IT IS GETTING DARK ON MY BODY AND I CAN NO LONGER SEE MY FINGERTIPS. MY GENDER IS NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK. MY BODY IS AFRAID OF EVERYTHING. MY GENDER ALWAYS CARRIES MACE IN ITS POCKET AND KEYS BETWEEN ITS FINGERS. MY BODY SLEEPS SOMETIMES BUT MY GENDER IS ALWAYS AWAKE. WE EAT TOGETHER, AT THE SAME TABLE, BUT THE FOOD IS DIFFERENT ON EACH PLATE. WE TRY A LITTLE OF EACH OTHER’S MEALS, FEELING WHAT FUELS THE OTHERS FUEL US TOO. I AM DISTRACTED BY MY BODY, MY BODY IS DISTRACTED BY MY GENDER, AND MY GENDER IS DISTRACTED BY LIGHT, AIR, AND THE ENERGY LEFT IN THE ROOM ONCE EVERYONE LEAVES. MY GENDER IS DRY ROSE PETALS, AND WIND, AND THE SPINNING FEELING IN YOUR GUT ONCE WE’VE LOCKED EYES. SUMMER IS GONE BUT WINTER IS JUST AS LONELY. AT LEAST AT NIGHT MY COMFORTER MAKES THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY NEXT TO ME AND WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES I CAN STILL SMELL YOU. OUR GENDERS ARE FRIENDS, IN THE REALM WHERE ONLY GENDERS LIVE, THEY DANCE AND TALK AND SHARE SMOKES OUT OF THEIR BEDROOM WINDOWS, LIGHTING INCENSE TO HIDE THE EVIDENCE. MY GENDER IS THE FLOATING PYRAMID IN THE PURPLE WINDOW OF A MAGIC 8 BALL: SHAKEN, FULL OF ANSWERS, AND SLIGHTLY FROTHY. MY BODY IS JUST AS FROTHY, BUT FILLED WITH QUESTIONS, INSTEAD. EITHER ONE WILL ONLY TELL THE DIVINE TRUTH.
Danni Bergen (they/them) is a poet, photographer, and artist who was born and raised in Denver but has recently relocated to Butte, Montana to try living a little slower on for size. They have an Associate’s of Arts in Theatre from the Community College of Aurora and a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with concentrations in creative writing, visual art, and performance from Naropa University. You can see more of their work on dannithealien.com. @dannithealien on Instagram
A kid outside shouts “There’s no tomorrow!” and, I think, he’s right. And, I think, how must it feel to be this kid, ten and skating a paved alley, bright sunshine in April, and feel not joy but dread. The world is burning. But I have just eaten a fig that tastes of your mouth and tastes of my desire for your mouth, so if he’s onto something, and there is no tomorrow, let me fall into the rubble with this last wash of your sweetness on my tongue, let my desire be the blade of sprouting green that cracks the wreckage, let all the world that comes after sing out for you.
If you ask me why I left Michigan, I would tell that you that it wasn’t because of the weather which left me with a bloated album of waiting for the blackouts to skip between the trees. It wasn’t because the roofs unfurled and the doors retreated to hollows somewhere in the sky. It wasn’t because of the shelves of water, inching like new constellations across an endless night. It was the full circle of fear, the kind that stays in my mouth like neon jawbreakers, refusing to surrender, tailor-made to dislocate words that I try to speak. I dread colliding against this familiar: when the memory gathers like burning hands around your throat.
John Kucera was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, The Sandy River Review, Utopia Science Fiction, Slant, Connections Magazine and Friends Journal. He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he writes and teaches.
The green chilis wait to warm the winter’ silence,
smile on its bleak face reflecting on our drowsy stillness
dropping our moist clucks of winter appetite that craves
for the sweet burn on our cold -dry tongues. A handful, as my
mother makes a cut along each, the mouths open as babies’. She
stuffs the ajwain, while dipping each in the soft besan batter, and
drops those saffron-hued bodies, in the boiling dance of groundnut oil
they drift with sizzling joy, and the aroma being wafted unsettles to
resettle us with craving gulps of eagerness to warm our frozen taste
buds. My daughter hops and struts around, cooing off the moments into
those succulent brown, hardened chili bajjis my mother serves warming
our frozen taste buds with each mouthful that
deliciously burns us afloat into the wrapping cold of winter.
