Where Blue Fires Blaze
There are two matching beds in one pink room
a pink shag carpet and identical ruffled duvets.
Two sisters sleep on opposite beds,
always facing away, one from the other.
The first sister spends her nights tumbling down Niagara Falls
in a whiskey barrel only to wake up and find everyone
gone from the house, distant voices droning beyond the walls
the entire world racked in fever.
The second sister becomes a velvet painted girl hung in a basement
her ribs broken open -- her fortune-paper head
nodding yes nodding no
the careful sister who washes all the dishes without being asked
and tries not to stare too long at the sun, fearing blindness.
Where one sleepwalks,
the other sister follows, a slow circumnavigation of the bedroom’s perimeter
knife in hand, tonguing crumbs in antithesis
while avoiding the moss-covered hallway
which invokes delirium at its widest shore.
Their amphibious poses betray disdain
and the desire to murder with stones.
How interesting to not be hunted down with every possible dagger
though it would hardly feel like love anymore.
~Kelly Boyker~
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#12
The Child Cyclops
The famous child of Tourcoing, France, was born with only one eye located in the center of her forehead. She was perfectly normal in every other way, and lived to the age of fifteen. Robert Ripley, 1929
At first it was easy
hiding the child from the light
lying in her bassinet,
her one eye tracking a mobile
of Hydra, Griffin, Hippogriff, Roc
her laughter only detectable by creatures
thick with impossible claws.
But as she grew and wandered the village,
the whispers became a swallowed nosebleed,
thickening in her throat like pudding skin.
She beseeched the sky
which would not be sated
by her flooded head,
by the loathsome eye.
Her single suitor held her
in the darkness of the henhouse,
slipped his hands beneath her bodice
and when the tentacles of his tongue circled her ears,
she admitted everything:
the small fires licking the floorboards,
the rat she accidently swallowed,
the narrow fissures between the monoliths
and that she was perhaps not a fully mortal girl.
In the end there was no real confession,
only her mouth, like an entry wound
ringed with infection
the tiny taking teeth, the rotten hooves,
and her single eye
unmaking even as the stones commenced,
adding and subtracting.
~Kelly Boyker~
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#11
Sermon at the Plastic Surgeon's
they've been shaving down the bone
of my oversized nose
I've been looking in the mirror
at the blood
someone mentioned that my toes
are slightly overgrown
I think they want to trim them
next
week I'm working on a psalm
for the black bird bible
I thought I put all the syllables in place
but my ears have just been tucked
and i cannot hear the tone
of cluck cluck cluck
from the mass
~Emily Smith-Miller~
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#10
VINDICTIVE SPIDER
Vindictive spider
dangling dancing darkly on her string
perfect hourglass belly
seductive shape
“come to me
draw close”
feigning innocence
shy and innocuous
“my fangs are not needles
I won’t plunge into you
you won’t catch a dose of poison”
sets of eyes fluttering
sharp, gleaming
disguising the penetration
of their alluring glare
She weaves her web
around and around my wracked body
strand by strand
injecting my neck
with lies
and truths
no hesitance
just small insistence
poison disguised as love
jealousy disguised as caring
anger disguised as justice
I’m cocooned
prostrate
struggling
the serum doing its job
the life dimming in my eyes
lips dry and trembling
body limp
I’m dying
and she won’t withdraw
Vindictive spider
I am wed to
gauzed in full
smothered
enveloped
turning gray
she sucks me
and my life drains
she does it as nonchalantly
as precisely
as a mother cuts meat on her child’s dinner plate
the precision of a surgeon
as the light flickers out
in my eyes
my body droops
my hands cold
fingers unable to grip
a few more threads
and I’ll be gone
with nothing to prove
I was here
except these words
Vindictive spider
breathing in my shallow breath
this will be the only meal she ever has
she’s making the most of it
~John Tustin~
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#9
I Hunt You
Your shallow breathing kept me kneeling at your side, pouring the thin poison over parched perfect lips, loving you just the same, wanting to watch you fade, fade away. Flutter in my palm humming bird baby, beat out your best speech to tell me it's all my fault and we were conditional, based on the things I did. Drink up slowly, I want to make this last. I want to see your eyes flash purple while I'm singing the chorus to your final aria. They said topiary romance, cutting hedges with my hips, bringing strays to touch the bed sheets, leaving paw prints on your pearl snap shirts. Pack of eager hunters watching you slip away. We will stare down the days you last, like beast baited on the floor. She would never feed you to the wolves, they said. But they don't know me so well. They don't know my cloak and dagger, or my moonlight voice. Waiting for the jugular, waiting for your heart, creeping, creeping, as you flicker and your eyes fill with fear.
