Two Poems by Sarah Russell

Moving On

We had run out of words.
He paid the check,
anxious to leave.
"Thanks for lunch," I said.

"Yeah.  Sure.  I'll pick him up
at five for the weekend, OK?
Glad we could talk.  Glad
you understand."

"Jamie says he likes her,"
I said.  "Happy for you."
His cellphone rang, and he mimed
he had to take it as he walked away.
I sat staring at the crumbs we'd left,
my empty glass.



Reclaiming True

After four years of I love you's
he said he'd never leave her.

I told him to get out.

Then I double-checked the sell-by date
on milk I bought that morning;

took off my shoe, compared the size inside
to what was on the box;

checked outside when the weather guy
said 65 and cloudy;

pinched my arm hard, relished
the red/purple welt.



Sarah Russell is the poetry editor for Voices and co-edits Pastiche, a local literary journal.  Her poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Red River Review, Misfit Magazine, The Houseboat, and Poppy Road Review, among others.  Follow her work at www.SarahRussellPoetry.com

Two Poems by A.J. Huffman

With Acerbity

I swallow the memories of our time

together, choking on the chunks,

the happiness, random and coated,

overly sweet.  Clear away the last residual

tastes of doubt, could-be’s and what-if’s,

with a final dramatic inhale.  Cleansed,

my vocabularic palette shines, rejuvenated

by the melodic explosion of conjoined syllables,

repressed far too long.  Released,

the echo encompasses my body, reminds

of the power of oration.  The enchanted tone

of regeneration smiles through

the proper enunciations of goodbye.

I Remember

the way you looked when you said

you didn’t love me.  When you said

you tried, but . . . I tuned out the rest,

having heard all its variations in the past,

focused instead on the shape of your mouth.

I recognized its shape, a record player’s,

broken, your tongue a needle, skipping and

scratching the same scar deeper into my heart.

A.J. Huffman has published eleven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), and Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications) are now available from their respective publishers.  She has two additional poetry collections forthcoming:  Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) and A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press).  She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2300 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

Three Poems by J.J. Campbell

ghosts creeping in the back of your mind

turn on the sad songs
and remember the only
time she kissed your
lips

another empty bottle
for the floor

saturday night alone

again

the lost souls raging
right until the sunset

ghosts creeping in
the back of your
mind

surely one of them
must think you were
the one that got away

everyone laughs and
opens another bottle

and here you thought
women liked a good
sense of humor



these hands used to make you smile

lost in the deep
pools of regret

buried in the old
books of wise old
men smart enough
to find love and
squeeze it until
death greets them
one evening

i'd give anything
to hold you this
evening

your dark hair
and soft skin
sending my
imagination
racing

these hands used
to make you smile

perhaps one day
they can be of
service to you
again



two in the morning

wishful thinking
at two in the
morning

your lips should
be somewhere
near mine right
now

instead they are
wrapped around
a cock not attached
to my body

i look at my bottle
of lotion with
disgust

how many pumps
until it starts to
feel like you

pour another glass
of something
strong

and this time
add a few pills

J.J. Campbell has given up the farm life and is trapped in suburbia.  He's been widely published over the years, most notably at Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Dead Snakes, The Camel Saloon and Horror Sleaze Trash.  His most recent collection, Sofisticated White Trash (Interior Noise Press), is available wherever you happen to buy books these days.  You can find J.J. most days bitching about things only he cares about on his highly entertaining blog, evil delights. (http://evildelights.blogspot.com)

Three Poems by April Salzano

Days or Years Later

I travel the length of your name
down a driveway that is no longer
ours, my pace slower than it should be
in the middle of another winter.  Six feet
of snow has fallen between every yesterday
and tomorrow.  I might be walking
backwards, waking down.
The good thing about a prison
is its walls.  From down here, everything
looks the same as the day we left,
but those are someone else's
curtains, another family's blinds.
My kitchen is as empty
as the Pennsylvania sky.  I cannot find
any reasons for nostalgia, any cause
for such concern.  I would knock
on the door, but I still have the key.
I would only be returning
to the ghost of a dog, the bitch
of a moon, and neither worth howling at.



Body Parts

lay scattered across the autopsy of your page, exhumed
from memory's shallow grave to make metaphor.
Tiny breasts with brown candy nipples, yonic disrespect
under the guise of ode titled elegy.  Small doll-thighs
around misrepresented cock.  Everything but anything
of mine.  Not my skinny legs or stretch-marked stomach.
Not my inadequate hips or the freckles on my aging skin.
Not the curve of my heel as my feet considered
so many other directions in a decade of snow.  No
mention of the one pussy that tore open
to give you life.  Not once, but twice.



