Two Poems by Kat Hayes

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The Day After the Storm

The day after the storm
I walk to see
how much the stream has risen.

I remember yesterday:
rain pounding through the
ancient trees,
weak limbs snapping
from the canopy,
leaves seizuring with wind gusts.

A storm really will end it all.

Now, standing on the bank,
the stream obscenely swollen,
I see everything in reverse:
raindrops rising from the surface
sucked to clouds whose gray
is draining.
Fallen limbs levitate
back to their branches,
animals unhole from hiding,
and the landscape
gasps the wind back to
wherever it came from.

Life is not like this,
so easily undone.

But I swear sometimes
I can almost unsee it,
that storm
and the swollen creek.

 
 

Settling Down

This house has good bones,
yes, despite the rest.

Never mind the mold blooming like a tumor
on the doorframe.

Never mind the way immobility
is so much like a death.

It could be home—
coursed through like blood
in a body cavity—
exploited, returned to.

We could live here,
the walls holding us
like a second skin,
witnesses to the miracles,
the tedium of brushed teeth,
the clock’s pulse,
the cicadas intimating
god knows what over and over.

We could turn a corner as slight
as the twist in our double helixes,
everything benign and
malignant trapped in one place—
a room,
a home,
this body.

 
 
 

About the creator: Kat Hayes

KatHayes-Seascape_with_Jellyfish__The_Day_After_the_Storm__-kat_hayes

Kat Hayes is a writing instructor at Eastern University near Philadelphia. She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from West Chester University. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose.

“For Omnivores” by Richard Hartshorn

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A raccoon clawed out Drake’s left eye when he was two years old.  But instead of shrinking into a cobwebbed corner and cowering until he died, Drake, my third cat, soon became the most vicious animal alive.  When coming home from my job at the local food co-op, I’d often find small piles of dead rodents on the stoop, their bodies reduced to pinkish meat.  My neighbor, Isladora, stopped bringing her dog around when Drake pounced on its back and sank his incisors into its neck – the dog still carries twin puncture wounds – and Drake’s thirst for violence remained unslaked.  His one desire was to hunt down that raccoon before the end.  The raccoon had taken something from him, the part of him that held dignity, inhibition, and the pure animal magnetism the lady cats, who always retreated at his approach, craved.  He would never reproduce, and the way he looked at me, you’d think he knew it.  It wasn’t long before he ravaged the legs of a bike-riding kindergartener, whose parents called to let me know they’d spoken to the proper people.  I assured them they had the wrong number, dropped the phone onto the cradle, and promised not to give up on Drake.  I sometimes wish I’d tried harder.

After a nine-hour shift on a hazy Friday, I plodded along the dirt road toward my home, the log cabin passed down the family tree since my great-great-uncle’s days.  I’d recently had the plain white letters on the mailbox changed to P. Colehammer – P for Patrick – since I was now the only one living there, and I couldn’t help but feel a swelling of pride every time I walked by.  My hands were tender from a day of culling overripe peaches. Isladora was crouched on my steps, a cigarette pinched between her fingers.  She only smoked in the summer, and liked to stargaze from my porch – I never bothered to ask what was wrong with her own; I liked the company.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Isladora would normally dive into what she’d been thinking about all day: astronomy, the latest batch of indie films she’d seen at the local CinePlex, or her ever-expanding fourteen step program for shucking any bad habit (she still claims she can quit smoking whenever she wants to, but it’s been years since I’ve smelled anything but smoke on her rack-hung jackets).  She was the only person who understood why I wouldn’t surrender Drake to the people who plucked misbehaving cats from the streets, even after Drake had treated her precious dog the way a Weed Eater treats a patch of dandelions.  She exhaled a draft of smoke and stood up on her long legs, her brick-brown hair twisting around her lobeless ears, and walked onto the wooden wheelchair ramp I’d built with my dad when I was a teenager.  I passed through the smoke cloud behind her, my nasal glands stimulated, my mind wild from the odor.

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“The Hanger Thief” by Bob Williams

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I’m going to tell you about the first two things I ever stole, though I doubt you’ll blame me for it. At the time I decided to become a thief I was in the habit of attending various artistic outings around New York City. I’m not really an artist exactly, but certainly someone who enjoys watching others bashfully explain the genius of their own work.  The other thing is I’m quite poor. It just fills me up when I get to wear a tie and drink clean cold water and walk across those plush violet velvet carpets they’ve always got in the entryway—the ones drenched by a subtle chandelier sunset so soft I feel like kneeling down to pray.  It’s peaceful, everyone whispers.

“Evening, sir,” the doorman said to me.

“How do you do?” I replied, entering the hall.

“Just fine sir,” said the cordial doorman, nodding and all.

