Tag: #poem

A Self-Analysis – Brice Maiurro

Some days I leave my arms at home
to give other people the chance to show me
how to conduct a symphony.

I am an owl in many ways
but most of all in the way I like to be alone at night
staring out my window
sitting on my tree branch
waiting for the field mice to come to me.

When I look at the hairs on my legs
I see thousands of tiny trees and I think about
the day each seed was planted.
I think about the way I am so very large
because I am one billion things so small.

I have a hard time with spiders
because I don’t want to kill them and
I know that I am ultimately unimportant to them
but I feel them crawling up my leg in bed
and when I look they’re never there
but my vulnerability is sometimes counter-intuitive
to my survival instinct
there is a certain amount of acceptance of death
that comes along with trust.

I refill ice trays in the freezer like a madman
like some great fleshy robot filled
with a singular algorithm to make sure there is never
one moment where this house will be without ice.

I don’t drink enough water.

In the middle of the twilight I talk to ghosts.
They carry all these stories about regret and war
and I’m just trying to sing myself
to sleep with songs of faith and renewal
but they clean their guns on the edge of my bed
and sometimes I like to swim
on top of their uneasy oceans.

I papercut my finger
on my contract to myself
and when the blood begins to run
I put it beneath the cold water faucet
and watch as it pours down the drain
and sometimes the water rises
and the sink fills up and the bathroom floods
until I’m underwater in my apartment
scuttling along like a crab
on the warped wood floor
but I do not drown, I sleep best in rip tide.
I dance in disaster.

Sometimes I fall asleep to radio static.
There is a room so quiet you can hear your blood
in your veins and the silence will drive you mad they say.
I talk so loud about how good I am at silence.
How American it is to always know what to say and that’s the thing.

I think I’m an auditory citizen of the world until it gets quiet
and I can hear the national anthem reminder
that I don’t know how to sight read a page of rest symbols.

I dance like I am protesting dancing,
Like if I flail my arms enough they’ll call it satire.

When I dance with women I follow their hips
and pretend I am so keen to the difference between
control and influence.

Sometimes I get stuck in the middle of a poem
and I don’t know how to end it.
Sometimes I’ll get real cute
and just throw out a one-liner like something
Oscar Wilde would say at a cocktail party
but sometimes I’ll just take a minute to be in it.
I’ll walk around the poem like an empty apartment
opening the closets looking for clues about
the person who lived here before
and sometimes I’ll find that there’s nothing but
wire hangers in the closet
or sometimes I’ll run out screaming
chased by skeletons

not tonight.

 

BRICE MAIURRO is a poet and writer from Denver, Colorado. He is the Editor-In-Chief of South Broadway Ghost Society and the Poetry Editor of Suspect Press. His second collection of poems, Hero Victim Villain, will be out June 24th, 2019 through Stubborn Mule Press. You can find more about him at http://www.maiurro.co.

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Frozen Fingers – Jim Bates

“Jerry, how are those matches holding up?” Steve asked, blowing on his frozen hands. “Can you get that kindling lit?”

“Shit, no,” Jerry swore. “I’ve got three left and I can’t feel my fingers. Can’t feel a damn thing.”

Those were not the words Steve wanted to hear. It was twenty degrees below zero. If they didn’t get a fire going soon, they were going to freeze to death.

Jerry fumbled lighting the match he was attempting to hold. It flared for a moment and then fell from his numb fingers into the snow, sizzled and went out. Two matches to go.

Next to them the rushing water of the Yellow Knife River cascaded over ice covered boulders on its way to Lake Superior ten miles to the east. Steve and Jerry had been on a winter hiking trip along the trail that ran high above the river when the ledge of snow they were on collapsed and they tumbled thirty feet down the steep slope into the frigid water below. In just seconds they were both not only soaked but numbingly cold. They scrambled out and found a level spot in the snow. Steve had sprained his wrist. It was up to Jerry to build the fire.

That had been fifteen minutes ago. A combination of wet stick matches and a wind swirling down the canyon walls made lighting a fire difficult. They’d built a small teepee of twigs and pine needles but getting it to light was proving next to impossible. With two matches to go, their prospects were grim.

Steve moved closer to Jerry. In a gesture of profound intimacy, he motioned to his friend, “Give me your hands.”

