October 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Experiment in Weightlessness
Upside down fishbowl
occupant
right side up
tablecloths like spiraling
butterflies
brown lace-up shoe
a woman’s
random receipts brochures
sticky notes
last year’s desk calendar
curling uncurling
a glowing suspended instant
strangers on the ledge
faces averted
unwilling to witness
the tragedy of
scorched birds in flight.
The Power
I plant thoughts in your head,
walk a mile in your shoes
and leave you to wonder
where all that sand came from.
You once accused me of being
all talk and no action,
but you would tremble with fear
if you could see me now.
Magic dances on my fingertips,
sparks crackle in my hair.
I cook my meals these days
without ever going near the stove.
I just sear chunks of flesh
with the heat of my regard.
By Jeffrey Park
Jeffrey Park’s poetry has appeared most recently in Star*Line, phantom kangaroo, Mad Swirl, and Danse Macabre. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey currently lives in Goettingen, Germany, where he is lecturer for Scientific English at the Georg-August-Univeritaet. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Knight’s Night Out
You write
your memoir
of shattered mirrors
and misconstrued epiphanies.
for every recollection,
every doubt that
binds your
mountainous limitation,
to the top of the
summit of debt,
retaliations still sings
as it’s proliferation stings,
dissection
of affluent
memories persist,
onto life’s projection
where you tip-toe
towards your demise,
a modest dignitary
forever monetized
within life’s monotony,
where life is a lease,
any moment could disease.
Inked into our membranes,
are words transmitted,
through our rife.
We reside inside
our calligraphy,
where you recite.
Your memory is a mic
your future is a turnpike,
but the past remains
a present
– a precedent
only a wish could represent.
The Weight We Carry
We painted black
into backpacks,
revived our
medieval retrievals,
and clasped onto
our adamance
that sunk deep
beneath the bag,
where thorough
thoughts of
fervent promises
transported to
a portal of
prominence.
When we gathered
our optimistic
pleasantries,
we prevailed
like concrete
shadows,
but our fossilized
memories froze
under
the clock
that echoed
faint haunts,
as we traced
our uncertainties
that paved
to cemented
cemeteries,
where
we follow,
but never lead.
When we cleansed
the palate
that painted
only faithful
melodies,
we withstood
our melancholy
tragedies
as we
evaded our
casualties
to combat
the disdain
that punctured
the tapestry
of a gangrened
dancer.
We Bloomed
like flowers,
and watered them
until the spring
turned to autumn;
memories that
blossomed
melancholy
melodies,
and when
love walked
on bridges
we began
to break
by the
hook that caught
onto our shirts,
where we descended.
Still we arose;
we were maps
that traced back
into the wilderness
and we eroded
from our sacrilege,
sentences written
of trials tribulations
and labored distortions.
As they swallowed
their accelerants
and grabbed dismay
and sold it’s Adsense
to the relapse
that plummeted
into yesterday,
we still peak
to re-capture.
and re-hash,
decades of last
years ghosts,
so within
a century
our ancestry
could
create an abstract
memory
where dissipated
pilgrimages
pulled their
weight
like sacrilegious
vestiges
as they tore off their
appendages.
It’s never too late
to rekindle the seams,
that took apart
our shovels,
and buried our dreams.
by Chris Ozog
Christopher Ozog is a 23-year-old writer who currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has previously appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, The Commonline, and Crack the Spine and has work forthcoming in the 2015 winter Crack the Spine Anthology.
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
I liken the effects of coffee
multiplying in my nervous system
to the sound of cicadas,
cacophony transitioning to unison
on the warmest of days,
finally climaxing, singular high pitch,
solid throbbing greater than the sum
of its parts. My brain ceases to exist
outside itself for a period,
all becomes internal cloaking haze
before the caffeine begins to sluice
and trickle down liver’s way,
as the insects disappear into winter.
by James Mahon
James Mahon’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bitchin’ Kitsch, Enizagam, and The Insomniac Propagandist.
July 2015 | back-issues, fiction
I have an image in my mind. It is an image of a particular man. He is perhaps less scruffy than he was over the weekend, and no matter how close his morning shave he reached the evening’s shadow. I see him, soaking in a tub. There are no candles burning. No bubbles. No salt crystals filling pastel jars tucked in the corner. I see the steam rising, clinging to the surrounding tiles, everything about him shines, and so does he. Eyes closed, his hair drenched enough for droplets to drip off the ends and down his neck. Shoulders peaking above the service waiting for their turn to soak after his knees finally give up creaks to the bath. His sighs cast ripples to his toes as the heft of his worry evaporate from the substance of his thoughts as he soaks. The gate of his imagination opens to an image of a woman. She is by far more tousled than she was at the start of her day. He sees her, in the particular way she leans against the bathroom door, arms folded, barefoot, smiling, with him on her mind.
by Julieanna Blackwell
July 2015 | back-issues, poetry
But I can only pour you this poem:
with poor cloth-made and form not yet shaped,
metaphors rain upon flesh and bone
floating riddles dress in pale champagne froth
tiers of honeysuckle foam pin to a clover’s song
light seeps inside the ink droplets black–
an ever-musing vestal rhyme
charts my fingers to your mortal gasps.
With warmth of day the eyes grow dark,
I breathe your name of caress reigns
where wings of holy light stretch my ocean vast,
in soft similes of wind-drops caught
and hollow crowning thorns.
Weak nods full of sleep in the shadows deep,
old notes draw your breaths once more–
depart soon as last sighs coax from my lips,
courting you home.
by Lana Bella
Lana Bella has a diverse work of poetry and flash fiction anthologized, published and forthcoming with more than eighty journals, including Aurorean Poetry, Burningword Journal, Chiron Review, Contrary Magazine, elsewhere, The Criterion Journal, Poetry Quarterly, and Featured Artist with Quail Bell Magazine, among others. She resides in the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam with her novelist husband and two frolicsome imps.
July 2015 | back-issues, fiction
She scribbles a few letters on the back of her card and hands it to him. She smiles and says something cheerful. The words don’t matter. As he takes the card, he answers in kind, if only to keep his tenuous grasp on the vision of civility he’s retreated into. He does not think of all the countless things he would like to say, because he does not want to risk their appearance, even in his eyes. But she is not as perceptive as he fears. She has another appointment waiting, and he is not the face she puts on a world’s betrayal; he just isn’t that important to her.
In the elevator on the way back down, he presses himself into the corner though no one else is riding; it’s the only way he can keep from pacing. He walks past the metal detectors, where a man is shaking his head as he struggles to undo his belt; false suspicion has shamed this nameless man into stripping away another layer of his pride, if only to prove his innocence. The security guard that mans the machine doesn’t notice this inner struggle the man is having, but only does his job instead. But our man notices, just before he hits the door and once more takes a breath of the good air under an open sky. He wishes he could remember what it was like to take that for granted.
by D.F. Paul
D.F. Paul lives in the Midwestern United States. He’s been writing since he was a child, when he uncovered a beat to hell typewriter cleaning out the garage. Many years and a lot of wasted paper later, he still doesn’t understand the process any better. A list of his published work can be seen at: dfpaul.wordpress.com
