July 2017 | poetry
The Narcissist Hears What You’re Trying to Do There
Grabs your argument in a certain hand, clenches
your words in a fist,
spits
them back at you before you’ve decided
what you were even trying
to say. Perhaps
there wasn’t a manipulative germ
or any exhumed dirty word,
maybe
what he can hear and see
is the extent of it,
transparent,
but he’s perspicacious with a straight spine,
drawn to full height,
tongue
slashing, that dripping dagger
to remind
every syllable matters
in the way
it could possibly relate
to him. Admit
he wasn’t part of the intended audience,
meandering sentence
still unspooling from your lips?
Unthinkable.
Unforgiveable sin.
He has to stop you before you can begin.
Swing Song
Squeak creak squeal
squeak creak squeal: across the street,
a couple in their twenties
pumps long legs into glassy sky, bodies
flung nearly perpendicular
to the top of the bar, so high. Individual
horizons. Now she knows those sounds
last week at sundown
did not mean she was going to break
something.
How silly to think the weight
of forty-seven years means anything
to a swing
ready to squeak all comers into the clouds
and back to thirteen,
sullen, holding a Walkman
turned up loud, back to seven,
screaming in delight, pushed
so hard she had to hold on
tight. All the way home,
their palms will thrum
with effort while their minds
fly, worries having fallen
from their pockets like pebbles
into sand,
the smell of salty steel
still kissing their hands.
Kasandra Larsen
Kasandra Larsen’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Into the Void Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, and others. Her manuscript CONSTRUCTION was a finalist for the 2016 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry; her chapbook STELLAR TELEGRAM won the 2009 Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Award. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee.
July 2017 | poetry
Scientists call it the measure of the disorder
or randomness in a system.
Too abstract?
Then reduce it to this: it’s hard,
very hard, to make things better
but it’s always possible to make them worse.
Thus relationships, children, companies, countries.
Entropy is the clock that forever
runs forward and down until it no longer
resembles a clock at all.
Meanwhile the love leaks out of marriages
one molecule at a time,
airlines beat passengers in their seats
and drag them screaming off the plane,
and we drop bombs on our enemies so big
they dwarf our own disorder, or so
we think, or would think, if thinking were something
still within our grasp.
I must make time in my desert of a day
to visit the grave of Robinson Jeffers and tell
his silent stone that our republic
no longer shines as it perishes
and entropy is the reason.
I’m sure that will comfort his departed shade,
long since dissipated into millions of strange shadows
by that other, more efficient entropy, death.
Kurt Luchs
Kurt Luchs has poems published or forthcoming in Former People Journal, Into the Void, Minetta Review, Poydras Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, Otis Nebula, Sheila-Na-Gig, Right Hand Pointing, Roanoke Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, Noctua Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and Antiphon, among others. He founded the literary humor site TheBigJewel.com, and has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as writing comedy for television (Politically Incorrect and the Late Late Show) and radio (American Comedy Network). In September 2017 Sagging Meniscus Press will publish his humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny).
July 2017 | poetry
Swimming Laps
crawl up 1 crawl down
2 up 3 down 4 up 5 how
many minutes how fast the heart
rate down 6 the second hand do-si-do-ing with the minute
hand of the big wall clock the beat of the rock-a-billy on
the boom box up 7 breaststroke down 8
up 9 down 10 flip turn up 11
backstroke down 12 butterfly up 13 down
14 sidestroke 15 16 how long? long enough
next crop of legs dangling swinging impatient on
the ledge, lanes a blur up down up down bathing caps goggles
you know/don’t know men women counting strokes times
laps minutes days (how many this week) (not enough) hot pink/
slate black FitBits blinking/sleeping pulses (up, down) calories in out…
You know nothing about the people in these bodies. Only
their swimsuits, sliding jumping climbing getting in/out. You say hi
to the red bikini. To the floral board shorts. You/they hustle to the showers,
to the lockers, to the hairdryers. Presto! Ms Bikini perfect in Givency suiting.
Spiked Prada’s. Mr. Board Shorts casual Armani all the way. The stay-at homes,
the techies, the mommy/daddies, the laid-offs, the bigwigs, the retirees – headed out
in their yogapants grungy sneakers /crocs, toting their Lululemon/Nike/no-
name duffel bags off to the parking lot. Remotes awakening their shiny Masaratis
their slightly dented Kias, their ‘50’s Corvette convertibles, lovingly restored.
Their Honda minivans moving forward backing carefully anonymously into the world.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Again. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Again.
Suffering, Medicalized (in the ER on a Friday night)
On a scale of 1 -10, where 1 is no pain and 10 is the worst you can imagine, how bad is your pain?
10.
How would you describe it? Check two:
Burning ☐
aching ☐
stabbing ☐
shooting ☐
lacerating ☐
piercing ☐
pounding ☐
radiating ☐
throbbing ☐
stinging ☐
crushing ☐
Two isn’t enough choices
Sorry, that’s all the computer gives you.
How is your mood? Remember, just check two:
happy ☐
unhappy ☐
angry ☐
miserable ☐
anxious ☐
terrified ☐
hopeless ☐
hopeful ☐
depressed ☐
suicidal ☐
Thank you. Take a seat in the waiting room, and fill out these other forms. The doctor will see you in order of the time of your arrival. Or maybe the nurse. Or maybe the intern. Someone, at any rate.
