PEOPLE ARE WEARING MY BLOOD

PEOPLE ARE WEARING MY BLOOD

People are wearing
my blood without
my permission.
When I died on
the cross I did
not mean for the
worst of the worst
to be saved. There
are terrorists
and stone cold
killers going
to churches and
drinking my blood
turned to wine.
It makes me feel
uncomfortable
seeing those evil
bastards walking
around thinking
they could say a
prayer and they
would be forgiven
for their sins. I
would let an
adulterer slide
depending on
the situation.
People who run
red lights or cheat
on their taxes
get passes if
they are truly
sorry for what
they did, but not
child predators
or rapists. I
feel like coming
back to earth
and wiping them
off the face
of the world

--Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal will have a new chapbook out next month from Kendra Steiner Editions. He doesn't know what the title will be just yet, but it will include photography by Cynthia Etheridge.

COMPLETELY SATISFIED

COMPLETELY SATISFIED

When you float into my mind
so vividly in my dreams
only to desert me I weep because
you are the one who got away.

Sometimes you stay around for
what seems like months and I feel
like everything is right in the world like
that one long hot summer in June.

If by chance dreams came true, I
would be a big fish in a
small glass, needing only you and nothing
else, completely satisfied.

--Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal will have a new chapbook out next month from Kendra Steiner Editions. He doesn't know what the title will be just yet, but it will include photography by Cynthia Etheridge.

GUIDELINES

GUIDELINES

If I’m accepted elsewhere, lady, don’t say I shouldn’t issue simultaneous subs. I’ll tell you, you exceeded your response time.

--Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California. He is the creator of the Micro Award, an annual competition for previously published flash fiction. Two of his short stories are MWA Notable Stories, and his first novel, Vow of Silence, is available from Trytium.

Temporary Like John the Baptist

Temporary Like John the Baptist

I have found the Lorazepams my lady
has taken to hiding from me
and I have taken them and I have drunk
the wine today. Chianti (Gabbiano),
and the bottle's almost empty,
and the cup is to the left of me
(left to me).

It's like the blood of a sacrificial
bull when I pour it in me, warm, dark red,
flowing.

Sometimes it's as good as beer.
Occasionally it's better.

Like now... sitting in my swivel chair,
listening to the rain coming down
and Bach's Organ Music.

The house is dark, even though it's still
daylight, and the wind outside blowing
the palms around.

I take a sip of red... I'm in no rush
to do anything, no one's waiting on me
and I'm not dreading or expecting
anything.

(shut that door)

Of course, this isn't going to last.
I'm just temporarily in abeyance.
And temporary like John
the Baptist.

Anyway, bliss like this is always
fleeting because it has to be.

Bliss has no memory,

friction
makes most

--M.P. Powers has had work published or forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Main Street Rag, Ghoti Magazine, Underground Voices and many others. He is originally from Chicago, but lives in Florida now & works in the (lack of) construction industry. In his spare time he erects origami boulders out of failed poems.

BETWEEN WHAT THEY SAID AND WHO THEY WERE

BETWEEN WHAT THEY SAID AND WHO THEY WERE

When I was a kid we lived in the sticks.
I liked to play outside in the evening

listening to my parents talking
on the picnic table underneath

the psycho-looking sycamore tree
after work was done,

in the thin line between
screaming at each other

and snoring side by side,
in that barely breathable margin

of black cricket truce,
them drinking beer or wine,

the dancing cherries of their cigarettes
getting lost in the fireflies

and me out in the woods
just at that point

where I could hear their voices
but one step farther

and I could not, walking
that tight rope.

--Mather Schneider is a writer and a cab driver in Tucson.

Words Within The Margin

"But sometimes I get carried away..." --The Poor

Words Within The Margin

I'm going
into
dArk.

The number of the Goat...

This whole in my chest.

--Lucindo Anthony is a poet from the U.S. Rust Belt. Words are about all that's left there.

BLUE OX BLUES

BLUE OX BLUES

There’s a thirty foot tall statue of Paul Bunyon
on the corner of Stone and Glenn
which I pass in the hot afternoon
on my way home from driving my cab all day.
He hulks there with his big square jaw
smiling in the power lines.
He wears a well trimmed black French Canadian beard
and a good-natured woodchopper’s shirt
faded red like a dying lily
with the sleeves rolled up to reveal
log-jam forearms and giant easy-boy hands
gripping a grand-daddy
of an ax.
His legs are like blue-denim Stonehenge
and his boots are as big
as black baby strollers.
He stares down into the traffic
and he appears to lean forward
like he might just fall face
first into the intersection.
What he’s doing here in Tucson
standing on the tumbleweed corner
holding in a sneeze
is a mystery...
Maybe he thinks he needs a tan.
Maybe he’s looking for his blue ox Babe.
Whatever the reason,
when I see him I know
I’m almost home.

--Mather Schneider is a writer and a cab driver in Tucson.

after reading meister eckhart

after reading meister eckhart

if your mind
is a great sunflower
hunched over on its stem
just remember
what seneca said: "that man or
woman is wretched who does not
transcend
their humanity." and to this i would
like to add: self-love is the
fleetest animal that bears
you to
mediocrity.

(the spiders they
sleep on sunday)

--M.P. Powers has had work published or forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Main Street Rag, Ghoti Magazine, Underground Voices and many others. He is originally from Chicago, but lives in Florida now & works in the (lack of) construction industry. In his spare time he erects origami boulders out of failed poems.

Say, Chico, got a light?

Say, Chico, got a light?

the Marx Brothers are burning bridges
one by one leading off Manhattan
Audrey Hepburn warned us, did she not?
we’ll all be trapped among the pillars
no power, a million rats teeming
and slipping out of haunted subway
stations, miles of pipelines echoing
Edward G Robinson’s devil-may-care
cigar-tongued hackle, with Bogart’s eyes
peering from blinds, then disappearing
right when you looked up, and further
up, the sun sets into the universe, straight
toward Pluto, still a planet in Brando’s heart
and the bridges set afire start catching
along the sidewalks toward Central Park
where Rod Serling gives the final sermon
the final rights to the streetlights, the caged
horses reeling at the sound of Boris Karloff
limping in the flaming night, the last man standing
with the final bell, somewhere, tolling the end
of the greatest curtain-call you never saw

--James H Duncan is a New York native, part-time Taoist, and editor of Hobo Camp Review. Although a graduate of Southern Vermont College, he considers himself a lifelong student of the road, picking up non-credit courses in local dive bars, all-night cafes, and used book stores. Plainsongs, Red Fez, The Homestead Review, Reed Magazine, and The Battered Suitcase, among others, have welcomed his poetry. Bird War Press released his fourth collection, "Maybe a Bird Will Sing," in June of 2009. More poems, books, and info at www.jhdwriting.com.

