Eyes rend and tear.
Mouths gape, jaws have forgotten
their function. Idolized
is she, amongst the strobing lights
and fluorescent bulbs.
But, we’re rarely pretty when
stripped of our hearts, when
the camera shifts below
our hips, when flesh and jaw
dangle, longingly attached
to their former structure.
She’s shucking her glossed
leather gloves, flicking light
from shadow. She’s tugging
each gloved finger, peeling back
it’s black casing, a second
skin. Her sash blinds
in the stuttering lights, freed
from its bindings. Her hips
dip and roll in their easy crash
and saunter of angst-laced bass.
The precise pitch a perfect fever
to settle deep in the bones.
Glacial heels slam and crack
against the stage, her glove
drifts to the floor.
Why is death never a woman?
Why is she only aching
when she creates a life
for you? This body half loved
by you, this body spinning
a new life for you and
loving it more because that
budding body is half of you
too. Why is does she ache while
she’s creates a body
to sustain you?
Her robe parts, a scar
cleaves her soft belly
in two. The hood
of her robe, peaked over
her brow sheathes
pitted sockets and mangled
maw. Scuffed heels pierce
the sleek pedestal in which
she was raised. Her ease
fractures with rigor
mortis, her gentle serial
suicides laid as stepping
stones for the ferrying.
Her hood falls, long locks
moth eaten, much like
the webs she’s weaved.
The lies piled upon curled
silk, spun from ashes
and grief.
Why is she
not our harbinger
of death? The androgynous
shape the same
as any cut
from the stripped
fineries of living.
—
For now Brit Graham traverses the tundra that is South Dakota, while tripping over things while stargazing in the all too brief summer months. She is the crux of an ongoing love affair between the Pacific and Atlantic. She managed to pry an MFA in Poetry from the grasp of Converse College. You can read her poetry things in publications like Devilfish Review, The Night Owl, RealSouth Magazine, and The OWL.
strangers lined in rows sundresses on layaway where’d you buy dem shoes?
MéShelle Fae has a passion for teaching and developing others, which led to the creation of meshellefae.com, her online blog for writers who want to hone their craft or learn how to tell their stories on a digital platform. She’s an avid reader of anything she finds interesting and thinks of herself as “the ultimate geeky, weird nerd-girl.” She’s a resident of Charleston, SC, where she operates The Writers’ Block, a literacy and mentorship program.
It is tempting not to speak. Rather, to breathe in cold catacombs with eyes wide open. I think I understand the way you hope. In your mind, above, crisped spring: white plum blossoms icing up saplings. Belief is like this, getting carried away by progress. I cannot believe in history. Still, the fisted buds flare into wicks burning atop stone- cold facades tipping deeper into silence.
Michelle Matthees lives and writes in Duluth, Minnesota. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Recent work of Michelle’s can be found in PANK, The Prose Poem Project, Cider Press Review, 22 Magazine, Proof, Memorious, Anderbo, Defenestrationism, 5 Quarterly, Humber Pie, Specs, Third Wednesday, Paradise Review, The Mom Egg, Sou’wester, Thrice Fiction, and elsewhere.
Remembering the sound of my father’s axe as it split wood, the pile of kindling on the ground, how my fingers would test the edge of the blade for sharpness and the day it left us when we ice-fished on Banks Lake, Mark chopping a hole through the thick ice, the axe slipping from his grasp as it broke through the opening and fell to the lake’s floor where it still lies— Have you felt the surprise when you swing at something expecting to feel resistance, but hit emptiness?
This December, George Such will graduate from University of Louisiana Lafayette with a Ph.D. in English, a significant change from his previous incarnation as a chiropractor for twenty-seven years in Washington State. His creative writing has appeared in Arroyo Literary Review, Barely South Review, The Cape Rock, Dislocate, The Evansville Review, and many other literary journals.
