In The Womb We Dream of Carnations by Dan Lasher

In The Womb We Dream of Carnations by Dan Lasher

Monday sits watching the spectacle of the weekend
plotting her revenge.
Wind is the paint brush of The Divine
against the clouds.

I drink the milky flesh of your thigh,

Ashen-eyes
you move just as good across the page
as you do in my mind,
or across the hardwood floor of the earth.

Soft sundress on you on the floor,
and rain fell like buck shot.
Light danced between your legs
and I saw God and Heaven.

You are a flood in my arms,
if my eyes were mirrors
you would see what I mean.

I’ve walked in to find you fixed
and nodding on the couch.
Your eyes dreaming of saxophones
and out of state plates.
We rode on Coltrane,
mined our souls for lamp-oil
right up ‘til morning,
we kindled a fire of twigs,

Loins scarred,
I’ve seen you naked
on your bedroom floor.
Starving for air
like a fish,
fin stretched south to Heaven.
I’ve seen you dying—

Sick with time. When our day grows old,
and all our grand visions for the world
have gone to bed—
the face of them drooping down—
obscure.
We sit around contemplating wine bottles.

Don’t you know that in the womb
we dream of carnations? The dead come back
to visit the earth as song birds.
I have witnessed this.

A Praying Mantis by Maryanne Sanders

A Praying Mantis

at the foot of my bed
and the room is on fire
like Moscow summers.
Tall, naked, and tangled with hair
cobweb strangled like spider egg sacks,
he stands with hands touching, tapping,
counting my offenses with fingertips,
long and pointed quills
of celestial justice oozing.
His sermon is booming
and stretched like a jet
through sound.
I’m pushed by salvation,
wind whistles my ears
high
like low sugar.
His wings are vibrating
the hum of seven saints
but his eyes are blue and gurgling,
a stream beneath ice and red sea.
Spine a stressed sapling.
There’s no fruit to grow,
but the bees
still return in season
for flowers
when it will rain for forty nights
and forty more
forever drenched  in sacrament,
Eucharist loaf.

He’s not the St. Michael of my girlhood
as he kneels over my bed,
careful not to graze his haloed head
on the ceiling fan.

Two Pieces by Richard Godwin

Two Pieces by Richard Godwin

 

SORDID HEART

Bring me your sordid heart
the one you took next door
as a bird hovered near your hollow head
and pecked at your lies

Who scurried at night
among the debris and pain
fetch it here and bake it with sauce
and myths of your virtue

Did you lie back and think of it pumping away
all that blood through your tangled veins
a web of intrigue in your sickened soul
a pulse of promise and a spurt of life

It is rotund obscene
full of corrupt desire your lustful
hatred and your cheap allure
the breath of your promise like a broken toy

It is a fat muscle with redundant purpose
it is a mystique you never did acquire
you spent it on condoms and come
you left it in your stained bed

And now you seek it
it is here in the sewer with the forgotten things
you never lost just threw away
with yourself and the tawdry imitation of you

It is not blue you are
It is blanched whiter than a whale

Which spews up from a foaming sea
It is your intrepid soiled reality

 

THE MAN IN THE T SHIRT

At night I drive through the city. The road sounds like a broken bone beneath my wheels, I am driving over broken bones, the skulls and skeletons of all the dead, gone in the war and buried like dogs alone at night or in the daytime that brings no sunlight now, just a wound in the skyline.
I look down on the city of dreaming lights from my hotel window.
It is past midnight and I stand on the twenty-fourth floor.
The streets coil like an electric snake around the houses and the lights stretch all the way to the edge of the horizon.
Below me the river flows with some freezing frequency against the electric heat and charge.
The city bristles with deceit and crime.
I can taste it.
The freeway buzzes with a hive of cars like bees released and hungry for nectar.
The nectar these drivers seek are hookers they visit on their way from work.
They stop at sports clubs to shower the women’s flesh from them before donning virtue like a worn hat.
There is no hush.

I watch these men and women who use night time to do the things they do.
I see a car stop in the road below me.
Through the reinforced glass of my window and at this height the man who gets out is less real than an actor on the TV I do not put on.
I am tired of the same dish it serves me.  I want new excitement.
He stands in the middle of the road and starts yelling. A blonde woman in a fur coat gets out. It is not yet cold enough for fur, although the signs of winter are in the air daily as I walk the block to fetch the newspaper I throw away after a brief glance.
There is no news.
The woman is saying something to the man. I am not part of this. I cannot hear what she is saying. I can make out she is attractive and angry. He hits her. He spins and hits her not with the back of his hand but his fist. Her head flies back and she knocks it on the car. She slumps to the ground and he picks her up, hauls her into the car and drives away. I wonder what this is about. I am powerless to intervene.
I am merely a spectator.
I consider if I have become a voyeur.
The truth is I am what the hotel has made me.
It is the structure of the building and its height that causes me to behave in this way.