Chained like beasts to the jungle

Chained like beasts to the jungle

oh, that sickly bug—
money
I have it screwtail in my veins
a fluttering, singing swallow in my throat
so little of it, and when I do:
vodka tears against the wall
money
it leaves the hand for small things
so easy like a twist-cap beer
but money, like a bear in the zoo
chained, hungry, ready,
it will kill you with nausea

who made these needs?
the ability to make and waste
so much money?
the questions people vomit at
each other on the street and at parties
what do you do? who do you do it for?
I’d rather live as a deaf mute in a cardboard box on the beach but the rich
have boxes much bigger and much thicker
and you need to have half the money in the world
to live like a Beat now
while the simple bums are sneered at
and run out of town
and crucified on junk bonds and real estate deeds
against a background of businesses that hire me and fire
you, and I don’t want your filthy job, or mine
just your filthy paycheck, and mine
and many thanks for the cardboard refrigerator box
the nice seaside bottle of wine
the view of the sinking world, of which
I am the ultimate rehire

--James H Duncan is a New York native, part-time Taoist, and editor of Hobo Camp Review. Although a graduate of Southern Vermont College, he considers himself a lifelong student of the road, picking up non-credit courses in local dive bars, all-night cafes, and used book stores. Plainsongs, Red Fez, The Homestead Review, Reed Magazine, and The Battered Suitcase, among others, have welcomed his poetry. Bird War Press released his fourth collection, "Maybe a Bird Will Sing," in June of 2009. More poems, books, and info at www.jhdwriting.com.

string-and-can telephone

string-and-can telephone

then there was only the light of the monitor
the electric candle glowing long after the doors
have closed, after the long-legged waitresses have
turned in their finals orders, after the bearded painters
have died along the side of the road on the way
to Denver, after the dogs turn the corner
and the cats return to stare wide-eyed at the
blue neon bar-light rain shimmering through
the summer heat, and the wandering bums all
fall away between the fingers of life to heaven
or hell or some place only they know and fear,
the old men lying on their backs in beds in rooms
drawn shut, alone and afraid of the pain
in their arms, and young men fearing the same
but laughing as their eyes drink up the last
of the nightlife still throbbing beneath the smog,
the taxis, the tulips, the barred school windows,
they all slip away, the women somewhere,
the children even further, youth and old age:
two sides of an ever shortening string-and-can
telephone call to God, a halting one-sided
conversation that ends when the sun explodes,
when the ice melts, when the oceans rise
when the dogs turn the corner and the cats
return to stare wide-eyed at the moon, and afterward
there is only the light of the monitor, the electric
candle burning like blue neon bar-light rain

--James H Duncan is a New York native, part-time Taoist, and editor of Hobo Camp Review. Although a graduate of Southern Vermont College, he considers himself a lifelong student of the road, picking up non-credit courses in local dive bars, all-night cafes, and used book stores. Plainsongs, Red Fez, The Homestead Review, Reed Magazine, and The Battered Suitcase, among others, have welcomed his poetry. Bird War Press released his fourth collection, "Maybe a Bird Will Sing," in June of 2009. More poems, books, and info at www.jhdwriting.com.

Credentials

Credentials

The trouble with male stripping is they say they hire dancers not porn stars but when you come in with your resume it turns out all they want to see is your penis.

--Twinklewinklestinkle Dinklehinkle dreamed of writing since a young age, but due to family and monetary constraints, he dropped out of high school and took up several part-time jobs instead. His first and real passion, though, has always been literature, and after the death of his grandfather, he has begun sending out his own work. His pen name is a joke, and a promise, he had with his grandfather, who was the only member of his family to encourage his writing.

Shotgun Perspective

--Chris Major has appeared widely in print and online including in Calliope Nerve. His free E-chap of visual/concrete work Concrete and Calligram is available at Why Vandalism?

Landscapes of Loneliness

Landscapes of Loneliness

An old woman sits her catacomb sterile in whiteness. alone

Forever cold warmly embraced in a patchwork blanket

Intricate stitching, colors alive in micro fiber threads of security

Firing nerve endings tiny roadmaps of a brain slowly extinguished


A window covered in the cloudy haze of failing eyesight evolves

Her world slowly opens to a backyard of remembrances and life

The sun still in unborn shadows beckons a fractured perspective

Youthfulness of that first early fall when she was beloved


Snapshots of the past interrupted with an aged oak tree

Leaves wilt in dementia, last gasps of breath propel downward

Each one a memory loosened to become the landscape of the past

Branches weakened their fragility etches final eternal hope



Beautiful young girl climbs upward the dawn light within her reach

Mirrors of the past a young life filled in innocence and discovery

The weight of living once supported in the strength of the family

Fractured branch and falling-face etched in surprise and freedom


Smiling, forever suspended in a morning vortex between life and death.

--Carl Scharwath is a father and that means the most to him. He enjoys competitive running and most of his poems had their birth while out on an evening run. Print publishing credits include; Not Popular Magazine (short story), Lake Healthy Living, Pulse, and Abandoned Towers. Web publishing credits include; Lake County Library. Pens On Fire, and Language & Culture. Net. He recently had a news story in the Orlando Sentinel and a two page feature in Lake Healthy Living Magazine. Both articles discussed the Running Poet. Finally his first poem was published in an anthology book Other Voices.

Peaches

Peaches

“Peaches,” she smiled, and her jeans didn’t fit. I watched, up on my elbows, a dickhead. She said something about something else, but I wasn’t listening anymore. Her mother came into the room and asked me to leave. I considered it a question, an option, and her face soured, wrinkled, rotten fruit. I couldn’t stand to look at that, or my peachy tight jean girl, so I climbed out the window, ignoring the door.

