Your skin
is a favorite

dresses
shadowed hem

pulling the hair
of stair

climbing angels
amiss of angles.

It’s not the motion
but stillness of

a chewed lip,
the spit

caught between
the recess

of breath,
drowning

in another’s
bitten pause.

Meanest Dog in Town

The neighbors were strung out
like telephone wires heavy
with dead squirrels, orphaned shoes,
and busted starlight.
Their dog was vicious,
Snarling fixedly from the rusted
chain meshed into his neck as
he’d guard the children without shoes,
Freeze-pops smeared around their sticky lips.
Dollar store macaroni in paper bowls collected
dirty clouds of flies as the paperboy heaved
yellowed newspapers against the broken steps.
Dogshit piled in the driveway while
the kids went to school for free lunches.
When the truck thumped his skeletal frame
The gravel skidded as
Intestines came from his ass
And blood leaked like a sad bucket from his ears.
The flies moved from the bowls to his eyes
as they began to shrivel in the sun,
silently looking onward as the children kept
playing in the street.

All Guts no Glory

Biting a pepper
mint in the dark
showed snow
angels tumbling like
falling stars
from your laughter,
remembering
when the muted
sound of television ads
fought lovers
unwilling to
break each others
sweat as
katydids vomited
deaf gods
into misplaced
mornings.

Zach Fishel is the owner/operator of Horehound Press, specializing in
limited edition books and broadsides. His work has appeared in
numerous print and online journals and twice has been nominated for the Pushcart.
His first chapbook, “Prayerbook Bouquet” appears courtesy of NightBallet Press.

(after Eugenio Montale)

All night it flashes, flashes
on my mind’s skullcap
like the glistening trail of a slug
through shards of brayed glass.

Not light from the church
or the all-night factory
but light that lingers,
clerical red, then black.

This iridescence I leave you
as testimony of my last-minute faith,
of hope that caught more slowly
than a green log in the fireplace.

No inheritance, no goodluck charm
can ward off nature’s lashes
or the relentless web of history
that doesn’t last, except in ashes.

Still, keep these ashes for the day
Lucifer arises on decrepit wings
to say: Now it’s your turn.
That feeble shine below is not a match.

Dawn Corrigan’s work has appeared in more than 80 print and online journals and anthologies, and been nominated for awards including the Pushcart, the Million Writers Awards, and Best of the Net. She has work forthcoming in Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, Otis Nebula, Pachinko! and So to Speak later this year.

 She languished over them
end table
her grandmother had given her
stacked on top of the flower-printed couch
and its wilted pillows
a jumble of hollow things
a mountain in front of her house

Aiden curled in her arms
wept for his toys
playthings swept into a pile
below the garbage truck’s hydraulics
being tossed carelessly into its maw
men having little time to languish
like nature in their dispassion

They didn’t care
while mother and son endured,
pining for them.

]]> http://jumpingbluegods.com/?feed=rss2&p=503 0 http://jumpingbluegods.com/?p=490 http://jumpingbluegods.com/?p=490#comments Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:11:40 +0000 jbridges http://jumpingbluegods.com/?p=490 (one)

Irritants.
For example. This book I’m reading. The font of the numbers at the bottom of the page. For example. It’s bubbly and fat.
The font.
I don’t know what you call it. Arial. Trebouchet. Courier. I don’t know these things. Serif, sans serif. I shot the sheriff. Whatever. The font of these things makes them look like insects. When you’re reading and you’re seeing these numbers on the periphery, these bastards look like bugs. I’m telling you. Don’t laugh. And if you move the pupils along with the text, and you do because you’re reading for Chrissakes, they look like moving bugs. You know? You hold the thing in between your thumb and forefinger…well, down in the crease between the digits, and the things are actuating. They’re supplanting on the fucking page, these arthropods.
The zero is a tick.
The one is an ant.
The three is an aphid.
You get it. Every fifth line I feel like smacking down on the book.
Listen, if you’re reading this, stop. Do me a favour. Go find something else to distract you. There must be something on TV. Get a facial. A pedicure. Let those mousy Asian women draw minuscule flowers on your toenails. Color your hair. You look like shit, pushing forty. Your skin is flaky. Drink some water.
Don’t start in on this. I’m warning you, you’ll just get pissed off. What this is, is just another confession of a lousy, anonymous sap. An addict. A twelve-stepper. Nothing new. We’re a dozen a dozen. Even I’m sick of it.
Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.
Step 4.
The four is a twisted silverfish.
I’m serious. Don’t waste your time reading this. You won’t find anything good here.
Stop.

