Baby Lawn Literature, May 2016 by Ashley Kay

Baby Lawn Literature is a free online literary magazine. All rights are reserved for the writers, poets, and artists featured. We just ask they give us what a kids call a shout out on the social networking sites.

May 2016 Issue 5, Volume 1

Editors Ashley Bach Rakim Slaughter Design Ashley Bach

Table of Contents Poetry Dissociation by Caitlin Plante……………………………………………………………...page 6 Poeticus Interruptus by Gareth WriterDavies……………………………………..page 8 Betweens by Perry L. Powell…………………………………………………………..…...page 9 Spied on at Work by Perry L. Powell…………………………………………………...page 10 Wearing by Perry L. Powell………………………………………………………………..page 11 Prose The Singing Tubes by Gregg Willard……………………………………………….….page 13 Contributors’ Notes ……………………………………………………………………….page 18

DISSOCIATION Caitlin Plante Dissociation of unsaid moods veiled in sharp ghostly uproars culminating in sailing trips of unlove pseudo sea simple lake dam(n)ed harrowing metal structure encasing railroad town beneath the feet of texas water follow the tracks where a penny lay singing words of love spent worlds flood water rushes to fill in the spaces long empty displaced nephilim silently screeching singing cacophonous waves bellowing from below the stench of decaying last lives escaping from the bottom of the water fish floundering missing jacob’s ladder 6

upstream to the marital bed the flea unborn smolt endangered undiscovered dying dead the wind smells of methane streams upon the sails ripples of wings warped in feathers bluebird whistle gone by

POETICUS INTERRUPTUS Gareth WriterDavies A pastiche of florid Victoriana She was nothing special; (Her own words) But I desired the pearl in the shell I wanted her sea to crash around my island rock I wanted her waves to beat the tidal clock I wanted to drown in her scouring flow I wanted to be gripped by her undertow And plunging fifty fathoms deep Follow her to a sailor’s sleep I now said she was a goddess; She denied it I felt she was being unduly modest I wanted to etch her face out of stars I wanted to hurl Venus into Mars I wanted her sun to burnish me I wanted to feel divine gravity And on an endless solar flight Follow her through perpetual night She said she’d get back to me

BETWEENS Perry L. Powell

When the time goes by, it goes back to the real beginning. The beginning is always the best place to hide. Of course, you and I do not know how to follow, how could we? There are more steps between any two numbers than we can walk. It is so easy to fall into what you cannot count.

SPIED ON AT WORK Perry L. Powell No doubt it makes you crazy; the days die one after another and you are left with remnants, a remnant… You say the wrong thing at meetings. You have your inappropriate thoughts. You want to be somewhere else even if somewhere else is nowhere at all. You put on your navy blazer and walk down the hall to leave: empty pockets in an elevator going down. Then there is traffic on the highway and the sun is more yellow than red.

WEARING Perry L. Powell

You can't hide from life― life will track you down. Though you rest alone in your room, quietly reading in your recliner, the phone will ring. there is a knock at the door, a letter arrives… Before you know: another foreign entanglement and there in the trenches, back on the beach, trying to keep your head down and your heart intact, life catches up with you and you must don its uniform.

THE SINGING TUBES GREGG WILLIARD Many children were just falling asleep in their new iron lungs when the polio vaccine arrived. The ILung children had trained eagerly, thrilled to join the special ones wrapped in cocoons of finelytooled silver, rubber and glass. Soon their fraternity would be decimated by the new vaccine scourge. The ILung ones were left to suffer the indignities of the sideshow freak, their illmaintained chambers quickly losing their shine, cleanliness and soft sighing pumps. Inside, the rotting gaskets would smell. No one knows when the ILung children withdrew. Previously their heads had been outside the chambers, doing the chatty, cheerful work of brand ambassadors for the German automotive company that manufactured their tubes. Suddenly they refused to come out, many covering their glass walls with opaque paint, duct tape, or pillowcases. No one knows how their air mixtures were infiltrated with nitrous oxide gas and marijuana fumes. Soon their despair became hilarity, euphoria, and zealous chant: “Death to the

boys and girls outside, life to those crewing ships of alternating intrathoracic pressures within!” Motorization and tube to tube communications brought a dancing polio world of gyrating, singing tubes. Sexual practices of older I.L.er’s involving manipulation of air pressure for autoerotic asphyxiation made a life in the tubes all the rage, and rental tube retreats promising sensual and spiritual rejuvenation au courant. Different factions among the I.L.er’s emerged for and against the tubes. A messianic counter movement led by a purported renegade Son of Salk preached that Jonas alone could liberate them from the prison of their condition. “He put himself and his family on the line! He injected himself, my mother, me and my brothers with the live polio vaccine! He could only do this knowing that he had the power not only to prevent the disease, but eliminate it from those already stricken! We can and will be cured tomorrow, or incinerate ourselves in a funeral pyre feed by pure oxygen!” It was never proven that the Son of Salk was a true I.L.’er. Such confirmation would have shown that the vaccine had, at least in this case, 14

failed to prevent the disease. Others claimed that the Son of Salk was a polio manqué, acting from some patricidal impulse to destroy Jonas and his legacy in an act of mass suicide. While all but a fanatic core of I.L.’ers managed to escaped selfimmolation the Son of Salk was claimed to have burned to a char. But some eyewitnesses say that as the flames consumed his tube he shot out of one end like a roman candle into a clear sky, laughing the high pitched squeal of a nitrous oxide high.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES CAITLIN PLANTE a young woman poet and resident of Denver, Colorado. Her poetry

explores ideas of identity, womanhood, environmental issues and it seeks to remember the past and understand how it affects every moment. GARETH WRITERDAVIES was shortlisted in for the Erbacce Prize and also been Highly

Commended for my series of love poems “Love and Darts” by the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize. He is based in Letchworth, Hertfordshire in the UK.

PERRY L. POWELL is a functioning systems analyst who lives near Atlanta and writes odd and other things in the evenings. He has been published in a number of online and hardcopy venues. GREGG WILLIARD had had his fiction and essays have been featured in decomP, Barge, Diagram and The Collagist. He also likes the pun. So there’s one.