VERSIFICATION
NOVEMBER
2020
POETRY
SEPTEMBER 3RD
kenleigh gilbert
Riverside can you hear me?
I'm shaking my pill bottles to make music,
Asheville do you see me, am I real?
I'm sitting in courtyards at night just to feel
prescription happiness
Raining Blood
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KKUURRTT
​
It’s the Apocalypse probably, but not the Slayer kind
blood levels won’t stop rising and now we're all living
on top of our houses, grilling dead pets for dinner
always make sure to wave to the neighbors though
This has really helped our sense of community
A Fear of Breathing
​
Isabel J Wallace
Disposable; one use only
​
I save the N95 in my paper bag,
hands nimble with practice
in minimizing contamination,
​
and I think: yeah, me too.
Rusty Little Me
(An homage to Adrienne Rich)
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Meghan Sutherland
Stressed breasts bear the brunt of
mauling minerals inspired by thigh chasms;
salted mouths where instruments are born.
Yet metal tarnishes, turns blue, green,
variegated by that maw, that chiasmus of self.
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photo: Jessica McNamee
DRINK SICK SCARED.
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ANDREW VALZIAN
Most who know this feeling can’t speak of it
for it is lodged in the gut like a fishhook
ready to tear you apart if you try to
remove it.
THE NEWS
LISA LERMA WEBER
Sometimes while watching the news,
I want to put my fists through the television,
watch the fucked up world shatter into a million pieces—
a kaleidoscope of pain and blood on my living room floor.
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photo: Lisa Lerma Weber
FIRST CHRISTMAS
Paul Rousseauu
​
Our first Christmas,
Eating candy canes and
Fucking in bed,
Sticky fingers and
Sticky tits,
Your father knocks
On the apartment door,
Clinking his keys and
Stomping his boots
On stained linoleum
Cracked and curled
By the footsteps of others.
La Llorona
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Abigail Swire
Paint myself a cracked happy face;
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Remember, you crossed the border to Tijuana?
Sent postcards, left nothing.
On El Dia de Los Muertos, Los Inocentes,
I’ll feed you, decorate altars with tequila and marigolds.
Commune with ghosts.
There must’ve been a time I loved you all.
Before the hate, before I learned to like the taste of pain.
Yes. I’ll set out your plate, love for a day.
I was a mother, if I was anything.
Losing Wednesday
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CG Nelson
When she’s a little off her meds, the globe
doesn’t stop spinning. In this world,
she cannot sustain these revolutions—
Time is elastic.
MY LIMITATIONS
SCOTT BRYAN
I
Cannot picture
Kurt Cobain
Driving a car.
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SUICIDE WATCH
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JULIE EASLEY
there was a pound of flesh
for each stage – the family whispered
in corners as the shaving
off of body parts took its toll
​
they failed to see that all destruction
has to devour
the originator of its darkness
​
in the end.
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​
toaster
​
claire denson
the moment you take it in the tub
will never be worse than
the moment you realize
you never plugged it in
​
Banging Our Blocks Together
​
JERICA TAYLOR
We are ready to have another child.
Counting days, saliva ferning, vial sales, delivery and storage fees.
Off the meds that make me stable and on
the ones that tell my body to lay like a chicken.
David Calogero Centorbi presents,
​
Honesty has its place and time
It was during a slow dance when you whispered into my ear, “What is your favorite thing?”
​
I replied, “Cigarettes and coffee or cigarettes and Maker's Mark. It’s a hard decision.”
WARNING SIGNS
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amanda crum
There are no hills
with enough darkness
to keep me safe
tender girl-flesh and
trees flashing amber
like a signal
HIRE ME
harmony
i scrub off my black
liner before interviews
capitalist cogs don't
hold death at
the water line.
​
Menstruous
​
Louise Mather
They kept her in the hayloft
housed her soul in a stone
to crush between their backs
the menstruous scent of leaves
licked until sundown
when she was grown
she overheard them airlessly
wonder why she could not adjust
to the light
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photo: louise mather
you left this afternoon
L Scully
tonight
i eat pills with granola for dinner
Bum Wine Makes Instant Friends
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Zebulon Huset
In Oceanside, soon before they stopped selling booze at two, a beached
stranger showed me the empty bottom row in the cooler hidden behind
malt liquor posters. “The Night Train’s normally there, must be sold out.”
Smile and a fist bump when he noticed a Tropical Punch Kool-Aid packet
in my palm—universally known to make the fortified wine more palatable.
