2014
MARCH CONTRIBUTORS
Glen Armstrong, Lyndsey Bellosa, Alison Brackenbury, Matt Bryden, Mara Buck,
Sarah Claypoole, Tony Curtis, CJ Giroux, Jack Houston, Antony Mair, Michael Mark,
Lisa Mullenneaux, Vincent O'Connor, Antony Owen,
Gillian Prew, Paul Strohm, Sarah White.
GLEN ARMSTRONG
Lipstick Traces
So that we'll remember the shadowy windows,
so that we'll remember Elvis
all lit up like Christmas lights,
duck-tailed hipsters
twirl their heavily tattooed
Betty Page clones around
and around.
The cow-punks are in attendance
as is the neo-surf faction.
And actual Christmas lights
somehow make a dreary December evening
in Detroit even drearier.
We're in denial here,
about a lot of things
not just the past.
Black pasties the size of silver dollars
screen printed with clean
white Misfits skulls
have made their way
into my baby's performance art.
She approves of me calling her "baby"
because "babies are strange
and problematic."
We kiss against the grain,
and the rain turns to snow.
Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and his recent work has appeared in Conduit, Digital Americana and Cloudbank
LINDSEY BELLOSA
Fertility
Honey clouds in the cupboard, its properties
mysterious as sleep, summer, thrum of bees.
My second son is nearly weaned.
Nearly. His cries beckon me at sunrise.
Still, I can feel the change. Chambers
of my womb are humming again.
Sweeter than sleep, this song clouds my better judgment.
Again, again. The cycle repeats,
predictable as sunrise, and season.
The bees hear nothing else. Compulsive,
they fly from the hive. Love sticks;
renews in their waxy cells.
Suspension
Hush, love, snug
in your snow hut.
The crow's call
scratches the sky,
the snowflakes float.
They are in no hurry,
sweetening the air
with fleeting lullabies.
Remains of the day
pile blankly and cold.
The sky looks on,
bleak as a stone.
Sleep, love, gray air
swallows the snow
like notes. It swallows
our voices too.
Lindsey Bellosa lives in Syracuse, NY. She has an MA in Writing from the National University of Galway, Ireland and has had poems and short stories published in both Irish and American magazines, webzines and journals. She won the 2012 Red Poppy Review's Summer Poetry Contest. She works as an adjunct English lecturer. Her first chapbook, The Hunger, was recently published with Willet Press.
ALISON BRACKENBURY
Crops
The roses are in season and
the sweetest is the German rose
whose name I think means happiness,
whose snow breathes June to lips and nose.
July booms in with thunderstorms.
Ask, in their growl, what ageing means:
stiff knees, lost names, a sudden wish
to turn from roses to broad beans.
For broad beans are in season and
my mother skinned them, then would cook
her thick white sauce, the fatal fat,
with parsley which my great-aunt took
to munch from rows, threw, torn, still green
into her morning porridge bowl.
She lived past ninety, grew broad beans.
I think that they deserve their skins.
I think they do not need a sauce.
I chew upon their glistening curves
as patiently as my old horse.
The pea's white flower, on crossed sticks, leans;
for months, potatoes plump. How short
is the warm season for broad beans.
Alison Brackenbury Her latest collection (her eighth) is Then, (Carcanet, 2013). New poems can be read at her website here
MATT BRYDEN
Clothes
As she enters, her hands
are punched deep into pockets;
they almost meet in the middle.
She walks barefoot
over the green tarpaulin,
into our line of sight.
I appraise her robe – citron,
rich and finely-made, of a piece
with her cool urban jeans and top.
She disrobes and we draw.
After an hour and a half, a frisson
as she stands – is herself
as she refastens the robe, then walks
to her screen. And she is in jeans,
holding a cup of tea on the lawn.
Three Poems for Jack Kerouac
Ti Jean
i
This side of the mountain, resistant pits
of ice crunch under her slippers
as she walks right up. Hair trussed
a sash hangs from her gown.
