January 2013 | back-issues, poetry
There’s a chill
in the air so wet
that it drips down
the window pane.
I sit and wait on night
to blacken the steel grey sky,
wondering how in hell
things ever got this way,
combing through and through
each conversation,
each blank stare,
each empty dawn bed.
I go down to the sloping banks
to dream of drifting downstream
past the confluence
into the stronger flow
toward the full and teeming ocean
where lie other beaches, the sand
redeeming the crushed shells,
leaving this house
and this cold,
cold war.
by Robert Strickland
Robert Strickland is a bassist, composer, and singer who reads books and writes poems, among other things. He splits his time between Colorado and Florida. His poetry has appeared, or is scheduled to appear, in Pale Horse Review, A Handful Of Stones, and Houseboat, where he was recently the featured poet.
January 2013 | back-issues, poetry
for Abe Sada
If anyone knows how to make dangerous love
on knuckles and knees to the pluck of a shamisen,
its chords quivering like skeletons—its you.
It’s 1930 Japan and you must have spat
like a yakuza, a little-razor-tongue misfit
from the old bordellos of Tobita Shinchi
and Edo’s Yoshiwara
You are more than a slash of lipstick.
You are cult myth; the spider tattoo
across a geisha’s shoulder blade like a claw.
You need no pistol camouflaged
in a silk boudoir to control men.
When I was seventeen a lover threatened
to kill himself on the bathroom floor,
held me down as I slashed the air with my hands.
He stalked me like a hound for weeks.
I can still see his Volvo watching
my bedroom window from across the street.
The midnight telephone calls as I shivered in the corner.
I took him back like a thirsty dog and when he left again,
without my hips fasten to his—hysteria,
the kind that throbs and tears, leaving me
lonelier than a shriveled root.
As I sit alone on the dark writing table,
I stare at a painting of you in a book.
You’re breasts aglow, taut as a mauve plum,
naked body round and fattened,
lit up with a kind of shine as if you’ve eaten
something so holy and satisfying.
You have just killed your lover
in a Shibuya love hotel. Tied his limbs,
told him to lie face down on a tatami mat
until tamed like a fish in a quiet pond
then wrapped an obi around his throat,
waited for droplets of sweat to simmer
above his lips, the gesture of his head
that told you don’t stop.
When his body went limp you held a knife
in your salty palms and carved through neon veins.
I confess I have found love in torment,
allowed it to wash over me and swell inside
like a drug. I still don’t know how to survive it,
and there are nights, in silence,
where I fiend for its wreckage but I am no
warrior and this is why I write on the ruddy page.
by Angela Peñaredondo
Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a poet and artist from Los Angeles, California. Currently, she is completing an MFA program in Creative Writing from University of California Riverside, where she is a Gluck Fellow. Her work has appeared in 20×20 Magazine, Global Graffiti, The Poet’s Billow, Noyo River Review, upcoming in Solo Novo. Angela’s work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was also awarded a University of Los Angeles California’s Community Access Scholarship in poetry, Fishtrap Fellowship and a Mendocino Coast Writers Conference Scholarship. She received first runner-up for the 2012 Atlantis Poetry Award.
January 2013 | back-issues, poetry
The world has found
New Jersey, the
new entertainment capital.
like an ant farm on a glucose high, now,
we crawl, we build, we eat each
other, we carry the dead, we swarm the
living, and we sit in your living
room, while getting picked apart,
and give joy to those viewing-that life can always
hit a new low.
they understand that when fate gives them
the dagger, at least it didn’t come
soaked
in coconut oil.
usually when the networks
come and the advertisers pay,
those on the other end- providing the
laughs and memorable quotes, are the ones
with the last laugh, that the spectators
and the tourists are the fools
for tuning in.
but like the bad end of a casino game,
it seems the joke
is on us.
and even though
our pizza
is better
I’m pretty sure
the masses are right.
and for the first time
in all history
the masses are right for the right reason,
and i’m not invited to the
victory party.
by Scott Laudati
