Can’t Understand / Fly

January 2013 | back-issues, poetry

Can’t Understand

when in the drowsy hours
you speak to me in tongues
I can’t understand,
is when I realize we must
be doing this for a reason,
to get to some end, or
to prove something lost,
and you wait patiently for me to answer
in huffy silence until you recall that I can’t
speak a bit of mandarin
and you laugh, a sweet,
funny kinda laugh before
you fall asleep and forget.

Fly

All this world out there
and you can’t reach
any of it, and neither
can I right now, Only
I know about it
you can’t even realize it,
even in the end,

this glass is ugly
people cough, piss & die
it’s reflected on me,
windows divide the cosmos,
the very black hole of reality,

you stick to it,
falling sideways,
crawling about my books.

by Thomas Pescatore

Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia, he is an active member of the growing underground poetry scene within the city and hopes to spread the word on Philadelphia’s new poets. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row.

Looking for a Key

January 2013 | back-issues, poetry

The Dungeon, Midwest Books, Stoughton, Wisconsin

Confine me closer, little room of shelves,
And hold me in your mouth whose teeth are spines.
Your concave paper and your convex cloth
Collapse upon me. Drug me with the smell
Of mummied wood. The book I want is all
Ways hidden well: accept my captured hand
Into your close forgotten crevices
To touch the flesh the angle leaves unseen.

by Sara Bickley

Lemon Ice

January 2013 | back-issues, poetry

It was a sweltering summer day and

dripping with sweat I

popped over to Taylor Street,

ordered a lemon ice.

Waiting in line, my

phone buzzed it’s usual “hi,”

opening it

while taking an icy sip,

that’s how I

learned

that you’d died.

The sharp taste.

The sour taste.

The aftertaste

of lemon ice.

by Stefanie Lyons

Stefanie Lyons received her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a Chicago advertising copywriter by day, working on her great American novel by night. These poems come from a series of digital loneliness and anti-advertising pieces she’s currently working on. Oh, the irony.