DM O'Connor is from a small village on Lake Huron. After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a short story collection progresses. He contributors monthly to; The Review Review and New Pages. His writing has appeared in; Barcelona Metropolitan, Collective Exiles, Across the Margin, Headland, Cecile's Writers, Bohemia, Fiction, After the Pause, The Great American Lit Mag (Pushcart nomination), The New Quarterly and The Guardian. He is Fiction Editor of The Blue Mesa Review Tweet: @dmoconnorwrites CUTTING MORNING Opening that morning grapefruit on a ship climbing a tree I will not get scurvy or go hungry with coffee and this sun there is hope that nothing more is needed at least not today and the choice to be happy in the day the best part is the juice on my fingers which I wipe in my hair which I still have full of salt and sap as the sea ripples the leaves bend all childhood and love in each simple spoon.
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Teodora Dumitriu was born and lives in Campina, Romania. Passions: children, books and English. Sometimes, she writes. Ballerina When the tiny ballerina put her light feet on the brink, She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t even blink. “Little wonder for that”, sniffed the Jury of Clones; “She isn’t made of flesh And she isn’t made of bones. She’s like rain in the desert: eyes made of fears, Limbs made of dreams, Toes made of tears.” When the willowy dancer ventured over the edge Judges weaved safety nets out of the thorniest hedge. Tricky places she paced with no flinch and no fray – So they recycled useless nets into a shipshape bouquet. When her heavy new crown made her bend and look down – Music died, slowly drowned by the noise: They were counting her tears and were weighing her fears, Dreams were measured – and sold off as toys. The day the prima ballerina oddly faltered, tripped and fell Made massive headlines in Heaven – raising viewer rates in Hell. The Tree Blasted and blown by a cry and a roar They bewail and they sob till they struggle no more. Yes, they flung out of a fret and a fight But each rough husk of darkness envelops a light. Softly they swirl and then slowly descend To immerse in the power and peace of the land. They seek warmth - to be rested and soothed and absolved And undressed and caressed and released and dissolved. When the seeds of the storm fall asleep by the sea Skies clear up So You can See the Tree. The Big Bond The time is longest ever Now - or maybe Always - the place is neither Here nor There, since rippling nothingness unfurls in swelling folds of Everywhere… and what may seem like silence is in fact the wafting music of the spheres whose perfect notes are lighting, in the ballroom of the Universe, all chandeliers… while myriads of misty mirrors glimmer, wistfully watching, in a trance, one star and one besotted planet dancing, from a distance, their first dance. Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Deep Water, Expound, The Muse: India, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems, both from Flutter Press. The House We Forgot Tonight the bricks glow as moonlight trickles through oak. But we just tossed keys onto the muddy lawn as our truck bounced out of town. We were baying to oldies, not caring that our credit was shot. We were looking for Atlanta with a phone and a map. Your mother said this wasn’t a good idea, to drive south in such a wind, face to face with ourselves and the house forgotten, the world not quite green in early spring, but poised to end in gloom or flame or some quieter misery crouched in the future, in shadows where pines bent along the coast and crows above wheat fields pitted the face of sky. Beyond the Tracks A house sits half sunk in weeds, an ocean of grasses nobody wants, a Sargasso Sea of dandelions and crab. Maybe you lived there once, with a unit of your beloved dead. Maybe you sat at the window while crows dotted the empty sky. Faces swam in oil slick puddles, handprints smudged the walls. Voices poured from the kitchen worrying over coffee and soup and handfuls of beans. Radios crackled from an upper floor. Stairs creaked with the weight of ghosts. Windows rattled, trains rumbled by at intervals measured by the absence of noise. They carried freight to a city that burned with desire, one melted down to shells and sand. Tide rushed in and tunnels flooded, subways floated in garbage and rats. It was a town deleted by history, where the dead trudged, following storm clouds and the rains of night. Will You? I will ride a train that stops here, at this beige house with its windows smiling, its pleasant pines bowing, its squirrels chittering over the roof, and its prophetic crows. Without a look back, I will board at 5 a. m., breakfast dancing in my gut, and ride across the desert to mountains bleeding rust red in the sun. Will you travel with me, hands empty as a new page in a writing book? Will you leave the air shaped around a structure charred into shadow and ash? We could carry houses on our backs, small ones into which we could crawl at the first sign of trouble, first hint of gunplay as we bounce into