Ace Boggess

Depressive Episodes

She buries herself in murk & lonely earth

like a mole streaking to hide from footsteps.

Mole is also another word for spy,

like Aldrich Ames trading secrets for the lie of money

instead of the competing lies of flags.

Spy serves as synonym for see,

as in: if we could afford it,

we’d travel to see the tulips at Les Tuileries,

an unmanned rocket burning on its pad,

the world’s largest ball of twine,

an execution, though we don’t agree.

But, see as well means prophesy,

a fancy way of saying fear the future,

which she does, which is why

I want to tell her all will be right.

She’s built herself a grave for midnights &

sleeps in it as though the dark she wears

like a casket shell is the sole safe place

on this bastard of a planet where she lives.

* * *

How I Knew Charlie

He threw his crack pipe on my dashboard,

leaned out my window like a dirt-blond cocker spaniel,

howling at the women we passed. This was after

he held a hunter’s knife against my throat

because his mother sold me pills, & he wanted to be the one

to score a few bucks, to run the show.

Chaos business was the biggest brand in any parking lot

behind some hick bar so unknown its name changed twice a year.

How many strangers shook my hand with a baggie in between? &

Charlie? Last time I saw him, we were both in jail:

sober, muted. I read in the paper

how he robbed a woman for thirteen dollars,

threatening her with a broken bottle

That was Charlie: coked up, drunk,

small-time with ambitions, stupid-crazy like a spider

drowning inches from the slippery cyan wall of a swimming pool.

* * *

Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003). His novel, A Song without a Melody, is forthcoming from Hyperborea Publishing. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, RATTLE, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Jessie Carty

The Fourth Dimensional Flea Market

There’s a white, round, taped-down sticker on my mother’s gravy boat. $12. I’ve seen it, in other universes, for 10. 15. I don’t always buy it, but in this world, I collect my mother’s Pyrex pattern: green with white daisies.

From another vendor I negotiate $10 for a $20 framed crochet of a rainbowed snail.

I buy a rusting birdcage because in one plane I had a cockatiel when I was nine that never learned to talk.

While the seller is making change, I pocket a pair of webbed earrings, complete with dangling spiders, because in every dimension I find a pair to steal.

On most I sneak them back onto the shelf.
On most.

* * *

Concessions

You are too early for the movie so you watch the concession stand.

You think the little girl, who can’t stand still, will ask for Fun Dip; for the activity it takes to obtain the sugary powder from the pouches with nothing more than a candy based chalky stick.

The big guy by himself will want to upsize his combo, but he'll stick to his small diet coke and a soft pretzel.

The girl on her first date will ask for the freshness of Junior Mints even though she’s craving the Butterfinger Bites because she knows chocolate would be messy and she's wearing pale yellow. Her date will decide on a tactile treat: Twizzlers.

You haven’t decided what you’ll have, but you hope they have tea. And maybe you’ll add a medium popcorn, denying your desire for the round satisfaction of a large tub.

You can already feel the rhythm of piece after piece of the popcorn carefully selected and placed on your tongue. The salt. How your pace quickens as you reach in for handfuls, noting the sandy sensation of the bag, nearly empty, before the trailers are even done.

* * *

Jessie Carty is the author of seven poetry collections which include the chapbook An Amateur Marriage (Finishing Line, 2012) which was a finalist for the 2011 Robert Watson Prize and her newest full length collection Practicing Disaster which was published by Aldrich Press in 2014.

Dave K

there are so many ways to say ‘fundamentally unemployable’ at great length


the window reflects my open mouth and
i line up the cars with my teeth as they
surround the black tongue of the street

on busy nights they pack into the gumline
grinding and scraping and exchanging plaque

one time a guy ran out of his car
left the hazards blinking
and jumped into oncoming traffic
the decal on his back windshield said FLORIST
his license plate said NHLST with the vowels missing

he was jutting halfway out of the space
he would never fit and he knew that and
now it’s someone else’s problem

an impacted kind of wisdom, this

sometimes it’s like my brain is a dick
and my skull is a fist and my blood is
gushing from all the holes in my head

i still keep one of that guy’s teeth
in my wallet when enough of mine
fall out i’ll make it fit
this is my gift to him



* * *


for whom the Chris Tolls (dedicated to Chris Toll)



why is work in twerking? that
shit is supposed to be fun.
who put the manslaughter in
laughter? wait, reverse that
one or it won't work.

