Deluge (Issue Two, Spring '14) by Paul Cunningham

Deluge Magazine

DELUGE ISSUE TWO

SPRING 2014

DELUGE

SPRING, TWENTY-FOURTEEN DELUGE is the official literary magazine of Radioactive Moat Press. DELUGE seeks poetry and prose, translations, essays, review, criticism, poemfilms, photography, art, art, and any variations of [anti]

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MANAGING EDITOR PAUL CUNNINGHAM

www.radioactivemoat.com

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NEILA MEZYNSKI

PARTS & PART

On the edge. Sharp that is. To make ‘em fit is all there is, matters. Disparate things of go between. Where they live not for sure or seen. Walls up for safety sake. Too easy. Better imagine ‘em outside a box, no return stand alone, a wall for all. See. Pants down.

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DELUGE SPRING, TWENTY-FOURTEEN ISSUE TWO

NEILA MEZYNSKI

[p. 8]

RONNIE PELTIER

[p. 11]

NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER

[p. 13]

BETH TOWLE

[p. 17]

DREW KALBACH

[p. 19]

RACHEL BURNS

[p. 21]

KYLE BELLA

[p. 23]

RUSSELL JAFFE

[p. 30]

MEGAN BURNS

[p. 33]

DAVID BLUMENSHINE

[p. 36]

ZOE ADDISON

[p. 38]

MICHAEL SIKKEMA

[p. 40]

CANDICE WUEHLE

[p. 44]

RYAN BENDER-MURPHY

[p. 49]

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

[p. 53]

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RONNIE PELTIER

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[What Sweet Seduction Lies Before Us?]

VERSE 1: See what festers behind daddy’s sweet silhouette, 2: We’ll never dance again, your sanguine pirouette 3: Eternal dungeon ashen under milky wet sallow whispers oozing aortic decaying heart swirling entombed in memory’s uncouth, wartand cold with absence. Melodies hummed apart remains that you drink and kiss. Certain trust ridden pleasure complex. Dig in, seek wearily never resolve, rather dissolve into wanton lust emerges from mutual death, where lovers steeped that seepage between brain and bone—infant dust trysts beckoned in silence but explicit on treble into silence, silence finally grasp that dim shiver. snorting crevices past beauty, lonely kink queen libretto tongues licking wounds raw again. Where We could never clutch each other in the dark, only dressed in precious muscles. did I spit your chewed nipples? Where did you in the fetid warmth of harsh exposure. expel the bleeding tip of my erection?

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NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER [BRONZE HOUSE]

Statues in the concession gardens until the beachmaster hippo signaled it was time to move. He needs to learn about his male privilege but I’m actually talking about real hippos here. This is the most terrible of all the animal prisons because it’s the largest. the barometer of the modern zoo is based on the spike in penguin mass suicides, but these places suck anyway so fuck it. My father,who left me w/ my mother’s collections. This exacerbates into a goat barnyard in the petting area of the park. Both of them are experts at mannerisms that prevent disclosure. She has about 30 cookie jars now, ranging from chicken little to baseball tart. Someday I will have to sort them. I will do something strange to pay homage to what we couldn’t bridge, I will bring the pieces of ceramic cows and giraffes and rearrange them into a pentagram on the sidewalk. As a teenager I refused to come home one night and got drunk, had sex, and passed out. The next day I was sentenced to 2 days in the county mental health facility. When you picked me up, you didn’t say a word. So the first shard, a piece of a bear nose, goes here

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[PUCE HOUSE]

His body rejected the new lung like my body rejected your dick, but here it is anyway, a fresh new track in the mud, filling with rain, and the children of frogs who have nothing to do with you. A family of young shelleys in A-line dresses & puce beehives in a forest fire burnt to death. They are holding hands, their heights tiered to indicate who is the cosmetically ordered Oscars mother. A doctor is in the woods. I’m helping him give my cat a hysterectomy but we close her up when we realize she’s already pregnant with little fallout cats blooming up for a prop-job airplane. Since this is a room I’m not familiar with, I am confronted with the curtain of trust: Love, a stranger that plans your future. It’s the conversation that continues after you excuse yourself to go to the john at a dinner party.

