Springish 2012

an online Journal of Voice

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, NY
BlazeVOX12 Spring 2012
Copyright © 2012

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition

BlazeVOX [books]
78 Inwood Place
Buffalo, NY 14209

[email protected]

p ublisher of weird little books

BlazeVOX [ books ]
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2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3 1
 S p r i n g i s h 2012
BlazeVOX12 an online Journal of Voice

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Springish issue of BlazeVOX 12. I do

want to apologize for the lateness in putting together this issue of
the journal, we had a bit of a thing with the National Endowment
for the Arts, that is now, thankfully, favorably resolved. So hurray!
To find out more about this here is a link to a recent Huffington
Post interview: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-
shivani/blazevox-nea-ban_b_1374042.html

It is my great pleasure to be able to continue on, get back to work and publish fine works such as is represented in
this sunny issue, hurray!

Presented here is a world-class issue of BlazeVOX12 featuring poetry, art, fiction, and an arresting work of creative
non-fiction, written by authors from around globe. We are introducing a new section in the journal, Book Previews,
which as the name describes it is a brief look at some of our new book titles. You will find work from Bobbie
Louise Hawkins, Clayton Eshleman, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Ted Greenwald, Tom Clark and many others. This is
truly a special issue of BlazeVOX. And if you are so moved, please take a tour of our online bookshop. We have
300 titles of weird little books available for sale. So hurray, now get reading!

Rockets, Geoffrey

Geoffrey Gatza
Editor & Publisher
BlazeVOX [books]
[email protected]
 Table of Contents

Poetry
Amy Whatever Andrew Hamilton
Andrew Kuo Katherine Arsenault
Austen Roye Autumn McClintock
Billy Cancel Christopher Brownsword
Chuck Richardson C. Marie Runyan
Carlo Matos D. W. Hey
Daniel Y. Harris Dayna Patterson
Don Cozzette Elena Botts
Felino A. Soriano Gareth Lee
henry 7. reneau, jr. Ivan de Monbrison
Jacob Reber Jason Stocks
John Miatech Juliana M Sartor
Kate Weinberg Lauren R. Gay
Liz Mariani Luca Penne
Matthew Dennis Marisa Malone
Mark Cunningham Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Patrick Chapman Peter Burghardt
Philip Lewis Ryan Hilary
Ryan Stechler Sarah Lilius
Scott Ables Simon Perchik
Sarah Levine Tess Joyce
Tom Bridger Vernon Frazer
William L. Alton
 
Fiction
Material Support Hose
Brent Holt

The Sucsas
Bruno Casanova

Spring Snow
Celia Laskey

Me My Motorcycle and a Brick of Coke

C. Davis Fogg

Myra’s Last Dumpster Dive

Riya Aarini

Glue
Eve Maher

What You Want

Penelope L. Mace

Thank Heaven
Juliana Grace

Creative Nonfiction
Drug Chronologies
Sarah Ruth Jacobs
Book Preview : Special Section
Selections from our new and forthcoming BlazeVOX [books]

A N A N A T O M Y O F T H E N I G H T by Clayton Eshleman
—Poetry

Comma Fork / Moving Parts by Ted Greenwald

—Poetry

“now, 1/3” and thepoem by Demosthenes Agrafiotis

Translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis —Poetry in translation

Distance by Tom Clark

—Poetry

Transcendental Telemarketer by Beth Copeland

—Poetry

Mylar by Eric Wertheimer

—Poetry

Circles Matter by Brian Lucas

—Poetry

to go without blinking by Aimee Herman

—Poetry

Continental Drifts by Cheryl Pallant

—Poetry

Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins Edited by Barbara Henning

—Fiction and interviews
Springish 2012
an online Journal of Voice
 Springish 2012

William L. Alton

Money and Time Enough

Someone was saying something about work. We all sat in the bar with the smoke rising into a bank over our heads.
Not all of us were drunk, but some of us were. No one got excited. We all knew one another and we sat together
watering the sorrows of a day passed doing whatever we could for a buck.

The girl came to the door and looked through. She stared at us and I noticed her standing there waiting for
someone to come to her and let her through. She was too young to sit with us, too female to understand the rough
language we used, man to man.

An hour passed and we paid our tab. We walked down the street and the moon was ringed with clouds. There was
nowhere to go, but home, so we walked slowly, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk like children singing about
breaking their mothers’ back.

We caught the rain with our swollen hands and licked it from our lips. The wind pushed us along and when we got
to our door, we fumbled with the lock. We stood in the living room and thought about eating, but neither of us
could cook. Soon the night would fold itself over us and we would sleep until morning, waking and rising to go out
again to work in a world that spun without thinking about how we all dreamed of money and time enough to live.
 Monsters in the Dark

I have seen the day coming through the window like a thief. It comes slowly and I sit in my chair watching the
shadows go from fat night to narrow morning. I almost wish I could sleep through this, but then the birds remind
me that morning is when things begin. Morning’s when secrets are told and I would not miss this for all the sunlight
in the world. This is when I go out to smoke and stand in the rain, when the clouds break and the sun comes out
for a moment before hiding again. I am not lonely in the morning. I part of the beginning of things. I have a
purpose and it carries me through to dusk, when the shadows get thick again and the silence falls. I cannot rest
knowing that there are monsters in the world taking advantage of the night and disappearing with their victims
before the world spins ‘round to face the sun again. I sit up nights and sleep lightly in my chair, cautious, fearful, full
of anxiety. I sleep in fits and starts and wake in time to catch the day stealing over the horizon.
 Morning

What is the morning, but the chance to lie in bed with the shadows eating the corners of the room? The sun is
watery today and the wind is bitter. In the bathroom, water drips from the shower, staining the tub with rust and
mold. I have not cleaned my apartment in weeks so the floors are crumbled with laundry and sundry bits of paper
leaked from my pocket.

Outside, the rain is cold. I stand in the corner of my patio and smoke cigarettes, watching the world move from
night to day. Birds sing the sun up. My neighbors begin to move around. Cars drive from corner to corner on the
sparkling wet asphalt. I cannot seem to bring myself to say anything to anyone. The world talks to me, but I have
nothing to say, so I listen and nod.

I make eggs in the kitchen and sit at my table with a cup of coffee and shiver because the windows here leak the
winter air. My hands ache and I drop my fork on the floor. What does this mean? Am I dying? I don’t know what to
do about the pain, but I soak my hands in hot water before washing the plate and lighting a cigarette. I stand in the
dining room and stare out the window at the pine growing there. A sparrow lands on a branch and calls my name.
I’m here now. I have nowhere to go.
 Music

It had the beat of a heart going mechanically through its motions. Blood poured through the little vessels and the
music, the bloody music of a child’s birth, claimed the little hours between midnight and dawn. We all stood in the
courtyard drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and waiting for the night to cool enough to allow us to crawl into
our beds to sleep a few hours before rising and working. We talked of love and politics. We prayed out loud that the
rain would come and settle the dust. We listened and the child wailed her way into the world. Now that the worst
was over, we could relax and wait for the next crisis, the next thing that would rob us of comfort, rob us of peace.
 My Lover Drinks

My lover sits at the kitchen table drinking bourbon from a coffee cup. He says it’s for the rheumatism, but I know
better. It’s for the slow buzz, the echoing high of alcohol in an empty room. He’s not a mean drunk. He hugs and
says the most maudlin things. In the morning, his hands shake and he drinks peppermint schnapps. All day he
works and comes home sick with want. He lights a cigarette and pours himself a drink. He seldom eats. “Food is a
shock to the system,” he says. I don’t know how he lives, but he lives on and on. I kiss his balding head and wait for
him to come to bed. He comes and we make love in the heated room. He takes me places when he’s drunk that I’ve
never been. I love him more now that he’s grown so affectionate. When he touches me, I grow warm as fresh
bread. I rise up and fold myself around him. When he sleeps, I watch his face and wait for the day it will no longer
be there. Nothing this good lasts long.
 Springish 2012

Vernon Frazer

The Coming of The One

no new avatar
till oblation seeks its kind
in styles written

mind follies
implore blind wunderkinds
exploring

where
their backroom exegetics

trash them with a grim panache

stifled passion
brews insightful riots
trashing

decorum filters
padding avowed relations
matter aligned

through
every ventral scar renewed

(flash of sacral eyes unlidded)

A Return Too Safe

home to where
good blundering carried away
forgotten patchwork

necessary to midnight central time

fox spectacles
either waved or flew into soup
reading wonder

scraps declared force controlled

the box beside them

inquired the fast contortions
proofread in silence

daylight isolated residing purposes

quickly music growled

so fond of wood clinked rubber
some distance found

same blotch failed the answered path

No Return Call

adamantine stricture glyphs

impound the glottal precipice
shoring round errata tipped

membrane retrospective aria

kindling power-clipped lighting
mapped internal to pyrite fire

dead-fished memory tangents farm

the clot depicting a sacrifice ground

to air the curving lineage

arming regurgitation clips
vessel too near the shore

a serpentine conundrum
leads a speculum chase
to search for justification

wherever the wish of a flowing line

laments the dwindling desire found

admonishing picture clips

motivate the highway sounding
an echo slips its shadow
 Running its Chorus

the
terminal liter parts
of an amnesia beggar lateral ammunition
orchid pit in seed cuts possum indices
in ruins germinating

le

(lad up
so

portal
ambiguity the gambit
ran hotplates
co

(
rtic

throughout
al

shapes of space
plasma
pla

renounce classic
sm

gladiator combos
ar

< <
oc
ke

racket procedures announced

ts

the
du rojec l in n se ed

g am em er gi
lce til tim al,

ng
d a p u ra t i o n c

lam iss s
t c e m ate
ce nt as rs pl liba nou

or ive

ut
r
to u
de
an d se nt dr itig enda
t
no ala ive an
roa cule ser m e ag
tru les tplat

a FROM A
t h e l ho

barnacle
orchestration pit HERD WORLD
ora

un

modular MARKET
sequence
rebounding

-1-
leather amnesia seats
lead a buttock cringe urging forethought remnants
down the line through spy molding decibel homilies
to ratiocination cleavage

slanted ambiguity folders

braking surcharge glory
where folding narratives
a v in g o n
le inati
r um d
e
(
rolled frantic abomination pitt inst
to the classical rudiments
grilled alongside an urgent
aga

i n g
rnis h
na ga
erg
s o le

(
m
lad
up

coro su n s ets
red
ro c
gladiator combos
d e
ren itous
ket
renounce classic
tu
s

gra iguity
shapes of space
cor

OLA amb
ti

B
cal

A
PAR ERTER
pla

p
lasm

V
sm

CON
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cke
ts c
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ona
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-2-
modeling
an orchestra sequence

folding urgent rudiments

that balked
a granule replacement baking along
correlative lines
its
implacable
l a s ma ty
harness p
b igui
an am out
r
r o ugh
th plate
hot tals
p or urges decibel garnish
a defacement platitude
running scarred across
the template of a rural
mind boarded in fossil
encomiums a chordal
obligatory radial flush tarnish shift from slow elastic
banners molding a sly

combo gladiators
renounce classic
shapes of space
) )
))

soup
label

renounce space
of classic combo
shape gladiators
em
er

< pocket procedures denounced

amphibious buttock remnants

< g
in
g
hostile to cortical plasma sprockets
yield to dictaphone matters implied

-3-
 FROM
A
WORD
mark

ro
ck
) herded
)

s
et
et

ck
s shapes of space
co

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sm
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lp
as

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co
< renounce procedure pockets
<
corona vanish
em er gi ng

verg i n g

radial tarnish flush obligatory

-4-
 Springish 2012

Tom Bridger

Diesel lotus king,

Mind bending ever changing thing
Screw me with your knowledge, I'll bend over
And take it like the perfect stereotype of a man
We could burn through jungle runs backpacked
With the clap and million foul diseases
Sounded by mystic sunclaps of the shuttercopters,
Motorbike hum angels thru the wilderness,
Click-clack two-step hum-drum smoking,
Attention! Attention! Slaughter the mad bury the crazy,
Assholes red and charred by napalm,
Fucked up by knowing emptiness,
Holy reloading gooks,
Diesel lotus king,
You are west of everything.
Untitled

I sat in clustered bedrooms straining eyes at brought-along books,

Ignoring fucking in the corner, horrorshow in front of me,
Throwing shit against the walls in glory,
Focusing on emptiness, sat insatiate to the window,
Holy place! Dawn on white buildings and stoned gardens,
Lobotomized locals, shithole bookstores,
Embarassed chapels full of sexy eyed demons,
Im a teary bhikku lost in waves of versace and vuitton,
Teaching myself radical acceptance,
Waiting on friday nights,
Outside flats,
Broken,
Complete.
 Springish 2012

Tess Joyce

If Life was like a Lecture on Magicicadas

We sit with notebooks filling up

information about paleoclimatic
influences on prime-numbered periods
of emergence, mass-emergence
every 13 or 17 years
when plagues, campaigners for life
swell the air all fighting like a baby
that’s arrived and would feel the pain
of being gobbled up by multiple predators
and it’s all so beautiful that a film was made -
in tiny exoskeletons of the dead
magicicadas, LEDS blink,
lightening the blackened cave of the screen
with love beads upon soft lichen beds.
villanelle of a third eye

parietal eye positioned at top of cranium

in lizards amphibians does it surprise you that our pineal gland
is tucked above the stem and cerebellum
detecting circadian rhythms avoiding delirium
by modulating sleep and lizards detect bands
of light in eye positioned at top of cranium

our third eye opens in higher realms a drum

of inner beats gives messages in metaphorical strands
from the front of the stem and cerebellum
for in the gland like a seabed of chalk deposits of calcium
carbonate collect in follicles called brain-sand
no longer needed eye at top of cranium

if gland responsible for release of DMT then inner sanctum

is interlinked with all kinds of rhythms and
tucked above the stem and cerebellum
changes occur consciousness blows like a gum
receptors alter minds when they bind with a ligand
no longer a parietal eye at the top of cranium
just a puzzling gland above the stem and cerebellum
2064: a note on ultra-weak photon emissions

she alights herself in a photon bath

sprinkled with information about her own DNA
upon her brow she sits up
breathes as if she is five years old again
each cell in her body is a candle

lighting the days and nights pass by unnoticed

beneath the pressure of pear fabric fleece
but tonight with little time left
she will rise up through the interlacing
of her own energy
her DNA will bare all in images like an x-ray
which she will send through her light
to every conscious being
regardless of whether they are ready or not
when we tried to give up cigarettes

inside the cafe he throws his bubblegum

at the ceiling
like a madman vent on accomplishment
no matter what whereas i just feel ugly plain as dough
outside i ignite his fuse and we start to bicker
says he’s going to call everyone
who passes by an idiot
he does and they look confused
like a fool i laugh to melt the ice
so in a rage he throws his helmet
and the pavement cracks too
some kind of cow shit mushroom

it was barbed and stabbed my mind

should never have consumed it
when filled with darkness
six hours passed and still no lucid thoughts
so i begged the cow
and suddenly saw my father’s fluffy hair
as he waited for me to leave the womb
for i was never ready to leave
the warm coat of DMT that bursts upon day 49
when a baby is given a conscious life
“when we are born we must come out and shine like stars”
shouted the cow
but my mind’s been stuck in that chemical-induced orb of the womb
and must be reborn
must let a tiger
rip it apart
bit by bit
to gather some strength and stick my head out
 Springish 2012

Simon Perchik

*
Even the dying wince, their stench
makes you gag --you can't ask
must rely on their skin
and its yellowing glaze
with just enough sunlight left
for directions back

--they languish at night

looking for what must be
those tiny rocks mourners leave
as if the dead could still
find refuge in a few simple words

placed near --the dying need this doubt

to go further, not sure why
their eyes once had such power
and now can't open to demand

where to make a boundary line

that's safe once inside
with all those stars, far off
not yet arrived
as still warm dirt and mornings.
*
Attack and this hillside
shows its teeth :each stone
drips with saliva

and even the glaze

can't tell the difference
-- you dig till the sun

enters at last
staggering the way each evening
is burned to the ground

laid bare in the smoke

all stones smell when struck
one against the other

and the dirt dragged away

still struggling
--you only want to share

though your hands won't dry

and each year less room
--you dig as if each hole

is filled with shoreline

could be held back
rebuilt from waves

from valleys and mountain streams

that whiten these stones
with cheeks and emptiness.
*
And though your shadow just
by cooling down
dries the way leaves bring back the dead
with not even a footpath
the snow can hold on to --cold

is how galaxies are held in

huddle weightless in the window
closest to the street, empty from the bottom

then wander off in the dark

flecked with gold :a star and its mother

still calling to the others from a window
and what sounds like gunfire
is just more snow throwing out its light

for the circling approach that guides

her shadow safely to the ground
the just above the branches
step by step torn open by their leaves
and on their back the pieces.
*
As if risk was still involved the group
doesn't move, struck head on
though the flash has too much sun in it
--the class wants the yearbook to command
flame with that relentless sound
only a chorus can ignite :a single voice
caressed by others and you almost touch
the face that once was yours, half
at a stand-still, half telling you
directions
--its eyes left open the way every grave
puts together those small stones
left alongside :flawless voices
--a cleared mountain pass
letting you through where the Earth
is almost nothing in itself.
*
Still warm and the paint
darkening the way all walls
grieve --in just an hour

another coat though the floor

will cool first
lose its hold and the ground

--you're careful not to touch

where the corpse is listening
comforted with skin and bones

and gloss --over and over

that sing-along-song
where no one weeps

or remembers the words

and you let the roller drip
kept silent for so long.
 Springish 2012

Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Drug Chronologies

I’m in the dark cool garage of Dillon’s mom’s house in Capehart, a welfare community of cookie cutter

homes where everything, even the sunlight, is unnatural. We’re having trouble scoring acid and Heather, 17, is

hunched over on the torn-up couch, her short black hair falling over her plump pale face. She is throwing a fit.

“Chill, Heather, we’re trying to get some,” one of the guys says.

“I fucking need it,” she says, her face piggish, slow colorless tears moving down her cheeks. The guys in the

garage are alarmed, are telling her to quiet down, but her fingers are like claws on her legs; she’s freaking for her fix.

People say that acid isn’t addictive. Those people never met Heather. Rumor had it she did ten tabs the first

time she tripped, and most people said she never fully touched ground again.

Heather would have been better off staying on that couch forever, her babyish face contorted, sobbing.

Sometimes I’m almost comforted to think that Heather may have left her better self behind, parts of her psyche

burning off, her mind one long trail.

*
 I can’t tell you how I first met Heather. Memories of that time bleed into one another, are only salvageable

in brief episodes. I met Heather when I was 15 and riding in a stranger’s car, smoking a harsh cigarette, listening to

Paint It Black on blasted speakers, cruising through springtime in Maine. We got out to meet Heather on the street

with Dillon around midday on a warm sunny Friday. They were both dressed in full goth regalia, and I was

convinced they were siblings and lovers. This is small town Maine, where the local sex shop was burned to the

ground for indecency. Heather was an act of defiance, walking around wherever and whenever, dressed in black,

gother than goth, beyond care. Stories followed her. Heather was a nymphomaniac. Heather was a lesbian. Heather

was always waking out of some cracked-out fairy tale and we didn’t have a better reality to offer. I think I loved her

from the first time we met.

I’m 14 and it’s Friday in Capehart so we’re going to do acid. This is my first time and it’s already dark

outside and the garage is only half-lit by a stand-up light. My tab comes out of a plastic baggie and after I take it my

ex-boyfriend James, 16, tells me to lick my palm where I was holding it. When I don’t he takes my hand and I feel

his slimy deer tongue there.

James was my first kiss but he was only going out with me to forget his other girlfriend, and one day I found

where he had written to god to save her in circles in his notebook. James was probably the most beautiful of all of

us, clothes draggling, a perfect mole on one side of his jaw, dark skin and skinny as death, his hair in graceful

clumps of filth. He had gotten on his knees in his baggy, draggling pants to ask me to be his girlfriend. I think that

was the day we met.

But now I’m tripping and I want to run away from it all, I want to hide and ambush the world. I bend

license plates, climb a tree, stare down the moon, and piss myself on purpose; the grass gleams in the night, artificial
as Easter. There’s a playground out in the middle of all of the identical homes, and Heather and I swing as she tells

me about Orange Juice Boy.

“He took two hits of acid, and decided to pour himself a glass of orange juice. Pretty soon he got convinced

that he was the orange juice, and whoever came around couldn’t tell him any different. To this day you can visit him

in a mental hospital.” She gently kicks her feet out on the swing, but she isn’t really moving. Her face is moony but

when she smiles it’s like she’s on top of a sky-high Ferris wheel.

The summer after that I stole a bag of my mom’s Moroccan weed, brought it like a trophy to the porch of

the house we were skulking. Brandon, an adorably fucked young man, took one hit and flopped to the porch floor,

lost to the world.

Sitting on the steps of that porch that summer, Heather told me once about why she was so screwed up.

“When I was twelve a group of men all got together and raped me…there was a lot of them. I was crying

and saying for them to stop.”

She was sitting above me on the steps. She recited the story carefully, as though it happened to someone

else and she had only gleaned it secondhand. She was looking down at the cracks in the porch wood, and she was

perfect.

“They did it to me in a way that the doctor said I might not be able to have kids.”

Of course I hugged Heather, I told her I loved her, but no one could change something like that. Love is

only another burden. I wonder when it was that I first realized there was no saving Heather.

*
 On the 4th of July that summer I had the idea of burning an American flag in the street. We lit the cheap

thing up and had a small parade, whooping down the vacant avenue, the flag licked by fire and night. In the

morning, hungover, I stumbled over charred bits of old glory on the porch. So many mornings I would confront

the face of Bangor, Maine, a town that can’t seem to pull itself together, that had been rebuilt from flood and flame.

I would stay up all night and dawn streets would greet me as I stumbled home, the light as sourceless as fog.

Then I met Malachi. I had heard of him long before I saw him in person. People said he was a mean

motherfucker, that he kept two Labradors in his basement, starving and torturing them. One day when Heather and

I were in the town square, she seemed shaken.

“Malachi burnt my leg when I was passed out. I didn’t feel anything, but it’s real ugly.” She pulled back her

skirt and on the pale insides of her thighs there were glistening burns from where Malachi had pressed an iron.

Heather herself seemed nearly indifferent to her wounds.

The night I met him it was in the first dregs of winter, the streets empty, snow deep and still sifting, so cars

were rare. A bunch of us were crammed into a tiny apartment ten minutes’ walk from my house. Inside, Heather

told me about the time she had done Dramamine to hallucinate. She had seen an entire town in miniature on the

wall, and she had spent most of the night chasing around a magician and his crow.

After Dramamine, Heather mentioned the whole cough syrup trick. I hadn’t heard of that either, and I

offered to take a short walk through the snow to the supermarket and steal a bottle for her. The kids all told me that

the heavy cough formula worked best. It was miserable and windy outside, practically a blizzard with snow in five
foot drifts. At the supermarket it took me forever to steal a bottle or even get the courage up to go to the pharmacy

section. Someone saw me slipping the box inside my jacket but he remained quiet.

Back at the apartment, Heather plugged her nose and chugged the whole bottle of orange glop. Soon, she

was more or less catatonic. Her words would come from a very long distance away, and her eyes were glassy. I felt

lousy for enabling her, and I vowed to babysit her the whole night.

Less than an hour after she went into the daze the landlord came up the stairs, and everyone hid from him.

He announced that he was evicting them and that everyone had to leave or he would call the cops.

Some of us were driven by the cold into going to Malachi’s. I remembered what he did to Heather’s thighs,

but there seemed to be no choice, and I thought things would be okay if we were in a group and I watched over

her. Heather was still robotripping and didn’t seem to be able to get out of her rabbit hole. When we got there it

was pretty late, and everyone seemed committed to staying over. His apartment was a boy palace, his floor littered

with video games, crappy posters covering every surface. Malachi was in his mid-20s, he was blond and blue-eyed,

ruggedly handsome with a slightly wiry build. He kept his hair in a Mohawk which he would dye different colors.

“Who’s your girlfriend?” he asked Heather, referring to me.

“Shut up, you leave her alone,” she said dopily.

“Heather has really great tits,” he said, addressing me. “Don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Yeah, too bad the rest of her is so ugly.”

His eyes were everywhere, crazed. He could feel everything. Months later I saw him on the street from

inside a car and as we passed his head turned, his bullet eyes matching my gaze.
 “How about this?” he started. “When the world ends, you can be in my harem.”

I thought him slightly mad and slightly intriguing as he continued to babble about how he knew many

languages, how he was a genius who had been sent to college as a boy, how he had outwitted the professors. He

told me how he could kill anyone. He was spry and boyish, and his apartment was his kingdom, everyone in it his

servants. He referred to a girl who would clean for him as his footstool.

Soon he was sitting next to me. Heather was miles away, and I could barely see the other people in the

room. I think they were playing video games or zoned out. He held a Rubix pyramid. I could feel his heat next to

me. I was wary and yet found him attractive. His zeal was in everything. He made what he said true, like how

Christmas is something you feel, not just tinsel and stale peppermint, something that emanates like a fever.

He twisted the shape in his hands. “See, if you want to move this piece there, you have to do this, just three

twists.” The piece moves. He shows me again.

“Okay, here, so move that there.”

I take the pyramid and I twist it like he showed me.

“That’s good, you got it.” Suddenly I was in his strange club; maybe slightly better than his harem. His eyes

were so blue; I was drowning.

“There’s something about you. I feel like I want to protect you,” he said.

Somehow I knew I should get Heather out of there, especially in her state, so I took her and left. Everything

about her was slow, and we shuffled through the December night, moving at zero miles an hour.

“Where are we?” she kept on asking, and she was so puzzled that it could have been another country that

we were cutting through.

 We knocked on many doors but none would have us. The warm doorways would close and Heather would

be left staring blankly.

One day the following spring I was at the square and I realized that our group was dissolving. The mother

who owned the house that we most frequented was moving. Our nights of sitting on the picnic table taking hot

chocolate bong hits were over. Everyone dropped out of school, joined the army, stopped coming to the town

square, or in some other way disappeared from sight.

I had always been on the outside of the circle because everyone else went to public school and my mother

had insisted I go to private. My school had a dress code, was called prep, and I hated everyone there, almost on

principal. Truly, I was on the outside of both groups, and I didn’t feel entirely at home with either. My mother had

had me at 45 and she had never married, and therefore she had never felt comfortable socializing with the other

married parents—she couldn’t relate, and therefore I was shut out from most social circles from an early age. I

wasn’t allowed to invite kids over to my house because my mother was a landlady who rented out all of our rooms

to tenants, and she was a hoarder so there were no common rooms where we could hang out. By the time I got to

the private high school, I resented all of the normal, well-to-do kids.

There was one or two worthwhile teachers at my high school. One of them quit halfway into the semester.

The other one once came up to me, too close for comfort, and asserted “You’re beautiful, do you know that?” I felt

like I had been spit on.

There might have been one or two bad apples in the peck of preps at my school, but they sure had dull ways

of rotting. When I met Heather and the other public school kids I felt like I’d come home.

*
 One day, nearly a year and a half after the group had split up, my mom and I were at McDonalds. It was a

few weeks before my senior year of high school and we were arguing about where I should apply to college. I was

ignoring her and looking at a newspaper. There was a short article near the bottom of the front page. It stated that

Heather and Malachi had been arrested for possessing a gun, mushrooms, marijuana, and over $10,000 in cash. I

was shocked that I had gotten so estranged from these people that now they were news to me. I hadn’t even heard

that they were a couple, and that piece of news struck me as terribly wrong. I told my mom that these were people I

knew. Our policy had always been don’t ask don’t tell. She knew very few of my friends, and in return for a

ridiculously late curfew I was expected to pull strong grades.

She looked at me, her sad old eyes doing the martyr bit. “That’s really dangerous, that they had a gun,” she

said. She was looking at me in that filthy McDonald’s light as though I was stillborn at 17.

A few weeks later, we flipped a penny over the living room rug to decide whether I would apply to Cornell

or not. My mom won. Cornell was the only university that accepted me, I think because I applied early decision and

my mother ensured that I met with local alumni for an interview. The couple who met me had met at Cornell and

were benign, plump, had what appeared to be a lax life.

“Cornell’s main social scene is frat parties,” the man told me. “Have you considered joining a sorority?”

Later, when they spoke to my mom over the phone, the couple said that they had known just seeing me that

I was a Cornell girl.

Since my high school was a prep school it had a Sociology class taught by a wasted looking red-haired

woman who seemed to think that the key to knowledge was in memorizing answers by rote.
 For our one and only field trip our class went to the district courthouse. I had never been there, though my

mother often went to evict people from rooms in our house, or in the case of one tenant who went too far, to get a

restraining order.

Just entering the building I had the sense that I had done something wrong. Maybe it was the still hazy

memory of the time I had been questioned by police, their cruisers flashing, while I was tripping on acid.

My class passed through a metal detector and then quietly stepped into a court hearing that was already in

progress. The defendant was Malachi, his Mohawk shaved, his body encased in a suit. Heather was also there to

testify. We all got copies of the court document. It was a hearing to discern whether the police had followed the

correct protocol in busting down the door of Malachi’s apartment, a lair studded with nearly 20 knives stuck in the

furniture.

My class watched hungrily. Two worlds had collided, and my friends were on trial. All of my classmates’

faces were frozen in fascination, and they were staring at Malachi and Heather as though they were bugs under a

glass. In a way, I suppose that’s what they were. They had been removed from their natural habitat, exposed to the

deadly court process. I had thought so highly of both of them, at least in terms of fear or respect, but even I felt

skeptical as I listened to Malachi explain how the cops had unnecessarily busted down his door. He was trying to

sound expert but even I knew he was a dead duck.

The cheap defense lawyer strutted back and forth. “What level of education have you completed?” he asked

Malachi.

“Eighth grade.”

I was furious that they were being degraded, that their own lawyer’s tactic was to make them look stupid.

Maybe they were even buying into it. My stomach was a sick knot.
 Heather on the stand, chewing gum, nonchalant as ever.

“What level of education have you completed?”

“Tenth grade,” she said.

It still hadn’t really sunk in for me that they were a couple. The whole scenario was wrong.

Heather and Malachi must have seen the well-dressed prep students gawking at them, but I don’t think they

recognized me. I thought about yelling out Heather’s name, but somehow I didn’t want her to know that I was a

part of the group, or to know that I had seen her subjected to such questions.

On the way back to class, the other students were making fun of Heather and Malachi, talking about how

dumb they sounded. Erin, an especially chicken-thin, obnoxious smartass who often bullied me, was imitating

Heather’s voice. I hoped they never know how ignorant they were⎯they don’t even deserve that knowledge. As an

activity during the next class, the teacher handed us bits of paper with questions about the hearing, mainly the legal

issues, and my stomach felt so wrong. The girl I loved had been turned into a class assignment, into questions that

allowed three inches of blank space for an answer. I can never forgive them for that.

Right around graduation I was walking down the bright spring streets when I saw Heather. She was fatter

and somehow cheerful. She was chewing tobacco, hawking brown bug juice onto the street.

“Ross and I are getting married so we can have conjugal visits,” she told me. “I go see him in jail. He’s going

to have to go to federal prison.”

To me, she seemed like an entirely different person, like there was something missing, her words simpler. I

hope to God she was already gone.

*
 I went off to college and a part of me always looked up to Heather, just for her courage, her recklessness,

the way that she didn’t care what the world thought. I treasured our time together and looked back on it as a time of

innocent experimentation. There was no bad blood in the group, and I knew that otherwise my high school

experience would have been misery. I never stayed in touch with them, and still don’t know where the boy I lost my

virginity to is. Maybe part of it was that I didn’t want to know. I wanted my memories to stay safe.

The day the radio spoke death, time was out of season. I was back home during senior year of college for

one break or another, though I have no recollection of traveling to get there. I was in my old room which my

mother had held back from renting for the prior few weeks. I was getting ready to do something. Something. I was

sitting. Or I was about to get up. Or I was floating at the ceiling of the room. The sun was bright, trying to shine

through the winter. The air was thin and chill.

“The murder of Heather Fliegelman” the radio garbled cheerily. I heard Malachi’s last name. It wasn’t my

life then. I was a rag doll that had grown up in a box, and the other rag dolls had names and relationships but that

all disappeared at night. I guessed maybe someone hadn’t put us away right the night before. I stopped.

I will say what the newspapers say. Heather was murdered by her husband, Malachi. She was last seen

through a surveillance camera, walking through the aisles of a supermarket with Malachi and hugely pregnant. Less

than a day later he attacked Heather in their trailer home. He took a knife to her and she became something else.

She was stabbed “at least” 47 times, many of those times in the head and stomach. He covered her head with a bag.

Someone who studied murder scenes said that the stabbing pattern showed that the killer had intense feelings about

his victim, and the fact that she was covered signifies his regret. Rumor had it he hadn’t wanted the baby.

He left her there for the weekend, he spent the savings they had put together for the baby.
 Monday he confessed.

The distance was what killed me. I had loved her as much as anyone and yet she had been dead for almost a

year before I found out. One might think that that distance was somehow a comfort, that I could console myself

with the fact that I could have done nothing. But I would trade that horrible powerlessness for anything. She was

gone before I knew it.

Ritualistically, for four months following my discovery, I played her murder over and over in my head. I

tried to get close to her in death, to understand what that was, what she had felt. It was all I could think about. I

read the newspaper details as though they were secrets imparted by the dead. I became the killer and the victim,

playing things over and over in my mind, anything to escape that distance.

Six years prior to the murder, my junior year of high school, New Year’s Eve 1998. We’re all gathered at the

latest apartment on a street with a bad reputation. It’s maybe two months before our group could be said to have

officially broken up. There’s a huge VHS camcorder being passed around. Someone videotapes me, my eyes burnt

out and red.

“You’ll never be able to work in government now,” someone says to me. The knowledge of my future

dawns on me for what feels like the first time.

Heather’s sitting against a wall of the room, her head between her legs, now and then making a slow moan.

“Don’t bother her, she’s having flashbacks,” someone says.

 I get dared to make out with this curly-haired stoner boy in front of everyone, and I oblige, getting on his

lap, his baggy pants making him bigger than Santa. Our mouths are so dry, our kisses expanding into the endless

darkness of our throats.

Later that night I wander over and sit next to Heather. She’s half closing her eyes, trying to concentrate.

“I just had a vision,” she says. “There was this woman sitting under a big fruit tree. She spoke to me. I have

to draw it.”

Heather gets a thin piece of paper, and she starts to sketch the scene, but it is already gone. She looks at the

paper dumbly, and I can feel a trace of what it was she saw, something older than parchment and rich as earth, a

secret that is lost between us.

 Springish 2012

Sarah Lilius

Always the Ocean

Father, I feel your death rising in my throat like a cold tide of salty water.

Mother takes your clothes to Goodwill to be sorted and sold to people who did not know you. She washed those
clothes over and over. The machine knows them so intimately. You shuffled around in them. You do not need
them, you are ash.

I walk into the diner and “Landslide” plays. Just weeks after your death, I remembered how we danced to this song.
I was the young bride. We would never dance together again.

I’m tired of this bittersweet entity chasing me down like a boulder. I’m looking for stones, in my heart, my mouth.

That ocean with her constant nothing. There’s no landmark of that pulsing. Just the living and dead thousands of
miles under. The broken shells under my feet are gifts the Pacific gives. I collect them for no other reason then to
know I was there.

We see who can be the saddest in hiding. And then in therapy we cover our mouths and we close our eyes tight.
The man watches and reassures in such delicate lies. His mouth is moving. His mouth is moving.
Within

If we have not found heaven within,

it is a certainty we will not find it without.
-Henry Miller

I was a tragic wind the day my father died.

Penetrating whistles propel

Sunday garbage into flight.
The broken way we stare through
old windows before a storm,
amazed by how night can take the day
then stunned by how day can recover,
return with a childish light—
we feel relief.

Among the pews

we melt into a common dread.
The oldest lie
does not slap or pinch
but leaves us fluffing our wings,
waxing our chariots.

My feet will walk the pavement for miles

if a garden, endless and fertile,
is within these days’ reach.

A dead bird,
gray, stiff,
borders where concrete meets earth.
Countless children ride past
the eager solitude,
the flightless
summons.
Within:
a mangled desire
inflated with hope,
a cauldron of hot,
hot fear.

We spin into
each other to find the one
who is not spinning. The one
who is solid within

shall be fearless
without.
Thirst

~for Virginia Woolf

Wait for the approach.

The barren stroll—

you search the
waterside for words, words.

The storyline lies patient

among stones.

Word by word, you drop

the end—smooth
into your pockets, full.

This story will be told,

word by word—wet death,
they will find the weakness
in your mind.

But your lungs

fight and yearn,
the words

usher you slow to the

bottom, a sullen cliché—
you return to the mother

heavy and fed—

the approach, the hunger,
the thirst—

a strange
immortality.
You control

the way the story

ends.
 Springish 2012

Scott Ables

New City VII

You tell
a joke, a

request for help

with the punch line.

Everyone
is texting.

Have the wasabi

in a new city.

Have your head

examined.

You have been

given

W.W.J.D. lanyards,
Butter-

burgers,
and popular
sheepskin gifts.
Parks and

recreation.
You have

a mom
as good

as mine
and you, you must

want it to be
summer. Remember,

racing
ruins your bicycle riding.
New Rush Hour

One vehicle
per person please.

This isn't a school of fish.

We don't get more

than we paid for.

Today I ripped up a petition

form to
recall you.

At all
you can eat buffets

many of us take
more than we can eat.

Please select an ad. Otherwise

one will be selected for you.

Please raise your left

eyebrow.

It is hard
for an unhappy host

to deliver a happy experience.

This is not a school of fish.

How many in
this audience

will start to care

about the mark
of the beast? The
beast and the host

are gossiping about people

that you will never know.

You set
yourself apart.

You make a promise

to ride a bicycle.
 Springish 2012

Sarah Levine

The heater is not responsible for its own suffering

I fed the stomach penny and spoon. Mother’s lace and clove until it got so cold you had no choice but to be held.
Your neck smelled of beechnut peeled clean by thunder and I forgot our mothers will both be dead one day. Oh the
things we do when afraid. The broken wheels we become. The windows we leave open for birds to fly through.
--
You take the rings off your fingers and hold a peach pit on your tongue and your hair turns white in the sun. In the
rain it turns poodle.
The sky is like an unreachable swimming pool and I wish I was a cloud. I wish I was a storm cloud because then I
would be responsible for turning your hair to poodle.
I try to speak and swallow a peach pit instead and you laugh laugh laugh and I hate you.
I hate the weather moving through your lungs and I hate coughing lawnmowers into the sky and I hate the way my
lawnmowers scare the birds back into the sky.
I hate the way you stand there, watching me thrash like blade against field and I want to hurt you.
I want to steal the sky in your mouth and bite your lips until they swell like over ripe watermelon.
And I hate the way you still stand there. Laughing laughing laughing.
I want to set a match inside your ear and watch your face bloom jack o lantern.
 Springish 2012

Ryan Stechler

Lilt

I invented a more efficient vowel

using noises I found in my sleep.

In turning,
a sound on the left becomes
a sound on the right quickly.

Slurring consonants
makes even the most uninteresting words
oscillate;
I have always accused language
of echoes.

Vagrants in the park talk to themselves,

perhaps the fault of extremely acoustic
park benches.

This nocturnal city

never stutters
never mumbles
when it sings.
Robopoem

Everyone speaks as if their words

are robots, building them. Carrying
robots bringing vibrations from one ear to another.

These particular vibrations are good vibration robots

by the beach boy robots.

Everyone is a robot
listening to a giant robot symphony orchestra
playing the best of the beach boy robots.

Everyone is a robot magician, making word robots

appear out of thin air;
robots of the moment.

The word 'robot' is a word-robot that carries

itself; its own meaning.
It is the ouroboros of robots.
It is a robot building itself.
Wikileaks

an exchange
of fuck you's
among friendly parties

mutually understood
the lack of biting savagery

(even after seventy years the western world

is still only half of the world)

when last we met

in the mud and silence of
two wars
semialive and dreaming

maybe it was summer

maybe there was a treaty
or patriotic songs

history is a series of statues

erected in various places
then taken down
when you ask what i am thinking about after sex i am really thinking about

how hard it is to fall into small holes accidentally

or on purpose

the arbitrary ethics of not burning down a forest

in relation to the total lack of remorse of mosquitoes and ticks
for not choosing an alternative vegetarian lifestyle

installing a revolving door in one’s spine and the degree to which

it would spin in moments of excitement or arousal

how many licks it would take to get to the center of an arbitrary object
like a mailbox or a hand

whether bacterial organisms think about

what it would be like to have sexual intercourse or
how big their flagellum is in comparison to their best friend’s

if my house key misses its lock

or vice versa
 Springish 2012

Ryan Hilary

I
Invocation

Amuse me!

Nothing is as nothing was

Now emptiness is and blindness
And all the spaces
And all those "things" forgotten
Or unheard are
Suddenly important

This will be the hour of something.

The clamorous grief of a dead slave's voice
Rising to an orchestral, bitter peak.

I was their familiar stranger

Sailing the poet's night tyreme
Drifting the surface of the salty universe
While waiting for the Son to come up.

As the ancients invoked their gods

I invoked the abandoned dead
Indians, slaves, martyred women

In the distant clamor

I sang
Through an unanticipated storm.
 II
The Storm

The mother screamed, broke, an aural itch

Curtained by the silk undershorts of, well...
It could've been any old suburban bitch I suppose
Iris, Rose, somehow they were
All named after flowers
With their SUVs
With their skulking surgeries
With their "I play the stock market" crap.
Here was a true urban tragedy
A wilted flower
A tide of irony
The leaves of her life
Beamed--presented--back to her
Ugliness
By a mourning talk show queen.
And she'd buy it in a blink
If the New Yorker told her so

One day she screamed

Then laughed
Then killed the gardener with
A gimmick rake
She'd ordered from one
Of those tele-market obscenities.

And the television laughing too, is always laughing.

 III
The Floating Witness

I have no time

Every month is the cruelest now

Cruel as snow
Cruel as the sicknesses that come and go
My dead granddad knows

I have no time
For although young
I am surely cancered

And in the middle of my life--only thirty

I came to a dirt road where beetles scuttled
And wisteria hung and mosquitos on the wing
Did hiss the fungus songs of frogs
Which spawned light before shadow up a hill
Beyond the common folk. Mammon
McMansions they called them on account of
How fast they sprouted from some
Sub-contractor's pit. We were in Virginia

I heard a scream.
 Springish 2012

Riya Aarini

Myra’s Last Dumpster Dive

She lives in an insect-infested studio apartment. Centipedes crawl up through the drain pipe of her shower stall,

frightening the living daylights out of the fifty year old. “They bite! I hate them!” she’d say to anyone within earshot.

