Frederick E. Whitehead

we will all be on that platform


hailing
the last train out of town

the question
of whether it is
pulling out of tranquility
or steaming toward it will
most likely be the one
leaning on the doorpost of memory

memories
of your run
of the world spinning toward you

the glory of each sunrise
glinting on
the sickle that was
always mere inches
from the back of your neck

how you knew
even at full sprint
you would
like all before you
finish second

fading
into the crowd
as the victor
collects
another bouquet

with my attention on Venus


revealed as a bank of crimson bellied clouds
was pushed out of the way
by some upper level current

I nearly drove off the road

a correction made to center myself
between the lines
I looked for her again

but she had
ducked behind a curtain
once more
leaving me to ponder the hypnotic sway

of a single point of light

concern


I can tell by the furrows that
she worries

worries that I will
wonder aloud
one too many times

fearful that someone or two
from some agency or another
will walk up on me
maybe from behind

as I stand

with my head cocked
index finger knuckled under my lip
stating to anyone within
elbow grabbing distance
that none
of this
can be
correct

I can picture it playing out
in a blue tinted comically slow silence

her
trying to wave them off
me
painting a mural of lunacy
for all I feel should know of such
agency fellas
circling and signaling position
to one another

above it all
someone is calling out a play by play
but the peanut man has packed it in
and the scorekeeper has
lost count on account of an addiction
to confusion

the crowd
turning as they always do
to stare
at the one objecting to a union

I should stop

but I know that
I will always
need to know

hitch


somewhere there should be a road
suitable for the use of a thumb

just roll out a map
and get down to choosing one

weigh the corners down
with your regrets

they've only
been good
for that kind of thing
anyway

it was


if you were to ask me last week
where it was that I awoke
I would have
deadpanned
America

if you ventured to speak to me at all
I may have spoken back

(( in terms that didn't seem so
goddamned
disturbingly nostalgic

that yes
it was
good

if you were to look in anything resembling my direction
I may have be found
wandering
in some forgotten garden
as it was
giving little thought
to the all too likely
ascent of another beast

once I regain strength
there is hope
that
I will emerge
I will find that garden again
I will try to locate
all the pieces
of a broken faith
and rebuild
a sacred vessel to house
all that I was to be for others

placed when done
next to
a candle kept burning
for all who intend to do the same

Frederick E. Whitehead is a Buffalo area poet who has had a blog at www.fewhitehead.wordpress.com since 2010. He is the author of 7 volumes of poetry. His latest, titled Luna, came out in March of 2016. He is also the host of Dog Ears 4th Friday Poetry Series at Dog Ears Bookstore & Cafe. In his spare time, he publishes limited run chapbooks through his Destitute Press.

Alana Kelley

shooting stars are just dead stars but you look too good to be a dead star


i hope to die fast like a shooting star - i have looked up the definition of a shooting star - when i was 4 you grabbed my face and died - I stood back to see, if under all those flames stars would appear - i was mad because you died before i got to tell you that a shooting star is a noun - a transient fiery streak in the sky when it passes through the earth’s atmosphere - a shooting star can also be any person or object that moves with spectacular speed - you are also a noun in the atmosphere - to you i would have given the recipe for the sun and the main ingredients of different skies - i asked NASA how often shooting stars occurred and she said every 10 to 15 minutes - this might be everything i have ever been trying to tell you - every 10 to 15 minutes i would have told you that you died fast like a shooting star

you have a lava lamp head and you are becoming my living room


i try to touch your legs on my leather couch - in the dark they turn into my leather couch - i can’t see where your legs start or end or if I’m sitting on them or if they even exist at all but i think they’re close - i can see my lava lamp in your eyes and the irises start to separate in melting neon balls moving inside your head bouncing off the top and the bottom and the sides running into each other causing fights and reforming into different shapes - your legs are now a leather couch - your head is a lava lamp - your light is dim but manageable to live with - I’m trying to feel out where your arms are and i startle as they stretch into standing lamps with no switches - they have slowly curved themselves up almost touching the ceiling - your palms arch inverted into shades and your elbows become the bases - your lava lamp head still remains our only light source and i try to keep you awake for the sake of seeing each other - your entire chest and torso deflate and flatten and your sides drape over the cushions of my leather couch, or your legs - they grow small microfibers the color of cherries - and i ask you if you’re done settling in - you shake your lava lamp head and wrap your blanket body around me - i burn my lips kissing your lava face

The Only Muscle I Work Out Is My Tongue


i tell you, “the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body”
so let’s get buff
it’s a gun show
but for tongues
we’ll take the whole day off just to shoot each other

let’s go to the gym with our tongues
and work them out
we’ll sit facing one another on the floor
and take turns french kissing

i’ll stand over you while you bench press and when you breathe out
i execute my upside-down
Toby McGuire Spiderman kiss

let’s rearrange the treadmills
so you can look me in the eyes
i’ll run as fast as i can to get closer to you
and when i think my tongue muscles are ready i yell
“I LOVE YOU!” over the hum of machines
and you say,
“i think i need to buy a new gym membership.”

Alana Kelley is a visual artist and poet currently living in Buffalo, NY. She experiments with interdisciplinary poetics, often combining modern writing styles with contemporary subject matter to produce alternative literary and visual products. She is currently experimenting with digital and biological poetics, working with a new formed romanticism and the relationship between the body and its environments.