She pleasures in her body
even as she urinates or is at stool,
and like an apology
for sexualising women,
for seeing electricity illuminate the skull,
for lamenting one cannot look
a man in the face
without being considered gay –
while being gay – for issuing
'we are existing in milk,' for the perfect
episode in Mexico with love and loss and sadness,
you walk out on deck, feel
the ice beneath your slippers,
as you hold onto the rail this side of the mountain.
ii
How you see things as performer and audience,
pay the tribute of thinking man capable of sighing,
of all these women wondering.
How you tied Buddhism to a hillside shack,
would have us all jump in beside you.
In a cab, a bohemian
compared Dharma Bums to Sergeant Pepper,
On the Road to Revolver –
but this is so much nonsense
(I can hear you say a word like 'diaper;'
the timbre of your voice, always this sense of audience).
Dharma Bums is understated.
iii
A couple of hundred pages into Visions of Cody
a football is kicked across the motorway to catch it.
I would years later belt a ball into the wind
have it pelted back, bouncing past me
at tilt, as a little girl laughed and said do it again,
as her mother sighed at your like like like
you didn't even have to sing.
Matt Bryden is an EFL teacher, which has taken him to Tuscany, The Czech Republic and Poland. His first collection, Boxing the Compass, was published in 2013. His pamphlet, Night Porter was a winner of the 2010 Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection competition. Visit his website here
MARA BUCK
Questions of memory
Do men say this and that about
That and this, or is it only women,
Women who speak of "This was hers"
And "I remember that was yours,"
And "Mother used to"
And "It's been so long?"
And do men remember that this spoon fed them
Pureed carrots and will serve to feed
Them more pureed pap in years to come,
And do they recognize and do
They speak of it to themselves
On a winter morning when
The sun slants over the dying
Plant in the blue pot?
Do you remember that this was yours
And this was mine and these were ours
And now they all, all the spoons and the
Cracked plates and the mugs and those
Things of this and that,
Are neither here nor there,
But somewhere far different from
Imagining or remembering?
Heritage
In marmalade is memory
of my father's workworn hands
at the round oak kitchen table
early in the morning,
yellow sunshine on the orange
goodness in the Dundee crock
from which this pen now comes
while all is morning stillness
once again.
Mara Buck writes and paints in the Maine woods. She has won awards or been short-listed by the Faulkner Society, the Hackney Awards, Carpe Articulum, Maravillosa, and has been published in Carpe Articulum, Caper, Huffington Post, Orion, Clarke's, Poems For Haiti, Pithead Chapel, Drunken Boat, The Lake, Apocrypha, and others.
SARAH CLAYPOOLE
Before the Schoolbus Starts
In the room with the broken paneling,
you splintered the coffee table,
slipped splinters under your skin, splinters
everywhere, while I fractured a wrist,
not yours, mine, fractured the tenuous
understanding that these were days
with no consequences, fled through
the uncovered doorway, the hallway
and its threadbare carpeting, out to
a delirious afternoon, disconcerting
in its brightness. I thought that
we'd live in this room forever,
leave our comforters and curl up
under the window, awake at daybreak
to the street's humming lethargy,
the men in suits putting on the coffee,
children with the backpacks,
places we'd lost to each
other, having long since deposited
such functions, left it all behind.
You said you were a monster
and I did not believe you, kissed
the empty above your collarbone,
wrote poems onto your hips,
and all of this because you said
you had seen your own ugly,
because you had tried to bleed
it out, because you had failed.
You never wanted it to be like this,
the house biting into your sides,
too much daylight ahead,
the slatted windowpanes refusing
to close. You told me
you wanted to stop hiding
from yourself, cutting corners
to avoid mirrors, cutting,
contemplating the wan face
reflected by the cereal spoon
far past breakfast time, but you
are a sloppy mathematician,
you did not account for the withdrawal,
for the subtraction of the infinities
you had intended to spend
alone. There are rules
made for such a situation,
I'd like to tell you, some dead white man
mapped this very scenario
far before you even knew you'd live it,
ways to slip you out of this indefinite
form. The house is hazy
like the heated summer horizon,
and I am to choose the method
of my own disintegration: in
or out, it's the same game, still
waking to the howling,
barely sleeping to avoid waking,
barely awake at all, still drifting
through conversations in the
grocery store checkout line,
still the feeling that something
has been cleaned out of me,
that I will not recover. I search
the house for evidence: the cleaving
utensils, the dreamcatchers,
proof that you are collecting me
outside of myself, that I am
not insane, only oblivious.
