July 2018 | poetry
To minimize sorrow’s splash & sizzle
baby lava drops slow motion fall
leaving their tear ducts empty of ways
to transport the stuff of grief
some lean toward heavenly things
the blue & white fluff of paper Mache
obese clouds of thunderous joy
the pretty and perfect pulseless distractions
made famous by the stuff of faith
consumption is rarely subpoenaed
for questioning too much stuff
in the gut’s garage too much mail
in the mind’s cold box to sort out the real
from the almost real the who the hell sent
this wickedness to me who has time
for such stuff
Daniel Edward Moore
Daniel Edward Moore’s poems have been published in the Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Columbia Journal, New South, American Journal Of Poetry and others. His poems are currently at Lullwater Review, Natural Bridge Literary Journal, Scalawag Magazine, Tule Review, Fire Poetry Journal, West Texas Literary Review, The Chaffin Journal, Bluestem Magazine, The Paragon Journal and Sheila-Na-Gig. Poems forthcoming are in Weber Review, Stillwater Review, Hawaii Review, Blue Fifth Review, Plainsongs, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, Broad Street Magazine, The Museum Of Americana and West Trade Review. His books of poems are the anthology “This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians,” and “Confessions Of A Pentecostal Buddhist” can be found on Amazon. He lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. (danieledwardmoore.com)
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.
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
July 2018 | fiction
An old woman stands on the corner of 5th and Wall, a book of poetry in her tattered wool jacket.
- She shouts to no one in particular.
- She used to be famous. I heard it from the postman.
- I think I knew her.
- She was my teacher in first grade.
- She was my Girl Scout leader.
- She is my mother.
- She is not my mother.
- It’s me. I am on the street corner and I am all alone.
- 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.
- I call him goat dog.
- He protects me from the addicts.
Meanwhile, on the opposite corner.
A yellow haired man with whiskers is holding a fortune cookie and sobbing.
- 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.
- She doesn’t love him. She is ambivalent about love.
- It is raining outside. They are too busy with their mental chess game to notice. He wants her. She wants his job.
- The office is on the 15th floor and with a view of the street.
- He has a cold and left his raincoat in the car.
- She doesn’t have a cold.
- 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.
- He is terrified of ending up alone.
- She’s terrified that this is all there is in life.
- 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.