Red ants crawl across the cracks of her kitchen, and spiders share her home with her, albeit to the disfavor of Myra

Perez, the inhabitant of the cheap studio she rents.

It’s not unusual for Myra’s overtly-friendly neighbors, like Tom, to peep into her bathroom window and have

lengthy conversations with her as she swathes her five-foot five-inch frame with soapy suds and a blackened

sponge. After all, it takes two to tango and two to hold a conversation.

Myra keeps an eye on the dumpster situated in the parking lot of her apartment complex. On occasion, she’ll find

useful items disposed into it. Once she found a lamp, still spanking brand new; and she helped herself. Now the

lamp sits on her bed stand to give her light from which she scrutinizes the local newspaper, especially the obituary

section, looking for the friends of friends whom she may have heard of.
Poor? No, no, no. Myra is not poor. She is just a utilitarian, a scavenger, a practical person. If it’s new in the box

and it’s dumped in the dumpster, she’ll have a go at it. It is her logic—and not an uncommon one at that.

But she has another side, a not-so-bright side that brings the attention of two beings. One being, like a furious

spectacle, skyrockets up from below, while the other gently glides down from above. They meet in between, on

earth, in the parking lot of Myra’s home. It’s a devil and an angel, and they aim to determine Myra’s fate civilly and

fairly:

The angel, clad in enormously-beautiful white wings, stoutly stated her position, “Myra has shown allegiance to the

good!”

“Oh, nonsense!” said the devil. He was spewing fire and argued, “She has as much good in her as the emptiness in a

half-empty bottle of Gatorade.”

“Well, isn’t that just how much all human beings have? Half good and half bad?” the angel pointed out. The angel

was experienced in debating with the devil to determine the fate of human beings far and wide.

“Okay,” said the devil, “how about the time Myra threatened to punch a store clerk in the face because she felt the

clerk looked at her ‘wrong’? She said she’d physically jump on her and knock the living daylights out of her until the
police came and took her away in handcuffs! Now that’s aggression, and you, as an angel, don’t need that in a

civilized world.”

“Perhaps you’re right on some level, devil,” said the angel. “But Myra helped up poor old Pat when the old lady fell

on the snow in the office parking lot. Pat was grateful, but such a complainer,” argued the angel. “Myra has a gold

heart,” mentioned the angel, with a sentimental gaze toward the sky. “Oh, I hope we take her,” thought the

compassionate angel.

“Gold, mold, what’s the difference? I’ve heard her lie and exaggerate when it comes to her coworker who did not

deserve to be treated in an unfair manner. She could have gotten her coworker fired. I think that’s what she

intended to do. Remember the innocent paperwork mistake one coworker made? Myra ran to the manager when no

one was around, during early morning, and guffawed and yelled all kinds of hullaballoos. And not one bit of it was

true,” said the devil.

“Now devil, at least some of it must have been true,” argued the angel.

“Well, maybe it was true for Myra. She communicated it in such a way to make the coworker look really bad,”

retaliated the devil. “So Myra belongs to me!”

“Let’s just play it out. I’ll go first. If I had it my way,” said the angel, “Myra would experience this:
“Myra dove into the dumpster once again. She thought she had seen a shining metal object, beautiful enough to

encourage inspection. A brand new box of kitchen utensils lay in the dumpster. Myra’s eyes bulged out and a smile

crept across her face. “Oh, oh! Look what I found!” Myra said to herself in a very excited tone. As she grabbed the

box, she found an old lottery ticket stuck to it with chewed bubble gum. She grabbed the box and held on to the

wrinkled ticket, placing the soiled paper into her moss-green utility pant pocket for safe keeping. Then she walked

with a hop into her studio, a grin beaming across her face. She thought she’d make a nice dish of fish tacos for

dinner with her newly-found utensils. She daydreamed of scooping up the fish with the newfound ladle. But when

she got home, Myra quickly grabbed the used lottery ticket from her pocket. She stared at the ticket for five

minutes. Then she said, ‘I’m going to play these numbers.’ And she did. And she won. Five million dollars.

“No, she does not live in her studio apartment anymore, and she has never gone dumpster diving since her big win.

“That,” said the angel, “is the way I play Myra. What about you?”

The devil said, “Myra’s fate will fall this way:

“As usual, Myra walked past the dumpster and noticed something long and made of brass. Her darting eyes zoomed

in on the object. Recognizing it as a treasure worth her interest, Myra became so excited that she dove into the

dumpster head first. The middle-aged woman hit her head on the very brass object that drew her in, and she

experienced a severe concussion. She was fully inside the dumpster for hours, which turned into a couple days,
when, at their usual time, the garbage hauling truck came. The truck backed up and lifted the dumpster with Myra in

it—still unconscious—and threw the contents into the top garbage heap, where it was slowly crushed to a pulp.”

The devil bellows with booming laughter that bounced off the tops of the apartment buildings. “She belongs with

me. You see, angel, Myra will never go dumpster diving again (especially not where I’m taking her)!”

- End -
 Springish 2012

Philip Lewis

The Proud Nubian King

The proud Nubian king

Has the regal bearing of a mansah
Of Old Mali
Six feet two,
One hundred eighty,
Dark-complexioned,
Thirty-four years old,
Not bad to look at, so
Everyone says.
He looks in the mirror
Each morning
And repeats it to himself
Like a mantra
“I am a King”
Or
“I am a Proud Nubian King”
No one seems to realize his kingliness
But himself
Even his vaunted Queen
Doesn’t realize it
The Queen does not accord the King
The respect he thinks he deserves;
She sleeps around on him
(whenever she feels like it, which
Is often)
Badmouths him to her girlfriends
Every now and then he gets wind
Of the Queen’s wrongdoings,
And “keeps her in line”
With slaps, punches and kicks
But truth be told, the Nubian King
Is impotent
He has an heir to the throne
But the King doesn’t know his name,
Nor does he know of his whereabouts;
All he knows is that the heir to his throne
Is not the issue of his Queen.

Every evening, the King must leave his domain

To work the night shift
At the Parkland Hotel,
A crumbling relic of the 1910s
On the “better” part of town
Most of the hotel’s guests are Europeans,
Africans, Asians, Latin Americans,
Shoe-string travelers
Who have no clue that the spook
Who takes up their soiled bed-sheets
and empties out their ashtrays,
unstops their toilets,
cleans out their bathtubs
and vacuums their rugs
is a King.
Every evening, the King
Wades through rivers of dried come,
Spittle, blood, urine, feces, dog
Dirt, foot-tracks, layers upon layers
Of dust from frayed “historic” carpets
And stairwells,
All the while muttering to himself
That he needs a better job.
He gets $13.13 an hour,
Far less after taxes
Still less after union dues
The rest is gobbled up by rent,
Food,
Clothing,
And “recreation”
None of it goes toward
Building his Kingdom
The Kingdom costs nothing
But a little bit of his time
And imagination
He has a little room in the hotel
Allotted him by the management
Between shifts;
He relaxes in his little room,
And with the help of a bottle of Thunderbird
(or a couple blunts)
He returns to his Kingdom,
to a castle of his own making,
sitting on a throne of his own making,
wearing a crown of his own making,
to kiss a Queen of his own making,
decked out in royal robes,
facing an army, an air force, a people,
a nation, entirely
of his own making.
Bis Morgen

The store on xstrasse

Was where one usually
Found unusual things
It was still open at night,
Though near closing
An old, bald, fat man
In a skullcap
Sat near the doorway
I stepped in
To look for an old pipe
There were no pipes
There was plenty of used
Wooden furniture, in
Various states of repair
And disrepair
A lot of old tables
And armoires
I found nothing useful
I only found a wooden tray
Filled with old pince-nez
Glasses
And violin knobs
A young man in a Nike jacket
Was standing near the
Old man
And trying to tune up a violin.
He played a Turkish melody
The strings were scratchy
The bow was fucked up.
The man put the violin down.
“Bis morgen, bruddah,” he said,
As I stepped out.
“Bis morgen, chatz,” said the
Old man.
Paper Bag, Casablanca

Walking out of the hotel

I found to my right
In the middle of the sidewalk
A teenaged Moroccan
About five feet nine
Light brown skinned
Standing with his face
Buried in a paper bag.
He appeared to be endlessly
Blowing up the bag.
Okay, I thought:
If a guy wants to stand in the
Middle of a busy street
Blowing up a paper bag
It’s his business,
Whatever floats his boat.
I walked around for a few hours
Brought a newspaper
Had lunch
And a glass of mint tea
Took pictures of the medina
And the souk off Boulevard Mohammed Cinq
Had another glass of tea
Then a Coke
And came back to the hotel.
The teenaged Moroccan
Was still there,
In the same spot,
Still trying to blow up
The paper
Bag

--Berlin, December 15, 2011

 Springish 2012

Peter Burghardt

Fish Gift

In Chicago night I am thinking

of the fish circling
classifieds, everything
unwanted.

All those proposals that plunge

into yeses, the fish nibbles
them as if they were new. Poor fish,
alone as the moon’s reflection.

At night, Chicago thinks

like a hole in the lake. No
reflections. No clear glass bowl
to hold the slump
of the stars.
Endless Premise

Remember when the beacon broke?

The buildings of West Berkeley dissolved
in graphite shadows. I saw lightning

loot the heavens— it was rich, that lighting:

staggered filaments of height rare as nature
at my stoop. The clouds were long, the light green.

I picked up the phone, the signal died.

Outside an invisible café the transmuted dog’s head
barked away.
B Reel

(Buster Keaton sits atop the rod of two train wheels, a young lady approaches)

BEAUTIFUL LADY: Why didn’t you enlist?

BUSTER KEATON (rises in the harmless dirt): They wouldn’t take me.

(Keaton’s porkpie hat conspicuously wilts; the train emits a jaunty puff of steam)

BEAUTIFUL LADY: Please don’t lie- I don’t want you to speak to me again until you are in uniform.

(The train eeks forward, crushing a sand-painted skeleton as it pulls from the station. Keaton, forlorn,
reclaims his perch. He is thrust from the rod up into the protosexual sky. At the apex of his arc he clambers onto
the crux of an immense dove. He discharges a whistle.)
Of Mountain

Sometimes, if you cut the porchlights,

the sister stars sward the peaks

of your flesh

and you become

the display in the habit,

the calm prefect

you once scorned

for refusing to exist-

Annulus

The rings in our bones

the eruption of phosphenes

At the end of the line

everything we imagined

Remember the song

of the tufted titmouse

In the end she came back

but had seen too much to sing it
 Springish 2012

Penelope L. Mace

What You Want

The boy and girl were face to face on the blanket. Around them the deep summer woods carried on,
oblivious.
Suddenly she pulled back with a gasp. “No. I’m not doing this again.”
His narrow face was moist and surprised. “Why not?” he panted.
“I don’t want to,” she said as if it were obvious. She sat up and swatted the gnats away then pulled her white
blouse on. He watched sadly as she did all the buttons then pulled up her riding pants. Her face too was moist,
sticky, caught with bits of leaves.
He reached for her. “Come on,” he said, “you did it once before.”
“Yeah, that’s the point. I did it once and I didn’t like it. It hurt.” With definitive strokes, she tucked in the
blouse and buckled the belt. “And I feel all gritty. All I want’s a shower.”
He stroked her thigh. “It won’t hurt his time. I promise.”
She frowned at his hand as if it were an independent and unwanted creature. “You can you promise that.”
“It only hurts the first time.”
“You know that. For absolute sure.”
He hesitated. This is what she did: never asked a question but jabbed him with statements that he had to
counter. “Well-“
“Yeah, exactly. No thanks.”
After much coaxing he managed to ease her back down again and they kissed but soon she complained
about the heat and the gnats and yanked away. This time he didn’t say anything but instead fumbled with himself.
When she realized what he was doing she leaped to her feet.
“Oh, not that again,” she said. “I am not watching that again. That is the grossest thing a person could ever
do.”
As she spoke she turned and threw herself across the clearing toward the deepest shade where the black and
white horse stood dozing, his head drooping, the reins slack around his neck. Before the boy could react she
grabbed a fistful of white mane and swung one long leg up and over. Startled awake, the horse whinnied in protest
but she clucked to him and he calmed.
“Hey, hold it,” panted the boy.
 She yanked the reins and the horse took off at a lope toward the break in the clearing that opened onto a
rocky path out of the woods.
Struggling to his feet he pulled at his clothes and ran across the clearing, down the steep path, the smooth
soles of his riding boots slipping on the stones so when he caught sight of them she had just eased the horse into a
gentle canter. Her long braid had come loose earlier and now her hair was a sandy plume, catching the sun. “Hey,”
he shouted, “that happens to be my goddamn horse.”
Cursing, he stomped back to the clearing and got the blanket. She had left her hunting cap so he snatched
that up too and started walking home.
A few hours later he eased his mother’s station wagon up her drive way and sat for a moment watching. She
was on a glider on the porch, hunched over a notebook, writing furiously. When she didn’t look up he was not sure
if she’d noticed his arrival so he waited another minute then got out of the car and approached. He’d brought her
cap.
The steps creaked and she looked up. “Hi.”
“Hi.” At least when she saw him she smiled, he thought. Her hair was loose and damp around her
shoulders and she’d changed into a tank top and short shorts.
“Here. You left this.” She nodded but did not reach for the cap so he put it down on the wicker table.
“Did your Mom tell you how proud she was that you decided to jog home instead of riding?”
“Yeah, nobody jogs in riding boots, Cassie. She knows that. She figured we had a fight. She was all over me
about it.” He couldn’t hide his irritation.
Her smile widened into a grin. “Sorry. It was all I could think of on short notice.”
The screen door whined open and her mother stepped outside and smiled at him.
“Mom. This is Mike. I take care of his horse.”
“Oh. Right. Which one is yours?” She was a pale echo of Cassie, smaller, thinner, with a spill of faded hair
around her face.
“Satin, Mrs. Whittenborne,” he said. “I just uh – Cassie left her cap. I figured she might be uh exercising
another horse later today.”
“How considerate of you. And do call me Sarah. I don’t think she is. Are you?” Cassie shook her head. She
was staring intently in the distance and tapping her pen. “Would you like some iced tea or something Mike?”
“No thanks.”
“Well. I’m in the middle of a sketch. I should get back.”
Cassie swiveled around as her mother stepped back inside. “Is it another insect one?”
“No, taking a break from that today,” she said vaguely and was gone. The screen door shut with a snap.
“Insects?”
Cassie nodded. “She’s doing flying insects right now. But not the usual ones like butterflies. Stuff like
dragon flies and moths.”
“Yeah? She’s an artist?”
She shrugged. “She tries to sell them. Sometimes.”
He swiped at his forehead. He was still sweating though it was relatively cool here on the wide open porch.
It was an old settled in house surrounded by tall thick trees. “Go on, move over so I can sit down.”
“Not here, it’s too hot – sit over there.”
He sat opposite her in a scratched up wicker chair that groaned and shuddered when he sat down causing
him to hold himself. She tossed the pen and drew up her long legs into a wide splay. He couldn’t help but look.
Girls didn’t sit that way, at least, no where he’d ever been. When he made himself look away his gaze fell on her
notebook. It was thick with a bright red cover. He couldn’t make out what she’d scrawled all over it. “What are
you writing?”
Pushing her hair back she shot the notebook a hard look as if worried that it might wander off. “Stuff.”
“Stuff about me?”
“No. Poetry and stuff.”
“Can I see it?”
“No,” she said firmly.
“Just don’t leave it lying around, Cassie. Ok?”
“I don’t,” she snapped, “and anyway, my parents would never do that. They don’t spy on me like your mom
does on you.”
“My mom doesn’t spy on me.”
“Oh. Well then. I guess she spies on me. Seems like every time I’m there in the barn with you she finds
some reason to be there.”
“She doesn’t mean it that way, she just-“he couldn’t say, she thinks you need more supervision, she thinks
you’re allowed to run wild, so instead he said, “Hey, I’ve got the car all day. Let’s go for a ride.”
She played with her hair, lifting it all up with both hands, then letting it drop again, fluffing it, smoothing it
down. He remembered how it smelled, how silky it felt when he buried his face in it. She seemed to consider his
suggestion. “Nah. It’s too hot to go anywhere.”
“Ok, I’ll take you to that ice cream place. I think it’s air conditioned.”
“The new one on the highway? My mom reported them for some labor thing. I can’t go in there.”
“Well, how about a movie? The Warner, in town. It’s so air conditioned in there you practically freeze to
death. And they’re showing that new thing with Debbie Reynolds.”
She swept the notebook away and it fell to the floor with a smack. Then she stretched out on her back
causing the glider to pitch and creak. “I’m not sitting inside a movie theater in the middle of the day. I’d feel like a
weirdo.”
He looked down her long body. She was just about his height and his mother said at her age she might still
be growing. His mother also said she was pretty but had terrible manners. If that girl doesn’t watch herself, she told
him, she’ll end up with a bad reputation and she said this as if it would cause him to avoid her. Of course he knew
what his mother did not: any bad reputation material she might have, he had provided. Yet his mother had brought
her around, hired her to exercise Satin so he could work more hours. She took care of thoroughbred show jumpers
and came recommended, his mother said. No doubt she had hired her without ever seeing her.
“How about we go into town? We can get a soda or a sandwich or whatever you want. I have money.”
She sprang up and stretched wildly, arms in the air, her tank top rising, allowing him a glimmer, then headed
toward the side of the porch where the steps led down to a vegetable garden. “I can’t get comfortable there,” she
declared over her shoulder. He stood up. Her speed and agility always shocked him. And she was strong. Once,
before he’d kissed her, they were playing around in the barn, half wrestling, and she shoved him with both hands,
nearly knocking him on his ass. Mike knew he was no he-man but he wasn’t a weakling either. It was the instant he
realized how attracted he was.
He followed her through neat rows of tomato and pepper plants, pale green shoots of lettuce and thick
clumps of parsley, all marked off with borders of small well matched stones. His dad was a gardener and he had
been forced all his life to help so he appreciated how much work had gone into this. He wondered who the
gardener was – her foggy headed mom or her do gooder dad who was always off somewhere helping colored
people get the vote or get something. Neither seemed likely candidates. At the far end of the garden was a sagging
screened in gazebo whose frame sorely needed painting. She had to yank the door to make it open and then to close
it she kicked it so hard with her bare foot that he winced.
Falling back onto a small ripped couch, she breathed, “Better. Breezier out here. And fewer bugs.”
The gazebo floor was littered with crumpled potato chip bags, library books, empty Coke bottles, candy
wrappers. To the one side was a neat pile of red notebooks like the one she had been writing in. He settled himself
tentatively onto a small lumpy armchair that smelled of cigarettes. “Is this where you write most of your uh, stuff?”
“In the summer.” She saw him eyeing the pile of notebooks and said, “Forget it. I don’t show my diary to
anyone.”
“You said it was poetry.”
“It’s both.”
He nodded. “So what about it then?”
She twisted all her hair up behind her head then let it flow over the back of the chair like a curtain. It was
drying into unkempt spirals. All the girls he knew from the Episcopal Church or the girl’s academy had poofed out
hair dos that, helmet like, remained absolutely stationary when they moved their heads. This one: he wondered if
she ever combed her hair.
“What about what? Poetry? I like Emily Dickenson. And Walt Whitman. And my dad just sent me a book
of new Negro poetry. It’s amazing.”
“Yeah? Negro poetry? Where is your dad?”
“Mississippi. But the poetry is from all over.”
“Mm.” He was thinking she had better not mention something like that around his mother. “What I meant
was, what about going into town? I’ll buy you a cheeseburger.”
“How can you eat stuff like that in this weather? Thought of it makes me sick. I just survive on iced tea and
watermelon all summer.”
Exasperated, he tossed his hands in the air and leaned back with a sigh but the little chair quivered so he sat
back up. “Why are you like this?”
Laughing, she arched her back, her full breasts straining against the tank top. She was not wearing a bra.
Without a trace of shame she had told him that she never wore a bra unless her mother forced her to. And then, she
added, soon as I get somewhere, I take it off. “Why am I like what?”
“Such a grouch.”
“I’m not. You came here on your own. I didn’t invite you.”
“You know, most girls your age would be real happy to have a guy my age asking them to go out
somewhere.”
She stared at him. “Really? Yeah. I guess you’re right. But I don’t want to. How come you didn’t work
today?”
“Have to work the weekend so I have off today.” Mike’s father had got him a summer job at the hospital
where he practiced. Mike thought probably he hoped it would inspire him to study medicine but so far the very
smell of the place made him queasy and he wasn’t even around the patients yet. Without planning to, he rose from
the rickety armchair and pushed himself down beside her on the little couch. She stayed and their hips and thighs
touched, her warmth finding him, a hint of her muscles and softness. She smelled of shampoo. A wave of dizziness
washed over him and he peered toward the house before turning to her. “You’re a very pretty girl Cassie.”
 She grimaced but did not resist as he put his arms around her. “Stop saying stuff like that,” she whispered
into his neck.
Girls he knew loved it when you said stuff like that. Girls he knew wore dresses and jewelry. She had told
him she lost jewelry and dresses made her itch.
He held her harder and kissed her a little. “What do you want me to say then?” he whispered.
“Tell me about the college you’re going to in the fall.”
“Penn State,” he said simply. “You’ve heard of it, right?” She nodded and did not resist as he slipped his
hand under her tank top. Hers were the only unfettered breasts he’d ever touched. The way they seemed to radiate
heat shocked him every time. “Mm, uh, my dad went there. For undergrad. Come on.”
They kissed more deeply. She tasted of tea. Before him she had never necked, she told him. He could tell.
She didn’t know how but he couldn’t think of a way to tell her. He still did not understand why she had let him
have her the other week but he was not about to question it. He told himself – what do you care - but part of him
wanted her to let him because she liked him, because she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
“No more,” she declared and pulled away wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Fine, I’m going..” He stood up. The damn door would not open. She stood behind him telling him exactly
where to kick it until finally it opened and he took off in long strides down the path between the budding and
fragrant green plants. He sensed her behind him, keeping up easily, something about her breathing suggesting that
maybe for once she wasn’t so sure of herself. At his car he turned and saw her hovering on the edge of the grass,
her hands gripping her upper arms. She was not looking at him.
“Wanna know something, Cassie? Do you?”
Her big eyes found him. “What?”
He glanced toward the house and stepped closer. “You start in high school this year, right? 9th grade?” She
nodded. “Wanna know the one thing that high school guys hate about a girl? Do you?” Her gray eyes widened. He
could see that he finally had her attention and he did not want to relinquish the moment. “Do you?” he repeated.
She nodded. “The one thing they hate is – is - not a fat girl or a stupid girl or even an ugly girl, but – are you
listening?” She stood still. “Are you?”
“Yes, yes,” she said and not sarcastically.
“A tease. Guys hate a girl who is a tease. If that gets around, you will not have a date for the rest of your life.
You will be everybody’s favorite baby sitter because all your weekends will be free forever. You hear me?”
Frowning, she looked away across the long slope of grass heavily punctuated with dandelions and butter and
eggs. He thought maybe she was about to respond but when she didn’t his pride dictated that he leave. He yanked
the car door but she said his name.
It was the first time she had done that, called to him, and it made his heart skip though he called himself
pathetic. He aimed for a righteous but disinterested tone. “Yeah?”
“Maybe. Tomorrow night. Want to come over? My mom is going out. To a meeting. Usually she makes me
go with her but I told her I don’t want to go and I think she’ll let me stay home.”
“What time?”
She made an expressive shrug. “7 or something? I don’t know.”
Her big eyes were on him and her lips were so delicate and plush that he wished he hadn’t made such a
show about leaving. “All right. Why don’t you call me? When she leaves?” She nodded. He half closed the car door.
“And. Cassie? I’m uh, sorry, if I-“
Her hands went up in front of herself. “Look. If you do come over. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
 “I know. It’s ok. Call me.”
“Bye. Oh, wait a minute.”
He had the key in his hand. “What?”
“Know what? If you hate that job. Don’t do it.”
He stared. “My dad wants me to –“
She took a step toward him. “But what do you want?”
The urgency in her voice stopped him. They looked at each other for a few moments and then he got in the
car and started it up. As he pulled away she gave an exaggerated fluttery wave with both hands, a gesture so unlike
her that it made him smile. He waved back and she smiled and took off for the back, her long hair swinging.
How had she come to know things? And why wasn’t she afraid? He hoped she’d call him.
 Springish 2012

Patrick Chapman

The National Style ‘O’ Resonator

You pass it to him hopefully. “Play me something
Meaningful. Thrill me on your metal strings
With a blues from my homeland, or the spiritual
You learned how to pluck, just to undress me.”
Fingers adept on a fretboard, you intuit,
May serve you well in other ways. But this –
This is before you are married. This is the time
You desire him the more for his skill with a neck.

There will come a day, after a long intermission,

When he takes the machine out from under the bed,
Shines it like new, carries it down to the kitchen,
Hoping to catch your smile reflected in the body
As his fingers flutter on your lips, trying to strum
The music back into your voice.
Black Smoke
There is no Australia in the Bible. This point
Gave them resolution when they came.

In the sky that Easter Sunday morning,

A new sun flashed, snuffing out

The Guard in a second, along with everyone

It had been charged with protecting.

What remained was not a city of the dead.

There were no corpses in the streets. Where

They still existed as anything, the people

Were shadows traced on marble walls.

The ceiling of the chapel was unwounded;

The Pythian Apollo, undefiled. Statuary

Inherited this territory,

Contaminated now for centuries.
Selas
Days when every night is a full moon
And you a true lycanthrope. No doubt
There’ll be a dawn; it will not save you.

Dawn will draw you out. It’s not the bone-

Distort mutation that reshapes you
In a hail of lunar stabs; it is your shadow

In daylight you hope no one will see. That blot

Of darkness follows you around like a tell –
The wolf unrevealed but his tail on display.
Volcano Day
Your heartbeat in my ear;
My tear upon your breast –

And in the earth, a thunder

Where there never had been

Thunder. In the street

Where never had we heard

Any more percussion

Than a drum in some god’s

Dying day parade –

Arrhythmia, a starting thing

So let it come –
My tear upon your breast

And let it come –

Your heartbeat in my ear.

Already we are studies

For our own discovered statues.
 Springish 2012

Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Thin Red Jellies

Persons Represented
(Distinction is faulty between persons. Each is daughter of a mother. All will be mothers of daughters. Their
positions shift. Their roles repeat. They reek of nondescript sex, sweat, and blood.)

Pentheus, Sovereign
Bromius, Divine Double
Tiresias, Seer
Cadmus, Founder

Interphase
(1st Gap: Warehouse, vacant as a drunk sixteen-year-old waiting for a blowjob. Lights dimmed.)

Shadow and projected text. On shadow and projected text, Pentheus walks in shadow and projected text. In shadow
and projected text. In tight denim, he walks across shadow and projected text. Half-memorized words
superimposed on superimposed self. Projected text superimposed on shadow. Projected text superimposed on him.
Pentheus walks. Pentheus stands. Pentheus leans, thumbs hooked in tight denim. In tight denim, his thumbs
hooked.

Synthesis
(Warehouse. Lights darkened.)

Half-memorized words superimposed on superimposed self. Pentheus strips nearly tripping. Half-memorized words
superimposed on superimposed self. Pentheus strips nearly tripping. Discorrupt, discorrupt. He strips to meat
façade. The meat façade, he strips. A blond body in shadow. A blond body in projected text. A blond body in
shadow and projected text. Out of. Out of tight denim. Out of tight denim, a blond body in projected text. A blond
body in shadow. A blond body in projected text and shadow.
2nd Gap
(Warehouse: Lights dimmed.)

Out of tight denim, his thumbs pressed. Pentheus leans, thumbs pressed on blond body. Pentheus stands. Pentheus
walks. Projected text superimposed on him. Half-memorized words superimposed on superimposed self. Out of
tight denim, he walks across shadow and projected text. Through shadow and projected text, Pentheus walks in
shadow and projected text. In shadow and projected text, a blond body walks.

Prophase
(Warehouse. Lights shine obscenely.)

Out of tight denim, a blond body, out of tight denim. Stripped to the meat, a blond body. Out of tight denim, a
blond body stripped to the meat. Out of tight denim, a blond body stripped to the meat.

Anaphase
(Warehouse: Lights dimmed.)

Shadow and projected text. On shadow and projected text, Bromius walks in shadow and projected text. In shadow
and projected text. Stripped to the blond meat. Bromius and Pentheus stripped to the meat in shadow and projected
text. In shadow and projected text, Pentheus and Bromius. In projected text and shadow, Cadmus and Tiresias.
Cadmus and Tiresias in projected text and shadow. Firm armed and soft stomached, Cadmus and Tiresias tread in a
double veil. Cadmus faces aft. Cadmus treads backwards. Tiresias faces fore. Tiresias treads forward. Balls press
against the double veil. Ruddy balls press against the double veil. One treads backwards, the other forward. In a
double veil, Tiresias approaches Pentheus. In a double veil, Cadmus approaches Bromius. In a double veil, in
shadow, in projected text, brunette meat approaches blond meat. The double veil pulled taut. The taut double veil.

Telophase
(Warehouse: Lights darkened.)

Cadmus, Bromius, Tiresias, Pentheus. Cadmus, Bromius. Tiresias, Pentheus. In shadow, Cadmus, Bromius. In
projected text, Tiresias, Pentheus. Cadmus and Bromius tread in shadow. Cadmus in Bromius treads in shadow.
Tiresias and Pentheus tread in projected text. Tiresias in Pentheus treads in projected text.
Cytokinesis
(Warehouse: Lights shine obscenely.)

Tattoos bleed through the veil. Tattoos bleed through the double veil. Treading backwards, treading forwards.
Tattoos through the veil. Cadmus in Bromius. Tiresias in Pentheus. How fine the torn tulle. How fine the torn tulle
around each.

Metaphase
(Warehouse: Lights dimmed.)

Body under gaze. Tattoos bleed through veils. Torn tulle around Cadmus in Bromius. Ruddy Balls against tulle.
Bodies under gaze. Torn tulle around Tiresias in Pentheus. Ruddy balls against tulle. Red balls against shadow and
projected text.
 Springish 2012

Matthew Dennis

The Labrynth

Entrance

There is a mouth, a mouth that grins

And when I shiver
He shivers; him
Not in an agony of fright
But in ecstasy and stark delight

I’ll never know why he ever came

I love him not,
He feels the same
And as fear of him his lust compels
Sure hate does lurk within our shells

The path we take is changed sometimes

And I changed his
Less he changed mine
The past and present soon forgot
The future: endless Qliphoth.
Husks

When I looked into the sun

I saw
Her ancestors fighting,
A great
Serpent pinned beneath eagle’s claws
The tongue split
Down the middle and the snake followed
Now,
Two snakes beneath eagle’s claws
One passed
Shedding skin with clear white eyes

In my dreams I found the great bear

She is sick
Milky eyes and hot frothy breath choking
She screams,
Slides onto her side, her brown fur greasy
From her belly,
White crabs cut their way out and scuttle through,
Their shells
Are tinged with the deep blue of pelagic seas
The clicking
Is witness to the absence of her sound

Beneath the deepest ocean waters,

In the black,
Weird men move in repetition
Their faces
Covered by featureless masks
They pray
With the slowest of motions
At an altar of basalt
Un-crushable by the enduring pressure
The weight
From their backs, is lifted by songs floating up to the sun
Without your voice speaking through me
I am dead
I am a container for your sound, a shell
Filled with echoes
Of a mollusk’s noise, found on a quiet beach
Please speak,
Please cry out in fury at the sadness of the void
I am here
Where are you? Why won’t you talk anymore?
If we do not meet
Again,
I loved you and will not love
Again.
Lord of Dead Bodies

The parasites float to the top

Of the old water
Dust gathers in gray canopies beneath the shelves
If beer cans had souls,
This would be their purgatory
And they would weep at being unfulfilled

I can’t clean up anymore

The world goes on,
Decay’s clock ticks endlessly
Things pass
And
We go on,
Stop.

The dispersal of energy and matter is a waste of Time

Space should listen to the ageless black
The hole between that does not change
Hear peace in the silence of endings
And feel content in the touch of stillness
All being should rest in quiet
And forget the sadness of sound

We looked at the crumpled leaves

And the old popcorn, that was hard and soft
I thought about falling from a balcony
And the passing of wind and windows by my face,
Half submerged in the lake a log, with slime coating it,
It floats up then sinks then floats then sinks then floats
Then sinks then floats
Then sinks forever more.
Fleeing the Light

Outside of every body

Is a mind that does not sleep.
When we crawled out of our wave-lives,
There was a reflection of infinity hooked to our souls by white threads

As I grew in darkness
A fungus, needing no father,
Spilled from a glowing cone
I was instructed to breath by chemicals

Each of our choices has no meaning,

There are but two options.
Why question anything,
When there is no absolute.
Devourers

“Keep the harness tight.”

He sneered through gritted teeth
“Break the ankles if you have to, I want
Her tight to the ground.”
The big horse shifted,
Her eyes rolled and steam whistled
From wet nostrils

When we cut her heart out

She blew air out of herself at a surprising rate
She shivered, rocked, did not scream
Soon she was still and warm instead of hot
We threw the heart in a pile of hay.
There is no ritual here,
Only death.
The Desolation of God

Shame has come like an old blanket

Like the sky
I have asked succor from the merciless
I have tried to resist the irresistible
There is cold
There is stillness
There is shame
And there is
Stillness.
Center

Before you go to bed, pray

When you wake up, pray
After you eat, brush your teeth.
 Springish 2012

Mark Cunningham

[quantum]

Light might be “the great organizer,” but things keep getting in its way. We were going to call our new cartoon
character Hegemony Cricket, but Disney put a stop to that. My rock garden petrified. I told her I was never sure if
she was kidding, and she said you must be joking. When the interrogators asked if she thought speech was what
separates humans from animals, she new better than to say anything. Those antibiotics didn’t save the cow, either.
 [quantum]

I said it was my big day, but they said that, after a certain age, people start to shrink. Though nothing happened for
a whole year, the physicist proved our bodies continued to give out personal information. The news anchor gave
good plausible denial, but her dentistry was totally unbelievable. I pointed out a vacuum was a gestalt, too. He said
she was fast-forwarding her shadow at him in a subliminal fill-in-the-blank; she said she was materializing the trace
of her delay.
 [quantum]

The light indexed in a photograph is still moving, since you see it. They told me the “right here, right now” line
formed over there.
 [quantum]

When I said, “At night, everybody has a black eye,” she punched me. He said, “Depth leads to projection,” but I
didn’t understand that, so I figured he was just another idiot. We voted to “oppose the formation of a new cliché
that would make us sink lower than low.” No point having three copies if you’re going to keep them all in the same
place—this statement used to refer only to inanimate objects. She wanted to clarify whether they said they’d see her
inside or see her insides.
 Springish 2012

Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Thin Red Jellies

Persons Represented
(Distinction is faulty between persons. Each is daughter of a mother. All will be mothers of daughters. Their
positions shift. Their roles repeat. They reek of nondescript sex, sweat, and blood.)

Pentheus, Sovereign
Bromius, Divine Double
Tiresias, Seer
Cadmus, Founder

Interphase
(1st Gap: Warehouse, vacant as a drunk sixteen-year-old waiting for a blowjob. Lights dimmed.)

Shadow and projected text. On shadow and projected text, Pentheus walks in shadow and projected text. In shadow
and projected text. In tight denim, he walks across shadow and projected text. Half-memorized words
superimposed on superimposed self. Projected text superimposed on shadow. Projected text superimposed on him.
Pentheus walks. Pentheus stands. Pentheus leans, thumbs hooked in tight denim. In tight denim, his thumbs
hooked.

Synthesis
(Warehouse. Lights darkened.)

Half-memorized words superimposed on superimposed self. Pentheus strips nearly tripping. Half-memorized words
superimposed on superimposed self. Pentheus strips nearly tripping. Discorrupt, discorrupt. He strips to meat
façade. The meat façade, he strips. A blond body in shadow. A blond body in projected text. A blond body in
shadow and projected text. Out of. Out of tight denim. Out of tight denim, a blond body in projected text. A blond
body in shadow. A blond body in projected text and shadow.
2nd Gap
(Warehouse: Lights dimmed.)

Out of tight denim, his thumbs pressed. Pentheus leans, thumbs pressed on blond body. Pentheus stands. Pentheus
walks. Projected text superimposed on him. Half-memorized words superimposed on superimposed self. Out of
tight denim, he walks across shadow and projected text. Through shadow and projected text, Pentheus walks in
shadow and projected text. In shadow and projected text, a blond body walks.

Prophase
(Warehouse. Lights shine obscenely.)

Out of tight denim, a blond body, out of tight denim. Stripped to the meat, a blond body. Out of tight denim, a
blond body stripped to the meat. Out of tight denim, a blond body stripped to the meat.

Anaphase
(Warehouse: Lights dimmed.)

Shadow and projected text. On shadow and projected text, Bromius walks in shadow and projected text. In shadow
and projected text. Stripped to the blond meat. Bromius and Pentheus stripped to the meat in shadow and projected
text. In shadow and projected text, Pentheus and Bromius. In projected text and shadow, Cadmus and Tiresias.
Cadmus and Tiresias in projected text and shadow. Firm armed and soft stomached, Cadmus and Tiresias tread in a
double veil. Cadmus faces aft. Cadmus treads backwards. Tiresias faces fore. Tiresias treads forward. Balls press
against the double veil. Ruddy balls press against the double veil. One treads backwards, the other forward. In a
double veil, Tiresias approaches Pentheus. In a double veil, Cadmus approaches Bromius. In a double veil, in
shadow, in projected text, brunette meat approaches blond meat. The double veil pulled taut. The taut double veil.

Telophase
(Warehouse: Lights darkened.)

Cadmus, Bromius, Tiresias, Pentheus. Cadmus, Bromius. Tiresias, Pentheus. In shadow, Cadmus, Bromius. In
projected text, Tiresias, Pentheus. Cadmus and Bromius tread in shadow. Cadmus in Bromius treads in shadow.
Tiresias and Pentheus tread in projected text. Tiresias in Pentheus treads in projected text.
Cytokinesis
(Warehouse: Lights shine obscenely.)

Tattoos bleed through the veil. Tattoos bleed through the double veil. Treading backwards, treading forwards.
Tattoos through the veil. Cadmus in Bromius. Tiresias in Pentheus. How fine the torn tulle. How fine the torn tulle
around each.

Metaphase
(Warehouse: Lights dimmed.)

Body under gaze. Tattoos bleed through veils. Torn tulle around Cadmus in Bromius. Ruddy Balls against tulle.
Bodies under gaze. Torn tulle around Tiresias in Pentheus. Ruddy balls against tulle. Red balls against shadow and
projected text.
 Springish 2012

Luca Penne

Sardine Storm

Like the cats, Fred likes sardines. Melanie also likes sardines. But when sardines rain from the overwrought sky,
they’re suspicious because out of season. The cats don’t care: they dash from hiding, snatch a few samples, and
retreat to their smelly dens. Usually fish fall during the early autumn, after hurricanes have stirred the sea to froth.
Why should they precipitate in the dullest part of winter, a month before spring? Fred recalls the autumn of sea
bass. Big ones, twenty to forty pounds, fell and smashed windshields, breaking the collarbones of school kids
waiting for the bus. But the Congregational Church had a fish supper so good a dozen people dropped with heart
attacks, their arteries so clogged the surgeons had to replace them with lengths of pasta. Luckily everyone survived.
With a dustpan and broom, Melanie sweeps up sardines to freeze in plastic bags. Fred picks one up and munches. A
black cat hisses, and a gray tiger meows. They know the sardines fell because the Great Cat in the Sky loves them.
Who are Fred and Melanie to say otherwise?
Neither Law nor Justice

The snowflakes gloat in their doily-like geometry. They’re so intelligent they clot and plot like brain cells. They plan
to avalanche even before winter begins. Lounging in tiny lounge chairs in the Yukon, they map the slopes and
divide up the dopes among them. Some choose to avalanche over Jeremy, who impregnated his sister by sending
her a Christmas card with a pop-up Santa-Phallus. Others choose to crush Kristy, whose child wails so horribly in
coffee shops the other patrons rush out and vomit on the sidewalk, blood slopping from their ears. Still others elect
to gang up on Mike and squash him in his office where he plots to overthrow the law firm that was kind enough to
hire him despite his dozen felony convictions. And what of the slide that buried Mark and his children on the ski
slope while they hotdogged family-style? What of the mass that crushed Annie while she dispensed cocaine to
elementary-school kids from the plastic bag under her skirt? After a winter of avalanches all the snowflakes plead
guilty, whether tried individually or in groups. No one believes them, but the trials continue all summer, judges and
juries fainting in the orange heat. By the time the verdicts come in, the defendants have escaped, leaving not one
clue.
Since the Election

Since the election, zombies have plagued the village, staggering about the streets while munching babies and dogs.
The first snow fell last night, a faint stippling, and I found zombie tracks all over the yard. Everyone has
complained, but the police can do nothing, claiming that the first amendment protects the walking dead as well as
the living.

Those rolled-up, mustard-yellow eyes, granite teeth, starched postures, and stilted walks offend me. At the camera
shop I stock up on batteries. Fueled with a Thermos of coffee, I catch a group of zombies who’ve cornered skiers
from New York and are about to crack their skulls and suck out the nut-meat inside. I point my camera, trigger the
flash. The zombies startle like geese, stumble and fumble off. I chase them, flashing the bold electric flash until they
lurch back to the graveyard, flop into their proper graves, and pull good Republican earth over themselves.

Scouring the streets, I repeat the process until all zombies have returned to the platitudes of death. As I refill my
Thermos at the diner, fellow citizens thank and congratulate me. The waitress won’t take money for the coffee.
Outside, in the park by the river, I crouch in the chill and watch leaves drift on the current, red and brown and
yellow leaves. The snow has already melted, but a long winter lies ahead. I hope the drifts pile high, convincing the
zombies to lie as still as possible while overhead the wind and ice converse.
Somewhere in the West

the world’s tallest building leans against a thousand-foot bluff. The eightieth floor opens onto a dusty level plain. I
step outside, walk a few yards, look back. Foliage conceals the top of the hotel. Fat naked people approach me.
Transparent as protozoa, they slobber and hold out their hands for alms. I can see the landscape through them, a
distant lurch of mountains purpling in dusk. I know these people; have known them since adolescence when they
embraced sex and booze like bears embracing beehives. I watched them laugh in the parks and mock the straight
world passing like a slow freight going nowhere. I envied the full-bodied force of their rejection, envied the surge of
conviction that fueled their separation from church and state. Who expected them to live so long? Who expected
them to become so fat and transparent, even their livers absolutely colorless, their bones ghostly sticks of
crystallized sugar? I never thought they’d stoop to beg from me, but now they’re crying my name, pleading not for
money but acknowledgement. “Why go naked in this breezy climate?” I ask, and they look so confused I realize
they don’t understand the word “naked.” “Why did you grow transparent?” They look at each other and shrug. I
invite them to return to the hotel with me, but when I push the foliage aside the hotel has gone. A long gray slope
of boulders and sagebrush slants to a desert floor. My old friends sigh and turn away. I start the descent, a long dry
walk to someplace.
Lord of the Flies

Let me help you with your salad. You’re too thin already, and eating lettuce accentuates your green eyes to the point
where they glisten like rivets. And these slabs of tomato grin too aggressively. Remember what you said about
phony smiles? Oh yes, tomatoes are fruit—I forgot. Your own fruitiness comes to fruition when you gobble a pear.
The juice running down your chin suggests faucets dripping in abandoned houses. Apples you crunch crunch back
with wanton pleasure. Grapes pop like pimples. But salad—good old garden salad slathered with ranch dressing—
does nothing but challenge your lack of vegetable desire. Speaking of dressing, I like your low-cut but funereal
dress. Who died?

