Category: Poetry

In the event we get stranded

My mouth is an anchor that never learned

to save the ship, a slow descent into a darkness

I never loved, but always knew how to flirt with.

I’ve left more poetry strewn on inner thighs than

have made it on paper, some of my best lines

will always rub against jeans I’ve never seen

strewn on my bedroom floor.

 

I hope you taste my name every time you bite your lip.

 

One day we’ll get drunk, and reminisce about the way

our bodies fell apart against cold blankets, the sting

of heaving chests, familiar, just to keep us warm.

Kristen Kane is a Pittsburgh native whose poetry has been featured in Backroads, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown’s literary magazine. 

Varicose Veins

My thoughts, they bulge

from the surface of my

skin, swelling and twisting,

oblong blue branches stemming

across gaping valleys of hushed pores.

Suits with crescent scowls

point knives at me, threatening to

slice me open and let the dense

air swallow me whole.

 

I hide in a music box that plays

off-key carnival tunes, letting my blood

thicken to a viscous concentrate.

With a gentle touch, I squeeze blood

onto page, after page, soaking them

until they drip, saturated. Once

 

I emerge

 

from the box, I wring out

the pages over the suits—

their bodies wither

into an ashy heap, and I hear

that same off-key carnival music

on the radio for the first time.

Evan Goetz is an enigma wrapped in chocolate filigree. He is a graduate of the University of South Florida with a B.A. in creative writing. His work can be found in Damfino Press and Digital Papercut among other journals. When he is not writing, he spends his time performing with an improv troupe making a fool of himself.

Two Poems

An exquisite corpse is a parlor game for group writing. Invented by French surrealists, each participant writes a line of poetry in response to a line that came before. Before passing the “corpse” to the next person in line, the writer folds the paper so that only the newest  line is visible. In this way, a poem is built. At the end of the game, the paper is unfurled, and the new work is revealed. This past August over an enormous plate of nachos, Katie and Anya wrote the following poems. With two papers passed back and forth, the poems were written simultaneously, each poet responsible for alternate lines, a lyrical do-si-do, a poetic kind of play.

Wanted

In a ziploc bag behind his fishbowl

on top of a pile of housekeeping magazines

beneath a framed class photo, a dusty cobweb

frames the aquatic world of Leonardo.

The seahorse discards his pie pan halo and snorts

throwing the laundry around. What’s

a dirty sock compared to all the tent cities?

If he wants to shoot someone, he must invent

the weapon. And if he wants to conquer, he must

conjure more. So Leonardo studies day and night.

Cotton-brained, leering, famished, and laughing,

he imitates the posture of a pastry chef,

the dough flattens beneath the weight

of his uniform. Time to hire an intern.

Someone to yell at would be fine. Someone

organized, an eye for detail, who makes his own ink.

On the Elevator Between 4th and 5th Floors or Icarus Tries Again

When turtles pull back their heads, do their

brains compress? Do their dreams leak

or lock? No one ever craves a sack lunch.

Her socks crimp and crumple beneath schoolgirl knees

and she slouches like she’s been spooked.

Her plastic spork slips from her grip

and the world beyond her checked blanket

dissolves into a black puddle. A cat blinks.

The biscuits, damp, cannot be picked up

until after the barista consults with his

hose. Everything boils down to process.

He portions his day into teaspoons, TV shows,

balanced meals, drafts of the manifesto, several baths,

but still there are mornings he cannot

remember and still his gums bleed.

Anya Groner’s essays, stories and poems can be read in journals including Guernica, Ninth Letter, The Oxford American, The Rumpus, and The Atlantic. She received her MFA from the University of Mississippi where she was a John and Renee Grisham Fellow. Currently, she’s finishing a novel about teenage girls and eco-terrorism, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Her first chapbook of poems, a collaborative project with the book artist Sara White, titled So Our Ghosts Can Find Us, will be released later this month. A resident of New Orleans, Groner teaches writing at Loyola University New Orleans. She edits fiction for Terrain.Org and book reviews for The New Orleans Review.  You can view her website here.

Katharine Ogle is a poet. She studied English literature and was a member of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts with distinction. She attended the University of Washington for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry and was the writer-in-residence at a local high school during that time. She currently teaches literature and creative writing in Seattle and is Associate Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her work has been published in Quarterly West, Pleiades, and Mare Nostrum, among others. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript of poems titled The Smallest Gun I Could Find, which follows a conversation between a speaker and her newly-discovered homunculus: the little man who lives inside her head, protesting her moment-to-moment decisions.

