Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University, Rome, Georgia. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and more than a dozen other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River magazine and more than sixty other publications.
Where every gram
of every human
inhabiting this place
is ground to dust
poured into cement
and mixed with the
water we only see
when it rains gray.
Gray that is hard
but is not rock
spreads over this
Earth we call home
and the land is
plotted out with
the width and height
of every human here.
Human sized
human sourced
boxes, we build
and we pave
and we build
with our waste
until we run
out of room.
Yet we come, we all come
here, because it must be here
and we pound
this pavement
thirsty, so thirsty
for something
we cannot see or hear
or smell, but we come
and we build our boxes up
until there’s no more light
until there’s no more
blue or green or brown
and gray is all we have in sight.
So we wait, we all wait underground
and we close our eyes to air that rushes but is not wind
and we sit or we stand in place, not moving
while something else moves us
waiting for someone to move us
because it must be here…
Jenny Keto is a writer and actress born, raised, and currently living in Austin, Texas. She graduated with a B.A. in Theater from the University of Texas at Austin and acted regionally until wanderlust bit her. As a life experiment, Jenny moved to NYC just shy of turning 30. After the city taught her what she needed to learn, Jenny returned home to switch gears and become a nurse. She looks forward to the prospect of helping people for a living. Her first publication can be seen in the upcoming web publication of Painted Cave Literary Journal.
Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for this poem.
Editor’s Note: “He Realized that the City was an Abstraction” was originally published at Gnarled Oak Magazine.
W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage(wjacksavage.com). To date, more than fifty of Jack’s short stories and over eight-hundred of his paintings and drawings have been published worldwide. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.
FREETOWN
We struggle to negotiate
mid-morning traffic,
not just cars
but a half-naked drunk
stumbling across the road,
a horse-drawn cart,
and heedless children hauling goats.
At the red light.
homeless men heave forward,
a ragtag army of open palms
going car to car
until the light turns green.
Windows down,
we risk the beggars
but enjoy the scents of
plantains fried in palm oil,
the exotic aroma
of crain-crain and okra
stirred in a large pot.
Our travel is a series of glimpses:
an artisan carving lions and rhinos out of stone,
children munching on
butter-soaked cassava bread
as they shamble into school.
We pass out of the city,
skirt the ocean by road,
watch dazzling painted fishing boats
ride high on the waves.
This world comes no closer
nor does it keep its distance.
It appears here, there,
as if for benefit
of a foreign couple
in a rented car
for whom West Africa
is only slightly less myth now
than the moment we arrived.
FREETOWN
A young boy waves
from the side of the rough bumpy road.
It might be a welcome.
He could be warning us off.
Travel’s like peeling away
the baffling, the strange.
until what you’re left with
is nothing but ignorance.
PLANET CHILD
glow-in-the-dark-stars
stuck to the bedroom walls –
I stretched out my arm
to try to hold light –
the dark was ominous
the stars were well-intended
and they needed no prompting
to shine my way –
tacky yes
but almost beautiful –
I believed in them
as I did in the ones
who glued them into place –
intimate flashlights,
precious objects
of permanent fire –
a wall-paper galaxy
no universe
should be without –
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. He has recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.
Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for this poem.
The Monument
The newest skyscraper offends with its defiant geometry inscribed in brutal planes and striations. The graveyard looks up and pleads. The last tourist drops on all fours and scrabbles in the dirt. He’s eating clods, spitting out the grass and swallowing the earth. It doesn’t matter who planted this garden of graves, or why the dead lie head to feet, feet to head. Only the glistening skin of the skyscraper can repel the relevant ghosts. Only its acute and unlikely angles can situate the suffering tourist in time and space. But he refuses to look up and enjoy the spectacle of a sneer of glass slicing the pure hard rind of the moon. Such gelatinous events occur almost every night, now that the President has re-elected. Maybe when the criminal charges toughen into bedrock, when the petroglyphs become more legible, everyone will learn to more convincingly blame everyone else. The graveyard sighs a modest but apocalyptic sigh as it ingests the tourist. When he awakens at home in the next century his hands will smell of dead heroes, and his feet will have petrified to agate. Someone will say, I told you so; but the skyscraper with its awkward stance will dominate still, its windows oozing spectrums the human eye can’t process or even detect.
