July 2017 | fiction
Marco looked at the empty space that his sculpture was going to occupy. What the hell did he have to say that would be worth occupying this space with? His collection of found objects that were going to be used for the assemblage lay in boxes and sat in bags all around him. He had metal and wood and plastics of all sorts. No paper. He had given up on paper and on vocabulary because words had only ever gotten him into trouble in life. But even without words, his sculpture was supposed to mean something.
The empty space before him was more profound than anything he could fill it with. He could add pieces of his life: the slights, the insults, the bashings in the head he’d endured at the hands of so-called friends who’d only ever left landmines for him to be exploded by later. No, they did not deserve any acknowledgment in his work. He could talk about his great loves, the ones who sliced him open, threw him onto funeral pyres, and, even worse, ignored him when he needed them, especially when he’d dedicated entire weeks to their problems. It was always the same thing: I love you if you are helping me, but if you need anything in return, well, then you are just out of luck. Yep, that was it. He was out of luck. He was completely out of luck. And what can one do when one has no luck left at all? What is there left when all hope of anything ever going right again has completely gone?
That is what he needed to figure out. That was what the void before him needed from him. It was the artist’s job to stare into the gaping maw of nothingness and pull from it something. That was a profound obligation. But now that he stared into that gaping maw, all he found was nothing. His ability to pull anything out of nothing was gone.
He picked up the bags and boxes and carried them out to the dumpster. He had nothing left. Without the objects, perhaps the silence could finally overtake him. Perhaps the noises that kept hurting him would finally quit, quiet. Quite.
He had left nothing.
Eckhard Gerdes
Eckhard Gerdes has published books of poetry, drama, and fourteen books of fiction, including the novels “Hugh Moore” (for which he was awarded an &Now Award) and “My Landlady the Lobotomist” (a top five finisher in the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll and nominated for the 2009 Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel of the Year). His most recent books are a tongue-in-cheek work of creative nonfiction, “How to Read” (Guide Dog Books); a novel, White Bungalows (Dirt Heart Pharmacy Press); and a collection, “Three Plays” (Black Scat Books). He lives near Chicago and has three sons and three grandsons.
July 2017 | poetry
Natal Motions
You blame me for rumors
floating across highways
which come to rest uneasily
among swans
and other natal motions.
The voice you claim
to speak with may be your own
or the disembodied sound
of warm intentions you thought
had finally been quelled.
Like a spin of insects
beneath an evening streetlamp
it’s useless to sleep
when you could be awake
imitating life and tracing art.
I appreciate the false existence
you’ve found in a patch of tulips
but I don’t want
an expression of your tenderness
chained to a bird of song.
The Highest Reaches
Beneath the highest reaches
in a yellow-gold field
your eyes are filled
with gestures of joy
and light-blue bends
but sadness and star grains
still cling to your hair.
I rise to my feet
even in an anatomy
of insignia and pins
obscured beneath a canopy
of crippled captivity.
The birds have ended their ostinato
and we’re left
with only a stuttering silence
of leaves.
My dream is cracking open
the egg of a white lizard,
a little girl pounding
on a locked door.
If it’s me you’re crying for
then no, I don’t want you to stop
until we’re separated again
by sutures of emerald green
and pinches of black.
Gelatin Plateaus
You’re scared to exchange words
fearing that I’ll intersperse my voice
with a disastrous elixir
designed to make you love me.
In my guise as a simple hitchhiker
with a broken guitar
you’ve driven past
at least a dozen times
coursing the roundabout
with your left foot tapping out the window.
Cast from the joke of a raven
you dance naked but impenetrable
in a tongueless world of gelatin plateaus
and abalone snow.
The sound you’re hearing in your mind
is only a mortar and pestle—
the killing powder was consumed
when you first imagined
the swollenness
of my lips around your nipple;
felt the insistence of glacial stone
opening furrows of ochre and loam.
Disconnected Flickers
Never does my mind
consider the disappearance of earth—
my thoughts go even further than that
a grisaille balance of stars
and starlessness
the high pitch of emptiness
and the decaying swingset in my backyard;
warped, brittle wood
and tattered canvas.