A different employee, a coatman of sorts, came by to take my coat.  It felt very posh handing the coat off like that.  I held it out for him with my fingers trembling to show that I couldn’t be troubled to bear the weight of it for another moment.  He kindly accepted the coat, nodding thanks as he walked toward the set of hangers.  Glistening metallic hangers all in a row, perfectly spaced two inches apart from one another.  An alignment of soldiers from an alien race so ideally composed that they need no alteration and should never be defeated—they don’t even compete anymore, they alone are responsible for keeping resting clothes in place.  They remain proudly stilted throughout time and toe the line of arrogance but never cross it. Their form and function are united in an eternal euphoric reverie that begs and teases the ordinary and imperfect things that comprise the world around them.

The coatman selected a hanger and slid it gracefully through the vacant arms of my coat.  A stunning curl of hanger head turtled from the collar, sparkling in the bright lights of the entryway, or the foyer, as some like to call it. The hanger body held the coat exactly in place. The coat looked comfortable and assured as though it’d just come in from a long day’s work ready for a nap.  I needed to get a closer look at some of the still naked hangers.

“My good man, which way to the lavatory?” I asked the coat checker in a profound way.

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Three poems by Jan Ball

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Circus Flower

Last night when we ordered red wine
at our favorite Italian restaurant,
the sommelier decanting the Chianti
Classico Reserve’ said, “You’ll find
this wine smells like dead roses,”
and as I inserted my nose below
the rim of the crystal glass to find
out for myself, I suddenly smelled
the fragrance of the plastic rose
my sister brought back from the circus;
more fragrant than the ecclesiastical
incense that used to waft around
our heads on Easter Sunday or
the Evening in Paris my mother
splashed on her underwear before
going out with my father on Saturday
nights and now this wine.

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Two Poems by R. W. Haynes

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Verse Junkie Says Goodbye

And as you go out the door this time
And oblivion stealthily closes in,
And echoes faintly sound a parting chime
As if the square were finally circled then,
How the twisting loop of time replays
Its ironies, false starts, and happy ends,
Shuttling recollection’s coming days
For us, our true, and our two-faced friends
Enunciating verse as though our fangs
Were savaging some bloody body’s flesh,
Twitching in convulsions where it hangs,
Ripping out, spitting, then tearing afresh.
Walk softly, wisely, but vigorously,
For the hamster-treadmill rotates you back to me.

 
 
 

Ion at Starbucks

Your lyrics are purely rhetorical, Sybil said,
And I paused to let the chemistry reply
Of whatever impulse would start in my head,
But lightning struck, a radiant pig flew by,
A choir of lepers sang ecstatically,
“Rhetoric is Hell! Let Hell be poetry!”
And, as they all tap-danced dementedly,
A flight of F-16s screamed past suddenly,
And somewhere startled neurons, in confusion,
Protested this storm of deafening racket,
Slowly separating fact from delusion,
Each fumbling back to its own packet.
And I, recalling my half-spoken syllable,
“Oh, what is that you were saying, Sybil?”

 
 
 

About the creator: R. W. Haynes

RWH photo (1)

R. W. Haynes, a South Texas academic, writes all kinds of stuff, including poetry, a good bit of which can be googled. His main professional interest is currently the enigmatic Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote.

 

Two Poems by Mihaela Tudor

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Becoming

Shadows in the city of the desert,
Streets segmenting the life in squares and roundabouts;
Motion in the riot of leaves above.
Silence.
Trees passing over me.
A defiant stop.

As if here on the ground tonight (at the red light)
The light becomes some sort of living thought,
Lying flat, sticking its density to the asphalt
Yellow and dry, like the dust around,
Around my hips, around my mind
Rising as a vortex, deep as a cry,
asking
Why is it that I cross the same path
with somebody else’s feet, as if remote-controlled from above?

As if here on the ground tonight (at a good bye kind of thing between expats)
Glitters in the eyes dropped aside,
In a little pond of flowing years
Interchanging instant memories and borrowing present from this mud
which mixes life with dreams and hopes, fears and struggle within;
It’s been too long,
It’s been too long to dive and find a key which doesn’t exist,
It’s been only years
Buried in sand,
Why am I crossing another path
with someone else’s feet, as if remote-controlled from above?

I guess it’s a start,
Geared through the lights of the stop
In narrow streets, segmenting the blaze in black (Saudi feminine herds) and the slaves
In squares, roundabouts,
Or all the houses afar.
Why am I crossing this path with somebody else’s feet,
as if remote-controlled from above?

 

 

Around it was silent

A glamorous shisha
sparkling emerald shades in candle light
When nights were burning whispers,
Or whispers were burning under my skin…
Around, the world was silent,
Feverish…
Harder.

Smoking flavors of solitude,
Raising into the air like amber,
I was dancing with serpents
Like an Indian master,
Around, the world was silent,
Tantric…
 heaven.