(two)

Fine.
Go.
Where am I?
Irritants.
Like people who say “anyways” or “Febyooary” or “nukular” or “supposebly” or “irregardless” or “as per” or “a myriad.” I once sat in on a meeting in which the big honcho kept talking about another CEO’s rolodex, and it didn’t become clear until a few minutes in, that our man was actually referring to his counterpart’s Rolex timepiece.
Irritants.
Like lye on skin. Poison oak. Small talk.
What I’m addicted to is being addicted. Or, rather, getting help for being addicted. Only I’m not addicted to any particular vice, nor am I visibly ravaged by a degenerative disease. I’ll take anything they have available for that night: Support for men with prostate cancer, survivors of mesothelioma, N-stage breast cancer patients (men develop a rare form of breast cancer usually in their 60s or 70s, but I’m always the rare case, which gets more attention and more pity), thyroid problems, leukemia, parents of children with brain tumors.
Anything.
Television, even though I don’t own one. Internet porn. Electronic mail. Depression. Bi-polar support. There’s a feel-good group for everything out there, you just have to scour the back of the Independent and find your drug.
Child abuse.
I’m good with that. I know a bit about that. I know a bit about being the recipient of that, is what I mean. I used to think the physical was much easier to take than the mental. It’s much more clear-cut. It’s easier to forgive black and blue and purple bruises on the thighs and arms. The pain of it all is finding good excuses for the tracks. There aren’t any. People know. But you give it to them anyway.
AnywayS (extra “S”).
(Irritants)
You do. You run into armoires, walls, you bump into nightstands, fall down the stairs.
Conveniently.
What happens over the decades with physical abuse is, it turns into the animal that eats at the inside of your brain. It morphs into the mental. So now you have two issues. Don’t ask me how those things transform into sexual addiction or what they call deviance. It’s why I go to these lousy meetings at night. To listen to how they figure it. Because I have no idea how you go from a leather belt on your back at age 7, to sleeping with a man twice your age in your parents’ bed, while they’re frolicking around Prague, drinking Pilsner Urquell and chomping on giant radishes.
Don’t ask me.

(three)

Four nights a week I volunteer at a hospice just outside the demarcation line of the city. Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. That’s not really the name; it’s what I like to call it. The place is off Florida Avenue. You know it. That brown, asbestos-infested edifice down by the fish market where the Italian guy slices off capicolla and pancetta with a rusty knife, and wraps baccala in newspaper. All the while screaming at you: ma vafangu you lousy gagootz! It’s atrocious watching people wither away to nothing. But it’s also a type of addiction. My addiction: observing death take over a complex system. They don’t have support groups for that. That’s why I go to the others. The cancers. The thyroids. The blood disorders. To see how they apply their twelve steps, and plagiarize. Or adapt. Or adjust. I live in other people’s stories. Remember? A copy of a copy of a copy. I am an insomniac haunted by Kafka’s Felice and her rotting teeth. You know Felice? She was his first love. Only he despised her teeth. And now, so do I. I live in his books. I live in his Castle.
yea gimme a manhattan, add bitters.
I’ve seen people being decapitated with dull knives, or being tied up and shot in the head, or thrown off buildings handcuffed, landing on their necks or spines. Or in Uganda: men and women with their limbs cut off and sewed back on, but reversed. You ever wanna know what it looks like to have legs for arms and arms for legs? Come have a few drinks with me. And don’t call me a boy. I’m not a boy.
Forget it. Don’t ask me about it. I told you, it’s an addiction. It makes my insides turn and I can barely hold dry toast. But I go back and relive that. Over and over, I go back. With no support group.
Tonight I empty bed pans.
They still have those. I pissed in a yellow, plastic one when I was a child and lived in a two-room apartment on the eighth floor of the C.P.R building in a cold, drafty city.
have I told you about the time I waved to Nixon’s motorcade from the red room window of our apartment? remind me one day.
And turning them over to change the bedding. That’s my task tonight. Bob Rothstein shits himself, and here I am with a suitcase full of cloth towels and soap and water. Upsidaisy old man. I turn him over and wipe off the dried excrement from around his cheeks and bottom of his thighs. I once studied to be an LPN.
Licensed Practical Nurse. It didn’t work out so well. They gave me the day shift and I couldn’t step out into the morning. That was the year I spent living in my car. The trick is to find a parking lot which has long, pole lights with concrete bases and A/C outlets built into them. That was the year my parents are buried.
yea I know I’m switching tenses. are you paying attention?
After that, I studied to be a pharmacist. And then a pilot. My friend passed on a copy of the DSM and I became addicted to being addicted. I cleaned people’s apartments for three years. It’s amazing the number of dildos I found stashed under mattresses, or the amount of pornography stacked on the DVD player. I became addicted to that, too. Pornography. Only that lasted a few months. There’s only so much you can do. So many holes you can stick body parts into. And I’m not into pigs or donkeys or dogs, although in Amsterdam I paid to watch a leggy blonde go down on a horse.
Don’t ask me about that. It turns my stomach. I cannot even hold toast. I got off pornography one day. I just stopped watching. That’s how it was for cigarettes, too. One morning I woke up and just had coffee. Twenty-two years of smoking just off the bed. I got off it. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know anything about anything anymore.
remind me to tell you about a girl named Tramby who came and turned everything upside down for me during a long winter in which i contemplated going out with a Luger.
Yea.
Remind me.
Because I lost my heart. I buried it somewhere. And she saved me.

