April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Elisabeth Dee
I get my best ideas while in the shower.
Plums are best when sweet and cold.
I faint at the sight of blood.
I don’t know what color my hair is,
I’ve heard it both ways.
I pick spiderwebs with bare fingers.
Trains mimic washing machines and lull me to sleep.
I always unintentionally burn the toast.
Insecurity haunts
Legs.
I hold a world record. Look it up.
I would have voted for Obama, if I was eighteen.
Unfortunately democracy only stems so far.
Nightly rituals are not to be broken;
Piece of chocolate, Italian soap.
I will listen to you, let you hit me,
Let you cry on my shoulder.
What are friends for?
I work to keep an open mind.
Laughter is like bells, shattering still air.
If I could, I would stand in sunshine and never move.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Brett Devlin
the moon smiles down from
his cold sky
the limbs of the oak
like the fingers of an
ancient witch
The dark night smells
of the earth as
the trees burn with the
colors of autumn
decompose
decay
dirt
crisp
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Megan Baxter
The Owl
I found one of the old night birds
in the trees above the sugar house, starving,
it refused the trap-killed mice I brought,
hunter, whistling weight in the dark.
I laid their bodies below the tree
until I came upon him, frozen
knocked from his perch by the wind,
hollowed, hardened by death and frost,
the thick black centers of his eyes
fixed past me, devouring the light.
The Rower
For Hannah, Age 15
You watch morning
come over the mountains
straining at the banks of night
as the shells
set out north up river,
breaking the surface ice of spring.
The hands blister and open
along the oar.
On the shores
we call out
as you pull into the final meter,
glowing with sweat,
blond as summer,
in the long light of sunrise
crowned by dark pine bows.
Megan Baxter works at a 40-acre organic farm in Vermont. A graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, she completed a BFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. She has been published in the Georgetown Review and was the runner-up in this year’s Indiana Review ½ 5K contest.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Standing Upon The Sands
I cast my sinker
Deep into depths
Fishing for instructive humanity,
Fishing in a sea
Of sweat and abuse,
I spend my leisure hours,
Suffering,
As we all suffer together.
Never Reached
1
Seems in moments clearly sighted,
Far from damnable pride,
Seems I wished away my life
Wistful wishes without
a) result
b) because
I seem,
Now beneath the lens of sixty,
Less lent to fancies guide
Who fleetingly flew me
Where ill won’t usher,
Less today than yesterday,
Yesterday less than before.
Like the stunted tree,
The bonsai,
I reached out roots
To blind clay walls,
Aged and misty,
Aged beyond my wise,
Coarse beyond my hopes,
Steeps stretching past centuries
Aged and ochre
Too tall to see over or beyond.
Oh wonder killing wish of thunder
Rolling off a sleeve
While a lightning pen writes
In nights dumb darkness
Wonder,
Will inky storms
Soar me away
To future world’s gray praise?
2
Man I know can
c) become.
I know it happened before.
History need not lie!
Great men show their force of “will”
Then die (most)
Saturated with self satisfaction
Or least,
Feeling the wealth of their accomplishment
Some few, few believers
Offering wreaths at their altars.
So why not wish myself away
Into efforts beyond my reach?
Mighty efforts
Like the late great did seek.
Why not seek,
Each effort always more
Than that which came before
Seeking further reaches of the mind
Hoping walls enclosure not so coarse
It stifles my amour?
3
Oh but why,
I want to know,
Do efforts tumble down,
Back down to days before reach
Beneath me at a lesser steep
Leaving me wishing a way up
Or worse,
Wondering why,
Why reach,
Why climb at all
When faced with oh,
So steep a wall.
Richard Jay Shelton was born in 1946 on a navy base in Coronado, California, but has lived most of his life in Los Angeles. The six poems selected are part of three larger works titled “Carefully Chosen Words,” “Pathetic Poetics,” and “Apathetic Poetics.” His poetry has appeared in The Chaffin Journal, The Poet’s Haven, The Eclectic Muse, Pulse Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Down in the Dirt, The Homestead Review, and Willard & Maple.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Staking Claim
She brims with enamor over the notion
Of the rolling curves; the fat
Of the land.
She forages through the land’s lovely crevices,
Prospecting for the offering of its fallen fruits.
The pristine, primeval soil lays dormant.
Like her, its surface is only stirred by
Sporadic storms.
Unlike the beasts that ruled the land
Before the cruelty of humanity devoured it,
She scorns the challenge of brutish pursuit.
The land is her darling.
It never challenges her place to tramp on it.
It cannot threaten her with infidelity.
The supple, comfortable nature of
The fat of humanity repels her.
Its complexity, uncertainty,
And the manner in which it moves, thinks,
And refuses to regard her.
She reserves the right to sink her stake
Into the gritty soil, the unresponsive regions,
Of others.
And only into the parts that allow themselves
To safely be walked on.
But the soil shelters something,
Rooted far beneath the fathoming of man.
