and when you pull over, you’re still screaming,
hands held shaking in front of you like the skin
of them must not be real. my body hurled into
your windshield like mid-autumn hailstorm. my body
leaves streaks of blood and feathers and blindsided
desecration. my body the railroad tracks and
the trainwreck. the punching bag and the percussion
instrument. the pigeon queen, at once both sickness
and softness. you’re stumbling out of your vehicle,
sobs chiming from your throat. you see from
far away a mash of gray and white and red and bone.
tell yourself you can look at me up close. the carnage,
and the tenderness vomited from its mouth. there is
a strange grief inside you and you don’t know how
to free it from your ribs. there was a grief inside me,
and it spills an ocean on this asphalt.
Wanda Deglane is a night-blooming desert flower from Arizona. She is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants and attends Arizona State University. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming from Rust + Moth, Glass Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, and Yes Poetry, among other lovely places. Wanda is the author of Rainlily (2018), Lady Saturn (Rhythm & Bones, 2019), Venus in Bloom (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and Bittersweet (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019).
I ask a friend if she can remember the last time that the stars and moon hatched from a golden egg. She doesn’t answer straightaway, just tucks a stray comma of hair back behind her ear. Because it’s one in the morning, the darkness outside is more like a solid than a liquid or a gas. I’m suddenly really tired of struggling to stay awake. The answer comes later, when I read in the paper that they sliced open a dead whale that had washed ashore and found in its belly plastic cups, plastic bottles, plastic bags, and two flip-flops.
Howie Good is the author of The Titanic Sails at Dawn (Alien Buddha Press, 2019)
Dead roots from an infertile farmland
wither all around her
She is the only sprouting thing for miles
in this muted abandoned wood
Her ripening lips wish for stained glass,
butter, and a pretty dress
She left her heart in an established
country across the sea, unwilling
pilgrim bound by a parent’s faith
She shivers as an outcast, unsnared traps
leave her stomach broken, the whisper of
the dark side growing louder. Kill the roots,
they say. Kill the roots.
December Lace is a former professional wrestler and pinup model from Chicago. She has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Molotov Cocktail, Pussy Magic Lit, The Cabinet of Heed,Awkward Mermaid, Vamp Cat, and Rhythm & Bones YANYR Anthology, among others. She loves Batman, burlesque, cats, and horror movies.
She was summer,
covered in pinks & oranges,
& at sunrise she gave me a ring.
She took me north, & summer turned
into fall. She had mentioned her love
for sleep, so I told her she could stay
with me, but she grew thorns of yellows
& wrapped me in chains,
just in time for winter. The snow cleared up
the fog as I fought for spring,
though I soon found she didn’t want
the key. Sometimes I still wonder
if she is still in the snow, but I know
she had a key of her own.
Bio: Dani is a freshman in high school from Parker, Colorado. This is her first published poem.
I.
He said that we became one under the sun sipping arizona tea,
chasing the heather reeds and marrying ourselves off to the ships as they sail into the indigo silk.
I saw our symphony in wearing each other’s clothes and getting lost in each other’s hair,
swinging under the pale moonlight on a child’s castle we wish we had known when we were young.
I suppose time saw us in watching as your pink and my green paint the sky every night from our tattered windowsill covered in lyrics and terracotta children,
you laying in the empty bathtub while i was singing about a place we’d never been and an adventure we’d never had
It doesn’t matter, because we agree that most of all it happened through spending hours in silence making faces and laughing at the things we love most.
II.
You and I were too busy getting lost in each others’ angelic faces
brightening and rising and sinking as we lay underneath the water damaged ceiling
spilling paint on the unfinished kitchen floor and dancing in the puddles left behind
holding a cigarette neither of us will ever smoke
To smell the scent of linens and strawberry fields and sweat
To regret glancing at your photograph lined walls
To feel the scraps brushing against my thigh as I try to sleep
To miss chasing geese in the park under a grey sky
To notice a love that stood unscathed by the courtney and kurt costumes hanging in our closet
But by the time we did
It was too late for us.
III.
I remember dancing on one another’s toes because of our four left feet
crying when we laugh
finding an old trunk of fancy ladies’ clothes and dressing up for poptarts and tea
that feeling that one moment is never enough
dreams of each other we never talk about but hold so close
But I forgot about the buttercups falling into your eyes
sharing sunglasses and the color pink
freckles dusting our self expression
I suppose I don’t regret filming our home movies on vhs’s even though we could use something more modern
because otherwise I never would have watched these.
