Editor note

Issue 26

“A third way to die” — Gareth Branwyn, More Dreams Than Sleep

The spectrum of “other-worldly” runs infinite. This is just one corner of it. Call it a time slip or a literary mandala. Each contributor is a poet, and an artist, with a spirit beyond the mundane. 

Inside this issue are poems about the grotesque nightmare of being, damaged consciousness that haunts (which is a definition for most ghosts), and a few poems about heartbreak. 

Love is the only thing that will save us in the end. Some wield it like a machete. Others distort it until it’s unrecognizable. Some of us are orphans or forgotten or aliens birthed without the programming for love. 

How can I create a transference of love? This magazine is one way. Anything that scares you. Everything that is unknown. That is what I love about everyone. 

Claudia Dawson, Founding Publisher & Editor
February 2022

Contributors: Bernardo Villela, K. Johnson Bowles, Olga Gonzalez Latapi, Melissa Cannon, Ilaria Cortesi, Jason Brightwell, MJ McGinn, Amy Young, Anna Shirshova, Priyanka Kapoor, Barbara Candiotti, Steph Amir, Gareth Branwyn, Rebecca Davis, Alex Thayer, Donna Dallas, Roy Christopher, Zack Rogow, J. Campbell

break-up

a tangled nest of birds
in a nightgown
a slip of a strap please
give it a pull
off my shoulder
a hedge of quills, undone
like when i stood near the wall dreading
no one would ask me to dance
and then he did, my broken egg
the scent of a baby goat
a gentle fern in black underwear
gulping from a garden
of carnations
the kisses made in my mind, the tail
of a thread
moving further from
the seam

 

Alex Thayer is a writer living in Boston. Previous jobs include: actress in TV and film, teacher, waitress, cat sitter, coffee barista, sports radio intern, and bunny face maker.

Salt Three Corners; Converse with the Fourth

A combined Sonnet and Golden Shovel after Michel de Montaigne’s essay: “That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged Until After Our Death”

So listen to noises in your stomach,
there are languages inside. Keep those who
are hungry in your ear for the dumb-luck
spirits making bets on your home. Go queue

up carbonated whispers of gin, held
above shrunken bellies and shrunken heads
who trust the TV – the ghosts once expelled
are back.  Supply them supper of sweet breads:

envious sustenance you created
of flowers, kisses, compliments, secrets.
The final dinner (last breaths of dated
grandeurs) leads to the want that is deepest.

Here is a hunger you could not have known,
below the skin, driven into the bone.

 

Rebecca E. Davis is an award-winning writer, experienced editor, and established dance instructor/choreographer living and working along the Mississippi/Alabama gulf coast. She is currently working towards her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, and recently received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of South Alabama.

The Dream Corridor

The dreams,
the purple calamities
wrapped in rolled-up letters;
this was now the sitting position
of the chameleon.

The bell rose in the corridors
like a sulphur smell
infusing time with memory,
turning them into the concepts
that they were,
ringing against empty metals
for our dogs to
raise their ears.

And the ears belonged to the dogs,
the bell to the stars.

 

Priyanka Kapoor works at the Vedica Writing Center for The Vedica Scholars Programme for Women. She has a Masters in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. She has been published on platforms such as The Indian Quarterly, Hakara, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, The Showbear Family Circus. She has been shortlisted for R.L. Poetry Award and The Brooklyn Poets' Fellowship. Recently, she was published in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2020-21) (edited by Sukrita Paul and Vinita Agrawal).

Haunted Doll

Somebody else
wore this dress
before me.

I feel her skin
slipping into it.
I feel her hands
work, crumpling
and smoothing
the skirts.

Then a cold finger
melts down my spine.
I’m pricked, I’m
shuddering.

She will wake me,
a midnight eye
at the misted pane.
A wind keening.

She cries in my sleep,
bringing me fragments
of dreams.

footprints   indented snow
hunted   or lost among drifts
a green summer mound
a blue butterfly, entangled

She lives in dark places‒
a closet, a basement,
under the bed.

I know there is
something to run from
or that begs to be witnessed.

I can’t tell if she
wants me to hide.
Or to seek.

 

Melissa Cannon lives and writes in Nashville. She has had careers in academia and in fast-food. Her poems have been published in many small-press journals and anthologies, including Bitter Oleander, The Closed Eye Open, Indefinite Space, Sinister Wisdom and Slant. Her chapbook Sister Fly Goes To Market was published in 1980 by Truedog Press and in 2019 she won the inaugural Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry.