Beneath its layers that are marked by
Innumerable manufactured years,
Hidden within its body of powdery rock,
And profoundly inexplicable parts,
Which were fiercely forced asunder by the
Fervor of floods,
The icy blanket of inclement winters,
Slashed and scorched, but never consumed,
By ancient flame:
A secret.
She, a mere sliver
Of rapidly disintegrating sinew,
Will never know
That the dirt of the earth
Won’t be owned.
The Cards Are Stacked Against Me
In a drab den
that clings to a buzzing Brooklyn block,
a woman performs
experiments of the spirit
with her mind.
Though, perhaps,
not of the supernatural kind.
The pallid paper of her hand
is a map of ink blue veins,
like worn river beds
alongside well trodden tracks
of rickety gypsy caravans.
Or maybe just a printed map
of New York subway trains.
The withered tips of her fingers
rasp dryly over the faces
of battered cornered cards.
These relics of Celtic eccentrics,
whose minds danced with runes and romance;
The Hierophant,
The Hanged Man;
Dealt into a hasty mound with barely a glance.
You will find love…
You will find happiness…
You will find luck…
I recall a film that I once saw
A star of Scandinavian cinema
adorned in a costume cloak
(hoop earrings, and the like),
The cliché, not yet tired or trite.
The mid century model of modern novelty
in flickering black and white.
The hard young hearts of New York
won’t open for her lore.
Her lair, unchanged through the ages,
beside a vintage clothing store.
She sags in her worn costume cloak,
and cloaks her Brooklyn accent.
You will find love…
The Lovers.
You will find happiness…
The Magician.
For a twenty dollar fine…
The Fool.
Foolishly lured by neon words.
A Psychic Readings sign.
The cards should be aligned;
And their meanings: cryptic, wise.
Instead, they pile and pile.
And I smile and smile
at this aimless act.
My charity is hers,
And hers is mine.
Do you have a boyfriend?
No.
You will! You will!
Do you have a job?
No.
Oh, but you will!
Do you have friends?
Not really.
Oh. But you will.
She has cast her wicked spell:
The old fashioned feeling of good will.
I step outside to sidelong glances;
The cheeky faces of two hip girls.
They scan me with pious surprise.
You have been scammed,
Cool eyes imply.
He likes you, I can tell,
one girl remarks to her forlorn friend.
Her words are free and flippant
as she flips her cool hair cut,
but mine cost twenty bucks:
I will find love,
I will find luck.
Celeste Walke is a writer, visual artist, designer, and musician. She is currently looking for agent representation for her first novel, “The Roar of the Dandelion”. Her passion for writing is equaled by her passion for the visual arts. After living in New York for six years, she now resides in Los Angeles. She has displayed her art in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. She loves to use rich metaphor to explore the internal dynamics of relationships and the human condition.
January 2011 | back-issues, poetry
The Last Remaining Ghost
The last remaining ghost
In a world bald and gone wrong,
For no one wants to stay,
And no one wants to play
With all the children snug in the night,
While their parents cap the evening
And peacefully drift toward the dark.
No one is judging them,
Everyone is judging them,
They can’t be themselves with the ghost in the room.
“Stop staring,”
“I heard a sound,”
Litter lines the cracks in the floors,
The wood creaks and squeals.
Snug in their beds they look to the north,
The winter breeze shreds their fleece.
But children, don’t be scared;
There is no monster in your closet,
There is only the chill of the night,
But it cannot be seen,
Not by them or by him.
Nevermore
Drop the anchor on the shore,
For we shall leave here nevermore;
It’s paradise that’s in store.
The trees bloom fruit tender and sweet,
As all the life we generally meet;
To awaken the seed that’s what’s in store,
For we shall leave here nevermore.
Obscenity
Obscenity twists the knife in the heart of the town,
Day by day they go around falsely amused.
Dubbing the houses and roadways to the stillness of sound,
Living a life of stone.
The day Nick Adams fell into the lake,
Fundamentality went with him.
The day Nick Adams was burned at the stake,
Obscenity lifted the veil.
Thunder struck the tip of the church’s cross,
Through mud and dirt and spirit.
Burning a piece of nothing-a-loss,
A crack in the stone was found.
Foaming crowds in the night lit scene,
Their spirits lifted and smiles cracked.
The harmony changed from silence to obscene,
The falsely amused no longer false.
The Eye is a’ Coming to Seize You Again
He crept the morning stairs,
Each creak weeps frightful sighs.
Afraid of gathering glairs,
With engraved hatred in both eyes.
A shiver crept down his spine,
To awake and douse in history.
The cries of innocents unknown,
A bleak truth pawn to misery.
His conscience sighs for a goal,
He sees the withering of the mass.
Another mode of stiff control,
No spirits grave for none shall pass.
A city of wine and gold now bust,
A land now barren, lost, and slain.
One man, one power, now who to trust,
As the eye is a’ coming to seize you again.
All trampled and torn his body molds,
Contorted as each of the worlds go.
Fewer are left the further it unfolds,
What shall be done my companion, my bro?
On this day he sees this worldly truth,
But hides the real from the guilt and the shame,
The dead in the world corrupting the youth,
With powerful hands our masters to blame.
