SF&D | NOV/DEC [Wrap Up] by Deadly Chaps Press

SF&D | Short, Fast, and Deadly Nov/Dec 2012 | [Wrap-Up]

Joseph A. W. Quintela | Senior Editor Sarah Shmitt | Poetry Editor Chris Vola | Chapbook Reviewer

Published by Deadly Chaps Press www.deadlychaps.com www.shortfastanddeadly.com DCsf&d2012 | 11/12

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heme

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Rich Larson | forensics

sometimes after you left I found your shampoo hanging sweet pockets in the bathroom hall, a strand too long / too dark on the white tabletop from when you pulled your hair from this side to the other, but that was weeks ago and evidence decays so time of death is hard to determine.

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Scott Thomas Smith | Case #19 - Angels in Space Suits

The trick with dealing with the mindless (and the depraved). Is to realize that they might not want to be saved. (Not sure a coincidence that rhymed). The idea of vast conspiracy to create walking pasquinade of sterile zombie lovers, to create in the mind the doubt that one can feel authentic, is just an excuse for the great pay day when we can blow our paychecks on falling in love.

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Catfish McDaris | He Listened To Too Much Elvis

Listening to the radio on the way to work today The news reported a man who killed one fellow & fired four shots at another, the altercation took place because they stepped on his foot His problem seemed obvious to me.

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Grant Kittrell | Raisin

His mother always told him he’d turn into a grape—he’d eaten only grapes since he was seven—and when he finally did he was standing on the Atlantic shoreline with a basket of fried chicken in his hands, smoking a cigarette, watching the waves break when in an instant he shrunk and fell as a grape into the sand, where he shrieked and he shriveled until a seagull swooped by, picked him up and carried him to heaven.

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Brad Rose | A Stabbing

Changed my prints, moved eleven times, learned to blend in with the crowd. But there’s always something coming, no matter how good you get at looking over your shoulder. In my front pocket, I worry the rosary of two copper-tipped bullets. At 42nd St., a man with a scar scrawled across his forehead approaches. As he nears, his fog-gray eyes meet mine. I'm dead certain I can hear him ticking. "Don’t be ridiculous," I reassure myself, "bombs don’t tick."

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Bayard Tarpley | From the Desk of Det. Geoff Norton

Case #: 337 - 06/23/1983 Victim? - F. K. Brown Suspect - N/A Victim, aged 86, found in home, deceased in living room chair. Slight blood residue on fingers. Paramedics judged heart attack as cause of death. Further investigation found message, "Not Natural" written in blood under victim's chair (photo attached). Blood not victim's.

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Elissa Gordon | Whaddaya Think This Is, The Big Sleep?

With gams like that she didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t to wait long to get my attention. I listened. She leaned forward, a bracelet glinted as she dropped $500 on my desk. Coffee, cigarettes gone 2 hours, only thing I had a surplus of was a shortage of sleep. Sitting vigil in a cold dark car for 5 hours before any lights went on at the house, front door slammed, 3 big guys got into a big sedan. Now, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re all winding down the hills.

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Gary Clifton | Dead Certain

Dear Chief: Photos of thirteen dead fools who'd tried to rob Kamanski's Pawn decorated the front window. Homicide sent McCoy and Harper. Fourteen's head splattered across the threshold, pistol beside him. Yellow tape circled Fifteen on the sidewalk. "Told them sumbitches they was makin' a mistake," Kaninski had survived Auschwitz. "One barrel each." "Bad News, dude," Harper said. "One out front ain't shot. Heart attack...I think." "Damn," the old man said. Homicide Sergeant.

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Phil Lane | Why I Shot the Neighbor

His bulbous head fills the peephole, not to mention his globular stomach, vapid gaze and asinine, shit-eating grin. Every morning, I hear him harrumph out of bed and clop to the shower, where he sings â&#x20AC;&#x153;Stairway to Heavenâ&#x20AC;? in a terrible falsetto. He frumps down the sidewalk like a slug, carrying a bag that leaks milky liquid. The smell of strange meat oozes out of his apartment. He glows with inane confidence: an almost radioactive pomposity. He wears a visor and Capri pants.

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Amos Damroth | Stranger

The tall man rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. The trench coat he was wearing was two sizes too short and one size too wide. It stretched tightly over his shoulders like a rug, falling to his ankles, and allowing far too much empty space in the waist. It didn’t fit right, it didn’t feel right, and it didn’t look right, but that didn’t matter to him. All he needed was not to be recognized and he was doing that well. Shadows danced off the buildings and neon streetlights dotted the sidewalk.

