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Womannotated – Wide Eyed

January 23rd, 2021

Wide Eyed 

I get disheartened when an artist tells 
me they’re bored.  It’s especially brutal 
if I’ve adored you and the art propels 
my own rhetoric, research,
collections of folders some might besmirch. I think 
Stanley Kubrick would have approved though I’ve 
no warehouse of boxes when I’m extinct 
to prove my passion for working still thrives 
between poems and books.  We live 
amidst fascinations.  If we stay spry,
wide eyed enough, work is transformative. 
Suture eyes shut someday after I die
with the stories I’ve written, some I hoard. 
I’ll die exhausted.  I never lived bored. 

Continue reading “Womannotated – Wide Eyed” →
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Womannotated – Madonna & Manchild

January 9th, 2021

Madonna & Manchild 

Bury bereavement in cellar below 
with buttercup onesie, Château Pétrus  
Merlot  — a godless sacrament you know
is mortal sin.  Silicon reproduced
to simulate skin so your spouse can 
begin, maternal virgin, again. Sleep 
walk through mutual grief she countermands,
rationing love, plastic in pale hands. Keep
cries deep in your throat until she’s asleep.
A baby monitor projects its first 
weep — graveled, full grown. The hell two have reaped,
one remembers alone. Insatiable thirst
nursed by propped-up bottles inside brownstone,
She suckles a doll while you drink alone. 

Continue reading “Womannotated – Madonna & Manchild” →
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Womannotated – Pretty Maids All In A Row

Pretty Maids All In A Row

after Servant

Rambles past ringlets, ruffles, rouge to you, 
end of the queue, interviewed for the show,
television lady forgets your debut —
segment you are someone she chose to know.

Her fascinations are fleeting and slight,
provincially dressed princess one night.  Lives
she catalogues on oak shelves in plain sight. 
Decades of ingenues in her archives,

Continue reading “Womannotated – Pretty Maids All In A Row” →
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Womannotated – Dead Sea

Dead Sea 

Saunter through snapdragons, the cobblestone path

inside his house, into a bath prepared 

with Dead Sea salts by a sociopath— 

Continue reading “Womannotated – Dead Sea” →
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Womannotated-Girlarium

Two Girlarium sonnets:

Continue reading “Womannotated-Girlarium” →

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Riverbed Reunion by Abiodun Usman

Very soon,  I will embrace my wife again as a farmer embraces the rainy season, or, like a groom embraces his new bride. I will be drenched in water. A sorrow–hidden moment it will be, just like January 1st, 2005. That was the last day I saw her heavy dimples and swollen abdomen. 

Continue reading “Riverbed Reunion by Abiodun Usman” →
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Fear Thyself by Stephen Embleton

I lie on the bottom of the pool, my back resting lightly on the rough, cool marbelite; staring motionless up at the surface of the water. Four feet of water separates me from fresh, breathable air.

Continue reading “Fear Thyself by Stephen Embleton” →
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Kids

I became a widow at the tender age of nine.

Continue reading “Kids” →
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Womannotated – Golden Ticket

 

Two Golden Ticket Dark Chocolate Sonnets:

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illustration by Amy Suzanne

Pipe Dream

“He’s changed!” said Grandpa Joe, peering down through the glass wall of the elevator. 
“He used to be fat! Now he’s thin as straw.” Grandpa Joe on Augustus after the pipe,
Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

 All they saw, “thin as straw” Augustus who

once was not.  Boy almost boiled inside

a chocolate pot, consumed post fudge room

before the change.  Chocolate liquefied

Continue reading “Womannotated – Golden Ticket” →

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First Person Shooter of the Heart by Jane Judith

Continue reading “First Person Shooter of the Heart by Jane Judith” →

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lV + ll by Reza Pourdian and Callum Leckie

Continue reading “lV + ll by Reza Pourdian and Callum Leckie” →
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OUTSIDE WORLD – A Multimedia Art Project by Noise Weaver

Small, childish hands of a small, childish body. And its childish legs stood on the ledge of a grey, concrete obelisk. Big, adult clothing was hung around and hugged its body. Slithered its hands and small, childish fingers out of the long, snake-like sleeve with two needles. Threw one over the ledge and punctured the young meat of its finger with the other. In from one and out from the other end. Sew the fabric of reality into itself.

It inhaled the measured, sonic existence of the concrete forest. After its hand came out when it reached into its pocket, the weird, long, white, plastic strand of earphones was hanging from its fingers and small, cute nails.

