Issue #23
Kate Garrett
The nightmare tells me I’ve passed the test
Sometimes when I wake my body is lead and iron.
I don’t try to move my limbs: I know she stands
in the doorframe — a charcoal sketch with a vulpine
smile. Or she’s in the garden or on the stairs,
anticipating my signal — I’ve seen her through my
fused eyelids. I always see her, and she tells me this
is war. Every one of these dark mornings is a time
of still and silent trial — she stands there, and I lay
here, and behind the menace, the tendon-snapping
teeth a prize waits for me to claim it. I only need
to meet her gaze, calm the quake in my shoulders,
undo the unseen buckles binding my breath, push
this blood-borne chill out of my body into hers.
Her haematite eyes blaze with understanding
as my ribcage at last expands, the sound of air
rushing down my throat dispels her shape into static,
the crackle of her voice hits the space between us
before my head bolts off the pillow — you are my
best student. Each battle I’m sent to start, you win.
Kate Garrett is the author of six chapbooks, and her first full collection, The saint of milk and flames, will be published in April 2019 by Rhythm & Bones Press. Born and raised in southern Ohio, she moved to England in 1999, where she lives with her husband, children, and a cat.
Matt Morris
ADDENDUM TO WORDSWORTH
according to the 19 th century romantic
in what one may rightly call flagrant dis-
regard of anecdotal & scientific
evidence re childbirth we enter this
world through a secret tunnel cleverly
concealed by towering tiers of never-
ending bookshelves in god’s great library
then down the golden passageway answers
to all the questions of existence
instilled within our infant hearts we creep
ever onward undeterred by a sense
of doom at what awaits when cold forceps
attached we transform into dna
machines & pushed head out the vagina
Matt Morris is the author of Nearing Narcoma, winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and Walking in Chicago with a Suitcase in My Hand, published by Knut House Press. His poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies.
Melanie Dubose
Swimming Pool
Squinting in the bright sun
she reaches up
The bathing suit top
on a flat chest
rises revealing
a nipple
to a boy’s
upraised eyebrow
The young girl dives
into the water
chlorine on burning cheeks
Each humiliation lasts
until the next
Melanie DuBose advocates for equity in arts and teaches film to teenagers in East LA. She is an Arts Activate Fellow and a graduate of the UCLA film school. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Red Flag Poetry Express, antinarrative journal (defunct – ed. note), Right-Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, Ekphrastic Review, and Contemporary Haibun.
Robin Ray
BACKWOODS BARBECUE
Canine girls with glassine eyes
and yellow smiles like gilded lilies,
gourmet lips and S-shaped hips
sashayed for days do more
than charm you silly.
Racist boys in fifth wheels
cooking meth throughout the night,
chemical aesthetes planning
revolutions of evermore —
the wrong versus the right.
Coal-worn relics sipping moonshine
in mason jars on oaken stumps,
chewing sarsaparilla twigs
at pits spit-roasting clumps
of slaughtered coon and possum
since duck is out of season.
A pinch between the cheek and gum
of chew, so blithely pleasing.
Doeskin boots with camo jackets
hanging out to dry on taut lines stretched
across a hidden, smoke-filled clearing.
Fiddle tunes cram the air with stacked
staccato riffs till line dancers finally eye
intruder me appearing.
Rifles from the washtub cowboys
fly from pickup trucks;
one bang, one crack, one last roundup
and that’s when I wake up.
Here’s some advice I’d better learn
and learn it quick, I must —
cede the jarred moonshine alone,
it’s no accident it burns —
there’s none that you can trust.
Robin Ray is a writer from Port Townsend, WA. he has written two novels, nine novellas, two collections of short stories and one book of non-fiction. His shorter works have appeared online at Red Fez, Fairy Tale Magazine (defunct – ed. note), Scarlet Leaf Review and elsewhere. His blog: link
Sean Lynch
Etymology of a Nightmare
In my dream you were dying.
I didn’t know yet that you are dead.
In my dream you rested.
I sat by you in an unfamiliar room
in my dreams I watch you die again
and again I experience the worst pain
I have ever experienced which wasn’t my pain
but bearing witness to the pain my mother felt
as she died and I dream again and again
every night again and again her death
in a different way all slow quiet nightmares.
In my dream you were dying
and I woke to google the etymology of nightmare
and stared at the results which say
“Middle English (denoting a female evil spirit
thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers):
from night + Old English mære, incubus.”
And I think of the words god and death
and again I experience the worst pain
then try to shut it out and my body rests
and your body rests and my sleep is suffocated
by your absence and I think of my ancestors
and how I speak their conqueror’s language
and how many mothers of my ancestor’s have died
in my dream all of my ancestors are dying.
I have betrayed their languages
by speaking the imperialist language
but from modern to middle to old English
I cannot express how much pain there was in your breath.
I can only convey your death
through stating the inability to do so:
in my dream you die, in my dream you are dying
in my dream you died, in my dream you have died
in my dream you were dying.
You are dead and it’s not a nightmare.
Please Speak
(in Irish: “Labhair le do thoil” – ed. note)
Mother will you please visit
me in my dreams.
Labhair
le do thoil.
I miss your face
and your voice.
Labhair
le do thoil.
I won’t be afraid
if you appear.
Labhair
le do thoil.
Sean Lynch is a working-class poet who lives in South Philly. His poems have been published in various journals including (parenthetical), Chrysanthemum, and Poetry Quarterly. He is the author of three chapbooks, the latest being 100 Haiku, published in 2018 by Moonstone Press. You can find out more on his website.