My Grandmother is Far Away

I remember my grandfather in the prairie winds.
When I dream of him I dream of geese,
settled in high, yellow grass, and not 
of his face.
Instead of his voice 
I hear the geese call from beyond 
the horizon, the edges of the dream.
When the dream ends
it is blown away by a clear wind that makes my own breath feel
cool and fresh,
makes the geese spread their wings and rise into the sky and
block out the sun
with contrasting feathers that leave trails of brightness on my
eyes.

Waking, I say
I am remembering.
I say good morning 
to my grandfather
and I no longer think of the harsher, clearer memory of 
my grandmother on church steps
screaming with an outstretched hand 
for the dark, long box,
which holds my grandfather.
A moment of my childhood collapsing under the weight of passing
time and faces.

I remember my grandfather in the prairie winds
but falsely.

I have learned in all this,
in all the passing years
what it is to forget,
what it is to remember,
what it is to put love into dreams.







Epidemic

I’d like to let you dissect me. I’ve come to the conclusion that my feelings are too difficult to explain and too dangerous to set in skin (my skin).

Wait, parenthetical: my skin. I am told that this is part of my trouble: not taking ownership of my actions. Let me be clear: I am hurting myself. Maybe I have hurt myself but this is beyond adolescent self-harm. Write the book about the grown woman who tortures herself and those she loves because of actions she cannot own. 

Yes, I am an adult. I have been chased for years by the ghosts of scars. For a while, I thought I was free of them but they’ve reappeared in lines. You’re never free. I can show you.

However, I must warn you that the demonstration will destroy you. The scars will crawl under your skin without permission. I’ll infect you, like I was infected. All my friends do it, now my biographer will do it. I’m sorry, now my audience will do it.

And it is pain. Relentless, loud, itching
Burningitchinginsistentbeginningwithbeadsofbloodlikecursedperspirationfromasquashyou’ve peeled the skin off likechopchop,likescritchscrach slice , likebrightredmarkslikeyeslikesomethingiswaitingtogetoutofyouwhatcrueltyitistoholditallinwhenthosecantakeitallawayandgiveyoua box for your noise.

Well, a thought’s come: giving it to you, my story, is passing responsibility. Maybe I am incapable of ownership. I take it all back. Shoo, now. You can study me when the deed to my head comes back. Ha! Suffer for your sentences! Go now, alright? I’m calling a quarantine. I’m locking the doors.
​
But—it’s too late. Well, pick your poison, my friend. You mustn’t carry it beyond us. It’s a disease, don’t you know. I have other things than paper. Here: tweezers, paperclips, I like this. There’s always the conventional razor. You can borrow mine. Don’t give it back. I think you’re my ticket out. Keep the razor as a thanks.


​​

Hong Nguyen-Sears is currently working on her MFA in creative writing through the University of British Columbia and holds a BA in English from the University of Alberta. Her work has appeared in Story Shack and Room. She lives in Calgary with her partner and their rambunctious puppy. You can follow Hong on twitter @HongNguyenSe and read her sporadically updated website.

convalescence

we drink bodies:
gaze or shuffle,
barged chest or bow,
and gush head: 
fondness or withdrawal
disdain or respect

and keep nothing inside
like rolled toothpaste
we’re empty 
between these moments
when smiles and fangs
outshine loneliness

we spew out desires
beyond our mind's sink,
feeling sick and weak, 
rabid and mean,
piggish yet clean

though foibles itch slightly 
a kernel between the teeth
everyone sees
but no one speaks of

gifts shyly lick others’ feet
a dogged fatigue
everyone speaks of
but no one can be

this morning in silence
cannot be trusted
without the pat or lashing
from a distant human being







Portrait

my father's portrait 
has yet to be mounted.

he can wear livery in the hall
buried beneath guests’ coats 
of blushes and gums
or rags in the attic 
like obsolescent records

he can be a toy flag 
waggled on holidays
or on the moon, a stiff 
handkerchief in the suit 
of a nation

he can be a hare chased down
and disemboweled by wolves,
employers, creditors, and spouse,
or he can be the wolf gnawing
its own winter hide

he can be the war letters 
or investment charts,
the incandescent blooms in my life 
or the ashen dirt,
the involuntary chuckle or tic
the creek or the cliff
map or bush
engine or drift
the writing or the stillness

he can be all these in different moments 
but this grief has narrowed me
to dimples or wrinkles 
on his face.







