Julia Rose Lewis: A Keeper of Winter Zephyrs

Tell Me a Story Or Another Vineyard

My sister keeps seeing a woman with

a long gray braid and glasses, so she

calls me.  I tell her that my hair is as

short as hers, the last time I saw her. 

I have been thinking of Catalina a lot lately.

“Grapes and grays and graze,” we

say. 

Sleeping Sevenling

It was the time of the metaphors,

the verb to be,

participles.

Winter,

static winter,

winter ring was the rest of the world. 

Meanwhile, I was trying to hold a place in my head all winter. 

In Memoriam

Of the tree

that thought itself a horse.

A feeling for my steed please, the tree

has turned into a horse that is too old to ride.

Standing still,

it is dying,

broken legs are fatal for horses. 

Sap is all that is left

of the branch that I used to climb on

the branch that was its back, thick as my thigh.  

A big barreled animal standing at 16.2 hands,

a tree as tall as me,

with a mane of needles 

I could use to find its breed, its species, its seedlings

unfolding into foals. 

I have loved

a tree that thought itself a horse.  I want

a blood bay horse again. 

Julia Rose Lewis is a working towards her MFA at Kingston University London.  She received her BA in Biology and Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College PA.  Her poetry incorporates philosophy of science, representations of illness, and climate change.  For her dissertation she is looking at the intersection of ecopoetics and queer theory.  When not in school, she is living on Nantucket Island.  She is a member of the Moors Poetry Collective of Nantucket.  Her poems have appeared in their second and third anthologies, Lemmon Hummus and Tips on Throwing a Housewarming Party in a Small Space.

William S. Tribell & His Leary Jeremiads

Midterm

We all need places to go; real or not

Contentment in our containment

But that’s cool too

When the room has a view

For a great many

And nothing I can do

The dogs are in again

And we are pissing on the fires

 Begging the Question

The mind outside the mind

Outside the outside, sideways and slippery

Poetic logic – chance

Linear, but many and steadily unsure

The Language of Abjection

Laughing loud but longing

All the while aware and weary

Leary but driven – and so then bold

Egg

Human progress is deconstructionism

Our growth is painted death

The lumberyard, the tannery

Our industrial birth

Ancestral

Gods of power

Holding mean sticks or holding flowers

Monkeys with car keys

Chance of rain

Cocaine drain

Second hand, slightly bland

Sterilized and filtered through

Western civilization

And in triumph of the rational mind

The probabilities do not add up

They multiply

Oversexed ne'er–do–well; starving artist type with erratic sleep patterns and a penchant for travel and aimless wandering. A Pushcart Prize nominee; William has contributed to journals and magazines around the world. His favorite color is green, he thinks sushi is great, and he has done his part for Post-It art.

Connor Stratman--Son of Creeley in the Meta-Desert

Alack,

you stand for No thing

           Not even a sculpted mask:

           Lover. Marketer. Fiend.

I’ve found something I should tell you about.

Let the voice rehearse:

If a kingfisher dives and restrains, all at once,

can dark swoops grip time? Just now,

a drop of snow in a bled desert, on his way

to springing a dove:

then the blood sun’s a threat.

Escalante

The only place

of “no permission.” In the deep

of the canyon, I could

smell a death through a passage.

A wing-torn crow lay

watching the shadows

bounce off the wall. The Guide

drizzled water

near his feet.

“The wolves would have him,

Sooner or Later.”

For Robert Creeley

a bell

or like a bell

some ring

far away

and it could

have been

just about

any thing

Connor Stratman lives in Dallas, Texas. His books and chapbooks include VOLCANO (Writing Knights Press, 2011), SOME WERE AWAKE (plumberries press, 2011), and SOME WERE AWAKE (Erbacce Press, 2010). His work has appeared in such journals as Moria, Counterexample Poetics, Ditch, Otoliths, Dead Snakes, Etcetera, and many others. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Howie Good and a Philosopher's Argument

Snow White Punishment

The poison apple goes a long way, / to a museum of manual labor / rife in truncated limbs & torsos,  /  the seven dwarfs jammed against the wall / & subtly touched all over / by a small piece of fire, / every pure yet lifeless wish / mirroring a handmade loss, /  a shallow, dead-end space, / the insistence on  stillness & quiet, / & later an anthropologist of his own childhood,  /  safe & asleep in bed,  / hanging from a noose / his father installed.

Track 33

The train rocks from side to side as it gathers speed. Something about the small, fidgety woman sitting across the aisle from me recalls my dead mother. Philosophers used to argue that the soul is like a pair of horses, one dark and one light, harnessed to the same heavy wagon, each pulling in its own direction. My mother has been dead a full 10 years now. If you ask me, the soul is more like crushed stained-glass mixed with sleep and kitty litter and loaded on an obscure artist’s horsehair paintbrush.

‘The Heart Is Not a Metaphor’

It’s kind of hovering, like a figure on a cross,

a headless male torso, water sprouting from his nipples, 

with you in front of it, twisted into an X. 