Body Horror

Occupying
a human body
is horrifying.

Open wounds bleed;
central nervous breakdowns;
heartbeats bring life,
its cessation brings death;
a freeing prison cell.

Bones fracture in life
or after in becoming dust.

The mind creates beauty
and nightmares easily.

Eyes bring sight
and go blind.

Scattered throughout the body
are angry little gods bestowing

wonders and taking them away
on a whim or cellular fluke.

Out of a seed
planted we spring
to a life more
complex than any,
only to be reduced
to a death like
others; dust
to dust, ashes
to ashes. Ashes,
ashes
we all
fall
down.

Our body being most
wonderful
in some ways and most
horrible in other ways
does not help in the
least.

The worms have their feast
wither and die to
be eaten too, dust
becoming dust, ashes
eating ashes
ad infinitum.

 

Bernardo Villela has short fiction included in periodicals such as Coffin Bell Journal, The Dark Corner Zine, Constraint 280 and forthcoming in Rivet. He’s had stories included in anthologies such as 101 Proof Horror, A Monster Told Me Bedtime Stories, From the Yonder II, and forthcoming in Disturbed and 42 Stories among others. He has had poetry published by Entropy, Zoetic Press, and Bluepepper and others. Website: www.miller-villela.com. Twitter: @BernardoVillela. Instagram: @bernardodeassisvillela.

Kill All the Flowers

A second grader said, “all the flowers
are dead people.” It felt like rain
from someone else’s umbrella dripping down
the back of my neck. I worried
in drizzles and drops for all the dead
people who grew into flowers named weeds
purslane, periwinkle,
morning glory,
dandelions blown forever into breath.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
I worried for all the flowers plucked, cut,
purchased, apology flowers,
adultery or apathy or words so cross
they have x’s for eyes.
Flowers screaming, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
Please.”
Flowers screaming, “take me back.”
Screaming, “never let me go.”
The rain everywhere, all at once, screaming, lightning loud, “I’ll do
anything.”
I worried for forgiveness or forgetting or
bury this alive.

 

MJ McGinn received his MFA from Adelphi University and was a VCCA resident in 2019. His work has been named to the Wigleaf 50 best very short stories of 2017 and has previously appeared in the Guernica/PEN flash series, New Flash Fiction Review, Firewords, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.

Ivory

Your fingers
-    mine,
so thin.

Vine
climbs up,
in heavy braids.

Coils love the
marble
mezzanine.

Cold
under your fingers,
cold licks on ivory.

Your fluttering eyes
-    mine,
among the

malachite and
howlite,
cold licks on ivory.

 

Anna Shirshova (she/her) is a poet who studies and lives in London. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Writers’ Block, WinglessDreamer, Blue Daisies Journal, and W.E.I.R.D. Anna is also a co-founder and editor for an online magazine The Literary Canteen. Her poetry is tender and elegant, with a sense of timelessness and stillness.

Skeletons Who Soak Up Watercolors

darkened violins on empty screens turning into  eyelashes.  sitting comfortably and wishing for the rest of the world to be swallowed up by the mouth of a plaster wolf.  dissolving down into metal  and disappointing days of lying down   .  watching mountains made of blue and gold.  giants watching baseball through the string of a violin.  tied to the yellow rain boots of flying geese next to the ocean of oil paintings.  while you boulder on across the water.  doing your best to reach the yellow light          

ߛ

rooms full of bodies on purple smoke.  through vents of blue plastic skin.  I see you breathe into.  even as the others admire your death under the fluorescent lights of red eyes.  looking unto the shoulders of dinosaurs.  in the arms of sculptors out on a sea of worlds.         overflowing with the bricks of new societies and languages of skeletons.  smiling at blue butterflies that now surround the waves of last breaths.  now lost to broken oars

ߛ

when we sat at kitchen tables with half eaten apples in our hands. and the days turned out to be too much. and the nights did not dare show up in case you did not learn to appreciate the light of the stars in time. as our practices starve in locked cages when we fall asleep in the pause of vocals. clinking against fresh snow with the feeling of summer spilling out

ߛ

light and memories blow out the candle and hope to be let into the coves of capitalism. looking for a drop of sweat running down a body. to attach themselves under the blue trees we were all told to wear. no one notices the death of tired voices inside. telling us to jump into the tainted glass and let out the dark. where the paint mixes with our tears

