Julia Rose Lewis Explores the Ontology of Gummy Bears, Ethidium Bromide, De-Caterpillarization, and Unconditional Love

Lingering Question 

When life hands you lemon flavored gummy bears, then drive.  The dancing bear turned into the gold bear turned into the gummy bear.  The illusion of travel, the illusion of being a turtle in a Walmart parking lot, the stereotyped behavior of animals in the zoo.  The pineapple flavored gummy bears are clearer, sometimes, the grape flavor is colorless.  This sweet and squeezable candy can be organic and/or vegan when the gelatin is replaced with pectin.  What hallucination makes lemons taste yellower than pineapples?

ha you sign gnash un-

less ananas ne parlent pas 

plus airplanes bear fruit

I bring you bears and raspberries. 

only beet juice blood

not ethidium bromide 

pink-red dye cast bears 

Anatomy of a red gummy bear, if you think mashed raspberries resemble blood, then you have never seen blood, mammalian blood.  Nantucket red is the converse of hunting pinks.  Blood is neither magenta nor blue, it is brown as the water from the well at Hibid Farm.  The old bottom of the old gate was scalpel sharp aluminum, I think.  The iron-rich water we used to wash down the wash stall after the obsidian pony cut open her femoral artery.  It was red pear liquid everywhere and covering everyone standing there.  She did not die, but oh my blood!  

The Greening of the Bears

hay and strawberries 

someday, the stems, the hairy 

leaves gummy bears green

Not the red of beets or cranberries for these candies; anatomy of a strawberry gummy bear is liquid tsavorite garnets for organs.  Gummy bears and arabinose and ribose were all named for gum arabic, resin from the acacia tree.  Safer to extract the deoxyribonucleic acid from strawberries than make gummy bears at home.  The body of the problem is glucose.  My sister gave me a recipe for preparing strawberry DNA; her ingredients are frozen strawberries, shampoo, table salt, ethanol or isopropanol.  All the required equipment can be found in the kitchen: coffee-filter, funnel, sealable sandwich bags.  Like dissolves like when the whitish strands of DNA are extracted from strawberries, the liquid left behind is red.  

Ginger Bears with the Wifey

fire, corn, fire, foyer, 

fire, corn, fire, fruit, corn, fire, foyer, 

fire, corn, fire, foyer 

Of food and fire-pit, I peel and de-caterpillar the corn for the wifey.  We are celebrating our eleventh anniversary with corn and steel colored wool.  She makes me cry with wasabi; she makes me cry with laughter.  In honor of the painting we call big ass bun buns and fruit.  Always replace the word vegetable with festival; it is more knowable than ananas banane orangensaft.  

Is ginger root a festival?  She knows the week to buy me crystallized ginger root that has been dipped in dark chocolate.  We reimagine the orange gummy bear as ginger root instead of fruit.  

When she asks me how it feels to come out of the ginger paper bag, I reply that first is first and second is second with respect to the roundabouts.  Do you think they are going to come over and ask us to stop saying corn and fire?  

The Quaker Kind

If there were a blueberry gummy bear, it would be the color of the teeshirt she loved, part mother, partner in crime.  Unconditional love is a human construct like blueberry leather clogs.  There is something of the glass essay about us.  Acid loving bilberry plants are grown with manure compost on New Jersey farms.  Unconditional love is a human construct like a farm built one stall at a time.  I was always about to fall in love with the mare with a blueberry gummy bear in her eye.  

sour currant and sweet

blueberry pairs of gummy

bears are holding hands 

“This is vintage Julia” 

shit, diet pepsi

junior year pre-road kill, breast 

cancer, chemistry

Remember: she prefers violet syrup, and I prefer violet extract.  If gelatin is used in place of agar or pectin, a beef flavor may contaminate the gummy bears.  Neither black carrot juice nor grape juice concentrate may be able to cover up the beef flavor of the gelatin.  I am her grape, and she is my violet gummy bear.  She loves the intrigue of the painting of white eggplant surrounded by three apples.  The wind loves her breasts so she is a dangerous curve.  She does not back down up the hill, ever, we walk about in tropical storms and hurricanes.  Forever, we would prefer to share the beach with the wind and sand and rain in place, instead of man people.  We have devolved into affirmative sheep amongst the Jeep Wranglers.  