Why I Can't Eat Toast and Other Aversions

It's not the butter-side-up logic, all soft and melted,
laced with crunchy contradictions as it is, or the tongue-
to-roof-of-mouth freeing of what sticks there.  It's not
the crumbs in my hair.  Those shake out easy/enough.
It's not the crust-border-conundrum I face each time
I hold the loaf-dictated shape up and consider biting.
I can reconcile that.  I makes sense//It is something
about the way my ex-husband baked toast in the oven
for a year in London, where we found ourselves
toasterless and terrified.  My anxiety-infested mornings
and catastrophizing evenings could be sedated with
two slices and a cup of tea back then, my share
of the antidepressants swallowed on socialized
medicine's dime.  By today's standards I am just
as shaky, and I still refuse to clean the crumb-trap,
that secret door at the bottom where everything
that should be buttered and broken stays in waiting.

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two sons.  She is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry.  Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, DeadSnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle.  Her first chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is forthcoming in spring, 2015 from Dancing Girl Press.  The author serves as co-editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press (www.kindofahurricanepress.com).

A Poem by Ralph Monday

That Vortex Vibe

The guy ran a better deal than
Barnum and Bailey.
It was once upon a time
stuff when we first met.
You know the deal
girls:
Flowers and chocolate,
long soul-bearing walks
in the woods,
sex like the opening scene
of a porno classic.
Then you were Marilyn Chambers
before Behind the Green Door,
still the Ivory soap girl,
Snow White, not Mary Magdalene,
beauty before he became the beast.
You got sucked in--like we all do--
into his black vortex.
You became his child, a stupid toy
thing, mannequin that he dressed at
will.  He controlled everything:
money, perspective,
made you feel dumb for not realizing
his genius, how right he was, how
wrong you were,
trophy on the mantle,
you started wondering what was
wrong with you, didn't you?
You wrote long texts explaining
how you feel,
that he ignored.
You did everything he asked
in an attempt to please.
All in vain.
He found another supply,
didn't he?
Left you spinning in
the hole.
Don't worry.
He'll be back.

Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN, and published in over 50 journals.  A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014.  A book, Lost Houses and American Renditions, is scheduled for publication, May 2015 by Aldrich Press.

Three Poems by S. Black

her song

i am found hiding
with her song
the breaking dawn
highlighting
the latest colour
of her hair
and the sacred places
where the love
used to begin

maybe just maybe
time hasn't wasted its time on us

she farts again
i can't take it anymore



the new girlfriend

i heard it said
she wasn't all bad
and it is funny
in this light
there is a resemblance
but in another
she reminds me of her
in that wedding photo
the one they found
on the path
that follows the river



total recall

i burned all memory
there was nothing left
last night
2:30 a.m.
in the 24-hour supermarket
i saw a woman
she looked
nothing like her
it was uncanny

S. Black has been mining for a heart of gold since 1967, and lives in the UK.  Other writing may be found at the likes of Clutching at Straws, Gutter Eloquence, Red Fex, Tanka Undertow, and Deadsnakes.

S. Black - Mining for a heart of gold since 1967, lives in the UK. Other writing may be found at the likes of Clutching at Straws, Gutter Eloquence, Red Fez, Tanka Undertow and Deadsnakes.

A Poem by Mercedes Webb-Pullman

13 uses for love

I love seeing cities
in rear view
mirrors

and your morning smile opening
even before your eyes.

I'm moved by
the second movement;
I'm sure the cellist
will prove a good investment.

Grace today--
every traffic light
from the fire station to Oriental Bay
past the railway station
to the biscuit tin
turned green for me--
I felt like
President Kennedy.

I really admire your work
with the Palestinian Zapatistas

and I adore garlic prawns
cooked tails on, the Spanish way
soaking up olive oil
and crunchy bits of garlic and chili
with chunks of bread
and a cold pinot gris

I'm amazed at what you've done
with the bathroom, so original,

amusing and flippant
like Frank Zappa's music.

I'm hot for cool
blue clarinets

and passionate about
pomegranates and
potassium.

I dissolve in Courtney
square hole Love
's music but not in her acting.

Somehow it's satisfying
that the Fairlane is longer
than the house is wide

and I'm happy that
Butch Cassidy
thought of going
to Australia
just before
he died.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from IIML Victoria University Wellington with MA in Creative Writing in 2011.  Her poems and the odd short story have appeared online, in print and in her books Food 4 Thought, Numeralla Dreaming, After the Danse, Ono, Looking for Kerouac, Tasseography, Bravo Charlie Foxtrot and Collected Poems 2008-2014.  She lives on the Kapiti Coast, New Zealand.