Borderline | by Chelsi Robichaud

Stitching holds my skin together;
A hysterical laugh threatens to burst
Through the seams, revealing the glowing,
Undulating light
That burns my blood.



The blaze threatens to explode,
Rending me.
How came it to be there?
It shakes me, twists me,
Vomits every syllable.
It erupts everything into
A blinding white vision.



Debris fills my lungs, my bowels, and my throat.
My body is overflowing with pollution.
How do I rid myself of this?
Am I doomed to fluctuate
Between bursting light, lucidity, and guilt?



Permit the blaze to bleed out;
Give it sanction as it drips
From your fingertips.
Turn your gaze inwards
To the sinew and scars
Carved onto your bones.



Let it be known
That you are a cenotaph
In need of filling. 



___

The Poet: Chelsi Robichaud's work has appeared in The Perch magazine and is forthcoming in Mock Orange magazine, The Voices Project and Mythic Circle magazine.

The Artist: Chrystal writes. Hard times, troubled times, the lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is? The story is in the struggled, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters and all the other things she knows and loves. Sometimes she writes urban romance and sometimes its aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing she’s taking pictures, or curled up with a good book and a kitty on her lap.

Concrete Gardens | by Chrystal Berche

Tonight, the sky is an electric highway of war gods

Quaking in a jagged loop of endless dreams

The reaper spins its heels at an all night dinner

Sipping coffee and 151 from chipped porcelain mugs

The essence of watered down memories

There’s no one left here to mourn the sun

The gypsies all dance in concrete gardens

Celebrating the fall of Eden and the death of spring

Wild roses burned in neon righteousness

Jabbing their thorns into frozen flames

All flickers of warmth stolen by the dying sun

Red is the color of brake fluid in snow

The long shadows creeping through broken windows

Devour what the kudzu failed to claim

Wood creeks, the echo of rockers in an empty room

A stark reminder of a massacred past

A kaleidoscope of disconnected edges

This ever changing nightmare of platitudes and regrets

The sky cries icy tears across the faces of rainbows

Their technicolor frowns inspire Midas dreams

Ocean and heavens meld into disharmonious blue

Bear witness to tumultuous sunsets

Only immortals are blessed with eternity

Endless opportunities to erase their sins

___

Chrystal writes. Hard times, troubled times, the lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is? The story is in the struggled, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters and all the other things she knows and loves. Sometimes she writes urban romance and sometimes its aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing she’s taking pictures, or curled up with a good book and a kitty on her lap.

The Jaw | by JD Dehart

Speaking to some people

is like nesting beside a microphone,

every sound and mistake broadcast

across grandest expanse.

Samson slew an army with the jawbone

of an ass, and it is easy to see why.

How I used to believe in perfection,

graceful human kindness, but have too

often tasted the singe of others’ tongues,

not cast in altruism, but wearing the azure

shade of the serpent’s underbelly,

calmly slithering through the garden,

searching for innocence to lose, sniffing

to see if the fruit has yet to be tasted,

reporting the latest bit of juicy gossip

among the blue hairs and bonnets.

___

The Poet: JD DeHart is a writer and teacher.  His work has appeared in Eunoia Review, Eye On Life Magazine, and Ancient Heart Magazine, among others.  His first chapbook is set to be released this fall. His blog is jddehart.blogspot.com.

The Artist: Chrystal Berche is a photographer, artist and Writer living in North Central Iowa.

This Place and its Internal Song— a poem by Jeremy Voigt

This place hypnotizes itself each evening
with the making of color—the pink beginning

to grey seems to cup behind all we can see
as a huge hand around a cooling mug of tea. 

Here is something to huddle against.
This must be similar to Keats’ angst,

bedridden and dying in Italy, shaking
bitter lips in those last letters. I love reading

the poems, but the angry, dying voice brotherly
and haunts me. I want to make a grand display,

an “awkward bow,” but feel foolish on my porch. 
It is October, and I’ve turned thirty. Do I adore

Keats’ death-rattle because I’ve lived longer
than he lived, lost in his chambers. My mother

is still drinking even though I’ve sent my letter
with no poem or philosophy, just asking stop. Let her

heed: “we are limited only by our vocabulary;
this gives us universes.” My newest strategy:

attempt such optimism. But the universe is sad,
Stevens wrong, the people are ugly and the world sad.