Cherries to Old Nantucket

Begin with a cube of sugar in an old fashioned glass, due to the humidity all sugar here is more or less regular cubes.  Hint, hint, nudge, nudge, insert holding pattern here.  Muddle the sugar with bitters as with lightship baskets woven in a month’s duty of boredom.  As with gummy bears, recipes disagree on the relative amounts of plain water and flavoring bitters.  The oval purses, otherwise known as friendship baskets are traditionally eight inches in size large enough to hold a man’s head.  Add ice cubes and rye whiskey to the glass.  I hold this bulk in the corner of my elbow, this old lightship basket, house sing a stolen head.  Garnish the drink with an orange or lemon twist.  Is a maraschino cherry, so much more cheery than a cherry gummy bear?

finish with the fog

rolling toward the wood deck and

late reservation 

Sand Woman, Sour Woman

granny smith apple

blown sugar green glass apple 

blowing glass essay 

Sweeping a carpet, like cleaning out a stall, everyday with broom and shovel and plastic pitchfork, the paddocks too.  Unconditional love is not natural and it is not what animals offer us; her horse is part magpie with bowling pin ears and four white hooves.  Sour apple, sour grapes, we sit on her mother’s uneven stone steps being aware our failures, we are all women here because mares are cheaper than geldings.  Sour apple, sour cherries, still blond, I hate her hair, I loved it so when it was auburn, my color, it was dyed then too, I was just young enough not to know.  What the sour orange! the sour gummy bear flavors are the same as the sweet.  They are covered with sour sand.  This was the summer that everyone told me to make peace with my mother before she died.  And I did, sort of, sew our failures together.

Julia Rose Lewis is working on her PhD in poetry at Cardiff University.  When not in school, she lives on Nantucket Island and is a member of the Moors Poetry Collective.  Her poems have appeared in their anthologies, 3am Magazine, Poetry Wales, and Missing Slate.  Her Chapbook, Zeroing Event, is forthcoming with Zarf Poetry this autumn.  

John Grey Surmounts the Bartering of Bars, Glistening Teardrops, Squirming Stomachs, and Gravity's Behest

BAR ENCOUNTER

I want no part of
the unity in all things,
the woman on the stool next to me
whispered close enough to my ear
to pick its pocket.

That is a real problem, I replied.
I could take you for a lover
but, to be honest,
you are better off right here
where you still exist
in your purest form.

Maybe if I let my hair fall loose,
she added
and I responded,
yes that would get you more on my side
but then you would only see
how vacuous I am.

We both agreed to ask the bartender
for his opinion.
He said, we're all plants
but how we choose to be watered
is our own business.

I then told her plainly
that I am cynical and contrary
and what could I possibly give you
that wouldn't feel like charity.

Yes, as the bartender explained it.
we all have a common origin.
But we learn to give a little or not to give it.
Then would you? she pleaded.
I said but your need is greater
and the trade would not be fair.

Being curious though,
I asked how much she charged.
She said, for an evening of light
and warmth and understanding.
one hundred.
For you, make that two.


THE ARMY WILL BE HERE ANY DAY NOW

The bones are jagged by rock
or buried in mud,
miles upstream.
Only blood makes it down this far.

A trickle at first
to match the glistening teardrops.
Then a swirl or two
for squirming stomachs.

A current mobilizes
a steady stream of crimson,
an opportunity
to truly witness grief.

And finally a flood,
breaking the banks of all resistance,
an offering of red water
to a bitter inland thirst.

