting out of a gray v-neck, a smile like the best meal of your life.
No place I’d rather be than in a room where he is singing.
Orange lights pouring in from the street, a breeze, a voice–what a voice.
Promises I’ve made –No More Musicians! – want to fall into the sky.
Quitting would mean I learn from my mistakes.
Reason never wins; look at the divorce rates. But,
Spring has come and gone and
Timing is everything. Maybe I should have owned a clock all these years.
Usually, I can read them like paperbacks, but those eyes—museums should keep them
Vaulted in a glass case.
Where they can be studied,
X-rayed.
Years will go by and I’ll still remember them, under the awning, rain falling around us.
Zippers staying zipped, a long embrace that felt like home—a home I can’t afford yet.
ZHANNA VAYNBERG was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine and moved to the Midwest in 1991. She graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing in 2008, and will be receiving a master’s degree in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University in March 2012. She recently won an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s August 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers for a piece of flash fiction entitled “Things You Should Never Tell Your Mother,” and her first published story, “Do Not Leave Chicago,” will be coming out in Euphony Journal’s winter issue in January 2012.
time runs
fluid stop-motion
over carpet –
around in music syncopation,
notes hanging from the ceiling
like mobiles
and your hands keep reaching
for the moon, but clouds swarm
and silver is only a flimsy figment
in the dark