Aidan Ryan

American Oneirology: Footnotes to a National Dream Journal


September 17, 1787

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America*

* In summary, some white men, once, had a Dream and called it “We, the People”
In it they were strange, they were themselves, but multiple, and vibrant
Arguing and singing, skin stretched across the continent like borealis
Or Dakota Badlands rockslide, they were falling up and down and
When they woke they tried to capture it on parchment
All the parts they could remember, they were too afraid to conjure it
But left to us the paper and the words. We are not born
So much as dreamed into being, or becoming, only some of us
White, male, moneyed, others some, or part, or none of these,
But in every generation trying to remember
When we could remember
The Spirit of ‘76 or ‘62 or 2008
Brief waking-dreaming moments when we flew
Schwinn Sting Rays naked over Iowan farms
Blue Angels on banana seats over mountains
Of corn and rock candy and catseyes,
And looked something like the Dream.
And we dreamed our imitation dreams.
And some of these dreams turned to art, money, or both
And some turned to hashtags or Civil War ghosts
And some dreams died in screams from the balcony
Which, dying, opened something in me
A dream in a window which one morning had closed.
One of us dreamed of cigarette trees and whiskey lakes and liberty
Some dreamed railroads and airplanes, canals in Panama and Erie
And some dreamed war and CTRL+ALT dustclouds
And the personal computer and a God we could live with
A God who’d speak like Kind of Blue
And not Alexa or even the old AOL dial tone
(though we dreamt those up, too)
And dreamed a utopia of soviets and satellites
And dreamed three men to the moon
We dreamed in sex, silicon, and Cirque du Soleil
We dreamed without a national tongue
Free to sleeptalk and walk and sing
And sometimes dreamed back to 1633
When dreamed John Cotton of a new continent’s purity
For to allow any man uncontrollableness of speech, you see
(he said)The desperate danger of it –
We kept alive the danger in our dreams
And left the desperation for the living

For often in my waking dreams I am some
Homophobic high school version of myself
In a world populated by people who voted
And people who didn’t vote and relatives
Who don’t remember me. Chasing some
Misguided goal, Grail-Quest without a Fisher
King, or else hurt and bent on hurting
In an economy of pain and qualitative easing
This isn’t, really, dreaming.

But on the same Plymouth-bound ships
Rode some Nadabs and Abihus, drunk
Sons of Aaron and Marianne Moore,
Ready risking Hell for the gift of strange fire,
To give God their tortured desert poems,
Like Las Vegas, Heizer’s City, Everett Ruess’ graffiti
These dreams were good.

How good it is to dream awake at the wheel
And trust only Ike’s curves like a catechism:
So all you funny hats manning mantraps
Up and down the I-90, Seattle to Boston
Take out your radars and point them
See how fast I can go in a Prius
And then we’ll trade places. I’ll wait
In the same service road scrub and I’ll watch
You blaze by, lights blaring for no one.
We’ll sit on hot hoods, engines clicking,
Share beers and stories and when
Dawn comes point your gun at the sky
And track eagles, ospreys, and baseballs,

How good it is to dream with a west-
Ward step to a place where there are
No other faces to reflect your face
Only overmastering emptiness and
Ringing rocks like silent rhyming poems
Until standing at the edge of your tradition find
One who doesn’t look or think or smell like you
But says, I am a dreamer, too.

But after all the Dream that dreamed us
Wasn’t borne from blood to brain but wrote
Us in its ink and told us to do likewise.
So let’s let go like bubbles from the side
Of a Coke glass and burst on the surface
A carbonation of awakening: morning breath
Reasonless, a sizzle and a sigh, from Atman
To Brahman, spiritus sancti and Stevia
Offering strange fire to anyone
With marshmallows, and sitting down
To listen to the stories of their dreams.

Aidan Ryan resides in Buffalo, NY, where he is an adjunct professor of English at Canisius College and co-editor of Foundlings poetry magazine. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Buffalo News, Slipstream, Traffic East, CNN and The Skinny, where he is a regular music critic. Find his work at www.AidanRyan.com.

Lalita Zakaryan

Poem 5


The sweet night sang to me in black and white
The loving breeze asked me to stay warm and smell what was sweet
I shiver with the nostalgia you asked me to remember
I smiled because the hope I whispered about, you already knew.
The glow of your laugh made the water murmur
The moon and our memories asked us to come closer
And your sweet hands told me I could rest easy

Who?


I talk to a pretty wall that talks back
But when I talk enough the wall stops-
It sounds like a crack

I talk to a pretty wall that tells me to act on command
It tries to tell me when to stop-
But I won’t take a demand

I talk to a pretty wall that stands tall on this floor
When I interrupt, it stops-
Because it knows that I can build a door

I talk to a pretty wall that has a hard heart
When I tell it to stop-
For some reason my words can’t take the pains apart

I talk to a pretty wall that sticks to its griefs
When I tell it my truths it stops-
But it holds onto its beliefs

I talk to a pretty wall that has an opinion
But when I tell it my facts it stops-
Because my words aren’t something it can fill in

I talk to a pretty wall and it causes an infliction
I don't talk to it for too long
Because it holds my reflection

I count blocks


I count blocks; the way I count mala beads
I gasp for air and open I mouth to the dry sky for rain
I look for the stars to give I prana to continue
I tell myself I like the briny smell of the East River
I tell myself I'm venturesome and street smart.
If I run the right way I can't be raped
I tell myself if I throw up it'll be okay.
Sometimes that happens when you jog
I tell myself I'm in love and in bliss
And if I'm not yet it's okay because I'll reach it in the next block
I tell myself the block I just blinked down is good because it means I was being meditative

For some reason these orange lights don't burn I like Swami orange
Maybe if I stopped my panting and slapping feet I'd hear the self scream

I love is breaking.
The storm waits for self before surrounding.
Secret words cry the water self wished for.
I turn away this time from the drink I hid from soft eyes

Lalita Zakaryan is an emerging artist from New York City based in Washington Heights. My art is a reflection of an urge to define and redefine life situations as I am developing and understanding myself and the world. I think of my art as reaching out to a place of pain and hope we all hold in us. My work is inspired by my coming of age experiences and the want to communicate to other's the value of evaluating difficult life situations but also letting them go.

