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Volume One, Number Twelve October 2010
Death Raises Mulatto Mongrel Cliché
Snake as Nigger
The Feast sometimes it glares back The City Augur
A Snack Reincarnation Under the Horizon
Someday When I'm a Hundred She Smokes Slender
She Speaks To Me
I've Yet to See Your Eyes
My Mortal Chaotic Evil Stardust Cowboy
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Timothy Black
Death Raises Ghosts
Death
It is very hard, sometimes, to walk past graveyards with their weeping willows and their tall stone markers. I remember the young girl next door who is now buried there, six feet above twelve feet under. Her personal stone, when viewed under reflected sun- light shows her in rainbows, smiling the smile of the forever alive. I imagine her parents winding down their days. Mornings at the kitchen table, evenings around the fire contemplating her, and the world’s, amazing depth. Sometimes when I walk past the frozen rows I can ignore just how deep it is, and my own still beating heart.
Raises
The dying man said he smelled baking bread when asked what dying was like. He had a hole blown through his heart, was gasping through hot lungs, was staring through fresh cataracts. The hitch when he spoke was what really got to me. When I was young I remember my mom baking bread. It was an all-day task back then. She would tell me to walk softly through the kitchen – said any little movement could cause the rising loaves to fall. When my wife asks what my youth was like, I tell her it was like the smell of baking bread.
Ghosts
My parents have a pre- paid funeral. They say it’s for the living, so we (or they, if I am dead) won’t have to deal with that as well as our stunning grief. They put the matter to rest, and spend each day like ghosts, clanking chains, and waiting to get their money’s worth.
Mulatto Mongrel Cliché
White child, what’s in your wallet? Black child, what’s in your heart? And which line’s longer, you son-of-a-bitch? I paid the price of hailstones and shotgun shells, bad crank and great crystal meth to ask those three questions to the fucked and the damned.
The hail formed when the wind whipped rain up and up through the chill firmament. I press the black cat down beside me where he purrs in a great black mass. Those opaque balls fall hard on the cars of the just and unjust alike. The bright red shells
were sprinkled through the carpet of tall grass and adorned with swastikas and racial slurs – die niggurkind, die falsetto whiteboy. Die unholy baritone trinity. The bad
crank glew yellow and dove down to the devil’s palace of sulfur and ice-blue regret. There is no girl with dirty-blonde dreads in this one to lighten the load, no brunette to shoot a load into anymore. There never were. Here never is.
And good crystal meth looks like Japanese hard rock candy, like the shards of copper sulfate at Hackberry Lake. It’s as blue as your baby’s eyes, but not blue at all. What’s typed on your head whiteboy? What’s
stapled to your heart, niggerchile’? What was in your mind, you filthy cliché? I could guess, but it’s too lonely and too blue and too cold in this fucking rubber room to think, let alone worship your left-alone slapstick comedy.
Snake as Nigger
Tonight, this very night. A near-black water moccasin, with chain-link marks on his wet back emerges from the weight of spring water. He holds a nickel that shines like a fallen chunk of moon between his fangs and the crus clitoris of his tongue.
In the light of this faltered day the moon sees this coin and wants it back. The snake winds like kite string through the wet, high afghan of grass. The moon can only glower down on the snake, can only whisper lightly for its fallen desire.
What is the coin? Out here there are no books to read, no discarded condom shells. The only screams are from feather-picked night hawks, stressed at the water’s furious parting from carp jumping. We invent these hawks, just like we invent the coin and the moon’s undoing when we summon the words to fail at its description.
We fancy ourselves masters of those that would punish us with poisons. We tinker with phosphorus compounds we place in glass pipes. We don’t know
enough to leave well enough alone. We tread on reservation land, and hand out tickets to come see the snake. Come, make a wish: throw a coin into the lake, and see
what will come of it, wet, black and angry.
Timothy Black’s first poetic novella, Connecticut Shade, is in its second printing through WSC Press. He teaches poetry at Wayne State College, and is a Cave Canem Fellow. He lives in Wakefield, Nebraska with his wife and two sons.
Timothy’s work has appeared in the anthologies The Logan House Anthology of 21st Century American Poetry, The Great American Roadshow, and Words Like Rain. He has been published in The Platte Valley Review and at bringtheink.com , has poems forthcoming in Breadcrumb Scabs and has won an Academy of American Poets prize for his poem Heavy Freight.
