Erin Farrell

Annual


Collections called
A final notice of forty dollars
past due
For sitting in a stale, white walled room
Where a boy on the smoking kills poster
watches
My breasts, pale crescents
Cupped in hands
Smaller and softer than my own
Hitch in throat
She babbles to keep me calm
But I am an infant wailing for mother
Forced grin assures
It's probably benign

6/11/06


My skin was still soft
Swollen pink
Yours
Freckled
Drawing strange objects from
A wooden desk
The mirror image of mine
For the sake of grinning
There were whispers
They wanted to save you
But you were a giant sequoia
Immovable
I try to picture you then
Bathed in red
Your insides turned to ash
Wondering if it hurt
As much
As old friends
Gray and weeping
From unfamiliar features
I wanted to pull each one of you
Inside me
Take us back to the red brick building
Where children don't die

Erin Farrell is a 25 year graduate student who enjoys drawing, painting, reading, and writing.

Megan Kemple

Mondays Can Hurt


I'm in a juvenile lock down facility teaching children
who have had harder lives and are more adjusted than I am
the patience and acceptance I do not have.
In the empty concrete room,
painted in murals of a tree on a hill and outer space
with chunks missing,
signed by fists long since and never forgotten,
an eleven-year-old tells us about the time his dad stabbed him.
Another boy sculpts his friends into a clay portrait of
his mother's fists in the air,
his sister hiding under the bed
as he takes the beating for her,
they are not speaking,
but the sound is deafening.
A girl without the slightest trace of puberty in her figure
chokes on the words "whore" and "liar",
a fourteen year old who can't raise her eyes to your face
hyperventilates in the corner,
I tell her to focus on breathing out, to open her eyes,
but I know she can't hear me through the white noise in her brain.

It feels like being electrocuted,
like a DVD skipping and rewinding
with the volume on 1,000,
like the past and future are the same
and you will forever live in those moments
because that's you at your worst,
your most human,
the most true
to animals and man and woman.
You are so grotesquely alive,
reduced to silence and fear and shame,
the disgust at your own impotence and complicity
burrows like a parasite in your gut.

A sixteen year old tells me his plan for staying off meth
as I'm coming down from my morning blunt,
a seventeen year old girl tells me she's not angry anymore,
and I believe her.

Colored Lights, or Something to Live for


"Did you wanna die?
Did you wanna die?
Did you wanna die?"
Lana asks her friend K
again and again
as my What's my m3? app
asks me if I want to connect to
National Suicide Hotline
before showing me my score.
If it's over 33 your mental health
is interfering with your life,
I score 103.
Two down from my record 105,
I didn't even know it went over 100,
until a week ago.
I'm an overachiever even in crazy,
found some form of extra credit.
I thought the app was just flattering me,
the way I blush when someone says
"you look so thin"
after not eating for three days,
a sort of guilt-pride
the feminist in me can't get rid of,
but no one else I force to take it
(I'm competitive, you see)
can even top 80.
Once again, I've aced a test
and it has added up to nothing.
I was kicked out of college
with a 4.0
for drinking,
or rather being anemic, bulimic and drinking.
When I stopped screaming
my paraphrased Constitutional rights
in a British accent,
and bruising my wrists against the restraints,
the nurse looked me in the eye
and said
"If you keep going like this,
you're going to die."
Then she gave me two blood transfusions,
an IV, and a Xanax.
I don't have health insurance anymore,
which is a disgustingly adult detail,
and a terrifying prospect,
like my 170,592 mile Jeep
I drive knowing it needs $800 worth of repairs,
before the heat, A/C, and radio,
I make bargains with my mind
when it starts sputtering,
"Not today, just please don't let it be today",
but I know it's coming.
My mom called me on my 25th birthday
to tell me I had a soul just like Janis Joplin's,
and that she had never been so scared.
Two people genuinely congratulated me
on still being alive this year.
I feel like I might be dying,
I'm spinning faster and harder
and more desperately,
hurling myself at anything and everything,
I'm always pushing the limits,
pushing people to their limits,
pushing people away.
I don't mean to get angry,
I'm just so tightly wound,
and terrified of everything,
and God, I'm exhausted.
Every night a new nightmare
in the same place,
same cast of characters,
a new fucked up situation
to clench my jaw so hard
I nearly break my teeth.
I don't sleep even when I sleep,
I can still think inside my dreams,
physically and emotionally,
everything feels real,
how often in those dreams
have I accepted dying,
only to wake up?
What happens when I don't wake up?
I'm terrified of taking my foot off the brakes,
knowing they're giving out anyway,
as my leadfoot anger constantly slams against them.
I'm afraid of doing something I can't undo,
my biggest fear is what I could do to myself,
if one pill, if one blunt, if one drink is too far away;
if one pill, if one blunt, if one drink is too close.
I'm afraid,
and there's no one to tell,
no help I can afford,
no step back from the ledge I know how to take,
because, like Amy said,
"What's inside her never dies".
I hope that's true,
the demons and the passion
because as long as that's true,
as long as fate is cyclical
and some part of you remains,
if your demons get you this time,
maybe your goodness will win the next round.
I have to believe in reincarnation
because girls like me don't make it very long.
We're animated corpses really,
decomposing as we dance on borrowed time.
I'm afraid to be still,
afraid it will set in like death,
that I will wake up and be fifty
and have nothing to show for it,
afraid I'm not everything I always thought I was,
everything I always wanted to be.
I'm afraid of my mind,
of its Mt. Everests and Marianas Trenches,
its earthquakes and tsunamis,
its arsenal of nuclear weapons,
the big red button is too easy to push.
I don't want to do it,
but there are ten million ways to die
and sometimes I start to shake
just getting behind the wheel of my car,
the world is just so big,
and so wrong,
and it could all be over before you realize it,
and there's no way to get it back.
So if this is my turn to dance,
I'm going to dance as fast as I can,
so maybe the edges of these anxieties will blur
and the world will be nothing but colored lights
and music so beautifully sad that I cry tears of joy
as I spin, and I spin, and
I try not to fall.

