shy — a poem by linda m. crate

I fold myself into silence,

I wax and wane in desire —

that never comes to

fruition; mother taught

me never to make waves.

I watch all the lovers as

they frolic upon the

beaches and in the woods —

taking my dreams with

them, leaving me stripped

bare of my leaves like an

autumn tree, and I let them —

I wish I were braver, that

I’d steal my moments back;

but I’m too shy to be an

ocean, so I sit back and 

drink in champagne clouds;

lilt my loneliness to trees —

my heart burns with passion

my lips will never express.

___
Linda M. Crate is a Pennsylvanian native born in Pittsburgh, but she was raised in the rural town of Conneautville. She attended and graduated from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English-Literature in 2009. Her poetry, articles, reviews, and short stories have appeared in several journals online and in print.

The Last Fear Frontier — an essay by Melissa Davis

As a teacher, I have been taught that we should accept all disabilities – that all students have something to offer and can be taught. I have always agreed with this assumption as have the vast majority of my colleagues. We accept, and teach, students with intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and autism, just to name a few. But, there is that one area that many teachers still fear – the last frontier of teaching – working with students with mental illness. Teachers will refer them for special services after only a week in school, suspend them for any infraction, and send them to a multitude of counselors and school psychiatrists. Any decent teacher would never dream of calling a student with Down’s syndrome the “r” word, but a student with mental illness – call them crazy – the teacher’s lounge will agree.

I do not agree. I have a mental illness. I am not crazy, insane, or teetering on the edge of sanity. I have a severe anxiety disorder and have suffered from depression. I can become paralyzed by fear and have panic attacks. I develop hypochondria and rack up thousands in doctors’ bills. I cry uncontrollably at times and cannot get off the floor. I have sought treatment. I take three medications and am not some drugged out zombie. I have spoken to a therapist and am not some risk to myself or others. I can be helped- but only if someone is willing to help me. For me, it was a rough road to self-diagnosis and the referrals of a few good doctors. My parents both called me the “c” word of mental illness – crazy. My father even suggested that horror of horrors of mental illness – an institution. I didn’t need this, I was helped.

I am not a psychiatrist and do not claim that there are not some people who are a threat to themselves and others. We have all read about them. However, this is not the majority of people with mental illness. Mental illness should not be a stigma. It should not be a source of ridicule.

Those of us with mental illness should not be made to feel weak-minded and unstable. We should be accepted and helped – not avoid our symptoms for fear of scorn. This begins with education. We should not be pushed aside by teachers, but embraced by them. We have come a long way in accepting people with disabilities, although there is still a way to go. This is especially true where mental illness is concerned. 

___
Melissa Davis is a doctoral student and has research published in the American Reading Forum Yearbook. She has had poetry and fiction published in journals such as The Circle Review and Leaves of Ink. She has also been a teacher of primary students for several years.

Finishing — a poem by Marc Carver

We finished

and laid on the bed

we did no speak a word

complete silence

but our betrayals hung in the air

and they said so much more

than words

could ever say.

___

Marc Carver has published six books of poetry and works as an editor for a site in New York. He has had about three hundred poems published around the world but most of all he hopes people enjoy his work and it inspires them to pick up the pen and turn the tv off.

The Quiet Ones Next Door— a poem by Holly Day

Mother and Child

near a narrow strip known as the Isle of Boch

they still whisper of a witch that once stalked infants

a pale-skinned woman with long pale hair

waiting in dark corners, dark cloak covering her face.

in the dark growing deep beneath the baby’s crib

something wizened with small, sharp teeth and sharp nails

lets itself into houses where newborn infants lie

bare-headed, blue-eyed, trapped in deep sleep.

___

The Poet: Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft  Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in Borderlands, Slant, and The Mom Egg, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are "Walking Twin Cities" and "Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch," and her novel, “The Trouble With Clare,” is due out from Hydra Publications late 2013.