Chipped plaster, termite-infested walls, cockroaches— that which is worn, desecrated, lived in; ghosts, overtaken gardens, tilted fences, scattered tool pieces— that which is overwrought, still growing; tree houses, sibling truces, midnight pillow forts, mailboxes— that which we build together, try maintaining; grief, malicious gods, tsunami aftershocks, gravestones— that which we dread, yet still want to cling to; cradles, mothers’ eyes, fathers’ hands, port dock posts— that which nurtures us, kept us tethered; toy ships, beached debris, tropical hurricanes, scorched sand— that which topples, adapts to destruction; moving trucks, interstate traffic, 80s rock & roll, cardboard boxes— that which is in motion, sequences go, going, gone.
Starr Herr recently graduated with a BFA Creative & Professional Writing and BA Philosophy at Converse College. She worked on her high school literary magazine staff as editor-in-chief and her college literary magazine staff as a poetry editor.
Let’s pretend the room is dark. You on your blue bedspread daydreaming when your daddy comes swaggering down the hall bringing presents. Hmm, not here since Christmas, but he’s come to lead the singing on Easter, make your church thunder with hallelujahs, rock with hosannas;
let’s pretend he promises to watch you in the senior play, and you slip out front to take a peek, but he’s not there. Not that you expect a miracle, but let’s say he appears in the second act: your dead-beat father, ashen in the stage lights, new Afro, his deep brown face reminding you so much of yourself, you forget your lines, forget how lonely you always are.
Then, one day peeling peaches for a cobbler—crumbling sugar, flour, and more sugar in a bowl and smearing sweet salted butter over everything, taking your time when a door slams, and there he is, smelling like Wild Turkey and Old Spice, you blinking at white sharkskin and gold incisors, the loss of all the
years, when the knife leaves your hand, clatters to the floor, and Gran appears, lifts the hem of her apron, fans her face, speaks slow like she’s from high class Southern soil: Every girl need a daddy, but this girl walking in the light. We don’t need no trouble,
and your daddy steps back, catches himself before he falls clear through the screen door and slips away, you leaning against the table, thinking this is just pretend, but there’s a knife on the floor, your gran reaching for the Bible, shaking and praying, peach juice running down your wrist.
Ann Herlong-Bodman’s work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, including The Courtland Review,Atlanta Review, South Carolina Review, Cold Mountain Review, Main Street Rag and KaKaLak, anthology of Carolina poetry. She is a former journalist, travel writer, and college teacher whose full-length poetry manuscript was named runner-up in the 2010 SC Poetry Initiative competition. A featured reader at the Piccolo Spoleto Sundown Poetry Series in Charleston, SC, she lives along the Carolina coast.
I said Vic Damone. He was a singer, like Mike Douglas
or Jerry Vale or Steve Lawrence, narrow tie
and pastel shirt, a pleasant enough face, pleasant enough voice
singing the standards, the love songs of his parents’ courtship.
Think singing new songs so that they sound old, wrong,
nothing to fall in love by, but Vic Damone a star
in my family’s firmament, because of the famous elevator ride.
At the Jersey shore for our summer vacation,
in a hotel with an outdoor pool, it was the afternoon
my sister and I were allowed to sunbathe by ourselves
as we waited for my mother to come down,
as my father took a nap in the room.
Could it have been that my mother and father
both took a nap, together? This question did not occur to us.
Anyway, we dangled our feet in the water, made sloppy,
slappy footprints to the plastic lawn chairs, and we waited.
When my mother stepped into the elevator, there he was,
Vic Damone, like any man wearing a polo shirt and plaid shorts.
My mother, bright white towels
pressed to her pink seersucker bathing suit with boy-cut legs,
my mother smelled of suntail oil, and did not speak a word
to Vic Damone, did not even look at him, although
she could not help but see his reflection
in the elevator’s steel doors, until the doors slid open onto sunlight.
She walked over to us and sat, began combing my sister’s hair
into a pony tail, while Vic Damone paused beside the elevator.
He put on his sunglasses, lit a cigarette,
maybe preparing to meet his agent or sign a contract,
to be driven to rehearsal for a show. Then he turned,
headed into the lobby, and my mother, still combing, whispered,
That’s Vic Damone, as if she spoke not a man’s name, but,
rather, a verb or noun, and she was enriching our vocabulary, vicdamone meaning “to prepare for departure” or “to pause,
to reconsider,” vicdamone meaning “privacy in a public space,” vicdamone the discretion that keeps strangers from saying
what could divert them from other, more important, things.
