NAP 1.2
Edited by Chad Redden
Copyright 2011 NAP Literary Magazine and Books
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NAP Literary Magazine
Volume 1 Issue 2
April 2011
Editor: Chad Redden
NAP Literary Magazine and Books: Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.
&
WWW.NAPLITMAG.COM
Twitter: NAP_Magazine
NAP Volume 1 Issue 2 © 2011 NAP Literary Magazine and Books
All rights revert back to authors upon publication.
DIRECTORY
IN BED
FOR THE LOVE OF BUTTER
IMAGINARY CRIMES
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
WHAT’S ENOUGH?
MISSTEP
DUDE, SERIOUSLY?
ADVICE FROM NO ONE IMPORTANT
A NEW KIND OF CINDERELLA STORY
3RD FLOOR
THINGAMAJIG
SALVAGE
MOON SHOT
HOUSEBOUND WEATHER
STRANGERS
TUESDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON
AMELIA EARHART
RELATE
I AM SWIGGING DOMESTIC BEER FROM A WARM CAN
MY MENTAL ATTITUDE ISOLATES ME LIKE A PORCUPINE AT THE ZOO
SELF-ESTEEM IS A CLUMSY EXERCISE
NUTRASWEET
HUH?
YOUR FLAG
THREE PHONES
THINKING IF ANOTHER OPTION IS EVER ENOUGH
HORROR VACUI
YOU START OUT FROM LOS ANGELES, TRAVELING AT 70 MPH
THE TRAVELING WOMAN
UNDERTOWN
MEAN STREETS #13
LEAKY LUCY
JAPAN IN APRIL
ARE THERE
COLUMBIAN CAB DRIVER
THE SECOND LIFE OF JOAN OF ARC
PARADIGM SHIFT
LOVE POEM FOR A POET
AFTER ZUKOFSKY
GOLDEN ARCHES OF LOVE
THE WAY WE WERE
CRUMPLE
SUB SAID EYES ID
ADOPTION
SONGS OF A GYNECOLOGIST
DAYDREAMS OF UNKNOWN PROTAGONISTS
DIM WHITE HURRICANE
GIFTED AND TALENTED ENRICHMENT
WHAT LEAVES
MANY DAYS
DELAYED TAKEOFF
THE ASH VALLEY TAPES
IN BED
There was an earthquake last night. At four AM you felt a short, hard jolt. It lasted twenty, maybe thirty seconds. You made it part of your dream.
The second jolt left you groggy, but you willed it away.
After the third blast you looked at the bunk below. The German boy was trying out this sex thing. His girlfriend wasn’t correcting him; so, this could take a while.
FOR THE LOVE OF BUTTER
His grandmother was obsessed with butter, no one knew why; it had something to do with cows. When she wasn’t eating butter she was hoarding butter. When she was neither eating nor hoarding butter she was warning everyone in shouting distance (and she had quite the pair of lungs, so this really meant something) to lay off her butter. His grandmother was nuts everyone knew that.
Every morning his grandfather left the house. He’d retired, years ago, from the plant, so no one knew where he went. Finally, one day he stopped, he had to, he was dead.
Then his father died. It could have been an overdose.
Then, it was just his grandmother, her butter, and he. One night, over the empty table his grandmother said, “You know, they never listened. Did I not warn them? I told them to lay off my butter.”
The grandson asked, “How do you feel about salt?”
“Salt’s fine. Live it up. Just lay off the butter and we’ll get along fine.”
He did, and things were, in fact, fine until one day, unthinkingly, he brought home some olive oil.
It was a blood bath.
Adam Jeffries Schwartz is a writer & photographer. Children like him, dogs follow him, cats jump in his lap-- it's just like magic.
HOWIE GOOD
1
He was a man who liked to appear in public with a red face and drooping black moustache. What’s my last name? he’d ask strangers. A silk top hat was the only clue.
2
We read about it the next day in the newspaper. What looked like an accident was really the mind-body split. The satchel didn’t seem big enough to contain so much darkness.
3
I followed the sound of champagne music. The front door was open and the radio on, and then the room spun like the cylinder of a revolver.
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
1
The fire
is breathing.
Something
to think about
when there’s
nothing
to think about.
2
The hitchhiker
holds up a hand-
lettered sign.
What’s it say?
Even he doesn’t
know anymore.
3
God
like a Nazi
doctor
living
in another
country
under
another
name.
Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).
JAMES VALVIS
My soul is like a fiery furnace; is that not enough for you?
--Rumi
My soul is like a fiery furnace; is that not enough for you?
It is like a flame flaming for you; still not enough?
My soul is like lightning, and I have these arms
you can use as matches; what's enough?
My soul is light looking to penetrate darkness,
this darkness within you, the dark caves of you,
and everywhere my light goes it touches darkness.
My soul touches your dark; is that not enough for you?
My soul burns through its fuel fast, without thought
to saving itself, burns till ash asks, is that not enough?
A few embers more, maybe less, and my soul
like a fiery furnace consumes its allotment of light, love, life;
is enough never enough until enough is enough?
MISSTEP
After lights out, he lays in his bunk,
resting on top of the scratchy blanket
so he will not have to make the bed
in the morning, looking at the ceiling,
listening to the other men in their beds,
the quiet of them-- a sudden cough,
and then a return to the dark and quiet.
What he hopes to hear, he cannot say.
55 men are with him in this barracks,
4 men to a bay, except for the odd one.
Under him is Private Simms, redheaded
and rip-roaring ready to fight and die.
Across sleep Privates Jobe and Moses,
which give the bay a biblical feel,
as if God has a hand in this thing.
The ceiling is the same as the walls.
No personality. The army hates color.
There's more to uniformity than uniforms.
So far he has managed to meld in,
disappear into one of one of many.
But it won't last, and he knows it.
Something about him steps sideways
when others march straight, not because
the cause is wrong-just some people
misstep. He sees no honor in this.
He sees nothing noble about failing.
He's simply the type who stays awake,
the kind who listens to other men sleep.
In the morning, he will wake up tired,
and the drills will notice he's sluggish.
He'll never again disappear in the ranks.
Everywhere he goes now men will notice.