The Artist: Mark Zlomislic's art resides in the tension between the eternal and the temporal. It explores the human need for security and the inevitability of an impermanence he has difficulty accepting. He paints to capture moments of time that reveal frailty and vitality, joy and sorrow, decline and glory. Born in Rakitno, Hercegovina, he has lived and studied in Vienna, Paris, Munich and Zagreb. His influences include Bacon, Balthus and Tom Thompson. His work is included in numerous private collections throughout North America and Europe. His gallery and studio are located in Cambridge, Canada.

Chapter Eight — an essay by Maurizio Turco

You walk to class and feel your head already spinning, as well as stomach beginning to turn. You know you have no control over this, but you have to try and shake it off; you have to think of something else to divert your mind from these annoying, constant thoughts. 

Things aren’t so bad.
It’s just class. Another, ordinary class.
Everything’s going to be fine. 
Fuck! This isn’t working.

You enter the room and sit near the back, hoping to God that you'll not be called on today. You take out some paper and a pen and jot down: Chapter 8 Anxiety Disorders; You realize it’s the day you learn about yourself. The turning in your stomach grows tighter, but you remain seated because you worry that you will miss something important.

Your professor begins to teach, while you begin to take notes. He says that the information presented is important when studying Abnormal Psychology; he then adds many college students are diagnosed with this treatable illness. He delves into Generalized Anxiety Disorder and lays out facts of which he pulls from the DSM-IV:   

“Now class, persons who suffer from G.A.D. struggle from excessive episodes of worry and anxiety. For instance, they have difficulty coping with their worry, and worrying about their worries causes them great amounts of stress,” he says as your palms become drenched with sweat and you find it hard to breathe.   

He continues,  “For people to be officially diagnosed with G.A.D., these episodes must last on and off for at least six months. It’s more common in young adults, since they are constantly faced with stressful situation in the workplace, as well as in their education.” 

You look down at what you've written so far and feel uneasy. You only wish that the first six months would have been the end. 

Is there something wrong with me?
Am I abnormal?

Your hand rises without intention and when called upon, you ask what happens if these episodes last years. Your professor says that most people in those cases seek out treatment and are put on anti-anxiety medication. After he asks if anyone has any more questions he continues on with the lecture:   “People are diagnosed with having G.A.D if their worry and anxiety includes at least three of the following symptoms:   

- easily fatigued                   

 - irritability                 

 - feeling on edge       

 - difficulty concentrating

 - muscle tension                   

 - sleep disturbance.”

Jax

  You haven't slept well for two weeks, and you're currently going on thirty hours without sleep. You can't sit any longer as your stomach has turned its final time. You walk out in the middle of class and head back to your dorm. 

Why Now?!
This happens in the worst times.
Almost there…
…Fuck

Fighting the urge not to, you vomit anyway. You crawl into bed and helplessly shake. These compulsions continue for over an hour and you want to disappear. You ask yourself why this happens and why it has to be you.    You recall what your professor said in class:

“The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms can cause extreme distress especially in work, social situations and other important areas of daily functioning.”

After these thoughts race through your head you remember what was said when class began. You recall that this is treatable and "many college students" have this illness. You begin to realize you're not alone and you can beat this. For the first time in years you have hope. For the first time in months, you feel determined. For the first time in weeks, you feel stronger. For the first time in days, you fall asleep.


___
The Essayist: Maurizio Turco is a senior at Emmanuel College in Boston, MA. He is an English Writing and Literature major. He is anxiety ridden and has been for a few years now. He writes mostly pieces about relationships, his father, and more recently: anxiety. He is a runner who competes in road and track races. He is also a musician and frequently incorporates music into his writing.

The Photographer:  Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16 year old internationally award winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic, The World Photography Organisation, Nature's Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in the Telegraph , The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited

Worry Play— a poem by Joseph Robert

A pocket watch, found in ditch, on constitutional stroll,

T’was old-fashioned, tacky, electro-plated(?) gold,

Sterling silver or high-carat d’or, would have kept it sound,

No inscription, nothing, it was done-busted junk, a toy,

Always down on myself for never having taken apart and played,

With mechanisms, like I’d heard gifted boys did,

Never too late, I pried it apart with a kitchen knife,

Slicing open a chronometer-pinching digit, spilling blood,

On lockjaw little gears, shocked still, in total annoyance,

Visions of juggling shiny bits back together, making them tic,

Rudely usurped by trying to remember, were there any plasters,

And where,

And I yelled, “Fuck”, set knife in sink, dropped watch in bin,

My butchered hand twisting, in the loose waist of my T-shirt,

I kicked the bin over,

Spilling coffee grounds over rented, carpeted floor,

“Fuck!” I yelled again, louder this time,

And maybe this wasn’t about the watch anymore.