You watch the cars go by,
hoping one of them will stop
in front, kick in the door, take you
to another house, another girl,
this one arriving empty, so you skip
the rending process, you get
all that you want without
the dirtying of the hands, without
the tremors, the quiet in the house
just before I leave, slamming
the door, taking the french press
but not my clothing, hiding out
to restore myself to factory settings,
peering into roadside ditches
like some part of me was deposited
there. It is always daybreak
in the room with the broken paneling,
always the traipsing children
with their home-made lunches,
always the coffee without sugar,
the cry of cars far away, both of us
nauseous, half-awake, waiting
for the other to speak. Here,
the fireplace no longer works,
and it is never winter, but if you
catch my finger above the heated
water, I will not put it back:
I want to stop scalding myself
on your behalf.
Sarah Claypoole writes for upcoming situational comedy, Office Hours. She is working on a short story collection.
TONY CURTIS
The Mole and The Cosmos
for Philip McCracken
I have taken down
A piece
Of the night sky,
Just for the night.
At mole's suggestion
I've put it by the window
Where it looks glorious
Against the mountains.
Some say moles are blind,
But it's just that they love
To look at things far away,
Like stars.
Sometimes when I step out
To look at the night sky
I have to ask mole
What's what, where's where?
And mole, as if he were
A poor country fellow
Naming wildflowers,
Lists off the constellations:
Southern Cross, Flying Fox,
Bernice's Hair, Winged Horse,
Great Dog, Water Bearer,
Painter's Easel, Chained Maiden.
Mole's deep voice,
Sunk like the roots of a tree,
Sturdy, reassuring—
You just know he's right.
By The Wood Stove
The first icy day of winter.
I am out in the yard
Chopping wood for the fire.
Beyond the hedge
The world has gone grey—
The island is full of sorrows.
I look back through the trees,
Through the quiet yellows
Of another November evening.
The woman I love, have always loved,
Stands by our back door.
Above her, the sky is clear blue.
On the radio the weatherman
Says there will be storms
By morning. But I don't think so.
And if there is? Well, then we can
Just sit by the wood stove
And talk about the clouds.
Tony Curtis lives in Dublin, Ireland. His latest book, Pony, was reviewed in the November issue of The Lake.
CJ GIROUX
Homecoming (After Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled)
Ivy, elm entangle, entwine
brick by beam,
from porch to post to peak,
foundation to floor to flashing.
Crawling toward a tired heaven,
blooms munch on mortar.
Like briar roses
bit by frost,
patients plagued
by creeping cancers,
books, walls molder,
turn the past to paste,
plaster dust.
The abandoned terminal sinks,
leans toward Mexicantown, international waters;
eyes scan sulfur skies;
empty lots blur, the kaleidoscopic gaze
of Mason bees duped
by double vision, blindness,
blight.
In some 4 a.m. distance,
a freight train skirts the city;
bleats once, twice, again;
pierces dreams.
The rustbelt calls,
a pause our answer.
CJ Giroux is a lifelong resident of Michigan who continues to be inspired by the peninsulas that surround him. Born and raised in the metropolitan Detroit area, he is an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University.
JACK HOUSTON
I'm English, or so they say...
after James Berry
I've heard people say that I'm an Englishman, yet
I'm not sure I've ever met one,
not sure I'd even know one face-to-face.
If I speak English, it's
no more than a stream over pebbles
or a lark singing at day's break.
People say I dance
like an Englishman, but that's
hardly a compliment is it?
England, to me, is an empty field,
like land enclosed - gone -
my right to lop there lost.
Harnessed, overworked, paid
in grain like any horse;
ancestors were franchise free.
Those who then ruled England's land, hurled
ancestors from it. Never caring to restore us
and so, having sold us and abandoned us,
I can never think of England.
