John Dorsey Is Your Woody Guthrie; Did You Know That?

Philadelphia Poem for David Snellbaker

You were the first real friend I ever made here

Telling me about your days with a Mexican religious cult

Where they tried to brainwash that man

right out of your hair.

You said, “They’d have to whitewash the streets with blood”

to make you feel clean again.

Bridget

You sang songs by Woody Guthrie

Not the originals

But covers by the Counting Crows

Placed your heart in a locket

Hidden under a pillow

On the third floor of a West Toledo mental ward.

You never learned how to dance

Just painted flowers on your toes

when it came time to bloom.

Drunk John

gave me $7 and a cigar snip

for my 25th birthday

the morning his girlfriend

kicked him out

of their spruce street apartment.

the year before

i’d watched as she passed him

love notes in hindi

across the bar

while he listened

to iggy pop

on the jukebox

as it rained outside.

i could swear he was crying  

when he sang happy birthday

under the busted street light.

John Dorsey is the author of several collections of poetry, including “Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw’s Prayer” (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), “Sodomy is a City in New Jersey” (American Mettle Books, 2010), “Tombstone Factory” (Epic Rites Press, 2013), and most recently, “Natural Selection: Early Poems” (Kilmog Press, 2014). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com

Erica Bernheim: Marrow-Craving Head-Huntress

The Scent of Fear

It is not unlike the lye, and what you need to know

is nothing to brag about: the vestigial nipple of

the nutria, a handbag filled with other handbags,

a buzzard in a long, blonde wig, the idea that you

could--if you wanted to--control the weather.

It is criminal to celebrate fragility. The bees want

your pollen; the chickens want your plants; bugs

will populate your made-up dreams about other

poets and farms. Tell me what city I'm in, and I'll

tell you my name. The rabbits sense the smells

of stale human bodies, of legs stacked larva-esque

in the sprawl of an underground garden. The weather

begins to remind you of movies you haven't seen,

of books you will never read, and of the sounds

of the sounds of trees. There is no place in which

you don’t want traffic to move forward. There

are universal misdeeds. There are times when

resurfacing is the expectation.

The Shrunken Head

It’s been nearly fifty years and no one remembers

the country he was filming in. Headhunting

occurred in many regions of the world. Is it

accidental that he couldn’t tell you to stop making

sentences or plans? When you stumble upon

the head of your beloved on Match.com, the proper

response is:

a.     Develop an attraction to striped shirts.

b.     Never have the intention of doing the right thing.

c.     Grow in popularity.

d.     Move to a suburb of Milwaukee and cultivate a suntan.

e.     Bring your best feelings towards the cooler.

           

People, look too helpless and you will cover

yourselves with pastry, fashions, burning down,

and awkward conversations.

This is the age of being touched:

gently. Don’t touch.

Death Swim

It wasn’t about the war. It wasn’t about

the lake. It was about fire and the lakes of oil,

shot from a helicopter. Those are not lakes.

These are full of oil, the oil is literally

boiling, and the process of watching

makes you wonder how long you should

make the same mistakes without thinking

about them. I say, there must be a better

way than this to evolve. There

should be a way around impossible love,

a legitimate reason women love horses first,

then men. There must be a way for bone

marrow to settle around the heart and heal

Only sometimes do situations not turn out

as you might have expected. Think how you

might have overused me, merrily screwed me

over the promises of darkness. If I were

a naked vulture, things would be the same.

My experiments will not have gone

unnoticed. A man outside will invent

something for this. This is me walking

away. This is me as seen from behind.

It is a fact that we will grow old before

learning to settle our deeds near fire.

It is a fact that civilians do not need

search warrants to enter each other’s homes.

Erica Bernheim holds degrees from Miami University, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Florida Southern College, where she directs the creative writing program. Her first full-length collection, The Mimic Sea, was published by 42 Miles Press (Indiana University South Bend) in 2012. She is also the author of a chapbook, Between the Room and the City (H_NGM_N B__KS, 2006) and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Georgetown Review, Saw Palm, and The Iowa Review.

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.