The Current State of Matter
Expensive watches grimace
in a shop window so pricey
a security guard drools on it.
Fresh from the dimmest fusions,
I drift past with open pores.
Every neuron feels alit.
Every sentence seems too short
to describe the caffeine moment
when books I’ve read all my life
kick in with unearthly roar.
Sleek and seamless adolescents
sporting smartphones like rhinestones
chatter past in clots of flesh
a carnivore would tooth to rags.
Nothing edible for someone
of my persuasion, however.
Nothing but a stutter of goods—
expensive sunglasses, flimsy shoes,
jewelry pimpled with evening gloss.
I’ve walked so far my shoes fit
more firmly than ever, my hands
have swollen with tired blood.
Too many troubles converge
in this corridor of storefronts,
skyscrapers lilting overhead.
How much shine can I withstand
before my bones soup themselves
in whimpers of yellowish birth?
Those born digital recall
nothing of the egg. Their lives
elongate before them like shadows
thrust from the heart of the moon.
The books I’ve read all my life (Stanza Break)
need not apply. Competing
shadows of tall buildings duel
in the fiery dark, and sales clerks
hover over powerful goods
no one has the moral power
to either purchase or refuse.
This Possum Hour
You say you’re nocturnal like
a possum. Remember that Pound
called Eliot Possum, meaning
the creature that plays dead
rather than express emotion.
At two AM the avenue
plays dead. The sidewalks curl
like lips. The tame trees planted
to shade dog walkers and pimps
defy lamplight with gloomy leers.
I should to describe you sitting up
in bed reading the bible
with the faintest hissing sound
like sand singing in an ebb tide.
Downstairs chuckling over puns
while you become too serious
to tease to life with sex, I picture
the mall leafless, cushioned with snow,
but the June night embraces me
with an argument I won’t refute.
Maybe when the shops creak open
and the famous hairdresser arrives
with his little moustache tingling,
maybe when the sailboats cream
the basin in the first big hour
of daylight the summer will seem
summer enough to enhance us.
But at this possum hour the cries
of dreaming dogs remind me
that so much has gone up in smoke
or fog or mist or unraveled ghost
that the trees have no cause to sneer,
and the bible you’re reading
may or may not falsify
the reckless history of our souls.
Your Favorite Tree Looming
At dusk in the public gardens
small, medium, and large dogs
off-leash speed across the lawns,
ears flapping. Propped on a bench
with your favorite tree looming
we merge into a single mass.
Einstein predicted warps in space
and time as energy flows
around large gravitational fields.
What about smaller entities
like a pair of seventy-year-olds
crushed together by the pink
of a fading sky? The glamor
of this hustling city passes
at a distance, a creature flowing
in a skein of yellow silk,
its assorted bling clinking.
A footfall shaped like a series
of grotesque errors tracks us
to our bench, smiles upon us,
and clomps off, dragging one foot.
Surely nothing in the bible
explains the parsing of souls
through digital processing.
Yet faces lit by smartphones
look ennobled, if sculpted in lard,
their spiritual excess burned off.
How long do we have to recline
with our senses bubbling before
the light fails so completely
that whatever wants to devour us
can approach without a whisper?
We refuse to move. The last cloud
sheds its colors. Your tree thickens
to warp us into a shadow
so deep we’ll have to escape it
like clambering out of a well
with the entire world watching
to see how naked we’ve become.
The Street of Many Spices
On the Street of Many Spices
only one toilet functions.
All night I hear it crying
down the sewers, plaintive notes
crumpling in the slush. The dead
of this long street congregate
at every corner. Tatters
of cigarette paper stick
to their lips. Their lack of breath
reeks of the rooms they occupied
before coughing up what passes
in most religions for a soul.
The local religion, however,
describes that emanation
not as soul but toxic gas,
and warns that inhaling it condemns
the victim to uncertainties
like lost wallets, passports, and keys.
I stay in my room after dark
and drink the local vino
and watch the one TV station
with sitcoms in several languages,
none of which anyone around here
speaks or understands. The creak
of giant footfall prowls the street.
I keep the curtains drawn and hope
the glow of TV doesn’t tempt
whatever skulks out there
to clamber through my window
and push its ugly face to mine.
Maybe when dawn arrives I’ll run
to the grocery for orange juice and milk.
