a hunger that has two names All of us wading through stage curtains to find something true. There is nothing in the box, my darling, just candles. Though, we were the side-show, the lamentable trough of us bodies boy and bodies girl and bodies spirit. Our bodies were bred to lie. They said we were not of this world. We were on the Austrian news in the morning. We sweat baroque. We coughed up blood. There is nothing in the box, my love, just fabric. We were in beds besides one another, arms and arms and legs and legs wrapped and unwrapped and faking and faking. And the pink eye and the shared eyeliner and the champagne and the start again. Previously published in Vanilla Sex Magazine. Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She founded and edits Luna Luna Magazine and is the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks: Andalucia (Poetry Society of New York), War/Lock (Hyacinth Girl Press), and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Buy her books on Amazon & Small Press Distribution. Her poetry and other work can be or will be seen in PANK, Spork, Atlas Review, Tarpaulin Sky, the Tin House blog, The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Rogue Agent, Moonsick Magazine, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center and others. She has spoken on the topics of writing and publishing at Westfield High School, New York University, Columbia University and Emerson College. Her work was recently selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in the Best Small Fiction 2015. She got an MFA at The New School in NYC. From THE BOB PERELMAN QUARTETS II. OR WAS IT AQUIFER? Lagoon. Aquaphor. I made the fatal mistake of bringing two "civilians" to the reading, an anesthesiologist and a product designer, and now I am trying not to laugh, at Avik, the designer, sleeping with his head jerked back his mouth hanging open, and at Nick, the doctor getting more and more annoyed at the 20-year-old bespectacled poetry student rhythmically nodding (and not asleep) in front of him, and above all at the profound seriousness of this event, how we are all swept up with E=V=E=R=Y=S=I=N=G=L=E=W=O=R=D as an object of explosive meditation except instead of explosive its sort of a depressing deflating that makes my heart swell with pity, no never mind, that's just the beer I've been drinking since the morning, I am pretty sure I am going to get diabetes after the last 24 hours in which we've been drinking fancy coffees and eating rosemary doughnuts and doing all that stuff you're supposed to be doing in New York, taking only occasional breaks to see some pictures at the MOMA, which for me was far more poetic than sitting here with these vintage store blazers and facial hair and girls who can't decide if they’re hippy pixies or French cinema femme fatales, and I know that I look like a dentist on holiday in comparison but I can't help it, I grew up in Silicon Valley, played an instrument, did a sport, volunteered at the local retirement home, and I never did anything on the weekends because my mother was sure that if I hung out at the mall or wore shorts in public I would be raped or, worse, kidnapped by North Korean spies. No, I exaggerate, she only worried about North Korean spies when I was in college and did study-abroad in Europe. You know, the one time my father wrote to me years later when I was pregnant and again in Europe was when he saw the movie Taken and then, he said, he knew, he knew exactly how Liam Neeson felt. But now I’m ahead of myself. So my mother wasn't wrong that Kim Jong-Un was in Switzerland, but I was at Oxford, that’s where I had that cat lady as a poetry tutor, I can’t remember her name but she was championed by another poet whom I don't recall either, one of those guys the British get all excited about and the Americans feature in Ploughshares. Anyway, homegirl told me I should write about being Korean if I wanted to “market” myself as a poet, so I wrote a poem about T. S. Eliot riding the London Underground as my version of saying FUCK YOU. You can see I’m not really good at showing people what's what. Is this totally narcissistic to be thinking about my own poetic formation while being at this reading or is that what this nodding kid is doing too, composing his On-the-Road-in-“Post-Free”-Verse (“Aren’t we all post-free?”) with a section like 4. CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES ARETES on yo' ASS! but I don't think he would be cool enough to end with ASS, alas, pigeons on the grass, I think that is my beer talking again, and then the next section would be about DNA sequencing because there's, like, all these converging registers in the bureaucratically determined code of language you know what I mean? And I'm not really sure his nods are aligning with the rhythm of anything being read aloud here, and Nick is now staring into his manly cocktail drink, one of those cocktails that's just some hard liquor on top of another hard liquor, and I don’t get that because cocktails are supposed to hide what you’re drinking, right? So I had to order it for him by repeating each of the syllables I thought he said but apparently came back with the wrong thing, which he still likes. Vivisection of my rotundular enigma. I am not even sure these are words that were in the poem, I am forgetting all of them as soon as they are spoken, they are all so soft and round and abstract and don't cohere and I now think vivisection