© 2012 Marc Carver

© 2012 Clinton Van Inman

Walking my way to a graduation advising session

I think: Twenty-seven and still

living at home.

My ripped-seam backpack stuffed

with so much right-brain material. An awkward

struggle of weight

over my shoulder: my spine curls

and I wonder

if my scoliosis is caused by the lightness

in my left-brain.

I find a gray chick, neck twisted,

hunch-backed and chirping at me with one eye—

It doesn’t peck at bugs

but bites at its feet in the grass.

The mangled ball of feathers cupped in my palms

tests a jump and fly. But with one wing

shorter than the other, it flops right back

down, thrashing to press itself

on its feet.

I pick it up again,

Where is your mother? I say.

A sea of twittering in the foliage above me,

I wait—

but none descend to rescue

their crippled kin.

So I bend to remove my shoe,

plop down in the grass,

take off my sticky sock—

If education is what we think as flight

I may as well chew on my own feet.

© 2012 Tara Leigh DeAngelis

Salt Sick

I pull a silver fork through snarls

of bronze caked brittle hair.

The wash of sea is gray and sick

with briny bones of fish.

My skin breathes a pale glow

through a coat, salt-thick

and iodine-rich,

as a man stands tall

in a stiff black suit

surf unlacing around his feet.

He’s watching—

my body beached

on a high rock, sharp

beneath my scales.

I sink my heart into my spine,

wrap my fins around me tight.

I’m almost sure he sees me here

metallic in the dusk.

A swoop and cry from a gull above,

I look down to pearls

strung on seaweed overflow

my shiny shell of abalone.

Hands full of saline water

fail to fill my thirst.

My tail’s encrusted with salmon stench.

I am chewing sand—

for the man’s mind marvel:

The endless illusion

of sea touching sky,

the horizon’s gust of breath.

Oh, no, these shells

are not enough.

Abstract: “Salt Sick” is the product of an Ekphrastic study of John William Waterhouse’s 1901 painting, “A Mermaid”. The free verse  poem illustrates the feminine desire for life and the masculine longing for release.

© 2012 Tara Leigh DeAngelis

At least the size of a ballpoint

pen, this mantis stood blank

against the concrete and turned

his head to look at me.

When our eyes met, I imagined

that we were both meditating

on this very moment,

considering each other

and the possible harm each

of us may cause. I was in a drive

thru and I wondered if he looked

at everyone this thoughtfully.

I kept the window up until

he turned his head back around

waiting on the next car to come.

I moved my car forward

and didn’t blame him for giving

up on his prayer.

© 2012 Heather Wyatt

the day’s eye glazing the window panes.

It is mid- summer or maybe early spring,

and floating up from the linden trees

come voices spiced like saffron

or rich as the African yam.

We linger, sated, relishing the sense

that we have once again performed the trick,

bodied forth the insubstantial tidings of the week,

praised the children who, distracted,

overwhelmed by the terrible tedium of childhood,

kick their chairs and mess their food.

Those side tables, artfully arranged,

frame our own bright selves

now steadfast, nearly stout, middle-aged;

the coffee cups are readied, the sugar and cream.

See the shadowed eyes and slight tremor

of hands we would unabashedly kiss

but that they nurse the tea with lemon

poured from a copper samovar.

And everyone is waiting, breathless,

for the cake studded with raisins

that you will slice and hand around,

the sweets we’ll taste with throats

moistened by premonitory tears.

It is given to you: eat.

© 2011 Carol Alexander

patent leather butterfly.  Just what farrago

do you fancy yourself moving along the frozen indigo

lake of this asphalt

stage?  Tripping, genuflecting:

what am I to do with you?  Turn of century

limbs compose

a physical elegy of body.  Pebble

nipples beneath threadbare T.

Black crown

of hair; black chipped

nail polish—gothic, macabre

darling, black & violet islands freckle

your thighs.  Your tiny

ribs a pigeon coop.

Sugar-coated berried lips;

suede-veined, you waltz

upon a pin top.  The speeding—

is not the curtains

closing but the theatre

of the mind burning down.

Streetlamps halo your staggering.  I usher

you against my thrift store trench coat.  Your ballet:

now an opera

of extraordinary angst, exaggerated drama.

You are all applause, wingstorm, mascara

leaking cheeks,

roses & lilacs; stems

at your feet; you, gagging

on your own glossolalic encore…more, more, more…

The excruciating whites of your eyes: stars;

falling stars & the starburst

headlights

of

cars.

© 2011 Flower Conroy

because you have built your self a beautiful life on hard work,

because you never expected anything less,

because you are a brilliant doctor,

because you have so much riding on it,

because you don’t actually have any black friends,

because you’re so much like your own father,

because you never wanted to be like him,

because you are so sure of your self,

because you get stage fright sometimes,

because your lips have grown thin,

because you break my heart and don’t know it,

because you asked for this poem,

there are things I will never be able to convince you of.

 
© 2011 Emily Kagan Trenchard

No net for this family.

He was frozen by the fall,

and he pulled himself up,

never again

pulling himself up,

by the blood of the trapeze

of the hapless little circus.

The Flying Graysons were phenomenal

in between hoops, clowns, and cattle,

a country carnival, synonymous

with everything good and true.

But the imprint of the blood

and the thud were seared

into the lad, now an orphan.

And Bruce gave the lad love,

the mind of a sleuth,

the art of the jitsu, tautness to climb

every darkened skyscraper in town.