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[LINEN WHITE HOUSE]

The mean girls who become liberals and work at non-profits. What do you mean the world keeps rolling, she says. I have absolutely no desire to become the first woman president. In every small town in America I become an alcoholic. This means your eyes, your clothes, your gym bag, your poverty. Hot poverty for the good news project of systemic theology, inc. And my name iss floorplans. A tiny tiny alcoholic wasted in the Kitchen Sink where I am small enough to talk to starlings living in the day old bread of ye old sandwich shop. they want in & I want out, The hope of school, of strangers with strange pieces of paper owned by shareholders. Feel that ssstillness of ending the war with yourself while the war of the word is beginning . I guess it’s considered A privilege to be suspicious of education, but you’re assuming the poor have no right to criticize with a heightened sense of smell, that your tongue is the only thing that matters, trespassing the skin of knees.

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BETH TOWLE [Mind the Prediction]

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[Advertisement]

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DREW KALBACH [untitled]

Sic semper feed me first I Have a clutch and a new Sharpened coin and a mile-long hunger For flesh of the beast. Leaky hero thrust through my hair-do like Tell me more on credit scores or Honk away little traffic jam Dealing with precious disease and too slim jeans. I have a desire for public accolades On social sharing sites. In straits, in pro-consul thievery, Won't wear no false flag. Thumbs up. Logged in through so much red.

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[untitled]

I'm slower in person than in persona. Can my card be feed. Can my account unfreeze. Can my feet come clean in some tight ass jeans. High gloss gif finish slow load bandwidth in public place now where can I get service now where can I need service. Can my phone stay quiet. Trash gets dank while you gather my data rank after rank. One whole tank of pre-paid messages. I filth out and snap public addresses with space to sweat over and moon.

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RACHEL BURNS [rush]

my wannarexia has become indecipherable with my craft & all the other poetesses think i’m a bellied second cousin but you are so sweet you are so so sweet i am as metaphorical as a home town buffet taking the first swan dive

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[scarlet]

excess hangs to me as things once categorized as pellets guilty of compartmentalizing if you wanted glamour, why the fuck am i even here slipping my hand into my breast pocket see i can create a beginning for compartmentalized glamour at all hours pulling at all hours if i close one eye i am no horus a start hangs at my chest, fraud i drew my brain like this a chorus in my head chants about grains & feeling sensations the chanting i cannot unbutton my shirt

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KYLE BELLA

[my lips, against a poet’s lips]

"When I bow, / a black fish leaps / from the small of my back. / I catch it. / I tear it apart. I fix / the scales / to my lips. / Every word I utter / is opalescent." – Eduardo Corral, Slow Lightning

The word opalescent hits my tongue, viscous and a little salty, like the first time I tasted another man’s come.

== Is it strange that from a quote on fish scales & lips & the word “opalescent” I settle on two naked bodies together? Maybe it is, except for that it’s 1) powerful to watch him beg for you 2) milky white, imagined as seductive & inviting on lips 3) The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration categorizes semen as "other potentially infectious material" or OPIM. 4) I do it anyway because I want to take the risk. I don’t take enough risks these days, not with bodies at least. 5) I have to remember when acts felt risky. == Other male bodies invade every city on this trip, leaping from my back like that black fish. I tear them apart as the nomad because it is easier than ever to objectify them when passing through, in ethereal form. As pixelated bodies on a computer screen, I too can affix these men, flat images to my lips, calling out their names (if I’m lucky)

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or otherwise their screen names. The image of the moment is sonorous8. Named so because of a photo he’s unlocked, showing an eight-inch penis positioned against a Sprite can. == I call out: sonorous8, do you want me? do you want my opalescent lips? but there’s only silence, now, because it’s five days after we first talked, and I’m 260 miles away in Vermont at dusk. maybe a bird answers, half a warble, but it’s not enough to feed my desire. == I bow down, alone in my single dorm, as I stare up, noticing bright white light making even my sunkissed, summer skin look pallid. But I still bow down & open my mouth, wide:

O With that wide, round shape I make, I don’t know what I expect to enter me. There’s nothing else around (though this is not unusual, as there never really is.) But I still hunger with that gesture to find something, even if this is the invasion of history into the present moment. == O, O, O, O— familiarity in the gesture, more black fish from the small of my back, less leaping & more a disjunctive twisting of memory into presence: the first moment I felt dirty & transgressive yet more powerful than ever ==

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== At least for now I have another poet’s lips. O, Eduardo, I say into the still dorm room, to his ghostly image, every word I utter / is opalescent. Repeating back those lines, I imagine something dripping from the corner of my mouth. In the empty & quiet landscape it’s now clear I’m never really alone. Even if my impulse is to orient my mouth toward real flesh, I also survive on shared history, of lines that form when imagined lips graze.