Of course we’re going to dance later when the salad course is over and the music begins. We’ll dance until the great
roast pig appears, greased and gleaming. Let me help you finish that salad so we can dance up an appetite worthy of
the Lord of Flies. The dead pig will bless us, and maybe later we can find a moment to acknowledge that blessing by
sacrificing our unborn, unconceived child.
 Springish 2012

Liz Mariani

Skim.bird fashion.show.
skinny and dead/after all these years.
Playing along, just to survive.
Crass. A gift.
Full Needle Therapy in the Two-lands.
We are half-off the grid.
Charismatic cherub-toms, justifying left the jack-fried small.birds.
Yet, still, I find you mining my armpits into cones of sorbetto-memory.
 But.
I think you're crazy-wild,
a thorn-bread of high school force-beds
chatting up small heads and polite test cheaters.
You have chandeliers hanging from your outer parts, your
earlobes, clitorises, your eyebrows, your toenails.
I contend your content, your assurance of gold.
Gallivanting blubber.dome,
Yesterdays formfitted into our airbrushed
gastrointestinal opulence of grandeur.
A flat.brush for flat.noodles.
Sincerely yours, Subservient Forever.The Woman of the House.
Formula.
What becomes beauty to a day sunlit after sunlit day?
Find me a feather-beard, some sort of Raven song
Where the scorned daughters meet this lonely fast
to Crust-Crucify, determined to Blend and engage Disposal.
Trustworthy commonplace dead.end.roads follow home.
Intrepid memory, liberate me from this Neon Vein.
For the coastlines the coastlines envy.
The chasms dream of interference.
We are better in breath today,
far from fertilizer.
 Help.
Today, I am awake to the Homelessness
kindergarten motherboards harnessing
the loudspeaker Flight Announcement
the Ever.spun spider.web of property ownership
formless form, trying too hard to squeeze the yellow from beneath
my eyes. I cry in cowardice, beg to be Seen, really Seen.
For what it is, treading water, treading oil
Separate, child and adult, poor and rich, desolate and popular-
I have nothing to express how impossible it is
to own land. If you require, however, I'll hold your sadness,
your acres of White-Guilt, your curiosity spreading distance.
All for the sake of Gravity.
Distance-pure binoculars curing vision,
a glimpse of qualifying humanity.
All for the sake of Purity piously
squeezing the Acid from our Grapefruits, calling them Sweet.
 Feeling the Forever feeling.
Because this bookstore has an army.
thread. thursday. tinfoil. treatment. treadmill.
Because bagpipes concur with city.birds.
Thread our cousins' cousins' cousins.
Because thunder is digested/burbled through birthquakes
Thursday our sisters' sisters' sisters' sisters.
I wonder what these glass buildings would say,
If They Cracked a Little.
Tinfoil our land-grabs, place them on the 2nd shelf and set that
Appliance on Fire.
Would they scour at our Reflections of Ashen gratuity?
Treatments, baby skin ointments, devour Fear of Death.
Whether, by land or sea, floater plane or Status Update.
When they come for the poets, set down your Mango and head for
the Treadmill.
 White in air.
These seagulls of candle wax, eyeing homeland security's
homeland security.
Cry this vanilla molten rage.quality,
something branded-backed by atomic energy, retrofitted to
calm just enough, just enough, just.
This shit.list of interconnection overwhelms the storage-uterus.
It makes me feel I should give birth to a litter of litterbugs,
set on finishing the human destruction of human destruction.
What I write is for the trees, the crystals in this plastic light.box
for what these new fat babies have to demand
of Us. Quiet. Please. Quiet. For they will come for me too, and I
want to Live. Live. Live.
Border.
I am on the edge of the edge.
Staccato. Still-born. Silhouette. Perforated.
The North Coast of North.
Staccato asthmatic inhaling.
Between this Fresh Lake/Fresh River.
Falling.
Still-born sportscaster forecasting a loss before each game begins.
I am on the Coast of Innards sailing a Boat through Bile.
These Bible-Lands. This Border planned and fought over.
This Edge is your Arm speaking Stop.
Silhouette Statues becomes Mannequins become Carte Blanche.
Explain who you are and what you want and
what you bring over and why and why and why.
But I have Family over there.
But I have Family over there.
Bloat Pressure.
Before whale.watching season begins.
Best not to ask the children of Conquerors for Directions.
Before the better-thans and younger-thans
become Richer-Still. Laughing.
Best not to depend upon referals from referal agencies.
I see the lines lining Oppenheimer Park stretching.
Best to flash your goodies, your inner-coat of timepieces
to the right people with the right moves.
I see your iPod melting into your hand. I see your
iPhone complimenting your eyes.
Just passing through, hovering in trauma-relapse
Best not to Explain in Plain English what decades, months, eras, fortnights,
hours of compulsion + obsession
destroying access to the Languages, tones, rhythms,
the foods, the rejected peoples gathering,
Bastards of the Earth can Mother.
The Sake of.
Distance morphs as disdain becomes Nostalgia Smooth.
We are survivors of educational depth, Increasing Weight on Voice.
Rotary orbiting these uncanny serendipitous corks of nostalgia.
One.child.wonders. The only combination of Egg & Sperm.
Fact found where opinions froth of iced Root Beer .
We have been Blonde.Safe. Blonde.Unsafe.
Calibrations tune Celsius. A State of Mind is declared.
Twin cities of classic burlap Swapping.
Gold-flaked skin skins weathered winds of broken glass.
Allegiances rot, wear.
Fire primed for the twist, reeks of Pinecone labor.
 Common, it has become.
Separate these countries, North.South.East.West.
Immediacy in relevance.
Scattered seconds of Right Now.
Feel orbits stutter.
Eyelashes upon plowed streets.
Diminish not the agency of restorative blemishes, Scars Returning.
We are made of two voices of four of eight of sixteen and so on.
A chorus becomes us, brings.
I feel healthy. We feel wealthy. Cashing Laughter on the Street.
 Springish 2012

Lauren R. Gay

Bodies dragged by ankles on softball fields.

Play catch and piano with your best

friend. Never tell her you love her.
Even though you do and stop being
friends by fifteen.

On the piano
She will play the right hand.
You will play the left hand.

Two gether you are playing. Together.

Separate the title from the face and the

bread from the meat but not the mayo
since that is impossible once spread.

I’m glad but considerate unfortunate

we none of us know how to use the
same words while some of us just
scoff.

You have to consider how they met.

Fate. Always. With faith. A relationship,

not a religion. I think of you. I think of you
sweet and wonder if we’ll meet at church
someday.

I’ll never come crying.

I’ll never show you my scar because you
never cared to ask and I know you would
have avoided my father’s funeral. I think
you were in love with him. As I think I was.

Like cotton balls in a mouth stuffed already

with marshmallows. I am still in love with you.
Hi. Hi. High is time high in the sky like a

fruit. A sour pink orange in the sky

happy you’re so slick to be here. So happy

to see you.

Check your shoes.

Check your nose. Your coat your coat at the door.
Check your wallet as in watch for the pick pocket.

He said
He swore

He had
He had something
something important
I damn well know he said he had something
something terribly horribly important to say

say there, how’d you get here? So happy

happy you made it. We made it. We made it.

We made it. We made it here.

We’re here.

Check check check. New new new news:

Do not pay attention to the news:

Else you pay with your life.

Else actually the life of someone else.

Splice spice slice

I pre pre prefer app pp ple pie.

Please apple pie.

Please apples.

Please please me atop the sky scraper. Touch it gently with your toes.
 Springish 2012

Katherine Arsenault

holes

there is a bullet hole in my bedroom wall

it’s been pasted up with green tactical tape
as sticky as glue
at night, I peel it back with my fingertips
a single strip of light pierces my dark room
and cones out a flaxen glow across my face

when i am at school my brother

covers that bullet hole
but when i am home my eye covers it
as i watch through my room
past my punctured walls
Prayers to the ignorant

they taught me how to save you

though the gray-toned classroom smelled nothing
like those words you kept murmuring
as I exposed your wounds from uniform
caked with sand and sweat
you called your armor

for now I hear the colors of your pain

your veins trilling burgundy
while your arteries chant the color of those
cardinals
blurs of crimson
melting into this deserted ridgeline

they demonstrated how to stop your bleeding

use strips of that armor and my strength
and tourniquet off you femurs
as the camouflage fabric mixes with your sticky blood
which you name your pain
and I call your clotted soul

I was told there is no humiliation in war but

then there were those symbols i painted
with blood across your forehead
TK 1536

but it was you who taught me combat and gauze

are the only medals you that care
for the stars and ribbons you wear
like badges of pain
will only tell you lies
they will not veil your men from the external world
for when you believe in dying I whisper in your ear
you are only a little dead
and it is all covering you
masking your face and hair and arms
with the same opaque color as you are
completely hidden by my shaking hands
that you say is my innocence
but I call Afghanistan

the last thing I was taught was how to drag

your dead through the dust and metal scraps

leaving wide-set tracks behind

which read like no map to salvation
I ever learned
and you whisper to me
as I drag you like the dead
I am touching death
I flash back to that gray-toned room
they all eventually die
and remember what they called me
naïve

as I first stepped out on that battle turf

I thought that as I drag your men
out of those sandpits
that I will save you all
Recruitment Officer

I walked in his beige office, with those wood and copper placards of high achievement lining the walls
he sat reading the army book of ethics
eyes dusted with a stoicism
which made my stomach churn
the only blood that ever touched this man’s uniform was that of his
own men
boys like my brother
so I sat down as he beckoned with his hands
exposing his perfect teeth
as I pressed my palms against my knees
my shaking legs

I told him I was having bad dreams

I was having miserable fantasies of what was happening
with the boy he took away
the boy he could not remember by name

I told him I was having nightmares and he

smiled
and walked around his cherry wood desk to
lay a single stern hand on my shoulder

he told me men die

if you are strong enough you would be brave too

and told me my hands would soon trick me with their stillness
eventually remain as statuesque as his

this man told me men die

and my brother dying would make him
a hero

long after I left his office my hands would not force me into
submission, though
and as I dream, that boy enters my thoughts
when this man told me that bad feelings would soon leave me
so do not agonize
he was so very wrong

for every time I close my eyes my brother drifts back

cloaked in war medals and pride
leaving a line of gold in his path
as he lets out his last warrior cry
and then before my very eyes falls down in ash:
bodes down to the weight of his sack
as he seems to die for the very first time
 Springish 2012

Kate Weinberg

Negatives

I.
My mother on the kitchen floor, surrounded by
potato peelings; my mother

gnashing on the tiles, the tiles’ faces

mottled with little Os

like how ghosts show up in pictures--bobbing

blinding orbs, electric
floating breast-shaped things; my mother’s face

placid-puckered in the nothing way potato

is mute to knife--

splitting its single

passionless continent into many

bland islands, in the logical way

things un-sentient don’t know knives

from lips
kissing dirt from their dimples,
clefts. A bowl, full—skinned
potatoes on the island
in the kitchen

shining cornea bright. She peels, washes them

naked, slides on her back in their skins—up-ended

pig, blankly ecstatic, ghost-orb

mouth whooping slightly, peek-a-boo

teeth. Potatoes glister florescent

beneath lamp shade nests

woven for focus, so the light shrinks back

its lake of bland sprawl, pointing

like a long hot finger, like god’s

long hot finger, beneath itself

and mother and I imagine ourselves

angels beneath god’s

pointed palmy heat

when the radiators stop slurring,

spurting beneath all their bulby

metallic-smelling paint. angels

as the cold freezes the water tap

shut and night slides in, jaunty
in its frozen, inky

gait and we: orbs

we: picture-stilled ghosts,
round and fleshed and
moony as those far-away crops

rustling up from middle earth

waiting to be plucked.
II.
grandma is biblically
huge her mouth takes food
sloppy, whale-like, the dead things she swallows
wrestling in their dead way
with none of jonah’s verve,
her lipped roof
fine-boned and fish scale-shiny,
exhaustively sour. She: mammoth
static island, colored
hair that shimmies like gelatin mold

when we feed her

things drop from her lips
sea-brine swaying. She: grunting, sugary
head quaking, hands
splitting the mess of her mouth-fall
plankton small, blue scalp
peaking gently, low tide
tremors beneath coif
crowning dessertishly.
III.
Oh brother won’t you
send word from that hale, flanked beast upon which you coarsen and wrestle and maim
your slippery goddesses. they say you throw them overboard to watch their faces as they under-wave, noses
protruding, buoying like a slim point
like a pencil or needle or other trite conclusions of form through the green blackness through clapping fists, more
violent at night. they say your soul, if ever it was, has been suited and coffined and buried and I say Impossible: it
was your will to be burned,
there would have been flames a heat at skins a bristling a shiver
in reverse. it’s hard to trust people
hard to trust when they’ve fixed their mouths on delusion, defamation, and frankly,
I’m with you oh holy stumbler. I hear the boards you walk are only half un-rotted and I admit I praise I knee-slap
swear if only you’d raise your head and speak it, tangle your slattern tongue around the corridors of solid answering
I could make you clean again without the hollow faux-lemony smell of public-restroom sanitation. i’ll say remember
thanksgivings ’92-’99, how the snow fell through the country club’s huge glass faces and everyone stopped pulling
the bones out of their salmon to stare, silent
in that echoey room, naked walled and chair-less, the blooming cold suspended: a robe of ghosts hovering shoulder-
high. Your eyes
will undark—brother, i see the retreat—and i’ll pull the curtains away and say
See, No One is watching, No One will be here till Mouthy Dark calls off Bashful Light. but for now there’s tea,
appetizer-sized portions of quail on toothpicks, gooseberry nectar.
i’ll grab your fist and unfurl your red fingers and we’ll do an indian dance involving sage and owl-bone crowns and
i’ll say now sit
sit and tell me what dresses we should wear
when they burn us.
Birds in Bags Over Galilee

do not return home; stay in Israel

Jerusalem Yeh-roo-sha-lie-eem Holy Land
where lips go purple after nights guzzling
mountain grapes and not the cheap shit
your father first got head-
swimming drunk on—no—
liquid less monumental, more expensive
than that small history

you are told of at length, wriggling

bodily to escape what you suspect
you will become, your genetic
google-map. Shoulder-blades
sharpen inscriptions along the sway
backs of chairs announcing your departure
from flesh, from the chatty
script of bloodline demanding
sideburns on a woman, arms the kind of hairy

school-bus taunts were made for, a patch

above the crack that flows
Samson-lush when wetted
by sea or shower or
sex in that sweltering hostel in London—
same boy who finally (third time's the charm)
disengaged the stubborn sheath of skin
so long eluded you, made you dry-

heave in a spinny room first time

you tampon-ed, twelve chittering girls out-of-doors
cheering your womanhood as new blood
spatted in clots from the place L. adjudged early on
the “special hole.” Later than them
in every biologically-meaningful way.
Not meant for tits, meant for
tissue in training bras, a uterine lining
hellbent on shedding itself near
naked every month, once it caught
the endocrine drift. At Yad Vashem,
look at images of prisoners
growth-stunted, their angled shriek of bones
foreign and disorienting as hieroglyphs. Know this:
there are some symbols
not meant for ferreting out. They will leave you
cold of tongue, chattering of teeth
if you try. You will try. You will not win
back any warmth. You will toss in bed
waiting your turn.

Six of you shed

bathing-suits for pure plain skin, hook
fingers in fingers and Star-Of-David your bodies
in a dancing swoop through thick salt, piss-
warm water of the Mediterranean. One old man
slats himself between tall waves, eyeing twelve moony
breasts in varying states of wax and wane. Sometimes
he disappears behind a curtain of water but
is always there when it parts again to deliver him

his celestial due. Creepers

migrate at night. As do woodcocks,
thrushes, thrashers, nuthatches,
bobolinks, grebes, murres,
loons. Start at sunset and fly
clear past the lip of the cool-ass moon,
hung there

silent and patient as a door-knob

waiting to be turned, swung
loose at its hinges, entered
full-fleshed and famished for buffet. But soon

you will learn: this, too, is not quite

freedom. There are strings at one end
and they will tug them tight till they grab you
soft at the neck, tag your knobby ankle
so no one wonders
if you do not return
what you are. You are
This. You come from.
Stay
Stay
Stay here in this hand
and it will feed you.
 Springish 2012

Juliana M Sartor

Ahasuerus

As women, we say
in the days of, in ruling, in reigning, of reins
in those days, vaulted, extended, pressing
upward in tower and situation
of stone.

The place of the east, a land skewed into time and division,
nominalizing the rising throat of view.

In this place we arrange for presentation. A full invitation. A round gathering, the opening of arms.
The arming, a sense of breath, the nobility. Taking the point of a series of months and display.

It becomes congruous to bear witness and gifting,

noisy with amorous movement.

Rounding up into full feasting, garden brush, a known tower. The breath of kings.
The pull of clean curtains, fastened hangings, stretched to violet. A precious architecture, mosaic of gold,

where, with a gathering of anointed gardens we swallow

to witness the pill of cloth, the fineness of applause, a swift violet
quieted into pourable wine, into an elevation.

Wrists golden on the pavement.

Esther Chosen Queen

Beneath a careful eye,

the watch of months, the year of spice

and wine, oiled perfume in mouths,

a place of risen walls, a palace to pull into desire, a king and a crop of skin.

What woman does a man covet? Her name

low on his voice, summoned, the quiet of chords.

A woman of the eyes, between palms and the rounding arms,

with a crown to choose the greatest spectacle.

The tax of lust, a lowering,

another spread of heat and feast. Dim the din of metal
and mouths, holding a golden glow in the honor of a turn,
the whispering eye.
Walking downtown without snow.

To muster some more quiet light of completion, there is not a moment but a tension, to put an origin on end or
know the split of voices, the glow of chemical synthesis; the standing up of buildings. Your face against trains
alternates the time of intonation, morse code of a voice at auction, a fold of summer steel. A sentence of ringing
against it. The voice of the owl in sun. The origin as an urge of a closing or the color of a closed throat, of lungs
launched against a hillside. To rake quietly in the light of a mile or morning, heat and a heightening, a ripping back.
Exposure and posture. Ringed ribs of a spine. Wires dragged to some shore we thought distant, a gut along
something monumental or just a moment of your movement. To go north and stay north. A series of musculature
or verbs strung; a sigh and some grasping. An owl in a wood with its wingspan.
The Kid with the Spanish Accent.

The kid with the Spanish accent started reading. It was his turn. I didn’t know if I felt sorry for his voice or what. It
was like he was reading his own biography.

The kid with the Spanish accent started making toast. He always checked the toaster dial when we walked into the
kitchenette. Also, what else was there to eat. I watched him because my sister had told me that people will steal
your laundry. Not him, but someone.

The kid with the Spanish accent waited at the crosswalk. It was winter. Four crows lit onto chainlink beside him.

The kid with the Spanish accent saw my eyes. I felt embarrassed. He was easily exoticized. He came into the store
behind me. Or, after me, by a few minutes. He was buying super glue to hold his shoe together.

The kid with the Spanish accent stood at the bus stop. He had yellow headphones. There was something about the
cloud in the west that day, or the sunset. Maybe it had to do with heat or something.

The kid with the Spanish accent had three pencils. He lent one out for a multiple choice test. I knew he would
never get it back. No one cares about the pencils they borrow. I almost stopped to remind the kid but I just kept
walking.

The kid with the Spanish accent knew how to braid. I thought this is funny in an appreciative way. I have brothers.
At dinner, one of them would fall out of his chair on purpose and we’d all always laugh.

The kid with the Spanish accent got his driver’s license. He must’ve been older than me. I saw him in the parking
lot in a green Cavalier. Most people, at some point, drive a Cavalier.
The kid with the Spanish accent started wearing cologne. I felt embarrassed for noticing. It smelled like a house. I
started wearing deodorant at 7, when my best friend told me she did. She said she did because she thought I did.
Maybe I put on my dad’s once.

The kid with the Spanish accent started throwing up. The carpeting. I whispered, “It could happen to anyone.”
This is what scared me.

The kid with the Spanish accent high-fived another kid under a basketball hoop. I felt compelled earlier to keep
quiet. Someone asked me what was wrong. Maybe this was all I wanted.
 Springish 2012

Juliana Grace

Thank Heaven

She watched closely as I criss-crossed my arms and pulled my T-shirt over my head, exposing the cotton

pink training bra I didn’t really need yet. My fingers paused at the top of my jeans. They were still too broad for my

hips, but my mom said I could grow into them. I had to undo the safety pin at the fly before I could unzip the

pants. I was picking up high-pitched alien transmissions, a nervous tick with no name.

My friend was impatient. Take them off, she ordered. The bra too.

Why? I complained, that’s against the rules.

Elle’s lips curled. Rules are made to be broken, Jen. We’ve been playing this game long enough to update the rules.

She peeled her scoop-neck top over her head and unhooked a bright red under-wire bra. She wiggled out of

her stretchy skirt, and with one leg, sent it soaring onto the bed. She was wearing black sparkly panties. She struck a

pose like those pictures of horses some girls keep in their lockers. They’re all named “Bluebell” and “Snowflake.”

See? No big deal. We’re bigger now, that’s all. Well, she said, giving me the once-over, well, I’m bigger.
 She had a black mass of pubic hair that reminded me of my mom’s when I’d see her undressing for the

shower. Her nipples were long and dark—gross. She made sure I got a good look at her before she helped me pull

down my underpants.

That too, she said, meaning my bra.

Avoiding her eyes, I fumbled with the back hook. I sighed and stamped my feet as I worked behind my

back.

She frowned.

You want me to do it?

No. I got it. Um…

As soon as I’d get one hook loose, the other would catch: a losing battle. Plus, my hands kept slipping. I

went to wipe them on my pants but remembered they were on the floor.

They were pretend kisses, and pretend noises, and it was a pretend scenario—of Elle’s imagination—but the

singing in my ears was real, and I suddenly couldn’t imagine anything more fun than watching her copy of Now and

Then for a second time. My favorite scene was the one where Christina Ricci and Devon Sawa hold hands on the

porch swing. Lightning bugs circle their heads and they sip on cans of soda.

Okay, she directed. We’re older, like sixteen or nineteen.

Yeah, I said. Nineteen.

My favorite babysitter, when I used to need one, had said she was nineteen. She used to wear red lipstick

and tugged at her eyelashes a lot.

Okay. We’re sisters. Twins. And…we’re orphans who’ve just been kidnapped from the orphanage in the middle of the night.
 We scurried around the room with the lights off, holding our clothes and whimpering like we had our

mouths gagged. We held hands tightly and fake-cried. She always played the protective older sister, and would give

me frequent pecks on the forehead. I was supposed to cower against her. I liked those moments. Sometimes I

wished that were the whole game.

Now, we get to the house. It’s a mansion…in India.

Elle had lived in India one summer with her mother. She bragged about it a lot, and it was always the

destination in our games. Her step-dad’s house was filled with statues of dancing elephants and statues with four, or

six arms.

Who kidnapped us, Stella? I whispered in the dark.

She always wanted to be called Stella because it was close to Elle but meant star.

A tall man in black leather. And he tells us to get on a motorcycle. We have to hang onto the back of him, and he’s really

strong.

Yeah, he’s tall and strong, and he’s got long-ish blonde hair, right?

No. Dark brown. Across his face.

Fine. Yeah, brown and he’s got blue eyes! So hot, I giggled, but she interrupted me.

No, no, no. Brown and brown. Trust me. Like John Marks, on the varsity lacrosse team at my school. He plays JV for

Bethesda High too, already. They recruited him. He’s got brown hair and brown eyes, and really strong arms. Super hot. Just trust me.

I conceded. Okay, okay. And he says, I wish we didn’t meet this way, ‘cause you girls are really pretty…

Right, she approved. He says, You girls don’t look like twins. You have to hide in here. And then the bed is the room.

My brain felt like a balloon floating above my awkward limbs as I crawled onto the bedspread. Then, as she

usually did around this point in the game, she switched roles.
 Now I’m him. She smoothed a hand over my cheek. Oh, Jen, you’re so pretty…

Not Jen. I want a better name too.

What about Jezzie?

I curled my lip. What’s that?

Short for Jasmine. There’s a really pretty Indian girl at my school named Jasmine. She’s really popular, everyone knows her,

and they call her Jezzie. And it’s close to your name already.

She hadn’t stopped touching my face.

Uh—okay. I’m Jezzie.

Jezzie, you’re really sexy. Don’t you wanna kiss me?

I tried to pretend we were Barbies, kissing with our smiles. I tried to pretend she was John Marks. I tried to

imagine Devon Sawa like this, above me. Only I imagine he wouldn’t be comparing our budding breast sizes and

showing off his rehearsed sex noises. But then again, I thought, don’t actors have to practice stuff like that so they

can do it in a movie? How do they make sure the guy doesn’t, like, accidentally slip it in? Do they wear cups or

something? I tried to imagine myself as Devon Sawa’s cup.

I was pretty sure we shouldn’t have been doing what we’d been doing. My gentle Protestant guilt tugged at

me—that’s how I knew it wasn’t normal, neither the game itself nor the way she reacted when I showed up at the

door the next week and refused to play it.

Can’t we just play Barbies? I suggested, although I knew I was too old.

Are you serious? Barbies? What’re you, two?

No. I’m not two. I just don’t want to play the game. It’s weird.
 Am I weird, Jen?

She said it softly and I sensed danger. Her arms hung straight at her sides and her snake-green eyes searched

each of my features. I could tell she was trying to force tears. She loved the way her eyes turned turquoise when she

was crying.

No…you’re not weird. But doesn’t it feel weird? The game…that game, I mean. If we keep doing it, doesn’t

it mean we’re gay?

I’m not gay, Jen. You think I’m gay? I get more guys than anyone in my grade.

I know, it’s just that—

She was always interrupting.

I’m just getting you used to it. Don’t you want to know what to do when you go out with Collins?

Yeah, but—he hasn’t even asked me out yet.

That’s because he can tell you don’t know what to do. I’ll bet you. I’m your coach, and you’re really lucky because I’m good. I’m

the best. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.

My mother picked me up an hour later. By then we were sitting at the kitchen table picking out juicy little

seeds from a pomegranate. Elle’s mother was in the extended living room cuddling with her rich husband. I heard

the door first and I jumped up to open it. My fingers left sticky red smears on the doorknob. “Hi, Mom,” I said,

trying to rub them off with the end of my sleeve.

“Hi, hon,” she said. “I have your books for class. Are you girls ready?”

Elle had appeared behind me silently, so I jumped when I turned around.

Hi, Mrs. Paulson, she cooed smoothly. She leaned against the door, sucking juice off her fingers. She did not

look ready.
 “Hi, Elle. Let’s get going. You don’t want to be late.”

Elle and I rolled our eyes at each other. We would’ve loved nothing more than to skip about half our

required Communion class in that mildewed room in the church basement.

I just need to change, Elle said, making no moves. My mother looked her up and down, from her busty blue

camisole top to her striped leggings.

“Okay, quick like a bunny. Where’s your mother?”

The den. She ascended the stairs, sliding her body against the banister. At the top, she turned and made a

covert gesture for me to follow. But her mother had heard our voices and was wrapping me up in a tight squeeze

from behind.

“Hi, Nancy,” she greeted my mother cheerfully. “Thank you again for driving the girls over there.”

“Oh sure,” said my mother. “It’s my pleasure. You’ve helped us out plenty of times before. Which reminds

me, Hal and I will be in Singapore for a week in June…”

“How exciting!” Elle’s mother exclaimed.

“Yes, and a bit difficult trying to figure out how to maintain business back here. We have a neighbor taking

care of this one,” she placed a hand on my head, and I shook it off, “…throughout the week, but then they’re going

out of town that weekend.”

“We can take her!”

“Could you?”

“Sure! Elle, baby,” she called, her clear singer’s voice echoing off the marble tiles and hardwood stairs.

“How’d you like Jen to stay with us for a weekend in June?”

 Elle appeared from her doorway looking pissed. I hadn’t come upstairs, but adult presence trumped her

authority. She was brushing her long brown hair slowly and gazing down haughtily at us. Sure, she said, without a

hint of enthusiasm. Her mother frowned at her attitude, but she turned away and disappeared again.

“I’ll be in the Islands myself on some business, but Alex will be here.”

“Oh…” My mother shifted her purse from one shoulder to the other. Alex made her uncomfortable. He

was always making weird jokes with the kind of punch line where you’re not sure anymore if it was a joke or not.

But he was still an adult figure, and we all knew he was the disciplinarian of the two, despite not being Elle’s

biological father. “Well if it’s no extra burden…”

“Not at all! Alex, honey? Would you mind having Jen here with Elle the weekend her parents are in

Singapore?”

The brown curly head watching T.V. in the recessed den didn’t move. But an open-throated voice said,

“Suuuure. She’ll have to pass the test first, though.”

Elle’s mother blinked a lot, squeezing her eyes shut and reopening them wide. She wore a permanent smile.

She shook her head at us as if to say, No, no, he’s just joking. But he lifted himself off the couch and strolled

into the hallway in his socks.

“Are you ready to take the test?” He asked me. All the adults stared at me. A drop of sweat made its way

down my back. I reached a hand back there and tried to catch it with my shirt.

Um, sure.

“Um, sure? What kind of an answer is that? You say, ‘Yes sir!’”

Uh—yes, sir?

“OK—here’s your test: What is the hypotenuse of a triangle?”

 Elle’s mother cut in. “Oh, Alex.” She was still smiling.

“How old are you?” He demanded.

Eleven.

“Eleven. You should know the hypotenuse of a triangle. Fine. Another one. This is your test.” His eyes were

bright green, menacing like Elle’s, but brighter like a cartoon character’s. He often made dirty jokes when her

mother was gone. Elle got them and I pretended to. He could tell I pretended.

“Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

I know this one, I thought with relief. My own father was fond of it.

Grant, I answered, and they broke into a chorus of impressed “Ohhh”’s.

“Elle?” Her mother called again from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s five ‘til, baby, you’re going to be late!

Let’s go! What is she doing?”

To my mother’s and my mutual despair, she began climbing the stairs to look for her daughter, leaving us

with Alex and his interrogations. He worked for the government somehow. I got the sense he could smell fear. My

mother smiled politely and I looked at my shoes.

“So,” he said, addressing her. “Singapore, huh?”

“Singapore,” she nodded.

“It’s gonna be hot. Real hot.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“You should go in September.”

“Oh?”

“Go in September. It’ll still be there, promise.”

 “I’m sure it will be. Hal…” She started, but he cut her off. He did that a lot too.

“And take this one with you,” he said, glaring at me. “She’ll stay out of trouble in the hotel room while you

two go club-hopping.”

It was an absurd notion to think of my middle-aged parents “club-hopping,” my dad in his cummerbund

that he wore for formal dinners, and my mom in her square-shaped reading glasses. It was like he could read my

thoughts, judging by his impish grin. As usual, my mom ruined the joke.

“Hal’s there on business. I think he’ll be too busy to go out much.”

“So why don’t you stay? Watch the little terror here.”

I cursed him silently. My mom looked confused, but just then we heard Elle arguing with her mother and a

door slammed. The elegant divorcee rejoined us, apologizing. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “She’ll be down in a

minute.”

“I was just saying,” Alex said, “Nancy should wait to go to Singapore until they can have some fun.”

“Oh, don’t worry about Nancy,” she said, winking. “Hal’s company always plans some nice excursions for

the spouses on these conferences, don’t they? Nice luncheons and tours…”

“That’s right,” my mother said, relieved. “They bring the country right to you, no hassles or stress. It’s

terrific. Just what I want from a vacation.”

“If you wanted to be bored, you could just stay at home. No need to go to the other side of the world.”

Elle’s mother poked him in the ribs. “I think it sounds lovely. You’ll have a wonderful time. Don’t worry

about a thing. I’m sure Elle will be thrilled to have a whole weekend with Jennifer. Elle!”

She appeared at the top of the stairs, pouting in a powder blue collared shirt buttoned to her collarbone and

a pair of blue jeans. She sat on the banister and slid halfway down until she almost fell off.
 “The next time I see you do that while we don’t have company, there will be consequences,” Alex

thundered. She rolled her eyes. “What was that?”

We stood in embarrassed silence while she mumbled, I didn’t say anything.

“Excuse me?”

I said, I didn’t say anything.

“And I said, the next time I see you do that there will be serious consequences. Do you understand?”

Yes, she said, raising her eyebrows.

“What was that?”

Yes, sir.

“It’s five now. You’ve made everyone late.”

We could only stare while they had their standoff.

“Thanks again, Nancy,” Elle’s mother broke in apologetically. Alex put his arm around her, drawing her

back into the den.

Elle was the only thing that made the forced routine of church bearable. With her help, I could continue to

learn about that secular world my parents were trying so hard to keep from me. I blamed them for my awkward

status among my classmates, my non-existence to boys and zero athletic renown. I still wasn’t allowed to watch

television other than the kids’ networks, but even some of those shows were too “rude.” In daily verbal battles at

school, I was the one running to the bathroom stall to cry and curse and read the ballpoint penned invectives

against me on the walls:

Jenny Paulson has a stinky vaj.

 Jenny Paulson is a bra size negative AA.

Jenny Paulson is a lifetime virgin.

My mom told me girls were just jealous that I was smart and “getting pretty.” She said I’d have more dates

than those girls soon. But thanks, Mom, the wisdom didn’t stop the smirks, comments in the halls and pictures on

the walls. A few changes in myself could, though.

Elle had promised me she’d save me from all this so I wouldn’t have to endure throughout high school too.

I needed to do a few things: first, start wearing jeans that actually made it down to my ankles and didn’t start at my

ribcage. Next, learn to flip my hair over my shoulder, tuck it behind my ear and play with it around boys. She’d

taught me how to walk like a bitch—arms and hips swinging, chin raised and eyes lowered—so I wouldn’t be their

constant punching bag. I needed to learn the names of the members of groups like Destiny’s Child, the lyrics to

Puff Daddy songs, learn all the music video dances. My peers operated on a completely different consciousness,

becoming teenagers while I was trapped in reluctant childhood.

“Project Jenny” had to be worked on at church, or afterwards at her step-dad’s house nearby because we

didn’t go to the same school. Her school, one neighborhood closer to the city, seemed to be full of richer kids with

later curfews, T.V.’s and phones in their bedrooms, those windows to the outside world. They hooked up, made

out, went to the mall in groups and came back with sexy clothes and inside jokes. They didn’t sit around at lunch

and talk about class. They were more mature and street-smarter than the relatively nicer, more childish kids at my

school. I was too obviously good at school to get guys like Collins to flirt with me like he did with Allison Forsythe,

the lovable ditz who wore spaghetti-strapped tank tops and visible thongs sticking out of her low-rider jeans. My

oversized tourist T-shirts with the names of obscure countries and foreign languages failed to be the conversation-

starters my parents must have imagined they would be. They were very confused by my lack of popularity. My mom
said I was “worldly, well-read and polite, pleasant-looking besides.” Why was I worried about getting dates anyway?

I was still a kid. I should just be having fun. How could I explain that to normal kids, “fun” meant filching LED

lights from Sharper Image, making out in the dark corners of un-chaperoned coed parties, and learning to

incorporate the terms “mother-fucker” and “dick-sucker” into my vernacular? They didn’t get it, but I couldn’t

explain it either. Being a “nice girl” didn’t have any perks—for one thing, I had no way to defend myself against

social attacks.

Elle kept a list—she called it her hit list—of people from her school she intended to “destroy.” Their

malefactions were as major as slander and as minor as a dirty look. A girl who supposedly had called Elle a slut

came to school one day to find her locker smeared with a smelly brown paste. A guy who’d called Elle stupid in

class started finding typed letters in his locker—he transferred schools, they said. The origins of these middle school

“hits” were never discovered, and she never fell under suspicion. Adults loved her. She used a sophisticated level of

sarcasm, was a master of uncovering artifice and developing complex ideas. She brought gifts for congregation

members in wheelchairs. She hugged everybody. No one like that could do bad things. Our pastor said she had “a

way about her.” I wondered if I was the only one who really knew what that meant.

That Sunday, I found myself actually listening to the sermon.

“The Devil, as we define him today, is less of a being than a natural force of evil, responsible for cruelty and

corruption in the world. Thief of youth and innocence, he is master of smoke and mirrors, appearing in many

forms, like a harmless garden snake. It allows him to spread his volatile influence in a chain reaction, eventually

infecting the whole human race until we are unable to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.
 “We fight a very different battle today than our parents did a generation ago. These destructive paths of

corruption have become valued, even mainstream, embedded in every aspect of modern youth culture. That’s why

it’s important, friends, that we teach our children to walk with God now, so that when the Devil inevitably enters

their lives, they will have the strength to turn him away right then and there and spend the rest of their lives

wrapped in Jesus’ love.”

Then everyone murmured in imperfect unity, “Lord, give us strength.”

I wish I had been strong enough to resist her. I learned much too late in life that I didn’t have to say yes to

everything. But Elle was a girl who was not used to hearing no, and I was not used to having the opportunity to say

yes. I wanted what she had. I wanted to be invincible.

God-is-great, God-is-good, lettuce-thankum for this food. By-his-hands, we-are- fed, thank you God for

daily bread. Ah-men, I recited with as much devotion as I would “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It had been the family

dinnertime prayer since I was old enough to speak. It was easy to remember, and didn’t make my dad too

uncomfortable to mumble under his breath. He used to have faith, he said, before he moved to the Washington,

D.C. area. “Now the Democrats are God,” he’d say.

They began discussing the new plans for me to stay with Elle for the weekend. I should bring my bathing

suit so I could swim in their pool, and Mom would get to work marking my name in all the tags of my clothing with

a Sharpie pen so Elle and my clothes wouldn’t get mixed up.

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that,” said Dad.

“Why do you say that?” asked Mom, a portrait of innocence.

 Dad chuckled, but not like he did at those insurance commercials. “Come on. I think it’s safe to say there is

no chance of mixing up Jenny’s clothes with hers. Did you see what she wore to church the other week? Jeez. I’ve

never seen so much cleavage at the communion altar before. I think Pastor even blushed.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Mom, sharply dismissive. “You can’t blame the girl for developing early.”

“For crying out loud, she’s a hop skip and a jump away from standing on K Street in some of those clothes,

Nancy. I mean, those heels had to’ve been about eight inches. And with cherries on them? I mean, Christ.”

“Well,” said Mom defensively, “She is Jennifer’s best friend, and her mother is just lovely. That Alex,

though…”

“Oh, he’s a creep,” said Dad with a mouthful of steak. “Don’t you find him to be creepy, Jen? I pity that girl

having to live with that guy. It’s like being a gangster crook is legal now.”

“What a life that girl’s had, though,” said Mom. “She deserves a nice house like he has for them.”

My parents wouldn’t explain why they talked in hushed tones about Elle. They told me I would understand

when I was older.

But one time she told me a story about her life in Alabama before her mother married Alex and joined our

church. My parents were right: I was too young at the time to process the implications of a stepmother who used

six-packs of beer as bludgeoning devices, or a step-uncle who played with Elle when she was too little, or the things

someone did to her in the backseat of a car while her mother sat up front with the driver. I thought she was the

biggest liar in the world. Even if what she told me was true, I thought maybe it was the best thing that ever

happened to her because now people fell over themselves to shower her with attention and expensive gifts,

excusing away all her tantrums and mischief. I should be so lucky.

 Her life was a source of fascination to me, like the price tags on dresses worn by celebrities in gossip

magazines. She had a princess’s ransom in glass bottles, each one the shape of the body she was developing. In her

room full of mirrors and magazine cutouts of heartthrobs, the colors and tubes were dazzling. I wanted to use the

sparkly nail polish as finger-paint, and the wands, applicators and brushes reminded me of little feather dusters and

princess gowns. In my house, these things were as forbidden as any dress shoe with more than a one-inch heel, or

any skirt above the knee. One time, I used some of my contraband Tinker Bell sheer pink lip shimmer on the way

to see a musical with my parents. My mother caught it in the rearview mirror in time, and pulled over to watch me

wipe it off. She said that next time she caught me, we would turn around and go home. The gloss had felt cool and

slippery, like lingerie for my lips. When I wiped it off, the tissue was smeared with pixie dust. I rolled it into a ball

and kept it in my pocket all night.

I stood at the large double oak doors on Friday, June 6th, trembling with excitement. This was my ticket out

of childhood. This would be a weekend full of sneaking sips of vodka, digging through her step-dad’s porn

collection, and prank-Instant Messaging people we hated. Like sexy girl summer camp. Maybe I’d leave with a

makeover, or new leads on a boyfriend, someone more mature than the scaredy-babies I went to school with. There

was just one stipulation, a promise I’d made to myself: I would not agree to play that game again.

This is gonna be awesome, she squealed as she smoothed her curtainy hair in her vanity mirror. I sat on her bed,

watching her in the mirror, studying her beauty routine.

Alex is gone from like five in the morning ‘til eight at night. It’s the best. We can have John Marks and some of his lacrosse friends

come over.

Oh my God, oh my God! I yelped, jumping up and down. My first kiss, my first kiss!
 She smiled sweetly in the mirror at my silly enthusiasm. That’s great sweetie, but um, first thing is? You can’t act like

that around him. You gotta be cool.

Right, I said, right. Cool. Cooooool.

Second thing is, he’s already had a couple girlfriends. So we need to get you ready.

Yeah! I said, A makeover! Can I borrow a push-up bra?

You’re going to need more preparation than that. Let’s go downstairs.

The basement had its own door that could be locked from the outside. The steps down were narrow and

slippery. There were three doors at the bottom: the one on the right was a storage room filled with boxes of canned

food and toilet paper, the one in the middle was a marble-floored bathroom, and the one on the left was always

locked—that’s where Alex kept his guns, Elle said. The rest was a big, open space divided in half between the tile-

floored bar area and the carpeted home theater area, separated by a sliding glass partition. There were no windows.

Mirrors lined the wall behind the tiered shelves of sleek liquor bottles, and the home theater section had lights in the

floor.

