At A YMCA Swim Meet The inexperienced, unsupervised lifeguard splashed the baby vomit into the pool. The mothers collectively gasp. Last Chance Last chance sunflowers Wilt on the table Winter claims it’s time Brave World I was brave today. I went into the world, and didn’t take a sweater. We Find Out This house hemorrhages nails. Where from? After a big wind we find out.
Category Archives: CHAOS
Poetry by Lachlan McDougall
A Summer Memory Trees in bloom, reckoning the sky towards a cloudless night. Sultry summer rain hisses on the sidewalk— bloom of Jacaranda purple against a slate grey sky. Wine of holidaymakers sound of laughter navel orange splash cooling upwind of (rain) Long pull of books and films drag towards the night of oppressive heat and (rain) Here is the season of purple blooming around us wrapped like a garland wreath; lively dances performed for the summer dead Tuft of Light lizard beaked sits riotous in motion; silver shredded ribbons; blood and dead leaves; (breathing in the stink) calm cup of tea dissolve atmosphere of hate words; nastiness; just blood and dead leaves; (open to the sewer) skin smooth over porous shale; seawater laps the deck of the ship urine soaked and alabaster; (soap bubbles over shale) bring order, bring results into present time; blood in the pissoir; ice; smoke; just blood and dead leaves Sound of Laughter Sound of laughter children playing I haven’t the time to stop and look I'm losing the thread of innocence You see, I was unnatural and my time was fleeting along with the ermines Sound of laughter cold light of fish the pool of algae ran rivers of blood I was Unnatural, it was the time I was to lose fleeting moments of moonlight took their anger out on a lonely boy Sound of laughter one wet rock A flock of seagulls to shit upon it Sound of laughter delicate bones set in the ear they break at a moment’s notice Sound of laughter it’s all I can do to stay in touch with children playing I haven’t the time to stop and look Dreaming All was gone through layers of night As I wandered through my sleep, All was gone through rays of light I wandered here as though I might Wander knowing that children weep All was gone through layers of night Bludgeoned, I held my form aright Through holds of sleep’s yellow keep All was gone through rays of light Obscenity, profanity held to height Wafting bleats of nettled sheep All was gone through layers of night The pornographic lust grew bright: A penny, a dollar, sir, just for a peep All was gone through rays of light Awake I felt the dirt and blight Lost in the theme of dream’s full sweep All was gone through layers of night All was gone through rays of light. The Balance I have hurt my hand. I do not know when, or where Or how, But I suppose it must Have been in the delicate Balance between sanity And the dark place we fear To go. It is not useless. Just a slight twinge When I perform a task, Simple things Like arranging my affairs Or the flowers Of state. It is not altogether Unpleasant, Although it does pain me And I do not know How it happened Or whether There is a purpose To this injury That plays on my conscience. I would ask you, But I know That you are not there, Not altogether Useless Just a slight twinge When performing a task. I have invented a person To talk to And hold, I do not know When or where Or why But perhaps in the balance Between sanity And affairs of the state. Miles Davis He was cool when people was still playing hot! Be-bop that horn zoot rollo Like a golden tide river stretched out for miles Pulling me by the ears Old Devil Moon just be-bop-a-lu Wail that siren like for fires Hep cats playing Hot! Cool! Anything you want! Lid those eyes over Bitches Brew You toot hoot full zoot get a snoot Full of the hippest Jazz fever bopped along funk rollo
Photos from Channie Greenberg
Poetry from Damon Hubbs
Not Another Holiday Poem grandmother’s annual holiday poem was nothing like The New Yorker’s annual holiday poem the top bard of Walton, NY poet laureate of St. John Street wouldn’t think of starting a poem with “Greetings, Friends!” she was more Miss Havisham than Grandma Moses in those later years when the wraparound porch on her black & white Victorian collapsed like a poorly measured fruit cake and the delivery man who dropped off groceries & cases of Genny every Friday would find her on the old wooden swing kicking out over the abyss noting the times & the season hark, with each pump of her schoolyard legs. Suburb such a fuss was raised last night by the chickens in the neighbor’s coop you would have thought kids were staging boxing matches in the foreclosure on the corner or Mr. Connolly was finally putting the misery out of his sour puss wife or a delivery man who knows that evil works against us on a daily basis was fighting the high-casualty event of middle class life by arranging a tufted boudoir chaise in a perfect pelt of moonlight. Mount Vision it’s a small town nothing to do but fantasize so when news cropped that the radio tower on Mount Vision had picked spectral music out of the sky the disappointment was as sharp as finding a plastic toy saucer at the bottom of a technicolor cereal box the rise and fall of the west ‘You’ve gotta’ be fucking kidding me,’ I say, half under my breath ‘are you sure that’s right?’ The woman behind the cash register is wearing pink earmuffs. It’s December but there isn’t a bite to the air or as much as a flake on the ground. The pink earmuffs are her way of saying ‘sorry, fucker I can’t hear you bitch about the cost of potatoes because my ears are huddled in pink earmuffs.’ I’m so pissed about the cost of potatoes I wanna’ tell the woman that her pink earmuffs make her look like she feeds on the homeless. But she won’t hear me anyway, so what’s the point. Then, in a mock hospitable voice she adds, ‘sir, potatoes fueled the rise of the West.’ The last item scans, chirps. ‘Paper or plastic?’ ‘Plastic,’ I say doing my part to hasten the fall. the last roundhouse on dead end street south of the rib, in the flatlands dram shops & the roundhouse, upstate’s industrial colosseum the Canadian Pacific razed it in 93’ but demolition began earlier 36 of 52 brick stalls scattered like a game of pick-up amongst the ruins & rotting Pullman mail cars a woman with a dismembered goat hoof between her legs says to an ex-con: tastes are becoming hard to satisfy.