IV.
I was always annoyed by those glasses you stole from your dad that always fall onto your fairy-nose
the memorial for michael jackson in the corner of your bedroom
socks that hang off your toes
But even still I can never comprehend why you always smelled like the forest even though you never go outside
the dinosaur that your little brother left for me
Or our obsession with eighties cereal commercials
So I’ll focus on the day we sat on the edge of the bridge and threw petals at the ocean
writing songs together about dead celebrities
and feeling like we are one and pining over the time we missed before we met
because those times are enough
to make me miss you.
Bio: Sophia Jones is an artist, writer, musician an collector of memories. She has spent her childhood chasing imaginary friends and dreams, and in return has written many tales and poems mimicking the euphoric feeling of imagination. She is currently studying to become an art therapist, and aspires to someday publish a full collection of poetry, melodies, and scraps of inspiration found in the glances between strangers.
Nobody is loading a shotgun because
the hardware store has accused nobody
of illegal dumping. The cul de sac
is absent of a shape tearing beer cans
in half, a voice swaddled to empty lung
by a winter night,
nobody screaming is this what you want is this what you want
The airedale terrier across the alley
no longer labors in breathing.
Most passerbys begin to wave back,
say to the new neighbor, once there was a ghost here. For real. I saw it there. And there.
The rumor is that nobody would sit motionless
in a black sedan overnight during the freeze,
open french doors in the morning as if
they were clearing brush from a trail,
and walk their knife around the block.
The mountain hemlock that lined the sidewalk
didn’t hurt nobody, but nobody blamed them anyway.
The houses shawled in yellows and pinks
didn’t hurt nobody, but nobody haunted them anyway.
The basement nobody lived in was a mausoleum
the size of a father. The good man who used to live
there was smothered in his sleep during the wildfires.
Some say he lives again, drinks iced tea while mowing,
always looks like he wants to apologize to strangers.
He rolls the garbage out, stands there, listens
to the neighbors walking up and down the stairs.
DIY Wishing Machine
BY NATE FISHER
Set aside several empty drawers,
so many of those little coffins,
a whole chest of them.
Unscrew a pair of cymbals from that drum kit
you never bothered learning to play.
The wiring won’t have to be up to code,
but blockade your front door before proceeding.
Fill drawers with those letters and photographs
you refuse to throw away. Contemplate
an eventual stillness for every hand
responsible for making them. Place
drawers stacked inside a dark closet
to let them breathe. Attach positive terminal
to top cymbal, negative to bottom.
Find a cassette recorder that hasn’t
been touched for at least twenty years,
and begin recording over whatever tape
is inside without reviewing it first.
Form a wired connection as follows:
cymbals to recorder to closet.
Lie flat, place head between two cymbals.
Concentrate on the most hidden of all things.
Invisible thing. Colorless thing. Allow
no harshness of the face. Raise your right hand,
and begin the first stroke of an autopsy.
Donate to a tax-deductible charity organization.
Raise your left and build a palace of mirrors.
Do not be alarmed if you hear the sound
of an engine turning over, or a quarry
full of dynamite. There, that point of light,
be distracted by it instead. Your memory
will snow. Watch your footing. One thing
and another are now colored things.
You can now allow yourself to be afraid.
Your liver is failing. Your children will
have a twenty-five percent chance of being born
with a rare congenital disorder. Nobody will ever
raise a toast to you again. Feel this sink in
and harden into the trunk of the body, you beautiful
son of a gun. Goddamn, you’re looking so fine,
you have any plans tonight, sweetness?
Do not turn yourself down or stand yourself up.
Politely reschedule if necessary. Raise
your left leg; make note of the prophecy
that arrives to mind later. Raise your right,
and ignore this instruction. Something’s here
or just beginning to hear. Thinking thing.
Wishing thing. Marry your genitals to beauty.
Keep in time with the lub-lub, lub-lub that now
heaves into the cymbals. Dwell here. Move everything
from your apartment into this space. Tidy up.
Wait for a shortness of breath, and then speak.
