TABLE OF CONTENTS Daniel S. De Maio………..........…..………………………………………………………….cover Anna Escher……………………………………………………………….”The Harvest” p. 3-4 Kristi Nimmo……………………………..“Byrd,” “LA Convertible,” & “Whistle” p. 5 Alexis Sikorski……………………………………..…..”Waking Up My Roommate” p. 6 Emma Gammans…………………………………”Throb” & “The Sighing Tree” p. 6-7 Changming Yuan……………………………………….….”Natural Confrontations” p. 8 Jessica Dionne………………..….. “A Witch’s Suicide Note” & untitled poem p. 9 “Hung Up On Me” & “ The King of Oz” p. 10 “Wild Women” p. 11 Stanley Kaplan……………………………………………....”Throwing Things Out” p. 12 Woodrow Hightower…………………………………………………..…”Catching Up” p. 13 J.H. Johns………………………………………….”What Some Lives Amount To” p. 14 Matt Paramo...”Highs and Lows” & “What Are You Looking At? Hah?” p. 15 Kirstin Aguilar…………………………………………………………………”Lucky” p. 16-19 For all inquiries or if you wish to contribution: pourvidazine@gmail.com
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The Harvest by Anna Escher We were really roughing it this time. My 1997 Volkswagen hugged the curves of Highway 84 West. The bottles of wine clinked against each other on the floor of the passengers seat as Jade lit up a cigarette. She was a brunette, like me, and Serbian with a strong jawline, dark eyebrows and light green eyes. She had a tattoo of three kittens that peaked out on her right shoulder behind a denim overall strap. We’d been on the road for 3 days, and were looking for the next gas station. I had just come off of a bad breakup and we were heading west to the ocean through the town of La Honda. La Honda is a remote city, population: 920. It’s really more of a landmark than a metropolis; a few homes nestled in a thick forest of redwood trees. It’s more known for Alice’s, a diner at the intersection of 35 and 84 where the Hell’s Angels were known to stop. La Honda was home to Hunter S. Thompson, Neil Young and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a few cyber security experts who preferred the privacy. And now, me. There’s a heavy historic sentiment to these roads, as they’ve been explored many times by the other wanderers, drunk drivers and recluses who escape the suburbs — they’ve been here too. I pass my old exit and am reminded of him, how we drank whiskey on the stone porch at midnight in August overlooking the garden of my temporary home and the acres of dry grassland that surrounded it. We caught the distant shimmer of the Pacific Ocean behind the rolling hills and saw the entire Milky Way sparkle above us. He dug deep to know everything about me until there was nothing left that he wanted. His fingers in my hair, uprooting my pain. He broke me slowly when he yelled so loud the windows rattled. When I found the correspondence to the other woman in Boston. I cracked and my heart found its defeat in the wet moonlit dirt. What else to do when you’re empty but let your pain grow like a weed. Spread myself along these roads and in the dark bedrooms and at the bottom of bottles and cigarette packs. Drive until your tailpipe peppers out and you’ve successfully destroyed everything you ever loved. Jade passes me the wine and I swerve to dodge roadkill. We’re nearing the ocean. Gas station, spotted. I wipe sweat from my forehead and fill up the tank at the one-pump, cash only pit stop.
