Then in the motel room
they rented
by the month—with the kitchenette

& the microwave & the mini-refrigerator
& cable tv

When he sat upright & peered at the ceiling
each lung an ocean

eyes wide & hands tight on the arms
of the recliner

My father swears he saw the host of heaven
call him home

An ocean in my head
I wish
I were certain

*

Then in Texarkana
her heart heavy
as a rented room—with the kitchenette

& the microwave & the mini-refrigerator
& cable tv

When she sat & peered at her laptop screen
solicited prayers from an ocean

My father swears heaven is a host of people
family you want most

The fast-rising tide
I wish
for less blood in the water

*

My sister sits in the lecture hall
daydreams of
the trailer she bought—& end of the day

& her boyfriend & the kitchenette
& cable tv

Scrolls through the newsfeed
a rising tide

An ocean asks her to pray
for her dead

An ocean fills her head
she wishes
it had not soaked through

*

Then in the motel room
I have built
in my head—with the kitchenette

& the microwave & the mini-refrigerator
& cable tv

The channel is tuned to static & the volume
turned up

The bathtub is filling & the sinks
have overflown

My father swears that heaven is an ocean
& grandfather has a boat

Water surges into the room
I wish
I could swim

Tyler Atwood was marooned on this planet as an infant, and has been searching for home ever since. His first collection of poetry, an electric sheep jumps to greener pasture, is forthcoming from University of Hell Press, and his work has appeared in Perpetually Twelve, Danse Macabre, Housefire, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Denver, CO.

Yesterday, a man walking his monkey on a leash kissed my cheek
offered sweet potato ice cream. A flavor I’ve never tried. This note—
Please burn your bread at the right toaster.

Temple sign teaches what to say before I cross the bridge:
careful of the footing
because the responsibility cannot be assumed
about the accident in case and so on.

I tell you, Menelaus
it’s possible to survive
even if your tongue turns black
your fingers freeze
like tea-brown curled up worms
your blood, still red, turns poison.

It’s dust and ashes, falling hair and ashes,
flower petals, cherry blossoms, autumn leaves and ashes,
school children will fold you origami cranes

and still
ashes.

At start of Fujisan trail I read:
During the season this
trail is not safety.
So we are not responsible
for your life and what you
do.

Yesterday,
regret drowns in tsuyu. So easy to see tears under clear plastic umbrella.
I am beautiful in rain.

Today,
one question—

are these two human hands enough
to hold
all the not responsible burns
and burns and burns.

Catherine Keefe is a California poet, essayist and former journalist. She’s the founding editor of dirtcakes journal, dedicated to themes suggested by the UN Millennium Goals to end extreme poverty. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have recently appeared in Superstition Review, ArtPrize Anthology, and Minerva Rising. She teaches writing at Chapman University.

 

 

Find, if you can, the brightest stars—
her right shoulder, the toe of her sandaled left foot,
one on each of her hips.
Her halo has gone out. Stars flicker on and off
from her lifted wrist, her right hand raised,

index finger linking with thumb,
blessing the shining northbound lane.
How exhausting to be collimated.
She does not disperse,
intended for eternity.

I wish on slow nights,
she could extend her arm,
hitch a ride north
to the Waffle House, where the syrup flows
for twenty-four hours without stopping.

Give her a smaller miracle, lacking
loaves and fishes. Lacking a wedding without wine.
Let her heal the pothole just before the bridge.
She’s stranded in a field on a hill,
waiting for the moon to make

the cars into parallel arcs, star paths,
riding a silver-scratched record.
A turntable made out of the earth,
and she’s in the center,
unturning, unwavering.

Sarah Ann Winn lives in Fairfax, Virginia. “Our Lady of the Highways” is part of an ongoing set of poems about travel she has written. Another poem in that set, “My 95,” will appear in the upcoming issue 6 of Apeiron Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nassau Review, Portland Review, San Pedro River Review, and Two Thirds North among others. Visit her at http://bluebirdwords.com or follow her @blueaisling on Twitter.

                               Half-dark, extra mild.

I pass these words to the cashier
standing behind the bulletproof glass.

She returns those words to me with
a tone change, eyeing my buttoned shirt
ironed as crisply as my speech free of twang.

Shot through the microphone it feels
forceful, like an indictment saying,

                               my brother, you are what you eat.

What a peculiar feeling to be looked at
suspiciously and not be considered a threat.

I have frequented these joints for years,
peppered around the South and West Sides
like soup kitchens meant to feed
the poor: Harold’s Chicken Shacks.

Pieces of my parents that never
left the hood, so they handed it to me.
A tradition. A taste of the city
cooked in the grease of its politics.

++++++++++++++++iA side coleslaw paired with two
++++++++++++++++ilegs, two thighs, two slices of
++++++++++++++++iwhite bread and french fries, coated
++++++++++++++++iby mild sauce with sweet accent.

Needless for that cashier to say,
I was a mild-mannered kid. Soft-spoken.
No knuckle on either hand. Most of my
friends, girls, according to recipe,
enjoying them for what they would become.

I was sensitive. Fragile. My classmate’s
thesaurus. A transplant, a heart
in a home it was not born to.

Suburban in South Chicago, in
Hyde Park, in the Hundreds, humming,
praying, paying no tax on the tithe.

Blackness surrounding me in a small
circle, and not the square of a block.
The brightest shade of black:
the ink used to endorse a check.

And after service, we would
go pick up chicken for dinner.
Humble our egos back in time to
the cotton fibers of our clothes.

I ate dark meat because I needed
to feel the way I looked.