I look beyond what has just happened.
It is not real.
The lights of some offices blink at me in the sky.
The buildings have taken over with their grim prophecy of our exile.
We are set apart, made remote from experience. Who’d have thought that architecture would finally spell our ruin? In our attempts to house more and more people we have breached the purity of sky and alienated ourselves from one another. We ride the hungry streets searching for the things that make us carry on. Sex and money fuel us.
We are part of their design. They have designed us. They have shaped our world and warped our perceptions. Truth has become a dubious spectacle. They have been doing it for years. Eroding our souls with concrete and steel.
At night they numb us. They heighten our threshold of pain until there is no sensation.
In a disused parking lot a man kicks a beer bottle. He gets on his cell phone and walks away.
Two young women walk arm in arm singing, they are drunk, they stagger in their high heels and look vulnerable. I wonder if they will be attacked by a predator.
A light comes on in a building. I fetch my binoculars and hone in. They are high powered and make the blurred shapes come into sharp focus. I see a man stand at a window. He is playing with something. He is young, well built and wears a T shirt. It is black and he turns towards the window. His T shirt has a logo on it that looks like a bull. Yes, it is a bull.

He seems to be saying something and I imagine he is talking to himself. He walks away from the window, into the room, and I follow him. As he moves I see a man and a woman in there. They are naked and tied to chairs. The woman is staring with horror at the man in the T shirt. She is tied with ropes and they are cutting into her breasts. She is trying to say something. The man is tied as well, the binds tight against his genitals.
I think of turkeys trussed up. There is the melody of an abattoir that drifts into the static space of this spectacle, a melody with no music, just the staccato rhythm of noise jarring against a structure, like a needle on a bone.
The man in the T shirt hits the woman across the side of the head.
She spits out a tooth. Her mouth runs with thick blood.
I realise they are not playing a game.
She is screaming now, pulling forward on her binds and trying to escape like an animal.
The man in the T shirt shoots the man in the chair. He slumps forward, all resistance gone, a relic.
I wonder if I am giving reality to this scene. I want to help.
The man in the T shirt shoots the woman and leaves the room.
The word violation floats before me. Its sense seems to have been removed, it is like an egg shell with the small dead foetus of a bird inside it.
I watch, my binoculars trained on the building as if it might give them life.

I stand looking at them. They do not move. I look at the city. I rest. There is none to be had here. The hotel has no guests.
I can hear movements in the walls, the structure is being eroded from within.
They have infiltrated the structure of our lives with overload.
They have invaded us like tiny parasitic worms that crawl beneath the surface of our skin and eat our food within our bellies. That explains the hunger, the constant gnawing need.
We have been impregnated by some nameless nocturnal rapist. The deformity inside us is leeching our nutrition from us.
All part of the political program. The body politic has swollen like a tumour. Our alienation is complete.  They have sealed us off like vacuum packed food.
It is a subtle form of entropy. I wonder if the system can be punctured.
Everything is accelerating within this gradient of disorganisation, the speed is like frenzied masturbation. They have organised the direction of our pleasures.
When I look again the man and the woman are still slumped in their chairs, alone in the room.
I get my coat and head down into the street. I have my weapon. I walk to the building.
I want to see what theatre this is. The city is a hall of mirrors.
There is a doorway that leads to some stairs and I figure what floor they are on and buzz the intercom until I am admitted.

I scale the stairs. I face two doors.
My estimation of the direction the room faces and the layout of the apartments leads me to one and I kick the door in. I walk through a hallway and find them. They are naked and real. Blood spatters the walls, my binoculars do not pick that up, this is a better image. They are dead and there is no sign of why this has happened.
I consider if this is an interlude between acts.
I hear coughing and a shuffling noise as if offstage an understudy has dropped his script.
I turn, a man wearing a hat is standing in the hallway and he begins to run when he sees me.
I run after him. He starts to go into the apartment opposite and I grab him. He pulls a knife and I draw my gun.
He slips away from me and slams the door. I stand in the hallway saying I found them.
He does not hear.
I leave.
I return to the hotel.
I know I have to find the man in the T shirt. I watch the city come alive as day breaks. A grey sky pales against the electric lights. I watch the workers leave and return. They are drones. They hum. The air conditioning is wheezing. I consider they are poisoning the air.
I watch the sky fade.

