April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
You were there from birth,
passed down from father to son,
waltzing through my veins. My muse.
We embraced, perfectly on pitch,
a song, and then I found
another
and I left you.
I see you
tattooed on my wrists. Thick
black lines, a G
and an F.
My former muse, permanent
over my veins,
under my skin,
a perpetual reminder.
I stare at you, remembering.
Wanting still
to create with you. After all,
you are in still in my blood,
but you’ve left my heart.
Empty capillaries flail
like strings waiting to be plucked,
longing to resonate,
but I’ve forgotten the tune.
by Justin W. Price
Justin W. Price is the managing editor at efiction Horror and for The Bridge online newspaper. His first book of poetry, Digging to China, is available for Amazon Kindle. He has been published in the Hellroaring Review, The Bellwether Review, The Rusty Nail, the Crisis Chronicles, eFiction Humor and eFiction Magazine. He maintains a blog (http://pdxjpricefirstblog.blogspot.com) and is an active writer on Hub Pages (http://pdxkaraokeguy.hubpages.com)
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
At the Southern Museum of Archaeology, I find
Homo heidelbergensis, the last common ancestor
of man and Neanderthals.
A skull with a sloping forehead, pronounced brow ridges
and no jawbone, a skull that, coupled with a heart,
once contained techniques of ecstasy,
esoteric knowledge of joy, gained,
perhaps, near a gentle soughing stream or
at dawn, sunset, night under the stars or
after a successful hunt or
at his joining with his woman or
at the birth of his children or
at the death of an enemy—
I am much more simple, now.
Tonight, the android Gypsy woman in the glass booth
will awkwardly lay out my cards and discern my future through plastic eyes
and with a resolute smile egest a slip of printed paper
telling me generic-happy-specifics.
I really cannot ever make myself believe
a common augury. Chinese fortune cookies
do not change my life though I have tried.
Benny, a homeless street prophet at 5 Points, tells me
every time he sees me “You are bound for greater things.”
Elijah, my fundamental Christian neighbor, constantly warns me about
a hell that “invades the land of the living and takes prisoners.”
The cards will yield no ready clues.
They must be interpreted by an adept,
a possessor of occult knowledge
concerning past and future.
Heidelbergensis is the first species of the Homo genus
to bury its dead.
I am a middle way Catholic.
I like historical criticism too much, or
I want to like it. In the Church galaxy, hell is a “mystery”
beyond my ability to understand, to understand
the rightness of it, the justness of it
and how God can yet be love.
I believe in geologic time, carbon dating, archaeology.
Homo heidelbergensis could probably ferment a beverage.
He knew about certain mood-altering roots and herbs and flowers.
Did his people suffer from addiction? They had no package stores, no bars,
no coffee shops, no rave clubs.
In Nazi Germany, alcoholics and addicts
were deemed to be “life unworthy of life.”
They were sterilized during America’s early 20th Century eugenics purge.
Now the health insurance companies and hospitals say
it is a disease, a heritable disease
expressing itself on the level of genes.
Chemical dependency is a malady, an unfortunate state
which comes upon us. Like diabetes.
Recovery nets billions of dollars per year in America.
The illegal drug business nets 350 billion dollars per year,
worldwide. And so on. (Alestair Crowley called himself “the Beast 666.”
He died a heroin addict. Did he also require heroin in the afterlife?
Did he need to detox there?)
The next right thing.
I would readily see the lesser secrets.
I would readily see the greater secrets.
I still need help to do this,
to look for the defining arcana
in a random array of circumstances. And
I will learn to interpret the circumstances.
by Bryan Merck
Bryan Merck has published in America, Blast Furnace, Camel Saloon, Conclave, Emerge Literary Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Literary Juice, The Rusty Nail, Stoneboat and others. He is a past winner of the Southern Literary Festival Poetry Prize and the Barkesdale-Maynard Poetry Prize. He lives in Moultrie, Georgia with his wife Janice.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
It’s cigarettes and coffee
between worries and words.
I could be talking to you
instead of myself,
but you’re allergic to smoke
and I can’t step outside
every 10 minutes.
It’s winter in New York City.
I won’t make any sacrifices.
I’ve come far enough in life
to know when to give in
and I won’t give in to you.
I don’t have to.
The thing inside of me
that can radiate for miles
will bestow its warmth
only on the hands of those
who know how to touch it.
And it shifts.
It twists and turns and
sits angrily deep within me.
It rages against the lampshade
I’ve been living under
since I came back home.
It curses the shade’s weight
and girth, and then
it shakes.
And the only thing I can do to still it
is find a worthy pair of hands,
or bathe in the sun.
But it’s fucking winter in New York City.
So it’s cigarettes and coffee, then,
and conversations with myself.
by Tonianne Druckman