the hungry west, balanced on this river of steel and noise. Louis Gallo’s work has appeared or will shortly appear in Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. OLD HOUSE for Cathy 1. We take the long way so our baby can see October fire in the trees. You hated the house when we lived in it and so did I. I sensed my other child in every room, heard her call my name long after she was gone. You saw traces of another woman. Yet what a time we had that year we stayed waiting for the sale. We sat outside in snow to gaze at stars crisp as sugar. I felt blood course through your hand-- the hours we spent exploring each other's unfamiliar flesh despite ghosts and fear. It has been five years and now safe enough to visit. It seems so small, you exclaim, as we pass-- and dingy, I add, who would paint a house the color of skin? Yet we can't stop looking, turn the car around, circle the block. It's just another house, I sigh and shift my eyes to the road for good. 2. When we stop at McDonald's I pluck an apple from a tree next to the parking lot and prop it on the dashboard. You offer to drive home to our new town and I sit in back with Claire who, strapped in her seat, can't stop smiling. She will never know this place; I will never hear her call from desolate rooms. I mourn that other child as our baby curls her tiny fingers around my thumb. We stop again, for cider at a roadside stand. I watch you walk toward rows of jugs and pick one out. You look so beautiful I want to sing out. We are done with history for a while and speed out of the past. I reach over your seat for the apple but you fling it out the window. I watch that last token of remembrance careen backward, fall, shatter to bits on the interstate. MULBERRIES Each day, as they bloom, I pluck a mulberry from our tree and chew it up. A modest berry, lacking distinction and taste, but faithful, profuse. I have done this every summer for a decade, turned it into a kind of sacrament. They don’t last long. I’m devouring July, I tell the tree, which listens. I’m eating time, bit by bit. The tree thrives in a swirl of lanky pines near the back driveway. Once the berries go, it almost seems to disappear. No one, I think, notices but me and the birds that feast on its fruit and deposit purple splotches on our windshields. But I know when the searing cold returns and long dark days enshroud the mind I will stand again beside the garbage cans and tally not only the seasons, but the life, yearning again for the mulberries’ inauspicious return. This is no feast for pleasure, no picnic or burst of gustatory delight. This is prayer. I eat prayers, I tell the tree as its unglamorous leaves flutter with gusts sweeping in from the mountains. The tree consents, tolerates me in a way that I, with almost nothing in my hands, vaguely understand. NECKLACE This chain of incidents should loosen with accumulation but the cinch tightens, rubies drop like dried seeds, popping into sand. Some moments swell like a lizard’s throat, others drip into creamy vats of terrifying sweetness until the entire windswept past congeals. No necklace but a monument droops from your neck as you dive into furrows to root for something severe and holy. OMENS A red asparagus came with the bundle and we, who nurture the quotidian, could not eat. The next morning a cocoanut exploded in St. Augustine, bananas torpedoed out of their skins, the square avocado leaked blood, and we, devotees of signs, starved to death. All Jerico mourned, feasted on our remains. The dogs carried off a few ribs, pilgrims some lockets of straw and singed hair. There will be no progress, cried the viceroy, until we suppress the noose of superstition-- whereupon he decreed creole tomatoes obscene. We, meanwhile, penitent as stone, picked at entrails, ghastly our demeanor. A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. His latest P.O.D. amazon release is an art-text hybrid, "According to the Order of Nature (We too are Cosmos Made)", a work which takes to task the words which have been used against LGBT folks from time immemorial. In 2014 he began a webpage to gather links of his poetry being published in such zines as Great Works, Unlikely Stories, Quill & Parchment, etc., in one place:http://stephenmead.weebly.com/links-to/poetry-on-the-line-stephen-mead Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Chiron Review, Pink Litter, and The Literateur, among others. Come Hold the Moon “come hold the moon,” she whispers, offers it to me nestled between small, upturned breasts. Harvest moon's tawny orange of your skin compares to witch's moon of the snowdrift behind us. It's pale, its beauty pales between you I cup the moon in one hand it is soft, smooth, lovely as I kiss it arouse you Duke Dante was plagued by demons. This is true. My Geryon, however, is the way you stay with me even in absence; I can hear tenor echoes of smoke in the air, but cannot taste the salt of your skin. Naked I Your body under me last night felt more solid than anything I've felt since the last time my car got hit II You can't be naked in the light so I have to see you when you wrap your body around me and we drift off to sleep Roger's Funeral We waited for the priest to start in on the whole ashes and dust thing. Instead, he did tricks with zinc pennies. Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Commonweal, Guwahatian Magazine (India), The Galway Review (Ireland), Public Republic (Bulgaria), The Osprey Review (Wales), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey) and other magazines. Some of his work can be found at http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs (Photo: Carol Bales)