That’s who I want to stand in front, you, not me,

waterfalls versus boxes of rat poison, 

while empty space slants precariously,

an ivory satin bridal gown where there was none.

NB: A collage based on Roberta Smith, “Reality Skewed and Skewered (Gushing, Too),”New York Times, Oct. 2, 2014

Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014), from MadHat Press.

Asha Gowan--Lantern-Bearer Clad in Throes

Fireflies, Flying Their Fire

Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows,
Torch the night, chastise its lullaby for stealing light, and away
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.

I could say, have me die in my sleep, resign my life to sad woes
But my light was borne of blazing gleam, sing me back into dream the way
Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows.

Scar the darkness, char this living’s starkness, by burning glad blows.
Men, small lightning thieves, must dare brandish their flames into the dying gray,
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.

A wicked game of smothering life does some demon child, clad in throes,
Make when twisting the lid airtight? Maybe so, but my dreams alight to follow stray
Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows.

Oh the pain of stolen light, and pain greater still when slow stolen! Had those
Dreams and I flew into this mortal quarantine, tied! But they glow into the gray,
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.

And I, once light bearer, know the torch will wane into the night, in bad pose
Of trembling gleam but dreams, living’s darkness, yes dreams do betray --
Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows,
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.


My name is Asha Gowan and I hail from small town Carrboro, NC. As a freshman currently attending the University of North Carolina at Asheville, my intent to major in Literature with a possible concentration in Creative Writing is evolving into a sound conviction. I have a wide range of far-reaching interests that have enriched the content of my prose and poetry. An unbounded love of truth, beauty, and wisdom motivates me to keep pushing beyond the limits of my understanding. So, I make a habit of absorbing as much as I can. I consciously observe. I mindfully pay attention. However, my life blood is verse. Ever since my solitary days spent in the school library during lunch, I befriended poets such as George Moses Horton and Li Young-Lee, then on to essayists such as Thoreau and Emerson, etc. I read vociferously. I mustered the courage to give it a try, to pretend to be an author for a day. I've been at it ever since and I've no intention to surrender the pen. Writing has been a stabilizer, a confidant, and a tutor.

Chani Zwibel: Postmodern Cassandra

WAKING

First, the needling headache behind the eyes

Allows I am awake

Sun caught in the gauzy white curtains tells

Morning and reality have merged

First, to dress oneself against the elements

Today-the cold, tomorrow, the heat

God expelled us from the Garden

To a world where we’d need

To clothe our bodies against its harshness

While Paradise bloomed in splendor the rest

Had a hard evolution –the slow birth of rocks,

The slimy ancestor crawling up from muck

The worm out of the primordial sea

To a place where our ears are beset by singing cowboys

Our culture inundated with thong panties and racecars

Until one mass-curl-crowned-wave

Curves over our heads darkly

And falls

Ocean reclaiming camera-phones, contact-lenses, favorite pets. 

WEASELS

weasels are underground, waiting.

they want skin.

weasels are snorting cocaine, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair.

weasels are fucking, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood.

weasels are performing satanic initiation rites underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood; they want muscle.

weasels are embezzling millions from top Fortune 500 companies, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood; they want muscle; they want bone.

weasels are keeping toddlers in cages, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood; they want muscle; they want bone; they want marrow.

weasels are snapping babies’ spines, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair, they want blood; they want muscle; they want bone; they want marrow; they want gristle.

weasels are underground, waiting. 

Chani Zwibel spent her first 18 years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but now calls Marietta, Georgia, home.  She writes and gardens in a little red brick house. Married to Evan Butler, she and her husband are parents to a lovely blue pitbull named Loki. 

Charlie Farmer, Dangerous Young Debonair

Am I Not Lucky?

Every Thursday,

I visit the High to see the Veiled Rebecca.

Someone took a slab of marble and did that.

There are nights I don't want to sleep in my bed,

And I pack a bag of books and take a cab.

And I begin.

I carry three books--Gatsby, Meditations in an Emergency, and Jesus's Son.

Last week, a girl took me to her home and in bed as I unpacked,

She asked to read me to sleep.

Fools

We fooled them.

Dressed up, we almost belonged,

You, 19, wearing your dead mother's heels,

Bouncing checks for a two hundred dollar dress,

I borrowing a skinny tie and using your bobby pin as a tie clip,

Ordering duck confit and wine we could not pronounce.

Now we have leftovers, postcards, 

and people mistaking us for being in love, important.

Your Birthday and Apple Juice

Each morning in traffic,

I think of how you will wear your hair.

You arrange it three ways--

Straight, tucked behind your ears.

Curled, Gatsby, pure grace.

Or braided, and just so,

My favorite.

You are one year older today.

And you are going to break so many goddamned hearts.

A Capricorn since 1978, Charlie Farmer was born in Forsyth, Georgia. After years of teaching  English in Milledgeville, Georgia, he finally discovered the virtues of barsitting with a drink, pen, and stacks of cocktail napkins at hand.