January 2015 | back-issues, poetry
before
I’m stricken down
by overwhelming
heartiness
Lindo,
remember
my hands flagging
down my elbows
when I suddenly bent
them at asymmetric angles
and thrust them toward my second rib
to cry out a phlegmy Milwaukee born
Hrrrrraaghh!
I’m stricken up
like that often
you know-
I’ve watched you
you flinch with a smile
three seconds before it comes
knowing all
about the blended
and aimed reverence
laced tolerance
masking irritation
and dismissal I shove
into every
boisterous afternoon
I spend with you
by Steven Minchin
Steven enjoys capturing things he’s seen almost as much as things he has not. To date he has quite a collection of both. He makes Facebook his artistic warehouse and periodically promotes dead people there, elsewhere his work has appeared in Mad Swirl, Heavy Hands Ink, Short, Fast and Deadly, vox poetica, and Crack the Spine.
January 2015 | back-issues, fiction
The fire gnawed the grasslands to bone-cracked earth on the way to our village. We hoped the lake would save us, the buckets of life we hauled from the shore, the trenches of dirt we overturned, the drenched rooftops.
We saw it writhing across the plane, rivers of light beneath rainless billows, bound for our storehouses, our livestock, our children. We beat at embers, singed our skirts, lost our hats in the breach. We unmoored our fishing boats and cast ourselves on the mercy of the inflammable.
The lake became a cloistered room of steam and sodden embers, roof of smoke, wringing the breath from our throats. We drenched aprons and handkerchiefs, tied them round our sons and daughters, round their ash-flecked faces.
When our rowboats scrape the shore, the ground is still hot, patched with guttering flames. The soles of our boots melt. The stones by the lake are blackened and cracked, and the cattle have vanished to ash. The evening is yellow and gray with smoldering.
We remember the purple flowers that flourished by the water, the grass that tumbled toward the shore. We remember the woods across the lake, its mosses and mushrooms, its birds’ nests, its deer.
We remember that the fish are still in the lake, and the boats are in the lake, and our sons and daughters lie sleeping in the boats.
by Brianne Holmes
Brianne Holmes lives and writes in Greenville, NC. Her work has appeared in the Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature and Art, in which she was also named the featured writer in 2012. She has a piece forthcoming in the Journal of Microliterature. Currently, she serves as an editorial assistant for the North Carolina Literary Review.
January 2015 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
what becomes
you are breathing on the
frozen ground with broken ribs you
are smiling and we are higher up
between venus and the crescent
moon in the last seconds before
first light we are falling we are
praying are laughing at the
idea of someone else’s pain
are laughing in the tall grass and
she is turning away with
broken hands a bleeding mouth and
i have known her i have held her
and he is at the wrong end of
the gun
he is no one or at least is no one
we know and she is laughing
as the trigger is pulled
he is laughing and they are
breathing with their lungs full
of iridescent poison full of
broken glass and this is the
moment when she speaks my
name
this is the taste of
her salt on my lips
we are alone here together and
moving deeper
into the heart of salvation
a luminous song
baby shot in the head outside a liquor store,
held up like a shield by its father and
no one can tell you when this desert began and
no one can tell you where it ends
the maps are all drawn in black on black
the politicians all laugh
it can go two different ways
you see
and the dogs believe in violence and the
whores believe in money and
both will always lead to power
and the bay is dead and then the father
but it’s a long ways away in
both space and time
a warm summer evening on
the opposite coast and i’m 26
i’ve given up on heroes and i’ve given
up on god and what it feels like is freedom
a small surrealist game to be played in a
back
yard
garden
with polished stones and
bleeding hands and naked lovers
a pile of skulls left at the water’s edge
and the mother says he never
really wanted a child and
the humor in pain is sometimes difficult to find
the joy found in terrorizing others is
what makes us human
seems like what you’d actually want to
be is something
more or something less
an answer
life wasted crawling towards water beneath the
sky blue sky and these
last days of winter and this taste of dirty frost
this 10 below zero this neverending wind and all of
the furniture from
the burned house spread out on the lawn
jesus in his unmarked grave
dreaming lightning bolts
understands the kingdom of god is a
fairy tale for suckers and fools
knows in his endlessly dying heart that a man who
wants for nothing is a man who can never be trusted
diogenes
and nothing and
nothing and then ten
below zero at five thirty in the morning
no FOR or AGAINST
no TOWARDS or AWAY
am just trying to remember how to
breathe and how to be
am through believing in gods
in heroes
from room to room
with absolute clarity
need a gun or a window or the
doorway to a different kingdom
need to be a fist
a believer in those happy
days of open wounds
a priest waiting to
fuck or be fucked
i would give you hope if i could
just for the pleasure of
taking it away again
the bleeding horse sings one last song over the graves of 500,000,000 nameless victims
and if all you are is a ghost or
even if i find only one small place that
isn’t enemy territory
if the dogs have all eaten
their fill of corpses
call it a victory without
naming the war
let me rediscover hope
let me drown in the
ocean of your beauty
it’s enough that what we have will
still matter
even when nothing else does
by John Sweet
john sweet, b. 1968, winner of the 2014 Lummox Poetry Prize. opposed to the idea of plutocracies attempting to pass themselves off as democracies, and to all organized religion. not too impressed with television, either. collections include FAMINE, INSTRUCTIONS FOR DROWNING and the upcoming THE CENTURY OF DREAMING MONSTERS.
