POETRY: A.J. HUFFMAN – THE SOUND OF A SKIRT

The Sound of a Skirt

falling is an earthquake
of anticipation, silence. Silk,
like an avalanche, consumes the room
in suffocating embrace. Words give way
to flesh. Touch becomes
language of stuttering
midnight. Motion ignites. Two bodies
whine as this fabricated flag
and all inhibitions hit the floor. Contact,
consumption, and eruption are inevitable
as dawn and the sex-
stained tendrils of smoke that temper its mood.

–

A.J Huffman is founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press: www.kindofahurricanepress.com

POETRY: KATIE GOETZ – THE JUDGE

THE JUDGE

I tried to wrap my words around you
too hard for too many weeks
with too little success.
The right ones found me
when I remembered a phrase
I heard an out-of-town judge turn
all those years ago
at the county fair.
In giving his reasons
to the crowd in the bleachers,
he explained why
he hadn’t placed my steer —
an athletic black baldie
with a mercurial temper —
any higher in the class.
The judge slowed his words
over the tinny old PA:
“He’s got some real nice parts…
He just dudn’t tie together
quite the way I need him to.”

POETRY: KYLE FLAK – CARNIVORE DOLLS

CARNIVORE DOLLS

After tuba practice, I went to the mall to look at Carnivore Dolls. I’ve got: The Bobcat, The Crab Eating Mongoose, The Eurasian Badger, The Ethiopian Wolf, and The Giant Panda. I ain’t got: The Bush Dog, The Aardwolf, The Spotted Hyena, and multiple various others. My Dad only lets me get one at a time, which is totally lame. Johnny Bronson just gets the whole damn Annual Set mailed to him year after year after year–the lucky bastard. One of these days, I’m just going to run away from home, become my own Carnivore Doll, eat whatever stuff gets in my way. Mailbox: chew, chew, chew. Ice Cream Truck: chew, chew, chew. Homework: chew, chew, chew.

Yeah. Chewing’s good. But now I’ve got to decide what I’m going to tell that crummy old man who sits behind the counter. The one who really controls my fate. The one who can either let me or not let me play with the European Pine Marten right in the store. That thing is fucking great. He’s feisty. He’s moody. He’s grouchy.

He eats rodents, birds, and beetles. Also: he’s an excellent tree climber. Whenever I get to play with him, I make him climb all over the fucking place. He gets on people’s sweaters. He gets on people’s heads. He taunts and flaunts. He coasts and boasts. His fur is brown and full and lush. You really wouldn’t want to get on his bad side because even his good side is basically a bad side.

Yup. He’s one rough dude.

I really hope that I will get to play with him today. Play with him for own particular purposes.

Which basically are: to harm.

To harm and to harm and to harm.

POETRY: Keith Landrum – My father’s prayer

My father’s prayer

It usually starts
with heavenly father
and then goes
into asking
him to make
the food do all
the things food
will do
on it’s own

like taste
good
and digest
in our guts

I stare
at my shoes
and am reminded
I need
new ones
that will do
all the things
they were designed
to do
as well

like be
durable
comfortable
stylish

and the prayer
continues without
asking for anyone
to be punished
by wealth
or blessed
with poverty
the way our lives
so often
are

like capitalism
or the way
we look at
ourselves
in the mirror

and it usually ends
with the same
simple word

amen

and we let it
be

as if
there were
no other
way

to get
through
this

POETRY: JACK FREEMAN – DECISION THEORY

Decision Theory

I understood its meaning
to the extent
required of conversation
in the cocktail pools
and heavy-air parlors,
but an explanation
would test the water
and prove me
thin.

And when a woman
in white silk
leaned over and breathed
vapor in my face,
asking for my opinion
on the very subject,
I answered in a cloud
with no edges.
She inhaled my words,
held them in,
and blew them out
in satisfaction.

And when we were done,
she lay on her stomach
and in misty breath
processed my words,
picking and pulling
them apart like
papier-mâché,
determining
just how full of shit
I really was.

And she clothed herself,
leaving without her
electric tobacco.
I lay on my back
exploring the pattern
of plaster in the ceiling.
There were truths
in that ceiling; how
the light from the street
drew disjointed, scraggly
shadows that faded
by dawn.

POETRY: LUCAS HERNDON – ODE TO CHUCK B.

Ode to Chuck B.