Destroy Me


My life is falling apart and all I can think about is how much I want to fuck,
not softly,
and not with my boyfriend.

I need a new he,
a he that doesn't exist except when he is inside me,
uncomplicated by plans and expectations: hopes, dreams, or feelings.

I need arms without a face,
not for holding me close, but for holding me down,
drilling me out of reality, until there's no room for anything else.

like Ryan Murphy's addiction demon,
orgasming on self-loathing and
masturbating over every masochistic moment.

My world turns upside down and I howl at the moon,
my arteries are itching, and I can't control my rage,
I just need a way to get it out.

So fuck me from behind,
waterfall scratches and bite marks,
pull me up by the hair and throw me against the wall.

Just don't let me see you,
don't try to open me up or calm me down,
fuck me like you hate me and leave me to my thoughts.

There is no water in this well for you,
it's poisoned with self-pity and ambition,
and if I gave it to you, you'd choke on it.

So choke me instead,
show me how angry you are that a bitch like me has the balls to use you,
to fuck you and leave you before the first sign of trouble,

Bring on the bruises,
write my faults in blue letters down my back,
carve my fate into my wrists,

be my lunar eclipse oracle,
whispering the truth into the cracks in my spine,
break my body to match my spirit.

But first, let's get high,
I've got an awful lot of issues to work out,
and you're tonight's target.

We're going deep tonight,
burying bodies in the sand,
burning draft cards and disappointing daddy.

You like that don't you?
Daughter desecration,
it lets you work out your anger issues.

I don't mind,
we'll both get lost in our heads,
years later I'll wonder if you were even here.

I've got secrets I can't stop shouting,
so gag me with gin and tonics,
numb my throat until I can't speak,

I only flinch at gentility,
so give me what I deserve,
fuck me so hard the pain drowns everything out.

Let's forget our names,
forget the rust melding us to the floor,
fuck duty, fuck monogamy, fuck me.

Such a funny word monogamy,
the most revered poison the world has ever seen,
silently siphoning the life out of an entire planet,

Like anti-global warming,
the conservatives know it's real,
but I find it a ridiculous conglomeration of syllables.

Can you imagine if we let ourselves taste every mind we momentarily fell in love with?
Made every fantasy a reality with a simple choice,
a choice to be happy.

A choice to be slutty,
to cheat and let them, because if you decide it doesn't matter,
it doesn't matter.

We're all animals anyway, right?
So let's wreak carnage out of love,
broken ribs and missing hearts.

You can survive on muscles and blood.

Megan Kemple is a writer and actress currently based out of Buffalo, NY. Her plays have been produced by Buffalo United Artists, American Repertory Theatre of Western New York, Road Less Traveled Productions, and Niagara University. Her poetry has been published in Vending Machine Press, Ghost City Review, and Feminspire. She spent the last year as a teaching artist with Barter Theatre's Project REAL, and previously worked in the Literary Department at Florida Studio Theatre.

Tom Dreitlein

I dreamt my father was stabbed last night


I dreamt a hot gold knife spread his heart in two
his chest birthed a bed of red flowers.

