Raspberry Hives

by Donal Mahoney

The ancient man with raspberry hives
on his cheeks since childhood
will live alone no longer.
He will marry, he says,
the first woman who’ll have him.

Till now he has wanted to die
as he’s lived, alone in his room
with the radio playing,
with the water in the bathtub
dripping.

The drone of hours, however,
has become the drone of years
and the ancient man with raspberry hives
on his cheeks since childhood
fears death will convert
his hives into pocks,
take his body but reject his soul.

Now he believes if he weds
the first woman who’ll have him
death will have reason,
for the first time,
to do the job right.

untitled

by Lynne Hayes

if I had have moved softer
arranged the flowers with finesse

wore the cobalt blue you liked
tilted my head to the east
and licked my bottom lip
slowly,

you may have
stayed for a cigarette and brandy.

In Honor (Hopefully Remembrance, Soon) of the Appalachian Rollergirls' "HARMORY" Floor

by Jordyn Coats

Not quite like a marble,
nor a mud slung tire,
or a failed caught Frisbee on dirt.
Resonances of silence
want to make themselves known,
but they know it's like
trying to keep static away
from inside a modern day living room.
No matter.
They keep on
and on,
leaving traces of echoes
on the slippery corners we all fall
while rounding, low and slow.
Reverberations,
here and there,
everywhere,
dancing all around...
dispersing, causing chaos,
looking for solid ground to roll on-
to work on-
to stand on.
Eventually, time forces change
and we must move on.
The skids and echoes left
are only testimonies of what will be-
what will become of us and of me.

Youth

by Rafael Hernán Gamboa

We stood together under doorways,
under moonlit autumn skies
and pregnant winter clouds
waiting.

We waited in mediocre restaurants,
in long, rickety trains
and car rides we both remember
for reasons we’ll never really understand.

We waited mere feet apart
in magnetic lock
and all those places looked the same,
painted for the blind by the echoes
of reluctant goodbyes
we each hoped would get the point across.

What were we thinking, I wonder.

We, standing there,
staring
and waiting.

Consciousness Dilates

by A.J. Huffman

Don’t look down.
The sky is falling.
And the floor is gone.
And a shadow is all you have left.
Too bad it’s not yours.
Too bad it’s not mine.
Too bad it’s not safe
to say its name to the wind.
It would save you.
But only for a shelf.
Its sin needs a shell.
that isn’t afraid
to force a nail
into and through
a crack
your eyes didn’t even realize was there.

Small Bombs

by Jamie Gersh

Kitchen floor, eyes
wide with terror of drawer's closing.

Curled up, set off; can't
stop you running out
the back door. You can't
help but bring it with you, that weight
that you carry, that I carry now too.
If only I could reach you:
lover in child, child in lover.

But between us there's a minefield
exploding in hurtful bursts
with each misstep. Get out of my house,
bitch! and I'm leaving, wish I'd never been

here! and wanting love, we destroy
each other on the sharp, metal seeds like bb gun
pellets planted by hands not our own.

Destroyed, you and me:
all the un-set, healed-over bones heal up

right this time. Clear the stage of wreckage,
make a path for us to walk without pain.
This growth is ours even if we never
asked for it.

Let's teach it to be
kind.

Underbelly

by M.P. Powers

A beggar with dreads and bloodshot eyes

toothless
except for a fang
raps on the window of my truck. "Goz any
change?" I look in the console, shake my head

no... He trudges

off. The light changes. Miami is a different
beast
for everyone, at any given time, but today,
on NW 27th

Avenue, the beast seems only evil.

I see it in the three
grimacing faces at the bus stop,

dark faces

like "rainbeaten
stone," and the heavy stormclouds.

There's an old
Spanish
mural pealing, and a place where nothing
grows: the one-story motel
under
the railway, a soulless
agglomeration of no-frills
fuckshacks
overlooking a glorious
empty parking lot.

