Joseph Ellison Brockway is a poet, translator, and Spanish professor. He likes to juxtapose words and signs to disrupt the language on the page and to disturb the reader’s thoughts. Many of his poems also experiment with ideas and images that explore the human psyche and existence. Joseph’s poetry has recently been published in L’Éphémère Review, Moonchild Magazine, SurVision Magazine, and Surreal Poetics. He can be found roaming the socialmediaverse at @JosephEBrockway.
I was told (who told me? what voice?) to imagine
a porthole, to focus across the blue. Wait
for the glare of clarity to abate, subdue it.
Acknowledge the blue, it said, like breathing
used to be. It will be cold, like the first snow,
as you ease yourself across. There is the sea.
Concentrate. I become my focus, which is her.
She watches the sky (I remember the sky). I don’t
see her, it is not sight, yet she’s there on the terrace
watching the clouds, seeing vertebrae.
The voice says, It’s like blowing. I remember
breathing, taking in a deep breath. The thought,
or what sounds like a thought, makes me smile.
(A smile is just a metaphor now.) Focus.
I’m entranced with the mirror image. I need the sea
for practice. She’s searching for letters – an L – but clouds
are untamable, they stand on end, wisps
trailing away into a spider’s thread that I follow (again,
a metaphor) in wonder (now I know wonder)
and she is no longer on the terrace, no longer
looking, though her ache crimsons the scent
of pine and honeysuckle. I translate touch, sound,
sight, want, pain. She is trying to translate, but knows
only blue, sea. Sees only vertebrae, thinks I don’t hear.
I resist dissipation. I dally, imagining our two mists
mingling (what sex used to be?), though I’m becoming
wisp already. Her every thought like a blood-red
light flashing in the empty blue. Listen.
Kymm Coveney was born in Boston and has lived in Spain since the 1982 World Cup. Some poems are in Under the Radar, Prole, and The Interpreter’s House. Several flash pieces reside at 101Fiction. Online translations include a poem at Surreal Poetics and a short story at Palabras Errantes.
Blog: BetterLies Twitter: @KymmInBarcelona.
conch/sea
I am and I become
abecedarian as a personal charm
to am and become
to be and become
remind me to be light
inside each memory egg a gold inlay of an incident
how the brain compartmentalizes like a chambered nautilus
yet it is all one sand – the brain distinguishes one from the other to understand
i’ve made a career of privacy and compartmentalized objects
i’ve made a career of my traumas
what is privacy here with all exposed and sifting over one another in an endless span
how much of privacy or keeping secret is wrapped up in fears around judgement
light exposures popping up – the privacy book the mean latitudes of reason
a wish to bold concave belly flesh shoulders wrapped in marbled warscape
a wish to stand tall to withstand the seas at the door
i biked all over town in the early dawn popping off light exposures drunk on tall boys and crashed into a lexus
the me then the me
mortal rigor in the fountain in the landscape chasm
conch/sea
to rack focus like an aperture to let light in
object/frame stillness among the raging
majestic orifice right there
alate lion in the yard
these death energetics
i swallow hieroglyphs like a carceral bee
fires all around the island in a glacial crisis
war on my nerves a pallor a fungus
the lens has holes in it
a disintegration of the ephemeral
the segmented abdomen becomes integrated
losing its segments as an insect ages
cerci wave in weapons of copulation
wingless among the deciduous
the sense making
malicious octopus reticular trap
alphabet laughter in the yarrow
when you become the lens itself
so the pallor is swallowed, excreted
the moult can moult
electron nostalgia
Electra clasp the wretches
wretched the wretches wash ashore
pubic schema old days of the goddess
stressed belly the “curved inflorescence”
irascible pharaoh egg-shaped coffin
bury me in this alleged
Home
receiving familiar Legend
Hers is the felled heart a sword-shaped segment
when i curve toward you
the air stretches me pinnate
radio neuron electra radial split inquisitive
I split I fire on all radials
electrons of nostalgia acquisitive longing
how the “stigma persists at the tip” even though its buried
how trauma persists the skins a sun coming through it
kletic
wild mouths wild mouths
when the agor settles
when gold dust lament
covers it all
i am a beetle captured
in glass
my green thorax aglow
among the amber
my pincers akimbo
like come at me bro
i still believe in a female god
Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & nine chapbooks, including the forthcoming trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020). Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
remember Hollow Man? Kevin Bacon
stuck in our seat forced a rapist’s point
of view women can’t see him
we go unseen reliving through
leading to his neighbor her apartment
stuck in our seat as credits roll
I should have left before credits
still without closure Rhona Mitra
credited only as Neighbor
Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, and others. Etzel is the recipient of a 2017 Troy Scroggins Award and the 2017 Topeka ARTSConnect Arty Award in Literary Arts. He co-edited Ichabods Speak Out: Poems in the Age of Me, Too with Dr. Jericho Hockett which features poems against sexual assault from the Washburn University and Topeka Community. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council and leads poetry workshops in various Kansas spaces.