the hazing

in starless parks the poets gather
before some were jerking birdseed to impregnate a line
but now’s the fun part: a new pledge marches
from the bleachers of roads
and wants to deke through a verse

“Please step forth and shackle on your best frown
so children scamper from you in daylight
find a raving love – drop her quick and mourn long
you can’t guzzle sap or pollen, here’s the hard stuff
be a plumber and write about the trinkets 
you dislodge
meet your friends in ER’s
read the fresh Bible and dramatic Dictionary
before any other works
live one month with the mannerisms of a dog
then hide yourself like a tick on that dog
slither acid for better omniscience and metaphors
spraypaint each sensible school 
with a cadenced fuse
then come back to this park
to see if we’re still here.”







Incantation

Our placards of loneliness

cannot make haggard

any quiet daisies

slipped into letters


​

Nicholas Matthews is in his fifth year of undergraduate psychology at Ryerson University.

juno fuil.    

    Concluding,
name the hegira that wasn't 
    an abstract work of art

    Collating 
the ferry rides an eternal      
    anthesis of mist

    Drenched
in cherry blossoms to lure
    osmosis  / a life

    The great white
letting of go with wasp 
    wings and fists

    Statements
freed and made tactical
    like Juno

    The box
she left in center of the room
    Lemarchandy aurora
                    
    its contents drumming
a very angry very goodbye 
    ready  girl







keegan fuil.

    Once we entered its insides
the abandoned house in Monterey
quickly scaled a sensible danger 
       most children doodle

Rustic   Ginger root & craquelure, 
Dracula chased into a mouse
hole Yet it worked 
          to his advantage

I could see Keegan magnifying  
       a broad inner scope
Surveying the condemned space; 
this   boy   intuited his own

       beak-horned goose       w/ sugar  
hungry smiles -- this house 
he could break &  every padlock 
    today
A paucity of borders; his to mine: 
today
tomorrow       Today







nico fuil.

Succeeding  Pangaea         
        Titanomachy--
    He has gone
behind the frame of the étagère
The patio door--
How long it has been open
I persist with the question

A sweeping sun 
the tearing of roads
I fear our world may mistake
the sauce on his face 
    for post-feeding      blood

He is only a child, 
I tell the mob disconcerted 
by his glee   He will only
    ever   be a child

Kris Hall is a writer and event coordinator for Ogopogo and Da'daedal from Seattle, WA. Author of the chapbooks Dillinger on the Beach (Horse Less Press) and Notes for Xenos Vesparum (Shotgun Wedding). He has been featured in Dreginald, Uut Poetry, The Monarch Review, Pismire, and The EEEL.

 
I have this dirty feeling
plants could grow on my face.
The topsoil promised
is more than politically adequate,
forecasting a downwards growth
pursuing light.
Tea, man is like ubiquitous.
Then in the evenings
tropical card games,
and the disparate dichotomy of doom.
Technically, we have removed
enough of the forests
to consider any theory
other than this tendentious 
one coalesced.


​

Colin James has a chapbook of poetry, A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity, out from
Pskis's Porch Press.

Alligators



    Our place 
orbits 
itself / it
packs the
continent / & we
feral in
our own / repeating
out / to
kept
glare.
    Citizens of 
that 
rust / deaf
is it
loose / suns
tilt
buildings
to caves / or
widen / 
throats
watch
maul.

/

    Our place
curves 
to
gnarl / us
under 
the crane.
    Night &
the
black
locks /
piling 
golden 
blades.

/

    Shaped
to 
gone / so
groped 
out / &
went flare
at
anything.
    We  
were 
in
barrage / season 
tore
your
intuitions / toward
reproducing
the
knife / mute
of
the hollowing / to
not.

/

    And to
clot low
riot shine /
we 
carry
our
own 
hands / pouring
in flu 
color.
    To mapping / 
the arcs 
of 
tusks / or 
a 
mouth /
excites up
the swamp.






