nobody expected
it
history
++++++++trumped up swirling dust
++++++++of staked vampires
strategies for coping

++++++++a bloviating Eurocentric trace
++++++++of what’s already happened

not just

unforgivable
++++++++what’s HR lean+++ focused
++++++++competitive and agile

on that grid
they made me
make my own
++++++++spreadeagle
++++++++on the rock
++++++++I’ve fossiled into

a defensible space
a safe room
++++++++installed by security

(more…)

Huddled together in our dog costumes, we stand by in the blackness and keep our heads low.

In front of our faces, a man and a woman in a bed — man’s knees pointing at woman’s pointing knees — blanketless muddy feet saturate their lower bed — crow’s feathers and curled leaves. Dreams and hideous blood clots from the rumbling of the ceiling. We stand there. We just stand there and discuss the man and woman’s rectangle bed and their rectangle ceiling.

We grew up eating rectangles.

We grew up collecting red drops in pots from the kitchen ceiling.

We grew up getting carried away in our black sheets — our ghost costumes — our stitched felt tails always wagging.

We want to bark and wake up the man and the woman and show them what good dogs we are. They continue sleeping with inverted elbows and a real dog enters the room and spreads a fever. A crucifix falls off the wall. Mud drips from the real dog’s paws. We feel a sudden hardness in our belly buttons — a heavy loneliness in our upper torsos.

We are only children.

Do you want to leave? There is a real dog in this room, I say to my sister.

We should just stand here and keep swallowing the air that enters our mouths. When we feel we have collected enough air, we should float into the ceiling, she says.

We stand there and wait for the air in the bedroom to fill us. Nitrogen flows. Temperature rises.

We stand there and wait to expand.

_________________________________

P. Edward Cunningham resides in Western Pennsylvania. He is the author of an ebook of poems, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Pangur Ban Party, 2010), a contributing writer to Open Thread, and the founding editor of Radioactive Moat. His writing has appeared in journals including H_NGM_N, decomp, LIES/ISLE, Titular, and WTF PWM.

The day was mean and sweating
(a lazy leaking
too big
for any amount of ocean)
so
we climbed inside
the heady weight of an egg
blood boil.
The ground was a thick red mud path
and the eggs suspended
everywhere
slipping across the back roots of Louisiana.
The heat fed us with a
necessary humidity,
and we took a
smaller boat
to wade through the guts
and the watery insides of
each other.
All parts were damp,
but misery was not an option
as his hand swam on my wrist.
I fell in love
300 times
in succession
with the swell
of his slickly salted smack of lips.
I never did think
my tongue could hold
too many spices
for his weak stomach,
so
I let it snake out
between upper flap and
lower,
speaking like a sea-master of the bayou.
I think we became
liquid
as we reached a ravine
with fallen tree over water,
and he asked me to cross with him,
the fearless fight
of a worm
that repels the fish’s bite.
I did not wriggle away from
the fear of that
slick stab of pain
or the knowledge of melting.

______________________

April Michelle Bratten is currently tucked away in the peaceful Badlands of North Dakota.  She co-edits the online literary journal Up the Staircase.

These things he could give.
Hades peeled her an orange, fed
her girl-mouth, kept her from
the strangers outside (those
strangers which appear only in
mourning, or in afternoon games.)

Blue jays: there were blue jays
with their beloved babes. He birthed
them for her, early in that summer
soon turned fall. Those eggs barely
made the subway ride, the old women
clung to him, gathering his ruin,
++++++++++++++++ his honey.

Hades loved them, they would be
his, too. They would grow appetites
too large for their skinny bones.
Some would sit in their cars and die
under the shut-off moon, to distant dark.
There was a graveyard dedicated
to his shadow wives. A place never
+++++++++++++ Persephone’s.

For years, she had no friends.
She grew up before she began,
her mother soundless, shapeless
always found in loneliness fifteen
miles north of the city. After the funeral,
her mother emptied every word into her
++++++++++++++ husband’s coffin.

Persephone loved his pocket watch
most of all. The one with the fingers
bone-white, case worn. Sometimes it
would skip like a record. At times, she
would wish for the shore again, her
mother’s belly, her laughing teeth; but she
+++++++++++++++++ loved their hell.

____________________________________

Joanna C. Valente was born and bred in New York, where she still currently resides. She is a writer and artist who has been featured in various publications, as well as the founder and editor of the online literary publication, Yes, Poetry. In the future, she would like to live by the ocean and own too many cats.

Don’t just be yourself — build your personal brand. The self is unstable. It might not be found by the search engines. It might be rejected. The self regenerates every five or six days. A consistent brand, a coherent self. Consider the interface, testing for usability. Even crows have a sense of self, and the accompanying self esteem, self loathing. The crow is self-reflexive, self-defeating. How dejected is the crow.

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