I scan the area for the man I must find. I consider that he may be a politician.
I look at the apartment but they are not there. The man and woman who led me to this have gone. I consider that victims draw others into their drama. I muse on their culpability.
The city buzzes with decay and erotic violations. It crackles like a psychotic snake.
I go to my car and drive. I tour the city looking for him.
The next day I buy a newspaper.
I am wanted for two murders. The man at the apartment must have taken my picture.
Talking to him is pointless. I look at the room now, but it is empty, a space where there is no indication of what has happened.
It is a vacant stage. Someone is running the theatre. I know the games others play. I think I may be a prop in someone’s drama. The bodies were real. The killing was real.
I tour the city.
I stop the car near the river and walk along its edge listening to the noise of the water.
As I walk I see a shop selling clothes. In the window is a T shirt with a bull on it. I return the next day. The T shirt is gone from the window and women’s dresses are on display.
Party dresses that no one can wear. Women do not wear dresses any more, androgyny is prevalent as is the need for desexualisation within the political program.
I enter.

A bald man stands behind the counter, he is talking to someone at the back. There is a door and beyond it another man. I walk towards them. I want to see the other man.
‘Did you finish them?’, the bald man says.
‘Two shots that’s all’, the other man says.
They turn and see me.
He could be the man I saw in the apartment. He could be the man I am looking for. They stop their conversation abruptly when they see me. I leave. I consider they are a cult. The T shirt is a uniform. They are a faction of the government. A faction we do not know about.
I think of the man’s face at the window, as he stood and shot them. It may be him.
I drive to the shop at night. There are no T shirts in the widow. There is nothing in the window. As I walk away I see a tooth lying in the corner of the empty shop front, a tooth with some dried gum attached to it.
I read it in the newspapers. They are looking for me. I am wanted. I consider the word.
The streets below me are full of want.  I have become an object of desire within the veiled campaign. They want me, and a man with an image of trite anonymity is pulling the reins and dragging the sharpened bit of the bridle into a blind horse’s mouth. The animal’s eyes stare with obscene redundancy into this blackness. There is a hole at its heart. Some contagion of acid. It poisons the flesh of the city. It generates need and the odour of money as it soaks in the sweat and faeces of our days.

The lights below my window bomb like fire flies through the violent night.
The people are ravenous with the hunger of a lifetime’s need.
I train my binoculars on the apartment.
The room is empty.
The lights from the building sparkle with a sinister glow.
I can stay in the hotel.
They won’t find me here.
I will find him.
I drive through the city looking for him.

 

Richard Godwin is the author of the crime novel ‘Apostle Rising’ which is out now and available at bookstores and online. He is a widely published author whose works can be found in many magazines and anthologies. Please go to his website  for more information.

Two Poems by Dan Lasher

Absinthe by Dan Lasher

In a lust of licorice—
suddenly my sinus
cavity is open, and I can breathe,
but only suddenly.
Then I need more.
I don’t need water or sugar—

because the image that you
have painted inside my skull,
on the bone of it—
on the bone of it—can not
be removed by 80 proof whisky,
no for that I need, turpentine.

Roses by Dan Lasher

Dead dog sister melancholy wise up. Winter set in cool breeze through my hair against my skin. Your way is not enough and summer time charm has no time to care. Forgetting the scenes on your eye lids and laughing at the madness on the screen, shrill, calm, cool, disdain. The captain is green and the crew is mutiny. The night time fearless, while mourning lapping against a hallowed haul. Blood is drawn, and the young man dead in the bath, overdosed, his girl still out there somewhere.

Robins cry, sparrows sing, so close to land, I think, I can taste it, but I can’t see it. Nereid, sweet nymph, mother of helpful seas, help me.

We got in before sunrise, the mountain was burning and Jamie is dead.
Her tragic suicide has left her homeless, tears on her pillow, still it burns. Remembered only as a child, in her father’s eyes. In her own eyes, her young ones, a woman.

I wish you could come home, your bed is still made and your place at the table set, lavender lining the flower bed outside your window, roses on your bower, and lace on your bed sheets, this time I would tell you.

