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.
Editor’s note: the following piece is an ekphrasis, a rhetorical exercise where usually an artist bases a piece of writing off of an image. In this case, Mark Blickley based the following story off of Keith Goldstein’s image above, a picture of his son at Acadia National Park.
I’ve had this recurring Bridge Dream for nearly fifteen years. It first appeared one night after being exhausted by cram studying for my Bar Mitzvah. In this initial fantasy I was a swaddled infant left on the very beginning of a long and twisting walkway through a vibrant yet desolate forest. I was crying and there was blood from my bris seeping through the fabric covering my groin. We don’t need to dig Freud up from his grave to figure out I was about to undergo a ritual of manhood, so I must’ve been thinking about the genital mutilation that first signaled my acceptance into the tribe. What’s quite disturbing about this recurring dream as it appears today is that after fourteen years of experiencing it, I’ve only move forward incrementally from the bloody infant that was first placed on this forest path, into a six year old boy that balks at moving forward. In the real world I’m about to turned twenty-eight.
My name’s Han because my parents are both Star Wars freaks and the worship of this film series is the only real religion practiced in my household. They obviously were not the only disciples. When I was in Pre-K, there was another boy named Han as well as a girl named Leia.
What’s strange about my abandoned boy at the bridge recurring dream is that it’s always just a prologue to whatever else I’ll be dreaming that night. This winding walkway always introduces whatever anxious or peaceful visions my brain has decided to focus on that night—nightmare, erotic ecstasy, exciting adventures, idyllic beauty.
These days in my dream I am a first-grader who is really hesitant about moving forward, but I also see it as my feet turning into the classic ballet 4th position. My mother taught ballet for years so perhaps my foot position on the bridge is a nod to her. Once again I don’t need to disinter Freud to figure out this bridge snakes into a representation of my life’s journey. By the way, did you know that babies double their birth size by age five months? Yet in my recurring dream I remained a crying, bleeding infant for years —no physical growth, no emotional growth.
I’m a bit confused about relationships with women. My testosterone tells me to be more aggressive and not to feel so shy and unworthy. I’m always terrified of saying the wrong thing. In High School I didn’t really have a girlfriend because I always hung out within this circle of friends that were both males and females. Most activities were communal, not individual dates. Recently I joined a dating app called Bumble. On Bumble only women can initiate first contact which I like because it reduces the stress of rejection, yet I’ve been registered on this app for five months and have yet to receive a single hit.
I’m presently undergoing E.M.D.R. (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy, which also includes hand tapping and listening to ambient sounds, like ocean waves, via headphones that seesaw these sounds from ear to ear to promote a kind of aural hypnosis. One of the side effects of this treatment is that it can cause vivid, realistic dreams, but my recurring dream happened years before I entered therapy. My therapist insists I keep a journal between sessions in order to maintain the session’s progress she insists is occurring.
My shrink Martha works for the V.A. but please don’t think I’m some sort of Veteran war hero suffering from PTSD. I never even enlisted in the War Against Christmas, yet I’ve never known a world without suicide bombings, school shootings and acts of terrorism that take place in my backyard, not in some distant land. Martha is also an ordained Lutheran pastor but she never mentions God in any of our sessions.
I tell Martha I’m so sick of reading/hearing reasons why Millennials can’t grow up. My shrink calls it a “First World” problem not unique to young men my age. I am depressed and anxious all the time but don’t know why. I am always smiling and laughing at jokes I don’t think are funny so people won’t discover how unhappy I am. I feel like I’m faking everything. Being an adult to me means not doing things you enjoy doing, yet that’s nuts because my parents still act like kids at Star Wars Conventions.
Why am I so miserable? I had everything I was supposed to need while growing up— emotional and financial security, a good education and now I have a more than decent paying job. I do feel guilty that they are so many less fortunate than me and know it is unmanly to be so constantly sad. Every day there’s somebody crying out what privileged assholes we Millennials are, so I always feel pressured to pretend I’m happy.
My shrink says I should spend less time always surrounding myself with people and more time being alone, even if it means being bored at first. But I can’t relax by myself. I tried all different kinds of things, but I can’t slow down my goddamn anxious thoughts. I’ve tried drugs, porn, video games and even different kinds of meditation—Zen Meditation with mindfulness on breathing and intentionally focusing on the moment. Then I did Metta meditation to focus on a loving kindness towards myself as well as empathy for other people. In my final workshop I studied Sufi mediation to try to achieve mystical union with a Supreme Being.