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We detour on foot down a small trail and arrive upon an automobile graveyard of rusting pick up trucks, tractors and miscellaneous car parts. A porcelain, beheaded Venus de Milo statue replica haunts the trees further down the trail. We come upon a garden full of savory tomatoes – this is surely what sunlight smells like. Huge purple artichokes blossom slowly and crack apart in the afternoon autumn heat. Rainbow chard spouts from a bed, I let my fingertips graze its dirt-covered, emerald leaves. Onions the size of a human head yearn to be unearthed from the crumbling soil. The aroma of wet dirt mixes with the sting of fresh air and a dry breeze hits our faces as we begin our forbidden harvest. I pick 8 tomatoes, an onion and some sage. With some time and the right concoction of sunlight and water they’ll grow back eventually. So will I. We reach the perpendicular intersection of Highway 84 and Highway 1. I leave my car unlocked and we begin the descent down to Tunitas Creek Beach. I step into the ocean and foam rolls over the ends of my blue jeans. In the distance, a few driftwood shelters reek of sweet bonfire. The water is a light cerulean blue and the waves are absolutely relentless in their fight against the jagged rocks that obstruct their route to lap up against the shore. The wine is hitting me hard and the sand isn’t coming out of our clothes and the laughter is escaping us, hysterical and silent. The waves are so chaotic as they break, a drum roll to a cymbal crash against the California coast, rebelling against whatever momentum guides them. Violent, crashing cerulean currents are telling me that none of us were ever destined for smooth sailing. ***
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“Byrd,” “LA Convertible,” & “Whistle” Frottage, drawing, and graffiti in graphite w/ a graphite + tea wash by Kristi Nimmo
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Waking Up My Roommate by Alexis Sikorski You said you liked to look at the sea, not swim in it. You said you liked to read about tragedy, not live in it. You said you wanted to be courageous, but didn't know how. You said you could handle this, but look at you now. *** Throb by Emma Gammans bellows like wound. Finger pressed into the jaw a wine hot bruise. Throb toys at the thumping flesh like a peeled plum; invokes thrombosis: bullies veins, blows blood cells in the head. Skin breaks: a thatch blown off the raw place. Throb bursts at the throat slits the sky in half where aurora rages, like a neon claw.
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The Sighing Tree by Emma Gammans Their tombs are cloaked in white-tipped moss. Angels rise upward; flowers, limp as a tired hand, are strung in half moon crescents around the headstones. I write names, dates of birth, dates of death. I write what I see: fragmented stories of short lives and of long ones. And I imagine what I cannot see. The unabridged lives. The way she fought polio, and he, yellow fever. The way this man kneeled by the lake with his son, reeled in salmon, maybe trout. Each grave is a sandstone knight. A protector of things. After all, these are stories, now. Maybe they always were. My fingers, like flint, try for a scratch of light. I feel their histories warm my bones; maybe it is in knowing that everything there ever was, still isin some way. When I stood in the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, not far from Phnom Penh and saw eight thousand human skulls stacked behind a glass panelled shrine, I knew for sure that everything that ever was still is: a beat pulsing onward, a never ending echo, a cry, reverberating across an empty canyon. Then, hiding in the shade of a sighing tree, I am told this is the Chankiri Tree against which executioners beat children and babies. In my head I watched them whip and snap bodies against the bark. The laugh of a soldier. Babies thrown into the soil. These stories, I am told. The horror, grows like a hair. It cannot be stopped. Each skull is a moon, blown open by a hammer. Sockets, deeper than a crater, stare through the glass. The sun has made everything dry, made the ground and trees dry, made the bones dry, where they emerge, cracked and gleaning out of red dust. New bones wash to the surface every year during the monsoon. I’d never seem human bones this way- tossed out like a chicken carcass peeled clean.
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Natural Confrontations by Changming Yuan
1/ Plum Blossom Without a single leaf Grass-dyed or sun-painted To highlight it But on a skeletal twig Glazed with dark elegies A bud is blooming, bold and blatant Like a drop of blood As if to show off, to challenge The entire season When whims and wishes Are all frozen like the landscape
2/ Eddy A gossamer-like breeze Left far behind By a running dog Tries to strike The stagnated twilight Hanging above the whole city Before the storm sets in
3/ Seagull As if right from heaven A snowy seagull charges down Trying to pick up the entire ocean With its bold beak As the tsunami raises All its fierce fists In sweeping protection Against earth’s agitation In foamy darkness five poems by Jessica Dionne…
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A Witch’s Suicide Note Sick Sick Sick creatures we are blackened eyes and hollow hearts spiders braid webs in my hair whisper lullabies in my ear
the night is the best the night is the best your wicked soul shall have no rest bring out your demons put them to the test and daggers pierce your beautiful chest and angels weep at your beautiful death eternal sleep weary soul blessed Inferno welcomes expected guest. *** Quotes about monsters Songs about ghosts Pictures of demons and heavenly hosts Nightmares from which I awake with a scream— These are a few of my favorite things. ***
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Hung Up On Me
You wear your past like a noose around your neck & treat others like low-hanging branches And all I can think is please, please, get hung up on me.