When Jerry balked, Steve said, “Don’t give me that macho BS.” He motioned again and said, softly, “Here, let me help.” Steve took his friend’s bare hands in his and, ignoring the pain in his wrist, drew them to his lips and blew on them, warming them with his breath.

After a minute, Jerry said, “That good. Thanks, man. They’re better. I can feel my fingers, now.”

He took the second match and struck it against the side of the match box. Nothing. It was too wet. On the second try it broke apart and fell to the snow.

The two men looked at each other. They were in their mid-thirties and had been best friend since grade school. Now it all came down to this. The sun was setting behind the pine trees lining the rim of the canyon. With the lack of sunlight the cold was settling in deep and hard.

Jerry took the last match, resolve set in his eyes. He looked at Steve. “Let’s do this.”

“Go for it, man,” Steve said.

Jerry struck the match. Both men watched, their lives hanging in the balance, as it flamed…flickered…then caught.

They quickly built a roaring fire. There was hope for them yet.

 

JIM BATES lives in a small town twenty miles west of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His stories have appeared in CafeLit, The Writers’ Cafe Magazine, A Million Ways, Cabinet of Heed, Paragraph Planet and Mused – The BellaOnline Literary Review. You can also check out his blog to see more: http://www.theviewfromlonglake.wordpress.com.

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The Doughboy – Nathan Dennis

I find myself here —
All covered in chicken wire
Plumped full of metal:
A bled out, trussed up Christmas roast of a man
Spilled over on no man’s land

I feel the wind on my liver.
I always hated the wind.
In the winter, it felt like it cut me
Like it was going right through me.
Now it is going right through me.

Can anybody see me?
I can’t see well now.
Everything is very grey.
Though it was grey earlier.
Exhaust and snow and gas make the best ash to hide the dead.

They won’t hide me, though.
I am high off the ground.
It will take a mortar to dislodge me.
And I’ll have died by then.
I won’t lie to myself. Snowflakes feel hot.

I should think of my last words —
Something someone may remember me by.
Or something I may remember myself by.
“Mother?” “Father?” “God is great?”
“God damn you sons of bitches who sent us here in your stead?”

The chicken wire seems so soft now.
A brilliant string of lights that decorates my body
Bedecked by pooling jewel ornaments of my blood
I catch a warm snowflake on the tip of my tongue,
A snowflake that tastes of somewhere not here.

The twinkling stars of machine guns blink hello
And sprout maroon goose feathers through my wounds.
I gurgle out through iron-rich froth,
“Happy Christmas.”
I am an angel. My God, How beautiful I am.

 

Nathan Dennis is a Manhattan based playwright and poet of Floridian extraction. A graduate of NYU Tisch Department of Dramatic Writing, he served as a Rita and Burton Goldberg Fellow, and was awarded Outstanding Writing for the Stage in Spring of 2015. He received the Magnolia Review Ink Award for his poem “Meditations on the Creation,” in January 2019. His most recent play, Circle of Shit, was presented by Dixon Place in March, 2019.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons from the private collection of David Ball [Public domain]

In The Grip Of Sensual Illusion – Holly Day

the pop star’s new album comes in the mail and I am uncomfortably aware
that time has passed, the man on the cover has grown older.
There are memories tied up in his musical legacy, indelible fingerprints
on my childhood: my mother humming along at the kitchen sink
my father playing along quietly on his beat-up acoustic guitar

others from when I started calling the music my own: a tiny apartment
with a shitty stereo that I loved, the lights off, the music loud
blissful in my solitude, later: in bed with my first husband, eyes closed
pretending to be asleep, pretending there was nothing wrong
the pop star’s then-new CD playing itself to the end in the background

even later: my son in my arms, face tiny and red, missing the last few words
from a well-worn song that finally put him to sleep.
I take the new album to my office, pull out the various incarnations of media
bearing the pop star’s name: two cassette tapes, four vinyl LPs, seven CDs, lay them out
in chronological order, like portraits of a family member never seen
yet sorely missed.

