Between Us
by Meredith Weiers

Between us
there is             where
            should not be




Meredith Weiers graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and currently lives in southern Maryland. This is her first publication.

Gabrielle In Arrears
by Bill  Yarrow

It’s 10:46 in Shreveport on New Year’s Eve.
You’re rushing to the Ramada ballroom
for an evening of kisses, hors d’oeuvres,
and darkened drinks. Someone honks.
Unnerved, you swerve to the right, side-
swipe a Buick, slide back across the lane,
flip into a ditch. Doctor Claussen warned you
more than once about the consequences of
being distracted. Well, it’s too late to resuscitate
advice now. You should be calling 911, waving
at headlights, flagging down trucks, pulling
your bleeding husband from the car. Instead,
you’re just staring at your hands, as if, somehow,
they were imperious tools capable of magic.




Bill Yarrow is the author of WRENCH (erbacce-press, 2009) and "Wound Jewelry" (new aesthetic, 2010). His poems have recently appeared in Ramshackle Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Used Furniture Review, THIS Literary Magazine, BLIP, PANK, DIAGRAM, Negative Suck, Now Culture, Right Hand Pointing, Whale Sound, and Metazen. He lives in Illinois.

Perhaps A Second Sun
by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

i.
There was no poetry today.
I had dog-eared pages in Autumn Journal
to read to you but you chose wine.
You insisted on telling me its aroma – lemon and berries.
I asked: If you don't have the words,
can you smell the scents?

ii.
I take note of your wise words:
the small liquor details one learnt
must not be rote-memorised and departed as eternal,
universal truths.

Still, remember:
This will all pass, like alcohol eventually evaporates.
You are not that good; you aren't that romantic.
You stole my ripped stockings for souvenirs.
Your bed sheet, every time, is the same blue.

…. You are now the only proper noun I care.

iii.
Morally speaking, one woman's boyfriend
can only be another's nobody. And so I've now returned
to my own home after an afternoon
in your cocoon-shaped room.

When staring at my bookshelves,
I know: my books and yours, with or without inscriptions,
will not bookend together, will never form a conversation.

vi.
The rain outside was peanut-heavy and bright.
We heard it, didn't we, this afternoon? Splashing on the ground.
We weren't imagining. How absurd, I thought
every time there must be a weather event.
Perhaps a second sun will appear in the sky,
if I go to your place again. I can better see your face,
flustered between my stiffened knees.




 
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. She is a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. More at www.sighming.com.

Your Ironic Haircuts

by Lucinda Beeman

All my bad men

belong to each other.

My friends light cigarettes

at the windowsill, say

Not Him Again, but I am curious

mostly as to whether you would ride

your bike to me through the rain-

I want to towel you off after. He would

never, not unless I offered to buy him

breakfast and blue eye shadow. Anyway

I like those awful words in ink across

your chest. It was nice and sort of

sexy when you wondered aloud if I wanted

to hit you on the elevator and

in answer I did, hard.  That short

sharp sound, your smile. My love you are

nothing if not a good kitten. But he

is a better kitten, blue eyed, and

darling you’re never going to want

me the way he did, or even as much

as you ache for Daisy Buchanan but

that’s okay- I’m happy to call you

Jay if you can manage to make me

die in my way, twice. I’m won’t

to root against you. I also won’t

believe a word you say. 

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Lucinda Beeman is currently an undergraduate at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She studies Literature and Publishing.

Al Ortolani:

Two Poems

The Gift

The old man had this car jacked up in the back yard.

I have no idea where he got it, maybe payment

For some black market job with Uncle Frank.

It was a 1935 Dodge without wheels. One day

Out of nowhere he gave it to me.

He said do whatever.

I couldn’t believe my luck,

So I bought some jet-black paint and brushed it

Carefully under the trees. You really had to look

To see the marks. Then I went down to the junkyard

And worked out a deal with Tommy. I lugged home four wheels

And four bald white walls.

One morning the old man

Took a look at what I’d done, and decided that he

Needed the car after all.

So that was that.  But sometimes in the afternoon

When he was asleep after the nightshift,

Mom would help me push it

Out of the driveway into the street. Before supper,

She would follow me back in with a rake, smoothing the gravel

Over the tire tracks. 

 

Performing the High Wire

Before Easter a teacher sent you to the office

where the lady from the Children’s Fund

presented you with a brown package of clothes.

Walking back to the classroom, you hid

the embarrassment of carrying your

New Start in a meat wrapper. You learned early

that a joke at your own expense

put you in command of effacement. As class clown

you assumed a persona, the package like a chair

on the tip of your nose, tight roping an imaginary high wire

to your desk. You swayed above the eyes

of your classmates, teetering

like nothing mattered but the circus.