*** The King Of Oz The lion took the courage gifted to him & then devoured the heart of the tin man. The courage made him more instinct than emotion, & a lion can’t pass up a bleeding heart. ***
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Wild Women Wild women roam the night with tangled hair & feral eyes cursed by love and the instinct to be free. Native, lush, scarred skin, claws pierce your heart— hold it forever. Delicate women cannot survive love wild women thrive, vicious kisses & yes, they bite. ***
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THROWING THINGS OUT by Stanley Kaplan Boxes of credentials tucked away on old shelves, establish the order of ordinary days. I insist on the exact amount of light that existed on the day she died. Throw out all abhorrent buffoonery, then assault the cornucopia of grief. I bubble the enigmatic brew. To enroll is enough, to die insufficient.
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CATCHING UP by Woodrow Hightower Shit man, I haven’t seen you in years Where you been? Last I heard You were riding water buffalo Down Mercury River With a Bible in one hand And a cherry bomb in the other And how’s Bugaboo? Your sister sure made me laugh The way she’d prank the Suicide Hotline With some crazy cirrhosis-of-the-liver story Did you know she put me in a sleeper hold once? Then woke me up with a bitch slap Hard enough to wake the dead She was violent but tender I don’t know if you heard about my dad Vanished into thin air last Christmas The cops think his disappearance self-inflicted He was a suffering soul Weak as a blade of grass Sweaty palms and high drama But I’d be lying If I said I didn’t miss him Man, there’s something I always wanted to tell you I’m really sorry about me and Danette She was your ball and chain, not mine It was wrong of me To take her to Chavez Ravine To look for arrow heads In the middle of the night What’s that? What did you say your name is? For fuck’s sake! The resemblance melts my mind Please forgive these old eyes And tales of a life badly lived I’ll let you go now I thought you were someone else.
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“WHAT SOME LIVES AMOUNT TO” by J.H. Johns I walk my dog a couple of times a day and I clean up after it, religiously- zealouslybecause I’d want the same courtesy; so the guy who lives four doors down, pulls up alongside of me in his Range Rover and says“I saw your dog squatting, why didn’t you clean it up?” Well, first, I told him“…females piss that way…” but, then, I realized that despite his coat and tie and his briefcase on the seat next to himthat’s what his life amounts toa conversation about dog shit…
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“Highs and Lows” & “What Are You Looking At? Hah?” by Matt Paramo
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Lucky by Kirsten Aguilar He rolls his window up, left arm cranking at the handle (one of those manual windows), and tells me that this is the most dangerous road in California. It is like a ribbon through the hills, a curled tongue, and although he is convincing, I do not believe him. “Because of the wind,” he says. His window is up now, sealed closed and both hands are on the steering wheel again – a rare instance. He is perpetually doing something other than driving while he drives: taking off his sweatshirt, adjusting the heater or the AC, fiddling with his phone to play music, to check messages, to take a picture of me or the sunset or of something else beautiful. He drives fast and it is hard for me to trust him because of the way his car sounds, how it creaks and rattles and feels like it might break, fall apart, come loose in a shattering of pieces. “People are idiots when they drive this road,” he says. He turns to me, his shoulders up in a shrug, his eyes wide, crazed and sort of goofy. “They think they can go fast and then they get to the top of one of those hills and its like a fucking vortex, the wind knocks them into the other lane and splat, they hit another car.” I don’t know if vortex is really the word he wants to use but I don’t say so. It reminds me of the way my mother instructed me to make poached eggs – bring your water to a boil, use a spoon to make a whirling vortex and then drop in your egg. He shifts gears with a loud rumble. We are approaching the base of a hill – soon we will ascend to one of those fucking vortex