 

HOLLY DAY’s poetry has recently appeared in Plainsongs, The Long Islander, and The Nashwaak Review. Her newest poetry collections are In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), Folios of Dried Flowers and Pressed Birds (Cyberwit.net), Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), and Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope) 

 

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Yesteryear’s Silicon Jukebox “Do No Evil” World – Gerard Sarnat MD

SAN FRANCISCO, AP, April 21, 2005 — Google Inc. is experimenting with a new feature that enables the users of its online search engine to see all of their past search requests and results, creating a computer peephole that could prove as embarrassing as it is helpful…

Doing my parking lot homeless medical clinic today, there’s
old Wild Ray root ‘n toot’n folks to sign his petition banning
the growing identity theft crisis. Somethin’ ’bout the
gov’ment stealin’ three of his eight multiple personalities.
Which he damn well wants back, and pronto, please.

The late Erik Erikson first used the now common phrase
“identity crisis.” When his biological Danish dad split before
his birth, he was adopted by his Jewish stepfather and took
the name Erik Homberger. But because of his blond-and-
blue-eyed Nordic look, Erikson was rejected by his Jewish
neighborhood. At grammar school, on the other hand, he was
teased as a Jew. Feeling that he didn’t fit in with either
cultural world, Erikson’s own identity crises fueled his career’s
work. Not needing a weatherman to know which way the wind
blew, he left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and
immigrated to the United States in 1933.

In 1935, Monk Eugenio Pacelli Pacelli, speaking of the Nazis,
told 250,000 pilgrims at Lourdes, “It does not make any
difference whether they flock to the banners of the social
revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception
of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by
the superstition of a race and blood cult.” Four years later,
this hybrid Monk committed identity theft, evidently no
identity crisis for this hypocrite, when he oxymoronically
renamed himself Pope Pius XII. For much of the war, he
piously maintained a public front of indifference and
remained silent while German Holocaust atrocities
were committed. He refused pleas for help on the
grounds of neutrality, while making statements
condemning injustices in general. Privately, he
sheltered a small number of Jews and spoke to a few
select officials, encouraging them to help the Jews.

Homeless Squirrel Girl shows me her very own hybrid
Munk, a mixed-breed pet chipmunk squirrel she’s raised
since birth as her baby girl. Now looking like an overfed
rabid rat, the fat rodent slithers from her shoulder down
her blouse, crawling up her skirt. How ’bout that.

Looking for a place to stay, Milo’s back from a short
unsuccessful vacation in Waikiki. “Turned out to be
Disneyland corporate Amerika, a tourist companytown
scam, too many regulations, too high a cost of living.”
Sniffing his unmistakably sweet smoke, I’m inappropriately
asked if I want a toke. Nope. “But by the way, Doc, will
you renew my San Francisco City and County Volunteer Medical
Cannabis Card that Hawaii won’t honor”…for nonexistent
chronic hepatitis B?

Now a middle-aged Stanford dropout, Shady Slim sidles
over with a new story about an old identity. “Once upon a
time, I was a horse trainer until my partner died. A year
ago, I was surprised when his son contacted me with an
offer of 20% equity if I taught him all I knew. We got lucky
getting a horse runs good down in Southern California. Now
Consolidator’s rated fifth of the ten that’ve qualified for
the Kentucky Derby next month. Four-time Derby winner
Wayne Lukas’ training him. Got new duds to wear back there.
If he wins and goes to stud, I’m a rich man, wish me luck.”

Hard to hear under the boombox’s Iggy Pop and Bessie Smith,
Suzanne, a Native American with congenital alcohol syndrome
stutters, “P-p–lease g-g-ive me s-s-ome p-pills to s-s-stop
my piss.”

Vicious truth sees into metal, making it melt: President
Tru Man spoke of the White House as a jail cell. Same time,
in a woman’s parallel outlaw universe outside the usual soupy
gumbo political rain, Billie Holliday sang about Strange Fruit.
Today, a middle-aged Lady Day lookalike and stranger to the
Urban Ministry, there she is in her full black glory. So demure
and sexy, sitting there on a folding chair, strangely unnoticed
and alone, rubbing oil slowly onto calves lifted above green
socks under brown high top boots. Mother Mary full of grace,
I long to kneel before and anoint you. Rings on every finger,
black garbage bag backpack covered with wilted red roses,
busted guitar case held together by fraying bungey cords.
Short gray dress above the knees, with sparkly white specks
peaking out like stars on a cloudy night. Chartreuse and
purple silky head scarf tied in front like a beautiful serenely
freed non-Aunt Jemima.