Punishment

___

The Poet: Joseph Robert was born and raised in the Midwest. However, he has always been partial to Hawaiian beaches. Nevertheless: Go Badgers! After living and working for several years in rural Japan, he now resides in London with his wife, writer and poet Leilanie Stewart. In his spare time, you can find him at the British Museum trying to teach himself how to read Sumerian cuneiform. Don't worry, yes, he has seen Evil Dead, so doesn't read any of it out loud.

The Artist:  Eleanor Leonne Bennett is an internationally award winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic, The World Photography Organisation, Nature's Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in the Telegraph , The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited.

WINDOW— a poem by Brenton Booth

I am the wind

          a caramel sunset over

          peppermint trees

          the glowing blue ocean

          seen from space

          the last perfectly green

          leaf before autumn

I am the wave crashing on

          the ivory sand

          the glowing leaves of

          summer

          the morning song from

          the sparrow

          the warmth of the moon

I am also the old car yelling

          pollution

          the rat crossing the

          kitchen floor

          the slaughterer of cows

          the maker of bombs

I am the one who often

          doesn’t know

          the one who regrets

          a lot

          the one who seeks

          love

          the one who is not

          satisfied yet

I am the hurricane

          the tidal wave

          the gunshot

          the silent explosion

I am as you are

          and we all are

looking at the window

and trying to get the

courage

to go out the door

and be part of what

I can see.

____

Brenton Booth resides in Sydney, Australia. Other work of his has recently appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Thunder Sandwich, Dead Snakes, Yellow Mama, The Mindless Muse, Underground Voices, Storm Cycle, and Dogzplot. 

Pre-rain. — a poem by Umm-e-Aiman Vejlani

The sky, clear but hasty, made a sound today,
Rumbling and grumbling,

I thought, mistaken, it had laughed too hard,
Chortling and throttling,

But the wind, crisp, on boughs teetered clumsy,
Swooning and crooning,

And the grass, limp, swayed brisk off its roots,
Rustling and bustling,

Flowers, arrayed, wrestled with the stems in cling,
Huffing and puffing,

The clouds, soon bulging, began to pour impatiently,
Ripping and tripping,

From its unclosed eyes, a storm burrowed loose,
Blundering and thundering,

Like nestled were confessions many, soaked salty,
Sobbing and bobbing,

The purring water sloshed off memories damp,
Borrowing and sorrowing,

The ground soggy, trembling, as I walked hurried steps,
Heeling and reeling,

Leaving the hosts, alone, to jazz in each other’s music,
Browning and drowning.

___
Umm-e-Aiman has been published in a few online and print magazines. Most of her poetry is simple, in directness and fluidity, hoping to communicate, through her writing, a feeling that can be related to by people from all wakes. She wishes to continue locating broader portals that will showcase her writing to give her the credibility of being an ocean swimmer. She also writes under the pseudonym Sheikha A.

The Non Herein- by Michael Mc Aloran — reviewed by Christopher Barnes

This is an ambitious group of poems of considerable formal dexterity.  An avant-garde tract of angst, night terrors, the quest for renewal and ultimate loss.  The poems churn upon themselves in echoes.  Half and distorted repetitions create unity across all of the poems which keeps the rhythm moving.

          “Tracing the night’s

          Parchment”.

And “Of the traces of –“are good examples.  The language and grammatical units disconnect and are often left uncompleted which de-familiarises our expectations of what words normally do.

          “Absent…we’ll

          …laughter till the lungs bleed dry of corrugated flowerings”. 