“Peregrine Falcons are the fastest animals on the planet,” I sprayed to the gardener who, in turn, sprayed a bed of wild flowers. The flowers were so wild, in fact, they refused to be domesticated. They too did not fit into their genes, however, they also did not blabber nonsense about peaches. I slapped the gardener, then walked to the corner café.

“Tea,” I said, and the girl handed me the letter T. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked. I turned it over, thinking it a cross, a crucifix, anything other than the letter T. The letter T meant too much to me, it hurt too much.

The girl told me to use it. I told her I could not. I whittled the bottom to a point with a plastic knife, then stabbed the counter. It vibrated for a moment, settling—a flag, my stake, my piece of the world, this counter, this small land. My fists pounded.

“Get off my land!” I laughed at the girl. She squirted me with mace that the owner kept beneath the counter, my land. My eyes went red barbed wire, and I choked, coughed, puked, shit myself.

Later, at the station, my girl picked me up in her jeans that didn’t fit. On the ride home, I heard the word “peaches,” and immediately stopped listening.

--Mel Bosworth lives and breathes in Western Massachusetts. Read more at eddiesocko.blogspot.com.

I Am Not How This Is

I Am Not How This Is

The pillow here it talks to me and the things it says are things I can't repeat. The pillow it has a bad mouth. The pillow it once opened up and swallowed me and I slept for a night on the down that was inside of it. There was a penguin and an iceberg and what I found inside of the iceberg was a city named nowhere and what was inside that city was a diamond ring that someone had carved out for me from a thousand other diamonds that were imperfect. And on the inside of the penguin I found fish. The penguin had been eating fish. And the fish dead there were mocking me with their diamond eyes. Because diamonds are relative and penguins, they are something I never see. Out of the pillow and my head spinning. I am allergic to down. I need to get a new pillow because this one it has a dirty mouth and I am worried it may strangle me in my dreams.

--J. A. Tyler is founding editor of mud luscious and the author of SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE (ghost road press, 2009), IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010), and INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (vox press, 2010) as well as the chapbooks OUR US & WE (greying ghost), ZOO: THE TROPIC HOUSE (sunnyoutside), EVERYONE IN THIS IS EITHER DYING OR WILL DIE OR IS THINKING OF DEATH (achilles), and THE GIRL IN THE BLACK SWEATER (trainwreck press). Visit: www.aboutjatyler.com.

Lonely Death 2 Doors Down

Lonely Death 2 Doors Down

(Based on an actual event)

Two sets of eyes ablaze in apathy
Neither of us exist in the others thoughts
A soul close in living, yet far apart in life
The neighbor you can never fully befriend
---or care to

Children knew he was mean and reticent
Errant ball bisecting the lawn invites a scowl
Grass in perfection devoid of visitor footprints
Sacred ground of senior suburbia
---wasted days

Red lights pierce the darkening night
Reflected in the inquisitive eyes of a summer crowd
A macabre show gives pause to mundane lives
We witness a soul sickened beyond hope
---surrendering

In the bath tub a veteran dons his helmet once more
War time memories splattered against the tiles of fate
Blood soaked rivers of death drain to a lost finality
Grace bestowed should have been my gift
---to help another

--Carl Scharwath is a father and that means the most to him. He enjoys competitive running and most of his poems had their birth while out on an evening run. Print publishing credits include; Not Popular Magazine (short story), Lake Healthy Living, Pulse, and Abandoned Towers. Web publishing credits include; Lake County Library. Pens On Fire, and Language & Culture. Net. He recently had a news story in the Orlando Sentinel and a two page feature in Lake Healthy Living Magazine. Both articles discussed the Running Poet. Finally his first poem was published in an anthology book Other Voices.

Ogling -- At Home and Abroad

Ogling -- At Home and Abroad

According to Webster, one aspect of ogling is to look amorously at, flirtatiously at, or impertinently at.

We’ll accept that – but infuse some spirit into the definition, so that ogling will come across as: To stare at with unapologetic lust; to give free reign to your eyes, so that they can run amok over a woman; and/or to so keep an eye trained on a part of the female anatomy that it all but goes up in flames.

We’ll also use, oogling, instead of “ogling,” throughout this feature, as it is one way the word can be pronounced -- a far better way as it more accurately relates to an activity involving the male eyeball…

Now, oogling is not to be confused with “googling.” In a technological society, Google provides you with information on just about anything and everything you wish to know. A real service we no longer can do without. Oogling, by contrast, has remained primitive. It knows but one thing, and that one thing is the sum total of what it knows. It is this: Girl’s got something Boy wants. Therefore, the “oogling,” the search for that something – search being the only similarity it has with googling.

Imagine the snappy, crackling exchange between Tarzan and Jane when they first met, and you’ll get the idea.

Tarzan: “Me Tarzan. You, Jane.”

Tarzan: “Tarzan like what Jane got.”

Tarzan: “Tarzan take what Jane got.”

On a deeper level, surely, oogling’s got something to do with the reproduction and survival of the human species -- but that’s above this writer’s pay grade to really get into. Besides, try using that argument to curtail the male’s freedom to look-see. You’ll be looking for a fight you can’t possibly win.

It’s enough to say that oogling is inbuilt in a guy, so that it’s, like, instinctive. Like sniffing up close and personal is to a dog; or, as a-vote-in-mind is to the Washington politician when he eyeballs you at election time.

Not understanding this, the oogler is of course looked upon as a rude, uncouth, semi-barbarian bound for Purgatory. That’s if he’s Catholic. Hell, for sure if he’s a Protestant, unless mitigated by heart-felt repentance. If the oogler is of that persuasion where he returns for another try at life, it would be as a wet, green-tailed booger. It can’t be otherwise. No one would validate him or conduct like his. Just think: Would any girl in her right mind admit she enjoys the horny feet of an oogler’s roving eye freely scrabbling all over her?

Let’s face it: The oogler is a rank, piggish, unrestrained lowlife. Nothing more. Nothing less.

He’s the guy who fathered the Feminist Movement!

