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.
Look closely—
part of this poem was written
20-some miles from his home
at a bus-stop in Santa Barbara.
He doesn’t know how
to give voice
to his ambitions,
so he writes half-poems
on napkins
on State Street
and pretends that
stolen toilet paper rolls
are tiny scrolls
and he is a scribe
with nothing to write
but gold.
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.
I’m the unpronounceable something
that lives behind the garden wall.
Something that begins with the letter something.
The something from something for nothing.
I’m really something, or I’m something else –
we can debate the various uncertainties.
We can discuss our purpose, divine a plan.
‘A thing unspecified, a thing unknown’,
the dictionary patiently explains.
‘An amount being stated that isn’t exact’.
Like ‘I love you something terrible’.
Could you ever love me in return?
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pskis Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).
Exiled to a lonely corner, wanting more than letting on
something is wrong with the state of myself,
love as transaction, flowing freely of course
being silently watched, no effort at a smile.
Making the world go round, insolent situation
cutting hands and feet to ribbons in protest,
I don’t care about you anymore, if I ever did
rolling one’s own jelly babies not really my problem.
Serial butterflies galvanise the rotten core,
protected in instances of eventual delivery
home-grown opportunity not a mortal sin
just the run of the day, everything is special.
Principles aside, nothing at a loss.
Breaking through ranks, ass being grass
and me being the lawnmower, catch you out
mutual benefit never hurt anybody.
Instant messages, never mind the duress
the tawdry ambition ascending for the kill
bleeping phones on a constant adventures
transmitting turn-ons, a glorious guilt.
Streetscape for want of a better life,
the passer-by muscles by a hearty congratulations
knowing less than required, plugged-in cartoons
advertising psychosis hidden in a purpose.
Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland. To date, she has published one novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors, with Lapwing Publications in 2010. She has since been published in a variety of print and online journals. These include: The Lake; Seventh Quarry Press; Marble Journal; New Binary Press; Stanzas; Crossways; Ygdrasil; Seventh Quarry; The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet’s Wing, Narrator International, The Galway Review; Poethead and The Evening Echo.
Have you been dreaming much?
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.
victoria
I inhale the pungent ambrosia
the brackenwater of
you deathly loins.
The pulse quickens against
bolts of funeral lace
and you will reach the ecstasy
of the trite.
artemis
I massage algae into stone,
Create histories on your chilly face
melt my muscles to shape your flanks
One moment fluid, the next:
sturdy as a ponderosa pine
I change, but you?
Half a million years ago
you yawned.
insinuated
Your words are dust
Swirling into desert storms.
Your words are sand
Itching underfoot.
Your words are weeds
Choking up my roots.
Yet I know that you need me.
Like a fire that ravages,
Clears the forest land.
I destroy all virgin soil
To let you seep in again.
Moira Murphy is a vocalist, pianist, and songwriter who fronts Oryad, a band that marries metal and opera in a trance-inducing ritual.
south broadway press 