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[dream #1: freedom from]

imagine if you woke up one day and the world around you was all the same except for the fact that it was distorted, shoegazed. what would it be like to not only lack knowing any coherent sounds around you, but to also see noise? what would it be like to have the effects of a violent world dulled, at least temporarily? this is where my dream begins, and while its origins remain elusive, every action after that i recognize now seems to emerge from the vision of a distorted world. my dream begins, funny enough, by thinking i’ve woken up after a restful night of sleep. no alarm has gone off, so i’m immediately alerted to different surroundings by refraction of light through the bay window. the color is still the same, a butter yellow, but as it streams through the half open blinds, it seems to be distorted. not in the way you’d expect light to, but jagged and pattern-less, moving against its color. the interior of my apartment seems the same, as i stand up out of bed, and peer down the long, narrow hallway. i’m not going crazy, i think, grabbing my towel to head to the shower. but as i arrive in the bathroom, the light has the same quality against the blue cerulean tiles. simultaneously soft and pointed. i turn water on. quite warm to fog up perception. hitting skin, drops penetrate. just below the skin. pinpricks invading touch. like sun’s invasion of my vision. i have a busy day ahead of me, i think out loud. i have to just keep going.

DELUGE

27 soft cotton towel. wicks against invasive drops. click of my briefs’ elastic against hips lends assurance. in anticipation of my body’s ability to seduce. i gather all of my belongings, finally opening the front door on to san jose avenue. sound & touch & color pound into my tiny frame. noise is. so intense. i cannot…breathe properly. feeling. my lungs, tighten…

I wake up in the present moment, gasping for breathe. I wake up in the present moment with a newfound freedom. It might be paralyzing out in the world littered with violence, but I am in my body, which is the place that knows better than anyone else how to envision future cartographies.

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[animalism, dreamt] The first thing that startles me when I come into consciousness is my owl beak. It’s not that the rest of my body has changed. Just in the place of soft lips & cartilage nose, a hard protrusion. I always strive to know my body, but here it slips away. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like an animal. I’ve woken up under the canopy of a willow tree, overlooking a barrier of rocks back where I was born, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As a young child, I’d submit myself to the waves when the winds would pick up from the East. A pale white speck peering over the edge, staring into near obsidian. I was naïve then. I thought the waves had sharp edges and would shred my body. But my teeth were stronger than water. My beak, now, even stronger, as the memory of A Single Man seems to fall from the branches. The moment out at the edge of the Pacific, when I jumped in with George. When I was cleansed. Do I want to be an animal? Maybe not. But do I really have a choice? I begin to wonder. I don’t really understand why fantasy objects to my present realities. It’s like my vision always demands more out of me— I hear: open your beak. screech as loud as you can. All of this coming from somewhere. Maybe that faint rattle from a little crevice in the rocks below my feet. I open up my beak as wide as it’ll go. Opening it up, I even strain my neck, letting out the most piercing of hoots I can muster. I suddenly feel larger than my body. Much larger than the waves, even, which seem to have halted their constant rolling motion. I do not act out of consciousness, in this place. The surroundings compel me into action: to rise up from crouched position. To very carefully, almost tiptoeing, down the rocks into the sand. To crouch down, untying the laces of brown leather boots, tugging them off, and throwing them hard over my head, into the rocks behind me. I wade into the edge of the water, which, when it touches me, instantly warms up. I edge slowly forward, as my clothes cling tightly against my skin. The one bit of awareness I have is that of the push between body and surroundings. The final call from the water is to sink into the obsidian. The moment that beak hits the water, it falls off and is instantly replaced by a set of gills. And so I do what one does with gills: Stroke forward, into my power.