Remi Recchia

Election Day


The grass swoons
under your spittle, catching
acid sideways. Apple- and wine-
chunks push past your lips and straggle
over your chin, pink
and flushed with the leftovers
from a liquid breakfast. Your father
is ready in a blue Camaro stalled
in front of an oak tree. Small
circles of adhesive are also ready,
calm and patriotic inside dry
churches and schools. Liver spots
blind the sun. The polls have been open
since six a.m. Your hands have been open
since midnight two days ago—palms
sweating, fingers as bottle-openers
as stick figures as rats. You
are not ready for your America
to crumble. You think sometimes
that pride is like the last icicle
in an icebox—smooth and jagged,
stiff, stiff. Defeatable. Your father
tips icicles out of iceboxes before
they form, but you can catch
the beginnings sometimes, and lick
the the salty rim-lid. You think
about the first time you kissed a boy
and how his lips were unsweet,
and remember the trauma of public
school, and how your father
would pull you out at lunch time
for ice cream and a new book.
He understood you on a simple
level; you understood yourself
in the lens given. The Camaro
fails to start three times, and you
wait to join you father and watch
him vote for his ideology over
your sins.

Under a Walnut Tree on a Sunday Afternoon


Silver sleeves covering a lace wrist-
watch, two gold buttons on the cuff,

brown tresses June-baked under the full sun
and curling on a shoulder—she offered

him an apple with seeds on the outside
and skin in the heart, coating the stem

with a blackberry that stained itself
on the way down. Purple juices met rough

red and white ridges, trickling south
to the core and the bruised under-flesh.

He rolled the berry between his forefingers;
he leaves shuddered above her and dropped

white fragments—she stopped, remembered
delicate parasols and luncheons, appealed

to the summer before counting ingredients
for iced tea, and covered her pink with white linen.

The Socio-sexual Indicator of Horned Owls


Three horned owls in a sycamore, swallowing
empty mammal bones hollow like lockets

and delicate as a maiden’s ring finger; they compare
their horns, which are not horns but plumicorns,

and shift eggs against the branch, slivered in the moon,
already deep under the roots from hanging

herself last Tuesday. The eggs drop in miniature parachutes,
break open like cream on a mother’s kitchen floor.

The nest is gaping black under an empty sky; it calls to the
groundskeeper, making his rounds at moonset.

He scoops loose feathers gently from grasping roots
and molded moss kissing tree-knots. He thinks

of his wife and how he loves her carefully—exquisitely—
sober and somber as if at a perpetual funeral

where the widow wears fake pearls that look like oysters
and a veil that hides her bird-eyes from the small death.

Remi Recchia holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University (WMU), and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. Remi has been published in Gravel Magazine, Ground Fresh Thursday Press, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cutbank Literary Magazine’s All Accounts & Mixture series, The Birds We Piled Loosely, The Blotter, The Laureate, and The Poems That Ate Our Ears and have poems forthcoming in Front Porch and indicia. At WMU, Remi was a reading intern for Third Coast, an assistant editor for The Laureate, and a student intern for New Issues Poetry & Prose. Remi was also announced as a Poetry, Fiction, and Playwriting finalist for the WMU Undergraduate Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Awards.

Natalie Crick

Sepulchre


The remains of Winter look set to die in March.
Trees, leaves, undergrowth, tangle and twist
Together, obsessed lovers

Dry as bones in the wind.
The glow and shadows on her face,
In memory, make me dream

She’s home

Until I remember
This house is death’s
Eminent domain.

Scarlet leaves spin like carousels
To feather her resting place,
Sumacs sucking at my blood

Until I lose all colour,
Her whisper and phantom limb
Feasting in the sun.

Fresh Rain


Fresh rain fell
Onto velvet skin

Beneath an open sky.
I seek shelter in you.

Every stranger
Becomes a ghost passing by.

I harvest the fog,
Bathe naked in the waxing moon.

Sometimes I think I hear
The echo of the storm.

Afterlife


At first you could not imagine how
I waited in the shadows.

The sky is blank,
Flesh of no feeling

The sun glowing, spectral,
Rising with the smoke.

A door swings open.
The heavenly music surprises me.

Without invitation, I enter.

Under starry skies, in prairies of
Knee-high corn, I dreamed awake.

Natalie Crick, from Newcastle in the UK, has found delight in writing all of her life and first began writing when she was a very young girl. She graduated from Newcastle University with a degree in English Literature and plan to pursue an MA at Newcastle this year. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in a range of journals and magazines including The Lake, Ink Sweat and Tears, Poetry Pacific, Interpreters House and Jet Fuel Review. Her work also features or is forthcoming in a number of anthologies, including Lehigh Valley Vanguard Collections 13. This year her poem, 'Sunday School' was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Julio Montalvo Valentin

Social Suicide:


When Dictators tactfully inform
The ignorant masses
To self-destruct
By using #hatespeak.

Riding with Revere


Paul's red Mustang takes us to a room
where Franklin is a mint on the pillow
and the sky has set into fiber weaved stars.
I lay on the grave whose tombstone reads:
Desparety sleeps here,
staring at popcorn in suspension.
He begins to gallop my self worth
in his throat
as I groan:
The Spanish is coming.

Fat-shame Rebuttal


The human race has created tools to survive hunger
but is still ill-equipped
for obesity.

Julio Montalvo Valentin is a semi-confessional, socially awkward poet. As cofounder of Cringe Worthy Poets Collective, he aims to make poetry accessible while engaging in deep topics with simplistic writing. He has published two chapbooks, "Don't Give up the Ship" in 2015 and "Ship Lost" in 2016, both with Cringe Worthy Press.

Skylar Thayer

mall jobs


the man from the cell phone case kiosk
holds his hands against the ground as if he
can stop the earth from shaking his bones
crack as he rises to his knees
i watch the night fall through five o’clock smog
three hundred and sixty five days - one trip
around the sun and i am immobilized, a
statue growing ivy, standing still in the darkness
he holds his face, cries against the concrete
praying toward mecca in the shipment bay

chimera


focusing my energy into becoming
a glass that meets your lips in the morning
cold black coffee, cold hands, faulty
circulation / i am trying to become the
10 am stillness that surrounds you in
your new home i do not live in
this is the only language we know
i hold rose quartz and say your name

Skylar Thayer is a 20-year-old aquarius from tulsa, oklahoma. They have been featured in basement babes and the dinner table review. They tweet at @skylarinacoma.