We didn’t scoff

at such novelty then,

but Robin would get clobbered

by the professional muscle

of today’s mixed martial arts.

Fine.

Muscle is frail, and always for sale

when placed beside the wonder

of our paneled lad,

who makes his trapeze ancestry proud!

Swinging through bricks and blackness,

averting sleepy chimney sweeps, there:

slender sadist with ye chalk face, cornered,

move in.

We nod, nodding off,

we hush and we drift,

smiling, comforted

by the commissioner and the cowl

and the youth.

© 2011 John Glass

like Albert Goldbarth, who dishes

out a maelstrom of nipple-twitching,

a lip ring in a dungeon.

I am so glad to have you to talk to. How

can I stop? Don’t make me,

like a birthday card with a naked cheerleader

open carefully, contents under

pressure me to do something unconventional!

Isn’t this the room from Ghostbusters? And isn’t Dan Aykroyd

about to drop one of these chandeliers on our heads?

Chevy Chase waits in the wings

while the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man gets fatter.

Here, have you tried Burt’s Bees Hand Salve for your

back pain? If I see one more set of air quotes

I’m going to pull out my hair; it’s dying anyway.

Air quotes don’t validate me in the manner to which

a chandelier would, were it falling on the doddering

old man who is putting me to sleep. It must be his naptime.

I just heard the crystal in the chandelier yawn,

the artificial flames are rolling in the glass housing.

For someone who doesn’t read anymore, I wonder what in

the Wichita Kansas I am doing here; writers are weird.

Who’s story is this? I don’t want Cliff’s notes, I’d

rather jump off a cliff, dive into a Jell-O beach

blonde dead hair salt rinse. With my tuition in remission

my eyes, just like Dickens, changed public opinion,

invoked pop criticism

like pop tarts—twitchingly sweet but unsubstantial.

I am in love with the guy up there telling the story of Little Red

Riding Hood, even though we can’t understand him.

Do you think his accent is thick because he knows it charms us?

It’s a shame(less). I’m tired of wearing a loincloth over my

banana and nuts; thank you, “Mom,”

for taking care of me. Here try my RC

and let’s sit in the room with chandeliers that got squashed

by giant tomatoes fleeing from a Hitchcock film,

spilling a trail of seeds on the pavement

like Hansel. I want to be a mentor mentee

without menthol or menstruation.

Left-handed pens worn as jewelry,

girls as jewelry, women in the men’s bathroom.

Only one man attends the session on lesbian fiction.

Maybe he has identity issues, or geographic ineptitude.

How many eating disorders can one woman collect?

Tender hooks, full of appetites, they must press on.

Coconut custard cream pie baked on a crust of holy wafers

Deliver unto me its lascivious blasphemy.

We switch to Waldorf [the best room] and Why We Need

Ideas for Stories. Maybe we need salad instead

of ideas. We do not choose our medium—

it chooses us.

I like him—bald, bubbly, and repetitive.

Like any Buddhist, I long for an epiphany

Not a phony epiphany but an organic semantic.

I need to lose weight to sit next to you.

And the loafers—I never took you for a loafer.

Every now and then it just feels good

to untie myself from the confines of laces.

I’d hoped to get through the day without air quotes.

Why do I think everything she says is bogus?

Because all stories already exist in formlessness;

the only thing that changes

is the desire to trap them between the lines.

After the last forum everything else sucks.

I’m in love with Robert Olen Butler.

Now what can I do but drive five hours one way.

Five hours is a blip in time when we’re talking love.

I am surprised by the stark whiteness of this crowd.

When do you want to leave, and how do we extract ourselves?

We’ll go after this speaker and ease into the Ballroom,

where we can dance with the woman

who speaks with her hands.

I want to learn to speak without sound,

fingers opening and crossing fists.

My messages to you would bend gently at the knuckles

palms warm and open. I would be honored

to have my reading interpreted by her

in a grey double-breasted jacket,

hands dancing in pantomime.

Does she ever get tongue-tied?

I’d help her, but my hands are tied.

She’s always a phrase behind

because she must hear and think and hand dance.

How does she whisper?

I have so many secrets.

The best place to put something

for no one to read is in a poem.

Oh how I would love to make words dance.

I like listening to the ways they sway and shuffle.

I have a Chicagoland hand rash

so I pull a pen from behind my ear and write.

Stories about dust and snow, death and fire.

The chandeliers are pears ablaze above

Donald Hall. He’s changed since I read him in class

or maybe I’m confusing him

with some other grey, unkempt poet.

His head nods rhythmically

either from a mild Tourettes,

or maybe it’s narcolepsy.

© 2011 Meredith Danton Camel and Diane Larson

like guarding bruised fruit. We never watch them

light the match, just know they burst

with oxygen. If we’d witness the catch

and cultivation, spread of soft flame

underground (The roots go first) our shadows

would extend from toes to wall, the well filled

now—not like yesterday, when we could only

hold out, empty. Language and sight,

nothing else is as estranged.

Let the shoreline represent infinite

progress, sliver of worth, trees forked

into banks of rock and angle. The world wasn’t meant

to accept just any border. Between fear

and wonder, a thing hollowed out, almost gone.

Don’t pick it up on the beach or blame it

on earthquakes, even four lane highways:

that underground muck fire will take years

to put out. All of the living, but never

another’s life. Small hand in its mother’s, yanked

—don’t stare! Palms, like maps, laid flat

against us.

© 2011 Caitlin Mackenzie and Becca J.R. Lachman