THE BIRD

The bird is flown. No point staring at the sky.
Man is stuck in man at gravity's behest.
The bird is out of here. So get on with it.
Seed, fertilize, tend, harvest...
it's your best chance. And yes, produce children.
The old home's falling down but the future
has a place. Not a wing in sight.
Just this willing pasture of the generations.
Besides, birds have such a meaningless ascendency.
And being grounded feels like flight in time.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.   

Milenko Županović In the Vapors of Ashes, Illuminated Silence, Silver Dust Upon Gallows, and Apparitional Fog

                                               Gods
                                                                       

                                                Courage
                                                of  lonely
                                                warriors
                                                on the ashes
                                                illuminated
                                                silence
                                                the sleeping
                                                Gods.

                                        Judas



                                       Spirit
                                       of apostles
                                       the gallows
                                       figure of betrayal
                                       in silver
                                       dust
                                       disappears.

                                   The verses


                                              Apparitions
                                              death
                                              disappear
                                              in a fog
                                              recollections
                                              verses
                                              dead
                                              poet
                                              hidden.

Biography:

Milenko Županović was born in 1978 in Kotor (Montenegro). By profession he is a graduate marine engineer, but in his free time, he writes poetry and short stories. His stories and poems have been published by many magazines, blogs and websites, mostly in the Europe, U.S. and in Latin America.

 In 2010 he wrote and published his first book, a collection of stories, and he also written and published few collections of poems (ebooks).

 In 2015 he wrote and published his second book , a collection of stories and poetry.

 Milenko is an ethnic Croat and lives in the town of Kotor (Montenegro) with his wife and 3 sons.

Email:milenkozup@t-com.me

Ken Allan Dronsfield Died Today Chasing the Raptors Through the Nebulae

I Think I Died Today

I think I died today.
Staring at the bare walls;
a knife, a fork, a bottle and
candle lay before me.
The sounds of blaring horns,
screeching brakes and shouting;
echo from sweltering streets below
through my shaded open window.
The smells and hell of the city
permeate the entire room and
the fan in the corner just quit;
but...... I think I died today.
I laid there, on the old mattress,
sweat running down my face.
I dozed off for a bit, and awoke
in lovely fields of green grass,
with white crosses all about.
I stood and watched friends of old
toss roses of red into the hole of
darkness, landing upon a casket.
I think I'm there, tucked inside
wearing my dark gray suit,
white shirt and hated 70's tie...
Oh yes, I died today,
I just don't know why.


Splintered

Bending
twisting so
deserted.
Windswept
bristle cone
legend grown.
Rock or slag
of boundless
stone crags.
Lifeless eyes
exhale dust
in dried grass.
Rattlers move
ride or hide on
high plains.
Desert chill
breathing still
splintered dry.


Chasing the Raptor

My ghostly shadow soars, an exhilarated flight;
forbidden in a life; bequeathed beyond the veil;
Memories burn away like a nebula's fiery light;
Rising from the ground; to the clouds I inhale.
Once only strife where a life should've been;
Destiny fulfilled during this sunset at the harbor.
I'll smile for awhile; electric vibes upon my skin.
Now soaring into the mist; Chasing the Raptor.



Bio: Ken Allan Dronsfield is a Published Poet and Author originally from New Hampshire, now residing in Oklahoma. He enjoys thunderstorms, walking in the woods at night, and spending time with his cats Merlin and Willa. He is the Co-Editor of the new Poetry Anthology titled, "Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze" available at Amazon.com. His published work can be found in Journals, Magazines and Blogs throughout the Web including: Indiana Voice Journal, Belle Reve Journal, Peeking Cat Magazine, Dead Snakes, Bewildering Stories and many others.

Mark Young, Stricken By Hubris, Rollerskates in the Buffalo Herd While Tagging Butterflies

Watermelon Patch

In a morning

landscape in

which every

nutso bird in the

neighborhood

has come to-

gether to gather

in varietal

flocks & shout

down the other

flocks for im-

pinging upon

their territory,

the sound of

Roger Miller

proclaiming

loudly from the

house across

the road that

you can't

rollerskate in a

buffalo herd is

a reminder

that prejudice

is a standard

feature of the

landscape in

cowboy country

such as this

is hereabouts.

