Johannes Göransson Do you think it’s easy to close a wound? To close the mouth of a wound? There is only one way: to go into the mirror and explode. Congratulations on your rotten body. Congratulation on your shredded mask. It looks like entrails on the wall, hanging from that obscene nail. Congratulations...
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~ a Journal of Literature and Art since 1971~
Poetry
from Sugar Book
CILGWYN ST MARYS
G.C. Waldrep These are the postures of pain, the mannequins pain makes of us. The mind’s crows settle in the midst of the thorny bush, little dark tongues of flame. It is difficult sometimes to relinquish that which resembles bone, say the scientists. Winter’s docents, strapped to gurneys in the hospital corridors, sleep...
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CURE
Sarah Cook (how do you prepare for anything?) the world makes days out of our knees learns to bleed / quietly the shoulder that lets into the light a long black dress generous / shoulders roll down like open windows overseas you bury the last moment of instinct little thumbs rolling...
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Kilter
Matthew Gilbert The search party’s joke goes, Nothing is lost in these woods except virginity. Mine went missing two days ago, disappeared hiking the Dakotas. Shirtless, outside the mosquito nets hung like wedding dresses, I examine the bites on my chest. I test the skin’s eaten charisma. The woods background like the self-help...
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Coretta Scott King as a Young Girl
Marianne Kunkel They tease about the fact that when I was growing up… I used to fight them, but then I would be the one who would become involved with the nonviolent movement. It feels good to be mean. It feels good to be mean to my sister, brother, my boy cousin who’s...
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Benth*OS
Joe Pan After failed attempts to temper the course set upon by man in nature, following violent earthquakes & floods, the great city sank beneath the ocean waves in a single day & night of misfortune. – P. Aristonson, History of the Great Atlantic Coastal Creep Miami Lost Apollo. Florida sunset....
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Swans Reflecting Elephants
Matthew Gilbert “ resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections.” -Salvador Dali, on his brother I was making the masks for your exorcism. Working on your face in hand-cut leather. Are you sure you want to get rid of me? They performed speech therapy on my sleep. You...
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YEAR OF THE POSSUM
S.Marie Clay Your stature suggests the sleep of a museum, fifty coffins piled into a single room; waxen figures with mouths furiously cut open, hair from possum’s shield, eyes sliced from poached eggs, those oblong white flags. The smell is what makes you real. Things go bad. When I was a grasshopper child,...
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A FORKED BRANCH WILL DIP WHEN IT PASSES OVER WATER
S.Marie Clay Let us talk about the blackness of heaven and winged bats. It is the back then I am after. Even though the past is a pregnant stove burning mutton, I want it. My daughter screams, the kitchen fills with lung. I place her near an open window. She knows something I...
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Soraya
Anis Shivani 1. I believe in licking riot grrrl power beads. I believe in ring-around-a-rosy to move the Mensheviks’ frozen mercury. I believe, Soraya, in Roman candles whose eidetic effusion kills the licensed goose. I believe in rodomontade among splashy waterfalls, cold water the spitting image of Thomism. (Thoth, messenger of pins, screw...
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