James Valvis lives in Issaquah, Washington. Publishing for over two decades, his work has recently appeared in 5 AM, Confrontation, Eclectica, Hanging Loose, Nimrod, Rattle, Slipstream, Southern Indiana Review, and is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Atlanta Review, Crab Creek Review, Gargoyle, H_NGM_N, Los Angeles Review, Midwest Quarterly, New York Quarterly, Pank, River Styx, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. A collection of his poems is due from Aortic Books.
MATT MCGEE
I was told
tonight
by a friend
that I’m a
terrible
gossip.
When I got
offended
and asked
where the hell
she got such
an idea,
she said “oh,
I heard
it around.”
ADVICE FROM NO ONE IMPORTANT
My son,
don't run around
like a thief in the night,
stealing time
‘til the sun goes down.
She knows
where you are,
and eventually
she will reclaim
her debt.
A NEW KIND OF CINDERELLA STORY
She says she has a latex allergy
and hands me a square package
containing her slipper of choice.
It was 2 sizes too small,
and minutes later she was back
in her panties saying "get out,"
her 34 A’s swinging in the breeze,
two jiggly thumbs
pointing toward the door.
I dressed, left, and drove home,
where my curtains are the right color,
my socks all fit and wait in their proper drawer,
and I told myself it’s alright:
sometimes women just don't know
how to shop for men.
Matt McGee is the editor/publisher of Falling Star Magazine, a literary quarterly in the Los Angeles area. His latest collection, "We Liked You Better When You Was a Whore" can be found on Amazon.
KRISTEN RYGMYR
“Go ahead and roll him into the dining room,” my father said, distracted by the smoothness of the clipboard and the accent of the African doctor assigned to my grandfather’s case. The doctor had done his best to stretch every long diagnosis out for us like taffy, smacking out each syllable slowly into my father’s good ear, looking away only occasionally at my grandfather slouching heavy in the corner, but never at me.
The gray man in front of me had been motionless since breakfast. He sat hunched over, resting the broad part of his forehead on the crevice made between his knees, and his big white hands, the same ones that turned pages in picture books and shoveled endless miles of snow before the knuckles started to swell, hung limp by his sides.
I wrapped my hands around my grandfather’s chest from behind, pulling his broad frame towards the back of the chair so I could secure the straps across his ribs. He was startled when his back hit the canvas and he jerked slightly so that his legs spread beneath his hospital gown and he slipped to one side. His flat white thighs and belly no longer drooped over what he thought I would never see through the space between his knees. I would have blushed when I came around to fasten the straps and saw all of him, knelt down, but he had already started shaking and mumbling, his eyes open and rolling blankly around the room until they met mine, and he was gripping my hand so tightly that I knew he was afraid.
The shaking stopped for a moment before it started up again. “There’s my girl,” he smiled down on me, “my sweet little alligator-eyed girl. You know why they call ‘em alligator eyes, don’t ya?” He paused and then continued without waiting for a response. “They are called alligator eyes because to the casual viewer they look like dark brown marbles rollin' around in your skull, but when you get ‘em in the sun they shine gold and green."
The walk to the dining hall was long. Something about the emptiness in the hallway, the unspeakable whiteness of it all, boiled into a scream that tore from his throat at the straps around his chest. I felt it, too. He writhed and pulled at them, terrified, but quieted when we entered and he saw the television in the corner. The first thing I saw was a man. He was sitting too close to the television with one hand reached all the way under his robe and he was jerking his head to one side, then the other, flashing his toothless grin to the empty chairs beside him. I chose another table.
The room was filled with endless circular tables, provided by the hospital to promote conversation between patients and their families on visiting day. I pushed him, already going limp, into the table so that the top roll of his belly rested on the linoleum top and took an empty seat next to him.
“I was an infantry man,” said the man next to me, staring intently at the curved part of my neck. He started coughing. He coughed and hacked until whatever was in his stomach came up onto his plate. It looked like orange scrambled eggs.
I turned the old woman across the table, trying to avoid eye contact with the man next to me, now dipping his roll into the newly made gravy on his plate. “How long have you been here?” I asked. She was wearing a red dress, torn at the shoulder where the stitches were coming loose, and the seats next to her were empty. The woman threw her shoulders back and clicked her tongue a few times before she answered. “I don’t know,” she said blankly, and then she began to sing.
“I said I’m an infantry man,” asserted the man next to me. I gave him a polite smile despite the smell coming from his plate, and an orange colored ring drying around his thin lips. “My name is Jack and I’m an infantry man.”
The television on the wall clicked and went to static. The toothless man started to moan.
“This here is nothin’ compared to the war. I fought in the Great War, you see. Tell me, darlin’, have you ever killed a man?”
I turned back toward my grandfather. He had already slid so far in his seat that the straps were cutting into the flesh around his nipple and I could see through the gown that it had started to draw blood. I stood to lift my grandfather’s trunk and shift him back upright, and all the time eying the door to the dining room, hoping to see the shadow of the African doctor and my father, but no one came.
“No,” I said evenly, although the words felt violent and heavy on my tongue, “I have never killed a man.”
Jack smiled and his blue eyes darkened. “Well then, let me tell you, sweetheart. Let me tell you what it’s like. I took a big knife, bigger than this here knife. Sharper, too, with a flat blade that comes to a point. I took that knife and slid it cross a man’s neck. Opened it up like a clamshell. The blood poured out like a river. Drained him dry before I left him face down in the mud.” He took the last part of his roll and swirled it in the orange liquid on his plate and shoved it in his mouth with one finger until it hit the back of his jaw.
My heart flattened. “Where was this, Jack?”
Jack glanced up from his plate and rested his hand under his chin while he finished chewing. “Muskego, Wisconsin!” he finally roared, throwing his head back in loud laughter. His laugh shifted to a deep cough until he was lunging forward, smacking his palm on his plate and hacking until little bits of orange shot out from his mouth onto his lips and chin. The woman across the table leaned forward and giggled. In the corner, the toothless man was weeping.
Jack’s coughing trailed off and there was silence for a long time. Without looking up, he placed one hand over mine so that his fingers rested across my knuckles and cleared his throat. “Forgive me, sweetheart, I say Muskego, and maybe that’s all right ‘n all. That’s just the only place I can still remember.”