Note: Bajji is an Indian delicacy from the state of Andhra Pradesh
Sreekanth Kopuri Ph.D. is an Indian poet, Current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He recited his poetry at Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, and many other universities. His poems appeared in Arkansan Review, Christian Century, A Honest Ulsterman, Chicago Memory House, Two Thirds North, Heartland Review, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, Contrapuntos IX, Vayavya, to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of the Golden Book of the year 2022. He lives in his hometown Machilipatnam with his mother.
My oldest living brother a farmer; a writer, me; my sister a banker; my youngest brother a nuclear bomber pilot; our other two brothers long where our parents have gone, we stare at the dew-starred earth we’ll soon become and, though grown, wonder, like errant planets or wandering asteroids how much more mischief we dare.
Ralph Salisbury (1926-2017) grew up hunting and trapping, for meat and pelts, and laboring on a family farm which had no electricity or running water. He attended university on the GI Bill after WWII and retired as Professor Emeritus from the University of Oregon, Eugene, where he taught for 43 years. His prizewinning memoir, So Far, So Good (recipient of the 2012 Riverteeth Literary Non-Fiction Book Prize), his three books of fiction, and his eleven books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. Poems from his twelfth book, seeking a publisher, have appeared in Northwest Review, About Place, and elsewhere.
Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou A review by Chris Bullock
“a moment of pause with things that matter”
Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou
Another Death Bed (but this one is more comfortable, and the sheets just came out of the dryer)
During my time “studying” in China, I learned to see art not as much a hustle and grind, but rather as way of being. While taking an introductory Mandarin class, most classmates said they were pursuing business and politics, which only elicited a nod from the teacher, a middle-aged guy from Shanghai. When I said I enjoyed art, he gave a pause and a grin, then said an artist is blessed because an artist is never bored. From others there I got the same impression, a few said they wanted to be friends with an artist because an artist thinks differently than most, offering refreshing if unpredictable conversation. I had a local Chinese musician buddy who offered me drugs, guns, and often spoke his mind. When I said I was studying education, he interrupted me to say “Chris, you are not teacher. You a fucking artist.”
Artists, poets, and other rabble often share with us the process of discovering themselves and the world, and Another Death Bed by Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou, or Jasmine, offers that insight of a sitting in her brain as life unfolds. She rummages through the closet for an old stackable chair and offers us a seat in her mind, and she points out things which are as new to her as to you. You might expect to read a few pieces and set the book down, but time has suddenly passed and you have finished the book and wondering if there is something you missed. These are notes in the head of a creative, and as she puts it “a moment of pause with things that matter.”
I had first made her acquaintance upon returning from China to Colorado Springs, and attending a monthly discussion salon put on by Non Book Club Book Club. I had lived in the Springs and never found it repressive or backwards, rather I had come upon the same inspiration that has made it attractive to artists since the Broadmoor School. It was a bohemian life, piecing together rent how I could, playing concerts, going on tour, attending poetry readings, wandering art galleries and alley ways. In contrast to Denver, where quite a few were on hustle and grind mode and unwilling to open up for fear you might plagiarize and profit, in the Springs I found a tight knit and relaxed misfit milieu wherein just seeing differently made you different. Similar to my time in China. Fucking artists.
A few things had changed since my time away, however. All these creative students and faculty from UCCS were not only putting on events, but also inviting you out to see it. Living downtown, meeting up just to chat about what we are up to. Trying out unusual ideas, without even a business plan or a merchandise table. It is true what Denver diehards might say, the Springs could be boring, but it also encouraged you to do something to fill the boredom, even if as in her case, “riding a Lime Scooter the wrong way down Bijou Street with a big black hat on.”