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Michael Brantley | Train

I can tell you what didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen. I did not catch the train to go home. I did not get married, have children and live in a cul-desac. I did not have an affair with my secretary. I did not get the corner office. Or the salary that went with it. I did not have the beach house or the heart attack. I did not die in a sterile white room alone. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s to the train I missed.

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Bruce Harris | Steak Out

He sat for four hours in his beat up Chevy, watching the pair enjoying filet mignon, wine, bread and dessert while he, with a bad back, a private copper on a stake out making barely enough money to feed himself and his dog, fingered the worthless $2.00 tin City Police badge that had looked so good on the ancient cereal box from a company in Battle Creek, MI. He shook his head. He should have known better back then.

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eaturing

Leslee Rene Wright | Statement // Leslee Rene Wright | Photograph // Leslee Rene Wright | The Case Against Smoking // Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Mysterious Coils // Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Fake Picasso // Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Vanishing Blonde // Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Speluncean Explorers // Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

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Leslee Rene Wright | Statement

A lot of what I write is a mystery. In this case, I began with titles; some were actual titles of mystery novels; some were titles of persuasive articles; some I made up because I—for mysterious reasons—liked them. With a lot of writing and art, the title clues you to the theme or subject (unless the title is Untitled). In this case, the title informed theme or subject, often in ways that I didn’t expect—I never anticipated writing about Gertrude Stein, but there she is. Sadly, Alice couldn’t make it.

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Leslee Rene Wright | Photograph

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Leslee Rene Wright | The Case Against Smoking

We got together to watch the state burn. We couldn’t get close enough to roast marshmallows so we smoked them instead, and later, when I licked your neck, you tasted like smoke, too. At once I missed your old flavor, salt and damp cedar, even the tang of sweat. You didn’t miss mine—it had been tepid and floral, too clean to be true. The smoke thickened while you gobbled your fill. We parted ways under a fox-colored sky, moon bathing us in light that was like church. Believe me when I say I was ravenous.

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Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Mysterious Coils

The Kraken has us cornered in the museum. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been stalking us all summer, busting up our lobster salad picnics. We fled while wearing our bibs, only tiny forks for protection. Then there was that ruckus at the pool. After that, we knew it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t his coils we feared, but those eyes, big as revving snow tires, starved for a companion. Quick, lure him to the gift shop while I find a whale or an ancient ship, some ice-age relic he can drag into the atrium for a few minutes in heaven, for his plunge back into dark.

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Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Fake Picasso

Gertrude didn’t recognize the man who shoved macarons into the hole beneath his moustache. In profile, he had a single azure eye, a demure half-lip. He laughed and spat crumbs on the divan. He painted her without permission, rendering her forehead high and haughty, like a monk’s, the rest of her swathed in black and reclining in a room so dark that she felt herself being swallowed up, her bright outline smudged and obscured. It might not look like you now, he said, but don’t worry. It will.

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Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

What were you doing by the dock? Lanterns grazed her cheek and in the clumsy light she was lean, the mist revolving her hair. And why were you covered in water? Something like sweat beaded over her lips, which were red as foretold, and shook in the telling. What of the uniform you wore? If you had her alone, she might ask you send her to war, as you did her brothers, her father. And whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that weapon in your hand? Pearls plucked easily as men, and hearts that breed in a drop of brine, so hostile and sweet.

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Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Speluncean Explorers

We take tools and root around the earth’s sockets, and wager on what once plugged the cracks. You put five on dinosaur mansion. I put ten on the biggest diamond ever, which was hit by a comet and burst into all the diamonds we have today. It gets painful, that void. We want the company of vampire bats, a solo in Bigfoot’s soulful baritone. Instead: everything drips, stalactites glitter like bones. Then we realize that the cave is a fish swallowing another fish, and we’re too far gone to feel the gulping.

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Leslee Rene Wright | The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

How you know she’s a villain: lips carmine, apples the color of apple, eyebrows arched to escape the face for good. Somewhere a beauty mark, flirting like a blown kiss. And the hair—coils of reliable rope, good for sailor’s knots and hauling around traps. She’s a champion for trips North, all white drowning around a dark blemish, and her shapely breath: is it fire or ice that built it? You want to read her like a book, black ink on stark paper, but it ends so quickly. Better make it black ink, black paper.