Jack Houston works for the Hackney Library service, co-edits Nutshell Magazine (nutshellmagazine.com) and is a member of the London-based radical housing cooperative Breaking Ground (bghc.org.uk). He has previously been published in the Morning Star, Black Lantern (US) and Ink, Sweat & Tears.
ANTONY MAIR
The Firegrate
It's not only the streets, and the haggard crowds,
that bombard the brain with megabytes;
even inside, where the heavy door excludes
the children's yells and the rumbling cars,
screens beep and flash, flick signals like flies
blurring the air. In the cellar, though:
darkness, silence and an abandoned grate
that will fit our empty fireplace. Secrets sleep
in the curls of its cast iron. We bring it home,
and the imprints rise, unfolding in the heat:
a snatch of laughter; a grieving woman's tears.
Ghosts flicker in the flames of burning logs.
Unseen, beyond our warm perimeter,
owls pierce the night with nocturnal eyes.
High overhead the silent galaxies
move to a music we no longer hear.
And the pale crowds grow in the deafening streets,
looking for something lost, that's no longer there.
Pleas
New moon, and the sea swirls jade,
hits the ground with a roar of pain,
runs along the harbour wall like a hound
caged, leaping for attention.
In the dance-hall a glitterball
kaleidoscopes shadows on circling couples.
The clockface with its unchanging numerals
hides its ratcheted cogs. The couples turn
in a world enclosed by a saxophone.
At night, badgers scuttle down from the hill
to forage in empty yards. The television's boom
drowns even the ash-tree's scream.
Antony Mair lives in Hastings, East Sussex. A former commercial lawyer, he has had poems accepted for publication by Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acumen and Agenda. He is currently in the first year of a Creative Writing MA at the University of Lancaster.
MICHAEL MARK
Cowboy
The darkness made him
so small
when his mother
closed the door
on the days he was bad.
No goodnight kiss
for the boy
with lassoing cowboys
on his pajamas.
Under the hills of blankets,
holding onto the clacks
of her footsteps -
did she move away?
Was her face pressed
to the door,
not hating him?
A wild cry rises from
the hurt coyote
inside the boy's chest,
where the moon
waits
for his mother
to kiss him
before it could ever
shine again.
Big tree
This tree was just too enormous for me to take in this morning
with a trunk of an elephant's width and its varying ash colors,
its countless man-thick branches flexing
and the car sized roots pushing up the walkway.
So I selected a single finger-thin twig
with three gentle bends holding out two green bouquets of
Nefertiti eye shaped leaves and a
dangling strand of infinitesimal seeds
under which the baker took his breakfast at 10:21
and his wife joined him minutes later with her tea
that she held to her small chest.
Michael Mark is the author of two books of fiction, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief
(Atheneum). His poetry has appeared and is scheduled to appear in The NY Times, UPAYA, Awakening Consciousness Magazine, Sleet, Empty Mirror, OutsideIn Magazine, Elephant Journal, Everyday Poets,
Forge, Angle, and other places. Please follow him @michaelgrow
LISA MULLENNEAUX
Deep Inside
After he left the army hospital, he floated
above their beds, the terminals,
the ones who'd never leave—
McCarty, a triple amputee,
his skull a crushed melon,
Suarez' cycloptic eye
in its sheath of white gauze,
Rostrovsky and his epileptic fits.
They were all still there
in the waiting room to hell—
limbs that once patrolled and marched
cut into stumps like pork sausages.
Above the hum of respirators
and monitors he heard the husk
of throats and tongues without saliva,
a scrape of dead leaves
against an iron grate.
Mostly he smelled fear;
it exhaled from the nostril holes.
It said: they all think I'm gone,
but I'm deep inside.
That's where the action is.
And every flanged gap
of missing body parts asked: What now?
Manhattan poet Lisa Mullenneaux has published the collection Painters and Poets (2012) and maintains the ekphrastic art blog www.paintersandpoets.com. Her practice of poetry connects her with the happiest people on the planet. Who could ask for more?
VINCENT O'CONNOR
Sestina for my father
The night I carried you,
elbows akimbo, rigid, like
Arctic ice, your shirt a surrender,
fluttered as a chastised child.