But to go on:

The oogler generally comes across in one of the following unwelcome ways:
/eye-popping, as in, Aye-Yah-Yah-Yah-Yah!; /learing, as in, “See? This-is-what-you’re-turning-me-into, Baby. It’s all your fault!” -- his “turn-on” that he wishes turns her on, in turn; and, /eye-balling (hot, heavy, rolling and clicking), as in, “Hey, I’m upping-the-ante-for-what-I see!” This is where the oogler throws caution to the wind. He gambles here. He commits himself here.

No two ways about it: It’s do or die – kami-kaze style.

Banzai!

But the oogler had better know where he is first when he emotes in any of the ways described. Particularly if he’s anywhere in one of the 7 land-masses of earth we call “continents.” First rule in any one of these places is that he’d better be sure no tough male is escorting the one he’s oogling. Secondly, he’d better be sure there’s no male support for her anywhere within at a 10-mile radius, at the least.

In China, for example, they have a charming way of responding to the insulting oogler: They walk over him to death. Believe me, they’ve got enough people to do that at a finger-snap at any time, day or night, 24-7. Think of a quarter of a million people, five abreast, just using your poor, writhing bod for a promenade. Over there, you do your oogling, secretly, while you’re engaged with whatever you’re expected to do. Multi-tasking. Hey, we’re serious: just one 87-pound woman alone, in a pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos (even if a knock-off), can puncture you to death in two quick steps…

In some Malaysian countries, it’s even more perilous. Umbrage is taken at the drop of an eyeball; definitely if it bounces. The oogler would be knifed three ways to Sunday. In an instant. And if the blade runner doesn’t like red for the color of blood, he castrates you. Right there and then – forthwith!

Zreeep-Zreeep-Phit!

[If you guessed the sound is Malaysian for a speedy filet-on-demand, you’d be close.]

One second you’re groaning deeply; the next, you’re squealing, as high-pitched as any school girl just voted Kumquat Queen of 2009.

So the art of oogling in such places has to be extremely cunning: Subtle, furtive, sneaky . Side-winding, at best.

And where people aren’t ever to to think they’re in America (geographically, the middle east), you, as oogler, had better have a pair of dark sunglasses perched on your nose at all times. Just be sure they’re expensive and stylish. If tacky and/or inexpensive, you’ll be made out at once by Syrian Intelligence to be an oogler on the cheap. They’re good. They know. They can spot you instantly. They wear the cheapies. That means zero-tolerance for you. And the penalty, no bull, is death by soccer balls kicked at you.

Ka-pokkk!

Without ceremony, you’ll be taken to a football stadium where the national soccer team, scoreless in the last World Cup, will take vicious turns in kicking balls at you until you expire.

Ka-pokkk, Ka-pokkk, Ka-pokkk!

So listen up: Have your dark glasses on at all times. It’s allowed there because, for the most part, the ooglees are swaddled in sheets from head to toe. Oogling without dark glasses, however, will classify you as a usual suspect and subject you to a frightening interrogation that can go as badly as this:

Bad guy, in his element, as “bad cop”: “What’s your interest in how we mummify our women?”

Second bad guy, totally out of his element, as “good cop”: “Take it easy, Aleppo. This infidel may just be wondering how we keep our women virtuous.”

Third bad guy, young, still being shaped by the elements, mostly American: “How come the cheap shades, Man?”

But, to be fair, it isn’t at all easier for the oogler in the good U.S. of A either. Caught, he can either backdown, breakdown and confess how low down he’s become to all and sundry present; or, he can refuse to admit he’s a pervert and take the consequence, which is to get his face radically rearranged. You see, his defiance validates the ooglee’s boyfriend to get a tad violent.

[Tip: Have some thin, but tough wire with you when you leave the house. The kind that jewelers use. That’s for the broken jaw and/or dangling ears, so that you won’t look like the guy in Edvard Munch’s painting, “The Scream,” when they roll you to the ER. No wire? Try duct tape. It will do to keep the parts knocked off your mug from getting lost… Masking tape, as well, as this may help you draw sympathy in your make-do mask as the “Phantom” on the operating slab.]

But let me get on as to how best to oogle and get away with it...

Look for an oogle-free zone. This is where women are paid to be oogled at -- at Pseudo-decent night clubs, bars, nostaligic discotheques and cathouses and at seedy night clubs, bars, to-hell-with-nostalgic discotheques and cathouses. There, the oogler will find girls doing what snakes do around poles and around guys…

Then, there’s the oogle-express. That’s most any bus on a local line or a tourist bus on a special line. Either way, on the move, you can oogle as freely and as much from a window, then. But don’t expect that you can keep a stare. You can only do a drive-by oogle, at best. But that’s better than nothing. Better than trouble, surely. But keep your glasses on: You can get stuff in your eyes if you try to stare. Dirt. Sand. Grit. Spit -- from someone in the same bus, but upwind from you.

Of course, what’s best is to possess your very own ooglee to oogle at; then, you can be sure that, uninterrupted, one pleasant thing will follow in the wake of another, such that your poodle could oogle you doodling like a noodle…

[Incidentally, say that last real fast, aloud, and you’ll draw the magical sound of Mumbai right into your living room!]

Hey, now that you know how to get away with oogling, when you can’t get your way with it, go oogle, safely! And may the patron saint of either, the defective eyeball, or the male, wandering eye, Saint Ogleoff, be with you!

Amen!

--Cat Roberts (no bio provided)

Revel with Me

Revel with Me

A hand of wind caresses the pond. Sun-tossed sequins stir upon water. My husband says that people love shiny things like sequins and chandeliers because of the way sunlight dazzles water. I laugh and he thinks I’m laughing at him but I’m only laughing because he’s so perceptive.

* * *

When I walk through the woods of myself I find thorns, burrs, questioning empty sky, trees with scarred trunks and sudden twistings of the woodland path that surprise me. I arrive at hitherto unseen vistas of inescapable and disturbing beauty, where the smallest detail is huge, and normal life is only an echo. I can imagine myself living here forever, foraging for nuts and blueberries, eating ice during the winter, emerging hollow into spring. The spray of creek water over rocks will sustain me. I’ll dress myself in rose-tinted sky reflections skimmed from the pond, I’ll let birds nest in my hair and a corset of sharp sticks will forever guard and cage my heart.

I’ll be free of all whose whims and interests turn like dry leaves readying to fall in the wind of changing seasons. Loyalty, the last trunk standing in the storm, lists sharply as its leaves hasten into passion’s engorged and flooding creek beds.
I will be loyal to the sky as it has been loyal to me.