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oncept

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Camille Griep | Great Divide

In old paintings, the land was shaped just so--cradling our collective dreams. If it were ourselves, our own hearts we'd painted, they'd be as purple as the mountains' majesty. Half the hearts followed the blue oceans, a coastline of song. The rest stayed to work in the red sun, to build the new and the brave. They dismiss our music. We eschew their sculpture. All of us fail to write the great American novel.

//translated from â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Gift Outright.â&#x20AC;? by Robert Frost//

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Camille Griep | Good Neighbors

My parents' neighbor is at their door with a Valentine gift. I answer, tell her my father died last week. She hadn't heard. She's so sorry that cupcakes slip to the ground. My mother keeps the gate between their yards closed, as if the cats and kids and hockey pucks might not find a way over, under. As if our grief wouldn't seep through. As if we could hide it under a rock, a groundswell of sorrow and pink frosting.

//translated from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mending Wallâ&#x20AC;? by Robert Frost//

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J. Fossenbell | Are Copper Her Lips Wire

Bootleg drinkers fog gleaming globes. Lamp-posts licker like in sway, the whisper yellow. Against and be beads, breath bright, globes let me, moist yellow. Are insulate main power-house. Telephone that the wires (and billboards, corridors, dewy down of her play softly up words) are incandescent lips. Mine press, remove tape, then till tongue they with your.

//translated from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Caneâ&#x20AC;? by Jean Toomer//

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J. Fossenbell | Sinking Dead Down

A diver’s helmet house monstrous Rhobert wears. As banty bowed because child His legs rickets. Shaky. He is way down. Air, antennae, dead house like prop, Rods stuffed the thing up. He is way down. He is sinking dead down. Him, His house is that thing weights. Compresses him, is Life microscopic, murky, that water wiggling, Compresses. Crush head it minute pulled out, that would. Being drawn is Life, off that water.

//translated from “Cane” by Jean Toomer//

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Michael Chaney | English-to-English

What Tommy Stearns Eliot meant when he said “I wish I were a pair of ragged claws” is Eat my human heart out, won’t you please, for these carpet-tunneled typewritten hands cracking dawn before Lloyds Bank give me the bends as my Vivid batlady snores up straightjacketed sheep bleating ten pound notes against the bed post; it means I’m so shanty shanty assbad that if I wrote a scuttled clause it’s cuz I wanted to.

//translated from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Elliot//

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Stefka Benisheva | Newspaper Memorial

At the very bottom of the last page, where no reader ever reaches and the comma button is beyond repair, words were arranged as it follows: A man/ once handsome and tall/ died two weeks ago. Phlebas the Phoenician drank too much water and forgot to breathe meanwhile.

//translated from â&#x20AC;&#x153;Death by Waterâ&#x20AC;? (The Waste Land) by T. S. Eliot//

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Elissa Gordon | Rapture

Silly, secular me, “post-Rapture care for pets”, not an article about after the exuberance fades, After the "rapture" of choosing a pet wears off, and responsibility of daily care sinks in. As if I could ever tire of that black cat brought in from the rain, what an idea! Misinterpretation of the headline reading: sadness, like discovering the lyrics you’ve been singing are much better than the actual words to a song.

//translated from headline: “Post-Rapture Care for Pets“ by Karen Datko on the MSN website, Tue, May 10, 2011 4:22 PM//

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Diane Solis | What’s-In-a-Word

She never holds back except when it counts, when she’s giving, or not, from the heart. Doesn’t like the word Tender. Says it’s her least favorite, like canned and sardines. Authentic is okay. She can talk her way around that one. But nothing scares her more than True. That one is a hopscotch sonofabitch, a million jelly fish washed up on shore–and she in her bare feet and all, miles from the jetty, more from her car.

//translated from the “Merriam Webster Dictionary”//

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ord Art

Tony Rickaby | Turning Orders

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Tony Rickaby | Turning Orders

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Robin Wyatt Dunn | Translate

Give it a push and make it sing; trap it under our houses. I can hear it breathing. The noose, the noose, give it the noose! Oh my God it has a universe inside. Going up! Going up . . . I said . . . I’m going up . . . and who is that in there, that little weevil who is snacking on my rhymes and maps? Why does he think that language is a game, hasn’t he seen me crying? Stretch it out and carry it across the water. I feel the neighbor’s need like coming thunder.

