Orion headless

by Jeffrey Miller

“Hurry up, your father’ll be here soon,” Mom said, towering over my brother and me as we played with our toys around the Christmas tree.

She stared at the flotsam of ribbons, bows, and tattered red and green wrapping paper scattered throughout the living room before swooping down like a hawk and stuffing it all into a heavy duty Hefty garbage bag.

It wasn’t even noon and she had already gone through half a bottle of Vodka and her Johnny Cash collection. It wasn’t that she hated this arrangement – my brother and I spending half the day with his side of the family. But maybe it wouldn’t have stung so much if he only coughed up a little more child support.

We fidgeted in our new clothes waiting for dad to pick us up, not sure what the drinking was about and why we had to dress up. We were just going to spend the afternoon with our grandparents and get more presents. Mom fixed herself another drink and gave us a once over, flattening the cowlick on my head, tucking in my brother’s shirt.

Outside, Dad beeped the horn three times. He knew better than to collect us at the door. Mom lit another cigarette and tossed down her drink.

“Remember what I told you,” she said, “and mind your manners.”

Later that evening when our dad brought us back, she and a friend had polished off that bottle of Vodka and made a dent in another.

“Did he give you any money?” she asked, picking at some leftover turkey and dressing her friend had brought over. In the living room, Johnny Cash stuttered and skipped.

We shook our heads and commenced playing with our new toys around the Christmas tree.

“Damn him,” she said and extinguished her cigarette in a half-eaten mound of cold mashed potatoes ringed by viscous brown gravy.

by Nels Hanson

“Good night, Sweet Prince—” ~

I watched Kyla’s husband Delmus disappear down the blowing vine row—past the elm I saw the empty dark fields under the stars—then holding the window frame I got down off the trunk. I leaned forward and pushed the black case back along the wall.

Without closing the window, I moved to the bed.

The wind was cool and I slipped off the sheer robe and put on the blue nightgown, first looking down again at the Butterfly Delmus had seen, then snapping the buttons. I lay back without fear on the pillows.

I turned off the lamp on the night table and listened to the wind rattle the elm leaves, watching the stars flicker across the dimly moonlit sky beyond the shadowed branches, past the velvet dress and its diamonds at the foot of the bed. The white and red and green fire of the stars seemed to rise and fall with the wind. It was marine air, straight from the sea.

Now the scent of the yellow roses was cloying. Soon, the night wind would bring clouds and rain, to spoil the ripened grapes laid upon the ground for raisins—

Even with the breakers smashing against the rocks below Aaron’s house in San Francisco, I had always been a country girl, a jewel of the San Joaquin. The name never reminded me of St. Joachim, father of the Virgin and the husband of St. Anne, but instead of Murrietta, eternally avenging the rape and murder of the beautiful woman he loved.

Ramon had the dream, said he and I were nearly man and wife a long time ago.

In the darkness, I felt the waves hitting against the cliff, sending tremors like veins through the rock to the foundation and up the timbered stories of Aaron Markham’s house, to the room where Joaquin Murrietta looked down from his picture above the bed.

Suddenly the salt air lifted the lace curtains at the balcony and turning I saw the tall man standing in the open doorway, grinning and doffing his hat. He wore the same black swallowtail coat and the black turned-brimmed hat with the sable pearl.
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by Garth Pavell

Milk my eyes with the quill of your pen
She mysteriously wrote in the ancient language of lipstick
I lifted classically trained butter onto my blunt knife
And spread the maze across the little disasters in the bread
Tailored sanctuaries sweetly whipping the blackened crust
Into a freshly baked autobiographical story
Let me taste it, she said, opening her lips to receive
The remnants of the fire that burned my house as a kid
Reminds me of the spoonfuls of sugar my mother used to cook
She licked a charred flake from her tooth and magically fertilized
The physiological stampede rampaging under my napkin
What’s gotten into you, she said, intangibly feeling my forehead
We taste different things in the same bread, I said.
Her tongue moved like a sanguine poem plods
Igniting my fire into her primordial spell of candy

2 poems by Tyler Bigney

Laos, I haven’t forgotten you.

I walked the narrow streets of Vientiane
sometime between May and July of 2008.
The streets were quiet, except for the kids selling
pirated DVD’s. I would have bought a few
but their asking price was too high, and I
didn’t have a television.

“I hope a landmine kills you,”
they yelled after me.

There were clouds blocking
the warm sun, and beautiful girls
lost in the streets. They told me
before I came that I wasn’t allowed
to speak to them. But I spoke to them
anyway, late at night, in the dark space of
small, empty bars, where I whispered words
like beautiful and tragic
and run away with me.

Except none of that ever happened,
you see,
I’ve always been a bit of a coward,
so instead, I settled on eating pomegranates,
and timing the clouds
moving away from the sun,
anything, for a reason
to shield my eyes.