The Ram’s Head by Maryanne Sanders

The Ram’s Head

by Maryanne Sanders

I am angry
angry that this all feels rehashed
recycled, resold,
stale.
Give me something
I can really sweat to.
Play unplugged, half drunk,
bring back the hothouse love
of rock,
Of us,
of what it didn’t mean.
We are angry
Because we want you naked
and all we get is your bare wrists.
Stop your bleeding hearts
your burning suns
give me the gritty details
of how you shake before a show
clam up and choke on your tongue
second guess yourself
then swallow it back like a shot.

I want to know why
you hold your dick at night,
pull your hair and cry,
gasping for air
like you just washed up on shore,
spit naked out of salty sea
like it was your mother’s womb.

Lost Light by AJ Hayes

Lost Light

by AJ Hayes

Last time I saw you we were walking
down a low-tide beach just north of
Fort-De-France in Martinique. The land
crabs making their way up the sand
under sea grass parasols. We were
practicing the proper uses and
pro/nun/ci/a/tions of C’est Va.

A daylight moon skipping in and out
of wispy clouds. Black gulls dipping wing tips in the
surf line like ink pens. Your breasts were sunless triangles
twinning the coarse glisten of your  pubic thatch.
Your hips filled my hands like a chalice.
You tasted thick as salted honey.
Caribe black faces watched us from the road above.

I heard later that you didn’t come back
one day. Just kept going deeper.
Were the stars as bright as the sun that day?
Was it raining down light all around you?
Sometimes I hear your laughter
riding the penny whistle wind.

The Dinner Table by Sydney Brown

The Dinner Table

by Sydney Brown

“The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner…”
—Margaret Atwood

Mother insisted
we were all there
on Sundays,
like the Kennedys,
like an iron lung,
like the hydrogen bomb.
Father came for the food:
plump little lamb chops,
Shit on a Shingle,
tuna casserole fortified
with crinkled Lay’s.
Sister, the beauty queen,
moved her meat
about the bone china
like a debutante—her eyes
like smooth stones,
like a surgeon’s knife.
Brother, a has-been at 15,
always had to put on a shirt,
like a tie,
like a hardhat,
like a diaper
for the electric chair.
And on Porterhouse night, I waited
for their fat and marrow,
like a good dog,
like a good girl,
like a good landmine.

Beautiful by AJ Hayes

Beautiful

by AJ Hayes

It’s about a burnout bar a long time ago that smelled like puke and sweat and watch their eyes real close because when they go pinpoint something’s going to happen, fast. And don’t be the one
in front of me when my switch gets flipped.

It’s about those 1960s wonder years you all adore when one of the classiest guys I’ve ever known popped his brains all over his bathroom wall because he’d got outed and lost his job. Gray and white and red all over. Peace and Love and Woodstock. Yeah. For some.

It’s about JFK and RFK and MLK and so many wars I lost count and dead kids in uniforms laid end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to end to . . . well, you figure it out. Please. I’m beggin’ here.

It’s about chatroom ghettos late at night and I’m remotely sliding her panties down the last sweet curve of the tight rump of a girl I’ve never seen who is texting: Takemetakemenowohpleasepleaseplease.
(Or maybe it’s a silverback pedophile slowly roping me into a world I never thought of.)

It’s about a sea container with thirteen young Chinese women stuffed inside all dead on a San Francisco dock and eight old Mexican men lying still and cold in the border hills back of Tecate. They died trying for the American Dream. The same dream we gave up on. Life sure is a funny old raccoon, ain’t she?

It’s about looking at a black man in a business suit taking an oath on an old bible on a chill January morning and with the sun bursting inside of me, thinking, Finally, by God, Finally.

It’s about me caught in the hazel pure infinity of my two-year-old granddaughter’s eyes, thinking, ain’t it all just too beautiful?

Damn Straight.

Confessions of Wiliam by Steve Bedle

Confessions of William

by Steve Bedle

William Burroughs in 1983.

Jack, you bloated ol’ sonuvabitch,
you left me in this world, so lonely.
Sunken-eyed me:
black hat black coat
magic cane.
Beneath rainy lamp post
I emptied needles
full of criminal prayers
onto the pages of these destruction manuals.
I wandered the sad broken bars
of paradise side-streets,
haunted by the specter of Joan
at the bottom of every empty shot glass.

Allen,
where are your ribs for my elbow
when young, pretty men strut by?
Gone are the days of gone nights.
The hipsters, deadsters.
We were the saints cast into the desolation
of our own wounded womb,
right Jack?
We found the peaches and avocados
and tomatoes of America ripe with madness,
didn’t we, Allen?
But the mad road has ended
and I’m so beat I just wanna rest.
Dr. Benway signing off.