Bodies Exhibit – By Fern G. Z. Carr Black walls, track lighting, spectators milling about silently, reverently surrounded by vascular systems preserved in fluid, skeletons, diseased organs, foetuses in jars. Hollowed out corpses in life-like poses play soccer, hold hands, boast their musculature – a post-mortem artistic rendition of red meat. In a display case, a […]
Read more
AGE HAS ITS PRIVILEGE – By Ray Gallucci When you are old and prone to mold, It matters not if you they’ll scold For skipping meetings by not heeding Platitudes they keep repeating. It’s right you’ve earned to choose to spurn What management claims you should learn. Once you have heard it all before, Their tired words are just […]
Read more
In this small, blue room— overheated, clenched by melancholy, I sit the night, guarding carnival goods, blood potions, the knife thrower’s serrated blades. Two buskers beach-walk a tune, harmonies muffled by wave’s insistence. A mathematical conceit of stars burning to earth enriches water’s lap against pier beams, a night sailor’s crossing. Taken on as apprentice, the alchemist insists […]
Read more
Stone Slate – By Melissa R. Mendelson They tell me that I am alive. If that were so, shouldn’t I breathe? Listen to your heart, and I’m stupid for listening once more. I don’t hear anything. Check your pulse. “I am checking,” I scream. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. How could they tell me what they tell me, and how could I […]
Read more
A Nuclear Childhood What if your parents had never met had never married had never yelled at each other and instead had wed someone they loved and lived peacefully all those years. That would have been their Eden but you shaking there now decades later wouldn’t be with us cursing the tremors of a […]
Read more
Those who sent their men to war Still wait, forever wait Their return at full moon. Those whose men returned long ago Still wait, forever wait To be issued their fortune. We hoped amidst the struggle Our blood shall dry not, but sprout Into long-bearing palm trees of joy As we wrestled with nightmares of time We remained awake […]
Read more
van Diemen’s land eclipsed in artwork A solitary Joshua tree curling, fetal, looking outwards its instinct tailored, to fold itself in. and wrap yourself around your arms even as you scream “not here” take me somewhere else you say ribald, Nostradamus hued. Alone. one wondered if you, who liked the drumbeats to suggest how much of music […]
Read more
The Blood of Poets I should have left you lying in the mud, And maybe sacrificed all you had to say But my thought to act brought on me obligation To belay my mind the images of things inside, I dare not deny your trail: You steal hearts, make men cry Wolds are born upon your spine Bills […]
Read more
OUT TO YOU (By Joseph Cavera) Could I help but see it? That light shining down, Everlasting direction Like Thorns of a crown These refractions fly, His word’s unveiled Another day… All Hope is impaled With the sentence he sends, Verified misnomers aside, Until you stretch out your hand To call me to the true light, A truly luminous […]
Read more
Embedded and this statue still tightening its grip tries to revive the horse expects its crumbling reins to smell from leather and crowding –you squint the way the general looks for a small thing encased in a season exactly where he left it waits in the rain for your black umbrella to open make room for you […]
Read more