Issue #18

Natalie Eleanor Patterson

Foxes

I don’t know where foxes go when they sleep,
how they make their beds, or where.
I imagine they nest with the fur and feathers of animals they’ve killed,
folding fresh over former,
like snow after sullied snow.
I don’t know where the bones go
after the fox has had its fill.
Surely they don’t know to respect the spirits of the dead,
to bury them beneath the poplars,
to hope that more will grow.
If so, then there must be an expansive burial ground
just below the soil, and every step in the forest
is an omen, a shudder in the cold bright dark.
There is no lamplight where the foxes nest,
only the sting of survival.
I wonder if they know the secrets of their foxhood
better than I understand my own existence.
Maybe the first step is to make a nest
in the deep sea of night, under the poplars,
to make a nest at whatever cost.

blink

are you ready to recover your memories?
having saved old candles & prom night perfume  in your bedroom just to smell them again &
remember    how you felt but time is a precarious [precious] slope already passing & sliding

into the stomach of has been         you    have been

ready for winter’s breath to take your own    by the lake where the branches twisted their spines
to snap themselves into a wild tableau to lock themselves into a picture perfect for a memory that
will not hold them     that will pick out sparse & random details:     the smell of the smell of
water a flock of birds making noisily for water        still boats moored in the graying
lightif you do not remember what you heard or what you saw         you will remember

how you felt

nevermind that you will for the rest of your life be called back to water; that nothing will feel
quite like this         that [even] when you return the birds will have dispersed    the brackish
smell different after the tint & push & groan of years reddening the shore        & from now
on everything you feel will be tinged with the knowledge that you can no longer describe what
you feel     every word is unmoored    you can come back: to the vision of flight     to the
taste of peppermint in your cottonmouth         to the gray & fading sun    [no longer a
sun        ]     record every dream     visit & revisit & slide        &    slide &

slide

what I mean is: every time you return it will be different    there is no stillness    no one true
memory    not even cells can stop to be captured    so return     & return    & slide
& slide     & dream    & be afraid to live another day     because your memory
will not hold you        your mother will not cradle you again.        so breathe the
old perfume.    & let distraction come.        in waves.    in waves that neither crash

nor draw back.


Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a half-Cuban lesbian poet from suburban Georgia currently working on her BA in English and Creative Writing at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC. Her work has been published in Incunabula and in 2018 she received the Katherine B. Rondthaler Award in Poetry.


Bob Elmendorf

Unpicked

We who are no longer quite young
though still bright and not yet fallen,
feel in the wind a distant autumn
and hear in the stream another tongue.

Footsteps near us rung by rung,
bees have long since left our pollen,
and grey ladders are tall when
they rest in forks where we are strung.

Frost will have its laces hung
on wide green glades. The shadow’s drawing,
the sap finally in November’s stalling,
strand some fruit above each trunk.

And drifts the wind around us will have flung
will be warm as robes as those winds worsen,
and soon we’ll see the snow fields glisten
from sun and moon and moon and sun.

After the Harvest

My scarecrow hands are mute and expostulatory,
knuckles red from the cold, a glove of gasoline.
The crows that paint the cornfield waver
above my outstretched arms and mosaic smile.
A vane, I turn in a gust of wind, direct
another set of furrows. The stirred clouds’
pigments sizzle round the lightning’s splinter,
lap the blonde stick wading in their center.
The crows widen their circle priming its borders
with a coat of black. Rough soil stubbled with
cracked shale and glacial till glints flint shards
rained from a clay bed. The clouds brush the horizon
black and gray closing the white off from the south,
penning me in a cell of fallen light, the sun broken
into corn husks trashed amid the stalks. The wind
mines the rising moon ain’ting in the clouds,
a sulk of yellow drawn in childhood, miming
with the eloquence of her curve the dolors of growth.
A few stars crocus, then the vast Pacific of the sky,
and a star scythe to cut down my starched form
and let me breathe and run.

The Abdication

Bad fall for leaves, rained a lot. Trees are diluted,
futile. Kept last year’s around to remind me
what was supposed to happen. Even faded they’re
ahead of these. This year’s have no imagination.

Colors do not pastel, royal, fauve, sharp or flat.
No large regal glares. Forms are staid, no chances
taken. I saw more trouble in soap stretching
five spectrums across a bottle, each tint a tawdry

wash, heralded to pink, green marked down
regaled by water, and doubled above a blue lagoon.
Nearby a fulvous bubble, palate or oil,
plan or completion, a blueprint few will ever follow,
abandoning the staples of order, not giving a damn.

Yet raking up in one yard was the scarlet bounty
of a solo tree, already two piles of bullion pulled
through dragged tines, and a third being carefully
tossed with just a few rogue yellows deposited
by a poplar which the wind switched for contrast.


Bob Elmendorf has been published in 46 magazines including 4 poems in the current issue of Little Star. He gives infrequent readings and was in poetry workshops for 20 years. He has been teaching Vergil, Catullus, Ovid and Horace and New Testament Greek pro bono to home school teens the last 12 years.


Annie Blake

DESIRE

it is hard to differentiate between webs and silk. no one will ever know
how i desire this sweet dose called life—
this is the last handwritten page of a beautiful book.
i wish it was legal for a woman to press her fingers against the loop of a gun—
the crack of my knuckle. the creak of an old door—
this moist taste of flies crawl like spiders from the words i speak.
how she finds it hard to breathe when she discovers her love is a synonym for death.
there is no one here now. i have played this part myself.
one room. this antique table i sit at. this smell of mice and yellow money.
see how this epileptic body shakes off its last skin—
this unexpected sun that dilates in my eye when the optometrist asks me to focus
on the green light.

