July 2016 | poetry
Curving, climbing, descending
On steel tracks, the moon keeping pace,
While in ten thousand little towns
The sleepers sleep in the earth.
In ten thousand furious days,
Men, machines, explosives
Blast through the mountains,
Hard labor building highways: The age
Of the motorcar has come and must
Be accommodated. But there are
No real rules yet, and whether
In a plush Pullman smoking car or a flivver
In a field, men will hop up, pulling
Long and deep from jugs of corn whiskey.
The ten thousand days diminish one
By one, and trains, men, swaying,
Drunk, join the sleepers of the little towns;
Sleep, while mountains and fields
Shift and change from what they once
Knew them to be, and cannot, even now,
In their stertorous breathing, imagine
The stranglehold to come.
by Christopher Kuhl
Christopher Kuhl has been published in Big Muddy, Crack the Spine, OVS Magazine, Euphony, Prairie Schooner, The Anglican Digest, Ensemble Jourine, Inscape Magazine, Kane County Chronicle, Mississippi Literary Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Zzbaggins Poetry Victims, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Thin Air Magazine, Tulane Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Alabama Literary Review, OxMag, Superstition Review, The Griffin, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and The Critical Pass Review. His short story, “Wade,” was named the Annual Editor’s Choice of Best Work in Fiction by Inscape Magazine. In 2014, five of his poems were selected to be published as an individual chapbook by Red Ochre Press. Kuhl’s self-published book was awarded an honorable mention in the poetry category in the Writer’s Digest 15th Annual International Self-Published Book Awards, and he came in 10th in the Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards. He also placed first for my poem, “Agon,” in the Mississippi Poetry Society competition.
July 2016 | poetry
The evening beryl blue
A wavy horizon puffing out clouds
Sanguine in her lasting coffers
My heart lies silent at the bottom
Of the jar of peace.
Ears lounge on sand,
Coarse as they may be
Toting cottony waves
And their aimless niveous roars
The wind lifts my hair
Levity sinks in the sand
A shell upturned, burnishing a golden
Corals stray awash unshapely
Yet their randomness beholds a design
Woven in the blindness of foaming waves
Warily retreating into the belly
Of the gurgling sea
I lift my chin, scan them accede
My sights lock as colors riot deep
Into my fist wet sand intrude
As my toes surrender deep
A sombre wave romances my chin warm
Then rushes to bathe my dazed soul
That time too shall come
When my ashes they douse
Harboring them in their sojourning fold.
by Sudha Srivatsan
Sudha was born and raised in India. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Commonline Journal, Tower Journal, the Germ Magazine, Carcinogenic, Indiana Voice Journal, Bewildering Stories, Leaves of Ink, Mused Literary Review, Subterranean Blue, Corner Club press, BlazeVox among others. Her work was also selected to be part of Storm Cycle’s 2015 Best Of anthology.
July 2016 | poetry
Only the best trickster gods
have wings. Beating away at
the dried browned grass,
they knead the air and earth together
in the stone bowl of a yeasty, wet spring,
fooling us with movement and stories
that only let us see shadowy parts of things.
There are layers and layers
of air and birdsong and grass
that only a woodcock can lay claim to
strutting in that flat dinner plate of prairie.
For us, each step closer is a snap of grass,
but the only way to know it is to lie on it
and to feel it’s sharp ceramic crack underneath you.
I can stand still, feel my feet in the fragile brotherhood
of all the things in motion—
fluid wings, the unsettled earth, the ungrown grass,
a frog-chorused April dusk against
that fluttery squeak of flight,
which is not so much an awakening,
but the audible refilling of the haunted earth.
by Paul Wiegel
Paul Wiegel is a Green Bay native and now writes from his home near the upper Fox River in Wisconsin. His work is forthcoming in The English Journal, Eunoia Review, and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal. He is the 2015 winner of the John Gahagan Poetry Prize.