Bukowski you old devil
You got me through
The worst of times
And gave me the perfect thing to say
When I found the best of times
I sit here
Stuck to myself
The remnants of love
And lust
Adhering to each other
Seems for me the two are intertwined
Not so for others
Or maybe
More easily distinguishable?
Doesn’t matter about others though
I’m happy
So goddamn happy
To sleep in rumpled sheets
Sweat and and other solutions
A perfect damp nest to lay myself down tonight
I found something else that fills though
You were wrong about that
Well, probably you weren’t
But you were right to mark the good
More often than the bad
Tonight’s tryst was bumble bees
With budding flowers awaiting pollination
A late spring on an autumn night
My neglected manhood in both metaphor and noun
Rocked boldly once more into an upright and erect existence
And now dawn approaches I defy it with clouds of smoke
Bringing in that acrid stench
Sweet let down to my racing fevered mind
I’m shaking with post anticipation
Of history repeating itself.

POETRY: JEAN VALENTINE – Silences: A Dream of Governments

Silences: A Dream of Governments

From your eyes I thought
we could almost move almost speak
But the way your face
held there, in the yellow air,
And that hand, writing down our names–
And the way the sun
shone right through us
Down with us

Then
the plain astonishment–the air
broken open: just ourselves
sitting, talking; like always;
the kitchen window
propped open by the same
blue-gray dictionary.
August. Rain. A Tuesday.

Then, absence. The open room
suspended The long street
gone off quiet, dark.
The ocean floor. Slow
shapes glide by

Then, day
keeps beginning again: the same
stubborn pulse against the throat,
the same
listening for a human voice–
your name, my name

–
This poem originally appeared in Jean Valentine’s 1979 volume called The Messenger.

POETRY: Late May Weather – Philip Rafferty

Late May Weather
For Drew

The May day sky

thick as
opium smoke
makes the school children
sleepy and
the day quiet.

Much of the job
is done in the halls
with the few wide awake.
What passes between us
is small and fleeting
like midday meteorological systems.

The four walls
of brick dry history
are not ours
so we conference outside.
I reassure a tall kid with sad eyes
as the rumble of water calls in the distance.

FICTION: The Tiger Girl Blues – Gary Every

The Tiger Girl Blues

She moves like a tiger, all hips and tail, beautiful elusive eyes and hair that alternates between bright colors and stripes of shadow. I believe that in the years I have known her I have seen her hair all the colors of the rainbow. She is often excited, sometimes irritated but always quick to laugh. She has a loud and lusty laugh and the lust is contagious. The tiger girl has flesh that rolls sensuously across her bones and the most amazing breasts for a middle aged woman. These breasts are so round, full and firm that if you sprayed them with sperm it would ricochet back.

She claims she is the daughter of Marie Laveau, the original voodoo queen of New Orleans, a direct descendant. Or at least she lived in the voodoo queen’s apartment once. That is what she told me while she was reading my Tarot cards. Then she told me of this one wonderful, magical Big Easy evening when she had been driving a minivan all around the countryside, stocked up with thousands of hits of LSD, wailing that “She was on a mission from God.” On a full moon midnight, when everything was exactly right, street lights flickering, magic lingering, music spilling up and down the sidewalk she rode a throne of hands atop the cobblestone, passed from hand to hand, till at last, eyes full of liquid ecstasy, she was crowned queen of New Orleans. It was a perfect moment with no forward or past, a moment so perfect it could never last.

She used to fish the docks at all hours of the night or day, throwing line, bait and hooks into the Gulf of Mexico. She loved to fish. It was a way of connecting to her lost father, a career navy man – standing by the sea and talking to her father when no one was looking. When someone was looking she would sing to the pelicans. If that someone lingered very long, she would sing loudly to the pelicans. Usually people leave pretty quickly when you sing loudly to the pelicans. When she was alone on the dock of the bay, tide rolling away, she would think to herself. Between the blue of the ocean and the blue of the sky there was a lot of space to think about a lot of things. She had a lot of time while she waited for a fish to arrive. Sometimes she would think about forgiveness she had never received and other times she thought about forgiveness she had never offered. Mostly, she stood there on the edge of the water, talking to her long lost father and asked him for advice. The Tiger Girl needed lots of advice, widowed early and trying to raise two young daughters as a single mother. Sometimes the fish she caught was all they had for dinner that night and other times the bounty of the sea god’s harvest was so plentiful that she would give her catch away – often feeding the local police officers.

Perhaps it was the sea god Poseidon who decided to reward this daughter of a seafaring man or perhaps it was the voodoo queen who decided to bless this New Orleans native with what looked like a curse but was really a blessing. Whatever the reason, one day Hurricane Katrina arrived.

The fishing docks are no longer there, ripped asunder by the obliterating powers of ocean, wind, and the fearsome wrath of God. Marie Laveau’s apartment was flooded and ruined, torn down in what was optimistically called a reconstruction. The cemetery had been ravaged with wave after wave until all the crypts were flooded and her sweet dead husband’s coffin floated away to sea.

