Perennial

While we slept last night,
late October frost passed
over the garden like the angel
of death, shriveling
the purple heads of cone flowers.
Already the smell of snow.
Tightening in the ribs.
Little by little
afternoons shrink around us
in the darkening rooms. Inexorable,
the earth’s engines drive headlong.
Deer huddle in their yards.
Black bears sleep. Tree frogs
suspend. All
abide.
Elsewhere, someone
is opening a door,
stepping out in the garden
where the first crocus pushes up
like the fingers of Persephone
eager for light.
Here, we tap in the dark, call
to each other.
—-from Hyacinth for the Soul

Joan I. Siegel, author of Hyacinth for the Soul (Deerbrook Editions), Light at Point Reyes (Shabda Press) and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books), received The New Letters Poetry Prize and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Lilly, PA

The layered deaths of small things
made black the heart of these hills,
and the streams, washed gullies, the great river
carry the dead’s murmur
to roar, drowned now
by the chunk chunk of machine,
rake and clang of cargo cars,
the squeak as they pull away,
rust feathered, driven.

Shadows come early in the hollows,
ice lies late. The crooked railroad
ties them all here
in the wrinkled palm of this off-god’s hand.
Fathers wasted want on lack,
the fabric of cheesecloth
brought home to the women for cranberries,
bought in half-yards from bolts
at the dusty back of the 5&10
with coins from pockets
lined with the lint of the realm, rich
with reinforced seams,Wrangler rivets,
the yellow w’s of their leaving.

The war was a gift:
young men, fresh-shaved and willing
to tie honor on like a wool scarf,
wear it to the field,
my father to sea.
Waves like the Appalachian ranges,
gray meeting gray,
boredom and torpedoes a heady mix, oh,
“how do you keep them down on the farm
after they’ve seen Paree?”

The topography of those ranges:
the ropy muscles of my father’s arms,
the taut veins on his temples
that looped across his balding head
to disappear somewhere up there
and seep down to dark:
what lay behind his eyes,
what caught his throat.

Time stumbles in the gnarled valleys
where anthracite and bitumen
elbow bones, and men
wore down their teeth
on hard wind and miner’s wages,
and children stole away on slow flapping wings
like the odd heron on the flyway,
one eye on the Connemaugh,
one on the next ridge.

Blair, Huntingdon, Mifflin, Juniata,
leviathan ribs of mountain force the roads to follow:
No way but down,
or up the arc to Jersey.
Cambria, Somerset, Indiana, Clearfield:
roads circle back on themselves here.
No way for a sober man
to get to Nanty Glo.

Marilyn McCabe’s book of poems Perpetual Motion, chosen by judge Gray Jacobik for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, was published by The Word Works in 2012. Her poem On Hearing the Call to Prayer Over the Marcellus Shale on Easter Morning was awarded the Orlando Prize by A Room of Her Own Foundation in 2012 and will appear shortly in the Los Angeles Review. Marilyn’s poems have been published in print and online in such magazines as Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the Cortland Review.

Tonight, the Dead

whose names are water
in water, howl at my door
like locked-out dogs,
asking for love, love,
endless gratitude, inviolate memory,
justice, what they deserve,

though they are more forgettable
than packed away clothing too good
to throw out, unredeemed keys,
obligatory visits, kisses,
though their names
on the mausoleum’s drawers of ashes
are like labels on files assembled
so they can be forgotten—remaindered,
to the shredders.

And when I go to the door they stop
whimpering, suddenly as kids
whose mothers give in to their yowls
for dessert. They are coyly expectant,
camped out in my grave yard.

Aunt Edith sits splayed
on the ground, arranging
her hair, grass in her mouth.
“I’ve never worn it this long before,”
she says, her voice plump with smiles;
“You don’t remember, but I do,” she says,
“how your mother sprung closed the Murphy bed,
and you in it!”—she snuggles her squirrel hands
to her chest—“and I heard a little squeak, ‘Ee-ee,’
and I crept around calling out ‘Ee-ee’
is here. I saved you. ‘Ee-ee,’
you called, ‘Ee-ee.’ ”

A few rows back, unhurriedly,
my father’s oldest brother, Ben, crosses
his arms and plants one foot
on his expensive marble tombstone, as if
on a ’49 Packard’s running board.

