On D-Block

Behind the wired window       drinking grape juice
women swoon to the gospel  oxidized   like corked wine

On D-Block we write letters   Dear bud of forsythia
Dear love   Dear fetus   Salutations pour from us like wine

We watch each other cradle   our cloth and clothespin
dolls   nurse them with regret  our milk soured like wine

Call us pain-capable unborn children   zygotes
embryos   rosebuds the color of a sweet fat wine

From this white satin altar to the playpens in the kitchens
we thank the grandmas   cellared and aging like wine

We drink sugary milk from the cereal bowls
Sweet like we’re home    intoxicating like wine

We are Sarah cruel   with jealousy   barren & blessed
expectant & howling    bellies bloated with wine

 

Sea and Salt

LA in June          and we were together  the beach was hot and bright and fat with sun
he flirted with the slurping line of foam and sand     On the verge
In over my knees     wet linen skirt clinging     my shoulders burned
I turned around in time to see him  shaking sea water from his hand

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++At lunch licked salt   from my hand
and I drank the tequila drank the shot drank the shot drank the shot
I was hot    and wet      I was thirsty   I drank I kissed him  I grabbed him
from behind                  always behind

I followed him and followed him and followed  saw the sea
through polarized sunglasses    It was white  it was blueblack  it was bright
Another day   hiding my eyes

In the remembered world the sun is golden the water is golden
we are golden         Then sunset   then his lengthening shadow
++++++++++++++++++++++++then a moonless night.
Later my burned   red skin  like a promise          turned golden
I turned to gold   then turned over

The thin white edge of the year      later            winter
Cornered in a corner  boxed in with moving boxes  my legs crossed
and his bony hands   locked around my foot    We drank drank drank
I pretended not to see him          I was already gone  He invited himself

This image he had of us         it was blown-out    white    dated
he left and left   and left it    bathing in   the salt silver
It was blackened bitter   that   thing   he dropped at my feet

I left when he told me to       I didn’t look back        didn’t look back didn’t look
Still he turned  bitter   he blackened   still he turned to salt

Sarah B. Boyle is a poet, mother, and high school teacher. She is the author of the chapbook What’s pink & shiny/what’s dark & hard (Porkbelly Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in VIDA, Menacing Hedge, Entropy, and elsewhere. Following the rapes and assaults that ripped through multiple literary communities this past year, she edited a series of essays for Delirious Hem on rape culture and the poetics of alt lit. Find her online at impolitelines.com.

Drink this tea, he said, and you will fly naked
into starlight. I drank, felt tired, and sat on the couch
and ate potato chips. Drink this tea and you will not know
yourself. We drove along the freeway by your old school,
without direction or speed as light raptured down
through barred clouds scudding across sallow fields
where coyotes loped. Drink this tea and you can speak
to your dead lover in a stone wall and no tears will come.
You will hear angel trumpets and taste thorn apple,
henbane, mandrake, deadly nightshade…
Sleep was no longer sleep. I slept, a dull
flat space, and woke in fits for three days,
wondering where I’d find myself again. Myself,
bare flesh, reddening flesh, breath quick. The body
is where love ends and fear begins. Drink this tea
and you will feel the root of each emotion
in your limbs, your thumping, squeezebox chest,
sweat clings to your forehead, saturates the sheets,
your dreams are all fire and tongues
that surround God as he explodes into stars
in an expanding universe of chaos. I woke.
I stepped onto a balcony overlooking the sea,
the small beach town where I grew up.
The lighthouse flashes from a rocky point
and the scrolling waves pound sand.

Christopher Dollard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Cossack Review, The Freshwater Review, The Little Patuxent Review, The Rappahannock Review, Redactions, Tirage Monthly, Watershed Review, and others. He lives in Providence, RI, where he works as a waiter to support his writing habit. Find him online at www.christopherdollard.com.

What can I tell you?

I confess
from you I learned
sweat is poison as well as nectar,

& there is no good word
for how I linger as you exhale.

I confess
I am a cracked mirror,
& you are a stone, a bird,
starlight tickling the fractures.

From you I learned jilting
doesn’t require stepping away.

I confess
I drink your furious glow
like the color black,
like a poet

whose mouth is a bucket,
whose head is an ocean of roses.

Roberto Carlos Garcia’s published works include the chapbook amores gitano (gypsy loves) (Červená Barva Press, 2013), his poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, Bold As Love Magazine, Entropy, PLUCK!: The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, The Rumpus, 5 AM Magazine, Wilderness House, Connotation Press—An Online Artifact, Poets/Artists, Levure Litteraire, and others. His translation of Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Macchu Picchu & Other Poems is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press in 2016. A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry Translation from Drew University and is Instructor of English at Union County College.

Days were short and buckled,
the dinner to prepare, our table
to set, cream and tan plumage to fan

in a gold-rimmed goblet, hint
of flight.  Together we hunted
wild turkey feathers, tracked

hay fields where flocks lumbered
in summer, walked a trail over
to the next road, followed it past

the last house as gravel gave in
to double mud ruts strung
under high tension towers stacked

on a hill of scrub oak and granite
where we found a feather more
than once and understood always.

Grace Mattern’s poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Hanging Loose, Calyx, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the NH State Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center and has published two books of poetry. She has worked in the movement to end violence against women for 35 years. She blogs at www.gracemattern.com

I drive my mother home because the train
is late, because her hands shake, because

my brother doing push-ups after he lost
a bet had all of us fearing the explosion

in his chest and what are family reunions for?
Food.  Too much wine.  A kickball in the gut.

When I pulled the folding chair from its bag,
unused for a year, a nest of mice tumbled out

all stolen cotton fluff, shredded paper, trembling
like a dropped heart in the grass.  The mother,

a baby still attached to her milk, ran for it,
watched the rest of the day from a tree’s branches

her babies scattered and blind.  We discussed cruelty
and survival, circled our chairs like stagecoaches.

Isn’t each family a new frontier, in its way?
Spreading out into unknown places, each child

a satellite shot into the dark above.  My mother
wants me to spend the  night—such a long drive

to get her safely home—but the car is already
pointing away, has a full tank, I even bought

a coffee in the biggest size they sold just
so I could kiss her on the cheek and say no.

Suzanne Parker is a winner of the Kinereth Gensler Book Award for her poetry collection, Viral (from Alice James Books, 2013), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and is on the National Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List of recommended books. Her work has recently appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, and BODY. Suzanne is the managing editor at MEAD: A Magazine of Literature and Libations and directs the creative writing program at Brookdale Community College in NJ.

Three a.m., and night is an oil spill
seeped down to the benthic zone.

The way a man-of-war is simultaneously
individual and colony,
I am wide-awake and exhausted.

My head, sunken into the pillow, fills
with ideas, insights, plans, and epiphanies

like the gold coins and suits of armor
stuffed inside a seafloored shipwreck.

I load my arms and make for the surface
where the submerged treasures
will atomize in the barbarous sunlight,

and the waking world, as always,
will plunder me of my private riches.

Doc Suds is a proud Wisconsin native currently residing in North Miami. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, New Delta Review, Paper Darts, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. Find more at www.docsuds.net.