issue 3


		issue 3 - section 1


Cover Painting "Clape" by Andrew Abbott

	section 1 (J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden - Amy Sprague) SCROLL DOWN (to view section 1) J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden - Synopses of the first five days of the beloved's fragmented diary, No aesthetic outside my lover, The Surface, Effected an Empty Pattern Karen Greenbaum-Maya - "Still Life with Anemones"; "Room at Arles" changming yuan - Snowflakes: Siamese Stanzas, Pseudoscience Or Not: The Ancient 5-Element Theory Flower Conroy - YOUR BODY THE UNNAMEABLE BODY, THE MUSIC OF MADNESS Caroline Hagood - New York, New York Rob Cook - My Monster, The Man Who Invented the Universe, Dinner Party, Pennsylvania Mountain Story, No Connections From Here, Frank Who Thinks the Sky is Against Him Marcelo Hernandez - Electricity Andrew Abbott (cover artist) - Wag, Clape (cover) Paul David Adkins - BLACK RAIN HIROSHIMA 06 AUGUST 1945, POEM TO ANY SURVIVOR OF THE TOKYO FIREBOMBING RAIDS Felino A. Soriano - Approbations 805 Cal Freeman - Rider Unhorsed and Bewitched, Villa R, One of Holst's Planets e. smith sleigh - symbiont IIW Raymond Farr - A Pome as in a Lover's Jaw, Modern Art Jeffrey C. Alfier - Manasquan Inlet, Where We First Swam Jeanne Shannon - Easter Morning, ESCAPE TO TAOS Maude Larke - Bermuda Triangle, Oscuro SJ Fowler - {Gallery} Matthew James Babcock - Even Now Chris Vola - Postmodernism Isn't Fun Anymore, Emaciated Factbook Amy Sprague - Love,Your Angry Ballerina

	section 2 (Kristi Nimmo - Chris Vola) CLICK HERE (to jump to section 2) Kristi Nimmo - Love Affair On Rapa Nui Tobi Cogswell - Incisor, Paper in Plastic, Escape Into Orange Dana Kroos (artist) - Jack Be Nimble, They Licked the Platter Clean Ray Succre - Shone Perhaps Too Frequently in Drink, Astray at Twelve O'Clock Abigail Uselding - Tumbling After, This Is Never Going to End, Ketchum Sandra Ketcham - Acrobat, Misplaced John Sibley Williams - We all arrive by different streets, Kiss Pat Smith - Wintry Mix Julia Paul - But This Alexios Antypas - The Lost Child Regina Coll - Absolute Assortment Martin Balgach - The Paces J.S. Watts - The Effect of Moonlight on the Human Voice Michael Shorb - ON VAN GOGH'S 'THE NIGHT CAFE' (1888) Carl Palmer - tit for tat Thom Dawkins - Der Musiker Spricht Les Wicks - Dig Nina Bennett - A Georgia O'Keeffe Sunset Shane Allison - HELLO MR. CENTO Floyd Cheung - So Valued Nicole Koroch - The Masses, Mayflies Nancy Carol Moody - In Answer To Your Question Concerning the Disposition of the Soul Peter Schwartz - rattles Kristene Brown - Gojira Imee Cuison - De Stijl Jim Davis - Transience as Arcade Tracy Darling - Hinges Mitchell Storar - 12 Anathemas David Raymond - Kenneth Noland's Mysteries Afloat, Piero Della Francesca David Tomaloff - blues song, thirty five dollar Hollywood Kirby Wright - UNDER THE BEETLEBUNG TREE, MARTHA'S VINEYARD Shelly Bryant - Acrylic on Canvas


	J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden No aesthetic outside my lover I am the sensitive areola pink when I paint you. Tell me how soft the spring sky is when I paint it with you. The Surface A hole in it Only where still Rib enlightened and loose Glinting handfuls heaping glass Laying itself down Assembling quick Leaving obstacles and rippling accumulation The slow cold bed I look The leaves still Synopses of the first five days from the beloved’s fragmented diary Do not that you do. The catastrophe is what will make what is. Into it for time. It scatters like the mountains loosed. You are as heavy as the dawn. Effected an Empty Pattern Without payoff trope Ice of eggs Convey one’s roto-tiller on aged soil Leads to nothing To bother to greet apodoton Ms Young Too long ocelot Hutong women find most too You know Overdone apolet J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden co-edits Erg's chapbook series and Cricket Online Review. He lives in Iowa City.