SEX COMPLEX

Thank god I’m not a man.
It would feel like cutting
to intersect with the fruit. What feels like love
to some feels like murder
to others. Steering the mesocarp when it is filling
with human blood—
it is easy to feel loved
when you’re the one chewing the cud.

VANISHING POINT

There will never be enough time to drink all of these holy candles.
My eyelids will close, my lips will shut down.
The light glides down my throat and folds down coldly.
The persistence of time doesn’t ensure consistency.
No one can promise the line graph will rise and rise.

The excited needles of the polygraph make careful incisions.
I don’t even need to think of the truth—
they already know what it is with me. They say you need to heal
but there are only sick stomachs
and billboards warning me against syphilis.

You tell me it can’t be that bad. But there is no way
to dig out death—death doesn’t like to talk things through.
They say there is catharsis but these two cars are driving head on.
I see their big bodies made of glass and steel. I thought that maybe I could rise up
out of my skin like a ghost before I pull out—

teletransportation at the unifying point. Just at the spot
the two roads merge. But one car is speeding on the wrong side.
I see the stiff strips stuck against the rocks—
this sea that keeps filling its jelly belly. When the last wave comes, its mouth
snatches me so fast I mistake its tongue for my flame.

THE RITUAL

for ruby

my father was hard to reach / his fury / his strap /
not a strip like a stole / or a chasuble /
a performance / the hometime bell ringing unexpectedly
when stuck inside a class discussion / the ritual /
lucky dismissal /

deep inside his house / the waning moon underneath
the roots of his legs / great chimneys / turrets and the non-flowering
of the song of solomon /
it was heritage listed / for no one on this earth
was allowed to touch it / to poke at the door /

a burn to turn / the knob / my mother pantry / for milk
and reserves / for the preservation of all of us /
venus / to seduce him / strip by strip / yoke of christ
to remove his gown / hospital or wedding white / for the host
is in the tabernacle /
worked womb / hermaphrodite / of theotokos

and the door
to take you like gehenna


Annie Blake is a divergent thinker. Her research aims to exfoliate branches of psychoanalysis and metaphysics. She is currently focusing on in medias res and arthouse writing. She enjoys exploring symbology and the surreal and phantasmagorical nature of unconscious material. You can visit her at her personal website and her facebook.

Sanjeev Sethi

Earful

We never had comfort of consuetude.
We continued writhing through forest
of feelings. Your verbal calisthenics
induced ripples in my tiny heart: hearing
you was to hear tapestry of love intoned
by the universe, its sublingual message
only for me. What it edited out: croupier
and dang wallet are coadjutants.


Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three books of poetry. His most recent collection is This Summer and That Summer (Bloomsbury, 2015). A Best of the Net nominee (2017 & 2018), his poems are in venues around the world: Poydras Review, Miller’s Pond, Litbreak, Red Savina Review, Persian Sugar in English Tea Vol. III, Formercactus, The Five-Two, Amethyst Review, Terror House Magazine, and otherwhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.


Justin Karcher

When Inkblots Take over the World

One night‬
we kidnap
a tattoo artist

force him to
tattoo our resumes
graduate degrees
on our bodies
so we can broadcast
our overqualified sins

we’ll walk naked
into the places we work:
offices
restaurants
bars
malls

show America
how much we’ve tried
how ambitious we once were


Justin Karcher is a poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, New York. He is also the editor of Ghost City Review and co-editor of the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX [books], 2017). He tweets @Justin_Karcher.


Kristin Garth

Signature

Awaken, shaken, charmeuse charcoal sheets,
quivered ribcage walls, live doll heartbeats, roof
retreating from ensnared doe eyes scream bleats,
reduced, like you, in size. Flexed fingers, proof,
immense, descend, a bejeweled signet ring
reminds you when you saw it last upon
his hand — art collector, dollhouse, shrinking.
You understand what reaches from the dawn
to play. Lace-socked-toothpick-legged runaway,
walnut armoire, you hide inside — fingers
following their reluctant bride. Bouquet
they bring, her doppelgänger in moonstone—
pale doll around ring finger, trapped alone.

Cameo

His body coiling, snakeskin bow, your neck
black velvet, he’s surrounding slow. First gift,
affixed accoutrement, oval reflects
a fate you scry by accident. Silk shift,
a shuffle, half asleep, you feel its tight
reminder creep across pulsed vein constrained
with lock. You claw its fabric, frozen, fright,
a shock at midnight, mirror, scalloped frame,
a serpent, panic, suffocating pain.
Abalone visage, curling hair floats
on amber, side-eye stare. A warning skeined
around your throat, a shell of girl who chokes
connotes brutality or jewelry?
You’re locked inside either respectively.


Kristin Garth is a Pushcart & Best of the Net nominated sonnet stalker. She is the author of six chapbooks including a full length entitled Candy Cigarette available from The Hedgehog Poetry Press in April. Her poetry in this issue is from a forthcoming collaborative chapbook, A Victorian Dollhousing Ceremony. It features a dancer who is sold by a frenemy ballerina (character’s poems by Tianna Hansen) to be shrunken by a wizard (character’s poems by Justin Karcher), kept captive in a dollhouse and removed as competition. The story is a modern fable about codependency, art and magic. It will be published by Rhythm & Bones Lit in the summer of 2019.