Jimena, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and Northern
Africa, among today’s forgotten refugees. Thinking he’s
helping by wielding a broom to the ceiling’s corner to clean
out a nest of spiders, a new volunteer is booed by all for
making fellow creatures homeless. Even if you don’t
have everything you want, be grateful for the things you
don’t have that you don’t want.

The radio blares a Marketwatch Bulletin: Google profit
rises fivefold as revenue tops target.

 

GERARD SARNAT MD’s authored HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes, 17s, Melting Ice King (2016). Gerry’s published by Gargoyle, Oberlin, Brown, Stanford, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, American Journal Of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Brooklyn Review, LA Review, San Francisco Magazine, New York Times. Mount Analogue selected KADDISH for distribution nationwide Inauguration Day.   gerardsarnat.com

Image via Pixabay

 

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Conflagration – James Lepak

The pizza boxes we had accrued
Almost hit the ceiling. There were no dorms
With more collegiate hygiene.
The diet, the order, the sloth of bright
And horny teens bled out
Into our idealized décor.
What better sacrifice to make
Than this monument to the cusp
Of adulthood? We burned it all
In a pyre that excited solely
Because of its novelty,
And that it was our waste,
Our waste of health and time
And privilege underused.
The burning of our eyes in heaving smoke
Was joyous, as only the illusion of freedom
Can allow. Rob shouted,
“Fuck pizza!” and echolalia ensued.
You weren’t much in the spirit, Scott,
But you dutifully repeated,
And that chain of brotherhood
Was not broken by solemnity.
Pat was most aware
Of the nihilism we celebrated
And was therefore the happiest.
I saw the fire’s reflection
In all their eyes and loved
This projection from hearth
To man to world,
And did not care
The order in which it truly came.

 

JAMES LEPAK is an ESL instructor who enjoys reading and writing poetry in his spare time. His work has appeared in Isacoustic and Songs of Eretz Poetry Review.

Image via Pixabay

Passage – December Lace

It’s a lonely walk through the dark tunnel
All light extinguished
There’s no guarantee
He’ll be waiting for me
At the other end
I’ve left the cold, but it crept in
Keeps trying to attach itself to
The cloth I wear, snags in my hair
Wind picks up and enters the walls
No matter how far I’ve come
It follows me
Like an earlier sin
My velvet boots make echoes in
The hollow darkness
Rats scurry round my ankles
Away from my destination as
More wind slaps my face
My punishment for braving the night alone
I am unsure if there are
Any demons poking about at this hour
Dressed in rags or suits
Then my hearing fails
And it’s darkest at the end
One lone street light is on
The man with the dim coat
Isn’t where he said he’d be
He’s at the opposite entrance
Waiting for me across the street
But he is
There

 

DECEMBER LACE (@TheMissDecember) is a former professional wrestler and pinup model from Chicago. She has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Molotov Cocktail, Pussy Magic Lit, The Cabinet of Heed, Awkward Mermaid, Vamp Cat, and Rhythm & Bones YANYR Anthology, among others. She loves Batman, burlesque, cats, and horror movies.

Image via Pixabay

Because I Couldn’t Bear – Ray Ball

Because I couldn’t bear

to let you go, I transformed
you into a small bird. I shouldn’t
have done it, but I caged
you in my right hip.

You built a nest in the dry
and brittle bramble of bone
and fascia. Sometimes,
in certain yoga poses, I can

feel you flutter against
the wrought iron of my widest
point. Sometimes, when I run,
I hear the faint acoustics

of your song beating
into my blood, and I slow
a bit so that you will rest
once more. Remain with me

to support this weight,
this internal rotation,
another season without
enough numbing snow.

 

RAY BALL grew up in a house full of snakes. She is a history professor, Pushcart-nominated poet, and editor at Alaska Women Speak. Her chapbook Tithe of Salt was just published by Louisiana Literature Press. Ray’s work has also recently appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Moria, and UCity Review.