Awesome, I said, gazing inexpertly at the bottles. Which ones taste good?

I think the vodka and the whisky taste the best. Try this one.

She handed me a bottle of Grey Goose. I held my nose as I tipped it back into my mouth. I let go of my

nose. I had the sensation of having swallowed rubbing alcohol. I coughed, and gagged, and the tears streamed down

while she giggled.

You’re supposed to mix it with something, silly.

 She reached below the bar and brought up a can of cranberry juice. She poured it and the vodka in a stubby

glass and told me to drink it like cough medicine.

Knock it back.

I did, and tried to restrain myself from convulsing as she poured a tiny glass full of Knob Creek and threw

her head back with it.

Wanna watch something?

We studied the movie cabinet. She said I needed to do “research.” So she isolated a few choice options

including Pretty Woman, Striptease, and Nine Weeks. We put them each on, just for the scenes she’d already

memorized. I felt like falling asleep right away, and I started to nod off. She jumped up and grabbed a can from the

refrigerator and a bottle from the cabinet.

Here, take this and wash it down with this.

What is it?

It’s good for you. It’ll keep you awake.

I’m not supposed to take anything without knowing…I said, immediately losing my new sexy girl credibility.

Sexy girls did not ask precautionary questions.

Oh shut up, Jen. It’s just Adderall and Red Bull.

Is it dangerous?

No, silly. I take Adderall everyday, and my mom drinks a Red Bull every morning before work. It just helps you stay awake

and alert so you don’t fall asleep.

I placed the blue pill on my tongue and took a swig of the rubbery drink.
 Bored of the movies, she used the big screen T.V. to play our favorite Jock Jams CD. We danced around the

room, our arms waving wildly and our laughter getting shriller and faster. This was going to be a great weekend. I

was going to learn so much. I was going to go back to my school in the fall and blow everyone away with my

maturity and sexiness.

A sharp, shrill tone filled my head and my stomach started lurching. I ran to the bathroom with Elle calling

after me. I felt as if my body were trying to turn inside out. I was crying, retching, and gagging on the searing liquid

running down my throat. She appeared in the doorway, laughing. Then she kneeled beside me and drew my hair

back. She was whispering things to me I couldn’t understand. It felt like she was dabbing the back of my neck with

a sponge, but once my vomiting subsided I sensed a very different thing going on. She was sucking on my neck.

I pushed her off. She fell back onto the floor, stunned.

I don’t want to play the game anymore, Elle, I slurred, trying to reach the toilet paper. She just glared at me.

You’re drunk. You don’t know what you want.

No, no, I said. She appeared once, twice, again, and again, like the numbers on the Deal or No Deal wheel,

like I was in a giant balloon rolling downhill.

Her expression softened and her voice got that scary, quiet tremble.

Poor Jenneee, she sing-songed, caressing my hair. I threw up the first time too, it’s okay.

She crawled on her hands and knees towards me and gently pushed me against the side of the bathtub.

You got puke on your shorts. And your shirt. Wanna take a shower?

She reached over and turned the knobs. It was the most welcoming sound I could’ve imagine at that

moment, so I began undressing. She helped me pull my shirt over my head and my shorts over my knees. I felt like
a limp puppet. She giggled, and squeezed my thigh. I wiggled away a little and tried to stand. It didn’t take much

effort to make me sit down again. She leaned over me with both her hands on my thighs.

You ever felt this before?

She shoved a hand inside my underwear, up into me, and suddenly my muscles all seemed to jump at once.

Later on, the adults would determine that since I had a bruise on my knee that matched the mark under her

chin, I was responsible for her concussion, occurring when the back of her head hit the marble with a dull,

sickening crack, and therefore also responsible for her erratic behavior that followed. It would almost have been as

if I myself had unlocked the door on the left with a key I wasn’t supposed to have and held the gun myself,

unloading a .9 mm bullet into my own arm. My own worst enemy.

Forgive her, father! for she knows not what she does.

And yet, she shall reap what she sows.

Elle never became a pregnant teen, as everyone had expected. Her stepdad enrolled her in an alternative

school for troubled kids. Her mother divorced him after discovering a tracking device under her car. Everything

went pretty much according to the prophecies.

But there was one thing no one expected, least of all me. I missed it. The Game. Never again did I hear that

shrill scream, that primordial alarm of danger. The silence that folded around me in her absence was unbearable.

Every night before I fell asleep, it was like there was a meeting in which everyone was speaking at the same time,

with the same urgency. It lasted for hours, so deafening that I began stuffing my ears with plugs. When that didn’t

work, I began my regiment of Valium, prescribed me by a lady psychiatrist.

 When that didn’t work, I began begging my lady psychiatrist for something stronger. She prescribed

Ambien, but I told her, “I want something stronger. Like a pussy.” She told me she couldn’t help me, but I proved

her wrong. And when I did, over her protests and whining, bargaining and logic, I heard it again. The pure,

feminine scream of danger and pain and familiarity. It’s continued ever since.

I have regained control, and thereby my life. When I met Natalie—whom I call Nell—I knew that nothing

had been an accident. She allows me to be myself, to pursue my pleasures the way I want. She wants nothing but

the chance to be less. It’s perfect.

I am not beyond saving. This is what I have been told to say. I am a whole person, not a shred of what I

once was. My desires and dreams are valid, and I don’t have to be threatened by them anymore.

But I’m through with desires and dreams. I’m through with the idea of evil. It only exists in that one place,

the place where my parents were too ashamed to go anymore. A community of supposed do-gooders, until one of

them does not do-good. Until one of them steps outside. And then you’re supposedly lost forever.

But I’m not lost. I’m not a simp. I don’t have to fall for that baloney anymore. Elle taught me that. In her

lessons of coolness was the wisdom to see that I was being held down. I was made to believe that to deny myself

pleasures was to make myself into something acceptable to something greater. But there can be nothing greater than

getting to hear my lullaby again. I want those people at the great bedtime meeting to shut up. And if it means losing

everything…

God works in mysterious ways.

All I’m left with is gratitude. My prayers have been answered—I’m free.

Elle is great, Elle is good.

Lettuce thanker for my cool.

 Springish 2012

John Miatech

Stone Woman

Stone Woman, whose wrinkles

were canyons,
felt the coolness where the shadows were lengthening…..

Sun lowered Himself

toward the horizon
as a breeze began to move across the earth

A cook-fire sprang up in the camp of

Woman-who-sings,
the smoke from which floated into the hills,
mixing with sage

Coyote called out to Woman-who-sings:

“What are you cooking in the darkness, Sister?”
To which there was no reply, so coyote
called again……

And the moon rose…….

 Place of Great Water

I have been on the long ride

Around your body,
And while I have seen into your clear waters,
It was impossible
To see all of you at once

Your waters are cold and deep, but not unwelcoming

The wind that blows across you is powerful
And it reminds us that you are a path that we tread on
Only with your permission

Someday, I will come back to listen to your secrets,

The ones the bears along your shores protect,
The ones the wolves sing about when the weather grows painful,
The secrets the Anishnaabe and Cree live by

I will climb your rocky shores,

Look out over the swells of your body,
Search the deep water of your heart…..

I will come for your beauty

Gichigumi,
And I will marry it
To all I know

I will tell my daughter;

“Here is where your blood came from,
And you must remember this
To know who you really are”
 Stories from the Ground

Tom Grant stopped the tractor

In the middle of the potato field
“There, see that?” he pointed
Hopping off the old grey Ford
He stooped to pick up a rock

“Grinding tool” he said

Dropping a rounded stone in my hand
“I find these things all the time
You keep it”

The tractor lurched forward,

Discs cutting into the soil
To turn out the potatoes that lay under
The old Pottawattamie Trail

“This was a trade route,” Tom yelled

Above the noise of the tractor
“I have sacks of arrowheads in the house”
I stood on the hitch behind the big metal seat,
Holding onto the wide fender and the words Tom spoke

I watched the soil turning behind us,

Looked for more history to be brought to the surface
As the tractor calmly plowed ahead,
Watched for more stories from the old ones,
Who called out from the ground:

“We are still here…”

 Still Something to Do

Laying in the darkness, I listen to the rain

It is already a river in its own mind, all these tiny drops
The rain rejoices knowing this and comes down harder

Sometimes I am a river too

Once you are a river, everything changes

The rain moves over the roof,

It goes down the drainpipe in mighty gulps
Hurries to become what it always was

Even at this late hour there is still something to do

 The Christine Poems: Poem 1

She said:
“If I go back now,
I’ll have to be apart from you.”

He said:
“I’ve always loved you.
I never stopped.”

She said:
“That was a great kiss,
Not a little whimpy thing…”

He said:
“Wait ‘til we’re alone -
No, why wait?”

She said:
“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He said:
“It broke my heart when you got married.”

She said:
“But that’s over now. I don’t
want to leave you for a second.”

He said, squeezing her hand:

“You won’t.”

Not even when the dream ends,

Not even for a second.
 Springish 2012

Jason Stocks

TORN between
being a man
and being
polite
,

if I said
anything at all
I'd probably say
:I'm not a calculator.

To think easy like you do is fresh eggs, cornbread and buttermilk on the table every morning. Without worrying
about who put it out.
 I'll take care of you
can tell you need
someone to. Strong
and determined.

there's too many people at the park today. Their happy times is killing my buzz kids running through the cricket
sounds and hot grass. Clicking an popping ,girls hopping broke fences to catch up with freckle face boys with cane
poles slung over their shoulders.

I'll forget you when

you need me to. Send mixed signals that only you can appreciate. My dreams roller skate backwards round the
rink, ask you to dance and maybe you say yeah. We'll do flips off the rope swing that was cut down before you
had a chance to see it. took you to the rock , and you could see how we ran down its elongated face, launching
our young bodies into the cool green pool.

I'll have a good job one day

if you hang on a bit you'll see I I I I I I I I I Ii I I ii ii IIIIII IIII
'm studying important stuff
don't give up on me

my lies didn't scare you away like I hoped. Your Indian hair was what I always wished for.

coming Home
I'm coming Home
 retreat
fallen dreams
icons made of salt
born to believe
a lie that stalks

your linear love

lean, in to hear
encouraging words of
whispering love:

the who that never was

the could that never would.
Sometimes, in baby eyes
I see they know
all they're ever
gonna know

neatly
 Springish 2012

Jacob Reber

Milk Sweat

clumsy nerve endings

spill milk all over the warped

wooden flatlands

we knew it would happen

barely make us laugh

we would be dead before

anyone came to find us

not save us

they already tried that

with greasy finger tips

and rotting epiphanies

they lie through their lips

but we can read the brainwaves

The Cult of the Fictitious

Lepers’ graying hands

Trace the outlines on my arms
Of the life that thrusts its way through
to find existence-
essence.

Like a frightened child

escaping
the screams
of his father’s stumbling
rampage,
I crawl through
the seeing iris
with blistered palms,
to live a life
deliberately-

I slip beneath the lens of the exterior,

Miniature mountains coat my arms

As the icy oxygen irritates the wind
I kiss the wilderness within the
fragments of my psyche
musing giants of contemplation,
with leaves
my skin howls
laid bare,
I wail lovely thoughts

The anthropocentric animals

and I
can stare into the night
with our eyes sealed
And see the stars through our
immaterial eyelids
It is here
We become
The cult of the fictitious,
Praising the transcendentalists,
Transcending

Burning holes in our brains

We see the dripping sun spill
Silhouettes
Swaying towards their eventual graves
Deliberately.
I Can Still Hear the Echoes

I can still hear the echoes

of the self proclaimed beat gods
rousing my soul.
I feel the coyote snarl room dividing me
from the rest of my generation.
Another hour was meant for my poems
To drip from my pen
And mix
With a xanax driven psycho highway chaser blinking sleep.
The needle in my head is skipping and scratching
At the embryos of my adolescent thought, creating
New mountain knuckles
To let old church harmonics
Ring out
and let the Holy Cross and rushed nails scab over my drug loving heart.
Pain is the easiest drug to get your addict finger tips on.
One quick slice, splice opens up the spiritual truths you’ve placed your dreams on, the natural truth riddled with
screaming tendons of tranquility.
We are real when we chose to live in the druggy sanctuary and cling to madness with broken fingers and blistered
knees
And sun aged eyelids and white out pupils.
I revel in every soul squeezing phrase with mankind diction and iodine spotted periods.
Religious words spat out on pages among coffee stains
Magazines, broken bottled beers, blank sheets, rolling paper, and ghost rings of empty glasses.
Asaph melodies remind us of
cultural captivity, the materialized man.
Soft soaked mind thoughts
In acid contemplating madness and religion in
One empty sentence,
Sing to me
with no bullshit bluntness.
The enlightened dead beats rise
In spiritual memories – we
Are only as mad as
We ought be.
Seemless Doctors Silky

silky seemless doctors

put words into the mouths

of anesthetized

patients with their eyes

wide and cotton

balls in their ears and nothing

in their brains anymore

unless the broken glass

hopes still exist in fragments.

doctors seemless silky

gray professional suits

funereal carpets

real prescriptions

used recreationally

their sunglasses don’t recognize

they are still too cool to see dead patients

Swimming pools Nude

Coated in green-tinted cytoplasm

where our arms are connected by saggy tissue

the dogs hum into the feedback

stitched with amateur precision

knife wound cut backs

in lung water splashing fishlegs

we split uneven down the seems

sewn fresh and foolishly

even hearts slip out spread puddle

gluey liquid seeps

then explodes as it drips

oozying atomic explosions

the doctors made promises

but love only sees the new

fireworks

rockets remember the transparent

human gelatin messes

pools of the liquid saliva

or bloodhound swooping drool

collected until we float

so our feet do not touch

 Springish 2012

Ivan de Monbrison

6 images (ink and acrylic on paper).

Artist Statement

Art is for me the only answer in our modern world to the question of death and the fragility of
human nature. Through the ages human beings have used the representation of the world as a
medium to conjure what they saw has powerful elements of nature that they could not explain and
which would threaten them, it included spirits of the ancestors, forces of nature, death itself etc. I
think this process is still at the core of the art medium. To represent ourselves is still a mirror to our
own self, and the consciousness we have of it is reflected in the very image on the surface. In a
world of technology to choose to use still a very classical medium like painting is a way to set a
bridge with the past resisting the facility of technology but with the will to represent the world with a
modern eye. That is why i choose to paint mostly in black and white and to represent human beings
more as shadows than as fleshy bodies. They are incarnated in the canvas but not yet fully present. I
hope that people who have experienced pain and loss in life as absurd and meaningless will be able
to connect with these ghostly shapes as images of the sense of precarity they may feel, giving it a
depth that goes far beyond the simple pleasure of the eye ."

Ivan de Monbrison 2010

 Springish 2012

henry 7. reneau, jr.

I Am Trayvon Martin!
Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in
their place—I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I
live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live.
If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets
close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought
for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that
poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here
to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me
and my folks stand.' —John William “J. W.” Milam, co-murderer of Emmett Till, Look magazine, 1956

There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see. —
Mamie Till Bradley, mother of Emmett Till

Do angels smell of sea salt rush of tears,

snatched to sleep everlasting,
a connotation of “collateral” become a label of fear,
of confrontation? “Skittled” by gunshot.

$50,000, $2,000—how much

does a murdered Afghani child cost to just go away?

Euphemized like Emmett Till,

weighted down in death with cotton-gin fan,
weighted down to death by a 115 grain full metal jacket,
a bag of Skittles & spilled ice-tea,
his cell-phone ring-tone a cautionary tale, “you should run!”

Plantation lullabies generations removed, from an open casket

like a tell-tale heart—serious as being Black.
Geraldo thinks he brought Neighborhood Watch His-panic on himself
wearing a “hoodie” while Black,
like driving while Black,
jogging Black, “suspicious”
saggin’ while Black, reaching for your wallet
41 bullets inna’ freeze nigger! back Black!

Mississippi1955, whistling at white women while Black, “suspicious”

as Medger in his driveway Black, “suspicious”
as MLK at the Lorraine Motel Black, “suspicious”

as white men with guns & badges in the “hood”, in my niggas pockets
& they socks, lookin’ for some dope or the undercover Glock,
like piling 9 dead children to make a bonfire under color
of “ Stand Your Ground” military Shock & Law.

Serious as a heart attack, h.i.v/AIDS, the Sanford police—serious as,

nowhere in the definition of “suspicious”
is the adjective defined as a “coon”/terrorist in a gated community
wearing a “hoodie”/suicide vest, with Skittles/WMD in his pocket,

but who
watches the Watchman,

but the specter of Emmett Till?

Requiem for Kong

The Emancipation Proclamation gave birth to segregation after rape

by Reconstruction.

Segregation, agitated by fear & ignorance, conceived white sheets & impotent political teeth

to cage blackness. The freedman ex-slave was imprisoned behind separate but unequal
bars of rhetoric & legislation.

Then . . . they poked

the subdued beast with the sharpened stick of deceit, Jimmy Crow &

institutional racism. A collective racial emotion, much more complicated & vicious than
anger, enflamed Negroes’ “las’ nerve” be patient . . . waiting.

Afro-Americans planned & plotted vengeance that festered in submissive silence,

before black folk sprouted fangs & claws that were filed to razor sharp on the nihilistic
threat & double consciousness.

Then,
one day, distracted by arrogance & entitlement, the gate keepers

forgot to lock the cage,

as they invited Amerikkka to view the subdued beast . . .

adults: 7 dollars . . . senior citizens: 4 dollars . . .

children under 12: free.
 Springish 2012

Gareth Lee

HIATUS

Scar-struck, melancholy me, seated on tusks

from a narwhale ascended from the deep . . .

What did it think of the transient brightness

quick shapes and brightness, the seductions

of day, what did it hear? The sky, or my leg

(now whale jaw) dispatching my anxieties

eternally to the quarter-deck Amen, or hissand-

roar, one anointed ill-clad man crazed

by the consecration icing the masts so went

over to be dressed in regal robes of blue-hue

that squid-enlarged sea. These questions so

mystic, spectral, albino-like, these loomings

that worry me, your chief reprobate, whom

God has groped to inspire abandon, abandon
VESTIGIAL (LONGING)

Deep sap, apples

everywhere I’ve rested these

on are apples, or

remind me of

corduroy made for trees, for

climbing and falling

when it is brisk

I love the fall crunch crunch

shuffle crunch. Do you

love the fall

crunch crunch. And the wet

rolls beneath, indecent

soft, are a sprung earth

giving in, complacent, as we

nap the noons off

and move

on to the next, cider-laced in

our bones but fingers

on the edge of bloom

PREBIOTIC TO THE POSTMODERN “BIBLE”

The slow Sabbath groups

around the Old Navy
then grope like libertines:
fine-wale corduroys,

tinsel-topped boots, thick

flannel exhumed in
cotton fields and brought
to be bought. Oh it’s

just commerce, you say, in

full degeneracy. I
say whoso refuses this ilk
(of a bosomed shirt,

etc) is yes scattered about,

but as part of an Ark,
is a raucous collective like
one summer thunder.

So hm who is the zealot now,

you say, who is—
I say these bright shapes I
keep simply,

my own nudity, that which

horrifies some, isn’t
much: they will blur as we
cycle, or as you hock

that fashionista’s wool hat,

cut the stylized curls,
shave all sideburns and so
commit to me thus.
 Springish 2012

Felino A. Soriano

Amid the Strain: c o m f o r t

You’ve conceived.

They’ve detected.

Concurrent.

Inter|related thus collocation plush affirmation

bodily
sustenance diversion philosophy: pain then release the
ornament of sound quilts
cold of nuanced
diversion

birth

became upon extraction of walled corporality.

Created momentum

lead query
tongue excerption rereading scrutiny of the past appositions

—miracles
conception formulated otherness (others’ necessary tug-on, at)
tumbling fascination
with
motional wanderings of unrepentant brokenness
believable subtleties

wound as though
fatherless children mature, stagnation—
paused, muted vernacular ventilation
hearers oscillate vindictive motivational pleasantries

releasing

vagabond

themes of incessant movement, recall then (yes?)

collapse of themselves
clued remission of intellectual having|s

certainty mishap stagnant thought (yes, they’ve removed)

wound into

with frac
tioned moments’

|monuments dictating misdiagnosed (trueness, then) veneration|

trajectory fascination sustaining

width and focus the

eyed remorse misinforms as diligent

failure,
silhouette-thinness intellectual effort

“Many would sooner die than think.”

Bertrand Russell
reimposes worth of delineated rhythms
cultivating
passive
diversions to then toward self of anecdotic absence

graduating theories thus thoughtful penetration of

ingurgitated revelation
 Springish 2012

Eve Maher

Glue

My sister sat in the passenger seat coating the back of her hand in glue. It was an odd habit, but the smile

that spread across her face when she peeled off the tacky layer of pseudo-skin was worth enduring the thick smell.

“Have I ever thanked you for taking me here?” Cherish asked as I hit a red light. The afternoon sunlight

blasted through the window, painting her like an angel against the drab brick buildings. I could only see her scar in

the light, a long-healed diagonal scratch that took the path her laugh lines would run someday.

“Probably?” I said.

“Dr. Freeman says I should be more expressive. So, thank you for taking me all this time.” I knew she was

really thanking me for putting up with her the past year. Still, it was progress, and I squeezed her hand that wasn’t

glossy with half-dry glue before the light flicked to green.

“You’re welcome. And thank you, for being the greatest little sister. Even if you do make my car smell like a

kindergarten classroom.” She didn’t laugh at the joke, most likely because she knew I was really thanking her for still

being alive.

#
 Ian always reminded me of a greyhound, with his long face, seemingly endless limbs and puppyish

innocence. I usually avoided him and the melting smiles he would give my sister, but on her fifteenth birthday, he

insisted on helping. He even knew lemon cake was her favorite. My clearest image is him hunched over the kitchen

counter, tongue poking through his lips in concentration and hands too big and nervous for the frosting bag. We

planted a wax 1 and 5 above his wormy message: Happy Birthday CHERISH we love you.

Ian drove an ‘85 black Mustang that Cherish adored. I thought it was boxy and dated, the kind of car that

was cool when his father was, but she would practically squeal when she heard it thud into our driveway. She took

off with him every Friday and Saturday, always back by eleven to say hello to our parents and give her a not-too-

long kiss. There was some Saturday in the spring where they went to dinner together. It was raining hard, and my

mom and I were bundled up with a movie when the phone rang. I remember her voice sounded harder than it

should have, and I didn’t fully understand what happened until we were halfway to the hospital.

I remember the stitches, how the red of her wound scared me so much, like this one crack in her porcelain

face would cause her to shatter. When they were sure her head was fine, the doctors let her sleep. They had the

same coats and voices but all sorts of undistinguished faces, all telling me how lucky she was, how the truck couldn’t

possibly have seen them with all the rain, how they couldn’t make any promises about Ian’s recovery. We had to

pass through the waiting room to get coffee, and the man driving the truck spoke to us for a while. I only remember

how swollen his face was, how sorry he really seemed to be. When we headed back to Cherish’s white-walled room,

the man was gone. Cherish was still sleeping when another doctor pulled us into the hall for Ian’s prognosis. I never

saw him again until the funeral.

The waiting room in Dr. Freeman’s office was sterile, but it tried not to be with miniature zen gardens and
colorful posters of landscapes. I sat in the same hard chair as always; I had picked it on her first visit with our

parents, hopeful but mostly numb. All I could remember about Dr. Freeman was his tan skin and thick knuckles.

For the first few weeks after the funeral, she didn’t talk much. I imagined her like a cartoon character, uncorking her

mouth and letting the words spill out and soak through the carpet of Dr. Freeman’s office. It was after her tenth

session with him that she asked if Mom could make green bean casserole for dinner. It was Ian’s favorite, but it was

the first request for food she’d made in weeks.

Cherish had therapy just once a week now, and she was eating and smiling and close to normal again. When

her hour was up, she emerged from behind the plain wooden door that separated the patients from the rest of us.

In the car, she didn’t reach for the glue. She fidgeted with her hands, rubbing her nails together and further

chipping the pink polish.

“Matilda, can I ask you for a favor?”

“Sure.”

“I kind of need you to come with me somewhere tomorrow night.”

“Where?”

“Well, my friend Liam asked me on a date, and he really wants to take me to the aquarium, but, you

know…” I did know; she didn’t trust anyone outside the family to drive.

“You’re going on a date?” I tried to hide my concern.

“Yeah, I mean, Dr. Freeman told me he thought it was a good idea.”

“But, do you really want to do that?”

She stopped fidgeting.

“I think I do. And I think Ian would say I should do it, too.” She looked at me, eyes wide. “You think I
should too, right?”

“Completely. If you want it, that’s all that matters.” My agreement was partial, but I wasn’t about to

contradict both her and her therapist. My old car rattled up the driveway.

“So you wouldn’t mind coming with? I mean, you could just drop us off, I guess, but I was kind of hoping it

could be a double date or something.”

“A double date, huh? Should I bring someone too?” I asked, undoing my seatbelt.

“Could you ask Tristan? He’s such a sweetheart.”

“Oh, absolutely. I’m sure he’d love to come.” I wasn’t sure, but she smiled big and draped her arm around

my shoulder as we walked toward our house.

Tristan, whose real name was Thomas, was a gaunt and pale boy with a permanent film of grease on his

black hair. He was a caricature of himself, a “lone wolf” with notebooks full of bad poetry. He was also my ex. He

knew Cherish through group counseling at our school (he was in for a “dark and concerning” art project), and she

spoke so highly of me that we had to meet. For three months, he had been a good boyfriend, which was the

problem. Constant phone calls and declarations of love pushed me farther away with each syllable. I broke up with

him just under a month ago when he tried to celebrate our three-month-iversary with a midnight picnic and a

speech about our future together; I had been avoiding him since then because the last time I saw him, he was crying

hysterically on the checkered blanket spread on his front lawn.

“You’re the greatest, Matt,” Cherish said before ascending the stairs to her bedroom.

“I try.”

Tristan turned his phone off after my fourth call. At dinner, I ate with zeal. Mom and Dad were too
preoccupied with an inquisition about Liam to notice my silence. An hour later, Tristan’s phone was still off. I

grabbed the car keys from my desk and called a hasty promise of quick return to the rest of my family, gathered on

the couch for a TV show.

Tristan lived on the eastern edge of town, less than a mile from the site of Ian’s accident. My entire body

knew nothing good came from this neighborhood, sending off flares of gooseflesh. The turns were still second

nature to me. Tristan’s hand-me-down white sedan stood underneath his window like a guard, bathed in artificial

yellow light. I pulled in behind him and picked out the largest bits of his gravel driveway I could find, their dust

mixing with the sweat in my cupped palm. The first two pebbles hit the glass with a sharp plink. The third was

sharp between my fingers when I heard a faint rush of air from his window.

“What are you doing?” Tristan sounded more confused than angry.

“You wouldn’t answer my calls.”

“Why didn’t you just knock on the door?”

I didn’t have an answer for that one.

“Can I talk to you or something?”

“Only if you stop trying to break my window.”

“Fine.”

I crunched across the driveway, letting the rest of my ammunition slide out of my hand. I approached the

door, rubbing the dust on my jeans to keep myself from reliving the catalogue of prior walks down this path. I

chewed on my tongue, unsure if I should knock. The harsh dome light forced me to squint into Tristan’s face as the

sound of television laughter escaped before he shut the door behind him.

“I wasn’t trying to break your window,” I mumbled. It was as close to “hello” as I could come.
 “I know. I was kind of joking.”

“I just wanted your attention.”

“Right.”

“I mean, not that I want you to pay attention to me. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“I assumed you would get the hint after I turned off my phone.” (Translation: Please go away.)

I wiped a layer of sweat from my forehead, looking at anything but him: the mat asking me to wipe my

paws, the dust in the corner of the doorframe, the dark patch of hair on the knuckles of his big toes, the fraying

ends of my shoelaces. Crickets sang a faint ballad announcing the arrival of warmer months.

“So how is Charlie?”

“He’s got fleas. Did you really come here to talk about my dog?” (Translation: You interrupted my rereading

of Catcher in the Rye. Get to the point.)

“Cherish is going on a date tomorrow.”

“Seriously?” he sighed. “Is she ready for that?”

“It’s been a year.”

“Love never dies, Matilda. Love is forever.” (Translation: I read that on a tattoo once. It will take me just as

long to get over you. Maybe longer.)

“Well, she asked me to invite you. She and Liam are going to the aquarium and she wants us to go with.”

(Boys don’t last forever, so please attend this dysfunctional double date.)

“It’s quite harsh of you to be pouring salt into my wounds so soon. I thought you would be kinder.”

(Translation: I’m still angry.)

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry that we didn’t work out and I’m sorry to ask this favor. I’m doing this for
Cherish, not for me and especially not for you. She needs us.”

“There is no more ‘us.’ You killed ‘us.’”

“What if I said I needed you? What if I told you that I didn’t have anyone else to ask?” I finally looked at

him, the corners of his mouth pulled tight.

“Then I’d ask you what time I should be over tomorrow.”

“Five thirty.” I shoved my hands into my too-small pockets and stared at the ground again. “I really, really

appreciate it, Tristan.” I turned and walked off, trying to prevent any reconsideration on his part.

Before Ian would come over, Cherish had seemed like she was possessed by a housewife. She would flit

through the house dusting and straightening and fluffing, frantic but giddy. She abandoned the ritual for Liam,

leaving dishes and dust on counters. Minutes until the boys’ expected arrival, I entered Cherish’s room to find her

watching her favorite movie again. The glittery pink television, a relic from her childhood, played an image of a man

brushing makeup on a corpse. Mortuary science was another hobby she picked up after Ian’s death, and this

particularly in-depth gem was a gift from Tristan. She still wore pajamas, but she was just as made up as the body on

the screen. She looked up from the film and grinned, patting an empty spot on the bed. The stiff woman made me

queasy, but I sat without complaint. As the men in dark suits nailed a cross to the inner lid of her open casket,

Cherish went to her closet.

“Can you keep my glue from me today?”

“Sure. I mean, you could leave it at home.”

“I want to have it close by in case I need it. But I don’t want to freak Liam out.” She pulled off her

oversized shirt. I stared at the almost-closed door, not wanting to watch her or the funeral procession.
 “I am so excited for today,” I lied.

“Yeah, me too. I hope you like Liam.”

“If you like him, I’m sure he’s great.”

“Thanks for doing this for me, Mattie.”

“It’s really not a problem.”

A faint knocking echoed through the mostly-empty house. I glanced over to see Cherish check herself in her

mirror and head out the door. I followed suit and heard her from the top of the stairs.

“Hi Tristan! How have you been?” I reached the bottom in time to see them pull away from a hug.

“Pleasant, and yourself?”

“I’ve been great,” Cherish said, looking over her shoulder at me. “I’ll be right back.” She gave me a

mischievous smile and bounded up the stairs. I nodded to Tristan, lingering at the edge of the foyer.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, staring at the rubber soles of my shoes.

“I wrote you something.” He took a half step toward me and held out a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it.

to call you rose is an insult

your beauty is far more adult

you are not my lover

but the truth i cannot cover

you were the glue that held me together

without you i am broken forever

It was a tradition of his to give me a poem before each of our dates. Today’s work was an improvement. I

still remembered the first one he gave me, which actually started with “Roses are red.”
 “What did you think?” He spoke in a whisper, as though he carried a fragile secret. “I mean, if you don’t

want it, I’ll understand.” (Translation: I read an article about how to guilt someone into taking you back. Is it

working?)

“It was nice,” I whispered back, knowing Cherish and I would be laughing at this later tonight. “But what’s

even nicer is what you’re doing for Cherish.” (Translation: That was more of a limerick. Do I need to break up with

you twice for emphasis?)

“Yeah.” He sighed, visibly crestfallen. “She looks happy.” (The article was in Cosmo. Guess I need a new

approach.)

“We both appreciate you coming with. I think today will be really good for her.” (You’re not here to

clumsily seduce me.)

“Let’s hope so. I don’t th-“ Tristan stopped midsentence when he heard Cherish’s footsteps on the stairs.

“Liam says he’s running a little late and we should meet him there,” she called from the landing.

“What? Why?”

“His sister’s dance recital is going on longer than he thought. He’ll be done in a few minutes but he didn’t

want us to wait up for him.”

Tristan sighed and opened the front door. We followed him outside, Cherish sliding in the back and Tristan

taking the passenger’s seat.

“So, tell me about Liam,” Tristan said, turned around in his seat.

“He’s a senior like you. I met him in my geometry class. We eat lunch all the time. He’s really charismatic.” I

did not to point out that he was in a math class two years below his grade.

“He sounds pretty spectacular. Why did you choose the aquarium?”
 “We were talking about squids and how cool they are, and he said I should see the ones in the aquarium

sometime. So I said, why not tomorrow?”

“Wow. Good for you, Cherish. Boys like girls who are forward like that,” Tristan said. (Boys like them until

they break their hearts, of course.)

The conversation lulled. Tristan drummed his fingers on the dashboard.

“Do you still see Mrs. Hicks? How is that going?” Cherish asked.

“Oh yes. She’s still telling me that attending her church will cure my depression.” I laughed a little, pulling

into the parking garage adjacent to the huge glass building.

“Yeah, that’s why I go to Dr. Freeman.”

“It’s so nice to see how much you’ve grown. You’re so much healthier now.” (Good job at not dying.)

“Aww, thanks Tristan,” she murmured as I pulled into a parking spot. Our footsteps echoed, thrown back

at us and all around by the dark concrete. The air in the elevator was thick with humidity and silence. It shuddered

and stalled before reaching the main floor of the aquarium. Vinyl benches lined the outer walls of the sunlit atrium,

opposed by the ticket counters and employees checking tickets. In the middle of the huge lobby was an intricate

mosaic, scraps of bright glass spelling out an enormous red squid. Cherish pulled out her cell phone.

“He hasn’t responded yet, but we should probably just wait in the lobby.” We claimed seats close to the

middle, with Cherish on the edge to watch the door. The crowded lobby was filled with just enough daylight to

catch her scar. A wayward boy, clearly only an apprentice in the business of walking, stomped on the huge yellow

eyes of the mosaic to see if the beast would move. When his tiny feet hit the floor, he let out a joyous squeal and

laughed. I scanned the various adults in the scattered crowd, but each one seemed equipped with a set of children. I

idly wondered where their parents were.

 “Do you know if Liam has left yet?” I asked.

“I’m sure he’s on his way. He doesn’t like to text and drive.”

“Why don’t you call him?”

“I guess I will.”

Families flowed in and out of entryways and elevators, graceful and mob-like as the schools of fish they no

doubt just observed. The small boy stumbled after a particularly hard step, but righted himself.

“I’ll be right back,” Cherish mumbled, rising and crossing to the bathrooms before I was entirely sure what

she said.

“Do you think he’s going to show up?” Tristan asked.

“He’ll have to answer to me if he doesn’t.”

“At least I can be proud that I never stood you up.”

“Yeah, but you never took me to the ever-so-romantic aquarium,” I retorted. Tristan laughed a real loud

chuckle that came from his belly.

“Touché. At least I didn’t break your heart.” The residual smile from the laugh was gone.

“You’re right. You didn’t. And I did. I wasn’t even nice to you. There’s no reason for you to still love me.

Hell, there was no reason then, either.”

Cherish emerged from the women’s bathroom, face blank and unreadable.

“Well, you’re right too. You dumped me for being too nice, which is pretty hilarious. But love is just

inconsiderate like that. It doesn’t give you a choice.”

Cherish took her seat next to me once again. The boy in the mosaic seemed to grow frustrated with the

unmoving art, and brought his foot down hard enough to knock himself over. His eyes were wide, and he didn’t
seem to know how he got onto the floor. I looked down to see Cherish’s hand in my purse. Tristan looked on as

she removed the smooth white bottle and poured the viscid liquid onto the back of her hand.

“He’s not coming.”

“What?” I was almost shouting. The boy began wailing, head thrown back and facing the heavens in

dedication to his sadness.

“I called him and I asked where he was. He said he couldn’t come and then he hung up.” Her face was

perfectly flat, her eyes unfocused.

“He didn’t even say he was sorry?” Tristan asked.

Cherish blew on her hand.

“He didn’t even give a reason?” I asked.

The child’s screaming grew louder.

“Can we leave now?” Cherish asked.

Tristan and I both nodded and stood, waiting for Cherish to follow suit and guiding her with a gentle hand

on her back. A tired looking woman took our path in the opposite direction, collecting the boy and cooing gibberish

to calm him. The loading of the elevator and car were silent and still. Even Cherish’s blowing on her drying glue

was uninspired and more of a sigh.

“I’m really sorry, Cherish,” I said when we were on the freeway.

“Don’t apologize for actions you didn’t take,” she said.

“If he’s inconsiderate enough to string you along like that, you don’t want to spend the afternoon with him

anyway,” Tristan said.

“I wanted to spend the afternoon with him.”

 “Well, maybe something really did come up,” I offered.

“He told me a few weeks ago that he doesn’t have any sisters.”

The quiet was so thorough that I could hear the soft sound of Cherish pulling the layer of pseudo-flesh

from her hand. We were close to home now, and the sky was a warm pastel color that I had no reason to appreciate.

“Why don’t we go out and get some frozen yogurt? I know that’s your favorite,” I said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’ll bet you will be when we get there.”

The shop closest to us was named Yogurtie, which sounded more like a greeting for a hip grandmother than

a place to get a sugar rush. The walls, floors, and counters were white, but every decoration was a shocking bright

color, down to the radioactive looking spoons. Our silence was made louder by the other tables filled with

chattering friends. I pushed my melted, sloppy sweetness around until the colors of the sprinkles began to bleed.

Cherish refused to eat, and instead stared at the glass storefront.

“When a squid’s mate dies, she eats the body. It’s more efficient, but it’s also a mourning ritual.” Cherish’s

unfocused gaze was still directed at the window.

“Huh. That’s a really neat fact,” Tristain said.

“I wanted to see that so bad. I just want that kind of ritual. That process.”

“Why?” I asked after a moment.

“So I could know when it ends.”

We were quiet again, unequipped for aiding Cherish in her battles. She broke her catatonia and stood, eyes

wide.

“We need to go.”

 “Why?” Tristan asked, eating another bite of dessert.

“Because he’s here. Liam is here.”

A boy with sunglasses and brown hair clearly styled to look unstyled approached the door, leading a pack of

various teenagers. Before Tristan could stand, I was at the door, blocking their entrance.

“Hey, you’re Liam, right?” I addressed the apparent leader, who was a solid three inches shorter than me.

“Yeah,” he responded, eyebrows raised. “And?”

“I need to talk to you out here for a minute.”

The rest of them filed inside, most ignoring me but several giving dirty looks.

“Where were you today?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You had a date today. With Cherish.”

“Her?” he laughed. “I told her she should see the aquarium some time and she took that to mean I wanted

to take her there. It’s not my fault she’s crazy.”

My hands were foreign, independent beings, one opening to clasp his shoulder and the other closing and

connecting with his nose. Something cracked underneath my knuckles. He stumbled backward, blood streaming

down his face and dripping from his chin to the concrete, thick and rhythmic like a broken faucet. I turned to see

the entire café staring at me, with both my friends and his rising. Tristan and Cherish got to me first, and led me to

the car, their warm hands pressing into my back. I fell into the passenger’s seat, still delirious and full of rage. As

Tristan drove us away, Cherish slipped her bottle of glue into my shaking hands.

“This will help.”

 Springish 2012

Elena Botts

slow-rise
grey, huddled side by
side, houses in procession,
nearly fidgeting for space,
half-shuttered windows squinting
to stars burning above
a neighborhood blackened in charcoal night
the people inside
in separate corridors
fogged lights flickering
like dim ghosts fading
in and out
a man lying on the floor
his breath coming up
geysers of agitation
as he churns in wakefulness
inches from
another through the wall
who in dismal lamplight
peruses a volume
sleep unattainable,
time has become
a haunting companion,
a link through the tenement wall
that seems like not so much a separation
rather, a dawning association
a retreating glacier
you have dilapidated landscapes
with the staccato of your cracking fingertips
by the sea-sickening tilt of your backbone
the tremors of your eyes in atmospheric heat
they melt, dissolve, fall through
the shifting of you
leaves purpled obelisks
in perilous position
slopes carved by
the dissolution of one creation
until by the webbed branches of a leaning tree
on the mountainside, each ancient feature has been
in dawn distinctly wrought by unique relation
the fish in the deep
can hear me breathe
currents willed

why would you strike him

am I part of your structure
toppling your civilizations

still we sleep
in separate oceans
deepen dreams
ebb tide inhalation

I’ve been to playgrounds

submerged in darkness,
I’ve seen her
and her and her and her

and maybe you

sometimes

I can here the bonds breaking

civilization never lasts
it crumbles, it churns
it plummets fathoms
quicker than your eye
in mine

such
a distance
a bridge fallen into ruin
embraced by tide
in every aspect differently manifested
these waves carry onward the ghost
all of the time
i woke to trees
growing in my brain
i cannot feel any-
thing but steady
root expansion
some days,
i just stand here
holding a warped mirror
you point out something i’ve done
what color does your mind
turn when you see
a world reflection in me
what space does the world
owe to anyone
i’m a nonentity
been living on shelves, coat hangers and bird feathers
hook myself to the sky,
try to
pull it down
through the vast chambers branched from the
halls of my spine
i call myself
everything
outside, ethers merge
into inner ropes and bonds
the sky has fallen
into me
i am spread on ironworks
can i evaporate,
suffuse in summer night,
then collect
in trickling pipes,
sink through your veins
to the foundation of your brain

you in your emblazoned clothes,

you flick your wrist, bring your hand up
i don’t know you
or anybody
you’re just a sun in my eyes

your face is
a bullet in my mind
crimson flowers
from my head, behind

forever
we’ve been swimming alongside
immersed in each other
individuals by unique refraction
in this mutual river
 Springish 2012

Don Cozzette

Late Bloomer
Cherry Lane
June

The Jones rush, push and pull behind their weed-killer carts with a
stern look on their faces; determined to annihilate any space invaders on
their bright green chemical carpets… The sun shines strong… Bumble
bees pollinate… The pink Dogwood blooms… Mockingbirds mock…

…I left the strange weed to grow in the midst of the giving flower
bed…

Nosy, next-door neighbors pulled, poisoned and punished

theirs…

Through the perfumed, purple butterfly bush, burgundy iceberg

and lavender floribunda roses, the straw like, pale-green weed
grew and grew…

Late in September and just prior to last call, the reed-like

ragamuffin produced the most delicate daisy-like, white and
yellow flowers, providing a brilliant exhibition of color
and vitality…

…….Meanwhile, neighbors continued their pompous puppet

dances of conformity, except now when they passed the yard,
they made sure to look the other way…

And the hidden Praying Mantis prays to his alien gods for a
timely return…
 Cherry Red
Union Square
NYC
Farmer’s Market

Gravity’s pull is inevitable…

…And fresh peaches fall off the Vermont vendor’s cart; consisting of
cardboard cabbage cases…

Girls (woman) my age (forty), in most cases, just don’t do it for me…

Who wants bruised fruit, cottage cheese derrieres and gorgonzola

veins?