​
Town, of year



Both. Even 
my late intimacy
             with hooks  
has been 
         no separation.
If you
repeat out by
             tiers
         of
minor,
         there 
remain 
         vicious some 
things I 
         continue to know.
        
An exact thing 
             replicas away.
         The 
serious gardens 
         lower their 
plants,
         then I do not 
             recall 
before we 
         had our things
             imitate
         figment,
barely 
         alter.

         Killer of veins,
even the 
         fevers 
continue.
         Environments 
tearing in,
         the only exact 
thing.



​

automatomic 

there will one day come a cataclysm where everyone will turn magically 
oyster--oy vey my own private apocalypse blitz--a pox upon the lips 
of latin fiends full of disease, the master race is still unclean
feel free to stay awhile & watch me light my phantom limbs on fire
a whole new rite of woe is me! I’m fully gaud & fully man-eating 
fully hamburger pasties & gnostic lobotomy--believe me, my inner parking lot 
is filled w/ lost kittens stitching cancer symptoms to their paw pads
we are all so balls-out desperate to leak the clean stuff instead of 
this murk shit cut with baby lax & groupon shopping sprees 
lick the dirt out of my spray-tan creases, beam me up to new-
found statistics of thunder & sleet, then add cream
I am the curdled tissues you decipher when the goats bleat out their night-song
I am the underwater crucible who shows you its back-fins flash sheen 
I’m still stripping my barbies naked just to see how far they’ll let me take it     
stay put & feel my stubby fingers fumble for locked doors
I’m forming puddles but where I come from no one mops me off the floor







over[h]eating

sucking on a handicap sign in the street shine, my empathy muscle starts to burn blue. who are all these passersby, mummified by layers of vitamite mayo and bi-weekly payrolls? when I swallow their idolatries, they become a part of my overall laughing phantom physique, but they also turn into the chewed fruits that eject themselves from everybody’s excavated shock tubes. once, when I was only two, I gulped down too many special interest groups and got sick on their pharmacy stew. my mother brought me the bucket, but I refused it. I preferred to let their excretions leak down my forefront real formal. I preferred the bare brute of ruin, like a full frontal surgeon. I’ve never understood John Wayne masculinity. what’s manlier than braving a forthright exchange w/ your own demon babies, cracking at their softy head seams? they’ve been speaking in turns since the day you were born, egging on your unconscious under brimstony seethes of unseen. speak back, and they just might let you muzzle mother’s hungry cudgel. speak now, or forever molt your meat. 







money / talk 

thank you to the IRS for threatening 
to fine my ass, for giving me a reason 
explicable in psychopathic-speak to 
call my mother, say “dear god I have 
a problem only a bible-thumping 
anorexic songbird can resolve” 
and it has to do with some number 
of shekels buried in the ground
has to do with the quantity of baby 
teeth you saved inside a valentine--
red ribbon wrapped around--the 
trouble with me is I’m turning to 
rubble, the trouble is you lined my 
childhood bed too many times with 
vicodin & lemon trees run wild. “oh 
the pill it is bitter but the numbing 
power is sweet!” no straight & narrow 
just hard 180’s, extremist to the marrow
whether apocalyptic harlot or the soldier 
of a saintly light, one day evolution knew: 
your automatic drafty laugh advantaged 
you, a pathos pathology squanders unsaid 
I’m helping myself--excuses, excuses!
--excuse myself from having nothing 
left to say to you but what the tax 
collectors tell me to







submissive’s song

in the fists of impossible monsters
this is what the future bites like
all dappled in broken blood vessels
& the angry ash of hazmat have-nots

take it from the shoestring-limp sub-
missive who knows: those who aren’t
experienced in daddy’s belt tightening
about the neck might do best to avoid

un-sun-goggling their eyes in front of
close friends. “what’s that violent-edged
corona radiating down your lash line?”
and you won’t intuit how to tether

their worry to your pleasure, won’t 
coerce yourself to say what evanesces
in a chokehold: the not-yet-severed 
dungeoning in someone else’s ample hands







belting

but who can know? even in the biblical sense. i made a mirror out of crows’ tongues and goddamn it really glows, like maybe whatever genetic junk i’m made of is meant to silence singing. i’ve been silenced one too many times to sing at full volume in front of strangers, so now that’s how you know you know you know you know me, when i sing so loud you cower--no no, my mother called it “belting” like i was the one beating her, a grand reversal where my oral dexterity takes a break from holding up the saints’ slacks--all day long I’m busy fashioning the fasteners between us. i say i’ll save my voice for jerusalem’s next yearend feast, but then i notice my sad-eyed raft has cocooned into a grand piano with the strings and pedals still intact, so when I lift my pagan beach dreads unto heaven, bless the tide, untie my tongue, i’m belting one world to the next, the eternal yes and never snuggled up together underneath my dress

