Maxwell Baumbach

 

Too Dark for Daylight

I am sorry
Mr. Sun

I know
you are only trying
to do your job

hear me out
please

no one thought to tell me
that he was dying

so if you will excuse me
I am going to close the blinds
and close my eyes
because the thoughts
that circle through my brain
like an abandoned carousel
are too dark for daylight

Left and New

I saw him
two days ago
but now
he is dead

I wonder
what they do
to his corpse
as they prepare it

what is left
of what used to be him
and what is new
that was not him before

I also wonder
what is left
of me


CP

Maxwell Baumbach is a poet from Elmhurst, IL. He edits Heavy Hands Ink, has a youtube channel (Youtube.com/MaxwellThePoet), and likes sports. His first chapbook, Suburban Rhythm, was recently published by cc&d through Scars Publications. It is available as a free read.

Adam Palumbo

HOW TO BE A BODY

There’s no place like here, this massive legume. Smell the wingéd cold and the wretched streets and the sun that shines through you like a rosy bloom. Don’t feel entitled to anything, because you’re not. For God’s sake (and yours) don’t get caught in the caul.

The fuzzy feeling behind your eyes will sharpen into consciousness, like a tooth. Intellect will seize you—have faith also. Its steep slope gets more treacherous, certainly, but more wondrous for the danger.

Warm yourself by the embers of language. Feed them until they conflagrate and rage, and with them feed the breath of your form. Embrace your whiskey slurs, dammit. They will teach you to see through your blindness.

Release your hope for a painless life. You will fail. You will have conversations with the terror of culpability, but do not fear. Remember what it would impoverish you to forget.

Look at the blue velvet of her eyes. Carry it with you always, even when you dream you’re alone in the world.

At least once jump into the sea, that nitrogenous bath at the border of our comprehension. Consider the eddies of existence that have preempted yours, but remember that every problem in this world has flowed from human error.

Become dust. Exist in songs of being.

HAZELWOOD

He used to walk,
as a child,
with his mother
down the sunny lane.
Together they would walk
together, on their afternoon expeditions
to the wonderfully radiant field.
And there, in the middle,
the tractor.

He had never seen it run.
In fact, its huge iron wheels
swore their testimony of rust—
it had not run
since before his mother was a girl
herself,
when it
winnowed the bright grain of the lonely field
in the heavy summer sun.

He had never seen it run.
It stood like a friendless lion,
alone,
growing darker and weaker with age.
His small feet found the grooves
in the cogs
of the dilapidated wheels
and he hoisted
himself
into the driver’s seat
and brought the old beast
back to life
to the tune of his boyish mind
and the rumblings of his happy little mouth.

He used to walk,
as a child,
with his mother
down the sunny lane.

Now,
the furious cars fly past,
slapping the air in their whizzing way,
eating the golden field
one forlorn lane at a time.


CP

Adam Palumbo is a senior English/Creative Writing major at the University of Richmond, where he won the 2010 Margaret Haley Carpenter award for Poetry. He has had poetry reviews published at The Rumpus and PANK.

Ray Scanlon

 

Sting

Train pulls out; Cheryl's off to Boston. A guy approaches my car. “I just came in from Kansas City...” “A likely story,” I interrupt, not yet knowing how true. He's in shorts, hiking boots, beat flannel shirt. Gigantic pack, bedroll below, bandanna. “I'm going to Lowell; can you help me with train fare?” Ahh. His accent's not from here. He's wicked plausible. “Where Jack Kerouac was from.” I give him the eight bucks.

Get a Life

At the Dunkin' Donuts there's a muted television. To compensate there's Elvis on the Muzak, three chatty teen-age girls, and Spanish on a cell phone; cell phones by definition are always too freaking loud. Behind me there's a robust trade in ice, caffeine, and fat calories. I'm composing haiku in my head, but lucky for me the symptoms are subtle and misleading. Anyone who notices is too polite to take me to task.


CP

Ray Scanlon lives in Massachusetts. He's paid attention for about fifteen minutes during the last 60 years. His web site is http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.

Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz

Home on Sunday Morning

It is not guilt you see in your father’s eyes when you enter the kitchen and he looks at you. No regret or whatever it is you’re expecting to be there. Tiptoe in!—you don’t want to disturb him—but he’s close to sober. Showered, freshly shaved. The solemn look on his face as he thoughtfully raises the coffee cup to his lips and looks, once, at you standing in the doorway. Last night the door opening to your bedroom and you thought it was your mother, crawling in afterwards, as she always did, checking to see if you’d survived the blows to her head, the vicious words tearing at your hearts, but your doll house fell—someone stumbling in the darkness—the plastic family and their furniture spilling to the floor. Through the sliver of light from the hall, you could hear her whimpering in their room. And later you thought better than let your whimpering join chorus, remembering your mother’s weekly chant: He was just drunk, he didn’t mean it. And you tell yourself this. Now. For no reason. Because nothing happened. You can see that in your father’s eyes. This is what you tell yourself.

CP

Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz lives in the desert. She blogs about her life at gwennotes.blogspot.com and about her writing life at wwwonewriter.blogspot.com.

Howie Good

PRISONERS OF LOVE

You signed the confession
they stuck in your hand,

at dusk the silhouettes
of armed guards

atop the cell-block wall.
Visiting day I bring you

a pair of dancing mice.
All the candles are burning

We watch baseball on TV
 and cry at triples.

CP

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of the  poetry collection, Lovesick (2009). His second full-length collection, Heart With a Dirty Windshield, has been published by BeWrite Books.

J. Bradley

 

Exhibition

I ignore the feedback from the hearing aid in Jennifer's left ear as we lay on my bed, naked and ragged.  She nestles into the trench between my torso and right arm.

“I met this guy who's into me, into me into me, but he wants monogamy.  I'm not wired for that.  You might meet him if you come to the paint party this weekend.”  Jennifer's thumb reaches for her empty ring finger; I just trained mine to stop doing that.

I sigh, place my hands beneath the back of my head.  “I took someone out last weekend, someone I knew here and there for five years.  We kept running into each other at shows and we're finally single at the same time.  I can't stop thinking about her and I want to see where things go.  I'm making Cantonese at her place for her this weekend so I can't make it.  I hope you understand.”  I forget what it's like to be a museum of smiles; I keep it under wraps with the tarp of if's.

“I hope it works out for you.”  Jennifer cuddles a little harder, her hand grazing my Northeastern halogen skin; this is the most open, honest relationship I've ever had.

CP

J. Bradley is the author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009) and the author of the flash fiction chapbook The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You Is A Robot (Safety Third Enterprises, 2010). He is the Interview Editor of PANK and lives at iheartfailure.net.

Christian Bell

 

Blackened Catfish

I ordered the blackened catfish as they ripped the neon cactus and Stetson from the wall. Background sounds of crashing glass, chopping wood. A bulldozer’s rumble as my meal arrived, sawdust snowing down. Excellent as ever, I told the hardhatted waiter, one hand a forkful of fish, black beans and rice, the other a dark beer. Too bad you’re closing—where will I go for southwestern dining?

A wrecking ball shattered the wall, swung overhead. I looked around at the memories. The bar, devoid of liquor bottles and stools, where I held court with friends on weekends. One table where I proposed but was denied; another that hosted two first dates—both covered in debris. The front steps, now just broken bricks, where I tripped the first time in.

I ate slowly, savoring this last meal, as the ceiling became a cloudless sky. Brick and wood pieces drizzled down. Finishing the last bites, I asked about dessert. You’ve been a solid patron over the years, the waiter said, but now we must depart.

So I paid and left, as the last pieces rained down, the crew outside looking at me as if I were a funeral mourner. Progress, a man in hardhat said as I walked by. Hardly, I mumbled. The crumbled structure burped a cloud of dust. I watched, the beer and catfish tastes buzzing in my mouth, soon to fade away.

CP

Christian Bell lives near Baltimore. His fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Skive Magazine, rumble, JMWW Quarterly, among others. He blogs at imnotemilioestevez.blogspot.com.

Michael Estabrook

 

Any Other Way

The rain plinks mercilessly
against the bedroom windows.
I hope she isn't getting all wet
sleeping out there in that tent,
camping with her friends
in the Cape Cod dunes.
I hope she isn't
getting chilled to the bone
when the sun goes down
and the winds whip in off
the mercilessly churning ocean.
"I missed you today,"
she says to me on the phone,
lying alone on her air mattress
in her tent. I respond,
"I wish I were lying next to you right now."
But she doesn't hear me.
"If you were here," she says,
I know you would've walked my bike
up the hills for me today
and I wouldn't have to be so tired."
"Of course I would have," I say,
then think back all those years
ago to high school, to that time
when she sprained a tendon in her leg,
in her precious beautiful leg,
and couldn't walk and I gallantly
carried her from room to room
in her house. Yes, I have been there
for her a long long time and wouldn't
have wanted it any other way.