In every class and workshop I’ve taken, I seem to be the only one who can’t obtain this metaphysical knowledge and peace. I would often comfort myself in class by thinking my fellow students are just bullshitting their enlightenment to try to make me feel like shit—but thoughts like that defeat the entire purpose of meditation, which is to get to know myself and pull away from the outside world to focus on my inner world, instead of blaming everyone else for my failure. Do you understand how fucked up a person I am? Hell, I even get sad deleting old tweets because it feels like I’m flushing away a big part of who I was and who I am.
Last month Martha suggested I try using a weighted blanket that applies deep pressure touch. She says it simulates the feeling of being comforted, like a swaddled baby, and is supposed to help my insomnia and anxiety. So instead of fighting my anxieties like a real man, I retreat into acting like a fucking baby again, all tucked inside my crib beneath a blanket with 30 pounds of pellets sewn into it. So far it hasn’t worked.
When I ask Martha how she arrives at the concept of what exactly my emotional age is, she turns the question back on me and asks what do I believe is my emotional age? I tell her I don’t know anything except first my dick is snipped at birth and then as I advance in life I have my balls constantly broken by social proclamations that I MUST BE SUCCESSFUL!
I worry I’ll never live up to my own expectations. I grew up being told I could be anything I wanted to be, but I’m coming to the realization that I’m not as smart, talented or special as I thought I was and that fuels an obsession with having to succeed. My friends and I seem to be growing up poorer than our parents. My Mom and Dad can afford to go to Star Wars conventions all over the world but my important travel plans are still handcuffed by student loans.
I get incredibly stressed over not being able to find a WiFi spot, forgetting passwords to online accounts, the buffering sign when I’m streaming online—it’s like taunting me that my life is going in circles, like the areola of a maternal tit. I stress when unable to find my T.V. remote just as my favorite Netflix show is starting.
Why am I unable to advance past the age of six in my recurring dream? Is it because I’m a victim of helicopter parenting? During my childhood my Mom and Dad hovered over every experience and problem I had growing up. Cell phones are the longest umbilical cords in the world. I was taught to be afraid of strangers, playing sports, sexual contact. Is that why they claim we Millennials act more like children than adults?
This outburst of self-pity is very tiring, so I’m going to disappear under my state of the art weighted blanket and hope tonight is the night it crushes my recurring dream of being a child stranded on a spooky bridge inside a dying, primeval forest. And if my heavy blankie is unable to extinguish the dream, perhaps when I wake up I will have at least gained a year of emotional age so I will be a seven year old boy on that walkway, just three quarters away from achieving my true age of twenty-eight.
Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. He is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books) and the forthcoming text based art book, Dream Streams (Clare Songbirds Publishing). His video, Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, was selected to the 2018 International Experimental Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain. He is a 2018 Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nevertheless We Persisted.
Keith Goldstein is a freelance photographer and photo editor in New York City. Keith began exhibiting his photography since the1980’s. His work has appeared in many publications including ABC News Australia, Now Public, Flak Magazine, JPEG Magazine, Time. His work is included various private collections and in the Erie Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and the S.K. Neuman Culture Center, Brno, Czechoslovakia. Website
She’s fascinated
by birds
I’m captivated
by bones
always optimistic,
she calls me pessimist
but I’m a realist, I say
is it just coincidence?
that she’s drawn
to living things
while I’m humming along
to songs of death
attractive opposites
and all that
but we really are
a perfect pair
I cheer her up
when her eyes turn dark clouds
or I give her space
if that’s what she needs
she makes me laugh
when I refuse to smile
she anchors me
reels me in
when I drift away
Magpies from her youth
Sparrows in the yard
Northern Flicker peck-peck-pecking
Blue Jays hit her heart
but she sees Crows the most
and what do I see?
but dead squirrels
in the street
a bird with broken wing
I used to have a spirit animal
a Coyote
or a Wolf
I saw him under bridges
hidden in tall grass
but I haven’t seen him
in a dozen years
did this beast take flight?
or flower into bones
I see
the plain underbelly
she sees
the decorated wings
if I had to choose one now
I know it’d be an Owl
I’ve heard him at my window
I’ve seen him up on high
Steve Shultz is a poet, mailman, and former journalist from Aurora, CO. His third poetry collection, Pancreatic Care Package, was published in September by West Vine Press. He blogs sporadically at https://fmghost.wordpress.com.
standing on the edge of love, i looked in but was always forced out; a false god stood in the temple of my family keeping me away from all those who loved me—i could not break his lies nor could he swallow my truths, and so we stood he and i; two different shades of fire unable to communicate—he misunderstood me, claimed i misunderstood him; people have always whispered that he is good but they didn’t have to kill his ghosts—they didn’t know how my feet trembled in fear of breaking egg shells or how hard it was for me to reclaim all that was lost, didn’t know what it was to be versed in silence so they could know the hymns of peace when they really wanted to war against monsters; they do not know the definition of good—but maybe that’s the point, no one really knows what they are saying, no one really knows; everyone thinks but no one knows until they see the monster how monsterous a monster can be—but i know, and i’ve seen, his fangs; he cannot feign innocence to me—sometimes monsters take the shape of people we love, and sometimes that means we have to kill nightmares so we can remember how to dream.
