Journal

Let’s Say It’s Tuesday

A small town under examination.
It occupies the corner of a memory,
where time’s sawdust accrues
and spiders entertain visions.

A camera cranes in a high arc.
We see each slat and eave.
We tumble through doorsills,
tap on windows, slump against walls.
For the sake of argument
let’s say it’s Tuesday, long after dark,
midnight creeping along.
Summer has ended and autumn hit hard,
the last of the strangers departing
for the cities’ wider boulevards.

And let’s suggest there’s music,
the intertext of subtle ambiance,
a light wind chortling,
none of which is noticed
by those pressed listlessly to their slumber,
surfacing rarely from the deep waters
of sleep’s sanctions, actors
in a part but forgetting their lines
and the play long closed.
And the theatre darkened.

 

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press), ‘Like As If” (Pskis Porch), and Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

Mexican Fever Dream

The lack of you
unbearable

My tea cold
My feet cold

My sleep cold
My mind mushy

Five minutes out of
an hour I get relief

and then my eyes
yank open.

I’ve been eating avocado for a week
I dry the seeds; I grind the seeds
I mix the seeds; I drink the seeds

I see you in a delirium
Me bathed in red

You swooping across the frozen Lerma River
With me in tow… laughing as we fall

I scurry up to the top of a mesa
Where I see the mountain lion stalk

It’s you. It’s you!

Josh Medsker‘s writing has appeared in many publications, including: Contemporary American Voices, Haiku Journal, Red Savina Review, and Virga. For a complete list of Medsker’s publications, please visit his website (www.joshmedsker.com)

The Vegetarian Dismembers a Chicken

There’s no good way to do it,
snapping the ribs under the delicate
breast, shoulder bones and their pearl ends.
I’d rather this went faster.

But the wings that moved a little,
if it ever had room to run,
refuse to come away. The knife and I
together can barely bruise a leg
backward as if a car had nailed it.

And here, the heart like a slender thumb
and the lobed liver, wet as pudding,
but shaped with a strange intelligence.

It’s a world of sacrifice: the cat
to the coyote, the deer to the boulevard,
damp hands of steam pushing the windows,
my mother asking for the one last thing
she might be able to taste. It’s April,
and the surgeon showed us the shadow
while outside the clinic, lilacs popped
their innocent heads against the fence.

Betty Turbo’s life as a Maker of Things began in a family of very artistic grizzly bears in the snowy wilds of Alaska. She earned a BFA in photography from RIT, got down and dirty with a stint at Hatch Show Print in Nashville, spun sugar and beaters as a cake decorator, for a brief moment, before focusing full-time on art shenanigans from her headquarters in Oregon. This painting is another from her Green Series. To see more of her fine art paintings, cards, posters, pins, and other glorious paraphernalia, go to Betty Turbo.com. or to Betty Turbo on Etsy.

5 Years

in my head
I’m not vegan
or even
a vegetarian really,
but still
I don’t eat meat
or drink dairy much,
not until no alternative
presents.
vegetables are cheap
and bread is cheap
and food to me
is just fuel
and a source
for vitamins,
not flavour. I do it
for the few extra
euros in my pocket
and to exist
in a stream
of knowing I’m not hungry. I still kill flies
and set traps for rats
and if I had a cat
that would get
steak every morning.
nonetheless
I don’t see why
the idea is so bad. maybe
when gay rights
and racism are sorted out
that really will be
the next battle. it’s only a matter
of time
after all. I give us
5 years
to get it all done
to my satisfaction
and move on to animals,
but then I’m white,
very cheap
and optimistic.

DS Maolalai has been published on 3 continents and in more places than he can count. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press and he has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

My Child Asks About Landing

You’ll see our plane get closer and closer
to the ground, and then the Lion will help
with two bounces and a roar with which
we can sing along, two bounces and then
a long feline growl, so we are ready when
Kahului spreads beneath us, the worrisome
clatter erased with our chant and rumble
as we laugh into Maui’s moist heaven,

a private joke we still reprise arriving
anywhere, Barcelona or Oakland – God,
how young we were – long before our faith
could rest on the small pebbles of calculus
the Lion was our rock – bounce, bounce, roar
I still tell myself sliding safely back home,
an impromptu balm for a child now my own
prayer of arrival, that touchstone, that abode.

 

George Perreault has been a visiting writer in Montana, New Mexico, and Utah.  His 4th collection, Bodark County, is comprised of voices of character living on the Llana Estacado in West Texas.