His shroud falls open
at the chest, where golden chains
in graduated sizes encircle the bone.
He sees me. He turns his head.
He likes the silence of the dead. Now I
must come to him—“Beloved Eldest Brother
of T and P and M , whom he saved
from the Nazis, and staked when their idiocy
led them to bankruptcy; Beloved Uncle
of R and B and N (the conspicuous
absence of my name), who made no complaint
when he lifted their lips to look at their teeth,
knowing they wouldn’t be alive, etc. etc.”
And in gold letters, BENJAMIN.

And Manny and Mimm and Rmm and Mmm, thick as leaves,
waving and drowning at the far shores
of oblivion, while the unclosed stories
of their lives still play,
like drive-in movies
you glimpse from the freeway:
shadows you first think are
water, trees, as they slide and pour off—
though refracted from life,
so you glance back.
No cars in the hollow lot,
the speakers all hanging at their stations,
the mute screen flashing to no-one.

But I am listening, dead ones,
I am listening.

From light lowering in diminished sevenths: Poems by Judy Kronenfeld, 2nd edition, Winner of The Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize for 2007 (Simsbury, CT: Antrim House, 2012)

Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent books of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech , 2012) and the 2nd edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, (Antrim House, 2012); her most recent chapbook is Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals, including Calyx, Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Women’s Review of Books and the Pedestal, as well as in over a dozen anthologies including Love over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010), and Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse Press, 2012). She is Lecturer Emerita, Dept. of Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside.

Sybil Ghastbrow

Portrait of My Children

Ghastbrow Mansion

Alien with Phallic Hair

Bunnyphallupede

Alexander Ghastbrow(Villasenor) is an artist, sculptor, and photographer who resides in Beverly Hills, CA. His works appeal to fans of all things edgy and dark. For more information please
see: http://ghastbrow.tumblr.com/archive

You know ghosts and spirits aren’t the only thing that can haunt you, right? I have been haunted, sometimes by the eyes of a stranger on the bus, other times by a photo I have seen at the art gallery. Once I felt even haunted by the simple thought of a certain spider I had never seen with my own eyes, only heard about on the news. Once, I was on the internet and looking up videos of death; real stuff, not what they have in movies or on T.V. I watched a guy shoot himself in the head in front of a crowd, saw the remains of someone hit by a train and watched a soldier cut someone’s head off with a hunting knife. For months I would close my eyes and see those shaky camera images in my head, turning my stomach and making sleep almost impossible at times. Their recorded deaths haunting me, their memories burned into my head. As terrible as their deaths were, at least they will always be remembered for something, even if the images are terrible. I hope one day, when I am gone, I will haunt someone.”

Franklin reached out and turned off the tape player, needing a break from his former patient. Shelly Hughes had started seeing him four years ago when her parents became worried that she was depressed. She had been fourteen and like many girls that age, there was a difference between being depressed and being in high school, though many parents couldn’t tell the difference. Franklin knew that her real problem had been a bad diet, poor body image and being in her first year of high school, but he didn’t tell them that. Instead, Franklin agreed to take her on as a patient, if only so he could continue to see her once a month.

The thought of her, sitting across from him, playing with her hair as she spoke to him; telling him all her deepest and darkest secrets was a fond memory, yet every time it brought him to the edge of tears. On some level, he loved her though he was ashamed to admit it to anyone for fear that they might look at it as something sick and twisted. His love for her though had been as a protector, the same way a parent loves a child or even as a child loves a kitten, not some fantasy of a molester. She was a lost soul, a damaged child and needed his office to shield her from the outside world that wanted nothing more than to destroy her.

She had come to him and let him help her.

Then, she was gone, her whispered voice calling from the tapes, bringing him back to those days.
Taking a deep breath, he turned the tape player back on, leaning back in his leather chair as he closed his eyes and remembered her face, the way she held her hands on her lap or played with her light brown hair as she talked to him.

“My mom wants me to go to church with her, but I don’t see the point. She believes in heaven and thinks that if I hear the priest go on about how beautiful it is, it’ll bring me some sort of peace. It won’t though, because if you ask me, heaven is too final. You go there, and then what? Nobody will ever remember you if you’re at peace and happy. Why should they? I think heaven is simply a place you go to and fade away so that people can easily forget you.

“I don’t want that. I want to be remembered, obsessed over so that I can live on at least for as long as that person lives. That is an afterlife.

“Maybe I can haunt you, Doc? Can I be your ghost?”

