Save Yourself (Again…)

Self-help book publishers
Looking for old answers
In new packaging

Of crafty cover art
Catered to mid-life upstarts
Caught up in life’s heist

Stealing unpredictable
Trust fund diamonds
Hiding from the sun’s glare

Seeks futility’s self-awareness
Posing as repressed confessions
Yet still contributes to yearly profits

 

by Charlie Weeks

 

Charlie Weeks is the type of guy who writes with any liquid poison soaking in his mind. He has been recently published in lit mags such as the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg review and Summer edition of Haunted Waters.

Kodachrome

In every family photograph

I see what isn’t there,

the change in my face,

my father’s gestures,

my mother’s hair.

I search through the box of photographs

for evidence. The fights we didn’t hear.

The book and its damning inscription.

Do I imagine the rift in the photograph,

the four of us on the couch in Texas at Grandpa’s house?

Mom is holding me still

her hands on my upper arms

as I lean toward the edge of the frame.

Eddie is resting against Dad,

his whole body balanced,

a weight on my father’s knee.

Dad leans away.

Mom looks dazed, her smile as static

as the turned up ends of her plastered hair.

I read an article years ago about how you could

tell which Hollywood stars were breaking up

by paying attention to body language in candid photographs.

Do I imagine our demise

in the way my parents lean away from each other,

in the way my brother tries to hold them still,

in the way I struggle to escape?

 

by Lori Gravley

Lori Gravley writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She earned her MFA from the University of Texas at El Paso. She has published poems and essays in a variety of journals, including Flights, Ekphrasis, and Mock Turtle Zine. She has work forthcoming in Crack the Spine and I-70 Review. She lives just outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio between a meadow and a cornfield.

The World Is Braille We Can Read With Our Fingertips

hide with me

in the unfinished corner

of creation

 

from Hannibal,

Busta Rhymes,

and Google

 

Matthew McConaughey

will have no power

until sundown.

 

we will play yahtzhee in the dark,

the dice with convex dots

so we can feel something

 

there are lightning bolts

in our eyes and we can split trees

by looking.

 

let’s read

the curvature

of the horizon

to each other

fingers thrust into the copper blood soil

your face deep in citrus and silver.

it’s dark but for your thoughts

and the full clouds.

 

by Akiva Savett

Akiva J. Savett’s poetry has been published in a chapbook entitled Preservation and appeared in The Orange Room Review, Poetry Quarterly, Kerem, Circa, The Red River Review, In Parentheses, Four And Twenty, The Eunoia Review, Etcetera, and was published in The Washington Post’s “Autobiography As Haiku.” He teaches English and Advanced Placement Literature at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He holds an MA in English from University of Delaware and lives in suburban Maryland with his wife Alison and two children.

 

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