Perhaps when the fruit section of my personal produce market

finally sells out, I could just “devalue” the merits of ripe fruit to
myself…

Perhaps then I could become a connoisseur of junk food…

Artificial Flavors…
And preservatives…
Botox…
And plastic surgeries….

No, no, no…that’s not me…

I’d rather spend my time contemplating the suspicions of hunger

alone, than chasing skirts….worn skirts…

There are those that convince themselves that beauty is inside…

Then why were we giving these dismissive eyes?

Perhaps I’ll save the spiritual connections for when I’m a spirit…

To deny…
Is to imply…
That my eye…
Is a lie…
And that wouldn’t be logical…

After all, a ripe Japanese Black Ruby plum gives us energy, while a
dried prune is recommended for a case of constipation….
 Anonymous Genius
Lao Tzu (550 BC) – He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know…

The smartest man has come and gone, or perhaps he’s here right
now…

We’ll never know him…

And never not know…

Because he’s the smartest man…

He’s aware of the big picture…

And the hypocrisies and contradictions…

He sees through fame, gospel, greed and ego…

He knew early, perhaps right after birth, that less is more and
communication can be dangerous…

He’s aware of the big picture…

And all the parts of the machine…

He see a “love” based on ego and self-need…

He questioned conformity and traps of human guilt and shame…

Because he’s the smartest man and we’ll never know him…
And never not know…

He saw immediately past life and death…

Consciousness for him was clarity and clear…

He was aware of the big picture and not concerned with the frame…

Because he’s the smartest man and we’ll never know him…
And never not know…
Him…
 Springish 2012

Dayna Patterson

Hermione in Prison

". . . and, for the babe / Is counted lost for ever, Perdita,
I pr'ythee call't" —Antigonus citing his dream of Hermione,
The Winter's Tale

I haven't seen my newborn in days.

I'm afraid she is lost to me.
Paulina took her to the king, a testament I am
given of my faithfulness. What father afraid
can see his new baby, she's
stamped with the same blond hair,
the same dimpled chin, and remain a rock? lost to me
That seems years ago, but mere days
have passed. My breasts blaze
white fire. My friends visit this prison I'm afraid
and bring cabbage leaves to draw out the milk,
balm for my cracked and swollen nipples. she's lost to me
If only there were a salve for my vivisected
heart. I would pry open the jail (me)
of my ribs to apply it. If leaves
could leach away accusation's poison, I would bury
my body would resurrect me
bleached white as the sun at noon, I'm afraid
blown cold as a murderous moon she's lost to me
lost.
Stingrays

My daughters play stingray

in the tub, their wet bodies slip
on the ceramic, arms for wings.

Mine have not lost their barbed

stings like the ones in the shallow
aquarium pool, who slid
around the edge, waving
their flaps in a passive way.

We were instructed to insert

only two fingers and the tame
creatures would come.

I touched one,
rendered harmless for the masses,
its cartilaginous body the softest
surface I've ever skimmed.

Were they anesthetized

when their stings were stolen,
cut from their elastic bodies?

How do you keep them

soft, supple, yet ready, if need be,

to puncture a predator's heart?

 Springish 2012

Daniel Y. Harris

The Melissa Oracle

for Melissa Chapman

Here Merlin ceased, that for the solemn feat

Melissa might prepare with fitting spell,
To show bold Bradamant, in aspect meet,
The heirs who her illustrious race should swell.
Hence many sprites she chose; but from what seat
Evoked, I know not, or if called from hell;
And gathered in one place (so bade the dame),
In various garb and guise the shadows came.

—Ludovico Aristo
Orlando Furioso, Canto III, Section XX
I.

A nimbus tilting toward aura and bleeding geist,

prescient in the marginalia of direct access, melds
in the other face—that chasm of strength, inchoate,

to furnish the undenizened with a home—converges

at the apex of opposites with a plan for the minute
gate. “Open it!” Melissa struts out in white face and

narrow over-lapping strips of brightly colored cloth.

To her right, Columbine, ragged and patched. To her
left, Harlequin, back from Dante’s hell as Alichino,

perfumed to flip over backwards. “We have come

to replace circles with triangular patches,” they
boast in phony a cappella. “Where is Sybil?” asks
II.

Columbine, as if betrayed by a common sense of

mayhem. “That’s a different mythology,” says
Melissa, and launches to the skeined corner for

a sip of Ouzo from Mount Athos. Not a divine

shield over the city, Tule Fog and the stench of
an alley brewery littered with scarlet and bur

oak. Enter the measured exile of the mediocre,

the rabblement of moldy figs in desperate need
of discard, and the scene muddles as if toxins,

pasty in their attraction to weak immunity, held

a community meeting to discuss their spreading
nature. Not that possession. This one, after the
III.

great purge and the day of new bodies. It’s the

rough side of a rift, the oblique with ray-tints
curving in themselves and dispatched in code.

The anagram is a rebus which is now a pun,

baroque and elitist, which the uninitiated may,
in a week or two, blame for their anaphylactic

shock. It comes down to intervals between

the margins and the center of our willingness
to reach up to the gilded scaffolding of new

peptides creating new people with a mix

of amino acids and hyperlinks. It’s about the
0.24% with holy inertia—how in endtime,
IV.

that silly paroxysm with its attendant acid

reflux, each of us will reach the unblemished,
when stasis becomes divine parastasis, when

pleroma and emanation describe the same

unfallen precursor, when the tetragrammaton
is a heart palpitation gleaned from the latest

list-serve. Nothing about ethos and a place

to score mission. Not in this fractured enclave
with its familial resentments glossed by the lit

aporia of false mystagogues. The short “then”

of beshert has been replaced with the long “now”
of gevalt and the spatial deflates like a helium
V.

balloon over midtown. Enter the plumed

and coiffed, the troubadours, puppeteers,
acrobats and larded clowns sporting tulips

and dandelions. Enter the bearded immortals

hauling Holy Writ on shopping carts, and listen
to words spawn from a seraphic mouth. “Doom

is eager, or rather, we are doom-eager,” says

the youngest of them, the one whose moniker
is JHAK, for Provençal Rabbi, Jacob Ha-Kohen.

JHAK enters the conference room. Is that where

they are? It’s a far cry from The Globe or Carnegie
Hall. “Frankly, I’m directionally challenged,” says
VI.

the Infrequent Voice feigning omniscience. “I

spent a generation living as an ancient Canaanite
on Mondays, a Phoenician on Tuesdays, a Hittite

and Philistine on Wednesdays and Thursdays,

respectively, becoming a bloated Babylonian
on Fridays, to emerge, triumphantly, with scepter,

as King of the United Monarchy of David on Saturdays

and Sundays. The telegraphy fades in the telling, as
does the metempsychosis. Worse, incongruity sets

itself against a plethora of antitheticals, seeking

a respite for the estranged spirit. Characters come
and go and we wince at the Eliotic flippancy,
VII.

darker than pitch black, but don’t abate, it being

our intention to people these triads with galloping
personae, suspending our disbelief above corpses

of dead ideas. “I can’t support this,” pipes in Melissa,

“our troop of stock and pantomime has no place for
the lukewarm middle cast in white noise, lids heavy

with snicky snacks.” It’s eleven minutes to rapture,

fourteen minutes to the apocalypse, ushered in by a
meth-head eschaton, seventeen minutes to a nation

of priests chanting the yahwic yelp of the Asherah,

but too late for the cradling messiah of flux. Melissa
broods and grows crimson with fury. “Crap,” she says,
VIII.

“this is shape shifting and reification. Have we no use

for uplifted hands and wrapped leather straps? And the
chronically betrayed, have they no say in the outcome?

Margins? Peripheries? Borders? Zones? Apps of the pod

people? Nonsense! I prefer the nondual, shred nostalgia
clichés and read The Tanakh upside down.” The moldy

figs shift their blue squints to a sulfur-green sulk. Now,

bent on the cusp of the void, appeased by the thickening
plot of origin-craving, without force of edict or bylaw,

no decision is made, nor opinion voiced. Nothing happens.

The oily, neon hum of light bulbs play God to a fat fly.
Such is the reprieve on a day of light rain. Is it reprieve,
IX.

or a revolt against the digression of dramatis personae

dropping in without appointment? “I pick the latter,”
bestows the Infrequent Voice, unphazed by the lack

of a latter. Then, in unison, the Greek chorus of this

mise-en-scène sings “the reprieve is the latter!” Hyenas
dart across the office carpet. Raccoons and opossums

nibble on trail mix. Pest Wildlife Control is closed,

but the janitorial service has a vacuum cleaner and two,
32-oz. spray bottles of Windex powerized glass cleaner

with AMMONIA-D RTU. When the hoopla stills to a

wince worn by a passerby, we come to a conquered
verity: we’re the possessed holding the last chance.
X.

Notice the period, grammatical prank of completion,

and the new realism—the conceptual has been replaced
with the digital instant of viral media: bandwidth blood-

lines, 4G DNA, a parthenogenic shared drive with trigger

happy error messages, fiber optic pineal eyes, forensic
webinars, remote access pituitary glands, fetishized

social media with an amygdala GPS and wireless limbic

systems. Let’s perform the ancestral autopsy. Please, no
interruptions, even if they be entropic agons of worry.

We are hybrids of antiquity, amalgams of disparate

nuances, resolute in our talents to swerve away from
extinction, be that by polis or lack of diffidence, thus
XI.

prone to pulsing bright like a semaphore in winter fog,

or desert reliquaries replete with canopic jars. The secrets
of scrolls, really, are not bulwark covenant, though the

throngs would revile this claim, and blame their adherents

for an insufferable syncretism. Spin us, inflate us, deflate us,
burn us, bury us, force us to be our opposite with hyphenated

or truncated names, and we’re still here, a fractured people

of ventriloquists, voicing the grand, undead monism with
a sigh. We take a corporeal shape and look inward at a

zoharic Daniel fresh with new double-chiasm theories,

as if the four beasts were Ezekiel’s postlude to a third
temple. Call Daniel and Ezekiel our nervous ticks of fatal
XII.

urgency, and let us say that Melissa is the first human,

macranthropos and Adam Kadmon, at once biblical tzelem,
renaissance golem and hybot of the messianic internet.

Theosophically, we are adding a variable to the classical

tetragrammaton. For the faint hearted, queasy and easily
prone to gossip during the High Holidays, we offer this

caveat: poetry is still the Stevensian supreme fiction,

abstract and inconceivable as an inventing source. Now,
add MLSS to the Mesha Stele, suspend disbelief and

invoke the sad loss of vowels. Why the slapdash? May

this not work with any chanted consonants reinscribed
on the Moabite Stone? The Melissians say “yes,” but are
XIII.

quick to point out that only secret societies with quick

senses of a comedic cabal have outwitted the redactors.
“Do we now contain every variation,” worries the

Infrequent Voice. “Have we evolved into variation itself,

shifting foci with each trope?” The reproducing triads
are without frontispiece. It would be futile to start again,

now that we’ve come this far, late and all, fragile in
this overreaching preamble to our lack of epic closure.
At times, say on Tuesday in the afternoon, aren’t facile

antitheticals annoying? Can the rebus be redressed as

linear call-to-action? Is the straight-and-narrow always
chronically unhip, saturated by formal monotonies clad
XIV.

in tweed and loafers? There’s a way out, down a flight

of stairs to a storage room filled with scraps, bottles,
steel-flits, tax forms, excretes and nitrogen waste, slag,

sludge, strategic plans and human resources manuals,

modest post-consumer waste, e-waste, insulation debris,
electrical wiring, rebar, wood, concrete, bricks, lead

and asbestos. The Melissians provide us with disposable

coverall splash contamination suits to protect against
blood and blood-borne pathogens. The exit is well lit.

Is this respite from the heights inevitable? There is no

one asking, albeit, perhaps the Infrequent Voice, now
engrossed with our spectral people. This is the latest
XV.

news—our miracle of survival is a nervous disorder.

Frankly, no. We’ve reached neither a respite, a reprieve,
a crescendo, a way out, a way in, a closure, a resolve,

a dénouement neither naming nor unnaming our tribe’s

vandalized preoccupation with each other. Yes, yes,
the great chameleons and millennial polyglots we

know, cleaving to the romanticism of priority. Guilty

as charged. When aesthetic immanence become trite
and ponderous, negate it: farewell to the pulpit with

its oratory charm and charisma. Farwell to departure

with its rose garden lattice, apocrypha and canards.
Today is the high art of the continuum, meandering
XVI.

about like the moving targets of a population study.

The Emersonian prayer is a disease, but nostalgia,
with its quaint orientalism, in part raw psychotropic,

at war with the human sciences, produces unbearable

tears. Can we bear a hybrid cosmogony of the Galilee
and the Black Forest, to say nothing of the soggy pathos

of personal angels? How they oblige us beyond terminus

and are held responsible for our remission from malaise.
Welcome to bliss with its conical terrain. Here is honey,

milk, petite madeleine with chamomile tea, nuts, dates,

almonds, a splash of lemon zest lit by lemon-light and
sugared pomegranates above a thin veneer of marzipan.
XVII.

We have reached the hinge of the mirrored door, a.k.a.,

La Porte de l'Enfer in a mock Hôtel Biron, adjusted
to 36 degrees of the line of sight. With a quorum present,

the minutes are approved. The Three Shades, renamed

Mem, Lamed and Samekh, make a motion to add a final
Samekh, augmenting the original 98 centimeters by 515,

or 613 centimeters. This readjustment has chronic re-

percussions: the original size of 6 meters high, 4 meters
wide and 1 meter deep, by dint of gematria and nuclear

fission, is cryptically resized to 6 meters high, 1 meter

wide and 3 meters deep. The blacklight of antimatter
is released through the mirror. The sexy prime triple
XVIII.

of 613 dispatches its 613 parts in sefirot and mitzvot,

all contained in the one supernal body with its lacuna
of ancient Hebrew. Call this digression an infiltration

of the normative: after all, we’re at the threshold and

about to burrow into underlives clad in vintage dress.
The Infrequent Voice calls upon The Lord of Talent

to speak: “nothing but the loggia of décor—my

laxity as tenor before the aria—my triad’s trap
scented like the perfume of a triangle—leafmold,

dyspepsia—bulldozers like giant clams are the root

causes of my political imbroglios—this is my paisley
ascot, and my royal-purple smoking jacket—may
XIX.

I disturb you for a Romeo y Julieta from Belicosos,

and a Chocolats Halba from Wallisellen and truffles,
an aluminum necktie, a velvet thong, diamond cufflinks,

a Louis Vuitton handbag for my wife and one, limited

edition Yaacov Agam to mount next to my vitrine of
Alsatian figurines?” The narrative moratorium of said

triads is proclaimed to no fanfare: in fact to no one, or

to no one who would ultimately make a difference. Who
proclaimed? The Melissians are out of the office. Next

time, we’ll install a surveillance camera and catch the

proclaimer in the act. Was it the Lord of Talent, or the
Infrequent Voice, Columbine, Harlequin, the ultra-hip
XX.

JHAK, Ezekiel, Daniel or Melissa herself? We’re sorry,

the answer is Chaim Mania, the one whose voice has yet
to surface, may not, has already—awkwardly uncanny

of the outcome and its attendant gloss and blue pencil.

The cross-hatched third-degree—the alias’s or avatar’s,
or impersonator’s stand-in tone littered with double

entendres and trompe l'oeil—hyperreal crazy irrealism,

for better or worse, is a by-product of 21st century post-
digitalism. He is, of course, part dilettante and animus,

and part Vitruvian Man, standing at ease against the

holographic wall, which is an infernal machine, a final
form of identity, and we’re unlucky not to be on hand
XXI.

to shake. Where have we gone? The unhappy claim

to the land of incoherence having trashed the idioms
of the canon, caught between some neutral proverbial

wisdom and an edgy ellipsis. With that said, is Aristo

anywhere to be found? After all, didn’t he begin as a
preemptive strike on intent and ethos? Is he mere agit-

propagandist, or Chaim Mania’s alias, absent the ottava

rima. If only our coy Chaim had littered the canon with
couplets soaked in dactyls, but he didn’t. Chaim Mania

is a Renaissance Man of nothing. Neither a maggid nor

a magus, the rabblement accuses us, (the writing coterie)
of a fatal deception—another false messiah linked to Writ
XXII.

the way plaster is linked to mould. Anxiety melts into

postponement, which melts into distraction, its milieu
a potpourri of memorabilia and recondite ends lit by

a strange hegemony. It’s impossible to blink it away,

to change the channel, or post a retort. Best to break
the triadic mesmerism, what lulls and stirs, romances

and flames to come to a reappraisal of the enterprise.

It may just lie in changing stanzaic length. Why four
stanzas of three lines per section? Chaim Mania was

emphatic at the outset and planted his magnetic pole.

Though we know nothing of him and less about her
and the others, we are doomed to be failed romantic
XXIII.

questers, born with a passion to expand the epic,

epic now meant as epic tweet. Same harbingers of
doom, different medium. No eidolons. A gut feeling

that a decade’s sustained mediocrity far exceeds the

current state of the art—this is the microcosm. Later
that day, a jolt forward to confluence with its bold

trajectory—the “we” is now the “I” of a crowned

skull, hurled in the air, catching up to its face, neck
and torso. There’s no turning back. The deed has been

done. The oracle implodes in pledge blanks, spent

by the zealous support of no one. Not a moment too
soon. Support is lost. The fabric, unwound. Here lies
XXIV.

the requiem with its litanies and postpartum. How

did it die? Why didn’t we stop it, or at least market
a public restoration project, prior to the fatal blow?

A lattice of reasons: say the windowpanes, the ir-

regular climate system, the hollow walls between
offices, provincial bandwidth, raw novelty and the

pilfering of shits and giggles in the back hallway

where black, bound newspaper tomes of “the great
age” lie next to Elmer’s Glue. Perhaps the Herring

Hall Marvin safe flanked by tubes of simple wash-

able tempera and a Presto heat dish, are to blame?
The culprit is entropy with its glazes of declension.

XXV.

Declension has its wit and vacuum to add to ends,

which veer toward a true lack of coda. The coda
is no coda at all and the dramatis personae peopling

the vestibule and foyer, are sadly mere aliases and

agents of the continuum. We surrender to the fleeting.
Skinned to bare bone and lower, reduced to flakes

spinning in slants below the midtown streetlights,

one pale verity leaves its glow: the heart is a fitting
spell. Once, of course, we demanded prooftexts

with their nuanced Latin. Once we were chivalric.

Now, we spin our stint groomed by the gray mood
of a pineal eye blazing from a hot, conic head.
 Springish 2012

D. W Hey

Weed rose up

Weed rose up
and left the garden
while manearthdog was sleeping.

A jug of water
stood next to some
gardening tools,
haphazardly placed.

Weed looked from the jug to her caregiver, prone,

right arm gesticulating, now and then, upon the grass.

I have never been thirsty, she thought,

as she shook some rooted dirt
from her new-white legs.

(In his dream, manearthdog proclaimed from the rooftop:

Good People! I have fashioned a home

of bread crumbs
and ukuleles!

Surely, somebody believes me!)

Weed (watching him – mute,
charismatic in mid
-dream)
said, to herself

I cannot leave because I am not free –

&

I am not free because I see him

over there

sleeping and shouting.

Whomever he is calling, he is calling for me.

 Springish 2012

Chuck Richardson

SOME SCHIZOID-ABSTRACT COSMIC CONSPIRACY THEORY IN 9 PARTS

[A SCI-FI POEM AFTER PKD, GHOST ADVENTURES, CHRYSLER AND OTHER SPONSORS, ETC. & ET AL]

1.

Going in peace
to the ship’s transmitter
as an antenna for the race,

2.

and from there the prayer

goes into the nearest relay network
to something instead.

3.

Is there a spirit down there

where the nun loves the infinity pool
and attached conduits,

4.

the conduits that carry—

she hopes—
5.

outer space?

She seems to possess the rhythms of a fairy tale.

Phonographs project 3D holograms

of nothing. Somehow,

the Force 1500 Expeditor says much about her

in a deep Lemmy sort of way.

6.

No reservations at 9.

She remembers you

marching up the gangplank
into the light,
where Willie Brathwaite seems as passionate about Phish as you do,
making you happy.

Hide.

7.

You have your biggest experience yet,

pacing a horrifying magic—
23 chapters,
2105 C.E.

Her job, as always, bores her,

so she has
her prayer—these days—bouncing
to the transmitter
through the permanent electrodes
extending from her pineal gland.
8.

This place is being torn down.

Help.

Nothing will impede her if she’s a Phoenix.

Come on, say something.

Every chew leads you somewhere new,

to this plush houseboat, perhaps,
where a plan is fulfilled
in which all the sad deaths add up
throughout the galaxy, becoming
a maze of death
converted
to joy.

9.

At one of the god worlds,

maybe the Sufis
won’t run
with their conviction about Its innate beauty.

Maybe this is why,

during the previous week,
a spirit, matrixing in the energy pod,

Why are you talking?

 Springish 2012

Christopher Brownsword

ORPHIC SACRAMENT

So flood layer to carrion tightened over mouth

utmost towards the frequencies she
emits had chasm in sky. River
cleave breasts with violets frothing

by retraction knelt at vortex for widen heart, her kisses

shed inside each mote filters into candles - demark upon
become this ashen swarming now boundaries corrode:
spasms halted with renewal. Vibrate not level signal the

vertebral bloodied star indwell wrought

deep (tended cipher) held to root from blossoming
inception. I gnaw corners of shadows,

febrile angle of room diagonal fed orgasm

where genitals convulse retching cedar
to embrace her teeth at foreskin beyond digit
centre equivalent output if light treads arms
more wither landscape twitching in response; her flesh
minus wings as tendrils ornament the clouds to womb,
never her complicity of seepage brought eternal

amidst
refractory
currents and there
dilate from

easing singularity. Forced under

against in lull the shift trampled to fissure did hands fade
upon horizon. I tether outwards thrown back sun the retinal
compound her contours via place: mouths fused yet
only increases flux delay imprinted she opens at limit and

soft necessitate, the warm rain dissolves.

SONNET (ARMOR ME IN YOUR SHADOW, QUENCH MY THIRST WITH YOUR KISSES)

Eclipse torsion whether dilated goes

calm; I graze upon collapse how recall else

diameter in seed flare distant, the green

water soft around her ankles. Burn not only

more if then forced out, softly

tongue brush contour why to summit on fill:

ashen rain ceased dwell, as did. She

ever moisture without trace. Dawn vapour

empty, though, embroidered by degrees,

the horizon flows new sun.
 THE UNION OF HUMAN AND DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS WEAVING THE FABRIC OF SPACE
AND TIME IN WHICH THE SELF AND ITS SURROUNDINGS ARE EMBEDDED

Rift by static that even out of was issued these

desire on either a gradient into spectrum
which yet to scan at the base she did as diameter:
territory-ratio contained within skull made void.

Everything alone implies which to the reflux I shall

henceforth garland and passes
through the lens as one.

The breeze felt heavy, vibrating tallow

in my own and so it with from annexed by that
at the field; the sun engorged beneath her
to maintain alter of these systems convulsed

by its present distance, diagonal to the

meridian though where output I held
if all her countenance branching access

obliterates
the amplitude of dawn.
(((Outside the rim of the sun
bent across the horizon,
haemorrhaging the sky
whilst encasing us in a warm
membrane. Her flesh pulsated
softly against the palm / of my hand
where it fell upon her breast.)))

As together did swelling nor I appear to begin

the arc gliding over my spine blots out why beyond us
had due crest shall revel of spores; contain such
distance for itself that causes if than diverge
to breathe with her, sacred, though embers are fled.

Let her kiss me with the kisses

of her mouth; for her love is as amber
poured forth. Let her kiss me,
kiss me with the kisses of her mouth.

Grown back into near the topmost at connected

has residue by light, the disruption of intracellular
nerve transmissions as went towards and for the
elegant on her remain this within body curved from

a depth: mouth between filaments. Riven upon

node pulse outwards has become with these and
which into adorn could only be still further yet
rootlets assimilated and be complete into lasting

visage; dimension surged print image on the

silt to attain fed light. I convulse: erase apex
of desert. Let her kiss me with the kisses

of her mouth; for her love

is as amber poured forth. Let her kiss me, kiss
me with the kisses of her...

O gleam of her mouth were blossom holy as then

are to blazing if should more otherwise imparted
is rendered terrain - she with solar axis beholden

so river called upon to the magnanimity of sunrise

emerges from beneath flesh: O gleam of her mouth,
O infinite dew! Her love is as amber poured forth.

Will slowly the weight of soft and moist opening

to fields, here I vigil in caresses shared

up neither did gone back via ebb. Let her kiss me with
 the kisses of her mouth. The beams of our

house are cedar. Her love is as amber

poured forth. O Let her kiss me, kiss me
with the kisses of her mouth.

In dune has modulate at her wrists lined

with radiant visions - my flesh stream nor
sphere would curve through sky if locate
expansion where having orbit from her is

just the distance of ionic exchange

between mouths when fused.

The beams
of our house
are cedar.
Her love
is as amber poured
forth.
Let her kiss
me with
the kisses of...

Her tresses loosen in my hands as shone

or at landscape the heavens writhing endlessly
ravish us. Joy too is certain, bearing its
persistance. The bough from axis did such able

now: a vista accentuating light. As her

trajectory by love is no more of distant to
beneath a covering the aroma of thighs

upon rejoice and which together we meld.

Petals drawn in so how proximity she ever

did. For this, most truly, I caress her sex by

which the space around us becomes infinite.

2

Until the daybreak

and the shadows flee
away, I feed among

lilies. Her eyes by dark slumberous we shared of the fire

here were lattice as / entwine torsion either yet drift
to growing how softly under fulcrum>>nor had>>she for
these, her sex burns shone-through now holding her

from behind her pulsations become as shall

inwards than did caressing thighs and womb offered
to mouth.

At zenith
we narrow into brightness. The winter

is past, the rain is over and gone. Flowers

appear on the earth. I lay down beneath her shadow

with great delight, her left hand draws me inside,

and her fruit is sweet to my taste.

The glyphs for ash wherefrom

a gradient into if nesting has fallen
silent. Her body lays discharged
upon black embers, soaked across

lilies would at else by refract. Our bliss

spasms to state vector via copper landscape
given brightly as flare beyond plane trees.

She feeds only on sky beneath a feral sun,

and her shadow over me is love.  

3

Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Reverence! Reverence!
Love!
 Springish 2012

Celia Laskey

Spring Snow

Sharon and Renee, our friends who had just gotten married, invited Jules and me over for dinner. I told

them to come to our place; we’d cook for them since we had to miss the wedding and all. But they wanted us to

see the new house and all the pictures so we said okay, we’d go to their place. We’d bring dessert and a nice

bottle of wine or few. It was a couple months after the ceremony when we finally ended up going, when they

were back from their honeymoon and we were back from Argentina. Where did those couple months go? God,

I don’t even know where the time has gone since.

I remember the night when Renee came to the bar and held her left hand out like a straight woman,

almost poking my eye out with that hunk of diamond as she jumped up and down. Sharon had popped the

question at their favorite restaurant the night before. I always thought that was a weird expression, to pop to the

question. Like a gun was being held to the person’s head who had to say yes or no. I’d also always thought that

Sharon and Renee would take some liberties with the whole marriage process, saying no thanks to churches and

tradition, since they never any interest in either. But they went right along following in the predictable footsteps

of a bunch of people who would rather see them marrying men instead of each other. I gulped down some

whiskey and told her yes, the proposal sounded just right, and boy, was that ring something.
 The day before dinner, running in the park with everything green and blooming, I asked Jules what kind

of dessert we should make.

She let out a tight laugh and I couldn’t tell if it was because we were nearing the hill or because she was

pissed. “Oh, what dessert should we make?” she asked, her tone jokey but now I knew she was a little mad.

“I’ll help,” I said, and when she responded just by looking at me, her eyebrows raised, I revised. “I’ll

make it,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, pulling the corners of her mouth down and then sticking out her bottom lip, her

gesture that meant “I doubt it.”

“So what should I make?” I asked, squeezing her shoulder and putting my face close to hers, our heads

bobbing incongruously as we ran at different paces. “What about some jell-o? Or some flambéed bananas?” I

joked. She broke out into a real laugh.

“You’re right, you’re right. I’ll make dessert,” she said, taking my hand from her shoulder and kissing it.

“Now let me focus on hating my life for the next few minutes,” she said as we neared the hardest part of the hill.

I watched her as she exhaled in long streams, making an O with her mouth. Her cheeks got redder, her chestnut

ponytail swung in wider arcs, her small breasts bounced subtly. Six years and I still loved looking at her. Loved

being with her. Our friends constantly asked us when we were going to “tie the knot.” Again, what an

expression. I pictured Boy Scouts running around us, wrapping our bodies in twine and tying knot after knot

until we were trussed up like a pork tenderloin headed for the oven. We weren’t married because we didn’t want

to be married. We hadn’t made a hard and fast rule about it or anything, but we were content. We saw friends

emptying out their measly savings accounts, running down the altar after being together for less than a year, and
for what? To maybe stay together forever or to maybe split up, the same outcome as before. Maybe it was

because we were gay, but I guess we thought we were a little above all that hubbub.

Sharon and Renee had bought an old townhouse in Windsor Terrace a few months before the wedding,

and had it gut renovated so that it was ready by the time they officially became Mrs. and Mrs. Brennan-Fields.

Their parents, of course, had covered the down payment and renovation costs. As we walked over from our one

bedroom in South Slope, we wondered to each other what it would look like from the outside. San Francisco-

style pastel with a front porch? Ultra modern with natural wood paneling? Classic brick with white shutters? We

turned onto their street, Windsor Place, and our eyes scanned the buildings, trying to find the one that stood out

as Sharon and Renee’s. As we got closer to the address that I had scribbled on a post-it, none of the buildings

seemed to be newly renovated. Finally we stood in front of 211 Windsor Place and looked at each other.

“Maybe they gave us the wrong address,” Jules said.

“Yeah, or maybe I misheard them or wrote it down wrong,” I said.

We stood there, taking in the house. It had a porch, but it sure wasn’t San Francisco style. It was covered

in that faux-stone siding that was falling off in huge fleshy peels to reveal black rotten wood underneath. In the

front “lawn” sat a pea-green toilet.

The door opened and Renee stepped out, a potholder over her right hand as she waved. “Hi guys,

you’ve got the right one! It looks like shit from the outside, I know,” she said, waving us inside. We tried to hide

our judgment as we walked up the sagging front steps. But as soon as we stepped past the front door our

impression flip-flopped.

“Jesus, was HGTV here?” asked Jules, smacking Renee’s arm.

 Renee laughed. “Yeah, we kind of blew our whole budget on the inside of the house.” It did look pretty

nice, but something about it was off-putting. Jules was right; it was like an HGTV model house. A shade of gray

paint on the walls, red throw pillows, stainless steel this and that in the kitchen. I didn’t see anything about it

that seemed to be Sharon and Renee. Maybe they hadn’t put their own touches on it yet, or maybe it was

exactly what they wanted.

Sharon came downstairs holding what looked like a small white dog, until I heard it snort. “Meet

Eugene,” she said, holding the tiny pig out to us.

“Is this one of those teacup pigs?” I asked, holding my pointer finger out to touch its moist snout.

Sharon nodded and set him down on the floor. “Watch this,” she said, pulling a baby carrot out of her

pocket. “Sit.” She held the carrot slightly above the pig’s head. “Sit, Eugene.” And then he sat. She gave him

the carrot and he crunched it happily.

“That is too weird and cute,” said Jules, squatting down and scratching under his chin. I didn’t see the

point. If the pig was going to act exactly like a dog, why not just get a dog?

“Well come on in,” said Renee, taking the paper bag I was holding. “What do we have here?”

“A few bottles of Malbec, and a rosemary olive-oil pound cake with chocolate chips, baked by yours

truly,” I said, looking at Jules mischievously.

“Yeah right!” said Renee. “Thanks, Jules. Now, first things first.” She pulled out a bottle of Malbec and

we all sat at the marble bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. She poured four glasses and I was

about to take a good glug of mine until Jules raised her glass.

“To the newlyweds,” she said. We all clinked and I tried to look happy for them. I was happy for them,

but I would have been even if they didn’t get married.

 “Oh my god, this is nice,” said Renee, puckering her lips happily and swirling the wine in her glass.

“We drank so much of it in Mendoza,” said Jules. “It was good to take a break from it for a couple

months before having it again.”

“Mm, I don’t think I’d ever get sick of this,” said Renee, almost guzzling her glass.

“We’ll bring you more the next time we hang out,” said Jules. “It was dirt cheap down there.”

Renee poured more wine and Sharon stood up to go stir the pots on the stove. “I wish we had this

malbec when I was cooking the coq au vin,” said Sharon. “I used a crappy pinot noir from the place on seventh

ave.”

“You guys have a Le Creuset?” Jules squealed, watching Sharon as she removed the thick top from the

dutch oven.

“Wedding gifts,” said Sharon. “They’re the best.”

“Well I guess that’s the only way I’d get one of those things. I couldn’t bring myself to spend my own

money on it,” said Jules. I watched her admire the dutch oven. It was a pot, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t see what

was so special about it. She had never mentioned wanting one before, but the way she was looking at it, you

would have thought not having one was the thing holding her back from the good life.

Sharon announced that the food was ready and we all moved to the table. Renee opened another bottle

of Malbec and Sharon served huge portions of coq au vin over egg noodles. As soon as we settled into eating,

Jules said, “Sooooo. Tell us about the wedding!”

“It was a whirlwind,” said Renee, shaking her head, her eyes floating to rest on some point on the

ceiling.

“A whirlwind?” said Sharon through a mouthful of chicken. “More like a tornado!”

 “But a perfect one,” said Renee. They looked at each other and smiled, and Sharon reached over to

squeeze Renee’s hand.

I felt something cold and wet on my ankle and jumped. I looked under the table and the pig squealed at

me, jamming his nose into my shin.

“Sorry about Eugene,” said Sharon. “You’re in his chair.” Sharon looked at Renee like she was the one

to blame for it.

“You let him sit at the table?” I asked Renee, pushing the pig away with my foot.

Renee leaned down and titted at the pig to get him to come to her, then picked him up and put him in

her lap. “Yes, I let him sit at the table, don’t I?” she said to him. He snorted happily as she fed him another

carrot from her pocket. Sharon shook her head and looked at us as if to say sorry.

“So you were telling us about the wedding,” said Jules.

They pondered for a second, and then Renee laughed. “My brother got wasted and made a ridiculous

speech, of course,” she said.

“Bobby,” I said smiling, “How is he doing?”

“Oh, you know, he’s in the process of getting his fifth MFA for god knows what,” said Renee,

absentmindedly twirling her ring with her thumb. “I don’t know if he’ll ever settle into something.”

“He always seems happy though,” I said, chasing an egg noodle with my fork. “I’m sad we missed that

speech.”

“I’m sure we have a recording of it somewhere,” said Renee.

“What about pictures?” asked Jules. “Or should we wait until we’re finished eating?”
 “Naw, go ahead and look at them now. They’re all on the iPad,” said Sharon, getting up to grab it from

the couch. She swiped it a few times and then handed it to Jules. Jules scooted her chair closer to mine so I

could see the pictures too. I reluctantly leaned in to look. At the first picture, I almost burst out laughing. Now,

Sharon and Renee were our dear friends. But why, when they were both some the biggest butches we knew, did

they insist on wearing white wedding gowns? Sharon, with her elvis hair, round face, and broad shoulders,

looked like a two-year-old boy that had been whisked out of the bathtub and stuffed into a wedding dress. And

Renee, with her twiggy frame and hint of a moustache, was like a pre-pubescent 13-year-old boy forced into a

dress as a joke by the football jocks. Jules had a saying for when a lesbian wearing a dress just looked wrong:

Dyke in a Dress. And boy, was this picture the epitome of that. I couldn’t wait to crack up about it with Jules

back at home. But at that moment, I caught my laugh and turned it into a cough.

“Aw, look at you guys, all married and stuff,” I said, knowing they were waiting for some kind of

reaction.

After a few seconds, Jules said, “You both look so happy.” She was good at knowing what to say, unlike

me. It was nice having her at my side. Sometimes when I went to get-togethers and she wasn’t there, I found

myself standing silently after people asked me questions, waiting for Jules to swoop in with just the right answer.

The rest of the night passed with more wedding talk, and then us telling them about our vacation to

Argentina. I showed them a few pictures from my phone, of us driving through watercolor-drenched mountains

in Salta, walking through vineyards with red-stained lips in Mendoza. I couldn’t help but notice how naturally

happy we looked in our vacation photos. After the big topics were out of the way, we moved on to the fun

menial stuff like our new food discoveries, what embarrassing tv shows we were hooked on, and the lesbian
gossip within our circle of friends. We went through four bottles of wine and it was a nice time. I even got to

liking that pig a little bit.

On the walk home, Jules kept giving me love looks, and I gave her some right back. It was strange the

next morning when I realized that our looks had meant different things. Jules woke me up with a stack of

blueberry pancakes, each of them the size of the plate they were on, and when the top one said “WILL,” I knew

what the next three would say. I ran to the bathroom and puked. It was red from all the Malbec. I sat with my

head on the toilet and wished I could disappear, and then I came out and told Jules I must have a bad hangover.

Later, when we were wedding planning and Jules had had it up to here with the crumbly cake at the

tastings and the forgetful florists, she would look back on that night at Sharon and Renee’s like it was to blame. I

should have known that she was wishing for what they had for a long time.

“Stupid Sharon and Renee, with their house and their pig and their Le Creuset,” she’d say after

slamming down the phone with a printer or a caterer. We told each other that our wedding would be different,

but the closer we got to it, the more we would buckle and say, well wouldn’t it just be easier to do it the way

everyone else has done it. Before we knew it we were walking down the aisle in white dresses, stuffing dry cake

in each other’s mouths, and dancing to a budget wedding band’s version of “My girl.”

After the wedding, we were so relieved not to be on diets that we stopped running together in the park.

We put on weight and we cut our hair. We still have dinner with Sharon and Renee every few weeks, and the

pig must weight about 75 pounds now. “We had no idea he was going to get so big,” they say. None of us had

any idea how things would change after that night.

Sharon and Renee got us a red Le Creuset as our wedding gift. It sits in the back of the cabinet next to

the stove, never used. Every now and then I’ll see Jules crouching down, peering into the cabinet and sighing,
scowling at the pot like she’d like to break it into a million pieces. But then she’ll stand up and give me an

absentminded kiss and ask me if I want to order some thai food. Sometimes she still gives me a love look, but

they come further and further in between. I still remember the walk home that night. The reassuring way her

hand felt as she squeezed my side right above my hip. The apple tree we passed under that was losing its white

petals as the breeze blew. Spring snow, Jules called it. And the long brown eyelash on her cheek that I stuck to

the tip of my pointer finger, holding it out and saying, We don’t even need a wish.
 Springish 2012

Carlo Matos

Power Politics for Kids*

We are at war again with the Decepticons. That’s just what we say. It is nearly impossible to tell the difference
between a Decepticon and an Autobot these days. And what does it matter? Everyone knows that the world’s
supply of energon is nearly depleted. This war with Megatron is more than meets the eye. Certainly, nothing good
can come from the increased dependence on thundrillium mining. The Thundercat lobby has been pushing hard to
open up more of Alaska. Lion-O always did shine on camera; women love him. And then there’s the Serpentorian
evangelists looking for the body of the one who is many. Saw Juggernaut carpooling with his brother—well, half-
brother—the other day. That’s how you know things are bad . . . Juggernaut carpooling with the Professor.

*The Juggernaut may not have been riding with Professor X. It was probably one of those dolls people use so they can ride in
the carpool lane.
Zero Tolerance
--For Sandro

Today, the law finally passed outlawing cancer. Special task forces have been formed; think tanks have been created
and a UN summit has been announced: “A World Without Cancer: We Can Do It.” Countries like Holland and
Portugal will be publically censured for their stubborn refusal to criminalize; the medical establishment too since it
continues to maintain it is a disease. Victims, so they say, are to be treated not punished. But the people have
spoken . . . their will is zero tolerance. We’ve been on the run ever since.
Ghost Writer

Being Dumas’s ghost writer is no fun. Have you seen how long his books are? There are plenty of others who
could fill those pages with gusto for him. I don’t know why he keeps asking for me. For example, in my version
d’Artagnan is cut short by Athos in his first serious encounter. Being that kind of young Gascon, this is the more
likely and glorious end. And Dantes, he doesn’t even make it out of the boat approaching the Chateau d’If. Like
any man faced with a long and uncertain confinement, I don’t hold it against him and neither should you. And as
for Philippe, twin brother to Louis XIV, he got to like the taste of iron oxide and to sing himself to sleep. Poor
Aramis, he finds his body light one elegant head of hair that longed too close to the papal mitre.
 Springish 2012

C. Davis Fogg

Me My Motorcycle and a Brick of Coke

My name is Josh, named after Joshua the Israelite spy, and I’m seeking the promised land which happens to be Las Vegas—
a mythic destination, the land of cash, milk and female honey, of light and sparkle and a sufficient dark side to make life
profitable and maybe too exciting.

To get to the “Big L” as soon as possible, I planned to drive straight through, stopping only to rest, eat and sell a little dope
to finance my trip. So I gassed up my Harley Hog and loaded minimal supplies, a tent, change of clothes and my dope
hidden in the false bottoms of my saddlebags.

My vintage Hog is mirror black with chrome headers, pipes and cylinder heads. Everything that’s not black or portable is
chrome. The gold Harley logo neatly swishes both sides of the gas tank and I have huge fiberglass saddlebags on the rear
topped by a second comfortable seat. I crank 95 horsepower and can go a bone-busting 95 mph. I like the breathless
feeling of power, freedom and excitement, the wind blowing my helmetless hair and a destination in mind riding solo or
with my buddies. I’ve never been in a serious accident….yet.

In “Kit” I’m a pretty formidable piece of work if I do say so myself. My friends agree. I stand about five foot eleven;
weigh in at a portly, belt lapping 225 with a full-face straggly gray and black beard splayed maybe six inches below my chin.
Of course my hair runs wild except for the small bald spot that’s growing on the top of my head which regrettably helps me
sense the force of the wind or the chill of the rain.

The “driving gear” that I wear almost all of the time consists, first and foremost, of my tattoos. I started with the U S
Marine Corps shield on my right arm punched in during a drunken night as part of my initiation during boot camp. It was
the thing that you did. After that, it seemed only right to continue to paint beautiful images on my beautiful, canvas, so my
arms are covered with abstract swirling multi-color designs, my pecs each have a Harley Davidson logo and bike design,
there’s a death’s head with the number 13 around my navel. My back is decorated with creepy vine-like patterns, a Celtic
cross and various tribal tattoos and the backs of both of my hands are covered with bright red and blue flames.