Continue reading “OUTSIDE WORLD – A Multimedia Art Project by Noise Weaver” →
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VAMPYR by Louis Armand – an excerpt from a novel-in-progress

For we cannot define everything & must begin somewhere. The atoms whirl about, a picture forms. A hole that is no longer bottomless, contemplation of which, carrying the first sky, falling(mouthless)upon the first watcher…

Continue reading “VAMPYR by Louis Armand – an excerpt from a novel-in-progress” →
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PHOTOGRAPH OF A WOMAN IN PAIN by Caela Price

Vahid Sharifian, An Unfinished Love, 2020, acrylic on paper, courtesy of the artist

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There there there there there there there here on in the wall Onan’s masturbating guiltily again she’s all blacked out out out and up in the clouds cold closing moon’s in the sky I say to her why couldn’t she stay a little longer there’s something in the walls

rrrrrrunning rune ropes thick around the body tight and heavy a storm coming crack open the sky and wait for the apocalypse yes it is coming haven’t you heard and I already made my graving restplace

here now here now here now here now hear me i’m there paralytic and fucked in the basement as the light cracks through schizophrenic mother always told me id end up funny down this path yes and no knowing id believed her at some point going going going gone

Continue reading “PHOTOGRAPH OF A WOMAN IN PAIN by Caela Price” →
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Short Story by Anna Walsh

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Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash

 

 

short story: Ruined Things Are Only Gorgeous When They Are Not Yours 

 

Driving along the motorway, the radio crackled. She wanted to trace something on the window, but couldn’t think what. She fiddled with buttons, found an old song they both liked and turned it up. She imagined she was going to Berlin, to meet girls wearing orange lipstick and boots, tall and forward in the chaos of other people.  Continue reading “Short Story by Anna Walsh” →

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Short story by James Cato

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Photo by Jaunathan Gagnon on Unsplash

 

 

short story: M80

 

I remember telling my parents that I was destined to get along with Bud Lykke, with that prosocial name of his, but I didn’t expect such a character. Each morning, he pours a bit of coffee into the hanging plants. After dinner he spends hours inside chunky headphones with “Binaural Beats” blaring, engineered to trigger dissociative states. He grew up in Appalachia, some obscure county in Ohio, and blames his ills on the heavy fracking around there, radioactivity in the drinking water. Continue reading “Short story by James Cato” →

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Short Story by Jennifer Brough

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Photo by Yuzki Wang on Unsplash

 

 

story: The Somnambulist Party

 

The moon is full and bathing. Light laps each house in this quiet village, casting silver squares through windows with undrawn curtains.
In one such bedroom, a cat bathes too, pale fur illuminated against the floorboards. A clock chimes deep within the house and his eyes flash open. He stretches, unfurling his length, and leaps on the mistress’s bed, pawing at her cheek once, twice, waiting.  
                    The mistress is between dreams. Within them, a dark ocean crashes into itself. She is expecting an arrival in the foam but is uncertain what form it will take. A vast scattering of shells and flint line the shore but she can’t move quickly enough to search through the piles. When she moves her hands, they leave ghostly echoes of themselves. The sound of waves melts into chiming. It is almost the hour, she knows, and she hasn’t found a thing.  Continue reading “Short Story by Jennifer Brough” →

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Two Poems by Ahimaz Rajessh

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Photo by Patryk Grądys on Unsplash

 

 

poem: time travel is cruel & kind

 

you’re me. i’m not

one but so many.

you do not walk.

empty and rootless i drift. i’m

you. as everyone digs out caste histories and thump their chests and thighs you drift and i turn at right angles. time’s not linear but parallel. adrift i turn left right left you turn at left angles.

 

cyclone of light or what, i say

Continue reading “Two Poems by Ahimaz Rajessh” →

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Short Story by Stephen Orr

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Photo by Cam Fattahi on Unsplash

 

short story: Point Nemo

He’s been on two journeys in his lifetime. Firstly, Antarctica. With his son, Mark. Arriving by air, setting out (despite all the warnings), saying to the seventeen year old boy, We must take our first reading from the coastline. Mark saying, How can we do that? It’s covered in a billion tonnes of ice. 

That doesn’t matter. Continue reading “Short Story by Stephen Orr” →

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The Love Addicts, by January McCormack

It was Saturday night. Friday, I’d got out of rehab. Someone called me and said did I want to go to a meeting of sex addicts. Probably be full of men who’re addicted to internet porn I thought.

“Sure,” I said; what else was I going to do. “Will there be girls there?”

It was being held in the basement of some church in Islington. I was sitting in the back row watching the girl in front of me touching her neck. There were young, old, women, men. Someone lit a couple of candles and set them on a low table in the centre.

“Lights,” said a voice from the front.

The crypt was darkened; some people kept talking, finishing their conversations in low voices.

The secretary spoke up: “We’re very lucky to have Roy here who’s agreed to share his experience, strength and hope with us for about 10-15 minutes, at which time I’ll open the meeting for general sharing. So, Roy, I’ll hand the meeting over to you …”

Roy said thanks. I looked over the heads to see him. He was tall and thin and bald. It was hard to tell his age in the half-light.

After a pause he said, “Some of you who know me will remember … when I came into these rooms it was in a wheelchair.” Continue reading “The Love Addicts, by January McCormack” →

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