I’ll pretend that living on this street [stanza break]
is like living anywhere, the stink
of the one toilet stoking a blue
flame many stories tall, mocking
or maybe commemorating
the functions of the body
none of us love anymore.
William Doreski recently retired after years of teaching at Keene State College in New Hampshire (USA). His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.
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Growing up in various small towns in Kansas, I’d lived a life wrapped in the gauzy imagination that insists the “real” America is comprised of white Christians. Our neighbors were Catholics or Methodists, Lutherans or Baptists. I had exactly one Jewish playmate throughout my childhood. But then I left for college.
Meneese Wall’s graphic poster art showcases man’s footprint on our planet along with the implications of our daily choices to change our experiences of life.
Through artwork that incorporates jocularity, parody, satire, and/or social commentary, Wall’s posters spotlight today’s truths and suggest ideas we each can implement to make a difference. More of Wall’s creative dexterity can be seen on her website www.meneesewall.com.
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Blaze Vox, Matchbook, and elsewhere. His latest collection of poetry/prose isFuture Wars from Another New Calligraphy. He loves 50s Sci-Fi movies, manga comics, and pre-punk garage bands of the 60s.
I.
The only thing I’d feared
in the west was the cold
der Graue Stadt swaddling us in winter, my chest shuddered
as I breathed my scarf hot, wiggling wool-socked toes in boots
cars slicking down ice-platted streets and buses
sighing their unending exhaust as the first flakes fell
the slow-moving water that waited below frozen facade
as my brother and his friend parted glass branches
with ungloved fingers, laughter echoed through darkened trees,
through my shouts of protest, sneakers to pond’s edge,
closer to the other side when the glazed surface cracked
and my heart stopped cold —
until my hand found a branch to pull them ashore.
II.
I thought I knew what fear was
until the train to Sachsenhausen
my teacher’s wrinkled finger across pursed lips, whispered
reden sie bitte nicht auf English, es ist unsicher.
I looked from face to blurred face, city stops full of dark
winter figures, to fields and rural platforms
blanketed in snow. Neonazi?…Neonazi? I wondered,
pulling my jacket collar close.
III.
It wasn’t until I was older that I understood
some walls are never gone
remnants of bright eighties cheapness, posters on posters
outside construction sites grown wild with weeds,
rusted Trabbis and 99 Luftballons and Goodbye, Lenin!
Nina Hagan’s lipsticked mouth dangling a cigarette.
I no longer fear the Deutschpunks with neon-spiked hair
all-black and combat boots, headphones blaring Rammstein
a decade of freedom from Stasi and wires beneath wallpaper
der Mauer that once constrained them sold in pieces
at souvenir shops, a generation shouting
we are here,
we are still here.
Kara Cochran is a writer, editor, and instructor. She holds an MFA from Rosemont College and a BA in English Creative Writing and German Studies from Denison University. She teaches English Composition at Temple University, Widener University and Delaware County Community College. Kara is also the former Managing Editor of Rathalla Review, the Assistant Program Director at Philadelphia Stories Junior, and a Mighty Writers workshop teacher, volunteer, and mentor. Her poems and craft essays can be found in Schuylkill Valley Journal, flashfiction.net, and Fiction Southeast, and she tweets from @philawriter.
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FRANKLIN AVENUE IN 2015
Two years ago, we would drink tall beers
hidden in black, plastic bags ’til we passed
from laughter, fluttered to fill
our glasses with more.
There would have been more pages
to turn, but none of us spoke our
human language anymore.
Now, a browned frond slumps
between parked cars.
Two teenagers flirt
underneath a palm. Whispered leaves
are fragile– each movement
a link to the next
until it is not.
Their laughs reverberate
when they, too, part. Uncork
those swan bottles–
let them go, graceful
into night.
NOMADS
I know you want to leave, to take a bus
out of Columbus, to fight your battle
in Seattle, or Denver, or wherever
your heart may lead–
to be a nomad is to go
where the landscape dreams,
and to scrunch it all in your hand
like wisps of dandelion in the wind,
and in your palm its feathery white
is dissolution–
however far you go, know those you meet
will occupy the room in the tiny hostel
of your heart, sharing wisdom and laughter
despite however many days we spend apart.