All things considered, I really convey an “attitude” when I patrol in my sleeveless, studded leather vest, tattoos, silver-
trimmed leather chaps, kick-ass boots, and spurs. Not someone at first glance you’d want to mess with.
.
In reality, however, I’m a pretty nice guy. I’m not out to make trouble, I like things peaceful, I never go looking for trouble,
but if it finds me, I’m not going to run away either.

To understand why I’m taking a little “road trip” and adventure and fleeing my circumstances here for a while, you have to
know a bit about my hometown Piddle Dee Dee, Tennessee tucked away in Wail Hollow. Those aren’t the real names of
this God-forsaken place but the locals named it pretty good. We’re a town of 300 people, two bars, one barely functioning
Baptist Church, a gas station and garage and what might pass for a general store in a grade B 1920’s silent western. That’s it.
We’re way up in the lush Smokey Mountains and the big city for us is Pigeon Ford, 30 miles away, which was a nice little
city of 2,000 until native Dolly Parton got famous and ruined the place by building the theme park “Dollywood”,
inundating us with grey-haired and cowboy-hatted tourists, and tacky motels restaurants and souvenir shops. You can go
really crazy here or watch your brain deteriorate before your very eyes staying around this place for long, so periodically I
need some outside stimulation. Anything.

I live in the standard generations-old Appalachian “shack” with weather- beaten wooden wall planks, tar paper layered here
and there, brick fireplace, rusted tin roof, raw dirt yard and an old 1965 Chevy truck rusting in the side yard. No washer or
refrigerator on the front porch. I’m upper class.

If you look carefully, however, you might be struck by the number of bright and shiny 4X4 pickup trucks scattered around
town, the occasional new snow mobile, and the new bikes, swing sets and toys for the kids. If someone invited you into
their shack, a very unlikely event, you’d find new 52-inch satellite TVs, sparkling dishwashers, refrigerators and other
appliances and some furniture that wasn’t hand –me-down. Now you may wonder where a diddly little town in the middle
of one of the most depressed areas in the United States comes by such wealth.

Look no farther than the end of our only street, imaginatively named Main Street. All that largesse is a result of a booming
local economy--based on the production of the finest grade of “hillbilly pot” available in the Appalachians. Our fine
income is supplemented by our world class “chop shops” They receive stolen cars from New York and New Jersey, chop
them into parts and sell the parts to the auto repair industry through a set of “honest brokers”, The pot goes back thought
the same distribution channels—a very efficient arrangement that would be the envy of any Fortune 500 CEO.

We’re expert in our businesses and experts in avoiding the law. After all, it was our ancestors who made the finest
moonshine and bathtub gin during prohibition and World War II. They, if anyone, knew how handle he Feds short of a
shootout, and sometimes with. So we come from a long line of Captains of Industry.

I have to confess that, being educated, I’m a bit unusual for these parts and my transformation started in the Marines. All
the guys I knew were heading back to the family farm, construction, dusty, dirty labor, re-upping and a lot of things I didn’t
want to do. Didn’t think their future was interesting, wouldn’t make enough money, and certainly didn’t move me up into
the world I wanted to be in, not that I knew what that was. I only knew what it wasn’t. So I took the GI Bill, got into the
University Of Tennessee, I assume, under their affirmative action program. I figured they have to have a few mountain
boys to show off with their other minorities. After graduation I misspent several years working in legit enterprises and then
returned to Piddle Dee Dee to help my folks with their pot farm. A horticulture degree has to be good for something. So
there you are--hillbilly to college kid to hillbilly in a few short years.
All of this is by way of saying that I was taking two bags of top grade “hillbilly” with me to keep me happy along the way,
and a 1 kilogram brick of coke to sell to pay for my trip and make some money for gambling and what ever else I had to do
to make the big “L” a hot place. I got the coke at deep discount prices through our marijuana distributor. I figured I’d stay
“high,” rich and happy. I had no idea how I was going to sell the dope.

I roared out of town on an idyllic spring day, trees in full bloom, daffodils up and yellow and the forest thick and green. I
envisaged lines of school children and their parents lining Main Street and waving American Flags and screaming goodbye
to their adventurer, hero and explorer, but it was not to be.

First stop, Nashville, 500 miles away. Halfway across the state and another world.

I blasted into Nashville, my illegal muffler cutout wide open, and down Broadway into the honky-tonk and tourist part of
town. My destination was “Tootsies Orchid Lounge”, a tawdry, smells-of-beer and sweat, can’t-see-through-the-dirty-
windows bar that, half a century ago, was the watering hole of soon-to-be-famous country singers and now the spot of
choice of never-going-to-be-famous singers and curious fluorescent lycra-clad tourists. I could just see Johnny Cash, black
clad, leaning against a wall in the back strumming “Walk The Line”.

I pressed my belly on the bar and asked for two shots of “Jack. I downed one, saved the second for sippin’ and made nice
to Randy, the bartender. It’s my experience that bartenders in places like this know how to get anything from girls to
trouble to dope. And I sure wanted to sell come coke to add to my Vegas war chest.

Randy was a tall, slim drink of water, as they say around here. He was about 6 feet 2, encased in skin tight jeans, a gingham
cowboy shirt with little smiley eye darted pockets and mother of pearl buttons. He wore a tan leather vest, bolo tie, huge
belt with a silver “rodeo” buckle with a relief picture of a bucking bull on it, and a pair of ostrich boots, a status symbol
around here, that must have set him back $2000. His slender unshaven face reminded me of an older Slim Pickens. I
slipped him a number A-1 fat joint to get the conversation off to a good start,

I leaned over the counter and quietly whispered in Randy’s ear: “do you know where I can unload some top grade coke at a
good price.”

“Maybe. Depends on what’s in it for me.”

“How about $5.000 pure untraceable cash after the deal is done and I’m back here safely?”

“How do I know that you’ll come back? How do I know you’re not a cop?”

“You have to trust me on both points. Worst case you don’t get your $5,000 and that’s not going to happen. You’ve got
little risk for a good reward. All I want is the name and place of a dealer that you trust. You’re completely out of the
transaction.”

It turns out that there were well-connected dealers that hung around vacant riverboat --era brick warehouses along the
riverbank a few blocks away. The trade apparently became pretty active after 10-- particularly the upscale drive-through
buyer group that likes top grade blow. He recommended a guy named Percy who seemed to be pretty high up in the
hierarchy and might have some purchasing power. Percy, it seems, sells dope but doesn’t touch the stuff himself, preferring
a few shots and beer at the end of a hard working day. He was, Randy said, a man of his word and could be trusted. A
prince of a criminal if there ever was one. I was a little scared since the only contact I had had was with the friendly
neighborhood types back in Wail Hollow. I hoped that I didn’t end up on the wrong end of a Law and Order episode.
Randy arranged a “meet” for me to negotiate a deal with Percy and I took a cab to the designated spot under the
Cumberland River Bridge where the homeless camp out and have their shack city. I didn’t want to make a deal and give
Percy samples around criminals and thieves, and cops pretty much avoid the homeless as long as they behave.

It was two in the morning. I didn’t have much trouble finding Percy. He was a squat tough, middle-aged black dude with a
pock marked face, cigarette hanging out of his mouth and hungry eyes. I no sooner introduced myself than I was grabbed
from behind by two goons, a hand clapped over my mouth, and thrown into the back of a monstrous shiny black Escalade.
I normally wouldn’t object to posh leather seats, but this was not my idea of a fun ride.

We barreled through the streets of Nashville and its suburbs and into the maw of rural, massive, Warner Park. The park was
pitch black, densely wooded with bushes and brambles crawling under the trees. Isolated. Not a person or car in sight. We
negotiated miles of the park’s back roads, my back seat handler keeping a grip on my arm damn near tight enough cut off
my circulation. I had no idea why this idiot was kidnapping me because I didn’t’ have the drugs with me and, aside from
them, I was about as valuable as a glass of polluted water. I was trapped and had no idea how I’d get out of this if I did at
all. I went around my mental worry beads so fast that they smoked.

Percy, driving too fast, suddenly threw the truck around a tight curve. The truck careened, the henchman loosened his grip.
I opened the door, flew onto graveled shoulder of the road, and stumbled into the dense woods. I hit shoulder first and it
felt like a turkey leg being ripped from its socket at Thanksgiving, but I didn’t think that it was broken or dislocated--just
mashed up. Thank God for leather jackets.

There were distant sounds of my pursuers, and flashlight beams swinging through the forest, so I ran faster, I changed
course. The undergrowth and briars cut me and tattered my clothes. I splashed through a creek, ran across an exposed
meadow to a highway streaming along the side of the park and took off on foot toward the glow of Nashville.

I was lucky, lucky, lucky. About a painful mile down the road there were two “genuine ”and friendly bikers gassing up at a
big truck stop. They dropped me off at “Tootsies” so I could pick up the Hog, clean up a bit and get out of town.

I hopped on my bike and headed for Interstate 40 and the Southwest. I swear I saw a black Escalade follow me out of
town.

I still had a problem--I hadn’t sold any drugs and I had to if I were going to take Las Vegas by storm. The trip from
Nashville through Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas was uneventful. In New Mexico, I managed to find a Harley Store in the
small town of Clovis and stopped in to see if I could connect with a motorcycle club that might be able to broker a drug
sale. Sure enough Dave’s Harley knew of a rally of “tough guys” taking place about 20 miles down the road. Being a
Marine, I figured I could take care of myself with a tough crowd, and I set off to investigate. Stopping a couple of miles
short of the rally, I hid my coke in a hollow tree stump, a safety trick picked up from my hometown pot-dealing days.

A layered blue haze and full moon hung over the pond in a farmer’s field. It smelled of exhaust, beer, smoke, sweat and
pot--a truly noxious brew, but heavenly, heady and enticing to a dedicated motorcycle man. When I rode up, there were
over 200 cycles--mostly black Harleys punctuated by the occasional metallic red, blue and silver-- arrayed around a pond.
There was a huge spark-billowing bonfire. Blasts of hard rock split the air, people milled about talking and showing off
their fancy and not-so-fancy bikes. They were “outlaw” bikers and, according to their jackets, members of the “Road
Killers”. Like all outlaws, they would be dedicated to theft, drug trade and wanton violence. Not a crowd that I should mess
with.

I didn’t have to look far to find their Chief to see if I could move a little coke. I was yanked off my bike by two ugly
behemoths and dragged by my armpits, toes down and digging into the ground, to the center of the crowd and tossed into a
heap at the feet of the King and his court.

The honcho’s tribal name was Blackbeard. Beard for short. Indeed he had a full black beard, droopy handlebar mustache, a
large hoop earring, and head capped off by a black bandanna. He was muscular to a fault; hard-time barbed wire tats on his
arms, a grizzled hard face and venomous eyes. If eyes could kill, these would, and probably had. He had a cutlass by his
side, a symbol of brutal authority.

Straddling the saddle of his bike was his “biker babe”, his chattel, his servant, his sex slave. She was young redheaded and
beautiful. Her silken flaming hair glistened all the way down her back. She had long shapely legs, wore a black mini-mini
skirt hiked up to her crotch, a red blouse tied under her breasts, no bra, and nipple rings. She flaunted her hot, steamy
sexuality and, at the same time, told you “look but don’t touch”. Given her boyfriend’s position, I doubt that anyone would
try to touch.

“ Get him up” Beard said.

The two goons wrenched me up under the armpits and stood my sorry ass up.

“What the fuck you doing here. Don’t take lightly to strangers at my meets, or strangers at all.”

“I saw you guys from the road and thought I’d have a some beer food and fun”, I said.

“Well you came to the wrong place. Last idiot that dropped in on us left without his bike and staggered down the road
hoping someone would pick him up. Doubt they did. He was a mess. Surprised he made it out of here at all.”

“ John, cuff him. We have special bike rides for people we don’t like, don’t we?”

John clamped my hands to the bar on the back of his bike saddle, my body racked over the back wheel fender face up, heels
down. My blood pressure went through the roof. I could see what was coming next—a skin-ripping ride around the field,
the end of my life-or, at best, a long stay in a hospital.
The bike motor roared. The exhaust choked me. So much for a beautiful trip to Las Vegas. So much for my judgment on
rest stops. So much for me.

Then Beard noticed my Marine Corps tattoo. Remarkably he was a Marine too and now being instant, fast comrades in
arms, the case with all proud Marines, the atmosphere changed from hostile to brotherly. Beard nods to John to uncuff me
and we do a high five in honor of the occasion.

“Hey dude, Semper Fi buddy. Where’d you serve man?” Beard said. “Trained at Pendleton. Two tours in Iraq with the
“Thundering Herd”—3rd Battalion, First Marines. We spent our time killing the goddamn insurgents in Thar Thar. We’d
knock off 50 and another 100 would appear from nowhere.”

“What did you do, friend”? I said.

“Two tours as a Sergeant in the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Saw action cleaning out Falluujah and Hadith . My platoon
lost a lot of men in that cesspool.”

“ You’re lucky to be alive after those blood baths”, I said.

“What’s your name?” Beard said.

“Josh”

“And what can I do for you?”

I broached the subject. “Could you buy half a brick at an absurdly low price? I need money for Las Vegas fun. Could you
sell it or use it?”

“Hell yes. We can use it here and now. We go through half a Ki in no time and it’s going to be a long party weekend. I’ll
give cash on the spot if the price is right.”

I offered the blow at 5% below the going retail price would be just fine. I was escorted back to the tree stump with an
“honor guard” of ten gleaming black, belching Harleys, delivered the coke, pocketed $25,000 and was back on the road to
Las Vegas. Spending change at last.

I figured I was “home free” until Las Vegas. Wrong.

I was whizzing across a moon-drenched barren cactus-populated Arizona desert making a swift 90 miles an hour when,
suddenly, car lights pierced the dark several miles behind me. I thought little of it as, even at night, a handful of brave souls
travel through this haunted wasteland. Surprisingly the car accelerated and closed on me at over 100 miles an hour, pulled
abreast, bubble lights flashing, signaling me to pull over. There were two cops, not a good sign. They don’t like bikers and
always suspect drugs.
No way in hell was I going to get caught with a half brick of coke and enough pot to make every biker west of the
Mississippi high for a week. I passed a narrow dirt road, hit my brakes, the cops shot past, and I doubled back, turned my
lights off and roared up the road, barely in control, toward a low, bouldered hill. I scrunched over the bike, dust washing
over my face, eyes watering and half closed, choking, my pulse going through the roof, and sweating even in the bone-
chilling desert night. I hid the Hog and me behind a boulder and watched the show from there. There was no obvious place
to go.

The cops did a fishtailing U turn and sped up the road after me. A narrow dirt road is less kind to a car than a motorcycle.
Their car, moving too fast, hit the edge of the road, skittered off into the desert, and hopelessly bogged down in a small
arroyo.

The two cops took off on foot after me, guns drawn, stumbling toward my lair. There was no road down the other side of
the hill only rough, sandy, rock-strewn dangerous downhill terrain. So I had only two choices—end my trip in jail or try a
John Wayne escape. I choose John Wayne, careening down the opposite side of the hill, slipping and sliding, horsing the
bike around cactus and dragging my precious boots to keep my balance. By some miracle, I reached the road again and
took off at 90 leaving the sputtering cops in my dust.

Me, my dirty bike and half a brick of coke were on the way to Las Vegas again.

I slowly wheeled down the “strip” and was struck with a psychedelic-LSD-like blast of light--all of the neon and LCD
colors of the rainbow swirling around my head, bathing the pavement with mobile abstract patterns, and bouncing off my
shiny gas tank and chrome. The colors danced, swirled, moved, crosscut, formed images and figures, blinked and put on
the greatest light show on earth.

Of course there was the Bellagio’s famous water waves- an acre of water spouting, splashing and receding to music and
changing color to the moods of the tune. Then came Treasure Island with pirates swinging from the rigging of a fake
galleon, rescuing damsels in distress, and blasting more cannons than the average revolutionary war frigate.

Not wanting to blow, pun intended, my cache of cash, and wanting to transact a little business on the side, I found a cheap
motel in back of the Cowboy Casino, a third-rate buffet palace for the poor and foolish.

It was a two story worn cinderblock affair with maybe forty units and a small parking lot with old weathered cars, the
occasional bottle here and there and a pair of old tires propped against a curb. One couple was sitting in front of a room
on cheap plastic lawn chairs drinking Southern Comfort and 7-up. No other residents were in sight as it was prime
gambling, wandering and eating time, or maybe no one was foolish enough stay there except me and the Southern Comfort
people.

I went to the locked office door. Behind the office desk was a man in a dirty singlet, blue worn slacks, flip flops, and a gray,
bored, stubbled, I’ve-seen-it-all cynical face. Beside him was a German Shepard with a chain choker collar who looked like
he had a sour outlook on life—and on strangers. I was begrudgingly let in.
After a perfunctory conversation about the weather, “singlet” rented me a single room, bottom floor, for $75 a night three
nights up front, cash. I took the key figuring that this guy might be a source for my last drug transaction.

My room made the shacks in Appalachia look like the Ritz. It had the obligatory circular bed on a raised circular platform
and a brown dirty matted shag carpet. So far so bad. The cinderblock walls were painted a pale purple, sprinkled with
sparkles and stained with what looked like food or barf. There was an askew brass chandelier with one dim 40-watt bulb, a
bed cover that looked like it had been rejected by the Salvation Army. I couldn’t tell what the probably awful bathroom
looked like because it was lit with a 20-watt bulb. At least it didn’t smell.

I immediately checked out, got my money back and, not wanting to ruin my only vacation in years, decided to check into
the Metropolitan--a brand new skyscraper-like casino with the most expensive rooms in town. After all I could afford it,
and nothing like having a room in a casino where you can fall out of bed onto a poker table. The Metropolitan has the
reputation of being a hot party spot for the younger generation, which fit my needs very well. Party, gamble, and maybe
find a companion for the night to impress with my high-flying room and high-stakes gambling. I may be a country boy
from Tennessee, but I sure can enjoy some of the big city thrills. I think that it was my Marine Corps experience that
introduced me to the finer, so to speak, things in life.

I pulled up in front of the Metropolitan, or Metro as they call it, dressed to impress in my Sunday best—clean jeans, full-
sleeved motorcycle jacket with “Hillbilly Motorcycle Club” embroidered on the back and my best black western boots with
silver spurs. I tipped the valet $50 to park my bike and strode in through the forest of two-story lit, psychedelic stained glass
trees that lined the entrance. This is not to mention the giant neon robotic cowboy who was strumming some
undecipherable tune.

On the way to check in I passed under a three-story chandelier made of crystal beads and swooping down to the lobby
within feet of entering guests. It had a huge bar suspended in the middle of it and I made note that this was an early
destination of choice. Given the low to no necklines that pass through the lobby, the view should be spectacular.

I bought the best room in the house that I could afford—a $5,000 a night, top-floor “nostalgia” suite with a spectacular
view of “The Strip”. Yes, a bed on a platform shaped like a heart, red plush figured walls, comfy red leather furniture in the
most expensive middle class taste, hyper-plush rugs and mirrors on the ceiling. There was a Jacuzzi for four (I wondered
who I could fill this with) and a bathroom the size of a small house. A far cry from barf-haven, my last “down-and-out”
motel. But I didn’t expect a retro-room in a new casino. Forty years ago yes, now, no.

Vinnie showed me to my room, as is the procedure, carrying my one change of clothes. I had what remained of my “brick’
in a money belt arrangement inside my pants so I felt my livelihood was relatively safe. The room had cold champagne and
a cheese and fruit plate. I hate the bubbly, too weak and little girl stuff. Definitely yuppie and Gen X goodies.

In traditional Las Vegas fashion, trolling for tips and business on the side, Vinnie ask “if there was anything else he could
get for me, anything”. Translated into English from the Italian, this means booze, food, dope, girls and any other kind of fun
that you want.
You have to realize that the Mafia permeates Las Vegas from commanding the casinos, unions, running the girls and dope
to their traditional occupation of trash collection. So the chances that Vinnie, Vinnie Vito it turns out, can help me with my
little problem of getting rid of the rest of my coke were good. I didn’t think that Vinnie had any friends in the DEA so I
asked him point blank. “I have half a brick of coke to get rid of. If you help me sell it, there’s a 5 percent commission on
the price maybe $1500. Vinnie almost fell over in enthusiasm, said no sweat (yeah, right) and we agreed to meet at three in
the morning, six hours down the pike and after his shift was over.

That left me free for a few hours to explore. First stop was the gaming floor, a place awash with green tables and slot
machines. Everything under the sun was in action--poker, 21, roulette, craps, and the ker-ching of the slots was deafening.
I played an hour of high stakes poker, got bored, lost $5,000 and decided to take in the Metro Club billed as the best and
most exciting club in Las Vegas.

The Club is the damndest thing I’ve ever seen. Well not the damndest, but damn close. There were some choice single
females in there, and my heart went thumpety thump, not counting the interest generated in the southern part of my body.

The room was huge: 62,000 square feet said the sign at the door. On the back wall over the high-tech DJ, there were dozens
of dancers, almost stripers, writhing, bumping, and grinding in black, lacy garter belts and mesh stockings, skimpy g-string
outfits and garish hot pants with ample boobs barely left to your imagination.

There were hundreds of bodies on the dance floor--men and women, many unattached, others with their girl and
boyfriends, writhing, undulating, and waving arms to Buckcherry’s “Crazy Bitch”. They were bathed in alternating green,
red, yellow, white, and blue floods and from the ceiling hung dozens of spacecraft-like fixtures that flashed like the UFOs in
a dozen “close encounter” movies.

The female dress code seemed to be skin--the shortest skirts legal, and hang out of the top as far as gravity would take you
without tipping out of your bra--if you were wearing one. The predominant color of these “trolling” dresses was black with
lots of sparkly jewelry platformed on flashy spiked heels or some other exotic footwear. The men were deadly dull.

I decided to move onto the dance floor, if forcing my way through this mass of squiggling lemmings could be called
moving. I crunched my way to the middle of the floor and, wiggling around, got a butt slam from a beautiful girl in an
uncharacteristically red dress. She turned and laughed, I laughed and we faced each other and danced. Imagine this scene--
a black-leather clad biker dancing with a woman in a sophisticated filmy swirling almost-dress. How un-Tennessee.

Peggy was her name and we took an immediate liking to each other. So I did the cave man thing and pulled her into a small,
intimate, closeted booth to get to know her better. When she slid into the booth, her skirt rode up her shapely thighs and a
luscious set of boobs and peeking nipples damn near fell out when she bent over to tell me something over the din. I was in
heat. I ordered some champagne, and put down two lines of blow to loosen things up a bit.

“My name’s Josh. What’s yours?”

“Peggy. And never call me Peg, I hate it. I’m from Des Moines, the dullest, prudiest, corn-husking city you can imagine.”
“Nice name”, I said, really meaning it. “ I’m between jobs and I don’t want to spend time in Piddle Dee Dee Tennessee--
home of boredom, downscale living, pot fields, booze, nothing under the age of 50 with teeth to party with. So I’m here to
boogie. I used to be a Marine but gave it up for growing pot with my folks.”

“Well, I’m a hair stylist to the kings and queens of corn, not porn which would probably be steadier work at a much higher
price. I’m here to raise hell—dance, drink, do some drugs, and have sex. Simple as that. It has to be the right guy for sex,
someone like you--handsome, sexy, funny and lots of drugs.”

“I’m your man”, I said.

We had a rollicking time and did everything that you might imagine and more. Of course there were the obligatory drinks
though we were pretty much at the “walk-a-straight-line” limits when we got to my room. We smoked some of my top
grade “hillbilly pot” for an extra kick. A round of to-die-for sex followed, as did a few lines of coke. After the second line, I
didn’t remember a thing until about two in the afternoon the next day. I didn’t remember that I’d missed my meeting with
Vinnie either.

I woke with an awful drug-alcohol hangover to find a sleeping woman, who I didn’t remember, naked in the bed beside me.
We both had wedding rings on. I don’t recall ever having been married, but I finally recalled that the girl’s name was Peggy
and that we’d had a sweaty and animated anatomical fling last night.

I scanned the room for my stuff and the coke belt, which were there. What was there that was unexpected was a photo
album of Peggy and Josh’s wedding. Pure and Simple. Right there in the Las Vegas Elvis Wedding Chapel, the McDonald’s
of matrimony.

There we were, in front of an altar-podium with a black-clad, long-necked, Adam’s apple decorated preacher that looked
like he lived in a gold rush town in 1849 and had a Grant Wood American Gothic face. The background was a huge fake
gold record with “Hound Dog” written on it. Next to us as best man, guitar, and ring bearer was Elvis. At least a good
imitation of “The King”. I vaguely recall now his playing “here comes the bride” at the beginning of the ceremony and
“Love Me Tender” on the way out.

And here was my dilemma. What now?

Well, if in doubt, hit the road. After sobering up, Peggy and I, having taken a liking to each other, decided to take the
trip…she on my back seat with her arms around me, face into the wind, hair streaming behind her.

We headed toward California to see if we could find a nice place to settle somewhere. We agreed if it worked, fine, if not,
fine too. After all, we had plenty of money, a great black bike and each other--for better or for worse. Sober or high.
 Springish 2012

C. Marie Runyan

DISCOVERY

you have to believe in a storm sometimes when the rain falls around the flowing forth of the fly and why of life and
the rocks are beneath your toes and you are watching the cars go by on the quiet streets of night, thinking about the
world and the trees and the way the windows with their wooden frames all but hug all that we are seeking, all that
we are looking for from the outside on in, a girl in the window waving a hand like love in the air, turning around,
serving to remind you there is more than her or you or me here. here there is also the outside looking out: the
absolute absence of the self in the light of night and in the sky where streetlights hang like ornaments from their
poles. you have to believe it when we speak to each other in sacraments and symphonies, something common and
holy happening happening here between us, and the night is still there along with memories like fences forgotten
and unrepaired, self-neglect the only elephant in the room. and truth is there on your bookshelf, next to your hopes
and prayers and prose. and truth is a sweet language, a tunnel burrowing beneath the bullshit on the surface, below
bridges long broken and hearts long torn.

you have to believe in these moments. clarity like this only comes in one of every hundred sunsets, and only to
those of us looking. and the cricket chirps and you think of conversations like icebergs and the gentle notion of
unplanned ultimate surprise. there's the sound of a woman's fingers in the fruitful moments of music at night when
the air is alive with the strokes and scores of life, the oceans of new beginnings, discovery.
TWENTY HOURS A WEEK

now i work in a cubicle

treeless
and my walls look like carpet
and my phone has yet to ring
and my ears fill
with the clicking of keys
dead

there is an emptiness in this

selling-out or settling-down
that makes all things wild
necessary

(perhaps this
is in and of itself
necessity)

yesterday mother called me

it was afternoon

my coworkers were mining the earth

charting hazardous areas
maneuvering heavy machinery
pulling levers and maps
across desktops and empty planes of space,
making plans and jokes, iʼm sure
in languages i don't quite know

now i am sick on tuesday

with aches in my head and heart,
the growing pains of true identity

and my mother calls again

it is afternoon again already

(underground i go)
 Springish 2012

Bruno Casanova

The Sucsas

The hollowness of the last thump on the eroded soil foretold the end of the excavation was near, and the

following underground resonance provided them with the confirmation they needed. Professor Matthias looked at

his assistant with surprise, and then snatched the spade from his hands to begin digging frantically. The excavation

had lasted for hours, without rest, with the sun burning on their backs like charcoals, producing a mix of sweat, and

dirt drenching their countenances. When they wiped the sweat off, it formed new puzzles of gray lines accentuating

their wrinkles. Professor Matthias was digging as fast as he could disregarding the pain produced by the blisters on

his hands, throwing the sand towards the sun shining over his shoulder, as if a life depended on his effort. Finally,

the surface gave them in return the entrance they had eagerly searched for so long. Both men immediately went

down on their knees to strip the vault with their bare hands - they looked like dogs digging up a bone - until a small

hole gave off a pungent odor faintly similar to the smell of matches. Immediately, they screamed for joy with big

eyes of disbelief. And they hugged, and they jumped together, and they danced until their excitement gave way to

the fatigue. Then, they sat close to the hole, and waited for the smell to dissipate. When they considered it safe, they
entered a narrow cave, crowded together, and uncomfortably stooped. Their elbows touched their thighs, and they

bowed their heads with their chins rubbing their chests, in an attempt to avoid the graze of the pointy rocky

formations.

II

The Sucsas were the most advanced civilization of their time in South America. Due to patience, hard work,

and the leadership of their brilliant thinkers, they managed to capture the vast knowledge acquired during centuries,

in their exceptional technological discoveries; a large part of which still remain up to the present day as an enigmatic

collection of clues.

Professor Matthias’s meticulous studies proved one of their greatest discoveries was the elaboration of a

complex and very singular written language. As opposed to the Incas, the Sucsas organized an alphabet, which

combined various writing systems. Using ideograms, and pictograms – although it was found they also used a

simpler system of phonograms, similar to the Etruscan alphabet, and to many of our current western signs, which

was most probably destined to groups in the lowest posts of the Sucsa social scale - the signs could be read in more

than one direction: from right to left, from left to right, or even diagonally, with no modification of the meaning.

Furthermore, it is believed these signs possessed exceptional qualities, unlike any other language. For their most

impressive characteristic was their capacity to convey the emotions of the narrator based on the election of signs.

Not by means of interpretation of the chosen sign. But because the combination of these bore the capacity to

communicate the emotion the author was attempting to imprint in his story. Due to this capacity, the sense of a
phrase could be transformed from a jolly story to a painful one, depending on the permutation of signs, despite

using the same signs every time.

It is for this reason any attempt to translate the Sucsa writings into one of our contemporary languages,

could only aspire to be incomplete, since in our vocabulary, the choice of words determines a meaning, and this

attempts to convey an impression which may or may not be understood by the reader. While the Sucsas’ signs were

already receptacle and transmitter of an innumerable range of emotions.

Many of these characters have been deciphered, and an imperfect attempt of translation has been

developed. Nonetheless, the identification, and classification of all the possible alloys used in the Sucsa language is

without a doubt, a task requiring many lifetimes to be complete.

Several years before, the professor learned from the locals the legend of a buried monolith, sculpted by the

Sucsa priests, and hidden by their commission to protect it from imminent destruction. According to the legend, the

rock contained all the symbolic barters of the Sucsa language, and had been buried hundreds of years before in the

bowels of the long forgotten, Ccantac Mountain.

The professor and his assistant began their search almost immediately. Guided initially, by the improvised

instructions of inexpert guides, and later following their own judgment; digging almost everywhere in the mountain

with little luck until now.

 III

They advanced into the cavern with the echo of their steps confirming it was much deeper than they had

predicted. It took them a few moments to adjust their vision to the darkness. The place was dry, and a veil of dusty

mist made it difficult to walk without groping the walls. Their pupils were dilated, and the professor’s hands were

still trembling with excitement, when a blend of sensations coming from the walls invaded him.

“Did you feel that with your fingers?”

“Yes, it feels like carvings on the rocks!” replied his assistant with awe.

“It’s more than just carvings, it seems like a tale”, said the Professor unable to curb the eagerness vibrating

in his voice. His fingers began caressing the carved signs on the wall, which produced in him, from one line to the

next, a gamut of dramatic emotions, from expectancy to happiness, restlessness to fear, and finally disappointment.

It was the story of the last Sucsa king.

Although he was not able to translate every detail on the wall, professor Matthias understood the images

told the prophecy, and the anticipation of the Sucsas for the arrival of a king who would lead them during a long

reign of prosperity. But the prophecy was never fulfilled. The king was born, and evolved from a playful lad into a

man of character. But when he reached adulthood he suffered a surprising conversion, giving in to a treacherous

force, which changed the man, and eventually the Sucsas’ destiny. The story of the king in this period was a long

succession of contradictory, and selfish actions, which did not correspond to the conduct of the long awaited leader.

He gathered wealth, acted extravagantly, and began reasonless wars with complete disregard to the well being of his

people. But the story was incomplete. Professor Matthias’ rollercoaster of emotions ceased when he reached the last
corner of the wall. The final chapter in the life of the infamous king was missing. Both men searched around them,

but the silent passage, told them nothing else.

They slowly advanced even further into the cave, testing each of their steps against the irregularities of the

ground. The ceiling became progressively taller allowing them, after a few feet, to stand straight, and walk almost

naturally. Until they found on an altar of uncertain age, erected to the dome, a splendid carved monolith. On it,

engraved to eternity, were the signs keeping the hidden intimacies of the Sucsas.

On a wall behind it, an inscription in deep furrows told the king’s final chapter. It was a painful story. It

detailed the perverse influence of the king’s main political advisor, and the fatal consequences on the lives of his

people. The glorious technological, and cultural advances of the Sucsas had been insufficient before the power, and

authoritarianism of the changed leader. The wall recounted persecutions, tortures, and executions extending for

decades, until finally, after a long reign in agony, the ill-fated king found his end at the hands of his entourage. A

senseless civil war led the Sucsas to slavery, and famine, and eventually to their extinction, leaving behind only a

superficial trail of their phenomenal talent. The story left Professor Matthias with a deep sense of sadness. It wasn’t

hard for him to decipher the tale. Whoever was responsible to sculpt the story of the Sucsas on the rock, made sure

to use signs conveying that one emotion, which made the interpretation easier.

The two men began to examine the massive monolith next to the wall. They walked around it admiring their

amazing discovery. Gaping at the carvings like deep wounds inflicted on the stone, which tripled their size.

Palpating the signs extending from its top to its very bottom. The same signs keeping the hidden formulas created
by the Sucsas, the extraordinary translations of even the most intricate of sensations feeding the souls of men. The

Sucsas’ ultimate contribution, their attempt to unravel the mystery that grants humanity to humans.

They walked slowly, unfolding the signs and the sensations conveyed by them; perplexed by their findings,

when they noticed the air was beginning to rarify. The first signs became evident on their newly found vertigo.

“It’s time to go back”, announced the assistant, breathing heavily.

“I know,” replied the Professor, with a smile of satisfaction despite his gasps. Like a runner who after a

strenuous effort, just won a race. “But wait.” He added all of a sudden, as they were beginning to walk back. “There

is another line here.”

Right at the bottom of the wall behind the monolith, was a line he had not read. It was written with

characters utterly different than any other they had seen so far. They looked like sketches out of order, each one

conveying contradicting emotions in a chaotic pattern. As if, they had been carved with desperation by someone

trying to leave a message in his last fraction of life.

The Professor felt his duty to read it. He couldn’t understand it, but it seemed to him that solitary line

carried a message intended specifically for him. Next to his assistant he grazed the signs on the monolith; moving

swiftly from one to the other, revitalized by his curiosity. Until one by one, each graphic, each sign keeping the

secret of that last phrase opened up in the darkness like a flower to the benevolent power of the sun. And his eyes

opened widely, his jaw fluttered of panic and the hair on his arms rose, before the message he could never reveal.

For his scream answering his assistant’s question, “What is it?” remained hidden behind the deafening roar created
by the curtain of a solid deluge that left almost nothing to take refuge, and confirmed there are secrets in this life

better left unrevealed.

 Springish 2012

Brent Holt

Material  Support  Hose  

My  Dear  A:  
Finally,  I  can  forward  this  package  with  confidence  that  the  contraband  contained  within  will  transit  the  
frontier  unsuspected  and  arrive  to  you  without  the  postal  authorities  ever  realizing  they’ve  played  a  hand  in  
the  occupation’s  undoing.    Score  one  for  the  resistance.    As  much  as  I  have  complained  of  its  members’  
reprehensible  habit  of  procrastinating  –  for  if  we  weren’t  so  laissez-­‐faire  we  wouldn’t  be  in  the  position  of  
having  to  resist  –  it  seems  that  in  this  case  at  least  the  habit  will  prove  to  have  paid  off.    Within  the  week  you  
should  have  this  supply  in  your  possession.    I  trust  you  know  what  you  are  doing.  

I  cannot  fully  express  the  difficulty  I  had  in  procuring  the  items  contained  herein.    Our  contact,  C,  was  an  
artful  dodger,  slippery  enough  to  elude  his  own  scent.    Yes,  a  good  insurgent  should  be  skilled,  but  
considerate  enough  too  to  keep  appointments.    And  D,  our  so-­‐called  middleman  –  “so-­‐called,”  I  say,  because  
of  his  complete  disavowal  of  medians  –  had  the  gall  to  take  his  bloated  cut  only  in  beans.    Doesn’t  he  realize  
how  dangerous  it  is  to  be  out  and  about  with  a  70-­‐pound  sack  of  dried  legumes  slung  over  one’s  back  when  
every  fork  in  the  road’s  a  lair  for  beanless  rogues?    Of  course  I  was  stopped  by  the  police!    I  dare  not  ponder  
how  believable  was  my  excuse  that  the  soup  cannery  at  the  edge  of  town  had  acquired  an  unexpected  
windfall  of  bacon.    And  then  F,  our  supplier  (oh,  what  an  appropriately  acronymed  Fool),  delivered  the  
wrong  items.    What  are  we  to  do  with  silk  stockings?    Arouse  the  occupation?    For  his  blunder  I  demanded  he  
surrender  to  me  a  pair  of  the  damned  things.    They’re  enclosed  herein;  I  trust  you  can  find  a  use  for  them.  
 
If  my  handwriting  appears  a  bit  uncertain  it  is  not  because  I  quiver  over  the  security  of  the  shipment,  but  
because  my  hands  are  weak  from  wringing  laundry.    I’ve  no  chair  to  sit  in  and  no  table  to  write  at;  all  the  
furniture  is  holding  clothes  and  linens  to  dry.    So  I  write  standing  with  one  knee  upraised  as  a  board  to  write  
upon,  with  shirts  and  long  underwear  like  so  much  shroud  draped  all  around  -­‐  M  herself  is  no  stranger  to  
procrastination.  
  
Speaking  of  my  wife,  she  and  our  little  P  are  just  fine,  drawing  water  and  retrieving  cheese  from  the  well  for  
our  meal  as  I  write.    I  considered  offering  the  stockings  to  M,  but  then  questions  may  have  been  asked.

Vigilantly,  
B  
 
 
¤

A:  
This  letter  follows  too  soon  on  the  heels  for  you  to  have  received  the  package.    Another  matter  compels  me  to  
write.  
 
Did  I  not  mention  previously  that  M  and  little  P  were  at  the  well?    Alas,  poor  P  fell  in.    There  I  was,  carefully  
sealing  the  package  you  are  soon  to  receive,  when  I  heard  a  shout  from  the  yard.    Stowing  the  box  into  the  
oven  for  safekeeping,  I  ran  from  the  house  to  see  what  was  about  and  found  M  bent  over  the  lip  of  the  well  
with  tears  flowing  at  a  rate  that  should  fill  the  pit.    Dear  P  was  there  below,  clinging  to  the  rock  walls  with  the  
cheese  for  which  she’d  been  sent  clenched  between  her  teeth.    What  a  heroine,  that  little  lass!    A  trickle  of  
blood  marked  her  temple,  but  she  appeared  to  be  in  command  of  her  senses.    I  withdrew  the  belt  from  my  
breeches’  loops  and  dangled  it  toward  her.    “Release  the  cheese,”  I  exclaimed,  “and  grasp  the  leather.”    Which  
she  did,  with  her  teeth,  and  like  a  fish  I  pulled  her  up  and  out  from  what  would  otherwise  have  been  her  
damp  demise.    She  would  have  no  doubt  tainted  the  well  as  well.    Do  not  worry,  upon  P’s  retrieval  M  
managed  to  scoop  up  the  floating  quarter-­‐round  of  cheese  with  a  single  drop  of  the  bucket  –  how  precious  
and  rare  is  a  quarter-­‐round  in  these  times.    Blessed  M,  she’s  worth  her  weight  in  cheese.

I  later  became  concerned  that  P,  in  the  course  of  her  fall,  might  have  dislodged  the  items  –  those  little  metal  
thingies  that  you  and  I  had  so  carefully  stowed  in  the  dry  crooks  of  the  well  –  and  sent  them  to  ruin  in  the  
water.    Rest  assured,  the  items  are  secure  and  remain  at  our  retrieval  for  when  the  time  comes  to  use  them  
against  the  occupation.    P  is  fine  too.    She  stutters  since  the  fall,  but  it  is  a  small,  even  endearing  effect.

The  real  reason  for  my  writing  to  you  so  soon  is  to  relate  a  dream  that  I  believe  may  be,  if  I  may  presume,  
prophetic.    I  saw  that  officious  puppet  of  a  Minister  standing  at  his  podium,  chest  puffed  up  like  a  pigeon’s,  
while  the  desecrated  horns  of  our  national  anthem  sustained  through  the  final  bar.    Before  the  clarion  had  
died  the  Minister  opened  wide  his  mouth,  but  not  a  word  could  he  speak  for  from  between  those  insipid  lips  
emerged  a  great,  roasted  boneless  rump  bound  in  twine  and  dripping  grease  down  the  chin  of  that  charlatan  
and  on  over  the  podium.    Below,  the  populace  danced  and  leaped  with  knives  and  plates  upheld,  ready  to  
slice  and  dine.    It  makes  my  mouth  water  to  think  of  the  dream  now,  and  in  fact  my  pillow  was  moist  when  I  
awoke.    I  am  heartened  by  the  vision,  and  feel  compelled  to  pass  it  on  to  you  so  you  might  not  feel  
disheartened  at...  oh,  I  don’t  know...  at  times.  
  
Oh  yes,  one  other  thing.    D,  our  middle-­‐man,  came  to  the  house  this  morning  with  a  troubling  concern;  
namely,  that  questions  had  been  raised  by  the  authorities  about  the  amounts  of  bacon  rumored  to  be  held  by  
the  local  soup  cannery.    I  surrendered  to  him  a  suckling  pig  –  too  young,  I  know,  but  it  was  the  only  one  I  
could  spare.    What  else  was  I  to  do?    I  advised  him  to  make  bacon  of  it  all.    I  thought  you  should  know,  
information  being  the  glue  of  our  effort.    I  suppose,  in  the  spirit  of  that  last  line,  I  should  also  mention  that  he  
–  D,  I  mean,  and  not  the  pig  –  was  wearing  a  pair  of  the  very  same  stockings  that  F  tried  to  peddle  onto  me.    I  
will  remain  alert  to  any  further  signs  of  collusion  between  them.

Oh,  and  again  one  last  matter,  and  no  small  item  this.    I  may  be  able  to  recommend  an  inductee  to  the  cause,  
the  man  to  be  our  G  –  a  real  go-­‐getter  he.    Lots  of  ambition.    He’s  a  carrier  for  the  postal  service  too  –  What  
luck!  –  and  considers  himself  a  brother  of  the  resistance.  
 
