“Reaction to S. Cearley’s Creation”  by John Dorroh

I am swimming through water, no, blood that is thin like water, its salt diluted, unable to nurture the cells, the tissues, the organs.

It is unfair to have such a life tempered with anxious abandon, reeling forever loose

into a cacophony of pity.

Even water sheds tears, and so it was with our crew, that pitiful facsimile of a human being,

his twisted toes long overdue for amputation;

a captain in name only for his attempts at lending support for crew or passengers

failed miserably.

I ate rats once a day, long gray tails that hung out of my mouth like a tough, fleshy rope,

followed by precious water

water without salt, such a rare commodity and it was rumored that urine could be treated

and drunk with only mild effect.

The balance of power is such a non-existent commodity on a craft like this; its sails full

of holes, no attempts to sew,

to block wind that no longer blows hair – too matted from salt of sweat and dead skin,

no bathing chamber, no closet for heavy hearts.

I was beaten by a ragmuffin of a man, spat on, pissed on, kicked like a sack of rotten fruit.

I am sixteen, barely a man,

and wondering if this trip is worth what is happening to me. Mt dear aunt, I think, is being used

below deck for unsavory purposes.

How can a God be present? How can such a test be within his jurisdiction? It is the devil

here on this ship,

the devil for sure who plays his role like a stable genius, who demands to be revered and

adored and worshipped.

I cannot bow down to such an entity and live with myself. I am smitten with the essence

of a cockroach who keeps

me company and eats the dead skin on my exposed ankles. I pray that his offspring

find their way into the mouth of the captain.

I find sleep now, perhaps forever, my weak body purging itself up through the clouds

and with one last surge of energy

I push against the wooden siding and pray that I will pass through whatever gates or curtains

are available. I am spent.

Facts Unknown

Good morning stairs this is the way of coming down
((faces in agony)) the bracing rails either side as step by
one more step gingerly I ((faces in ecstasy)) make way,
taking only the required number of, no side trips
straightaway ((pain is intimacy)) to coffee to chair
with ottoman & feet ((pain in invitation)) off the ground —
Last night my body hummed white noise,
((spike, throb, wave)) lit up at every nerve ending,
touch me I am a plasma globe ((undulation in stardust))
whose lightning follows your hand and some days a vibrato of glow
other days ((trepidation)) an orchestra of intentions gone awry sing me to sleep
my hands go numb and I shake them until my fingers reemerge
from snow But how many plush vials shall I give the nurse today
and how many possibilities will return and — Hello, today,
the longer I stand the longer I can stand standing until later
((pain I can eroticize might distract from pain I can’t))
when I can’t stand any longer and all of this invisible
and the migraines seem to have subsided for now
and my knees hips elbows shoulders clavicle
((the persistent chainsaw buzz that frays))
wrists fingers fingertips thighs calves ankles feet
dissolve into ache and the parade of specialists still say
I don’t know. ((some days your body keeps you close to home))

Cati Porter is a poet, editor, and community arts facilitator. She is founder and editor of literary journals Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and Inlandia: A LiteraryJourney, and the author of My Skies of Small Horses Seven Floors Up, the chapbooks small fruit songs,most delicious, The Way Things Move The Dark, what Desire makes of us with illustrations by her sister Amy Payne, and The Body, Like Bread. Her third full-length collection, The Body at a Loss, is forthcoming in 2019 from CavanKerry Press. She lives with her family in California’s Inland Empire, where she is the Executive Director ofthe Inlandia Institute, a regionally-focused literary nonprofit.

Brief Response to Mindy Ohringer’s “The Man in the Yellow Hat”

As writers we often enter from left field and exclaim there is no center! We speak here of grief. Loss before it occurs. Where we meet an entangled affair where identities collapse into one. Mainstream for Bestseller vs. The Promise of Writing. Here mainstream is positioned in the hands of the older. An odd form of tradition is in the hand of the young. Writing promises erasing. It promises exploration, wonder, and tussling with concepts. At the end of life, the aged character encourages his client into writing less vague. The vagueness that writing requires in order to be considered writing. He offers a sense of directness as if to be vague is not to also be direct. The young writer, who loves him, is in expansion and search for turning this performative platform of literary fiction away from the grips of entertainment consumption that shields from the process of exploration, questioning and wrestling that happens behind the curtains. Written in response is an intentionally vague poem, that speaks of the direct experience of baptism, an experience that transcends mainstream and tradition. As baptism is a way to the paradise that commercial routes are known to offer, it withstands a tradition of freedom as a release from death into an eternal life. Hint the line: The body is portal. I speak from the experience of my relationship with my
deceased father who encouraged me into a mainstream heaven that would deny all parts of my tradition of freedom that my queerness, blackness and woman-ness offers me.

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The Perforating Spider   

To what degree we should fear her we can’t know, but we extol her labor which is eleventy-seven percent more exacting than that of her arthropod relatives since she has thirteen feet (five more than the standard setup)–if you look closely, you might glimpse the flickering of their stochastic puncture-patterns on the moving spider map of the universe known also as the interdimensional network of negative space.

Nor can we discern whether she achieved her position or it was primordially imposed on her—is she an angel, perhaps a lesser god?

We do know that these feet are named respectively 1 absence 2 anomaly 3 discontinuity 4 the specious present  5 ellipsis 6 antithesis 7 stealth 8 the fugue-state  9 the lost sea 10 the anti-tonic 11 the oblique gravitational force 12 polysemy 13 cipher.  Note also her wing-buds, infolded, either prophecy or vestigial legacy of aerial predation.

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Chapter 19 – Day of the Dead, 1988

Marivi Soliven’s novel The Mango Bride

 On the Day of the Dead Beverly kept to the routine she had begun a year after her mother’s death:  she rose early, putting on her favorite pair of jeans and a blouse in the pale pink her mother favored.  She took her baby picture from the closet, giving Clara’s image a quick kiss before tucking it into an inner pocket of her backpack.  Then she spritzed herself with the Spanish baby cologne her mother had loved and walked out the door. 

The holiday was acutely bittersweet for Beverly, marking as it did two milestones in her life.  She had been born in the final hours of November 1; fifteen years later it became the day her mother died. But by the time Beverly turned twenty-five, her mother had been gone for ten years.  She had mourned long enough; it was time to seek joy.

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