by Chamber Four
your expression fixed and seamless.
The hills look so graceful in snow
it’s easy to compare them
to folds and naps of the flesh,
easy to apply those contours
to your infinite mental landscape
as well as your slinky posture;
but I can’t use them to construe
the figure of you I envision,
a mathematical rather
than emotional state of grace.
Maybe that portrait by Sargent
contains in two dimensions
everything I know about you
except that right now you’re sitting
over War and Peace and almost
aware of me being aware
of you; and down the valley
a freight train’s hooting along like
someone unzipping a zipper
to reveal that other dimension
in which I’m sure you exist.
The Transamerica Pyramid
by Yaul Perez-Stable Husni
The Transamerica Pyramid is an old Gypsy
who reaches up to rob the sky of its planets.
The Transamerica Pyramid is an old Gypsy—
I want to hear him sing
the wandering tune
of his footsteps.
I want to swim
in his eyes of distilled sunflower.
The Transamerica Pyramid is an old Gypsy
veiled in quartz.
I want to see his picture in the newspaper
His big lips enter
my blue consciousness.
I want to spear the old Gypsy through the liver
with a wooden knife,
watch him bleed,
so that we know he is alive
and a Gypsy woman birthed his great body.
How to See Yourself
by Shannon C. Walsh
I.
At the full-length, suck in then push out
your stomach. Gingerly stroke your lower
belly as if to pet the fetus.
Imagine the phone call, “Honey, my mom
was right, two people in love can make a baby—
it's a miracle!” Tell her that it’s only right
to marry the mother of your impossible
child. Jerk your abs to pretend the baby’s
kicking. Remember your pregnant friend’s
uterus climbing up to her sternum,
her stretched skin, a figure moving beneath
that taut sheath. You wanted to vomit,
thought something would pop through her stomach—
an alien. Then the screaming for food,
a change, a toy, a nappy, bobby, passy,
blankie, potty—years of sticky screeches.
Decide you’d rather be single.
II.
Study your lips, eyes, nose—nothing special.
When you flutter your lashes you look
epileptic. Your breasts list toward your hips
and your thighs look like garbage bags
of tapioca pudding. But your ass
is thick and round like a Thanksgiving
turkey. Shake it, side to side, slowly,
like Jessica Rabbit. Pretend you’re in
a sparkling blue dress, tight in the right spots,
atop a piano crooning Fever.
She’s in the front row, in a zoot suit.
When you leave the stage to work the crowd, sing
on her lap, bottom barely touching
her knees. She wants you, but can’t have you.
At the end of the show, she’ll buy you a scotch,
rocks on the side. And you’ll saunter over,
sip the drink push it back to the barkeep,
“Jimmy, make it a Manhattan.” And you’ll treat
her so badly, she’ll just want you more.
III.
Catch the reflection of the fat cat
lying on your bed and think she too looks
like oversized poultry, and she couldn’t
make her stay. Realize mirrors don't show truths.
In a business suit, the mirror makes you
a mogul. In an orange vest, a hunter.
You've never held a gun, but the glass
doesn't discern between shown and real.
When in pants, it appears a tree branch
never blazed a scar across your shin,
but you can remember the whizzing pain
of falling from your perch. Even naked,
the mirror doesn't show the marks She left:
useless, ugly, unworthy. You should
shave your head and tattoo a trashcan across
your skull so a glance shows what you really are.
Town and Country
by Luca Penne
A famous Thanksgiving dinner at my stucco urban palace. The tables arrange themselves variously: two very long ones, four shorter ones, two middling short, one slightly long. I realize the scene is unreal, my guests imaginary, conjured largely from the dead. My father, my Uncle Aloysius, Jack Bate and Herman Melville, Lord Byron and Teddy Roosevelt, Aunt Esther and Henry Adams, Charlotte Bronte and One-Arm Connolly, who killed himself at forty. The rattle of glassware makes a ghastly but cheerful music.
Unable to correlate my guest list, I step outside the urban dream and enter the rural one. A huge maple has broken and half-fallen, angled over the eggshell of my country house. Let it topple and smash the antique slate roof if it wishes. Meanwhile on a nearby ridge of naked basalt a gaggle of teenagers silly with beer is climbing a sullen mossy cliff. I shout at them to halt and descend, but they ignore me. When one falls and breaks her bones with a snap audible for a mile I laugh the meanest laugh.