The Santa Clause: Don’t Lie to Your Children

It’s nearly midnight,

and I just wrote “From Santa”

in red Sharpie

 

on the present under the ornament

my son stuck together

with felt and Popsicle sticks.

 

There was a time not long ago

I swore I would never

lie to my children like this,

 

never invoke the hoary, corpulent

somethinggenerian whenever

they misbehaved,

 

never sit at the kitchen table

with them hammering out

lists of superfluous toys,

 

never try to explain

how the big guy makes it around

the world overnight in a sleigh,

 

or how he finagles

his gelatinous frame into

our house without a fireplace.

 

Eventually they’ll become

little forensic handwriting analysts

and figure out why Santa’s penmanship

 

so closely resembles

their mother’s, stop

rising at dawn like chickens,

 

and sign quote marks in the air

when reading “From Santa”

in red Sharpie

 

as I train the video camera

on their morphing adolescence.

Maybe they’ll mean it

 

when they vow never to lie

to their children,

leaving only shredded wrapping paper

in their wakes.

Ted Millar teaches English at Mahopac High School in Mahopac, New York, and creative writing and poetry at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.  His poetry has appeared in Cactus Heart, The Grief Diaries, Chronogram, Brickplight, The Artistic Muse, and Inkwell.  He lives in Marlborough, New York, the heart of the Hudson Valley’s apple and wine country, with his wife and two children.       

 

 

 

Road Rage

They were spared the details of their son’s rituals.

How the latest raccoon had been found, belly up,

at his girlfriend’s door, its mouth around a red snapdragon.

As a child he dipped leaves in gasoline

to watch their edges ruby & curl.

In Bali, the dead are buried

and then lifted & mourned into fire,

along to the next life.

Always grieving season where he lived.

They remembered, then, how he’d once

swirled his toes into crimson coals,

lips open like a banshee,

& asked where his soul had gone.

Meggie Royer is a writer and photographer from the Midwest who is currently majoring in Psychology at Macalester College. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review and Melancholy Hyperbole among others. She has won national medals for her poetry and a writing portfolio in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize. 

When Spring,

i.

He turned off the lights.

The tangerine sky, the downward

t r a j e c t o r y

of the

e a g l e,

and the silent scraping of nails.

My body – holy, ocean-like,

and the world: walls, blood, hands.

The single eye twitching in the corner,

and my bones coming loose at odd angles.

                       

ii.

I touch myself where he touched me.

The soft, the brazen, the fleeting touch of a leaf,

the breaking and un-breaking

of tea cups, coasters and dry concrete.

I find no salt in my wounds, no clot. Rather, a clawing

longing to fill the air with sand, to sew up my skin with

thread–

a longing to make maps with blunt knives,

and surrender my body to water.

                       

iii.

When we were fourteen, we declared that we could fly.

Yet, as the years went by, we grounded ourselves to our homes,

yet rootless where ever we went.

    But I rooted myself

                        to the wet walls and

                        the soft earth, my limbs

                        fossilized in the moment,

                        and my arms-

                        dissolved under whispers.

                       

iv.

When in spring,

when the weeds we grew in our gardens uprooted themselves and left,

when the birds came, regardless of hate, when the water rippled again,

when I turned to a crusade, my body – no longer a place where he touched me,

but

a war memorial

a souvenir

a museum exhibit

a book of fire

when in spring,

when we left our attics to take to the streets,

our clothes torn, our faces scarred, our bodies peeled of skin,

and these, these footprints of an earlier life,

that dream of doves, vanishing into a deafening cry-

then,

perhaps, the stars will reign again,

weighed against a golden sky.

Smriti Verma’s poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Word Riot, Open Road Review, DoveTales Literary Journal, Alexandria Quarterly, Inklette, Cleaver Magazine, Textploit and Yellow Chair Review. She is the recipient of the Save The Earth Poetry Prize 2015. She will be joining Inklette as a Poetry Reader and currently serves as an Editorial Intern at The Blueshift Journal.

In Training

While   you   are away

(somewhere)                                                                training—

7 killed                        an accident                  mechanical failure

over water    then into                         the water                     an accident

debris              and                              remains

washed onto the beach       not identified

where are you?

 

4 killed                        an accident

live ammunition                    mortars                        grenades

4 sweep the field                               1 undetonated mortar                 found

undetonated until                                found

where are you?

 

tanks on the beach                        stumble upon

by accident                         when running                          an accident

where

                                                                                    are

                                                                                                you?

Lisa Stice is a military wife who recently completed her thesis year in the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program. Some of her work is forthcoming or appeared in Emerge Literary Journal, 300 Days of Sun and On the Rusk. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. You can visit her Facebook page here and her website here.