Dan McKeon

The Pelican


Have you seen my bed?
I must've sold it for a weekend,
To some dock drifter in Tampa who ties knots around pelican necks,
The bird would catch fish and be unable to swallow them,
And the drifter would rip the fish out of its mouth,
Reaping the rewards of an ugly bird enslaved by an uglier world,
And I think I’m the pelican,
Doing what I should be doing but never getting the benefits.

Have you seen my bed?
I pushed it out to sea a week ago.
When I don't sleep for a while,
I start seeing moving figures in my peripheral and the more tired I get,
The faster and closer they are.
I wonder if they're ghosts realizing I'm more susceptible and rushing in for some
human connection,
I'd sit down with them if I could,
Make some tea they could drink through the air,
Ask what went wrong and what's on their mind,
Play my favorite lullaby for them until they could finally sleep;
The best thing you can give to a ghost is a little company.

When I was very young,
I kept having this dream where an infinitely bigger man than I screamed with such rage that the world collapsed in on my eardrums and nothing seemed possible.

But have you seen the moon's face?
It's turned around and said hello to me on the beach,
Asked what was wrong and what was on my mind,
Sang me the sweetest song I've ever heard but I couldn't even whistle the chorus for you,
I collapsed on the sand at the sound of the refrain.

In the dream,
I was still in my childhood room,
The door was barred shut but that massive screaming man was picking the lock;
Does anyone realize the cruelty of bringing a restless spirit on a road trip?
It’s like bringing a starving man to a supermarket but taking his wallet first.
But I'm sure the moon sang me to sleep because it didn't think anyone else could;
And for all my plans and tries at gripping my squishy brain,
The shifting tides finally convinced me everything was fine or was going to be,
My bed drifted back to shore and when I woke up,
I untied the knot around the pelican's neck.

Dan McKeon is a Long Island exile living in Buffalo, usually writing about buildings or lawn gnomes in his spare time to avoid having to learn how to ice skate.

Linda M. Crate

white king


it's the end
of an
empire
i am white hot flames
burning galaxies
in my wake
won't listen to any cries for
mercy
because i'm done asking
permission to be
myself
when it is both my power and my
gift,
and these white hot flames
will kiss the knees of my enemies until
they're nothing but ash;
i refuse to
give the forgiveness they refused to all those
who they killed in their wake
i will avenge the dead
because their names deserve to be
remembered
by more than a tombstone and a family member—
i am the king in my kingdom
don't fear your crown nor power because i have
a strength all my own.

may her truth break you


you never hid beneath
a gauze of transparency
so i suppose you wouldn't
be honest about something
so serious as this
you were cheating on me before
we broke up,
and you married the swine of a
woman who had the gall
to go after a taken
man;
i suppose i should have read between
the lines when you told me even if
i had been pregnant you wouldn't have
stayed;
but i loved you too much—
left me buried beneath the ice with your
other blue lipped angels,
but i refused to die;
and so you resented me
it's okay now i loathe you too;
you're just the haunting ghost of memories
i wish i could get out—
you'd say i was just on a witch hunt,
but that's an insult to witches;
so love and light and blessed be
because karma will punch you harder than i
ever could and may her truth break you
as you broke me.

she woke me


i loved her,
and it scard me;
because i had only ever
loved men,
and she said it strange
despite the fact how many of them
had hurt me;
and i couldn't say why i liked men
only that i did
then she came along and splintered everything
i knew of truth and my perspective
shifted—
she's the only woman i've ever loved,
but i never had the courage to say for i knew
someone like her would never love
a broken person like me
despite the fact she found scars were beautiful
my anger was an egregious character flaw
that drove her away;
and i wish we could be reconciled as i constantly dream
we are
just to be her friend again would be a blessing
even if she's a gift that i don't
deserve—
she was otherworldly to me
a faerie dancing into my path and enchanting me with
her unique world views, her beauty, and her laughter;
she was kind but cruel, sharp yet soft, and every shade of
perfection i have ever known
always smelled of roses and broke open the shell of my timidity
so i could remember to be a brave warrior as i always
knew i was
since childhood.

Linda M. Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville. Her poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. Recently her two chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013) and Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014) were published. Her fantasy novel Blood & Magic was published in March 2015. The second novel of this series Dragons & Magic was published in October 2015. The third of this series Centaurs & Magic was published November 2016. Her third poetry collection If Tomorrow Never Comes(Scars Publications - August 2016) was recently published. Her poetry collection Sing Your Own Song is forthcoming through Barometric Pressures Series.

M. Wright

Madonna on the Burnt Pancake


I leave my body on
Sunday mornings

while people wash
their sticky finger

sof post-service pancake
residue and guilt

over the sin of consumption
(or of not enough consumption).

And I baptize my
fear in the sea.

Hold my hands on
either side and swing

me like a child. What if
I’m of no interest

to the world when I
grow up?

I may just drown
now and prove

to the pancake mourners
that fear is arbitrary.

I’d like to put
all my chips on red,

decompose in salt
Water--maybe

one day, my atoms
will rain over

rusted wheelbarrows.
But I am so hungry.

A Love Supreme


John Coltrane
after a near O.D. he
composed a four part suite
to commemorate his spiritual awakening
(thank god for heroin it does great things to jazz artists)
called A Love Supreme.
This is what I learned from a love supreme:

1. I’ll never awaken like Coltrane so there is no
use considering heroin.

2. SKIP THIS AD IN 6 SECONDS

3. Humans looked out at the sun god
up at the sky god &
down at the screen god

is the result of some
historical fear
of loneliness.

Reconciling with Deleted Files


I knew how to dismantle the
radiator from watching YouTube
repairment videos.

You can
reverse engineer pretty much
anything if you start at the end
& rewind step-by-step.

I tore it from the wall & found
a shoebox
full of postcards from
the underworld.

I put them in the blue
recycling bin.

I tried
to understand what
happens to something that
loses its meaning.

I made a puddle of
tap water in the winter behind my
apartment. I dropped the radiator
in & watched it freeze.

