POETRY FIX ISSUE 1
POETRY FIX fictionfix.net editor@fictionfix.net
Editorial Advisor
Mark Ari
Editor-in-Chief
April Gray Wilder Poetry Editor
Grant Kittrell
Associate Editor
Blair Romain
Managing Editor
Alex Pucher
Acting Managing Editor
Kelsi Hasden
Front & Back Cover Ben Grasso By the bullrush II oil on canvas
Editorial Assistants
Christopher Prewitt Rebecca Titus Readers
Sam Bilheimer, Kelsi Hasden, Sana Riaz
Copyright Š 2015 Fiction Fix. All rights reserved by this journal and the authors and artists included herein. Typsetting and design by April Gray Wilder.
CONTENTS 1-5
Jeffrey Haynes
Champion The Cranberry King Best in Show
6-7
Jenn Blair
At The Nature Center
8-9
Helen Wickes
Damage
10-15
Mike Good
Bass Fishing In America
16-19
Steve Coughlin
Another Perfect Sunrise Things I Could Never Tell My Father
20-27
Cathryn Hankla
If I am Wrong Considering the Alternative It Must Be
28-29
Dustin Junkert
Varations What It’s Going to Take
31
Eldon Reishus
Midlife Reassignment
32-33
George Eklund
Escape From January
34-39
Amy Marengo
Letters They Share Tracker this is love
40
Brad Garber
Mythology
42-43
Matthew Vetter
To T he One-Ar med Crawdad Who Pinched My Son
44-45
Jerry Wayne Wells
Nobody Expects the Dead Possum Remember Your Breath
46
Clark Ogier
damnit david
47
Flannery Lier
Untitled
48-51
Insley Smullen
Pleadian Future Message Common Design T he Battle Hymn of Shotgun
52-57
Stephen Massimilla Our Pompeii Proto-Post-Momento Mori
58-59
Marc Berman
Immutable
60
Amanda Williams
Elegy for Two Horses
61
Wendy Thornton
Exit Covenant
67-70
Barrett Warner
Wind Music Balance I T hought Pigeons Were Vegetarians
71
Marianna White
Mostly, I shake even when I aim
72-73
Sean L. Corbin
A student claims to dislike Kentucky poetry The light bulb
74
Karen Hildebrand
This is the Revolution
75
Fred Dale
Last Call at the Lounge Named After a Saint
76-77
Cynthia Atkins
If These Walls Could Talk
78-79
William Repass
kaput: as a matter of fact,
T
he notion of doing a poetry issue for Fiction Fix was tossed around for some time before a plan took shape. This was, most simply, due to the fact that Fiction Fix has historically published prose. So, from the start, this was very much a “special� issue, if only for that reason. However, as the parts started coming together, it quickly became clear that this issue was special for many reasons apart from its novelty in the Fiction Fix timeline. It is exceptional because of the knockout cast of poets inside these pages. While the poems that follow are as varied in voice, form, and concern as they could be, each contains and shares an energy that reaches far outside of itself, with the potential, it seems, to explode at any moment, to bare its secrets and its ghosts before us. And here at Fiction Fix, that energy seems
to have provided momentum well beyond this installment. We are thrilled to announce that this issue will be the first of many, and that it will become a new fixed branch of the journal. Thus, while this issue is as “special” as ever, it now has a number—that number is 1. Many thanks to Fiction Fix for providing the ground for this first issue; to Ben Grasso for his gracious contribution of artwork, featured on the cover and throughout these pages; and of course, thanks to our many wonderful contributors for their honest words. Now, without further delay, I am delighted and proud to present the first installment of Poetry Fix. —Grant Kittrell
Jeffrey Haynes
Champion
I’m the contestant on a gameshow. It’s called I’m So Hungry I’ll Do Anything. I’ve passed the Name that Dictator and How Many Cheeseburgers Can You Fit in Your Face in Sixty Seconds challenges swimmingly. I practiced purging for weeks, and read everything I could on Stalin, I explain to the host who looks a lot like Pat Sajak if he got hammered with an anvil. In fact, everyone in the studio audience looks a little like that—defeated, flat-headed, and creepily baby-faced. What happened? I wonder, and a shoe factory I used to work at in Milwaukee shutters its windows. But we go on. It’s the lightning round. I’m nailing all the trivia Pat “the Anvil” Sajak can throw at me. George Jefferson, I answer and the cannon booms. Lionel. Weezy. Florence. What is “Me So Horny”? Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. A gong sounds, and the floor retracts revealing the lava lake obstacle course. Bonus round. I start sweating like my father used to when the rent was due. How did I get here? I wonder as I hop from hot rock to hotter rock. And what do I get if I win? Back at the shoe factory, I remember I once saw a sewing machine yank a man in half and then stitch him back together again. For once I hear cheering. I hear the crowd calling my name. All I really want, I think, is for this life to mean something. I’m the contestant on a game show. It’s called You’re the Son of a Failure. It’s called You Haven’t Suffered Enough.
1
Jeffrey Haynes
T he Cranber r y King as the cannery chimneys yawn into the sunset I’m considering the necessary ruthlessness of successful men wondering when the time comes will I be able to forget how in early August the long shadow of my father’s monument will work just like a sundial I grew up in the darkness of those harvest sundays where his rough fists raked the bog water my own industrious father who told the truth who taught me that a cranberry’s only ripe when it bounces who once said to me look kid, I love you but your mother is a doormat
2
Poetry Fix
Jeffrey Haynes
Best in Sho w I was at the dog show with some friends when a pomeranian pinched off a loaf right in front of the judge who didn’t seem to notice the pile which was surprisingly large especially when compared to the dog who was little more than a blob of red fur and afterwards in the lobby of the arena everyone looked at me like I was crazy because I couldn’t stop talking about it I was so distraught I was near-hysterical I was like did you see that shit? that dog shit right in front of him and still won that’s some bullshit that weimaraner was robbed robbed! I said shaking my head wistfully as I was having a nervous breakdown
3
and no one knew it but me though I was trying hard to ignore just how grief-stricken I was because someone I loved had died recently in a freak accident on a Wednesday morning while on a walk in the neighborhood just enjoying the day when out of nowhere… and sometimes I just can’t help it I wake up screaming from dreams where I wish bad things on other people and then they come true the bad things and I’m so happy when they come true it freaks me out even in the dream I’m freaked out and I lied to you about what happened earlier someone died but not someone I loved but rather someone you loved instead and it was me who was responsible and I just wasn’t big enough to admit it that even when I was a kid when I fell down I blamed my mother
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Poetry Fix
I blamed everyone else and broke things a tiffany lamp an antique violin the microwave that caught fire after I said sayonara to some action figures and this is not a poem about dog shit though it started that way because that’s how I felt after I ran over my neighbor’s dog and pinned it on the mailman and I can’t help but wonder if somehow subconsciously I wanted it to happen if maybe something secret inside of me willed my foot down on the accelerator and I’m so scared of hell Father I’ve done so much wrong I must confess I cut down your cherry tree and then I salted the earth
Haynes : Best in Show
5
Jenn Blair
At T he Nature Center
I watch the ink-y letters of the Corn Snake’s newspaper nest brush up against his milk grey belly: Be a Hero! Mentor a Child in Need, Tanner Jones for District Commissioner, local born, five generations no new taxes, DUI classes, futons, fair prices… Finely handcrafted Adirondack furniture sets and end tables, —unable to refuse any word in any form I’ve almost ingested the whole helpless mouse of the alphabet when the Corn Snake’s tail suddenly curls into the second
6
Poetry Fix
stanza of a wretched, endless poem for Cody, beloved baby boy, boy in the cowboy hat haloed by a thick, squiggly lasso frame, dadda’s partner, momma’s pride, angel’s best helper—safe now from the world’s great cares, mama! let’s go to the salamanders! Shhhhh. I slap my own flesh away and lean in once more, begging the tail to scatter again so my eye might better gobble down the nose and other cheek and perfect God will never make it again mouth.
