Grethel Ramos

July 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

Taking

 

I’m leaving you tonight,

but before I leave I’m taking your chess,

your ping-pong, your Poems of Others,

your quiet geometry, your sloppy watercolors.

I always thought your nudes were ingenuous

and your self-portraits perfidious.

I’m taking your fatal pouty mouth,

the oil in your scalp, the virile volatile day

when we went to see your mother’s face.

I’m taking every square centimeter of cloistered soap

and skin bacteria from your sink.

And your affection for sentimentality

and for marshmallows.

The yacht is already sold,

and the money is kept safe with the mafia.

I’m taking your teeth, one by one,

all of them, and some more.

You’ll never ever be as chic

as you were when you lived with me.

I’ll wear your torso on my sleeve

and your allergic reactions on my knees,

already pale and sick for a lifetime’s sentence

of Saturday’s nights without the company of crickets

and your asthmatic burly posture.  I don’t know

how you went so far with that attitude.

I ‘m taking and taking a little more—

your unresolved conflicts

of sex and ego with the mirror,

the thrill you get from stains on a white shirt,

the pancreatic cancer you never experienced,

the bitter-sweet days

where you had me but desired her.

I’m taking the vision of love in your progressive astigmatism

and your accelerated breath every time you saw a beautiful girl,

a relic more than a memory, stark as a roasted pig,

still pink, on the Thanksgiving dining table.

I’m taking all that defines you as a person

because I cannot think of any other way

to be remembered.

 

 

Give Me Joy, Not Liberty

 

No one feels well here. Not the turkeys during Christmas,

not the mouse in the pet shop doing acrobatics with its tongue,

not the maiden, not the nun, not the bricklayer,

not the beautiful but toxic Russian for-hire assassin

who sat down to drink in a club by the beach in 1998

and hasn’t gotten up since.

The orthodontist is sad. The dog walker is sad.

The sommelier racing downstairs for a Sancerre is sad.

The traffic cop with the fat neck and the loaded gun

ready to shoot anybody is also sad.

The communist novelist looking for inspiration

in a café decorated with posters of Che

cannot believe how sad the world is after he wrote one word

on a scrap of newspaper soaked in champagne.

Ocean Drive Drag Queen Nina Blackrose is sad,

so is the trophy wife cloistered in a yacht.

The young are as sad as the elderly.

The bald and the handsome are equally affected by suffering.

The beginning actress who didn’t get the role in the audition

is sad and needs sleeping pills to make it through the night.

There are no sleeping pills in America anymore—

Marilyn Monroe took them all.

The Italian whisky-seller

sadly stays in the scene all year round,

littering cigarette butts and glasses half full of Jack Daniel’s,

shoulder to shoulder

with sad thick gold- toothed naked trapeze girls,

dropping bills as if he owned

that trashy juke joint on 11th street.

Sadness is more serious than acne.  Just ask Benitez,

or the technician from the cable company.

I had an abortion on a morning as yellow as margarine.

My doctor, who was obviously depressed,

recommended that I avoid heavy lifting

and cardiovascular activity for a week.

I sit by myself on a bench in the playground

to look at the children playing.

They all have features that foretell potential for grief—

the rigidity of a jaw, the crude rhythm of a hip,

the deranged leg in the air—

as if they had inherited tragedy from their parents,

who were once naïve 7-year-olds

chasing restlessly after a ball,

but grew up to become sad sommeliers,

sad dentists,

sad strippers.

 

by Grethel Ramos

Grethel Ramos Fiad is a Cuban-American journalist, writer, poet and photographer currently living in Miami. Her poetry rejects the cheap comforts of dogmatic conventionality and welcomes the disclosure of the dissonances in human nature.

Impressions

July 2018 | poetry

shadow

 

The shadow

of a cragged tree stands

 

sharp and complete

across an old apartment building,

 

though my angle

of vision

 

blinds me

to the shadow’s tree.

 

*

 

pigeon

 

A pigeon flies toward the cornice

of an old tenement building then

 

draws up short, startled by something

it finds where it was about to land

 

and it flaps in the air, in place, in

a flurry of disbelief; then it either

 

attacks or shoots away

but I don’t notice

 

because it sticks in my mind

as stuck in midair, in shock,

 

unable to square

with a truth

 

I can’t

see.

 

*

 

deli

 

The royal blue

deli awning, dripping

 

with rain, says:

Cold Sodas, Newspapers,

 

Sandwiches, Hot Coffee, Beer,

Play Lotto Here.

 

The cramped, over-lit, under-cleaned

deli itself

 

crunching these commonplaces

together in

 

the dark

reflection of

 

my deli-stocked

face.

 

*

 

mirror

 

The acoustic guitar

hanging on the café wall

 

behind me

hangs halved in a mirror

 

on the far wall

before me, a mirror

 

in whose frame is tucked

a curled, faded photograph

 

of a smiling young woman, a mirror

crossed by cropped reflections

 

of staff and customers

coming and going

 

until it empties

in the night.

 

by Mark Belair

Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East and The South Carolina Review. His latest collection is Watching Ourselves (Unsolicited Press, 2017). Previous collections include Breathing Room (Aldrich Press, 2015); Night Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2013); While We’re Waiting (Aldrich Press, 2013); and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2012). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times. Please visit www.markbelair.com

Assumptions

July 2018 | fiction

An old woman stands on the corner of 5th and Wall, a book of poetry in her tattered wool jacket.

 

  1. She shouts to no one in particular.
  2. She used to be famous. I heard it from the postman.
  3. I think I knew her.
  4. She was my teacher in first grade.
  5. She was my Girl Scout leader.
  6. She is my mother.
  7. She is not my mother.
  8. It’s me. I am on the street corner and I am all alone.
  9. There is a white dog with scruffy fur in the alley. His front right paw is deformed and he limps. He is focused on his daily quest for food and sex.
  10. I call him goat dog.
  11. He protects me from the addicts.

  

Meanwhile, on the opposite corner.

A yellow haired man with whiskers is holding a fortune cookie and sobbing.

 

  1. He’s loved her since the day they met, at the office Christmas party. She had her hair in a bun, loosely tied with a gold and red garland.
  2. She doesn’t love him. She is ambivalent about love.
  3. It is raining outside. They are too busy with their mental chess game to notice. He wants her.  She wants his job.
  4. The office is on the 15th floor and with a view of the street.
  5. He has a cold and left his raincoat in the car.
  6. She doesn’t have a cold.
  7. He wants to get married and start a family. That’s all he’s ever wanted. Being promoted to Director was never in the plan.
  8. He is terrified of ending up alone.
  9. She’s terrified that this is all there is in life.
  10. This is all there is in life.

 

by Sheree La Puma

Sheree is an award-winning Author, Producer, and Social Media Strategist. She holds an MFA in Critical Studies & Writing from California Institute of the Arts and has published articles/fiction/books on a myriad of topics. In addition, Sheree has over 30 years experience in the charitable non-profit sector, working as a social scientist, synthesizer, and wordsmith. In 2012, Sheree traveled to Ghana, Africa to meet with a child trafficking survivor. Changed by the experience, she spent the next two years writing about his journey. Passionate about women and the rights of the child, Sheree wants to reach out and inspire the voiceless.