Nothing will induce me to return to the Thanksgiving dinner I dreamed in a sorry moment. My country house, a sprawl of twenty rooms, is also a ghost of the mind, but it doesn’t repulse me the way the imaginary dead, eating real food in my townhouse, do. I lack a motive for either dream; but watching the huge broken maple sway like the Sword I suppose revenge against myself will do—the brief November day going sulfur-yellow at sundown and the lawn torn by frost-heaves exposing the bedrock.
A Frog Pond
by Luca Penne
Off Dusthouse Road a frog pond stews in mingled purples and browns. The jitter of crickets and keening of cicadas fill the gaps between senses, alerting me to the continued expansion of the universe, critiquing various dimensions. The modest industrial buildings scattered along the edge of the woods—old brick, modern metal sheathing, fire-prone wood-frame—regard me without curiosity, though only the brick predates me, the rest erected in honor of the passing of my childhood. That is, the narrative includes both the raising of small buildings and the rearing of my person, parallel structures responding mainly in terms of strategy rather than mutual perception. The frog pond, however, remains murky, grape-fringed, difficult of access, private as the mind. The occasional croak of a frog expresses continuities I can’t claim even with myself. To be a frog is to be all frogs, I guess. The industrial buildings don’t even pretend to any permanence, and neither do I. Not that frogs don’t suffer and die, but the pond, only twenty feet wide, resists the encroachment of worlds less complex and fully realized, and the fringe of grape and ivy upholsters this small fragility against clumsy people like me.
An Outdated Globe
by Luca Penne
Russia remains the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka still Ceylon. Amusing myself with a razor knife, I cut out and peel away nations until the planet’s piebald in my hands. Now in mockery of cosmology or divine rage, I drop the metal ball on the floor and stomp it flat. This feels good and I wish I could do it again, like any authentic creator disappointed by creation.
So much for a sublunary world susceptible to artificial frontiers, stamping of passports, military coups, and famines. So much for the United Nations and global capitalism. I pity those
abstractions children study in grammar school, where no one learns grammar anymore.
Later, on the way to the landfill with a mess of trash including that crushed, humiliated globe, I wonder how many worlds lie beyond the measurable universe, whether the human ego counts as a world, whether the basic globe-shape adequately represents everything from atom through ego to macro-universe.
At the landfill the solid thump of trash bag tossed in the hopper satisfies so completely I wish I could discard my body that casually and violate the law of form and walk away into worlds unknowable as globes, atoms, egos. I stroke my razor knife and wish I had the nerve to slice my arteries and learn if the blood flow is as cosmic as they say.
Dementia (I)
by Julian Smith-Newman
At the appointed hour repetition
Conducts us to the table once again,
And we, abandoning what vague volition
We retained, yield gratefully the reins.
A radiant evening, flaxen tablecloth
As usual laid with china and oblique
Streaks of the setting sun. I first, then both
My father and my father’s father seek
Our customary chairs and start to eat.
The food is good; and the familiar scrape
Of silverware on teeth, chewing of meat,
Deliberate swallows, fills somewhat the deep
Inevitable silences: but for this
We’d all go mad. As it is, we grow versed
In ceding to a rhythmic peristalsis
We invent, teaching ourselves the first
And only art dementia can perfect,
This art of repetition. Evening sun
Splinters across the dinner table, flecked
With silver, glass. We eat until we’re done.
A state of mind, like most things—
by Katelyn Kiley
i.
Yesterday, I climbed through
a fresh snowfall, to your house
where whiskey awaited me, and a fire
that started and died within an hour.
The embers went cold and still
we can’t hold hands in front of anyone.
If you try to hold a poem
too tightly, it squeezes, suffocates
and flattens out in front of you.
It would be too heavy-handed to say
that is our relationship, and yet—
Here I am, not saying that, but saying
stop it with the goddamn video games already
and, sadly, what I mean is
aren’t my hands more beautiful
than anyone’s? My words?
ii.
It’s like trying to sew hair into scalp,
the kind of connection only God
can make, miraculous
growth. What we need is
some stem cells, to have a fair shot—
a bit of my heart transplanted
as a supplement to yours.
We are trying to fall because maybe
we could save one another, then.
iii.
Lets move to a rainforest, live by
only our wits, under tents permeated
by heat and humidity, using our hands to make
fire and dinner and everything—I’d smash
this glass of wine and cross
your forehead with what has spilled,
lovebaptism by chardonnay—
the whiskey was too much for me
and it’s not in a glass tumbler
with three cubes of ice, instead,
it’s in a yellow mug, and you’ve used
snow to make it a slushie, there is
some black dot floating
in the bottom but you drink
anyway, I want to shake you.
