The Train Missed Me 

Thirst so old, it becomes
the air I breathe.
Between a cup of
tea and valium,
I choose the latter,
relish the sweetness
of pill after pill
melting in the heat
of my mouth.
Hypnotic song of the
morphine in my veins.

And rain,
after many days
of no sunset, rain.
The drops vanish into
my barren fields, vapour
hisses from the cracks.
Rain lashes on the
window, sprays on my
bed, pillow, face, hair
and all I can smell
is the beginning
of the end.


Reaching the station
just as the last train leaves.




The Inmate

White of those walls,
witnessed many runaways 
to the world beyond,
sucks the wind out of me. 

I step into the 'All Our Goodbyes'
smile and cheer on their faces, 
the way only the lonesome can.
So forlorn. So proud. 

And the parchment touch of her 
in the warmth of my youthful 
supple hand. The gentle flutter. 
I read quietly from Dr Zhivago. 
The blare of the TV from the hall,
the chatter of her friends fade away
to give way to the stillness settling
within a summer's dusk. 

Her silver her cascading 
down her shoulders, white winter 
ravages, then adorns the 
cut beside her right eye. 
In the moonlight 
I step into my own shadow.

​

Chumki Sharma is a poet from Calcutta, India. Her poems have been published in many corners of the world. Most recently, her work has appeared in The Shot Glass Journal, Expound, Oddball, The Birds We Piled Loosely, etc. She is also a Pushcart nominee for the year 2016. Currently, she is working on her manuscript 'Running Away With The Garden' when not engaged in her day job as a banker. Find her on Facebook.

Room

‘Undelivered’, a section 
in this storage space, whistles 
when wind blows. The caretaker 
says, he sought for a fissure 
and found a room between 
two layers of emptiness.


​


Long Sentence of Insomnia

If sleeplessness comes
so I may chitchat 
with the dog you left
before leaving, let it
toddle up and down
these nervous streets in
my body, mind. I
don't mind. I shall talk
about the soft cones 
we shared and the ones
I dropped so the dog
would lick. We never 
tried chocolate 
for that and that reason.
If sleeplessness finds
a threesome pic lost
amidst the cushions,
and dust the top shelf
so the cookie jar 
of light may fall, let it
creep in and feel the rush
of my soul.

​

Your name here

When dragonflies un-
ravel all the words
I never spoke
and I come undone,
 
            the scroll will carpet the floor of my childhood
            forest. At night, letters will step out of the cellulose,
            white little haunts eager to walk in the moonlight.
 
This is where we come from:
Ink.
This is my wish:
Speak.
Forget my words

            were all about you. The blank scroll
            will reroll, burst into dragonflies,
            and forget its beginnings as the tongue
            that doesn’t speak. Countless wings
            will blink like eyelashes. There is
            no word for this.




Stillborn
 
How deep is this ocean
     can you sleep in it
 
How deep is the small of your back
     can it fit an ocean
 
How far does a heartbeat swim
     before it drowns
 
How much ocean does it take 
     to heal this 8 ounces of you
 
This much ocean I say
     opening my mouth
for you to spit our second
     and third sorrows into
 
I am sorry 
 
     This ocean is amniotic
     This sleep is an animal padding through water
 
I am sorry
 
     The small of your back is clay 
 
I am sorry 
 
     I can't mold you from you



​

even the alphabet betrays me

you can sing a song to remember what order
the lies come. pretend you're a unicorn.
that you're magic. rare. light. pretend you're hurting
& shouldn't someone help you. pretend to love me
until the trap closes. there is no spell for spelling this.
pretend you'll die if I divorce myself from being useful.
you're a no-kill shelter, Emily. if you don't soothe
the struggle, you become the problem's source.

I don't have custody of the sham marriage.
somebody put our mutt down, then
buried her under the back porch
with the dead lawn mower. phonics of no.
you can sing it when the door slams
on your hand or you can sing it before
you've been buried or you can rattle your chains
down the hall from your demons as if
you don't all share a house. I'm all of the above.
injured. buried. singing. vacant. home is
where the start hid. home is where the spark bit.
home misspelled as hold me. I divorce
myself. I'm only just beginning
to tell it. home is where
you held me down.



​

one room city
 

the bar full
of no one wanting
you to stay so
stop showing up
already / stupid dead
bird I re-meet 
every gutter I'm not
going to bury you
nor am I the kind of shot
who kills without sighting

I see you drifting down
the window bloody
chin, beady-eyed
you're sober as September
attentive to your hate sprigs
treating them like succulents
pouring beer & beer / blow
foam away over the yard
in dripping clouds

keg kicks / I have nothing
left to tap or empty
my new ghost ate the prints
off his fingers he doesn't
believe in robin's egg blue
doesn't gun the engine
won't ring me or the party

stop barging in on neighbors
expecting sugar where
there is none / there’s nothing
to key no mortuary no double
barreled death for us I'll plant
a fern & walk off feathered
alive uncomfortable introduced
to everybody as one you mean
to blot out by imitation
 

A Toast

I am sick of pouring love
while my cup stays empty, yours runs over
pieces of my souls discarded like ghosts

I become a part of your bones
invisible like a girl
malleable like clay

I’ve drank the wine and the kiss
I’ve lost it all because a girl
cannot be a princess
I love too much

I  am a huntress not a queen
too fierce, too mean, a girl unseen
too large for glass, I break like shards

My soul explodes
I am too much to hold in
a bottle of enchantment
kept in the back and you pick it up
and call it love, I crack and fall for you
I am gold.