	Karen Greenbaum-Maya “Still Life with Anemones”; “Room at Arles” Now tendrils writhe up from the canvas, spill across the yellow frame in arsenic green, his telltale color for what wants to fill and crowd him out until there’s only vines to halt his brush, then overrun his face. Too late, now, for the vase’s heavy line. Bed washstand chair: the doctor’s house at Arles. There is no way to walk across the room. Each shabby piece has warped this smallest world. His eye advises him not to assume, not to rely on any point of view. The chair, the bed, the window do not dream the same great yellow field to hold them all, and where they don’t agree, the air bleeds out. He cannot step across. The floorboards fail to guide him where he never can arrive. There is no place to be, no way to leave. Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in Claremont, California. She has been writing since she was nine. In another life, she was a German Lit major so that she could read poetry for credit. She earned her B.A. from Reed College in 1973, and her Ph.D. from the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles in 1982. Her poems and photographs have appeared or will soon appear in many publications, including: Off the Coast; Umbrella; qarrtsiluni; Lilliput Review; The Dirty Napkin; Abyss & Apex; In Posse Review; and, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Eggs Satori, was selected as a finalist in Pudding House Press’s 2010 competition, and will be published in the first half of 2011. More photos may be seen at www.flickr.com/pieplate.

	changming yuan Pseudoscience Or Not: The Ancient 5-Element Theory Accounting for Us All 1 Metal (born in a year ending in 0 or 1) -helps water but hinders wood; helped by earth but hindered by fire he used to be totally dull-colored because he came from the earth’s inside now he has become a super-conductor for cold words, hot pictures and light itself all being transmitted through his throat 2 Water (born in a year ending in 2 or 3) -helps wood but hinders fire; helped by metal but hindered by earth with her transparent tenderness coded with colorless violence she is always ready to support or sink the powerful boat sailing south 3 Wood (born in a year ending 4 or 5) -helps fire but hinders earth; helped by water but hindered by metal rings in rings have been opened or broken like echoes that roll from home to home each containing fragments of green trying to tell their tales from the forest’s depths 4 Fire (born in a year ending 6 or 7) -helps earth but hinders metal; helped by wood but hindered by water your soft power bursting from your ribcage as enthusiastic as a phoenix is supposed to be when you fly your lipless kisses you reach out your hearts until they are all broken 5 Earth (born in a year ending in 8 or 9) -helps metal but hinders water; helped by fire but hindered by wood i think not; therefore, I am not what I am, but I have a color the skin my heart wears inside out tattooed intricately with footprints of history Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Politics and Poetics (2009), is a two-time Pushcart nominee who grew up in a remote Chinese village and authored several books before moving to Canada. Currently Yuan works in Vancouver and has had poems appearing in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, London Magazine and more than 300 other literary publications in 15 countries.

	Flower Conroy YOUR BODY THE UNNAMEABLE BODY (Inspired by W. Bullock’s photograph) You break my heart: Nude in Cobweb Window. If I were on the other side of that cloaked glass with you I would touch your edges. Like touching burning tracing paper. I would cup the bars of your ribs. Feel how they feel against my fingers’ dragging, a scalloped frame, a warped archway. A harp. Then I’d recoil; wish I were back inside. You’re splattered. Tar & brine define you. These are no ordinary cobwebs from which you reach; they are material tricks. I am almost afraid of you. Poised & undeniably just beyond—I look to the door. But your cone’s magnetism lures my eyeballs back to: you. The bolt slips. Or my mind wishes it did. Collapsed on the couch with you, the curtain moving slowly like a moth breathing in the afterlife closer to the fuzz coated sill, fluttering away as if something else had just occurred to you then tilting again against that murk, you, you coming back, headless, you, your body a statue of milk, your hands knitting an aura of importance, yes, you. You. Now I remember. You. The owl ascending from hell & descending into a patch of chanterelle. Also, the ghost of an angel. The dark air inside a sleighbell. THE MUSIC OF MADNESS Even here—edging the outskirts of a drained, bled-dry town where weeds jackknife up from the dust & sporadic goats strain their necks upon first notes of the piper’s pipe, wild lips growing wilder, ears pitched back— the music of madness whistles through the straw. Each extracted sound: part zodiac; part aphrodisiac; part panic; part drug, part bliss—the sky’s raw bliss. The music of madness infects its listener. It’s not quite gold trumpets & coiled horns; nor is it the isle Greece, BC, first hatched & glistening in the foil sun. Nor is it gravel, pebbles or acorns discarded upon the nail-bed of pine needles stitching woods’ floor where poison mushroom knobs poke up & rainbow lacquered beetles roil some dropped, rotting body, consuming a skull inside-out. At times the music resembles butterflies: innumerable butterflies met midair by an intuitive host of crows—how emblems of tissue wings like torn flags flinch as beaks tear into living paper—scissor-art—the crows awaiting this predictable, annual migration, basking in the Mediterranean sunlit trees, contemplating the exact hour of which they might ransack the cloud of powdered petals, & those butterflies thwart up against the onslaught. If not butterflies: ladybugs. If not ladybugs, perhaps fireflies. If not fireflies, then the jewels of our pried open eyes.