Al Ortolani is a secondary English teacher in the Kansas City area. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, The Laurel Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The English Journal and others. His next volume of poetry, Finding the Edge, is due for publication from Woodley Press at Washburn University this spring. Presently, he is a co-editor for The Little Balkans Review, a small regional journal in southeast Kansas.

Tony Brewer:

Three Poems

The Cremation of Voices

You’ll wish you had it all back, they say.

But wishing is for wells.

I had a fireplace, and I

reached in and yanked open

the coughing sooty flue.

Men have a history of building big dumb fires.

Driving everyone away from the warmth with heat.

Setting a forest on fire to rebirth it.

Burning Man. Or Hiroshima.

I made mine small, out of history

gone cold: heart-dotted i’s

and decadent initial caps in folded

grade school correspondence,

postcards dense with longing posed as brevity,

hate speeches, Dear Johns.

Birthday cards signed Dad

beneath where Mom had written love.

The taste of blue-tip sulfur behind

my two front teeth washed

down with wine.

The pyre caught and rushed

up the chimney of itself to escape

a box of me I would never see again.

Voices plumed into January stratosphere.

Cinders liberated from storage units of memory.

Attics of denial echoing

like an empty cathedral collapsing.

It’s a miracle no one was hurt.

A shame no one was inside.

The Things That Stick

Dad sits across from me.

His bruised hands hesitate.

Before the tremors

his fingers manipulated pocketknives

and chewing gum wrappers

and drywall tape and mud.

We are waiting for ribs

as he prepares a syringe and insulin.

Rolls the bottle between his hands to warm it

clicking against his wedding band.

He plunges the needle into his stomach.

Quick and practiced like a sniper

assembling a rifle blindfolded.

I was the only one who saw.

It is bearable because he remains

calm as it happens.

We even laugh at how frail he has become.

I don’t have to try anymore

to make my voice sound like his

when he says you just plain fall

apart when you get old.

The silence after the laughter dies

is broken by our waitress carrying platters.

The meat so tender

it slides right off the bones.

Whatever else happens

is happening to us all the time.

Wine Country

A hundred miles on snake-colored roads

clogged with black socks and sandals

trout print Hawaiian shirts

trophy wives riding shotgun

convertibles fast for no guard rail

life by the sip with cracker

palette cleansing chasers.

I was a tourist passing through her

spilling my guts in gravel parking lots

about how my ex-wife done me wrong.

Worrying a buzz down to drivable.

Vultures pin-wheeled in a cloudless sky.

An entire ecosystem devoted to giving

a little taste to entice then off

down sinuous curves of savannah

freckled with Mexicans

bent toward irrigated earth.

We developed a language for enjoying

something more than it deserves:

Take a swig but don’t swallow.

Suck it through purpling teeth.

Swirl it around like Listerine.

Then tilt the head toward rustic

hand-hewn tasting room beams

and pronounce Ah, Tuscany

certain we would never make it there.

Tony Brewer is a poet and sound effects artist from Bloomington, Indiana. He has work forthcoming in Plain Spoke and the anthology And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana (Indiana Historical Society Press). His first book of poems is The Great American Scapegoat (2006); his latest chapbook is Little Glove in a Big Hand (Plan B Press, 2010); and he is one-quarter of the performance ensemble Reservoir Dogwoods. More at www.IndianaPoetryTour.com.

Motel Row

by Byron Matthews

Check in, never check out!

No laugh's too cheap

for roaches, none

too darkly bought

For any but an eye that looks

out that cabin at the end,

peers through a slit

in humor's shade. 

My father fought unpacific isles,

mustered lucky home intact,

but even so could not evade

a last indecency

Of chance, a stray decree: Go

swaddled into deepening night,

dark slump descend to suckling

vacancy.   

Defilement disallowed a pet

who fails her perch, lost his wheel,

foul slow burlesque, exits nailed,

piano falling out of tune,

of dignity, of grace.

Where were the heroes striding

from the seats to cry Enough?

Voices mislaid? Forgot, again,

to bring our pillows? A foot to kick

a plug out of its socket?

In the dead floral air in this

last dim room,

truth clicks like a hammer

pulling back, clear

as vodka shimmered over ice:

I toast the inn at the edge of light,

mini-bar, spa tub, amenities galore,

and reliable, ready, oily bright,

your valet there

in the right-hand drawer.