~Emily Smith-Miller~
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#8
Queen Arachnid
your ravenous queen, all beauty and disease, dark veil over her eyes, lace spreading over thighs, shes porcelain mistress, licking crimson fingers of a satin glove, black days are here again, and she’s your reason for living and dying. let her take you to the bed, run the gauntlet, sweat and blood, tearing up from passion’s cusp, this wont end so nice, i trust, never leave an arachnid to her spinnerets. flashing that seductive leer, but you wanted her, you needed this, and each touch makes you love her sadistic feelers more. widow, at the window, plans left to unfold, web unwound and occupied, let the poison kiss take hold. empty shell, beautiful victim, sucked dry and drunk on reeling grace. who knew death tasted so savory.
~Emily Smith-Miller~
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#7
Chrome Bumpers
I could feel my whole body clench when she walked into the room wearing nothing but a clear plastic rain slicker, a pair of my white briefs, and red rubber boots.
She said she liked to do it in the rain with the lightning lighting up her face.
It was late, pouring outside, and I had already taken care of business to a six-pack and some porn. She must have heard me, wanted some of that action, but I didn't think I had it in me until she bent over to turn off the TV. Her nipples pressed hard against the plastic.
I said, "No."
She went and got the keys to my truck.
"I can't see shit," I said as I twisted the steering wheel, the road blurred in the rain ahead of me as we bucked, swerved, and weaved our way down the dead end road to the quarry on the outside of town. She had her head out the window. Screamed. Delight. Rain kissing crystalline to her eyelashes, her hair pressed close to her lips.
She said all kinds of dirty things to me, and she smiled when she said it, but I said, "No," and kept on driving.
She liked the ledges, where the rock was loose and slippery. The rain slicker flashed in the headlights as she danced to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, blasting from the car stereo. I loved the way the sludge hit her bare thighs every time she smacked her heels into the soft earth. I lit a smoke, watched her, thought about her, pressed wet to the filthy hood of my truck.
"I want you," she said. "Want to feel you next to me, on me, in me."
I said, "No." Then I kissed her mouth while she fumbled with my jeans, pushed them down to my knees with her feet. The engine was steaming, and the rain felt good on my ass. I flipped her over, pressed her face into the metal, her nails scratching into the fading paint. She said she loved me, but she didn't really love me. She loved a good time. I just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. I pushed the rain slicker up to her shoulders, grabbed her hips. Her rubber boots squeaked as she struggled against the bumper. Her lips were wet. Her words were wet. Her lies slick with sweat. She said I was a bastard, a motherfuckin' tease, so I put a rag in her mouth to shut her up.
And the rain came down, pressed the night in close around us.
She was the tease. She wanted it. I wanted it too, I guess. But she always said, "No."
On the way home, she said I tasted like gas and lithium grease, and "According to the news," she said, it was gonna rain all week.
~Cheryl Anne Gardner~
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#6
Scrap Metal
You tasted of salt and lithium grease, and you smelled of flux and butane. You had once said to me, "A penny for your thoughts," and that's how it is for me when I think of you now -- a bit of copper on my tongue.
