Alessandra is a queer feminist writer and philosopher. She enjoys the finer things in life: chowder, dogs, hooded sweatshirts, wandering on foot for hours on end, and talking in accents. She has a BA from MSU Denver in Creative Writing and Philosophy, has been published in the Metrosphere Arts and Literary Journal, and has been featured on the Denver Orbit podcast. Find more of her work at www.greenworldwriting.com.
Photo: Zhengtao Tang
Memories act as detritus, lettertorn ice
avalanched into my cabin: I stare at the ceiling
for hours, paralyzed by my sleep meds,
by fear, or by the memory of a memory.
Atop the submarine I am rooftop dazzled
by a piercing white sun. I wince at a beauty
that can kill me. We are not seeking a white whale.
We are not seeking anything. We go out to sea,
& we sleep. I have an application around here
somewhere. It reads, Fill in the blank: I function
as a _______. You get the job if you leave it blank.
photo: Thomas Henke
Sam Albala is a poet nestled in the mountains of Colorado. She has a horizon habit and can often be found gobbling up the sky line while babbling about road trips, tea, and anatomical hearts, all with her mouth full of light. To see not-real-life horizons find @keepmindscreative on Instagram. To read more composed words, visit samanthaalbala.contently.com.
The last time I was awake at this hour
You were in my bed
These sheets still smell like you
We both know why I haven’t washed them.
There’s a ghost in my car with his hand on my thigh
Looking away from the road into his eyes
He’s gone before I can kiss him
There is no ritual to rid me of this.
One horrible comfort in all of this mess
Is that there is a spectre on your skin too
They have my hands on your back
My mouth to whisper sweetness in your neck
And eyes that haunt you like mine do.
D.o.t.B. is a Godde that currently lives in the body of K.V. Dionne. Boulder artist, poet, and photographer, they are one of the founders behind Writer’s Block and are current editor in chief of Writer’s Block zines. You can read some of their work in Spit Poet and can look forward to a collaborative poetry book coming out soon. They have many Hawk friends and Crow songs to share! Instagram: @o.macbeth
editor’s note: this poem was an ekphrasis piece in response to a call SBGS put on twitter for poems inspired from the white house’s very grim choice in christmas decorations as seen above.
Before we understood
that hoarding was included
in the Mental Anguish Act
we kept the tapering trees
in the hallway, their needles
abundant and invisible.
Their cones were ampules
of congealing blood
that broke underfoot like ice
in a poem involving death
under arboreal glass.
Like extras who outstay
their welcome in a scene
where a woodsman taps
his wrist for a pulse,
each tree mapped
it’s own trajectory
from seed to being else-
where in the world.
They grew. Their shadows
were cropped and kept
in specimen jars inside
the pockets of our coats.
We gave them names.
In the one-way flight
manifest we hammered
to the wall, we called
each bleeding specimen
to account, then stripped
them to the bark.
Our hoarding healed,
we went like crime
scene cleaners, gloved
and masked into the stains
light leaves like sutures
in the dark.
Anthony Lawrence often tries to extend the metaphor he lives in into prose, but poetry sets snares at every exit and he returns to the broken line, the phantom rhyme, the image with ‘do not revive’ stamped into its skin. He teaches Creative Writing at a university in a town with high levels of humidity, and lives beside a bay in a Queenslander with a painter, a dingo and a kelpie. Twitter: @tide_inspector
I read a Frank O’Hara poem
and ate a cheese sandwich
The apocalypse replaced the sandwich
with a torch
that led me down a dark tunnel
vibrant with the rich fur coat of its odor
Its ragged breath is its own thick body
and it is this body that I follow
Suddenly the apocalypse is gone
and then it is all around me
It has swallowed me and I hang onto its tooth
until my grip slips
and its breathbody carries me
through its esophagus
and deep into its ruins
Erik Fuhrer holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. His poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Crack the Spine, Maudlin House, Ghost City Press, and Cleaver.
early / small nocturnal / to the priesthood /
titular / personal yacht / unexpected death /
early airplanes / wintergreen / flowering plants /
box on percussion / halfway house orchestra /
ships sunk, foundered, grounded or otherwise lost /
space, classroom, gallery, art / surveillance footage /
smoke bomb / refrigerator / corpse / flees
season took home / be used again /
the surrounding mare / the inner walls /
a ghost crater / moonmadness /
the spirit finished / she appeared
photo courtesy of NASA
for three days
I walked to the town where
the monks translated winter
for seven years,
their work crumbled like bricks
even in obscurity –
truths fall
(plucked from the eyes
of our lords)
Bare Ly is the tender gender-fuck your parents never warned you about. They make sad music (Double A Dollar) and host an experimental podcast series called A Soft Mess.
Photo: Also by Bare Ly, @dear_bare
The aspen stand like a cemetery,
upright, gray as ice, bark furred
with white velvet, and their sad
hieroglyphic eyes witness, witness.
The aspen stand straight as the deer
they camouflage, trunks bars
of invisibility. This little stand
is a house of ghosts.
Their twigs stick like fairy-tale fingers.
All their bones are showing,
it is a magic defense. And in each tip,
tight as a heartbeat,
the bud, the knowledge compressed to potency
in each of these desolate soldiers, these angels:
like a sex dream
spring surges in darkness.
Maria Berardi’s work has appeared in local and national magazines and online (13 Magazine, Voca Femina, Mothering, The Opiate, getborn and most recently Twyckenham Notes, Luna Luna, and 8th street publishing guild). Her first collection, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is currently at work on her second (a chapbook, or perhaps not, entitled Pagan). She lives in the Front Range foothills west of Denver at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level .
Her process is one of listening for transmissions from the cosmic radio and trying to catch them on paper before they dissipate: the glimpse, the complicated knowledge.
She may be reached at mariarazberardi@gmail.com.
She Said She Dreamt
we were prisoners together,
standing to the side
while hard men fought battles,
their arterial spray like trajectories
of missiles on computer maps.
I climbed inside her head into the dream &
sniffed permanent bathroom stench
mixed with faux-bleach & burning tissue-
paper smoke off makeshift cigarettes.
It wasn’t real, but as she told her story,
I heard the desk guard shouting, “Lock down!”
I watched the goon squad roll in,
cans of mace for target practice.
I wonder if in the dream I squeezed her hand,
said, “Hold your breath. Forget,”
or if she knew how lucky she was
to dream herself into a place like that,
whereas I, in my age of atrocities,
spent eighteen hundred nights alone
trying in vain to dream myself back out.
Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have
Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra
Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in
North Dakota Quarterly, River Styx, cream city review, and American
Literary Review, among others. He received a fellowship from the West
Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West
Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
south broadway press 