Hasn’t it?

* * *

After a night of sticks and little round stones, I wake with a baby bird somewhere above my right eyebrow, peeping direly for its mama. All the rest have joined in and this keeps me awake, that and my rose-tinted gown having wrapped tourniquet-tight round my ankles. After the birds feed, I sleep another two hours with gown straightened and corset removed, having crawled off to a spot of deep soft moss.

There are multitudes out there, over tree tops and far away, living in cities and towns, installed in apartments and homes, whizzing along highways and running red lights. They work for money and wish for time. Pity is kept tucked behind the socks and underwear, in the very back of the drawer, always rolled up, an inexpedient emotion in the drawer of most intimate things.

I think I’ll adjust to this new life in the woods, but it will require making peace with the hair that kinked up and dreadlocked by the end of the first week, with the snails that sometimes think I’m a shady rock, with the birds and their constant housekeeping about my head. Is it better here? In the fairy books I read as a child the fairies did not have kinked and dreadlocked hair with birds living in it. They did not tear their sunset gowns while forging creeks. They did not ever seem to hunger for more than leaf dew or the occasional blueberry. Why am I growing wan with wanting and gaunt in gazing at the sky?

Where will I be understood if not right here in the central, raw focus of God’s attention and delight? And where are the other fairies who are supposed to dance and revel with me, to be my companions in abandonment? I want to drink and sing their songs with them, songs satirizing all things civilized and human. But alas, the revelers seem to have passed away from this place, having left only hollow spaces that knock together like chimes of nutshells in the wind.

Can one revel in the wilderness alone without being considered mad? Maybe that is precisely what I have done. Maybe I’ll explain it all to God one day, once I discern the exact cloud to which I should deliver the thesis of my alienation. There is a bosom of God it is claimed. If I can’t find the revelers, maybe I still can find that resting place?

I stand on a rock at the edge of the creek, sipping milk from a dandelion stem, hunger at home in my stomach. The rock will warm up as the sun gets higher in the sky. The sun will scatter sequins of light on the pond. The wind will caress the surface of the water.

* * *


I sit on the bench next to my husband on the bank of the pond looking out at the sun on the water. He says that people like sequins and chandeliers because of the way sunlight dazzles water—that humans compete with nature, that we wish we could clothe ourselves in nature.

I laugh.

“What?” he asks.

“I was only laughing because you’re right,” I say. He can’t see my rose-tinted gown.

Nor has he ever seen the birds that nest in my hair, or the hard, young trunk of loyalty fallen across the creek, or the hollow spaces left clicking like the chimes of nutshells in places where fairies once danced. He only knows that sometimes when he touches me, my corset catches his skin like a thorn.

I draw closer to him, as close as I can possibly get, on that park bench by the pond. I want us to be like sun on water. And we will be. I know it. We can wear these dazzling things. We can be these dazzling things.

--Phoebe Wilcox lives with her family in eastern Pennsylvania. Besides writing, she also enjoys yoga, dancing, rainbows, flowers, and a lot of other miscellaneous/girlie things. The first chapter of her novel, Angels Carry the Sun, was published in Wild River Review. An excerpt from another novel in progress is archived in Wild Violet. Recent and forthcoming experiments may found in Vines and Shoots, The Chaffey Review, The Battered Suitcase, The Black Boot, Counterexample Poetics, Sixers Review, The Northville Review and a handful of others. Her story Carp with Water in Their Ears, in River Poets Journal was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Dream Portrait

Dream Portrait

Destructive dust caresses

new dreams awake

Buildings darkened mosaic tiles

frame the foundation of night

Lives once controlled in

economic facades of deception

Weeds entwined in fossilized cement

born from greed, nurtured in lies

Broken promises-------I walk


Nightmarish road opens to

familiar landscapes of the future

Pandemic thought erased souls

populate a lost panorama

Skeleton trees no longer

breathing the sun of freedom

Citizens of the evening

words formed in silence

Linguistic parables---I hear


Of stories that enlighten historical

mistakes of time disremembered

Society brainwashed in the new

language of thought media

Sickness, seriousness, hopelessness

The face of our new future

Daughter joins in epiphany my

hand in hers my knowledge asunder

Father-daughter heals the future- past

--Carl Scharwath is a father and that means the most to him. He enjoys competitive running and most of his poems had their birth while out on an evening run. Print publishing credits include; Not Popular Magazine (short story), Lake Healthy Living, Pulse, and Abandoned Towers. Web publishing credits include; Lake County Library. Pens On Fire, and Language & Culture. Net. He recently had a news story in the Orlando Sentinel and a two page feature in Lake Healthy Living Magazine. Both articles discussed the Running Poet. Finally his first poem was published in an anthology book Other Voices.

Waters of Dispassion

Waters of Dispassion

Children, water evokes at your swollen feet
A calamitous trap reflects no escape
Clouds wash epidemic rain across the plains
And cover the world's eyes
... in forgotten plight.

Insects contaminated droplets of mist destroy the future
Seeds of disease interrupt your destiny to grow
Sunken despondent eyes cry tears of malaria
An illusion of who you are and
...never will become

Kinship with no one the warm earth waits
The lens of history records a fictional play
Betrayal masked in far away luxuries
Dead bodies of apathy covered with
... kisses and blankets.