	Caroline Hagood New York, New York On grey days I like to stand beneath bridges, and watch the cars above leaving me behind. Then I’m born anew, with bendy limbs, lit from within, and able to see all things, hungry for every city block and strange shape to twirl, astonished, on the quivering balls of my eyes, living to sit on fire escapes, and watch my Gotham pass by taxi light, a cement orchid among hotdog stands, beautiful and artificial, as I remember the subway rumbles, the cardboard signs of the homeless, the love that came before. I have seen loss in the seared light of Brooklyn, the scent of his cigarettes still in my skin, the two of us in a playground, the nighttime, and I left weeping. He went home to sit in his room of plants touching the blushing flowers as he could no longer touch me. I crept back to my apartment to let tears fall from my sockets in slow motion, Tonight my city is fat with night light as I look upon it. I forget, but my New York remembers, tells my story back to me. At this late hour, I allow myself a wild fancy, alone and smitten by pavement, I imagine my metropolis in love with me. originally published by Amphibi.us Caroline Hagood is a poet and professor of literature and creative writing in New York City. She has written on arts and culture for The Guardian, Salon, and the Huffington Post. Her poetry has appeared in Shooting the Rat (Hanging Loose Press), Movin' (Orchard Books), Angelic Dynamo, RootSpeak, Ginosko, Quail Bell, and Manhattan Chronicles.

