[sic] poem, dude! by Graham Duncan

Graham Duncan is an alum of Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, and a graduate student at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He is also a writer. He can be reached at ghduncan001@converse.edu.


[sic] poem, dude!

I have spelled
‘apple’ correctly
since first grade.

But for some
reason, today,
I began typing
‘aplle’ instead.

Change
is a part
of life,
I
sup-
pose…

My friend says “that’s aplling news.”
I say I find it quinteesentially Amreican.

As Amreican
as
aplle
pie.

Florida on My Mind by James Barr

For years, Jim was a creative director (copywriter) at two top advertising agencies. He wrote a variety of national TV commercials and ads and is on a first name basis with the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Green Giant and several Keebler Elves.


Florida on My Mind

I had no idea she was a sword swallower.

How was I to know? Watching her delicately drizzle a dollop of honey onto her biscuit, take a delicate bite and slowly swallow it revealed nothing about her unusual profession.

Hearing her backstory in a Sarasota, Florida coffee shop was an eye-opener. Once the winter headquarters for the Ringling Brothers Circus, Sarasota became the forever home of trapeze artists, clowns and stone deaf human cannonballs.

My next Florida encounter was with a roofer and serial biter named Harley. He recently moved into his 308-lb. girlfriend’s tiny home where he shares any remaining space with her two out-of-wedlock kids. Recently, he and his girlfriend got into a fight and he took a chunk out of her upper arm.

The girlfriend isn’t without her issues, either. Having that 308-lb. “canvas” to work on, she has covered herself with tattoos that appear to tell the history of the world, with very little space left over for next year.

I met twin sisters who have been battling for the past 30 years. One has an eating disorder of such magnitude, she eats only small amounts of salmon and shrimp, then cleanses daily. While she and her husband are at work, their dog is locked in his cage and forced to listen to Christian music for 10 hours. The dog is not pleased.

Days later, I met someone who works for a Port-a-Potty company. Her job is to dispatch drivers to pick up and deliver these plastic palaces to alligator and snake-infested building sites. There are no words to describe the state of these potties that have been used all week at an insanely hot, humid Florida building site.

One day, I met a chain-smoking, overweight middle-aged woman who was about to have a “Pirate” wedding. Guests were going to be encouraged to dress accordingly and to bring a bottle of rum. Wooden legs and eye patches were to be optional.

Meanwhile, trying to eat healthy in Florida is a lost cause. Bacon finds its way into virtually everything on the menu. All fish seems to be fried. Salads are seemingly nonexistent. Looking around a strip mall breakfast joint, you see folks with massive guts, and chowing down on biscuits and gravy. They just don’t seem right in the head.

A trip to a Dairy Queen exposes you to people who look like they’ve either just robbed a mini-mart, are thinking of robbing a mini-mart or have just been released from prison for robbing a mini-mart. How else to explain the conversation that stopped as I walked by or the lingering, smoldering assessment of me (Cop? Detective? Snitch?) as I got my Blizzard Blast and made quickly for the door?

For family fun, adventure, lasting memories and eye-popping experiences, who needs Disney World? It’s all right there for free as you wander around Florida.

Sounds of the Spring by Brittney Deaton

Brittney Deaton is a recent graduate of Central Washington University, where she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in English: Professional and Creative Writing. She lives in Naches, Washington, where she works as a part-time nanny and substitute teacher. She enjoys reading, writing, cooking, and spending time with her family and friends.


Sounds of the Spring

        Inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Sounds of Winter”

Sounds of the spring too,
No snow atop the mountains—a distant birdsong
That was missed all winter long—the sound of bees, streams, frogs,
The soughing breeze— even the rooster crow, newborn calves,
    crickets,
Children riding bikes—tractors waking from their
    winter sleep,
A baseball team’s first game of the season, Let’s play ball
    Batter up,
After these dark months we dance in a sunlit rain.

Rain/Snow by Chris Couchon

Christopher J. Couchon is a writer of poetry and fiction who lives in the valleys of southern New England. He is 21 and enjoys the works of Hermann Hesse. His work has previously appeared in the likes of Other Magazine and the Black Candies book series.


Rain/Snow

My mind is screaming.
I broke the glass. The temperature is low.
I am bleeding. When my blood touches the air
It turns cold. My wound begins to clot.
I storm through thorny bramble
My skin is enveloped in goosebumps and cuts
I can see my breath
I start to run – I am sprinting
The wind is attacking my face
I am bleeding again
The blood runs
I run

I don’t know where I’m going
My heart is pounding – I cannot breathe
I stumble and collapse, frostbitten
Exhausted and hypothermic
The raining slush thickens
And I stare into weak fluorescent light
A streetlight

There is no one outside
I am sedated
And drift into sleep
So peaceful now.

Catching by Carly E. Husick

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine.


