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.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Peter LaBerge
I was that four-year-
old boy smiling, thumb
aimed at the sky like I was
molding the atmosphere’s clouds
with Minnie Mouse
and my eyelashes, tangled as ever,
winked at each other.
Dimples singed into cheeks
like the atmosphere-clay
after I’d jammed my innocent
thumbprint into it.
And I can’t hold back a laugh.
Blood like fiery yarn
spun into rivers
up and down my coarse
veins until it has nowhere
to trickle except for under those
tacky, plastic Venetian love boats
at Disney World—it’s a small world
after all.
Peter LaBerge is currently a sixteen-year-old high school student. His writing is featured or forthcoming in: Indigo Rising Magazine; The Camel Saloon; Down in the Dirt Magazine; Children, Churches, and Daddies Magazine; and more. He is also a photographer, with photography featured or forthcoming in: This Great Society; and Children, Churches, and Daddies Magazine. His flash fiction piece, ‘The Ansonia Girl’, was featured in the January 2010 issue of Burning Word. He is the founder and chief editor of The Adroit Journal.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Tyler King
Like a silent lover,
Summer slipped out this morning.
The sheets were pulled aside.
Summer’s clothes were gone,
and my outstretched arm lay
under the phantom nape of her neck,
my body folded into her vacant back,
my hand caressed her missing thigh.
Autumn tried to slide into Sumer’s side of the bed,
(her mattress-impression doppelgänger)
but her feet were cold and sent
shivers through my shins, so
I told her she needed to put on socks
or get out of bed. She said maybe
it would be better if she started
making breakfast. I went back to sleep
and dreamed us two together again.
Tyler King is currently working toward his B.A. in English at Whitman College. His work has been published in The Binnacle, the December 2009 and 2010 issues of Quarterlife, and featured online at www.365tomorrows.com and trainwrite.tumblr.com. More of his writing can be found on his blog: tkfire.tumblr.com.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Victoria Haynes
The prayer is offered,
and waked, the robins march thru
the chambers of open morning.
O, they are small and they hurt,
they bend and break to broken birds.
The morning gone as we talked
over the problem of bones—
shall we hang them for the children?
string them across the lights?
make secrets of them in vials?
There is no place for brittle things.
At once the yardplay is embarrassing and public
and the children’s teeth glint louder than keys.
She comes to you empty-fisted and unsatisfied
and pulls your hair and your ears—
O daddy i’d give anything for a small sparrow
to hold against my clothes—
and somewhere through an armor of wings
you point to the stones, which must be enough—
and the prayer is closed.
Victoria Haynes is a writer of poetry, fiction, and accordion music.
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Brandon Graham
My Daddy always liked to say
“The Blue Ridge Parkway
is the prettiest place
on God’s green earth.”
‘Course his heart
calls that part of the country home
so you have to allow for some bias.
He said it again
the day my cousin Tim drove us
crazy fast,
flipping us around
hairpin switch backs
on a one lane
unpaved country lane
that stepped like stairs
up the side of a round top mountain
not more than nine miles
from the spot my Daddy was born
and his own Daddy dropped dead.
“This is the cutest little church
you ever seen,” Tim is saying
‘cause he’s a preacher
fresh out of bible school
and he got himself an old country church
he wants to show us real bad.
The road just stops,
butts right up to Blue Ridge Bible Baptist,
like the road was just a long
twisted ribbon of driveway.
The church is one, cavernous
brown room
with dark pews down
both sides of a central isle
leading strait to a pulpit.
Tall windows
along the sidewalls
with dried glazing
and cracked panes
let the
honest
God-fearing
mountain air
blow straight through.
Tim stands up front,
strides around,
his tennis shoe stomping pretty good
sending echoes off the walls
telling us this and that
about his plans
for the souls
of the dirt farmers
who gather to learn the wisdom
that my twenty-two year old cousin
has to offer.
After a time we pop the trunk on his car
and pull out a squirrel gun
Tim called it a “four ten twenty-two over under”
Which I know now
means it had two different barrels for two kinds of ammo
stacked one on the other.
Behind the bible church
we drag an old log
across a gully
and line it with the rusted
tin cans we find
lying around
plus the fender
off an old motorcycle
that quit running
decades earlier
and was left to rot.
I stand with my back to the church
close one eye
line-up down the barrel
and fill the mountain top
with thunder.
That first shot kicks,
I stumble over
fall on my ass
in wet leaves.
I stay there,
in the wet
looking up at the sun
the canopy swaying
over head
as the boy preacher
and my Daddy laugh and laugh.
