Heads bang and fists are raised in rock ‘n’ roll’s three-fingered salute. The Eagles are ready to soar. Drums beat and guitars churn, bluesy, but not yet blue. Staccato bravado from youth gone wild births rhythms that scare and scar. Dancers sprawl on the floor, soldiers in a war for which they were never armed. […]
Category Archives: Issue 7
What the Walls Heard
Calamity by Matthew Smart
The sound of the TV from the next room reminds him that he should go to bed as should his wife. The sound of the newsfeed gave up hours ago, defaulted to infomercial desperation. She’s probably asleep or else she’s much more interested in new meat grilling technologies than he expected. Last time he checked […]
November Song by Ron Gibson, Jr.
On the edge of me, this light is hard to read when censor marks blight, broken trails disappearing beneath shifting shadows, and I swim, unseen, for the surface calm protects me from me. * On the grand opening of my skin, the world will hear all the unheard. Musicologists will chase down notes like black […]
The Lesson by RL Raymond
If you walk with the wind at your back, your ashes will carry much farther. RL Raymond just tells stories. Through poetry, fiction, painting, and photography, Raymond lives by his motto — A good story is like a well- placed punch: quick, effective, and impossible to ignore.
Desert A Collection by T.L. Krawec
Desert The people reach the desert at noon and try to drink the sand. While it crests like waves in slow undulations it is not water and the people spit it out. It is bad, the children repeat, I will not put it in my mouth. The people are still crossing when the next noon […]
Even Days by Ken Poyner
I took all the qualities that I thought made up my citizenship and gave them to the mermaid I was secretly in love with. She organized them, and began to apply them to rattling the waves and dividing the sea into houses for the finned and houses for the unfinned. She mocked the water and […]
The Detective’s Chair Two Prose Poems by Anne M. Carson
The Detective’s Chair (4) Salvo Montalbano doesn’t think like other men; his mind is lithe, elastic. He sees odour as colour—brownish yellow streaked with fiery red assails him in the sick woman’s room. A manly swoon stops him in his tracks when intuition kicks in. Metaphor is real and lived. Synchronicities appear with the force […]
Trip by C.C. Russell
Outside of us, there were visions—an orange sort of aura over the range. Third sunset since you last slept, your eyes a stranger to themselves. You threw your hands out in a wild sudden gesture, flapped them across the sky; encompassing. “This,” you said. “All of this.” And then you fell silent, the evident depth […]
Spooky Actions at a Distance by Howie Good
1 Because he has been pinned, unpinned, repositioned and pinned again, he thinks he’s turning into a god, and that’s what baffles me and why I choose sleep, hoping to escape from people tattooed with words like “imagine” and “remember,” only to encounter someone laughing for no apparent reason. 2 As the eye continues to […]
Whose Hope Lies in the Ocean by Zachary Bos
やゝ年も暮 (Bashō) ‘Gradually the year drew to its close…’ (trans. Keene) I WE DISEMBARKED AT THE SUBWAY stop closest to the beach. Like ritualists we walked from the underground station into the open air, into the winter seaside sunshine, passing from unimpressive afterlife into the waking world, from tomb to lambent promenade. I said this […]
Tessellation by Santino Prinzi
I want to finish the puzzle but there’s a piece missing. I’ve made my own, trying to force it where it doesn’t belong, bending the cardboard into this shape and that. I put one edge of the piece in my mouth and let my saliva swish and soak. I try again; something’s lacking. I wedge […]
Eh? by Scott Thomas Outlar
One life is all we get, eh? Sweet. That’s all I bargained for when I came here. Got the rough patches out of the way up front in the years when I didn’t know any better. Played five aces once the pot got fat. Holy roller screaming hallelujah in the midnight silhouette. Now it’s a […]
Under the Shade of a Sequoia by Charles L. Crowley
I dug up my time capsule, and then shook hands with my seven-year-old self. Together we looked at old pictures of us—you and me—and were reminded of your sunflower dress … my overalls … and the way we couldn’t smile without showing all of our teeth … I stood there—days ago—brother. Today I fumble with […]
Remission Two Prose Poems by Kyle Hemmings
Remission You’ll recover from her pomegranate lies. You still unpeel at the touch. Tossing in her bed like another stray dog, sweet canine shelter for animals shedding skin. Gluten will not unravel the night. So you stay hungry & speechless. Her meager hand-outs, her breasts that taste slightly vanilla and not-forgetful. She says she heard […]
Two People by Dalton Day
Aubrey Plaza goes through her day & sees two people. One of them is in their car, singing as loudly & badly as they can, using their hand as what Aubrey Plaza assumes to be a microphone. But, after thinking about it, Aubrey Plaza decides that this person is singing into a ghost whose littleness […]
Holding the Ball Two Prose Poems by Keith Nunes
Holding the Ball no one has died around me today, I’m lucky, in this corner of a V-shaped valley aside a mountain death comes by accident or lost cause, rarely by intent, we are moving in the kitchen as though no-one is dying anywhere, she is baking a cake and I’m playing absentmindedly with the […]
Thinking of a Monk by Jefferson Navicky
at the decline of the Ottoman Empire, in some far flung border province, alone, with dogs and images, and who would have recorded testimony of rumors, of theosophy, rivers, moving pictures, women, violins and oddly strung instruments, of enormous open ears and hands, and the whispers of white animals disappearing into the hills. Wondering if, […]