There was a welcomed stillness. I looked up at Jack, wanting to mourn with him the places he had forgotten, but instead saw something different in his eyes: around the deep black center was a ring of shining gold.
Kristen Rygmyr is an English teacher from Atlanta, GA. She graduated from Kennesaw State University, and currently teaches ESOL at a community college. She will be working on a degree in writing in the coming months. She enjoys writing about people, and lives happily with friends and two cats.
VALERY PETROVSKIY
In my compartment two looking-glasses peered one at another. I butted in and saw an infinite row of mirrors immersed in each other, running far away. They ran further than I needed to go. There in every mirror my face got stuck and stared at its reflection. And I was scared that I would never get out of these glass worlds, existing besides me. The train was running forward and the mirrors reeled with the coach. And my head was swinging after them so that I felt sick and the back of my head was aching.
When a child, a roomy aquarium arrested my attention – with its golden fish, fluffy threads of unearthly algae, underwater mainsail and with shining air beads coming up from the very bed. A boy, I ever watched fish standing stock-still, with barely stirring gills as if of heat. A foreign world, so close and difficult to access, surprised me. And I wanted to throw my head into it and look around with bulging eyes as if a fish, opening wide my mouth with astonishment.
There, behind a glass plane, occurred something strange, as if a prolongation of the room followed. Not a reflection but extension, to be continued there. I wished to smash the damned glass into smithereens and to face the truth as if it were screened by the glass. However, children sometimes do like that: smash a looking-glass and hurt themselves, then weep injured or offended, or of disappointment. Adults do not act this way, they have there own playthings.
…At one time a small panorama was in my office with its own reality running behind the flat glass. A surprising fluid smoothly flew from above downwards originating a miraculous world. One could come up and turn over the thingamajig to create new strange images. At times there arose a toppled down volcano pulsating with violent ashes, forming islands in a mysterious ocean. Or a green spider spread out its tissue aiming to cover the entire world. Or all of a sudden ancient mountains started to collapse, slipping into the sea and hiding themselves in its waters.
Strange enough, it depended on who was turning upside down this world flattened by the glass planes. A young office girl was setting up a romantic island with two silent bodies slow reveling in each others kisses while prolonging the pleasure. An old janitor knocked it with a crooked forefinger and was building his Mount Fuji to ascend to in the last attempt. In silence the office ladies were turning over the miracle box to detect a boy or a girl was revealed for them by a mysterious screen.
Nearly every guest came up to it to look in a fantastic thingamajig so much alike a shop window to a strange planet. Everyone felt himself a God originating life on a foreign planet. And the game of making worlds went on till an unknown visitor came over and tried his capacity. Yet he failed – no mysterious world, nor strange beast, neither palm tree on an ocean shore appeared there. Every time behind the glass plane there sprung up nothing but a sandglass. And the sand lamentably crumbled down from the upper cone down forming a pyramidion to prove that time flew one way.
The design wouldn’t break but something was wrong with it. Then the visitor just went away. He vanished as if ascended to heaven. Following his last touch in the glass cell set a certain picture resembling a man. It looked very much like the stranger who had come no one knew what for and went no one knew where to. However hard the people tried no one could replace the shape afterwards. Thus his image was imprinted once and forever.
Nobody knew what do next with a weird picture, so they simply pushed it behind a bookcase. The image being revealed on the glass would stay there for long if not a charwoman Tamara. She reached to the unknown appearance, swept off some dust and took it home. There she placed it to the amen corner.
… Dully I’m sitting at the hairdresser’s in front of a mirror. I have my hair cut with his left hand.
Valery Petrovskiy is a journalist and short story writer from Russia. He studied English at Chuvash State University, Cheboksary and journalism at VKSh Higher School, Moscow. He has been writing fiction since 2005. Some of his Flash Fiction has been published at the magazines The Scrambler, Rusty Typer, and BRICKrethoric.
P.A. LEVY
SALVAGE
this rocky romance
never has been plain sailing
we shout clouds
at each other to stop
the sun from having a chance
but out of the blue you’d say
i feel a storm coming
turn the radio on
let’s do it
to the shipping forecast
MOON SHOT
I stretch up towards
the dream calm deviant light
of the Sea of Tranquility,
reaching as if I’m drowning …
the anesthetic of terra firma
reveals the gravity of my dilemma,
although I fight against the pull
and lunatic scream
night after terror mare night.
I keep a loaded gun under my pillow;
35mm Canon snap
of you and he
cliché sailing into the sunset
paddling faster on a life raft
constructed out of driftwood promises
tied together with fraying string.
P.A.Levy, having fled his native East End, now hides in the heart of Suffolk countryside learning the lost arts of hedge mumbling and clod watching. He has been published in many magazines, and is an original member of the Clueless Collective to be found at:www.cluelesscollective.co.uk.
ALEXANDRA PASIAN
She is feeling drafts again.
Even as the house is shut tight
against the city, air is moving
across her neck. She blames
the collision of dry electric heat,
with the slumbering moisture of children’s
sleep and clothes hung on racks
in the kitchen. The family
is creating its own weather systems; cleverly
moving the breeze from one room to the next—
an orchestration of high pressure here
temperature there— a crescendo of fronts
crashing on cue. Now,
if only she could get it to rain in the living room.
STRANGERS
Do you remember that dream
when we walked with our arms
as if through water? I told you
flying was easy if only we could
figure out the trick of that first lift.
The song’s playing again—
I’m really listening to the lyrics
this time. He has lost something
something important. How easily
we are distracted. In the dream
you became someone
I do not know.
TUESDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON
I am counting spider legs. Startled
by their abrupt arrival. How strange
they should appear on the ceiling;
come up from the floor.
Lying,
with my back to the room,
I hear the curtain untangle
itself; the spider extends
first one leg, then another.
This could be friendly.
But it doesn’t matter
where I begin, it’s always the same
cruel trick he loves me: he loves
me not.
Alexandra Pasian is a freelance writer living and teaching in Montreal, Quebec. Among other journals, her work has appeared in Arc, CV2, Event, andThe Fiddlehead and was short-listed for the Arc Magazine’s “Poem of The Year” in 2004 and 2008. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University.