Sketchbook

He’s sketching the water tower,
my hands, the parking lot of IGA. 
The leather binding is coming loose. 

The carts are scattered and the flood lights
are on, the northern sky held down
in amber, held down in dusk.

We wait for the snow to come, for the
headlights to follow other headlights--
for the erosion of rooftops and cement. 

“I need a new way to understand the 
passing streetcars,” he says, “and to stop 
you right there, standing still, alone.”







Islands

It’s all that remains of the weekends--
the trips to the reservation, to the port. 
We had everything at once. 

I took photographs of Boldt Castle, 
his face pressed to the window,
climbing stairs in the garden.

He’d follow the stone path and take
my hand, take the side street to find    
the swimming pools and grand pianos. 

It is the unknown of the lakeshore 
and he is the spark that fades,
the way he doesn’t look at me anymore. 

It’s me, It’s us, it’s everything. 
Nothing is perfect and you don’t 
understand. 

He gasps and I hold ground, the waves
coming up to my knees now.
This is how it’s supposed to feel.







Studio

He’s painting me with the window shades drawn, my profile decomposing. 
He painted stars on the ceiling, once, and told me to close my eyes. 

“Imagine yourself underwater. You’re tired, is all.”







Navigator

“Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under 
heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last?” 
            - James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room 


In the morning, you find yourself 
kissing the artist, holding form--
the boy beside you caught in light. 
You understand the axiom, the equality, 
the pages of the novel written before dawn. 

“Confusion is transparent and 
there is no significance in beauty,” 
says the critic to the world, 
but nobody listens. His voice is too soft 
and they say he feels too much. 

You call yourself the architect, 
the navigator, but perception is relative 
and you remember this while walking home. 
He takes your hand and you let him, 
the footsteps following in time. 

To the west bank, to the underground, 
to the ledges underneath the bridge, 
you wade into the water 
waiting for your life to change, 
and for the current to make it last. 

Kevin Bertolero studies English Literature, Philosophy, and Art History at Potsdam College. He is the poetry editor for Mixtape Methodology, senior editor of North Country Literary Magazine, and is the founding editor of Ghost City Press. He tweets @KevinBertolero.

​Cradle

friends of mine said
“we’re going to play 
some baseball”
I believed them 
I didn’t notice the shovels

I can’t see, can’t move
my skin burns, bones throb
phone, shoes, wallet are gone
blood seeps through my clothes

worms burrow in my nose
drinking fluids for survival
they slide across my face
preparing their home

I try to slow my pulse
saving the air in my lungs
I thrash against all sides
loose dirt spills into the gaps

I feel vibrations - a pounding 
they are jumping up and down
I open my mouth to scream
more earth voids the sound

I hear their laughter
my friends stand above 
having their fun
while I'm here

still here






Hydra 8

An immortal snake
of poisoned breath,
guards life-giving waters.
I tried to steal a drink
to preserve my being,
but I was detected.

He coiled around me,
and swallowed me whole.
Days I lived inside him,
while he lived off me. 
No longer of use,
I was expelled
into the empty space.

Pluto emerged,
cupped his hands together
caught, cradled my remnants
and renewed my minerals. 
He told me I’m not wanted,
not yet. 


​

Paradise


When I looked up again, the

light had changed what I saw

of myself in you. Seaside air

laved our skin frankly sexual

where we touched. We made

a depression that bruised in

the thigh’s bright hollow.

Common Baby’s Ear and

Scotch Bonnet. Within

the labial fold. A surface

broken by vents, vortices,

and breathing indentations.

Events mapped in a medium

that looks right back at us,

just asking for preservation.