	Rob Cook FRANK WHO THINKS THE SKY IS AGAINST HIM The man screams about the afternoons lost to the interruptions of foliage just beyond his cataracts. It is never autumn in the tenement forests. “It feels loud in my blurriness tonight,” he says. The clouds also loud as they pass on their way to Monday. Sometimes he looks shoveled out of the puddles that collect here. Other times his voice is enough to cover those wet spaces. The man freezes the fish he rescues from the ravenously still river. He takes his kite out to lure friends from the sky on days he forgets to listen for the neighbors who’ve been stalking him. “The buildings and trees keep getting in the sun’s way,” he says during that moment it’s emptiest. No matter which storm he visits, his name is Frank, neither a nostalgia nor a curse to be repeated. He comes home to eat his live dinner, and after he spoons the dying bass from his drifts of oatmeal, he crawls inside the woman with blue fingernails watching from her bed of magazine glare, a little futon girl behind the stapled door at the bottom of the page whimpering, “Mommy, Daddy, I’m sick.” The man thinks he hears a moth caused by his breathlessness. He masters each page of blue, lusting fingernails; the woman nowhere near the pits around his mouth, fossils of another hour’s thunder. And after cleaning up his microscopic eyes and lungs and heart arrhythmias, he hides his aspirin money behind the mirror that’s slit open the way a fish is slit open. Sometimes he watches the salt dancing on his muted television, and outside his window, crows and related umbrellas arranged in suspicious lines for the bus darkening towards them. And because it is always late, he writes help-me-help-me notes to the owners of the air to evict the gnats crowding the stereo next door. Mr. and Mrs. Gnat he calls them. The ones who want to take away his silence. He has no idea what to do. “I cannot draw a picture of the quiet to protect me once it’s gone,” he says, and forces a sound of pain from the wall with his body, pounds the wall with everything he knows and does not stop even after his eyes and all they’ve seen have fallen to the floor. MY MONSTER holds me in its radar each night while I hang the darkness back on my walls. It turns the light on inside its stomach so I can watch the animals there becoming new places for pestilence. It makes no noise, and keeps disappearing when it tries to speak, its vulture accusations collapsing into the quarry of its choke-blinded neck. My monster follows me to the snake hotels and bottle cap towns and summers that keep repeating. It tells me to love the scribbled days of heat and television. It tells me to love no matter how many voices I lose. It fondles all the shadows I’ve made, all those gods of missing galaxies. Taking out its sharp crayons it flays everything I’ve learned into one hangnail. When I forget the blackhead harems holding its torso together, I go digging through the smudged, fragile fires buried to the fringes of its unmapped body. And though there is no reason for this, I tell my monster I’m hunting herds of northern rust that started as men who couldn’t lie. It points with no sound of its own at my shirt’s ink roses that possess withered names at best, and no Methodist temptations. It speaks, but only with one tooth. My monster breathes under my skin to let me feel the swamp where its last father lost its plague happiness. And after the land there becomes like slabs of caribou, the solar compassion and humidity ranges and wind castles drift away from the remote parking lots photographed in the shyness of my monster’s carrion fellowship. My monster that does not die. My monster that does not tell any of its teeth where my body and its penicillin gardens begin. My dictatorship of breath and light that is no longer a mirage. THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE UNIVERSE Forty dimensions from here, a man smashes the portholes to his hypodermic shanty. His mirrors burrow far as a spinal crab. He screams to make the sky go away. It doesn’t. Do not stop erasing the lungs when they make the animals move, do not stop even when the eyes become unbearable: a mantra from the inside: “Air, please,” he begs, “just a drag or a sip.” He tastes only the curtains spreading their legs. He cannot cry—there is not enough water anywhere. “I can see, but no farther than the beginning of the crocuses who’ve already prayed for me.” Everything he touches will know where he is from now on: the linoleum instant dinners, the cans of sleep from the A&P, the ulcered lightning along two arms, one arm, none, the sky that is a dead body and nothing more. Stone generators weeping from the hills mistaken for wind remind him of his sister: Listen to the low-volume elite getting up from your songs to exchange shadows. There is a man who destroyed every light in the universe. And you created him by simply giving him your name. He wants to listen. There’s the noise of a face lost on a knife and a brick moth harvested from the bed’s apnea, pages being turned outside his window that spies on him from its false sightings of daylight. And on his monitor screen copying all the eyes he’s found, he watches the reptilian firmament approaching. He doesn’t remember the air. He does not recognize the dinner plate covered faintly with peeled ladybugs that purr. DINNER PARTY The spider-faces gather on the patio, and that is how they look because I am new and not yet filled with digital spores that can be counted. Nor the collapsing growth of gossip and chlorophyll greed. The grownups, dressed in tall goblets, moan to each other for the eight legs tucked in their pockets. They pop open bottles of spittle and put crackers between their teeth and drink mosquitoes filled with cisterns of descending fractals. I hear the trees and I hear the feline colors Pablo and Zeus, but can't find them, the light is too yellow, too many hands and voices at once. I crawl back into the refrigerator because the looming people are bright and laughing. It is quiet here, behind the swamp meat and the quivering spinach, the back of the refrigerator where I survive until I'm thirty. And then I see it: the homework spider who strung up, in the blackening potato gutters, the lashings and finch lynchings from my book of story problems where a cauliflower calculates the depths of my friends, the caves through bodies of birthday cake, who blink once, then twice, between the silence when it seems to move. PENNSYLVANIA MOUNTAIN STORY 1. A girl hikes with bottled fjords, a map of the spinal regions of Appalachia, path of stones to the fire tower, boots that know the mountain by scent, grasses that the wind took the whole summer to bend just so. 2. Who taught the ridge to become skinny every November? Who lets the trees return to their mothers at dusk? Deer kneel over a beer trickle and fill themselves with hunters’ blood. 3. The trees follow each other into the woods that won’t stop moving. One tree is without its own russet hush. It is treated as a woman with no eyes, no hair, no face, no autumn that can be gathered from the ground by the coyotes who cross the Delaware and eat the cold houses of rattlesnakes, the mountains forced to stand or lose their way inside an acorn, eventually. 4. A man leads away the mosquitoes dried to the withering heat. The girl climbs to the top of the first forest. The mountain a pile of storms. The second mountain hiding in the eyes of scattered fawns and the woman raped for her maple secretions, her tired shadows that drank this far. 5. Third month of retirement, a crooked boy’s father watches the chimney swifts carry trees one stick at a time to the drinking belts of Pennsylvania. The man walks to the mailbox— Evening, the road flickers, there and then gone and here again, still something he saw once, but only from the little eyeblinks freezing in their nests. NO CONNECTIONS FROM HERE No one remembers the human Januaries, and only the laptop knows the names of the rivers of a screen-saved flatland from which animals reproduce and make ATM shelters and their digital embers a possible terrain. No one asks who will gather the arrivals at a Jan Arrands billing address, or who will get up from his electric chair wrecked in a Marion streambed. And beyond a shadow-year internet connection a man writes to a softly famous memory editor: “I want to erase your house and divide your children with irreparable caesuras.” He knows the paper animals will not count to those burials north of infinite Iowa. Enemy lamps limp close but in wrong directions, disconnected houses marching without wind across the central drought crops. A farmer sees the scratching of songs and floodlights on an actress’s silicone body, a tattooed Monroe surviving in stadiums of video cortex. She plays a kerchief named Connie Little Crumb: “When the clouds stop moving I will be able to keep still,” she says. “When the camera closes its eye, maybe I’ll feel my tobacco ancestors among the apple starving in my hand,” she says from her trembling teeth, disfigured by fifty prairie years of advertising. Only one of heaven’s error lights keeps her warm inside her lipstick rags and martini eyeblinks, her photographs of the hours reached by now. After she strips down to a no-longer-fed television, she hears animals healing each other at silicone cancer depths and stays awake counting the windows left on across the sky to the middle of the known cities of April. Rob Cook lives in NYC. He is the author of four books, the latest being Blackout Country (BlazeVox [books], 2009) and Last Window in the Punk Hotel (Rain Mountain Press, 2010). Work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Asheville Poetry Review Fence, A cappella Zoo, Zoland Poetry, Tampa Review, Quiddity, Poor Claudia, Rhino, Aufgabe, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, etc.