This enacts these poem’s themes concretely.  Crafted into the dissonance of the physical language, is a sense of breathlessness and even fear.   This is a series of poems of torture, mayhem, death and the realities of the body.  The careful honing of lines and verses and the tense economy used create a shape that brings to my mind the genre New Music.  Line endings and rhythms also create a sense of controlled and well-tested soundscapes.

          “Choke

         Of dust and of the

         Parched sun

         Of bled”.

These are difficult poems, ordinary perceptions are de-habituated.  We are in a place broken which is a frightening at-the-edge experience.  Though the end is a passing out, “Fading wishful fading ever knowing none of it”.

It does not feel like the end because of the circularity of these poem’s psychological and visual cat’s cradles.  The conscious voice in the set of poems could wake up at the beginning and start over.

The collection’s title holds within it its opposite ‘the herein’.  The dichotomy between the internal/external seems to suggest a constant search to find meaning, connecting the persona’s internal life to the world in an Existential vacuum, a voice in the wilderness,            

         “And the brutal fist

          Of the herein”, the poet adds, as well as the tension and confusion of verses such as,

          “Head non vast

          Non herein

          Scattered speeches of”, the central failed quest being to unite the two.

The first line “Into Echoing –“springs into action as ‘a shall we begin’, with the promise of the half-repetitions and turnings back that sustain these poem’s themes and obsessions.  The line endings are quite brilliant.  Look at the way

          “Till severed

          Knocking upon the

          Bone chimes

          Hollow” creates a psychological gap or gasp, a vertigo hangs on the use of the world “the”.  There are instances of synaesthesia which show that we can’t trust the subject matter to stay stable, nor the senses,

          “Breathless the eye”.

There is a mention of opiates and the experience is like a bad trip of the soul which can be used as a device to explain the unfamiliar.  There is also the occasional suggestion of a struggle for faith.

          “(Bring out your dead)” seems apocalyptic, an

          “The lightning

         Of the upturned

          Eyes”, could subtly reference religion, though the poems seem Nietzschen.   There isn’t an ‘I’ in these poems, the closest we get to an identifiable persona is that some things are

          “(Asked of)”.  That in itself is a very radical challenge, there is only witnessing.  The hinted at persona is

          “Next to none

          And nothing next”.

The poems haunt with lines such as,

          “Or a locket of

          Shadow”, not quite sentimental, or entirely romantic in these contexts of visceral imagery and the poetry of the bodily real,

          “Doused by final piss”.

There is great skill in the lines,

          “Split skyline of

          Heaving silences”, suggesting chasms that want to be alive and personified but lack the ability to connect their herein with their non herein.  And the weight of the word “black” in,

          “Breathing of the black pulse” is tonally (musically) disturbing as it fights with the “ck” “lse” glooping sounds.

    

The poem’s imagery is bleak, fragmentary and sometimes deadly,

          “Ah bone wither”, but notice how carefully, how artfully the poet controls the havoc by means of fine articulation,

          “Skull

          Droplets of rampage

         The dead eyes wastage of it”, even the chaos has style.

   

Meanings jump to their opposites,

          “Ballast heart” implies the hope of safety, the heart as stable but later…

          “Spew of the heart’s cancer”.  There is a line where the gaps between words stretch into two spaces, a void for something to slip into that never comes, a visual representation of it.  We are “Lingering on the dice of loss”, chance has brought us here not self-making, which must therefore hold an absence of guilt.

          “Echo

          (None)

          Echo

          (None)” is a ghostly chorus of lack, deceptively simple but profound.

         “Breath (Till Knock) -

          Breath

         The knock of absence” has dramatic urgency; with terror embedded but the knock is also a chasm, a vertigo.   And like many quests, in the end there is nothing to find, nothing to know, “Knowing of the which or when of naught” leaves mere disappointment.

    

The line “Head of sand” is brilliantly Surrealist but as important as it is as an image, just as striking is its economy.  But all things fall into each other,

          “Smear of night

          Till flesh smeared” is closer to Impressionism in its blurriness.

And the norms of narrative are skewed to be only potential narratives,

          “Further back in till forage laughter” is merely a hint.