tops. Since March, my mother has been losing weight. Her collarbones pierce at her skin, her belly no longer rounds out. In Hollywood they’d praise her, call her a babe for her age. How’s a lady like you stay in shape? they’d ask her. She’d clear her throat, move her face close to the recorder (she’s never really understood technology), then say, delicate, allow your body stop working. That’ll make you skinny. When we get to the cottage, the sun is still out so after we’ve brought our things inside, we walk to town, step into Murphy’s. The man at the bar asks us if we don’t mind moving down a seat because he has a lady friend coming. Abe says, “Course not, bro,” and claps the man on the back. We move down. Abe orders a Guiness and I get a Stella Artois. There is a Niners game on TV and we are ahead a touchdown. It is th the 4 quarter. I eat peanuts out of a little glass bowl. They aren’t salted and they disappoint me but I keep eating them anyway because I like to have something to do with my hands. The chair beside the man remains
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empty. He has fading red hair and a brown beard which I find strange because I thought that redheads were red all over. The bartender tells me I look like someone he knows. I ask him who and he says he can’t remember, just that I look familiar. There has been an interception and the Niners are running toward another touchdown. Abe jumps up from his stool, puts his hands on his head. “Oh, ohhhh, ohhhh!” he yells. “Duuuude!” I want to tell him to quiet down, but the redhaired man is at it too, pounding his fists on the counter. His ladyfriend hasn’t yet shown up and his beer is almost gone. They make it in into the endzone but miss the extra point and when they do, Abe buries his face into my shoulder. “Noooo,” he says, like someone’s died. He goes to the bathroom and I buy the redhaired man a beer. He wants a Coors, plain and simple. “What’s your name?” I ask. “Harrison,” he says. “Son of Harry.” He laughs and his shoulders wiggle up and down near his ears. I tell him that I used to come here when I was little. Spent summers at my parents’ cottage out on the lake, my cheeks red with sun, my feet bare and perpetually dirty, crusted over with callouses and mud. He tells me I’m one of the lucky ones. “I hitchhiked out here when I was 20,” he says. “My girlfriend came with me. Can’t hardly remember her face now, if her eyes were blue or green.” “How does that make me lucky?” I ask. He shrugs. “You just look lucky.” The bartender pulls out a brown sack, pours more peanuts into the glass bowls. They fall together in slow piles and the sound reminds me of rain. “I tried to go to Hawaii once,” Harrison says. “Went to the airport and all. They screwed up my ticket, somethin’ about the seat, bein overbooked and whatnot, so I stayed, was gonna wait for the next flight. But the one takin off, the one I was sposed to be on, I saw it take off and somethin messed up. It started goin up, up and then all a sudden comes smashin down, you know, just like that. All fire and flames and shit. They all died. 240 of em. True story.” I don’t believe him. “That’s sad, ” I say. I order another Stella. The Niners score another touchdown but Harrison doesn’t notice. “Haven’t flown since,” he says. “Family lives out in Virginia but I haven’t been back for quite a while, fifteen years, I’d say. Parents are getting’ up there in years, you know, 80’s, slowin’ down.” Abe is back. He kisses me on the forehead, brushes back my hair. We go to eat bread in a little alley on the square where they give out fresh hot rolls from the back of the bakery. They cost 25 cents each and Abe has to dig around in his pocket to find enough. The moon is low and round and I
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get a feeling that I want to pluck it out of the sky and place it on the lobe of my ear like a pearl. We have sex when we get back and it is a little sloppy, a little drunk. Abe tells me I’m awesome and pretty. Afterwards we eat the rest of our rolls and get crumbs in the bed. My mother calls but I don’t pick up. She leaves a message telling me to make sure we turn the AC off before we go to sleep. “The button’s a little funky,” she says. “Sometimes you have to press it twice to get it to work.” She says other things too, but I don’t bother to listen. I press the 7 on my cell phone, delete the message. There’s