Sugar Window
it [comes]
[tripping]
[tripping]
[tripping]
DOWN THE...
#####################
along again along with machine
a marching band
and a
H*O*R*S*E
quaalude to take the cake
the wheel has come off the
[FIT]
[FIT]
[FIT]
[FIT]
######################
###############
#########
.
.
.
Nebulous Time[stamp]
////////////////////////////////////
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this is the sound of THUNDER (something)
only on the better
spring
clouded
semaphore
semaphore
semaphore
semaphore
[[[barked down in
nightdress as the soldier
grovels with
lids in the basket]]]
WHAT A case:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Insubstantial Lamplight Callisthenics
hoof and
hhhhhooooooooopppppppppp
waging on the shore
B
L
A
N
K
MISS-ALIGNED
[soup][swing]
!
the coast is cold
&
volume is apprehension
&
&
&
.
.
.
Glass [half] cut [half]
brother can you spare a...aluminium aluminium aluminium...
a constant swab of...falalalala...how much is the cash back...
long long long long long long long...sheepskin rug...I
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
!!!
and the same to you
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////
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--lift--[to say it[[
--left--[leg[[to say it[[
--lift--[to say it[[
--right--[leg[[to say it[[
ARRANGE IT ALL AGAIN
Anxiety Measure (wa wa)
consignment
ever
t
h
i
s
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
a l
i
n
e
in the
u
p
p
e
r
c
a
s
e
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
crustacean
i want my elbows back
i want to stand in summer
i want a nightdress and a telephone
i want
i want
i want
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
i
w
a
n
t
what
you've
..................
..................
..................
Bio: Nathan Anderson is a poet from Mongarlowe Australia. He is the author of Mexico Honey, The Mountain + The Cave and Deconstruction of a Symptom. His work has appeared in Otoliths, BlazeVox, Beir Bua and elsewhere. You can find him at nathanandersonwriting.home.blog or on Twitter @NJApoetry. Nathan is a member of the C22 collective, you can find more about it at c22press.wordpress.com.
The Terror of Tulips
By Chris Butler
The cock of the walk. The early Saturday morning's sun beamed through the gray overcast of night with the rays of golden gods. The college campus's freshly barbered lawns glistened. The acoustic melodies of an older generation echoed from the insomniac stoners' room, playing the soothing soundtrack for coming down. The birds chirped their harmonious courtships. A college junior, with his combed hair parted to perfection across his head and his brand new satin shirt hung across his plateaued shoulders without a wrinkle, had the stride with the pride of a royal lion as he smirked fondly across his kingdom.
Leo strolled past the mailbox built within a block of individually selected bricks and up the winding driveway of his fraternity house. Alpha Beta Gamma was a century's old mansion that was formerly the home of the university's founder and first dean. His body swaggered with the fluid swing of each arm. He inhaled deep, free puffs that filled his bagpipe lungs to capacity. He skipped up each of the three concrete steps that led to the massive oak door. He paused for a moment, the sly smile of the recollection of satisfaction smeared across his face, lifting the corners of his lips just below his bloodshot, bright blue eyes. His sure hand gripped the iron doorknob as he took one last breath of fresh air.
Leo reminisced of the evening before, and massive celebration at his friend's parent's house, who left their son in charge as the caretaker of their home as they flew south for a lavish vacation. His friend had decided that the Friday evening of that week was the opportunity of a young lifetime to throw the perfect keg party, along with a shapely array of plastic bottles of clear and brown alcohol. Since Leo the had the earliest date of birth of everyone in his class, he had been placed in charge of procuring the drinks for the epic celebration. Most of the girls who had arrived at the party with promises of free liquor and beer had already spent an evening with Leo, and were aware of his predatory ways. They were lionesses, and knew all too well that it was the female of the species who brought home the dead meat. They were more interested in spending their precious evenings with anyone else.
