July 2016 | fiction
Arlo was strolling down Pike Street one morning when he saw a woman sitting on a bench in front of a sex shop, madly trying to light a cigarette. She looked to be in her early twenties, was tall and slim with azure blue hair, and her milky white skin was adorned with tats and piercings. She looked vaguely familiar so he offered her a light and they chatted it up a bit.
Her name was Oona, and he found out that they were at the same Poetry Slam event the month before. She told him that she just moved to Seattle, used to work as a dominatrix, and that her wife, Didi, was a tranny. She also revealed that she once lived in a coven and was a witch.
Afterwards, he took her shopping at a place that carried a wide assortment of the dark, Goth clothing befitting her persona.
They met several other times that month, always followed by more shopping sprees. Arlo could see what was happening but it almost didn’t matter because he just wanted to be in her presence, at whatever cost. He liked to buy her needful, shiny things. She liked to get those needful, shiny things.
During the following months, Arlo fell into the role of servant to Oona and Didi: running errands, delivering takeout food, chauffeuring, and helping them furnish the apartment they shared with another tranny. He truly enjoyed this role.
One day, she told him that she unexpectedly inherited some property in New York and would be moving back there within the week.
Arlo felt hurt and lost without her. Eventually he figured out a way to sooth the pain and kick-start his life back up again; he would immortalize her in print.
by A.R. Bender
July 2016 | poetry
Jimmy was a dreamer, a handsome James Dean kind of guy.
Jimmy decided at 17 he was in love, so he eloped with his child bride
and kept it a secret until nobody would question her age.
He loved his bride and she loved him. They had a baby
daughter who was a dreamer too.
Jimmy had tiny flecks of gold in his eyes that looked like the sun
had burned right through them. Sometimes he wore a patch.
Jimmy loved to dream but he loved his child bride and daughter
more than any dreamer would think possible.
When Jimmy was 20 he was drafted in the Korean War.
He didn’t like war so he pretended he was blind in one eye
and when that didn’t work he bought a sunlamp and stared
into the light for 29 minutes a day
Jimmy was never really blind in either eye but his dreams
began to be slightly blurred.
When the army said he could still see well enough to kill
a man, Jimmy went off to war.
Years went by and he sent love letters home to his child bride
and daughter who were both growing up, alone.
Some of the letters spoke of the things he missed most
from back home. All of the letters had a pencil sketch
of wild horses running through a field.
When Jimmy returned from Korea he was different. He stayed
out all night and played cards. He drank a lot of whiskey
because his dreams were more like nightmares.
He went to strip-clubs and bars parading around with prostitutes
or cheap whores according to his child bride.
He started talking about the men in his platoon.
He wore a fedora with a long duck feather wedged beneath
the black satin ribbon.
Jimmy loved Winston cigarettes.
Sometimes Jimmy drew horses but they weren’t running free
anymore. They looked sickly, their heads hung down, their tails
never flowing in the wind.
Jimmy’s mother was concerned. She asked the doctor
to straighten Jimmy out. She ordered electric shock therapy
to get rid of his nightmares.
Jimmy told his daughter he was being followed. He said people
slipped things in his drinks. He said he chewed bubblegum
to get rid of the taste.
He started hallucinating. His dreams were not dreams anymore.
Jimmy couldn’t tell the difference between his child bride
and a cheap whore.
He acted funny, told his daughter not to look at his eyes.
Not to stare at the sun and never trust anyone, especially
other men with fedoras who started hanging around after
hours leaving ashes on the steps.
Jimmy liked to smoke but those ashes weren’t his. Jimmy
feared for his life and his family’s lives too.
He began to lock the doors feeling paranoid.
He wrote crazy stories in a secret black binder.
One night, Jimmy took an overdose of sleeping pills
His daughter found him with his eyes closed.
Jimmy didn’t need a patch anymore.
When they buried Jimmy they draped his coffin
with an American flag. His daughter kept it with his drawings
of horses, the ones with their tails whipping through the wind.
Years later someone told the family that Jimmy was in a special troop.
That the government had given him LSD in something they called
* ‘Operation Midnight Climax.’
Jimmy had been part of an experiment that went terribly wrong.
Jimmy had been playing Black Jack at a safe-house
set up by the CIA.
Jimmy died an unsung hero. But his daughter never doubted
his dreams were real, even when they became more like nightmares
than dreams.
Some days she turns on the sunlamp for 29 minutes and lets
the warmth surround her face. She wears a patch on both
eyes to protect her from the light or anything else she doesn’t want to see
She says Jimmy’s dreams are still alive in her. She runs
her fingers over his pencil sketches and reads herself to sleep
with the crazy stories he wrote in the secret black binder.
She dreams of horses and unsung heroes and all things that sound
too impossible to be true.
On his birthday every year she takes out the folded American flag
and drapes it over her bed. She puts on his feathered fedora
and smokes a Winston cigarette then chews one piece of bubblegum.
