Come now, circle cut in dirt
finger twist & bend cup palebreath
dreams command
snakes, sing
sultry song-tissue & fissured ……………………………………memory
descend, you who taught me cruelty
of blindness stumbling moonless & concussed
by nightforest, your terror- dipped step switches
through blades barefoot ……………………………………violet eyed
after you I welcome the visitations
yes, they become me
seizure of warmth
damp blackness these things ……………………………………a kindness
why do I trust the future
you’ve pinched into your dirty palms
divining rod pressed to my mind
somewhere blood twists uproot a child
awakens, nightforaged visions mangling her
chaste memories of land, of home and the size ……………………………………of herself within
do you remember the sun? you ask
your hands open
and close like mothwings
my only knowledge in the dark ……………………………………you love them to be so
each night I hear myself say no
no, I cannot remember ……………………………………things like this
Patricia McCrystal is a published poet and fiction writer from Denver, Colorado. She’s currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program. She believes she was followed by a poltergeist from ages 10-24. She is sad to see it go.
my ventriLoquIST diEd, but i kept right oN talking.
i know you’re sorry for my loss. HEy, want to Know
what’s on the other side? come up here and whisper in my wooden ear
to your dead santa claus. ask that stIff I caLLED a boss.
recite a wish list for the dead ventriloquist.
it’ll be a job interview gone wrong. you’ll see.
hear the dead head Man uncomfortably rEPLy to all my quEries.
whAt a riot. talk about having the bosS on the ropEs!
see, I’ll remiNd him he’s past his expiration date,
as he awards me employee oF the year.
too bad nO one caRes about his opinion. the Man’s deceased.
and you—like THE POLICE, you Keep askiNg questIons
about your FatE, If there’s an aFterlIFe, a heaven
where good boys aND girls go. but IT’s immaterial.
and i’m already dead. how the hell should I know?
Matt Schumacher’s poetry collections include Spilling the Moon, favorite maritime drinking songs of the miraculous alcoholics, and A Missing Suspiria de Profundis, forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press. He serves as managing editor of the New Fabulist journal Phantom Drift, and lives near a Paul Bunyan statue in Portland, Oregon.
he pressed seed to soil,
convinced that force could yield to growth.
the earth does not spit out
the beginning of your becoming.
for this, she is a true mother.
nurturing despite herself,
a sacrifice you are indebted to.
you know
the burden of a seedling
in tough soil. of plants
born in desert sand.
you know
what it’s like to grow
in a hostile womb,
suspicious of all things
padded for protection.
you are born
when the sun is at its height
cruel and unforgiving in exposure
of the elements.
your mother
tries to shade you,
casting shadows
you conjure when evoking
your father, an abandoned wind
lining the crowns of trees.
he speaks in metaphors
and you respond with poetry.
but language eludes you,
a longing lingers between
tongue and desire.
you search for roots
the potential of recognition
ravages
your family’s vines
concealing
the conception
of the first rejection.
the initial fortification
of want without resolve.
teetering on
a petrified foundation,
the past is porous
and swelling with decay.
but instead of dying takes
another form. molded
in stone, a fossil
imbued with traces
of recorded history.
Cassidy Scanlon is a queer writer, Capricorn, and astrologer who received her BFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Her work has been featured in L’Éphémère Review, Loaf Mag, and WITCH. She writes about astrology on her blog Mercurial Musings and is a regular contributor to rose quartz magazine. You can follow her on Twitter @sassidysucklon.
• Converse on a wide variety of topics
• Share music she’s never heard before but likes
• Be physically close • Challenge her, without conflict • Have similar outdoor interests • Love nature • Notice rocks • Be quick-witted • Be offbeat • Keep your mind open • Be intelligent • Care about things • Give • Have patience with her children • Be the keeper of more than one talent • Be thoughtful • Be intuitive (to a fault) • Be sensual • Make her laugh • Have bright eyes
August 2010: They say that the brain doesn’t stop developing until mid-twenties, even early thirties. Guess that means I meet her at a crucial point. Twenty-four. I tell her twenty-five; my birthday just around the corner. She’s eleven years my senior and a lesson in forced autonomy. I have her and I don’t. She asks if I see my future full of options and I say yes: multiple paths yet unknown. To be settled down is her dream and I lose myself in it.
