Author: Mariah Perkins

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Issue 5 Contributors

Issue 5 Contributors

Heather Bell’s work has been published in Rattle, Grasslimb, Barnwood, Poets/Artists, Third Wednesday and many others.  She was nominated for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 Pushcart Prize from Rattle and also won the New Letters 2009 Poetry Prize.  Heather has also published four books.  Any more details can be found here: http://hrbell.wordpress.com/

Wm. Samuel Bradford teaches high school in Atlanta. With his wife, he enjoys bird watching and dancing the tango (though he’s not very good at either). His libretto won the 2012 Atlanta Opera 24 Hours of Opera contest, and he has been working on a novel about opera and Christianity for a long time. He is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club. To read more of his stuff, please visit http://www.wmsamuelbradford.com/

Nuncio Casanova- One day I stole a ragged magazine. I walked away the reading room while whistling nervously. Later, alone, I took that old art feuilleton out of my sweated shirt and there I met missus Dada who taught me how to cut and paste old prints and photographs which show the way one must behave when at the table with an oiled wrestler queen. https://facebook.com/nunciatura   //  http://www.coroflot.com/nunciatura

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, among other things, and curates the Shelterbelt reading series. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of two poetry collections, One Last Cigarette and Mythology of Touch. Her chapbook, The Dopamine Letters, will be released in 2014 by Hyacinth Girl Press. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in St. Joseph, MO, where she also coordinates the First Thursdays Poetry Reading Series and co-edits Stone Highway Review.

Christine Hamm has a PhD in American Poetics, and is a former poetry editor for Ping*Pong. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript, Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Pebble Lake Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at CUNY. Echo Park, her third book of poems, came out from Blazevox in the fall of 2011. Christine was a runner-up to the Poet Laureate of Queens

Rae Hoffman received her BA from Warren Wilson College and her MFA from Wichita State University. Since then she has fallen into the 9-5 grind, started working on a science fiction novel, and tries– with all of her effort–to keep her pug from eating non-edibles.

Will Moore is Graduate Student at Miami University. He draws comics at http://www.uptomynipples.com and is working on a graphic novel that may or may not ever be finished.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey & currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of So You Know It’s Me, a series of Tuscaloosa Missed Connections, Level End, a collection of lyric essays about video game boss battles, & Leave Luck to Heaven, an ode to 8-bit Nintendo games. He is working on a group of lyric essays about professional wrestlers.

 

Masthead

Katelyn Delvaux- Poetry

Soon Wiley- Nonfiction

Garrett Quinn- Fiction

Kallie Falandays-  Managing Editor & Website Design

Matthew DeAngelis- Public Relations

Readers- Christopher Krueger, Matthew DeAngelis, Charlie Edwards, Trevor Fuller, Tiffany Lear, Jake Russell, Manda Roble, Olivia Lawrence, Taylor Gorman, Kallie Falandays

 

 

Categories
Poetry for Issue 5

Decoding the Poem – Heather Bell

Decoding the Poem

And the cardinal is December. And in December
there was blood and a wavering light. You describe
a flock of wild hair and it is that hair that makes me
keep still. I hold the phrase white tissue with my fingers
as if it is very small and broken. And there, I see
that you want me to touch a thing more dense
than air, but I know that you cry when you write
your letters and the lack of stars
does not mean you are lonely, but only
that you are very alone, in that moment.
And there you place moodiness and there
you set grief, just as we did,
at the kitchen table
after you lost the baby. And there it is again-
December. And as always, December
is put there sneakily to make me think
that a staircase is a door, but I know you
and this door is a hole
or wound that you walk through.

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Categories
Poetry for Issue 5

Galapagos in Spring – Christine Hamm

Galapagos in Spring

We sit on the beach in our underwear, trying to figure out which bit of
broken plate fits into which by looking at the china patterns. The sand is
warm, flesh-colored, the water like it’s from an uncle’s bathtub.

Bats hang in the trees, stretching their wings and yawning. One of them
complains, I feel broken in two.

I spell messages on your calves with my mother’s lipstick, emergency,
coconut-flavored, red-cross, but you’re on your phone, texting someone
else. I whisper, running like a coked up reindeer, I try to break my head
against a brick wall, and it hurts so much I have to do it the rest of my
life.

You put a hand on your paper hat and wave to the bats, calling, I know
what you mean. I shuffle to the rim of the waves, past two half-blown
shacks, an overturned VW bug, banana peels and fake nails.

I say, I feel broken into, and hope you can’t smell me. My toes are
bruised and swollen, I suppose you remember why.

 

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Categories
Poetry for Issue 5

Uptight Flamingos Will Only Have Sex to Marvin Gaye Slow Jams – Mary Stone Dockery

Uptight Flamingos Will Only Have Sex to Marvin Gaye Slow Jams

Later, in the bedroom, you’ll undress me
or I’ll undress in front of you, and we’ll
stop mid-way because something you mutter
makes me uncomfortable, like that time you
said Tell me you like it before I even let you
inside me, and the way my limbs
became empty corn stalks and I tugged
my underwear back on because I had to
start over, and you’ll always keep saying
how sorry you are, it’s about the moment,
you get so into it, you just want me so bad
and I’ll really know that if I don’t close
my own eyes, I’ll watch you too closely,
find a new gray hair in your mustache
or count ceiling fan blades or imagine
us in the same bed at sixty. We’ll always
have to start over, try a re-do,
make it work somehow, even on laundry day
or in your mother’s home or in the car
while I think of grain bins or medical bills
or your brother’s new job or what we’ll
have for dinner each night that coming week,
when we’ve promised to do it at least
twice a week because all the studies say
that couples who make love more
are truly happier. I’ll ask you to change
the music, and change it again, or turn
it down, and you won’t hear me
and my hands will move too quickly
to catch up to your hands, and I’ll apologize
for all your apologies, so much breath,
and when it finally happens, and we move
remember how to move or where to place
our hands, it won’t be that awful,
and we’ll forget how long it took to get there,
how tricky it is to allow the body to open,
to let all that sunlight in.

(*title taken from a Jezebel article)

 

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Categories
Nonfiction for Issue 5

Special Medical Adhesive – Will Moore

Dad and I have the same scars,

willmoore1

The Lincoln Monument is surrounded by smooth marble.  Dad and his college friends used it like a slip-and-slide.  Dad slid straight into Lincoln’s foot.

 

They built a new shed behind the preschool.  We decided it was chock-full of ghosts and ran circles around it.  We screamed gleefully until I collided with another boy named William.  His skull was thicker than mine.

 

 

will moore 2

 

 

 

Neither Dad nor Grandpa can remember what happened.  Maybe it was from the time Dad went for a breakaway layup.  Stacy tripped him and broke his front tooth.

I was playing croquet in the back yard with my neighbor.  He swung the club wildly and it slipped from his hands.  I was standing twenty yards away, but the club cart-wheeled across the lawn, turning end over end.

 

 

 

 

willmoore3

Some bully threw Dad’s slingshot over a fence.  Dad tried to get it back but the fence was sharp at the top.

 

Dad was playing with an old diving mask at Turtle Point.  The tightening mechanism was an old metal screw.

I had a glass mug in my mouth.  I was pretending to be a dog.  I couldn’t help but laugh and the mug fell from my mouth and shattered on the floor.  Dad told me that he had scars above his eye, on his chin, and in the palm of his hand.  In the emergency room I hoped for stitches.  They used a special medical adhesive that meant there wouldn’t be scarring.  I was really disappointed.

 

if it weren’t for the special medical adhesive.

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