Book of Life

Sister, it’s flooding sunshine. Days drop

like caramels. I turned my back

on you, the hunted dogs

of our girlhood. Here’s the devil

coming from my palm, the mad

raisins and relished dirt. I’m in

the open, the cream soda bad.

Is rubber your only feeling?

Wooded and measured out, you

stomach the untried, the vanilla

pudding that won’t feed you.

Why did you take orders?

A cube of hesitations,

the learned magic won’t leave us.

 

by Kimberly Lambright

 

Kimberly Lambright’s debut poetry collection, Ultra-Cabin, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2016. Lambright has been awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and Sou’wester Arts Colony; her work appears in Columbia Poetry Review, phoebe, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, Bone Bouquet, The Boiler, Wicked Alice, Big Bridge, Little Patuxent Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, Not Very Quiet, and The Burnside Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

Breaking News

Mother earth is off the wagon.

According to reliable eye witnesses,

She’s been drinking again:

Hammered on Greenland ice melt,

Falling down drunk from glacial rebound,

Knocked off her axis from mantel convection.

 

When this reporter confronted her

About her alleged drinking problem,

She denied, denied, denied.

I’m not a drunk, she said.

I’m as sober as a judge

At a high school beer blast.

Hey!  I’m a pop culture celebrity,

A rock star with an agenda.

Any planet can spin on its axis.

But me, I put a new spin on things.  Listen.

 

Earth vacillates, undulates,

Oscillates, pulsates,

Rattles, rolls and shakes,

Shivers, quivers, quakes.

Ask any social tweeter,

We totter as we teeter.

We wibble as we wobble,

Just a hiccup of a bobble.

We sway as we play,

We’re surreal as we reel,

While twirling and swirling

Out of orbit we’re hurling.

We sprang from the void

In a big bang boom,

To that we’ll return,

Womb becomes tomb.

 

I swear by the sun, moon, and stars, she said,

And every can of beer I ever drank,

I’m stone sober as I tell you this.

 

Now there’s a sobering thought.

 

by Susan Martin

Susan Martin is a retired English and creative writing teacher. She has had poetry and short fiction published in several literary journals and anthologies. Most recently she has had a short story published in Brandt Street Press’ anthology, Dammit I Love You, and poetry published in The Aquillrelle Wall of Poetry: Book Seven, WestWard Quarterly: Summer, 2018, and Blue Unicorn Magazine: Fall, 2018

visions from “high” country: our So. Cal. so-called makeshift decompression chamber

If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving

— Brendan Lorber, June 2018

 

 

on the occasion of my seventy-third birthday celebration,

having finally begun to learn some rules of paved roads

 

‘stead of taking usual straightshot hellbent damn 405

freeway from spitfire West L.A. down to pacific

 

Redondo Beach, fam elects to use an iPhone

Waze app to navigate lazy side streets —

 

where wobbly young lowlifes in pajamas

vape nicotine or maybe marijuana —

 

that then meet up with ocean views

as soon as possible which fluid

 

continuity more than makes

up for few extra minutes

 

sort of like coming up

slowly gently coolly

 

when you’re doing

SCUBA diving —

 

oy to thus avoid

The Bends.

 

 

by Gerard Sarnat

Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards, and authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Main Street Rag, MiPOesias, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Voices Israel, Blue Mountain Review,Tishman Review, Suisun Valley Review, Fiction Southeast, Junto, Heartwood, Tiferet, Foliate Oak, Parhelion, Bonsai plus featured in New Verse News, Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan, Good-Man-Project, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Poetry Circle, Fiction Southeast, Walt Whitman Tribute Anthology and Tipton Review. “Amber of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor. Married for a half century, Gerry has three kids/ four grandkids so far.