Lately everything is a little bit more than it seems. Lost in a book of a back-mountain man who builds his stasis from the wood of trees much like the ones that are burning to the ground as I speak. Maybe it’s a little bit timely, maybe it’s a little bit telling: the winds that raged that Labor Day when we trailed behind a group in the woods, crossing paths with children hunkered down under backpacks, on our way to an inlet that led you and I to our private rocks of contemplation. And tonight, we can’t even talk over the winds so I hold her against me, against the porch pillar, letting passersby revel in our puzzle pieces.
Dear T,
I know I gave birth to you. You wilted with your wife and said you revived my body, the way Maria did mine. But I have seen how when a body is resurrected, a war can begin inside. These disorienting dilemmas have a way of upending lives. Your former life was a carefully set table overturned in rage. I knew our life together might meet the same end. Nevertheless, I persisted.
The thought just barely creeps in. It says, we can make it outside my dreams. Her eyes are reckless windows that lead directly to her soul without passing ‘go,’ without collecting two hundred dollars; precisely why I always look away. Our very separate bodies ached together, woman who oh-so-frankly called me out on the speed with which I fell. Tempted to say: told you so or oh, how the tables have turned.
Valentine’s Day, 2011: I rent us a room at a quaint bed and breakfast in a mountain town, fill it to overflowing with candles, lie my guitar across the bed like a naked woman. After we have dinner I bring her there. I am shy. I sing and play for her every song that has shaken us. We consume one another the rest of the night. Blood everywhere. It’s either love or death to the housekeep in the morning. Surprised they don’t call the police. The next day, she vanishes.
Dear T,
Who are our first lovers if not our mothers? Your disappearing act was familiar to me. You were familiar to me. You were my home insofar as you were like my mother.
Baby Duck Syndrome:
Absence on loop.
A scratched compact disc.
Unable to advance.
Insane in love.
Insane in war.
Maybe the possibility that we could heal our respective mommy-traumas is what held us together for so long. In the meantime, we loved the outdoors and creating things with our four hands.
December 21, 2011: We live together now. I promised her before I moved in that I wouldn’t drink.
She strands me at a billiards bar in a suburban strip mall. She rents herself a room, over an hour into the mountains and makes her angry getaway. Her disappearing act is familiar to me. I fill my bloodstream to overflowing with beer by midnight, take a taxi home, find her reservation in her email inbox. I decide to chase her down, guitar in my backseat, and serenade her back into my arms.
A couple close calls: my passenger door and the guardrail, my sideview mirror and the median. A couple of empties thrown through my open window into the dark. A couple hundred shards of glass on the snowy highway. A couple of good samaritans. A couple 911 calls. A couple of cop cars. A couple of blows: a couple tenths of a milligram per deciliter away from a coma. A couple of hands in handcuffs. A couple of mugshots. A couple hours sobbing. A couple hours sleeping. A couple hot showers in between the couple hours of sleeping. A couple of other women cry aloud in the beds around mine. A couple bus tokens the next morning. A couple miles to walk back to our home without my socks, short-sleeved in a couple feet of snow. A couple days until Christmas, a couple dissolving.
Dear T,
Thank you, oh and fuck you, for letting me back in a few months later. I became the third or fourth mother to your children for a second time. You’ve really gotta work on your boundaries. We were a five year love affair. Drama all the time. Maybe we were caught up in the passion we had lost. We fought about something everysingleday for two years. A zucchini flower. A credit card. Any snide remark. Any crooked look. The childrens’ bedtime. What to have for dinner. Who will cook dinner. Who appreciates who less. That thing I did two years ago. Which therapist we should hire.
January 1, 2015: She says get your shit and get the fuck out by 8pm or I will call the police. My blood turns to battery acid and my eye levees burst. I get out. Downtown, center of the city, my friend Chad helps me across his street, up the stairs, into and out from the elevator, down the hall, into his open-air spare bedroom, and back again about fifteen times. I am moving out, maybe moving on, but my identity is still T and the kids. They’re everything. People often ask why a battered wife won’t leave her abuser. I understand now. It becomes the only thing of everything you know. Probably of everything you’ve known since you were a child. Familiar may not be healthy but it’s expected. Ani Difranco sings privilege is a headache that you don’t know you don’t have. Read that again. Let it sink in. I guess in my case it’s: abuse is a headache you have always had and so you didn’t know you could exist without it. And I won’t know for another two years.
