Wanderers
by Geoffrey O’Brien
With footfalls
on rock flake and feather glue
on crushed grass and reed slime
we make our way out of the lake world
A reversed landscape
to which we woke in the dark
all signals lost
feeling for the path to the mooring cove
So connected we are
that even while alive
we already imagine
we have come back from the dead
Visitation
by Dayna Christensen
Out of a dream of teeth you return, neck snapping
so fast it burns along the artery.
Some familiar figure nictates in the dresser's shadow,
gone the usual spaniel. Eyes like milk water.
He beckons like an old man, club-handed come come
brushes your cheek with rough knuckles
hot as asphalt. He is older
longer than he has been gone.
You go with. He stops mid-flight to pick at his hairline,
pulls candies and zip ties from his robe.
Sunk in the black ocean at the bottom of the stairs
he is half anglerfish
half father who
gripped the back of your jumper on the street.
He doesn’t want you to be afraid to meet.
Wants you to feel at home
with the berber squares unmoored on concrete, the dusty table saw
and claw hammer, boxes of belongings the shelves inherited,
a grey safe room the size of his former closet
where suits pile in the corner like beached creatures.
Orange carcasses enshrine a photo of your living mother.
He has worried the edges to pieces.
Below it a suitcase, shimmering slick as oven air.
He lays his head against the wet nylon,
pats the rancid baggage, unzips it, eyes a-dew
why haven’t you been to visit us?
Identity Theft
by Michael Brosnan
I was careful,
drinking levelly,
carrying on
conversation, no longer
worried about earth-
quakes or ocean swells
pulling everything back;
but this desire for ruin is
as single-minded as
deer tick hunkered blind
on a narrow trail, hungering
for heat and the sweet
succor of passing skin.
So I slide my seat in tight.
Behind the bar, the mirror
reflects the backs of bottles
smooth and simple and blunt.
The people beside me,
they are smoking their
eyelashes down
to the tiniest nubs.
Ghostbusters
by Nick Daoust
that almost-night perversely white watching
your piss ravine the bathroom wall I thought
I heard a whisper from the stall inside:
time moves in the shape of a heart
it said two curves coming together and what we did
in the broken highway half-
light was beyond the pale dark anachronisms
bite marks loose glitter everywhere
the city’s spectral mouths blinked open
to us like history breaking its fever
sweating eye to the glory hole feeding the cold
finally the truth turned our shirts to
the inside seams outside shaken
up in the cool eschaton we counted the thunder-
claps with our own sounds the lightning was
far away but it still affected us the past
flowered open like a valentine the sky bore
a new covenant the river thrummed a rapture of white
fingers on the pier and still our bodies held like
spirits in a bottle filling only the space we’d brokered them
Witch Kill Switch
by Betsy Guttmacher
Bright witch piping it in
Shrill witch’s twitching din
Whining whirring criticism
Dismissing simplistic witch
This witch I find in grinds
This witch I sink in shifts
Blind this witch with signs
I mind this witch
I mind this thinking spirit
I this witch critic will fix this
Will wig ‘til I hit with fists
This glib flirting witch
Will kick this childish prig
Will dig will spit will spin tin
Will find its silk linings
Fill this witch in with ink
Lit I will sit sifting
Lit in this thinking kiln
Binding my twisting mind
Mining my divining spirit
Find my sin wiring
Find its wind-mist thrill
Sing this birth sing it right
Bewitched
by Betsy Guttmacher
when I was a girl
I wanted a peignoir
I dream of Jeanie
Charlie’s Angles
all that hair
and always something
translucent to wear
when opening the door
but even Samantha
cigarette pants
blond and coifed
was waiting
to break free
of her half hour time slot
and kill her parents
lying between couch
and tv table
I wanted to know
how it worked
I wanted to know
how to arrange myself
while waiting
for my own body
hurtling through doorways
into rooms then out
listening for cues
making a breathy entrance
oh hi
what is it
little girls
are afraid of
being airborne
over the inevitable
collision of bodies
wondering
will it hurt
and for how long
wondering
will I like it and can I
hurt them back
What Trouble Looks Like
by Betsy Guttmacher
After she dared me to buy deodorant
but before mohawks and the Clash
we two carefree girls walked an inky
elm lined street, she destined to die
by suicide after shooting her boyfriend.