 
Paradise
 

But how will I find my way to

the sea, with no tragedy and

no staircase love to make me

yank my own eyes out. Out

on the town beach, egrets

and herons, sandpipers and

seagulls, pelicans and brown

terns. Orderly music.

Though my memory was

of sleeping, not of a gravesite,

and I dreamed of swallowing

fistfuls of grass. Stretched

logic till it turned poetic.

Does it, or anything, make

actual the subjective roil

buried in even a lover. Like

killing a mosquito and your

own blood splatters the wall.

In the wilderness, there’s no

such thing as wilderness. The

boy sits in his patch of dirt

and spreads it about. What is

a city of love. What is a city.






 
Paradise
 

There was loft in the

sentence, air in the heart.

A record not of your activity

but of the climate in which it

occurred. The explanation

was no genuine explanation,

but a series of pre-established

responses, easily memorized,

each naturally triggering a

new question, until the

querent walked away

“oriented.” It feels like

the brain unraveling, but it’s

just ideas. The red spots

indicate healing and alarm

the children. She liked to tell

a story about a time when

her son had been lost, and

instead of running around

in pursuit, he’d been

responsible, and sat down on

a bench to be found. Waiting

for an outcome, from afar.

Could you do the wrong

thing, please.






 
Paradise
 

A few more contented

minutes, the mothers yawn

and press the corners of their

eyes with their fingers. How

still is your morning. The

phrase, something my father

might have said but never

definitively did, played back

in my mind at predictable

times, such as when I lay

awake and delirious at 3 a.m.,

and also at inopportune

though unimportant times, as

when I deliberated too long

about my coffee order while

a line formed behind me, and

his voice slowed, deepened,

prolonged each articulated

syllable beyond the range of

simple discomfort, so that I

felt each time as though I was

“losing my mind,” an

abandonment I’d long

expected, and eventually

the language of the phrase

deteriorated, leaving only the

cadence and the tone of his

voice behind. Why should I

be sad, or careful, accounting

for any cost. Perception isn’t

memory, all alone. As you

know you’re safe when you

see the lightning. A blue cup

with a white lip. I love the

whirls and striations of this

“flat” stone.


​
​

Andy Stallings lives in Deerfield, MA, where he teaches English and poetry at Deerfield Academy. He taught several years at Tulane University prior to that, and has published a book of poems, To the Heart of the World, with Rescue Press (2014). He has three small children, and coaches cross country. 

In   a moment the
            street lamps will  flick on        at once
and clouds will                        dim to
            swimming pools.
 
In here I slip
            under a thin lip
                        of         sleep.
 
Mica swirls      disperse
over the bodies            of them            who
 
glide
on their backs
in my brain’s                
            gray pools, sipping paper umbrella drinks.
They caress my hair
and sing me
            sailor’s lullabies.
 
When I move               in your
lamby arms,
you murmur
            soap-words
                                                 meetooooomeeeeetoooooometootoootoo
your mouth loose   
     
with trust
and slobber.
 
Under the darkened
mountain clouds
I, Mer-Queen, ascend
with my scepter
from a tower of shriveled
siren tails, ghosts of
other women
you have slept with.
I demand to know
if I’m the best! I feel
their sweat erupt
 
from your dreams’ hot hollows.          
 
            I sail my ship over the city’s
                        corridors of crumbling brick
 
       they call me to dinner
            they wash out my wounds with gauze
                        they shove me backward off tall jetties
                                they slice me up with splintered mirrors
                                            they take my bones and build hotels
   
other women you have slept with
go to Stop n Shop,
buy bags of rice,
            take showers.
 
in                     darkest marshes of sleep
neurons            tread    water
talk                  to each other
in         blackness.
 
Retinas flicker under their lids   
                                                like eels!
                        Where do we go
                        after we sleep?
I only know
the sky at the top of the sea
-- sheet light of morning
calls ghosts to scatter.
 
In Atlantis, even the deadness
 
breathes.
 
I wake sticky-lidded
            humming some shanty you sang
in the blue enclave
                        I am already forgetting.


​

Kathleen Radigan is a human, writer, and Rhode Island native. Currently an English major at Wesleyan University, her poetry can be seen in The Harpoon Review, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, and Constructions.  She loves comedy, dogs and  lox.