Thick With Conviction

These gravestones are shaped the way every avalanche wants to enter the Earth –first as a single doorstep then the rush though the rocks you listen for are already moons helping you find the door for holding on while the light under you becomes another shadow made from wood lays down as a room that cannot change its mind is filled with cracked lips, the cold and end over end the strong corners, the kisses that made it here. Your face is covered with paper now held in place by its words for sky and wind –a simple love note can keep the rain away let you read forever in the dark though it tastes from the salt still on your lips –all those years soaking up this hillside till nothing was left to open except over your cheeks you have all the air you need in the corners not yet grass. You sleep with the coat buttoned and though your eyes are closing the sleeves cling by listening sure her favorite dress is somewhere in this room no longer morning, name...

No Formal Burial I dreamt the roses died. The shape and odor melted into a red ocean. I dreamt I was gnawing on a warm piece of bread. A delusional delicacy disappearing from my palms. My dead branches poked with drought and dusted with barren earth, bleed thin twigs. I dreamt I was awake, that within the dream their bellies were full. They were different versions of myself: skinny, fed, bloated, in peasant bondage, feverish, tenant in a tenant-landlord brawl. I can’t seem to escape the spiral of my children’s limbs. My milkless breasts lead my children into misery.                             …guigh orainn na peacaigh,                                         (...

First Line In the end of days what you need is a good first line. To distract you from the truth with its own truth. The way pain can sometimes distract from pain. The way beauty can sometimes distract from pain. The way a good bedtime story can light up the dark side of an entire planet, given a little room with a bed in the corner, a few right words, a child listening. In the end of days what you need is a good beginning. Something hopeful and trembling like a tongue. Something open and unselfconscious like a mouth, listening to the words, and the music of the words. Something steeply rocking like a ship, or a sleep, heavy, floating, viable, smelling of saltwater and infinite possibility. Distance I love coming back here to this place where I was happy, or maybe I was unhappy and I keep coming back because I’m not here anymore--not there anymore. There’s a difference between a great sorrow and a beautiful catastrophe--beautiful for the way it brought peo...

Kala gives a tour of hell This is the metal box he locked me in. This is the chain he used to keep me bound. This is where he shot Charlie three times in the chest. This is where he buried him, like a dead animal. This is where I was allowed to walk around, like a dog, to smell the air, to hope for release. This when we hear about how likeable my captor was, how he was a great boss, a model citizen, never the type to do this. This is when I don't talk about my bare back against a metal floor, about tasting his scent, about the thumping sound in closed in spaces, and how it echoes in my teeth and eyes. This is when you can read about the fourteen year old that he bound and forced, about how they released him, gave him the chance to step up his game. This is the hole a gun makes, a shovel makes, a void makes when someone you love dies. This is when I give the story an edit, a heroine. When someone asks me what its like to kiss another girl It tastes like cotton candy,...

Those People   I never wanted any more than I could fit into my head- Dave Grohl, Monkey Wrench   They want a McMansion, with a pool and hot tub on 25 acres. They want a summer home on the beach at the Outer Banks. They want a house keeper, cook, gardener, and nanny. They want a Land Rover, Porshe Cayane, or Mercedes. They want the best private schools for their kids. They want bodies and faces like gods, and a bank account so large, the bank manager himself comes to cut their lawn. They want Caribbean cruises, and world vacations. They want to have celebrity actors, musicians, artists, designers, and authors for friends. They want jewelry that startles. One day, a chauffeur, a large yacht moored at a private dock, a helicopter, a private beach. They want to always be happy and healthy, and never die. All I want is a twenty-four-hour Taco Bell. Don Kloss is a 60-year-old poet, musician, and songwriter. He is a New Jersey transplant from rural Ohio. His poems have been ...

Like salvation  And here is the jar of stars I've  collected - your name etched  into each glowing corner. And here is the pulse of my wrist against the soft flesh of your legs, a reminder of devotion, the Morse code of an unspoken truth. And here are the arms I travel like memory, like the record playing over and over into the deep corners of evening. And here is the weight of what I carry each day, in all of the inches of  skin, in the name of this perfect thing we cannot name, but know to be our reason to open tired eyes, to hold like a newborn - like salvation.  Come bail me out of this god forsaken precipice I watch her cat eyelinered eyes flutter in the strain of the artificial light at 1am. Her body, a still, pale softness surrounded by a deep sofa embrace. Her forehead tilted back and exposed. I want to make a ritual of kissing the taut flesh, watch the anxiety's release, let the glow highlig...

Spoon Bender But I was left alone. Like a bent spoon. Or a cowboy. Boot that needs reheeling. I walked around for a while feeling. That I’d put too much faith. In Uri Geller and symmetry. My new and expanding faithlessness. Would take me far. I embraced that national restlessness. That so many young men before me had. I drove my rental car. To Redondo California. But I remained alone like a show dog. Only bred when some shadowy. Master’s needs took precedent.  Or a discredited theory. I would have thrown the broken boot. Into the ocean if there had ever. Been a broken boot to throw. Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three recent chapbooks: Set List (Bitchin Kitsch,) In Stone and The Most Awkward Silence of All (both Cruel Garters Press.) His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit and Cloudbank.

The Stages of Grief Obviously, surprises aren’t always good. There are so many areas where someone can get lost and not even realize it until they’re lost. You did find hints along the way – memories, but no nostalgia. There’s in you some of the stuff that you don’t want to be there. It’s like a gray alien woke you from a normal night’s sleep and showed you the moons of Saturn, leaving rocks in your heart. And then it’s not like that at all, and then it is again, and then it’s not, and everything is blurred and ten thousand times brighter. Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry.