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Tichners Point – Doug Stuber

Gale winds and lightning push me a mile or more down the lake.
As the aluminum Grumman canoe fills with late-spring rain.
I bullied my sister, insisting on paddling alone, so she raged.
The storm wiped the smug smile from my face, added pain.

That canoe remains the symbol of love in my heart.
I cling to it in my dreams. Its nurturing hand saved
A ten-year-old that day, and inspires further pours of art:
Paddle trips for trilobites wedged in cliffs of shale.

It waited every winter, unlike others I know
We wrapped cross bars with life preservers to portage lake to creek.
We pulled ashore on Squaw Island, a long way to go,
Retracing the frightful past strengthened this belief.

Fifty years later, there you are, not a spot of rust,
We hit Canandaigua, my love, my arms, my trust.

DOUG STUBER: father, professor, abstract expressionist, Hippie-punk improv rock bassist. Twelfth volume “Chronic Observer” now available at Finishing Line Press’ online bookstore.

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Why I Pierced My Nose – Cinthia Ritchie

Because in junior high
a girl with banana-colored hair
stuck a pin through my ear,
yanked a thread, blood dripping,
it felt holy, Christ
on the cross, Moses wandering
the desert,
my ears crusted with pus
until I smelled infection
across my pillow
animal odors, comforting,
special.

Because few years later a boy
with dark hair and green eyes,
led me to his bed,
another type of piercing
but Jesus, how he moved,
cat eyes blurring,
I licked the blood from the sheet,
tasted myself.
When I walked I could feel
a hole between my legs
gasping and hungry for breath,

Because the years smeared
together and suddenly I had a son
with beautiful teeth,
a job at a newspaper,
poems published in magazines no one
read. Every Sunday I blew a copy editor
in the supply closet, printer cartridges praying
my knees as outside the door reporters’ keyboards
sang the news.
After he left, I paid a man to tattoo
a dolphin over my arm, blood mixing
with ink, I loved the pain, the permanence.
Some things should never stop hurting.

But they do and soon you forget,
which is why years later,
no longer young,
I had my nose pierced,
pain blaring hot-rock shout,
eyes watering, it was almost unbearable,
Mary searching the temple for Jesus,
Abraham ready to slit his own son’s throat,
and then, just as suddenly,
it was over, a small pink stone
embedded in my right nostril,
a gift, a song,
a reminder not so much of pain
but of the relief, the welcoming
stillness, that follows.

 

CINTHIA RITCHIE is an Alaska writer and ultra-runner who spends her time running mountain trails with a dog named Seriously. Find her work in New York Times Magazine, Evening Street Review, Sport Literate, Best American Sports Writing, Bosque Literary Journal, Clementine Unbound, Deaf Poets Society, Into the Void, Gyroscope Review and more.

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Feverish – Kristin Garth

With scarlet fever, swans grow fangs. Two teeth
will spill, orange bills, overhang. While you
perspire beneath a portico, two beasts
conspire, crooked necks, approaching slow. Drool, blue,
that tinges feathered throats, you try to scream,
too raw to properly emote. Grey feet advance
too quick upon St. Augustine, wild gleams
in beady eyes — you deem them rabid. Chance
a feeble stand, retreat, screen door, if you
can. Land before them, lustrous grass, their mouths
upon your flesh so fast devouring. Shooed
away, saviors emerging from the house:
Veranda’s dangerous for you, it seems.
They will tell you it was a fever dream.

 

KRISTIN GARTH is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker. Her poetry has stalked magazines like Glass, Yes, Five:2: One, Former Cactus, Occulum & many more. She has six chapbooks including Shakespeare for Sociopaths (Hedgehog Poetry Press), Pink Plastic House (Maverick Duck Press), Puritan U (Rhythm & Bones Press March 2019) and The Legend of the Were Mer (Thirty West Publishing House March 2019). Her full length, Candy Cigarette, is forthcoming April 2019 (The Hedgehog Poetry Press), and she has a fantasy collaborative full length A Victorian Dollhousing Ceremony forthcoming in June (Rhythm & Bones Lit). Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie), and her website kristingarth.com

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

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Puff – Marie Fields

I took up smoking when I lived
In the ex-hotel, ex-brothel building
Everything had been repurposed
I’d sit in the kitchen with my feet up
Puffing on Sobranie Cocktails
The insulation so terrible that I
Didn’t even need to open a window
No fear of the alarm drawing attention
Not like Johnny would care
He’d probably join me
I splayed out a smorgasbord of
Colorful cancer in front of me
Letting each one inch me closer
To a high I was loathe to
Leave behind in sleep
The itch so strong I had to
Start chewing gum during the day
Keeping up the façade of decency
I had repurposed
Just like the building.