Burning coal at the touch of words,
Alighting wings, shaping thoughts,
“I want to have the world”,
Around, the world was silent.

The desert came,
Ate the snakes,
and left in shades of amber.
Around, the world was silent.

Too close to you.

 
 
 

About the Creator: Mihaela Tudor

Mihaela Tudor comes from Romania but currently she works as an English lecturer at University of Hail in Saudi Arabia. She previously published flash fiction on Orion Headless (“The Rhapsody of Thoughts”) and in The Battered Suitcase (“Les Reveries d’ un Promeneur Plus Solitaire”, Spring 2011, vol. 3, issue 4). A poem (“Summer return”) has been recently published on Every Writer’s Resource.

 

“The All of It” by T. G. Hardy

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J-P and I were on the screened porch overlooking the dark Chesapeake, granduncle and grandnephew, sprawled out on chaises side by side, me on the left — for I’m deaf in my left ear — and we’re stuck into the Periquita, our favorite Portuguese wine. We were silent, lost in the flame of the candle in the hurricane globe, as if it were a campfire. This is something we get around to whenever he visits, years now, just this way — evenings when we couldn’t imagine life being better, but never needing to say so. A guy thing, I suppose, this not needing to elaborate.

It was only a week ago, the last night he was here, so the details are fresh: a dark night, no moon at all, making the candle seemed overbright. You had to shield it with your hand to see the distant glow of fires on Town Beach. Feathers of breeze picked their way up the channel from the marina, bringing with them the sound of halyards tinkling against aluminum masts and the smell of salt marsh and now and then wood smoke.

Our talk that evening had been about J-P’s naval flight training and his life out in San Diego, with me almost having to interview him and him answering me with a reluctance that puzzled me. Then we were silent. We had sailed Miss Noor clear out to the ship channel marker, a wild run downwind with the spinnaker full and then had to pay for it, of course, having to claw our way back to the mooring with the wind in our teeth. J-P had to do the heavy work, cranking in the sails with each tack. Four hours of that. He would have been tired.

We watched the dance of the candle flame.

J-P is the 24-year-old grandson of my younger brother, Michael, who died in Korea. J-P’s father disappeared in the sixties, intent on destroying himself, which he did. J-P’s mother is a fine lady, once the best crop-duster on the Delmarva Peninsula, now editing an English language daily in San Jose, Costa Rica. She’s a fascinating woman, and though this is not her story, I feel it important that you get a sense of how J-P turned out such a good egg.

As to me, I am a builder and restorer of wooden boats. My own boat is a wooden Dragon with spars of Sitka spruce. Danish-built, she won a bronze at the 1948 Olympic Games. I drive a brand new wood-framed Morgan sports car made, at great expense, to look 1940s as well. I prefer older women, but haven’t had any luck with them, probably because they’re blindsided when they discover I’m really an eighties guy and a bit wild. For example, I’m crazy right now about a Rastafarian song by a group called Boney M. The lyrics start out — “By the rivers of Babylon,” and then it blazes right through the entirety of Psalms 137-something. My aerobics instructor was doubtful when I requested this song be added to her mix. I brought in the CD and she went nuts over it. She fixes on me when the song comes on. I can tell that she likes my Flashdance moves. She said just yesterday that I have the body of a younger man. How much younger I didn’t ask. I like ambiquity; it allows me to fill in the blanks in my own optimistic way. I’m hoping to make her my French-press coffee and serve it to her in my big old bed where the sun comes up between your feet, sometimes like thunder.

J-P brought me back from this pleasant digression. “Woody,” he said and waited for eye contact. “It embarrasses me to talk about my flying when I know that you wanted to fly, and then couldn’t.”

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Three Poems by Richard King Perkins II

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An Expression of Dried Flowers

After a year, the separation ended so she had a yard sale
and sold all the trappings of her brief independence.
She gave up her lover
and her tiny apartment
and went back to the stately pillared home
her husband had built for them.
It was for the good of the child, they both agreed.

Months later, the returned wife realized
her memory box had disappeared
somewhere in the shuffle,
like a grey tooth beneath her pillow.
Gone were the dried flowers, drawings and stories,
and the little glass bottles
she’d kept since she was twelve.
The recent love letters,
she had destroyed on her own.

If she suspected her husband, she never said.
The wife merely forced herself to smile
and enjoy all the trappings of comfortable servitude,
simpering like his time-worn basset hound
crouched in front of the fireplace.

Months earlier, as he tossed her memory box
into a construction lot dumpster,
the husband hadn’t recognized
that most of the dried flowers
were ones he’d given her

and this was why she had left him in the first place.

