July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Tick chicken, snapped bones with the marrow sucked out. America with stained lips, grinning. Florida tries to pull herself off the mainland, drifting into the Atlantic. A constellation falls from its proper place and collapses in the mind of Jupiter, lightning crushes a skull. We beat each-other with blunt objects and then fall forward into prisons where penance is expected but never given. Prisons are revolving until each prisoner reeks of freedom, makes the jailbird’s skin crawl. My limb departs like a parent. My skin unhinges like breakdown. I am six and stealing pencils to build fires, lead poison bloom. I am crossing over the border where the lockers hum and the dogs explode. A scissor cuts a sound from the air, like a chunk of flesh, it is cooked in a skillet until the pitch is golden and crispy. On a plate the sound is not thunder. On a table the sound is crashing into the porcelain beneath it, cracking the heirloom, ruining the dinner, bleeding into the cloth an orange stain.
by Sam Eliot
What Hunger Causes previously published in the Writebloody Press anthology, Aim for the Head.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
I remember my childhood
late nights with my Father
talking for hours
more Him
than Me.
I miss those nights
spending time like
its your last two
dimes.
The urgency of the morals
told in a confession of
one Man’s life, intent
to create a Man of a
Son.
The details always blur
as if it mattered anyway
the story of a young Man
is always the
Wanderer.
The last we spoke
it was of your
Peace in Life
as we drank wine
at the tops of trees
lighting the stars
at Night.
I recall the strangest thing
as I was doing my wandering
just after the sun went down
I completely stopped, unaware
of the purpose for such a feeling;
an uneasy glow from my soul.
The Night turned to a
new dark I’d never seen
I imagine my subconscious
beaming like a dream;
my heart falling asleep.
a feeling so Pure
that it takes years
to feel anything
again.
My passion has suffered,
and my apologies are genuine
Father, what is a Man
once his wandering has
reached its end?
by Michael Golden
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
made the Snow in the
Mountain grow, and that
very graceful heart-shape vine
with heart-shaped leaves,
I believed called
Choke Weed
A delicate rose leaned
pink petals as in disbelief,
toward an unknown weed
with leaves the size of
dinner plates
by Carol Smallwood
Carol Smallwood co-edited (Molly Peacock, foreword) Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets (McFarland, 2012). Her poetry received a 2011 Pushcart nomination. Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing, with The Writer’s Chronicle editor as foreword writer is from (Key Publishing House, 2012)