Some echoes are very subtle,

          “Bone orchid” becomes

          “Orchid

           (Orchid)” so we can’t read the “Orchid” without thinking of bones.  And the line

          “All along the walls the fathom refusing to scream of it” shouldn’t work.  There is no natural caesura; the line has a magnet in it pulling us past the scream.  Throughout these poems there is a need to grasp language in its meanings which forever change and are elusive.  And whether language is decorative or destitute, making language unexpected is at the core of Michael Mc Aloran’s talent.

__

'The Non Herein-' by Michael Mc Aloran (Belfast Lapwing Press £10)___
In 1998 Christopher Barnes won a Northern Arts writers award.  In July 200 he read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology 'Titles Are Bitches'.  Christmas 2001 he debuted at Newcastle's famous Morden Tower doing a reading of his poems.  Each year he read for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and he partakes in workshops.  2005 saw the publication of his collection LOVEBITES published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh. The South Bank Centre in London recorded Christopher's poem "The Holiday I Never Had", he can be heard reading it on www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=18456

The Barber... The Lover... — a poem by Greg Moglia

My barber Dominick Hello Professor, how are you?, then quick to the cut

All the years mostly in silence - the task completed with a quiet warmth 

But today as he masters my thinned tresses he works with deep labored breaths

When he finishes with the old single-edged razor he adds

After you, I go home, have a bowl of pasta, glass of wine

My birthday next week…Ninety-one

I smile Terrific and still going on

Shakes his head Yes…a weary yes

I decide right then to stop at the liquor store next door

Come back to the shop with a bottle of chianti and Happy Birthday

Me, a man who loves to be loved and that's what I get

In a glow Dominick clasps my hand says When I have a glass I will toast to you

Later, I think of Sue and her struggle with cancer

And that some words have been kept away

How our love instead has filled the air around us

With a silence that says so much

Until on the restaurant bar stools her one quick Love you

And this man who loves to be loved slips into knowing

 There…right there… Dominick…Sue…and me

A touch from a share of uncertain times

___

Greg Moglia's work has appeared in over 100 journals in the U.S., Canada and England as well as five poetry anthologies.

A two-way mirror — a poem by Marc Carver

The curtain is shut

the world can't see in

can't look at me

but i can't see it either.

It may be time

to open up that curtain

and let the sun in.

___

Marc Carver has published six books of poetry and works as an editor for a site in New York. He has had about three hundred poems published around the world but most of all he hopes people enjoy his work and it inspires them to pick up the pen and turn the tv off.

Homo Homini Khomeini — Fiction by George Djuric

                                  

Ich werde euch die Richtung zeigen
Nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus
und vor Paris steht Micky Maus

Rammstein - Amerika

Thomas Hobbes in the dedication of his work De Cive (1651): 'To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe. The first is true, if we compare Citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare Cities.' Hobbes's observation in turn echoes a line from Plautus claiming that man is inherently selfish.

Sometime in late 70s I spent a month or so in Paris. Ich stayed with my buddy Ivo Lakov, his father being a Bulgarian attaché there, presumably cultural, who managed the Paris transfer from Belgrade to arrange a kidney transplant for his son. If I'm not mistaken, which I probably am, the apartment was located in the 14ème arrondissement. On a few occasions younger guys from the embassy would stop by, get hammered, and share their spy stories. Since I was a member of the original Slavic tribe, my presence didn't bother them. 

Smoking Gitanes sans filtre all day long placed me from the get-go in the comfortable company of one Django Reinhardt, Albert Camus, or Luis Buñuel, as well as Jim Morrison, and Alain Delon; having for once something in common with the luminaries of this caliber. Talking about Delon, I'm glad it stops there, since each and every one of his four Serb buddies and 'bodyguards' ended up tortured and murdered. All they achieved was to prove Delon, Mickey Rooney, even one Georges Pompidou cuckolds, and have fun in the process. Marković scandal shook French affairs for a decade, until the false testimony of the fifth Serb, Borivoje Ackov, cleared Delon and his 'godfather' François Marcantoni of any wrongdoing. Interestingly enough, the crown witness Ackov committed suicide before finishing his memoirs in 1992.


