New poetry by Steve Calmars, Laura McKee, Jack Ohms, Luis Rivas, Sean Santa, Gabriel Shanks, Emeniano Acain Somoza, Jr., Jaria Cecil Sowl, Andrew Taylor, Heather Whited, and Elizabeth Wilcox.
Laura McKee
milk
I bring in all the milk
I found out it’s just something I do
quite well
a balancing trick
with you squeezing past
to bring home the bacon
a vegetarian Communist
atheist too you remember to say
afterwards
but once it’s done
I can’t remember how it happened
not really planned
either side of a breast
hands full
and then back for more
I bring in all the milk
with a warm feeling
in the let down.
Sean Santa
The Eloquent Poet Never Says EYE-RACK
“Sure, I’ve been called a xenophobe but the truth is I’m not. I honestly just feel that America is the best country and all the other countries aren’t as good. That used to be called patriotism.”
-Kenny Powers, East Bound and Down
Once freshman year I chased Darnell Washington through the halls of our dorm holding a garbage can over my head shouting, “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.” Jesus, we were kids, what did I know? He saved himself by locking himself in some girl’s room on the third floor and all I kept thinking about when they carried his coffin up the hill on 202 was how much fun that kid had been before he shipped out.
I looked for his poems at readings in The District. Every featured fist cooled their fevers on the Iraqi butcher, baker, and candlestick maker—relief. Before, it seemed I was all worried about my friends and shit, or what my uncle would look like with an IED through the head. Would there be so much red everywhere that the first on the scene might find it soothing? Would little children take apart his legs and use them as swords, pretending to defend their mothers? Would someone slip on his brains but laugh about it later? But we must be understanding.
Energy
There is a ticking in my father’s car.
A clinking tap that we follow
until the sound is indistinguishable
from the rest, like our leafless yard
next to the neighbors’ after snow comes.
“What kind of people don’t own a shovel?”
my father will ask at least twice a year.
But we dig them out anyway because sometimes
life is like that, you could be forgiving.
My grandfather claims
his father was smarter than Tesla,
that they sat across from each other
playing chess in Budapest parks.
Tesla would eat apples, convictionless, and never win.
He chokes up on tales about his father,
but even Tesla’s focus dimmed faster than his lights,
which kept going out.
Blast energy and go out, blast and go out—
that man could tell me anything.
Heather Whited
A Month Without Us
We came home;
you were gone
your outline
creeping up
on us,
in the wind
behind the curtains
in the sound of
bottles
with a rattle
like bones,
rising from a pile
of cigarette butts
swimming
in ashes
gray
as the recliner
where you sat.
When we
came home
everything
smelled like you
the cats
were wild,
there were tears
calling
for them
into the woods,
we had
gloves
and black bags
saggy like
dead skin,
then swollen
as we put what
we could find of you
out on the porch.
You were gone,
but the gray
and the brown
stayed on
while we scrubbed
and the bottles
clinked
with their
skeleton two step;
damp ashes,
ghostly,
the imprint
of smoke,
the bruises
it left on the walls.
Duplex
He gave her half
a house in Phoenix
half a house to call
her own.
You’re half a Queen
of half you see
and Queen
of half you don’t.
He gave her half
himself in Phoenix
though he said
it would be all.
One half a man
one half a life
he split one
neat in two.
Gabriel Shanks
The Next Time
Bring no presents but your pain.
Stand in the lightning and let it hit you
full in the face, storming. Welcome
me as a docent to your sandstone museum
with an biennial exhibition dedicated
to surprise. Answer your phone with the
hope that the caller will be all things.
Wrap your fingers around mirrors and
stare when you apply dark lip liner.
Once you’ve made love to him, never look
at him the same way again. Listen
to what you wish he’d say, but never does.
Andrew Taylor
Woodpile 1
Wood piles guard the door
like century old sentries
a path cleared for the mailman
it’s all about preparation
though the weather seems kind
one day the cloud will gather in
bringing temperature drops
eventually snow
be prepared stoke the stove
grind the beans stock the freezer
gather windfalls apples ready for pie
wholesome treats when the sky
Jack Ohms
A Quick Word from Our Sponsors
It feels safer here
in your blood-stained sheets
sweating alone
at the interface
of body
and society
surfing the unseen miles
on Temesta,
than with you
trudging around
with the crowd,
tightly inflated
like rubber gloves
at the
Customs and Excise
Christmas day party.
Here, I am like
a nugget of galena
unsmelted
all dross
and glint
and shine intact
(oh, load every rift, by Keats!)
like the little gem
in Lathkill Dale
two thousand years
on:
the Roman lead mines
quietened -
(oh, load me up, by Christ,)
this stuff should be available
on the streets!
drops early company of a day
old newspaper until lights out
Lines bought for the price of a packet of cigarettes
the raw egg
of sex
cloying
unswallowed
in my mouth;
fingering
another fantasy
for the
umpteenth time
this century.
Steve Calmars
early riser
she likes to
make love in
the evening
after dinner
and sitcom
television
while he
prefers to fuck
in the morning
to get up and
get it out of
the way
like a doctor’s
appointment or
mowing the lawn
or working a
crummy low
paying job—
Emeniano Acain Somoza, Jr.
Liquid Walls
Water surprise!, you flood me today
All the aqueous pulchritude of an unexpected mush
my desert could not help but blush.
Richter registers tremor
shush, your fingers whisper:
Vulcan is stirring up the earth’s core.
But some gods just couldn’t care less.
First they walk in when they walk in
then they keep your floodgates open.
Thor is no less more cautious
trigger-happy whip-cracking genius
whose timing just keeps my sheets lacrymose.