Vive  la  résistance,
B  

¤

A:  
I  can’t  take  it.    You  will  have  received  the  package  by  now  and  found  it  in  sad  condition,  singed  and  collapsed.    
I  know  I  should  have  made  mention  of  this  in  my  previous  letter,  but  shame  had  found  a  pliant  conspirator  in  
procrastination  and  the  two  coerced  me  into  telling  that  silly  lie  about  a  prophetic  dream  instead.    I  did  
dream,  that  much  was  true,  but  not  of  a  boneless  rump.    It  was  of  the  postmaster  general,  and  he  along  with  a  
detachment  of  the  gendarme,  all  gussied  up  in  hosiery,  were  sniffing  about  my  well  for  a  cache  of  bacon.    
Dreadful,  not  just  the  vision  but  my  betrayal  too,  and  now  I  have  only  this  simpering  letter  to  offer  in  apology.

I  am  wracked  with  guilt,  but  it  is  guilt  born  of  the  noblest  intentions,  I  swear,  for  its  procreator  was  my  own  
fatherly  instinct.    I’d  carried  P  that  evening,  wet,  afraid  and  shivering  from  her  fall  into  the  well,  to  the  sitting  
room  of  the  cottage  and  before  the  hearth’s  fire  I  warmed  her  and  helped  her  shed  her  soaked  smock.    I  set  to  
toweling  her  dry  with  my  handkerchief,  the  only  dry  cloth  at  my  disposal  for  as  I  had  mentioned  everything  
else  was  that  very  day  laundered  and  wet.    Meanwhile  M,  as  if  to  refute  any  acquaintance  to  procrastination,  
had  promptly  lit  the  oven  to  warm  the  cheese,  never  bothering  to  look  into  the  appliance  first,  the  foolish  
woman.    The  box!    Yes,  damn  it  all,  the  writhing  supplies  now  in  your  hands  were  then  in  the  oven.    I  heard  
the  hiss  of  the  gas  and  should  have  run  immediately  to  the  kitchen,  but  no,  I  was  swabbing  the  armpits  of  my  
dear  P.    Several  minutes  passed  before  the  true  meaning  of  that  signature  gasp  of  gas  struck  me.    I  left  my  
handkerchief  in  a  crevice  of  P  and  dashed  to  the  kitchen,  pushed  M  aside,  threw  open  the  oven  door  and  
yanked  the  package  from  its  sweltering  belly.    With  sunken  heart  I  stood  there  in  the  heat  of  the  oven,  box  in  
hands,  desperately  clinging  to  what  comfort  I  derived  from  its  being  only  slightly  charred.    M  must  have  
thought  me  crazed  when  I  shook  it  and  brought  it  to  my  ear,  listening,  listening.    Shh!  I  shushed  her.    Then  I  
ran  out  into  the  night  and  threw  the  box  into  the  snow,  thinking  in  my  panic  that  the  cold  would  reverse  any  
harm  to  the  box’s  contents.    Wrong!    I  snatched  it  up  and  brought  it  again  to  my  ear  and  –  please  believe  me  –  
I  heard  a  movement  within.    “Live!”  I  insisted.    I  stowed  it  safely  that  night  in  a  temperate  corner  of  the  
cottage,  and  with  the  first  light  of  morning,  before  my  wife  and  daughter  would  awake,  I  sped  it  to  the  post  
office.  
 
So  you  see,  A,  I  did  what  I  could  under  the  circumstances  to  salvage  the  plan.    Please,  forgive  me  if  all  has  
been  ruined.  
 
Ruefully,
B  
 
 
¤

A:  
Ah!    Hasps.    Ha  ha.    I  blushed  upon  reading  your  letter,  blushed  with  a  mix  of  embarrassment  and  relief.    Now,  
yes,  in  retrospect,  I  can  hear  clearly  when  at  that  boisterous  pub  where  we  last  met  you  leaned  in  close  to  my  
ear  with  a  roaring  belch  for  cover  –  I’ll  never  cease  marveling  at  your  cleverness  –  and  you  whispered  
beneath  the  din  of  the  revelers,  “Send  the  hasps.”    Now  I  know  what  those  metal  thingies  in  the  well  are  
called.    And  there  I  was  dizzy  with  the  diabolics  of  what  I’d  heard.

Silly  me,  a  case  of  asps.    Nasty  things  those  vipers,  when  they  are  alive.    But  now  I  must  ponder  at  how  a  case  
of  hasps  might  further  the  resistance?    Yes,  I  know:  “Ours  is  not  to  question  why;  ours  is  but  to  do  or  die.”  
 
I’ve  sent  P  to  the  well  to  retrieve  the  hasps.    She  stammered  a  bit,  tried  to  run  past  me,  but  I  blocked  her  with  
a  reassuring  kiss  upon  the  forehead  and  sent  her  on.    It’s  for  her  own  good  after  all,  for  the  good  of  the  
resistance,  no?    And  on  the  morrow  I  will  be  in  touch  with  C  to  coordinate  an  additional  delivery  of  stockings  
as  well.    I’m  glad  they  pleased  you.  
 
Wait...    There’s  a  knock  at  the  door.    I  see  through  the  window  that  it  is  G,  my  letter  carrier.    And..  oh  my...  he’s  
accompanied.    Well,  I  suppose  we’ll  have  guests  tonight.  
 
Bonsoir,  
B  
 
 
 
 
End  
 Springish 2012

Billy Cancel

a 3rd team of white oxen & angels plough alongside us

beneath sucker state's mad canopy no intentional slapstick as
yet thank fuck. tectonic-summer you were there powerless
structure you were recall in the precinct how "we're only
transmitting shopper's aggragate data" meant reassurance?
too sweet for minimalism too hard for pop even in slumberland
this fragility triggers aggression which is why i'm on the pile
driver right now installing a cushion wedge. songs of grace
proceeded to make overcautious formal choices i.e "military
lamb dead wheel & i sat in winter clay works heard dumb
shapes screeching agreed there was a sourness here."
approiately an ancient free standing celtic cross marks
the site this is a good year fruitful in woods & field but
sorrowful with pestilence the usual spring of water appears
at least can't beat it. at deep seam academy got outfoxed
sizzled in our own pattern storm a lesson in perspective
dropped the ball in a building riddled with listening devices. if
yellow black horizontal blocks fill-freeze the upper tier i'll burn
driftwood down along the creek until the sun is lost behind the
trees & polka dots diagonal silver lines web the clean middle.
traced here by coins i used across vast geometric dirtscapes
watered a dead stick 'til it bore red moss.
recollected fragments
from plantation verandahs got loose from the jug loose from
cold stone anchor.
lured ashore by fantom lites backwoods-
economy body as gangland reason foxe's mouths are sharp
on state line hill.
as self-appointed saint of wasted places countless
times i beckon good people of the reduce up on stage.
met my
annual eradication target but was still trusted to allow leaves &
grass to move.
“the anxiety thread between crystal city ghosts cedar
valley ghosts is an oath so take your mad dog to drink at the well baptize yourself
in the ditch.”
“sleep flushed in blue tissue rain one day
twilight will tip blue Shock-Bloom SHOCK-BLOOM for thine
is the spring tide sand bank & the estuary reflooding recovered i am
no freak control.”
ways that are fragile ways that are bright
welded star patterns unfamiliar major key
short time between drinks tour of the vision
encoding translating from moss hanging branch
never had a winter house have a summer now
theoretical battlegrounds only between a rock
& a soft saturday night shows tuesday wearing
silver face paint am praying before the sea was
once saved from death by a wild boar on a hunt by
the appearance of a child
CIRCUMPOLAR-YOU
MAKE
THE
VILLAGE
LAMPS
AT
MIDNIGHT
SMILE
OH
CIRCUMPOLAR
a window full of face each starry night long?
give her some ham a digital clock mississippi
county farm technical chore songs redemption
that don’t disrupt work flow both low hanging
fruit & subject to search advised my friend
telstar who kept a house of thin men before
strong-heart-road-trip-blue-white-hill-glass-
hospice where she sings cold mouth prayers
& tells me red shark at the bottom of the bottle
this is how i won the big game unleased still
flapping all about daytona beach soon lapsed
into sad work upon street called tower went
bad in own shoes aggregate of edge no casual
nexus catch word open hander fed me crow
i drew the teeth from monday bread & butter
cut frost line tightened for the good citizens
of medical lake this will be their 3 o’clock
shadow stuffed you drink from incandescent cup
pull summer up red wet hills all the way
back to your citrus avocado pit
bloody ways that are fucking dark
purple black storm purple green swamp
horrible swaying trees bits of marsh gas
forming balls of flame bouncing about
wet edge between rushing clouds moon
running this parish. fire ripped through
my church up the estuary late last night
moved the dinner party onto the lawn
but it didn't piss down each time a pig
squealed like now TOXIC CENTRAL
YELLOW SPLIT RIPS HEAVY ORANGE
HOLE marsh marigold yellow violet
fringe yellow star grass amaryllis red trillum
camellia molinia blue water leaf dephimon
my church i painted x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-devil's
rope-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x--i set 'round-x-
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-my rectory-x-x-x-x-x-x-
x-x-playground i built no kids / let loose
my dogs / cardboard figures my wooden
choir no fog wind rain no congreation  
in the rawscape a proximity grouping joined
it’s union we got 1998 back over-elevated idea
younhinged during batting practice no doubt
will sing to the feds space spike concentrate
chapter 3 can nothing save us from being turned
out this bitter winter with our little all she-devil
on wheels younpacked in the harsh lands beneath
disruptive camouflage space spike concentrate
chicane focus bless this no doubt i’ll ask for
brooklyn get given boston & join you at midway
point of your protracted struggle. a series of crowds
stretching your mask no hotel bar proving
decisive. loose intimate word strings your
only range. inside aggressive temples you’ll
represent butterflies faded murals. in spaces
littered with abandoned skills stacked high your
whining freight. thanks known decoy for access
to the worst am no secret drone come tonight to
warn you & guess what gouged bloom uneven
flow means no symphonic output.
 Springish 2012

Autumn McClintock

NEWS

Made to recognize evil.

You are made to.

I want a go at the nose, teeth.

Line moving across the page; you will understand it.

You will take up the body,

justified unburied.
Your father or dictator,
past human, a pile of skin.

Get in there with the best adjective.

Language our way around it.
OF THE EARTH

I.

Men work at moving the enormous

pile of dirt, wheeling or carrying shovelfuls.
Covering the land takes days.
They do it this way, my father says, in Haiti.
Laboring with shovels means a wage.

II.

He let his land lie fallow this year.

Reaped all he could. Scattered
clover and plowed
under the tomato stalks.
Frames the day with coffee, wine.

III.

I have decided a green funeral.

Let me fall
six feet in a linen sack
like Mozart. In lime

so my stench doesn’t offend you,

mourners, too much.

Let there be men

to cover me,
and a tree
with many roots.
NATURAL DISASTER

in flash not second

you flash the wreck
of your wide echo

and then the sea up

up house on crest on top
of boat on top of tip

of the sound bearing down

this body around
this death in the mouth

where the land

is gone bad and
wrong gone who can

start to shake after

shock like this alters
does leave you far taller
in squalor the rubble
of dog near the hub of
a whorl on the roof-tub

and axe
and wife
and wave.
 Springish 2012

Austen Roye

in all honesty,

this story isn’t much of a

story at all, really, but it’ll
have to do because this
is all there is.

the characters are important,

the setting is important, the time
period is important, but nothing is
as important as the way in which
this information is delivered to the
reader.

here begins the

mechanics of art
and therefore the
end of it.

as for me, I’ll stick with what I

know, the only way I know how.
“write what you know and nothing
you don’t…” etc. etc. on and on,
generation to generation.

imagine if that rule wasn’t a rule,

the way this story isn’t a story;
professional chefs writing screenplays,
preachers tending bars, acrobatic lawyers
flipping through hoops in Saturday-night
circus tents, window washers taming lions.
there, that vision alone could disprove the
write-what-you-know theory. then again,
anything I say would do the same because
I know nothing.

also, no matter what I label this or

anything, story or not, someone will
say different and someone will agree
and no one will be right or wrong.
someone will find meaning where
there is none, which is
lucky for me.

ask the ghost poets if they have any

idea what they really meant, if they
really knew exactly what they were
talking about when they wrote long,
scrawling lines about strawberry stones
or cobweb bridges. or, leave it as it is
and depict it as you see fit, because that
is the point of the pointlessness, the
meaning of the meaninglessness.

that is why it exists at all.

so, in a way this is a story

after all;

it’s about you and nobody,

me and somebody else, life
in its entirety and death in
its pinhole, everything and
the emptiness of
everything.
lucky for me also, the fact
that a story like this can
only end in one way…

after all the comatose afternoons

and bright-eyed evenings, I’m

awake for the first time, the

drapes are open but window
closed, no face in that darkness
like I always imagined, only the
wall of a similar situation going
on next door and, if you look at
an angle to the right, the country
the way you might think of the
country in films.

it actually exists, for good

or ill,

there it is.

awake with a bleeding lip, awake

with evening sweat and no face in
the window, not even a single light
on out there over
the hills.

the city becomes the field so quickly,

abruptly, out of nowhere, cars into cattle.
highways and wildernesses, both exactly
as you imagine except one becoming
another without a sign to
predict it.

not even a veiled ghost bride on

the stairs like I’ve mentioned
before;
I expected her to follow me, make
some kind of appearance but she’s
not there. I open the door at night
after the lights go out and look for
her. I look out the window, out
across those hills expecting to
find her standing motionless in
the open field, my nightmare
bride who keeps showing up
in my pieces, unintentionally
becoming a part of an
ongoing narrative.

who are you and why do I keep

looking for you out the window?

why do I keep seeing you descending

spiral staircases?

why are you standing in every

window?

stay out of my works, the readers a

re growing tired of you.

the problem is, you never do anything,

you just stand there staring behind
that veil, just looking on and on.

what are you

looking at?

the segments, the fences, boundaries

of wisdom, lies of paranoid
daydreams.

that’s enough;

pull the
veil back.
so it seems

the more I thought about it

the more I realized it wouldn’t show
if I kept trying to pry it up
out of me
so I sat back and thought about
houses and taxes and groceries
thought about payday loans
and pawn shops and elevators
thought about anything
but this line
or this piece
(if that’s what this is)
thought about the
hours spent upright
at this desk
in this house
or the other
and the way things were
before it was so cluttered
and heavy with dust
and notebooks
the circled stain to my
right from years of
so many glasses
on so many nights
underweight pale drunk
always one line away
from something great
and now this room
and heavy imprints
of ink on top, drawers
stuffed with scraps
of this and that
hoarded away
for all these months
serving their own senseless
purposes
such as they are or aren’t…
either way
as for today I’ve unearthed
something of value
perhaps not considerable
value but alive nonetheless
and it testifies to the
meaning of the dull
unmoving moments that
define the gaps between
the action
(if that’s what it is)
and age-old look-back
remember-whens
that come in the form of
stains and dust
stains and dust
stains and dust
to shape
the
now.
 Springish 2012

Andrew Kuo

Dad, You Know What?

You’re an unfinished puzzle

to a daughter across the ocean, the years
mute, falling down between us like shadows.

You’re a lost mouse in an open maze:

I came to America to see you crumple-up
one marriage after another.

You’re the car with the keys locked inside,

because you stuck with waitering—
you quietly inapt, one-time
restaurateur.

You’re the stench at the bottom of a plugged drain,

taking money from your wife,
your teenage daughter,
your septuagenarian mother
so you can take it easy, relax
wait tables part-time.

You’re the wannabe cutter who threatens suicide

if you don’t have my money in your hand.

You are dead to me.

Colette’s Ghost

You know
a barista girl
long Athenian
eyebrows high
foolproof

eyes that
burn flimflam
possess rooms
corner thoughts

You know the one

clothed in filmy
stretchy black
You want her.
Let Time Flow Backwards

I dreamed of my first girlfriend

living in Philadelphia and I’m in SF,
house on glowing stilts standing
on a hill. Foggy sky then full of stars.

I’m calling her When will we see each other?

She says Next weekend, we’ll kick
the leaves while they’re yellow gold
red maroon.

I know people want

to undo the housing bubble
to take away 9/11
to undo the deficit.

But I miss her most of all.

Phonebook

I woke up this rainy morning & found--

delivered on the welcome

mat in a plastic orange bag--

a corners-wet phonebook. Standing

in my yellow bathrobe, coffeeless

I discarded it to a foyer corner

on top of a red dog leash.

Who uses phonebooks anyway?

Maybe old people forgotten,

turning brittle, fragile

like last week’s flowers. The once

scarlet petal tips darker than

burgundy. There’s still one

in my bedroom, she left

that bottle behind. I’m still

thanking her for it

in my gray, week old beard.

What did she call me?

Useless, outdated, washed-up.

Bar on the End

Long ebony bar

bartender wiping his way
mahogany tables
chair legs tipped with
bone.

Silver-haired man alone

on the end. You go
to him, orange tongues
flickering on the black,
brown tops. Piano playing
“Autumn Leaves,” he says,
“Come to hear my story?”
Eyes too light to be blue,
gray, closer to starlight,
electricity.

Now, dead soul, listen carefully,

even for the scratches of
his black suit, bent elbow,
cognac in his right hand.

Pointing up, “I know where

you’ve been. I’ve been higher
still. One day, we will go there
together. To the highest,
would you like that?”

Measure each word, now, each

thought
like placing fingers for playing.
He’ll put you down,
where he thinks
you belong until
he returns to my side
My first-born. The one
without form, full of fire
boundless.
 Springish 2012

Andrew Hamilton

Romance

I rattled her wheelchair on

concrete tiles that sprawled
into red nebulae, pushing
her up the twisted ramp
to Saturn’s ice rings,
heaven’s heat piercing holes
through the eternal curtain.
I pulled her up asteroid chains,
and when gravity’s whip
looped around our waists,
I broke the law—
seared its celestial bind
with comet sparks
from a flint fuse,
launched us soaring
over space slopes,
fired out of a slingshot,
galaxies waning from
stardust to star-specks
‘til it was so black we forgot
we could walk on legs.
Endoskeleton

Skin is a flaking coral reef.

Quilt threads that fray beneath
rays scribbling down from
sky’s yellow box of pastels—
periodic table a color wheel
water-painting the world,
where our self-portraits are
excavated like ship wreckage,
Titanics collided into uncharted
icebergs, divorces, losses—
encrustations of marine life
colonizing under our rusted hulls,
where follicles grow
like uncut grass beneath
a surface, a layer, a sun.
Particle

Like a weather balloon with eyes,

I stare at the clone of myself—

paint blot dropped from a wet brush,

wave sliding from shore to ocean—

I’m a red pixel blurred in a streetlight,

white flake swirling in a snow globe.

Ego sealed in an envelope and tossed

in the universe’s undeliverable bin,

sifting through dead letters every sunrise—

shredding paper molecules to thin air,

reaching without arms for content

piling to scrapped metal in junkyards,

unnoticed as an evaporated raindrop—

static atom bouncing into dark matter.

A microscopic blood cell pumped

into organs of the earth, air, stars.
Muzzling the Self

The conscious is driftwood,

floating on the ocean in our skulls,
above echolocation that ricochets
underwater and drowns at the surface.
Lit cigarettes smothered in ash trays.
Metal rod plunged through the brain.
Marriage divorced shortly after vows,
phoning only when drunk and broke
and alone on sidewalks of blinking cities.
Intoxication clutching a stranger’s hand
who guides to a familiar complex—
starved Great Danes barking in shadows,
snarling yellow teeth and scraping claws
behind our locked cranial doors.
Reloading

A bullet in my brain spirals clockwise,

tunneling through grey matter like
paperback pages flipped to a blur.
I forget to pause and read,
to write line notes that recall
the heat of the metal’s torque
splashing in the basin of my skull.
Where each ripple’s a neuron
ringing bells in my church,
filled with rows of empty pews
where I don’t hear air vents breathe,
smell hot sidewalks soaked in rain,
push grocery carts with jammed wheels,
or even remember a simple conversation
from a hundred breakfasts I shared with her.
 Springish 2012

Amy Whatever

Thirty Seconds in Elsewhere

We get a glimpse of her sitting

in an armchair expressionlessly
watching something we cannot see.
it was all rather pleasant, calming;
ice cream cones after terror drills.

She was fitted with the circuit boards

needed to stimulate human emotions.
Feelings, pain in a heart shaped hole,
the place where a heart might have been.
We can no longer see into her face,
our eyes blur. There is pain behind
your left eye. A needle of nothing
poking, double-plus good, scalding
hot milk before falling, falling asleep.

It is only in places like this one that

the fires of hell can keep the churches warm.
This building puts a lot of money
into a lot of well-lined pockets. Balances
earned in this life are balances earned
in the next; picking wildflowers, theft.
You said, just fucking go.
Drive the car into horizons.
Past the black lines, lines
separating us from one another.
The psalms are quite clear, saying,
Quit fiddling with that stove.
Go past what is in front of you,
go further into the ditches,
prison is always one step away.

You drink too much

You shouldn’t be in such a hurry
You think badly of us
You are just too much
You are out of order
You called me a fiddler
You have taken a diabolical liberty

Go, stick a feather in your hat,

I think the psalms said that as well.
in five minutes.

The vowels in her name reverse gender,

Change place and return in different locations.

She is no longer noun, but an adjectives delight.

Verb-like she pounces upon a name written

As if to stop the flow, an inkling to pushing back,

I want to go back to last week, last Wednesday.

He makes a moue of disapproval

Clasps his mind, hands at his side.

Few masters of craft linger, scuppered

In the wake of sleepless robotic arms.

The ambulances do not come, her e’s are leaking from her body,
Hers is a name, an appellation mountain, amber waves, pain, life.

Future times arrive slowly, there is no end,

They will changes lives; a truck will pass by.
 Springish 2012

Special Section : Book Preview

Special Selections
Selections from our new and forthcoming BlazeVOX [books]

A N A N A T O M Y O F T H E N I G H T by Clayton Eshleman
—Poetry

Comma Fork / Moving Parts by Ted Greenwald

—Poetry

“now, 1/3” and thepoem by Demosthenes Agrafiotis

Translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis —Poetry in translation

Distance by Tom Clark

—Poetry

Transcendental Telemarketer by Beth Copeland

—Poetry

Mylar by Eric Wertheimer

—Poetry

Circles Matter by Brian Lucas

—Poetry

to go without blinking by Aimee Herman

—Poetry

Continental Drifts by Cheryl Pallant

—Poetry

Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins Edited by Barbara Henning

—Fiction and interviews
 Springish 2012

to go without blinking
by Aimee Herman

Aimee Herman is a cyborg. Not in the sense of a mixture but: in her impetus. Her desire for a book to be a new kind of
thinking and being in the world. As she writes in the startling Statement of Poetics that opens this passionate collection: "This
body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection." I liked that.
A syntax that records what happens to a body even more than the words themselves. And that's just page one. Throw away
"the color pink," writes Herman, deeper in. And: "Gender is best received in a question mark." In not with. I loved that. This
is re-wiring where it counts: below the lexicon. Below the public-private register:" where the label was rubbed." Until there's
nothing left but, as the writer says: "The most dangerous parts of me." What those "dangerous parts" become, reconfigured,
mutilated and grown again, is the text of this "sore" and "feminine" book. A book in which "words" and beloveds, of various
kinds: "never stop coming." What kind of cyborg is this?

—Bhanu Kapil, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University.

Aimee Herman, a queer performance poet, has been featured at various New York venues such as the Happy Ending
Lounge, Dixon Place, Wow Café Theatre, Perch Café, One & One Bar, Bowery Poetry Club, Public Assembly, and Sidewalk
Café. She has performed at reading/performance series such as: In the Flesh erotic salon, Hyper Gender, Sideshow: Queer
Literary Carnival, Mike Geffner Presents: The Inspired Word, and Red Umbrella Diaries. Her poetry can be found in Clean
Sheets, Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, Sound Zine, Pregnant Moon Review, and/or journal, Polari Journal, Mad Rush,
Lavender Review, and Sous Le Pavre. She can also be read in you say. say. and hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Focus
on the Fabulous: Colorado LGBT Voices (Johnson Books), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), Best Lesbian
Love Stories 2010 (Alyson Books), Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal), Women in Lust (Cleis)
and The Harder She Comes: Butch Femme Erotica (Cleis Press). She currently works as an
erotica editor for Oysters & Chocolate and curates/hosts monthly NYC erotica and GLBT lit
readings. She can be found writing poems on her body in Brooklyn. Find her at:
www.aimeeherman.wordpress.com

Book Information:

· Paperback: 156 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-080-4
· $16

Buy it here or Buy it from Amazon

 statem ent of poetics

elastic minus the girdle

There is no need for synthetics like Victoria’s whispered, overpriced secret. Allow space
for binding, packing, a push down or spackle.

to write to fill the

lines where splinters
exhale
off benches

This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender
confiscation and syntax dissection. Calls herself alone with pen ink plastic cap between
lips, kissing language of stain and blots. There is no need for love when paper exists and
never interrupts or walks away.

to remove the veins attached to initials

orientations

There may be a carve out. A distinction between childhood trauma and mother carnage.

need to declare a bra size

sharp accent to disconnect
the unwanted

I know I have long hair but sometimes I am boy. When I talk about my dick I need you
to believe that I have one [sometimes].

write in scars and exit signs

stain of conformity and academic line structure

15
There is no need for paper distinctions, map assurances, stick-on-peel-off labels. The
location of this text-body may be found in Whitman songs and Bukowski contradictions.
Reveal the gesticulation of body’s remorse: call it dirty piece of nothingness or ghostly or
passed around or workshopped. How can one edit the typos found in scar tissue.
Poem.

bruises like brooklyn sidewalks

the stick stickiness stitches stitching

Scars are a language learned only by breathing.

confuse memory with medicine

scream down spine. paper cuts. signature
steam
permanence.

16
 sm uggled poem

this poem is queer with white disco blood cells, turning over floor boards purchased
from mice and roaches with a lineage of two hundred million years ago

do not lock lips with this poem because your bed sore against this lip sore could lead to
the need for medication in the form of cream or humiliation and I am quite sure your
health insurance, if you even have any, will not begin to cover the cost of it

this poem has been diagnosed with HPV, gonorrhea, syphilis, ADD, chlamydia,
dyslexia, candidiasis, scabies, malaria, herpes, high blood pressure, cataracts, genital
warts, PTSD, lactose intolerance, and bacterial vaginosis

this poem votes Republican, but calls itself a Democrat or does not vote at all due to
overactive sleep cycle, laziness and the inability to pick a side

this poem needs to hire an accountant to keep track of its sexual partners

this poem steals prescriptions from medicine cabinets and bedside tables

this poem is into coarse language, orgies, erections, blow jobs, humiliation and the word
NO

this poem places pills in pockets for later when it is hungry and too tired to steam up
broccoli or cocaine

this poem hates white people and yuppies and those with 401K’s and retirement plans
and women with quick metabolisms and personal trainers and anyone who contributes
to over-population

this poem has a bomb attached to its belly, distended from starvation because it chose an
eating disorder over trichotillomania because emaciation is more socially acceptable than
baldness

this poem fingers itself on a Monday in the bathroom of over-priced university and
foregoes hand washing in order to wipe poem juice on door knobs and hand shakes

this poem picks its nose and initiates a storm of blood rising from cartilage toward cleft
above lip

this poem has a weakened immune system due to nutritional laziness and inaccessible
health insurance

17
this poem does not know how to handle guns, a tube of lipstick, heavy machinery, and
men

this poem straddles guns, organic carrots, umbrella handles, chicken sausage, harmonicas,
drum sticks, thermoses, and does not wash after use

this poem packs an elastomer cock purchased for twenty-five dollars plus tax minus 10%
for being the floor model

this poem has stolen chapstick, salad dressing, a karaoke machine, several glasses of beer
from men expecting conversation or drunk touching, two cream cheese sesame bagels, a
cup of coffee

this poem will fuck you for currency as long as she can send in her understudy to
complete the transaction

this poem ran out of lubricant and found feces to be a fine alternative

this poem needs to tell someone about the time her uncle babysitter dentist music
teacher neighbor ex-boyfriend best friend those people raped her

this poem dresses in women’s clothing when no one is home

this poem has broken up two marriages

this poem refuses to pay taxes

this poem went to Thailand for sexual reassignment surgery seven years ago but still
dreams of its dick still swinging loudly and often wakes with hand around phantom
phallus, crying

this poem is vegetarian but savors the smell of bacon in the air and on her hamburger

this poem only knows how to fake an orgasm

this poem pretended to be homosexual in order to get out of the draft

this poem, smuggled in your pocket, pressed against your thigh, may never understand
the existence of god, proper hydration and the necessity to carry more than three
condoms at all times

18
 square root of m enstruation

inside the box, there was a calendar. pink

plastic cushion with padding called diaper
called sanitary napkin called heavy burst of
cotton and plastic against vagina like
chaperone interruption from underwear
fondle. i was fifteen i was twelve i was just past
sixteen i was ten. it was so late, i thought body
had forgotten me. it was so late i thought body
was growing claymation penis made from
blood and slaps and ingestion of processed
food and excessive sodium that just needed
water to grow like chia pet from within. when
it came, i searched for bandages big enough to
stuff inside me to mop it up. searched for
anything to stuff inside me to sop it up.
brassieres from sister’s dresser, envelopes
unclasped with ghost of electric bill final
notice form letter jury duty date of appearance.
learned foreign language called menstruation
called tampons called toxic shock syndrome
called smelly ocean called douche it away. two
to eight days of this vagina crying blood,
thirty-five milliliters or more sometimes less,
running away. uterine lining shatters like wine
glass against tile it is angry. this blood smells
like rust on bicycles like garbage disposal like
the rejection of internal. once a month, this
body chokes up blood in underwear and rage
refuses silence. six pairs of underwear ruined
times once a month times twelve in a year
equal to seventy-two. i never think that one
day this blood will become a bully. graffiti up
thighs, change the color of skin, reappraise
value, scare body from contact. some months,
i let it bleed into a puddle past ankles and grow
into a pool with limited access to lap swims or
scuba dives. color shifts from strawberry to
cranberry to cherry cordial pie to black tar
heroin.

19
 Springish 2012

Distance
by Tom Clark

“One of the reasons why language is so sick right now and cliché-ridden and lame and boring and laid-out, and
about to go to sleep, is because there aren't a thousand Tom Clarks. If I were writing a prescription right now, you
know, if I had my shiny thing here, a stethoscope around my neck, that's the prescription I'd write. Take one
thousand Tom Clarks before going to bed.”
—Edward Dorn, in Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes, 2007

“You have kept your own mind and done your perceptive and singular work every day — on your own resources
and with your own intent. For those who can care, you are a benchmark for what such industry and capability can
realize. Your practical hand has been there for me, I know all the way...”
—Robert Creeley to Tom Clark, July 26, 2002

Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941 and educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the
University of Essex. He has worked variously as an editor (The Paris Review), critic (Los Angeles Times, San
Francisco Chronicle) and biographer (lives of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley,
Edward Dorn), has published novels (Who is Sylvia?, The Exile of Céline, The Spell), memoirs (Jim Carroll, Late
Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan) and essays (The Poetry Beat, Problems of Thought: Paradoxical Essays). His
many collections of poetry have included Stones, Air, At Malibu, John's Heart, When Things Get Tough on Easy
Street, Paradise Resisted, Disordered Ideas, Fractured Karma, Sleepwalker's Fate, Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes
from the Life of John Keats, Like Real People, Empire of Skin, Light and Shade, The New World, Something in the
Air, Feeling for the Ground, At the Fair and Canyonesque. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and partner
of forty-four years, Angelica Heinegg.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 80 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-097-2
$16 Buy it here or Buy it on Amazon
Distance

There we are, and I don't know

where we are
being taken, but
I hope it's not too far
from where we started
to look down into the gently
sloping sparsely wooded
green valley, and see
the far dry mountains
fading into vague towns
of cloud, in the stillness
of distance

11
"power lines / stretching..."

a field, in the mind

fog, winter colors
power lines
stretching into the white-grey
frosted distance
empty

12
Winter Fog

Winter fog – thought

neither

in
nor out –

hid through
the day

in the night
window

shadow of
a doubt –

13
In

The wind in the large

trees ignorant in
nocent of all harm

blue waves of rain

flail the sea

14
 Springish 2012

Comma Fork / Moving Parts

by Ted Greenwald

This is a selection from our forthcoming book from Ted

Greenwald, Comma Fork / Moving Parts, which will be out in
the late summer or early fall 2012. This moving, reflecting
work is a set of mirrors, poems that seem to go on towards
the illusion of infinity. Greenwald is an American treasure.
The book has been designed by one of the foremost
letterpress artist, Kyle Schlesinger, the force behind
Cuneiform. You can pre-order this book by emailing
[email protected] to reserve your copy. We will have an
order page set up when we are a bit further along with the
project, but for now, this set from Comma Fork should peak your interest!

Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the
course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous books of poetry, including 3
(Cuneiform, 2008) Two Wrongs with painter Hal Saulson (Cuneiform 2007), The Up and Up (Atelos, 2004),
Jumping the Line (Roof Books, 1999), Word of Mouth (Sun & Moon, 1986) Common Sense (L Publications, 1978),
and You Bet (This, 1978) all available from Small Press Distribution.
Also by Ted Greenwald:
In Your Dreams Ted Greenwald BlazeVOX [books]

Ted Greenwald's 30 th book consists of 79 72-line poems, each with his trademark recombinatory drop-stitch
weave. As a basic pattern, which is varied, each poem's 26 demotic lines is repeated in 9 interlinked free triolets
(ABCACDAB-DEFDFGDE). In Your Dreams is almost, then is, hard to say, In Your Dreams is almost, hard to say,
autopoiesis, In Your Dreams is almost, then is, autopoiesis, flickering fugal strobe of the everyday, or sublime sonic
moir , autopoiesis, or sublime sonic moir, spoken and shimmering, autopoiesis, flickering fugal strobe of the
everyday.

— Charles Bernstein

In your dreams, text messages are cinematic connectives; in the rushes of Ted Greenwald's talking pictures, a
spoken grammar steps out of the voice and into language proper, only to find that the comma is an extra ( N atalie
Wood plays the waitress's pad; L aurence H arvey, the double helix). S hots and cuts are balanced for maximum
clarity and accommodation. What happens next is in the present tense.

— Miles Champion

As the centered layout replicates a spinal column or double helix of symmetrical verticality that allows the eye to
scan rapidly down through each stack of lines, the use of interwoven repetition creates an echoic choral effect that
builds-in rhythmic intensity: In Your Dreams . Two steps forward, one step back, these improvised speeches for an
in-town head reverberate with second, third and fourth takes that take out loans on short-term memory only to
break the bank of thought-heard voices and walk right through the door in a hum.

— Kit Robinson

Book Information:
· Paperback: -- pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 1-934289-54-X
$16

Buy it here or Buy it from Amazon

Read in a magazine
Lo mein
Ohmigod

I say, shit
He say, yeah
Come here yesterday

Ate there once

With Carol
You know Carol

COMMA FORK 9
If you like pass encore
Echo own nothing count blessing wounds
Where everybody repeat after math

Echo own nothing be before

No idea road repeat after math
Where everybody pass encore

10 TED GREENWALD
Slip into a slinky
Descending a staircase
I’m a I’m a I’m a

Age inside out

We aim to microwave
Open back car

Try being Mi Mi
Defenestrate crazy glaze
Lazy-boid days

COMMA FORK 11
Early on, for me, national interest fever
Light under bushel passing for vehicle
Am that idiot officials say suggestion

Light under bushel good grasp singalong

Break into line officials say suggestion
Am that idiot national interest fever

12 TED GREENWALD
Dismantle mental dollars
Suppose the next month
Toddle along in my wrecker

Put the hook in the rain

Come to right places
Money particles dust lights

Ex-girlfriends walks by
My bad, it’s grandkids
But, but, memento more me

COMMA FORK 13
 Springish 2012

“now, 1/3” and thepoem by Demosthenes Agrafiotis

Translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis

A book of temporally organized form that renounces time, that disassembles form. Demosthenes
Agrafiotis' poetry argues, chafes, bristles, and unrelentingly chomps at the bit of its own constraint, as well
as at every other human construct, linguistic or otherwise, that might serve as a convenient container for
consciousness. "now, 1/3" is an extraction of sand from the hourglass… as if the sand weren't free to
begin with.

—Harold Abramowitz

In agraphia, the inability to write, the letter A as prefix serves as sign of a negation -- the way to say a thing
that ain't. The alphabet's first sign annuls the logic of a civilization that defines itself by letters of the law.
In "Thepoem," Demosthenes Agrafiotis tarries with this term that lives inside of his own name, laying out
"words for the vacancies," in order to probe what appears where agraphia and insanity are synonyms for
the law's other side. The resulting text's "a lever for the reversal of separation," an oscillation between flow
& frame that adds to the toolkit of our "day-to-day epistemology" as we pick our way through the borders
of the made "while the technical allegories seethe."

—David Brazil

Demosthenes Agrafiotis is active in the fields of poetry/ painting/ photography/ intermedia/

installations and their interactions. He has a special interest in the relation between art and new
technologies. His book Maribor (The Post-Apollo Press) was awarded the 2011 Northern California Book
Award for Poetry in Translation, Chinese Notebook (Ugly Duckling Presse) appeared later the same year,
both books are translated by Angelos and John Sakkis. His recent books are +-graphies (Veer Books,
London), Betises (Editions Fidel Anthelme X, Marseille, in french), ArtxArt (Redfoxpress, Ireland). He is
based in Athens, Greece.
 Angelos Sakkis, b.1946 in Pireus, Greece. Studied design at the Athens Technological Institute. Worked
for a time as an assistant to the painter Spyros Vassiliou, and collected the material for “Fota kai Skies”
(“Lights and Shadows”), a volume on Vassiliou’s work, published in Athens in 1969. Immigrated to U.S
1970. BFA San Francisco Art Institute 1989. His artwork has been shown in group and one-man shows
and is in collections in Greece and the U. S. His poetry has appeared in Ambush review and Try magazine.
Together with John Sakkis he has been translating the work of poet/ multi-media artist Demosthenes
Agrafiotis. Their translation of Maribor (The Post-Apollo Press) received the 2011 Northern California
Book Award for Poetry in Translation, Chinese Notebook (Ugly Duckling Presse), also by Agrafiotis was
published in 2011. He participated in the Paros Symposium on Poetry and Translation in 2008 and again in
2011. He lives in Oakland, California.

John Sakkis is the author of Rude Girl (BlazeVOX Books), and with Angelos Sakkis he has translated two
books by Athenian poet and multi-media artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis — Maribor (The Post-Apollo
Press), awarded the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation, and Chinese
Notebook (Ugly Duckling Presse). The author of numerous chapbooks and pamphlets, most recently
RAVE ON! (Lew Gallery). Under the moniker BOTH BOTH he has curated various projects including:
blog, reading series, and since 2005 a magazine. A graduate of SFSU and Naropa University, he lives in
Oakland.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 132 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
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1 minute – 60 seconds

1. Now 31. to herself

2. café 32. his
3. “who 33. wife
4. bombed 34. Martha
5. the 35. whom
6. Old 36. Franco
7. Marseilles?” 37. Beltrametti
8. “the 38. called
9. german 39. “belle-reveuse”
10. invaders” 40. New Phoacaea
11. “the 41. Marseiles
12. collaborators 42. (1991)
13. of 43. five
14. Vichy” 44. years
15. coincidence 45. have
16. reading 46. passed
17. the 47. since
18. poem 48. then
19. of 49. memento
20. Dario 50. “chez nene”
21. Villa 51. white
22. who 52. hats
23. died 53. smiles
24. in 54. and
25. 1996 55. discretion
26. “on 56. bianco
27. his 57. mulino
28. previous 58. “who
29. life” 59. bombed?”
30. said 60. confusion

(Milano, 09:30, 03/30/1996)

9
 2. 1 hour – 60’

in between lessons
something
about the promotion of luxury
that is thoughts
about the dimensions
the projections, the roofs
the bas-reliefs

vagueness and mourning

for the moving museum
as it was nailed to a wall
on a plaque

interest for (daily) existence

fraught with stamps of menace
and of discontinuity
even though the subtraction of one line
won’t bring collapse

victims all of Greek geometry

at every transfer
books, books

so that the dependence is not lost

(the defense?)
the imagining
advancement, time
people miss flights and lose time

10
erasure between two conventionalities
in the bowels of Greenwich

was not mentioned

was not announced
was lost
in the distribution of the momentary

the important
the insignificant
increase the same way
strength weakness,
even anorexia
is named

distance, isolation
inside a snail-paced multitude
necessary for functioning
the securing of security
and the expression
“your personal copy”

quick glances
renewal in the gaze
platitudes
sparks in the vain arousal
of the untimely
“Le King Paparazzi”.
03/31/1996
06:45’-07:45’
(Hotel Manzoni – Linate Aeroporto Milano)

11
 3. 1 day, 24 hours, 1440 minutes

08/29/1997

08:20
thought
poor sister, so many other
opportunities
is not sufficient, fortunately
to things as reversal
and reality guides
thought
need
the double space
without a single face

10:01
suddenly
in the bustle to find the insignificant
the anxiety of tidying up
slippage
step from step
quick meetings
of the one
the outsides

13:40
the corporeal body

12
14:15
how much time for the nomads?
time
near and far
of yesterday
of today
of tomorrow
the unspeakable?

19:20
impudence and insecurity
the interiority of the gaze
far from absurd reshaping
motion, universe
harmony
incurable confidence
the waves disappear in
green pastures
everyone presumes the sinking
of the last ones

13
 Springish 2012

Mylar
by Eric Wertheimer

"Eric Wertheimer's poems touch what is near and far way, the drift and distraction of everyday life that envelops
and eludes us. In these poems, things as wonderful strange as mylar balloons and a rabbit tracking through time and
symbols arrest and surprise us. Look: a "mountain rising suddenly in a doorframe." And there: "miniature satin
hands." Life moving as slow and as fast as a sentence, poems refracting what adheres to the mind and senses: the
odor of rubber, shadow on cinderblock, silver berry bark, fishtank light. There is a lot colliding in the world, making
the conscience of these poems active and resigned. Allusions and keen reason, like a pair of mismatch socks, try to
straighten things out - and sometimes do. There is a sky pitched by Wallace Steven, Ben Franklin holding onto his
kite, Geronimo hiding in a cave, and Helen Keller, who - imagine - "might decode what is there." Might. All this
happens in poems lit with sunlight in some too hot desert place, a life of cars and malls, wise daughters, strained
loves, and entanglements with language that has to be nudged to be just right. It's like poetry should be in the waft
of what happens. "Do you make the exceptions in your mind and, from small nearby wisdom, persist in loving
error?" Wertheimer asks. Well, do you?"