--Carl Scharwath is a father and that means the most to him. He enjoys competitive running and most of his poems had their birth while out on an evening run. Print publishing credits include; Not Popular Magazine (short story), Lake Healthy Living, Pulse, and Abandoned Towers. Web publishing credits include; Lake County Library. Pens On Fire, and Language & Culture. Net. He recently had a news story in the Orlando Sentinel and a two page feature in Lake Healthy Living Magazine. Both articles discussed the Running Poet. Finally his first poem was published in an anthology book Other Voices.

a dog on a mountain

a dog on a mountain

life is a dog on a mountain barking at the moon
because its sterility pisses him off

just so we stare at the clouds, and resent them
vaguely for being there,

without bothering to mean or need,
without struggling towards happy eternity

that is coming to no cloud or body,
as if they were doing wrong

by accepting nothing after a minute's
existence, and just being free;

as if being human, and stupid
and arrogant enough to believe

you deserved a cupful of eternity,
were somehow an excellent thing to be

--David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his available books, chapbooks, and over 850 poems in or forthcoming at 370 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. Among things forthcoming is a chapbook called nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die from Poptritus Press in summer 2009 sometime. Early 2010 an anthology called laughing at funerals will be appearing with Epic Rites Publications, there's also a 50 poem chapbook from Epic Rites called hellbound which is appearing July 2009. For Epic Rites he edits the chapbook series and the e-zines lines written w/ a razor and the thin edge of staring, as well as selecting work for the radio network.

words and eternity

words and eternity

words and their thalidomide eternity
which is not on offer to you
the gibbering fucking subject

getting, with some difficulty,
a box of shopping together
to resurrect yourself,

relics of malformed bones
where saints and pigs
shared luckless knuckles;

words do not work for us
if we propose to live forever,
just give a little existence

a minute, lying about things
like why life is, and why
it's wrong to kill children

(if in fact it is)

--David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his available books, chapbooks, and over 850 poems in or forthcoming at 370 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. Among things forthcoming is a chapbook called nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die from Poptritus Press in summer 2009 sometime. Early 2010 an anthology called laughing at funerals will be appearing with Epic Rites Publications, there's also a 50 poem chapbook from Epic Rites called hellbound which is appearing July 2009. For Epic Rites he edits the chapbook series and the e-zines lines written w/ a razor and the thin edge of staring, as well as selecting work for the radio network.

the hooligan clouds

the hooligan clouds
the hooligan clouds rummage through the sky
looking for life

their orgasm is sweaty rainy night
and god's blood on the sheets

they feed the trees amnesia
and dreams

hooligan clouds we need
to feel

--David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his available books, chapbooks, and over 850 poems in or forthcoming at 370 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. Among things forthcoming is a chapbook called nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die from Poptritus Press in summer 2009 sometime. Early 2010 an anthology called laughing at funerals will be appearing with Epic Rites Publications, there's also a 50 poem chapbook from Epic Rites called hellbound which is appearing July 2009. For Epic Rites he edits the chapbook series and the e-zines lines written w/ a razor and the thin edge of staring, as well as selecting work for the radio network.

THIS SIDE OF HELL

THIS SIDE OF HELL

I would rather be beaten
with a stick. I'd even prefer
a root canal. I tenaciously
dig my heels in and fight it
all the way.

I mumble bad words and vow
I'll never do it again. Yet every
three years, like clockwork,
I'm at it again.

For days before I can't think
or write. Food tastes like mush.
I can't sleep and I easily get
uptight.

When it's over, I tell myself
it wasn't so bad, but I know
I'm just fooling myself. The
process is it just this side
of Hell.

Yet, every three years, there
they are, two burly goons with
their monstrous moving van.

--Mike Berger, Ph.D. is 72 years old with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was a practicing psychotherapist for 30 years. Now fully retired, he has authored two books of short stories. Has has also been published in numerous professional journals and freelanced for more than 20 years. His humor pieces Clyde and Goliath, Good Grief Columbus and If Noah Built the Ark Today have won awards. He is now writing poetry full-time. Mike has many pursuits which include sculpting, painting, gardening, and baking bread. His forcaccia is to die for.

she wrote flags

she wrote flags

she wrote flags on her skin so i could live
under them, there were memories almost,
and they flew like a devil's wings
unfurled but forgotten

they were childish cookies, hash
and a cup of water, flags and tattered
scars, and the bloody banners
time bowed beneath;

dead men and their living dreams

--David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his available books, chapbooks, and over 850 poems in or forthcoming at 370 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. Among things forthcoming is a chapbook called nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die from Poptritus Press in summer 2009 sometime. Early 2010 an anthology called laughing at funerals will be appearing with Epic Rites Publications, there's also a 50 poem chapbook from Epic Rites called hellbound which is appearing July 2009. For Epic Rites he edits the chapbook series and the e-zines lines written w/ a razor and the thin edge of staring, as well as selecting work for the radio network.

words heard

words heard

childhoods were words heard
in some scentless heaven, sterile
nothing coming, a well
where they throw children
and basically any human

being foolish enough to stake herself
raped under society's sun;
childhoods were words heard
talking about puppies, but lying
mostly, they were no fun;

childhoods are unheard words
today, worlds full of vicious Valium
and other loveless drugs

--David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his available books, chapbooks, and over 850 poems in or forthcoming at 370 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. Among things forthcoming is a chapbook called nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die from Poptritus Press in summer 2009 sometime. Early 2010 an anthology called laughing at funerals will be appearing with Epic Rites Publications, there's also a 50 poem chapbook from Epic Rites called hellbound which is appearing July 2009. For Epic Rites he edits the chapbook series and the e-zines lines written w/ a razor and the thin edge of staring, as well as selecting work for the radio network.

Waggle and Jounce

Waggle and Jounce

Out on the lake
the whitecaps leap,
old lions shot in midair.
Not far from the water
I sit on a knoll
and open your letter.

You're in Sacramento now
singing for money.
Here in Chicago,
on hot August nights,

I lick in my dreams
at the scoops
in your shoulders.
I prefer them to ice cream.

Next week I'll fly out
to salute your nipples.
Long may your buttocks
waggle and jounce.

--Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now Boeing), and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, Revival (Ireland), The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Davidson Miscellany, Calliope Nerve, The Goddard Journal, The Pembroke Magazine, The Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, The Road Apple Review and other publications.

From The Forest

From The Forest

In another moment
it will all be over.
On this winter night
her breast will slip
from her blouse
like a fawn, in spring,
from the forest.

--Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now Boeing), and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, Revival (Ireland), The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Davidson Miscellany, Calliope Nerve, The Goddard Journal, The Pembroke Magazine, The Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, The Road Apple Review and other publications.

Calliope Ears: In Your Eyes

More music to edit by...

"I get so tired of working so hard for our survival. I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive." -- Peter Gabriel

Colonize Me, Inappropriately

Colonize Me, Inappropriately

Downtown Denver. Brazen green
Peace and homeless solicitors
Due to innate politeness of the populace
And fervor. Maybe if you had
A shoeshine you’d be walking with
A woman, quoth the love merchant
With his polish potion.