Give me peace, some old man
Live and let live a sun shining
Warm bed is everything.
Luis Rivas
Beautiful Landscapes
i do not own any
beautiful landscapes
or see any horizons
forming at morning
glowing with god’s glory
i live in a small rented house
behind a bigger rented house
next to a huge, gray alley
we take out the garbage
tuesday nights for
wednesday morning pickups
we feed homeless cats
and the doors remain locked
when we’re at home
no one votes
not even those
that are most affected
the poor, the illegal
the homeless
the marginalized
there is no sun
or beauty
or hope
rudyard kipling
allen ginsberg
robert frost
ralph waldo emerson
lyn lifshin
they do not live here
here, there is no beauty
only the obligation
to document the crime
of its non-existence
Elizabeth Wilcox
As if you were made of marble
I wait outside to prop you up
against a hope. I take the tether to your shoulder,
tie it under ribs. Waiting
for the shakes. A chance to blame the stone
you’re made of. From my knees I count the pigeons
on your head with jealousy. A coup. A row.
A show of shards. The space inside your jaw
instead of tongue. That face a brick beyond
my door. I miss your voice. Your breath that traps
itself beneath my sill, my wakes. The line it lunges
to escape. Take the nether. Tow it
by the utterance I’ve placed between
your lips. Pedestal and mortar. Together
we will wear away the very digits.
Jaria Cecil Sowl
…To Bring Silence…
These dreams, oh these bitter dreams that walk into reality, carded by the hysterically inclined doorman who drops his key in front of the fallen wishes of a laughing mind bent feeling. His death is decided so the days can continue, of the importance is the lack of lashes from the sidelines, so he chooses death by photograph, instead of death by solitude. His wishes where then abused and grasped as was his meticulous nature and shoved into the graveyard of protagonist proportions, extorted bended melded and found filling the nails of some liquid dance of the damned. He grows wings then horns then sheds them both before he walks towards the next door that is rotating around the ferris wheel found laughing in the toxic slums of whoa begotten mistakes, causing strife between worlds. He raises hands and hands fall in order to keep the balance of his given perfectionist attitudes and fails to not fall further into sleep, counting age old questions in order to remember to speak when receiving the phone calls of far off deliberators finding their answers in the computer board minds that sway heavily with Gods long lost animosities. Found, he has cares and emotions, his thoughts are then brought on in forms of finding his door man bound to the art of arriving late, for honor of course, and his fiery chariot indeed being 20 blazing horses, each binding the shoes of different states of deliverance and indeed each have blinders, therefore finding the passing seconds quite strange as if the minds of many where passed into his abbreviated statutes, as if he had not given his all when he was asked to help. I find the following a weaned expression of nature, knowing full well that these grasped lemurs will die with the breaths of the bound by time tedium and again find the coffins of their well deserved owners, but in order to arrive late and by the death of monotony, one must first bind themselves in multi-personalities and then fall by the hand of mutiny. So I lay with silence and give my heart to the crosses of one, I fall into the states of distant lungs and laugh with the worded paths of my missions objectives, your intolerant wenchs, my elements stolen and falling into the hands of countless masses, my gifts on knees again, given in darkness so that you may receive the light. So sweet you would think he was found in the land of missile bound crisis’s being covered by the bandages of sugar cane fields and falling stars. I grab hold of the chariot with decadent arms and make a cubicle slightly to the left and little to weary, a little to bloody and a little too lovely, as sarcasm makes its entrance and then in turn kills feeling whose father would seem to be a man of mystery and man of lyrically inclined births, a tentacle retracts itself from around the neck of the man with stolen keys, and in turn will burn for the crosses coated in far away dreams. I am bound to the stream of thought, hopefully, so in turn sleep comes as a far away howling disaster, I shed tiny rainbow tears instead of giving my life to plaster, and fear the night like stars where then given glances of plastered abuse. In my heart I hold a cell, big enough to encompass hell, and small enough to matter most to those who glow and cover coasts. In the world is where I find my empathy, in the death of bleeding seas, fires die with her wishes, kittens fall of their own accord, maybe his heart was broken bitten? An idiotic choice to be fare, but the resurrection of feeling will only find that he has no ability to break these bitter choices so he in turn gives birth to more voices, more words and more stories, in hopes that he will fail to be bound to smiling faces, and fall into his coffin with the grace of her wishes. He has a choice, but instead places knife to wrist and wrist to her mouth, only she has fed upon the hearts of death before and now feels the burning chords of precipitation no more. So maybe these wicked gleams of carnal thoughts differ although the feeling dead is only for a second head, but the meaning that I find most as this post-humorous life leaves this world, is that I should settle for the soul of another day, leaving behind a tarnished wave and a shocking emotion that feels the reeling tone, because it is not in her nature to feel these things, but maybe there is a reason that nobody can know, so I place my head back in the snow, and care more for your stray arrowed days then if I was a murdered plague, an abrupt mission gone array, a day with the hellish furies who are shocked to know that their presence is actually enjoyed so they leave and find the teachings of an age old wisdom in her glory, kicking lessons over the fence to sir allegories and his trudging nightmare of a mind, that although is dark like night, still finds the light but only for an instance before it trudges on to the other side, and the darkness takes you all. And only when one has the gift will they back away from the cliffs of reason, today is the changing of the seasons, so give thanks to he who has to make the offering because his heart may yet break away from his traveled well groomed days, but in the end his mind is set, his words are binding and his heart is hers the goddess from beyond this world, and so he wakes to his coffin of dreams, and hopes to have her blessing soon as the meadows turn from brown to green.