He’d trash her place, wreck her holiday
decorations, then survive. We did too
for a while, making our way home
from the Circle Cinema after spending
all our trolly money on Butterfingers
and popcorn. We walked and walked
working up the nerve to ring the bell
of a stranger’s home, giggling, twelve
and spooked. What did that couple see
to make them keep her outside, letting
in me, the shy one, to use their phone?
Didn’t matter, busy signal or no answer.
We navigated the dim streets, familiar
from parents’ car windows. A few years
later the doomed one wrapped herself
in a blanket, Pink Floyd on the turntable
and cried forever on her sofa. Her dad
ushered me in, then left shaking his head
I don’t know what’s wrong. Side by side
we sat, silent, flipping through The Best
of Life, lingering on photos of dead soldiers
their leathery skulls, their smoldering guns.
The Stroke
by Donna Kathryn Kelly
This is the scene where
my best friend’s mother
kneels behind the tailpipe
of a 1969 Mustang convertible
and breathes,
until she doesn’t.
We had skated with her
at Roxy Wheels
not far from the Dundee Mall,
in the spring of our fifth-grade year:
each of us holding a soft hand,
spellbound by her dark blonde wings,
her thinness,
her smile.
The Kane County boys
were enraptured too,
leaning up against the rail,
watching her dappled movements,
as she led us around slick corners,
showing us
right over left,
coaxing,
See, you won’t fall.
Come with me.
Come with me.
Lines Written in the Dark
by David Pemberton
The map is a puddle.
The country is a puddle.
Precarious is an understatement.
The thunder is not an understatement.
What constitutes shelter in conditions like this?
What constitutes shelter in conditions like this:
Lightning, thunder, the come-in hand gesture
made violently
the door on its hinges closes violently
behind the thunder that scared you inside
a friendly gesture
towards the fiendish shelter.
To commemorate your arrival fresh flowers
are burnt and the smoke doesn’t smell like flowers.
Look sharp, here comes the host
though it’s probably impossible to please the host.
He has a dead wife.
He’s in love with his little dead wife.
Accept the rule of exceptions
that flicker across your intentions.
Please follow the butler
but don’t trigger the butler
and
don’t let that old gypsy bitch
bully you around like a bitch.
Oh, and don’t let the butler drink.
Your stay in this castle/mansion/house
will be another perfect example as to why people shouldn’t seek shelter in a strange
castle/mansion/house
but that’s not going to stop you
and that wouldn’t stop me.
To have any chance of saving yourself from what you fear
you’ll have to be able to describe what you fear
and hope someone believes you have a real reason to be scared.
You may not have a vendetta
but you’ve walked into a vendetta
which is either something complicated spanning many generations
or just a simple vendetta against life
by which someone needs to kill.
You think you are a do-gooder
but mayhem increases by the actions of a do-gooder
and the next thing you know you are a schmuck in over your head
and you’ve incited murder which is now on your head.
It’s time for you to be uncommon
bold and to respond to the pleas of the tiny
voice calling through a closed door.
It’s time for you to be uncommon
and crack the night
like a flare
and illuminate this dramatic cul-de-sac of the night
with a thruway of the day.
Lines Written in the Dark II
by David Pemberton
Through all that grain and imperfection
I can still see goosebumps rising to your surface
because you are afraid and turned on.
Repulsed and turned on. You have always loved
violence, but you are so weak and turned on.
In this gothic cul-de-sac these titled
aristocrats lead life cycles of darkness.
Aging in place, their vassals are absent.
They are beholden only to costume
and ornament and being frightfully
turned on. Visions I see in the tarnish
of the silver. In this purple mass
I’m horny with vision, flames and wax drips
tendrils of nothingness. This blue darkness.
This blue, blue darkness. A green spider, your hand.
I hope it’s not too late but it’s always too late.
My primary-colored sadism.
Your black masochism, paralyzing.