	Marcelo Hernandez ELECTRICITY Electrical everything is. As I touch an orchid; white, taste the white, an intimacy that insists nothing is white, things only for the taking, free- for-all in the secondary, which always gives way to another, and another, and another. Orchids are always like this, or like that, this color, or that color, never flowers; white. Swami elaborates on the delicate petals: rise green— dvandva moha nirmukt? dvandva moha. Marcelo Hernandez is an avid dancer and earns his keep as a carpenter, and handy man. He is an undergraduate student at Cal State Sacramento and the current poetry section editor for the Literary Journal Calaveras Station. His works have appeared online in Carginogenic Poetry, Sex and Murder Magazine and Puffin Circus Online Journal. He lives in Yuba City California with his mother and two younger brothers.

	Andrew Abbott Wag Andrew Abbott is the cover artist and more of his artwork can be seen at andrewabbott.mosaicglobe.com

	Paul David Adkins BLACK RAIN, HIROSHIMA, 06 AUGUST 1945 -- The first atomic bomb used in the history of warfare struck Hiroshima on 06 August, 1945. One by-product of the blast was a cloudburst of oily radioactive liquid above the city an hour after the attack. Not rain but tar which hissed against the northwest part of town. In an hour it had stripped trees, scoured the ponds of lilypads. Carp floated, silver fronds, beneath a clenched green fist of cloud. Puddles bubbled. Birds fell stiff mid-flight. The black drops burned our arms, stripped paint off car hoods. Rainbows drained pink and green to grates. POEM TO ANY SURVIVOR OF THE TOKYO FIREBOMBING RAIDS -- By early summer, 1945, Tokyo was bombed to the point where U.S. military leaders no longer considered the city a target worthy of attention, and shifted their efforts elsewhere. I cannot imagine my mother pulling me through that wash of fire, our house lathered with flaming paper. You need no imaginings, saw the planes yourself spill oil, napalm bombs across the city in a giant blazing X. They flew low, creased clouds of rising smoke. Flames lit their wing stars. One wobbled and spun. It struck a blazing house. Fire enfolded that splash.

	Felino A. Soriano Approbations 805 —after Phil Woods’ Stolen Moments Taken reactionary fantastical embellish —holder of classical halts semiotic fractions of hands sans priorly elated. Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974), is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He has authored 29 collections of poetry, including “Construed Implications” (erbacce-press, 2009) and “Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs” (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010). His poems have appeared at Calliope Nerve, Unlikely 2.0, BlazeVOX, Metazen, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He edits & publishes Counterexample Poetics, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review. Philosophical studies collocated with his connection to classic and avant-garde jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. His website explains further: www.felinoasoriano.info His e-mail is: me@felinoasoriano.info website - www.felinoasoriano.info - www.counterexamplepoetics.com - www.differentiapress.com - twitter.com/felinoasoriano - www.facebook.com/felinoasoriano Contributing editor, Sugar Mule www.sugarmule.com Consulting editor, Post: A Journal of Thought and Feeling www.postjournalofthoughtandfeeling.com