DELUGE

[anticipatory]

somebody says do

some body says not

some bodies say anticipate

some body says not

some bodies say anticipate

but why not? I ask with sudden ferocity anticipation is rapture somebody says do

in the act of anticipation I reclaim lines of possible en-action do you get it? my question pointed directly inside of where they en-act somebody says anticipation

some body says is

some bodies say [might be] sin

when you’re a boy dwarfed by the world words spitfire through an uttering I imagine what it is like imagine what it is like

—bracing yourself—

to open your owl beak loudly screeching abandoning somebody says do

some body says not

some bodies say anticipate

DELUGE

RUSSELL JAFFE [three poems]

Mom and dad sobb’d that I needed to see a therapist or talk to somebody. You’d laughed that the briefcase of toys under the bed was eerily professional. Shh. Yet I did not tell you all that I would win this war. I slept trench lines unsteadily. Treaties ensued. Please don’t panic tonight. Don’t throw up conditions of worship. Believe in my pipecleaner voodoo doll. My diorama asylum conversations. Please hurl sacrifices into my baking soda/vinegar volcano. For today my goal is to emerge from your body a kind of handmade god. Our daylight project plans are best laid booby traps for outsider non-believers. I will eventually peel myself from this humble square of floor. I thought you were special. I thought you were mine. I thought you could tell us who I am.

DELUGE

Everything has been a lie. But USA #1 no-god-but god this lie is our lie in hand over stomach knots and outdoor theatre drunks. At least vomit makes a pretty stain. In the bony gesticulations of this dead meadow and razed trees I’m a true necrosexual. Teeth layered wet in saliva kiss puddles barricade our dried bodystain walking paths in preserves. Pieces of spinal cord like children’s drawings in the dew. Lies in branches silhouetting the grass’s feud with the moon. Sundials and VCR tape worn out over time. Of course our refrigerators became shrines. History’s mysteries on tube TVS. Sisters! Lie with me. I suppose we’re all sisters of this stagnancy. The Alien Queen has two big hands then two small ones protruding from her chest and then also my two hands. I make me the meadow the woods. I want to draw monsters so I draw monsters. I draw the nature soakingly into pave’d oblivion from this sopping tent filled with radio parts. This manifesto of the creative and isolated child will be queen. These doodles are self-portraits in rapture. These offspring are exercises in assembly line necrological eggsack architecture. When I say I want your children it’s a lie. I want your children.

DELUGE

Lover. I waited around all day for you in my underwear. I’m talking weed growth day. I’m talking garden hose bacteria slime mold. I’m talking T-2 Sour Meltdowns in suburban grass and Kenner’s Alien Queen action figure with tail whip action. What I really liked were the Aliens comics from Dark Horse. I basically have them strewn all over my bedroom. More possibilities than your legendary black hole movie mythology popcorn stuck in the toothsome dark matter Pepsi night weekend gas giants for sure. Some great writing. I liked the one comic with the restrained Alien Queen that breaks loose and carnage fetishes the halls of space station intelligent design. Tail spines a boyhood. Can you imagine the killfloor bedroom plastic die-cast spacebot slave galley that would create a collar thus for a queen? Jumpsuited handlers tossed hither and yon by the big creator? Bloodsmear’d walls O teenage awesome. I was just a boy is all. If slime is life what’s with all the dry in the hellscapes? Do you think all those 90s toy company slimes are coincidences? Is drool a dominate for of communication or are the teeth the gateways of the slime kingdom? Who’s really on the leash and who’s really pulling who? Who’s in my underwear all day who?

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MEGAN BURNS [three ‘OKCupid Matches the World’ poems]

After sex do you clean up right away? now it’s true you always care less at some points what happens to other people goaded into transfer/ you make deals with your eyes closed wonder about the universe’s ability at nonchalance must it was somehow meant to be landed this life in a city built just low enough to hold you change was a seasonal never-never was but now long distance the horizon hums along the neckline all briefs contained copulated once for perfection any merry merry makes a destination groomed over for a crucial knotting this is what you came for this sideshow’s illusory wink cascaded out for you: he break breaks a better believer but conflicted, a corrugated matter the best box held in, you’d like to fuck her if there’s a way around getting over to be a draining wrenched free a glutton of superb sizings a wasted combine so she dazzles this desperation outshines the last bright gleam you’ve become accustomed to

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If you found out the person you’re dating cannot achieve orgasm without being slapped hard across the face, would you be willing to satisfy them this way?

the pretties have the same set design what you couldn’t kitten got stored away a stoking seemed familiar you bluff, collar the best dollys beauty was a hold out you didn’t have to wait up for/ well, I minded well & was rewarded, was reworded for lickety sticks & a purpling where your hand clamped which is a way to say i love u pinch back this turning what language was not was not the sensation so a poor lover, we say & lay it on wanting to cage it, but it won’t bend better still we caught exact replicas of how petrified this audience makes us

