Category: Poetry

Two Poems

Tropical Storm Winds (or How to Alchemize Branches into a Family Dinner)

Goats line their own southern fence,

eat the heads of sunflowers that bend past the rusty barbed-wire.

Water spots form overnight. I am a child, I say Our

house has moon craters!

while sister looks up handymen.

Five trees fall into a pentagram around my treehouse.

Dad yells STAY INSIDE, so I never set my toys on fire,

and mommy sleeps in a separate room like normal.

When the Kitchen Paint Melts into 1980s Flight Paths

I consult a phonebook psychic.

 

After the crystal ball flakes into ash

like cheap hotel soap, after

she instructs me that the house

wants to make love to you, and after

I empty all the drawers of mother’s

old pantsuits,

 

I get naked in the living room.

 

My toes curl inside the VHS player, a breast

bounces against the height markers that Daddy

scrawled onto the doorframe each year,

thighs squeeze the yellow desk lamp mother bought

me in Cincinnati, lips suck the laminate tread

under Daddy’s rocking chair, and my hand claws

the one placemat not worn in by nightly dinners.

Jerrod Schwarz is an MFA student at the University of Tampa and is also the managing poetry editor for Driftwood Press. He has been published in Dirty Chai, Scapegoat, Four Ties Literary Review, and others. The above things are a little mundane. In his day to day life, Jerrod does whatever he can to escape the heat of his Floridian climate, and has been known to take part in staring contests with alligators who would challenge an otherwise refreshing swim.

On the Point

When I saw you

crouching along water’s edge

gazing just over the water

tips of your sight, like pelican wings,

I thought of the deer

swimming across the lake,

perhaps to escape a wolf,

perhaps to enjoy life,

and I resisted

the urge to know

what made you appear

like a small stone

to be skipped,

a number of lives to be counted.

Brad Garber writes, paints, draws, photographs, hunts for mushrooms and snakes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. He has published poetry, essays and weird stuff in such publications as Embodied Effigies, Clementine Poetry Journal, Sugar Mule, Barrow Street, Ray’s Road Review and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. 

Urb Ex-Jungle

Another artifact of the Skraelings’

implacable xenophobia the wall

crosses the ocean on decadent runes

 

and ends in a concrete outlet pipe

under chain-link bent in as if giants

used it for football practice or dump trucks

 

took a wrong turn off this stretch of pot holes

while the guard hid underneath a smart phone

studying repetitive pornography

 

and bolt cutters timed to incoming trains

announced a new freedom, access for all

to relics of industrial majesty

 

broken and paintless as the Parthenon,

but here, now, with a few retired workers

to sing sad songs of our own Golden Age.

M. A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection, The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel, War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.

Ghost Story

The objects we live in and with and around have as vibrant an internal life and a language more complex than ours. This is a first attempt at trying to talk it out with the other half. 

for Anna 

 It was when you said something

about the tombstones behind Quarry Chapel

looking like animals standing still in the dark

that I thought of the man in Kansas

who used a trinity of flashlights

to speak with the ghosts of his parents.

He didn’t know the phantom  effect

was a fluke of science, the incantatory

breath of a metal contact beneath the bulb

rising and falling and rising again.

He didn’t know sister light

had unlocked his heart like an old car

and sewn the leather of hope inside,

that his mother and father were in fact

gone from the farmhouse where he grew up.

Walking in the dark near midnight,

it’s easiest to get the sense

this sort of thing is happening to us

all the time. We are not the only mad

masters of ourselves. No object

can survive void of entropy. Like we give

the knife its blade we give each grave a name,

until these endless white houses lining

the road are nothing but wooden ghosts, until

there’s barely room enough left to live.

Ian Burnette graduated from the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities with a certificate in Creative Writing. He is an associate at The Kenyon Review, a contributing writer for the college section of The Huffington Post and a student in Kenyon College where he studies economics. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2015, The Adroit Journal, plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing 2014 and Kenyon Review. He is a winner of the Adroit Prize in Poetry, Propper Prize in Poetry, Bennington Young Writers Award, Leonard L. Milberg Prize, Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize and the Foyle Young Poets Award. 

The Seasons I Walked Outside

I.

The ground was white.

We built a snowman with a carrot nose.

I reached to make his smile out of coals.

You said, “Now he’s a happy fellow,”

And you were happy, too.

Mom made hot chocolate with marshmallows.

II.

There were many flowers.

Petals whispered on my skin.

When I went to the meadow,

I picked my favourite:

red.

You: dead.

III.

I swam to escape these

glaring rays.

Mom has been turning pale

Since your heart failed.

I camped out in the backyard alone.

When you would turn off the flashlight—

Where were the fireflies?

IV.

The leaves fall.

Colors change.

Crisp and crack under my feet—

Your bones haunt me.

Alena Willbur, a senior at Villanova Preparatory School, is from California. She is the editor and journalist for her school newspaper. She is an attendee of the Cambridge Tradition at the University of Cambridge where she studied Creative Writing and edited the literary magazine of Cambridge Tradition called Staircase Voice. She won second place at the Poetry Out Loud competition last year. She served Inklette as a Poetry Editor.

After Picking

I stuffed the clots from the thorny patch

and forced them, capped them,

forced the whole glass batch into the fridge.

Golden raspberries, how can I

ensure you rot?

Brought out into the open air,

perhaps on an anecdotal hill,

the jar for the berries ossify to porcelain,

a prism polished, then crematory walls

of inlaid silver, with nothing to show

inside its milky membrane.

Respect this scene, its form.

But behind the mustard, under the fridge light,

stare in full jaundice the berries,

packed against the jar’s thin crystal

like people against the inner skin of a city train.

The words I say will change,

but what they contain will corrode.

Black in white in the refrigerator light.

I open the jar and see

I’ve picked too much and searched too far.

The question is hiding on my way to the trash.

Scott Stevens is a poet and fiction writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been published in literary magazines such as Textploit, Glass Kite Anthology, and Polyphony H.S. He is a recognized California Arts Scholar, has attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio at the University of Iowa, and is the Editor-in-Chief of his high school’s literary magazine. He enjoys running, swimming, and reading books in Japanese and Mandarin.

Andante

silence.

1. we don’t talk to each from across the room.

you call it a habit, but I don’t think it’s that.

2. You had once insisted we did away with the barricades

that partitioned the room into two.

There are none now.

But we feel claustrophobic,   still.

3. The silent metronomes of our hearts sound familiar.

Perhaps it rains outside.

4. I open the windows to let the breeze pour in. I can’t hear you over the phone.

You talk too loud.

5. Silence subsides, but

only outside. The breeze

has turned to a wind.

That’s all.

Trivarna Hariharan is an author, musician, filmmaker and humanitarian. Her work has been published across the globe, in various literary magazines, zines and journals such as Teen Ink, YoungMinds, Literature Studio, Writers Asylum, Textploit and so on and forth. Her first poetry book, Musings of an Alchemist was published by CreateSpace. She holds a grade 4 distinction in keyboard from the Trinity College of London. She is also the school representatives member at a social organisation called Redefy, the Social Outreach Co-ordinator at Textploit and the editor-in-chief at Inklette.