Having just done a two-year
Stint in Providence, I look right
Through them or mutter no,
I don’t care about the environment.
A real native would sneer, get
Out of my face and mock the
Shiner’s social status.

I do care about roach coach row
That is crazy international,
With Philly steaks, Chicago pizza,
Thai curry, Belgium waffles and
Gyro/baklava combo, that are
Mingled amidst a landing strip
Of Hybrid shuttle and solar lights,
Waiting for aliens who want pitch
Their breakthrough culture to
Folk who will listen and bite the
World.

--Paul Handley spent a career as a student and a student of odd jobs. He has an MA, an MPA, and is ABD. He has driven a cab and sold meat door-to-door. Paul has work included or forthcoming in Anemone Sidecar, Apollo’s Lyre, Boston Literary Magazine, The Shine Journal, and others.

Sundown Surl

Sundown Surl

Her lips?
As I recall,
even when she talked
her lips were slung
in a sundown surl
and there was liquor,
always liquor,
just a jigger,
in her walk.

--Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now Boeing), and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, Revival (Ireland), The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Davidson Miscellany, Calliope Nerve, The Goddard Journal, The Pembroke Magazine, The Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, The Road Apple Review and other publications.

Quoteable

"But I’m thinking, seeing magazines fold and new ones rise simply reprinting already established material: Where is my bespoke magazine? Where is my RSS feed with an option to POD myself a magazine? How can I bully someone into creating that, hooking up some service that doesn’t rely on borderline RTF presentation to throw together selected blog posts into a digest I can carry and pass around? Yes, still, culture of waste and all, but print it on the right paper and kill a few glossy mags off in the process and surely there’s a balance restored?" --Matthew Sheret found via the Warren Ellis weblog.

Constance Stadler Reviews Billy Jno Hope's The Thirty-Third Witness

Constance Stadler reviews Billy Jno Hope's The Thirty-Third Witness

Billy Jno Hope summarizes his chap The Thirty-Third Witness as follows: “My third book of poems is a continuation of my quest for a deeper understanding of my existence and my pursuit of purity in the midst of loss and infamy.” Thirty-third, as a unifying concept, has great significance and multiple references all stemming from the New Testament. It signifies the end of liturgical time, or the conclusion of the liturgical year. The new biblical year begins the following week, the First Sunday of Advent. It is a time to take stock in the full light of day, and this book is true to that theme, relentlessly so. There is originality and talent in Hope’s diatribes and lamentations. They are thin and lean, and some work wonderfully, as in the pulverizing “Morning Poem”:

dreams are diseased
reeks of mortal
found righteous in babylon
solicited suicide
strapping truth with bombs
strafing babies for democracy
metasizing cannibalistic tv
as phantoms prepare the day

… and the bitter beauty of “Burial Song”:

seasons gape
blossoms
ripens
for the kill
each poison
exquisite
infects
the holy
the hallelujah
the rapture

His voice encompasses the specific, the horror of war’s maelstrom:

Darfur Tonight
man invented horror
with demon's delight
shackled his kin
and wrote bloodstain memoirs
in the false of bad religion
history has hidden its fiends
in the lunacy of flesh
maggots feed with genocidal racists
and Darfur bleeds tonight

… and in “Fresh and Haunted Season”, the pathos of ‘protest’ is seen, when evil is systemic and deeply woven into the fabric of ‘civilization’:

carnal protest ended
self righteous trigger recoiled
killed the dagger of death
mice and demons lurking
I flew away on water wings
here I am in rutland niche
like I never saw the mirage
I am shining left of america
another milestone creeps unsheathed
fresh disregard of babylon
Zen words to lift the curtain
stark music fresh from the portal
squeeze me and I flow
out of the asylum.

There are several prose or prose-poem pieces, but even in their developed richness, it is the poetic voice that dominates, note the staccato voice, the contextual absence in “Sinners In Odds”:

She said my face aged and I swallowed harder than usual. Reality beckons. Virgin face abdicated. Time to paint the mirror black. I feel a groan building up fast. Hold thy vomit Judas, let’s hang together and count cathedral steps. A stiff double shot of rum on me and you can bet on lotto riches. Liquor shatters our innocence. Ernest guzzled deep for cesspool secrets. Shaky swallows to reassure the hangman. Big Six binges beyond ghetto myth. Hard choices. Mad burning vision.

And in the conclusion of “The Road that Stretches Forever”…

He stood gasping. Directly in front of him stood a building he had never seen before. He did not recognize its dome shape or its wrought iron fence. Something growled behind causing the hair on his neck to stiffen. He turned around like a prisoner condemned. A pair of menacing yellow eyes greeted him. The blood pounded in his ears. Escape was futile. He put up his hands and screamed as they lunged. He fell with the sickening realization that death finally captured him on the wrong road.

In the final analysis this poet is at his strongest when he goes to the root, because then his language skills and imagistic creations take their full measure of distinctiveness. The biblically infused damnation steeps in “Self-Debt”:

caught a whiff of spiritual
thrust open
stark orgasmic vanity
rebooted my wings
for judgment age
I am suspended
in the skin of conscience
the tribunal begins
slivers of venal vapors
fragile distorted timelines
I channel deep for immortal
I pay the soul cost

Then there is the eloquent elemental, as in “Stuff in the Stars”:

expunge the phlegm
from your conscience
to absorb the stuff
in the stars

… and finally, in “The Threat” the real reason behind Mankind’s inevitable ‘nuclear disintegration’,

by the nano
genetics disintegrate
past twenty-five sunsets
twilight stumbles
out of obscurity
into dawn’s
most contemptuous disregard
of mortality

This is a compilation that reignites the conscience, which is the highest measure of a singular voice. Billy Jno Hope is a singular voice who speaks to many.

----Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in such zines as Ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto. Billy Jno Hope breathes to impress art. His collection The Thirty Third Witness is available at LuLu.com.

A Clear Direction

A Clear Direction

The cellist admitted to experiencing a sense of bewilderment in the presence of sheet music. As the small black notes curve and twist, scurrying like beetles across a clean white page, only the conductor's bobbing hand seems legible. Yet he soon discovered that any concerto may be navigated with a compass, its slim metal hands whirling under dim chandeliers. On the night of his last performance, the song's highest note became its northernmost when the scale ascended, a strange bird rising in the dark blue hall. The audience was startled by the intentionality of the music, its sudden attainment of a clear direction.