M. Wright has recently been published in The Rising Phoenix Review, Maudlin House, Barely South Review, and (forthcoming in) Temenos Journal. He is the winner of Weisman Art Museum's Poetry ArtWords and was awarded second place in the Into the Void Poetry Competition. In 2017, M. will be one of the 24 featured poets in the Saint Paul Almanac's Impressions series. More: wrightm.com.

Arezu Montazer

Here the birds have learned


A forest with leopards in wheelchairs
and eagles that
with their sharp claws
on trees
they draw hearts.

Here the birds have learned
to stand in the air,
and worms become snakes without any cocoon,
and I am the god of this forest!

A child laughs


My glance falls off the height of a row;
Some sharks are lurking on a king size bed.
A child laughs and
his mischief runs across the house
and jumps up and down on the bed.

Sharks are lurking
Sharks laugh
Sharks ...

My soul,
falls off the height of the dream;

Arezu Montazer was born in Isfahan, Iran (March 30th 1988). I’m studied in the field of Software at Islamic Azad University of Najaf Abad. Also, her expertise is in painting with Pastel and watercolor.

Tom Dreitlein

November 9th, 2016


Still the breeze and the taste of exhaust through my window
Still cough up what is left of last night in the morning
Still my house sits on a corner where the man with the shopping cart full of cans likes to sit
Still hear him sift through my recycling
Still hear the wailing hum of the TV
Still empty from the night a red sea rose from the Midwest
Still my hand reaches for a blade or beer or blunt or blanket
Still mouth fixes to say revolution or revolt or regression or repression
Still safe
Still white
Still straight
Still come from bastard aristocracy
Still my skin is oligarchy
Still fascism sits like a quip on my tongue
Still will not escape elitism
Still tongue is sharpened by my skins learning
Still tongue opens the walls of my mouth
Still lips, the blood of my wound I won’t let close
Still my wound is a scourge
Still my scourge is my skin
Still my skin tastes like a spray painted swastika
Still swastikas on the TV
Still courts in the streets
Still jury and executioner
Still execute the famished
Still silence the poor
Still rhetoric the echoes
Still echo the rhetoric
Still puppets won’t escape their strings
Still a poem is not enough and yet I write
Still a howl is not enough and yet I scream
Still a god is not enough and yet I pray
Still my god is hollow and yet it kills it kills it kills it kills
Still I turn to god
Still turning is its own privilege
Still my country turns to its god
Still its God is a man
Still its god is oiled ivory
Still its ivory is carved from a darker body
Still the darker bodies bleed
Still my country’s god is a quiet atheist
Still my country’s god feels like home to many
Still all the streets in my home town are named after cute animals
Still all the boys in my home town are named after apostles
Still my whole home town is a confederate flag, even if I am the blue in it
Still I am complicit
Still all the white fathers in my hometown get drunk off Americana as the city crumbles for them
Still they profit from the crumbling
Still it is not the buildings that crumble but the bodies
Still my classes speak of classism as history
Still my history is classist
Still the media fancies itself activist, so do I
Still we do nothing but comment on the world as it burns
Still I teach kids who are burning, I show them how to make the fire pretty
Still the day turns my city like a cog
Still the bodies keep it turning, they are its grease

This is the truest sadness I have found:
To crawl each morning into a world that will not stop.

i've been thinking about the sky a lot lately


/ i’ve been wishing I could grab a handful of clouds and watch the mist die between my fingers / i've been thinking about what might watch over us / what might not / what might hate us / and how we waste our lives reaching / when people ask me about my faith / i wonder which cloud i should talk about today / i look up and see a sky full of promises i have broken / or that have broken me / when i was born i couldn't breathe / they had to work my lungs by machine / exorcise the cloud from me before i could walk / and so i was born of flesh and metal / each time too much God gets under my skin / something loud and made by human hands begins to pry / i think i am addicted to the ripping / when i think about the accident / i think about the clouds that burst from steering wheels / like God’s hands to hold you as you bleed out / i think about how mine never deployed / how God would not reach for me / i look out the window of an airplane and am sure you would suffocate if God got its hands on you / and what could God know of holding the folded paper of a child's rib cage / without crushing it / when the semi-truck hit / anything holy in me was shaken out like wet dust / i have been reaching for it ever since / when you ask me about faith / you are asking me to hold each almost death in my hands / to know i was born into clogged lungs and yet I breathe / to know my brakes failed heading towards a red light / that i was hit driver’s side / and walked away unscarred / you are asking me to account for inches / if god pushed the semi / just so / if he kept my lungs pumping / to be honest i do not want to know / if i am the lucky dirt beneath his fingernails / still / each memory comes to me in a haze now / to try and wrap my fingers around them is to try and hold the morning fog / before it climbs to wander above us / promises / answers / i will never be able to reach / when i look at the sky / i often wonder what i would do to divinity if i could just get my hands on it / i think about what its rib cage would feel like / between my fingers / how easy it might be / to crush it in my palms / and watch scripture evaporate.

I’ve happened upon this very time and place and decided to keep it


My name is Tom Dreitlein, representing Tom Dreitlein and I am looking for new clients / I wish someone could have told me what it would be like / and what a silly wish that is / I have tripped upon the room where you may have found death, and so I decided not to look / I love you, and I miss you / for now I am without a body and therefore without a heart / all I have are eyes and mouths / they both lie to me / still / I turn back time when I speak / I like that / I stepped into a broken lock and found God Loves Gays spray painted in pink / it felt like the sign hanging in the peak of my head / I wish more people hung their own prophecies in their bedrooms / I found a broken bible, stepped in and called it my home / I found my new home, broke in and called it my head / My head is a bedroom where I want to hang all of my broken bibles, but you can’t bring every lock home / some you can only walk along until the tumblers begin to look like woods in the snowless winter / I know now I know nothing / other than my own bedroom / It is the only lock I can turn / I wish someone could have told me we were all broken gods tumbling / and what a silly wish that is.

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’s basement.