Speaking to the Lady of the Lake at the Koi Pond in Moscow City Park, Idaho (2:30 AM)
BY NATE FISHER
Moths can smell the kind of drunk that likes
to wander
through the baking streetlamps
and the figure rising from the water
says lend me a mirror
i say no because you’re going to say
this is a dead mother thing
like every other dead mother
thing i fill drawers with: binoculars,
pocket magnifying glass from a sewing kit,
widowed spectacles; which, if you wear,
do feel removed somehow
says let me initiate your sojourn or whatever it is you need women to do
i say i’m not looking for healing
i’m not going to try and heal you
no offense
says none taken
i say my secrets are limited to
knowing the moths must be
cold tonight and
it’s slowing them down.
i’m
slowed down.
says you make jokes in the morning
i say yeah
says you’re very intent on staying out of that drawer
i say stranger things are happening
says tell me about it
and brushes her hair with a heron’s beak
i think about cold wings going colder
and my favorite doorways
the ones i had to stop in
to reach back, take the temperature
of the threshold
i say do you mind if i crash here
says i want to hear a joke in the morning
i say me too
and lean into my coat collar
drifting, but thinking
a moth walks into a bar
and can smell the wander on itself.
Nat(e) Fisher is a poet, musician, and educator from rural southern Illinois. He graduated with his MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho-Moscow in 2016 and currently teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Women transform into wolves
and drink Shiraz made from smoke
and blackberries. They cut red
meat close to the bone, untie the forgotten,
strong warriors, burn gentle wild fires
and spread angel bait around before laying
down to sleep. They shelter the young
females from being stunned and eaten
and make them strong. Women
run with wolves and follow
a path straight to their soul
where their spirit connects
and nurtures the earth. With their souls
they listen to their mission
story. They write it
bone against bone, braid it
into hair, intermingle it into their war
cries rippling gentle and stern
from this wild, endangered species
Bio: Lisa is the 2015 State of Illinois Emerging Writer of poetry. Currently, she is a lecturer of English composition at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and teaches creative writing at Lindenwood University Belleville-Illinois. Lisa is the “name giver” of the River Bluff Review journal. She is published in journals such as OVS-Organs of Voice & Speech, River Bluff Review, and Rhino.
On the pier at Hawley Arm,
their legs hanging over the edge,
the sisters watch a storm
punch its way from the west.
As the bruised clouds spread,
the air, thick and woolen all day,
shifts and trembles. The lake
blackens in response, while gators,
like logs, sink beneath the surface,
ripples vanishing almost instantly.
A pelican on a cypress stump
takes fright, takes flight, its white
feathers a momentary erasure
of the sky’s embittered indigo.
The sisters ought to go in; a storm
like that can bludgeon a body with hail
faster than they can run the quarter-
mile to the house, but they know
what they will find there: broken hearts,
broken hearts, faded magnolias.
A Syllable, a Dove
A dove drops from your mouth,
round and fat at my feet.
I pick it up, my hands a bowl
for its milk-white body;
it trembles but does not flinch
its gaze. Shell-pink beak sings
of what you could never speak:
your wish to find a sky
unspooling with clouds
of loss, of wind crystal time,
of desire that pelts like sleet.
Song complete, the dove lifts
into the air: your voice on wings,
Goodbye falling, a forgotten feather.
Proverb
In my dream, a bride visits
a blue crystal rotunda, where
an elephant lives in sequins and silks.
If it looks at her with its left eye,
her marriage will be happy,
but only as long as the reach
of wild lemongrass. If it stares
with its right, the couple’s first
thousand days will be as the endless
mangrove, thick with an underscrub
of despair. But should it fix her
squarely with both eyes, blessings
will fall like a shower of silver
rupees on the bride and groom
till they drown, drown—
and the elephant drowns, to bestow such joy.
JCReilly writes across genres and has received Pushcart and Wigleaf nominations for her work. She lives with three cats, one of whom is a Communist. When she isn’t writing, she plays tennis or works on improving her Italian. Follow her @aishatonu on Twitter or jc.reilly on Instagram.
I am from a lie
From a sad truth that turned into a lie
I am from a place of sadness and depression
I am from a rose that cuts and tears your flesh
I am from a tree of death and darkness
From hell itself
I am from the sex gone wrong
From a waste of time and slavery
I’m from a trench that was dug for me
I’m from Hawaii. A beautiful place
From Hawaii, and a state of regret
From a mother that was a teen
I’m from a sex addict
From a woman wanting to be an owner
Bio: Nicki Quinn is an idea. The main thing to know is that she seems to be one thing but sometimes is another. It all depends on the day, mood, and time.
south broadway press 