The tape stopped and a tear ran down Franklin’s cheek. He wiped it off his face, then licked the salty drop from the tip of his finger, imagining that it was one of hers that he was kissing off his face. He knew he had failed her, had never seen the pain she was really in, so when she went into the bathroom and never came out, it wasn’t just Shelly that died in there.

A part of him died too.

Shelly was gone, but he held onto her with the tapes and the image of her face that lived behind his closed eyes.

“Words can haunt you, and so can failures, Doc. Has anyone ever haunted you?”

Shaun Meeks lives in Toronto, Ontario with his partner, Mina LaFleur. Shaun’s work has appeared in Haunted Path, Dark Eclipse, Zombies Gone Wild and A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine, as well as his own collection, At the Gates of Madness. He will also be featured in the anthologies A Six Pack of Stories, The Horror Zine 4 and Fresh Grounds Volume 3 and will be releasing a new collection with his brother called Brother’s Ilk in late 2012 and his new novel, Shutdown, in early 2013. To find out more, visit him at www.shaunmeeks.com.

Cairn

darwin and
freud
and sartre:
a most
unholy
three

turned us back
to our rat
and lizard
brains
into igneous
rock

go to lascaux
the great hall
of the bulls
breathe in
chauvet
among

cave bear skulls
and come
away
gasping:
a brittle
asthmatic

stand above a
scraped hole
and heap
stones
to protect
the bones

and dream
death and
resurrection
that first, long
moment of
abstraction

Gregory L. Candela has traveled throughout Mexico since 1970 and has resided in New Mexico since 1972. He holds a doctorate in American and African American literature and is professor emeritus at University of New Mexico. Candela has written a volume of poetry (Surfing New Mexico—2001), six produced plays and edited 6 volumes of poetry and prose. Recent publications include poems in the Harwood Anthology, Malpaís Review, Adobe Walls, Sin Fronteras, and Italian Americana (forthcoming
in Fall/Winter 2012).

Trusting the Light

 
Artists and tyrants have something in common.
This comes to me as I look at the moon
 
in its mute serenity above the street.
I just heard a dazzled part of me singing
 
Hey everyone, aren’t things looking up?
Even through the gun battles down here, bitter
 
winter creeping over from that other
hemisphere, across famine deserts,
 
in hospitals full of the shocked or weeping
amputees and psychotics—that kid,
 
the one who sees a squirrel or a peony
and dawdles before coming in from his chores,
 
that kid who is everywhere, soon a painter
or a despot fevered with the echo of lost beauty,
 
that kid who is any bloody fresh-born baby,
innocent as that bright dust that’s the moon,
 
he’ll be driven, hand to brush pen pistol,
his eye on the hillside light or on the ideal-
 
istic manifesto, a new ars
poetica, a color theory—it might be
 
the dream of Plato’s Republic on Earth
in the eye of a little Pol Pot looking out
 
to the sea on a summer day in Dover—
perfection, for a mountain of skulls.
 
The thought goes farther, luminous moon
in my eye: Could be the radiance first
 
seen on this kid’s mother’s brow he then seeks
and seeks. Ezra’s sweet apparition
 
on a platform in Paris—he sees the world
come clean of the Jews and their interest, never
 
mind the insensible smokestack stench
east in the distance. Beauty’s the quest!
 
Cezanne is painting the light off the cliffs—
he forgets the trees and the evidence
 
Officer Dreyfus was set up—
does the artist’s brush conduct this
 
ugliness? Must be a seam of such
innocence inside the hardness of Es
 
muss sein! And Friedrich finds such fine words
to propose the annihilation of the weak!   
 
But oh, little Friedrich, your mother is
indisposed. Don’t you weep.
 
I think, I’ll look at the moon till dawn,
the one moon Mao, Adolph, Saddam,
 
Claude, Vincent, and my children have watched—
moon that forever does not even listen—
 
and by its unknowing brightness, imagine
I might find the difference between
 
trusting the light and forcing the lost
dream of it onto the mess of this life.

Jed Myers is a Philadelphian living in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Golden Handcuffs Review, qarrtsiluni, Atlanta Review, Quiddity, The Monarch Review, Palooka, Fugue, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Rose Alley Press anthology Many Trails to the Summit, and elsewhere. By day he is a psychiatrist with a therapy practice and teaches at the University of Washington. By night he hosts the long-running open-mic cabaret NorthEndForum. He likes to weave poetry and music together, and sometimes does so with the ensemble Band of Poets.