Third shift at the night factory
assembles the simple, elegant machine of night.
Workers, like figures in a shadow play,
hammer the fitted parts home,
extend the handle of a wrench with a pipe,
and brace a foot against the stubborn bolt.
Engineers pour over the schematics of the moon
trembling on the surface of oil in open buckets.
In the last of the dark hours,
welders extinguish their torches
while the foreman inspects the welds
with a candle held behind the seams.
Pinholes in the bead or casting
fill the factory with starlight,
a constellation of flaws, a myth and map of stars
we made to find our way out.
Queued at the gate and parting
at the whistle into morning,
shift workers call to each other:
‘night, see ya, so long, take care
Stephen Frech has earned degrees from Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Cincinnati. He has published three volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent (Kent State UP), If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness (White Pine Press), and The Dark Villages of Childhood (Midwest Writing Center) His fourth volume titled A Palace of Strangers is No City, a sustained narrative of prose poetry/flash fiction, has been published by Cervena Barva Press. He published a translation of poetry from the Dutch: Menno Wigman’s Zwart als kaviaar/Black as Caviar. He is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides. Oneiros broadsides have been purchased by special collections libraries around the world, among them the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the University of Amsterdam Print Collection. Stephen Frech is Professor of English at Millikin University
1.
California mouth sore
gas station brass
where a rich black mass
is still in the window
The phone
I use
crackles
and never
makes much
sense
I feel like
I’ve read
the internet
too many
times
and now I know
how it ends
we have
plans
to meet
at eleven
But
come eleven
I’m the
only one
waiting
underneath
the crumby
don’t walk sign
that really
just says walk
in either orange
or blue
I always wonder
what her cruelty means
She tells me
it means nothing
3.
Hauntings take time
you cannot haunt
somewhere
all at once
and if you ever tried
you wouldn’t understand
what it truly means to haunt
like a horse in the jungle
the cool smell of chlorine
the nearness of your dress
When we started I thought
—so that’s the way light tastes.
I called light—future.
Now I feel its loss in my teeth, jaw, hands.
My hair still smells like your hair.
I can’t think of my own body
without thinking of yours,
without thinking of swimming pools lit
by waves of lightning so close I can taste
their ozone and how there was a time when that taste was hope.
How many dawns did I greet hoping
you had not stopped breathing in your sleep
or whatever we should call the blear
between high and not high?
My love for you kept me awake—
what little I knew then—
watching over you, thinking that
if you died I would want to die too.
I tried to love you like this: all or nothing.
How many times did I shake you back to me? Do you remember
what I said? I said
here is my only life—take it.
I mean if you’re breathing, stay with me.
I mean if you’re not
stay with me.
If your hand is in my hair, leave it.
If you are this hurt,
let it hurt. I can take it. Don’t ever
be done with me.
I’ve been circling lakeside for years
cypress knees are fine fine thought
they were a breathing mechanism, but recently
researched into support marginal buttress
more waist-high concealment
Every loop a filmed apocalypse held
the length of a lizard’s tail
easy to detach
I’m sprung aloof
By the end, memory is abandoned
& I’m still speechless
swaddled in a thicker gunk called glow
say gray diligence
Nothing emerges
from perfect repetition the loop
devours all possibility, gurgling
warm at the center everyone still
blank where I left them
Here I am, laying out the longest
waiting room – red carpet gone to sun-bleach
I watch the lake for displacement,
though I’m not sure anything can live
in a constructed hollow;
fishers line the sides, though I’ve never seen them move a landscape
I can’t totally trust
because I keep coming back
Recently, objects have been vanishing, or simply
giving up the ruse
cattails reared in absence
nimble false bearings
There’s a stranger yet to arrive – summoned back to me;
We’ll shake hands, I’ll ask where they’ve been, though I know the answer
I’ve only ever emulated the business of obfuscation
What is the opposite of water displacement? When a thing erupts from deep volume?