As I pull near, I imagine
some of the dark secrets
those rooms

know. Make up a few scenerios of my own.

And then a door opens. A skinny white
crackwhore
creeps out, barefooted, hair a mess, purse slung
over her shoulder. She limps
up the sidewalk,
bony jaw
working, eyes, wild. A man howls
something
at her
from up on the trestle.

A train shears by. 11 a.m.

on a Monday, and the naked
light jiggles.

Birds of agony,
rise.

Earth moves
softly in its soiled wingless
mystery.

The Words

by Shawn Misener

When there are words going constantly
they start to feel worn we are
bludgeoned with them on the TV
and radio by the crowd comment
streams in our heads

So when we start to write
it feels like scaling dead trout
or grabbing at clouds or making love
to dirt or emitting one long continuous
groan that never ends but scales back
into infinity where it bounces off
the eternal cervix and comes back
as reckless garbling and surreal
poetic nonsense

Oh bless me Calliope
and excuse me for your belch
that I take credit for and one day
hope to feed my children with

Wormwood

by Jessica Otto

She has black dirt on her face.
The ruins of a garden plucked
for winter stain her hands.
She has scratched that greenery free
and bathed in the empty
soil, praying for next year’s harvest
with touches
of bare arms and thighs.

She rubs the flesh of the earth,
places stones in her mouth
careful of her teeth
though she knows
this is ritual.
Her tongue rolls in the grit,
Hips turn the ground like a spade.
She says, “I will starve myself for the gods
so I can grow poison in the spring.”

The sea in Tangier

by Tyler Bigney

Tangier coastline bathed in sun.
I soak it in.
The bloods the same
in all of us.

Maybe somewhere
over there
is a place
to call home.

Oh Nature

by Rob Dyer

oh nature, what storied tones I see in you

much sought in pen, the eye catches all

your shaded sepia textures, often clouded

by days broken light

caught between a cold hell and death's warmth

revelation, is for those in pause

oh nature, where should I force my limits on you?

a fleeting touch to cherish on stained walls

or my hands clutching your throat in fear

perhaps a hammer blow, with my cotton lens

oh nature, never are we far from meeting

I shall pass in your time, unknown

as you touch the soils of heaven

perfected by timeless hands



oh nature, can you see I am watching you?

AN ALMOST

by Michael H. Brownstein

and then at the lowest
mind swing and mood
deep in the bottomlands,
I changed lanes into a space
another car occupied.
How do you move from one
space to another
filling a space already occupied?
The driver honked once,
a half hearted honk,
and left me alone.
His car was there and so was mine
and yet what should have been
a body bursting full bodied collusion
fizzed to nothing. Immediately,
I thought of God, and angels,
and God again--the footprints in the sand--
and saw everything as a sign:
I'm not finished here yet,
there's something I'm to do.
and I told this to my son
later and he said, fate
does not work that way.
You draw your own lines,
you fray your own path,
and I told him, yes,
it had to be a sign,
and he said, OK, think
that way, but you are the one
in charge and it is you
who must make his way.
And yet I know an angel
was in that car--why no anger,
why the short honk of a horn,
why did the car vanish
in the dark behind me,
and why on the way home
did one police car after another
follow me home as if someone
needed to make sure
I would arrive there safely.

Illustrated

by Len Kuntz

All those stories stitched into your skin
with their wicked fonts
and buoyant color
are mere camouflage.
The answers hang
like gallows in your eyes,
swaying in shadows while
the ceiling creaks
from the burden of your dead weight.

Dusting Off The Blood

by A.J. Huffman

Do you love the color
of my hair?
Do you miss it
as it turns?
From red.
                To gold.
                              To black.
You hope for gray.
But that’s not the way I rot.
Conventions --
such as life --
shun me.
I don’t belong in any of their light.
And yet I cannot disappear.
I am the slate of a mistake.
Wash me.
Trace me.
Re-erase me.
I rise again and again.
I am a phoenix of misuse.
I dream of abuse.
Not mine.
It is my desire.
To be the devastation.
Without the fire.
Though this dream too will fade.
In time,
I remain:
a stain. 
Unforgotten.
And the ash in your mind
is my sin.
You will hear it calling.
Long after night
has claimed my skin.