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Mark James Andrews | 1926

Papa drops The Sun citing Ecclesiastes. Truthing simple declarative. Reductive pratfalling the running bulls with nympho stroking absent cock as Lolly Willowes empowers gender, a witch by vocation, while the breakout Pooh Bear in the 100 Acre Wood never smooshes curmudgeonly Eeyore. Nothing canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be fixed with honey pot & Mississippi Showboat.

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Mark James Andrews | 1953

Indiscriminate ironic apertures in View-Master stereoscope. CLICK. Olympia Press launches, tricking out Avant Porn; Plexus, Justine (or The Misfortunes of Virtue) & Fanny Hill. CLICK. Postnuke-dystopia & F-Bomb-Bradbury-451 gives new meaning to “Fireman.” CLICK. DEATH BY POETRY: Dylan T. enrages the liver at White Horse Tavern. Going comatose at St. Vincent’s Dr. Morphine is administered. CLICK. Sylvia P.’s trial run fails in Beantown. 2nd Prize Electro-Convulsive treatment bestowed in Boston hospital.

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Mark James Andrews | 1997

Goddamn Modelizers & Toxic Bachelors. Nevermind the variegated species of chick-lit Sex & the Shitty. Bespectacled Wizard Boy advances the 7 Novel Plan before being bonfire burned by Ned Flanders. (Coincidental (?)). Czech holy fool Bohumil Hrabel is closely observed by trains taking dancing lessons for the advanced in age. Falls to his death. Bulovka hospital in Prague. Feeding pigeons off the 5th floor.

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Kevin Maus | Will Wont

Will puts his hand in his pants to fetch a wet bunch of nut while watching women, wearing red vinyl garters and Lady Justice blindfolds with the eyes cut out, throat holster a giant black urgency. Will self-loathingly dispatches of his nut in a pupilar shit-can. A bottle of hog gland sass is before him; he drinks of it deeply. He lights a death wish and takes blue draws of aril smoke and flips on the psychotoons.

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Ray Scanlon | Fourth of July

The eve, I dice cucumbers; full moon, a wood thrush near, and fireworks next town over. Independence Day, the guy with fifty tractors and lawn mowers in his yard is closed, MY PLACE MY RULES spray-painted on his barn. Ice-cream man blares Dopplershifting "Turkey In The Straw." Eleven-year-old next door shrieks a sincere "I hate you!" at her mother. Black and bold orange monarch tacks randomly past me. Red Sox lose.

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Ray Scanlon | Backlit

This morning I'm the first of my peeps to hold down a porch chair, and I'm pretty damn pleased about it. Our B&B neighbor heaves to on the veranda, where I rusticate with book and passable coffee. Despite my New England introvert aura, our exchange escalates from "good morning" to "how are you?" He says "fair to middling"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;some days that covers it. Then the low sun backlights a bike, strobes off its rotating spokes.

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Ray Scanlon | One Point for Russell

Uncle Russell is a consumer of talk radio, contrary, cantankerous, bedeviled by indecision, always second-guessing himself. But he's sureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;adamantâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that October is his favorite month. As I drive down a corridor of sun-colored maples, light grey sky, light rain falling, the yellow is luminous, almost palpable. If I were indulging him in the pleasure of an argument, I'd counter with April, but my heart wouldn't be in it.

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Elissa Gordon | Hype

At age 12, I saw The Maltese Falcon and shrugged. The movie couldn’t live up to years of raves from my father. Don’t know why he didn’t just have me read the book, couldn’t have been he thought it too adult; I’d read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, and Victor Canning - whatever happened to him? And I’d watched Wild, Wild West & The Saint. I thought all adults talked about intrigue when they kissed.

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Max Vande Vaarst | Mayfly (1)

Mayfly, Minnesota runs seven blocks, a geezer bar and a broken gas pump. He grew up here. She did too. The bugs come out on black lake nights, the summer hatch. She smilesas he cups them in killing jars, mouthless things skittering along the ether, small as their lives.

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Max Vande Vaarst | Mayfly (2)

They’ve got alchemy down in the iron mines. All the pit boys know this, how to turn taconite into a month’s rent, rotgut liquor into the elixir of life. Her brother’s worked the pit since high school, blasting rock, gouging land, waiting for the day his brow drips with gold.

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Max Vande Vaarst | Mayfly (3)

Uncle Ed is an only-child, but no one really cares. Ed’s owned the lakeside canteen since ‘73. He’s seen girls become wives and boys become pit boys, seen him and her share a ring on the solstice. Ed is old and Ed is all-uncle, ice cream scooper to the world.