Transient amateurs

"We just

crank out the

data," said

the male kick-

boxer coming

out of a period

of secondary

hypogonadism

after his last

bout. "It's

the transient

amateurs, who

survey birds,

tag butterflies,

measure sunlight

& study solar

eclipses, that

are the true

artists of this

modern medium

of combat re-

placement."

Lares et Penates

Hubris strikes me down. Or,

more precisely, a cold; but I was

boasting only a few weeks ago

how the winters here were warm,

& now there are twenty degree

differentials between day &

night & I am dosed with

aspirin & vitamins. Unwilling

to write, poetry anyway, in case

I end up trolling down long

gloomy corridors of introspection

& self-distrust. Baroque replaced

by Berocca. Oh Marienbad, why

hast thou forsaken me? An

email from Jukka comes to the

rescue. We discuss detective stories.

Mark Young's most recent books are Bandicoot habitat & lithic typology, both from gradient books of Finland.  An e-book, The Holy Sonnets unDonne has just come out from Red Ceilings Press, & another e-book, For the Witches of Romania, is due out from Beard of Bees.

Christie-Luke Jones Bequeaths Upon Us the Twin Nebulae Solar Rapture Fading the PLastic Forget-Me-Nots As the Weightless Astronaut Floats Through North London Night

The Lonely Desert


The lonely desert keeps me warm at night.

It feeds me bats to fuel my legs.

And each and every day I walk to shed my itching skin.

The dunes sing songs to the pad of my feet,

Scorched and hardened clay.

My organs shrink and my eyes turn milky blue,

Twin nebulae beset by solar rapture.

I am the scorpion, the snake, the camel and the beetle.

I am everything I see.

Thoughts like frontiers sink quickly into the sand.

Memories of a lucid dream, evaporate on the salt flats.

I am the hermit crab, the haze is my shell.

The lonely desert keeps me cool in the day.

It wicks the sweat from my brow.

And each and every night I sleep to awake and walk again.



A Drab Interment

I fear for those most doomed of souls,
Who do not pain for knowledge.

Those who lack a thirst for words and maps and charts and music.

I’m sure that on this transient coil, to which they cling so thoughtlessly; their chrome and bricks will bring them joy, albeit rather fleeting.

What flat and lifeless hell awaits, these hollow moulds of men? The devil deals in embers bright; he has no time for matches spent. Nor has He a cloud to spare, for lungs that toil in unenlightened air.

Then must noble worms and velvet moles bemoan their drab interment. Lifeless neighbours they’ll remain, when they’re six feet underground.

Atop the flaked and barren soil, how best to sum them up? A polished slab of gleaming rock, a faded plastic forget-me-not.



Urban Fox

Through gritty, parched eyes I squint,
As hazy boulevards wind ceaselessly ahead.
The soupy June air weighs heavy on my shoulders,
A cruel curse befitting of a cruel hour.
I snarl and thrash and seethe.
I pray for a swift end.
Highgate lovers, swathed in crumpled bedsheets,
Gaze down from windows in dreamy post-coital bliss.
The soft light emanating from their cigarettes reminds me where I should be,
Where I should have stayed.
Her cascading onyx locks and melting stare, so far from here.
Snatched away in a frenetic dusk.
In the murky, nocturnal depths of this Hadean Borough,
The thought of fusing my weary torso to the elegant curve in her back is my only escape.
To sweetly kiss the nape of her neck,
And watch that sensual smile paint joyously across her sculpturesque face.
For a brief, heavenly moment, I’m there.
But mine is the oppressive still of a North London night,
Where bountiful summer trees loom black and menacing over deserted pavements.
Lo, wrapped in my internal struggle I have omitted another.
One who neither pines, nor laments, nor regrets.
A weightless astronaut, he skulks through the night air with a humble grace.
His sinewy frame. That restless, twitching muzzle,
An opportunist cat burglar, thriving in his concrete woodland.
He slows as I approach. A cautious arc. His marble eyes reflecting the street lights above.
What does he see?
We halt in unison, we share the stillness.
His keen nose analyses my scent, his pointed ears flinch at my slightest movement.
Such devotion to the senses is something I’ve long forgotten.
Suddenly I feel my heavy feet beneath me, notice my short, agitated breaths.
This wild animal has coaxed me out of my own head, made me living again.
He watches intently as I find the strength to move forward. Down this path I myself chose.
And as I glance back, I ponder his sentience. Did he share in my epiphany?
Succumbing to sleep I envy the fox. Long to dream his savage, unquestioning existence.