Linda M. Crate’s poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has five published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press – June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon – January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), and splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018). TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | FACEBOOK
Photo: Steve Shultz
The days – salamanders, were passing, white,
against the background of an elapsed summer.
The synthesis was a baby.
Everything is headlong –
to be touched, skin to skin,
and to become one.
Time was speaking.
It was saying that the future was past,
and the past was never.
I love you!, I was saying to the underwater bells of light
where I was seeing him above the sea floor.
I was loving him with bliss,
and I was knowing him.
Ουροβόρος (Ouroboros)
He is caressing my breasts,
I am caressing his hands,
which are caressing my breasts.
All life created itself so that
I would feel in your arms
the way I do.
Serafimova was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2017 and Summer Literary Seminars 2018 Poetry Contest, and long-listed for the Erbacce Press Poetry Prize 2018 and the Red Wheelbarrow 2018 Prize, as well as nominated for the Best of the Net by the BeZine. Margarita has three collections in Bulgarian (the most recent being The Insolubility of Splendour (2018)). Her work appears in Agenda Poetry, London Grip New Poetry, Trafika Europe, European Literature Network, The Journal, A-Minor, Waxwing, Orbis, Nixes Mate Review, StepAway, Ink, Sweat and Tears, HeadStuff, Minor Literatures, The Writing Disorder, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Orbis, Chronogram, Noble/ Gas Quarterly, Origins Journal, miller’s pond, Obra/ Artifact, Califragile, TAYO, Shot Glass Journal, Opiate, Poetic Diversity, Novelty Magazine, Pure Slush, Harbinger Asylum, Punch, Tuck, Ginosko, etc. Facebook
I have these recurring dreams of protecting myself
In one, I was hitch-hiking.
I had a purse full of knives in case of danger
I still remember glancing inside my purse trying to determine
Which one would make me the safest?
Which one could I grab the quickest?
I once heard a story of woman hitchhiking
She got picked up by a truck driver who put his hand on her knee
He tried to grab her by the neck and push her face into his crotch
She stabbed him in the leg
and threw the truck into Park
and hopped the fuck out
In my dream, I didn’t need the knives for protection
In my dream, I took the truck
I had a dream
That my brother’s friend took me in when I needed a roof
I told him that I would not hug him
I told him that I would pay him because I didn’t trust a handout
He eyed me like cake
he waited until I was asleep to touch me
He said he only wanted to tickle me
In my dream, I said I didn’t want to be touched or tickled.
In my dream, I put pepper spray can to his face
and said he didn’t get to touch
He said I was cute when I was angry
In my dream, I peppered sprayed the fuck out of his eyes
I had a boyfriend who once gave me a knife to protect myself
He said he never wanted a bad thing to ever happen to me again
He yelled at me the day I forgot to carry it in my bra
He yelled at me that same day for trying to say “no” to him
He was proud when I remembered the knife
He was surprised when I held up the knife to protect myself after he broke down the door
He was stronger when he wrestled the knife out of my hand
and showed me in the mirror how you hold a knife
to someone’s throat
MY THROAT
my blood on the floor
He instructed me to clean myself up
I broke a mirror and fled
that wasn’t a dream
it was a living nightmare
I have this dream that I don’t carry all this anxiety
That I don’t have to think of the best ways to protect myself
That I can walk around
and not be so goddamn scared
Sometimes a building will not let you
move around itself the way you want:
you feel an architectural punch.
You step over the leaves, & there is a branch
you did not see. You feel it in the back
of your leg, & again feel it for days.
You see a voicemail. You must have missed a call.
There are no missed calls. You cannot fetch
the voicemail. You turn your phone off
& back on again. You will do this again.
Miss Plum in the Bedroom with the Candlestick
Crime was common back then, and the law itself often criminal. Nobody was safe from the thugs prowling the city. It took a constant and wearying vigilance to survive. If I happened to fall asleep, I’d wake up afraid. I think I was afraid she wouldn’t be there, peering out through a crack in the curtains. Why you here? I asked the first time she appeared. She just gave a fuzzy, fragile smile. The ambiguity was intentional. When you leave details out, it opens up possibilities for what can be – an ancient tree whose entwined branches support 34 brilliant candles.
