The leaves are turning, the winds of fall blow colder and yet the protests in America are staying put despite eviction notices, arrests, one death and disagreeable weather. Poets who do not write poetry sometimes make better poets than the ones that write as if it were a career. The collection in this issue shows the vast range of the poet’s mind: from blunt, cold realism to soft and cushy surrealism.
Fuck the world.
Yours truly,
Luis Rivas
Henry Ajumeze
Amber Bromer
The Editors of Poetic Gloom
—
All that fall
By Richy Campbell
In the midst of the
puddle, where she had been pushed
Mary leaned forward
to face him, as moist
brown countries soak into her
legging cloth. She sits,
supporting self with
palms, eyes yellowing, serpent
like. Billy watched as
arms grew from her back
and purged down into her throat,
deeper, reaching for
her spine which crashed to
the puddle like a tower
into a lake; skin
floating above the
pave. In noon wind, skin-Mary
wraps around his small
head like a dispelled
shopping bag, and as shaking
recedes, arms going
limp, she lets go, and
her spine enters where left
to fill the floating
flesh-phantom. She stands
over him, thick sweat lacquers
the yellowing, air
deprived stripes on his
forehead; his hands on knees, spit
seeping through teeth on
the granite. She smiles
before leaning over close to
whisper in his ear
stands, leaving him, ropes
of phlegm swing and rattle in
his throat with wheezes.
Bio: Richy Campbell is writer and musician based in Staffordshire, England. He has been published in a few journals and works as a freelance indexer.