	Cal Freeman Rider Unhorsed and Bewitched after Paul Klee Another cactus, another arrow, another arrowhead. I have been down this road before. The wind drives sand without a thought, And I drive south with thoughts of sand And how wheel or hoof might press into it. One does not come to a friend’s home or The interstitial spaces between friends’ homes Without a curse from somewhere else. That someone looms like the moon And random star outfaced. That ink it takes to pit the blank Against the hum of breath. The horse, The rider are not opposed. The radio unnames The villas of the thoroughfare And the public houses, the bars Where fools you might not know Will lift you up. Villa R after Paul Klee Not a surname’s opening letter Or a hapless follower of Q. The top-heavy road doesn’t end Where the two legs fall Off their clay ledges to the creek. We wash there of the dusk Until the letter builds itself around This slanting estate like an atmosphere, Then we return. Empty is the letter That builds around the moon. This R stops referring to our days In the long oaken rooms and dim stairwells. There simply wasn’t a language anymore To say whether or what we had loved. In the dice cups on the tables We no longer saw our lives Beneath the letter but within it. The others that sleep here remember How I pleaded for strips of alphabet And memorized the blanks, So that enunciating R became An exercise in grounding, An interval of silence much longer Than the red lane and the hour On which it stood. On One of Holst’s Planets for Stew Price An icicle emerges From a gutter lip and grows Tick by measured tick. A small dog perches on someone’s throat. A woman threatens to go into a hospital And beat her head against A motherfuckin’ wall. Daughters Bring stress, she says—a son Will listen to a percussive wall and wish For a knit hat, perhaps a knife. Harps strummed lightly are analogous To the shiv’s quiet plunge. What does a son really bring? Strings analogous to paint— Someone’s daughter strums a harp— It is funny how the wind changes The angle of an icicle’s growth (Sons are not like birds, mother). The whole block is awake With dreamed text gone. The heroic 2/4 counts of Mercury, The bringer of war, are lost— To us, on us—the winter, absolute, Slants and slants the snow. Glockenspiels keep coming up Like cash registers for the analogy To glockenspiel and harp is a cash register In a candy store and the near-audible Hum of an electric clock—noumenological Hum, numerical hum. One daughter’s accordion Folder full of paper and hospital bands Has none of the proper documentation To fight Mercury slanting down, Lapel pins, ties, disembodied voices, A geometrical foundation deemed Safe to build upon. The daughter will beat Her head against the wall and would expect This to be your response. The dead and lidless bum near the stadium Never needed your pity— Snow enters through the eyes to fill that temple. Cal Freeman received his MFA from Bowling Green State University in 2004. That year Terrance Hayes selected his manuscript for the Devine Poetry Fellowship. His writing has appeared in many journals including Commonweal, The Journal, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, /nor, and Drunken Boat. He currently teaches creative writing at Oakland University.

	e. smith sleigh symbiont IIW I said goodbye to you with an inappropriate no poem no rhyming poem on your dedicated to death site or whatever they call it I don’t think the censors allowed it to be published I never went back to see you and I were lovers you died with your bi-ness hanging out perfect days my friend my brother my lover in all those years of growing up together we taught each other so much we wanted out of the small- ass small- minded town we wanted nothing less than the world we caught a little piece of it after college not together apart with different lovers you married for status by then you already told me you were attracted to men status why was it your family the family of climb-the-ladder the sisters who applied the pressure on you the mother who sought for you what she could never attain me I married into the military an officer with means and an attraction to males that he never acted on he said I guess I was lost I traveled I spent money and you spent your time in business and doing drugs just like school we gave our children the same names all those hundreds and hundreds of miles apart the names we wrote on a slip of paper you carried in your wallet you were my mentor my stylist my guide you were my everything in a small town with me mentally deserted by my parents and later by my strangely no-sexed husband me and my late-in-life children alone I dreamed of you and the children we would have had a sweet little brown-haired boy like you all along the road of our life I wrote about you to you my no-name lover in print you my voice you my interpreter the unnamed I railed at for so much that went wrong I loved you through it all and every night I wondered where you were alone always alone I saw us together I saw you with women and the status-provider who had to somehow be androgynous a drug-taker who was a drug counselor you and her going home to drugs she worked to push away from others all day in my mind I saw you with men and I tried to find it sexy I wanted to be with you anyway I researched your bisexuality I learned I stayed away until I picked up the phone and called you on that winter’s evening through all that space and time the first thing that you did when you heard my voice was call my name and say I love you I thought I would die with my present lover in the room monitoring our conversation I could not answer you I discovered you left your wife had a male lover were dying you lost all your money and your children were addicts but they were living one of mine died of a genetic disease I had one child left who would not talk to me but I did not tell you oh my oh my heart my soul why I love you so e. smith sleigh writes poetry (a third chapbook of poetry entitled These Things) and fiction (her fourth historical novel), won awards and prizes for her writing, and lives by a lake where she draws her inspiration. http://esmithsleigh.weebly.com/