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by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

click any image to see a slideshow, then again to close it

Frustrated verse by Russell Streur

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by Robert Vaughan

My aunts and uncles and cousins by the dozens are at the Labor Day picnic. I wasn’t going to come, Vermont’s too far now that I live in Seattle. And two tickets were too pricey. But this might be Dad’s last year. And there’s no better time to introduce Trisha, my new spouse, twenty years my junior. Okay, more like twenty-five.

Everyone was so fucking polite, happy to see me. I’m reduced to Ricky, not Richard. Aunt Flo gained fifty more pounds. Uncle Dirk’s skin was blue from his pace-maker. We were all hanging in the backyard tent which makes the 100 degree heat feel like 150. I had to pee so I headed inside the house. On the back porch, I heard Mom blabbing with Aunt Jo in the kitchen so I paused.

“She seems awfully nice,” Mom said. “Trisha.”

“My gawd, Deanna,” Aunt Jo replied, “He could be her father.”

I didn’t know whether to interrupt them, or head back outdoors and pee on Aunt Jo’s prize-winning rose bushes.

by Kenneth P. Gurney

Ellie sits in the kitchen, peels an orange
then breaks the sphere into wedges.

She sits there naked, but it is late at night
and no lights are turned on.

She sits with her hair in a long braid
in the french style.

Ellie sits there as the nightly inversion
pushes cool air through the open, August windows.

She sits there waiting for ghosts to arrive at the table,
but none show up, nor can her imagination
conjure faces at the moment.

She sits feeling the clock tick,
a regular thud against her ribs,
and knows her flight back to Iowa
will be an empty staring contest.

Ellie sits there and envisions
the church spires that tower over her home town,
the points of the gothic arches that lead the eye toward heaven
and the grayed wooden pews in need of oil.

She sits and stuffs an orange wedge into her mouth
and the squirt of juices from her bite
registers how quickly the barn and house
vanished in a whirl of splinters
as the tornado tore through her parents’ farm.

by Doug Batson

“Honey?”

My mom. She knocks gently on my door, which, since it isn’t all the way closed, swings open. I don’t shut my door for privacy anymore – I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. If my door is ever closed nowadays, it’s because I need it to be quiet so I can do my homework.

My mom steps into my room. She’s looking at the floor as she does it, how she always does when she’s looking for trash on the floor. She’s looking for something to give her an excuse to be in here – an excuse to talk with me. I used to get nervous anytime she wanted to talk seriously to me, even if it was something harmless like: “Your sister is feeling down, can you make some tea for your sister?”

“It’s clean in here,” she says with her eyebrows raised. Apparently she will not be able to find some dirty sock on the floor to kick around until she feels its right to say what she came here to say.

“Yes.” The chair I’m sitting in is adjacent to my bed, so that when she sits down on the mattress with a scrunching sound, I’m looking at the wall in front of me and she’s looking at the side of my head.

She pauses just a second longer. “I talked to your teachers today,” she says.

At this I look up. “Really? What did they say? Am I behind? Did I not do so well on the math test?”

“Honey, you’re fine. Relax. Reza said you did fine on the math test. He said you’ve made enormous progress this term, and that he’s really, really been amazed by your work ethic. You got the top grade in the class. Even better than Rachel.”

“She’s been kind of slacking this term,” I say, “that’s probably why.”

“Rachel got 97%. Don’t tell anyone you know that, because I don’t think Reza was even supposed to tell me, but…”

“What about my other teachers?”

My mom shakes her head. “They all said you’re doing fine. You’re top in your class in Spanish, math, and science and Ian said the only reason you’re not the top student in Government is because you flunked that one test really early -on in the term.”

I wince. It was the test she had yelled at me about until she had gotten a sore throat; the test she was sure would make it impossible that I would get into college. The test that had made me – once a kid with report cards that was full of Bs and As (but mostly Bs), no slouch – reform into something perfect.
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2 poems by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

: an accidental wandering :

a forced purgation, then left with one notation :
frontpage news folded, paper crane, then paper plane
off : are there lilies like these too
aloft off cheju island?

behind the monument to playback souls :

a beatnik, inside-out beanie to show shamrock threads
and two mothers sucking on horseradish toffee
and mary black dipping her finger into salmon rosette
and images of incoming dragons, quad of pink barnsleys
montaigne lilacs and purple elderberry in a squat :

sneak in the aperitif as an after-taste
a dry-down effect :
sine wave in a turntable treble

this is not a professional hobby, not poised
single-chip afternoon, where paths meet

slapdash : the tourists scatter, a white heron
burnt-through wing and terrified :
about to die, puddle of fire ants in an unward creep.

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