A steadfast rain dissimulates the carpeted silence of the office, the piddling sounds of breathing, the squeaks of cheap dress shoes and the creaks of rusty swivel chairs. I lean forward to dial a phone number, the shape of my back a pithy assertion of my approaching defeat. The man on the other end has a thick New York accent, and I can hear a baseball game in the background. “If you’d like, sir, I could call you back at a better time?” I ask, still optimistic for the sale. Then there’s a loud cheer and high-fives so frequent it sounds like the Fourth of July.

     “What better time than this?” he replies.

—

Justin Alvarez is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate at Goddard College. He lives in southern Maine with his girlfriend and two pets.

After the paintings of Gonzalo Endara Crow

Why is it in our country trains roll across the trackless sky?
Why are the hills puce and mauve? Why do the trees
bring forth bouquets of fairy-floss pink?
Green spheres, like apples filled with helium, float upward
through the blue air. The hillsides
are dotted with square houses, and below in the valley
a town collects itself round a circle of dust.
There people gather, reaching out
to touch balloons before they ascend,
departing the world and its cares. In the street
blue maize lies gigantic like an abandoned harvest,
and the blue horse, defiant as nature,
stands its ground amid the ceremony of pilgrims.
We do not know where we go or why, but our dreams
are whole worlds. On the hilltops, enormous candles burn,
attracting moths, which in their turn attract the hungry birds.
Above each flame, birds and moths flutter like confetti,
a festival of life and death. It’s like that in our country.
Even in darkness, there is some light, some hope,
mysterious pleasures.

—

Jeff Klooger’s poetry has been published in Australian and international online and print journals. Recently his work has appeared in The Liberal, Words-Myth, Eureka Street, Full Of Crow and Text. His other interests are music and philosophy. His first book, on the ideas of the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, was published in 2009.

For Gladys

I watched a woman fall
apart when her husband dropped
dead at her feet. Not a soul went back
to the house after that, where gladiolas
lined the fence and one by one they stopped
coming up. Everyone remembers

how she spoke so highly of her glads,
how unaware she was now of a story
that grew around her husband, how
one by one he pulled them back
into the earth. They thought of him
collecting them in his empty skull,
thinking someday her tears
might reach him.

But she, too, dropped dead
one day descending a flight
of stairs in a different house.
And the only thing we notice
now is the dark garage
where all their tools
are locked inside.

—

George Bishop was raised on the Jersey Shore until relocating to the central Florida area in 1989. Recent work has appeared in Freshwater, The Meadow, Barnstorm and is forthcoming in The Griffin and Third Wednesday. His chapbook Love Scenes will be released by Finishing Line Press in the Fall 2009. He is also currently a poetry reviewer for the publication Sotto Voce.

Your septic tank has exploded,
your books tumbled from their shelves.
Rather than reshelf, you’ll sell

your house and move to Rhode Island
where the big tame bay flatters
islands gone shapeless and adrift

and ruined old mill cities sigh
as the sea breeze warps from the Sound.
You claim you’ll commute from there,

but after a week of driving
a hundred miles each way you’ll close
your textbooks and retire. You lack

the will to heal the hole in the soil
where your septic tank burst in shame.
No use trying to read the books

splayed open on the floor. You shovel
your clothes into plastic bags, scoop
cosmetics, shampoo, and toothpaste

into another bag and slam
yourself into your pickup truck
and cry. Behind your house the river

apologizes with the song
of an oriole. Maybe the bank
will lend the money to replace

the septic system. Your neighbor,
a mountain of earnest goodwill,
could help sort and reshelf the books.

Rhode Island’s too small and shy
to accommodate your misery—
the bay too flat and historical,

the towns on Long Island Sound
obsessed with sand worms and tides.
And your clothes, rumpled in bags,

have wrinkled too badly to wear
among strangers. So you might as well
stay home and watch the orioles

twitter about their swinging nest,
oblivious to the stink you’ve loosed
on the innocence of the world.

—

William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge.

     She passes now, at seven in the evening. Down there, below. She does not seem to notice the bougainvillea, or the lone mango tree. She does not see the way the sun hangs heavy on the wall, the other side of the courtyard. She passes this way every evening, a reed thin bird, looking for a place to light.

     This is as close as I’ll come, I say. As close as I’ll get to her. Having her.

     Here, removed from her, I see only her. I smell the flowers and the fruit. Pleasant smells that I now associate with her.

     Many here make that mistake, of confusing their senses. So they call to her. Summon her. They pay a guard, who pays another. Who pays the guard who patrols the courtyard. Then, in this way, in slow minutes, the girl arrives in a man’s cell.

     And it is also in this way that she sails through the dark nights, lighting with strangers who are famished for the touch of a passing bird. She lands for awhile in a small concrete shell, to give away most things. It is dawn before she leaves.

     I am awake, always. I do not sleep well. I watch for her, down below, passing so very quietly.