Story from Peter F. Crowley
Dump
From the early afternoon light filtering through the tavern’s off-white shades, Sharon’s frown had become apparent. She sat there watching Daryl eat an enormous pulled pork sandwich after finishing her grilled tempeh and arugula salad.
“What?” Daryl asked, taking off his baseball hat and wiping the sweat from his brow.
It was over 90 degrees. From where they sat in the back, not a trickle of air from the doorway fan was palpable.
Sharon’s lower jaw sunk low as she started to open her mouth. She placed her pointer finger to her lips and thought for a moment before putting her shoulder-length, red hair into a bun.
“He’s not a bro but he’s different from me,” she thought. “He doesn’t get the details of my paintings and how it’s really only them that matter. Kara even said that the details ‘overwhelm and inform’ the whole. But the last portrait I did of an old woman, all that Daryl said was, “Very cool.” Did he even look at it? I tried to show every skin cell of the woman’s face to depict the dark circles around her eyes and all her wrinkles.”
“Not talking again?” Daryl asked.
The waiter came by and asked if everything was ok. Sharon responded that all was well, as Daryl had just taken another large bite from his sandwich.
Did they want the check? Sharon shook her head.
It’ll be ten years before he finishes that sandwich. He eats so goddamn slow and look how he chews! Like a cow chewing on grass all day. Hurry up, cow!
Sharon tried to remember if Daryl had asked her something. He must’ve, but what?
“How’s your sandwich?”
“It’s good.”
Sharon raised her eyebrows and nodded.
“Why do you always have to be so sarcastic about everything? You don’t have to look down on me for eating meat.”
“I don’t.”
Actually, I do, but not that much. If you just ate chicken and beef occasionally, it’d be different. But you eat beef or pork every day. Don’t you realize how bad that is for the environment? Methane is worse than CO2, dude. And you say you care about climate change. That was probably just to get into my pants.
“I have to say: I’m really loving this conversation we’re having.”
“Me too.”
“See what I mean? And I don’t even know if you mean it or not. But I guess not, right? Because we’ve barely spoken all through lunch.”
“That’s because you’re eating.”
“We’ve both been eating. You’re just done.”
“Yep, I was done like ten minutes ago.”
“Is it a race? I can’t help it if this place makes ginormous sandwiches.”
“You don’t have to eat all of it.”
“Come on, this kind of thing would taste horrible the next day. It’s eat it all now or waste it, you know?”
“Interesting.”
Was he always so boring? He couldn’t have been. Or maybe I was just blinded by his good looks and how into me he was.
“Really? You don’t find that interesting. You shouldn’t say stuff that you don’t mean. It almost seems like you’re just responding to me on autopilot and you’re really just way off on another planet or something.”
That would be preferable to being with you.
Sharon got up and went to the bathroom. A thick cigarette smoke pervaded the air. The stall she went into had an empty Heineken bottle floating in the toilet.
“Figures,” she thought. “He always likes divvy places. Maybe that was cool when you’re 21 but not when you’re 35!”
When she returned, Daryl was lying on the floor underneath their table, with his head popping out at the end. The plate of pulled pork sandwich, of which there was still ¼ remaining, was on his stomach. She rested her feet on his ribs as she sat down, and it felt particularly comfortable. The White Stripe song “Stop Breaking Down” came into her head and she tapped out the beat with her heeled shoes.
“I think I got it! That’s Green Day’s “Basket Case,” right?”
“No.”
“What is it then?”
“Why does it matter?”