Dear T,
Fuck you for begging me back nearly six months later. And what of the in-between? The only true thing you ever said of me: you didn’t want a lover, you wanted a mother. I think you knew my weakness. Maybe you didn’t want to disassemble another household. I almost said family, you didn’t want to disassemble another family, but you’d put me on a par with your children and when one sibling moves away, the family itself doesn’t dissolve. But the household changes. Your household changed, drastically, the third time in five years. I demanded couples therapy if I were to set foot back in your house. You told me you’d do anything to make this work. Why then, in our therapist’s office, did his nearly-gaping mouth betray his neutrality? I sat tight against the armrest, swollen eyes staring off at some object in the room. He coached you through what it would sound like to validate another human’s feelings. You kept up the questions about whether or not my particular feeling really had validity. That’s not the point. It’s not about right or wrong, feelings aren’t right or wrong. All feelings are valid because they are just that: feelings.’
val·i·date /ˈvaləˌdāt/ (verb):
check or prove the validity or accuracy of (something).
demonstrate or support the truth or value of.
synonyms: prove, give proof of, show to be true, give substance to; uphold, support, back up, bear out, justify, vindicate, substantiate, corroborate, verify, demonstrate, authenticate, confirm, endorse, give credence to, lend weight to; vouch for, attest to, testify to, stand by, bear witness to
It’s as though you thought that to say I hear you, meant you’d convict yourself. Of what, though? It’s the only time I ever walked out of a therapy session in my life.
My anger is so thick I can’t cry. I go through the house reclaiming all of my belongings, again – if it fits in my car, it’s going with me. I slam the hatchback so hard on this part of my life that it echoes through the cul-de-sacs. I slam my car door just as hard. The dead bird in the bush comes back to life, my hampered voice fills my mouth again, the first time since thirteen. This is it: the moment where I take up all of my pain and resentment. Like so many knick-knacks from my past, I hurl the abandonment and invisibility into my literal and metaphorical car and get the fuck out because dammit I deserve better.
Chris Moore is an elementary school teacher and poet-turned-essayist, residing in the Denver Metro area. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction in the Mile High MFA Program at Regis University. Her work has been featured in the 2018 Punch Drunk Press Anthology, Naropa’s 2019 Vagina Monologues Zine, and Allegory Ridge Magazine.
I’m left to that resonance of your last knock that ping pongs around my apartment like an invisible pinball.
I’m left to the vibrations like our hands intertwined on the keys of a piano pressed down hard with our feet on two pedals, letting our love ring long and loud but slowly dying down like a sick old dog.
I’m left to wonder if I still hear anything and at what point does living in memory become a madness.
A necklace, a gift, left to sleep in the bottom of a box.
Who’s to say that I’d wear it as a noose and not as the physical amalgamation of that song that comes on and transports you through time?
When we set things down to not carry them any longer, is it to forget or because they are already always there?
I look in the mirror as I wrap your necklace around my neck and watch as it sinks into my skin.
I hear a knock on my door but I don’t know if I’m home or not to answer it.
a stork family craned their neck
the plywood marsh was salt ringed
home never made me a man
we were pushing dirt in jumping run
a wasp was dissected by a law degree
T was in a fight with everyone he knew
the world needed mercy like a canteen of piss
G was possessed by a bobcat
and only a shotgun could end it
he made more money in county
chirping like a pigeon to melanoma frogs
the jungle was a mine of pvc glue
positive energy keeps bleeding out
the circle k in jacksonville has suboxone for cheap
G turned cigarettes into a cockroach
his father’s casket was made of clay
the holes in my jeans were leaking gasoline
my stomach was a power station
we lived in a dirt dobber’s footprint
each breath screamed i miss you mama
the kioti diesel is an adequate revenge
i wanted to drown the sun in birthday balloons
i wanted to be just like the biggest disease
the swamp sold discount cilantro
my baby stomach pulled a vanishing act
T could make anything potable
there is nothing good worth saying
a spider bite is a kind of art
landscape is the only necessity
i can’t wait to disappear
Jesica Carson Davis is a poet and technical writer originally from Chicago, now living in Denver after several decades of travel. Her work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Zone 3, Columbia Poetry Review, Stoneboat, Storm Cellar, and other places. Jesica is an Associate Editor for Inverted Syntax literary journal, studied poetry at the University of Illinois (as well as The New School, NYU, and Poets House), was the final Alice Maxine Bowie Fellow at Lighthouse Writers Workshop (2016-2017), and won the Tarantula Prize for Poetry (Pilgrimage Press, 2018). Currently, she’s working on several poetry manuscripts and an ongoing project making poemboxes, which sculpturally interpret her words.