i see trenchcoats flapping like
sheets on a line and a whole
Chekov's arsenal of guns unfired.
there is more ado in an avocado than
about nothing.

i scrape plaque from my teeth with
my fingernail and wish i'd brought
some sunglasses.

i can't see through all this light.
there is too much cum in this
cucumber for my taste.

we have about a billion years left.
that's not as long as forever.
someday the sun will die
and its last rays will wrap
around the earth and its final
words will ride on stellar winds
i'm sorry
i'm sorry
i'm sorry
i'm sorry




* * *


Dave K.'s work has been published in Front Porch Journal, Welter, Writers & Words, Artichoke Haircut, and Cobalt, and he is the author of stone a pig and MY NAME IS HATE. When Dave K. isn't writing, he spends his time as a tributary of the Bobu River in Romania.

Ed Madden

After long silence



My father is a puzzle box. He’s a map folded up.

The nurse says he has something to tell me.
He stares at me, but never tells me.

My mother is a vase tipped over.
Daylilies bloom one day, and each day is another.

So many vases left over after her accident,
stacked in the closet, like empty wrappers, like magic.

My father is a shrunken head and a blanket.
What do you want to say, old man, that you haven’t said already?

Outside, a skunk or something shuffling on the carport, the light is on.

My father is a box of lamentations, unsaid.
My mother is a blue jar.

Listen: my mother’s soft snoring, the daylilies furled in the dark.

* * *

Field guide, after the floods*

1.

In March, when we got the diagnosis, drove him home,

there were redbuds in bloom along the road,

out back where the barn fell,

in the front yard, covered with poison ivy we can’t kill,

and buckeyes coming up along the ditch, shoots

like red fingers, new leaves red as bruises,

and dock leaves along the road like tongues.

II.

Where the Stitt house used to be: hyacinth, vetch,

and everywhere dead nettle.

At the woodpile: leather flower.  Under the cypress: dayflower.

Out back: henbit and wood sorrel,

cut-leaved primrose, skullcap, dog fennel.

 

III.

In the fields, buttercup and vetch as the floods receded,

and later, as the plows began their business, something we’d never seen:

 

bear tracks. My cousin took a photo on his phone.

Days later, the newspaper reported two bears hit and killed on local roads.

 

* * *

Landscape, with levees*
           ‘If this is the middle, how long does it last?’
                                Luisa A. Igloria



Yesterday, they put up levees in the field
across the road, the new rice a green sheen,
the levees ready for what’s to come.
When I drive to town, I leave the windows
down, drink in the smell of well water,
metallic, cold. We think we’ve been close,
but can’t know. That weekend he was away 
from us, his eyes glazed and moving around
the room, his hands picking at the blanket, 
his feet twitching, jerking beneath the sheets.
That morning he couldn’t breathe.

Since I’ve been here, the floods have receded
from the fields, the men and tractors taken
over—landplanes leveled the field for the coming
rows, a red Case IH and a huge
John Deer pulling the yellow planes,
the long silver blades across the field.

Disk and plow have turned stubble under,

and weeds, the trees along the ditch filled out

thick and green. The river stalled a while,

so much water coming down the ditch

it ran backward for two days, but that’s passed.

The nurse blames the moon for dad’s moods,

says there was a solar eclipse the day

he decided to die, though all his vital signs

were fine. That night he said goodbye, leaned back

in bed, and waited. Nothing happened, and he was

mad, the next morning, that he hadn’t

been taken. I’m still here? Outside we could hear

the tractors starting on another field.

* * * 

Born and raised in rural Arkansas, Ed Madden teaches at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of three previous books of poetry—Signals (USC, 2008), which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Prodigal: Variations (Lethe, 2011), and Nest (Salmon, 2014). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in Best New Poets 2007, The Book of Irish American Poetry, and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, and online at the Good Men Project. In 2015 he was named the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina.

*"Field guide, after the floods" and "Landscape, with levees" originally appeared in The Arkansas Review. All three of these poems are from Madden's collection Ark, forthcoming in March from Sibling Rivalry Press. About the book:  In a spring of floods, a son returns to rural Arkansas to help care for his dying father. A difficult and beautiful book about a father’s death from cancer, Ark is also a book about family, about old wounds and new rituals, about the extraordinary importance of ordinary things at the end of life, about the gifts of healing to be found in the care of the dying.  At once a memoir in verse about hospice care and a son’s book-length lament for his father, Ark is a book about the things that can be fixed, and those that can’t.