(four)

One way to do it is begging. Stealing works too. I never went for any of that. Too much work. And theft doesn’t quite mesh with even my skewed definition of virtues. I got into medical trials, sleep deprivation studies, control groups, double-blind experiments, natural experiments, observational studies, field experiments, even a bizarre human vivisection trial based on my history and propensity for cutting my own flesh during high-stress times, or suicidal and depression bouts. There is money in all that.
And in plasma, too. You know plasma. The liquid part of your blood. Yellowish in color. Comprised of water and protein. Carries hormones and vitamins throughout your body. Red and white blood cells, and platelets are all suspended in plasma so they can circulate. Hemophiliacs need it because it helps with coagulation. Plasma products are also used to assist burn victims. So you see, it’s ethical to get paid for it. You’re helping people. But you’re laughing at my skewed definition of ethics and altruism.
Plasma.
Twice a week I donated it. Since I’d been tested for Hepatitis B, and didn’t have it, I’d get $60 a pop. Hundred and twenty a week. Do the math. Almost five C-notes a month.
Plasma is collected through a process called “plasmapheresis.” When you come in to donate, a needle is placed in your vein and your blood is pumped into a specialized spinning device that separates the plasma from the other whole blood components, such as red and white blood cells and platelets. While the plasma is collected, the other blood components are filtered into a reservoir. Once the reservoir is full, your red and white blood cells and platelets are returned to your body. Throughout the process, the system automatically alternates between collection and replacement until the predetermined amount of plasma, based on your weight, is obtained. The tubing and all other collection supplies that come in contact with your blood are discarded and replaced with new, sterile materials each time a donation procedure is performed.
You have to eat something beforehand. And even throughout. Sometimes it takes 8 hours for the shitheads to process you, identify you, test for HIV and other junk, and finally suck out the juice.
I got into selling plasma from living with my old man. He was a vampire for a time in the late 70s. He extracted plasma from drug addicts in Elyria. He got pricked so many times by used needles, his fingers and palms looked like a kid had gone berserk with a red pen on his flesh. But he never caught anything. My old man was a horse. When I was young, I thought he’d live forever.
Anyway. Plasma. You have to be at least 110 lbs. in weight. Eighteen years of age.
And if you’re a woman at these centers, any kind of a woman, expect to get hit on by the most decrepit swine parasites that ever walked the earth.
Only I’m not a woman.

Since emigrating to the United States from Romania in 1980 Alex has worked as a day laborer, a film projectionist, a music store clerk, a journalist/news writer for the U.S. Information Agency (Voice of America English Broadcasts), a TV Director for MSNBC and CNBC, and a freelance writer. Currently he is the Managing Editor of an education assessment software system at North Carolina State University. He is also a staff writer for The Lit Pub.

Alex has published fiction in Pank Magazine, Specter Literary Magazine, Connotation Press, and many others, and is the author of the novella Short Lean Cuts, available for purchase via Amazon. The ebook version is available via Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

He was a little Mexican man in a dark brown leather jacket.
He was carrying a bouquet of flowers.
I later learned that they were for his wife.
She was threatening to leave him.
He couldn’t stop drinking.

So I called him over and he sat down on the step right next to me.
He had twin sons, he explained. I listened.
His jacket smelled like vomit, his body odor like expired milk.
His younger son was a lawyer working in Marin County.
That son was married and had a daughter who was in the first grade.
She liked to draw.
“Mira.” 
The man pulled out his wallet.
He showed me a drawing that she did: she had drawn a sun and a moon in the same sky
And a man holding a child’s hand, as they were walking through a scarf of birds.