7
Helen Wickes
Dama ge
Damage, today I’m obsessed with damage. The cored-out heart of the rose, not the bud or the bloom, but root to flower— whatever’s maimed, blemished, blistered, harmed, this skin the talon, the thorn has hooked— morning’s minion, ha— and those shreddy clouds the sky assembles only to have something fun to tear into pieces. I remember Vuillard’s painting awash with parlor knickknacks, his floral decor so chintzed you can’t tell carpet from chair from curtain, can barely see the old woman dying quietly in her rocker. Down the street, in the corner shop the hollowed slabs of ribcage swing. From the café radio Janis Joplin’s ropy voice, almost present, then static, then gone.
8
Poetry Fix
Something gleams from the hubcap, saying, It’s evening, you lived so long, what have you done? Answer it back, oh hubcap, some things can’t be lived through— the bolus we grow around—but there is some endurable affliction, the abscessed hoof sliced back until it bleeds; we pack in the mud and wait and hope enough foot grows back to nail on a shoe. The long days are marked by waiting by the phone, by the door, by the mailbox, and the sense that the days themselves are passing.
9
Mike Good
Bass Fishing in America “He was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.” — Richard Brautigan
Fraxinus pennsylvanica. Hollowed the way of Castanea. Fluttering the way of passenger pigeons, auks, trilobites. Gone the way of . Gazing into manila cambiums. Stepping on red trillium. Staring into empty branches. Phyla lost through taxonomic disorganization. Phyla from a Greek word meaning tribe. Tribe from Latin tribus: three divisions of people within a place. Still, the evidence birds. Still, our fingers trace across devastated larval paths. Peeling away the bark, I am thinking today is going to be the day I return to poetry bass fishing in America. *
11
I promise to go back some day to the place my brothers and I fished with Dad during those humid plum-drenched summers, his grit stained-nails untangling each entangled nest of line as night crawlers snagged under the pond scum, where bleached bass floated among water weeds and lily pads, the bluegills’ sharp fins carving into our hands. *
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When evening leads out against the night stars will lie salted above fibrous grass. When air pierces our skin, we should pour bloodworms from our necks, baiting sharks or flounders to writhe in Atlantic thoughts. Children could play on the ash dock, ready to cut the maws apart, to dislodge baseballs bats, and then sling fish over their shoulders—and god yes we will say fecundity. We will not be horseshoe crabs scuttling from mate to mate, piling beneath the pylons, falling into the Great Lakes red tide swollen from algal blooms, but I cannot count the mudpuppies whose corpses clutch the air. When everything is dead, I will take up whittling. *
Good : Bass Fishing in America 13
Return to ashes with frank realism, abjure entendres and implausibilities. Embrace new languages to admonish ashen canopies, to uncover the understory by light’s unfamiliar touch on newly denuded folia. Pour umlauts onto red Üaks, sweet gums, birch trees clutching their papery leaves. Say fecundity. *
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If the red tide blooms again and it will. If the lake catches fire again and it will. If the ashes stop budding, we will count the tree rings growing about our necks and see that, and many things that were previously covered, and gather a stringer of bluegills, slice into their pharynges and tear gull bladders from the thoracic mass, gutting the small fish with a sharp knife, with pride: the way one cuts a largemouth bass yet untainted.
Good : Bass Fishing in America 15
Steve Coughlin
Another Perfect Sunrise
Even if a daily sunrise occurs in the remote sphere of God’s Heavenly Kingdom the thousands of angels residing there would not understand it in human terms. Certainly another pink-orange dawn again lighting their cloudless sky blue would be different from that particular sunrise in North Conway on the second Thursday of July in 1989 because my mother, who seldom got up before eight, woke before any of us and put on her dirty blue bathrobe much different from the whiteness of a heavenly robe, and because she had to walk on the wet wooden deck of the house we had rented for the last seven summers to sit in a uncomfortable wrought iron chair, and because on that particular morning several clouds obscured the sun from view. But what made it most different is that this was only five years after my brother’s death and that when we started vacationing
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in North Conway he was still alive, and he, rather than my mother, would have been the one to get up in the lonely darkness. She could not stop missing him and that is why my mother clung to such absurd ideas as angels who somehow understand human responses and can be persuaded to briefly stop braiding each other’s waist-length hair to help lessen our perplexing grief, and why, as my mother looked upon the few threads of light that suddenly split the clouds, she sensed the presence of something I have never sensed and gripped the arms of her wrought iron chair so tight.
17
Steve Coughlin
T hings I Could Ne v er Tell My Father
You’ll be dead within ten years. When you walk down the front porch steps your legs look painfully stiff. The day I turned 21, there was no way I was driving with you after lunch past all of Rockland’s abandoned storefronts to down a few shots of bourbon at the bar. When I was a child I prayed each night you would not come home from work. The sound of your car pulling into the driveway was my least favorite sound. The sound of your boots on the front porch— those angry stomps to get off the frozen snow— was my second least favorite sound. Your dead wife and dead son are not waiting for you in heaven. When you die there is only the silence you’ve been practicing all your life. The same silence that connects us and keeps me returning to your house each summer needing words neither of us will speak.
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I would have hated you as a young man. I would have called the police if I had witnessed you with a group of friends degrading men in front of their girlfriends by pinning them on the ground and removing their clothes. When I was home this past August I was sickened by the open wounds on your chest from skin cancer, the watery pus seeping through your shirt as we drove to Butterfields for dinner. I would rather grow old in an empty apartment than have a marriage like you had. I would rather never have children than have to wake up each morning hours before the ice-cold sunrise, work so late the house had returned to darkness when you finally opened a beer on the couch. I know you have grown tired— tired of me still waiting for you to be a father. I don’t ever want you to leave me.