Chris Fullerton

Tones of Home

A black-tongued boy eating dirt on the side
of the house with a plastic spoon from a yellow

metal dump truck, A yellow-haired girl standing
in the park beneath a gray sky with a broken kite 

dangling from a twisted dead oak tree, A graying
man leaning against the brick façade of a downtown

building drinking two dollar wine from a bottle
in a brown paper bag, A brown-eyed saint, head

in hands, feet buried in the white sand of a beach
at dawn frigid from a February wind next to a smoldering

bonfire, A borrowed white car loaded down with black
garbage bags in the middle lane of an eastbound interstate,

They’ll say that they miss you,
but they never actually notice you
until you’re already gone.

* * *


Know Your Surroundings

There’s a barn behind
the new house
(not a barn, but a barn-like shed)
gray wood to match
the afternoon storms
empty, save for a stray
scorpion and a leftover
can of wood-stain.
just beyond,
a field of pine seedlings,
the cusp of sequestration,
silence permeates
the neighborhood
every third house
empty, a community
foreclosed and liquidated.

The plywood floor creaks
beneath my weight,
stepping carefully
like a trespasser,
imagining the possibilities
of creation
or destruction, planing
pine into a table
or a makeshift coffin,
was central Florida
ever the “new frontier”
more than it is
right now,
cloaked in loneliness
I feel limitless
as the afternoon rain
begins to fall.




* * *




Christopher Fullerton is a writer living with two friends, four dogs, and a tortoise in San Antonio, Texas, but he's still never been to the Alamo. He keeps forgetting.

Julie Fisher

Quija Board

I could be the wine left on your lips.
You might be the urge of my planchette.
I trace the edge of your scar
in the dusk of my daydream.
Behind your gaze I glimpse your dervish
contained by centrifuge of will.
It’s this whir under your voice
that whisks me near you.
It’s your blur I want to decipher.
Pour me into your goblet
I will just barely lay
my fingers on your surface.


* * *



Detour

I

Dad often tells me
he drinks
because life is boring.

I suspect it is why
he waits.
His thigh tumor
is tangerine-sized
when he has it
examined.

II

Surgeons remove three
of his quadriceps.
In rehab he begs me
not to unwrap
his latest painting
before we burn it.

III

A slow somersault
of breast feather
kisses yellow line.


I glance backwards
to a hawk corpse
fluttering
in the zipper of traffic.

I lift the warm red tail
away from worn asphalt
to a clutch of twigs
crossed
like Dad’s wasted legs.




* * *


Julie Fisher instigates communal literary experiences at LitMore, Baltimore’s Literary Arts Center (www.LitMore.org), which she founded and manages. Her chapbook Skittering Thing was published by Furniture Press Books. She believes in magical beings and sacred places. In her bones, she knows we create ourselves as we tell our stories.

David Taylor Nielsen

5 Blackjack Poems*

You just wouldn't understand

Unless you jumped in the air

With your briefs outside your pants.

* * *

Insects have the right idea:

Adolescence is best spent

Isolated in cocoons.

* * *

ADHD poetry:

I would explain it to you,

But I've moved on already.

* * *

I donated a kidney.

It was the only way that

You would let me inside you.

* * *

She wants more than he can give:

Butterflies, rainbows, puppies,

Occasional orgasms.

* * *

*Blackjack poetry is a form that was invented by Maritza Rivera in 1999. It consists of 3 lines of seven syllables each or, less commonly 7 lines of three syllables. There are no thematic or stylistic restrictions or norms to this form.

David Taylor Nielsen is currently the host of Poetry Night Open Mic in Greenbelt, MD. He can also be found haunting other open mic poetry readings in the DC Metro Region. He has been published in Gargoyle Magazine, and Three Line Poetry.

Matt Sadler

North by Northwest

On a hike we encounter
the ruin, a single raised wall
blocking our view of the sea,
we cross the threshold hand in hand,

a dead love married in a dead
church, the ceiling pure blue sky
sacking the brick crumbs and
the old stone cross

is a wonder of the past
the firework grass threatens
to swallow.

This is the North Sea, county
Antrim, and the girl is radiant
in a blue dress dulled to shimmer
by that sky. And this is a

memory, the future of the past,
the hazel wand lost
in the thicket of hazel.

And the girl is a ghost, tired
of wandering around in my
story for no good reason,
looking at the ghost white

sheep dotting the hillside
between the raised scar beds
of old stone walls.

