Monthly Archives: July 2018

02 Jul

Poetry – Andrew Navarro

Spanish
by Andrew Navarro

My mom often tells me
how as children
for a while
we were good friends.

But that was before
the first grade.
Before the burnet
speech therapist
clipped the tip
of my tongue
like a
bird’s wing.

Because you stopped
playing with me Spanish.
Said it was because I couldn’t
roll my r’s and couldn’t say
your words the same anymore.

Yet, I tried. Every night
my angry tongue struck
the roof of my mouth
clenching flint stone
to try to reignite the pit
filled with ash covered bones
of my ancestors behind my teeth
with orange flames again

But I only managed to reopen
my oral scabbed wounds
and I learned every night Spanish
how your words taste of blood.

 

 

Drowned Children
by Andrew Navarro

A sea is the best way
I can describe life
to my students.
A large dark blue body
of uncharted opportunity
that we gotta ride through
in order to build our
separate worlds
atop islands of stability
sprinkled all over
the cold flesh of salt water.

And man believe me when
I tell you It’s cold. So don’t
teeter too close to the edge
of conventional wisdom
keep your head about you
and you’ll soon find
dry land to build a home on.

But there have been those
rare few who don’t
seem to care about drowning.
Who question if you
could really grow a beautiful dream
in dirt. Rare
few that I’ve lost,
that chose
to dive into the waters
in search of treasure
of gold, and jewels.
To wander the jagged
ocean floors of the abyss
with all the other drowned children.

_________________
Andrew Navarro is a lifelong resident of the Inland Empire, a teacher in Moreno Valley, married, and has a passion for writing.

02 Jul

Poetry – Corinne Shearer

Drafts
by Corinne Shearer

They ordered you like new furniture,
picked out your delivery date by jabbing a finger at a pocket calendar.
You came out unclean. Offended by the fluorescents,
you were subjected to the airy speculations of the doctor
that ended up being true- those limbs were made for movement.

The family cat did not like you.
He avoided your sticky, probing fingers and the gaping
vacuum that was your mouth- a door always left ajar
which let loose from its basement a human’s cry ancient
as the ribbon corridors of bowels.
But someday, sooner rather than later,
the crotchety Maine Coon would entrust you with its sorrow-
cast up at you its dying gaze that flickered on and off,
like the orange porch light you will kiss your high school boyfriend under,
as the maggots set up their suburbia inside its lower intestines.

When you were one there was a snowstorm.
The world welcomed you with ice and a full body
rash, made you wait years for the luscious little girl hair
you would become known for. When you were three
you unlearned how to breathe, began turning blue when overly-excited.
They told them your clothes were too tight, but it’d be years before you’d have
the weight problem, and subsequently the eating problem, but much later
you’ll invest in Thich Nhat Hahn and the inspirational tags
on Yogi tea, realizing how “just fine” you grew up to be.
You’ll remember too nostalgically the timbre of self-hatred,
the illusion that clenched fists can feel like a grip
on a wheel you know doesn’t exist- but you hold your hands
at ten and two anyway, just on the off-chance there is a God.

But before all that you turn six and learn what momentum feels like.
You beg to be spun from anywhere on anything
until your vision and stomach flip on its side.
You’ll crave disorientation all your life,
you’ll make a career out of falling.
At eleven you understand what it is to be lonely,
filling her absence with self-sufficiency,
and quiet, and a hunger for excellence.
But this is around the time you grasp the concept
of mortality and nothing can make you forget the imminence of death.
Even when you visit the expensive sunlit café you can’t shake off the dread,
can’t look at your mother’s face without seeing it white-lipped and dead.
You’ll feel something similar at thirteen,
lying awake in amber shadows (you still use a nightlight,
not subscribing yet to the salvation of ignorance)
suffocated in equal parts by the way people can break one another
and the irony of existing at all.

Looking back you’re still transfixed by your first kiss
At fourteen during truth or dare at dusk behind a half-
crumbling historical site. You hone your love of contradiction,
betting the Moravians would never guess that their meeting house
would someday be reborn as the place where
your tongue met Dominic Fetter’s, which was too big
but impossibly warm and soft like bubblegum.
At sixteen you get high.
The scope of your existence is as narrow as the creek
where you will negotiate barefoot between rocks as you search
for a glimpse of those iridescent tricks of the eye- fish.