	Raymond Farr A Pome as in a Lover’s jaw I too am off the cliff. Standing loosely away. Just the remainder tottles off. As in a pome. Or seductXion. A satisfied woman. Contraptions & everything white. In the case of. Neck Bone, Wyoming vs. Yonkers, NY Seems a happy juxtaposition. Seattle expanded via rocks dumped into its harbor. (a stage, a bulb is out (a 100 watt Needs changing. Portable in a way. Don’t cry yourself out. Just go. That is Harold’s job. & to the LEFT of Lefty. There are many stanzas bearing stigmata. Nine to LEFT. NONE to Right. I have come here in a vague manner. Not; just before One summer dropping calls. The next missing Heath Ledger. Or else the e in ellipses. Is the moon of a sentence. Concerning initiative. A fact is about. A collar is white. I wore what I had on because of. Chaos back home. I pabulum when I dated. I mistook up tennis for a lark. I mistook a space and a space. For up in space. While you on the other hand. & the Lone Ranger. Up & rapped along hollow stage rocks. Cartoonish in nature. At intervals. A pint stood in for purple rain. The affect was marmalade. In The Towering Inferno movie. The entire normal paragraph just jumped off the page. I shook out my umbrella. It was regular to do. Mascara jungle woman rode over me. Rutting in nylons. One Tuesday. & squeezing. A single recollection of. Lovely Rita Meter Maid. It is a noun but has no name. It is engulfed in squeezing. This alone allows manifold Byzantine ego. The rent is due. I have more or less than. When I began writing. Modern Art I: persona given me fireworks i breathe i shop at hh gregg spewing 2 cars behind a hundred very daze crazy wake & mother on her cell her Blue Tooth a splint of mobile co. Edvard Munch alternative to kidney pie, a wall enough psalter to one plaster her actual name, he sd, is kristine bourgeois II: imperfect affect her cuff link is a maid of honor motors in like pig sty, a syrup in shadowy things dismantles a cheap thing, cheaply plastic as inner matter the idea is “idea-ness” a box set of march april may & june apart a bayonet is modern art ditto la grand jatte! III: in first person only I enter suite In super first person I soup read Yves Klein As the blood of elegance lifts My facts’re s. pepys & (lucky) Palmolive nourishes my skin as it washes my dishes I step into samovar slickness like brass NY the illusion is called my slick though teeth my blonde on blurring enamel canvas clobbers blind my fifth inning a Jackson—hole—Pollock mist of black & tuna fish rubs glebes though I alert the Wurlitzer man I observe ironic—valence a king of teeth a golden calf of etas unis IV: pan-human I paint & draw the tronic clone mayb mercy in a coffin of small coffins I cry my Lucite calf my one tongue an episode or my belief in heil! heil! is a jet age in wood a boy is tall a lumpy jumanji a girl is ocean a chervil ego a town dumping data is slowly pawned as species go a fax is a given Raymond Farr - http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com

	Jeffrey C. Alfier Manasquan Inlet, Where We First Swam The fishermen that cast their hopeful lines for winter flounder have come and gone, leaving the bundled-up, elderly walkers who braved unseasonal northeasters, to explain how June finally ripened warm from winds that burgeoned up from the tropic south. Yet to come is summer’s humid campaign that will slide through in salt-stung swelter, out of your reach now; for you are gone, left to Eden’s foreclosure in dust to dust, leaving light to sift these clouds that fray slowly apart, like a jacket unfit for travel. Jeffrey Alfier is a Pushcart prize nominee whose poems have appeared recently in Connecticut River Review and South Poetry Magazine (UK), with work forthcoming in New York Quarterly. His chapbooks are Strangers Within the Gate (2005) and Offloading the Wounded (2010). His third chapbook, Before the Troubadour Exits, will be out this fall. He serves as co-editor of San Pedro River Review.

	Jeanne Shannon Jeanne Shannon lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she writes and teaches poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and chapbooks and in two full-length collections.

