April 2016 | poetry
Swing
Spilt and splashed down
here in the low life,
wild electric blue
blanketed eyes,
ham cameo role on
the gallows pole,
wrapped up whole
in the scarf of the sky,
open closet of bones
sounds a wind chime,
while a barbed wire
snare smokes a lung,
watch me dance on
hair trigger corrections,
plunge from life’s
unsolicited tongue.
PLATEAU
Given the high percentage
of supernatural compression
during the inception of a
catalytic chemical relationship,
why do we act so surprised when
the alcohol makes us hungover,
the cigarettes make us wheeze
and the chocolate makes us fat?
Why do we act so surprised when
the froth and fizz subsides and
reality staggers through the door
out of breath, plonks on the bed
kicks off its smelly old work
boots and gasps, ‘Christ, this
fucking Honeymoon is killing me!’
Lindsay McLeod
Lindsay McLeod trips over the horizon every morning. He has won several prizes and awards and stuff for poetry and short fiction and published his first co-authored poetry collection, My Almost Heart, in 2015. He currently writes on the sandy Southern edge of the world, where he watches the sea and the sky wrestle for supremacy at his letterbox. He prefers to support the underdog. It is presently an each way bet.
April 2016 | poetry
One Winter Night
after Mark Strand
My breath rose like a ghostly cloud into the air,
dispersing particles of me, invisible envoys
that would remain after I was gone,
marking my passage though no one would see.
The moon was a white slip, mute witness,
hanging high in a sullen wintry sky.
The street was silent, snow frosting
pavements, the front yards of the houses —
houses clinging to their warmth against the cold,
hosting domestic lives within their walls.
Not a soul stood by a window looking out.
I was tempted to stay outside, to embrace
night’s immensity, its indifferent
domain, I was tempted to walk away into it,
into an unscripted future with unknown
demands, but only for a moment, shivering,
the notion a whimsy, a flight of fantasy,
before I climbed the front steps,
icy hands turning the key to unlock the door,
returning me to my chosen life,
my chores, my children, my wife.
The Cognitive Dissonance Factories
Oh, how we have refined our techniques,
are refining them still, all for our production line,
churning out item after item, each one
individually tailored with our special mix
of empowerment and brutality, a little terror
here, a little deprivation there,
some brainwashing, some kicking of
severed heads, and promises, oh promises
of redemption, of a better world for believers,
of death to the infidels, of virgins
for martyrs, but let’s start with the children
and the messages they carry
in their brutalized hearts,
the future we are making embedded
within them, all our invisible suicide vests,
let’s start there where our immortality can blossom,
can bloom in their childish chests
and fear can grip the world.
The Mentor
for Jan Beatty
The mentor is so much more than herself —
she is her own reward:
she is wizard, prospector, pirate, conjurer,
maze of mirrors.
She practices rites of levitation and alchemy,
casts spells, holds students in her thrall.
What treasures come from this cannot be foreseen:
gold leaf on the Buddha,
sparkling raiment, cloudbursts,
citadels of delight. What she begins
takes on a life of its own,
fizzing trajectories of fire crackers
lighting up the dark. She knows
there is no greater reward than this,
her face illuminated in such light.
David Ades
David Adès is a Pushcart Prize nominated Australian poet living in Pittsburgh since 2011. He has been a member of Friendly Street Poets since 1979. He is the author of “Mapping the World” (Friendly Street Poets / Wakefield Press, 2008) commended for the Anne Elder Award 2008, and the chapbook “Only the Questions Are Eternal” (Garron Publishing, 2015). David was a volunteer editor of the Australian Poetry Members Anthology “Metabolism”. His poems have appeared widely in Australia and the U.S. In 2014 David was awarded the inaugural University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize.
April 2016 | poetry
Algoma Guardian
She’s bound for Toledo riding
low with grain, slipping through
fine blue capillary that splits
the difference between Belle Isle and Windsor
Canada keeping a low profile
to the south forever
confounding us.
N A I D R A U G A M O G L A
emerge one by one from behind
a clump of trees in the middle
distance, tidy Canadian houses
gobbled like so many pills
hull bleeding rust
I stand witness
to silent progress
her steady down bound passage.
Durable Medical Equipment
Standard kit; four wheels and a hand
brake, tubular construction in sober
parsons black with a lick
of chrome fittings, she’s low
to the ground and tight
on the turns with a basket
up front, padded kneeler in back,
our Mardis Gras float, I’ll ease her in
behind the Krewe of Mona Lisa and Moon Pie
while you slosh hurricane and wave
to the joyous, drunken throngs.
Dave Hardin
Dave Hardin is a Michigan poet, fiction writer and artist. His poems have appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Prague Review, The Drunken Boat, Hermes Poetry Journal, The Dunes Review, Epigraph Magazine, Loose Change, ARDOR, Carolina Quarterly, The Madison Review, the 2014 Bear River Review and others.
April 2016 | poetry
I’ll look for you at that place between the dirty
flame of evening, it’s temple to oblivion,
and the milky solution of dawn
where extremes meet and get to know
each other all over. There are lips there
that fit together, silk sky touching
coarse waves. There’s a field there
where the grass is too full
of reflections of the world to talk about.
Ideas, words, phrases like “each other”—
some pattern of permanence
in all that rush and loss?
Your crescent blush made me think
of mealtime, candied kisses on the teeth,
the incessantly efflorescent pungent
bouquet. Is love to be understood
beyond the study of frivolity,
the study of hypocrisy
if there’s no such thing?
Is the raw material of divinity
all that’s left to work with?
It’s time to give up on my brain.
If you think this is a good way to improve
your heart or your mind, sleep on.