That night, you just shattered on the bed,
and lay there still till morning.
You lay there still all morning,
bar the gurgle that gargled from you,
from the single, orthopaedic bed
brought by the district nurse, like
an unwanted guest. You were again that child,
bared of a boyhood, by a body's surrender.
But what could I know of surrender,
of knowing your last steps that morning,
of being informed, not as a child,
but finely, precisely, straight at you?
Or were you propped on a pillow, politely, like
a king with an egg in his bed?
What thoughts sounded, small in the bed,
foreseeing yet another surrender,
your body stenched, like
this room, turning sweet in the morning?
Was your da in capped vigil beside you,
stealing a look at his child?
I can just remember myself as a child.
Half asleep in my own father's bed
I dodged those darts from you,
too tired or stubborn to surrender.
"Just make it to the morning;
we'll do something that both of us like."
We never get to do the things we like.
Not you, for sure, as man nor child.
Did doubt surround your morning,
as you were laid out in your bed?
I hope you had passed. The surrender
demanded nothing, twice. But had you,
some morning, asked from your bed,
like a stilled dream, how should a child
surrender? I only whisper, I carried you.
Vincent O'Connor is originally from Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, Ireland. Having lived and worked in Spain and Japan, he now lives in Cork with his wife and two kids. His poems have appeared, or are upcoming, in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Penny Dreadful, The Puffin Review, Bones, Acorn, and The Asahi Shimbun.
ANTONY OWEN
After the Mastiff
All it took was whites removed from colours,
wind ripping her arms from the line,
a dog barking at a dog barking.
~
All it took was her daughter dancing from pegs,
ballet shoes wound a music box of rain,
one last dance dripped from tiptoes.
~
All it took were bouquets stuffed through railings,
the chill of a sunflower's flame,
burnt offerings, embers of a calyx.
~
All it took was a latch from another world,
the cowering cloth scrunched in a ball,
dog and daughter tied from Mother's cord.
Cold Storage
I have journeyed Hull through Venetian blinds,
felt Louisiana jazz sieved through elevators,
smelt fields of sprayed lavender on floor nineteen.
I am filed in Milton Keynes under miscellaneous.
~
I have poured voyages of ships through crucibles,
watched moon roll clams for gulls and migrants,
saved my whole life for a whole life with Niamh.
I poured her in the sea en-route to Wexford.
~
I am flashing before you on a memory stick,
our lives are briefly connected and then.
We shut down in the machine.
Antony Owen is from Coventry and is credited with two poetry collections since 2009, My Father's Eyes Were Blue (Heaventree Press) The Dreaded Boy (Pighog). Owen was awarded a poetry completion finalist by The Wilfred Owen Story and in 2013 had an exhibition feature at The Hiroshima Peace Museum.
Back to POETRY ARCHIVE
GILLIAN PREW
Factory
Droop-eye, me, lodged in a hole/all my sisters weightless now.
White, their gums, from blood-loss/their lost lowing high blue.
My one whole hoof shod with shit/my best bone a blade.
Clamped to the carousel with its thieving cups/its horror/my udder
droops milk for a week of babies. Fucked and forced with this life/
this breaking will hooked in the end in a concrete bowl of slaughters.
Shoved with drugs my blood is still mine/still flows in the green country.
What is this penance I have been set?/this unholy torture prized
from the bloody human hand and visited upon my sides. Sore, I am/
clamped here with misery/with a hell of bars biting about my head.
Pigs
after Les Murray
Us all on sorrow cemetery we.
Not warmed with gloss nor glutting sun
under that prize the light is tied to.
No fascist-shoehorn in our guts to make us sore
back then when world was us.
We dipped our good sides in the cool mud.
Us all free then our sung-out grunts. Bloomed/
our ballads bit the trees
and carried down the sheets of rivers.
Coughed lungs sometimes but rich with all we were.
Growing and growing/bedding our squealed litters
with sound no ticking clock/no death-knell.
Wounds sometimes from the edge of living
not blade or punch or swinging hook.
Not the bleeding screams beyond the wall.
Sliced pink our one-life/our gone-forever gifts
here where world's flung upside down.
