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.

Two Poems by J H Martin

J H Martin is from London, England, but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas.


Bare Concrete Blue

Come on now son
Let’s beat away time
With the sole of this boot
And sing us a song
To shake off these dusty thoughts

For how many years
Can these months truly last?

For all of these memories
And all of their longing
To feel what they felt
Are no more than bare trees
To this cold winter blue

For now
The ancient has gone
And the new quickly fades
No matter how many buildings
We may like to
Construct from this world

So let us just walk then
My old shadow and me
Through these concrete dream streets
And these phantom filled crowds

For any true hope is not here
But beyond that clear frosted sky

In those dead palaces of silver
In that burning river of gold


Spring Bamboo Rain

Sundial
Otter
And blue dragonfly

None of them
Chide this grey monkey
For watching the first rain
Of Spring Festival fall

Far away from that kingdom
And its blackened heart
I stand and I smoke
Unable to move
Watching my thoughts drift on outwards
With the ripples on this pond

Their burning paper
And their pure white crane wings
Still craving
Still longing
For even the faintest echo
From that bamboo dream village
And her bell-like flute

Waterman Men by Azaria Brown

Azaria Brown is a freelance writer and illustrator. Soon, she will be moving to Indiana from the Applachian area of Virginia. When she isn’t writing or drawing she’s crying while reading someone else’s written work, listening to a podcast or pretending that America isn’t in a state of disarray.


Waterman Men

All the Waterman-men gather for their monthly card game on the back porch of the Saint James’s, as long as the air aint too thick with humidity or chill or the smell of blood bleeding through black skin. A Gaines gathering of folding chairs and a tacky card table where hands of spades and Gin get dealt in quick succession. They chat and laugh quietly, so not to wake up Mr. Saint James’s six children, who sleep soundly, packed into the four-bedroom house with the dishes tucked in the cabinets and the laundry folded and in drawers, but the house will be in shambles come 9am. Taking turns marveling at the garden in the backyard and the trinkets Mr. St. James scoured from construction jobs they see through the window, the Waterman-men mumble and smile and enjoy freedom, whatever it mean to them.

They drink cups of moonshine, reveling in the burn that slides down their throats. Take this time to forget the group of Waterman-young men whose bodies were found at the ends of ropes; their skin gray, their faces bloated, their shoes taken off of their feet. They heard that the young men went out to a party, dressed in their good slacks and loose shirts, prepared to sweat in a room packed wall to wall. They were stopped by a group of Main Street-men while the rest of Waterman allowed their brains to sleep, but their spirits to feel conflicted. The young men were beaten and hoisted up, all from the same broad oak tree, all controlled by the same puppeteer, each branch a finger luring the young men to bitter release and forcing it into their hands when they did not reach out.

The Waterman-men tote the line between keeping their heads down and wondering if they next; working for Waterman-whites just hoping not to turn up Waterman-dead. Paying at the front and walking in the back and they don’t know what’s worse, having their own entrance or not being able to get in at all.

Different shades of brown and black faces unshell peanuts and mumble about the weather, avoiding what they already know. A neat row of shoes lines the St. James porch, as the Waterman-men rest their feet on the soft wood, feeling the cool air on the corn ridden toes all touched by gout. The wind blow past the peach tree and they stick their noses in the air in an attempt to smell the cobbler that they know will come when the fruit is firm with juice and the St. James boys pluck them from the trees, filling baskets, tossing some aside for deer to stumble upon.

“What you gonna do?” Mr. Young asks, staring at a losing hand like it aint so bad.

Mr. St. James don’t know, but he make a quick decision so that he look like he do. He listen to the buzzing that ring through the air from the bugs that lure in the St. James garden and slap down a card that he know wont win the game, but it’ll make sure he stick around to play a little bit longer.

On the Bleached Tongues of Anvils by Mark Kessinger

Mark Kessinger was born in Huntington WV, attended college at Cleveland state, lived in Oklahoma City and now resides in Houston TX.


On the Bleached Tongues of Anvils

nothing gets as brutally plain as a desert.
It is what it is: nature. Undeniable. Life
and not life, without disguise.

Everywhere a billion rocks,
the kind that wait for gulls
to drop clams into broken shells.

Or raptors to open a turtle.

Or a simple stumble
to open a skull.

Innocent anvils, just there,
just waiting for whatever use.

The sun likes to count them:
all there, all there, it says
each hour.

I squeeze them into photos.
An inventory of places.
Next visit might be a park
or a parking lot.

For now, I like them exactly
for what they don’t say.
A casual existence
indifferent to discoverers.

So little
and so much. Too many
to stay visible.

I can feel their gibberish
seeping into my skin;
this is where so many other things
give up.