They filled the living room,
smelled of cigars on Sunday nights,
felt like the autumn view of my neighborhood.

I climbed the flowers, and he looked at me like he always does
like I was stitched straight from patches of his father's laugh.

He pulled me into his chest, showed me a room full of the stories he tells about me.
The walls were painted with every time I’ve said I love you;

He showed me the beach at Cape Cod
all the times we buried each other
how we broke out like sea monsters,
sand grinding as we ran for the ocean.

He showed me the hospital bed I laid in,
the day he thought screaming metal would take me away from him.
how he cried and watched warm morphine slip into me.

He showed me the first time we shared a beer,
how it was cold, and sweet
it went down and blurred the lines between us
the knots in our throats let loose
we laughed.

He showed me how it made him feel-
like a good father.

There was another room.

It was full of all the stories he doesn’t tell,
the ones nobody likes to hear.

I saw in there, covered by chipped paint
the times my mouth twisted into a soured thing.

I saw how I tore into the edges of him that weren't gilded
ones that didn’t flicker like perfect film.

I saw the way I twisted knives into the scars he showed me
how I lit aflame the gifted maps he drew.

I saw his father’s tombstone.

I saw his five year old hands pressed firm against the lettering.

I saw the warped wood at the foot of his bed, from
the tears he let pool, on
the days dust from that stone fell out from his fingernails

I saw how I pressed my hands on the door of his bedroom,
hard,
and never entered.

I dreamt my father was stabbed last night
that a hot gold knife spread his heart in two
and it smelled like cigars on Sunday nights
and he birthed
a bed
of bright
red flowers,
one
for every time
I’ve said
I love you.

Dream Journal


I am sitting in the living room
In my empty house

I am counting cracks in the drywall

I look down at the spiral notebook in my hands
It reads:

When I was four
my brother locked me inside a toy chest during a game of hide and seek.
When my mom found me I was snoring.

My knuckles are scraped and
I know I spent all day knocking on the side door
From the inside
The way a corpse might

My brother shows up with a dead grill
So we pour our teeth in and light them like coals
We roast the notebook

When he leaves
He shoves me back in the house
Gives me the chard pages
And walks into traffic

I am sitting in the living room
I realize I have never looked upstairs

So I check the bedroom
And there I am
My torso is flayed open by the semi-truck
A tube is shoved down my throat
There is a surgeon trying to sew me together

Confetti is blowing out
I can hear a fan in my lungs

I ask the surgeon to stop:

Let me bleed
Please.

I’ve spent days with my lips stitched open
my stomach stitched shut.
These guys have had nowhere to go but out my mouth.

I’m sour of the taste.

I’d like to live outside myself
without licking each moment
before I throw it against the wall.

The surgeon pulls his mask off
mouthless
he instead writes on his face:

Taste is your means to learn.
Walls won’t change you
no matter how you paint them.

I go downstairs

I am sitting in my living room
I am chewing my notebook

Little Briggins Circle, Fairport


My father is ashing his cigar in a bowl made from the weeping willow that used to coat our back yard in shadow. He is looking off down the street. He says:

I’ve seen the leaves change from here
I have seen them wilt for our applause
I have seen families come and go,
come and go.

Here only the trees die. And they too birth something beautiful. We turn every loss pretty in the suburbs. We look at stumps and see only history, the kind that comes from years of bleached textbooks. We cut away the rings bagged under our eyes. We grind down each moment until it can fit in our hands. We pretend you can rip a stump from the earth without leaving a grave -an open mouth wailing- we gag each scar in our town with soil, use seeds as stitches. Which is to say we erase what history our tragedies try to gift us. And when we have gutted a death of its context. We take a bite of the trunk. We dip our hands in and remove the heart. We make from the hollow loss, a bowl.

One we can fill with our own agenda.

My father’s eyes are old. His rings wrinkle out from the socket, he lets them grow. Let’s thewillow’s stump stand, a corpse spit apart by saplings. He’s seen what holding on too tight can do to a man. Still, he only knows one way to love. He looks at me and says:

Tonight
You’re leaving.

Take this bowl,
I made it from your childhood.
The one you ripped out of the earth
the first time you drove off down the highway.

I grinded away each petty loss,
each ugly death.

All that is left is our streets,
our homes
folded into a bowl for you.

I filled it with ash.
Add what you want.

Tom Dreitlein is a poet from Rochester, NY. A senior studying English at the University of Buffalo, he currently works as a Teaching Artist at the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology. He wants to talk to you about poetry and other things you can scream along to in your friend’sbasement.