     She is tired and frail. And used, of course. Maybe used up entirely. Somewhere in the cell block a man is sleeping it off. Dreaming her over and over again. Maybe, in a week or two, he will have her again.

     Or, more likely, another man will have her sooner, in a nearby cell. Another brick wall away. But the walls here are fond of talking. Telling secrets. Listening. Repeating whatever comes their way. Their memory is as deep as a well. So a man will sleep with her anyway, will have her just the same. Through a wall. Inside a whisper. For a night, wherever it lasts.

     I’ve come close to having her. I’ve had bills clenched tight in my fist, a call to the closest guard rising in a dry throat. Until now, I have kept from it. It is not that I do not want her, even if a hundred men have had her. Or the fact of her children, who sleep at the prison gate, waiting for her to return at dawn.

     No, if I call to her, if I pay a fistful of pesos, I know I will lose something. Maybe more than I would gain. If she lights here, one night or many, she will never be the same again. To me.

     Nothing will be the same again. The way she passes down below. Through the flowers and the fruit. The perfection of that simple vision. Just as it is.

     So I leave things as they are. The mango tree, the red sun, the bougainvillea filling the air. I wait to see her pass. Coming and going. Dusk and dawn. I do not hope that things will change. I sleep poorly, keeping track of her. I keep an ear to the wall.

     If I listen long enough, I hear a bird, fluttering, trapped inside the night.

—

Christopher Woods has published a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. He lives in Houston and Chappell Hill, Texas. His photographs can be seen in his online gallery Moonbird Hill.

Mum draws the blackout curtains—
don’t want to attract doddlebugs
when we sit down for dinner.
They come out and sting
on nights like this. I wish
our dinner had more flavor, more spice.

Sissy was still groaning from gin,
when the long whine whistled the air,
flocking us simple pigeons
to the Anderson shelter outside,
our metal haven, the beds divided
the room into bread loaves.

Once my ears work again,
we go out.
The house in one piece still:
I’ll have to dust the debris
before we have tea tomorrow.
My parents are planning on company.

One bomb landed close to home,
I tell Baxter’s soft ears,
his head all a pile in the front yard.
It punctured a lorry next door,
ripped into it like a ham. I do miss meat,
the rations leave one ever so empty.

Not sissy, though—she is heavy,
from her boy-o, Matt Hervishire.
Spotted them in Miss Helshank’s bed,
about where they found the old bird herself.
That’s how it is everyday: eggs
for breakfast, and a blitz for dinner.

—

Paul Piatkowski lives in Winston-Salem, NC with his wife and corgi. He teaches high school English. He has had poetry published in U.S. 1 Worksheets and The 2River View.

     I first noticed the fly on the wall three days ago, while dining at Ming’s, a Chinese restaurant I frequent daily. I smiled at the fly, whom I’d decided to name Ernie, and proceeded with breakfast. Ernie watched quietly, motionless, but I sensed that he craved my eggs and potatoes and, more so, my buttered toast.

—

Ilan Herman is a musical producer with a passion for writing good fiction. He lives in the Sierra Foothills in Northern Ca and has a 12 yo daughter, a cat, and two parakeets.

—after Paule Vézelay’s Two Forms Holding Two Ovals

Moon forms a wicker basket’s
rough-edged silhouette, planted
on branch arm’s dedicated clutch,
       hiding in its muscular hold
dust lying on its lamenting side,
       physically rising from its kicked persuasion and
ground’s unwelcoming vernacular. Posted,
gracious creatures of night’s interim hours, pivoting
heads magnify alert transgressions the hunted
expire before rusted postulation. As night’s
wrists
       begin to bend into near-broken
examples of constant exertion,
two owls abscond, freely
stating day’s heavy influence
dictates a tiredness unseen for the reason of
allegorical weakness.

—

Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults, and editor/publisher of Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. He has authored 10 collections of poetry. His website explains further: www.felinosoriano.com.

Too many mistakes, too many times
Indirection left unanswered. What news
May have entered the grid, what scintillating

Rumors shaped the way we
Understand the world? Too late
Songbirds tell us to play on instinct.
Such a romantic view of the universe,
Ever the power of citizenry to go, turn out
Rot that gummed the machinery.
Tempered, words turn to matter.

—

Janann Dawkins’ work has been featured or is upcoming in Literary House Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, LiteraryMary, Poesia, At-Large, Alba, Taj Mahal Review, MiPOesias, Existere, Anastomoo, and The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others. Her chapbook, Micropleasure, was published by Leadfoot Press in 2008. She resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In poetry
I can lie like a sonnuvabitch
and get away with it

Because the truth of a poem
isn’t related
to its historical factuality

It’s in the fingers of the wind
wrinkles on memories
and promises of pleasures
in the dark

—

Richard F. Yates is a poet, short story author, and artist living in Washington state, USA. He is married and has two daughters, works in the writing center at Washington State University @ Vancouver, and his work has appeared in such places as: Mad Swirl, The Salmon Creek Journal, Words-Myth, Word Riot, and Vision? Nary! Magazine.