Poetry by Jomo Chiteji

Earth and heaven inverted

Remember?

It was there,

in a raindrop on the window,

the apocalypse and the world’s

first row

Remember

Filed under: Issue 2, Jomo Chiteji

Poetry by Jomo Chiteji

God shimmers in the window

in the room in my wine

We both rue,

Here I am, aquiver at your lips,

and a mere play of light

has you

 

Mere play of light

Filed under: Issue 2, Jomo Chiteji

Dancing With Those Whom Don’t Dance Back — Roberto Beltran

She hates me now, and she hated the only time I
fucked her up the ass.
But she’ll ask for it, letting each man do that first
until finally she’ll love it.
I can still only masturbate to her.
Masturbating with a broken heart.
Using the tears as lube.
I cry now because I never punched her in the face.
I cry now because I’m not brave enough to punch
myself in the face, but I have found the guts to
shoot myself in the mouth through a bottle of whiskey.
And now I have glass in my eye.

Filed under: Issue 2, Roberto Beltran

Speed — Caroline Depalma

I don’t know how

a record player works, why you have

to place the needle on an exact

glossy wrinkle or it will scratch

and force your Dean Martin

to sound like Al Pacino.

I don’t understand

the patience sewing takes, or anything

about banking from underneath

a mattress.

Yesterday, you positioned your hands

around the steering wheel and drove

me to church. Now, I’m the one driving 65

miles per hour in a 45 zone by the lake,

and you’re slamming

your foot against the floorboard,

an invisible break

you are convinced

should exist on the passenger’s side. A tree

is coming up fast, on the corner & you say

slow down but I won’t- not because I enjoy

defiance, but because I know you

won’t be able to see each

ridge on the bark.

As I speed past, I beg you to think of

the first time you heard your parents

slap each other, or saw your brother

cut your Barbie’s hair—

anything that counteracts

this outside beauty of

those trees, your eyesight, how

Grandpa would look over his shoulder

before dropping us off downtown.

I’m afraid of the speed at which

everything is replaced.

Filed under: Caroline Depalma, Issue 2

The Poor Swimmer’s Guide to Modern Swim Strokes — Howie Good

The more zeros added,
the greater the sensation of drowning.

How quickly our pockets
fill up with water.

I rest my feet on the waves,
but my head on the shore,

and silently count the seconds
between one useless cry

and the next.

Filed under: Howie Good, Issue 2

In Iowa — Phil Garland

In Iowa
I worked
on a farm.
The blood red
bulk of tractor
sat used up
in the sun.
Dinner always
seven sharp.
Family washing up,
Boss sat on the porch
with the gang. Even
those nights, you
could see maybe
twenty miles in a straight line.
It makes some
people uncomfortable.

Filed under: Issue 2, Phil Garland

Born Enough — Phil Garland

She had trouble with the baby
and labor pushed it to
two days. But she got it done.
Almost. Baby popped out normal,
but when the doctors got him
sprawled out on the table, sucking
the gunk from his throat, a nurse pointed
out his left foot was missing. Wasn’t
in placenta. Wasn’t even up in the mom—
they looked. Never had a left foot.
It got me thinking about
things never there, in the flesh,
and how you’d more so take notice of such
a missing than a something there, and how
far the spirit creeps from flesh.

Filed under: Issue 2, Phil Garland

The Great Achoo — Lee Transue

A great achoo! and all was made from pollen stuck in marmalade
the great swirling arms, the radio waves, a smear of peeling oil paint
as if innocence comes with an expiration date.
Sweep, sweep, the wind through the tall grasses, just the echoes
echoes of that great achoo! and we are all made of the same things
the same wind that sweeps, sweeps into a bayou
and it will swell and consume and turn the world to a swamp
where the mud-suck, slop, slop fills our lungs like a pawn shop.
That big, brilliant burst that brought billions of years of beauty
and it brought bodies in the water down in the Big Easy
and it brought the towns crumbling down in blue-beige Persia
and it brought the floods, the dust, the little balancing cancers
the waves over the low villages, Richter dances in China, and the airplanes
and of course it brought faith, which brought it all down.
A great achoo! sounded and then there was love which refused to move
against the great golden shoulder of a statue, plagued with the pocks of
sledgehammer attempts to bring it down, down, down.

Filed under: Issue 2, Lee Transue

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) — John Biscello

Anne Sexton: tall and lovely and dead,
and I, turning the knob, want to get in
and fuck her, but cannot,
because she is dead.
So really, I wanted to, past tense.
The point being:
how I wanted to fuck her, how—
Now, telling you about the biography I just read
on Anne Sexton: a poet, tall and lovely, who chain-smoked
and is now dead (by her own hand,
proving we claim stars when we can)
and why can’t I stop thinking about
how I am alive, how,
and she, the poet, Anne Sexton is dead,
and if we traded places—
a gravesite for a clean silver spade:
would she be the one
reading a biography about me,
and mooning for a twilight lay
with a dead writer?
These are the sort of questions
which keep me up at night,
and keep me reading biographies
about writers
dead  and open to whatever.

Filed under: Issue 2, John Biscello

A Visitation at St. Vincent’s — Robert Gibbons

He lay there like a blank piece of paper
sans line, sans margin, sans form,
the cold, starched room with disinfected floors
reminded me of an open heart surgery
a moment for Cather to bleed on this page
it was not until  Auden entered the room
with an apothecary of words it warmed up- it reddened
the asylum in my head continued to fluctuate
like those monitors overhead as I began to
coiling myself within myself; doctors and nurses
were like drug-carrying cartel, this poem
was just one way, one band aid, one sedative,
one way to kill this pain, one way to rid this doubt,
one way to let go of those drawn curtain, those
disinfectant floors, one more beat, one more murmur,
one more palpitation, if only I had a word transfusion,
I could find my way out, one way out of this labyrinth
word association, one way out of this needle in Billie’s arm,
out of Wright’s blues, one way out of this
general hospital.

Filed under: Issue 2, Robert Gibbons