A Dream with My Great-Grandmothers These women, stories finally made flesh, sit across from me on an upholstered couch. Helen folds her hands upon her prayer’s knees. Margaret offers me a piece of heaven-scraping cake. Sitting across from me on an upholstered couch, they ask about me, how my grandparents are doing. Margaret offers another piece of heaven-scraping cake. I’m careful to mind my language and hemline. They ask about my mother, how my grandparents are doing. I ask Margaret if she threw sheet ropes out the window, was careful to mind her language and hemline, and lindy-hopped to Benny Goodman with men. I ask Margaret if she really threw sheet ropes out the window, if she wore three gold rings during WWI and lindy-hopped to Benny Goodman with men who kissed her gloved hands goodnight. She wore three gold rings during WWI because she couldn’t say no to soldiers who kissed her gloved hands goodnight. Helen attended politicians’ wakes on Sunday afternoons because she couldn’t s...

on the nickel block where we go to see about my best friend’s medicine and she explains how the city has been extraordinarily slow in filling the holes on this street for months and months again she tells me how much safer she feels there than in the fast neighborhoods how tall beautiful and immature her son is for his age and i notice lately that construction cones have become as thin as apricot stalagmites marking time as nothing but brave young titian colored brachium punching out and up like any part of a bird’s mouth rootstock reaching for a breath of finished air all they want alive we turn around in an abandoned parking lot behind the next pile of broken orange teeth i wait for you to reseal your blunt with mother’s spit Some things are better free Nothing happens in America until someone sells a ware and a truck or train delivers it unlike all my favorite songs that start squarely in the middle of the end. Our first Winter toge...

3 AM Insomnia Perhaps, my darling, The most intimate thing we can do Is give another our sorrow, To be open, split, and vulnerable, Even while knowing The wound might not be sealed, But left open, and crying, The way a child does, Without shame, or reprimand, But merely To have the hurt held As though it were just another Part of us. Ache You beat until you bruised my heart, You don't get to ask Why it's gone black.  Jonathan Douglas Dowdle was born in Nashua, NH and has traveled throughout the US, he currently resides in South Carolina. Previous works have appeared or are appearing in: Hobo Camp Review, 322 Review, The Write Place At The Write Time, Blue Hour Review, and After The Pause.

Child in the Distance I want to remember the days of being young. Of being the same height as my mother’s knees. Of carrying a tub of fruit inside from the orchard while the sunlight drown the fallen leaves in gold and everyone I loved waiting at the kitchen table; my father in his fiddleback chair, holding a gin and tonic and a lit cigarette. But those aren’t memories anymore, they’re tiny pages scribbled in an old diary, after the war, tucked beside the rules of etiquette like treasured bibelots. Still, if I try hard enough to recall the feeling of being a child, it was for an instant, a flicker of whimsy; a barrel of uneaten fruit, the tenderness of handpicked apple blossoms pressed against my chest. The Boyfriend? I’m the guy who looks prettier than you who wears Zegna suits and cufflinks with my initials in gold. I’ve been told I’m great in bed and that’s an understatement unless you underline great in red, then you’d be on the mark. Here’...

REAR VIEW The heart stops. The dark stark up from beneath her fingernails like wrecks on water, frost smoke glows through lonely. Island and underskirt press into thick hips, lending to the reverie of the last girl on earth. Periphery loots from her to meet the artifice of wind, rustling all memories and miseries pistilled with roots for the scrawl of elegies. Nocturnes of the sea spend ripe in her mouth cooling to relic of things wild and doomed, cadence of sounds holds eventides as she holds jetsam to her chest. INSIDE THE CANVAS TOP It starts with forsythia and sacrosanct; the portrait of you whispering blooms. Each day, I embroider throat as a wound, smoke and drift wag as good as a tongue, dripping ooze on the canvas top. Be some- thing the night unlocks, I lift your stems above the light, sending hiss of words as might a hot mouth on empty. Now I paint your flesh into the trees beside dark, set birds to the palm that opens to coincide...

Hotmail once or twice a year I scroll down to the deepest subbasement of my oldest email account and see the earliest email saved, Subject: Sorry and part of the way through she writes how she needs to end this letter because she’s starting to cry, but wants me to know it was worth it and some days I agree, and some days I don’t know what to do with all this black tar sticking to my lungs worming its way into my bloodstream clogging my heart, blinding my eyes leaving me alone and listless on a silent, cold Friday night in March but I never delete it, and I never go back there and read it until enough new moons have passed that I need to see where I came from, where it all began, the place where the cracks started to form in my peripheral and grew into this collection of broken bottles and chunks of rebar cement moving forward, though sometimes looking back, Subject: Sorry aren’t we all? My Gratitude there is a Taoist belief that it takes the dark of ni...

Master Class: Cinderella Practicing Violin It takes special skill to acknowledge that almost anything may be mended. My mother plays the piano, beats her knuckles against the black and white keys—welds sounds together. Fingers thick; nails painted crimson not the typical hands of a concert pianist. Above her depicted in a Victorian dress—the instrument serving as her accessory; her captive audience. Who unhinged the gate through which her carriage, was set to arrive? (previously published in Zaum) On Lenin’s Mausoleum and Love After Jenny Browne Not every glance is capable of conveying all things at once: love, anger, frustration. I remember your mother’s house the inside of a ship. I know you thought things would be alright turning to sand, all of it coming down. In “Love Letter to a Stranger” you’re always you and I’m always me. A body you’ll do anything to preserve. (previously published in Scryptic) Alla Vilnyansky was born in the Ukraine and came to t...