Issue #14
Kelly E. Foster
A Lock from Medusa’s Head
I. At fifteen I lived
for pools in summer; I traded feet
for plastic flippers;
eyes for goggles—
my thoughts swam.
I imagined a 1970 Florida summer
where an old box radio lay
sunning itself on the lanai,
playing long & hard, & back to back
rock & roll songs or James Taylor,
“something in the way she moves.”
I visualized my short, pale body traveling
down the Amazon river.
Large red ant hills could count for sand,
but not the type you’d want
to walk on. Bites could turn to wounds
—the sun never dimmed.
II. July, a scab, swarmed
with heat & puss, thickening in
lackadaisical violet colors;
producing a warmth
so sticky days melted
fast like illusions.
One morning at the
bottom of the pool a water moccasin,
alluring enough to rest on Medusa’s head,
snoozed, or so it seemed.
What do snakes dream of?
She lay at the five-foot mark.
Any splash would startle her.
Later, my grandma called
animal control.
The officer caught the snake’s neck,
& dragged her out, wet & wild.
Her face seemed expressive
of the beginning. She knew about the apple;
all the rumors & misconceptions.
I told her sorry.
Her hazel eyes met mine,
her forked, pink tongue flapping
just once before she was placed
in a white plastic bucket,
with a lid snapping shut
& her inside it—
waiting for
her next
Eden.
Kelly E. Foster (website) is a creative writing student at George Mason University. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines such as Terror House Magazine and Polaris. Her poetry has won prizes from the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center.
Wanda Deglane
Body as Stranger, Body as Receptacle
my body betrays me daily:
the way i wake up to her
blood clots the size of silver
half dollars, the way she sews
my skin shut without asking,
the way i picture what she’d be like
as a house: suffocating and
trembling and murdering.
i tell her i wish i knew her better,
wish i was more than just the sack
of gray matter that never quite
made it to the steering wheel.
what little birds she holds in
the bend of her elbow, the dip
in her shoulder, the nooks
and crannies she hides whole
families. never learned the word
clitoris in sex ed, so i feel my way
around for the right buttons
and levers, like this man who
violently jams into me like he’s
desperate for the elevator,
confuses my terrored yelps for,
yeah you like that don’t you.
i want to connect my bones at new
graveyards, mold my body into
a weapon, but she lies there
still as time. she is yet another betrayal.
she is silence. she is receptacle.
she is hole. he finally realizes
his hole is crying, traps me in his arms
to try and coax it into opening again.
i am trying to stitch my mind back
to its body, to kill the ancient instincts
that just won’t die and he’s saying
baby what is it, tell me what’s wrong
and i must now tie my tongue to
my jaw to stop screaming
and no i swear i’m fine
baby i swear,
you were great
i loved
every minute of it
and can you please take me home?
Wanda Deglane is a night-blooming desert flower from Arizona. She is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants and attends Arizona State University. Her poetry has been published by Rust + Moth, Glass Poetry, L’Ephemere Review, and Former Cactus, among other lovely places. Wanda self published her first poetry book, Rainlily, in 2018.
Melissa Ann Sweat
Reworking an Old Mythology
In meditation today,
my arms flapped up
above my head like wings
in my mind
making elaborate semaphore
in the shape of a flying
paper crane
singing,
Do you have anything
ancient to say?
Melissa Ann Sweat is a writer, artist, and singer-songwriter, a.k.a. Lady Lazarus, who has been featured at the New York Times, NPR, Pitchfork, and more. Her writing has appeared at Impose, Dangerous Minds, and Skirt! (ed. note-p.62). Melissa lives in Santa Cruz and is finishing her first novel, and playing shows. https://www.melissaannsweat.com/
Marilee Goad
Snow in DC
Snow wells in concrete cracks bursting with ice, frisson —
the rare winter cold kissing its frigid breath against the nape
of DC’s neck, city that can’t help but tremble in the wake
of her soft touch, a few ice crystals caressing grass still green
with autumn’s last strains, promising to trample verdant
fields for the sake of transient joy, awe: vista of white enfolding
bundled visitors with open, aching arms, trying to embrace
those who deny her with warm whiskey and chocolate steaming,
hot, its breath biting and bitter next to her whimper in
your blazing apartment, banished to the scattered sheath clinging
to your window.
Marilee Goad is a queer poet who attended the University of Chicago and has work published or forthcoming in Ghost City Review, rose quartz journal, OUT/CAST, Persephone’s Daughters, and Georgetown University School of Medicine’s Scope arts magazine. You can follow her on twitter (@_gracilis) and check out her website.
David Chorlton
Fairground
Silence has no home
like the fairground
when the fortune teller has washed
off her makeup, the ghost train
has made its last run,
the peep shows are dark,
the prizes nobody won
lie still in plastic wraps,
sleet begins to fall
and the guard makes his rounds
with his collar turned up,
listening to a pocket radio
play static
broadcast directly
from the afterlife.
David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and his newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.
Mark Young
re/posit
Hope
fully
hope won't
fade, even when
thoughts & patience
both grow thin. Faith
fully persisting, hoping
to collide with luck, to
find rubies in the rain-
forest, a gryphon
in the garden, a
poem in the center
of the crash site.
Mark Young's most recent book is les échiquiers effrontés, a collection of surrealist visual poems laid out on chessboard grids, just published by Luna Bisonte Prods. Due out later this year is The Word Factory: a miscellany, from gradient books of Finland, & an e-book, A Vicarious Life — the backing tracks, from otata.
Matthew Schmidt
ANYM
Before 9/11, it was TWC. WWII, advent of VA
hospitals.
War is the SCUD below deck, a creeping
US dominance.
Or, no, it’s like MIA was a kind way to honor
POWs,
their C-RATs bloody, EST memories drawing
a closed circle
of the family unit. Missing A/C, it felt AAW
was useless.
Planes returning to JFK with bodies KIA.
I should ACK I don’t really know
how flagged coffins arrive. As a Vet,
I’d needed NA,
ER morphine slunk through my WBCs,
legless B/K.
So, I bought a prosthetic limb, hobbled
to the LQ store for a 5th.
I can’t keep what I know known.
All these ANYMs
the ATF can’t control. I’m DOA
when SWAT members
kick open the door of my A-Frame.
No wonder HQ
stamps KISS on outgoing denial letters.
My PO Box crammed
with C/O god queries; police scanners
dropping my APB
for an AMBER alert. Nothing is FOC.
Matthew Schmidt is working on a PhD in English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hobart, Pleiades (ed. note – Winter 2019/Issue 39.1), The Seattle Review, Territory, and elsewhere. He is an associate poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review.