May I have your insurance card while you are working on the forms?
Oh – your card has expired. Come back when it has been corrected. The 800 number is on your old card. They open at 8 AM on Monday.
Goodbye, have a nice weekend.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro
Marian Kaplun Shapiro is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). A Quaker and a psychologist, her poetry often embeds the topics of peace and violence by addressing one within the context of the other. A resident of Lexington, she is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.
July 2017 | poetry
Natal Motions
You blame me for rumors
floating across highways
which come to rest uneasily
among swans
and other natal motions.
The voice you claim
to speak with may be your own
or the disembodied sound
of warm intentions you thought
had finally been quelled.
Like a spin of insects
beneath an evening streetlamp
it’s useless to sleep
when you could be awake
imitating life and tracing art.
I appreciate the false existence
you’ve found in a patch of tulips
but I don’t want
an expression of your tenderness
chained to a bird of song.
The Highest Reaches
Beneath the highest reaches
in a yellow-gold field
your eyes are filled
with gestures of joy
and light-blue bends
but sadness and star grains
still cling to your hair.
I rise to my feet
even in an anatomy
of insignia and pins
obscured beneath a canopy
of crippled captivity.
The birds have ended their ostinato
and we’re left
with only a stuttering silence
of leaves.
My dream is cracking open
the egg of a white lizard,
a little girl pounding
on a locked door.
If it’s me you’re crying for
then no, I don’t want you to stop
until we’re separated again
by sutures of emerald green
and pinches of black.
Gelatin Plateaus
You’re scared to exchange words
fearing that I’ll intersperse my voice
with a disastrous elixir
designed to make you love me.
In my guise as a simple hitchhiker
with a broken guitar
you’ve driven past
at least a dozen times
coursing the roundabout
with your left foot tapping out the window.
Cast from the joke of a raven
you dance naked but impenetrable
in a tongueless world of gelatin plateaus
and abalone snow.
The sound you’re hearing in your mind
is only a mortar and pestle—
the killing powder was consumed
when you first imagined
the swollenness
of my lips around your nipple;
felt the insistence of glacial stone
opening furrows of ochre and loam.
Disconnected Flickers
Never does my mind
consider the disappearance of earth—
my thoughts go even further than that
a grisaille balance of stars
and starlessness
the high pitch of emptiness
and the decaying swingset in my backyard;
warped, brittle wood
and tattered canvas.
A calm has descended upon
morning grass
and the departure of small mammals
for more secluded silences—
the faintest trace of your instep
makes the world more
than a sequence of disconnected flickers
running in the direction
I suppose.
Richard King Perkins II
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.
April 2017 | poetry
When they were small, I’d line them up
before we’d go into the grocery store,
spit on a tissue and wipe their faces,
straighten their hair, inspect.
They say now I was marking them.
I’ve watched how ravens raise theirs.
By fall, big enough to fly for an hour,
the parents lead the grown ones
away from the nest up the mountain forest
as they squawk and loop,
following to a new silence.
The old book of cobbled myths
prescribes how fathers
should rub the newborns with salt.
The patriarchs dictated,
they must mark the children,
perform the ritual
as a sign of their covenant with god,
disinfect the corrupt tendencies of the heart,
so that the child would be truthful.
But it is no guarantee.
Though you believe they never will,
when they lie to you the first time,
you ache as though you’ve been cut,
as though something has broken,
never thinking you could ever close
such a wound.
You try to construct the lesson of forgiveness.
You think for days
that it is a fault of your own making.
But the lies are critical,
it is the way we learn to forgive,
the way we learn
that our eyes give us away.
Mark Burke
April 2017 | poetry
I.
Blacksmiths re-arrange
silken threads
Tailors forge
horseshoes
Where do you form, irony, to then become formless?
What whistles these are, from disintegrated yokes afar?
Fourteenth century subjugation, still prepared for trade
A hankering globe feeds on soluble and insoluble fibre,
O prodigal atoms of billowy attestation.
II.
An undulant weather is characteristic of rectified revisions
Continents and natural components perish simultaneously,
What well behaved skin of decorum, unwatched, undresses?
A lexicographer could coat tribes in cycles of gestations
Hence sap inside barks must be both; reminders and properties
The wonder, a superficial matter camouflage of damp interiors,
What perishes,
cartouches of
Ancient pharaohs
say geologists.
III.
Now, I will listen to them through mutations of my speech,
I will unlearn their ghastly spells when graveyards un-disguise,
Bleak moments
odorless air
practised inception
creation born.
The world communicates, where were you born, are headed to?
Leaves stiffen as they are spread out on bare grounds, everyplace —
These fitful events.
IV.
The exact value who can decipher? Value vexes fathomless froth.
Death descends upon a clear birthed moment while it undrapes
The broadcloth
over a carcass,
peruse discarded
companions and boots,
Death fetches and encourages filtered fibres of breaths.
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is pursuing her second postgraduate degree in literature at the United Kingdom and has been awarded the GREAT scholarship. Her work has appeared or is to appear in Ann Arbor Review (MI, USA), The Rain, Party & Disaster Society (USA) and in poetry anthologies such as Dance of the Peacock (Hidden Brook Press, Canada), Suvarnarekha (The Poetry Society of India, India) and elsewhere.