On the brighter note, Bruno Šulak, nicknamed Légionnaire, and Steve Jovanović casually walked into the Cartier store on La Croisette in Cannes, dressed like pastime tennis players and with rackets under their arms, only to walk out few minutes later with stones worth seven million dollars; leisurely taking one of the side streets toward Rue d'Antibes. They were never caught for this, yet Sulak became 'the French enemy number one'. The last time he was jailed, in 1984, Steve rented a chopper at Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport in a desperate attempt to pull his buddy out of the prison yard, but gendarmes weren't blind, and shot him dead. Sulak died a year later, under the questionable circumstances.


Far from this madding crowd, my favorite hangout in Paris is Notre Dame Cathedral, where the bells tolled in June of 1389 when Serbs were believed to had won the Battle of Kosovo (being outnumbered by Turks ten to one, to say the least). As Jean de Jandun wrote in 1323, 'In fact I believe that this church offers the carefully discerning such cause for admiration that its inspection can scarcely sate the soul'. And if I might add, it was the most powerful lesson in humility I've experienced to date, after inhaling those nine centuries condensed in a nutshell. What a secular time machine within the walls of this Gothic pride!

Ivo was a good friend of mine. We were at the identical 'wave length', shared the same tools for researching human enigma. Had a soft sense of humor, mellow appearance, with quite a firm intellectual integrity underneath. Twice a week he'd go for a kidney dialysis, allowing me reflective time in the City of Light. Still in my teens, all I could achieve was to track down the spirit of Lucien de Rubemprés in the facades of Monmartre, or picture Balzac bargain hunting all over town. Walking in the vicinity of Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, I had better luck with Remarque, since we shared passion for race cars, chess, and camaraderie in first place, featuring quasi philosophy mixed with wistful emotions. What a quintessential delight to watch Ravic and Boris Morosov sipping calvados in front of Fouquet's, observing time crawling into distance of Bois de Boulogne.

Sure, Paris was a esthetically cleaner space back then. No Pyramide du Louvre flipping its 70 foot all glass finger in the face of Hugo's Paris, 'climb this, hunchback!' No McDonald's in sight, so we could enjoy our inexpensive bistro lunch with a glass of wine. No Mickey Mouse fun, only Moulin Rouge and its can-can dance. The damage inflicted in the meantime is the least about the looks of Paris, fascinating as ever. Label me old fashioned, who I am, but it is beyond my pitiful imagination to draw even a sketch of good ol' Proust jumping off the line like John Force heading to the free buffet, or Ravic and Joan Madou holding hands during the Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast.

Times do change, that much I understand, but the spirit of 'that' Paris requires deep mental changes in direction of turning free spirits into consuming amateurs, dressing up the potential artists to look exactly like your newly divorced uncle on his first date: sloppy, pitiful, and ridiculous. If you somehow disagree, you can definitely laser blast this.

According to The Who, the real artist ain't got no distractions, can't hear those buzzers and bells, don't see lights a flashin', plays by sense of smell. And that's the most accurate portrait of an artist as a young man I've ever encountered.

But I digress.
It took another band for me to revisit Paris (Ten Years After). Already married, two kids, driving a taxi cab all day long, my collar getting bluer and sweater. I traded my Fiat 128 with hundred thousand miles (my son's godfather Milan Radonić, the best Peugeot mechanic in Yugoslavia by any measure, and I turned the odometer back to about 25K - nice, low mileage car) for a Peugeot 505 with almost gone gas engine, planning to install a diesel one. According to my fellow cabbies, who knew it all, you just cross the border to Austria, and junk yards with used engines everywhere. Bob Milovanović, a good friend from my racing days, Yugoslav and Balkan rally champ, joined our adventure.


We crossed to Austria - nothing, a small country. Crossed to Germany, much larger country - nothing other than Mercedes engines. Oops! Paris here we come.

