Tag: society

healing projected – ghost #11

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mirror 11

Famous romance novelist Nicholas Sparks once wrote,
“The emotion that can break your heart
is sometimes the very one that heals it…”

As cliche as it sounds,

I no longer believe that falling in love is going to save us,
not from ourselves and not from the inevitable storm ahead.
The clouds have been gathering over head for months now,
I chose to act like the sun was always coming back out,

The very idea that the love we share is both destroying me
and keeping me alive is hedonistic at best.
I’m no weather man but it seems to be raining red flags now,

we’ve been dancing in the streets begging for more

I gain unconscious pleasure from the pain of losing you
over and over again to the flood,
being wounded has it’s perks, after all,
I looked much the same when you found me right?

We’re just a shitty love story turned scratched vinyl record,
we can’t stop pulling the plastic back beneath our fingers

to replay the ending,

supposedly well written fantasy either
ends in happily ever after or tragedy,
and this looks more like self fulfilling prophecy.

They never mentioned fairy tales going awry at the
drop of a dime and the distressed left in the dark forest
waiting for the half slain monster,
I…I mean the prince…to swallow her whole.

I’m not convinced this model of love is worth the river running
out from under my bedroom door, worth continuing to write about,
not convinced that there will ever be an emotional payout for chasing someone who makes their living on running away.

The emotion that was made to break my heart is
the inner conflict of selfish and selfless spinning
a whirlpool depression in my chest because no one
will never be able to love you well enough to
save you from your homegrown impending doom complex.

Lead me to where this tornado begins to heal me…

It is difficult to wield my impatience silently,
analyzing the way my body detoxes you out of me
pores and ducts compiling the poisons you left
for examination,
minerals inside to extract so that
I may not forget

mental stamina halted by the crucial processing
healing is cyclical and having anxiety can alter
it’s trajectory a little but this self served circle will be completed

disguising survival as self love for the sake of saving face
while i take a second tour of the stages of grief in no
particular order, reliving my traumas like movie trailers
saved them for a dreary day such as this,

seek therapy as if I still believe someone out there has
the answers, get wasted once in a while and remember
why hopelessness is dangerous,

Can only see it when I’m bruised and
buried under it.

I find myself inspired by my loneliness,
supported only by my poetry,

ugly crying when I wake up in the same bad dream
can’t let the paranoias get the best of me, I am
letting go of what used to be
in one massive energetic release,

my aching body hoarding feelings
because that is how it is used to gaining control,

not this time, I am obsessing over my delusions
trying desperately to make them real, not this time

Naivety can in fact be cured but
using another human to witness your own healing
is a manipulation with no antidote hiding inside,
the results come out incoherent anyway

You have been alive 99 days longer than I have
With that extra time I expect you to be 99 days wiser
than I am, expect you to value your time a little more

But we all work at our own pace
and I’ve seen you pace a lot of circles into the floor
there are probably more in your future

I hope they look so much like break dancing
you throw windmills to settle the score with yourself
hope you find your answers in the flow

and start asking harder questions

The things you love the most in
the world can still be hard work,
in fact maybe they should be

Someday we will both get better at
paving our own way so that the labor
feels more like playing with your best friend

Until then we keep pulling each other’s hair out
strand by strand and catching fingers in every slammed door
this love is not the safety net that we planned for

I lose my balance every other step now

We have been crawling in and out of each other for
250 days without truly ceasing, what a polluted
cesspool of love we created to keep feeding each other our lies.

Are you still hungry? I could have just one more bite.
Spoon feed me all the reasons the wounds are still open.
Give it to me straight, what is the diagnosis?

Will the PTSD control the remainder of me
that you have not claimed as marionette parts?

We have not been on the same page since you
started skipping ahead to see whats next,
and ripping out chapters at random.

What would a romance novelist do to
heal them self from the inevitable?

Are we really just waiting around
for the dawn of the next cycle,
the point where the familiar emotion
fills us up with enough smoke and
to send out another beacon of hope?

SBGS December

photo: Noah Buscher

three poems // sam pink

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3

MY CARTOON

BY SAM PINK

Turning a crank

on the side of my head

& shooting diamonds

out of my eyes

into your face

where they explode

with little dinging sounds.

You’re in my cartoon now

honey.

JUST NO

BY SAM PINK

Sometimes

when I try to understand

where someone is coming from

it feels like

doing a math problem

& coming up with an answer

that’s just

the word ‘no.’

TOO BEAUTIFUL

BY SAM PINK

I wonder

how soon

is too soon

to go downstairs

& ask my neighbor

to take down her windchimes

because the songs they make

are just

too beautiful

Sam Pink is the author of books. He’s a painter too. Twitter @sampinkisalive.  Instagram @sam_pink_art

Photography: @florviadana

 

a wink may be the same as a nod to a blind man, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to lend you his credit cards to get a bunch of new spongebob squarepants tattoos unless you’ve got some pretty serious collateral – david s atkinson

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raw pixel

“The world ended today,” Carl told me as he sat down to watch TV.

“What?! How?”

