IS IT AN ELEGY WHEN YOU PRAY for everything that tried to
kill you but did not? How you
delivered breath after breath
out of your nostrils to add the
world? I don’t need words to
describe the silence that can be
lodged into bodies as years roll.
I have reached my lost loved
ones in the brevity of letters
they will never read. We let go
the minute we love. We don’t
learn to love, we love as though
we’d been there all along, our
eyes cast beyond the distance.
Once, I stood by the surface
of a river & counted stars
through their reflections. Tell
me the light we forget to love
has guided us through the dark.
I dream dark as a forest of olive
green leaves where we wander.
The dark moves our dead. Faint
light coaxes the earth to escape.
The earth shatters a little. The
sun rises from the underbelly of
an ocean. We eat the light. We
rise like ghosts with parched
mouths into the last silence.
{ X }
SNEHA SUBRAMANIAN KANTA is a recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship 2019 at the University of Stirling, Scotland. An awardee of the GREAT scholarship, she has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. She is the author of Synecdoche(The Poetry Annals) and Prosopopoeia (Ghost City Press). She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and poetry reader for Palette Poetry.
the pride of non-migratory birds that managed to eat through winter
video of woman folding laundry
slowed to ten hours
—domesticity,
the new #kink
Pope going off-message,
suggesting dustpan
awaits us at the bottom of the steps
FB data profile defines me as “very liberal,”
tone of Thanksgiving uncle implied
acorn aggro
asking white people with dreadlocks “why?”
Benjamin using “loss of aura” as getaway car
empire thinks
it’s a lot better looking than it is
5 pizza rolls acquired (because additional 15,000 was not available)
hoping it will be April
sometime in May or June
Russian spy poisoned 50 miles south of London had been looking for a cure for his cough
passing away
after a brief wellness
Barthes pretends to talk to mother on payphone that chirps Heidegger in his ear
wondering what the “it” phone is
that celebrities are throwing at assistants
posting oasis
beneath my nose on Airbnb
promoting with photos
tiny people napping/making love
along my upper lip
ketchup slices shaped like cheese singles but looking like fruit leather
kombucha as mythical country
where everyone has great abs
text-based
tuna
time warp
hungry for a fresh semiotic
—the old categories blurred on new menu with Lilliputian font, Brobdingnagian prices
the defenestration of Chet
friend says he’s out “Herzog-ing,”
his term for walking in the desert and considering the Abyss
morning show for night people that begins at 1 p.m.
review of the Bowie show at Brooklyn Museum:
it was nice to revisit a time
when people still believed in the future
bed that folds
upon itself
to protect
sleepers during earthquakes
—Dracula’s enforced nightly entombment; the robot version
rows of cartoon food
in the base of the crypt;
can’t be the Apocalypse if there’s snacks
Tuesday
taco
Talmud
choosing the Chekovian
whenever someone asks “what’s wrong?”
FB reminds me that 5 years ago today
i was floating over the city
—arms, legs spreading
a leaf’s expanse
woman blames “windy day” for cocaine found in purse
precious bead of obsidian placed in the blowhole
Clarice Lispector drawing stippled line
along the horizon of her eyelid
line she calls her “velvet lathe”
man with diamond bow tie mistaking it
for one of her sentences
Imaginary as the punch you never threw
desiring-machine,
tonight lacking toilet paper
no palm trees in Marxism
theory the gaze that thinks nudity is molecular
Tarkovsky ordering lunch
for all the hungry tummies in The Zone
when the worst
thing you did today
was cream cheese
digging
for the person you were promised
a few layers down
woman on my right
burns 650 calories;
man on my left
guzzling
bright blue liquid
burns 70
being old means hating yourself for the right reason
Louise saving a seat at the center of the cage
meat ecology
spectators on the other side of the border
watch the bombings
from beach chairs
Toulouse
tiki
tattoo
woman asks “chaise longue or chaise lounge?”
—linguistic Waterloo
in the pig fight,
the pig
always has
the home field advantage
trailer for a new restoration
pink light
sparking
you will hear music until your call is answered
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WILLIAM LESSARD has writing that has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, American Poetry Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Hobart, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. His visual work has been featured at MoMA PS1.