Catching

           In the bathroom she blacks out sitting on the toilet and when she comes back to the room, doing the one-two-three-triple-I’m-not-an-RA-knock she says she dreamed she was Lady Gaga playing a sold out concert at Madison Square Garden. She tips more Vlad into my solo cup half-filled with fizzing peach fresca and when I take a sip the cheap vodka goes down with an after-taste like what nail polish remover mixed with rubbing alcohol smells like. Nina is spiked up black hair and a heart that she’s carved into her own chest where her right breast peaks out under her navy-blue camisole. I’d thought it was a drawing at first, something she could wipe off in the shower down the hall, but then she told me. It’s a tattoo, she said and showed me how she used a razor blade to etch the edges and a balled-up tissue to blot the blood. I reached out and ran my fingers across the surface, it was pebbled and puckered against my skin, a scab forming on soft tissue.

           Nina goes to the gym every day after breakfast. Once I went with her, climbed on the treadmill by hers, and walked while I watched TV on the horizontal screen of my smart phone, cheap earbuds crammed in my ears. Nina set the incline high so she climbed a mountain and dabbed at sweat with a dandelion yellow towel in her black converse high tops and she started to run so she was climbing and running and sweating and I could almost see the bones in her chest and that scar pushing out through her skin. A skeleton running.

            She used to have problems with eating, she told me when we met the first week of classes. She would come over to my room and raid the care packages my grandmother sent – dried sugared strawberries and Nutella and my roommate’s cartons of goldfish disappearing between her chapped lips while I sat on my bed and practiced the poem I had to perform for my English class. Give it more umph, she said between finger licks to free her skin of chocolate, say it like you mean it.

            When she started sleeping with my friend Jared he turned down a dark corner and I found him one night on the quad sitting with his backpack in his lap, hands buried beneath the zippers, winding around the knotted neck of a noose contemplating the worth of his own life against hers. Nina’s. And I saw how he watched her at meals counting the bites she took from her plate, her fork dancing through angel hair pasta and crunching against frozen lettuce leaves as if the cacophony of silverware against pottery would distract her captive audience from the food that did not travel past her lips. I watched Jared watch Nina shrink to cellophane wrapped around bones and I watched as the heart on her chest sunk down and the blistered hardened goose flesh of its healing scar remained an open wound.

            And when I went to my professor about it I said, I’m worried. I sat in a chair across from his desk and said, I think her issues are catching, spreading. And my professor just looked at me like – what do you want me to do about it?

Ashland Street by Sara Sass

Sara Sass is a biomedical engineer who has previously published her creative work in Gadfly Magazine and Harpur Palate magazine. She spent the past four months living in Detroit, which she loved and was inspired by. She currently lives in northern Virginia with a massive fireplace and 6 rosebushes.


Ashland Street

I asked you
To walk with
Me down paths of leaves
And hidden stones,

Across the frost.
Laid shallow by mornings
Rising blue and yellow.

I asked you
To walk with me.
You said “yes but
Wait for me to start.”

I waited
And waited.
The sun turned away from me,
Snow fell in sheets.

Ice crept in
From my feet.
Settled into my heart,
Which burned and fell still.

Persons by Lucas Price

Lucas Price is a creative writing student at GCC. Initially inspired by a crisis between faith and conformity, this poem of seeks to confront and sort out those mixed-up thoughts and feelings.


Persons

Would I be less of a person if, say,
I made a mistake?
If I forgot something?
If I looked in the wrong places?
If I followed the wrong conclusions?
And then the costs drowned me
until I lost my lungs?

And how about my sentiments:
like if noise invades my space
or if my silence shoos people away?
If my beliefs clash
with a [growing] consensus?
If I spot holes in their logic,
yet mine is “preposterous”?
If my “greater good” is something
other than freedom?
If the blood of thousands, millions even,
seems worth one more saved soul?

Now what if I did a conscious evil:
such as if I stole and hoarded?
If I did not donate kindness [back]?
If I planted wounds and bruises,
be they physical or emotional?
If I scorned the benevolent?
If I defied my bodily design?
If I did anything without full faith?

These may seem destructive;
backwards; blasphemous.
You might see me as hopeless;
dangerous; disgusting.
But splinters inhabit all our eyes;
shouldn’t we help pull them out?

Puberty by Katherine Westbrook

Katherine Westbrook is a literary artist, currently in her senior year at the Mississippi School of the Arts. She enjoys writings works of poetry, fiction, and prose. She will attend the University of Iowa in the fall, pursuing a degree in English & Creative Writing and History.


Puberty

Figure.
An apology I don’t know how to give yet.
A ladle in the lung cavity, and the
sitting and the silent. The birth of stomach hair, dandelions
plucked before the wishes are blown. Afraid of my own
teeth and pulling. Little dipper
scratching at the jaw.

Fracture.
Mothering the milk-knees,
honeysuckle thrift in the spring,
rain-mouth, hot-head, skin-vased,
lilac in sleeping thighs, fear in the tibias, in the
cavities, small wrists like peach pits, roses licked in
mud. Fertilize, retract, ripping
the horizon from the
cradle. Hercules keeps returning home to
snake-bitten babies.

