Issue #16
dan raphael
All the Way Through
need a drain plug for the emotions, where guilt and regret can leave,
toilet as confessional: forgive me father for I digest imperfectly
not turning water into wine but piss
flushing anger away instead of slapping the weak or punching plaster
trying to get through the maze of my internal city without surrendering all of value
as a car that goes through the assembly line too quickly
sheds rivets & oil before it reaches the factory gate
after a week of meals through a blender
this burger’s like introducing a whole solar system at once into the vacuum,
cosmic rays and fine particulates no training for a cows two year history
so compressed I can barely smell the grass and rain
how winter drives our feet inches below the surface, makes me feel like a birch
stripped of everything but its skin glowing gray as January dusk.
we level forests. we keep rivers from reaching the sea.
what’s more just than cannibalism, or letting plants grow on our skin & scalp
I love you so much I’ll spend hours preparing, letting you marinate,
reducing 2 cups of choice memories to redolent cream
then a minute under the broiler of things held so long under so much geology
the skin caramelizes in lavaic bubbles and valleys
displaying our decades of struggle, transformation, and love
The Closer You Get to Nowhere, dan raphael’s 20th book, will be out this winter from Last Word Press, which published Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid in 2016. Current poems appear in Caliban, Misfit, Indefinite Space, Unlikely Stories and Otoliths. Every Wednesday dan writes and records a current events poem for the KBOO Evening News.
Peter Miller
HURT
Moonlight’s quite the hick,
to travel from such far
nothingness just to wrinkle
an empty bag of chips, to get
shamed pale by these
back parking lot floodlights,
to gawk at the cheap hurt
Lemon Sugar piles down upon
Dutch Baby’s face,
pounding with a frozen liter of water.
A black moth
fat with omniscience lights
on the responding officer’s
motorcycle handlebars and
she forgets: Is she taking her helmet off?
Or putting it back on? Or is
it tonight her father died?
Before irretrievable
black hole emphysema,
he used to take her here—
how now these displaced aromas
of burnt coffee and burnt potatoes
remind her why this neighborhood churns
now awash in money caked
and curled: Sheri’s Family Diner
has reopened as a strip club
called Sheri’s.
Damnation’s finer.
Pete Miller received his MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University. His work has appeared in several journals and the chapbook Born Soap, published by H_ngm_n. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska and works at a medical clinic for the homeless. Pete is co-editor of the poetry webzine A Dozen Nothing.
Sarah Etlinger
Playing with Fire
You reached up with your tongue to grab a star,
holding it like a throbbing marble
between your lips–
as we kissed, its traces
filled my throat so I could
swallow its light whole like a lump
of mercury,
before you placed it, still humming
on your wrist, where I could almost see
the silver lining through your veins,
under the skin a slow heavy drip—twisting
droplets to slick our bodies
into quivering nebulas,
then
at the very moment God’s lightning hand
reached down through the summer light
full of fireflies,
you moved the star to my chest
before it dissolved
back into a glittering éclat of memory.
Sleeping on The Couch
Crumpled on the cushions,
you are pulses and skin,
breath and keratin, angles
and folds and hands—
(the things you have lured
out of me with those hands:
movements and creases,
mounds and blinks—
imperceptible, except
for within the cells
and sighs, the caught voice
that will not speak or breathe,
or else betray the growing distance).
This is what we are
when distance and proximity
are the same;
in time, in space.
Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor who resides in Milwaukee, WI, with her family. Her first chapbook, Never One for Promises, is forthcoming in August 2019 from Alabaster Leaves; other work can be found at The Magnolia Review, Little Rose Magazine, and Brine (poet of the month), among others. In addition to poetry, interests include traveling, cooking, and learning to play piano.
Tim Meyer
Goodbye
When the knocking stops she will continue
to count the books and will not go out until she completes
the list she found after grandma died.
She has already put blades
on the wheels of the tricycle
and beaten the china into a powder
that was sprinkled over the dining room carpet.
The husband leaves the porch for another day.
He squeezes through the fence
and goes home to his chair in the dark.
She must have smoothness to thought, no melodies.
The books are to be taken down, sliced
at the bindings and the shuffled halves
reshelved and recounted. The instructions are strict.
That is why she continues,
aluminum taste in her mouth, swaying.
It makes no sense to her. Rationality is thin
as a toothpick under the lip of a plate.
The toothpick says there must be a reason
for the list sandwiched in the neat stack of hankies.
Number seven, she cuts the fingers out of the blue rubber gloves
and puts them over the ends of the white candles.