Here we’ve come to define the relationship
as the space between the whip and the body.
Don’t count on the count. Don’t count on the sun
that pitiful ember scared and scarcely
penetrating a veiled expression
mournfully turned on. All the flowers
are cut without origin. Syrupy
melodrama, dark centuries, white noise
of the phantoms whistling through walls.
Whosoever can resist the sleep
from this elixir can resist death.
I, that obo, indecipherable
and turned on. The shadows reek in the green
darkness. Gray matter. The laughter that echoes
isn’t jovial. As to the origin
of the sinister I suspect even
myself. Deliriously mad and turned on.
Desecrated unctuously and turned off.
The Scientist
by Jen Herron
Lightning flashes, illuminating a workshop of filthy creation. Shelves are stacked with bell jars, specimens suspended in a viscous liquid: meniscus, iridescent jelly, fluorescent livers, brains in saline, kidneys coddled in formaldehyde. A copper vat bubbles, pops, spews a mist that hisses, spits like a cornered cat.
Amidst the instruments of life, a shrouded figure, his black feet sneak from a white sheet, toenails glint like broken glass under the sickly glow of a yellow moon.
She walks towards the writing desk, pushes pen aside, searches the drawers. A crinkled fist of parchment, his last poem, Adonias, hides the heart that refused to burn.
The desiccated chest is open, awaits the infamous relic; two loves joined at last. Ventricle, valves and arteries stitched in; hours of needlepoint well-spent.
A galvanised surge will see him back. Tremulous fingers feel the lever, wrangle her into second-guessing. Was this the heart that loved her? (Yet shared a kiss with a sister, pushed a wife—or two— into the abyss).
The perpetual heart plucked from a pyre. What good this morbid gesture in the solitary sail through life? She beheld her man complete, flipped the switch—the indestructible organ, now pleasantly black and crisp.
The Mourning Garden
by Diane Butner
The last minute of their marriage
he appeared.
Less for Art’s sake than for keeping.
Shaped from dust, ashen grey
Weighty but with no depth.
Striking a frozen pose near the gazebo
Brooding and tragically stuck.
His face holds no color.
Stone deaf. Cracked dull eyes,
Once filled with promises,
Crying summer anemones.
He watches the hours with blankness.
Crape Myrtle rotting-
Roots twist and knot
Over a divine chisel, kissed
by silk moths.
He was her Eros.
Death scent burns dark.
Patchouli and Musk.
She walks the pathway through
her empty grove
of spoilt memories.
Each day she visits her odious choice.
From sculptress to wife
to widow.
Turned her lover to stone-
Keeps his jellied heart
from wandering.
Sealed safe inside
her apothecary jar.
The Ghosts of Downed Trees
by William Doreski
The ghosts of downed trees wander
for miles, looking to re-root.
Waving misty, weightless boughs,
they press against greenhouses
where tropical fruit defy winter
and pearly flowers dangle and gloat.
We’ve often felt the fragile spirits
of those trees as we walk in the woods.
We’ve also prowled the greenhouses
at the famous college where women
revise themselves into figures
of capable imagination.
Few tourists browsing for orchids
today, mid-week in February
with a windstorm plotting to fell
more hapless trees and free them
from their earthly sphere to roam
wherever they envision themselves.
The frustration of the ghost trees
reminds everyone that we’re clinging
to the slope of a cosmic funnel.
The women of the college sense
the tree-spirits brushing against them
as they stride to class to claim
their place in the one great intellect.
We were never that young. Only
recently have we sensed the trees
shuffling through a fourth dimension
like hanks of hair still growing
decades after the body has died.
Trees towering like all that’s unsaid
by Robin Seiler
Summer harvest
by Robin Seiler
Blackberries, plump and dark, fall off
the bush at a touch. Apricots hang
heavy on branches. Tomatoes,
sweet and small, burst open
in the mouth. A zucchini, overlooked
under a leaf, grows bigger
and bigger still. The lemon tree,
overladen, lets lemons fall,
pile up, soften brown, and sink
into the earth down to where
the chickens are buried,
the ones I named.