Byron Matthews left Iowa for graduate school in North Carolina, later gave up a tenured faculty position in Maryland to make furniture for ten years in Santa Fe. He lives now in the mountains east of Albuquerque with his wife, a cellist.

Jennifer Wineke:
Three Poems

how to eat a grapefruit

in the passenger seat sitting
cross-legged. take a bite
to make a tear and then unravel
slowly, carefully, make sure
to keep it all in one piece round
and full so you can use it as
a bowl for the thick white skin
you’ve got to use your fingernails
really dig into it try to get it all
tender-bare, smooth and delicate
stick your thumb in it, pry the rosy
pink in half  and make your choice,
peel off the plumpest little juice pillow

and then
when he is speaking his most
passionately

stuff it—hard
into his mouth
so that he cries
out and lets go
of the wheel to
catch the liquid running
down his chin and sticking
to his fingers and the smell
he can’t wash off and though
he’ll make a fuss,
he loves it,
you can
be sure
of that. 

remember that time

you leaned
over the couch
to give me
a kiss from
behind as I
was eating my
ice cream and right
when your lips
warm and soft
met my sloppy
mouth
the spoon
jabbed
quick--
into
your
ear
cold and metal,
well,
I did that
on purpose.
I’m sorry it’s just
I get a kick
out of
hearing
you
yelp.

ladybugs

our love motif. flickering like half moons
above our tangled bodies in the park,
landed on my blue-jeaned thigh, you picked one
from my hair. peering slyly from their seats
along the telephone pole as we dug
up the ring, notebooks, you and your shovel
and me in your hat but my boots. and then,
finally, resting on bayou lampshades,
drinking beers in cabins with sam cooke. on
the drive home i found one on your collar.

Jennifer Wineke grew up in Louisiana, was educated in California, and currently lives in Prague, where she works as a copywriter. For more of her poetry, please visit her website.  

By Tongues

by Jessica Bell

My friends adored you.

When you’d pick me up

from school they’d stare

at your eyebrows—logos

of gothism—fake lesbianism.

You were a like a big sister;

rock ‘n’ roll baby!—the woman

they all wanted to be.

You’d invite them over

for afternoon tea.

You’d coax them into talking

about sex, masturbation,

homosexuals; you’d express

insight—laissez-faire

toward the boy who

tried on my school dress.

You’d trick them into

betraying my secrets—the girl

I pashed behind the shelter

shed; the one with epilepsy

who liked to lie and got

pregnant from my tongue.

My friends never knew

what happened after they left.

Jessica Bell is an Australian who lives in Athens, Greece. She's a literary women's fiction author and poet whose debut poetry collection, Twisted Velvet Chains, has just been released this May. Her debut novel String Bridge is scheduled to be published by Lucky Press LLC in November, 2011. A list of published works can be seen on her website, www.jessicacbell.com. She also posts four days a week on her blog.

Laura Grafham:

Three Poems

To the Person in the Doorway

Tonight you look lovely,

   your stance by the door,
ringlets walking round unsuspecting freckles
that didn't know but to attach to your face.

Structure you have,
the iambic lines of your body
carry you up and firm,

straight and strong
   the shutters to your blue

   eyes close their blinds sometimes;
 open for a few

close shut
the curl upwards of a brown lash or two,
the brow rippling sand dunes,
making the dotted waves of your ginger skin
unsettling, earth shattering. Quaking, though

I just said hello.

Freewrite

I haven't had a sip. I see steam.
Not yet. Until I do
I flirt at the wide eyed little girl,
hand in her pink mouth,
sneakers pointing up from the floor
and out the foggy windows.

Her sneakers have shark teeth on them.
She's cooler than I am.
I don't know why but
the american poetry I read
and the Neil Young they play
are better early in the day;

I read places I haven't been
into rolling scapes
invading the little shop,
crowding red-eye patrons against walls,
the breezy dry grasses doing their thing
in front of me.

The barista with his tribal tattoo
changes the CD and goodbye:
John Wayne and Neil Young vanish.
Now Bjork complains through the speakers.
Icelandic whining and piled high black
hairdos do music. The people grunt disgruntle.
I note the nearest exits.

___________________

I like my land made
not of fire and ice
but of rain and fog
made of misty fabric
that evaporates when it turns corners

A place with piles of wet paperbacks that can't sell
with old Norwegians and Swedes in sweaters
where I can kiss your chapped lower lip,
lick up the blood I made.

I like the land to eke outward,
expanding from the earth's core
up and in, out
eating us up because it can,
not because we want it to. 

If I Could Inspire Jealousy

hey, up there, see that yellow light in the window;

it is he who tells the story

the story of the bear and kai-oat-ee

taking the grain at harvest time.