JEMMA L. KING
In 2010, a team of researchers discovered the remains of a 1930s female American castaway on the remote and uninhabited island of Nikumaroro in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is strongly believed that the castaway was Amelia Earhart, the pioneering female pilot who disappeared in the 1930s whilst attempting to circumnavigate the world by air.
I
For someone so accustomed to speed,
silence and stillness was something.
It fell to a hum
and widened
First, an inventory of quiet invaded and took root.
Each variety lived
and sang one note.
But this shelf fell off, deeply,
plaintively cutting to the igneous core.
The air plucked at bird string,
marsupial chatter and
tapped irregular fingers to it.
Each scrambled song an insult
to one who craved an engine and a wing.
At first, she went mad.
II
The damning thing was
the finger bone. Hers, they said.
That and the pre-war American cosmetics.
Gilded, misplaced
in a land without a metal press or edges,
nature powdered to a pigment,
hands to press the buttons.
Objects to mock the woman
who had to prove her womanhood over and over
again.
That and the oyster shells,
upturned shallow buckets laid out in rows
to plug up the sand
drain the sky.
The wretched equatorial
mouth-rot.
The desperation that brands the spot
where the star imploded
in the glass tapping inch
edge of the galaxy. Unnoticed
surrounded by star birds and star crabs
benign and useless.
III
The crabs ate her
crushing the bones that
once hung bravery,
eyes that beheld the earth’s curve,
the heart that burst adrenaline
drilled it to the tips of grasping fingers
feeling life, even in the face of the exploding sea.
The metal’s crunch and spasm groaning.
The sea church settles
and takes pity.
IIII
The plane sank.
Amelia fell upwards and
was laid like a pearl on the shoreline.
IIIII
I imagine her whole and tanned,
her clothing dirtied but intact.
Her right hand loosely on her hip,
the other shielding squinting eyes
from a sun leveling her up.
She looks out before looking in
to the mountain tip of her new island
reluctant kingdom.
The horizon as empty as the stomach.
Birthdays pass, Christmases pass.
The slow collapse
into new years.
She’s stood there, squinting.
Jemma L. King is a writer and academic based in North Wales. She has written extensively on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She is currently writing a literary biography of the contemporary poetess Frieda Hughes and is also preparing her first poetry collection. She lives in Southern Snowdonia.
DAVID R. MORGAN
To maintain received reality, the man with the unusual
penis tried his best to hide it from his new wife. It
was difficult because his penis wasn't in the usual place
but attached to his tongue. To distract his wife,
he tickled her vagina with his amazingly dexterous nose,
or he put his long, sheathed tongue inside her.
He had traveled far, left a place he preferred
not to talk about, and his wife assumed
he learned his sexual practices there. She was happy
until she discovered her husband
pissing through his mouth, as though he were trying
to speak warm, running water. She wished
that she didn't know what she then knew --
that her sexy young husband was also a ghost.
This was no time for sentimental lust --
a ghost can only bring loneliness to an executive home.
So she strapped her husband into her four-by-four
and deposited him near a Relate Office in Luton.
She told him to fuck off back to the Land of the Dead,
but he was stuck like a moving shadow
that was neither here nor there. Some say
they still hear him sobbing: "My wife
will not have me! My wife does not understand!"
But he has no way of knowing how she misses his
unusual penis, how she tries her best to
hide it from her new husband -- yet the world is small,
the gossip as fast as wind through a storm.
It's said she makes her new husband lick her face,
to feel the warm tingle of his tongue,
that she then weeps into his barren mouth.
The fabric of received reality, life’s unexpected
magic spell –penis or vagina, man or woman,
it's all the same … everyone’s last words leave us alone.
David R Morgan teaches 11-19 year olds at Cardinal Newman School in Luton, and lives in Bedfordshire with his Ex wife and two children. His eldest daughter lives in The Isle Of Man. His poetry collection Walrus On A Rocking Chair , illustrated by John Welding, is published byClaire Publications and his poetry Ticket For The Peepshow has been published by art’icle.
ADAM MOORAD
I AM SWIGGING DOMESTIC BEER FROM A WARM CAN
i am using the sidewalk as a makeshift yoga mat
and everything seems inordinately exaggerated
like a clumpy and splattered piece of abstract art
suddenly i feel like the screamer in the scream
but instead of screaming i’m just coughing a lot
MY MENTAL ATTITUDE ISOLATES ME LIKE A PORCUPINE AT THE ZOO
i feel like uninterruptedly sprinting blindfolded in a diagonal line
and not even stopping for alternative modes of transportation
and i can see a station wagon mowing me over on metropolitan
and i can see myself laying in the avenue like the handsomest cat
SELF-ESTEEM IS A CLUMSY EXERCISE
my girlfriend ordered a pilates DVD
because she felt fat or something
she talked about the DVD constantly
and i hated having to hear about it
she used it as an excuse to eat pizza
and when the DVD finally arrived
i remember she cried a whole lot
i remember thinking ‘why’ or something
NUTRASWEET
one reads nutrition facts
expecting transcendence
usually by some sort of
up-and-down movement
a mild, undemanding feeling
almost a soothing sensation
of bleakness, something known
as NutraSweet, something
completely artificial
Adam Moorad's writing has widely appeared in print and online. He is the author of Prayerbook (wft pwm, 2010), I Went To The Desert (Thunderclap Press, 2010), Oikos (nonpress, 2010), and Book of Revelations (Artistically Declined Press, 2011). He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him here: adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com
JOHN TUSTIN
I keep sending her
my poems
because
I always spoke better
with my words
than I could
with my words.
YOUR FLAG
Your flag flaps in the wind,
a sound like rifle shots
and in this sky tonight
I die like a distant star,
the wind in my face
and a sound like rifle shots
from a flag unfurled
for no other reason
than to keep me
still and saluting
THREE PHONES
I have three phones
They are all dead
I have twenty eight teeth
All yellowing
I have a dozen broken headphones
I have two eyes that see but a blur in the distance
I have one mind
That compels two hands to type this
I have one heart
That is broken
But still working
John Tustin’s poetry is forthcoming in Bryant Literary Review, Chiron Review, Bete Noire, and others. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry is a link to his poetry online.