Christie-Luke Jones is a poet, fiction writer and actor from Oxfordshire, England. His writing is strongly influenced by the Gallic blood that courses through his veins, as well as his interest in the more macabre aspects of the human condition. To see more of his work, visit www.christielukejones.com

Stephen Wack Smells of The Leaking Battery Shoebox, Alligator Skin Retainers, Wet Puzzle Pieces, Lana Del Ray, Valentine's Day, and Redemption Through Flawed Design

BRAIN RETAINER
   
Home. This is the place that Mom and Greg call home.

Squeezed between the identical one hundred and seventy something stucco clones inhabiting this suburb, each family identifies their home by the same intrinsic knack possessed by new mothers who can enter a hospital’s nursery and pick out their offspring from a cribbed line-up of slippery, standardized, paper white, blank-eyed babies solely by the sound of their cry or the smell of their shit. I identify ours by starting at the third STOP sign and counting down twenty-six houses on the right, and when we pull into the driveway suddenly I remember why I’m here:

Home is where I go when my brain goes bad. Sour. Acidic.

I dared Mom. I dared her to open up my head, to take a tentative whiff and see if I don’t smell exactly like that shoebox of old, leaking batteries left forgotten on top of the fridge in our garage.

And she did. So here I am.
I want to say I’m used to it. I want to carry on this flawed analogy and say that my bad brain reeks of black pepper and vinegar the same way my balls do after a therapeutic, eight-mile run. A smell I’ve grown okay with, more or less habituated to over time, because it’s mine:

“It’s my bitter odor. It’s my sour milkfarts.”

And so the true bitterness of it all doesn’t really become apparent until someone else comes in contact with your headspace, cups their mouth and grows teary-eyed, tells you in the politest way possible:

“You need fucking help.”

Mom has been breathing in my foul attitude for the whole car-ride home. When we get to the house, she advises me to take a hot shower to clear my head. I use their guest bathroom because to use any other bathroom doesn’t feel right. Beneath the bathroom sink I find enough complimentary hotel soaps, lotions, shampoos and conditioners stashed away to trade out in exchange for another one-night’s stay at a Holiday Inn., one with an indoor pool and an exercise room and a continental breakfast buffet of powdered eggs and sausage disks reminiscent of what I was once served in a Cobb County holding cell amongst thirty other men, young and drunk and still of a brain fresh enough to consider myself someone above jail food because I am a levelheaded, college-educated, white kid from the suburbs, judging this older black dude who’s just shamelessly pissed all over the toilet seat in the same cramped room that everyone else is eating, this dude who points to the plastic cafeteria tray at my feet and asks if I’m through with that, my smartass wanting nothing more than to ask if he’s going to wash his hands first, but instead I just smile a toothy, white-guilt smile and can’t resist the subconscious, self-righteous pat on the back as I slide my tray of mandarin oranges and synthetic eggs across the concrete floor over to him, questioning whether this here might constitute as some yearly tax write-off under an act of charity. . .

Likewise beneath the sink, stuffed in the back corner, I find my old retainer. Black, plastic, jagged as alligator skin. And, for whatever reason, I decide to press it back up into my mouth, force it in just to see how fucked up over these last few years my once-perfect teeth have become.