Trash Food

You take a memory and a healthy dollop of salted butter take a swig of cheap flat beer and plop a slab of date expired ham or chicken like your great grandmother did after showing you the pin cushion and how to darn a sock or make a doily soft light through porthole windows on either side of the unused fireplace jars of preserves in the mud room a little sunshine on an unpainted porch and you let it fry until corners start to curl like her wispy gray hair not yet bloodied by the car accident that took her keys away and bruised her forehead then brown one side of two slices of doughy white bread in grease until steam rises and wheat browns the smell of meat and sugar falling across her wool carpets darkened chairs and ottomans her touch through food of the Great Depression all dumplings and noodles her oak knot knuckles covered by silk skin laying out thin-sliced American cheese across side-browned meat with layers of family stories and cinnamon crackers dipped in whole milk a cheese sandwich on the pine wood counter crisp on the outside and tender inside like the grateful hands that formed food and child before scooping up the bubbling leavings in the pan to mix into a gravy that was poured over a small boy’s life.

 

by Brad G. Garber

Brad has degrees in biology, chemistry and law. He writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. Since 1991, he has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such publications as Edge Literary Journal, Pure Slush, DASH, Sugar Mule, Third Wednesday, Barrow Street, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Barzakh Magazine, Ginosko Journal, Junto Magazine, Vine Leaves Press, Split Rock Review, Smoky Blue Literary Magazine, Aji Magazine and other quality publications. 2013 & 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee.

raft

i am drowning under a raft of history.
i have nothing but
tanager trills in the dark,
a handful of wildflowers,
an ineffective rage.
i’m tired of growing vegetables
that die every year and must be
endlessly restarted by hand —
i want a yard burgeoning with blossoms,
overgrown, tangled, useless and thriving
by itself. i want
love like a field of wildflowers,
love like a mountainside spring,
cascading untamed, fragrant. i want
to grow a world where food
doesn’t have to be political, love
doesn’t have to be political,
the fucking wildflowers
can just grow where they grow without
being required to mean anything.
i cannot save this world.
instead i am growing vegetables,
tired annuals, non-natives, needy
and exhausting as colonialism,
to survive the world as it is
and try to help build a raft
that could hold us up
instead of holding us under
while the world around us
drowns.

 

by Kat Heatherington

Kat Heatherington is a queer ecofeminist poet, sometime artist, pagan, and organic gardener. She lives south of Albuquerque, NM in Sunflower River intentional community, sunflowerriver.org. Kat’s work primarily addresses the interstices of human relationships and the natural world. She has one book, The Bones of This Land, printed by Swimming with Elephants Publications in fall 2017, available on amazon.com and through SwEP, as well as several self-published chapbooks, available from the author at yarrow [at] sunflowerriver [dot] org. Her work can be read at sometimesaparticle.org.

Daniel Edward Moore

King Erasure

At your intervention which was nothing more
                                      than a pageantry of post it notes

stained by a ballpoint’s opium ink
                           dangling on an inch of yellow adhesive

stuck to your armored chest,
                                 you told us what you wanted to be-

a cold steel coffin of pink champagne
                               where a jewelry box gleaming with

dirty needles floated in the hands of ladies
                             in waiting who no longer spread their

legs like wings, sheltering veins of regal blood, as
                      your shimmering crown of aluminum foil

sparkled above a bath towel cape
                                                hailing you King Erasure.

 

 

Commando Ballerina

                                   The need to remember
not to remember   
    swallowing yesterday’s glassy swords 
                       sharpened by trembling hands,


                          by fingertips calloused from
dancing on lighters
                       to the beat of blood beneath these nails                                   
                                 that kept me alive through the night,    


                              is why ten little soldiers in
pink fishnet stockings  
                      salute the light in my eyes,
                                twirling at dawn on the shores

of my face, like commando ballerinas disarmed.

 

by Daniel Edward Moore

Daniel lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems have been in Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Columbia Journal, Western Humanities Review, and others. His poems are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Duende Literary Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Magnolia Review, Isthmus Review, Glass Mountain Magazine, Columbia College Literary Review, January Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Yemassee and Cumberland River Review. His books, “This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians” an Anthology, and “Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist,” can be found on Amazon. Visit Daniel at DanielEdwardMoore.com.

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