ANDREW DURBIN
THINKING IF ANOTHER OPTION IS EVER ENOUGH
Certain times, having ended, return.
This includes, of course,
mixed river ecologies, the sometimes
shark-infested “Mississippi.” Or so is said.
That’s it. The superfluous e,
for shame, not, despite “protest,”
the coffin builder whose
universe is built of carbon, the car bomb
which blasts
the will out of us. Not,
for shame, the “demoralized” aitch, the blush,
nor the super nautical rats.
How do dolphins ride them horizons?
Ma, I got the gun now go out there
and run Pa off the farm before—
damn!—trigger’s broke! “Appalachian”
midnight coffin time.
Snow seething in clouds, the “universe” is like that,
thinks by prolix (for thought,
to pull back through, does one find,
or is one found, inside a thought,
as in, thinking toward,
despite it’s in?). “Syrup”
on the “muffin top.” Our trains head down the production lines
of the post-“industrial” cities.
You’re point estimate
has overshot my place in midtown.
The Harlem lights. The lights in tomb.
Cry out! An indomitable
ipso facto kingpin (that’s him)
is determined to take the “best”
of us down. O hirsute prince,
my love is undeniable.
I didn’t really mean that. By a single word,
you may be denied what is your “place”
among the field mice.
But it’s unclear what you’re after.
That is to say, confident
nevertheless cowering in the “burning” hills,
a lot comes your way, only never enough.
HORROR VACUI
As well as in deep space, the outer
News, rumors and gossip
a book fallen from the cart
at the door stares hard at you but lets you pass
nor the reduction of such pretty things to their base
"Juice . . . . Juice . . . ."
that an eagle's crest may be
so easily lost. Because
I struggle to keep it real. Did you
know that the four poorest counties
lie in reservations the four richest
in Virginia. Some things
Will not change.
To declare for all feeling
against which is lodged,
at bottom, lost, that you might still
be in front of such women. But
A smiling (or frowning) stingray
will always leave you hungry for more.
YOU START OUT FROM LOS ANGELES, TRAVELING AT 70 MPH
Objects in the mirror
seem to come
toward you. Oranges fall
in with speed. A eureka of trees
sweeps clear the wind—
I was taken in that direction
for awhile before forcibly turned
around. Processes begin
(in beige and pewter).
Slippage comes easy,
quickly, until down
the mountainside the house (w/
the car) comes along with you.
Not to mention everything else,
highways designed to off words
and whack through woods. What,
she asks, do you mean
by driving so damn fast?
Not too much to go on, yet going still
determines the flatness of space,
content’s dream, in that mixed wind
way that wends different and alike.
Forced example,
another turnip washes ashore
of the plate/Long Island Ice Tea.
So what about that?
Traveling up 95, or is it 1,
one finds a range of cheap/free
fun (safe, as always) to be
had at little to no cost to your health.
You disappear under the rocks,
only to return at night. Is it in there
that I must go to sleep? How
will light come down to set
free my staid being,
or has no solution been
found to save women
like me? “which will destroy everything
I thought I knew if I ever feel like I understand.”
You can’t get far under earth,
we’re told, if sought out.
The sun decides to limp in.
See ripe fruit in San Diego
(lemons) before departure. That is.
As for this, to deplane suggests
a position totally aloof before
the scene ‘becomes.’ To think again,
in the car you find yourself
needlessly wrecklessly
adverbial to the ground
below. I don’t drive,
but my father does.
“. . . adopting embracing filiations,
communities, and discourses . . .”
In the silence that follows
the desert, there is sometimes none.
The music’s piped in.
Echo effect over all sorts of landscapes:
ear, hand, and mouth
(many months left to kill).
We’re occasioned to find a doctor’s help.
He takes what she gives. Adjourn
the semantic wig-wearing
judge, he’s fitted picayune daylight
with an edge of wax. The Pacific,
where healthcare was determined
(so salt’s good for skin?)
fresh air. Outside,
all fog and rain. That’s all right
‘cuz I travel light.
Imagine, all such clutter
colliding with the room.
Andrew Durbin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Antennae, Otoliths, and Washington Square. He lives in Tivoli, New York.
KYLE HEMMINGS
THE TRAVELING WOMAN
I would never unlock the door for a traveling
saleswoman selling mason jars of dead flies.
Over the years, I've kept files on such women,
how they return from the dead, walk only in
straight lines, stuff a child's reflection
in a tinderbox. A theory: Such women, before
graveyard-shift marriages, were not considered
dangerous. I was the child of one such woman.
Our eyes never met and she often spoke of me
to me. She packed me in a suitcase and we traveled
blind. I never got to see the passing scenery.
We never carried maps or nursery rhymes. I grew
numb with darkness until she sold me to a woman
with three blind pigs.
UNDERTOWN
I wear my childhood like an open coat in the fog. On a little hill that grew a house, a girl named Tilly loved me with a set of forks for fingers. She snorted lines of liquid despair and never once complained of runny love. Back in UnderTown, I've forgotten so much, the past, one big diaper rash that I now mistake for sunsets. I remember the subways under everyone's house. With each token, I lost one more virgin part. I'm talking anatomy and cross sectional slices of charred flesh, rib cages and goose longings. Children my age were ten multiples smarter and concealed the closet where their daddies kept the rye. The promised 10% wheat was always reflected in their mothers' sad glint. They died chafing in private. I could write Capote blue about growing up rich and impoverished. A girl I was engaged to now has spider veins and tends bar for miners with no sense of vertical direction. In shafts, they become their doubles with shadowspeak. At a drive in, she once joked about me and her making a canary. The truth was we did, a speechless canary, I never looked overhead since. In mirrors, I still see her closing her eyes, loving me with a chaste fierceness. In UnderTown, there was never a need for wings.