Daryl peered up at her, trying make eye contact and asked, “Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Did we ever say we loved each other?”
“Yeah, we both did. Remember? We were in Brooklyn at your favorite restaurant in the whole world.”
Sharon thought back to a year ago, four months after they had met. They were seated outside at a narrow row of tables next to a dozen-story brick building. It was an Indo-Chinese vegan place. She ordered an amazing Gobi Manchurian appetizer; he just sat there with a coffee, saying that he wasn’t hungry. He looked into her eyes and said those words. When she replied in kind, his eyes hazel eyes beamed.
Love is weird. I thought I loved you then, but did I? Maybe? But maybe I was just really horny and lonely. I definitely don’t love you now.
“Why do we always have to talk about these kinds of things?”
Why, really, do we have to talk at all?
“I don’t know. I guess that it’s nice to reminisce about the nice times that we’ve had together.”
Sharon looked straight across the table to where Daryl had been sitting and said, “I’ve been thinking. We’ve been together for almost a year and a half now. Don’t you think it’s time to give ourselves a little space and maybe see other people?”
“You mean like an open relationship?”
“No. I just mean us not see each other anymore. Ever.”
Daryl stopped chewing and looked up to the ceiling fan, which had finally whirred on.
“…I don’t think that’s something we need to do.”
“I do,” Sharon said, shoving her heels deep into his side as she pushed herself out from the booth.
She stood up, looked down at him as he masticated on a mouthful of pulled pork and said, “I’m dumping you, Daryl.”
Nanny
“Good timing,” Giselda thought, taking off her shoes.
Jimmy, the 13-month old she was hired to watch, had fallen asleep for his morning nap just before she arrived.
Giselda looked out the window, from the dried-up grass on the expansive front lawn to a sign in the neighbor’s yard across the street that read “We’re proud of our Christian Academy student.”
She took out her phone and scrolled through Facebook. Her friend Adriana and her new American husband had posted pictures from a fishing trip to New Hampshire. But Giselda knew that Adriana didn’t even like fishing. Giselda’s mother had finished reading the Harry Potter series for the fifth time. Her São Paulo high school classmate, Luiz, posted something new against Bolsonaro.
“Would you like a coffee?” asked Lisa, Jimmy’s mother, who Giselda had responded to on a local Nannies/Babysitters community page seeking childcare.
“No thank you.”
“Good, because I’d have to charge you for it.”
Lisa laughed and stood over Giselda, watching her look into her phone.
“How long are his naps, usually?”
“What?” asked Lisa, unaccustomed to ESL speakers.
“Jimmy’s naps, are they usually for one hour? Two hours?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They could be anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours.”
“Wow, quite a range!”
Lisa nodded and walked away.
Giselda fished out a hair tie from her purse and tied her long, silky black hair into a ponytail. She looked to her phone and saw Rodrigo’s number pop up. They had broken up two months ago, but he kept calling her to “check on her health.” It was around the time that she had Covid when she stopped taking his calls. She had been symptomless for over a month and a half but the only foods she could taste were Guaraná and her roommate’s barbeque beef.
Giselda texted, “I’m fine. Stop calling me all the time. Ok?”
A few minutes later, just as she heard fussing coming from Jimmy’s upstairs bedroom, Rodrigo texted back, “Ok. But I care about you. If the feeling isn’t mutual then I’ll just go back to São Paulo.”
“No, stay. Not because of me though. I don’t think we’ll ever get back together. But the money you make at your fancy job, it doesn’t make sense to leave now. Your family needs that.”
Rodrigo was a software engineer at a Boston financial firm. Although he didn’t make as much as his American colleagues, he was fairly content with his salary.
Giselda felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Umm, excuse me. Did you hear Jimmy?”
Lisa looked down at Giselda with small, squinting blue eyes. Her dirty blonde hair was parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears. When she bent over and tapped Giselda, the right side of her hair fell across half of her face.
“Yes, but it just sounded like a little fussing. Do you want me to go and get him?”
Lisa stood upright and leaned towards the staircase with a tilted head.
“He quieted down. Never mind.”
Lisa went back to the kitchen and began chopping vegetables. She turned on the radio to her favorite soft rock station.
“Just as an fyi, I don’t pay for the time when he’s napping.”
“Are you serious?”
“It wouldn’t be fair to us. I can’t pay you to just sit there. We aren’t loaded.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re loaded or not. This is my time that you have to pay for.”
“It’s your time to go on Twitter or text your boyfriend. I won’t pay for that.”
Lisa opened the freezer and took out a plastic bag with several pizza crusts from weeks ago. She placed them into the microwave to defrost, then put them in the toaster until they got warm and crispy and started chewing on them while chopping celery.