Learning

by Rafael Hernán Gamboa

Pressed our faces
taking breath mouth-to-mouth
and our eyes wide
and close enough to blur.

There is a new language
birthing in our hands
taught with the sounds of shivers
crawling on the curves of our tongues.
I’m not fluent in you yet

but I’m learning.

Accidental Voodoo

by Jamie Gersh

Her hands curl and uncurl like kelp,
as too much water to hold fills her, empty
and full in all the wrong places.

She'll drown like you almost did.
Know it even before the water
begins to rise.

Once you would have held your breath
in fearful sympathy
when camera shot below sea level
(when it surfaced again, you'd have to be reminded to breathe).

Sauteing mushrooms in a pan still feels like hurting you.
You on the other side of the world, too far away
to breathe killer allergen air.

Memory is not your effigy,
and yet I fear the needles in it.

Closing Credits

by Rob Dyer

our late slumber, finds us well

as can be, we cue

closing credits

signifying

everything is as it should be

this curious pause, sets the tone

humbled by force,

upward views ask for answers

were you?

did you?

are you?

I existed as a question

and now you want answers?

unfold the creased page and see

an event, trapped in the fractures

of the invisible crystal ball

where lies laugh at us

and missteps haunt the last image

we will never see

Oxy

by Chris Butler

Synthetic junkies
strut down the same streets
as sober rock stars
and peacock birds,
but trip over the crooked
cracks on the
concrete clouds of heaven’s
sidewalk,

while loitering above
bloody floods exhaled from
deviated septums,
until the soaring dopamine
spills their lopsided
equilibriums through dirtied
dollars,

because one does need
a written prescription
for self medication.

You must - a poem for Moscow

by Tyler Bigney

I am here – in Moscow,
rich from smells of flowers,
sea salt, & magic.
A city unrecognizable
from pictures or from above.
You must walk
her streets
in order to know her.
In order to love her,
you must.

Necropolis Streetcar

by Jessica Otto

If she were alive
her name would be Aureate Lion,
Sun-Beast-Rampaging-
Down-Latitudinal-Lines.

On this Saint’s Day
she shines gold,
windows open and flaunting;
she scrawls escapist vulgarity

down the tomb cover tracks.
The masonry cracks against her
and a monument
in the shape of a griffin

topples,
wings broken.
Without hesitation she dives
into the tunnel, pounding

the bones of clergymen
as if she could cut away
the gangrene on the hind legs
of the city.

Your Departure Left Me In Pain

by El Habib Louai

Sometimes there were cries
I hear somewhere long before
They arrive to my open door
On a lonely long empty road
Cries from a distant void
I hear them as they echoed
In the bushes of my dreams
Dreams I dreamed in empty
Curves of a labyrinthine well
Other cries of people I knew
Met them high before they vanished
I saw souls of members dismembered
And I cried alone as you left me
Your face I saw between two wings
It smiled to me before it faded
Will you ever come to me again?
A question formed on a sand grain
Your departure left me in pain
And I wish I could be then
As you wanted me so near
Melancholic, I sit wherever I dare
I count little moments and flick away flies
As time mercilessly in phosphoric bubbles flies
Sister moon comes to journey the night
Again alone just as it did, unceasingly
To somewhere I will never see
Will you be there for me?
Among those weary travelers
Formed in brown scattered clouds
Tinged by curving caravans of dreams
Borrowed from unfinished Arabian nights
Will you be there for me?
To leave fresh parting kisses
On my scorched sweet lips
I beg you as I perpetually did
To have mercy on me
My brown-eyed lady
The only one who walks really
In such never-withering beauty

Forbidden Love

by Jeffrey Miller

Kyung-sook came over on Christmas Day
to get back at her mother who forbade her
hanging out with Western men.