MEAN STREETS #13
Because I am a homely werewolf in a person suit. Because I can extract a dead man's echo from tin cans. Do you believe that I was once a cross between voodoo and virus, a double-vexed helix in everyone's right sided dominance? Because my bastard mother said a dream is a kite and she floated the box-world on a string on nothingness days. Because happiness is a subdural injection with the wrong medication. Is there anyone licensed in this house? Because I want nothing less than a prayer and a cruel Wicca joke. Bite me with your vaginal pain. Leave scratch marks then floss someone else's teeth. I'm in deep halitosis denial. Because I think you are pure punk goddess and acid throat queen. Your slow oozing during open-eyed sex makes me gaga for China dolls. In some love stories, I purposely crash my dune buggies. Because I have a hook in your skull. Nobody loves the back alley position anymore. Put a prohibition on penis enlargement and little Caesars. Because I want you to love me in all my right colors. Who put small furry animals under my bed? I'm pulling doves from under the sheets. Because I can only come on worn springs and moldy attics. Make me dance on one leg before the piano player crashes. Because from here on out, I will only butter you on the inside. Scratch me in only the night places. It'll never show up on the negatives.
LEAKY LUCY
The 12 year-old girl from Nanjing, Lucy Lu, nicknamed "LuLu," the one in Miss Pierson's homeroom, who blushed from roving dog eyes, who sat without a peep with her rainbow stripe knee socks--she had a secret. Like a bird. Like Tom Sawyer. She kept wetting her pants, in fact, soaked everything. But not in piss. Mother Nature could be ironic. She leaked ink, indigo blue blood, across everyone's floors. She almost drowned a classroom in a river of nonsense syllables. She was punished, forced to explain to the principle who hated bed wetters. "I don't know where all it's all coming from," she said in a pleading tone. "At first, I couldn't control it. But now I have some handle over the stroke. Do you think they will put me on Ripely's?" He sent her to the school nurse. Lucy squirted her face during the exam. For days, the nurse was blind, recalled her favorite passages back when there was a bookmobile and a hunger for World Classics. And Lucy lived her life leaking ink, covering the world with words and more words. For her the world was a hungry reader wanting its own autobiography with a creationist's conclusion, an autograph with flamboyant loop and confident flare. And for the world, Lucy was the mysterious signature, the global bridge and a sigh, a pen connecting dots into words, words into memoirs, memoirs stretched into stories, stories dissolving into a single blank page. Until nothing but whiteness, an endless siege of it. The ink had run dry.
Kyle Hemmings lives in New Jersey. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), Avenue C (Scars Publications), and Amsterdam & Other Broken Love Songs (Flutter Press).
TATJANA DEBELJACKI
Truly stunning, sometimes careless,
I crave silently and far away!
Naked, filled up with perfection,
I am attending enjoyment!!!
Where there is trust there is always glee.
He never painted my passion,
Dreams from the color to the word,
Without suspense and shivers.
The moment of light strikes me.
Pressing Japanese air onto my face.
April is slowly spilling its colors,
above duplicate shadows dancing away.
ARE THERE
Someone is breaking the branches?!
From midnight to the dawn,
The forest is trembling inside me.
My trees are innocent,
Thirsty for milk,
Firm hands, and
The scent of effervesce.
I'm drinking my mint tea.
I'm bringing tranquility without aim,
And flowers for the vase.
When I look at it is never the same.
I'm starting to believe in a fertility of miracles.
Is there the flame, which could turn the heavens
Into the ashes?
Are there any hands to pick up my ripe apples?!
Tatjana Debeljački is a member of Association of Writers of Serbia UKS since 2004 and Haiku Society of Serbia HDS Montenegro-HUSCG&HDPR,Croatia. Writers’ association Poeta, Belgrade. 2008.Croatian writers’ association – CWA, 2009. She has published three collections of poetry: A HOUSE MADE OF GLASS, published by ART – Užice; YOURS, published by NARODNA KNJIGA Belgrade and VULCANO by Haiku Lotos, Valjevo.
GARETH SPARK
He was determined not to take us
All the way from Salou to Cambrils;
It was early morning and the tourists
Had more Euros and less sense
Falling out of Snoepy’s, sick
With the same drink they could sup
In any pub, in any town in England.
He did not like the English, the Irish,
The Germans; nor did he like the
Dog-tongue shifts, the rattled dawns.
I suppose he did not like me, until
I asked if he knew Marquez -
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” I said.
He nodded and the snow thick hair
Fell across his battered glasses:
“I know him,” he said, pushing the cab
Straight through into Cambrils.
I watched a smoulder above the hills
Like muscles flexing in an arm.
It’s doubtful that he knew Marquez
But literature, that night at least,
Got me home and spared my feet.
THE SECOND LIFE OF JOAN OF ARC
Began with a single rudimentary spark
Of snow against a flame,
And the distant bark of a strange man’s voice
That was calling out her name.
Gareth Spark was born in 1979 and is author of Rain In A dry Land (Mudfog - 2008) Ramraid (Skrev Press - 2004) and Black Rain (Skrev Press - 2006). He currently divides his time between the UK and Catalunya and is working on a novel.
GRAEME LOTTERING
LOVE POEM FOR A POET
Because I could, I fell in love with a girl yesterday.
Yesterday, because I could, I fell in love with a girl.
Yesterday I fell in love with a girl, because I could.
Because I could, yesterday I fell in love with a girl.
With a girl I fell in love yesterday because I could.
Because I could, I fell in love yesterday with a girl.
I fell in love with a girl, because I could, yesterday.
Because I could (with a girl) I fell in love yesterday.
In love I fell, yesterday, with a girl, because I could.
She was the kind no syntax could capture.