19
Cathryn Hankla
If I am Wrong You don’t want this poem. If I am wrong then stop writing the other poem in your head as you read. I heard one on the radio. Terrible. Couldn’t wait for it to be done, but in my head as it droned on, a more perfect poem. If that poem said stick figures, my poem said stuck no more. If that poem said apricot or sea otter, my poem said CROATOAN or Massachusetts. When that poem said, Sometimes my microwave beeps
20 Poetry Fix
a dire warning, this poem said, The odd whistles of which you’ve been complaining issue from my African Grey. When the elevator doors opened in that poem, on an unfamiliar floor, strangers waved an important piece of my mail. We would have gotten this back to you sooner, that poem said, but we were on a Caribbean cruise and our family members drank too much. As you know, we don’t drink. In this poem we take the stairs, my statement’s delivered on time, and I rewrite the ending, over and over.
21
Cathryn Hankla
Considering the Alter nativ e
Not much of an endorsement for starters. He got the one who was not nearly as dumb as the others. The one not half as plump nor a quarter as conservative. It was dark, but it could have been worse. He could have been taller than she remembered, his face half-obscured by daylight streaking in from the street, but she could see him, albeit not perfectly. Their rock-strewn path— what mountain trail is not—zigzagged, but it could have been muddy and wasn’t, which is not to say they could not have used more sunlight on every subject, especially when he said he’d be back in August, and her voice froze with wheels spinning. She forgot to utter the first word about her leaving in September. But at any rate, they made it through, while not exactly tackling the hour like pros,
23
they made a contribution to the subject they were subject to, and might I also venture they executed better than expected given the odds, since they had such a low bar to shimmy, owing not to this very moment nor to any foul or flag on the present play, but to separate, relatively equal past failures encompassing each other not a whit. To wit, she got to say she was not a needy person, and he got to ask his first pointed question, as odd as it was to hear, when her major dispositional downside had always been independence or too much of it and not even trying, as someone said, to fit in. At any rate, her fault inflated her for once, it’s all about context, strengths and weaknesses aside, which is to say this sentence could not be more meaningless. Unless he wraps his arms around her and feels something inside other than regret, obligation, or
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a form of childhood angst, it ain’t happening. In other words, awakening’s the trick, and it’s going to take more than this here poem. But we’re pulling for them, whoever we are. We watched the game, someone had to sit this one out, and we cheered, which is not to say we were ambivalent exactly. We wore the right colors, or at some point we had had the experience of rooting sincerely for the home team at another’s expense. For my part, I even marched in the band, performing synchronized maneuvers at halftime with my clarinet. Beneath their more or less composed exteriors they were not really quaking, after all they are adults, but they could have been, if they had been attuned, if they had known what we now know. I’ve heard it said that no one gets out of here alive—and although she didn’t dodge his final question—what
Hankla : Considering the Alter native 25
brand of cynicism is that, I’m not really asking. Well, I heard one got out alive, and they managed a squeeze play, turned in opposite directions, whereupon his mother and children mushroomed at her feet. This cannot happen that often, she started thinking. And then I remembered Buster Keaton’s saying in his autobiography it was all about timing—and keeping a straight face, someone added—how he was sucked from his crib into the mouth of a twister, carried most of a mile and plunked up a tree. And in a minute or two she heard his mother’s phone ringing. I’m talking to Cathy, his mother told him. All or part of this might be true.
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Cathryn Hankla
It Must Be
Terrible not to quake when love enters the room, not to feel your brain bloom as your heart roars to flame, like an old stone furnace smelting iron. Awful to be able to march on for months searching silent battlefields in lockstep with ghosts, injured by MiniÊ balls and folks with little myths. Horrible to fall down with your lame horse and ambivalence, to know as extre≠mities drain that lesser souls raise a toast, faces glowing by the fire.
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Dustin Junkert
Varations
I go up to Washington, I take a ferry, I drink a twentydollar beer, I go down to the fire, I build it up, I draw a bug, I draw a tarantula, I use a spoon, I keep something to myself, I become elated, I carry a stick, I eat a snack, I mention something, I think of a solution, I use my emotions, I win a game, I look in the air, I call a number, I slip off my shoes, I pretend to laugh, I meet the Colliers, I see a branch fall, I walk backward, I get splashed, I hold on, I smile soothingly, I water the grass.
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Dustin Junkert
W hat It’s Going to Tak e
“You’re very good and you’re nice and you do good things,” my teacher said, “And that’s good, but it’s not enough, you’ll find.” There was nothing but goldfish on my plate, and even those were in shambles. Davey looked into the corner and said, “Wow!” A little girl began regarding me and trying to play with me as if we were old friends. It’s gonna take more than that, I thought. “Could you hold on a minute,” my teacher said out of the side of her mouth while I was dotting her upper thigh with fingertaps. “Miss P, Miss P,” I beckoned. “What? What?” She finally turned to me. “Davey said, Wow,” I informed her.
29
Ben Grasso | NASA
30 Poetry Fix
Eldon Reishus
Midlife Reassignment You half cross the Bering backwards in a walrus skin open dory tugged by, gaskets blowing oil, twin Johnson forty-horses, you want a shaman Inuit kneeling at the throttles, plus six mukluk boot models paired with you beneath the canvas, their warm laughter the craft’s lone life preserver. Life at the top of the tent at the end of the world. Each wave a final drum roll.
31
George Eklund
Escape from Januar y Who is to say how long a day should be? —Karen Telford, Autumn 1999 The face falls into its direction I want to go everywhere; so I go to the sea. Reading is a way to get lost As the hands and brain get marked By stains that few can believe. Glaciers have passed through our sleep; Give me back my hair. So many worlds get closed. Feet warming in silence, The radio news indiscernible My old music teachers Are probably all dead by now.
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If to have no purpose means being open To all purposes, how many ways Might a human be welcomed into the world. In the madness of the jet stream I have been a good man all day But it is not enough The light, the face seemed a fiction The beautiful objects unreal in their molecules Hopefully nearby there is someone Who can play the piano and sing.
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Amy Marengo
Letters T he y Share Ruth played Russian roulette with you, abortion edition: you, Kate, and Felix were clicks with no bangs between a couple loaded chambers. She’s the type of mom who yells at you for throwing fish down the stairs. You tell her you’re not; she yells at you for waking her. She washes your mouth with soap if you wet the bed, slaps you if you fall through ice in a faux rabbit fur coat before a dinner party. Forces you to picket for patients’ rights outside a hospital until 2:00 am on a school night. Belts what she thinks are situation-appropriate Jewel songs into a megaphone while balancing on a milk-crate soapbox on the sidewalk. Never explains what a tampon’s for but recommends the pill as she slips you antibiotics for your first UTI. Threatens rehab if she smells Zima on your breath, pampers you with Vicodin if your toenail grows inward. (She’s a psych nurse. Seriously, she’s in charge of people’s psyches.)