Plain Girl Pretty Rose was a plain girl from a small town. She sang in the choir, never missed Bible study, left for the big city after high school. She worked nights in a shanty diner next to a bar where working men gathered. Depending on how much the men had to drink Rose looked appealing but she ignored them all, said they wanted what she had to keep in case she got married. Marriage never happened and the years soared by. In her thirties Rose became pregnant to everyone’s surprise. No one knew who the father was and Rose wouldn’t say. Rose raised the boy, put him through school. On graduation day her son asked her who his father was. She said his father was the only man she ever saw put mayonnaise on a hamburger. It made her laugh. And he was the only man who ever told her she was pretty. Much better than any tip. His father was a blind man and he meant it. High Tea in Missouri They're the oldest couple my wife and I know and we’re no pups either. Peter out for a walk leans on his cane often to admire my wife’s garden. The English roses remind him of home, he says, and one day he invites us over for tea at the civilized hour of 3. That day at 3 we enter an old world in a Victorian house and are served tea in porcelain cups with warm scones and marmalade. They arrive on a silver tray. It’s a presentation one might expect at the proper hour at Buckingham Palace or in a nice cottage in England. Peter excuses himself for a moment and I get brave and ask his wife how long they have been married. Sixty years, Mary whispers, and then with a tinkling giggle she says whenever Peter enters a room her heart still beats faster. A Stationary Bicycle The doctor tells Phil and his wife he’s in pretty good health for a man his age but he needs to exercise. And Phil says he agrees and then goes on to explain his faith in recliner therapy. He sits in a recliner for hours, watches TV or reads the paper and wiggles his toes at least three times a day. The doctor asks if his wife if they’d try a stationary bicycle. She says she thinks there's one somewhere in the basement. Phil says his wife’s right as usual. He saw it one night during a storm when he went down to change a fuse. Said he almost had a heart attack. Parents Night Emma used to do real good in school her mother tells her new teacher. It’s Parents Night at Ryland Elementary. Mostly mothers in attendance. What’s the problem, her mother asks. Fifth grade shouldn’t be hard for her. Emma's never had a grade lower than a B, her mother says. Teacher says Emma doesn’t do her homework and talks a lot in class. Her mother can’t believe it. Says her father won’t either. She says Emma goes to her room right after supper with all her books, studies till 10, brushes her teeth and goes to bed. Bill's mother’s next in line to ask the new teacher what’s the problem with her son Bill, who did so well at his other school. Afterward the mothers meet over cookies and a glass of punch and wonder whether this new teacher can communicate with Emma and Bill. They don’t know Emma’s awake till midnight texting new friend Bill, who’s in her class this year. They like each other a lot. 13 Ways of Looking at Some Polyps He asked and so I told him. The “cancer” poems stem from cancer in the family. Daughter’s terminal. Son's a five-year survivor. Mother died at 59. I had 13 polyps, all benign, snipped a year ago. I go back next month for another roto-rooter. As one grows older, neighbors, friends and folks one doesn’t know die from it. That’s life, isn’t it. One never knows but the question’s not “Why me?” The question is “Why not me?" Think about it. We’ll all pop something now or when, won’t we. Abdullah Zaman Babar is a poet and an author. He studies Electrical Engineering at Air University, Islamabad. He currently resides in Islamabad, Pakistan. The Beggar In the streets of nowhere, Dwells a soul among the soulless, With a stifled wish to ease elsewhere, Like a prince in a fortress, ‘What about life at present?’ He realizes on a gelid dawn, ‘My life is an unpleasant present’, A tear, in his begging bowl, rolls down, His misery grows along the day, But no hand stretches to caress, To make him smile and gay, At this hour of prolonged distress, Only one seems to have interest. “Sir! What do you wish?” “Attention, applause and trust”, And he flips a coin in his metal dish. Away from the streets of nowhere, When he gets up to call it a day, A black cat from elsewhere, Intercepts his way. Insanity Thereafter His arms spread She turns away Now her lips puckered But he’s gone. Let's Ride She materialized an infant wish of mine That I once flagged up to find her love Seeing not, her infancy sublime I bagged a burgundy bicycle that I dreamed of Each morn a shaky voice in the cold would rise While leaning my bicycle against her thigh ‘Come baby get your ride’ And a toddler would hop on the saddle with joy ‘Steer your way nice and balanced’ ‘Like you would live your life in the nearest future’ ‘For I will be there at your back, every instance’ ‘Just promise me you won’t look behind until I utter’ It wouldn't be long before I would break my promise Witnessing her standing away I would fall down demolished. Nicole Long’s work has appeared or will shortly appear in Ampersand Literary, Belle Rêve Literary Journal, and Exit 109. She is a graduate student, earning her MFA in Screenwriting and Film Studies, and received her Bachelor's degree in English from Radford University. Her biggest influences are Poe, Frost, and Joyce. Read to me, Child The rift in your voice, Fractures the locks, That chain my eyes to the void. Barred from visions of nautical day and The Lost Boy's crows. "Har-de-har," cackles the gloom in my closet. But read to me, child; I need your tones to light the black brick road Tearing through the canyons; Stale fissures of blank pages Etched across the map of my sanity. Let Us Pray Let us go to the temple. Hold our crosses, Kiss our hands, The price of our sins Paid for in blood. I shall be a vagabond on earth, and everyone that findeth me shall slay me. Blood of the vengeance, The sweat and the spunk I can smell it. The things we've done The bills we have to pay Why go to hell! When the Devils are here to play. The Funeral Does Your Mother Know, In The Attic, Time Moves Slow. Hold Your Head Up, Imaginary Lover. Casper's Coming Home. Ice Beast Through the mists of frosted grass and icy underbrush, You may think you hear him creeping. Singing exquisite songs to rival that crafty Wood Thrush, Even though he should be sleeping. He might sound sweet and pleasant, and look just as such. With his soft and silky coat, dull, but lovely just as much. You'll want to travel far, simply to see his face. He'll run and duck for cover, leading you into chase. Mindlessly you'll follow, watching broad horns disappear. Gallivanting, flitting, you leap across the weir. Exhausted, exhilarated, your feet carry you on. You can't quite seem to catch your breath; praying to Amon. Since when did you have such devotion, to gods you couldn't see? Since the demon of your frozen nightmares, tripled into three. John Maurer is a 21-year-old writer/student working on getting his degree in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. He writes poetry, fiction, and everything in-between, things that aren’t boring to read, hopefully. He has been previously published at The Foliate Oak. Reverse Synergy Crepuscular sadness at epochs in an epic that doesn't seem to embody the word. A raindrop is a tear to God, a flood to an ant, but an infinitesimally small detail in the setting of this story. Eyelids rise with the day and fall with the night to no end and with no end in sight. Upon the close if you look close enough everything can be found in seemingly nothing. If you’re a bull you don’t frequent china shops. Morgues are more your venue. Whether your lips are loose or sewn shut. You get mad. You scream at me. I remember that I exist. I run in place. I fall awake. Sleep is the dream I have. You are a freshly coined collection of morphemes, fresh off the mint of your falling breath. A neologism on the dark side of a glass prism. Newly transfused blood flowing through the heart. Blood cells with bars incarcerating words yet to meet their definitional soulmates. You are on the tip of my tongue but lost in my mind and never to be found. Destroy Me Gently Fry my brain in a skillet and serve it to me for breakfast Chop off my limbs and corsage them to my breast Tan my skin and make me into a jacket Wear me Call me expensive Follow me nowhere Scars on skin indicate landmarks For what am I but a map to getting lost? For what are you but a traveler adopting my baggage? I gargle razor blades as I speak You tell fortunes in your sleep Take me to the stake Burn me Inhale me Hang me like a Babylonic garden For when I cry my tears will turn to fruit Eat it God has yet to forbid my wisdom The Solid Foundation Of Rock Bottom Drop a bouquet of cut roses in a dumpster Grow a garden on the dreams sleep stopped giving you Self-administer shots that can only make you sicker Bring an infant’s casket to a baby shower Finance a divorce attorney’s mansion Never give anything your all; for you already have so little Do not return a smile, just make sure to save the receipt At your mother’s funeral, they can’t see you cry Even God makes mistakes, you are one of them Exist in a way that no one notices, especially your reflection Be the death of the party; better yet die at the party Become baptized in the very water you are drowning in You will not be a memory less bitter than honesty Never sing in the shower, water has known sounds more sonorous Don’t forget that being heartless also makes you light hearted You are nothing more than nothing |
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