XVI

Contents

Western Civ............................Aaron Anstett
in the kingdom........................Julie Bolitho-Lee
With Pleasure..........................A.J. Huffman
Be Kind.Rewind.......................Mike Meraz
Or No....................................Aaron Anstett
Stop Tinkerng With It!...............Mike Meraz
# 0 \/\/ |................................Ruth Madievsky
Grief.....................................Julie Bolitho-Lee


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Western Civ
Aaron Anstett


My people, compatriot inebriates,

expound on errors of mixing liquors,

smuggling barbiturates, which leads to troubles,

sleeping in taverns during daytime TV, believing

speaking the word for “language” in all languages

solves one thing, asking such questions

as, “Are you a good man? A good

man. Are you?,” then going places with strangers.


______________________________________________________________


in the kingdom
Julie Bolitho-Lee


my dog uses urine
like an empire would a flag
as if he says, “With this drop
I claim this land for the royal line
of Spaniel. No Labrador or Terrier
may henceforth enter.”
He cares not for the nests
of rabbits who found the ground
first, used it to spawn young life

and this reminds me
of all the firsts—
how us young girls
our names still marked by teen
would steal the virginities
of friends
     our masculine counterparts
how we would use our anatomy
as a map claiming victory
stealing pistols off these men
as if collecting feathers

you see
we had been in the kingdom of men
so long
we needed something
to fight our war.


______________________________________________________________


With Pleasure
A.J. Huffman


Cocked and angled for [her] mere reach,
in midair she was thrown straight into she-devil.
Head back, a blade recognized this curved
amputation.  The preferred weapon:  Her eyes.
With new terror, she struggled but became consumed
with diabolical passion – to slash.  Savoring each
second of the violence to come.


______________________________________________________________


Be Kind. Rewind
Mike Meraz


go back
and seek those
you love.



______________________________________________________________


Or No
Aaron Anstett


Maybe a mermaid feels fabled when the sailor sees her.

Maybe a mattress exists for the imagined and caresses.

Maybe a pillow’s wrinkles are visible ripples of dreaming’s wake.

Maybe spiders balloon their webs' threads, floating over floods.

Maybe a moon’s to iron an ocean’s creases.


Maybe lavish of sunlight on cell floor will save us.

Maybe we’ll steal from port-town occult store means to summon demons.

Maybe market topiary seeds instructing shrubbery to grow those shapes.

Maybe contract outsourced labor to think these things.

Maybe found religion on belief that self is to swamp as soul is to liquid.


______________________________________________________________


Stop Tinkering With It!
Mike Meraz


yeah, everything.
your relationship.
your job.
your face.
your art.

just kick back for a while.
everything will work itself out.
just chill.


______________________________________________________________


# 0 \/\/ |
(inspired by Allen Ginsberg)
Ruth Madievsky


I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by apathy, listless lifeless burnt-out,
rambling four a.m. delirium in air-conditioned apartments about justice,


Locking their fingers in qwerty formation to fix the world, but only after finishing term papers on Hobbes, animal testing, the Kyoto protocol,


Who heavy-lidded and hungover diced flatworms in formaldehyde-stained classrooms and joined honor societies to copy old lab reports,


Who at night became shimmering kittens and stumbled through vomit-paved streets looking for love,


Who passed through universities with unabridged anthologies of A’s and learned nothing but how to covertly buy Adderall in the library,


Who bared their tits for shit-faced strangers with clumsy hands and at dawn crawled back to apartments reeking of moist socks and latex to tell stories of objectification,


Who over a glass of Pinot Grigio lambasted the fat cats choking public education, then ordered the Oreo cheesecake and went to bed,


Who took a microeconomics class and waving fading yellow highlighters were experts on the U.S. economy, but unapologetically explained between glorious bong rips that they didn’t have time to vote,


Behemoth books by Milton or on Milton or for Milton pretentiously misquoted to half-conscious slam pieces, who blinked twice to accept a cigarette,


Who minutes after torrential ecstasy tugged purposefully at skirts, sitting up against sweat stuck to jersey sheets, drafting an email to their professor,


Who annotated feverishly chapters on Zionism, the French Revolution, the circulatory system in hollow-eyed anticipation of tenured voices and the curve of a bell,


Who tore off their clothes in emphatic protest of child labor, marching the streets in bargain-basement bandeaus that came from sweatshops halfway across the world,


Who combed labels in grocery stores and sank rattling teeth into organic peaches after placing little white pills under their tongues,


Who laughed nervously and struggled to recall the last time they read for pleasure, making half-baked allusions to long-lost hours spent in O’Hare, where the air hung thick as taffy and US Weekly was on sale,


Who when asked to describe themselves without hesitation answered passionate, but when asked what their passions were stared blankly,


Travelling, they said, because they had plugged their power cords into every continent and sepia-grammed their way through fifteen museums,


And education, they said, because three years ago they watched Waiting for Superman and cried,


And cancer research, they said, pointing proudly to fading rubber bracelets reminding them that they paid a dollar to LIVESTRONG,


Who left behind only ashes and half-naked digital footprints, and after rallying the troops with furious hash tags, slumped off the couch and wore their Kony 2012 shirts to sleep.


______________________________________________________________


Grief
Julie Bolitho-Lee


Dena asks me,
“How do you cope with grief?”
and all I can think
of are the licked-clean
broken eggshells
scattered with pinecones
along the path
where I walk my dogs

and of the cacophony
I heard yesterday—
the flapping chaos
as I put the laundry out to dry
a mother bird cried
how wild the pain
how pained the wild

I stood in the sun
the bamboo wind chimes
clinking in time
and then the thought:
the German warplane
found intact on shallow shores of England
yesterday
that millisecond:
I will send this to Dad

who died eight months ago
cancer-beaten
licked-clean
an empty shell
the wild pain of his mother
who at eighty-two only suffers
from bad knees
slow legs
an empty nest

I do not know how
you cope with grief;
I only know it comes
in cacophonies followed by silence—
long pauses to remember
and forget again.


______________________________________________________________




Aaron Anstett has worked more jobs than he recalls.


Though originally for northern Michigan, Julie Bolitho-Lee presently lives in the United Kingdom and most recently was awarded second prize in the annual university-wide poetry contest at King’s College London. In spring 2007, she won the Leaf Books Poetry Prize, in which the book Ukraine and Other Poems was published—“Ukraine” being her winning entry. She has been published in Cambridge University's collection Bodies of Work, and in University of Chester's Albatross.  In the U.S., she has been published in Michigan State University’s The OffBeat, East Tennessee University’s Aethlon, Third Wednesday Magazine, and The Ballard Street Poetry Journal. She teaches creative writing for teenagers each summer at Oxford University.


A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida.  She has previously published four collections of poetry: The Difference Between Shadows and Stars, Carrying Yesterday, Cognitive Distortion, and . . . And Other Such Nonsense.  She has also published her work in national and international literary journals such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Writer's Gazette, and The Penwood Review.  Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000191382454 and https://twitter.com/#!/poetess222.


Ruth Madievsky is a graduating senior at the University of Southern California, where she studies creative writing and biology. She enjoys writing both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Camroc Press Review, Revolution House, and Literary Orphans. When she's not writing, she’s reading anything by TC Boyle or Junot Diaz, or searching Los Angeles for furry animals to cuddle.


Mike Meraz lives and writes in Los Angeles, Ca. He has been published numerous times online and in print. you can check out his work here: http://black-listedpoems.blogspot.com/