~Cheryl Anne Gardner~
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#5
Raw Sewage
One of the biggest mistakes he'd ever made was licking that light post, the one just outside the x-rated theatre on Delaney Street. He'd attended church that night at the chapel down the road, said, "The sermon set my hair afire," and he meant it, literally. I heard rumour that it did just that, struck by lightning, right there in the breach between a Hail Mary and an Our Father. His appeal had been turned away, his faith decapitated and found later in a ditch off Highway 1. He claimed in a hysterical confession that a school nurse had touched him -- there -- during her "inspections," which involved Polaroids and cherry flavoured lollies and lube. "Women shouldn't act like men," he said, but she did -- look like a man, even with everything tucked out of sight. He could smell gasoline and sewage in her hair, when it wasn't pinched tight to her head, when she'd hovered low over him and he could feel it against the naked skin of his back. She'd said all girls had spicy secrets and that all boys loved that sort of thing. That's why he'd licked the light post. That was the first night he saw her again. She was older, yes, a little worn, but it was her, definitely her, in her nurse's outfit, pushing the edges, pawning her favours in the throbbing red light. She'd rubbed her bare ass up against that light post, ever so briefly, and this time, he'd wanted something to keep.
~Cheryl Anne Gardner~
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#4
Animal Nature
He smelled like graveyard dust, thick patchouli wafting over her as he nuzzled her neck against the hardwood floor. Naked and arrogant they bent themselves into animal poses, drawing out pleasure while potatoes simmered on the stove. Sometimes the heat of the kitchen is too much to deny and lust delivers wet hard vibrations through your loins. She was growling in his chest as he rolled her hips back, pulling her pubic bone closer to his. Explosions were unavoidable. Even though the carpet had just been cleaned, she didn’t mind him pulling out to cum on it. Something about the stain excited her. She was all royal red rug burns and flushed orgasms, panting heavily. It always started like this. The first encounter. Pulsing passion in hot, damp sex. The animal began to rumble and she knew that her loss of control was a carelessness she couldn’t afford. Flexing back her hand she saw that she was too late. He was still breathing hard on the floor, worn from the fucking, from carrying her sweet ass from counter to counter and finally laying her down to bend her legs back and get deep inside. To pump himself through her veins. He was so fixated on his recent orgasm and the woman who he could eat up that he didn’t notice her. The fingers were cracking and bending, the nails curling and extending. She hit all fours. He looked up through his sex coma to see her legs growing and her body changing. There was no time to understand, before he could take her in, she was a real bitch whimpering on the lust scented carpet, barring her teeth selfishly at his flesh.
~Emily Smith-Miller~
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#3
Alpha Orionis Is Dead
Supernova from Orion,
glows as a pink star
emblazoning the universe red
as I look upon its starlight.
Oh, how I lament thee Betelgeuse,
most magnificent supergiant.
Explosive end of the supergiant,
alpha star of Orion.
Darkling death of Betelgeuse,
eighth brightest star,
illuminating the universe with starlight
casting an astral gel of red.
How long will the red
light of the supergiant
illuminate the night sky with starlight
before a black void appears in Orion?
How long before we miss the star,
the pinkish cast of Betelgeuse?
The universe shall miss thee Betelgeuse.
I too shall miss thy red
luminosity, dead star,
super bright supergiant,
alpha star of Orion,
in the waning of thy starlight.
The waning of thy twinkling crimson starlight
betrays thee, most beauteous Betelgeuse,
astral jewel of Orion.
More precious now than the ruby red
corona of any galactic supergiant.
You are my fallen star.
Tears flow from my eyes dead star,
as I watch thy waning starlight.
How much longer will I sense thee supergiant?
Will I be alive when thy spectrum forever dies, fair Betelgeuse?
Will my eyes turn red?
Will I see the void of the red that was integral to Orion?
I pray though thou be dead, that I will always see thee star Betelgeuse.
Shimmering starlight, a crimson cast of red.
Dead but not forgotten supergiant of Orion.
~ Daniel G. Snethen~
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#2
110%
~PoetJoe H. Gallagher~
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#1
Lines on the highway, going south from austin
her thoughts frenzied by winter, early evening.
a lucky strike tucked behind her ear
whistling show tunes and crawling south,
she steers his body like a pickup truck
covered in dents, a real bare bones ford.
drifters pick strawberries from the tires,
nap in the transmission.
she shifts with his spinal cord.
the roof of his mouth, the clutch.
he rides a silver bicycle made of metal from her cavities.
~David Greenspan~
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