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Ruth’s the mom who said you were visiting Daddy’s work. You walked into a bare hall, cement walls a thick sea-foam green. He was at a picnic table painting letters and hearts across a homemade jewelry box. He hugged you onto his lap. You asked how come he wore clothes like sheets, not even shoes over his socks. How come he wouldn’t come home. How come he got to paint hearts at work. He said his job was to make you toys all day, all night. Ruth stood over you, pointed to the pink acrylic letters drying on the jewelry box, said that’s your name. They told you the M’s in Mommy are like the one in May, the A in May is like the A in Daddy, the Y in May is in Mommy and Daddy both. Ruth’s the mom that let you blame her when visiting time ended. Said, no, you’re too young to live at Daddy’s work. Added, maybe you will when you’re older, with a smirk that the smirk itself seemed to question.
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Amy Marengo
Track er Ana names sharks she studies after grandparents, follows them from Cape Cod to Florida. Charlie went rogue when his satellite tag loosed four miles off Rehoboth Beach last December. Is a shark attracted to his own blood? He can’t resist the winking-eye silhouette of a kayak, so Ana worries, not knowing. No one in Nassau County can swim today because Maggie’s too close to shore. She stillbirthed twin pups the night Ana removed the two-foot hook
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from her mouth. Once, after collecting a semen sample, Ana pressed a bleeding finger to Linus’s nostril, thought, remember me, I’m watching over you always, swore his graphite stare grew softer. She does this to all of them now and never mentions to her colleagues the ultrasonic warmth that swells in her belly every time she sees color-coded dots inch zigzags across the monitor.
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Amy Marengo
this is love
in summer i walk to the corner store and see chives growing out a crack in the sidewalk and i think it doesnt matter whoevers the reason theyre there id leave my other and ask mr or ms or mrs sidewalk chive god will you marry me this is love not curiosity because i dont wonder who this person is i just want them i never pick the chives and am happy when it rains so they may not wilt till winter or till a damn dog has a taste while its owner stretches in that very spot after a run i watched this happen last summer and had to walk past the corner store because i was crying i didnt think i could buy my swedish fish and condoms
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without the new clerk asking me what was wrong and what would i tell him the chives that fucking terrier luckily it was early june and the chives regrew with a vengeance their purple firework blossoms so full by late july i had to walk past the corner store again but that time i was crying because whoevers the reason they grow there i knew for sure is my soul mate and someday we will plant beautiful things together in the grayest places
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Brad Garber
Mytholog y
One day I was camping in the desert and took a good shit after digging a hole. Buried it. Years later, an archeologist discovered that Jesus once sat in the same spot. Clerics, philosophers, all sorts of religious folks converged on the spot and argued over who could pray there. Turns out, Abraham had taken a piss on an ancient bush, in the vicinity. Someone piled up some rocks and made a shrine. “People who deface this bush shall be killed!” was scrawled in red letters on a plywood sign, nearby. A fence was erected between where Jesus sat and Abraham pissed. Razor wire was installed when one person tried to climb over to look at the bush. Still, people arrived, ate, drank cheap wine and PBR’s and tried to figure out a way to see where Jesus sat and Abraham pissed. In the meantime, archeologists found a piece of wood on a mountain and called it part of a boat. Some papers were found in a cave. A kid in an alley found a shriveled up apple that looked like pictures of Jesus. That was far away from where he supposedly sat. Abraham walked away from where he pissed and his path became a highway. Fences went up along the highway. Jesus, also, walked away from where he sat and another highway was constructed. Fences went up along the highway. People used these highways to move outward from the hallowed ground. If they turned around, however, they always came back to the same starting point. The place where Jesus sat. The place where Abraham pissed. One of the archeologists contacted me to ask me why I had created such animosity and hatred. I was quite old by that point. I told her that I was alive, at the time, which is more than I could say about a couple of dead guys. What people did with my shit was their own problem.
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Ben Grasso | Untitled (House)
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Matthew Vetter
To the One-Armed Crawdad Who Pinched My Son I call it an arm, when it was nothing so human, really a claw, a pincher you flung straight out to make your body long, to glide slowly backwards, lobster-like, in a dream of cold spring creek-water. I could tell your sluggishness and prodded you up against a mound of dirt and rock. To the delight of my son I held you between two fingers, right behind your one and only pincher, which you twisted and snapped open and shut. before laying you back down in the mud of the creek-bed. Who took your claw, crawdad? What broke you against the rock or log?
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What do you know of my son who grabs at you now, palm and fist, in imitation of his daddy and ignorant of the delicacy needed; what can you do but pinch? Crawdad, I question your ignorance before I can know ignorance is at the heart of a threat like this. All danger comes from unknowing, but not all danger comes from innocence. I can’t eat you, crawdad, you’re too small and muddy. I can’t mend you; so stupidly I tend to my own who shrieks with the quick prick of your pinch. I swing his small body up to rest against my hips. I kiss his finger as the smell of excrement rises from the diaper beneath his clothing. Its stench holds us together. It surrounds us in our own human promises.
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Jerry Wayne Wells
Nobody Expects the Dead Possum The lady who lives in the carbon monoxide alarm spoke to me last night. Low battery she said, and beeped, which translates to fix me you neglectful meat-hunk. I ripped the batteries out. Sprawled on the bed. Hoo, perchickory, cheeriup, sang the birds into the grey bottle of spring dawn, which means sex me sex me sex me in three different bird languages and is synonymous with most phrases in the masculine tongue: as in, voulez-vous un cafÊ, or my left toe has a kind of twinge in it. Even you’re lying, my dictionary of idioms does not mention sex has at least three distinct sexual undertones, a triad of desire, longing, denial and surprise. Four undertones. I want sleep, which does not mean sex, or maybe it does. Morning comes and the sun says to the land sex me and the land underneath rolls over and over like a bulldog on a ripe possum carcass.
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Jerry Wayne Wells
Rembember Your Breath Eventually you do watch the grass grow as the nose hairs of summer lengthen like icicles and the parties you throw no longer stay lit past the day’s sun. It’s a horror movie, grass growing—long blades count weeks and a set of mowings is a season and when the grass grows long again a year has passed. Once you hear the sound of one year passing you know the next isn’t far behind, body blow after blow and you know the guy throwing punches has a good haymaker that will do you in. Maybe this is the real reason I fear ice cream trucks: that morbid happy tune sings, Look, I’m your childhood! Feed me your parents’ money and I’ll give you a crack-laced Nutty Buddy! But I’ve left childhood and though I’m happy with my beer it too is transient and there aren’t any left in the fridge. Fear: knowing one day you’ll find no more years left in the fridge. But if I could peer into the future I wouldn’t. My dears, we’re clear: hop up on your chairs, smell the abundance of air, even here with all these leaf blowers, lawn mowers, ice cream trucks, heart-beating mammals, wind-bag poet-schmucks lighting too many tea candles. Even here.
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Clark Ogier
damnit david i have a fish named david. the one before him was named willy. willy jumped out of the tank. i liked willy. david sits on the bottom of the tank. i feed david and i clean his water. david doesn’t move. david eats my fish food. david gets himself stuck on the filter intake. i save david. then david sits. i clean david’s water. david is not impressed. he gets stuck again. david replaced willy. i don’t know what willy replaced, but david doesn’t do it. david should jump out of the tank. but he won’t. david just sits.