—
Suzanne Cleary‘s poetry books are Keeping Time and Trick Pear, both published by Carnegie Mellon. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in several anthologies, including Poetry 180 and Best American Poetry.
The Blues down south would cut you like a paper mill and let your rotten stink blow all the way north on a hot summer breeze. That’s how she left, you know.
She was the second oldest of thirteen, stocky as a sawed-off shotgun, red hair, freckles and plump green eyes that traced an un-retraceable line.
When I met her, she was Sunday dressed in a full-length cashmere coat and matching camel-colored hat. The wide brim tilted over her right eye leaned into each heavy stride.
Legend has it, she snatched a black snake out an oak tree in mid conversation and ripped his head off in the street. She gripped my hand and pulled a knife one night –
we stayed too late at Menlo Park Mall and had to walk out the service exit. I was just tall enough to see the blade flash in the corner of my eye.
Her anointed hands could rub a rash clean and make me believe the Blues were always one bitter snuff can away from spittin’ out the truth.
Valerie Smith delights in writing poetry and creative nonfiction. She is currently studying Creative Writing in the Master of Arts in Professional Writing program at Kennesaw State University where she is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant of first-year composition. Most recently, she presented her poems at the 2016 Decatur Book Festival. Her poetry has also appeared in Exit 271: Your Georgia Writers Resource and BlazeVOX15.
I have a confession to make. I don’t write every day. I don’t even write every other day. Despite the advice of every writing instructor and every craft book I’ve encountered, I have never managed to write more than once a week, and never more than two or three hours at that. And I’ve spent a long time asking myself if that means I’m not a Real Writer.
In my day job, I’m an academic, so I have plenty of experience with imposter syndrome, and it’s plagued my confidence as a writer for years. I know that most of us have full-time jobs in other fields, so I’m not alone in finding it hard to carve out time to write. But so many other people seem better at accomplishing it. I can’t get up at four a.m. to write before dawn; I object to four a.m. on principle. I can’t squeeze in fifteen minutes of writing during my lunch break; I just get settled in when it’s time to go back to work. What I’m left with is a jealously guarded window of time on Sunday afternoons when I hunch over my laptop or notebook and descend into a caffeinated frenzy of creation.
Astonishingly, writing once a week actually seems to work for me. In the past year, I’ve drafted one full novel and published several short pieces. And in that year, I’ve realized that the physical act of writing is only one part of the writing process. I’ve discovered that, while I’m only at my desk typing away for two ours on a Sunday, I’m actually preparing for those two hours every other day of the week. While I work out, I’m mapping my plot, imagining my beat sheet superimposed over the screen of the elliptical. I recently had a terrific revelation about a troublesome character while I was flossing my teeth. In the shower, I’m trying out lines of dialogue: yes, out loud. This habit must be particularly entertaining to my downstairs neighbor when my characters start arguing.
Some writers can compose in snatches, a sentence on the subway, a paragraph at lunch. The fact that I can’t do that has often made me feel unprofessional by comparison, as though, if I was a Real Writer, I would be able to wrestle my brain into submission and force it to produce art on a schedule. But the truth is I will never be that kind of writer. I need a large, uninterrupted swath of time to sit down and write: time to stare at the wall, gaze vacantly out the window, type and erase, type and erase. What I know now, though, is that I might not be able to write in short intervals, but I can think in them. My brain is at work even if my hands aren’t. So when I do sit down on Sunday with my coffee and my two hours of writing ahead of me, I have a head full of material waiting to be drawn out on the page. And whether that makes me as a Real Writer or not is beside the point: I’m writing, and that’s all I care about.
Christine Schott teaches literature and creative writing at Erskine College. She is Pushcart-nominated author whose work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Dappled Things, Casino Literary Magazine, and Wanderlust. She holds a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from Converse College and has been working for South85 for three years.
Abhijit Sarmah is a Masters in English student at the University of Dibrugarh, Assam, in India. He wrote a chapbook, The Voice Under Silence, in 2016.