 
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Three Poems by J. Patrick Lewis

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1942

My mother, heavy with twins to rival a moon of Jupiter,
broke water the same day, four states south, Tammy
Wynette launched into the world. There must have been
a few other things going on that year but nothing to rival
war. No Nobel Prizes awarded. The cost of a first-class
stamp—three cents. More than 120,000 Japanese forcibly
invited to “relocation centers.” The birth of DDT, Casablanca,
Bambi, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, Grand Coulee Dam,
the Manhattan Project, and gas rationing never seemed
to faze my brother, constantly mewling for the fatter breast.
We lay next to one another in our crib in diapers
that must have felt like my Depends do now,
communicating in our secret twin language of slaps
and farts. Later, when we were five or so, someone asked
him, “Sacheverell, what is the very first thing you remember?”
He made an “O” with his lips, and blurted out, “Round milk.”
Later still, he took up lepidoptery, which no one saw coming.

 
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“Long Road Wandering” by Peter BG Shoemaker

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In ’95 he’d lost two fingers trying to get from Washington DC to Hendersonville. One morning he’d woken to find the tips tinged in black. Over the next two days it spread and the warmth that had been there at the beginning turned to fire and then ice and then nothing at all. He kept his mittens on after that. Finally, he’d had to go to the free clinic in Charlotte. The pretty intern who’d smiled and patted him on the shoulder when he walked in turned grey and stifled a gasp when she saw. It was lucky, she said later, that he didn’t loose his whole hand. It didn’t feel like luck. Now he spent his winters–most of the year really–in the Southwest.

He moved from place to place, playing games with desert weather. In the truly cold parts of the year, he moved further and further south, from Tucson to Phoenix, from Albuquerque to Las Cruces. It was in Las Cruces where he’d found himself a day ago, exhausted from the people who no longer picked-up hitchhikers, and those that did, but you wished they hadn’t. It had been late, and he’d found the first culvert he could and crawled inside.

In cold weather, culverts were good. When things got hot, the arroyos that wound through the lands of scrub and pine, cactus and chimisa, served as drifting thoroughfares for all matters of life trying to survive. In settled places, most of those arroyos fed through culverts–hollow spaces under roads and trails–and were about as inviting a place as you can imagine. And not just for him. He’d learned that lesson early.

As always–even when still drugged with the night’s vodka and lost dreams–he woke silent and still, the sun’s beginnings behind his eyelids. The air was cold, acrid, wet. And he was shivering. It hurt to turn over. The culvert’s ribs, usually leveled by silt and trash washed though during the rains, were raw and defined by the wind.

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Two Poems by Jason Ryberg

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Monday, October 30

That cold-blooded bastard, the wind,
is having his way with
the house tonight

while some surly, third-rate deity
is dragging a dark blanket
of clouds over the city.

The gnarled and spidery trees all
rattle and creak like Halloween’s
cracked and splintered bones

and the crows
have folded up their
feathers for the day,

morphing into
the slippery black shadows
of early evening.

So, Old Man Winter has just now
decided to send his heralds in
across the state line,

each one trailing
long flowing banners like haunted
rivers of gray weather.

And once again
the good people of Kansas have been
caught with their short pants on;

for the wind, the clouds,
the trees, the crows;
they are telling us

that school is officially “in session”
and that our love for each other
will be tested.

 
 
 

This Time

the eye of Sauron is definitely upon you,
or whatever you want to call that chilling/
crippling/just-go-limp-if-you-know-what’s-good-
for-you feeling like a freeze ray or klieg light
suddenly beaming at you, prison break style,
from the dark heart of that doom-clouded
set of coordinates (just over your shoulder
and normally out of your sphere of perception
and influence); that place from where all
vaguely foreboding phone calls and
ominously certified letters seem to issue forth.
Well, at least somebody noticed your
frantic, little organ-grinder monkey antics,
even if it means your cover has been blown.
Ask any sullen, scowling, chronically texting
teenager: sometimes, merely being acknowledged
by someone (anyone) is validation enough.
Other times, best to stay incognito and off the grid;
an unlisted phone number, maybe,
and a forwarding address in someone else’s name,
a “cash only” policy and nothing anyone
would even think about putting a lien on.
Unfortunately, the tectonic plates of reality
seem to move with a life of their own
(and with no applicable quality even resembling
concern for your well being): one moment
it’s all champagne and chicken wings
and the next you’re out the backdoor
with a suitcase in the middle of the night
and no looking back, the polaroid snapshot
taped on the refrigerator door (you and some girl
from some long ago and presumably better time)
the only proof you were ever here.

 
 
 
 

About the creator: Jason Ryberg

Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry,
six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry
letters to various magazine and newspaper editors,
and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper
that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel.
He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero
Institute of Disquieted Poetics and an aspiring b-movie actor.
His latest collection of poems is Down, Down and Away
(co-authored with Josh Rizer and released by Spartan Press).
He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster
named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe.
Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com