Archives for December 2015

Two Poems

Jack Darrow

 

two soft plums
stain the eggshell bowl
beside our bed

 

a sight for sore eyes
baby’s got her pain
dress on

Delicious

Lori Brack

The rind flat on the pavement is by chance a circle—whole but empty where she shimmied out of her skin-tight skin. Around the corner, naked Clementine hangs out on a concrete ledge. She would swing her legs if she had any, puckered around her empty center, bold as anything under the sun’s blaze. When night turns cold, Clementine shivers her regret for peeling off there in the street, wishes she had not left so loose her spicy attire behind. She is sticky-sweet and irresistible to the wasp, his gold tooth shine disappearing inside.

When snow comes early

Mary Harpin

After Quinn Latimer

Leaves accept an early fate and privacies come bare.
There she is, in the naked broadleaf:
the hawks’ nest, the mother hawk, slender
eye, slender beak. We didn’t know
she was here all along, gone tomorrow.
What do you name the sacred
privacies of snow? Sorrow?

The Mexican Conductor

Matthew Dexter

Meth made the miniature train more endurable as it careened through the mall. Children chased the caboose. Eyes full of diamonds and watermelons and blood, pointing with cotton candy dusted fingertips as the majesty blasts its convivial horn. I think of muchachos and muchachas who ride with their siblings or mothers or babysitters. How they bounce. How they should be lost in a cave with nothing but fire. How steel melts beneath the broken wings of fallen serpents.

The Mask of Night

Lorraine Schein

A sleep mask masks sleep so that it does not recognize and awaken her. But she can see it still, swirling under her eyelids, satin under the satin mask.

When she wakes up, a blind man is lying between her legs. His eyelids are sewn shut with her eyelashes. He says nothing but reaches for her.

He Buys a Revolver

Wendy Taylor Carlisle

A 9 MM is “quick and adept.” A shooter stands with his violent ears, in which devils are. The devils are we, the sad followers of the paranoid “what if.” Our leader, Satan, stands whispering in a little hidden section behind the tympani, behind the breathing meat in a visceral explosion of longing and terror, a confusion of focus.

This story has to be in someone else’s hand. I’m not brave enough to write out all this sadness. Moreover, this story has to be turned away from any beautiful dread, any sexy alarm, from excuses, from the biochemical shell game. The man-gun in this story is blank as le Chiffre, unmoored, drifting away from skin and heat, knowing without means, by need. The man in this story is not the other man; the gun is not one we do not own. We are all meat and millimeters. We are all at bay.

Flattened

Sabrina Amaya Hoke

The crystal shard, the door,
where you rest your hand.
The alternate dimension. Universe.
A slightly uglier version of
yourself.

The Venus of Merchants

Robin Wyatt Dunn

Her body’s as wide as the tub; in her mouth a cigar. In her hair are bones. Her teeth gold. Gold also in the enamel on her nails. Wrapped tight round her neck, a blingy necklace studding the diamond word: MIDAS.

Her voice is a thousand metric tonnes. Her animal cry an engine so large it is kept in the basement, where it vibrates whole neighborhoods.

She is a memory of what was, and of what is coming to be.

The men stand around her and weep, pouring their wallets over her body, in devotion, and in humility, to abase themselves before her. She accepts it all, as the best temple whore, with her secret god she keeps inside, of no name at all. The escape god, like the escape hatch, unknown to her worshippers, perhaps it only is: the knowledge of the sham of it all.

Torrents of cash flood the basement; the dump truck scoots in, honking, turning Charleston Heston bodies in soylent-green-ways, turbulent and righteous it thrusts the men in their suits into the cement to make way for the promissory notes.

At the heart of the maelstrom, she is screaming.

Velikanova

T.M. De Vos

The brightest learned
to make chains, cliques of similars
who loomed heavy in that first atmosphere
where one amino acid began to mean another.
This is how higher animals began, and with them,
further metaphor, bad pastorals.

I was not one of those
who could make my chest swell with organelles
or corset myself into a fringy slipper.

I was a minimum, a single chamber:
I asked only waste, not the bright maki
of new cells. I kept matter only shortly
and released it, barely changed.

This is the model of your Annelids, those blunt bores
who pass through dirt like ether.
They are still going: simple orifices
and what is pushed through.

Weathering

Rachel Nix

By the bovine’s repose
I know soon the scent of petrichor
will grace the grassland;

and more, the verdure
will not be proof the season has tipped
in favor of cooler spells.

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