Jimmy would have liked that.
by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a seven-time Pushcart nominee and four-time Best of the Net nominee. She has authored several chapbooks along with her latest full-length collection of poems:Hasty Notes in No Particular Order newly released from Aldrich Press. She is the 2012 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook competition for her manuscript Before I Go to Sleep and according to family lore she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com
July 2016 | poetry
Serenade
Where have you been all my life
now that it’s nearly done?
Here on this island of our birth?
Where minds venture like hands
and pedestrians traffic in
solstice cold they import from
There to Here on overcoats into gin mill
noctilucence wherein
frigidity ensues
then overturns
itself.
Where they sit apart, that woman and man
once lovers, on the longest
night of the year.
Here they speak only in syllables but
there in the throwback booths fashioned
perpendicular, prismatic high-
gloss red
Where two slip into one
as we did once
risking scandal. Those two over
There—it’s obvious they are in
over their heads
having once been head
over heels.
Back then, Ramses II was believed
to have fathered
one hundred children.
Matrimony is like that.
Everyone was drunk
when first they met.
The woman was a girl in disguise.
Ricochet barlight on white of a beard.
There, poets were never made to adhere.
Where again, it’s your dime.
There, the scherzo’s on you, pal.
Put a couple of quarters in
Where once you might have wrangled a tone.
Request permission to employ vocabulary, sir!
Currying curious favor I, choir member, cant.
Right here, te quiero, quemamos. I want you. We burn.
Can I carry your books?
Are you generous or dangerous?
Beware, where poets dally, neologisms
being diagnostic for madness.
Where mushrooms grow and worms wind.
There goes thy long-reserved senility.
There, swans are mean, they mate for life.
Where you dream of eating
one, but I pushed the head of that last one
under, as into an oven, thinking
Now “it’s your turn, PeeWee.”
Where I once was angry,
I now swan around,
my heart,
the size of a fist.
There, Buoyancy took hold,
where no singing I do fails
to please me
and that is saying something for to go
there I know you
want.
There is still a market
for a woman who knows how
to diagram a sentence
in a corset.
Here she is.
Late June
Humidity grows high and heat holds it tight.
Pupils wiggle free of their seats. An angel cracks
A can open. A voice breaks. Triple plays transpire. Twilight
Corazon radio love, Sonido Suave and tank tops are back
With a vengeance. Sirens mesmerize. Quipping, some flirt. Beach
Boys oldies resound with static edges. Freedom screams,
Whiffle-snap nights herald the long-awaited reach
Of lilac and garbage-scented June. Waterfowl careen,
Raw-voiced over the harbor. A little spot outside
Goes a long way here, where a fire escape can save your life.
Rockaway Jamaica Bay gulls swoop, drop, dive
Over Gotham waters running various and rife—
Veils of low-hanging humidity June imposes
Promise July’s chain-link fences lousy with roses.
Maruccinus, You’re Asinine
Adaptation: Catullus XII
Marrucinius, you’re asinine, deft indeed, slick too,
at least when you’re sober, and your crappy de-
meanor otherwise leaves much to be desired.
Take your sleazy maneuvers, Klepto, like your
brazen pilfering of my dinner napkins!
You think larceny’s funny? Don’t believe me?
Go on, question your brother. Ask him. I dare
say your Pollio doesn’t find your antics
so amusing at all! And we know what a
great sport Pollio is. He can take a joke.
We know Pollio’d cough up a million just
cure your sinister penchant, fix or break you—
Come clean, cough it up. Give me back what’s mine.
Pronto. Fork over the linens you swiped, Lefty.
Come on, gimme the napkins, Veranius,
carried all the way from Spain for my table
by a friend who came to dinner here and left
empty-handed and this is why 300
mean lines packing a wallop are headed your way, O,
asshole dinner companion. Better act fast.
Send the napkins which Veranius, my true
friend, bestowed upon me back, that precious item
whose high-caliber fibers are well woven
close, tight into the fabric of my being.
Those linens you swiped did not come all the way
from Spain, Stickyfingers, so loser scum like
you could pinch them in between courses and
bites and pocket them the minute my head was turned.
by Michele Madigan Somerville
Michele Somerville’s collection of poems, Black Irish, was published by Plain View Press (2009). Her book-length poem was also published by Ten Pell Books (2001). A reprint of this book is expected late this year. She won Honorable Mention in the May Sarton Contest, sponsored by Bauhan Publishing (2012). She won first place in the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Contest, which was judged by Billy Collins. In the Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition, sponsored by Eason Bookshops, she won Honorable Mention. Her poetry has been published in Hanging Loose, Mudfish, The Nervous Breakdown, Mad Hat, Puerto del Sol, 6ix, Downtown Brooklyn, Eureka Street, LiveMag, Brooklyn Review, Purchase Poetry Review, Big Time Review, and Quarto. she also writes essays and has been published in The New York Times and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. she teaches in New York City, and is an avid painter.