YOU WERE MY BROTHER UNTIL your eyes wore a dragon’s breath until your hands grew into an orchard of blood until your mouth unwound into a coffin. May the blood that hums in our veins like a river knifing past a dark forest bear me witness. I love you brother with all the birds psalming in my bones. I love you o brother. In this sanctuary that’s my mouth, brother there’s a prayer burning wild –a lamp in the wrinkled hands of a monk searching God in a dark room. You were my brother until the ten o’ clock news says a young man walks into a market with explosives strapped to his body like a life jacket. On the TV your face appears like a surprise & so it is. A scar glitters like a promise on your neck & so it is. How you got the scar: we were god’s descendants in a garden one afternoon when you said let’s play a game –a game of stones. Everything always started with you even the morning fajr. You hurled your stone but I ducked. Mine stabbed your neck into spittle of warm blood. We both knelt like two unfurling hibiscuses. We both cried like a night wind behind a chariot until the ambulance came. & today the scar glitters on every neighbour’s screen. That’s your lips o brother where prayers & ablutions grew wings & flew into the heavenly nest of a whistling God beyond. O brother the dancing firefly in a dark museum. O brother the lonely lamb where the forest is wildest. Until your eyes wore the skin of night & your hands grew into a garden of cold fallen leaves, you were the vision I never had. You were all the places I always dreamt of. You were the only prayer I learnt to keep in my heart before opening it into Allah’s eyes. O you were my only dear brother. How do I pray for your soul when every song that leads me to you is a dirge stuck on a raven’s beak?
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NOME, EMEKA PATRICK is a blxck bxy & student in the University of Benin, Nigeria, where he studies English language and literature. He is a recipient of the Festus Iyayi award for excellence (Poetry) in 2018. His works are published or forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gaze Journal, Crannóg magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in a small room close to banana trees and bird songs in Benin. He’s on twitter, say hi @paht_rihk
BECAUSE IT’S QUIET AND CRAZY ONE HAS REASON to pause. Because questions
can fill the space between two people
and open anybody wider than another’s answers.
Because a truth that can be told
isn’t true. Where you goin’
with that gun in your hand? Because the first note
transforms Jimi from Jimi
who becomes a teller who is asking
Joe, who is not Jimi,
nor the person Jimi is not
the gun.
We listen because someone will die
someone will murder
because he caught her messing round with another man but the shot is not heard. There are notes,
chords, and rhythm—blues: polyphonic shuffling
dysfunction that functions to melt people’s brains
so that the daemon can live
as long as people listen.
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JEREMIAH DRIVER earned an MFA in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, won the Thomas Lux Award, has been a horse trainer, a service member in the United States Army, worked heavy construction in Manhattan, and taught literacy/ writing in Queens and the Bronx. He blogs at jeremiahdriver.wordpress.com. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Terminus, Columbia Journal, UCity Review, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, and Piecrust.
on its own is not a word to conjure anything of the sort. Santarella was not home to me, yet blood runs down
my leg and into the drain of its shower.
Santarella asked to be invited into me, and I said yes. Santarella’s reflection is only seen
on the surface of its own ponds.
The photographer tells me to be serious for just a goddamned second, but I’ve forgotten that I’m the bride.
In every photograph, I’m laughing with the many hors d’oeuvres, somewhere
in the background.
The symbol of our marriage is up at the peak of the silo, with the dark and all the stars. Without it, nothing
can proceed as usual.
Is it good luck to have blood run down my leg and into Santarella’s shower? I’m asking this to everyone I see, just before I lean to kiss them on the cheek.
With each kiss, I remember I’m the bride.
Is it good luck to have fingernails full of Santarella?
The soil is crawling into me, like a tantrum. It wants to be put to bed. Moss wounds my gown, yet I must
reach the top of the silo before the photographs are taken and I forget
that I’m the bride.
In every photograph, I’m crawling on my hands and knees up the Santarella garden, like a freak storm. It’s
snowing in September. I lie there in it, knowing I may fall asleep and never wake.
When I rise my gown rises with me. The snow has cleared and we have sun for our photographs.
On the way to Santarella, blood got on the driver’s seat. I was never the bride in my entire life. As I drove up
the Santarella garden, it became so goddamned dark.