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Flannery Lier
The paleontologist works in a field in the upper Midwest. It’s green there with hills. He’s built scale models of mega fauna and flora and searches for remains in the usual way with one meter by one meter squares scraped clean with trowels, but he has this thing that he uses to search his hands for foreign particles. You put a sort of soapy foam on your hands, place it on a screen in a white tent; the particles turn white at first and then a sort of neon green. He collects them and places them singularly in Tupperware containers which he shelves in an adjacent tent. His wife works with him. She is blonde and she fidgets letting out her breath, lifting her arms above her head. We are a school group tour and he shows us deformed skulls that are part of a new species he thinks he has discovered; their cranium are not round and globular like ours but look as though someone tried to force it through a rubber band and gave up halfway through. Someone asks about Homo floresiensis and if the skulls were shaped just recently through compression like the Mayans but he doesn’t seem to hear. There’s something off about the wife and we find out later that she can control the paleontologist’s mind through her pheromone excretions. She wants to find something in the ground, maybe the remains of her people to raise from the dead. She isn’t alien but she isn’t all human either. She just grows in height and makes us leave so her husband won’t get distracted from digging up her families’ bones.
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Insley Smullen
Pleiadian Future Messa ge
Awareness brings realization: I went to the sea to unite myself with the global energy fields. The sun: a magnet: can see into your organs: any of ours: any day even when sleeping in the sacred aluminum pyramid: a tree house with a bunk bed shaped like two nautilus shells: overlapping. Asterism: of having the property of stars: your body: the phosphorescent dinoflagellates churning in the water under our hands: an act of being grateful for what you cannot understand. When the truth light takes you: awakens in you the ability to speak fourteen languages: twelve of: are dead. Ascension: the higher realms of consciousness: the lovelight glow and the lovelight beckoning. When they return: not for our bodies: our money: for crystals: every rock mineral shop supply depleted: not a rhombohedral glimmer for centuries: bismuth: decays with a half life that is more than a billion times the estimated age of the universe. And then: the realms of love: a fourwinged angel. Expect wonderful things.
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Insley Smullen
Common Design
In the dream I have of my life where we are Muppets we speak only with words that move /up/ and \down\. Our eyes are all fixed in one position that is surprised in a pitiful way, or else our pupils roll like black marbles inside the white upturned dish that contains them. Real ache is a felt season, wraps its yarn around our necks. Here I can’t hold your hand, not really, our blue-orange fingers permanently sprung open in the five position— (except we are Muppets and we have four, including the thumb) the best I can do is lay fabric over fabric in a mock-tangle expression of what it’s like to feel close, though all the time there is somebody else’s hand at our backs, in our mouths. What I am saying is do you know how long I have waited to say this: what I would give for the dream to be over.
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Insley Smullen
T he Battle Hymn of Shotgun
Shotgun loves ___________. Shotgun loves pastries, the kind with birch-paper-flake crusts that stick to the edge of his upper lip. Shotgun loves showers, exceedingly hot ones, on warm days. Shotgun loves the mudflaps of eighteen-wheelers he sees on the highway into South Carolina with the figure of a nude woman in black and gold rubber silhouette. Shotgun loves women. And dogs. Shotgun loves blue raspberry flavoring, the kind of juice they have at school, and using a jelly jar from the Goodwill with the Tazmanian Devil on it as a cup. Shotgun loves his devils which are: refusing to do laundry, an inclination toward what he is told is graffiti— aka defacing property— aka the landlord decided to sell the house anyway, so it did not matter where he had left his name in capital or lowercase letters; taunting his sister, using the family card to buy Cheetos and gum instead of lunch, falling asleep to the idea of running away and becoming famous. Shotgun loves the famous people, Shotgun wants one or two of them to come and take him away, to adopt him. Shotgun loves what any Shotgun his age would love. He wants what every Shotgun wants.
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__________ loves Shotgun. The paint is stripped away. Shotgun was hiding, waiting, or was mad. Shotgun wanted to both start over and go back, to stick his finger in the nose of the past and pry out that nagging thing which kept tickling him, wanted to wipe it on the back of the bus seat in front of him or flick it into his sister’s hair. He wanted her to squeal, Shotgun wanted somebody to squeal for him so he wouldn’t have to. Shotgun wanted someone to be as disgusted as he was. A new pack of crayons, the school supply list. Shotgun knows permanent markers are serious business, that once you write down what you’re thinking you can never erase it unless you knife-peel apart the paint and throw it in the trash, or if you eat it. Shotgun wants to write down a swear word. His baby sister writes, “Chrissmus!” on the baseboard of the living room. Shotgun feeds her paint chips under penalty of Indian burns. They have to move, and the city put a sign on the front door to tell everyone, the kids on the bus see it and the bus driver sees it. Shotgun pushes the capend of the marker deep into his palm to make a mark. There had been space for a dog.
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Stephen Massimilla
Our Pompeii
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I. Choughs wheeling overhead like bits of burnt paper have left this grave absence; no wishes窶馬o assembled sun-bones of precious ships. Your girlhood torch flared down the long grotto of the undeliverable moon, drumming up blood in the temples, shafts of pain sharp enough to splinter this anticipated cry, like those of the women long gone before under begged-to bleak clouds over grape-colored faces, unblessed babes crusted in igneous mud-flakes, shrieks of flame.
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II. It was just another summer of migraines and burning purses, the violence of your blush, your solar blue mascara in the night, bioluminescence of algae bloom lighting you from beneath, like a capsized halo: I told you to take this excursion easy, but again and again, you disappointed. O sweet rage. O fig! III. So we’ve come back to uncover the lava of new birth blood guttering in sluices that should throw up brighter fires? No heavily made-up priestess with her life-renewing blade? No sacrificial basin? No place to dump the blame?
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IV. Please reclaim our words of flesh that flung up so much phosphorous in the name of dreams of freedom, star-shot straight out of ignorance. Take my yawing trireme from here, where everything goes straight to hell. Take this sundown city, this harbor, this schooner, and the next. V. Osiris’s mummy arm bundled between your legs, you collected the sun around your neck, And still the sea-wind shook out your hair, disheveled smoke like dimness wrestling with darkness in the corner of a whorehouse. I love you but am entirely hopeless.