 

Image via Wikipedia Commons

After Before – G J Hart

Before when sailing
Was plain, I moved
From here to there,
Rowed with oars spare
As ulna, returned hopes
To rivers
Risen
With hope.

Then, Built a cabin
With fir And foul
Language,
Hauled up jasmin,
And leant and watched
My plot
Scud through
Gasping storms.

After with rivers
Withered, I sacked
Kindling and clothes,
Boarded a ferry,
And leant and watched
It scatter
Years
Across my shoulder.

Arrived I relished
Forecasts and ice cream,
Hung hollows
For coming storms
And sat before
Waters
Beneath
Vaults of endless growth.

 

GJ HART currently lives and works in London and has had stories published in The Molotov Cocktail, The Jersey Devil Press, the Harpoon Review and others. He can be found arguing with himself over @gj_hart.

Image by Julius Hagen from Pixabay

You Ful I – Andrew Shields

The mirror shows you how to read
the secrets and the signs.
You’re not as young as you once were,
but something keeps you going.

As to why you don’t feel old,
the mirror has an answer.
Someone found a way to spell it,
even if it’s wrong.

There’s magic in the words and letters
moving round and round.
Read them every way you can
to cast their loving spell.

 

ANDREW SHIELDS lives in Basel, Switzerland. His collection of poems “Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong” was published by Eyewear in June 2015. His band Human Shields released the album “Somebody’s Hometown” in 2015 and the EP “Défense de jouer” in 2016.

Image by awsloley from Pixabay

Little one, I’m sorry – Kate Garrett

I was given the damning choice between feeding you
from a bottle and hearing from the midwife that “breast
is best”, shamed like a boisterous child flaunting the rules

or nursing you in secret, holding you between my heart
and the fear-bellows bred from the mouth of your father
who raised a fist and claimed my body belonged to him

(it is mine) and breastfeeding was forbidden under his roof
(also mine). I had to choose the safest path for the long game:
taking comfort in holding you close, in our pocket of quiet –

a plot planted in my mind to take you all away from there
as I offered my plastic replacement to your little lips, tears
streaming down your tiny chipmunk cheeks, nuzzling
for the warm scent of milk and love, the skin of a mother.

 

KATE GARRETT is editor of three web journals, and her own writing is widely published. Her first full collection, The saint of milk and flames, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press (April 2019). Kate lives in Sheffield, UK with her husband, children, and a cat. Twitter @mskateybelle / http://www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk

Image via Pixabay

 

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Cold Potatoes in the Wind – Steve Sibra

My father worked the pipelines
at night he drank in bars
with bare bulb lights and red plastic window shades
he never shaved
when he was sober —
used a straight blade to carve himself
into the outline of a family man

My father
tore pieces off people
I watched from a pickup window
as he beat the local butcher unconscious
in an alley behind the dry cleaners
“Who taught you to treat a cow like that?”
he raged
his fists like bloody mallets
he drove drunken spikes of shame
into the slack face of a gentle man

When I was seventeen
two cattlemen came to town
found my father teetering on a bar stool
one held his arms
the other blasting holes in his chest
point blank, with a sawed-off

Pieces of his heart lay on the bar room floor

When I heard about it
I took the old Chevy Apache half-ton
and a can of gasoline
I burned their house after midnight
heard a woman’s scream
as I drove away
period of punctuation
for a long hard sentence

I parked in front of the sheriff’s house
spread out in the back of the truck
Deputy Lester shook me awake

Now I sit in the state pen
pretending to do the paperwork
big words that tell me nothing
designed to get me out

But I don’t want “out”
I am teaching myself the guitar
I want to sit cross-legged on the floor
like John Lennon in “Norwegian Wood”
then go to the prison rooftop
eat cold potatoes in the warm summer wind
watch the sun turn the color of wine.