Stephen Massimilla
Massimilla’s book, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, was selected in the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize contest. He has received the Bordighera Poetry Prize, the Grolier Prize, a Van Rensselaer Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
April 2016 | poetry
The Secret
oh my aging starlet in the butter
bread me with hyphens wide-
eyed and strained of
wonder without reason
when I need help I go to sleep
there is no school for this
aged persuasion
certainties: perishables
doubts: fertility
a string tied to my reasoning
like tiny aggressions pouring forth
from the military hole until
all those antennae twitch to one leg
climb it like a food source
I was busy criticizing a rock
a gardener with a little slug funk
dripping from his angry shoe
I’m between accomplishments but
the cast-off river has its own explanations
necessary things are not always beautiful
the privileged ocean’s temporarily illegible
there is nothing else to say about not saying
pessimism: the body’s half empty
optimism: the coffin’s half full
at the end of the journey a talking goat
he doesn’t have anything to say
I can’t sleep some nights it rains all day
a common man doesn’t want common things
something will happen of course
but I’m stopping now
only an opening whose words contain
mouths
it makes the first page read right into the last
I can’t remember what was said to make me feel this way
but knowing the secret exists makes it less secret
The Small Birds of Early Morning
Needing only a shovelful of air to float on,
tunnels of light open daily with a flutter and a dash.
Little feathered flutes of dream buttered with song,
I bring you fresh lessons of foam from the rocks.
All the way to the end of my feathers I go.
There can be but one infinity, and it’s incomplete.
You might wish to swallow a river.
You might want to taste a stone.
There are mines inside, there are ancient caves,
as if you could have just a delicate slice of lightning.
Incongruous as a sunbathing polka dot cat,
I have forgiven myself for being too available.
I stand in this ocean walking on the bottom.
Your accomplice surrounds me and enters me.
Why so many of you, and so shy, as if I might
spill the patient seeds or eat up all the destinations?
I think I’ll go now, or I’ll go thinking unreasonably, with only
my beak and my new empty bones, lighter than thought,
having begun something illogical and right and needing
to search for the nest with my partially digested cricket thoughts.
The Telegram Got Larger
every room in the sentence was a new color
I had trained these wolves
and I knew how to defeat a bear
I worshipped indecision
my daughter can pluck out all the eyes in a room
everything is hungry here
the meals are not spaced evenly
and the legs of a table can lead you on
we were some kind of violation so we had to quit ourselves
it’s like the door to the middle of a missing universe
it lives in the attic but once it’s opened
it cannot close
we were healing but we could have called it sex
she appeared to be one of those gummy
sentimental things fat and unreasonably relieved
encased in a pink snowsuit that made her look like she floated
he kicked the step again and hurt my foot again
learning disabilities
tiny birds between his teeth
something brittle and transferred
I could not partake of the nontransferable emotions
one gooey personal shipwreck
if only I knew what to do with lost ponds
near the dacha on the Red Sea with Petrov
now tell me
The Way You Say Anything Is My World Being Careless
A cloud tattoo stains the sky’s vast back golden
as the lines reach across to the needle of feinting horizon.
There must be a clever dance on the other side
where the streetwise universe desultorily pierces
every unacceptable angle of unimaginable planetary skin.
Sorry We’re Open articulates the door with drunk humor.
You’ll have to borrow some light for the bleedin’ blunt.
Who can you talk to about celebratory addictions?
If you don’t talk about the law, you’ll find it
creeping up on you with a needy ass-kickin’,
part of an airy custody battle gone weathery
and feline with feral intent, oh rat-girl motherhood.
Where can we rinse our scavenging delicates?
Are there no spiritual remains to pick at,
no more incomplete catastrophes of faith dribbled
like griddle oil on the soul of morning’s argument
humming alive with golden terriers of tenacious possibility?
Somebody needs to say something wrong here.
Ten thousand obstacles just give us more to talk about.
Come in, come in, I’ve got a squirrel in the pot.
I can see that you’re a person of great substance
dominating a much smaller sphere of inaction.
Rich Ives
Rich Ives lives on Camano Island in Puget Sound. He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and has been nominated twice for the Best of the Web, three times for Best of the Net and six times for The Pushcart Prize. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a work for each day of the year, is available from Silenced Press, Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, is available form Newer York Press, and Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, is available from Bitter Oleander Press. He is also the winner of the What Books Press Fiction Competition, and his story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, is now available.
April 2016 | poetry
He doesn’t notice
the small flying thing
with the stinger
at the end of its thorax
fall into the opening
of his soda can.
So he picks it up
chugs the syrupy sweet
and the flying thing’s stinger
impales itself
in the wall of his esophagus.
He might as well
have licked an
electrical outlet;
replaced his blood
with acid.
The pain is an instantaneous God:
blinding, encompassing, absolute.
He will do anything to placate it.
There is not a single thought
in his brain other than
end this.
He pounds his throat,
nearly crushes his larynx.
He forces his fingers
over his tongue
down his gullet.
He can’t reach the tiny thorn
but he kicks in the gag reflex.
Every bit of lunch
and the flying thing
and the stinger
come back up.
In those few seconds
he’s decimated the patio furniture.
He’s slapped his significant other
who didn’t even have time to scream.
He’d counted himself
happy, even fortunate,
before.
Now he can’t
lay his head on a pillow
put a fork in his mouth
step through a door
without being afraid
of what might clamp down
like the unseen jagged teeth
of a bear trap.
Scott Urban
Scott’s poems have either recently appeared or are scheduled to appear in THE 2 RIVERS VIEW, ECLECTICA, and THE LOCUST MAGAZINE. His most recent poetry collection is GOD’S WILL (Mad Rush Press). His most recent anthology appearance is EVERY RIVER ON EARTH (Ohio University Press). He lives and writes in southeastern Ohio in a former Amish farmhouse that isn’t haunted — yet.
