I hadn’t visited in years.

This cemetery where once I cowered

in a Brownie uniform,

covered my ears at those Memorial Day

cannon blast salutes.  Where

I come now with my son and my mother,

to water the graves.

 

Marc pumps to fill the jug,

sloshes water that stains the headstones dark,

careful so as not to drown

the geraniums and bleeding hearts.

My mother is glad this place does not allow

plastic flowers, or grave rubbings to dull the stones.

 

One set of grandparents at the left

another at the right, dates and names

so neatly bring closure

to what has not really ended, to what I feel

moving through my mother, through me, through my child—

all those swirling helixes.

We water, yet again.

 

My mother will not answer as to her preferences

for a final resting place—she will leave that, she says,

to her survivors.  She turns away, as if she finds the subject too morbid,

as if I have tread on forbidden ground.

Here in this place, where it would seem age should draw us closer

through our bones’ own longing to return to earth.

My mother  makes this pilgrimage  reluctantly, in duty, in sadness,

full with too many reminders of all that has been lost.

 

Only the young can come here to rejoice.

I remember how my brother and I would beg

to call upon our grandfather’s grave as if

the very marrow below the earth

spun into our own cells would summon us,

as it calls my child, who spins round as if tethered.

We too, came closer then, without fear,

to step into that dance.

---

MEG J. PETERSEN is a writer and a teacher of writing at Plymouth State University, where she directs the National Writing Project in New Hampshire. She is currently in Santo Domingo on a Fulbright scholarship working with Dominican teachers on teaching writing. Her poems have won prizes with the New England Association of Teachers of English and the Seacoast Writers Association. She was named as a feature poet by the New Hampshire Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in Concrete Wolf, Entelechy International: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, Garden Lane, English Journal, The Leaflet, The International Journal for Teaching Writing and other publications.

Grey morning churned fog

along my eyes’ edges, a soupy slough

of muddy memories; our gazes met like Florida’s horizon,

mine: brown Everglades water,

his: blue Everglades sky.

The heat stroke shed details like discarded feathers,

sucked deep by swamp.

 

At Shark Valley, we biked 15 miles

and ran out of water halfway.  Ethan

laid me, delirious, by the side of the trail,

his sawgrass hair spreading cloudy tendrils into the air.

I closed my eyes, smelled mud and musk,

saw red tracks behind my eyelids,

heard ibises taking flight.

 

I woke surrounded by the white walls

of Heaven’s gift shop, clutching a tiny bell:

the clay bead clinked against the ceramic dome,

cool in my flushed hands.

At the ring, Ethan kneeled, eye-to-eye, mud-to-sky,

and promised I’d recover.

White ibis wings sprouted from his back.

 

Grey afternoon churned fog

along my eyes’ edges; my swamp spirit

with the glance of Everglades sky

trembled on lanky, just-hatched legs

as we piggy-backed across the doorframe

towards the car, my final

rest.

---

CASSIE HOTTENSTEIN graduated from the University of North Florida with a bachelor’s in English and a minor in creative writing and writing studies. Her other work has appeared in PULP, Perversion Magazine, The Talon Review, Exothorpe, and The Tampa Review Online. She now lives in the Boulder, Colorado area with her husband and two pet rats.

Hera blinded the old man

when he said women

enjoyed sex more than men.

 

Zeus made the old man

a prophet, a gift to balance

his wife’s rage.

 

And Hera doubled her

daughters’ pleasure

on the lover’s couch—

 

her gift in a world where

sorrow and pain were

blamed on one woman’s folly.

 

She was curious, brave

when she opened

the forbidden box.  Every evil

 

flew out, but every good

now had a name.  She wasn’t

evil but deserved to be

 

celebrated, her daughters

dancing for a woman

not a God.

---

WILLIAM “CHIP” MILLER is a poet and children’s author living in New Orleans. His poems have receently beeen accepted by Aji, Ank Sanh, Nebo, The Fredericksburg Literary Magazine, The Hollins Critic and Canyon Voices.

 

 

1

Every American knows the ghost of Coney Island

we rarely though

contemplate

from this altitude

Icarus in the henhouse

 

2

Youth exists in the perpetual recognition of gravity

without consequence

the inhalation

the wingless

rotation

Ferris wheel mirage

spokes snowing white rust

over fields of the quieted midway

 

3

The only difference

between flight and falling

is distance

a rat’s labyrinth is a puzzle from above

I can see it

a ticking two dimensional clock

wound once and imperceptibly beginning to slow

 

4

The same silver watch

they give to retired racehorses

they will give you

the world from up here

on a chain

length untested

 

5

The mathematicians called a meeting

to declare I don’t exist

but I can count the distance

by my fists

from this sudden folly

to the shrinking squares of their many swimming pools

 

6

For a moment he floats with one hand reaching for the parking lot like it was a lock, turning

only a moment, leaving the wheel behind like a wall with no floor

a chlorine light, would-be beast from the sea: remember this

 

7

What substance etches the jumper like skywriting from a plane into the air?