I didn’t know she had an agenda
until the following week when I saw her
coming out of my buddy’s apartment.

She got pregnant not long afterward—
Some other guy made her very happy;
Her mother wasn’t too thrilled, though.

Throwing Dirt at the Moon

by James Babbs

I remember getting angry
before running outside
throwing dirt at the moon
because some girl had
refused to dance with me
and
the moon was so bright
it hurt my eyes
and
I didn’t want to
look at it anymore
but
I stood out there
for the longest time
and
nobody ever came to
check on me
and
I don’t remember her name
but
I wonder sometimes
whatever happened to her

LINENS

by Ana Vidal-Guardia

In my absence
white powder owned the hours
and the minutes were given away free
attached to rented bodies,
ephemeral divine power
exhorted in some filthy hotel room.

The sweaty sheets
begged for laundry treatment,
while the bodies,
choleric trapezes oblivious to mercy,
performed night after night
balancing synthetic life
inside dehydrated fish bowl spaces.

On the long black nights
I waited for you
sewn to the kitchen table.

And anger replaced sadness.
And I wished death would plunge
inside your adulterous bones,
for no diamond
will ever sweeten

the bitterness of your sinful lips,
the same ones you will use
to kiss our children
when tucking them in bed,
the sheets smelling all so fresh

Ice Coffee

by Morgen Streur

I made the coffee just the way you like it
I drank too much last night so I may have thrown a jealous fit
And scrolled up through your sidekick
If I did, I don’t remember
All I know is your love is my November
There are so many thanks to give
For this and that, from past to present

I drove that other girl mad
I broke up with her the night before her birthday
She cried, and called me the worst person alive
She said I always left her, at the worst times
And if I really loved her I never would’ve done that
She’s right and I’m wrong in many ways
She even hired a counselor to keep the thought of me away

I still cause destruction everywhere I go
A trail of broken hearts line the rivers I like to flow
Alone, I’m getting better.
These veins of mine are leather
Forever tethered to an anchor,
Concrete in its nature, imbalanced in its soul,
if you ever find my heart… It may never know

Two Dimensional

by A.K. Jackson

I’m lying on my bed again
only now it is not made up
with my bloodstained, pink sheets
or anything flannel. Its thin
and white like the hospital bed.
I take a shower early in the morning
and my hair is wet with someone else’s
shampoo. I go back to the bed.
I take the game pack out of my gameboy
and turn it upside down.

All the Pokemon come falling out,
growing in the oxygen, leveling up
to be big. They are flat,
like colorforms. You’re flat, too,
just a notebook page away
and I can see your hairline
in the black and white photograph
from high school sophomore year.
I can’t see the safety pin
in the webbing of your hand.
Your hair, red, falls into your face.
Your angle-nose, thin lips,
not randomly generated face.
You have some DNA in you,
have your daddy’s look sometimes.

Maybe I will lift back this sheet white page
to see your face as it used to be:
no scars, no AIDS. Red hair and freckles,
turquoise eyes. I lift it.
The air has made the photograph
too big, the pixels are crosshatched,
your lips blending into your chin.
Your eyes are little black and white shapes––
not even circles. Circles with sharp edges.
This is not you, not you before, not
a single color or smooth to touch line.
I cannot smooth your hair because it is not hair
or you. I stop. I drop the page again.

SHANNON'S OASIS

by Mather Schneider

Shannon was born 4 months premature
to a crack head mom.

She was so small
you could see her heart

like a goldfish
under paper-thin ice.

The hospital lights ripped and ruined
her tiny retinas

and the doctors didn’t give her
a month

but somehow here she is
30 years later

blindly limping toward my taxi on
taffy legs

with Lloyd,
her loyal yellow lab

guiding the way.
Lloyd climbs into the cab,

sinks to the floor
with a happy huff

and then Shannon feels her way
like a spelunker.