Sophia Giovannitti

Family Values


My grandfather fucked his niece, leaving in
my father the fear of a vengeful god:
the male libido – no generation
may go unpunished. He thought he was safe
when he had two daughters. He couldn’t know
one would become a whore. She wants to get
paid for her work, tied up and slapped, unheld.

Do you know, a father will protect his
daughter like an untrained dom to his sub:
poorly. Her tongue is open and her eyes
are wet. A face marred by semen greed and
warmth. The body touched by capital is
the body at full potential and cost.
She gives until she is dead inside but
alive with caste iron lust, greased and hot.
She is unclean; she ages well; she’s won.

Do It To Julia


Like when Winston says ‘Do it to Julia’
At the end of 1984 – put the rats on her face
Kill the girl you love
Then you are worse than dead, you’re nothing
For her you were god. You were salvation itself.
You have forsaken what was made in your image
When a man gags on his creation he will be forgiven if his mouth was just too full

My first lover told me you are the most understanding person I’ve ever met
I know I am; I am a woman after all
Anxiety expands at a fickle speed until it overtakes the body
Does it happen like that
When you choose yourself over who you love
Does it happen as fast; a yes sustained by feral panic
When you kill what you love
Is it suicide?

The Art of Giving Good Head


One, I allow you to gag me like an
amphetamine object. Do as you get
told. There’s no subtext. But the whole time I'm
thinking how beautiful you are. Because
you are close to no edge. I want to pour
ecstasy on you. I want to take what
is inside of you and make it outside.
When you push my hair off my cheek for a
clean shot my neck pulls toward you and away
like the toddler who wants her mother but
also perceives her mother’s failure to
love her. I can't any longer ask you
for things. It’s rude to speak when you haven’t
been spoken to I heard somewhere. You say
your presence is answer enough but can
the body really speak? Or rather: can
the body in psychic pain decipher
another body’s cryptogram? The girl
not a prodigy but a bruising want.
Once, I think I’m the most dramatic bitch
in the world but then I thought I love you,
and now I am certain only that your
cum contains trace poisons because how else
could I explain this slow and painful death.

Lullaby


I told Julia I wanted to fuck a married man
And a distance opened:
She does not possess
And therefore cannot understand
The impulse toward ruin

A child came out of her mother’s body stained with her fluid
And his past
Becoming the only dirty piece of a sterile room
If I’d been born into water
The stain could have been lifted
The baby sees her body change her environment, materially
From fluid to fluid and womb to bathwater
She floats
Oh the water is red now from my body or hers or his
Or did something land here that I did not see
Slipping out into a hospital pulled by a strange worker’s hands
(in this case, a woman, but not always)
A stain sticks
And her first thought, before I’m alive
Is: I’m marked

The stillness of a secret
Edging under my eyelids
Into my mouth
I can swallow a secret like it’s my pride
Meaning: I can’t

Sophia Giovannitti is a twenty-four-year old queer woman artist and writer, focused on lust, family, and emotional labor.

Scott Kristopher

Each one of our names


Each one of our names
is a word; imbued with
deep meaning. Akin to
the sacred sound, which
broke the eternal silence
of nothingness and begat
the creation of everything.

Each of our names are
memory. Words and
wordlessness which
betray the meaning of
our moments. I could
never be so unkind as to
remove your name from
my story. Only, behind
your teeth I forget my
own name;

or the sound of my voice
when it rolls down your
tongue and lodges my
lost whisper in your throat,

choking you with my timbre
until my old name is changed –
becoming a new sound upon
which I gag. Calling you by

names
you never remember
– or –
names
you always forget.

hauntingly awokened


I open my bedroom window
as day breaks, to allow your
Ghost to escape; as if
this spectre of You

could slip through the screen,
like smoke wafting away to
join the whispered breaths
of this Autumn morning’s new dawn.

How many sunrises
would it take to save me now?
Now that my marrow has grown so cold
and my old battered bones

have frozen into some skeleton
caging a cracking heart. No longer
beating with the passion
that once would dare Destiny

into Dreams so vivid.
Where all future realities
remain haunted by all
the Desires we once imagined

to be true, or to be
falsely accused by a fate
as heavy handed as I
am hard headed,

daydreaming of some distant time
when my blood could pump
warm again; curdling
within these bruised veins.

Until that night falls,
both sleepily and silent
begging us to begin once
again on the other side of the veil...

scott kristopher is a Book Artist and Storyteller from Buffalo, NY. He is also a Barista. In a past life, he was trained to be a disciplined Social Scientist; and in some life before that he was most likely a Baobab Tree...

Jennifer Skelton

Scrub in Training, Fuckboy Wannabe

For Robert J. Smith (Not That Robert Smith )


Was I supposed to surrender my pussy to you
Upon hearing a clever Haiku?
The width of your wit couldn’t fill
The spaces between my teeth
Let alone any void I have
Begging to be crowded by any other
Sad Boy but you

Jealousy only looks good on poets
Who’ve touched me
I can count them on one hand
And fuck myself better than you ever could
With the other

Spreading rumors
Is no way to get me to spread my thighs
I am ruthless with my honesty
Like a jab to your gut
Truth ripples through screenshots
When you’re a millennial
It’s tricky to bend the truth
And trust me
I’m flexible

Ohio, Summer 2016, Sharing a Tent With Beth


Everyone is on acid and jumping off of ledges
I am too scared to do one of those things
I’ll never say which
But I can tell you that the bodies
Bobbing in the quarry make me nauseous
Like the smell of canned Dollar Store chicken
Or the thought of you leaving

Being attached to anything
Makes me want to cut everything into pieces
My lease
The bills
Your tongue
His poetry

Eavesdropping like I had something to learn
I heard
“Hey man, you just gotta treat it like
It’s something you’ve been doing your whole life.”
Avoidance
Pulls me close and tells me I’m pretty
So I fucked him
With Corporate America and the suburban
Baby Boomer’s bumper sticker protest of progress
Anything planted in certainty
Or anything uprooted in the name of
Change

