April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
our grave hearts crave in the dead night
old arms of night have taken our city abreast
our nameless faceless city
sweating/stinking
a broken-down mosaic
red rotting brick/dilapidated alleys
sheltering dark looms
drain pipes drip hot
fire-escapes uproot themselves
from failing architecture
music falls onto the street from open windows
a morose violin wheezes out
adolescent/untrained notes
lungs of animals
and men and women
expand and collapse
singing/speaking/crying/loving/hating
in this city/all cities
this throbbing/beating/machine-heart
in the infantile hours of morning
black money is changing hands
our grave hearts crave in the dead night
i wish i knew like the old trees
another first story of time
our morning street is warm
with the golden coming
from blood and a beating heart
life as it runs off the feet of men
and women singing
swelling undertones
harmonious high keys
distant sirens
lost in leaves
men like the grey trunks
overgrown, tired with hating
old men pedal past
flashing golden smiles
dry lipped
dancing
in dim daybreak sun
April 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Christian Altamirano
A man got up from bed, went to his bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw people come in full circle and detach themselves. He saw a person use another’s authority for their own gain. He heard that its better that people should be described by their actions then their actions be described by those people. He learned he had a voice that could be felt by others. He realized that he isn’t the only siren that could be listened to. He met an enemy’s ally and made them a friend. He looked himself in the mirror and realized he was a monster. He began to listen to more sirens one ringing strongly while another hummed lower. The louder siren speaks of a place of fire where bad people live and good people visit. While the man speaks of an animal who doesn’t exist. He finds an angel who speaks of Milos and the man creates a sound of earth, but the louder siren speaks harder with a sound of retaliation, and after the loud siren creates a boom into the man’s ear, the man begins to see things differently not because of the boom but because of praise after. The man starts to see Messiahs being praised while saviors are being forgotten. The man starts to see people drown themselves on each other but no one flooding themselves on him. The man starts to hear people tell him his own flaws of being a monster. The man begins to be ignored by people who don’t want to hear his own voice. The man’s siren begins to not be listened to and feel worthless. The man’s enemy of his enemy becomes his enemy instead of his friend. The man starts to become nothing and his siren will soon wither and die. And along with the siren the man will die also, he begins to scream at himself in the mirror with what siren the man has left and his reflection shatters before he could realize that it doesn’t matter how many people love his voice but as long as one person holds the voice dear to themselves then no man or monster can be worthless. I then wake up and find myself broken, in the beginning of the circle, in “Ruin.”
April 2011 | back-issues, poetry
by Michael Morical
Landscape
Between waterfalls
a poem written in moss
grows on stone.
Ferns sprout
from words intertwined,
twisted shaggy,
hard to define
in the mist sustaining them.
Under The Icy Ash
She walks her bike past
the dry spot where I sit.
We’re shaped the same,
man and woman,
lumpy and woolen.
She doubles back
and stops a few steps away.
Her breath unfurls as it fades
cloud after cloud out to the lake.
I open my mouth without a word.
We shade our eyes and squint
at the glare on the snow.
Michael Morical is a freelance editor in Taipei. His poems have appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, The Hardy Review and other journals. Sharing Solitaire is his first chapbook.