I looked down at his granddaughter’s drawing. Red and green. Blue and yellow.
Nice colors, I thought. Passionate and deep and wonderful. I pretend to be impressed. But then the man began to cry.

He was worried that his wife would not take him back this time. He pantomimed the endeavor of swilling booze with a bent thumb and said he drank for a reason. His other son was on death row; he was in San Quentin for a murder he committed thirteen years ago.

He could not look at his lawyer son, his good son, in the face. For he was a twin and he saw the same face as his other boy. That face also belonged to the son who was in prison waiting to die. This is why the man drank.

“Comprendes?” he asked. I nodded, s?, and flicked cigarette ash onto the ground.
I listened some more, pleased that my knowledge of Spanish was par.
He said, in Spanish, that his wife was tired of his fucking flowers.
That she was tired of watching him eat.
He was tired of making up with her.
He folded up his granddaughter’s drawing, sniffling.
And then I realized we had been having the entire conversation in Spanglish.

He started off in English and I finished sentences in Spanish.
He started off in Spanish and I listened and parroted the words back in English.
He was a poetic creature, this man.
His eye sockets were deeper in pitch and pith than the shadow of the cubbyhole behind us.
He began to cry hard. Sitting so close to him, I could smell the booze, whatever he drank.
It cut up the smell of his body odor and then I thought: “twins.”
I was told by my clairvoyant mother that I might have twins.

My great aunt was a twin. Her twin died in the war. Despite common misconception in my family, they were never really close. They had lead separate lives.
My great aunt’s twin, whose name I never knew, was buried somewhere near Baba Yar, the site of the largest massacre of Jews in the history of WWII.

It did not matter, I thought. Who the fuck was I? Who cared about my background and my identity? I was over it. I had the genes for twins and had a girlfriend waiting for me in the cool of twilight, half-naked, shivering a bit, back at home in my apartment, waiting for my body odor to rush up her nostrils and make due with my skin with her tongue and hands.

I might have twins one day. I hope that they are girls, that they have my mother’s eyes in color and my father’s eyes in cut. I would hold them in my arms and recite poetry to them. I would never betray them. My wife would never tell me that I drank too much. I would quit smoking. I would play in the grass with my toddler daughters and support their dreams. I would blow bubbles their way through a plastic wand. There would be no mistakes. No interruptions. No rehabs. No flowers to give to my wife, over and over again.

The man wrapped his arms around himself and wept with his boots in front of him as I smoked my cigarette.

He said he loved his son, the one on death row, that he would do anything to trade places with him, so his wife wouldn’t have to hear the reason that he drank was because of his failure as a father, and as a man.
He cried into his hands, and he angled sideways, weeping.
I let him rest his head on my shoulder.
I stared at his dirty, black work boots with missing laces.
I moved my head left and rested it on the side of his skull as he wept.
And the rattle of our skulls, I realized, was not from them hitting one another,
but from unfathomable demoralized pain.
He moaned, shivered, shoulders loose as ever.
I held him close, put my arm around him.
Told him I was his son.
That I loved him.
That I would never die.
That no one could put me to death.

                                                                            
Paul Rogov studied comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley and Social Work at USC. In 2009, he was a finalist for the Short Story Award for New Writers in Glimmer Train Press. His work has appeared in Exterminating Angel Press, Yareah Magaazine, Danse Macabre, and CORE, a humanities journal published through the American University of Paris. The Fallen Years, his debut work of fiction, is a novella about a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. It was released in October of 2011. A Deluxe Edition of the same novella, replete with new artwork, links to his work on-line, and a rare interview with the New York literary journal Gloom Cupboard, was recently released in October, 2012. He currently lives in Southern California.

Later, you will reflect
That the way it pulled in its head,
Each time you tried to kiss it, was nothing
Compared to the claws

Scratching you at night as you slept.
Turtles are capable of drawing blood. Can
Give scars. Can produce,
Without sound, the most

Excruciating pain. Remember you
Took it from the garden, lifted
Its sexy smooth shell from
The lake, paid no attention

To the snapping and hissing. You were
In love and thought that was
Enough. Maybe then you will
Let it go. Take it back out.