You fall in love somewhere along the way,
you will break each other’s heart at more distinct points.
Almost twenty, you leave on a plane
fourteen hours and a horizon away.
Home dissolves in your wake
but you will still cling to those few months as
a glittering gift; sweet, dense and messy like mochi.
You come to know that he needs you to say it more than
you need it to be true, and how not all loss feels like losing.

When you return
you’ll move away, following through on a threat for the first time.
You hide out in a city of 8.5 million,
dissolving into the rusts of the Harlem skyline.
You learn how solitary a thing freedom can be.

At twenty-one you write poems.

 

 

Villanelle
by Corinne Shearer

Your palms like valleys catch the rain.
These hands turn over empty,
there’s no refrain.

These are the things that remain:
The tenor of your voice and labyrinths for fingerprints,
your palms like valleys that catch the rain.

You waited but I never came,
too preoccupied with speculation, why
there’s no refrain.

You are this thing I scrub out over and over like a stain,
but I’m not one for self-restraint; I visit this place often just to watch
your palms like valleys catching the rain.

It’s not well maintained,
all the houses are overgrown, their insides spilling out across the lawn;
there’s no refrain.

What did I gain–
the blaze of this city pales in comparison to
your palms like valleys that catch the rain.

 

 

______________
Corinne Shearer is a recent BFA graduate from SUNY Purchase. Freelance writer, dancer and choreographer currently based in NYC.

02 Jul

Poetry – Iris Litt

THE DOG AND THE STREAM
by Iris Litt

When my neighbor told me
that his sweet dog
was seriously sick, I was sad, very sad

but when he told me
he takes her to the stream
that runs through my land
and she gratefully lies down
as the rushing water soothes the itch and pain

I moved beyond sadness. Something about
how the stream washes away all pain

and I pictured her dog dream:
the stream, cool against her hot skin,
will carry her to a dog heaven where she can
romp eternally with her kind and devoted friend
and catch the Frisbee again

 
SNOW IN THE COUNTRY
by Iris Litt

Snow, which is supposed to hide, reveals
the bootmarks in my woods
and tiretracks which, like fingerprints,
can be examined by the curious one.
Snow in its phony white innocence
serves loud testimony in this incredible silence.
Whereas summergrass cooperates,
bounces back conspiratorially after walkers,
snow in its alleged peace
squats on my land and, in ungrateful betrayal,
shouts of the inevitable unpeace of my life:
the friends who’ve fled to the central heating
of cities and tropical suns
and the one who stayed
yet examines the tracks of the suspected ones

until I, at the many-paned window
by the voracious woodstove, ask:
In this deep mountain winter with its hundred snows
does it matter who comes and goes?

 

_______________
Iris Litt had two books of poetry published: What I Wanted to Say (Shivastan Publications) and Word Love (Cosmic Trend Publications). Her poems, short stories, and articles have been published in many magazines, including Confrontation, Onthebus, Central Park, Pearl, The Ledge, Earth’s Daughters, The Avatar Review, Bryant Literary Review, Poet Lore, and Hiram Poetry Review, as well as the Saturday Evening Post 2016 Great American Fiction Contest Anthology. She won first prize in the Virtual Press Annual Writer’s Contest and honorable mention in the short story contest of Writer’s Digest.

02 Jul

Poetry – Alejandra Castillo

A Weekend Getaway
by Alejandra Castillo

Back to Tijuana,
the United States’ lousy neighbor.
The one that knocks on your door at 3am
asking for a glass of water
and you don’t give it to him
because you are the United States of America
and your neighbor is dirty
and ultimately you don’t fucking have
to quench his thirst.
So you take your rifle and scare your neighbor away
but he keeps coming back
because he really is that goddamn thirsty
and his house has no running water
and—you get the point.

As the migra escorted you outside you felt a little infamous
among hundreds of women with blisters on their hands.
You’re holding your breath with your mechanized arms.
Exiled for working without permission from Uncle Sam.

Once again in TJ, where it all began.
Except now you’re 23 y en la edad del desmadre.
La migra asks you and your girlfriends your names.
Carmela suggests you all give fake ones.
You take it further and suggest celebrities.

When the gringo asks you to identify yourself,
you say you are Angélica María.
Your friend Roselva is now Lucero
and Carmela is now Thalía.

So when the factory owner tries to import you all back
he can’t find any of you. You pay a coyote to guide you home
to the glasses factory and the East L.A. dance hall.