	Maude Lark


	SJ Fowler {Gallery} the Museum contains the Anubic gallery, the Grecian / Hellenistic borough, the Sclavus wave, the extent of Hepatoscopy, the Hydromancy tunnels, the Atumic gallery, the Metempsychosis gallery, the Elusinion mysteries, the trials of insufflation, the Caesarian spoils, the Domic and the dome, the Teutonicus furor, the Khrebet Kolymisky, the Hokhmah, the Sassanian gallery, the Assyrian gallery, the Coptic corridor, the Idrisian, the Amenophis gallery, the Dhee, the Mereblod tunnel, the Kramer room, the Ethiop basin, the Zeltokozie maproom, the Albarazado gallery, the Targum-losim, the Vascuence chamber, the Koutsoblachos gallery, the Bilyati and European water, the Mollygosher or Malagasay gallery, the Junker gallery, the Cuddies & Cubbas of the Southern continent gallery, the Ikey-mo peninsula, the Horwat gallery, the Megarian tear room, the Rochester portion, the Scythian disease libratory, the Beadpuller gallery, the Secta Nefaria gallery, the Kanaka islands room, the Tsiganit movement, the Hessian civilisation… There are double this number and another seven below. Ninety seven galleries is a superstition. There is treble that number, more even, for no one has the right to count SJ Fowler (1983) has had poetry published in over 70 journals & magazines. He is a member of the Writers forum poetry group, the International Necronautical society and an employee of the British Museum. He edits the Maintenant interview series for 3am magazine introducing contemporary, experimental European poets. www.sjfowlerpoetry.com and www.maintenant.co.uk

	Matthew James Babcock Even Now Even now the timber wolf that loped in slippers of thunder through spring drizzle north of Obsidian Creek stalks the interlude of azure daylight in which I stop on the street to watch seven dancers rehearse in the old building on College Avenue between Kenny and Larry’s Barber Shop and Sammy’s Café. Under charcoal clouds, we pulled off the road and, through binoculars, tracked its nimble retreat into mellow willows. Claws of copper lightning raked its gunsmoke fur. An assassin’s grace drove its light-footed gait, its coat as dense as myth. It vanished the way these dancers sway then leap from the parquet floorboards of Thursday into the glacial mirrors of themselves. Even now the thugs who beat a man to death at 2 a.m. outside my room at The Westminster Hotel loiter on the backstreets of Bayswater. Unnoticed, they chassé for a cigarette and Daily Mirror, shiftless at bus stops in the grubby leotards of their skins. The bark of the man who paid them—Fook ‘im up, lads! Fook ‘im up, lads!—shakes the shaggy hedges around Leinster Square. The shimmering red pool the street sweeper missed on the sidewalk the next morning ascends to become weather. The world’s roots feed on blood of rain. For every novice hitman, there is a smalltown ballerina. In the refurbished studio of the soul, intervals of blue illumine flaked whitewash and borrowed chairs. April tosses its swan partner to the evergreen rafters and catches in October jaws the broken costume of a snowshoe hare. Even the earth’s most savage pirouettes end in stunning feats of balance, a rhythm and hunger that beats time on a battered surface that was uneven then but is even now. Matthew James Babcock teaches at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg. PhD in Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His book, Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis, will be published by the University of Delaware Press in 2010. Awards: Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award in 2008. First place in Press 53’s 2010 Open Awards (novella category). Writing has appeared or will appear in Alehouse; Bateau; The Battered Suitcase; The Cape Rock; PANK; Pinyon; Poem; Poetry Motel; Quiddity; Rattle; The Rejected Quarterly; Slant; The South Dakota Review; The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review; Spillway; Spoon River Poetry Review; Terrain; White Whale Review, and Wild Violet.

	Chris Vola Postmodernism Isn’t Fun Anymore let’s fling our hues from the second storey and burn some misery off their rigid, waspy skin the ugly ramble of clown-speak always makes for an evening out until someone calls the drugs handsome and they suck and blow our masculinity into piles of dirty iPod fingers Emaciated Factbook 1. Headhunters only eat oligarchies. 2. Drinking gets better with age. 3. Idiosyncrasy is really tactful. 4. Blue lungs and compact skies make for a fine day in the mountains. 5. “You’re shaking,” she says. 6. “$8,495.” The poetry, fiction, and reviews of Chris Vola have appeared in such journals as The Brooklyn Rail, Verse, Short, Fast, and Deadly, Snow Monkey, and Clutching at Straws.


	Amy Sprague Love, Your Angry Ballerina In another language you tell me I am only dancing in your room for you, you tell me I am a stamp of a woman, elegantly abstract across your stage of equations, silly in my shoes. I watch myself in your iris and I shrink into pose, turning for you I want to say See? See how I slip behind the curtain, eating petals?



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