And it’s bad. Really, really bad.
When I unhinge its grip, the roof of my mouth is so bruised I can taste its bloody skin caving in like a waterlogged tent, wondering if the roof might then spring a leak big enough to drip pink, bitter drops of brain down onto my tongue, wondering what sort of person I might be now if, back when I was still young, I’d been given a retainer fitted for my brain, something to preserve that innocent, pre-adolescent headspace I possessed back when I still thought the world was big and the mall was cool and the sound of ice-cream trucks didn’t give me the fucking creeps, back before I learned that every food is a poison and every store is a sweatshop and every person is simultaneously hurting and suburban grownups don’t really watch reality TV and drink bottled beer because they like the taste, they do this to self-medicate, to systemically detach themselves from the dreads of day-to-day living, or else Mom and Greg would still eat and talk at the dinner table, and the fridge in the garage would instead be stocked with malted milkshakes and pouches of Capri Sun. . .

The showerhead starts to scream after I’ve been in here for too long, which I have no excuse for. Ever since my last psychotic break when I awoke at two A.M. and shaved my body down, head-to-toe, there’s really no more hair left to lather, rinse, repeat. But I’ve been in here for about twenty minutes now, and while an alternative me—one insightful enough to have worn his brain retainer since before hitting puberty knocked loose all former sanity—might still be lingering in the shower amongst the most vile and vivid of all childish imaginations, seated on the shower floor, crisscross applesauce, yanking out sticky globules of forsaken progeny that refuse to float nor circle the drain, there is now the paranoid-parent prospect that this bad brain of mine has gone worse, has macgyvered that curled metal wire of my retainer into some janky weapon of self-destruction as Mom and Greg stand outside the bathroom door, deliberating whether or not to pick the lock and risk barging in to find their son naked and depraved, or otherwise dead. . .

But I haven’t jerked off in months. When I turn the shower off, water droplets bead along my hairless body like I’m made entirely of wax. I skirt a towel around my waist and move to the guestroom, where the evidence of my last intimate one-on-one affair, way back in December, still exists as an inscrutable stain atop the wood finish of the guest dresser, its origins dating back to Christmas morning when my brain aroused me awake in the dead of holy night and refused to fall back asleep, prompting me to eventually get out of bed and stand barefoot among cardboard boxes and Scotch tape and rolls of gift wrap illuminated in moonlight to jerk off before this dresser onto a Kohl’s receipt for a crockpot that Mom would later have to return for store credit, only to wake up hours later to find the receipt paper and my jizz then fused to the dresser’s wood, picking off with my nails as much as I could, my fingers stinking of sour, rotting progeny all throughout unwrapping presents. And even now, however many months later, this receipt is still visible. Preserved like a fossil beneath a yellow, hardened tar pit of cum, it exhibits a barcode that you might scan to learn the price to pay for having a bad brain you’ll most likely pass onto your future children, and the price scanner reads:

NOT FUCKING WORTH IT.


LIFE OF THE PITY PARTY


Find me in real life
at a coffee shop
bald and still kind of drunk from day drinking and
on the utter verge of
crying in public
crying like a
babyboy fucktard
but not because I’ve just dumped a
Styrofoam bucket of
scalding hot coffee right onto my balls
down on my knees
shrouding the floor in paper napkins
volunteering myself to mop it all up because
it’s my life that’s a mess
not yours, pretty barista,
who I’ve just tipped
over thirty percent for
handing me a coffee cup that’s rim
must’ve been designed to
fit one and
only one plastic lid in
this whole God forsaken place
which is just riddled with awkward talks
divided by
even more awkward pauses between two
obviously mismatched souls whose
only common denominator is
feeling lonely and hormonal enough to
still meet up for their
Tinder date to
see whether this incompatibility of
theirs might just be
overcome with enough drinks to
push and force and fuse their bodies together like
two wet puzzle pieces
in hopes that they might lock onto one another and
never let go—
but they do let go
because it’s how we’ve been designed:
loose tops on hot fluid-filled bottoms and
these days I’m losing my mind like I’m
losing my house keys and
losing my hair on
purpose on
pure impulse on
Valentine’s day
when I shaved my body down
in one symmetrical line
in order to
prove to
myself that I still held some means of
self-control
only to
recognize in the mirror immediately after that
I’d actually just lost it all.