He left a message trailing from his bare feet

perhaps a wish for wings

perhaps simply, “hello” written for something so big it only sees you as you’re vanishing

 

8

The ozone gasp of impact

I watch myself escape

but I do not/ but I will

when the wind stops blowing

---

NATE MAXSON is a writer and performance artist. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently, The Whisper Gallery (Lit Fest Press, 2015). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

 

 

 

You tell me I like people like cats. I like cats—their bodies sit on laps, sprawl desks, stretch alongside thighs during sleep. I like bank tellers who send dog cookies and suckers in the pneumatic tube. At big boxes, I like cashiers handing over the flickering white coil of receipts. I like pushing a mega cart with flats of bubbly water and twenty-five bags of the animal crackers you love. Liking people is like liking cats. Lots of people are like cats—lonesome, winsome, self-lickers of crotch. My aunt was like a cat. She wasn’t a nervous cat in a room full of rocking chairs. She didn’t have any rocking chairs. She just lost her nerve—wouldn’t anyone who loved someone who was gay, trying to pass, who passed time smoking and rolling a cart of drugs. After the divorce, she changed her name, restarted an affair with a married man, and bred a new breed of cats, the Sphinx, folding her hands forever against Scottish Folds. Anymore, she won’t answer her phone. When we visit my ex-uncle with his live-in boyfriend and a futon we can have for free, he makes us dinner, opens your beer, says, I’m not really a barfly, more like a housecat, making me wonder how many housecats there are in the world, and why anyone would want to be a barfly, when you could be a cat. When we get home, me driving DD and you hauling the futon up the stairs, you lay the mattress in the middle of the floor and fall on it, eyes shut, grinning. I crawl into your lap, nuzzle your neck, rubbing my body against your own. You’re right. I say, I like people like cats. Thinking cat snuggles, cat warmth, midnight catcalls, I say, Now that we have a futon, can we get a cat?

---

LAURA MADELINE WISEMAN’s recent books are An Apparently Impossible Adventure (BlazeVOX [books], 2016) and Leaves of Absence: An Illustrated Guide to Common Garden Affection (Red Dashboard, 2016). Her collaborative book,  Intimates and Fools, is an Honor Book for the 2015 Nebraska Book Award. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

 

Rustic sprawls

of ancient stars

 

display a trellis

of imagined pathways,

 

ductile creatures

of glacial movement.

 

Lost in the bleakness

of clouds—

 

balloon animals,

bobbing the cosmos,

 

a menagerie,

coloured,

in a spectrum of heat—

 

their hidden smiles

could mean

almost anything.

---

Richard King Perkins III is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois, with his wife, Vickie, and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The Red Cedar Review, Crannog, The William and Mary Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State Review and Milkfist among others. He was a recent finalist in The Rash Awards, Sharkpack Alchemy, Writer’s Digest and Bacopa Literary Review poetry contest. 

We should have remained in our snowball, me,

half-frozen, ice-blue lips, clinging to you like

water.

 

And you, red-haired, blue-eyed, who thawed (somehow)

as the layers of snow and dirt piled around us all

year.

 

Now you expand towards the sky. When you dance

on the ground, I feel the roots of your feet (like flowers)

below.

 

Remember, darling, it’s only temporary. Soon you’ll see

what I made while you were away, a snow globe, an ice

sculpture.

 

Do not look at me the way you did. You wanted to eat

those pomegranate seeds; you saw that they were red like

love.

 

Do not flinch from my touch the way you did. You grew

to sit on your throne, to caress the souls as they flew

away.

 

Oh, do not shiver as you did. I have built you a castle of ice

so you can dance as you do above, heat wrapping around your

being.

 

I know that you cannot help but see me through the

glaze of your sleep, while the wind mourns its way to

winter.

 

But do not think of that now. Come, love, return to

our snowball, where we’ll find our own warmth in all this

death.

---

Joanna Cleary is currently attending the University of Waterloo. Her poem, A Coin Toss, is scheduled to appear in the September/October 2015 edition of Cicada Magazine. When she is not writing, she can be found reading, eating various forms of chocolate and, of course, thinking about writing.