Ruination

I don’t really mind
I beg for death
I renounce my crown
my dress

Now you see I am a traitor
to my own body

I try to hide what I already know:
the body part you want is irremovable

I hide it in the ruins
a trick of my mind’s eye
it becomes dirt at men’s feet
that imprison me

A trail for my misery
stomping out what my mother
gave to me - my womanly soul
it sinks beneath the black boot

I am destroyed like a pillar of Alexandria
misused, wrath like dust,
I disintegrate divine
crumbling before your eye.

​

Esmalita Vangarden resides in Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in The Social Poet, Lantern Magazine, and Contraposition Magazine.

If The Scientist by Coldplay was playing I must have missed it.
But how could one miss such a trivial thing?
It had to be the direction the wind
Traveled at the time that influenced
This bizarre decision to approve all
The circumstances leading up to your death,
As if collective mind-swapping could replace single-handed vision.
 
Come up to meet you
 
The little judgment that falls at the feet of the conductor,
Who, by all accounts, is winning the show
(If indeed it is a race.) begins showing
Signs of strain in 2 audience members,
Who take out their gloves and whip themselves
Until the diamond flagellation yields pocks and pocks
Of the deepest blood you can look at on a shirt, bar none.
 
Tell you I’m sorry
 
While this is going on, the girl in the emblazoned leotard
Looks out upon the stage and corrupts
The youth (5 total) with a middle finger.
Now, given these recent happenings
A boy, 1 such youth, takes out his knife
And carves a statue of the girl lovingly
Into the deep, somehow mahogany chair he called his own
 
You don’t know how lovely you are
 
Little Pynchonian vignettes play on a screen that has been dropped
To allow some sort of collective sanity
To return to the greatly vexed premises
(The time and place of a Civil War battle no doubt.)
That begin to take a life of their own.
(Its own?) In any case it allowed for
A distribution, an exchange to take place between the saucy girl
 
I had to find you
 
And her soon-to-be lover standing on the opposite side of the carving boy,
Etching a face not his own into a greater sphere
Than even he recognizes, and her paramour
Shoots a rose out of his suitcoat,
The blood dripping down his arms
Until it collects in a pool beside the statuesque
Little composer whose creation is so beautiful it makes the lover cry
 
Tell you I need you
 
With a happiness not his own. At least the founding of this nation
Didn’t brook any conflict, as the little sculptor’s
Teacher, now running screaming out of the auditorium,
Was wont to say to the students,
Of which 8 showed up and 5
Were mentioned before, leaving three
Who vanished into such thin air the teacher worried the Rapture had occurred.
 
Tell you I set you apart
 
The only true rapture occurring in the glowing chests
Of those who stayed in the building,
As their bodies lift up in unison
Towards the rafters, above the seats
And away from any incipient harm
At the hands of those who came before like checks in little grade boxes.
 
Questions of science
 
Now telekinesis had only hit this town recently,
The town being the newest in a spate
Of similar happenstances the news
Harped on about endlessly
Until the only unwieldy personage
At the botched show, the girl
With the shining birdy finger, raised her hands in protest
 
Science and progress
 
Against the coming hoard of telekinetics who really became her army.
And some say this very town holds
The keys to an everlasting future where
Secrets are given out freely
Like they cause no harm
And where undying devotion creates itself
Into a million little figurines patiently flipping the world off.
 
Do not speak as loud as my heart.


​

Blake Wallin’s poems can be found in Maudlin House, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Solipsist, Prairie Light Review, Kodon, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press, December 2015), and he tweets @Blake_Wallin.

​

Waves
 
Moving to California is the worst mistake I've made.
I can think of least fifteen pretty bad mistakes
but this one takes the cake.
It's irreversible, the time
I've wasted here. How I’ve watched this life
float away from me
all silver towards the heavens,
some place I cannot reach.
I'm on my knees, I'm a glass sphere
full of tears. I’m shouting,
Don’t shatter me!
               Don’t send me waves
               crashing into the thirsty coastline.



Sam’s Red Dress
 
I’m wearing Sam’s red dress, thinking about
home. This dress a sweet reminder
that you can leave behind a place
but never all the faces that once stared back at you. How there are
some faces you hope to never forget. How some faces
were the only things shielding you from those bitter Minnesota winters
and all the grey clouds that tried to swallow you whole.
 
Trust me when I say there’s nothing romantic about this,
about the clearing of your lungs and the way
life forces itself through your throat. I’ve been gagged
fifteen times in the last fifteen minutes
and sometimes I find myself wishing for the final
suffocation, for all these breaths to stop weighing me down.
 
But not right now. No, not right this moment
while I’m in this red dress that once belonged to a sister
whose blood is not my blood, though I know somehow we bleed
the same. That if you slit our throats you’d find that the red,
like this dress, would pour down both our chests,
identical waterfalls with only a slight variation.
 
The way two sisters can have the same memory but not
remember their mother’s hair in the same way. One says
her brown hair fell in waves around her face, the other says she wore a loose
braid straight down her back. Either way her laughter echoes within their skulls
to the same melody, the whipped topping mustaching her upper lip at the same angle
and what difference does the hair make when the memory
is about love? About laughter?
 
You cannot mask joy no matter how hard you try.
Even the saddest days have something
sweet for you.

Azia DuPont currently resides in Southern California. She founded Dirty Chai in 2012. Her writing has appeared in Dead Flowers: A Rag | Bohemian Pupil Press, Maudlin House, Squawk Back and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.aziadupont.com or via Twitter @aziadupont.
​

Zachary Cosby lives in Portland, OR. He curates media at fogmachine.life. He is twenty-four years old.