Archives for June 2017

Mosquito Logic Three (We the Help)

Jake Edgar

Emerging from your chrysalis, you were welcomed by an ignition of light that caught you and held you there. The warmth of crossed hands, pudgy and sterile. Is this true? Can belief be found in a place full of failed attempts to coalesce?

Peter says that he really just misses his kids and thank GOD for those emergency workers for talking him off that roof. You think sort of less of him each time he says the word God.

You’re waiting for the coloring session to end, to show a blackness sans blackness and then he brings up his kids again, each time he says kids he blinks like a falcon.

Paper Revolution

Lita Kurth

Paper stays with us, black and smoky like the sky above the roofs but behind the trees and there, automatic, it wasn’t, that thing that made me turn the lights on, car alarms buzzing and shouting, a noisy night of mammalian thunder and siren’s arms spilling out of cars. When the bomb hits, it’s only one, and wow, what a brightness and forth of July to a dead revolution, but bombs still burst. Here’s me in my quiet bed imagining blood. If only those soft curls fell on wounds, if only the snow, but why even talk of snow in a San Jose drought? This will be forgotten; an impact arises and grows from ambition, is that right? I doubt it. There’s door-kings of glass to grab, but leave the door closed. All the belts behind the door hide their history and the sky is cracking. Where are the soft hamburgers of pointed pain, a mess, but popcorn helps. It has no edges, only a plaintive mew. The bombs scratch the sky. Did we really do it all on purpose? We bought it, the breaking of many branches.

Lookout Mountain

Rick Alley

Stuffed with the tongues
of hummingbirds

the snapdragons
stoically choked

through August into
fall.

Mother heard
the thunder

days before
the storm.

Of course, her nerves
were a spine

of army ants
on fire.

A Tiny Crown

Martha McCollough

O Bug bug bug bug bug…
—John Hollander

Little musical hairdressers, His
favorites sing with nail and comb,
natter rhythmic clicksongs in His ear,

so many variations after the first
essay: pool skimmers to slide over
shady waters, little kitchen demigods

ruining the flour, nano-lumberjacks,
and you, assiduous worker, proud
to roll your ball of dung in the broad

field of His approving gaze: a God
so plainly fond of you if otherwise
unknowable, capricious, obscure.

Paradise

Christian Tanner

Christian Tanner Paradise
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Court-Bouillon

Clemonce Heard

is what French militants dubbed
the fish head mélange, but we say
Coubion, because the fewer syllables
the less bourgeois. This is no tartare.
This is the muculent skull of an arrow,
stirred into a stock with the butts
of scallions & celery, jealousy & snot.
Like Goliath’s lot, this too is prepared
for the sovereign, along with its guts
dangling from where the severance
took place. If a scalp is clutched
by its locks there is a face, if clasped
by its beard, a squid. Crustacean
shells & grey shallots may be heaved
in to give the stew more of a zing.
To ready the king’s palette, intestines
snipped from beneath the pectoral fin
are waved before his anointed brow,
in a hypnotic baiting, blood clotted
grapes. Here, he must bite down
& strain every drop before hawking
the putrid skins across the raw slate.

Appalachia

Will Cordeiro

A woodchuck munches
on a bruised crabapple
beyond the clothesline
where we play badminton.
It wobbles off, past mulch

and duff, snout dabbling in
rough muckage. Dandelions
lush the lawn with blowsy
ghosts. A truck guzzles up
a fog of yellow dust. Mizzle

stuns our horse-pond. Knuckle
deep, seep jellies over periwinkles,
whole brindled bundles of them.
A backlit buckle of felled trees
now doubles in it. Autumn,

and my life is almost over.
No, it only feels that way. Really,
the overcast erupts in slender
tinsel. Fat glops of frog spawn
slurry. The faint light suffers.

The Breakneck Boys

Amanda J. Bermudez

prettily-lit
& laced with that wealthy haze
insinuating older gentlemen
(aged less by trial than by trouser-ironing better halves)
practiced in rain-based exchanges of words
an hour here or there
in rooms kept safe
barred from the breakneck boys
by the legitimate sons
however dumb
(however deaf)
in letter jackets
linens & ties crafted for the occasion
crowded ’round
listening carefully for oceans
in shells
hallowed out
for the purpose of being easily swayed

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