Farewell from a Farm Animal
Kill, they would not say, but do/
their ruin-reeked poles full of electricity.
Stun-burn gleams rose-shaped. Nose
of red rivers and the fill in my throat. Ears whine
like a lost signal. My friend of barely a season
with his pale-eyed pain holds his guts in/
his death nailed to the concrete.
Born Stirling, Scotland in 1966, Gillian Prew studied Philosophy at The University of Glasgow from 1984-1988. Her collection, Throst Full of Graves, is newly released from Lapwing Publications in 2013 . Her poems have been published widely online and in print, including Vayavya, The Poetry Shed, And Other Poems, The Open Mouse, Ink, Sweat & Tears, 'ditch', and From Glasgow to Saturn. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has twice been short-listed for the erbacce-prize. She currently lives in Argyll, Scotland. You can find her online at http://gillianprew.com/
PAUL STROHM
We All Complied
Life always starts with the arrival of paper.
I got a piece of that paper mailed to me.
The Government needed me immediately.
I did comply. I boarded a bus and disappeared.
Whatever I was before was stripped off me.
Strange but the first things they wanted, i.e.,
"Your drugs, your pornography and all your weapons!"
I looked in my wallet, checked my bag. I did comply.
They put me and a bunch of guys in a cattle trailer,
taking us somewhere we had never been before.
Sergeants screamed and yelled; we were fags and ladies.
No point in denying charges leveled against all.
I stuck my chin out to witness my own humiliation.
Nothing was very complex, authority circled you,
and you complied. Getting up, running, endless pushups
and the fuck word your constant companions.
Our fatigues stunk of sweat like grass in a compost pile.
The body joined the mind to rot the Army way.
No big deal for anyone. Boys are broken into men.
Initiation rites finished, we residue were photographed,
60 dress green uniforms, one size fits most. One hat to wear.
I kept my photograph. It's in a new wallet. Not needed now.
They said go East young soldier and I did.
Learning a craft doesn't take place in school. You do it.
The killing lesson was easy, the staying alive lesson hard.
Everything was either very fast or terribly slow;
we had all the drugs, sex and weapons needed.
I imagine this is strange to you but it's absolutely true.
I did. He did. You did. We all complied!
Paul Strohm is a free lance journalist working in Houston, Texas. His most recent poem "Dimple Dell Davis" resides at HuKmag.com. Other poems have been published in the Deep Water Literary Journal, the Berkeley Poets Cooperative, and WiND.
SARAH WHITE
Atlas of Objects, Verbs, and Voices
The laws of Intransitive City:
They let you be.
They don't let you have.
You can come
but you can't bring a friend.
You can go up.
You can descend
but your stuff
has to stay in the room.
You can run
as far as you want.
You can sing. Only don't sing a song.
Speak. Only don't say a thing.
***
The Consignment Office
It teems with toys,
trinkets, coins, tickets
spilled from the pockets
of tourists, who check their objects
and seldom return to claim them.
The children they leave
are kept for a week,
then assigned to foster homes
in neighboring counties.
No one returns
to pick them up.
Parents thrive on life
with nothing to lose,
nothing to take to heart.
***
Suburban Scene
Passive on a patio,
curls riffled,
coverlet stirred
by the winds,
no word in her mind,
speech and its parts
unlearned,passion
yet to be undergone,
an infant, wakened
when...
***
Tale of the Transitive Woman:
I have, don't have,
have had, would have,
had had
two sons. One day,
they took off their clothes
and, naked as Saint Francis,
moved to a monastery.
They beg me to join them
in poverty, but I plan to keep
all I have harvested, painted,
written—EARNED,
including my dearest
possession—a mortal disease
whose numerous symptoms require
a different physician for each.
Soon I will call my children. They'll come
and carry me up the Holy Mountain
where mothers and grandmothers go.
As the brothers descend alone
it will snow.
Sarah White lives, writes and paints in Manhattan. She is the author of Alice and Ages (BlazeVox, 2010), a book of variations; Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), a poetry collection; Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses, (Pudding House, 2007), a chapbook. Her website is www. sarahwhitepages.com