Everyone is on ledges and jumping off of acid
Everyone is bored and eavesdropping
I am just like everyone
Scared
To rip my bones out and rearrange them
To peel back my flesh
And expose the only unsoiled parts of myself
It’s trendy to be dirty these days

Head bowed mumbled vows
Praise be unto Escapism
And the sins that beg me to be their home

America has a thing for zones: Comfort, End, and Kill


My brother used to promise me
if I played ‘Men’ with him
he would play Barbie with me

Playing ‘Men’ meant digging into a pile of plastic muscles
smashing their miniature bodies into each other
until we got bored of emulating WWE Monday Night Raw masculinity
forgot about Barbie
and starting fighting over the last blue sugar water drink

No one wanted the orange sugar water drink
and we liked the way our lips looked blue
We liked the way the sky looked blue
He liked the way cigarettes looked between his blue lips

Now, I don’t feel like a real poet because I don’t smoke cigarettes
He doesn’t feel like a real soldier because he goes to therapy
because he doesn’t like the way blue lips look in the desert

Sometimes he tells me that everything is still covered in sand—
That his daughter is covered in sand
That dinner tonight we are having sand

I asked him if he thought Norman Rockwell
would be proud of Colin Kaepernick
For taking a seat
While men like my brother still dream of the rocket’s red glare and the bombs bursting in air
While men like my brother
are built from steel beams
and have an anger like jet fuel

It’s okay to melt sometimes

It’s okay to sit sometimes
It’s okay to not believe in White Boy Democracy

Our Independence is written in blood
Our Rights are written blood
but not Black blood or Gay blood
Or period blood

White Boy blood

America’s homeboys sliced their hands open
with Tomahawks
and shook over Philadelphia
Shook over NYC

Shook their dicks after they took a piss on the graves
of participation trophies buried by bailouts

We are raising productive members of society here —
We are raising products here
Kids who won’t drink orange sugar water drinks
because orange doesn’t look enough like death
but orange methadone looks enough like living to their parents

The New York Times once had a story
about the way people in New York City die alone
Their bodies decompose before they are found and
Their belongings end up being auctioned off

I wonder if their apartments look like art galleries
If their sinks full of dishes look like masterpieces

I wonder if I can move America into a nice little loft
in one of the boroughs where we can all decay alone
together and our dirty laundry can be auctioned off

Again

Jennifer Skelton is a poet from Buffalo, NY. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from SUNY Buffalo State. The themes in her poetry include the comedies and tragedies of personal relationships – from Mother to Lover, from America to Japan and back again. Jennifer is a member of the Cringe Worthy Poets Collective. She has been a featured reader at Innisfree Poetry, Buffalo State College’s Rooftop Poetry Series, Queen City Gallery and Words on the Rocks. In her free time, you can find Jennifer hugging furry critters, trees and the occasional person.

Nathanael William Stolte

There are Too Many Fuckboys Masquerading as Poets

For Robert J Smith (Not That Robert Smith)


Shepherd, where is your flock?
I see you are constantly impressed with yourself
But the wind carries your lies
Like a grave robber’s whisper

Knowing all the answers
To all the questions
On Jeopardy
Does not imply brilliance

Your living room
Is a vehicle to nowhere
But that seems to be
Your preferred destination

You can put
Kanye West Adidas
On Jabba the Hut
But he’ll still be a villain

You want to be aloof
But you’re just a moody bitch

Twenty Sixteen


This year
has taken
so much

From me

From you

This year
Stuck it
In and
Broke it
Off

Now
We’re
Bleeding
Out

In
The
Corner.

Pernicious God


who will deliver us if
god made us in his image?

god of filth
god of compost
god of excess
god of landfills
god of junk
god of the hoard
god of the bog
god of plenty
god of fuck
god of drunkards
god of fugue
god of pathos
god of fisting
god of megrim
god of over-medicated
god of the brave
god of the oil spill
god of fracking
god of toxic algae blooms
god of pesticides
god of petroleum
god of fecundity
god of aggression
god of the three-fifths compromise
god of chemistry
god of disproportion
god of the drive-thru
god of engineered famine
god of the bomb
god of superiority
god of the scarab
god of rendered lard
god of free-radicals
god of us vs. them

no—
you’ve made god
in the image of what
you’re not.

Sparkle Bird


I saw one of the fare-folk
With motley hair
And a magic all
Her own

Her eyes were
Glitter and
Kaleidoscopic
Microscopes that
Discerned
All my sins

I folded
Dozens of
Frenzied
Origami
Flowers

Gave them
To the wind
To deliver

For fear
I would frighten
Her away
Like some
Feral
Thing
If I
Approached

I would give it up—
All of it

For a chance
To be
Hers

Nathanael William Stolte is the author of three full length chapbooks, A Beggars Book of Poems, Bumblebee Petting Zoo, & Fools’ Song. He is the author of three mini chapbooks, 9 by N.W.S., 8 by N.W.S., & 7 by N.W.S. His poems have appeared in Ghost City Review, Guide to Kulture Journal, Five to One Magazine, & Plurality Press. He is a co-founder of CWPCollective Press. He is also co- founder of Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, a small band of young poets attempting to make literary poetry more approachable for the youths’. He was voted best poet in Buffalo by Artvoice, “Best of Buffalo” in 2016. He is a madcap, D.I.Y. Buffalo bred & corn-fed poet.

Ruby Anderson

After just 18 hours, newborns begin experiencing distress in the presence of distressed individuals


Emotional contagion begins when the newborn in your
neighborhood crib realizes that Dick Cheney profited from the
Iraq war, and you’ve not yet investigated, but your
tears fall with just the same socially-just ferocity

Years later, you are a baby with a queen-sized bed and your
Lover, your roommate, your mother all have some distress but
the emotional contagion becomes a sort of modest discomfort
A tight jaw, a date with Jameson, the reason you took up transcendental meditation
The psychological basis of any political campaign, the G-spot of suffering,
The research behind an intangible cure from a body language expert in a red tie
Who’s forgotten how to cross arms and point one finger,
Who wouldn’t pose a plan without a corresponding no-no list
that looks disturbingly similar to the other party’s preferences and it
becomes an obvious decision, it becomes as polarized
As support for “butt stuff,” and you never get a taste of the
Other end.