“Dunno.” He cracked a beer. “Everybody was talking about it after the staff meeting, but I didn’t listen too close. Didn’t seem important.”

I sat up on the couch. “How could it not be important? It’s the end of the world!”

“Well,” he said, considering, “it doesn’t seem to change anything, does it? We’re still here. Plenty of stuff happens that doesn’t affect my life. Why would I care more about this than any of that?”

“I understand,” I replied, “but particularly in view of that, how are we still here? We couldn’t be if the world ended, right? Maybe it didn’t.”

“Nah, it did. Everyone was pretty sure.” He took a drink. “I’m betting they’d know. They aren’t the sort to get that kind of thing wrong.”

“Hmm.”

So that was that, the world was gone. There was nothing else for it but to watch Will & Grace.

SBGS December

David S. Atkinson is the author of books such as “Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep,” “Apocalypse All the Time,” and the Nebraska book award winning “Not Quite so Stories.” He is a Staff Reader for “Digging Through The Fat” and his writing appears in “Spelk,” “Jellyfish Review,” “Thrice Fiction,” “Literary Orphans,” and more. His writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.

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chance the goldfish // alessandra ragusin

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chance the goldfish

BY ALLESANDRA RAGUSIN
chance the goldfish

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

frank o’hara apocalyse – erik-john fuhrer

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silhouette

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

sbgs cowskull

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.

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hopper house – james h duncan

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steeple

Down the hill stood a house beside a set of railroad tracks, a house I always called the Hopper House because it reminded me of those Edward Hopper small town scenes he would paint, quiet and windswept, forlorn. Shades of chipped emerald and hunter green paint, scalloped awnings, spire staircase, slanted chimneys. This house stood on Orient Avenue with dirt for macadam and a green-striped folding chair on the front porch, a radio playing in the window and a dog barking somewhere deep inside, but no one ever sat in the chair or came out when I walked by every day.

I was in a bad way, unemployed aside from some very fortunate writing jobs or some small checks coming in for poetry, $10.00, $5.00, even a few for $2.00. I would walk to the bank and cash them and then take Orient Avenue and a short-cut through the grounds of a dilapidated trolley station to a small tavern by a rock-strewn river where I’d eat an inexpensive meal or just blow the whole shot on two-dollar bottles of beer.

I often stopped at the Hopper House and looked up, wondering what it must have been like to live there during its heyday. All three stories were gorgeous and ornate, though falling apart from years of neglect and agoraphobic hibernation. Save for the dog and the radio I would have called it abandoned. Even haunted maybe, and that green folding chair always gave me an odd feeling like someone I couldn’t see watched from within, waiting for me to leave.

All that summer I wrote letters to a woman in Germany about the house. She wrote back and told me of a similar manse near her father’s summer home outside Bremen. Her haunted mansion was not green but yellow, bleached by the sun and empty, and stood back from the road on a small rise, its black hollow eyes watching their car drive by whenever they went back into town from their seaside cottage. She asked if I named my green house, and I said yes. I told her of Edward Hopper. She knew him and adored his work, most especially Automat.

One afternoon someone at the end of the bar said a car went off the road and had rammed into the house and some of us got up and half-walked, half-ran up the street to the Hopper House. A white Subaru had crumpled into the front porch and paramedics, police officers, and firemen surrounded the car and were climbing onto the porch. We watched for a while but no one came outside, no one sat on the curb with head in hand, not even the driver, who apparently ran off. The dog didn’t even bark.

Soon we all walked back to the bar, but for weeks afterward blue tarpaulins covered the broken portions of the porch and stairs, with no dog, no radio, no green folding chair. I wrote a letter to Germany and told her what happened at the house, and two weeks later her reply said I should avoid it. My story gave her a bad dream, a bad feeling. It was haunted, she said, and a magnet for bad luck. I believed her. I always believed her. She signed her letters Yours, so I did too.

I avoided the house after that, as she specified, but I had dreams of the house as well. I had them then and long after I moved away. In the dream I walked up those porch steps and put my hand on the doorknob. A fear filled my chest about what waited inside, about going up the stairs to the second floor, the third floor, the attic, and then I was there, in that attic space. I heard the radio far below me, the dog barking somewhere. I closed my eyes and a claustrophobic warning in my heart told me that what if I opened my eyes again I’d discover something unbearable. In the dream I would run, painfully slow, and leave the front door open behind me, the green folding chair sideways, the dirt driveway littered with bottle caps and gravel as I raced for the horizon, for that wildfire sky.

And then I’d wake up—somewhere else, far away. But the dream was hard to shake and I wrote to Germany about it, but after three letters with no reply, I stopped writing. Now there is only the dream, wherever I go.

sbgs cowskull

James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review and author of such books as Nights Without Rain, What Lies In Wait, and Dead City Jazz, among other collections of fiction and poetry. For more, visit www.jameshduncan.com.

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the pilgrimage – bare ly

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pilgrimage - bare ly

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)

sbgs cowskull

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

candlemas – maria berardi

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light

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.

sbgs cowskull

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 – ace boggess

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hat

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.

sbgs cowskull

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.

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