Category: Issue Two, Fall 2012
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J. Mae Barizo
LIBERA ME I. Pain resurfaced, exiting out of my arms. In the dream was the face of your father but not my father. In that way I knew he had taken you with him. Music, a tortuous path. Therefore grief is ascribed to the body. A force fluctuating over time. We believe…
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Tina Brown Celona
ORPHEUS RESTORED. PART TWO. To write this poem I had to get drunk and also high because it was so scary and I needed to take leave of my senses a little and also I had some ice tea. I am probably ignoring some red flags as I’m being sucked into the black…
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Julia Cohen
ATTACHED TO THE SWAN COMES THE WATER i. Are you willing to wake me with your baby? To trust I won’t cut your luscious bangs as you rest? My two children we send to the school best fitting personalities of orange sheets, newspapers smeared with coffee & glitter-recycling. Tin cans emptied of black-eyed…
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Beth Couture
EXCERPTS FROM WOMEN BORN WITH FUR: A BIOGRAPHY Definitions Hypertrichosis: An excessive growth of hair on the body, possibly as a result of endocrine dysfunction, as in the hirsutism accompanying excessive adrenocortical function. Hypertrichosis: specifically refers to hair density or length beyond the accepted limits of normal for a particular age, race, or sex,…
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Jimmie Cumbie
WHITE SPACE (PDF FEATURE) Next→ Jimmie Cumbie lives on the north side of Chicago. His poems have appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, The CavenKerry Press, Swink, The Edison Review, and Spout among others.
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Phillip Garland
THE ATTIC They could sit in the attic windowsill for a clear view. Or toss off bits of inedible food. Sometimes they shared two or three cigarettes in a single sitting. Or boredom got the better of them and they kissed. Or it wasn’t clear. Even during the day. Sometimes the giant clouds of…
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Les Gottesman
FRONTAL A misquote dilates ghost-red and hat-black the Kremlin of impulse. On the spiky chance the thighs are real I am their appetite for polyandry, Dada, booze and spaghetti, the unseeable apartments in a dream of hallways. CRIB Soupy river of alt-sex as is mocked by terrapins and pangolins and melancholy…
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Ira Joel Haber
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives…
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Joanna Clapps Herman
FLESH, BONE, AND SONG My father’s bones are a version of him. The structuring ground inside, a connecting architecture. Lightweight, strong, dense, his bones protected his heart, his lungs, held up his belly and all the rest. Bones bind and support, connect us to ourselves. They allow us to move, go forward, to change. My…
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Patrick Kennedy
WORLD WITHOUT END: A BOOK OF PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS I When I was in parochial school, a nun from the missions came to visit my class. The nun wore a light gray habit. The nuns who taught us wore a lot of black and a little white. Our teacher turned the lights…
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Cheryl Diane Kidder
MAMBO Papa loves mambo! Mama loves mambo! Havin’ their fling again, Younger than spring again, Feelin’ that zing again, Wow! Los Angeles I didn’t know what he did with his afternoons until I was six months pregnant and he didn’t show up at home after a week or so. I got a call from his…
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Edward Mayes
NOT NOW NOR NEVER Not that you can hold us to it but then E-roads didn’t exist until recently. Our fingernails feel Veneered on our fingers, sinewy and locked, our hearts awaiting Eruptions of light shooting out of our heads: Rags for the rag traders. Who’s been gathering up Neophytes and acolytes,…
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Stephen McClurg
NIGHT TERRORS (Written for and inspired by Ryan Jetten) Deceived By God A phrase uttered by G.R., a female prone to Night Terrors. Her comment was made during a tirade against the masculine sex–in particular, St. Jerome and his view that “Woman is the gate of the devil, the road of evil, the sting of the…
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Ben Miller
SKIM THIS! MY LIFE AS A RENEGADE READER (SO FAR) As you may or may not know, the superintendent of the Dronx public schools, Melville Kelleher, illegally diverted federal funds earmarked for Head Start to a program called Slow Start designed to halt the progress of precocious students and thus spare them an unhappy life…
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Jamie Quatro
SACRAMENT That winter, I practiced saying goodbye to you sliding a finger inside myself Placing it—knuckle crease to fingertip—down the center of my tongue. I wanted to know myself—know the woman you might have known. Not sweet As I would have liked. A chemical quality I might have asked you about, later. That room…
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Garrett Rowlan
IS AHAB, AHAB I am Opal Thorndike and I’m not. I’m a sliver of self-consciousness that has never metastasized into her thoughts, if she has any. I’m inside her and inside a novel scribbled by an unreliable, maybe incompetent, narrator. It’s a protean world of typos. Eyes and hair change color from one moment to…
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Andrew Seguin
THE LESSER SYSTEMS On this day when the clocks follow the concentric tempo of a top and the verb to be has worn off its costume so the tongue can pick a place …
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D. E. Steward
Iuno Eighteenth-century Vienna in winter, carting and carriage horses steaming under their blankets, Stephansdom’s bells clean on the hour, ice floe on the fast Danube, the dry heat of ceramic stoves, their exhaust a brown inversion layer between the city and moon Tonight, here, the Leipzig Quartet performs Mozart’s C Major, K. 465, Dissonance,…
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Jon Thompson
SHARES (Harlan County, USA) In the long descent,/ darkness/ the one true compass. The world is not one; there are worlds within worlds/ what we know of the world of light is less than the weight of a soul slipping from an earth-pressed body. We have lost many a word/ lost many a word/ &…
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Sam White
CURRENTS Stay, says the moonlight to the snail I would if I could, says its trail glistening. Beat it, says the lake to the eels. Will do, say the eels, into waveform of voices of fisherman grumbling. Don’t cry, says the nest to the lake. I’m not, says the lake weeping Styrofoam. Giddyap, says the…