A Poem by April Salzano

Cliché

You, my words, my thoughts, my language. This

is the hell I visit on my way to catharsis. Here

is my reach for understanding,

the deeper meaning you think I am seeking

among your thoughts, the ghosts of your lost

arguments and failed attempts at discourse. I will give

you the fight you think I am picking, the scabs

you think I am ripping open. There is a change,

that much is true. I want to reach

one other soul and learn what

each of us lacks.

I want complete connection, to fit

together inside

the way your nose fits perfectly

against my forehead.

We were meant to lie

side by side, face to face, a circle

closed against time and space. If I could, I would erase

the lurking shadow of my past. I would take

all the intimacies and their antitheses and feed them through

your paper shredder, six sheets at a time,

cross cut into something fit

to line a hamster cage.

Let’s watch my past turn to ash, burn too quickly to catch

me, a blank greeting card, good for any occasion. Fill me

in with any stock phrase, any simple

explanation or retractable statement that holds no duplicity,

no metaphor. For you

I would stop my mind from doing its silly little dance

that turns bad into worse before I can

begin to throw stones at my own

house, one pebble at a time

until I am hurling boulders, dodging broken

memories where bits and pieces knot

my mane and mirrors deceive

even the most skillful of navigators. I am

lost in my head, my dialogue, my justifications. I am

tangled in my own speech. Metaphorical

and literal become indistinguishable. Don’t bother

pretending to understand. Meaning is subjective.

This is the place I bring us like a vacation

home, where we overstay our own

welcome, but don’t pack our things to go. The intensity

here will make the return to normalcy

and all its boredom feel beautiful again. Escape

is called that for a reason. When I am locked

in this house, trying each window and door

with precision before I fail, is that you I see

as still as a decoy dangling the key

from your mouth, but pretending to search

for a means to my release?

Your arms are outstretched but empty.

You want out. I’ll set you free.

You need pain. Let me play sadist.

You want to hide. Here, crawl inside.

I will give you a haven from which you will never come

home. I am your metaphor. I am your poem. Recite me.

I am your scar, your recurrent dream.

What I will take with me when I go is nothing

less than your soul, ripped wide open and ready

to embrace the void that will become

the nothing you have spent your life building.

April Salzano teaches writing at Westminster College. She has published poetry in several online and print journals and is currently working on her first collection of poems and an autobiographical novel on raising a son with Autism, if the beauty and pain allow articulation.

A Sample from the Editor, A.J. Huffman

Hell or Herpes

whichever claims you first. These are my wishes

for you

for all your bullshit chatter

for all your poor me’s for all your no one understands

me (but you and your substandard appearance) not good enough

to date you tried

but just couldn’t stomach all the romantic link[ing] I required

for your adamant unapology for having fun for making me your substitute

wife while still trying to fuck every pair of tits in town for telling me

I should just accept it as another fact like how I should be

grateful for the time you granted me

for saying that even if I had a perfect body we both know I don’t I would

only ever be average

for expecting me to want to be

friends and let you rely on me for emotional support

when the new anonymous fool filling your bed gets pissed

because you want to sleep with her best friend or the coke

addict who teaches you “dance” once a week

for expecting me to believe that it’s really your hair that attracts

these . . . females you can’t help it not

the now-overdrawn gold card that buys complacency

boats and presents for bastard children at random

for begging

me to confirm that you are a good person and it’s the rest

of the world that is at fault for your abandonment that it’s your honesty

not your superficial callousness that throws people

off for your whining no one wants the truth anymore for your sobbing

over your “herbalized” coffee for not even ever entertaining

the notion that it might be your semi-intentional sledge-hammer

delivery of the same that sends all your five-minute friends heading for the hills

with whatever of your belongings they can carry away

for destroying every potentially positive memory I might have

ferreted from the ashes of our “non-relationship”

for making me love you

for making me hate you

for making me

this.

A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has previously published four collections of poetry: The Difference Between Shadows and Stars, Carrying Yesterday, Cognitive Distortion, and . . . And Other Such Nonsense. She has also published her work in national and international literary journals such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Writer's Gazette, and The Penwood Review. Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000191382454 and https://twitter.com/#!/poetess222.