Shredded
Private lives are now lived in public. That’s the problem with putting Velveeta on enchiladas. It’s only a matter of time before the celebrity chefs start to show up. I pedal away as if I have to actually get somewhere. Everyone I owe an explanation tries following me – sons, daughters, parents, co-workers, etc. We’re a wandering soap opera. “You can’t paint them trees,” protesters yell from the sidewalk. I just want some semblance of normality back in my life, some sort of quiet, and my heart to stop agonizing like a flock of gulls being sucked into a jet engine.
Shadowlands
When you look back over your shoulder, you see yourself looking quizzically back at you. You always assumed that you’d been given up for adoption. Now, more than 35 years later, you know. It’s night, and everything is also nothing, the dark howls and whimpers of women in search of their shadows.
The Later Years
Given a choice, I would want to be the sort of shrewd, goatish old man it’s said Rodin was, strolling about the boulevards and back alleys of Paris, while the work in marble went on nevertheless in his head and a young Russian-born French lady leaned lightly on his arm, and if her eyes were a little too wide apart, or if she didn’t actually read any of the books he recommended, he wouldn’t care, because it had just turned spring, and the air was like a mix of wine and brandy, and they were always at least somewhat drunk.
Howie Good, Ph.D., a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser’s Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry, among other books. He co-edits the literary journals UnLost and Unbroken with Dale Wisely.
Photo: @sweetdangerzack
I take comfort in long lines.
I am not alone.
I pretend
that I’m a prisoner,
grateful for small slips of paper.
The stars belong to bankers.
They are strictly catch and release.
I pretend I’m all sorts of things
that I should never
pretend to be.
My youngest son wants to know
about our progress
and his mother.
Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three recent chapbooks: Set List (Bitchin Kitsch,) In Stone and The Most Awkward Silence of All (both Cruel Garters Press.) His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit and Cloudbank.
Photo: @richardguest9440
The girl was on her way to Walgreens to pick up her mother’s medication when she found the dead jellyfish on the street corner under that one lamppost that always worked. It wasn’t just one jellyfish, but twenty, thirty, maybe more. They lay in small iridescent globules, some strewn on the sidewalk, others slopped carelessly onto the edge of the sewer grate.
As she watched, wisps like smoke rose from the dead jellyfish and hung several feet about concrete, bobbing up and down like they were submerged in stormy waters. The girl thought the wisps must be the ghosts of all the jellyfish and she wondered when her mother died if she would be able to see her ghost rise and hover.
The girl had heard that jellyfish were biologically immortal, that they would naturally live forever, and she wondered if these dead before her had known it was coming, if they had planned their last days accordingly, or if they had been torn from a life everlasting like slaughtered angels.
The jellyfish ghosts cast morphing shadows on the dirty ground beneath the ever-steady lamplight, moving into and through one another, bringing out strange images from the cacophony of movement like unintentional shadow puppets. The girl pulled out strange, fantastical shapes as if she was laying on her back watching the clouds.
When she was healthy several years ago, the girl’s mother used to make shadow puppets with her hands on the wall of their apartment. She would turn off the lights and use a candle as backlight, so the images flickered and grew and danced on the wall with the slightest extra breath or movement in the air. A dove could become a dragon, a shark a leviathan, a butterfly a huge bird of prey, all if she laughed too near the candle. She learned to hold in the laughter, so the air would be still, so the shadows could be what her mother intended. Now, her mother’s hands have twisted into tough claws, slow moving and incapable of making anything like they used to.
The girl stood transfixed for a long time, watching the ghosts of the jellyfish paint in shadows on the concrete. If the ghosts of the jellyfish, continued only to bob foolishly, they’d be there forever. The thought made her angry and she screamed at the jellyfish to leave, to go, to get the hell out. They didn’t leave. They wouldn’t leave. She was crying soon and yelling unintelligibly—a deep throaty yell rising in pitch until it was more of a screech than anything. She balled her fists, she stomped her feet, knowing she was too old for a tantrum but unable to stop it erupting from her.
Why wouldn’t they leave? Didn’t they know they could go? Are they all so stupid just to bob there under the lamppost?
Her voice gave out and she rushed forward swatting at the ghosts and immediately pulled back her hand, stung. It wasn’t a sharp pain, or piercing, or electrifying like it might have been if the jellyfish had been alive, but rather a down-to-the-bone pain, like slow pressure on a deep bruise.
The girl left them there then, running off and forgetting her errand. Later when she was home, she remembered reading, though she couldn’t recall where, that a group of jellyfish was called a bloom or a smack. The text hadn’t specified if there was any difference between the application of the names.
Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared in CHEAP POP, Ghost City Review, and Pithead Chapel, among others. He is an Assistant Editor for F(r)iction and an Outreach Assistant for Brink Literacy Project.
photo: @__varinia__
south broadway press 