 

STEVE SIBRA grew up on a wheat farm in eastern Montana in the 1960s and 1970s. He moved to Seattle and made a living for 35 years by selling vintage comic books. His poetry and prose have appeared in various lit journals including Matador Review, Shattered Wig and Sleep Aquarium.

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My Mummy is… by Dan Brotzel

GENTLE GIRAFFE BOOKS — PARENTS AT WORK SERIES, No 17

My mummy is…
A SENIOR SEO CONTENT PRODUCER

Hello! My name is Kyle and I am nine years old.
Today I’m going to tell you about my mummy’s work.

My mummy is a senior seo content producer.
She works in an office with lots of other people.
She writes lots of things. It’s very busy work.
Mummy has to drink a lot of coffee to keep herself going.
Mummy has three stress balls.

Mummy works on the Internet.
The Internet is like a giant library.
But the Internet is not a library in a building. It’s in everyone’s computer.
Mummy helps to make it easier for people to find things on the Internet.
She says this is what seo means.
It stands for search engine optimisation.

To search for things on the Internet, mummy says, people use a thing called Google.
Google is a search engine. A search engine is different to a fire engine.
Google is like a big computer inside the Internet that helps people find things.
You type in ‘underwater train’, and Google gives you a list of videos of trains going underwater. You just click on the one you like.
My mummy doesn’t make underwater train videos. She doesn’t make train videos at all.
She says she works more in the e-commerce, professional services and b2b tech space.

Mummy says Google is like a big race.
Everyone wants to see their things come top of the list.
But not everyone can come top of the list.
Mummy says some naughty people try and cheat their way to the top.
Mummy says these naughty people are called black-hats. I think this is because they wear black hats.
Mummy says she never does these naughty things. Not unless there is a compelling business case for pushing the best-practice envelope.

Mummy thinks a lot about something called keywords.
Keywords are things that people search for a lot.
Some keywords are ‘cat videos’ and ‘Taylor Swift’ and ‘anti-wrinkle cream’ and ‘payday loans’ and ‘pornhub’.
Mummy says keywords help her understand what people are looking for.
Then she tries to make things that have these keywords in.
But it is very hard work, says mummy, because different people like different things.
She says that’s why no one clicked on her white paper about new developments in cloud-based e-procurement software.

Mummy doesn’t make things for herself.
She makes them for her special friends.
Her special friends are called clients.
She says some of the clients are like me.
Are they nine? I ask. You would think so sometimes, she says.
The clients give mummy money to thank her for making things for them.
Mummy uses the money to buy food and clothes and toys for me and my sister.
I tell mummy to be really nice to her special friends. I like toys.

Sometimes mummy makes things for Facebook and Instagram and things like that.
They are places where people can chat with each other even when they are far apart.
Mummy puts videos and pictures on Facebook that she pretends her special friends made.
Her special friends want people to click on their things.
But often no one clicks on the things mummy makes for them. That makes mummy and her special friends very sad.
Are you making cool stuff like underwater train videos? I ask.
No darling! laughs mummy.
Well, you should, I say. Remember, we need the money.

Mummy is a manager.
Managers look after a team of other people who help her do the work.
But mummy also has a manager of her own. She calls him My Boss.
Mummy’s boss must be a ghost, I think, because mummy says he’s not all there.
I want to meet the people in mummy’s team one day.
I want to play with them, because they sound really funny.
Mummy say they are all jokers and muppets.

A very special part of mummy’s work is landing pages.
Landings pages are like runways. People land on them when they click on something in the Google list.
Mummy says she has to give landing pages a lot of extra care and attention.
What about me, mummy? I say. Do I get extra care and attention?
Of course you do! she laughs. You mean the world to me! But I don’t have to worry about optimising your conversion rates.

Sometimes mummy has to use special words I don’t understand.
She talks about featured snippets and influencer marketing and rinsing the competition’s PPC budget.
She says I would make a good seo content producer one day because of my strong ideation skills.
What are ideation skills? I ask.
Coming up with lots of new ideas, says mummy.
Like when I tried to explain broadband with pasta tubes? I ask.
That could work, she says, writing it down.