But from across the room appeared a girl Leo had never seen before. She was as fully fulfilled and developed as a woman, yet naively younger than college age, she must be eighteen he thought to himself. But these numbers weren't of any concern to him on this evening. He seduced her with a special cocktail of his own concoction, mixed with his special secret ingredient of a little white pill. After she chugged his drink of choice as he whispered in her ear his favorite rehearsed lines to impress girls with a lower maturity level than their age, he offered to give her a refill. As her cup drained down her throat and below halfway mark of the plastic container, her body began to sway and she had to use his dominant body to help her equilibrium stay balanced. He had no intentions of carrying a passed out girl upstairs in front of the rest of the party's participants. He lifted the cup from her hand and placed it on a table. He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her towards the stairs that led to the second floor. She said something about her friend Lily, and Leo assured her that they would find her. And they should start their searching upstairs. With minimal resistance, he pulled her into the dark guest bedroom. He assured her that they would find her friend, just as he plopped onto the bed, pulling her down on top of him. Frenetically pulling off her sweater and jeans, he kept saying sweet nothings over her drifting voice. Flipping himself onto her, he pried open her legs. After the climax of his conquest, he pulled his underwear up and put back on his jeans, and as she squirmed in what he assumed to be as blissful dreams. He left, closing the door as quietly as a home invader behind him.
As Leo turned the iron knob to enter his fraternity home, a honeybee landed on his hand. His other hand went upward to callously swat it, when the bee's wings lifted it towards the bushes that grew around the exterior of the lavish house. He noticed that the annual tulips had spread open their closed petals for the spring season. The bee flew into the moist center of the flower. It crawled up and down and all around the sweet, sticky insides, fleeing with the bright yellow pollen clinging to its appendages. He nodded with approval towards the busy bee in its desire to master all the flowers in all the gardens around him. He removed his hands from the knob to smell the sweet, sticky insides that were still clinging to his fingers. He opened the massive door and disappeared from the daylight.
-----
The walk of shame. The Saturday morning sun hid behind a tarp of gray cloud cover. The spring air was moist, leaving a foggy glaze on the car windows across the suburban neighborhood. The early birds chirped with the hunger of hunters. A young high school sophomore, with long, bedraggled hair, strands dangling from the ponytail barely held together by a scrunchie, and her brand-new turtleneck sweater with a tear across her shoulder, she shuffled her feet down the street, arms crossed, her eyes staring downward at the asphalt before her feet.
Rose almost walked past her home before she noticed the mailbox painted with an array of colorful floral arrangements at the end of the driveway. She hugged herself harder until she wasn't inhaling enough air to catch her breath. She stepped onto the brown, worn welcome mat with "Home Sweet Home" embroidered in black lettering laying before the front door. She paused for an eternal moment, taking prolonged, bottomless breaths, until her head felt like a helium-filled balloon. Her shaking hand clenched the doorknob to steady her body tremors.
Rose hesitated. She remembered through the hammering headache, the queasy nauseousness in her stomach and the thorny pain in her groin about the lie she had rehearsed the night before. She had convinced her parents that she was spending her Friday evening at a slumber party at her best friend Lily's house. They were going to binge watch the newest episodes of their favorite show about fashionable, quick-witted high school girls and their everyday high school girl problems that claimed complete control over their lives, record themselves jokingly following the latest social network trends and uploading the results online, and staying up until dawn talking about the clear-complexioned boys in class they thought were cute, the girls they thought were sluts or bitches and the homework assignment they had to finish before Monday's classes were back in session.