God the Sun by Rachel L. McMullen
The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.” – Carl Sagan There he is, the solar deity. He tips his hat to the evening, and later lets loose a slight, knowing grin when the night can no longer stand its ground. He sits in the morning garden, praising […]
Indie-Pop by Jess Mize
Genuine smiles are like indie songs on the radio. Few and far between. Songs on the radio are like reflected suns. Mirrored discs and metrics bouncing back to the beam. The drums. The drums. The drums. Swelling vibrations that flow along with staccato heartbeats. One can do without anything else excepting music. Music is the […]
A Couple of Fools by Mike Jacobson
Stupor. An exaggeration. Lengthwise it could not be determined, but likewise it was promising. Lightness of touch when appropriate. Half-stoned, he turned to her. As it speeded up, he caught sight of everything out of the corner of his eye. Everything, the totality of what mattered. Matters, to this day. His eye encompasses elephantine figures, […]
Taps by Charles Hayes
Romantic and sympathetic in its genre, a perfect stand in for the cold and the dead that someone, somewhere, must have loved. Some smidgen of peace it may bring and peace it must keep with them that mourn, their hands clasp away from the necks of those who pipe its tune. But the dead are […]
Instagram Poem #10 by Rebecca Gaffron
Another surge. Selfie. Nothing’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Today try coffee cups and kids. Kids and puppies, attention grabbers every time. So this is your life. Another surge. Selfie. Look bone-cut and sexy all at once. Fuck lingering doubt and second thoughts. True love ended. Separation, divorce. So it goes. Another surge. When […]
Say Goodbye ‘Cause I Can’t by Daniel M. Shapiro
Since the smog stole their light, her dog has had no use for eyes. She had sneaked her tools in his chew toy, wrenches rolled on drivers. She told them the urns were Mom and Dad’s ashes. They didn’t check, didn’t see the inner frameworks. In the last days of alliteration and rhyme, she had […]
A Confession (what I want to tell my friends when they ask me why I don’t want to be involved with him romantically)
by Myrtle Yvonne
Spare me the romantic gestures, spare me the cliché love note on a tissue paper, the lame confession on the bathroom wall, the tree trunk with our flamboyant initials carved on it. I don’t want any of it. I don’t want to be involved with him romantically. All I want is our constant enthusiastic exchange […]
Parallel Speed by Sarah A. O'Brien
You taught me to drive with a beat-up Honda Civic and a shit-ton of patience in high school and mall lots. Parallel parking was your favorite; you had me learn the language of the steering wheel, flirting with faultless turns. The whiskey breath barely bothered me, and we’d laugh over the occasional carcass on a […]
I Saw a Little Boy Today by James Santore
I saw a little boy today. Tiny chunks of alabaster and big brown eyes. He was chasing a pigeon on Haverford Avenue. I saw a woman too. Candlelight spirit that shone for that boy alone. She looked at me as if to say, “Do you see this? How cute is this?” I moved on—and passed […]
Boothwyn by Catherine Zickgraf
Sears sent boxes of her grandparents’ new home up the tracks from Dover, Delaware. Men dug a hole, cemented its sides against bugs and dirt. New wood bored in the wall made cellar steps—still stable now as three generations later she surfaces into the living room, warm basket in arms, lasagna in oven, their first […]
Imports by Julianne Neely
1 There are imports right now in your living room. The television has seen things your eyes would melt from. The couches were beaten, dragged, held prisoner of free enterprise. They finally found a home and now you sit on them. Walls move and paint cackles. Watching it is like watching a girl walk up […]
A Good Eye, Kid by Dorian Rolston
Each night before tucking himself into bed and feeling for the shudder and push- off of dreaming, he stood tall as he could, puffed out and barefoot, in front of the mirror, and looked: looked at the wet-glass surface over his eyes, looked at the water-color white and blue and yellow and orange spread together […]
The Ghost of Jesse James or Jack Johnson? by David Spicer
I hear noise from the attic. This happens at night when I’m in a dreamlike state. I credit the sounds to mice, squirrels, or raccoons. I hope there aren’t any, but the noises grow louder. Two dark mornings ago my wife and I awoke when the windows in our bedroom shook. Somebody was banging against […]
The Things I Know about Sex A prose poem for my daughter
by Tina Francis
My daughter, lithe and teenage with her finger on the pulse, has begun trying to fathom what I know about sex. Her expectations are low. But I jump into the waters of advice where they seem most clear: it’s better if you like the person, I say. Which is good advice, unquestionably, in a general […]
Satsuma Oranges by Glen Sorestad
Enroute from Houma to New Orleans we spot a roadside stand selling Satsuma oranges, so I pull over, stop the vehicle, get out to stretch my legs and have a look. I say to the woman vendor, I didn’t know you grew Satsumas here. Her eyebrows shoot skyward; her expression says: Did you drop in […]
When by Nooks Krannie
When he lightly touched the wool under her jaw, she froze. She knew what this meant, so she traced his hand carefully along her jaw line. ‘I can’t hide anything from you, nothing, just like a jellyfish that holds a garden of every known lick, in perfect harmony, inside it’s stomach, trussed to corals in […]