john sweet

January 2019 | John Sweet, poetry

in a room, blindly

 

Not lies, really,

but truths that can’t be proven.

 

The ghosts of Aztecs,

of Incas.

 

Parking lots.

 

Palaces.

 

Man rolls the dice to see which of

the children will starve,

and then the bomb goes off.

 

Seventeen dead, blood everywhere,

the pews of the church on fire.

 

The runoff from the mill

dumped into the river.

 

Close your eyes and picture it.

 

The first time we met and then,

two years later,

the first time we made love.

 

Oceans on every side of us,

wars to the south,

to the east,

and I told you you were beautiful.

 

Had no words beyond that,

only abstractions.

 

Only need.

 

Thirty seven years old and

suddenly no longer blind and,

in the mountains,

the killers were making new plans.

 

In town,

the streetlights were coming on.

 

It seemed almost possible

we would find our way home.

 

aesop’s blues

 

in the cold white light of

febuary mornings

in the shadows of obsolete monuments

where we no longer touch

 

this is the world defined by

indifference and rust

 

this is a handful of salt held out

to christ while he dies on the cross

 

a gift without meaning

or offered with nothing but malice

 

a man walking slowly across

the frozen river and

then gone

 

sends his love

which is worth nothing at all

 

by john sweet

john sweet, b 1968, still numbered among the living. A believer in writing as catharsis. Opposed to all organized religion and political parties. His latest collections include APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press) and the limited edition chapbooks HEATHEN TONGUE (2018 Kendra Steiner Editions) and A BASTARD CHILD IN THE KINGDOM OF NIL (2018 Analog Submission Press). All pertinent facts about his life are buried somewhere in his writing.

Shrapnel

January 2019 | poetry

My own words ricochet

back into my face,

splintering flesh,

with the impact

of mindless syllables

muttered under my breath,

barely audible

but heard nonetheless.

 

Words spewed

into the atmosphere,

involuntary but vile,

words I should have vomited

into any empty vessel

and plugged with

a lead stopper.

 

Words spilled

onto sacred ground,

scattered in a garden

for the innocent

to find like tantalizing

red berries

on a poisonous bush.

 

by Gloria Heffernan 

Gloria Heffernan’s poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, has been accepted for publication by New York Quarterly Books. Her chapbook, Some of Our Parts, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. In addition, her work has appeared in over fifty journals including Chautauqua Literary Journal, Stone Canoe, Main Street Rag, Columbia Review, Louisville Review, and The Healing Muse.

Blue Glass

January 2019 | visual art

Blue Glass

by Steve Ausherman

Steve Ausherman is a poet, painter and photographer who lives in New Mexico. Throughout his life, his mercurial personality and restless nature have driven him towards travel and exploration of both the man-made and natural world. His paintings are filled with the rich colors of the American Southwest and his poems are reflections upon travel, family, and wilderness. His camera accompanies him on trips near and far, and allows him to make images that capture his experiences in literal, conceptual and poetic ways. Free time finds him exploring the backroads, hiking trails and mountain ranges of the American West with his wife Denise.

The Line, or, An Unreliable Narrator of the Short Ride Home

January 2019 | nonfiction

My son today is anarcho-Marxist and looks towards a world of fractured power. On the way to school he laughed at the rationale behind a thin blue line; a line he’s certain will and should self-implode.  I feel like there’s an even thinner line between how people see me and what’s happening inside; maybe it’s the color of a two-way mirror.  On one side there used to be a bougie white woman with bohemian tendencies, a well-read Northeastern WASP, and on the other was sharp teeth, madness, the unpredictable danger of an inappropriate turn of phrase; blood-crusted fingernails; cake for breakfast.  Then someone flipped a switch, maybe me, and the line separated instead an inner composed sophisticate and an exterior mess, a person who has lost track of how to wear her face.  Strange fluids burbling out of unnatural orifices, oops!  Yet when I turn to plug one, chunks of flesh fall away, revealing open tombs of dead promises and unfinished thoughts. But that’s just right now; in a few hours the key will be properly in the ignition, engine on, and I’ll pick up my kid; he’ll complain about plutocracy and play me bad punk from his phone, gleeful, knowing or not knowing that his driver is an unreliable narrator of the short ride home.

 

by Abigail King

Abigail King lives, writes, and eats radicchio in Austin, Texas.

She’s My Lady Friend

January 2019 | nonfiction

Grace lives up the street. Every morning she gets into her mint condition 1982 Plymouth Reliant and drives two blocks down the street where she spends the day with Gary, her gentleman friend. Grace is a spritely 89. She is robbing the cradle a little with Gary who is only 78. Gary is homebound. Diabetes took his vision. They both have grandchildren and great grandchildren of children who left this little town long ago. Widow and widower, they spend their days together. She cooks for him. “Having someone to enjoy the food is the only fun in cooking anymore.” They are intimate. “Our children think we should marry but phooey on that!” They never spend the night. “I need my beauty rest!” She takes him to church and to the Elks club for pinochle and for coffee and pie at the little café so they can get the gossip from the coffee clutch.  Gary always has pie, diabetes be damned. She reads the local paper aloud and plans their attendance at funerals. She has a little box of sympathy cards at the ready and an envelope of laundered and pressed five dollar bills. She always gives one in memory of the deceased to the church’s radio broadcast, unless a memorial fund is specified. She includes Gary’s name with her own on the card.

Late one afternoon, after she divvies the roast, mashed potatoes and gravy into separate containers for their meals throughout the week, and puts a couple in the freezer as well, Grace tells Gary she needs a nap before driving home. While she dozes in the floral print recliner, he listens to a cooking program on television. The woman cooks from her kitchen on a ranch, and a husband, children, and a widowed father-in-law are always brought in to eat what she makes, usually after chores or school or some play activity. They are always happy. He likes the show for the stories of ranch life that go with the food. It puts him in mind of his life, before the kids grew up and moved away, before Nettie died, before he’d sold the ranch and moved to town, before he’d lost his vision.

He says, “I was listening to the Pioneer Woman and thinking on the old times.” He says this over and over in the next couple of days to anyone who will listen, to his children, to himself while he waits in the corner of the family room at the church. He thinks on it during the Psalm and the hymns, and still beside the grave where disturbed soil gives scent to his sightlessness. His daughter helps him find the casket with the flowers he’d asked her to buy. The people whisper in the church basement over casseroles and bars, “Grace was always so good to him,” and “What will Gary do now?”

 

by Tayo Basquiat

TAYO BASQUIAT is a writer, teacher, adventurer, scavenger, and Wilderness First Responder. He gave up tenure as a philosophy professor to pursue an MFA in creative writing at the University of Wyoming. His work has appeared in Superstition Review, On Second Thought, Northern Plains Ethics Journal, the Cheat River Review, Proximity Magazine, and in a growing portfolio as producer of Wyoming Public Media’s “Spoken Words” podcast.