Graeme Lottering was born on the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. He currently lives in Kyoto, Japan. He has been published in Canada, the UK, and most recently by PULPIT Magazine in the United States. His first novel, ’98% Grey’ is now available on Amazon.com
DENIS JOE
(to Tom Leonard)
To my sink where I
push down on the shaft of the
soap dispenser which
ejaculates ‘pon my hand
To my sink that is
of ceramic and coloured
deep blue like my bath
which is made of fibreglass
To my sink a bowl
set on a Doric column
concealing pipes and
the dust where I do not clean
Comes a melody
glissando of hot and cold
washing my left hand
and then washing my right hand
Comes a flow that I
mentioned as a melody
a melody that
whirls around inside my head
melody which has
accompanied my dreams takes
texture over my
head of woodchip wallpaper
no longer my sink
since its ceramic meets me
morning refreshing
and clean enough for my bed
glimpsed in the mirror
elliptic slowly waning
as if the waning
eclipsed all my other thoughts
as if the seasons
of phrenology inform
fish and octopi
stencilled onto ceramic
so my sink to see
a single Formica tile
torn which I look at
and look at on each visit
and reflected back
wrinkled encrypted symbols
which encode value
the value of underclass
watching their dreams
intervaled by the morning
and waiting to catch
the conclusion at night-time
economical
in all of their possessions
and those things that they
only imagine owning
as that harmony
of water which drowns under
baritone motive
that becomes a fugue of life
a millennium
in a sink sounding out
the universe in their heads
Denis Joe has lived in Liverpool (UK) for the past 10 years and involved with The Spider Project and North End Writers. His work has been published most recently: Content (The Spider Project); a Different Kind Of Rocking (North End Writers); The Nerve (Liverpool) and 10X3Plus (USA). He runs a blog dedicated to poetical issues: http://talkingverse.blogspot.com/
GOLDEN ARCHES OF LOVE
In my address book, I have written down the address of every McDonalds in the world.
Why? Because I want to do something that no one else has ever done in the entire world.
No. That’s not true. I want to write them all. I want to tell them how much they mean to me.
No. That’s not true. That’s not it. There are interesting people everywhere. Everywhere you
go there are interesting people. What do I want? I just want someone to love me.
THE WAY WE WERE
My Dad had a tattoo. It was a saber
I thought it was a dachshund.
My Dad liked me because I thought it was a dachshund.
I liked my Dad because he had a saber that looked like a dachshund.
I like my Grandma because she first saw the dachshund
and didn’t know that it was a saber and screamed and
fainted and fell into the pool.
Ricky Garni is a graphic designer living in Carrboro, North Carolina. His work can be found in EVERGREEN REVIEW, CAMEL SALOON, USED FURNITURE REVIEW, ORION HEADLESS and other places. His latest work, JANUARY, is a sequel to his earlier work, DECEMBER. Although it could be the other way around, with a lot of space in between.
ALLEN EDWIN BUTT
“taste of copper after”
tastes the sidewalk
so the mind says “like the sidewalk”
we are widening the gap
while “pavement”
is another way
to kill you
then when fast cars
hit the slow ones
let them speak of “freedom”
this is how taxonomy
smells henceforth
I know many young conservatives
who are completely friendly
as though friendliness were
what we meant
to question!
if they posit distance
separating policy from morals, it’s
a sexy spray-tan
if you party like a guy
of course
I’m gonna tell them
ur a slut
obstructing justice from
the bench of policy
the goats who
do not labor for the kingdom
every vehicle is built with
“crumple zones”
that fasten the calamity in place
but “urban” is a synonym for “black”
at Wal-Mart
that’s how words work
all I want to show you
I’m the sweetest bitch
you’ll ever
tear his head off
SUB SAID EYES ID
Cloudburst brings
rain violence
the face
shoved into
it. Mmmmmm
hum poem
there it
there it
is. Alternatively
speak loud
said the
speaker (loud-)
& drown
out “opposition.”
There is
nothing like
this word
not anywhere.
And smile
say cheese
to sell
the dairy
subsidies, sub-
cities, dragged
the “heartland”
to the
stage. That’s
how you
kick dissent
down, bash
the terrorist
in post-Bush
beatdown, stamped
the sawgrass,
marshlands back
where they
belong. Public
outcry at
the opening
of Olive
Garden, but
he said
They’re just
all scared
because they’ll
all go
out of
business. What,
no worries?
(trembling) but
look closely
now—Yeah,
hit some
fucker, gunned
the gas
to get
away—thought
no one
talked like that!
But this
purports to
education—learned
& wouldn’t
let it
get its hands
on me. Now
out
into the street
watch bodies
given names
watch silence
take control.
Allen Edwin Butt is a poet from South Carolina. His work has appeared in a decent handful of magazines in the last couple years, including Otoliths, Peaches & Bats, ditch, Venereal Kittens, 2River View, and Poetry.
SOFIUL AZAM
(for Edward Hirsch)
Somersaulting is a curiosity I carry out
from one place to another. And not
finding the way back to where I felt right
as one allured by the algebra of this land’s
inscrutabilities, I feel I’m deported
to an uncertainty, my terra infirma.
And I’m now failing in the language
I learnt in my mother’s womb. I wish
I drank the wine made of the Lethe waters.
You see there’s nothing out there to do
with the dull orchestra of familiars
like the moon’s reflection breaking
into ripples or like guys prattling
about a language I adopted, and everything
I come across in it, not excepting my body,
which’s given to me nor the conscience
I’m showing others as mine. I may not
end up around the dot I started from. I melt
the past with today’s salt and sugar for a future.
Who doesn’t look forward to delights
and regrets blended into pages? I put
all my adoptions into what’s called
a specimen of the old or what freaks still do
in the name of poetry. (Finishing a poem is
like having an orgasm, and being simply
academic about it means nothing in the end.)
I hope I’ll get everything sorted out soon.
SONGS OF A GYNECOLOGIST
1.
We broke up while making love,
after quite a number
of quarrels and whirls in doubt.
My love, my sweetest adulteress,
now busy turning pages of the Kama Sutra
for having an wished-for orgasm with her hub.
(She told me frequently
I’m not having it with him for a couple of years.
I’m glad I was somewhat convinced of my virility!)
And I’m not going to have my old lather
a little warmed. After all, I’ve started hating her –
worth a femme fatale a lot more
treacherous than she was before.
2.
I never preferred anything in between us.
Meaning what, specifically?
No rubber, frankly speaking.
The only exception during her menses.
Now my kids and hers,
now my wife and her hub,
now the rules of society’s prescribed control,
in fact, everything in between us
making our love
a tattered and perforated tarpaulin
in the monsoon rains.
3.
In my office room
when patients and nurses were not there,
she came. We touched each other.
Especially biting her nipples
and even threatening her
What if I bite them off?
Your hub’s mouth will be nipple-less ever after.
Now I’m away from nipples.
I mean hers.
4.
Every time I make love to my wife
I have to say how much I love her,
not letting her suspect the breach of our intimacy,
especially before her orgasm and my discharge.
I’m wondering what my adulteress had to do.