Deported on a Friday night.
Spent the weekend in Mexico.
Crossed the crumbling desert on Sunday.
Showed up to work promptly on Monday.

That’s the kind of girl you are.

 

180
by Alejandra Castillo
by

Nomad
by Alejandra Castillo

The lawlessness of the river
runs through my veins.
I don’t know how to swim,
I know how not to drown.
It’s easy to run away from home
when there’s over a dozen kids
crawling along the mud like pigs.

My daughter asks, who do you miss?
I say, I never was too close to anybody,
but I remember the butcher and his son,
who raped me.

Daughter, we are gypsies.

Home is a dream we had one day.

 

Lex as Persephone
by Alejandra Castillo

I wanted to die and reincarnate
as the Brody Dalle
of a parallel universe.

One without the arrogance of her green eyes, glazed.
To be punk without the needles.
To be punk without the meds.

My soft lips pressed against the microphone one day
and I felt nothing.
Fixed my dumb stare straight across an ocean
of bodies who wanted to fuck
everything, myself included,
each other.

I ate the microphone.
My lips were bleeding.
Brody, I tried

to be a better version of you.
But I found myself bored with fame.
Singing the same old songs
to the same demented crowd.
Even nudity gets dull.

You and I, Brody, we’re not bad people.
When we signed our souls away
we didn’t do it for the fame.
You and I never wanted to be
goddesses of any underworld.
We never wanted gutter punks
to scream our names.

I paid the price, bound to this machine
that feeds me.

My manager preps me every night, he says
he’s never known a rockstar with no pain.
Lex as Trinity Part II
by Alejandra Castillo

She woke up in the middle
of the night gasping for air.
She had forgotten how to breathe.
Poor thing. One hour sleeps.
Foodless days. Singing
“God, help the outcasts”
on her midnight walks
to churches that were never
goddamn open.

Lex wasn’t religious,
only when she ached.
But Lex was still Lex. Performed
exquisitely. Fans by the handful. All
was good onstage. Backstage was hell.
Her manager said, Lex, you are dead,
you are queen of your underworld.

One day she almost died.
Crowd surfed into a hole of stupid
bodies. Cracked
her head in two. Cried
with primal gratitude. Clung.

Surprise. You didn’t want to die.

 

__________________
Alejandra Castillo is a poet from East LA and Guadalajara. Her poetry has appeared in ONE: Body, Mind, Spirit and Hinchas de Poesia.

02 Jul

Book Review – Junkie Wife

Junkie Wife
by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Book Review
by Julianne Carew
Fiction Editor

From the collection’s dedication page, which ominously states, “No names were changed. No one was innocent,” to its last line, Junkie Wife, written by Alexis Rhone Fancher, tactfully illustrates the affects addiction has on an individual, as well as the relationships it inadvertently creates.

In “Flirting with Death—A Love Poem,” Fancher begins with the phrase, “In love with the rush. Not the high,” which establishes a stark, matter-of-fact approach to a life lived on the fringes of society. By using colloquial language laced with blunt, in-your-face imagery, Fancher successfully portrays a set of multifaceted characters that, for the most part, remain anonymous. The one to whom we can only assume is the “junkie wife,” is never directly named, nor is the child prostitute, or the Armenian drug dealer, or the lovers on the beach. Vicki, the main character’s former best friend whose “blood [later] splattered the bone white walls like a Pollack,” and Dr. Tim, who tells the main character she “looks like a million bucks,” even as she fingers a razor blade in her pocket, serve as intrusions to the main character’s drug-induced haze, and remind readers of the blurred reality in which she is living.

Nowhere in Junkie Wife is there an excess of words. Each line is intentional, and takes the reader on a fast-paced downward spiral of self-destruction. Perhaps one of the most symbolic pieces of poetry is “Divorce Court Barbie (Ken Drives Away With All My Things).” In this piece, the main character essentially summarizes the exploits of her marriage, using tongue-in-cheek descriptions for herself such as “Bad Luck Barbie” and “The one Ken swears he wouldn’t love if I were the last Girl on Earth Barbie.” By comparing Mattel’s iconic Barbie with the bleak realities of her character’s shattered life, Fancher makes a statement about the unrealistic narratives women are taught as children, as well as makes reference to her characters inability to ignore these stereotypes with which she compares herself.

Junkie Wife is as addicting as it is honest. Fancher’s minimalistic style and slice-of-life formatting leave readers wanting more, her words a drug, in and of themselves.