Kristina Marie Darling completed a masters degree in American Culture Studies at Washington University. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Kristina has also written on contemporary literature for The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Literary Review, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Salem Art Works.

Convention in Miami

Convention in Miami

for Gerard Manley Hopkins

Around his navel this morning
a halo, a red stipple
Hopkins would love:
"Glory be to God for dappled things..."

It's a gift from this woman
he doesn't know.
She welcomed him last night
with open arms and open legs

sending him home to his wife
this morning, smiling and unaware
he was bringing a souvenir,
this bright halo of crab lice.

--Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now Boeing), and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, Revival (Ireland), The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Davidson Miscellany, Calliope Nerve, The Goddard Journal, The Pembroke Magazine, The Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, The Road Apple Review and other publications.

Quoteable

..."Cartographic attributes of the invisible," she said, lowering the bowl, "Spatially tagged hypermedia." ... "The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, or every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these." She indicated Alberto's phone, as if it's swollen belly of silver tape were gravid with an entire future.

--Excerpt from page 31 of William Gibson's Spook Country

Quoteable

"Travel becomes a phenomenon--seeing the world before you leave it." --Author John Updike on growing elderly.

CONTAINING BEAUTY

CONTAINING BEAUTY

As the invisible music flows
evoking from sleepy depths
the untouched distant chords
urgently seeking expression

I struggle for a moment
first with recognition
then with verbalization
of this unknown apparition

Notwithstanding the urge
to purge myself of the weight
of this unexpressed composition
barring all sensual imposition

But sometimes
words are not enough
language is insufficient
and weak and limited

Struggle fruitless
forced expression incomplete
suggesting that it is better
to contain beauty than do it injustice.

--Ashutosh Ghidiyal writes poetry, short fiction and essays. He was born in Lucknow in 1984.

STEVE COVETS MY WOODPILE, THE HUMOROUS EXPLOITS OF A BIGOT

STEVE COVETS MY WOODPILE,
THE HUMOROUS EXPLOITS OF A BIGOT

The museum had a cafe
where our party spent
most of its time
chatting up
the cute Welsh waitresses.
Nothing came of it.

--Colin James is a member of both The Brothers Of The Endemic and The Curzon Park Enigmas. He works in Energy Conservation.

Creation

Creation

First there was darkness. There was a feeling of unbroken sleep, of being absent and unaware. It was a little death, deep and capacious, brimming with potential yet ignorant of potential. One could say it swam in a circle around itself, for there was nothing else, no blot or demarcation on its existence. It was the perfection of nothingness. There was a velvet lack of feeling that was in actuality a prize, a prize that didn’t know its value, or its existence even, or of the germ of infinite permutations of possibility that it had folded into its nothingness. It was as though instructions on how to build a universe were being carried around in the bottom of a dark and forgotten God-pocket.

And then, because boys and girls mature into puberty and beyond, at some point to orbit each other with special gravity, laughing together, going to the movies, taking walks in parks, finding solace and excitement in each other, finding tenderness in each others eyes, it happens for each that in the light of their love they grow, unknowingly, a little closer to a certain infinity that sleeps in their midst.

They might sit on a park bench or lie on a blanket together in the grass and find in the sweet shared voyage of a kiss that they trade light for darkness and darkness for light in brilliant images and flashes of feeling. Each kiss draws them closer to a consensus that maybe a park bench is too public for them, a picnic blanket too exhibitionist. So they take themselves off to some secret place where they can further explore, in private, this magical, prismatic dance they’ve stumbled upon.

And the darkness is a waiting cushion that draws their increasingly quick and assiduous affection to its quiet center core.

At the core a tumbling little half-light has fallen a long, long way through darkness, lost maybe, following the traffic of biology to the inner edge of a woman’s body where it hovers aimlessly in indecision.

* * *

At the last bus stop before Creation the little half-light waits. Maybe she is on a country road. The night is like ink and all is invisible. There is no way to tell where she might really be or where she might be going next. There is a subtle motion through the atmosphere as though a small earthquake is rocking her nameless road. She is dark but she glows as though she is a light. Suddenly there is a brief lurching or launching accompanied by the feeling of a warm parade coming along in sudden quick profusion, a multitude sweeping or swimming past, dashing flagellated little swashbucklers moving fast, they all seem intent on finding her, jostling her, prodding her, poking her, fidgeting with her various outer garments as she sits glowing on her bus-waiting bench.

She doesn’t mind. Moving all around her they feel like warm spring rain at a country bus stop on a road that is rarely ever traveled.

* * *

Finally one dashing little swashbuckler manages to wedge the sharpest edge of his instinct into a nearly microscopic groove in her orb. She may have rolled forward on the bench a little to make this possible, who knows? These two like each other and if it were ever possible for a smile to be exchanged between a half-light orb and a dashing little swashbuckler, this would be the time. Now, right now, before it’s time to become something else.

* * *

Now the parade has passed. The orb and the swashbuckler twirl slowly, slow-dance themselves into a cozy, sauna-hot corner of their strangely well-padded bus stop bench. They begin the splitting and folding of self and cells, the braiding of DNA.

They are no longer plural. They are singular now. They are no longer an orb and a swashbuckler. It is now a swashbuckling orb!

The universe upstairs and outside will know of it soon…time will pass and everything will change. A great light will be born out of darkness. It may arrive in tears or it may arrive with an inchoate smile tracing infant lips, but it will arrive, a new life, a prismatic light, split, folded, braided, refracted, pulled
from some God-pocket
somewhere in the universe.

--Phoebe Wilcox lives with her family in eastern Pennsylvania. Besides writing, she also enjoys yoga, dancing, rainbows, flowers, and a lot of other miscellaneous/girlie things. The first chapter of her novel, Angels Carry the Sun, was published in Wild River Review. An excerpt from another novel in progress is archived in Wild Violet. Recent and forthcoming experiments may found in Vines and Shoots, The Chaffey Review, The Battered Suitcase, The Black Boot, Counterexample Poetics, Sixers Review, The Northville Review and a handful of others. Her story Carp with Water in Their Ears, in River Poets Journal was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.