Giselda remained seated in the family room and stared at the Persian rug. It had multiple gilded boarders, each one smaller than the others. In the center, there was a detailed depiction of a king seated on a throne. A woman wearing a wimple clasped his leg with both hands.
“I like that we can still talk,” texted Rodrigo.
Giselda started to text back when her phone was snatched away. Lisa stood over Giselda wagging it in her face.
“Hey, we provide free internet service for you here and we aren’t a public library. So, drop the sour face, k?”
Giselda gritted her teeth as Lisa handed her phone back. She looked back to the picture of the king and woman. The king had one of his hands on the woman’s head, as though he was petting a dog.
Giselda clutched the phone, put her arm back and hurled it at Lisa as she walked away.
“Ouch, fuck!” said Lisa, holding the back of her head where the phone had hit. She pointed towards the door and said, “Get the hell out of my house!”
Giselda walked slowly towards Lisa and picked up her phone from the off-white linoleum kitchen floor.
She looked into Lisa’s eyes and said, “Gladly, you miserable woman.”
As a prolific author from the Boston area, Peter F. Crowley writes in various forms, including short fiction, op-eds, poetry and academic essays. In 2020, his poetry book Those Who Hold Up the Earth was published by Kelsay Books and received impressive reviews by Kirkus Review, the Bangladeshi New Age and two local Boston-area newspapers. His writing can be found in Middle East Monitor, Znet, 34th Parallel, Pif Magazine, Galway Review, Digging the Fat, Adelaide’s Short Story and Poetry Award anthologies (finalist in both) and The Opiate.
Poetry from J.D. Nelson
. . . urger (b) roadside peaches bro + ken androids spock’s legendary green ape far-flung the sound of the tree machine box momentary ember one sparrow barthroom tart frog famished rose hat head santa fe nm 2 eyes made co rn co b p i p e ------------- bio/graf J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poems have appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of ten chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). Nelson’s poem, “to mask a little bird” was nominated for Best of the Net. Visit http://MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at http://JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Colorado, USA.
Poetry from Vernon Frazer
Panning Out
the ontological panacea
galloping airbrakes their launching
moles against angry vibrations
inveighs awful reverb to
orange scrape dentures
and beefburger eyeballs
the reveries of memoriam putting
darkening the screwdriver period
harkening sonic calcification
negative zoom: sternum
curls tight in tumid sector breath
the cornered moonbeam’s communique
latent in seawater
softened the homecoming eardrum
while
victors
bubbled
driveway claimants
stepped where clichéd glitter
stoked thoughtful commotion
drenched by deuce dropping
narrowed diaper compartment fairgrounds
Day Turning Dark for the Night
daylight drifting
intones the scented patois
its daydream stolen
the mixture
a bartered abandon
disposed the grim fret
holiday eponym aggression
the firestorm boiled
at empty eyebrows
to rapture in firecracker roadhouses
( )
a subterranean temptation
glinting retorts umder caliper vessels
nominal venom prefixes
nuance eyebrow tactics
repentance blueprint blown last
off the walks, a despair tankard
covered in a thermostat virginal
cowered before posse moonlight
( )
numbered breakthroughs
catapult the thought, not the few
the insight rushing
sycophantic mezzanine colors
docket tension
wayside caring
the chance phonemes neon remedial leave
The Loyal Backing Away
spectral allegiance
sampling
the legendary obscure
a rugby phantom
gone missing in the rain
a dalliance
dripping slippery breath
over wet tentacles
periphery bursting a drunken glow
no motto left
to have or habitate
over
each
nomenclature cufflink suicide undecided
beyond the reach
of any tonic’s clef
( )
at root
a sonic declamation
amply
scuttled
the celebrity rumor gloss thickened
its equivocal moss
festering essential time legions
where lingering denotes
chronic enervation in keeping
up with
a rumored sample
under a hiding sun
a traitor shadowed
Under the Weathered
the rain needs certificates
abducting a marginal soufflé
process merchants acquired
a projective conditioner view
that shuttered trough tests
to pace their slow sharking
over clustered frustration
their regions remembered
decorations bare for the rite
fossil taxes renewed raking
over the scrotal oration cloud
a weary gabble once it left
phylum rafters a cartilage city
warring below sweatshirt fringe
benefactors plaster the known
parameters vomit members
shopping becomes undone
for the wetter energy barking
commotion to terminal daylight
a tractor-lined euphoria danger
factored when foundations air
footed barbarity notwithstanding
clamor swim coincidence taunts
lunging turned danger a force
as voltage pits looted their colors
from omelets deleted as savage
the wary pain of practical turmeric
their savage daylight left unfilled
a mudslide flavored the movie