April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
our grave hearts crave in the dead night
old arms of night have taken our city abreast
our nameless faceless city
sweating/stinking
a broken-down mosaic
red rotting brick/dilapidated alleys
sheltering dark looms
drain pipes drip hot
fire-escapes uproot themselves
from failing architecture
music falls onto the street from open windows
a morose violin wheezes out
adolescent/untrained notes
lungs of animals
and men and women
expand and collapse
singing/speaking/crying/loving/hating
in this city/all cities
this throbbing/beating/machine-heart
in the infantile hours of morning
black money is changing hands
our grave hearts crave in the dead night
i wish i knew like the old trees
another first story of time
our morning street is warm
with the golden coming
from blood and a beating heart
life as it runs off the feet of men
and women singing
swelling undertones
harmonious high keys
distant sirens
lost in leaves
men like the grey trunks
overgrown, tired with hating
old men pedal past
flashing golden smiles
dry lipped
dancing
in dim daybreak sun
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Michael Morical
Landscape
Between waterfalls
a poem written in moss
grows on stone.
Ferns sprout
from words intertwined,
twisted shaggy,
hard to define
in the mist sustaining them.
Under The Icy Ash
She walks her bike past
the dry spot where I sit.
We’re shaped the same,
man and woman,
lumpy and woolen.
She doubles back
and stops a few steps away.
Her breath unfurls as it fades
cloud after cloud out to the lake.
I open my mouth without a word.
We shade our eyes and squint
at the glare on the snow.
Michael Morical is a freelance editor in Taipei. His poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, The Hardy Review and other journals. Sharing Solitaire is his first chapbook.
April 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Christian Altamirano
A man got up from bed, went to his bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw people come in full circle and detach themselves. He saw a person use another’s authority for their own gain. He heard that its better that people should be described by their actions then their actions be described by those people. He learned he had a voice that could be felt by others. He realized that he isn’t the only siren that could be listened to. He met an enemy’s ally and made them a friend. He looked himself in the mirror and realized he was a monster. He began to listen to more sirens one ringing strongly while another hummed lower. The louder siren speaks of a place of fire where bad people live and good people visit. While the man speaks of an animal who doesn’t exist. He finds an angel who speaks of Milos and the man creates a sound of earth, but the louder siren speaks harder with a sound of retaliation, and after the loud siren creates a boom into the man’s ear, the man begins to see things differently not because of the boom but because of praise after. The man starts to see Messiahs being praised while saviors are being forgotten. The man starts to see people drown themselves on each other but no one flooding themselves on him. The man starts to hear people tell him his own flaws of being a monster. The man begins to be ignored by people who don’t want to hear his own voice. The man’s siren begins to not be listened to and feel worthless. The man’s enemy of his enemy becomes his enemy instead of his friend. The man starts to become nothing and his siren will soon wither and die. And along with the siren the man will die also, he begins to scream at himself in the mirror with what siren the man has left and his reflection shatters before he could realize that it doesn’t matter how many people love his voice but as long as one person holds the voice dear to themselves then no man or monster can be worthless. I then wake up and find myself broken, in the beginning of the circle, in “Ruin.”
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Alan Britt
Humans in white shorts
are vulnerable
yet strangely aggressive.
What with their bare-legged dexterity,
if you’re a bug
there’s nowhere to hide.
The hand is mightier
than a horse’s tail,
or hind claw
hacking a basset hound’s floppy ear.
Humans plan social events
requiring white shorts.
They enjoy Cricket, yachting expeditions,
Wimbledon and every shopping mall
with an artificial waterfall,
to name four.
Throw in a few corpses
attending family reunions
with summer softball games
and you have
quite a mess
on your hands.
I’m telling you,
if you laid all those
white shorts
end to end,
you could encircle
the earth forever!
Alan Britt’s recent books are Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Chicago/Athens/Dublin: 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Martin Freebase
And writing poems about man’s fall
Puts her chips all on black
The redundancy of negativity
Seeps through the pores of her skin
Her first beach house
She wanted high upon a hill
To look over the turbulence
A physical reminder
Of existence
Saying hello to the ladies
As they pass by
Baskets full of turpitude
Her hopes have stopped being mine
A long time ago
I marvel as she fathoms
Multiple realities
Built by your Betty Crocker cookbook
At opposite ends of the cord
Lacing your feelings with an opportunistic spine
And wrap you in leather
We have both seen the wicked street ballet
Only I stood for the ovation
Martin Leonard Freebase lives in Dubuque, Iowa with his wife, daughter, and a black and white cat named “Daisy.” Martin’s work is solidly based on the concept of poetry as a social construction. Through our interactions with others, we create and recreate meanings that allow us to make sense out of a chaotic world full of contradictions. Martin considers the art of writing poetry as one small way of collapsing the confusion of experience into more meaningful patterns of social thought.