You need lots of special qualities to do a job like Mummy’s.
You need to be a good writer.
You need to be a fast typer.
You need to be good at understanding things called spreadsheets.
Mummy says that a spreadsheet is a big piece of paper full of numbers that no one understands.
But how can you do your job if you don’t understand? I ask.
I pretend it’s a game, she says.

I’m very proud of my mummy.
She does a very important job.
But mummy says that her job is only work.
She says her real job is being my mummy.
She says it is the best job in the world.
When I grow up, I want to be a senior seo content producer like you, I tell her.
I pray that day never comes, says mummy.
Why? I ask.
Mummy sighs and says nothing.
Why? I ask again.
Because you are so clever, you could do something you actually want to do.
Like what, mummy? I ask.
Like… an underwater train driver, she says.

Image via Pixabay

 

A Love Not Supreme – Ian C Smith

He remembers a night-long drive, fractious children – the reason for travelling by night – finally still, I Spy, Play School tapes, reached saturation point, semi-mountainous terrain straddling two states, through silent hamlets, his wife beside him also asleep, exhausted, radio tuned softly to his favourite DJ, Lucky Oceans’ jazz gems.

Past midnight, traffic thin, occasional headlights crisscrossing like wartime searchlights on the ever-winding road, exhilarated by Coltrane’s tenor sax, he goes over life’s teeming possibilities, the hope you might stumble upon the unhoped for that thrusts aside sudden mishaps when subsistence is conjured from little money.

Yet unweighted by the crush of years, he pictured their destination, the inexpensive cottage amidst tumbledown outbuildings, trees, on a cliff above a river where children romp in speckled sunlight, she plies her profession, studies, while he continues house-husbanding, writing everything down slant in the crabbed hand of one never quite certain.

Blueprinted dreams of happiness his trusting vision as chronicler, neglecting love’s demands while those years peeled away, children now adults hooked on their own dreams without passports to happily ever afters, leaves him with only the blur of absence like a silenced bell, a memory of night music, words calligraphic wreaths on paper.

 

IAN C SMITH’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, Poetry New Zealand, Southerly, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Image via Pixabay

White Light – Christine Brooks

When I was younger
seven or eight, maybe
even
younger than
that,
the thunder came rolling
in
over our house that
had been
dropped
on the outskirts of
urban-ia
landing on a street mostly
forgotten.

28 Ionia rattled and
shivered, but
Never, not ever
crumbled from the
booms,
Or from the
bolts.

I hid from the loud claps
house shaking, knees
knockin’,
under the bed, hoping
for time to grow longer and
Longer
as I counted the
seconds
between the
Growls and
bright flashes of
white.

Come out, you say
the angels are just bowling, no
need to quiver,
no need to shake.

Look at the dark sky
streaked
with light, even in pitch
there is
—light.

Sometimes, it isn’t thunder
that rumbles and grumbles, or lightening
that flashes and
flickers our lights

No, not at all.

The angels are
bowling
I remind myself

and when I do
I am with you again
in your arms
starched white nurse’s cap
Bobby-pinned high atop
Your salt and pepper
Bouffant hairdo

Even in pitch there is
light.

Even in pitch there is
light.

Even in pitch
there is
light.

Image via Pixabay

Swelter – T J McGowan

Swelter
The swelter of tight chasing shadows,
aflame in their hunger
and the eager rage
of wide ranging sparrows,
picking,
pecking,
up to their neck

in

the spectacle
of wrecked will
aging behind flesh
spilling over with fantasy
of happiness,

still

the walls fall dormant,
no ecstasy in escape from form,
mourning voids which remain unfilled,
a stain, we are,

born

to quick thrill, unstable,
unable to avoid the swift chill
and daunting shift
from oxygen
to something else,
a felt haunting

worn

like internal clothing
splitting stitches,
our riches are passed by,
roaming, we die,
striving for a warm fold
in the bustling chambers
of the heart,
before the cold edges
of nothing
completely tear us apart.

 

T J MCGOWAN is a Bronx based writer who has been published in Flash Fiction Mag, Collective Unrest, and 35MM, with a forthcoming publication in Mojave Heart. He spends his days as an Associate Producer for a Film & TV company, contributing to script and copy on most creative projects.

Image via Pixabay

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