DELUGE

Have you ever tasted your own sexual fluids? severing these plays, these fiery gaits oh echoing madly, then etching wide as or long as, this body of green sea aswirl, a masking you could cooperate blinding conducive or confirmed a losing he’s a simple anagram of forward/ backward timing & only you could make it more complicated let go to the point of possible a reminder of endly the same, you just put it to bed another & then again hold on to the reflection of the reflection

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DAVID BLUMENSHINE [Encyclopedia of Our Insecurities IV]

It’s given like the coin in the gospel parable, to be multiplied. And how could time be multiplied Except through eternity and outside eternity? –Anna Kamienska SAMPLES Notebooks as err atum as formisc. things incompetent alone grow loose accord in Symphony off beat sure the same free verse Betrays rhyme Problem is the ego inherent in compiling my own crumbs as your meal. But, the novel is just being told a meaLess substantial yes that’s the point self aware at that Springboard for someone Who can complete What I failed simply put significance of A symphony of Duh. This is caucophony. Admittedly, I beat her to the punch here. I didn’t beat Anything. Or Any One At All thoughts merge one spirogyrating mind One time Exists Thanks to You I am grateful/For endowments granted to me As bearer of w/e torch. Dispensiary Communial function as existence Humbled As Cog. Thank you for My teeth & the Teeth which Turn and from, All yours, All glorious Only not Glory

DELUGE

ZOE ADDISON [Hidden Places]

My cousins’ house was a rocket pirate ship Victorian parlor. The memory portals from the bannister in this house, also here the piano and the we’re just doing and the spools of effort. It’s the warmth of bodies which slightly rich the air, and how each encounters another, haunting their negative. I shared my secrets and Aunt-told-mom -told-me-that-Peter-said it would be a long summer. He felt plagued by sex like the girls on their way to the river cross the umbra placed on them. After those words I feel that nightmare focus, with caution I avoid touch, solidify myself in physics textbooks because liking girls and/or being one is beyond the scope of velocity and friction, any likeness incalculable. Years later these engines generate pools of cigarette smoke to the words “does every breakup even apply to us?” As if in halting the mechanisms of desire there could be a truth. I would leave it sparkling and overcaffeinated, gears in a quiver of carcass slivers to grind in livid sunshine. It happens. Even small provisional trusts are built with the pylons and struts we’ve assembled before. In time bridge becomes drawbridge and portcullis, deadbolted iron gate, encryption keys and ciphers. That pirate ship was always privateer, and as lawless turned criminal I learned loyalty rare and must be proven outside laboratories and chalkboards and security protocols, that a lie can be love, that there are some knives I never held and some I never knew I had. These conspirators weren’t mine, so I let go of home and searched for them.

DELUGE

[I Am Now Connected to the Moon]

I Am Now Connected to the Moon Deep in the forests of West Virginia they listen to lunar murmurs: radio waves bounced off and returned, watery and strange beneath the door. You can find those silver whispers staring at a static screen you bought secondhand for the purpose because new tvs don’t fuzz. In those little specks and flourishes maybe you’ll see the moonlight that glances over the river, the same sort of clutching anticipation quickly spinning water in a jar, the slight rumbles as the jar is knocked about by sightless motion on a countertop made of granite. Like when you know that, you’re close to rupture somehow. Too full but full of sound, a teapot discovers use. In this city, a NASA flight in 1969, landing a small polyhedron immediately after dawn in a desolate sea. They did not understand how this could be the beginning of the last event. Let’s say that later, when I watched the burning wreckage of Columbia fall across the news screen I forgot my younger scientific interests. Those men’s lunar injection as meddling, or the opening of ancient forces. The moon resting within the protective layers of truth. Listening, hollow. The illegal entry that compels further, tidal motion.

DELUGE

Opening the sky was once only done in great need and kindness, now the sky only exists in the terrible, mundane, predictable. Revealed wonders that unsettle magnificently. When asked what moonwalking felt like, Buzz Aldrin vomited promoting the colonization of Mars. The Body welcomes our violent history. A fighter pilot has icewater blood, he said, feels nothing.