A calm has descended upon
morning grass
and the departure of small mammals
for more secluded silences—
the faintest trace of your instep
makes the world more
than a sequence of disconnected flickers
running in the direction
I suppose.
Richard King Perkins II
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.
April 2017 | poetry
When they were small, I’d line them up
before we’d go into the grocery store,
spit on a tissue and wipe their faces,
straighten their hair, inspect.
They say now I was marking them.
I’ve watched how ravens raise theirs.
By fall, big enough to fly for an hour,
the parents lead the grown ones
away from the nest up the mountain forest
as they squawk and loop,
following to a new silence.
The old book of cobbled myths
prescribes how fathers
should rub the newborns with salt.
The patriarchs dictated,
they must mark the children,
perform the ritual
as a sign of their covenant with god,
disinfect the corrupt tendencies of the heart,
so that the child would be truthful.
But it is no guarantee.
Though you believe they never will,
when they lie to you the first time,
you ache as though you’ve been cut,
as though something has broken,
never thinking you could ever close
such a wound.
You try to construct the lesson of forgiveness.
You think for days
that it is a fault of your own making.
But the lies are critical,
it is the way we learn to forgive,
the way we learn
that our eyes give us away.
Mark Burke
April 2017 | fiction
After my father’s third wife left him, he tacked up a paper target onto the center of the cathode ray credenza and pegged a picture of my latest step-mother over it. He towed the fridge into the sitting room, packed with Pabst. Beside it was a cinder block-sized container of BB pellets for his pump action rifle.
From an inflatable arm chair he took aim and shucked beers until the picture was pulp and the vacant cans were an avant-garde sculpture. I came out of my room to use the bathroom when an errant BB whanged off the television’s curved glass, struck me in my solar-plexus and fell harmlessly to the floor.
I never told anyone, but for a while I thought I was bulletproof. My father wasn’t. He let things get to him too easily. But genetic inheritance is hard to hide. Hollow-points ricocheted off Superman’s pupils. Lois Lane’s devotion never wavered. My action figurine bulged with immutable, plastic muscles.
Decades later, when my fiancée broke up with me, I thought about my father, dead from a discharge through his ear lobe more potent than a BB. If I pinched the same trigger he had, would the bullet still bounce off?
Brandon Hartman
April 2017 | poetry
I.
Blacksmiths re-arrange
silken threads
Tailors forge
horseshoes
Where do you form, irony, to then become formless?
What whistles these are, from disintegrated yokes afar?
Fourteenth century subjugation, still prepared for trade
A hankering globe feeds on soluble and insoluble fibre,
O prodigal atoms of billowy attestation.
II.
An undulant weather is characteristic of rectified revisions
Continents and natural components perish simultaneously,
What well behaved skin of decorum, unwatched, undresses?
A lexicographer could coat tribes in cycles of gestations
Hence sap inside barks must be both; reminders and properties
The wonder, a superficial matter camouflage of damp interiors,
What perishes,
cartouches of
Ancient pharaohs
say geologists.
III.
Now, I will listen to them through mutations of my speech,
I will unlearn their ghastly spells when graveyards un-disguise,
Bleak moments
odorless air
practised inception
creation born.
The world communicates, where were you born, are headed to?
Leaves stiffen as they are spread out on bare grounds, everyplace —
These fitful events.
IV.
The exact value who can decipher? Value vexes fathomless froth.
Death descends upon a clear birthed moment while it undrapes
The broadcloth
over a carcass,
peruse discarded
companions and boots,
Death fetches and encourages filtered fibres of breaths.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is pursuing her second postgraduate degree in literature at the United Kingdom and has been awarded the GREAT scholarship. Her work has appeared or is to appear in Ann Arbor Review (MI, USA), The Rain, Party & Disaster Society (USA) and in poetry anthologies such as Dance of the Peacock (Hidden Brook Press, Canada), Suvarnarekha (The Poetry Society of India, India) and elsewhere.
