April 2016 | poetry
Fuck the Dead
I woke up and forgot how to write a poem
and decided that writing poems was stupid.
I couldn’t think of anything to love
and decided that love was stupid, too.
I went outside and the streets clanged with loneliness,
the people dulled and drunk with suffering;
some blatantly so, others
going through the motions of hiding it.
I decided that suffering was stupid because it was useless,
more useless even than poetry,
and I suddenly felt outside it all, bigger than
the living and their hand-me-down sufferings,
better than the smugness of the dead.
Fuck the dead and the living alike, I thought, what
good are they to me?
I wandered through it all like some stillborn ghost,
a thing unto myself, inscrutable and alien,
but within an hour I was tired of that,
so I fell in love with the next useless thing I saw
and wrote a stupid poem about it.
The Way You Cry for Things Beautiful and Gone
In truth there’s not much
I believe in anymore
but I sometimes go through the motions
nonetheless
like how we still try and be beautiful
in the few perfect hours
we stuff down our shirts
when the managers aren’t looking
the way we still try and be pretty
as we wait for the next disaster
to find us in the places where we hide
it’s a game we play to pass the time
but it’s not like back when joy
would lie beside us in the grass
like a great gentle beast sleepy beneath the sun
these days we hunt it down like vampires
we drain it and nail it to our walls like
a trophy to show our friends
and I’m writing this down
in an Italian cafe on Columbus Avenue
a man at a nearby table drinks wine
and watches girls, just as I drink wine
and watch girls
and the jukebox plays Italian opera
sad and beautiful like so many things
I can’t understand
it makes me want to cry
the way you cry for things beautiful and gone
and now that some wine is in me it’s easier
to cry for things, and I remember that the sad dumb beauty of everything
was made for us after all, we just have to let it
into our hearts like music
and now Sinatra’s on the juke and he’s got the world on a string
as a pretty black girl in a leather skirt walks by
and the man at the nearby table grabs the waiter and orders
more wine and I trust in his wisdom and do the same.
William Taylor Jr.
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including The New York Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and An Age of Monsters, a collection of short fiction. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. To Break the Heart of the Sun, a new collection of poetry, is forthcoming in 2016 from Words Dance Press.
April 2016 | poetry
I had to move more
on my own before
the wind would ever
consider me a ship.
I was born far away
from the ocean. I
had to break myself
to spill into the sea.
Darren C. Demaree
Darren’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, The Louisville Review, Diagram, and the Colorado Review.
April 2016 | poetry
Roadkill
car
blood slither, vomit, road shoulder, broken
car
antlers, up a hill, looks eighteen, frosty grass,
shivers, entrails, air like needles, hyper ventil
car
late cameo in glass, commuter, brake musing,
nausea, back road helplessness, call the police?,
grounded, mom’s breakfast, sausage goo,
failure, puffs of air, coalescence, coughing,
car
another payment, another day, another dollar,
dad’s glare, bruises, schoolhouse rumors,
irresponsible, grandma’s prayers, doctor visit,
whistling wind, ashen clouds, naked trees
Looking Through a Hole in the Brick of the Bingo Hall
I see an excited man standing, everyone else sitting,
in the fourth row through the tobacco haze
He looks at his card, finger tracing,
eyes looking up down up down while a
toothless man somewhere in the back lifts
a bottle to his lips
The plastic balls click in the drum like
forgotten change at the laundromat
The man, hand raised, shouts over
four laughing ladies and the room
hushes to hear his case
R.M. Cymber
R.M. Cymber is a graduate student at Fontbonne University in St Louis, Missouri. Some of his works are featured in Scrutiny Journal, The Provo Canyon Review, and Crack the Spine Literary Magazine. His poem “Manna” was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize. He is also an editor at River Styx Literary Magazine. Currently, he is writing poetry and short stories.
April 2016 | poetry
The power saws of my childhood
sneak into the wind, great whirling
motors spitting dust, soft
and clinging to the hair of my arms,
transforming me from child
to Nordic beast, wild curls of blonde
lumber blurring my edges.
My father’s leather-pouched belt
hovers by my ear, smelling of nails
and sweat, and the chalk of a snapped line
hangs in the long air behind me, marking
the path from here to the place
where I once placed fallen screws
in a blade-scarred hand, certain
what I offered
was needed.
Alice Pettway
Alice Pettway’s work has appeared in over 30 print and online journals, including The Bitter Oleander, The Connecticut Review, Folio, Lullwater Review, Keyhole, and WomenArts Quarterly. Her chapbook, Barbed Wire and Bedclothes was published by Spire Press in 2009, and her full-length collection, The Time of Hunger | O Tempo de Chuva, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Currently, she lives and writes in Bogotá, Colombia.
April 2016 | poetry
It’s nice to be me
she wonders
when you do not know
what the time is
at any shade of day.
When the dreams
bring down
the leaves of scorn
blown by the bluster
of those
that know what they do.
It is so nice to be me
on my own
to walk the trails of private gardening.
I rustle round the grass
like a whisper.
In the blue forget-me-nots
that flutter in my company
Who needs people?
if you have sown
the pretty pinks
to keep the head warm and cosy
in its bed of confidence.
I am so special I know
there are places to fly
to say the crazy things I say.
Nigel Ford
Nigel was born in 1944 and started writing age 14. Jobs include reporter for The Daily Times, Lagos, Nigeria, travel writer for Sun Publishing, London, English teacher for Berlitz, Hamburg, copy writer for Ted Bates, Stockholm. Several magazines in UK and US have published his work, including Nexus, Outposts, Encounter, New Spokes, Inkshed, The Crazy Oik, Weyfarers, Acumen, Critical Quarterly, Staple, T.O.P.S, The North, Foolscap, Iota, Poetry Nottingham, and Tears in the Fence.
April 2016 | poetry
On the way to see lavender flames and bloody cow tails,
a bunny runs from beneath my car, tears in his eyes as if he had heard me
screaming inside my room minutes before
Some mornings I weep instead
Ashlie Allen
Ashlie Allen writes fiction and poetry. Her favorite book is “The Vampire Lestat” by Anne Rice. She is friends with the Green man and some other weird creatures.