Eyes of the Fallen Men

The eyes of the fallen man darkened and squinted – weepy.

The eyes of the quiet man, strong and bold; scared and stretched.

The woman that holds his hand; the beast that pumps his blood, faster than a disease. Her bosom is the last known smell of him, sweet flowers on a summer day.

The pressure is real, the yearn is real, living still, too still. You feel the hunger, the anger growing. You tell yourself to stop but its much too late.

You fear the thoughts in all those other men,

You also fear the yearn for how much you need her.

She tells you she wants you, you don’t believe, its too hard to believe. You see her eyes, they tell you kind words, they want you, and you feel its true.

But the fear is too big in your heart, and their lusty ways are habit in their heart, For those animals who want her, for those animals who got her, death is near for all.

Get what you want to get take her away from everyone. You wish for no one else to see her!

Powerless is man on this Earth, cold stone and salty waters, time makes all shapes.

No, one else can love you – taker her for yourself!

Because the eyes of the fallen man weep quiet rivers from dark caves.
The view from within, squints bruised visions from within the soul.

All they want is your woman’s hand in theirs.
Lose the battle for love, they betray anyway, the only thing you love away from all that is really you.

They will have taken those things that breed hope, Desires from the soul now belong in a grave for eternity. And with your love in mind you will always be with your beloved divine.

Jorge Baldomero Valdes Jr. was born in Lufkin, Texas, in August of 1984. Hisinterests have always been to observe the arts; to look at things and to ponder them for a while.He decided to write in 2007, and try to direct his ideas to that which is hard to feel; but felt when an epiphany is walked upon. He havs been published in 2012 by the Horrorzine’s anthology: A Feast of Frights! And a couple of poems during the Summer of 2011.

The cat in the hat

The tree was green
and the cat was black
in which he sat
with a machine gun
ready for the attack

Alice fell with a questions mark
with three drops
of snow, shadows and death
painted in the sky

Why! Why! Why
Is my tea cold?
said the mad hatter
Does it matter?
Does it matter?
meowed the cat

Time is all we have
all we have
we have
echoed the hare
on the run back
to the paperback
hand in hand

with the cat in his hat

Mathias Jansson is a Swedish art critic and poet. He writes both horror poems and meta poems in the later he creates a dialogue with the history of literature and discuss the writing process. He has been published in Swedish magazine and English speaking magazines as SNM Horror Magazine; The Horror Zine; The Poetry Box. Homepage: www.janssonswebb.se

The Culture of Crows

Crows keep their enemies close,
roosting deep within borders of human
habitat, peppering landfills, buzzing
traffic and dropping acorns, waiting
curbside, bustling with pedestrians,
claiming their snack.

The old maple’s branches are beaded
with crows, street lamp guarding
their sleep, and at sunup, young crows
tease rubber strips from windshield
wipers, their mother’s hot belly lowered
onto pulsing eggs, relatives bringing
French fries, popcorn and a snake soaked
in a bird feeder, head wagging like a toy.

Hunters leave crows’ corpses scabbing
the fields, and owls deliver swift
decapitation. Blue-black against an icy lake,
an old crow poaches fishing holes; beak
pulling, foot holding, cleverness charted
by researchers sweating behind ski masks,
crows known to pick a tormentor’s eyes,
nose and mouth from the crowd; diving,
shrieking, bringing back-up to shadow
their target’s miserable foray into the open—
or maybe it’s one of their own evoking
judgment, and sent tumbling from the sky,
community showing its other face
to the weak, the awkwardly
flapping, as the joyful, lethal
cloud descends.

Lynn McGee’s poems are in forthcoming or current issues of The American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, 2 Bridges Review, Hawai’i Review, Bluestem, and The Same. Her poems also appear in recent issues of Tilt-a-Whirl, Big City Lit, Literary Mama and The New Guard; one poem a finalist and one a semi-finalist in the Knightville contest judged by former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall. She was a 2011 Finalist with Honorable Mention in the Winning Writers War Poetry Contest, and a 2010
semi-finalist for the Dana Award. Her poetry chapbook, Bonanza, won the Slapering Hol national manuscript contest; she earned an MFA from Columbia, and lives in Brooklyn.