(Goddamned is used here incorrectly. The dark was not damned by any god. It was just sweet. Like blood.)
The candle light could not penetrate the dark. It grew too quickly all around me. The Santarella garden became
a sound instead of a place, and I had difficulty experiencing it fully. The guests
of the wedding only spoke to me in spells.
But the dark scabbed over my body and my gown and my blood like a new skin
and that is what I wanted the whole time. More than anything.
Once I was inside the dark, I could experience everything fully.
And so I walked up the Santarella garden and spiral wooden staircase and into the shower with checkered tile and I bled what I needed to into its drain.
And the sun shone on the pond, of course, because everything was of the dark now including the sun. Including me. My bouquet was so moody and when I tossed it, it almost refused
to bleed out from the darkness and into the drain of the shower.
I am the bride, I remembered, and it shows in every photograph.
AFTER ONE TWO MANY, She rips the nails from their beds
Like children on Christmas morning,
Eager to open
A fantasy of something else.
But there is only coal
And air exposed on rawness.
Having eleven stitches into her chin
Felt like a bow
Tied by her mother.
Smart for church,
All dressed up
In that robe,
Where blood ran down
Between her breasts.
Kitchen knife,
Two K’s
But the silence of the last haunts her,
Its noiselessness
Cuts flesh and screams.
She digs
With small white keratin,
Not the ripped ones
Some are saved
For this very occasion.
They mark
Like crescent moons
On a powder dusk sky,
The shoulder and neck canyon
The valley of palms and wrists
Reflected back.
Pinches;
Like ants
Like too-tight denim
Like winter winds
Like plucking eyebrows
Like her sister,
Her mother made her wear mittens to school
Because she nipped other kids,
Nip sounds better than pinch
Pinch is only one letter away from punch.
She painted the most beautiful blues,
Lapis Lazuli slaps
Violent violets
Sucker for shallow skulls.
She watched the glow
Of the cigarette lighter
Its receptacle invitation,
Its perfect finger shaped hole
To burn off those remaining.
Licked by invisible flames
Sucked out of soreness
By salvia,
By means of salvation.
Fingertips aflame are like burning bridges,
They frizzle and melt into themselves
Only to regrow again more painfully.
{ X }
ALICE RIDDELL is originally from the U.K. and is currently studying at NYU’s Center of Experimental Humanities. She is Editor-in-Chief of an interdisciplinary journal called Caustic Frolic and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Breadcrumbs Mag, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Anthropolitian. Alice has also read her work as part of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. She is an avid table tennis player.
“Bombshell / Laughter Slaughter” is one of four fantastically flappy poems by FLAPPERHOUSE’s poet laureate, Jessie Janeshek, in our Winter 2019 issue.
{ X }
I’M GIVING UP BEING SAD ABOUT TIME
over it, over it.
I lie in this game and hem-stitch my waste
launch paper ships
never realize the fizz stringy meat rusty keys
stow my dress in the basket
nipple ice and no slip the contrast is stunning.
I lie nude in the sun dogshit on the snow
the consolatory song of corpse in the morgue at my feet
how she slumped on her steering wheel
knocked her gold tooth loose
the death of the party.
I never believed platinum days could end in olive oil baldness
two months of ooze. I didn’t need mystery
the black and white dots or The Girl from Missouri
nothing left but a fish kiss
and my pants don’t fit
and it’s ok that my weakness is brilliance
I’m just acting whatever you say
I’m already set to die in this bedroom
eleven phases of white chokecherry stage
I was rotting long before Hollywood
a cheaply-cut sapphire barmaid singing in stripes
following men with pool cues down to the tornado shelter
eating raw steaks and making them gangsters
weeping trees, houseflies poetic.
And I was the sunflower brownette drinking gin
with that old-fashioned death in my chest
my body barely holding together
my blood and piss flooding the plains
and they ghostwrote this story but I’m over that too
I’d swear anytime it was mine.
Note: This poem very loosely uses the life and death of Jean Harlow.