For Keats, in lines these clouds must be the soul,
and in epistle just light at evening after another stroll. 

Everything does not conspire, but is mostly uniform
in the sacred order of sadness. I’ve seen that pine conform

and fill with light as the teenage boy below pitches
a rock at the squirrel on the trunk. My fingers stitch

a failing screen for my son to hide from deliberate meanness.
No lie comforts, and I can’t make all unfelt, unheard, unseen.

Mother called me ungrateful and liar and cruel.
I’m shucking off the manipulated letter. The artful

crafting, the mother writing my grandfather is dying,
my father wants to meet, everything will be ok, sighing,

even the sky knows your name. My sweet creature,
I’ll call the unit in California where you went to recover

and instead slept in a hotel. The necessary world of pains
and troubles in deadly sweat, murmurs its complaints.

May you also be attended to by a devoted bedside friend,
(those clouds look like rain) sketching your reclined head.

Were we born for this end? The awkward evening sky gives
itself color bowing into a drink of grey where everything lives.


___
The Poet: Jeremy Voigt has a MFA from Bennington College. His work has appeared in PostRoad, Beloit Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, Washington Square, REED Magazine,Talking River Review, Pontoon 10, Poet Lore, and RHINO. His chapbook Neither Rising nor Falling was published by Finishing Line Press fall 2009. He has been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.

The Artist: Chrystal Berche is a photographer, artist and Writer living in North Central Iowa.

The Shadow— fiction by Michelle D'Costa

Karen enjoyed sitting in the dark because she was afraid of her own shadow.

It all began when she was falsely accused of cheating in her 7^th grade final exam.

She was simple and straightforward. She never entertained the thought of cheating.

On the night before the commencement of her 7^th grade final exam…

She had finished studying for her Biology Exam and allowed herself the luxury of a song she loved the most before she slept for the night.

Knowing that though the tune would play in her head when she awoke early the next day, she was confident that she would definitely not forget what she had studied.

Next Morning..

Just before the exam she sat upright, the way only confident nerds sat with that no-nonsense look.

Giving others the impression that no matter what the questions were they were ready for them since birth or maybe even before that.

When the teacher lowered the question paper on Karen's table, its edge slightly grazed her arm and she opened her eyes from her prayer.

She stared at the paper for a while and then she risked looking to her left.

The exam was of Chemistry. But how was it possible?

She then looked up at the black board, ‘Biology postponed to Wednesday, Chemistry today.’

This unfamiliar news was written with a pink chalk in her teacher's familiar scrawl.

The alphabets swam before her eyes.

Sweat trickled down her armpits and neck. She couldn’t focus.

She suddenly thought of the yellow armpit stains that adorned her shirt every day after school.

She became all the more conscious and started sweating profusely. 

The finger from behind kept nudging her shoulder. She tried to shrug off the finger by raising her shoulder but she didn’t dare turn behind for her fear of getting falsely accused of cheating or rather helping to cheat.

Karen did not even try to wipe sweat off her forehead for though Ms. Archer had her back facing Karen, she knew it was better to be still than arouse suspicion for nothing.

The finger started prodding again. She wanted to scream out, ‘I didn’t study for this subject! If I don’t know shit about it, how will I help youuu??’

She didn’t realise that she actually screamed those words out.

All except the three toppers’ heads turned around to stare at her.

‘Karen?’, Ms. Archer looked worried.

Karen fainted before Ms. Archer could reach her.

                                                                          

When she regained consciousness she found herself on a hospital bed. Someone was nudging her shoulder again.

She froze.

She turned behind and all she saw was her shadow.

The fingers kept nudging.

She tried to distract herself thinking about the consequences of the missed exam.

But that was more disturbing so she had no choice but to look at her shadow again.

Something about it perturbed her. Even more than the missed exam.

She began to fear her own shadow.

She couldn’t tell anyone about the hand that protruded from the back of her head.

They would just scorn at her, ‘Your shadow has a hand too? That means you have three hands? Where is your third hand? At the back of your head? That keeps nudging you? That doesn’t let you forget about your missed exam?’

Only in darkness did the fingers stop nudging and annoying her instead they rested on her shoulder consoling her that her shadow didn’t exist in darkness.

____

The Writer: Michelle D'Costa is 22 years old.  She never imagined she would be writing so much someday. You can follow her fiction/poetry here. 

The Artist: Chrystal Berche is a photographer, artist, and writer living in North Central Iowa.