Release it to the wild. At
The very least, perhaps you will
Stop clinging to its shell so like
A toenail, kick it out from

Under the covers. Decide it
Is a wall, a wall that moves, and if
This is not what shotguns are for,
You can at least duck and cover,

Reclaim the soft contours of
Your bed, go for a mammal next time,
Warm blood. Not yours.
There is a large world

Outside your bedroom.
But, damn it,
Put that hard-shelled
Turtle down.

Heather Fowler is the author of the story collections Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books, 2010), People With Holes (Pink Narcissus Press, July 2012) and This Time, While We’re Awake (Aqueous Books, forthcoming Spring 2013). She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her work has been published online and in print in the US, England, Australia, and India, and appeared in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, JMWW, Prick of the Spindle, Short Story America, and others, as well as having been nominated for both the storySouth Million Writers Award and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine and a Fiction Editor for the international refereed journal, Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures & Societies. Please visit her website at www.heatherfowlerwrites.com

With sweat lingering on her
face, she colored her room.

Tinted now like insides of
ripe plums, like perfect grapes.

When the sizzling lemon sun
dropped from heaven…night
became moist and black.

Her fan whirled thick air
stained with cigarettes
coffee, turpentine, white wine.

She sank into her wicker couch
as fog horns trail the horizon.

Lotus screech relentlessly for water
always wanting more more more water.

Closing her eyes, remembering him
now tasting the feast of his smile.

Joan McNerney’s poetry has been included in numerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Camel Saloon Books on Blog, Blueline, 63 channels, Spectrum, and three Bright Spring Press Anthologies. She has been nominated twice for Best of the Net in 2011. Four of her books have been published by fine literary presses. She has recited her work at the National Arts Club, New York City, State University of New York, Oneonta, McNay Art Institute, San Antonio and other distinguished venues. A recent reading was sponsored by the American Academy of Poetry. Her latest title is Having Lunch with the Sky, A.P.D. Press, Albany, New York.

Time drags on. And still you agonize. Wondering.

Will you exist when she stops seeing you?

Not realizing that she has NEVER seen you.

And she never will.

Separation…

Munch knew the score – art’s safe. It will never love you back. So quit this fascination with the light brushstrokes outlining her. They are not what they appear to be. And you are not so dark, or lost, or spent, as the pigment you’ve chosen to call your own.

You are no more envious green than she is golden pure. But still you wonder – do you exist when she stops seeing you?

Crimson fingers clutch at passion’s bleeding heart. Its beating…a gentle thump, bump, thump bump

Don’t you feel it? That noise that proves you’re still alive? Lay yourself down under a Hawthorn, learn its lesson. We have the capacity to love and love again.

This suffering. This fear. They’re choices, not necessities.

And she is not the sea.

Rebecca is fascinated by sea-green spaces, words, and men who behave like cats. She lives in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania but can be found at her virtual home: rebeccawriting.wordpress.com

Bring me back
a word

Charlotte told
the rat

and built
that word

into her web
RADIANT

maybe now Wilbur
will live

forever
it’s a rich

and steady time
when we wait

for something
to happen

or hatch
until we almost

believe
nothing bad

will ever happen
again

but where is Papa going
with that ax?

Dawn Corrigan has published poems and prose in more than 80 print and online journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for awards including the Pushcart, the Million Writers Awards, and Best of the Net. She lives in Gulf Breeze, Florida, and works for the Pensacola Housing Office administering housing assistance programs for low-income families.

 
I knock on any door
“I want a home,” I say
but I can’t find it.
then it dawns on me:
My home never existed.
I have nowhere to go.
So I go nowhere,
traveling alone with paper dolls.

I didn’t fly to Greece
like he said we would.
I was left standing alone again–
the usual occurrence.

I felt uneasy yesterday,
tense today as one tear flowed…
Aren’t I clumsy in my grace?
Always over-stepping bounds
To walk on shards of glass
As I batter my paper dolls around.

QUAGMIRE

What would you say now
I’ve often wondered
should a knock at my door
a rain storm
a slice of brie
somehow bring you closer.
I shut my eyes
to consider if you
ponder the same
stupid things about me.
I imagine us together and
am shocked. I mumble,
“Fools. Such a pity.”
Obscurity would cease;
in real life we would

become other people.
We’d behave inwardly bright
and superficially witty.

 
T. L. Sherwood—Tamilicious to her friends—lives next to Eighteen Mile Creek in western New York. Her writing has appeared in unusual and interesting places such as Bong is Bard, Inkspill, Girls with Insurance, Eclectic Flash, and Thema. She’s recently chosen arbitrary destination travel as her new hobby and hopes to meet you there.