The old house begins to creak.
This Meyer is a defibrillated socialite on a bubble raft headed for a hard water pool. His poesy started with a Druid handshake and later emerged from a man hole cover with Da-Da’s baby on its tongue. He has tried to settle somewhere in between edited and medicated by the presence of his wife.
Patrick Erickson
AUTOPSY
Facts provide the evidence
the hairline fractures
that censure hand wringing
and full-tilt embrace
the spiral fractures
deepening into fissures
as ennui grips a nation
ennui or angst
the avalanche
and the landslide
the chasm
and the abyss
Thus far the facts
those fault lines
in the mainline
the wind sheer
and the erosion
the continental divide
and the paradigm shift.
Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Cobalt Review, and Burningword Literary Journal, among other publications, and more recently in The Main Street Rag, Tipton Poetry Journal, Right Hand Pointing, and Danse Macabre.
Christopher Barnes
Enthralled By Our Guru’s Yellowed Teeth
Warble to the Ikon —
A slick-bowtied penguin.
Tipsy fumes glut the room,
King Size ash on plastic chair.
He manipulates insanitary twilight
And a hoped-for, adamant belief.
The Riveted
Anglepoise reinforcement
Zeniths a macaroon
On blue-tin skateboard.
The undertones — exhaustive, fribbling.
We short-hop into beanbags.
Incense room-creeps.
Our guru’s lips trench:
“Peel off your nature.
Foresight is a manacle.
Numbskullery engages knocked-sill love.”
Our Guru’s Prophecy Arrives
Retaining wall lisps,
Good-for-nothings bodypop in ectoplasm.
I lick the Beehived Godkin
Of pound shop hairspray, lycra.
We torpor on cushions.
Solar-powered fan jiggles.
Downdrafts on ashtray.
Beaming we nap, pill-less,
Under disco lamps.
Christopher Barnes’ first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer. Each year he reads at Poetry Scotland’s Callender Poetry Weekend. He also writes art criticism which has been published in Peel and Combustus magazines.
C.C Russell
ABOVE IT
Turbulence. Flying East while the sun slinks opposite on a long trajectory of slivers, off-color steel wool scraping just under the silvered belly. There are things, he thinks, worth risking your life for. Mistakes worth making. It is July. He’s flying over the Midwest, his eyes watching the imperfect dialogue of farmland turn slowly to cement. By December, he will be in love with someone that he shouldn’t be. He does not know this yet. For now, he is above everything – just looking down at everything coming so quickly towards him; the vast and terrifying face of this beautiful world.
C.C. Russell has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction here and there across the web and in print. You can find his words in such places as Split Lip Magazine, The Colorado Review, and the anthology Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone. He currently resides in Wyoming where he sometimes stares at the mountains when he should be writing.
Qurat
Boxed breaths
I was born with an ivory
box in my chest, sitting just
above my diaphragm,
hinging at my collarbone,
it was empty, but like all empty spaces
it became a place for the things that
had nowhere else to go,
unmoored objects, nomadic bits and pieces,
tears that had been dried and shed
again, hair torn from the roots, split-
-ends, the butterflies we’d catch in our sweaters
and keep in jars, which always fluttered to a
stop;
the pieces of my cast in the eighth grade,
with nothing more
than a few half-hearted signatures, which came off
and forced me to relearn how to move my arm, how
moving can hurt after being still
for so long, the elastics I’d wear on my braces
which snapped if I laughed too loud, kept me from
smiling with my teeth, only another reminder that I had to
keep my mouth shut,
my milk teeth, which never brought me any quarters,
which I lost as quickly as my hopes,
my wisdom teeth, which came out in shards
as I laughed, floated to the ceiling,
diaries I possessed (with myself/those that
possess me),
flakes of chipped nail polish, black & purple
& maroon like funeral confetti, because you can’t
pray with nail polish,
eyelashes which littered my cheeks in the aftermath,
empty pens and pencils with shattered graphite
cores. I’d carved initials into the lid,
whether by hand or the slow movement of
bone, some I’d tried to scratch out
but only reappeared, deepened, irreverent,
around the locks I fashioned, each more
complex than the last, each sure,
with time,
to break.
Qurat is an engineering student, an avid environmentalist, and an emerging author. She has work forthcoming or currently in The Evansville Review, Augur Magazine, Tenth Street Miscellany, The Temz Review, Rag Queen Periodical, Yellow Taxi Press, and KROS Magazine. Find her on Twitter: @DQur4t