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MICHAEL SIKKEMA [Jelly Smack: A Memoir]

We’re this jellyfish. There was no transformation. We’re this family. Start w/ light or venom. Start w/ light, we’re entertainment. Some pretty inside up. Venom––– we can’t poison ourselves when direct address is our bell. Screen & screens facing screen, if a candle flame, then everything Da Vinci said about mirrors & the eye. Any respectable POV delivers at least 4 monsters. Let’s be some

DELUGE

I don’t know this life. I woke up inside thinking my father’s voice in some woods I recognized when I realized I was speaking. My son grows his own trouble. “Everything works through itself one muscle & charge,” the Master says. The Master doesn’t laugh today. I don’t listen. Anything dollarable, I don’t listen. My daughter knows marram grass marram marram marram. When boundaries break down I think freedom, betray my nourishment and roots. They should film the ocean on this lake

DELUGE

Unsure footing, I think to write this inside the bell–––dining & living room. Inside/outside light. Their books and birds’ nests don’t happen before coffee, 11:30, Attack of the Puppet People. The Master moves the sun. I mean emotion. I move JPEG’s of medusas over each other & over text on a laptop. I should really go outside to see my house better

DELUGE

“Please beef,” the Master says, “please beef.” To be defined by one’s venom alone leaves out more. The living room breathes through its skin, senses light w/ its hair. It is not a cat. It’s here in the center with us like a cat. To admit we our evolution thoughts. “Book was there,

were hatched via fireplace, heat changes

it was there” says the Master in the man’o’war. My range is less sure. This might not happen. Da Vinci’s passage on Beaver biting off his own testicles to spite the hunters?

That ignores the obvious other half

DELUGE

CANDICE WUEHLE [Water]

I think I was raised by tree branches. Things that lifted me and swang back into space as stepped off. This holiday, I stay in Rachel’s empty house Where first I align all the gold

pumps and in one of the pump’s toes

I find the foil pop of a champagne cork. Other items: A pink foam roller, a body-length mirror I stack on four reference books Also THE YEAR OF DREAMING DANGEROUSLY. I brought the last. I put this at the end of the bed and now I see Myself upon awake. Have you ever been abandoned? Have you ever been a boat? Have you ever been a thirsty bottle? Have you ever got so good you became the basin and had to ask: not where’s the sky, but also why?

DELUGE

I expected this time To come. I have been so Satisfied. If you lived in this house and observed Plates of good food Are composed first of ordered lists: flour, soda, herb, fat. You also would Trust a list. I have come here at the end of the ordered Year. From Philadelphia, from New Orleans, from Atlanta Text wakes me. We Are in our own zones. I hate my friends so much. I love my friends so much. It is like Need. Outside

An establishment

Titled The

Mill I see a taxi parked on the sidewalk like an ambulance

In emergency. It is 11:00 am On a Monday. It is break And hard to make work like how poems won’t work, How my mother won’t work.

DELUGE

Have you ever tried to understand an element which wants nothing in exchange?

DELUGE

All the public pools Are emptied all across the nation. I try to Reach out without amplification and I do. I Hotwire Search a beach and the internet’s electronic Calendars are covered. Red letters and $$$. This house contains more mirrors Than clocks. My mother isn’t invited To this poem like she isn’t invited to My dreams. Then I order these worlds. I’m going To wake up.

I don’t know what time: at the Social Club I announced I’m a child In my church. I saw a blonde woman in a bikini Baptized in a Jacuzzi, she wore An air-brushed unicorn cover-up. I don’t know how To know I am old.

I peeked

At my mother’s dream journal last year: still The dream the vampire crosses the threshold, empties Me.

DELUGE

LET THE LINES MEET; ANEW THE LEAVES

DELUGE

RYAN BENDER-MURPHY [CHAT ROOM]

Deep in glaciers. Deep in fields of snow that cannot be found. I rifle through my backpack, trying to find Shrunken countries and parliaments that can fit between teeth. Polar bears froth, gurgling as something melts within these fields of crooked rhombuses, shaded. White crushes more white. Nothing rises from frozen corpses.

DELUGE

[VIRTUAL REALITY]

Through three yellow circles I drive the motorcycle on a dark night in a dark alley, black paint smeared on my lips. I’ve killed. The vroom enlarges my veins; the scalps in my fists ignite. The circles grow brighter as my tongue shakes like a patio in an earthquake. Behind me the stainless steel lies. I feel horns. I feel a tail. Limbs begin to impale me.