All of our friends came

to the fireside,

see, and they all gathered round,

told me how much they loved your ways

they loved the way your words made magic

at twilight, among the searchlights

and the birthday of your city.

I don't drink beer to escape

but to get it up, get the story up

get the grasses up and active, working.

If my hair were sage brush

damn, would it smell good,

and men would love me, and women would envy,

want my wampum bracelets and belts.

Laura Grafham is a senior English Literature major at Seattle Pacific University. She has published in her school's student-run arts journal Lingua, of which she now is a staff member. Currently, Laura is writing her senior thesis on Leslie Silko’s novel Ceremony. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest all her life, and having worked as a bartender and waitress on Orcas Island in the San Juans, she dreams of climbing mountains in the Rockies. Laura is currently applying to MA programs in the Mountain Time Zone. See graciethebum.blogspot.com for more poetry and nonfiction excerpts.  

Repeat After Me

by Rachel Mangini

How do I say how I feel in Portuguese?

English cannot amplify   sad.   We curl it

into a tiny space. Tuck it tight to contain it.

Give me a word. Make it mean ugly

and messy and ripping my heart out dripping with tears.

Make it mean my head is blown open. My nails feel

good scraping on my skin.

What is the word for full to bursting with regret?

What do you call the sum of this:

one day in Montreal when I smiled in photos, cried in between,

three police cars, one strong rope,

the digits of another man’s phone number dialed twice,

185 miles, me growing smaller in the rear view,

the slope of your back when you sleep alone?

The worst thing is: miraculous.

My body, so much soft flesh, goes on,

needs water, dresses, gets on a bus.

Opens its mouth and says “at the close of the third quarter.”

When what I really want to say is:

The rhythm of your breath is what I fasten mine to. 

Rachel Mangini loves to travel, and to bake. Both her husband and her dog can attest to the fact that she is a great kisser. On her blog you'll find lots of things she likes.

Barry Spacks:

Three Poems

Brimming Bowl

A rabbi may not even touch

a woman's hand.

Blessings, but maybe, with female beauty,

YHWH went too far?

Sex-energy, primal force,

no wonder the world will rush to control it,

create well-behaved

Black Stars.

True lovers say: here, take my eyes,

own them already, already yours,

useless now for anything 

but gazing upon you.

Young persons, are you wise enough

briefly to console one another?

(Let this question float away

like a note in a bottle).

Days and darkness.

Water in a sieve.

I want to be a brimming bowl

for the parched and weary. 

A Poem Entitled "Sometimes"

Sometimes I lose the word "dialectic,"

but after a struggle I get it back.


Sometimes I think of lush lives not shared

with Sally, Portia, God-bearing women.

Sometimes I sniff for the attar of glory,

but often that quest proves untenable.

At last I'm the grandfather out in the garden

quietly watching the children at play.

Often I sense a new bud stirring

deep in the heart of a full-blown rose.   

   

The Scholars

     

I study the scholars rapt in their books in the lamp light,

lost in their research, jotting sudden notes

their faces lit by bronze lamps on the long narrow tables,

the library filled with a massive quiet of knowing.

I want to own every detail of what they’re reading,

memorize names and dates, hold anecdotes

word for word for the mouth of the mind to savor

as I walk again some brutal, lonely road.

  

Known mainly as a poet/teacher, Barry Spacks has brought out various novels, stories, three poetry-reading CDs and ten poetry collections while teaching literature and writing at M.I.T. & U C Santa Barbara. His most recent book of poems, FOOD FOR THE JOURNEY, appeared from Cherry Grove in August, 2008. Over the years his poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and hundreds of other journals.

Morning Ritual
by Brad P. Olson

For Grace, age 6 months

I want to wake her,
see her smile,
hear her delighted
laugh.
But since I’m leaving
for work,
it’s her mother,
still asleep,
who’d be left
to deal with
the consequences.
So I refrain,
contenting myself
to touch her hand
and caress
her little fingers.




Brad Olson received a BA in English from Brigham Young University, and is an avid BYU football fan. He currently posts much of his work on his website, BradOlsonWriting.com, and his short story Good Fences was published in the Jan. 2011 issue of Pif Magazine.

The Concept of Time

by John Tustin

Rinsing out my daughter’s paintbrush

    in the bathroom sink

just now

    and she’s pulling

on my pantleg

    because she wants the picture

she believes she worked

    so hard to create

in her hands

    to show mommy

not understanding the concept

    that time

makes it dry

    and that

not touching what you want

    to touch

when you want

    to touch it

is sometimes

    necessary

if you want that something

    to last

beyond the moment

    you first

wanted it.

