Medea

The sculptor has made
her princess of Colchis.
Her eyes are closed.

She is young, small,
frail as a flower.
Her lips begin a smile

for the stranger
come for the fleece
in her father’s city.

She holds a bowl
in one hand laden
with petals and leaves.

Her other is at
her breast where
it weaves the future

from a heart on fire,
a soul that begs: Forget
this story, refute

somehow all you know,
that such a face
conceive of crimes

the graceful innocence
of such a one could execute.
If not, oh, oh, a memory

that understands the cool,
white marble floor,
the pools of blood.

Four-time Pushcart Prize nominee as well as Best of the Net nominee, J.R. Solonche has been publishing poetry in magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70’s. He lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches at SUNY Orange.

No One Could Ever Take Your Place

Today I woke up with you heavy on my mind — it’s nothing new. I thought of the first time we’d kissed, and how the entire world suddenly had meaning. I thought of the precious, flowing fountain of wonder you awoke in me; the way you made me feel; the way you placed me on a pedestal and loved me unconditionally like you did. I think of you today, my body quivering, because no matter when, no matter where, no matter how, no matter what… no one — and I mean no one — could ever take your place.

Today I walked alone. I went to our special place to think of you — it’s nothing new. I felt a warm breeze brush against my face as I sat staring at everything and nothing. I closed my eyes and imagined your gentle hand — not the breeze — caressing me, wiping away the crystalline tears that flowed like miniature rivulets down my cheek. Your ephemeral silhouette comforted me, and I reminded you that no matter when, no matter where, no matter how, no matter what… no one — and I mean no one — could ever take your place.

Today I watched a movie, not on the television, but on a blank wall — it’s nothing new. The projector in my mind played out our story: the love we gave, the love we took, the times we hurt, the way we trembled, and the way we shook; the hopes we had, the dreams we shared; the promises we made, the vows we swore — the way we cared. And inside, my heart beat that familiar pulse — no matter when, no matter where, no matter how, no matter what… no one — and I mean no one — could ever take your place.

Tonight I had dinner alone. No, I didn’t eat a single bite — it’s nothing new. I stared solemnly upon the empty chair across from me. How futile again of me trying in vain to wish you there. But I can close my eyes and wish as I always do, can’t I? I can replay from my memory those delicate words you spoke when you said, “I’ll love you always and forever.” And I’d reply softly into your ear, “no matter when, no matter where, no matter how, no matter what… no one — and I mean no one — could ever take your place.”

Tonight I’ll sleep alone. My soul will cry for you, and my essence will bleed of your memory — it’s nothing new. I’ll remember your angelic arms around me, the warmth of your breath against my neck as we’d cradle each other, surrendering to the deepest of tranquil serenity. I’ll reminisce of how we’d loved and what we’d said, and perhaps in your heart — I’d like to think — you’d felt that no matter when, no matter where, no matter how, no matter what… no one — and I mean no one — could ever take my place.

Boris Novak dabbles in film production, as well as its many other facets. He is also owner and CEO of DARK HATTER FILMS, an eclectic production company, and author of many short stories and poetical works.

Greek Woman, Corfu

Today I swam with a woman
who sang to the seagulls

she sang of midnight
she sang of poverty
she sang of fear
she sang to the sea.

Today I swam with a woman who sang of the broken.

She sang to the sparrows
and she sang to me.

She sang of winter, of hunger and starving.
She sang of sorrow, she sang of greed.
She sang of hope, the fallen, the dying.

Today she sang her song to me.

She sang of the spring that lives in her island
she sang of its wars, its people, its famines.

She sang of Athens, soup kitchens, hunger
of people queuing for food from Crete —
onions tomatoes bread and water.
She sang to the seagulls she sang to me.

She sang her song of cleaners and soldiers
she sang of the sailors, the driven, the hopeless
she sang of her sisters and brothers and poets
mothers of children whose lives hold no future.

She sang her song of the sea to me.

She sang of workers unpaid for their labour
she sang of shipyards, of builders and teachers
whose spirits were crushed, whose lives lay in pieces
she sang of her country she sang of the free.

UK poet Dr. Geraldine Green is a freelance creative writing tutor, mentor and visiting lecturer at The University of Cumbria.

Her collections are: The Skin and Passio Flarestack Pubications, Poems of a Mole Catcher’s Daughter under the pseudonym of Katie A Coyle, Palores Publications and The Other Side of the Bridge by Indigo Dreams. This latest collection formed part of her PhD in Creative Writing: An Exploration of Identity and Environment through Poetry. Her next collection Salt Road will be published summer 2013, also by Indigo Dreams. www.indigodreamsbookshop.com/#/geraldine-green/4565286878

Her poetry has been widely anthologised in the UK, US and Italy and translated into German and Romanian. Geraldine frequently performs her poetry in the US. She’s an Associate Editor of Poetry Bay www.poetrybay.com

Oblong gallows

The hangmans rope shadows
Criss cross in the despotic

Wooden frame of the lurching
Crawling platform

Its floor is tarnished with the
Blood bedeviled raw spots of
Human spoilage

The oblong tilt of the gallows
Frame creaks and moans

The shriek of its wood and coffin
Wood nails, belch out ,

A morbid pitch, that shatters the silence of comfort

As the dangling rope shadows
Fly into the gloom and dance

The old weary woe strickened
Structure will bend in angles
Of death

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).