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Max Vande Vaarst | Mayfly (4)

His mother sews over the collection trays, butterflies clapping brittle wings quiet as she hems with borrowed pins. The gown is more than lovely, it is love - stomach tight as a drawn bow, train dripping off like two wet cattails. His mother loses a scientist and gains a daughter.

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Max Vande Vaarst | Mayfly (5)

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no courthouse big enough for their love. The pit boys spill out the benches, loosening neckties with sulfurous nails. His mother snaps a drugstore Kodak, she walks the long floor. Ed gives away another niece. Summer dies in Mayfly. They are happy. They are caught in each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s jars.

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oems

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Kirsten Webb | On The Way

In thin morning a dingy seagull struts the sidewalk the light just slants still as a building & a manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paper hands fold in on themselves

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Sarah Schubmehl | She doesn’t live on that

street where she heard Loquacious talk about plants as God’s fingertips or on his lucid days how to eke kindness out of peoples’ souls.

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George Northrup | Photons

Mouth open, he sits on a sunlit terrace staring at the sky, enjoying a light lunch.

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Shannon Curtin | Sharp

Your gaze on my hemline, the whistle escaping your teeth.

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Shannon Curtin | You Had Time

5 seconds from couch to door plenty of time as you rush out 3 absent syllables check their watches wonder how they missed the bus

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Timothy McLafferty | at the corner

there was a space between the sidewalk and the curb a place where a dandelion grew and I sat poking hot tar with a twig

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Joe Columbus | Groceries

Bread, meds, ramen in a paper bag; Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m just trying to get by.

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Diane Solis | Caws (1)

You thought I defied you on the surface where I tried to. But you could have broken my stones, Babe. You could have broken them good.

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Diane Solis | Caws (2)

“I’m going to put my lipstick on,” she said on our last date, “want to watch?” Then, looking up over her compact, “You’re not watching.”

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Diane Solis | Caws (3)

Well, I never refused a kindness. It was only the times you mocked me to make me over, and the cruelty when it brimmed your playful heart.

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Diane Solis | Caws (4)

His love was hard. Hers was pure tragedy. Yours frustrated me. His broke my pride, hers, my heart. Yours broke my concentration for a while.

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Diane Solis | Caws (5)

Last memory: the ocean waves rolling through her carâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soiled windows, and she, scoping out that jogger in a sports bra, while she drove.

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Ivo Drury | Dilemma

blossom from every window yet his mood flat how could Schrodingerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cat be both alive and not

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Ivo Drury | Division

he facing west she gazing east on adorsed park benches matter contiguous minds parsecs apart

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Emily Rose Cole | 3 am

I stir, your imprint warm beside me like an open wound.

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Jessica Bell | Flesh

I drop my wedding ring in holy water. I hope it repels; the years of hate and hope, so I can finally relate to the son we made.

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John Savoie | Regret

Moustache drooping mud-eyed the catfish mouths the air too dry and thin, and I expressed myself no better.

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iews

Chris Vola | (re)View of WHEN YOU LEAVE by Sarah Carson // Chris Vola | (re)View of DREAM SONGS by Anonymous

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Chris Vola | (re)View of WHEN YOU LEAVE by Sarah Carson

“I spend several hours sawing off my right hand,” writes Sarah Carson in WHEN YOU LEAVE, because, sure, breaking up is rough; this one’s awesomely dark. When birds use your tearstained head as storage, his new girlfriend’s credit is impeccable, and even God calls you ridiculous, light’s the last thing you hug: “I go to the first place where the sun’s gone down and stand there pretending it has always been this way.”

//WHEN YOU LEAVE by Sarah Carson can be found online at H-NG M-N press: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/storage/CarsonSarah_WhenYouLeave_final.pdf//

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Chris Vola | (re)View of DREAM SONGS by Anonymous

Anonymously channeling (or dismantling) Berryman, the poets in these excerpted DREAM SONGS confess the most superbly unnerving moments--the taste of bad skin, the “wet shell” of a tragic dawn--a melancholy built on minutia. Whether we rely on dead words or those of the still-pained living, we cry their immutability, those of us “too afraid you might be disappointed with the silence.” Really, who likes a quiet hurt?

//DREAM SONGS by Anonymous can be found online at White Knuckle Press: https://sites.google.com/site/whiteknucklechaps/poet-anon/ //

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