I was speaking with a newborn in a hospital the other day, an independent but
Leaning more towards libertarian socialism, and I asked her why
She stopped crying when the nearby baby was mournful or afraid
And she said, waaa ahhhh hee aaaaahwwaaaa-- a profound notion

Of course she would say that her developing intellect has nullified seemingly
Unjustified fears and that her father’s outspoken, high-brow detestation
Of organized religion has helped her understand the difference between
Baby and bundle of cells, and that a Youtuber baby’s constant “woke-ness,” despite a
Newborn’s typical 16 hours of sleep, has encouraged her to question that
Which seemed impossible for herself

Now, I’m a devout atheist, baby, but I do remember the pre-Confirmation era
The religious assembly I attended called, probably, Lucifer the Liberal
The pictures of flesh and blood, the Murdered child of God caption, the kind
And trustworthy man in the robe, whispering beliefs into my subconscious
I remember the conservative in me, stemming from fear, not stupidity
I remember when I couldn’t say abortion until I said pregnancy scare

We live in New York-- it’s easy to forget that liberalism is a minority
That resistance rests benignly on our skin, soaking up sunlight
That open-minded today may be cancerous tomorrow, that a young man will call
Us ignorant for using a term from 2016, that we will try and try to be the perfect
Liberals, but we were born with fear and emotional contagion
Into a world where Trump was just any large man with small hands

Ruby Anderson is a lover of learning, overcaffeinating and pounding fists to buoyant classical music.

Ed Taylor

STILL LIFE WITH GUERILLERA, PARADE


Ranks of metal
file down the frozen avenue,

the numb crowds mute
except for an old woman whispering

summer
until they come to silence her,

put out the fire

STILL LIFE WITH HOPE


there is a shine to things,
the street gleams with dying

sirens, & sudden muttering
from horns
brightens into light—
settle
into the river, this rushing
sinuous as the past

snaking away down the long
avenue, & the lone walker

on the phone apologizes,
laughs wait, I am coming,
don’t start without me,

please, now under the dark’s
first star

STILL LIFE WITH CURRENT EVENTS


a big machine growls outside
a lung breathing up what is
in the dark tunnels of water

there is heavy cutting
at the monuments

something brittle
something blurred
passing alone

a torso muffled
by satin overgarments
at the crossroad

& the graces doing
dirty work under
a bitter white star

STILL LIFE WITH RINK


Marzelle the girl is on ice,
being read to by a dancer.

Some lug on the bench
scratches his heel waiting
for a spin.
The speakers
seep something cheap—
white is so white in this dark

& there is another divorce
in the crazy eights
cut in the dull mirror
by your blade

Ed Taylor is the author of the novel Theo and the poetry collections Idiogest and The Rubaiyat of Hazmat. My stuff has appeared most recently in St. Petersburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Louisville Review, Gargoyle, Vestal Review, New World Writing, and elsewhere.

E. Kristin Anderson

It Looked Like Dancing


You laugh
or go crazy.

I thank that horror,
nothing else.

Laugh or cry—
who could cry
after laughter swelling?

You put hands up.
Running. Laughing.
Holding out arms.

I was a red streak
on the floor, faded.

You burst into tears.
I was ice and God.
Hammering

In the rain
electric panic
had doors open,
the water washing it away.

More uncertain than ever


The clutter of consciousness, all the dirt,
opened heavy past the heartbeat.

Last night the radio said your prayers, called back,
playing lips between heart and milk.

My shadow was seventeen, myself the root of story.
I’m the tricks I can’t even remember, the bee in spring.

I cut clumsy, a kindness, more than
the doorway to a second.

Dignity, so natural, was a wing, the other way,
mistaken for ill-starred destruction.

Sleep until gone


In the air, snakes pulled violet
across the water, never aware
that noise dropped below.

Looking over a halo, the boatman
was dead, raging, trapped on route,
high, stripped of bodies.

Prom-goers took the keys and
flooded out of the stomach, moaning.

Behind, the hill was a rag doll,
eyes ripped skyward, fluttering.

Lit by ruin: warm subways
hellish onward, robes moving the man,
hand around monster mouth.

All wet, light danced on water,
a room over the pool, going down,
catching morning around sleep.

Gone fantastic:
always somebody out that window.

Distaste


Do you need a ride?

We bubble over, all right,
fresh air the slip, a receptacle
for the scream.

Listen:
I know the loveable ceremonies,
the crazy-ass day still nursing a spell
open and dark.

They laughed. Always.
Down the debris went pink,
paper traumatic,
mother forgotten.

Bleeding to death, sharply,
until half an hour ago,
you began to guess.

Funny
how things fall over.

E. Kristin Anderson is the author of seven chapbooks including A GUIDE FOR THE PRACTICAL ABDUCTEE (Red Bird Chapbooks 2014) PRAY, PRAY, PRAY: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), 17 DAYS (ELJ Publications) ACOUSTIC BATTERY LIFE (ELJ 2016), FIRE IN THE SKY (Grey Book Press 2016), and SHE WITNESSES (dancing girl press, 2016). My nonfiction anthology, DEAR TEEN ME, based on the popular website, was published in October of 2012 by Zest Books (distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and my next anthologies, HYSTERIA: Writing the Female Body and COME AS YOU ARE (a 90s pop culture anthology) are forthcoming. I’ve worked at The New Yorker magazine, have a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College and I’m currently a poetry editor for Found Poetry Review and I also recently took a position working on special projects at ELJ. I’ve published poetry in many magazines worldwide, including Juked, Hotel Amerika, [PANK], Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cicada and I have work forthcoming in The Boiler and The Indianola Review. I grew up in Maine, live in Austin, Texas, and blog at EKristinAnderson.com.

NOTE: This are erasure poems sourced from Stephen King’s Carrie.