* * *

Night at the Museum

Trying to be an honest father, I wrap myself in the tree wrap lights and suffer only minor, inconsistent burns. The children mistake me for a rash and giggle into the interactive intransitive. They touch

screen me. It’s all so weird I spork the porch floor and paste the dead spiders into an art collage on my skin and call it “the danse” with an s instead of a c. When the girls get scared

I try to convince them it was all a game but I’m art now and no one believes art even though art is forever.

* * *

Matt Sadler is the author of The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio (March Street) and Tiny Tsunami (Flying Guillotine). His work has recently appeared in Indiana Review, Open Letters Monthly, Diagram, and Eleven Eleven, among others, and he is Poetry Editor at Versal. He teaches writing and film in the suburbs of Detroit, where he lives with his wife and family.

Rusty Barnes

What You See on Shirley Street

A woman with a child crosses

the street from BK's Bar to the beach,

pushing the child by the butt like

a dog and dragging a cheap stroller

behind her. I didn't know you

could even bring kids into bars,

so already this day has taught
me something. The street also

teaches: buy pot here not heroin;
the Cambodian market is less

easy to scam than the bodega;
hang out here long enough you

might see a good tattoo; there's

a satellite police station on the beach.

but no cop is ever there. What the

street seems to want us to learn

is that every story you see here
has four sides and if you listen

closely you can hear them all
under the pavilions and on the wind

with the smell of cheap hot dogs
and the ever present sea air.

* * *

 Belle Isle Marsh

Every time I visit the Belle Isle Marsh
I feel like a six foot two 300 pound target.
No crime takes place there that I can see

But any time I walk into the reeds I expect
to see a body or a rape taking place. Before
I had this feeling we buried my daughter's
dead hamster Brownie there under six

inches of loam and a rock pyre
in memoriam. My daughter didn't know
better so I went with my ace plan

at the burial: I recited from the Tibetan
Book of the Dead. O soul of Brownie

as you confront the endless void. . .

Then I forgot where I was and had to start
again at the beginning while inside I thought
Brownie you stinking offal in your expensive
cage I am reciting this because my daughter
does not know how to lose you and is chirping
back tears and even as I speak I do not
know how to lose her among these endless
alphabets of rock and starshine and tears
so I stand here in the marsh and gibber
silently to myself years after the fact in
this place I fear for both what it holds
and what may happen, neither of which
I can control.

* * *

Rusty Barnes lives in Revere, MA with his wife, the poet Heather Sullivan, and their family. He's published over two hundred stories and poems since 1989, when his first submission hit the postal system. His poetry book I Am Not Ariel came out in 2013.

Helen Losse

In Defense of Confusion

Weather this winter is unreasonable,

both in North Carolina and in my hometown.

In the church my nephew pastors,

provisions have been made

for those who cannot remain in their homes.

I remember the February we drove to Joplin

in a blizzard.  My mother died three weeks later

at age 91. The next year—while hospitalized—

I set off my heart monitor, brushing my teeth

in a bathroom whose shower was useless,

without a curtain. The rain has stopped now,

but my senses roar. The Pope is right, men and

women are different. But why women have

hormonal hot flashes until they are eighty

remains unanswered, by him or anyone else.

Made from water and unrequited longing,

I speak in defense of much earthly confusion,

in glory of rain, in love with my God.

**

Wintering Birds Take Flight

So much about winter seems obvious.

So much about winter is true.

Small bits of hopscotch logic are tucked

into the hem of my rambling reverie..

Wind is cold, mittens warm.

Sky that holds flurries by day

held a star of prophetic wonder.

Events get postponed but not Mass,

yet I don't leave home like I did

when younger. It's not safe.

I'm still watching birds at the feeder.

Can one actually spend

"too much time" watching God's creatures,

as a friend claimed she was?

Nothing can keep Jesus away.

Nothing.

So just how is

bird watching not worship

of a quieter hue?

**

Bio:

A former English teacher, Helen Losse was educated at Missouri Southern State University (BSE, 1969), where she majored in secondary education and English and Wake Forest University (MALS, 2000), where she studied African American history and religion and creative writing.  She is the author of six collections of poetry, and her poems have been anthologized inLiterary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, Kakalak 2014, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VII: North Carolina.  Her poems have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and three times for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist. The former Poetry Editor for The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, she is now an Associate Poetry Editor for Kentucky Review.  Helen lives in Winston-Salem, NC with husband Bill, and is awaiting the May 2016 publication of Every Tender Reed, now available for advance order from Main Street Rag. http://mainstreetragbookstore.com/?product=every-tender-reed