DELUGE

[HOOK UP CULTURE]

Several hours I spend in the snow, which is a thousand paper airplanes shredded, waiting for headlights to strip off my skin. A monitor dangling from the crescent moon falls on my head. Another. And another. And— My whole body is covered until I become a monster. Villagers plug me in, then hammer the screens. My body is looping in my head like an abandoned carousel.

DELUGE

CONTRIBUTORS

[DELUGE ISSUE TWO]

ZOE ADDISON is from Milwaukee, WI where she co-wrote and co-designed the poetry hypertext http://www.etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetc.tumblr.com with Cynthia Spencer. She currently lives in Oakland, CA. KYLE BELLA is a Brooklyn-based social media writer for media website Alternet and a freelance writer for various publications including Huffington Post, Buzzfeed LGBT, and Truthout. Previous creative writing has appeared in [wherever] magazine, nomorepotlucks, and Jacket 2. He is launching a new book project in May 2014 called Viral Legacies, which will examine the HIV/AIDS crisis and its impact on a younger generation of queer men. RYAN BENDER-MURPHY lives in Austin, TX. His poems have appeared in Better, Flag & Void, Front Porch, Phantom Limb, Spork, and elsewhere. His chapbook of poems, First Man on Mars, was released by Phantom Limb Press in 2013. DAVID BLUMENSHINE is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Similar:Peaks::, and the author of the chapbook at the mall there was a séance (these signals press, 2014). He contributes to LUNALUNA Mag, and has been or will have work featured in Five Quarterly, H_NGM_N, Smoking Glue Gun, Octopus, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. MEGAN BURNS is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Jacket, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. She has two books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008) and Sound and Basin (2013) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop Press, 2012) and a city/bottle boned (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her chapbook, Dollbaby, was just released by Horseless Press. RACHEL BURNS has poems forthcoming in Spork, H_NGM_N, White Stag, and others. She is co-founder and managing editor of Similar:Peaks::.

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RUSSELL JAFFE is the co-editor of Strange Cage, a chapbook poetry press, and MC/coordinator of its reading series. He is the author of one poetry collection, This Super Doom I Aver (Poets Democracy, ’13) and a few chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The Colorado Review, PANK, H_NGM_N, Spork, La Petite Zine, American Letters & Commentary, and others. He collects 8-Tracks. His baby, a collaboration with Carleen Tibbetts is forthcoming (August ’14). Get at him at russelljaffeusa.com. He would like to publish more poems by people there, people like you-DREW KALBACH is from Philadelphia. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and writes about contemporary poetry and media for Actuary Lit. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Whole Beast Rag, and others. NEILA MEZYNSKI is the author of Glimpses and a Story (2013) from Scrambler Books; pamphlets from Greying Ghost Press; echapbooks from Radioactive Moat Press and Patasola Press; chapbooks from Folded Word Press, Men Who Understand Girls, (2012) NAP chapbook, Floaters (2012); Deadly Chaps Press, Dancers On Rock (2011), Warriors (2013), Mondo Bummer, Meticulous Man (2012), Mud Lucious Press, At the Beach (2011) RONNIE PELTIER studies creative writing at the University of Notre Dame. His work has previously appeared in Gobbet. MICHAEL SIKKEMA is the author of several chapbooks and collaborative chapbooks, as well as the full-length collection Futuring. A chapbook, 3000 Houses, for Nikki Wallschlaeger is forthcoming from Little Red Leaves Textile Series, and a full-length collection, January Found, is forthcoming from Blazevox Books.

BETH TOWLE is an Indiana native and a graduate of the University of Notre Dame MFA program. She is a contributing editor at Actuary Lit. Her work has previously been published in Spork. NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER’s work has been featured in DecomP, Esque, Word Riot, Spork, Likewise Folio, Horse Less Review, Storyscape Journal, Coconut (forthcoming), The Account (forthcoming) & others. She is also the author of the chapbook The Frogs at Night (Shirt Pocket Press) and the chapbook, I Would Be the Happiest Bird (Horseless Press). She lives in Milwaukee, WI and you can reach her at <http://www.nikkiwallschlaeger.com> CANDICE WUEHLE is soon to be a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa where she has taught rhetoric and creative writing. She holds a Masters in Literature from the University of Minnesota. Her work can be found in Fairy Tale Review, BlazeVOX, SOFTBLOW, Smoking Glue Gun, Quarter After Eight, Similar:Peaks, and The Sonora Review. Her first chapbook, cursewords, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press this spring.

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