CAREER DAY
​
CAVAR
i have always wanted
just 2
lesbian. or nun
for simplicity's sake.
in my town
ELIZABETH BATES
the streets are gridlocked
with homeless drug addicts
instead of cars. the yellow yield sign
and the red stoplight are never enough
to save them.
CRUNCH
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coleman bomar
Shame is a saggy
man in my head
who stays up late
and masturbates
during the day.
NO ESCAPE
claire marsden
We do the Christian thing and baptise our children,
And still our hearts break.
They fall and fail and fuck
Themselves up.
Strip Themselves
Of Love.
And still,
Their hearts break.
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photo: Claire Marsden
The Undertaker Drives a Black Cadillac,
​
Aime M. Geistman
and he knows where I sleep,
​
​
dream-
​
I fucked a man after a funeral - let him
hold me while I dreamt wept - and wrapped myself up
in its promise of forever
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​
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But the Undertaker is coming;
​
I heard him idling at the curb
THIS POEM DOESN'T COUNT AS A POEM
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keith langston
I’m tired of feeling like life
has no meaning; And I’m really not
in the fucking mood
to write this in
some bullshit fancy poetic way.
TMJ
​
Sophia Al-Banaa
Temporomandibular joint dysfunction
Clicks when I open my mouth to speak.
​
Locked swollen throbbing
Painful words line the insides of my teeth.
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migraines
Brittle, stiff, radiating into my ears.
​
In backseats of cars, silencing myself, resistance to the bass in his voice.
​
I dream of surgery& needles& microscopic procedures
to rip the joint from the skull
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photo: Sophia Al-Banaa
​
to the starling living in the bush in the tesco car park
​
Jake McAuliffe
we aren’t normally like that.
she was exhausted and I can be a cunt,
but when you met my gaze
i wanted to hide with you, grow feathers
from my nailbeds, and squawk at ugly couples too
POLARITY
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vic nogay
i watched him, the hoarder,
crooning at his cats between the wires, sick and dying or already dead.
he’d tucked them in dishcloths under his bed
with a letter to god for each one.
now loaded in vans to be hauled away and revived,
he knelt in the road as if to pray, then pulled out his knife
and drew meridians down his arms.
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photo: Brynna Ferguson
haiku:
​
Erwin Dink
butterfly
sleeping
on scat
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This was inspired by the following haiku which is often touted as one of Buson’s finest. I like my version better.
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Butterfly
sleeping
on the temple bell
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photo: Erwin Dink
SUMMER MEMORIES
jason love
watching fireworks from the front steps -
my son enjoys
water-ice
while I spit tobacco juice
into a coffee cup
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photo: Jason Love
interview
​
JAMES LILLEY
Long sleeved shirt, to hide my arms
Those fucking scars, from when I was sixteen,
Angry kid, nowhere to vent,
I turn up early, to make a good impression.
DREAM CATCHER
kip knott
The city sleeps beneath a tangle of black webs.
When my head hits the pillow, the dreams that float
out my bedroom window never make it very far.
I find them in the morning on my walk to work,
dangling from power lines like a bunch of used condoms.
we wanted our own
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SAM FROST
Miniature women rifled through boxes. Slashed
clothes on the basement floor. Musk is a smell
you cannot un-smell. We nestled our child heads
in old jeans, placed dolls between our child legs.
Our grunts mimicked television scraps. We pulled
babies feet first. Dangled their plastic skeletons
and used cloth to tourniquet our own child wounds.
2020
linda mcmullen
Optimists snicker that we live in the worst times
Except for all those that have gone before;
Ignoring the glass’s darkling half, the stooping arc of history,
And - amid consummate tragedy - the most grievous part is
By now, we should have known better.
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photo: Halima Voyles
baby teeth
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Meagan Johanson
Nose-pressed to door crack, you watch
as the bottle spits fireworks on the wall
and she cowers to bellows, bells in the dustpan,
while your heart pants wolves in the cage of your chest.
Her words drip limp through a smile surrendered:
“Go back to bed, Little Mouse.”
Your left side dimple is just like hers.
He says you have her freckles too.
In bed, you swallow down your howl,
and wait.
the writer thinks
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sara dobbie
Imagine
if I told the truth,
let the words spill like nails
from my open mouth;
the family would shatter.
LIGHTS OUT
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amy-jean muller
It's hard to masturbate
in the psych clinic
because the lady in bed
next to you
keeps crying
about
her dead son
ReD bUtTeRfLiEs
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sarena mason
Inside my arm, under my skin, caterpillars cocoon, infection within.
Hatchlings of parasitic veins gnaw at my heart, drive me insane.
Needle in to euthanize, red butterflies bleed into the sky.
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photo: Sarena Mason
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