“The Ribcage Explains (Again) Why It Never Votes” and “The Ribcage Dreams of Dancing on a Grave (or Two)” are just two of five wonderfully surreal & acutely affecting ribcage-themed poems by J. Bradley in our Fall 2017 issue.
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“The Ribcage Explains (Again) Why It Never Votes”
YOU GERRYMANDERED YOUR HEART where only the wolves of his name
are allowed to live. They have the facts
and still they vote to gnaw the marrow
out of you. What’s the point of this story,
this lover asks. You peel back your blanket,
show him the gore in waking up alone.
Heinz Tomato Ketchup with fries, by theimpulsivebuy [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons“Existential Ketchup” is a savory & poignant poem of melancholy & fast food by James Croal Jackson from our Fall 2017 issue. (To hear a recording of James reading his poem, be sure to click play below…)
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GOT A HEINZ BOTTLE FULL OF REGRETS but it’s dried up as the crust of red’s
lost its use you try to squeeze something
from an old heart and look how flappily
it beats sags and wheezes yet I got a cold bag
of wendy’s to share salted and soggy
on our porch in december rain I said to go to be tax-free and carefree yes
but on the swinging bench white-bagged I see
your face in wendy’s and your eyes some
sad fake black pocket’s full of lint and loose change
and can’t stop sliding my hands in to feel my legs
burning with desire to get up and build trash
cans from scrap at the edge of the yard
then wait for the passersby
to throw their guilty pleasures in
A SLIME DISPENSER THAT WON’T STOP shooting it out
of order, out of order, out of clichéd slots.
I’m either screaming or I’m crying
or I’m hideously mean.
I’m a female-shaped gumball machine.
You know you can’t wait
to break me open
or throw me out the window.
I turn myself into
a ripped out placenta in the trunk
of the car. I can’t even drive.
So I’m not the one who crashed
my own slot machine and smashed you.
I’m either cheating or I’m lying,
eyeless and unseen.
An arachnid, fat on the afterbirth
of gold rush dreams.
You can’t wait to off me before my time:
a 50 ton space phallus, spreading its slime.
An entourage of pill dispensers poured inside
broken flower pots. Hubris, rat poison,
3 left gloves.
A brillo pad will shape them all
into something to snort
to cast the heavy hex down,
connect the slime balls with the cat hair.
With the rat tails, with the bat, with the anti-
establishment non-jello mold,
with the tall ships, the dead letters, the dittos
marching into crippling immediacies,
bleached and unyielding.
DIRECTORS CALL ME IN I’m an on-call death
Consultant now
How is death done they ask me
Is it as still as they say it is
Is it unfaithful to throw petals by a corpse
How can I make the body feel
More or less beyond itself
It used to be such a great question
Where I would slide in & out of certainty
Just to see their faces
But now I’m so bored
It gets boring after a few times
The way people crawl around
Their own sense of decay
It’s a movie loop
And I am a sad moviegoer
with Dorito dust spackled across my face
Today I stood over Jeff Goldblum
Covered in fake blood like this dream I had
Where I poured chocolate syrup over his sick ass abs
His body in front of me in tension
with wound & liddedness
I stared at his sick ass abs
and I put my hair in my mouth as I watched
the director said cut
he asked me if Jeff was believable
I should have said fuck
Yes it is now let me lie with him
But I didn’t let them have it
I said shit on him
Throw some glitter in his mouth
And oh did Jeff have so much glitter in his mouth
And was he more exciting than ever
And what a beautiful direction I told them to go in
And still I did not touch him
Even though that would have been the way to go
Behold the shimmering dread & terrible beauty of “So, the Portal to Another Dimension is Not in the Hudson,” one of three terrific poems by Chris Antzoulis in our Fall 2017 issue. (And be sure to check out the recording of Chris reading his poem below~)
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IN TIMES OF DISTRESS
I look to the water.
Today it’s the Hudson.
I was hoping for fog
and all I got was the sun
rolling diamonds
down river like roulette balls.
And I could see my reflection, a specter
atop the glitz and shimmer.
He walked
toward me as he started
devouring
his own arm, took a chunk right out
from behind the elbow—
the part that heats up
when someone asks
you to hold them tighter.