John Tustin’s poetry is forthcoming in Primalzine, Lyrotica, pawpaw, and others. Visit his website.

Ally Malinenko:

Three Poems

City

When I was a child,

back in that small town,

with crickets and bats

and all the other things that small towns have

I would wake at night

just to sit in the quiet of the living room.

I would worry about someone

or something, a snake maybe, being in the

basement, or the garage

but I would be too afraid to go see.

It’s like that now, too

watching myself roam

from room to room,

in this little apartment,

wondering how we fit

our whole life in here,

each day

without the walls bursting,

without the windows smashing

without the water

flooding into the street.

How have we not run out of air?

Packed on the buses and the trains,

I wonder still

how we can even stand to touch each other

even accidentally.

Power of Names

There is too much power in names, I think.

There is a change the moment the word

shakes loose like a rainstorm,

from your mouth.

Like when I was young and out

past the neighbor’s yard

farther into the woods.

There was broken light and the smell of wet damp leaves.

Dan was there, and we did not tread lightly, he and

my sister and I. We stomped through wet leaves,

wet leaves that belonged to us the way the world

belongs to the very young.

We sang loud,

keeping the darkness at bay.

The snake was there, heavy

and slick, half its body under leaves.

We formed a wide semi-circle

as if coming in for the kill.

Dan held a stick.

I remember my fear.

Is it dead, my sister said.

No, Dan answered.

And we knew, at that moment, it was true.

We had to go forward, a sort of

manifest destiny of our woodland ownership,

the snake lying prostrate through the path,

tempting and begging.

We argued over who would go first.

And then there it was, like a bell,

like a salvation, my mother’s voice,

crossing the distance between my home

and this creature, cutting a swath through the air.

The sound of my name.

And I turned and ran, free.

This is the power of names.

But it works the other way too,

when we are older and I call your name,

the word coming together, shaking itself from me.

As you cross the street you

look back for a second.

And I say it again, desperate

and you nod a little but

you keep walking.

Tiny Revolution

In the dream I had last night,
you appeared in the hallway of my old house.

We had not spoken in a year,
just as we have not spoken in a year
in this life.

And I was so thankful to see you.
Relieved, like when you can exhale
after holding your breath for too long.

And I told you that you should have
called and why didn’t you call

but you didn’t speak, as if there was some law against it.

And then later we pulled back my childhood bed,
moved it away from the wall
and there was a fire under it,

just a little smoldering thing,
hot coals like cherries
ready to pop

but also broken doll heads,
finger bones,
dead dogs,
broken glass jars
filled with dying plants,
rabbit fur
bent rusted nails
split wood,
Venus fly traps,
church pamphlets
seashells,
toy guns
a mason jar of dirty water
pens and paper and ink and paint
and hot wet melting crayons

and right then I knew it was a dream
and that in just a moment from now,
I will wake, and we will still be in the midst of this tiny revolution.

Ally Malinenko has been fortunate to have poems and stories published both online and in print. Her most recent collection of poems, Crashing to Earth, is forthcoming from Tainted Coffee Press. She lives in the part of Brooklyn that neither the tour buses nor the hipsters come to.  

in my soil

by Sara Basrai


I was naked in the park today
By the statue of a mounted Polish king,
A triumphant man with bronze swords
Surveying his newfound land
-- A mock castle on Turtle Pond.

I followed his gaze not expecting
My skin and experience to slip away
(I thought he was disappointed)
And make a snail’s spiral
In puddles on the ground,

Or within watery ringlets observe
The Age,
The man,
The child,
(the defining heartbeats of my life) fade away.

In time, I raised my head,
And saw a scarf flicker,
Turquoise within silver lines,
A yellow raincoat bend to sow
A paper beaker fly to cranberry lips
And a dog dart golden on the horizon.

I thought the dog smart,
Knees, elbows, angles pumping
In rain tinged with russet bracken.

It was a little thuggish this sudden nakedness
The timing a little off.

I had lists to make. Anguishes to despair over.
But I told myself, the dog, the scarf
Not to rush the rain.
Not that I was in awe of nature
Or the Polish king;

I was simply in my soil.

Sara Basrai is a former teacher from London who now lives in New York. Her move to the USA inspired her to start writing. Her work appears in The Battered Suitcase, a soon-to-be published anthology published by Vagabondage Press, Smoking Poet, Grey Sparrow Press,  Protestpoem.org, 34th Parallel Magazine, among others. She begins at MFA in September at National University. Besides writing, Sara enjoys reading, painting and exploring the USA with her husband and two young daughters.