CP

Michael Estabrook has published chapbooks and appeared in various magazines through the years, but he is still searching for that perfect poem. Right now he is looking for it in his wife and says if it's anywhere, that's where it will be.

Justin Hyde

 

there goes the big Brazilian

five years ago
he was
in work release
for breaking
into storage units
to support
a heroin addiction.

2am
and 4am count
i'd often find him
upright
in his bunk
rocking slowly
back and forth
like a metronome.

said
he started doing it
as a kid
in his
third or fourth
foster home.

silly
i know
silly thing
for a grown man
to do,
is what
he told me
back then.

lanky
like a cat.

there he goes
down Crocker
past the
coffee shop window
in a
light rain.

this dude in my bed

three foot six
forty two pounds
crawling over me
like a mountain goat
daddy-daddy
time to wake up daddy
he says in that coy
sing song
that torques a smile
out of the deepest hangover
i'll wake you up punk
i say
gathering him in a bear hug
playfully chewing his ear
your breath smells like dog poop daddy
well your breath smells like iguana poop
nu-uh your breath smells like buffalo pee
speaking of pee
how about you go potty
he uses my razor
to reach the light switch
slide over mortimer
i say
as we both straddle the thing
swords daddy
yellow swords he says
swinging wildly
right down
my leg.

the place-mat at the vietnamese restaurant

informed me
my oriental zodiac
is the horse

it went on
expostulating
about my
psychological makeup

the final
sentence of which
has stuck
with me
three days now:

you need people,
it said
in simple
5point
font.

i'm not sure
why it
took me
thirty-two years
and a place-mat
to fully realize
a fundamental sickness
in me.

i do
need people.
i've been denying it
from a
young age

throwing them off
as if
letting people in
was a weakness.

this is
a revelation
worth noting

something to
bounce off a
trusted friend.

but of course
tonight
on the porch
during a rainstorm

i have no one
to tell it to
but this
bottle of beer.


CP

Justin Hyde lives in Iowa where he works with criminals.

Tyler Bigney

 

Spiders

The spiders living,
making babies on your ceiling
are helpless
to my force and
Kerouac’s Desolation Angels,
(the only Kerouac I didn’t care for)
as you lay on the bed
crying,
sobbing
that you missed your period.

Watching my grandmother smoke out of a window

Somewhere in Russia,
on a train traveling east,
my grandmother pries open
a window
with her wrinkled hands,
and asks me to be
the look out.

“What am I looking out for?”

“People,” she says,
lighting a cigarette.

I watch as the skin on her cheeks
sinks in,
holding the smoke
as she closes her eyes.

I watch as she stretches
to tiptoes
breathing out
flicks the burning
cigarette
out the window
sinks back into her seat
and smiles
as if the world outside
does not exist.


CP

Tyler Bigney lives in Nova Scotia. His short stories, poems, and prose have appeared in Poetry New Zealand, Nerve Cowboy, Iodine Poetry Journal, Underground Voices, among others.

Irena Pasvinter

 

Bigger than Life

How many years have we been doing this already?
It must be the fourth. Four years since you are not here.
Once a year we get together to drive to the cemetery -
Your wife, your grandson and we family friends.
The sun is ruthless, the air is melting with heat,
June in the Promised Land is always the same.
Your grave is in the front row in the corner,
With Russian-like surname in black Hebrew letters.

We place our bouquets on a gravestone in a colorful heap
And wait for your wife to release her grip on the stone.
We don't pray and don't say Kaddish - we never prayed,
So why should we start today? It would be insincere.
She says we can leave now, everyone picks a small stone
To put on the grave. The sun burns us farewell, it has no mercy.

We drive back to your wife's tiny place and have a feast.
She puts a glass for you on the table, with Cognac,
Covered by a small slice of black bread.
We drink to your memory a couple of times,
Then for everybody's well being.
One would expect us to talk about you, but we don't.
We talk about everything else, mostly.
I know why I only let small short memories out.
If I will start talking honestly I will cry,
I will be a mess, that's for sure.

I think I was ten when I first saw your smile,
First stared open-eyed while you told your stories,
First fell in silent love with you forever.
You are still bigger than life, thirty years later.

CP

Irena Pasvinter earns a living by software engineering and happiness by writing. Several of her poems have appeared in different corners of the Internet.