TEETH, EGGS, AND THE CITY LIMITS (OR: TINDER)
our short harmony brushes my teeth
flosses the ridges bending eating
at me the yellowy plaque on white
the yolks in morning how inside
we are tender sunny side up I love
the way you look at me those
runny eyes gushing off the pan
onto black-and-white tile floor
grids the burgeoning cities
in our minds cars read
the streetlights’ caution
as go, go, go . .
1ST & DELAWARE
wandered along the avenue to find Kurt
sitting at the mountain of a three-step staircase
don’t come up here he laughed
but the neighborhood spun faster
than the blue room I escaped
so I continued to High along the alleys
of wafting leaked gasoline and nectars
of dried roses this was not spring
but the cold allowed me briskly hack time
in a direction indicating forward
where I pleat the confines of the sidewalk’s
imaginary boundaries I drifted from
but felt motionless and free
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE WESTSIDE PAVILION BRIDGE
I.
stationary at the couch by the window over the street the cars move unseen beneath me in lines in some complex order that means they don’t crash into each other the sound of engines is replaced with repetitive 4/4 pop music snare singer pleading for her lover to return but in Los Angeles who do you return to
II.
locks click from storefront doors a Chinese family appears from behind the off-white pillar the mother in loose pink flowy shirt and dress takes a photo in front of the window her daughter in a white-and-red striped shirt her husband in a blue-and-pink striped shirt so much pink so many binding stripes and the mother captures that lone moment the sky a tender backdrop
III.
a grandma walks a black stroller and makes a soft kind of train noise shh guh shh guh in syncopated beats as she travels in circles the rolling sound of the stroller-like luggage in an airport constant whir her mouth a muted hi-hat to some imaginary beat on her third pass-by the baby in pink stirs and she stops her mouth’s percussion and tends to the baby who is absolutely quiet but lifts her arm in the air silhouette to the window of the world cookies-and-cream loose leggings
IV.
a man in his fifties eats macha ice cream alone near Dillard’s walks in front of a blonde man in a cowboy hat water bottle in hand hair tying his shoelaces the ice cream man on the other side of the window underneath the Westside Center sign stares at his reflection he moves from the window bits of cone now lodged in his graying mustache
V.
the green palms reflected on the speckled cream floor ripples in a pond that blew so gently outside a man with twenty hands and countless fingers dances and puppeteers
VI.
two Mexican women with glowing purses hanging on their right shoulder walk in near-unison one just a half-step ahead until the fast one stops to fix her shoe before walking into Nordstrom glass door squealing open at its most open it sounds like a bad brake on a car the other keeps walking
VII.
older man in a reddish shirt has a chocolate cone at 11:45pm and stands on the wide black stripe on the floor in front of the imposing silver pillar that splits in the middle like a buttcrack he stands licking staring forward at TVs that advertise movies now playing in the theaters of his daydreams
VIII.
half of the iPhone billboard outside would be indiscernible half white space stubs of fingers touching green fabric in a lazy V the space below it a half-globe of nothing the squeaking of shoes slowly silence the man in blue beneath as he does not even notice I watch as he tucks his manila folder under his left armpit
IX.
mountains are indiscernible from buildings in the distance curved with specks of white that hint at strange windows or a deepening mist that seem to want to envelop the rest of us and how do we know it won’t
X.
a faraway pedestrian timidly crosses the intersection illegally she slows but proceeds and from my vantage point she crosses to the smell of the soy in the pad see ew that steams in front of me
XI.
the light which hangs above these walls of shades of gray is latticed in spiderweb I cannot tell if the gentle sway-shaking is imaginary or earthquake all these little triangles hovering jittering above me I wonder if this is how the universe actually moves or what it truly looks like
XII.
upside-down reflections of walking legs move as the inverse of walking and sway with a sexy air voluminous breeze parting moving away in a regal but ultimately aimless sashay
James Croal Jackson is a writer, musician, and occasional filmmaker whose work in film and TV in Los Angeles led to a rediscovery of his love of poetry. His poems have appeared in magazines including The Bitter Oleander, Lines+Stars, and Cosmonauts Avenue. He is the winner of the 2016 William Redding Memorial Poetry Prize via The Poetry Forum. He lives in Columbus, Ohio. Visit him at jimjakk.com.
Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for this poem.
THE CITY KEY 