The cold is everywhere.
iv.
I find a half-eaten segment of
clementine still stuck to its rind
in the toe of my shoe the next morning.
No one knows how it got there.
You walk me home through the snow and I make
us breakfast. We are a week away from Valentine’s Day.
I keep trying to pull myself out
of my body. Ecstasy, it is called—not
the same as love, or even
sex. Sometimes eros is what we wish
to escape from. You’re wearing sunglasses,
the day is white, this snow—light
infinitely brighter, slushed out roads,
inconsistent ground—slipping home.
Falling Asleep in the Afternoon
by Daniel Lawless
Not navies harbor-bound in the veins
Or the pen’s gentle drift off the page
But a thundering horde on the steppe
And you little peasant all alone in a black field
Outside your frozen village motionless mouth agape
In wonder and gratitude at its huge approach
That spells the end of everything
Unknown Destination
by Daniel Lawless
Like one of the dead in Hans Memling’s fifteenth century vision
Of the Last Judgment, stepping from their graves
As if on risers onto a crowded stage,
Trailing their winding sheets like matted boas—
So you came to me in memory
As I leaned against a pole at the Bruges station,
Done in by the day’s chilly museum crawl:
A farm boy Caesar out for a piss
At a long ago fraternity party,
Missing your step and tumbling into the pit
Your brothers had dug for the next day’s pig roast,
Cracking your skull on a knob of Kentucky limestone;
How you slumbered there and finally rose
Shakily among us in an unraveling toga,
Head cocked as if to the unheard summons of a cloud
Of shivering trumpet vines,
Saint and devil by turns
Of the late-arriving old-fashioned ambulance’s revolving eye.
Picture This
by Jenn Monroe
I hear them, my neighbors, through the bathroom wall, as horsehair plaster
won’t keep secrets. He says I love you, and I wonder, does he want her because
he loves her, or does he love her because she lets him enter through her side
door. She will give just that much of herself, to stretch her pale body across
the dark bright space between them. He asks for a picture, to prove this is
happening, but only memory can capture warm water glowing bioluminescent
on a clear new moon night, giddy echoes in two languages, single cells
that shimmer at the ends of dark hair, brighten across chests with each breath,
and, along up-stretched arms, form constellations from sea to sky and back.
Illumination
by Greg Hewett
An ancient desire to be led by thread or breadcrumbs or stars takes me link by glowing link through something like darkness to one person
who may be bullheaded, a witch, a disaster, or unaccountable, but neither random nor determined, and in reality
of course just traces of someone, an image emerging from ether, from four billion virtual hues, each with its own precise charge.
Such precision. The image illuminated like every other—a profile spun out with filaments of words—becoming a second person.
I picture you crouched over star-glow of telephone as you offer your location up. Me, in the same position, back at you.
I can account for all illumination leading from my door to yours—car-light, streetlight, moonlight, steeple sheathed in incandescence,
glitter of stained-glass saints backlit, CCTV screens in your lobby, caged light bulbs in the hallways,
elevator light droning like a trapped fly, the peephole glinting, offering
<
br /> a hint of labyrinth's end, your interior. Nothing will appear beyond the angstrom range of the human eye.
Not in a world where the galaxies of deep space are just motifs for screen-savers.
About the authors
Gale Acuff has had poetry published in many literary magazines and has authored three books of poetry, available from Brick House Press. He has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.
Terra Brigando is currently studying for her MFA in fiction at Mills College and lives in San Francisco. Her previous work has appeared in Arizona State University's Superstition Review, Redlands Review, DecomP, apt: an online literary magazine, and Fogged Clarity. She loves the color yellow, the sound of words, and grinding her own coffee.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His latest collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, Natural Bridge. He won the 2010 Aesthetica Creative Works competition in poetry.
Born in Port-au-Prince, M.J. Fievre is an expat whose short stories and poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Haiti Noir (Akashic Books), The Southeast Review, The Caribbean Writer and The Mom Egg. She is the Secretary of Women Writers of Haitian Descent and a regular contributor to the online publication, The Nervous Breakdown. She is a graduate student in the Creative Writing program at Florida International University. She loves coconut shrimp, piña coladas, her dog Wiskee, and a good story. Anton Chekhov is one of her favorite writers. Her author website is located at www.lominy.com.
Margaret Finnegan teaches writing at California State University, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Times, FamilyFun and other publications. She blogs at https://margaretfinnegan.blogspot.net and is very grateful that she has never had to participate in a science fair, although she has been forced to endure them.