Beach, Summer 1980

by

Amanda McQuade

A shark float smiling his toothy grin. The cut 
of light across your freckled skin as you bounced. 
Across the pool, calls your mother, my sister, 
in her pink and black bathing suit, the one 
that displayed her sagging cleavage; hair 
tuft on her head like yellowy orbs and halos – 
how they stroked your coconut face. I watched
your feet walk and the sand churn you deeper – 
the salt water smack with each breath you captured. 
How the monster calmed, amber, rolled out and 
sucked in the bottoms of those feet, new to grass, 
to sun, to brushing hands, to enveloping arms. 
Plump and shiny with silver seashells; salt gargling 
each scratch the cat made. And your eyes, 
how they blinked back the white light buoying you ashore.

 

 

Amanda McQuade attended university in Ohio, where she studied American Literature. Recently her work has appeared in MO: Writings from the River, Mississippi Crow, and Ruminate. For the moment she and her husband reside in Charlotte, NC.

Leaving the Paper House

by

Stephanie N. Anderson

I lay alone in bed,
I watch how night urges the streetlamp
to drop her light through the blinds
and draw a map across my stomach,
my arms and legs.

She tilts her head,
wondering the purpose of my body.
Because for months,
my arms have been withering
their needless bones,
becoming empty paper wings.

For months, emptiness has written
herself in full lines –
starting at my toes, and working up
through my stomach.

I glance at him,
he is sitting on my bedside table,
smiling a smile for some memory
lost to the photograph.

For so long
I have placed him
underneath a paperweight
to keep him here beside me.
But now I fold his arms like an airplane,
and fly him into the night air.

This morning
the newspaper said ecstasy was clawing
its way back into the city.
And so I close the blinds,
lock the windows and doors.

Tonight
I shake the crumpled paper from my arms.

 

Stephanie N. Anderson is an English major at Austin Peay State University, with a minor in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in several print and online magazines, including Volume Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Decanto, Clean Sheets, Poetry Monthly and Poetic Hours Magazine. She edits the literary publication, Up the Staircase.

You’re Dead Joe

by

Jadon Rempel

You’re dead Joe, one day on the job
boots already dirty, they did it
to you, you did it to us. I’d tell you
they made the coffin out of aluminum
checker-plate, welds ground flush
indiscernible from chrome reflecting
the look on everyone’s face as your
pallbearers lugged you down the aisle,
all that stained glass and Jesus shit
flaring off your lid, they gave us
the afternoon off, first cold torches in
the shop for 15 years, like no one ever
dies when there’s work to be done,
you’d be pissed, even nightshift showed
up puffy-eyed and yawning just so you’d
recognize them. We all grabbed
something from your locker, coffee
cup, blackened deck of cards, spare
flints, union card. Your wife said to
divvy it up, nice lady Deb, I rode with
her to the hole they dug for you, one
car behind and she joked that you’d be
skeptical of the whole ordeal, chewing
your stitches because they wouldn’t
let you drive, too good for you anyway
Joe, but she lost it at the graveyard, as
they dangled you over the hole, lowering
you all dramatic-like, the pastor going
through the motions as if it weren’t too late
to save your soul and before long it’s just
you, a hole, a pile of dirt and not a shovel
for miles, odd thing this death business,
everyone works behind the scenes and you
never really know who you’re dealing with,
do you? Which is a shame, because a guy
works so damn hard to get there, I figure
death could use a foreman, or at least
someone to put in a good word for
the rest of us poor bastards.

 

 

by Leaf Press. His work has been featured on CBC Radio One, and he is a subservient minion with the 2008 Edmonton Poetry Festival. Jadon lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with his wife, dog, and baby daughter, Aria.

Every Ten Years

by

William Doreski

1.

Watching you sunbathe topless
in the restaurant parking lot
I wonder why officials
from the New England Aquarium
haven’t reclaimed the mermaid
they lost when you went ashore.

Your red hair looks so arrogant
no stranger dares approach you.
Your scales shine like the chain mail
Beowulf wore to his tea
party with Grendel. A gust
of families with tiny children
blows through the parking lot. Resigned
to decency, you cover up,
and sprawled in your folding longue
assume that graven innocence
Supreme Court judges emulate.

2.

The noon hour occludes in wisps
of cloud. The lunch crowd departs.
Show’s over. A thin, callow rain
spatters on the tarmac. You fold
your furniture and swagger away
and I follow so discreetly
you turn and sneer only twice.
I should go home and fold that image
of you topless and gleaming
into memory, but I’m tired
of glimpsing you every ten years
and would like to locate your lair.

But when a car stops to pick you up
it’s a Chevy from the Fifties
and I realize I’m driving it
four decades ago, and the smile
I offer from behind the wheel
so stuns me you evade me
in a stutter of arrhythmia
I’m too old to mistake for love.

 

 

Umbrella + Sewing Machine = ?

by

Cristiano Montanari

Young heroin(e), a Mary Sue of herself,
Bathing in a sad Muse’s bloodboil
(They might say I couldn’t do it to save my life,
But they will never say I didn’t, before the long goodbye.)

I think she has something to say about
The mutually parasitic nature of art and desire,
Hands tight like frightened teen lovers
Against the horrified screams of the masses;
Begging quarter from their deformed letters,
Bent wires and indecent exposure.

Goodness gracious, she has to try her hand at all and everything!
Her twisted humor harbors no pity for
The brush, shaking apoplectic in his box,
That poor guitar – busy disentangling her own strings;
The square of rice paper, closing tighter and tighter
Please, not him!

Such is the nature of thought, broken
And bound in its most rachitic form:
Little glory or subtlety in its stride,
But no gallows or needle can hold it back.

 

 

Cristiano Montanari, born 1985 in Modena (Italy), graduated in 2008 from SUNY Buffalo, where he attended a year-long poetry course taught by poet Karen MacCormack. His work will be published October 2008 in Poesia by Indian Bay Press. Other interests include music performance, architecture and environmentalism.