a vase on the kitchen table that used to be my grandmother’s. It is white and veined with blue flowers, and, for the moment, empty. When I was young, my mother used to fill it with lilacs. She’d go out early in the morning to the bushes that line the yard, clip the blooms and arrange them in bouquets. She wasn’t very good at it and they’d slide into lopsided groups - too full or too sparse. I go into the kitchen after Abe is asleep and sit at the table. I like it when the cottage is quiet and still and cool. I hold the vase in my hands. It is heavier than I remember and not as pretty. The painting is rough. A chip cuts into the rim. I press its belly to my cheek. It is smooth and cold – for a moment tricks me into thinking that it’s wet. I am shivering when I wake in the morning because the AC is still on. Abe’s side of the bed is empty and I stretch out my limbs, try to reach the edges of the mattress. I hear him moving around in the kitchen, the creak of floorboards, the sizzle of bacon. He’s singing along to a stupid country song – his voice is off-key but he doesn’t hold back. I get up. Make the bed. Pick his sweatshirt up off the floor and throw it on. It smells like feet and cigarettes. He’s set out placemats on the table and plates and silverware too. “You’re up!” he says when he sees me, and his smile breaks wide across his face, crinkles his eyes. He holds a spatula in one hand and his phone in the other. I sit down at the table. “It’s so nice,” I say. “You’re so nice.” My grandmother’s vase is full, blooming with a bouquet. I feel suddenly like there’s a string on my heart, knotted and tight. Abe shuffles over with a few strips of bacon, dumps them on my plate. “These are burned,” I say. I poke at them with a finger. They are hot, greasy. “You like them like that,” he says. “I made them a little burned for you.” He sits down across from me. “Is this all we’re having?” I say. “Bacon?” “I figured you could make the eggs. You make them better anyway.” The flowers in the vase are yellow and red, ones I don’t recognize.
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We eat our bacon and when we’re done, Abe reaches out across the table to hold my hand but I pull it away, rest it in my lap. “So how bout those eggs,” he says. “I’m in the mood for scrambled.” I get up, take my plate to the sink, set it in with a clunk. There is a window above the sink and it is rectangular, reminds me of a frame, a painting. It seems somehow that nothing outside is real, that we are contained inside this cottage like a TV set. Propped up and twodimensional. “You think he actually had a ladyfriend?” I say. “Who?” “Harrison, the guy at the bar last night.” “Oh, the ginger?” “His name was Harrison.” I reach over to the window, unlock it and slide it up. Air breathes in, cool and damp. “Nah, I doubt he was meeting anyone. Probably just a kooky old man,” Abe says. “Made up a girl or something.” I lean over the sink, press my nose to the screen. It smells raw and metallic. “That makes me sad,” I say. I think of Harrison and his airplane, those 240 people all dead as dust on the tarmac. I think of his family in Virginia, imagine his parents like wrinkled birds, their bones hollow and light, their hair brittle and lonely of color. “You ever wonder if you made me up?” I say, but Abe doesn’t answer and so I set about washing the dishes. Abe wants to go for a swim but I’m not in the mood yet, so he goes down to the lake by himself and leaves me alone in the cottage. His car keys are on the table, lying like a spill near my grandmother’s vase. I pick them up and curl my hand around them, make a fist so they disappear. When I was young, my mother tried to teach me to drive stick. She took me out to the edge of town where the roads were lonely and still, showed me the subtle exchange between clutch and gas. I couldn’t get the hang of it. The car kept stuttering and stalling and finally she told me to stop, that I was hurting the engine. Abe’s car is parked at the edge of the driveway baking in the heat. I move the driver’s seat forward so that my feet reach the pedals. I slip the keys into the ignition and adjust the mirrors. For a moment in the rearview, I see a little figure coming up the road like an ant, but when I blink it is gone. ***
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“Dripping from the mouth…”
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