He kept taking bites
until his arm was gone.
Now, in front of me
with his head swiveled in a way
that only a dead thing could
I watched, red-eyed in terrible
beauty,
as he sunk his teeth into his shoulder,
wondered if I was supposed
to be watching.
The sun whipped the smell
of breathing
off the gems of the Hudson
as I lunged into its riches.
I WAS WEARING MY BLONDE WIG When Trump pulled me over.
America my love, I thought I knew you.
But you’re living so wild now:
Bowing like Franco. Dancing like Mussolini.
Smiling like Pinochet. Clapping like Stalin.
I thought you loved me.
Once upon a time you would wink at me
And I would whisper: “Becquer and Lorca,” in your ear.
“I’m gonna need you to step out of the car,” Trump said while his upper lip twitched.“No more I love you’s is right,” he said, as he aggressively turned off the stereo.
“I’m gonna need you to balance yourself on your thumbs for the next ten minutes.
That better not be a wig you’re wearing, your tongue better not be having love affairs with
Other dialects.”
Thirty seconds later:
My thumbs cracked under the pressure of my fat limbs,
Forcing me to give up Moliere, hiding under my tongue. To point towards
Tchaikovsky crying of terror in my ear. Conned into admitting my love for
Bashevis and everything Yiddish.
My poor wig prayed and endured under the stomps of an enraged Tyrant.
“You’re not real. From the vomit your tongue stinks of, you probably don’t love my People,” Trump raged, while he hauled me from my ears and crammed me in his policeman’s hat.
Now, straightforwardly, no more swans. Or dances on rose petals. Or sentimental education. No more Poets and love affairs. No more Romance before sunrise; let’s talk of ethnicity Diplomas, of bans & tariffs, of odious men in white robes talking Nazism & looking Ominous on centric Boulevards. America my love you are so wild: There are no I love you’s for Me, In your heart.
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JUAN PARRA is a Cuban-American poet. His work has featured in the Indiana Review, Basalt, The Lake, Pear Drop, Driftwood Press, 4ink7, FLAPPERHOUSE, and REAL.
“Once or twice I have felt that odd whir of wings in the head, which comes when I am ill so often… I believe these illnesses are in my case-how shall I express it?-partly mystical. Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes a chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain. Then suddenly something springs…ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen.”
We have submitted our nominations for the 2017 Best of the Net anthology, which honors literary work that originally appeared on the internet between 7/1/2016 & 6/30/2017, and they are:
AFTER THE END, I’LL JUST KEEP FLINGING my musings into the void.
I don’t watch the news—well, I sort of do. More accurately, I don’t listen to the news, I just keep it on TV, on mute, in case of apocalypse.
My love’s a $10 bill you forgot to take out of your pants before you ran it through the laundry; it’s all stiff & crinkly now but it’ll still buy you a drink.
My soul’s a dreaming dachshund napping in the sun, twitching its paws & chomping at ephemeral squirrels.
My moral compass led me to a treasure map hidden behind a Sugar Ray poster in the Tulsa Hard Rock Café.
Thoughts collide & scrape inside me
like a rusty clusterfuck,
they twitch & blister as they spread their pox across Long Island Sound.
Sighs of anguish, howls of glee
are chiming through my lighthouse home,
they somersault like feisty leprechauns
across Long Island Sound.
Shit, I just remembered a field trip’s coming to tour my lighthouse tomorrow—gotta Febreze everything & hide all my Egon Schiele paintings!
Gonna spend the weekend booby-trapping the windmills of my mind, scrubbing all the Zinfandel stains out of my Metallica T-shirts, and constructing elaborate dioramas based on my most memorable childhood humiliations.
Tonight I’ll be hanging my silky new hammock in the toasty sliver between honest mistake & reckless abandon. I’ll build a fortress from coarse, lint-spangled pillows in the slender valley between false hope & unconditional surrender. I’ll be twitching atop the border of judicious heightened sensitivity & insufferable over-sensitivity.
“The Ribcage Explains (Again) Why It Never Votes” and “The Ribcage Dreams of Dancing on a Grave (or Two)” are just two of five wonderfully surreal & acutely affecting ribcage-themed poems by J. Bradley in our Fall 2017 issue. 
FLAPPERHOUSE 
