January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
The Old Dog finds its legs in the corner. He wants to take me for a walk, but I’m too weak. He knows that better than anyone. He’s been waiting.
We found each other the day I sank into my cups and carved up a drifter for sport. Together we buried the corpse underneath a wooden shed. I remember thinking how deftly his charcoal legs beat back mounds of frozen earth. Back then the Old Dog was only a pup with thoughtless marble eyes and fangs like sewing pins. He’s walked in my shadow ever since, placing paw after paw in my wayward steps. He’s seen me lie and cheat to cover up my crime. He’s watched me kill again and again. With each transgression the Old Dog took on weight and edges and heat. Now his claws glow like coals in a forge and his old bones land like anvils, cracking my ribs as he mounts my chest. His jaws close around my throat and I can taste his canine breath. The scent of eggs fills every cavity in my skull.
My Old Dog wants to take me for a long walk.
by Zach Lisabeth
Zach Lisabeth is a Los Angeles-based speculative fiction author. His work has appeared in the anthology RealLies (The Zharmae Publishing Press and he is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop.
January 2015 | back-issues, nonfiction
27 February 2013.
She said:
Gentlemen, excuse me, gentlemen. Gentlemen. You’re such nice looking gentlemen. Gentlemen. I don’t mean to bother. All I have to give you [rustle of a plastic bag] is this flashlight. Gentlemen. I’m a pastor. I’m Pastor Patricia Smith. This is a high crime area. I was just beat down the other day. I’m the victim of sexual abuse. I broke these two teeth. I need: to get them fixed. Gentlemen I’m not a bum, I’m a pastor. Pastor Patricia Smith here. There was a murder up on Broadway. I’m the only witness. My mother. My mother: I’m just trying to get back to where my mother is. To New Brunswick, New Jersey, where my mother lives. I’m trying to get to New Brunswick, New Jersey, gentlemen. Gentlemen. Thank you, gentlemen. You can have this flashlight. Oh, you’re such nice gentlemen.
by Adam Morris
Adam Morris is a writer and translator in San Francisco.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Today I thought I saw an ex-love
driving an old Mercedes
with stinking exhaust.
He had a beard
and drove slowly
as if he had no where to go,
as if he wasn’t the younger man
I held captive
in my memory.
Years ago,
right there in the dark—
we became birds
standing on a wire of resistance.
He was a flight risk.
I had a nest.
Ex-loves are panhandlers
of the heart.
They beg for remembrance—
loose change in a cup,
memories clink and spill.
Who can survive on this change?
At the intersection of Washington Boulevard
and North Roosevelt Street stands a man
with a sign that reads:
Bet You Can’t Hit Me
With A Quarter.
I pass him every Monday morning.
I’ve yet to throw a quarter his way.
Sometimes he smokes
and it’s so cold
I worry his hands are too numb
to pick up that quarter—
thrown hot from some hand.
by Sarah Lilius
Sarah currently lives in Arlington, VA with her husband and two sons. She is a poet and an assistant editor for ELJ Publications. Some of her publication credits include the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, BlazeVOX, Bluestem, and The Lake. She is also the author of the chapbook What Becomes Within (ELJ Publications 2014).
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
*
Here, there, the way silence
tows you below the waterline
and though you are alone
you’re not sure where her name
is floating on the surface
or what’s left
grasped by a single wave
that never makes it to shore
splashes as if this pen
is rowing you across the stillness
the dead are born with
–you are already bathing, half
from memory, half by leaping
from the water for flowers
growing everywhere –for you
this page, unclaimed :a knife
dripping with seawater
and your throat.
by Simon Perchik
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Osiris, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
before
I’m stricken down
by overwhelming
heartiness
Lindo,
remember
my hands flagging
down my elbows
when I suddenly bent
them at asymmetric angles
and thrust them toward my second rib
to cry out a phlegmy Milwaukee born
Hrrrrraaghh!
I’m stricken up
like that often
you know-
I’ve watched you
you flinch with a smile
three seconds before it comes
knowing all
about the blended
and aimed reverence
laced tolerance
masking irritation
and dismissal I shove
into every
boisterous afternoon
I spend with you
by Steven Minchin
Steven enjoys capturing things he’s seen almost as much as things he has not. To date he has quite a collection of both. He makes Facebook his artistic warehouse and periodically promotes dead people there, elsewhere his work has appeared in Mad Swirl, Heavy Hands Ink, Short, Fast and Deadly, vox poetica, and Crack the Spine.