_______________________________________ Ahmed Adam Shamma
The Feast
it started at the epilogue when the scavengers sniffed the quiet air and the lukewarm blood was their invitation they came in packs and swarms the jackals, the worms, the roaches, the crabs to the charnel paradise that awaited them in the streets of every town and city
now the flies are fat but always hungry and the sidewalks teem with the writhing of maggots the rats make their homes anywhere they please in this vast buffet of viscera and above it all vultures dry their wings atop the hollow buildings looking down like judges of the dead
no guns fire no engines roar the radio screams silent static all that is left is the shrieking of crows and the laughter of hyenas and god
sometimes it glares back
sometimes it glares back at us the madness beyond the peel when we are within ourselves the loss of purpose and the going-under that comes with it
it is the unknown it is death it is infinite void and it is the blurring of the lines that separate these and all things
like fingernails stuck in the walls of the Auschwitz showers, when our screams turn to a gurgling of bile all we have made will become a part of the endless absurd and/or nothing
The City Augur
The city augur sees more in the faces
on
She appreciates ugliness, almost to
the
The night sky should be an inky and
infinite
She knows a secret so great that if she
even
She laughs to keep from crying, and
when
When her throat is in bloody tatters and
she
Each person, with no exceptions, has
enough
One day she will dip a fountain pen in
her
Ahmed Adam Shamma, 21, is a United States sailor currently stationed in Charleston, SC. His work has been previously been accepted by Danse Macabre du Jour.
________________________________________________________
JC Crumpton
A Snack
I opened the bedroom door this morning and thought —only for a moment— that I saw milk and cookies waiting neatly for me on the landing: Sylvia? Are you there?
Reincarnation
I hear that winter cry like summer dying echoed back and forth between the hollow spaces of my mind wherein run shadows of memories hidden like some genetic recalling growing, growing further —becoming that hidden plan— until a seedling sprouts upon my forehead, taking root in the corners of consciousness like a bonsai tree of knowledge.
Now that reverberated voice has become the low hum of life moving beneath the ground until it erupts into the cacophony of birds singing, brooks laughing and wind whistling— a phoenix risen from the ashes of past dreams.
Under the Horizon
I watched yesterday as the sun gasped its last before being swallowed up by the night— it struck out with rage, lashing across the western sky with a wall of red fire, a plague of biblical reminders that burned the air with its final assault. But the inevitability of the dark triumphed in the brief battle.
This morning it had yet to marshal its strength; hidden by clouds, the sun did not reveal itself and the rains came.
JC Crumpton is a graduate of the University of Arkansas with a BA in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis. He currently lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife and two kids, and was a stringer at the Northwest Arkansas Morning News for eight years. His poetry has appeared in Outer Darkness and in the anthology On Wings of Inspiration. His short story "It Just Ain't the Same" has appeared in the (no longer) online Alien Skin Magazine. This month, one of my poems will appear in the Fall 2010 issue of Tainted Tea.
Blake Ellington Larson
i’ll remember how i used to feel so young amongst the dinosaur crowd i’ll remember i’m just an old boy in a new sweater that my calm demeanor is really stricken with sweet sin and marmalade that i’m trying to light enough candles in my heart so’s i can freeze up these doubts and meet a woman that reminds me i’m trying not to notice shadows from eyeglasses red lips
She Smokes Slender
goes black 'round the edges in her afterglow i find delight in the candlelight that cuts the fabric out of night and the movie moves the images and my fingers are negatives and
She Speaks to Me
through microphied phones that pause like quilts sew haiku's she is syllabic in nature hidden in daylight II. her message is in the bottle it washes on the shores that wash over the wires that sound the hungried spiral strings that ring when i sing with her
I've Yet to See Your Eyes
stainless pain un-endearing and harmless i've yet to hold your postmortem smile or feel the darkness shine through your teeth and it makes me want to kiss you breathless
Blake
Ellington Larson invented the color pink. He does not
collect Care Bears and most certainly doesn't have a
subscription to The Believer. On a scale of one to
awesome. He would definitely be awesome. He lives in the
quiet suburbs of Alameda, California and would very much
like to meet you.
Amber Victoria Tudor
My Mortal
I see constellations in your eyes Linking comets And Gods To our Mortality
If violins laced our Movements Melancholy notes Would Crescendo Into fireworks Harmonizing
Past Present And Future (like dated shiny pennies)
We believe in reincarnation And still Fear The inevitable “don’t lose me” It took too long to find you.
Chaotic Evil
Carefully calculated Manipulations
Tricked Out
By neon lights
Star gazers Beware
Northern lights Are cold
They’ll watch you Wilt Away
Eyes the blackest Shade of Blue
Chaotic Evil
Stardust Cowboy
My stardust Cowboy Freckled by Celestial Fireworks
Pupils That Pull in Exposing
A Parallel Universe
Where we Float Like Fog
Light Compressed
In a Sea Of things Yet To be formed
A seemingly Phenomenal Coincidence
Mirrored By Exponential Possibilities
All of which
Light Years Away
Amber Victoria Tudor has been published in Writers Café Anthology 2006 and in the Spring 2010 issue of Glint Literary Journal. She is the founding editor of Dark Lady Poetry. Currently she resides in Redondo Beach, California |
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Dark Lady Poetry, 2010. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 2152-8594