The night before Rose's long, lonely walk home, the best friends had learned of a kegger hosted by college men at a house only a few short miles from Lily's house. Not boys, but men. The allure of leaving the same old high school boys that made juvenile jokes and always talked about subjects that made the girls' eyes roll around in their heads and instead spend their Friday night with a gathering of mature, intellectual men. It enticed their imagination of a party without lightweights who could not hold their alcohol inside their teenage tummies and by the end of the evening wouldn't spread sprinkles of vomit onto their shoes. But once Lily became separated from her friend, she met and conversed with her first college man. Tall, with golden hair perfectly parted to the left side of his handsome head, a man named Leo introduced himself to Rose. He offered her a drink, returning from the bottles of booze with a red solo cup full. The drink was cheek sucking sweet, but with a strange aftertaste. She noticed the college women staring in their direction, likely glares of jealously because they weren’t flirting with the hottest piece of man at the festivities. From then on, the rest of the night was a spinning blur, as the young virgin eventually found herself away from the crowd she was so interested in meeting, to a private room with a guest bed, the first time she had ever been alone with another man, or boy. She had tried to say no, more than once before and after she fell onto the bed, but she wasn't aware that her words slurred when they left her lips. But her refusals didn't slow him down, but instead sped his libido up by a thousand horses of power. Her pushes were too weak to express her displeasure. She thought of screaming, but his tongue was licking her tonsils as her lightened head spun out of her control.
Rose remained still at the front door of her home. She released her grip on the knob. She collapsed on the mat with her back against the door. She saw the crotch of her jeans glimmered with a spot of fresh blood from her hymen that was busted by that man's battering ram. A buzzing began between her ears. A honeybee hovered over her head for a long moment, looking like it was ready to sting. It then flew around the flower bed next to the concrete path from the mailbox to the front door. It landed on a tulip next to her. The bee penetrated the unpeeled petals and burrowed its way inside onto the virginal anther. It began molesting the unadulterated stamens until it was caked in yellow pollen. The hairs covering its twiggy legs pillaged the pollen. Then the bee's wings fluttered as it flew away, hunting the next flower for a taste of nature's nectar.
When I was a kid I got invited, to my buddy Marty's Bar Mitzvah, it was for his thirteenth birthday, his parents were throwing him a big party, to celebrate a rite of passage, ya see Marty was a Jew.
I told my parents and was so excited, the Bar Mitzvah was at
Shedd's Aquarium Downtown Chicago, my Old Man said he didn't care, if it was at fucking Disneyland, I wasn't going, and forget about being friends with Marty, he didn't want him hanging around, ya see Marty was a Jew.
I was more than disappointed, I was righteously pissed off, the only reason he had for not letting me go was because of his religion, ya see Marty was a Jew.
His family didn't seem to mind that I was a Christian, you're telling me that's why I can't go, what's so bad about being a Jew, my mother put in her two cents worth, did you know Jews don't believe in Jesus, what does that have to do with anything, why does it matter, maybe Jews don't believe in Bigfoot, it's not a logical reason,
I knew somehow in some way Jesus would get involved, why in the hell would Jesus care if Marty was a Jew, and there's more pressing world issues Jesus should be attending to,
hold on here just one minute, you both have your facts mixed up, you don't want me to be friends with Marty or go to his Bar Mitzvah, just because of who he doesn't worship, Marty is a Jew
Yet we go to church every Sunday, except the Old Man,
and pray to Jesus, who died on the cross for our sins, and both of you should be grateful he did, because what I'm about to say, you may find it hard to believe, I guess you forgot this Messiah named Jesus, or maybe you just never knew, I read it in the Bible, so I'm sure it must be true, ya see Jesus just like Marty,
was a Jew.
AM NOT A POET
Don't call me a poet,
I cannot write the pain that flows through my veins
Nor draw the chains handcuffing my body
Don't call me a poet,
I'm afraid to use my blood as ink and my skin paper
Tangled in this life too
A slave to my emotions.
Afraid to let out my voice
which unwittingly quivers when I speak.
Don't call me a poet
Because I cannot make out words of letters
I therefore personify my sorrow
Though I pen my own story
I cannot give myself a happy ending
So, don't call me a poet.