{ X }
JESSIE JANESHEK‘s second full-length book of poems is The Shaky Phase(Stalking Horse Press). Her chapbooks areSpanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish(Grey Book Press, 2016),Rah-Rah Nostalgia, (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir(Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow(Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Hardscape(Reality Beach, forthcoming).Invisible Mink(Iris Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. You can read more of her poetry atjessiejaneshek.net.
2. “Knock Knock” Todd Dillard’s vivid & tender poem of love & parenthood from our Summer 2018 issue.
And our number one most-viewed piece of 2018 was “Snapshot from the Revolution,” Perry Lopez’s historical & horrific short story from our Summer 2018 issue.
A large pigeon had flown into her face – Charles Robinson, 1907
“Head Tree,” “Life On Mars,” and “Fitting” are three psychedelically surreal prose poems by Satoshi Iwai from our Fall 2018 issue.
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“Head Tree”
AFTER A LONG AND INSULAR COMA, sitting up in the half-melted bed, I find an apple tree has grown on my head. Each wall of the room is covered with the fun house mirrors which reflect the tapestry of deformed leaves. Thirteen years have passed while I had been sleeping.
The tree has a dozen branches which bear a hundred fruits. The shadow of the trunk tells me an eternal noon. Hiding behind the leaves, a wise snake tells me the sweet pain of molting. When a cool breeze comes I find that I have already gotten my ex-wife out of my head.
I wonder how many apples have grown to birds on my head until I die. Fishes die in the sea, but birds don’t die in the sky. Still, all I can do is forget every summer that has gone. When the warm rain stops falling, the first cloned passenger pigeon will fly away from my tree.
“Life on Mars”
YOU DON’T NEED TO WONDER why that old man can paint pictures so quickly, or why he and every old man appeared in his pictures look so alike. He doesn’t care about how his pictures look like, because he has lost his sight entirely since he was a little child.
The passersby don’t care about his blindness. They admire him just because he paints his self portraits without any photograph. At the abandoned bus stop, sitting on the half-broken bench, he depicts hundreds of his own faces under the sun, even under the new moon.
He is homeless, and he believes that he is homeless on Mars. Martians have three eyes, so he is confused every time when he can’t touch the third eye on his forehead. He is always in the dusk. Dusk is called mirrors on Mars. He always feels blue. Blue is called infinity on Mars.
“Fitting”
DON’T STAY TOO LONG IN THIS FITTING ROOM. The mirror in front of you reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror in front of you that reflects the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror in front of you that reflects the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a black sweater. If you answer your cell phone, someone tells you in a very, very hoarse voice. You are what you wear. Then, there is no one in this fitting room. The mirror in front of your absence reflects your absence and the mirror behind your absence that reflects your absence and the mirror in front of your absence that reflects your absence behind your absence that reflects your absence and the mirror in front of your absence that reflects a crumpled white sweater on the floor.
“Self-Adulation as a Note Accompanied with a Bouquet of Feathers” is one of two surreal & spiritual poems by Wale Ayinla in our Fall 2018 issue.
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TODAY, MY BODY FLOATS IN MAGENTA AIR; and everything around me is falling
like the words rolled under mother’s sleeves.
Imagine that I am returning to a fever;
of green grass soaked in typhoid bedspread.
My sight tightens mother’s lips
as music. Frail fingers squeeze
her palms into a collage of dark hooks
and sirens, while the syringe buries itself.
Sometimes I feel like I might fold the night
into my armpit and run the length of the
city as a ghost, nevertheless, something draws me
back to my mother’s words like a magnet;
like an oath. (Never leave a widow opened as a window.) A chimney of old wears
sewn on skin made with footprints.
I hold this memory firmly the same way
God tucks his secrets above the sky
under His soles. One day I will
hold a country and name it dreams.
Look at me the way you look a river
traveling with your face with words
holding you to a grudge. Do you see me
holding the hands of a father who is a heaven
away? Come, as a river paddling the body
into a shipwreck. I live here.
SNEHA SUBRAMANIAN KANTA is a recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship 2019 at the University of Stirling, Scotland. An awardee of the GREAT scholarship, she has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. She is the author of Synecdoche (The Poetry Annals) and Prosopopoeia (Ghost City Press). She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and poetry reader for Palette Poetry.
FLAPPERHOUSE 