Find me in real life
still at a coffee shop
less drunk but still totally bald and seriously on
the absolute verge of
crying but
not because I’m secretly listening to
Lana Del Rey
who likewise
definitely has some major daddy issues and
no
not because Mom is
getting remarried in June to a
quiet, compliant, well-designed store mannequin named Greg and
I’m so sorry, Mom, but I’m gonna have to
skip out on us
meeting up for lunch this afternoon because I
can no longer stand to
discuss the wedding with you over and
over and
over again
over
potato chips and Diet Coke and Publix subs
even though I know you’ll still go
alone and
you’ll still stand in line so
overcome by
what to order by
what to get
you’ll start touching at
your stomach every few seconds
wondering how another inch of
sandwich
just one additional pickle
might just fill you up to
see yourself become something hideous in
your wedding dress
wondering what it’s even worth to be
in love
with a man who must be
so mentally defective, diluted, idiotic, insane
as to
find even the slightest hint of
beauty in
this decrepit fleshy temple you’ve inhabited for
so long that
your skin now sits on
you like thirty-five billion cells of a
prison
wondering if you might just call the
whole thing off or
otherwise tear
your  w h o l e   f  u  c  k  i  n  g    b  o  d  y     a   p   a   r   t         .



Find me in real life
at a coffee shop
still bald and still ugly but now profusely sweating in
the men’s bathroom and
just milliseconds away from hysterically crying at
this urinal where I am
hiding from this nineteen-year-old girl who
has just walked through the front door who
I don’t actually know at all but
have still somehow
fallen
madly in love with or
something but at
least still have enough residual
self-control to
                                                                            stay the fuck away from her
unlike one of the other regulars here
the guy with the Red Stripe who
is reciting god-awful poetry out loud at
the stall next to me and who
is a registered sex offender
but still somehow gets away with
behaving like a
total dickhole despite
everybody here already seeming to know about his
having sex with
children
given that he has a tattoo of
the “Child Love Online Media Activism” logo of
big hearts scissoring
little hearts branded like a nape of
pride right onto his
so fucking chokeable neck and
yet nobody says a thing
because it’s how we’ve been designed:
tight-lipped until
the most inopportune moment to
spill out our guts all over
the floor and
oh God I am crying I am
crying I am crying
right here in
the bathroom at a coffee shop I am
crying I am
crying I am
crying like how I’m going to
cry when Mom tells me she’s too fat before the wedding
crying like how I’m going to
cry when Hillary Clinton wins the democratic nomination
crying like how I’m going to
cry when I
inevitably
impulsively
shave my head again
crying like how that four-year-old child must’ve
cried when she was sexually offended over and
over and
over again and
maybe never stopped
crying since
crying like the exact opposite of
all I held in
when I first heard that Dad was dead and
now the pedophile’s hand is on my shoulder and
he’s asking me if I’m okay and
I bet I get
really drunk before reading this poem and
I bet I sweat
really bad while reading this poem just as
much as
I am sweating now while writing this poem and
and
and
I am crying in public, you guys, God damnit,
I feel so stupidly human sometimes
I can’t stand it—
how inherently flawed I’ve been designed.

Stephen Wack is a recent college graduate from the University of Georgia. He recently self-published his first chapbook "scalpy," an auto-biographical collection of prose and poetry detailing his six-month trial and error(s) of withdrawal from cold-turkey quitting one's anti-depressant medication.  The majority of his free time is happily absorbed in reading, writing, and slumming it around town with his dog, Ernie.