I quoted Malcolm X whenever possible.
Hip-hop became gospel music. My body,
skinny for the threads I wore.

If a person can love and hate themselves
simultaneously, then surely I could
be two definitions of the same word.

But my tongue was never quite
comfortable in a sling. Never had
a fight I couldn’t walk away from.
Didn’t learn all my colors. Friend’s
funerals few in the story behind me.

Behind me, fires of my own design,
choices of bridges to take and make ash,
like a choice between locations of the
franchise, since my chicken came burnt.

My parents taught me not to take
wheels for granted, but I mistook skin
for verb, the reverb of punched bone.
Became who we all love to diss.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is a young poet residing in Jersey City, NJ. An alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and its Excelano Project performance poetry collective, his verse explores the hallways in his mind walked least often and, occasionally, his sexy. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bird’s Thumb, Kinfolks Quarterly, and Specter Magazine.

chlorine is one of those smells
that reminds me of home
and the first time i tried to kill myself
how if you were one of those kids
and i was
whose parents dropped you off at the pool
because it was cheaper than summer camp
you know an indoor pool is one of those few comforts
that is the same in any country
those summers i hated the backstroke
because of the flip
turns and how water always ended
up my nose
but i was good at it
which is to say i was faster
than the other kids
so the coach made me swim it
i consistently won silver medals
i could never see past the mesh
lining of the red trunks
of john or rico the lifeguards
as they sat sometimes watching
from their tower
bussed in inner-city kids
who could not swim well
but dared each other to sneak into the deep
end without taking the swim test
or sometimes napping with
sunglasses on
i passed the swim test on my
first try
and i would tread the deep water
or cling to the cement ridge
as i looked up at the birds
in a red sky that i wanted so badly
to reveal themselves to me
one time a kid crapped
in the pool and it closed early
so i waited under a tree eating hotdogs
until someone picked me up
many hours later
the odd thing about the backstroke
is that you can partially hear the
noise from the surface
as you bob through the rhythm
in that way you knew someone
was always cheering
and because you could
not make out any voice well enough
you knew if you did not
look over to the other lanes
for that moment you were winning

Robby Nadler is a baker for Independent Baking Co. in Athens, GA.

a child unearths a charm
I gave to you. Sand weathered
the face of St. Michael into a tarnished
silhouette, the vow cut
into the silver on the back no longer
reads “more than my own life.”
A whisper of distorted letters remain
as estranged to this child as we are now
to each other. When I gave you this charm
I said “he is the patron saint of war.”
as if he could protect you, as if death
was the only way you could die. I envisioned
getting it back, given to me while the flag
was presented to your mother, but you ensured
I’d never see it again.
As this child watches light foxtrot
across his trinket, he believes
he’s found something of value, as I did.
not knowing he is a mirage, a kindness I’ve created
because I know it came back home
with you                         and is buried
++++++++iin a land fill
with the rest of America’s unwanted things.

Jordan (Jody) Skeen was raised along the Ohio River and moved south to receive her bachelor’s in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University. She began strictly writing short stories and neglecting all things poetic until one of her professors read “A song on the end of the world” by Czeslaw Milosz. It was in that moment that poetry captured her and although she acknowledges that she may never write anything on the same level as that poem, she’s committed to keep writing until she gets close. You can contact Jordan at

 

Women draped over pianos
like spilled drinks,
wearing push-up bras and corsets,
trying to become long-stemmed
wine glasses.

A midget in a black suit
paints shadows on the floor;
he has Peter Lorre’s eyes.

Breath smells like cheap scotch,
men with broad shoulders
and smoke for bones
sit at the bar and peel their squints
toward the door,
while cancer leaks from their pores—
a fog gathering
beneath fedora brims.

You could find love here
like a tire iron to the shin,
ivory keys tinkling minor chords
in sync with rain against the windows,
glasses sweating rings
onto table tops, translucent scars.
Everyone pretending to be
someone else—
so many lost souls
drawing maps on bar napkins
to themselves, through themselves.

Jay Sizemore writes things down that come to him in the shower. Occasionally he sings these things. He’s been lucky to have his work appear in places like Prick of the Spindle, Red River Review, Negative Suck, and Black Heart Magazine. The last book of poetry Jay read was Blood Music by Frank Reardon. Currently, he lives in Nashville, TN, and reads submissions for Mojave River Review.

After he was gone,
she looked for him to return,
perhaps as a bulldog,
a stag or tusked-boar.
She did not expect this parrot,
perched on her sill, preening
and carrying on conversation.
Flying, it seems, exhilarates him,
and he enjoys the perspective
on earthbound life. Treetops
and leaves create a kind of jazz
with riffs and bridges all their own.
He doesn’t, however,
care for mites among his feathers,
they itch. And the neighbor’s cat
has stalked him for three days now.

He perches on her shoulder
as she reads, on her chair
as she writes, and they settle
into a kind of routine.
He still drenches the bathroom
when he showers, snacks in bed,
scatters seed husks among the sheets.

Ann Howells’s poetry has appeared in Calyx, Crannog (Ire), Little Patuxent Review, Magma (UK), Sentence, and Spillway, as well as other small press and university journals. She serves on the board of Dallas Poets Community and has edited Illya’s Honey since 1999—recently taking it from print to digital (www.IllyasHoney.com). Her chapbook, Black Crow in Flight, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing (2007). Another chapbook, The Rosebud Diaries, was published by Willet Press (2012). Her work has been read on NPR, she has been interviewed on the Writers Around Annapolis television show, and has twice been nominated for both a Pushcart and a Best of the Net.