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Stephen Massimilla
Proto-Post-Memento Mori
Sparrows brawling in the eaves… Like those of dreaming poets, filmy membranes of eyes and bellies (of two fetal carcasses that the parents in their spat must have kicked down to my doorstep) were rolling. Rapid Eye— and bowel—Movements: fatty blue and bubblegum stomachs already pregnant with maggots buzzed electric in the mid-spring sun. * That afternoon and evening, and after I was dead to what I’d eaten, the sky kept churning its goose-
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flesh, hints of worry eating my insides out. I dreamed of that long winter night in the hospital: I swear I woke up to lenses exploding in my rib cage, tentacles scrambling for exits. I closed my lids in disbelief, afraid to see white rubber tubes joining me to beeping machines. “Get over it,” the night nurse whispered, not lifting her eyes from her paper. * This morning, no more news on my doorstep. No paper. Not even a hint of Eberhart’s groundhog. Just peeling planks where I’d recently studied two tiny skulls and crossed femurs from nature’s foul rag-and-bone shop, thinking I could use the images— frameworks to commemorate open throats of things with the guts to cry out— only to discover that even they were soft enough to be consumed from the inside out.
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Marc Berman
Immutable
Loyalty is immutable, a life’s absolute, a mineral. Love arrives and leaves, a qualification diluted and changing in composition. Beauty too, from this color to that color, an altering landscape of wind and sun. Honesty is clothed in careful consideration, subjective merely to achieve a desired gain.
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Fairness, justice; we can argue and seek interpretation until the blue of day. But loyalty has no parse once established. And disloyalty, that dry wishbone snap, arrives with bewilderment, then the long-slumbered moment of vengeance, also immutable.
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Amanda Williams
Ele g y for Two Horses He stands on a dais at the entrance, looking as if he may extend a slender leg and step onto another patch of artificial grass. As I approach him, I realize how well he is treated; long veins snaking along his abdomen and hocks, rigorously pumping formaldehyde, dust of the prairie, or maybe nothing. His spotted hide unmarked, no coyote bites, no hair ripped out from catching on a branch, no clue about his death. His mane, careless, splits halfway down his neck, falling right, then left. Perhaps his former rider laid it just so, to mark him from the others; after all, this placard says he might have been the pony of an Indian chief. His eyes are cloudy with resin. They are like the eyes of another horse who lay in a bright field in summer, behind a whispering barn. His skin unharmed, perfect, his body an active line against the stillness of the earth. His black tail fanned over the weeds, downy nostrils as open and round as the moon. Flies landed on his resting flank. They too were amazed at how alive he looked.
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Wendy Thornton
Exit Cov enant
I saw you frozen on the banks of a slow-moving river the night you didn’t come home, saw you stumbling, sighing. Your warm laughter scorned the dying lark. Lying dark? Whatever – There’s a shadow in my head, the gray mouse-rustling of a half-life formerly lived. dirge requiem elegy threnody inquest kismet dialects syllogism dissolved, dissected integrity. If you reach out, adagio, perhaps your fingers will touch the flesh of a corner withdrawing.
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Ben Grasso Charcoal on paper
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Canop y #2
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Study
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T he Sequel: Part II
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Untitled
Barrett Warner
Wind Music
Children’s voices in the lower field, and inside, small pictures clatter face-down on tables, curtain pulls rattle against blinds and walls and sills, road traffic shakes the hiding forsythia and the hair I woke up with is sailing around my head like a gray spastic wreath. Grown and gone, none live here anymore except two horses, kin to the whole world, and a few desperately chirping birds. When who we love leaves, we burn the bodies— the red pony, the retrievers and barn cats— and store their cinders in sanded cherry boxes stacked like condominiums under the piano. My lover nests on the leather bench, staring at middle C as pages of Schubert turn forward and backward with competing earthy gusts. There they are again, those laughing little ones, and I rush, first to the window, then out to the porch where two girls—but who are they?— climb the fence and rush to the stream.
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Barrett Warner
Balance
Driving, I love the feeling when one of my tires needs marriage counseling. There’s a shimmy, an intermittent squeal, like I’m always moving over rumble strips. The radio doesn’t quite hide the strange percussion adding punk to Mozart, and even the wind rushing my face doesn’t carry any mysteries, only facts— my festive jalopy in the breakdown lane, white t-shirt tied to the side mirror. Motion is my friend, and calamity my love, and a tow truck my beautiful wife. Full of rage, she dyes her crotch green— easier to find others’ pubic hairs astray in the sheets.
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I answer every question like a woodpecker overcome with doubt—maybe, not sure, OK I guess. Why am I stammering? I should be singing instead of beating my head against the cherry tree. She squints at the tweezered evidence and curses— who belongs to this black coil? I spit and spit and spit on a comb but I cannot relax the beast rooted in my skull. Twice in my life I’ve driven the axle off the frame, and it’s such a dying fall. The bullet of something coursing like a drugged moth I can almost catch in my hands.
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Barrett Warner
I T hought Pigeons Were Ve getarians No machine can thresh grain like a bird, especially a pigeon who slow groans its song and floats off with nothing better to do than be faithful, like its close cousin, the dove. Monogamy isn’t merciful. Sunbeams stab through missing battens as two newlyweds dodder to the peak where an extended clan of bats sleeps upside-down like grapes. This pair takes its sweet time harvesting a leg, a wing, a face, resting between courses as if to relate a story in a gambler’s shuffling way— bluffing, calling, raking-in the kitty. Belief is a beast to keep alive on wheat and water. Despite miles and days of crops, and kept busy with the land’s riches, I never lose the taste for flesh.
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Marianna White
Mostl y, I shake e v en when I aim For stillness. My legs buckle more often Than they don’t. I am no stranger to tears. I leave stacks of work Undone. Unravel myself at the alter Of anyone big enough to pronounce My name. So yes, I lit the first match. My concussions all came From hitting the sky. I am blurry, Obese with yes and the dreams Of tamarind oranges. Laughing at yourself is another way to dance alone. Yes, I danced, chased the moon To bed. I baptized my brother’s heads In salt. Digging deep, I slept the sleep Of the old world and lived out My grandparent’s famine. I have eaten The great whale of depression And let its low bathtub moan bleed out my fingers. So yes, I buried myself. Four years deep. Even if you dug me out now, I Would be a shriveled sunless creature With no cinder in its spine but ghosts of flowers, Those small cratered stars, embalmed in its eyes.
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Sean L. Corbin
A student claims to dislike Kentuck y poetr y Sitting reversed in my chair straddling its metal spine, I talk about poetry and poems and the poetic forms of sandwiches and several different conversations about poetry at once. Scratching the rug ripping from my chin, I expound on sounds and towns and how there is no longer a single Kentucky aesthetic and other fallacies abounding in the leaden dust. Opening my mouth, I let the horse poke its head into the world and chatter on about how roses feel on one’s neck. Leaning back, I allow the students to throw torn erasers at my teeth, all using the same arm motions. Laughing, I tap on the desk, giving the blue grass outside fair warning.
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Sean L. Corbin
T he light bulb The light bulb wants to be a sandwich but can only ever light the sandwich, can only ever taste the deli cuts and wilted lettuce and regrettable onions when her photons prove elastic and tap the bulb and laugh at their mother and say, We were sandwich, We became sandwich, We transcended sandwich! while she weeps for mayonnaise. The sandwich wants to be an aircraft carrier.