The belief is there, but in practice I’m another statue sweat
fastening fissures
Nobody has fallen from the sky in years
Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama, and a PhD Creative Writing student at Illinois State University. His most recent work can be found in baest, The Wanderer, and Tagvverk. He is the recipient of the 2018 Robert Penn Warren MFA Poetry Thesis Award judged by Tonya Foster, and the 2017 William Jay Smith MFA Poetry Award judged by Daniel Borzutzky. He tweets @biometrash.
on canvas she’s shaped like an Easter egg
in life she’s young and sexy
Marie-Therese at 17
wakes from an erotic dream
moves her fingers
over and under her body
we watch Marie Therese
shift see her
eyes close her hips lift
she spreads out on a divan
she stretches over the canvas
we hear lullabies
sweet Marie sweet
he rocks the egg
he moves his brush
Picasso’s soft touch
shakes her yearnings
she rolls into life
far from Pablo’s hands
Mare Leonard’s latest chapbook was published in 2018 at Finishing Line Press, The Dark Inside My Hooded Coat. Read some reviews on her face book page: Mare Leonard Poet and Teacher and send a message with comments and if you would like a copy. She is also searching for home for a chapbook of ekphrastic poems
they make a receptacle of pins —
pale proxy still proximate to him, palmist
whom they proffer pathology (absent
middle finger valleys mean they’re ruthless)
these cunning folk he sends away, to your
village, though you’re allowed to stay behind
stone parapets in plaits, a veil demure,
a pupil with a higher left heart line
deemed pure. Sequestered, then you feel the sting,
the first of countless cuts. No one is there
besides the chiromancer, your shrieking.
He asks if one of them did braid your hair.
It was the elder, her ominous palms recalled.
You were once girl they make a voodoo doll.
the planchette spirals out
of control a giant dog howls
in the coffee reading cracks
shadows swirl in the crystal
ball all the tarot cards are blank
the runes have shattered
the mirrors broken
the petals I burnt with our names
come back dead moths fly
through the dollhouse windows
white eyes flutter
in the palms of your hands
the moon has dimmed
the dolls are awake
your crystal pendulum
catches fire the divining
coins land on their edges
the scrying bowl opens
to an infinite well
the threads unwind
the trees are yawning
a light is shining
from a split in the yew
tonight is the night
now is the time
this is the place where
the souls pour through
Lucy Whitehead writes haiku and poetry. Her haiku have appeared in various international journals and anthologies and her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Burning House Press, Collective Unrest, Electric Moon Magazine, Ghost City Review, Mookychick Magazine, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Pink Plastic House, Pussy Magic, Re-side, and Twist in Time Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @blueirispoetry.
All crowd in the church-
A lifetime of suffering
For the sake of gossip.
Found poem, remix technique.
Source text: Pike, Christopher. Falling Into Darkness. New York: Pocket Books, 1990.
Nick Quaglietta began writing poetry as a teenager, with his first work in print appearing in his 1985 college yearbook. More recently he has become affiliated with a few local writing groups, including Connect and Heal in Chandler, Arizona.
in the house of my body the light is mostly low
the rooms filled with ghosts performing an orchestra
of sorrow about all the broken glass
once, in high school, a girl i had never talked to
taught me how she held her breath until she passed out.
“after the light goes dim, you don’t remember anything.”
in the rooms of my body i wander, shuffling papers into
boxes made of songs i can’t always remember the words to
because i held my breath so many times
once a man held my balled-up fist in his own and
compared it to the size of the human heart. i noticed
how he held them both and i could breathe
in the cathedral of my body undulating rays of light
spell hope on the cracked facade and sometimes
i remember the words to every song
Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, is available with Apep Publications.
She is Head Publicist and Social Media Manager for Animal Heart Press, and a contributing editor for Barren Magazine.
She can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.
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