When I was a boy I learned
not to cry. I don’t know how.
I needed a wall, so I built one.
It was easy. Later I learned
that you can’t tell everyone
who you are. There are shapes
to fit in public places. Two walls
with a door. They told me
I shouldn’t sound so smart
if I wanted to make friends. You
have to drink, you have to have
fun. Four walls with a roof.
When I went out, I left myself
inside. I wore whatever costume
was expected of me. It was easy.
I learned to hide my anxiety, to
play parts. Bolts on the windows,
the shades drawn. What was
crying like again? I am a social
butterfly. I am a chameleon.
You will never see me bleed.
You will never feel the bruises
in my ribs. You will never even
make it to the front door.
Memory Rewritten According to the Way I Wish It Happened
Manhattan drives 18 hours through the night
from California to see me. I ask what’s wrong
and she tells me. She tells me everything.
We open to each other like doorways. We kiss
and the last two years melt away. It’s like
she never left. When we make love, our problems
don’t follow us into bed. There is no fear in
either of us, no hesitation. We wrap like vines
around each other’s trunks. We fall asleep.
The next day, we walk around the lake. She says
she never stopped loving me. She’s sorry and
so am I. If only we had been braver, if we hadn’t
run so far. That night we cook together and
the silence is so full of her eyes and lips that
I could die right now. “You don’t have to leave,”
I say. “Stay one more night.” She says, “Okay.”
Erasure of a Depressing Poem to Reverse Its Effects
Depression Poem
Every morning I wake up to an empty bed, feeling rejected by the night before.
Every minute is a fresh heartbreak,
every sunrise an opportunity to burn.
It takes most of the day for me to feel human again. My body whole,
my mind in its right boxes. But by then
it’s bedtime, and I lay down naked, alone, in the darkest dark I can
Eric Raanan Fischman is the incredible changing man. By the time you read this, he could be a bird, or an alligator. A faculty member at the Beyond Academia Free Skool, his work has appeared in the Boulder Weekly, Bombay Gin, and in the recent Punch Drunk Poetry Anthology. His first book, “Mordy Gets Enlightened,” was published through The Little Door at Lunamopolis in 2017. He is probably a chimney right now, but he might be a caterpillar, or a crane. He might be dust.
i
want
to
feed
this
skin
to
the
wind
on
a
rooftop
&
sit
silently
kicking
my
bone
legs
over
the
ledge
in
the
moonlight
Rob Plath is a writer from New York. He has published 21 books over the last 25 years. He’s most known for his monster collection A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY (epic rites press). He lives alone w/ his cat & stays out of trouble. See more of his work at www.robplath.com
He pissed his cornflake juice
in the expensive of the hallway belonging
to the soap opera queen.
From the din of the kitchen,
people wearing last year’s orgasm
tossed glances like stones at his wet head.
Awful faces hanging on fangs—
pancake make-do and sideburns stitched
to a general sense of pointiness—in a place
where the winged quality-of-experience police
have no jurisdiction.
But he had to go and do it,
he opened his desert flower onto
the auctionyard of seized cars.
His friends said:
“We’re your friends
and we’re not your friends,
we can never leave
but we’ll see you later,
okay?”
Anyway, it was little miss
whoever’s whatever birthday
and she spent all day getting into those pants
and men appoint themselves
bouncers in stripclubs as we speak
so maybe you better lower your tone
in regard to the birthday girl and Ms. Nose.
But won’t shut up, he threw a moist box
at Toby the BMX-racer’s head,
the crowd is ready to open into him
with its toddler teeth, and Cody
and the boys’re goin to turn
that sky inside out
and make a closet of bruises.
Colin Dodds is a writer with several novels and books of poetry to his name. He grew up in Massachusetts and lived in California briefly, before finishing his education in New York City. Since then, he’s made his living as a journalist, editor, copywriter and video producer. Over the last seven years, his writing has appeared in more than three hundred publications including Gothamist, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Washington Post, and praised by luminaries including David Berman and Norman Mailer. His poetry collection Spokes of an Uneven Wheel was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in 2018. Colin also writes screenplays, has directed a short film, and built a twelve-foot-high pyramid out of PVC pipe, plywood and zip ties. One time, he rode his bicycle a hundred miles in a day. He lives in New York City, with his wife and daughter. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.
south broadway press 