ߛ

flowers have replaced the eyes of the skull.  knowing these moments will be soaked up by the balloons dead from fighting.    fingernails stuck deep into the skin of oranges.  wasting for people.           the rage of being a human being standing next to                     the watercolors of us

ߛ

white tears cover the voices of the displaced. now dissolving into the glass of raspberry dreams. inside holes of sunny skulls. fallen over the first yellow eyes of the still living but not still dreaming. when the woods of failed steps still follow the rivers of bones. fingers tapping their own rhythms onto the wooden floors. reaching out and knocking on pastel doors of the living as their breath pass them by and leave nothing but their fatigue. tied to the wrist of the quiet and trailing behind on the sand. like an expired blue balloon who thought it could fly among the kites

ߛ

stand in front of windows and show us to be calm. so we can copy the rest of us on green churches. cut by the light. opening all doors with words we do not understand. meant for the beings inside of us chirping like birds that have found water outside forests. forms filling up air for those who have come to fight the coming from unknown coves

ߛ

looking out the window to cease the outside world. pretending we cannot take creatures with our hopelessness. where we stand in the call of patterns. bringing us back like a rope into the sighs of being untouched by love. crowding our hope and not letting us belong to the wonder of horses sinking into the ground

ߛ

listen to the break in the wind when my senses doubt the attachment of your purple string to the sun.         trying to make themselves small and unbroken by  human eyes.  as we sit in the metal railing    supporting the becoming of people.   pink clouds going around places with locks and studios to fill up.  inside  giant photographs that you see outside eyes.   condemn us to months with no light.  to look at the photos in your hand

ߛ

I know that you mostly wish we had dried our skin to the bone.  but this home is safe and this home is here.  even if you move the wrong ribcage and cannot sleep.    claws that are now a sweater that does not seem to fit you.  alone in the ink that comes out distorted by the fog of a hundred earthquakes.  of  twenty thousand cats spilled out on the slanting hills.  edging closer to the passenger side.  hoping they had a few more hearts

 

Olga Gonzalez Latapi (she/her/hers) is a queer poet with an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Although her writing journey started in journalism, she is now pursuing her true passion: exploring the world of poetry with a mighty pen in hand. She got her BS in Journalism at Northwestern University. Her work has been published in Teen Voices Magazine, Sonder Midwest literary arts magazine, BARNHOUSE Literary Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Impossible Task, Genre: Urban Arts, Biscuitroot Drive, iaam.com, and The Nasiona Magazine, among others. Originally from Mexico City. Twitter: @Olga_G_L. Website: letolgatellyouastory.tumblr.com.

Jump

You’re beside me in the kitchen, across a crowded room.
“Shall we?,” you ask.
I nod, words drowned out by sheets of falling snow.

I slide down the mountain, weaving between soft grey rabbits,
Unable to look away as blood runs from their ears.
My skis hit the top of a tree.

It’s warm amongst the branches, the books glowing brightly.
I hold you close, and we’re standing on the edge of a skyscraper.
You grab my hand and jump.

We fly.

 

Steph Amir is an emerging Australian writer with a background in public policy and research. Currently she is is a Writeability Fellow at Writers Victoria. Her creative work has been published in Archer, Babyteeth, Bent Street, Echidna Tracks, n-Scribe, Writing Place, and the Melbourne City of Literature’s wildlife postcard series. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Night Gardening

An odd time for coral
bells, green-edged,
purple—varicose swell.

While dark mother
swaddles her unnaturals
under blank gash in sky,

you’ve passed yard’s far
edge, where fences bend
toward world’s end.

How odd it is to say
where in the world, knowing
not where nowhere is.

 

Jason Brightwell lives in a tiny coastal town tucked away just off of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay where he finds himself routinely haunted by one thing or another. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including; Gravel Magazine, Sweet Tree Review, Right Hand Pointing, and many more. You can find him online @jasonbrightwell.com.

Love in an Age of Mass Extinction

She spoke careful, obliterated sentences, each one well made but fearful of meandering. Messages to friends, she would thumb out on her phone then near-immediately delete. This was not her life’s only false self-assurance. Did you know that asphalt dawns in nature? Bubbling tar, geocarpic around the bones of prehistory? Whatever earth you step upon is as permanent as tissue.

Her messages, their replies, et cetera loitered in others’ pockets or purses or bedside bibelot drawers. She understood. She birthed every thought and weaned them. But they were on their own now. Strays.