The tiger girl held her ATM card out before her as if it was a sacred magic talisman that would somehow protect her from this natural disaster. Eventually she realized how useless a bank card was without electricity. What good was money without a store to sell anything? She loaded both her daughters into the car and drove as far as one tank of gas would take her. Tiger girl camped beside a river and dropped a hook and line. Sometimes they would get a nibble here or a bite there but at least they had dinner. They were surviving, just barely, but getting a little thinner.

One night she climbed a tree, as high as she could be. The tiger girl decided that it was Katrina which had freed her and so she spread her wings and let the winds of the earth take her wherever they wanted her to be.

She toured the beaches of the world and lost one daughter who dropped off to attend college. When Tiger Girl got bored of the most beautiful beaches in the world she ended up in India. Most people come to India in a quest for spirituality but she had arrived seeking frivolity. She remembered the time she met the holy man, head guru of a large and beautiful holy temple, filled with faithful followers, and army of priests. With a long flowing white beard and a booming voice he looked just like an Old Testament god. He was revered as a living saint. Wherever he walked, devoted pilgrims followed, in the way that only India can be crowded. When he approached the tiger girl they locked eyes for just a moment and she worked up the nerve to blurt out a question.

“What does it feel like to be divine?”

The Old Testament God stopped suddenly, all the people behind him forced to halt for just a moment, the entire herd stuck on pause, and he sighed.

“I am a collared dog,” he replied.

She left the ashram that very moment and chose to wander the countryside. She walked past waterfalls and boulders, strolling through forests and more forests. At every junction she followed the Robert Frost rule and turned upon the road less traveled. She entered deeper and deeper into the forest, where the shadows grew darker and darker. She walked and walked, gradually becoming aware she was being stalked.

There were eyes which followed her. There were stripes and shadows which lingered, just off the edge of the trail, never anything she could be certain about but something which seemed to move only when she moved. Something that stopped when she stopped. It was something, big, graceful and silent that could melt into the shadows of the forest whenever she tried to turn her head to look at it. She was certain that it was a tiger following her. She walked steadily, without pausing for fear the tiger would pounce. She walked for miles. The tiger followed her the whole time but never let her get a glimpse. She could hear it breathe and sometimes the tiger would grumble under his breath with a sort of coughing rumble that felt like it could turn into a roar at any moment. Every time she came to another fork in the road, this time she took the path more traveled until the forest lessened and eventually she returned to the ashram. The pilgrims who welcomed her return could see the tiger and were amazed as it followed her closely. They were afraid for her life. The tiger stopped sniffed the air and returned into the wilderness.

Eventually the wind blew her all the way to the red rock desert where I reside. One daughter followed the tiger girl, trailing every footstep like a shadow, a succession of small animals following the daughter, creating a small line of vagabond souls echoing the tiger girl’s path. The tiger girl joined a community of post-apocalyptic hippies. Except they were all making plans and anticipating the apocalypse but for tiger girl the apocalypse had already come and gone. It was hurricane Katrina which had set her free.

Sometimes I invite her hiking so we might enjoy the beautiful scenery together. Sometimes she invites me to step outside during the night so she can map stars. When we hike together, I find I must take her farther and farther from the beaten path to keep her content. She is only happy when we wander lost in the wilderness. She walks off to the side, strolling through the tall grasses. Her hair blows in the breeze disappearing in tides of stripe and shadow. We are engaged in an ancient courtship ritual of predator and prey, lover and warrior, swirling together in a circle, alternating roles. I make a lame joke and she sneers, muscles tensing almost as if she is preparing to leap, unleashing a feline missile. I open my arms wide and close my eyes, anticipating the embrace of fur and fang. The wind blows through my hair while I stand in the wilderness and wait with my eyes closed, wondering if the tiger girl is fleeing or pouncing.

POETRY: ANTON ROSE – CITY OF GODS

City of Gods

This city is a peak, a trough,
a mountain, a valley,
a lifeline of light and shadow raised up
by plate tectonics. Lights spread below,
the buzzing circuit of a colossal
computer, a motherboard,
a filthy birthing pool.

Commercial, residential, industrial;
bound together by ties of desire,
rarely sated but never forgotten.
Roads and highways pulsate
with specks of light like lifeblood;
thrums of energy throb back and forth,
fuelling the pulse of the night.

In the storm there is silence, in fragments.
Up above, angels pass by, watching ominous
clouds form together and disperse.

–

Find Anton Rose at antonrose.com or on Twitter @antonjrose

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