is probably too vivacious to have been there and the real problem is that I would probably like the poet if I knew her, she looks smart and earnest and not at all like these affected pixie bitches. I am even sure I just read something by her in an anthology and must have liked it because I don't remember hating it and felt a flicker of interest when I saw homegirl’s name on the program, so now I am imagining how all these words she keeps lobbing at us might be laid out in an interesting way that would make it make sense. Or maybe there's some procedural framework like she cut up Alberti's De Pictura into a bunch of triangles and threw them on the floor like an Arp collage. Yes, maybe that's the problem with me, I want it all to make sense somehow, but someone is trying to pull out their rolling suitcase from next to my leg, I think it's Jennifer Scappettone but I don't really know her, and since I am looking around I see Bob Perelman's bald head near the front of the room. Any normal person who knows Bob Perelman would just go up and say hello after the reading, but I am filled with dread, any unexpected social encounter fills me with dread, but I also know if I sneak out without saying anything I will regret it because what kind of freak who knows Bob Perelman and studies poetry and knows he is a nice man would not just go say hi to Bob Perelman? So I look over at Avik for reassurance, and he is practically snoring, and it's funny how he keeps saying "homegirl" for any woman whose name he doesn't remember and how he can pull it off even though he normally doesn't talk that way at all. I am pretty sure I can't pull it off now that I've tried a couple times. Phosphorescent illusion. Proliferate. Is summoning. Once there was a time when we were all in college that my friends thought I was as smart as them and even asked my advice on their papers, but now I am in my 30s and I am still writing those papers and watch The Office and feel jealous of these people with paying jobs and cubicles and benefits and know my friends are spending this Saturday afternoon in a small dark basement bar listening to experimental poetry because they want to show they are interested in my interests and happy to spend any kind of time with me because I just had two kids and haven't been doing any writing but managed to get out of the house for 24 hours alone in New York and now I want to cry. I want to stand up and say to the poet, It's not you. It's not your poetry. It's me. Me. Me. But everyone is clapping, and she is already gone, replaced by a girl in a flouncy embroidered blouse and blood red lipstick, the kind of girl you imagine riding through the East Village on a bike with a wicker basket, in which she stores her thin cigarettes and artfully arranged wildflowers, and Nick listens to her introduce the next poet and says, "What a bitch." Previously published in I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press). Mia You was born in South Korea, raised in the United States, and currently lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Currently she is completing her PhD in English from UC Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Gertrude Stein, and teaching creative writing at the Universiteit Utrecht. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Hairpin, Jacket2, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Offing. With Chloe Garcia-Roberts, she is the co-founder/editor of A. BRADSTREET. She is also on the editorial board of Perdu, an experimental literary podium in Amsterdam, and a contributing editor at The Critical Flame. Broken Ghazal of Night Here This small city draws its hot wings near its body to perch inside itself. Night here soaks bodies in their own waters. Out on the porch goes everybody with cool amber bottles for forgetting, one by one out to meet the dark like a string of lamps turning on. All my life I thought hurt should split my body so I would know the body. When it did, bone gone from skin, gaze gone from body, street under body, metal into a body, I did not know it still. My friend was in jail at the crux of this city, his body mute as an unlit bulb. Not the body who sins, but punished, the body. My friend is free now (but the body is not free) and we go out on the porch at night. We wear thin clothes and our bodies shine. Somewhere beneath the current of talk in the heat is each person’s grief. As if beneath the babbling river a body. My old life is here like another body in a thin slip and beneath it the hairs on her body are grasses from the bristled plain of the past. She follows me down the street. Nameless, the body follows the body. The trees are withholding their green somewhere beneath the night. Previously published in MELUS. Shamala Gallagher is a Kundiman fellow and the author of a chapbook, I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke (dancing girl press, 2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, West Branch, Verse Daily, The Offing, The Rumpus, and many other journals. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. This spring she lives in Cortona, Italy. What is Growing in These Woods Green in here, gleaming like being inside a fable but with stalls of fruit you can’t eat. To go home, leave crumbs. When the wood circles you back here instead, let the lost and the impossible ripen in you, ripen and go. Previously published in Painted Bride Quarterly. Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. She is also the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, diode, and elsewhere. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. www.nomistone.net from You've Got A Pretty Hellmouth Maybe some sex at death lake to amplify the bright spots? And hey, nice mosquito skull sketch Way to keep the insides exposed and thanks for yelling “run” all the time * We all knew you’d be safer in the burning barn so you swamped that old Galaxie, fell into floorboard ferns and a hatchet, a peek-hole and a peekaboo choking scene * On one hand what’s left of my other hand, on my face your last useful teeth. We were just trying to relax at the cabin 45 acres of ancient evil and some antlers, so those misused farm tools are cursed now Welcome to the fam * You step into the flooded basement, wish for claws then gills, stumble out of the bushes into the ghost train’s path, open the cupboard door to some full on Bible sex, follow the goat farmer into the cave to count stars Previously published in Cloud Rodeo. Michael Sikkema is the author of four full length collections of poetry, most recently Die Die Dinosaur (BlazeVOX books) . He is also the author of several chapbooks and collaborative chapbooks. Unsolicited Advice To A Facebook Mom Stop plastering the site with photos of your strapping boy on the cliff of manhood, pitching a no-hitter, practicing guitar, don’t publicize his tuxedo’d beauty posing with his prom date, or family jaunts to look at colleges for the fall. Better to shield him from happenstance, mistaken identity, the evil eye; protect him from what you won’t imagine: a drive-by. a street race. an overdose. a dare. Pass an egg above his body while he’s sleeping. Make the mano fico over him with your fist. Sew small mirrors into his clothes to reflect misfortune. Tie a red string around his wildness. When someone gives him a compliment, spit over your shoulder three times. Then touch wood. Stop flaunting your boy’s shining face, his sweetness, how he still lets you kiss him goodnight. Listen to me: Like you, I was once besotted. Don’t tempt the gods. Previously published in Literary Mama. Alexis Rhone Fancher is the author of How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and other heart stab poems, (2014), State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, (2015), and Enter Here (2017). She is published in The Best American Poetry 2016, Rattle, Slipstream, Hobart, Cleaver, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. Her photographs are published worldwide. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. Find her at: www.alexisrhonefancher.com A Goddess In Purple Rain Behind glass, a lady is lit-up inside the laundro-mat. She’s folding sheets, pink curlers of baroque in her hair, singing and creasing a t-shirt with sequins. Her arms and hips stretch out to a body of air—the room filling with sound. And I am humming inside her—inside her body, burning for shelter from the abyss of my alone. Rounding a corner in a car, I am passing by, hearing “Purple Rain” on the radio—I almost can taste the sweat on the brow of the boy I danced with so many years ago—It tasted like dry toast or the brunt of hurting. Listen to the sky imploring, Come as you are—Alone to the last concert, to light matches in a spell-bound crowd—Remorse of loving a rock star we can never own. And now the lady in the laundromat is swaying, and I am swaying with her from my car—Maybe she is dancing with her son, going off to boot camp, or the ends of the earth. I’m thinking of my son at three, standing on the kitchen table in a wet diaper, banging music from a wooden spoon. This is that concert, where you lit a match to your own bag of wounds. You felt like you belonged, a citizen. Alive as a hackle of girls at the May prom. Look at the moon, hanging like a shoe to throw its heel of light on the page or an empty field. We are all in the body of this night, cogent as a judge who loves the law. The lady in the laundromat carries the load to her car, unpins her hair. I don’t want to be alone tonight. The stars allow me to follow her— we are passing the town, rooftops are hunkering down to sing lullabies to the young, and the night is a stranger touching my sleeve. Previously published in Hermeneutic Chaos Journal. Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers and In The Event of Full Disclosure, and the forthcoming chapbook, Still-Life With God (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Del Sol Review, Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, Hermeneutic Chaos, Le Zaporogue, North American Review, Poetry Fix, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, Tampa Review, Tinderbox, Thrush, Valparaiso Review and Verse Daily. She is formerly the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College, where she curates a quarterly Reading Series, Lit-Salon. Atkins earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work. She lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist Phillip Welch and their family. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com At / Here New Year’s resolution – stop talking to yourself. * I have no promises to keep. So it seems, good sense only goes so far as genius allows. As one grows increasingly informed, the desire becomes to lose commonality and the sensibility which accompanies it. What good is a sense if it is only used for good? Give me a sense which brings a sensation – hand on stove, fall from heights. Excitement in known harm but unknown consequences doled out by nature. * What I wanted was not really to be alone but to be head over heels over someone. Someplace for emotions to go. I’m ambitious that way. * Who will concur while I wait? Without a fever for the infirmary. Without need for quarantine, who else will be here to hear? * I don’t like ‘cool.’ I don’t like ‘beautiful.’ I don’t like. I just don’t like. Let me love something indefinable for once. Let me hate. Leave me the freedom to go beyond dislike to the extremist position against certain notions. Let me have floors and ceilings in this room. Leave my food by the door. I’ll swallow it when it cools off a bit. * In solitude, I take even the public rather personally. Get offended or let joy arise from those passing by. * Consequences are irrelevant to cruelty. * Am I guilty of or for irony? What liberty, what power in producing, being, becoming another ending – only somewhat unexpected. Because, who doesn’t account for the curse of the paradox? * I am barbaric. Or I was. Or I want to be. Anyway, Barbary is close to me. * What forms of expression are at my disposal? Have I seemed happy for at least some of the time? Maybe in the end it will appear (to be) more apparent. * Somebody is talking about a fear of airplanes and I’m here thinking about a fear of talking to anyone or in particular – a someone across the room from here. Neither these nor those books are shields. And besides, a proper glance caught in spectacular timing cuts right through. Oh, but a look caught in flight can see a lot of turbulence. * Patience will always prove random is regular. Chaos dictates how the lines will shorten. No turns are being taken, orderly, while waiting. * Does one exist who is deserving as much of admiration as affection? I feel I’ve been born into a banned life. I think I understand now that there is no room in languages frequented or neglected for duality. For similarity to feel the same. This soul came passed down from those passed on with certain policies intact. Boycott the insincere. Embargo bad faith. Find distant compassion for those who are fake only because otherwise there would be no need to ever use words. There’d be no comprehension of a range of emotions. Nonetheless, I’ve given up on smiling. Previously published in eccolinguistics. Bio: Kenyatta JP Garcia is the author of Slow Living (West Vine Press), This Sentimental Education and Enter the After-Garde. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Garcia now resides in Albany, NY where they received a degree in linguistics and spent a dozen years doing all the drudgery cooking requires. Now, loosened from the grease and sweat of the kitchen life, they edit Rigorous by day and spend their nights getting paid to put boxes one shelves. In the in between, they write short humor, poetry, diaries and work at being the best dreampunk one can dream up. Monkey Is Unrepentant And So Am I I am underneath the mountain with you, Sun Wukong. Buddha's ring finger on my chest, his thumb on yours. We can be proud together that the world was enough afraid of our noise that it put its giant palm over our mouths and froze that way. Previously published at Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Jasmine An is a queer, third generation Chinese-American who comes from the Midwest. Before graduating from Kalamazoo College in 2015, she also spent time in New York City and Chiang Mai, Thailand, studying poetry, urban development, and blacksmithing. Her chapbook, Naming the No-Name Woman, was published as the winner of the 2015 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. She has been awarded residencies at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and Hedgebrook. Her work can be found in HEArt, Stirring, Menacing Hedge, Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Southern Humanities Review, among others. Currently, she lives in Chiang Mai continuing her study of the Thai language and urban resilience to climate change. PREDATOR SATIATION
The cicada, little clock of self-sacrifice, true bug of Jesus, emerges in multitudes to the waiting mouths of predators so that a few might survive to procreate. And while I, too, have heard my biological timepiece ticking, shaved and spread my legs for it, fragrant and freshly vaccinated, my heart would beat as neither mother nor martyr. Woman is man’s most successful domesticated animal. I am no exception, childless or child-free. There’s no escape until, of course, there is-- but not as the machines we were. Our wristwatches seize the spike tooth every sixty seconds, the gold eyelid closes slowly, blades of sun blaring off the lake at solstice. Previously published in Southern Indiana Review Kathy Fagan’s fifth collection of poems is Sycamore (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Her first collection, The Raft, won the National Poetry Series; her second, MOVING & ST RAGE, won the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Her work is widely anthologized, and recent work appears in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and Narrative. Fagan directs the Creative Writing Program at The Ohio State University and serves as Series Editor of the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Poetry Prize. http://kathyfagan.net |
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October 2019
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