Amirah Abdulrahman. (JAWAHIR'S PEN)
Gladys always said, “Beware of what you dream. Ignore those visions if you must, but remember, these things have a habit of coming back to haunt you.” I don’t know what she based this kind of assessment on but, more often than not, she was right. Not long after this warning I had a dream that Gladys and I were in grave danger in some dark and threatening place. She died but I did not. Unfortunately, I ignored the dream.
After she left, I began seeing all kinds of people I knew who were dead. She said this might happen. Most of them were illusions or cases of mistaken identity. I wondered about the others.
Once the rain began, it was impossible to see the path forward or back. After a while, even up and down were getting confused. I felt as if I was in the up-escalator dream where all the stairs had stopped moving and all the lights in the tunnel had gone out. The air was stifling. It felt thick and smothering like a wool blanket that scratched the skin and burrowed its way into your throat. There was no point in trying to move. There was no place to go. Awake. Or dreaming.
Weathered stone. The way is blocked by weathered stones. Not exactly like a wall. Like what? A path where stones grew instead of grass or weeds. Stones that had sharp, ponied edges. Peaks sharp as knife blades, slippery with moss and mold that glowed in the incipient moonlight. These weathered stones. That moaned as they grew, aching as they cut through the gumline of the earth like teeth with nowhere else to go.
The shy is septic. An open untreated, suppurating wound too long left to fester. The fluids formerly trapped inside are leaking out like rain. I’m sliding on the black ice that covers everything the rain has touched. It’s like walking on sheets of motor oil, something that is both solid and frozen at the same time but impossible to move on. If I don’t relocate, I will adhere to where I am. Become a misshapen ice sculpture in a greasy downpour. Waking up here is unthinkable.
Cento Derived from the Titles of ‘Erasure’ Poems by John Dorsey
TendrilBy Sreya Sarkar
Decenniums descended,
Brave women marched with men
Shoulder to shoulder
Azaadi looked within reach
Palace walls crumbled
But a turret grew there instead
Its snake head sissling
Keeping watch on all
Tightening its grip
On men, women, children
Some escaped
Into the folds of wealth
Sheltered in connections
Others had nowhere to hide
They worked in the streets, and the fields
Exposed to the strict police gaze
The masters needed the shroud of virtue
To veil their craving
They made it law
Loose gowns,
Tight headscarves
A pretty young one
botched the command
Her tendril escaped
The gaze weaponized it
Looped it to choke her
The zhins moaned in agony
Beat their breasts
Lit a bonfire
Jumped in, one by one
A neo-futurist architect and AI
Imagined a mane of hair in the wind
Is the gust enough to place it in Azadi Square?
Can the snake be decimated,
the blood washed away?
Will the “flowing free” replace it, instead?
Insides of mausoleums i Shapes shifted blue (turquoise endeavored) to the favorite bar our constant devotion what stumbles across them the distant voices once heard if hereafter recollected, existents of a higher plane every body talks of— this no man’s land a graveyard sought for if retrogressive.
ii Type doors to faded sepulchers spectraled silhouettes align with, bundle what light makes (ancestral, important) in tombs windows encase them, cutting the distance to climb of their paradise eternal a squared room contorts it.
iii Sky’s throw the distance that covers closed sets of harvest (once and for all) if consequents of choices stand tall to accuse of some Other’s vision this room stocks it while perennial graces alabaster herein triumphs.
Andrew Cyril Macdonald considers the role of inter-subjectivity in poetic encounter. He celebrates the confrontations between self and Other and the challenges that occur in moments of injustice. He is founding editor of Version (9) Magazine, a poetry journal that implicates all things theoretic. You can find his words in such places as A Long Story Short, Blaze VOX, Cavity Magazine, Don’t Submit, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Fevers of the Mind, Green Ink Poetry, Lothlorien, Nauseated Drive, Otoliths, Synchronized Chaos, Unlikely Stories and more. When not writing he is busy caring for seven rescued cats and teaching a next generation of poets.