 

J. Campbell was born in Jasper, Alabama. His writing can be found elsewhere, in print and online.

More Dreams Than Sleep

Dreams, night thoughts, and entertaining hypnagogic nonsense

I’ve always been fascinated by the things we think, say, and doodle when our brains are in neutral, when we’re falling asleep, waking from a dream, sitting up in the morning (and other situations, like doodling while on the phone). For decades, I’ve kept a notebook (or an iPhone) by my bed to record what I call night thoughts, those strange, often disjointed and nonsensical ideas and phrases that drift through my consciousness while the rest of me is busy dogpaddling off to Slumberland.

The title for this piece, More Dreams Than Sleep, was itself a night thought. As I woke one morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to shake off the night, it popped into my head, a leftover from something I’d been dreaming or working through in my sleep. Like a lot of these nocturnal words and phrases, this one can be read from different angles. But in that moment, it was entirely clear what the phrase meant to me. In Egyptian mythology, the Goddess Maat, the personification of truth and justice, weighs your heart on a scale when you die to make sure your virtue has kept your soul as light as a feather. I take “more dreams than sleep” to imply a similar weighing. You want your life to be more “dreams” (creativity, big ideas, love, joy, passion, positivity) than “sleep” (spiritual laziness, excessive materialism, the sleep of reason, negativity).

And therein lies one of the benefits of capturing your night thoughts. You gain insight into yourself, surreal and thought-provoking ways of looking at the world, fished from the depths of your id. They also offer seed ideas for books and short stories, articles, poems, songs, and the like, and a dream record to analyze. They are also an endless source of entertainment. I still chuckle wondering what was happening in my sleep to generate “you man-Lucy!” and “amoeba-shaped power clown.”

Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of bits of such hypnagogia. Here is a small sampling:

Lucite cigarettes

Mind bone

Living in the apocalypse that fear itself is destined to create

All metaphysical dramas begin with Zero

A bunch of guys with Lee Marvin mustaches

Kung fu conflict resolution

An amoeba-shaped power clown

He had an asthmatic personality

Pesto and Charles

The next thing you know, it's Adolf and Eva in a bunker

Sometimes, I can feel the actual current of my life. It may not all be pretty, but it is beautiful.

A third way to die

A more profound question

You man-Lucy!

Red nickel #19

Shouldn’t being “full of yourself” be a good thing?

Sky criminal

Might as well meet in the foyer of Yankee Stadium

Into the graveyard of great ideas

Sorry, I’m not in Accounting

Tomorrow ain’t today

Within the oceans of possibility, art bathes

My spirit echo

There are no such things as inevitabilities, only overwhelming probabilities

That amazing moment when you realize that, alone, beyond the sight and judgments of others, you can be exactly as weird as you are

They both took off their shirts

Non-conceptual well-being

Dogshit mindfield

Human texture

I make sure to always sip, never finish, anyone's Kool-Aid (including my own)

There may be a little John Merrick in all of us, but not everyone has their bones in Michael Jackson's safe

William Blake didn’t think it was bad, he just thought it was sad

Just another spacetime Saturday night

Loving you oxygenates my blood

Spice logic

You didn’t know it, but I’ve been dancing. With all of you. The whole time.

 

Gareth Branwyn is a well-known writer and a pioneer of both online culture and the maker movement. He’s the former Editorial Director of Make:, was a contributing editor to Wired for twelve years, and a senior editor of Boing Boing print. He’s authored/co-authored over a dozen books, including The Mosaic Quick Tour (first book about the Web), The Happy Mutant Handbook (with editors of Boing Boing), and Borg Like Me (& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems). He is currently a regular contributor to the Boing Boing and Adafruit blogs, does a weekly newsletter for Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, and just finished the second volume of his bestselling book, Tips and Tales from the Workshop.

Death Night Boy

I’d love to set you on fire
and put your ears spinning
if there was one damn thing I can believe in
on this godless night
black as soot
not a star
not one sad comrade within 40 miles

If this truly is the end
and the end the beginning
I blow onto the cinders that forged
us
senselessly burn
I
boy
I alone
this death night
spark for us a final flame
one last blindfolded savagery
I pull your hand into mine
tell you a story
to keep you here
enthralled
keep us burning

 

Donna Dallas studied creative writing and philosophy at NYU’s Gallatin School and was lucky enough to write under William Packard, founder of the New York Quarterly. She has appeared in a plethora of journals, most recently Horror Sleaze Trash, The Opiate, Beatnik Cowboy and Cajun Mutt Press. Donna serves on the editorial team of Red Fez and New York Quarterly. Twitter: @DonnaDallas15