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Karen Hildebrand
T his is the Re v olution Last night at the open mike, it was rock versus scissors. Cowboys. Conquistadors. Artists, all of us, itching for a fight. As the night wore on, the crowd grew lusty with weapons, all manner smuggled in: Pencils, peace signs, religion, a shunt. If looks could kill, we were dressed in a lowcut gown and a diamond the size of Jerusalem. From the stage, a musician bellowed to a poet, “Shut up you faggot,” and like a hot wind at sunset the audience rose, hoisting bar stools into the exalted air above their heads. I turned to the guy at my side, “Are we the only ones here without guns?” I said. “Speak for yourself,” he replied, scratching his balls. “We have to crack the salty bone of contention from the rib housed in our own cage. The ankle bone hates the shinbone, the heart’s pissed off at the lung. It’s a virus we spread when it hurts too much inside. This is how change begins. We itch. 74 Poetry Fix
Fred Dale
Last Call at the Lounge Named after a Saint When the time comes for the lounge to give up its life, the fanged words used to eliminate them seek the stolen faces of God—as when the bone of the soul fires, and no one moves, not even the smoke. This is the power of disappearing, the time for truest accounting. Bowed in prayer, they await the miracle, a taste of his sleep.
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Cynthia Atkins
If T hese Walls Could Talk They would deliberate on a host of topics—No experimenting with silence the truth having a field day with the truth?— Boasting a Ph.D in paleography! On a first-name basis, blathering it out with the candor of a clock. If they would just say it, get on with it, we all might just primp and preen, varnish the sashes and doors—Move forward. The whitewashed coroner of quiet heaves a gasp and a sigh— A justified homicide? Fingerprints everywhere on the whitewash, until Sunday’s suppositions cheat us again with a wrongful death. Recondite paint chips will give riveting testimony, someday. Break promises! Smash the vase’s crisp Tulips like a face crying in the rain. Collapsed like a pyramid scheme gone bad. The neighbors will tip-toe across their covenant of lawns,
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mute the volume and peek out the blinds. Listen to the babel, holes darkle— Leaky faucets and children, closed doors. Tweeting these dimpled photos casting out our shame, honking and waving to a throng. Selling and telling our susurrus of pain to an anonymous listener who never even had to leave home.
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William Repass
kaput: a dirty crow post songbird, returned home as-poet, roosting up on the crucifix of a telephone pole––croaking of the virus down sagging lines of wire strung parallel, at passengers by: ourselves a murder of crows, blood caked from salvaging carrion––stripping the frame to its work to regurgitate for jet set fledgelings, still & still moving in the shell.
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As a matter of fact, school was a matter of form. As for example the long rectangular rooms lined up and down with long rows of square desks running parallel the walls, dictated by a chart drawn up in-advance of reality and thumb-tacked at the front of the room. We forced down three square meals per day. Three regular meals unpackaged and packed into lunch-boxes by mothers with stiff triangular dresses. Being regular children still in school we studied regularly, as studies regularly informed the administration how rules and regulations force conformity and deform creativity. School rules and regulations therefore dictated that this must not be so, that this was bad form. Form was still the matter with school. We memorized the long forms and the short forms, we memorized the forms of decorum, as for example the square sheets of paper we would accept upon graduation to decorate the walls of the businesses we would inherit from our fathers fathers with their square-framed glasses remembered in square-framed artifacts of light displayed on desks in businesses inherited from the American Dream oh and speaking of if you looked up dream in the d section of the dictionary at the front of the room the definition referred to reality in the r section which referred back to dream in the d section and so on no matter but never never look up dictionary in the d section of the dictionary no matter what we dressed in uniforms and in history class we memorized how history forms a circle in economics class we memorized how business forms a circle in science class we memorized how a tree forms a circle in math class we measured the form of the circle in art class we drew lines that curved around and became circles in PE we ran in circles in writing class we wrote in circles circling such words as still mattered in counseling we learned how to dream in a triangle. And outside of class we watched the water in the toilet spiral & spiral down the longest drain
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BIOGRAPHIES
Cynthia Atkins’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Del Sol Review, Green Mountains Review, Hermeneutic Chaos, The Journal, Le Zaporogue, North American Review, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Review, and Verse Daily among others. Her second collection, “In The Event of Full Disclosure” was recently featured on the Huffington Post and the Bill and Dave Cocktail Hour, and reviewed in [PANK] and the North American Review. She earned her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and holds residencies from the VCCA and Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and currently is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Western Community College, and lives in Rockbridge County, VA on the Maury River with her family. Marc Berman is a business executive originally from Boston. He began writing in airplanes while traveling from his home in western Massachusetts. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alembic, Blue Lake Review, Bluestem, Concho River Review, Confrontation, Crack the Spine, Eclectica Magazine, Forge, Fourteen Hills, Grey Sparrow, Lullwater Review, Paddlefish, Passager, Poetry East, Pisgah Review, The Round, Sanskrit, and Westview. Jenn Blair’s work has appeared in the Berkley Poetry Review, South Carolina Review, Pembroke Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, Copper Nickel, Rattle, Superstition Review, and New South among others. Her chapbook ‘The Sheep Stealer’ is out from Hyacinth Girl Press. 80 Poetry Fix
Sean L. Corbin is currently a student in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Kentucky. He holds BFA and MA degrees in writing and literature from Morehead State University, and has worked as a graduate assistant, instructor, and workshop leader. His favorite subjects are squirrels and the strange linguistic adventures of his son. Steve Coughlin teaches writing and literature at Chadron State College in northwestern Nebraska. Fred Dale is a husband to his wife, Valerie, and a father to his occasional jerk of a dog, Earl. He is a Senior Instructor in the English Department at the University of North Florida, and an avid cyclist, but mostly, he just grades papers. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Crack the Spine, Chiron Review, Raleigh Review, The Critical Pass Review, Stirring and others. George Eklund teaches writing at Morehead State University in eastern Kentucky and has published poems, reviews and translations in scores of contemporary journals. His most recent book publications include The Island Blade (ABZ Poetry Press, 2011); Each Breath I Cannot Hold (Wind Publications, 2011); and Wanting to Be an Element (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Forthcoming he has a book of poems written in Spanish and English, “In the Arms of the Fog/En los brazos de la niebla” from Ediciones Simiente of Morelos, Mexico. Valparaiso Press will soon release his translation of Mario Bojorquez’s award winning “El deseo postergado/The Delayed Desire.” Brad Garber has degrees in biology, chemistry and law. He writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. Since 1991, he has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such publications as Embodied Effigies, Clementine Poetry Journal, Sugar Mule, Barrow Street, Aji Magazine and other quality publications. 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee. Mike Good is pursuing an MFA at the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and serves as Editorial Assistant for The Hollins Critic. He is from Pittsburgh, PA, where he helped to found the After Happy Hour Review and Hour After Happy Hour Writing Workshop. His poetry has appeared in Collision, The New Yinzer, and is forthcoming in Nerve Cowboy. 81
Ben Grasso lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA in painting from Hunter College New York, and a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art. He has recently exhibited at Thierry Goldberg Projects in New York, Jerome Zodo in Milan Italy, and at Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been featured and reviewed by Art in America, Artnet, Harper’s Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Guernica magazine, the Utne Reader, Neon Magazine, Beautiful Decay, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Cleveland Free Times, and many others. Grasso is a 2010 fellow in painting from the New York Foundation of the arts, a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2011 and the Francis Neiderer artist in residence at Hollins University in 2014. Cathryn Hankla teaches in the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University and serves as Poetry Editor for The Hollins Critic. She’s the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction, the most recent of which is Fortune Teller Miracle Fish: stories (2011); a couple more poetry books are coming out in 2016 and 2017: Great Bear and Galaxies. Jeffrey Haynes is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Tech. His work has appeared in journals such as Yalobusha Review, Word Riot, Gabby, and The Hollins Critic. He lives in Madison, WI and rides a bicycle. Karen Hildebrand is chief content officer for the publisher of Dance Magazine. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Poet Lore, Blue Earth Review, decomP magazineE, WomenArts Quarterly and other journals, and was adapted for the play, “The Old In and Out,” produced off-off Broadway, NYC, in June 2013. She lives in Brooklyn and was the 2015 Artist in Residence at Ravens’ View Farm, in British Columbia, Canada. Dustin Junkert is working on an MFA at Georgia College. For the moment, he likes watching Malcolm in the Middle and reading books by Erich Maria Remarque. He has won prizes at the New York Times and Caesura and Willow Review, and has published in The Journal, South Carolina Review, the minnesota review, New Orleans Review, Natural Bridge, Chattahoochee Review, and Euphony.