Ivo turned every paper upside down until he found a junk yard in the outskirts of Paris. It was July, and rain wouldn't stop. We undug the right merchandise, a gorgeous naturally aspirated 2300ccm diesel engine, and went on dismantling it in order to fit in the trunk. Soaked to the bones, tired, we presented one discomfortable scene. 'Anybody for a hot chicken soup?', Ivo offered. Poor guy, this was getting to him hard. 'Are you a chef, or something?', we started to make fun of him, 'with a portable kitchen'. Sure enough, he showed up two minutes later, chicken soup steaming from vending machine's paper cups.

That was the last time I saw my long time buddy Ivo Lakov. I lost his address, he never wrote, and I have no idea if he received that kidney transplant necessary for him to live much longer.

Which takes care of Plautus' claim up there.

___
George Djuric is a former rally racing champion, master chess player, taxi driver, street fighter, student of anti-psychiatry and philosophy, broker with Morgan Stanley… and a writer all the way. Published a critically acclaimed collection of short stories that altered Yugoslav literary scene - 'The Metaphysical Stories' - was dubbed Borges of the Balkans, as well as reborn Babel. Djuric infiltrates flashes from his vivid past into fictional alchemy for the salient taste of the 21^st century.  



　

　

TODAY — a poem by Braden Bell

 Artist: Daniel Ayles

I have had the thought before. 

It was about Einstein; how

Even Einstein died in a hospital

But he returns to me now

In this closet of a room

In this sad honest flank of America

A day or two before the New Year

(And how the digit graduates only one more

no matter all those numbers' flagrances:

375 dead - murdered - this year in this city, two

candidates and a billion citizens, however many 

carbohydrates compose this malt Colt 45 marked at 

$2.75 three quarters of a mile from my initial want 

for it.)

How densely '12 becomes '13.

How simply and in spite. 

I realize when my head hurts

Or when I am tired or bored

Or sick, dissatisfied, hungry

Or after I fuck my own hand

And lay my head on the pillow

That Einstein said one thing

Before he went into that hospital

And died

That comes to me now

Even me and even now:

That the definition of insanity 

Is doing the same thing 

Forever

And expecting a different outcome

Each time. 

Mutation Malfunction

This

Which is the preamble that cannot be helped

That happens before we wake

Is the thing that makes us all crazy as snowflakes

As snow falls to cover ground

And always is salted. 

___

The Poet: B. Bell has written from a sun room in midtown Detroit, a garage in the Hollywood Hills, a high-rise patio north of Trondheim, Norway, and, most recently, from a guesthouse south of Portland, OR. He types on a Brother Charger II and has had works published in The Portland Review, The Detroit MetroTimes and with various online venues.

The Artist: Daniel Ayles is a Portland, Oregon-based artist whose work bridges the gap between the genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. If you are interested in exploring his body of work further, you can see examples of his art in the 2012 August issue of The Horror Zine.  You may also view two collaborative pieces he did with Tiffany Luna in the 2012 November issue of The Horror Zine.

At Mr. Jeff's Music Academy — a poem by George Bishop

A little girl on guitar, piano boy, sounds

being urged into the air like dust scaling

some unknown attic draft. Mr. Jeff knows

someday they’ll say something, but for now

he leans back and looks through the ceiling,

listens to the children explore the darkness

coming off each lone note, a kind of night

beyond their bed lit up for the first time.

They try their best to move them closer,

sensing the lure of attachments in the air,

some ghostly shapes of tune. But it’s no use—

the sharp edges of Mr. Jeff’s ears peel away

the dead skin of each attempt. He knows

no matter how many songs they finally fit

on the tip of each finger, one day they’ll be

called back, like him, to some single sound,

they’ll be forced to lie down in its poor

perfection and die in the dust of a message

only ever sent to themselves. It’s something

he must keep from them now, a lesson

only the audience of their own reflection

can teach, and only as they gradually begin

falling into the silence of an empty chair.

___

George Bishop is the author of five chapbooks. His full length collection, “Expecting Delays”, was published by FutureCycle Press in January 2013. Recent work appears in New Plains Review, Naugatuck River Review and Sakura Review. Forthcoming work will be featured in Cold Mountain Review. Bishop attended Rutgers University and now lives and writes in Saint Cloud, Florida.