Rubble by Sergio Remon Alvarez

Born in Madrid, Sergio moved to New York City at a young age. He studied playwriting under Karl Friedman and theater at Purchase College. After college, Sergio moved to Alta, Utah where he was a dish washer, waiter, handyman, ski repairman, firefighter and free-skier. Upon his return to New York City, Sergio has alternately been a bookseller, boxer, painter, translator, graphic artist, jazz musician, and writer. He studied creative writing at Gotham Writer’s Workshop, the Unterberg Center for Poetry, the St Marks Poetry Project, and New York University. He has studied art at the Art Students League, photography at SVA, and Jazz at the New York Jazz Academy. He currently splits his time living in New York and Madrid. He runs with the bulls in Pamplona.


Rubble

A single brick stacked and piled with mortar. There once was a guild for this kind of work. Brunelleschi’s herringbone ode to the pantheon was built from the stuff. A collective of tufa, pumice, travertine. So it is with the Aula Palatina. The Red Basilica. Roman legions travelled with mobile kilns. Fired, expanded, clay aggregate. Artificial stone. Sun dried like ripasso. Four thousand year old mud bricks still stand in dusty desert outposts. Courses and bands. Scottish bond, common bond, English garden, stretcher, raking, Flemish bond, rowlocks and shiners, rat-trap, single basket weave, pinwheel. A search for words for bricks which have stood for generations torn asunder by the great claw, the terrible jackhammer, into a mountain of rubble. Extruded, wire-cut, hand molded, dry pressed, accrington, cream city, London stock, Dutch, keyed, dry-pressed, clinker, red-brick, Roman brick, modern Roman brick, nanak shahi, Staffordshire. Hauled away by dump trucks towards radioactive Fresh Kills. Or sent into international waters on barges hauled by tug boats. No passport necessary. Bricks stacked into rigorous uniformity by hearty men in pageboy hats and wool trousers suspended by suspenders, lost to anonymous time. Ghosts appearing only in tin-hued photos found in flea markets. Three hundred years of dead epithelial tissue suffer sudden exposure to terrible sky. Formerly sheltered cans of tuna saved for coming apocalypse, splintered armoires, rags like de-boned corpses, sunning in rubble. Shattered writing desks. A vinyl tablecloth house a village of ants. Imagine if suddenly there was light, where for generations there was only darkness. Where once edifice covered the sun in a thick blanket of layered brick, a vast space of oxygen, where more often than once sheltered lovers and their progeny, now vacated to New Jersey. Westchester. Cockroaches and bedbugs search out new hosts. Rats excavate anew with eternally growing rodent teeth. I remember what life was like when staring out of a window at a brick wall only two feet away. A sliver of light to my left, where the street and the buses are, the only evidence of the sun. My flat flooded with the glow from the disk of Atem. Soon to be replaced by glass and steel looming forty stories above. I am crushed and cannot breath. I am told we have sold our air rights.

War Paint by Jason Joyce

Originally from Wyoming, Jason Joyce, M.B.A. is a writer, arranger, consultant and optimist who has made it his life mission to never grow boring. You can learn more about his companies, current projects and published work by visiting jasonrjoyce.com or @savageconfetti on Instagram.


War Paint 

Remember digging a grave in frozen solid ground at three in the morning for your mother’s dead parrot? He was such a little sailor as he quoted lines from Frasier and Days Of Our Lives while he lie wheezing on his side, molting a careless bed of feathers. Down across a bed in what could be and Ikea show room. wrapping refuse like lovers’ clothes on Christmas, mapping out foreign countries on the floor, where pillows and sage sheets wear makeup like war paint.

We still cover up.

Covered up, comfortable clothes, stutter step to strapless and pin downs, dressed up for failed first dates, miserably, mercilessly. More simply- strangers, talking about eating disorders and parents who died when they were young. First impressions far from impressions college roommates tried to make after these dates on 3 a.m. Wal-Mart runs for vanilla bean ice cream and cookies.

Now we’re watching stock tickers for significant signs in
Initials, Fighting
off going home alone with dairy and ground up Oreos.

Homework notes on your flesh, and the word you see in the partial permanence is “validity”.

Partial permanence like hospital roommates, bedded beside your mother, now carefully wrapped in wash worn covers, IV line ribbons, oxygen hose bows, and a laminate bracelet gift tag. Hospital smells don’t follow us home, but we’re sure the spirit of an elderly patient named Bea has.

”Excuse me ma’am, we were just visiting.”

I startle you awake in the middle of the night talking to the open door.

She’s the sour piss nicotine
of dive bar shows, clinging to clothes, smooth speaker crackle, warm wash clean waves wound round a mattress filled with air where we reek
of possibility buried in bed fibers and other ghosts that aren’t quite there.