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Flannery Lier was born and raised in a small town in Colorado where she had dreams of being an Egyptologist until she realized most of the things in Egypt have already been discovered. She received a BA from Colorado State University in both Literature and Creative writing and earned an MFA from Hollins University. She spends most of her time thinking about writing poems and knitting socks. Last spring Amy Marengo graduated from the MFA program at Virginia Tech, where she currently teaches first-year writing. She has recent or forthcoming work in Pleiades, Cimarron Review, DIALOGIST, among other journals. For more info on publications and awards, visit her at amymarengo.com. Stephen Massimilla is a poet, critic, professor, and painter. His co-authored 500-page volume, Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. His latest collection, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, was selected in the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize contest. He received the Bordighera Poetry Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday (CUNY); the Grolier Poetry Prize for Later on Aiaia, a Salmon Run National Book Award runner-up citation for Almost a Second Thought, selected by X.J. Kennedy; a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; and other awards. Massimilla has recent poems in AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, The Southern Poetry Review, Tampa Review, and Verse Daily; and his work has appeared hundreds of other publications. He holds an MFA in Writing and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He teaches at Columbia University and the New School. Clark Ogier currently lives in Jacksonville Beach, Florida and enjoys writing poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in Short, Fast, and Deadly, Psychic Gloss Magazine, Folio Weekly, IBS Digest, All Mail Review and The Dirty Spigot. Clark is a college graduate and felting enthusiast. He no longer entertains fishkeeping as a hobby.
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Eldon (Craig) Reishus lives beneath the Alps outside Munich (Landkreis Bad Tölz — Wolfratshausen). He’s an old school Exquisite Corpse contributor with recent work forthcoming at Fiction Southeast, Black Heart Magazine, theEEEL, Pidgeonholes Mag, Watershed Review, Maudlin House, and Apocrypha and Abstractions. A German-English translator and an all-around web and print media pro, he originates from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Follow him via Twitter at @EldonReishus. Call on him: www.reishus.de Originally from Los Alamos, NM, William Repass is currently working towards an MFA at Hollins University. He writes criticism for Film International Magazine and has published both poetry and prose in Berkeley Poetry Review, Connotation Press, Counterexample Poetics, Futures Trading, and elsewhere. Insley Smullen is a reincarnated opossum. Her first chapbook, DIRT GODS, was published in 2013 by Codorus Press and a second, updated version is forthcoming in Winter 2015. She was a Sophie Kerr Prize finalist in 2011, and nominated for Best New Poets 2015. She writes poetry and forages for carrion in Savannah, Georgia. Wendy Thornton has been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. Her memoir, Dear Oprah Or How I Beat Cancer and Learned to Love Daytime TV was published in July 2013 and her mystery, Bear-Trapped: In a Trashy Hollywood Novel, was published in February 2015. She has won many awards for her work, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been Editor’s Pick on Salon.com multiple times. Her work is published in England, Scotland, Australia and India. Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University Zanesville, Matthew Vetter earned his PhD in English from Ohio University. He holds an MA in English Literature from Morehead State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. His poems have appeared in numerous national and regional literary journals including Midwest Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, The Louisville Review, and The Journal of Kentucky Studies. A Pushcart Prize and AWP Intro Award nominee, Vetter was the 2009 winner of the Danny Miller Memorial Award in Poetry.
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Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco, 2016) and My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014). His recent poems are forthcoming in Adroit Journal, Be About It Zine, Bougainvillea Road, and Infinity’s Kitchen. Jerry Wayne Wells received his MFA from Hollins University. His reviews have been published in The Hollins Critic, and he currently teaches English at a private school in Virginia. Marianna White grew up in Seattle, WA but is currently living across the country for her first year in college and is studying creative writing (fingers crossed). She has a lot of siblings and a dog who she misses terribly. She rows competitively and when she feels awkward she curls into a ball regardless of where she is. She is just starting to send out her poetry and if she could be any animal it would be a cheetah. Helen Wickes lives in Oakland, California, where she worked for many years as a psychotherapist. She is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is World as You Left It, published in 2015 by Sixteen Rivers Press. Amanda Williams is an MFA Creative Writing candidate at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She is the recipient of a Jackson Fellowship, the Gertrude Claytor Prize in Poetry from the Academy of American Poets, and will serve as a Hollins Teaching Fellow in the Spring 2016 semester, instructing undergraduate students in creative writing. Amanda received BA degrees in English Literature and Theatre Arts from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, IL, and spent a year abroad at the University of Oxford. Her poems have been published in Artemis: A Journal for Artists and Writers from the Blue Ridge Region and Beyond, Jam Tarts Magazine, and the Red Truck Review and are forthcoming in Sugar House Review. Her essays have appeared in AAAA Magazine and The Morning News
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Ben Grasso | Nuclear Energ y
Cynthia Atkins Marc Ber man Jenn Blair Sean L. Corbin Steve Coughlin Fred Dale George Eklund Brad Garber Mike Good Cathr yn Hankla Jef frey Haynes Karen Hildebrand Dustin Junkert Flanner y Lier Amy Marengo Stephen Massimilla Clark Ogier Eldon Reishus William Repass Insley Smullen Wendy Thornton Matthew Vetter Bar rett Warner Jer r y Wayne Wells Marianna White Helen Wickes Amanda Williams