When she's comfortable
I drive her to the public pool

where she will sit so peaceful
under her dark umbrella

with an icy coke, moving her hand in
and out of the shade.

My grandmother’s quilt

by Tyler Bigney

I’m watching you sleep,
studying the light brown freckles
on your shoulders. I can feel your feet
press up against me
under the quilt my grandmother
knit me for Christmas.
If she only knew that I met you
hours before
at a bus station
and paid three hundred dollars
for you to sleep
naked next to me
to make me feel
something, or
anything at all -

she’d be disappointed.

Gravel Road

by James Babbs

it’s just the gravel road
where the teenagers go
drinking beer while
sitting on their cars
the music loud and
the girls want to dance
but none of the boys will
and they complain about
their parents and
the teachers at school
and anything else
they deem uncool
and they swear someday
they’re going to
get as far away
from here as they can
the next day
driving past their empties
scattered along
the side of the road
I can’t help thinking
back to the time when
I came out here
surprised to realize
it was so many years ago

Fault

by Abigale Louise LeCavalier

“It was not your fault but mine.”

A line from a song
that brings it all home.

The days passed in pants
and thin man suits,
the evenings reserved
for too tight stilettos
and cocktail dresses.

Creeping around secretly
with the sneakiest of sneakers on,
hiding what could not be hidden.

Though nothing lasts forever.

Like the death of a sunflower
the falsity of it all
came raining down,
in browns, yellows, and grays.

And being seen for the first time
meant loosing everything.

Work.
Family.
Friends.
Lovers.
And children.

Children.

But the creeping around
has stopped at least,
and I finally found the right heels
to go with that cocktail dress.

1969: Curbside Cleanup?

by David S. Pointer

President Nixon’s motorcade
rumbles along Truman Road
Kansas City motorcycle cops
process the street near Cash
Bargain Lumber Company-I’m
the astonished 7 year old kid
holding historic hedge apples-
I might’ve averted Watergate
with one light green diplomatic
greeting missile, misshapen,
splatting up a sidewalk balk
over the smoked glass non-
transparency entrusted with
the gigantic peoples’ planet

Rocky Top – Seoul, January 1991

by Jeffrey Miller

Inside the drafty, smoky juicy bar
halfway up the notorious Hooker Hill
hostesses carry out their trade.

Miss Lee hustles drinks at five bucks a pop
while Hotel California plays for the
umpteenth time.

It’s not really whiskey, but barley tea
you don’t know that with your hands
between her thighs.

You match her drink for drink
until you’ve had enough and watch her
waltz off with another guy.

THE MIRACLE

by Mather Schneider

She was 74 and the plastic surgery
made her look like grandma when
she went skydiving.

I was her 36 year old cab driver.
She insisted on the front seat.
She had just returned to Tucson
from summering in Maine
during which she planted
hubby #4.

At a long red light she wondered
if I knew how hard it was
to find a man at her age.

“Most men think you want to get married,”
she said. “I just want to have
a good affair ”

She looked at me with eyes
that never blinked
metallic cheeks
fish-lips pulled toward
her ears
and jowls
like cheese tied with string.

And then
with the deftness of a 50 year old
she reached over
and squeezed my leg.

The miracle was how I avoided
killing the snowbird in the
blue Lexus.

How I Am Every Second, Minute and Hour of Each Day

by Chris Butler

Last minute…happy,
and this very second…sad,
each hour/day…same.

Life, now

by Cath Barton

The twitches and trembles
of nameless fears
that pepper my days with anxiety
are relieved by simple things:
walking in the hills,
planting bulbs in the garden
and stroking your hair.

When I wake whimpering
from yet another bad dream
I feel your breath, the breath of now,
soothing me.
I realise that fighting
is not the way.
I must ride the wave of life.