This sort of lying is permitted
as you know my society is
still afraid of God’s vengeance,
in fact, every society even in the West.
5.
I’m a gynecologist. More interested
in politics and even literature. Rather odd, isn’t it?
Every time I check, you know what I mean,
her everything comes to mind.
I still don’t know how to lift up
or part this curtain of her memories.
I need to look at other scenes and concentrate.
I even saw that film And Life Goes On.
No use, whatsoever.
6.
Crying while making love
always had the charm for us.
(We always did it on a rented bed
or at a friend’s
during his wife’s absence)
It always quickened our orgasm
and intensified
the psychological feel for both of us.
It still holds the thread-ends together
of those intensities.
On our separate beds, certainly.
Weaving once again
something already worn out
in happiness or in despair
should be a weaver’s job. Why is it mine?
I don’t know whether it’s hers as well.
7.
Sona, a name I called her by in intimacy,
literally means Gold in conversational Bengali.
I even thought she was precious
as diamond or platinum. I didn’t know
money is a measurement
of everything Marx includes in his unending list,
and even one of the love I hold above everything.
I can’t concentrate. So my career will suffer.
I hope she will be as precious as bronze or copper.
The sooner the better.
8.
I wanted to occupy,
(no, no, this word sounds too imperialistic)
better say, to go into every crevice of her mind
and every hole of her body except her anus.
I was always furious when I saw her kids there,
or her apartment, or her extended family,
or even her hub lurking in a corner.
Now I’ve realized the fury
as something signifying nothing.
(Shakespeare still remains quotable,
damn him!)
9.
Once I slapped her in front of my clinic.
Thank God, no one saw
that fucking scene. (I was so sorry
to have known I’m just one like others
supporting this patriarchy!)
I even hit my hand against a wall
in anger.
She cried, partly in helplessness,
but mainly in shame of me
doing it in the first case
and publicly in the second,
perhaps.
Later, in shame, we almost
never mentioned it.
10.
We bathed together, in a bathtub.
At least once, in our rented suite
at Radisson Water Garden Hotel.
Ah, the feel of her skin on mine in water!
Right after that, we jumped onto our bed
and made love. We slept. We woke.
Kissed each other. Kneaded flesh to extract pleasure.
Made love.
How many times?
We even lost count of them.
Ah, the feel of skin-on-skin
and that of mind-on-mind,
certainly torturous at least for me now!
11.
Fingering there, you know what part of hers I mean,
in cabs, in parks, in movie theaters.
Grunts of pleasure. The only sound heard.
Even on the phone,
we did it while talking for hours
or texting cryptic messages.
When no one was around,
in our separate bedrooms, letting an increase
in the total income of a cell-phone company.
I’m sorry for the company now.
12.
Her ex-lover is a presence I hated most,
now all of her
what-we-call-human-possessions
except him the inefficient fucker and lover.
She was his mistress, crazy even for his unlove
and his intricately-wrought neglect.
Her husband was
always the second to count on,
now increasingly becoming her one-and-only.
I’m thinking how my wife will turn out to be so.
13.
Rickshaw bells, traffic horns,
sirens for waking up to eat before and after fasting,
fire brigade’s alarms,
patients’ loud sufferings,
parents’ scolding and wife’s screeching,
my children’s noise of breaking toys or things –
these are what I’ll be passing this life with.
A certainty among uncertainties.
Another is that I won’t hear her talking
in person or on the phone.
My life will be continuously telling
of a life lived alone in the crowd –
yes, ever after.
And my superstitious concern
for this last song, numbered thirteen.
Perhaps I’m wishing to end it thus.
Sofiul Azam was born in Sherpur District, Bangladesh, in 1981. He has earned Honours and Masters in English Literature from Rajshahi University. He has authored three books of poetry titled Impasse, (Dhaka: Pathak Shamabesh, 2003), Home Thoughts from Home (Dhaka: Ulukhar – Little Magazine Publication, 2009), In Love with a Gorgon (Aarhus: Les Editions du Zaporogue, 2010 and County Claire: Salmon Poetry, Jan 2012) and edited Short Stories of Selim Morshed, (Dhaka: Ulukhar, 2009). His new collection is Earth and Windows: New and Selected Poems (County Claire: Salmon Poetry, 2012).
DAVID TOMALOFF
DAYDREAMS OF UNKNOWN PROTAGONISTS
the average life
expectancy of a mall
is about twenty years;
only frogs are forever
down near the water,
impossible becomes
a distant memory—
or a collection of giants
the boats were launched,
and the ropes were cut;
plato doesn't live here
anymore, but thanks
DIM WHITE HURRICANE
this life; this—
dim white hurricane
#######
flipping through channels
and braving the static hum
#######
where I stop & where I don’t;
what does it say
about me?
#######
all my circus are
waiting on signs
#######
that wall has been staring
at me cross-eyed all night.
David Tomaloff is a writer, musician, photographer, and all-around bad influence. | likes: jazz | hates: jazz | photography: yes | his work has also appeared in publications such as: DOGZPLOT, elimae, the Sixteenth Letter, Phantom Kangaroo, Ditch Poetry, Otoliths, and BlazeVOX 2KX | see: davidtomaloff.com
STEVE SUBRIZI
GIFTED AND TALENTED ENRICHMENT
In the future, my son has received a C+ in math
on this school year’s first report card,
and he tells his mother that he is afraid
he will never get a job.
He keeps looking at me
from the other end of the room
and shuffling his mouth around
and then turning his face away.
It’s a Sunday. I drive us to the indoor pool.
My son starts to do Superman floats
for as long as he can hold his breath.
I can see the bottom of the pool
from my lounge chair, and I know
that to him the water looks deeper.
WHAT LEAVES
Your astral projection wandered into my bedroom. It brushed back the curtain by my bed and stared out at the road full of salt. It smiled. It didn’t see me. I gathered it into the cigar box where I keep the world’s smallest tree. Every time I open the box, another branch has ashed away. I keep the box closed and hold it against my face and it sounds and smells like a good strong fire.
If you want it back, come over. I moved. I live inside of the world’s largest seashell, off the interstate near Rockford, Illinois. I hide the box in the center of the shell, where the spiral begins. Knock first.
MANY DAYS
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