—Arthur Sabatini, author of Who Walks

Eric Wertheimer lives in the desert with Mili, Dani, Aya, and Tupac, where he is Professor of English and
American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in
America (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American
Literature, 1771-1876 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He has published his poems in
a variety of journals over the past ten years. His other book projects include: Pretexts:
War and Writing in the Early Republic, and Within Trauma: Politics, Poetics, Praxis.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-086-6 $16

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The Kites

In West’s painting “Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity

from the Sky”

Franklin’s friends appear as unwinged angels, an effluence

of a storm.

But after a moment, they are what they are--only slaves

hard at work on modernity’s indispensable rhombus, the

kite.

Their job is to anchor the line, to see that it

Points to the west and beyond, keeping the key

--a double O-o–w, blacker even than the sky

they ignore–aloft for Ben’s righteous fist.

They subject the great man to a minor

charge while others labor on more modern

generators and conductors, round fire,

17
in a calibrated genius of serene uncharacteristic disregard.

Franklin the hero is too handsome here.

And the poor little “angels of reason” are ugly in calculated

contrast, puggishly balding, too determined around the

eyes,

as they administer aid from the sub-regions of big cogito.

In Ben’s uncelestially linked hand, there is a scrolled cloth

!or paper, a careless gesture to the earth,

a connecting figure between the new

dialogues, above and below, self-annihilating strike.

No one is wet in Pennsylvania. They are blown by an

eastern wind.

They reveal nothing in their tasteful resistance to invisible

forces.

Is the head--the cerebrum as it appears beneath hair, bone,

18
and cloud--

tantamount to the mind? Is the center of this scene a capital

monster, with blind contraptions and sparks careening in

oil?

Another kite soars like a sea-phantom in the blackest part

of the sky,

above his mind. And the small fiends

who minister his knuckled frequency do not know to fear

its omen. Ben himself seems to launch this second kite

from the dark side of his authority, the leeward position of

change.

There is not enough of the kite here to trust the data,

which makes for a kind of distant satire.

It is enough to know that the line itself is important;

it is the kite, producing

the kite.

19
Think of the incurious spindles, the slack that must have

sped

out line upon line, Benjamin doubled,

in the agonized rolls of worry and

in the cool fastness of sight.

As if to say:

These sheets, all made gray, to the wind.

20
 Springish 2012

AN ANATOMY OF THE NIGHT

by Clayton Eshleman

An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman is a magnificent new work by one of America’s foremost poets.
In thirty-one parts written between December 2010 and February 2011, Eshleman’s long poem creates a choral
effect that masterfully evokes fragments of candid observation shimmering in rhythmic intensity. In bold
simplicities, illustrative sensibilities and lyrical integrity this work is imaginative, intimate and beautifully controlled.
Hauntingly, these poems rip open the space of the long form poem and create something new and brilliant.

Clayton Eshleman’s most recent publications include The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of
California Press, 2007), The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008),
Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010), Solar Throat Slashed (a translation of Aimé Césaire’s Soleil cou coupé, with A.
James Arnold, Wesleyan University Press, 2011), and Endure (a selected translations of Bei Dao, with Lucas Klein,
Black Widow Press, 2011). Eshleman is the first poet to realize a huge, researched, and imaginative project, in prose
and poetry, on Ice Age cave art: Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the
Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He was also the
founder and editor of Caterpillar magazine (1967-1973) and Sulfur magazine (1981-
2000). He continues to live with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-095-0
$12
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 [1]

The sky a bath incestuous

dissolving urn and tower
strewn petals gust and blend Whitman arched by
his menstrual harp,
vermilion moon scarves, surf resounding,
swim through our serpent-paneled spines,
stages interlocked and released by fountains rising from
when we were masts

Earth
pink and quilted with tufts of violet grass,
miniver and rose
I glimpse Wilhelm Reich
the last night of his life, November 3, 1957
recumbent on a prison cot

All is alive including the death carousel I load into the projector
of my awareness

Bashō’s compote of cicada-absorbed rock

Aphrodite’s pudenda served on an orchid of clouds

Graze of the night’s hydra-mollusked tongue

9
 [2]

All night long I was Argiope

laying out draglines, sifting
visual seam for word spore, dragonizing
my agon, working
star wreathes into phrase fairs, excreting
sermon fuel, thread coals,
a shadow self in shaman sores…

The queen’s pedipalp tapped my shoulder,

plumbed my marrow flora
“Come,
let us irritate the vessels of the earth–
they shall distill strange wine”

10
 [3]

What is the nature of the night?

Might it be the boundless destruction of existence in the origin of

the universe?

Is it an infusion brewed of cosmic darkness, initially articulated

by those shamans who, spanning the abyss of the Fall,
reconnected, if only in vision, humankind with its animal matrix?

Is earth but a tear in mad Ophelia’s mangled target eye as she

crawls the Milky Way searching eternally for the right black hole
in which to deposit the God-crisis in her being?

O light, you are oasis!

Descending / ascending, a plumb line through our minds, the axis

mundi longings to connect that antlered shaman buried in ice
with the morning stars all singing hosanna together.

Is there a basic dream?

An animal dives deep into primal waters, brings up earth…

I tumble into a hole, turn my body into a womb; while in this
cave I begin to daub its walls, out of my body
I begin to make a world…

11
 Springish 2012

Continental Drifts
by Cheryl Pallant

Continental Drifts is Pallant’s most unwieldy, sprawling, cosmic, and best book yet. It is far more tightly woven
than Uncommon Grammar Cloth, and stiller than Into Stillness. What really separates this book, though, is how
engaged it is (though tacitly and subtly) with the current historical/ecological moment. Basically it continues
Pallant’s signature hermetic style but, just under a language that sparks with reference, resides a deeply cutting
commentary on postmodern human existence in the world.

“[W]aywardness along the continuum of balance,” Cheryl Pallant’s new collection feels its way between old orders
and the information which renders them uneasy. Reality and representation are married here, but always on the
brink of divorce, and if the I and the Thou are involved, both are suspect: so that the core performance of the
subjectivity that emerges is a constantly readjusted search. But it’s this consistently exploratory quality of the poems
that is the great pleasure, this sense of desperate hunts and disparate strategies stabilized by a return to the material
body or gesture. Written in “the vernacular of flesh,” Continental Drifts is full of deep questions leading to deeper
questions, shot through by sudden answers that—blazing with the quick light of new illuminations—reveal the
dancing shadows on every certainty. “I know what saying wants,” Pallant writes, but (the poet warns us) “Letters
burn beyond recognition, beyond the naming of a star.” —Laura Mullen

Cheryl Pallant is the author of several poetry books, chapbooks, a collaboratively written poetry book, and a
nonfiction book on dance. Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been anthologized and published in numerous
online and print journals in the United States and abroad. She has taught writing
and dance at University of Tulsa, Keimyung University (in S. Korea), University of
Richmond, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives in Richmond VA.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 118 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound ·

Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-085-9
$16 Buy it here or Buy it from Amazon
A Directional

Pssst, this way.

Was a book. A fire of bon proportions, flames kicking the sky, every worse, verse for the verse. Lumen
beyond the eye scat shattering of sparks. History hisses. Hers too. Lost ties to a cohesion of the vast.

Any ism of an ology, any sound searching its arch. Every letter raining fragments, a letter here, there, a
patch of them, phrased and unragged, placed in a home, even rooms and odd. In the beginning, or middle,
the word.

Came down. Came down diss. Bespoken, a mark upon my shirt.

Some insisted upon end, some upon begin fell to their knees, failed to believe no such shush as ash by
face, star by staying put upon this orb, no greed, no choice, birth by birth, or a belabored point.

Most wanted signs. Some signs wanted sun. Battle begun, rift between pauses, commas spliced, words
ripped apart, none sentenced to end without a questionable start. Whatever the signifier says. Whatever
mouths lip purse. The heat insisted, persisted from warmed earth and tempers inflamed. No such yes such
not much yes crush no gone yes go in their own way, wet eyed and dry, heart hardened and heard beyond
deny. Shuffling shoes.

Verbs fight for their enactment

and let go from the deep.

I knows what saying wants. Saying so said so, you’re it. Where fore art. Westward wind unwound ravel.
This episodic undertaker blood lechery. Words interest more than more. Seems slim writhing down the
pole. Seemingly porous. Simultaneously wrathful and in pace with humor. Sod and rain, period and begin
again. Knowing knows not what saying wants said. Letters burn beyond recognition, beyond the naming
of a star.

Point within a pattern. Exclaim amid a crowd. Scar tissue, all.

However we come to know.

13
Do not ask

Whether I started from a place of my choice or placed choice where I began.

Whether I said what I meant or silence delineated the way.
Whether nature brands the move of each cell or I behave naturally.
The decision affects me.
Sinking in mud and declining to shout is preferred to staining doors and puttying holes.
Whether it’s your turn or I missed mine.
Whether any book existed or scattered suggestive sparks.
Who knew what was said and disagreed
to be disagreeable.
Let us go together toward the letter.

14
Where the tongue roams and the buffalo

It is you. You look away. I look directly.

Me arrives on the spot no longer me and turns directions, not wall, not window, but an expansive
desert. No flights or trains, no blaring horn, no ticket unclaimed.

It is who. Who looks away in directly. A severing of ties, not silk or plastic. Unfabricated.

Whomever wants. Desire sets the word afire and thoughts adrift. Tenderness heats bodies
supine upon the sheet.

You who calls from the back door and front. Time to come home.

No one answers. Silence defies vowels longing for consonance.

15
Earning My Keep

Keep out. Writer at work. Ozone level high. Veracious tweaking prohibited. Code orange. Soft shoulders,
a head.

Place all valuables in the magnetic chamber. Pull yourself together. Stack limbs on the bedside table and
donate extras to the thrift store.

If you step outside yourself, who lets you back in? Watch what you say and who slips on speech and twists
an angle. Observations matter in a magma charter.

Let yourself down gently on the couch. Or bifurcate explosively at the beach among shells in the toss of
crashing waves.

Don’t pour oil into the rain gutter. Don’t behave like somebody else unless you are somebody else.
Lurking, like loitering, is a fineable offense. Always match the right shoe with the left.

I’m out of my mind but reserved a first-class express priority-seating ticket. The same for everyone. The
first order of logic tumbles into second place. What is essential, the lacunae of minds, generates collateral
damage, a synaptic link, a hormonal whomever.

16
Giving it over

Give it to yourself. Why train the wait? Why prevent the stream, dam, or stop it in vowel toward
tomorrow rings. Various vectors. Burgundy striations and strains of accord. Into settlement, a
sentiment from the deep. Let pressure go by, sail past and unsold.

Hear now! Step upright and wink at the game and its players. Lie under shade of tree or book, beam
and look.

The statements matter of fact face it. Listen for your turn
and page.

17
X

ielding to the unknown y

letting slip
when they pulled out the nails and refused to refill the pale
near the cornerstone of speak return with a poke no nods hear
nor subsequent withdrawals of hands and toes
resounding dread and rising from

who can tell the flow from the trees

let them say now
for the sake of beauty
which saves us from this vacancy

just say anything

bound to leave dew

each drop
drops away

18
 Springish 2012

Circles Matter
by Brian Lucas

A triple play. Brian Lucas— painter, poet, musician—eye, heart, mind. Written with a sense of unfolding mystery,
his voice on the page is sure in its tone, the ongoing quest and questioning is awake with profound and restless
detail. Out of the ballpark. I await more.

— David Meltzer

Shock is the awe of reading—“a fable folded into sea.” The elemental act of reading is physical as well as chemical,
a catalyst transforming the coastline of clouds into the graceful synaesthetic prosody of Circles Matter. The circles
that matter are lines of approach, the “Contents” describing 25 poems and 3 drawings, from “Awe” to “Sketch of
an Eclipse.” Brian Lucas’s elegant Circles Matter moves time, in time, “Never resting as ideal state.”

—Norma Cole

Brian Lucas was born in Visalia, California in 1970. His previous publications include Telepathic Bones (Berkeley
Neo-Baroque, 2010), Light House (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2006) and The Trustees in Spite of Themselves (Neko
Buildings, 1999). He contributed drawings to Force Fields (Hooke Press, 2010), a collaboration with Andrew Joron.
After several years living in Thailand, he now resides in Oakland, California where
he plays in the spontaneous music ensemble Cloud Shepherd.

Book Information:
· Paperback: 100 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-093-4
$16

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Awe

X is a lyre or mountain range

fable folded into sea

Choir of revolt

a miserable mirage

occupied by specters

launched from

a nether eye

covered with soot and bream

Corridor with memory end

letters and numbers

brand its walls

Here, the tree is silent

world reverence

lit ruins with

skulls in relief

having no roots spread

across cracked lightning

…vista replaced

by inner expanse

9
 Sight streams along

until starpoint is enacted

then dust but

what dust it is!

spooned into vertigos spiced

by intrusion

Seeing a face in every leaf

settled on a seed of syllables

spoken by the eye

my tongue gone missing

10
Nigh Road

The walk across a perfect furrow revealed its hidden slant as the valley
subsides into microtones.

A thicket housing skyline that promises to implode its particulars waited

for our approach.

Even particles have no say as we pace, take up space, string a wondering

through hell’s finest vowels prone to shift without error.

How can I stretch this moment disintegrating; it hardly resembles itself

in its transparency and is buttressed by tuneless regard.

Ebb from splendor, this submission.

For Gustaf Sobin

11
Glimpse

It contains but

cannot stay full

It has roots and leaves

yet is still barren

Sound or no sound

neither either nor or

If not now

then when

or will that won’t

be said

or better left undead

in the throat

12
Forth

palpitant layer

so expectant

delirious mark

on the spot

where wind

shines from a pioneer bud

erases allusion

to fragment

slender rare grasp

13
Born

Glint, glimmer not glamour

Into beyond-number and definition

Finally free of an elsewhere that

Resembles not knowing where I am

Where I was not I

But a pigeon in a book about penguins

Touched by the instant of ignition

14
Pins of Light

Temples for the unadorned exist at the edges

in the abyss outer limits unfold

15
 Springish 2012

Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Edited by Barbara Henning

Bobbie Louise Hawkins is a remarkable master of the witty understated prose sentence and writes in the lineage of
Barbara Pym and Jane Bowles; she is also a fabulous storyteller with a great ear for the "very thing": quip or bon
mot. She should be more discovered and read beyond her adoring fans at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics where Bobbie presided as a grande dame teacher and consummate genius performer of her work many
years. This collection is a terrific revival! —Anne Waldman

Bobbie Louise Hawkins has written more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and performance
monologues. She has performed her work at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, Bottom Line and Folk City in New
York City; at The Great American Music Hall and Intersection in San Francisco, as well as reading and performing
in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, Holland, and more. In England she worked with Apples and Snakes, read at
the Canterbury Festival and the Poetry Society. She was commissioned to write a one-hour play for Public Radio’s
“The Listening Ear,” and she has a record, with Rosalie Sorrels and Terry Garthwaite, Live At The Great American
Music Hall, available from Flying Fish. She was invited by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg to begin a prose
concentration in the writing program at Naropa University where she taught for twenty years.

Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry, as well
as a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her most recent books are Cities and
Memory (Chax Press), Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping
with the Dictionary and Other Works (Belladonna Series), Thirty Miles to
Rosebud (BlazeVOX) and My Autobiography (United Artists). In the nineties,
Barbara was the editor of Long News: In the Short Century. Barbara was born in
Detroit and moved to New York City in the early eighties. Professor Emerita at
Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, she continues to teach courses for
Naropa University, as well as LIU.

Book Information:
· Paperback: 404 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-100-9
· $18 Pre-Orders Welcome
W hen you ’ re stoned on g rass . . .

When you’re stoned on grass and drinking wine and it’s

really festive ... a lot of people, eight or ten, and everybody
feeling privileged and pleased to be there and to be so hap-
py ... I’m talking about yesterday afternoon and evening.
It was a birthday party. We were five of us waiting there
for the birthday boy and the others and the cake and they
all turned out to be about three hours late because of the
traffic ... so we sat talking and enjoying it ... a fire in the
fireplace ... and they did finally arrive; coming through the
door. It felt like old-time family Christmases, waiting for the
ones who lived farther away. And at some time during the
evening ... the dilemma on grass if there’s a lot of jazzy talk-
ing is to remember any of it later ... so this Sunday morning
I started remembering it with pleasure and thinking I prob-
ably talked too much but not really feeling worried about it
and there was a moment in it that suddenly I remember I
said ... feeling really high and delighted to get it out at last
... I don’t even know if it was true but it felt so accurate ...
we had been talking about school’s being narrower in some
inverse ratio—like—the longer you’re there the less it’s got
to tell you, and I remember saying the dues are worth it; all
that’s worth it ... and what suddenly came out that I’m re-
membering lying here in bed is—I said with all the certainty
and pleasure of revelation, “Nothing in my life ever hap-
pened that was as important to me as learning to read.”
And this morning I’m hung on remembering I said that
as if the statement itself has turned to metal and I can hold
it and gauge it; as if it were negotiable. A riffle like flip-cards
in my mind of—wouldn’t I pay it like a coin to have had this
different or that different, as if that feeling, and being so
definite saying it, really has to prove out.

My daddy was a good-looking woman chaser. He looked like

Clark Gable and darkened his moustache with my mother’s
Maybelline mascara in private so he was angry when he saw
the kid, me, standing in the bathroom door watching him.

B obbie louise hawkins 9

 Pictures of me then show me as a skinny, spooky kid.
I was really quiet. If I broke a dish I hid it under the most
complicated mess of crumpled paper I could make, fill-
ing the trash to hide my dangerous broken dish. He had
a lousy temper and I never ... I guess I never will get rid of
that secret self-protection I learned then.
They both were fighters, my mother and father. I re-
member him pulling the tablecloth off the table when his
breakfast didn’t suit him ... what a mess. And the time she
threw a meat cleaver after him and it stuck in the door jamb
inches from his head. He stopped and she says he turned
pale. But he left. Time and again he left and when he came
back (it’s called coming-back-home) after a few months or
whatever time, they’d get along until they didn’t.
We moved all over Texas, never more than six months
in a place (usually it was closer to three or four) and they
fought wherever they were together. So I never made any
friends that lasted and everything was various depending
on whether it was just my mother and me or whether my
father was there; and whether they were trying to run a res-
taurant together or whether my mother was working as a
waitress ... do you know that breakfast-shift, dinner-shift,
swing-shift vocabulary? ... or there was once when she
worked in a candy factory coating chocolates and putting
the identifying little swirl on top. What I remember most
often is that we were just the two of us living in a bedroom
in somebody’s house and my mother’s salary would run
ten dollars a week and the room plus board for me, and the
landlady’s looking after me, would run seven.
I don’t mean to make this sound pathetic.
At some time during that, when I was five, I started
school and I was a whiz. I went through the first and sec-
ond grade the first year and I went through the third and
fourth grade my second year and the third year when I was
seven I was in the fifth grade and broke my arm twice so I
got slowed down.
That would have been when we were in Mineral Wells.
My father was with us then and we were living in a three-

10 S elected P rose
room house with a yard and honeysuckle on the porch at
the bottom of a hill that was notable for a line of twenty-
foot-high block letters filled with regular light bulbs that in
the night glared out WELCOME toward the highway.
I loved that sign. It felt like being in church to stand at
the base of those letters.
Just to finish that part of the story the next year we
went to New Mexico and I went from being a whiz to passing
the sixth grade “conditionally.” I was a kind of half-dummy
thereafter. I don’t remember whether I had any notion of
what went wrong.
It feels like years of chaos.
My father finally truly left around then. We sat in my
Aunt Hannah’s house south of Albuquerque and he roamed
in the night around the house yelling Mae and my Uncle
Horace would yell back Mae doesn’t want you anymore, and
I’ve got a .22 here, and my father finally left for good.
But, while I feel like that has to be told somehow, these
few pages going the way they’ve gone, what I really want to
mention and it took me until yesterday to get it into the air,
is that all that time, and right from the first, reading was
my darling pleasure.

B obbie louise hawkins 11

 I ’ ve always been impressed . . .

I’ve always been impressed by the ability some people have

to remember everything, things from a long time back, the
name of a first grade teacher, whatever.
What I have instead is page after page of random notes
to remind me.
Miz VanArt with the gun under her pillow and bullet holes
in her door eating squabs in Mineral Wells
horny toads
the old man throwing his shoe through the window and
putting shoe polish in his nose
the lady with the crazy daughter
In a book like this, the “plot” is whether it can come
together at all. It might help to think of it as having gath-
ered more than having been written. It’s got about as much
plan to it as tumbleweeds blown against a fence and stuck
there.

12 S elected P rose
L ast O ctober . . .

Last October for the first time in more than twenty years I
went back to Texas.
I went from San Francisco to my mother’s house in Al-
buquerque and the next day about mid-morning the two
of us left there driving her three-year-old air-conditioned
Buick, headed east.
“We’re going to have the sun beating on our backs all the
way to Cline’s Corners,” she said. And, “Honey, get Mama a
cigarette. They’re in my purse. Do you want to drive?”
“Sure, if you want me to. You sure it won’t make you
nervous?”
“I’ll just get us through the city limits. I know how all
these freeways go.”
“Are you supposed to smoke cigarettes?” I handed her
the one I had lighted.
“Oh, I’m not supposed to but it won’t hurt anything.
Just, I’m not supposed to smoke so much that I get to
coughing. Any kind of a cough plays hell with my throat.”
When we were into the Sandias east of the city where
the freeway turns into a more old-fashioned highway she
pulled over and stopped to let us switch places.
“This car handles really well at fifty-five,” she told me.
“O.K. Mama.”
She began an instantaneous nesting in the midst of
Kleenex, brought out chewing gum, put her purse where
she could get it.
I put the seat back a couple of inches, checked the rear
view mirror, pulled out onto the tartop.
“You’re just used to those little cars that don’t have
much power,” she said. “This car’ll creep right up on you
if you don’t pay attention. You’ll think you’re just poking
along and if you look at the speedometer it’ll be on eighty
or ninety.”
She pulled a plastic package of slippers out of the glove

B obbie louise hawkins 13

 compartment and exchanged her high heeled shoes for
them. She clicked the radio on.
The radio has a way of acting like a messenger. They
play so many songs that if you’re in any kind of a particular
“catch” there’s bound to be one that starts rising up above
the rest like it’s got your name on it.
If the song is at all popular it seems like that’s the only
thing they’re playing after awhile.
Merle Haggard came in on us singing that song that
has the line in it Sing me back home, turn back the years
... That song was number one all the time we spent driving
around. We kept car company for just under three weeks,
me, Mama, and Merle. It was like old times.

14 S elected P rose
 Springish 2012

Transcendental Telemarketer
by Beth Copeland

Beth Copeland's Transcendental Telemarketer lifts language beyond its typical meanings, lets it "whirl like a spinning top
set loose on the sidewalk," until language and meaning split - the way the "I" does in the poems -- "I break in two:
one girl stays on the bed while the other one floats to the ceiling to watch." With rare prowess, Copeland crafts
these poems, delivering "the equator in that Ouija world," "death" as a "potent aphrodisiac."

—Debrah Morkun, author of The Ida Pingala

Copeland’s Transcendental Telemarketer contains beautiful lyrics of emotion and meditation, but it also contains rants
against war and violence, and all the while it swings us from the U.S. to Japan to Afghanistan, from Islam to
Buddhism to Christianity It’s compelling, playful, and well-crafted.

—William Allegrezza, author of Fragile Replacements

Beth Copeland lived in Japan, India, and North Carolina as a child. Her book Traveling Through Glass received
the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and have
received awards from Atlanta Review, North American Review, The North Carolina Poetry Society, and Peregrine.
Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an English instructor at Methodist University
in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She lives in a log cabin in the country with her husband, Phil Rech.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-088-0

$16

Buy it here or Buy it on Amazon here

Still Life W ith O ne Apple

From earliest memory: one apple

in a bowl predating speech, spores

of sunlight floating on air like pollen

from the garden of Hesperides.

In childhood I wanted everything in pairs,

animals entering Noah's ark two by two,

the symmetry of hand in hand,

bride and groom.

I thought the apple needed another apple

or at least the company of an orange or pear,

that the apple was lonely, that everything–

even an apple in a bowl–

had a soul. Was it wrong to believe

the apple could suffer and bleed,

to project my own needs

onto that fruit?

To believe only a membrane

of matter and speed

separates blood from stone

and bone from apple seed?

To see the apple as a symbol

of the universal soul,

as in Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Green

Apple on Black Plate,”

a study in simplicity?
Still Life With An Empty Bowl–

I ate the apple to make it whole.

13
 M isconception

It was like catching a cold.

If he coughed without covering his mouth,
if he sneezed, you could have his baby,
or so I believed

at the age of nine when I read the chapter

on reproduction in a medical text. I knew the facts
of life had nothing to do with storks and bees,
but I couldn’t figure out the mechanics

of sex, that tab A had to be inserted

into slot B like the cardboard figures cut
from the Rice Krispies box that always fell
apart when I tried to put them together.

Conception was a kind of weather

or photosynthesis: as leaves absorb sunlight
and turn green, I thought a man’s floating spores
could penetrate a woman’s pores,

that they could be on opposite sides of the room

just looking at each other or looking out the window.
One could be reading the newspaper and the other
playing Heart and Soul on the piano

when, WHAM, BAM, sperm and egg collide

and nine months later she becomes a mother.
I thought the microscopic sperm
could pass like germs from unwashed hands

contaminate a door knob, spoon or drinking glass,

or as Casper
floated through brick walls
on Saturday morning cartoons, believing

a wife could receive her husband’s seed

like milkweed sown from the pod,
that every birth was a miracle, a gift from God,
that all you need is love.

14
Learning to Pray

I was told to close my eyes

and fold my hands like an unopened book.

I was not supposed to look

but sometimes I peeked

through downcast eyes

at steepled fingertips,

the double doors of thumbs

that opened and shut on all the people

in the sanctuary of palms.

After we read the one hundredth Psalm,

the preacher said a prayer.

Amen.

I unfolded my hands,
and the church disappeared.

How many years did it take me to learn

what the restless child knew then?

Prayer isn’t reverence in our hearts.

It’s in our hands.

15
 Confession

I stole another woman’s only scarf–

No, I didn’t. I stole the line above to lead to the next
line, swiped like the challis scarf

lost in a church parking lot.

It was black with a blue-and-white geometric print
like tiny Turkish tiles.

One Sunday I looked up from prayer

and an old woman in the pew in front of me
was wearing my scarf!

Because it had been given to me

by someone I loved, I couldn’t let it pass,
so after church, I said, “You’re wearing

my scarf,” and she said, “Someone found it

and said it looked like mine,” adding insult to injury
since I didn’t think my beautiful scarf

looked like it would belong to

a woman wearing Hush Puppy shoes and a Brillo-pad
hairdo. “But it’s not yours,” I said.

“It’s mine,” so she took it off,

handing it over as if she were giving me a gift
when the scarf had been mine to begin with.

I still wear it, especially

on cold mornings when I need to wrap something warm
and familiar around my neck.

That happened many years ago

when I still went to church and still believed
I was lost and needed God to find me.

16
M y Life as a Slut

Age 6: A boy finds a penny on the playground. He says he’ll give it to me if I go

in a closet, take off all my clothes, and let him look. My sister says, “Don’t,” but
I do it, anyway.

Age 21: My mother calls me a “harlot,” “Jezebel,” and “strumpet” after I stay
out all night with my boyfriend. I roll my eyes and say, “If we’re going to have
this conversation, at least update your vocabulary. The word is ‘slut.’”

Age 16: A teacher tells me to kneel in the girls’ bathroom. Am I supposed to pray
for forgiveness? I get sent home from school because my skirt doesn’t touch the
floor.

Age 27: I walk down the aisle in an off-white satin dress. It’s snowing, and the
next day I lose my voice.

Age 20: I have sex with three different men in one week. I write their names on
my calendar in wisteria-blue ink.

Age 10: At recess I tell Tommy Faircloth I’m going to be a stripper when I grow
up. Tommy tattles to the teacher, who scolds him and says I’m a good girl. I
would never say a terrible thing like that.

Age 32: A man at my college reunion tells me a lot of other girls in our class
were sluttier than I was. I feel like a failure.

Age 23: I fall in love with a Vietnam vet who plays guitar and writes bad poetry. I
sleep with him on the first date. He dumps me for a frumpy girl who waits until
the second date.

Age 9: I’m walking down the sidewalk wearing short-shorts, and a teenage boy
leans out a car window and yells, “Call me when you’re 16!”

Age 30: I buy a bar of Saints and Sinners soap in New Orleans. My husband says
it’s a rip-off.

Age 18: I get drunk at a party and lose my virginity. The next morning hot water
runs down my thighs in a stream of silver and blood.

Age 5: I’m afraid of dogs, strangers, and the dark. Shadows cast by tree branches
and leaves on the bedroom wall look like the devil’s face. Do I hear footsteps in
the stairwell? I’m afraid I‘ll die in my sleep. I know I’m going to Hell.

17
 Springish 2012

Acta Biographia

Amy Whatever

Amy writes poetry and when not at her home works at the LA Coroners office washing cadavers before and after
autopsy. Her goal is to clean the body and soul before they become death. She lives alone in West Hollywood with a
ceramic phrenology skull to keep her company while she watches the Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of Where
Ever, and Jeopardy. She wishes she could grow a mustache and walk the world as two people holding hands,
awkwardly. Her forthcoming debut book, Go Fuck Yourself off a Cliff, is due out in the Fall from SugarVenom.

Andrew Hamilton

Andrew Kuo

Austen Roye

Born and currently residing in Cleburne, Texas, a small town just south of the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Twenty-three
years old, author of numerous poetry collections, two novels and a series of creative non-fiction
collections. Previously published numerous pieces through Chrysalis Press, Vagabondage Press, Lummox Press and
The Battered Suitcase, among other independent literary magazines. Held jobs as a projectionist, waiter, copy boy,
grocery bagger, bookseller and bank teller. I work, drink and write. Big fan of independent presses, street art,
bookshops and DIY work ethics.

Autumn McClintock

Autumn McClintock lives in Philadelphia where she works at the public library and spends much of her spare time
baking bread and listening to baseball on the radio. Her poems have been published most recently in SNReview,
Blood Lotus, Apiary, and juked, and her essay entitled "Responsible for Death" will appear in the anthology The Poet's
Sourcebook, due out from Autumn House Press (no relation) next year.
Billy Cancel

Billy Cancel's work has recently appeared in Shampoo, Glitterpony & Cricket Online Review. He co-runs Hidden
House Press. A collection The Autobiography Of Shrewd Phil was published by Blue & Yellow Dog Press last year.
Sound poems, visual shorts, & other aberrations can be found at www.billycancel.com
http://www.billycancel.com/

Brent Holt

Brent Holt is a father by night and by day a subordinate in a social services office. Originally from the Pacific NW,
he is now sequestered in Minneapolis, MN. His stories have appeared online in The Adirondack Review,
amphibi.us <http://amphibi.us> , and Ascent Aspirations.

Bruno Casanova

Bruno Casanova is a short story writer. He studied at Manhattanville College and the University of Pennsylvania.
His stories have been published in the literary magazines in the US and abroad. His first short story collection
received excellent reviews. He lives in New York City

C. Davis Fogg

C. Marie Runyan

Carlo Matos

Carlo Matos is an Azorean-American poet and fiction writer. He has published in various journals and anthologies
like BlazeVOX, Arsenic Lobster, 5x5, Ragazine, kill author, DIAGRAM, The Mad Hatters' Review, narrative (dis)continuities
and the Gavea Book of Portuguese-American Poetry, among others. He is the author of A School for Fishermen (BrickHouse
Books), Counting Sheep Till Doomsday (BlazeVOX Books) and Ibsen's Foreign Contagion (Academica Press). He currently
lives in Chicago, IL where he teaches English at the City Colleges of Chicago by day and is a cage fighter by
night. After hours he can be found at Chicago’s Poetry Bordello entertaining clients.
Celia Laskey

Celia Laskey was raised in Brunswick, Maine. She attended Emerson College, and has had work published in The
Fiction Circus. She currently works as a copywriter at an advertising agency and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and
two cats. Her favorite cheese is every cheese.

Christopher Brownsword

Christopher Brownsword was born in Sheffield, England in the early 1980s. His first collection of poetry 'Icarus
was Right!' was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. A ltd edition handbound booklet titled 'The Eternally
Sucking Gorge of the Void' has recently been published by Frequency 13 (contact [email protected] for more
info).

Chuck Richardson

Chuck Richardson is the author of two novels, Smoke and So  It  Seams, and an e-book, Dreamlands:  3  Fictions,
all from BlazeVox[books]. His short-fiction and poetry have appeared in Thieves Jargon, eccolinguistics,
Reconfigurations,  Atticus Review,  Blood Lotus Journal and elsewhere. He lives in Western New York.

D. W. Hey

D.W. Hey is a poet, author, and editor from Long Island, NY. Most recently, his work has also appeared in the on-
line literary magazine, Danse Macabre He is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of and/or, an international print
journal of experimental literature and art.

Daniel Y. Harris

Daniel Y. Harris is the author of Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Cervena Barva Press, 2012), Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken
Levered Tongue (with Adam Shechter, Cervena Barva Press, 2010; picked by The Jewish Forward as one of the 5 most
important Jewish poetry books of 2010) and Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009). He is a three-
time Pushcart Prize nominee. Some of his poetry, experimental writing, art, and essays have been published in
BlazeVOX, Denver Quarterly, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, The New York Quarterly, In Posse Review, The Pedestal
Magazine, Poetry Magazine.com and Poetry Salzburg Review. His website is www.danielyharris.com.

Dayna Patterson
Don Cozzette

Elena Botts

Elena grew up in Maryland, and currently lives in Northern Virginia. She is still attending school. She likes to run.
And write. She's been published many times in the past year.

Eve Maher

Eve Maher is a current undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is currently working
toward degrees in Literary Studies and Speech-Language Pathology. Eve is an ethusiast of many things, such as
cephalopods, punk rock, and young adult fiction, but mostly she loves the English launguage. This is her first
time being published.

Felino A. Soriano

Felino A. Soriano has authored 51 collections of poetry, including Of oscillating fathoms these nonverbal chants (Argotist
Ebooks, 2012), Analyzed Depictions (white sky books, 2012) and Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (Desperanto,
2011). He publishes the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. His work finds foundation in
philosophical studies and connection to various idioms of jazz music. He lives in California with his wife and family
and is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. For further information,
please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.

Gareth Lee

Gareth Lee holds an MFA from Brown University. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Columbia
Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, EOAGH, Kenyon Review Online, Northwest Review, and other journals.

henry 7. reneau, jr.

henry 7. reneau, jr. has been published in various journals/anthologies, among them, Nameless Magazine; Subliminal
Interiors Literary Arts Magazine; The Chaffey Review; The View From Here; FOLLY Magazine; Entering; Tule Review;
BlazeVOX; Black Heart Magazine; Forty Ounce Bachelors; Suisun Valley Review; and Tidal Basin Review. He has also self-
published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance. His favorite things are Rottweilers, books relevant to
a concealed, but actual, reality, his “fixie,” and Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Ivan de Monbrison

Jacob Reber

Jason Stocks

John Miatech

John Miatech, poet, teacher and writer, lives in Forestville, California, in redwood country. He began writing poetry
in high school in 1969 when introduced by a friend to the works of Robert Bly. He has had the good fortune to
have worked with many poets in workshops over the years, including Mr. Bly, William Stafford, Etheridge Knight
and Simon Ortiz, among many others, helping him shape his work. John’s third volume of poems; What the Wind
Says, has just been released by AuthorHouse. Previously, he has been published in several poetry journals and has
written two self published volumes of poetry; Things to Hope For and Waiting for Thunder. John is the 2012 poetry
award winner at the SF Writer's Conference.

Juliana Grace

Ms. Grace is native to the Washington, D.C. area, but now makes her home in the gothic paradise of Baltimore
City. Long fascinated with art and artifice, she tutors writing at an art college and is a cerebral shop girl at a dress
boutique in town. She lives alone with two cats and a keyboard. Her inspirations include hardcore, crust, and proto-
punk, Frank Zappa, and [adultswim].

Juliana M Sartor
Kate Weinberg

Born and raised in exotic Baltimore, MD, Kate trained as an actor in Chicago before moving to Brooklyn, NY, and
then leaving Brooklyn, NY to walk across the north of Spain and try her hand at farming, and then returning to
Brooklyn, NY, where she currently resides, for now. She's written two young adult novels (under a nom de plume),
and has other work in the awesome Brooklyn literary journal, Armchair/Shotgun, and a forthcoming story
collection, Cornered. She would really like to travel the whole world in a hot air balloon, but, then again, who
wouldn't?

Katherine Arsenault

Lauren R. Gay

Lauren Rebecca Gay was born in Buffalo, NY in her parents’ apartment on Traymore Ave. She works beneath
education and in the arts. Her work is reaching larger and larger audiences by others’ and her own accord. Ms. Gay
birthed a press, POPPress. It is a zygote. Her intention is to work sustainably among fellows; planting gardens,
writing poems, drawing pictures. Buffalo is her home. She graduated with a b.s. and is certified to teach the English
Language Arts. She appreciates AAVE and the right to make decisions as a woman. Her goal is to make and survive
and make the survival of others more full of peace. She is one quarter of a century and her dog's name is Lincoln.

Liz Mariani

Luca Penne

Luca Penne lives in New Hampshire and this summer is building several large barns for horse people. His work has
appeared in many journals, including 2River View, Furnace, Prose Poem Project. etc,

Marisa Malone

Marisa Malone is from Reno NV. But currently lives in Olympia WA. She attends the Evergreen State College and
has self-published two chapbooks entitled “Lost Among These Wonderings” (available through
msvalerieparkdistro.com) and “Poetry For Other Eyes”.
Mark Cunningham

Mark Cunningham has a new book, Helicotremors, out from Otoliths. Among his earlier books are two from
BlazeVOX: 71 Leaves (an e-book) and specimens.

Matthew Dennis

Matthew Dennis grew up around Boston, graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature from New England
College in New Hampshire and then came back to work in Boston. He works a regular job and wishes he had more
time to write but makes do. He has been writing poems for 20 years and hopes to continue to do so.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Nicholas Alexander Hayes is the author of the books NIV: 39 & 27 (BlazeVox Books, 2009) and Metastaesthetics
(Atropos Press, 2012). His essay on the gay pulp novelist Jay Greene is forthcoming in the anthology 1960s Gay Pulp
Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage (University of Massachusetts Press). Along with Terri Griffith, he has composed a
book of contemporary retellings of Greek myths.

Patrick Chapman

Penelope L. Mace

After a long hiatus from writing during which she raised children and worked in health care, Penelope L. Mace is
now completing an historical novel set during the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. She has published short fiction
and poetry in numerous literary journals, on line and print such as "Moon Milk Review" and "Iconoclast." In
addition to writing and reading, she enjoys the delight of helping to care for her two granddaughters, Ruby Jean
and Alexis Laura. She lives outside of Minneapolis, MN.

Peter Burghardt

Peter Burghardt lives in Oakland, California, and works as a poetry editor for Omnidawn
Publishing. He recently received his MFA in poetry from Saint Mary's College, where he also edited MARY: A
Journal of New Writing.
Philip Lewis

Born in Atlanta and raised just outside Washington, D.C., Philip Lewis graduated from Howard University in 1992.
His first book, Life of Death, was published by Fiction Collective in 1993. He has worked as a dishwasher in D.C., a
temp in New York City and Rockville, Maryland; with these earnings he was able to get lost in Egypt, Morocco,
Greece, Rio de Janeiro, Romania, Istanbul, Damascus, Havana, among other places. He is currently “at large,” in his
own words.

Riya Aarini

Riya is a prolific writer with a passion for theater in all its glory--its triumphs and mega-failures, its bittersweet
endings and hopeful starts!

Ryan Hilary

The questionable writer of these dubious poems is an Irish transplant to New York City. He was educated at Vassar
College and Union Theological Seminary in New York. He has been published in print by Aquirelle Poets Amongst
Us III and online at junklit and 40oz Bachelors. He has publications pending The Wilderness Review (poetry) and The
Midway Review (fiction). He hates writing (or boasting, I suppose) about himself in the third person and is just
grateful that people other than his partner and mommy want to read his work.

Ryan Stechler

Originally from Massachusetts, Ryan Stechler is a graduate from the MFA program at NYU. He likes a good red
ale, trivia night, and New York City. He dislikes light beer, when trivia night centers around TV and Movies, and
New York sports teams. His poetry has also appeared in Jacket and West 10th.

Sarah Levine

Sarah Levine recently received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Work has been published in NAP, decomP,
and Publishing Genius.

Sarah Lilius

Sarah Lilius currently lives in Arlington, VA where she is a stay-at-home mother. Some of the journals her work has
appeared in are the Denver Quarterly, the Marlboro Review, Court Green, and Pulse Literary Journal.
Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Sarah Ruth Jacobs is currently a Writing Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch
College and a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her writing
has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Brooklyn Rail, The Mississippi Review, and Free Verse. She is also the
Managing Editor of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy <http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/> .

Scott Abels

These poems are taken from a manuscript titled New City, from which poems have also appeared (or are
forthcoming) with EOAGH, Forklift, Ohio, Lo-Ball, Juked, H_NGM_N, Sixth Finch, RealPoetik, DIAGRAM, Strange
Machine, Alice Blue, Raft, Poets for Living Waters, Scud Magazine, LOCUSPOINT, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, InDigest,
LEVELER, inter/rupture, Stoked Journal, M.I.A. Anthology, West Wind Review, Tinfish, Beard of Bees Press (as a
chapbook), and Lame House Press (as a postcard poem).

Simon Perchik

Tess Joyce

Tess Joyce's poems were recently published in poetry magazines Ditch, Four and Twenty, Anatomy and Etymology
and Phantom Kangaroo. In 2009 a collection of her poetry was published in India; the book was a collaboration
with an Indian writer. She is a British writer but currently lives with her husband in Indonesia. In 2011 she was the
communications officer for Dr Galdikas's organisation, Orangutan Foundation International in Kalimantan and
wrote articles for the website. She recently contributed to an International Poetry event in Indonesia, What is Poetry,
in a small talk with a focus on environmentalism and poetry.

Tom Bridger
Vernon Frazer

Vernon Frazer most recent books of poetry are Unsettled Music and T(exto)-V(isual) Poetry. Enigmatic Ink has
published Frazer’s new novel, Field Reporting. Frazer’s web site is http://www.vernonfrazer.
<http://vernonfrazer.com./> net. Bellicose Warbling, the blog that updates his web page, can be read at
http://bellicosewarbling.blogspot.com <http://bellicosewarbling.blogspot.com> /, His work may also be viewed
art Scribd.com <http://Scribd.com> and on YouTube. Frazer is married.

William L. Alton