This collection is the writer discovering her mind as it emerges, and sharing it with you. An invitation to sit in her head on an extra chair pulled from the storage closet, a place which is rough around the edges and unaccustomed to guests, but will make do if you show up. A peek into Tejon Street bars, rubbing elbows with the most normal people imaginable, as an artist with other oddballs making things happen in warehouses, restaurants, bookstores, parking lots, on the street, wherever there is an emptiness screaming to be borrowed and occupied temporarily. Art for art’s sake, after which the observer can’t point out any details but just feels like something invisible has changed.
One moment it is “the girl whose thighs don’t touch leaves the bathroom in front of me at the punk show” and the next is finding graffiti in the bar that says “I want to be dead with my dad”. One moment it is living your Boricua being and all the cultural weight and expectations, the next you are really just an artist and you are your “own greatest fear,” writing down your mind as you uncover it. Even after the tour is done, I am still in the chair on a dusty studio floor, and one of the legs of the chair is off-balance. But instead of complaining about it, I just rock a little, for art’s sake.
Tall City (Chris Bullock) was born and got bigger on Long Island, New York. He did a few things then moved to Colorado Springs after trying to study in Paris. He did a few things there too, then moved to Denver, where he went back to school for foreign language. A couple of years on scholarship in China, and he is back in Denver.
Everyone around the table was navigating through the meeting casting noncommitments around freely evading work with vagueness and excuses nodding to the boss with their personal variations of the boss nod. The meeting was a formulaic soul killer serving no measurable purpose except to do what meetings do best which is to generate more meetings. Attendees took notes at times but those who wished they weren’t there in that meeting did not take a single note. I did not take notes. The meeting dragged on and on. Its leader, clearly new to meeting leading, stopped caring himself halfway through. I actually saw his spirit leave his body as it yawned itself toward the ceiling. And once everyone had their shot at dropping a few buzzwords leveraging the platform empowering the Tiger team using synergy to increase market share while ensuring ROI for Q3 on the R2D2 They eventually called the meeting done in part because of the realization that it could have been an email, but mostly because it had become that wet log you try to burn in your campfire but it just won’t start.
life, it twists, frayed at the edges, its seams expose where dreams and disappointment touch
the day’s reach, slenderest blue heaven, heaviest cloud, longest hour past youth’s back door, what we experience
how many twists can be endured, split, cross section after cross section each thread pulled through the eye of a needle
it appears misshapen but every block creates a pattern mistakes, landscapes of torn cloth create a thing of beauty as each fabric, stitch and multi-layered piece completes the bed we can finally take shelter in. —
TAK Erzinger is an award-winning poet. Her collection At the Foot of the Mountain (Floricanto Press California, 2021) won the University of Indianapolis Etching Press, Whirling Prize 2021 for best nature poetry book. It was also a finalist at The International Book Awards 2022, Willow Run Book Awards and Eyelands Book Awards. Erzinger’s forthcoming poetry collection Tourist (Sea Crow Press, Massachusetts) is due out in April 2023. Erzinger is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. She lives in a tiny hamlet in Switzerland with her husband and two cats.
—–I found a head in my garden. Not a lettuce head, but among the lettuce heads –an actual head. A human head. It was wide eyed and alluring, a bit like Jeff Goldblum. At second glance, a lot like Jeff Goldblum. This head, it was Jeff Goldblum’s, or if not, an exact replica, nothing to distinguish it from the real thing. It wasn’t severed off, the remains of an act of violence or some horrific accident. Instead, it had smooth, unbroken skin under the chin where a neck should have been. No scars. The head was always a head, not a head that had been removed from a body. —–A bit disturbed, I buried it. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t need a bodiless head in my life. So I dug among the lettuce heads and deposited the actual head –the human head– into the earth. I watered the spot, thinking of Jeff Goldblum down there in the dark under my feet, thirsty maybe, even if he had no stomach to store the water. I patted the soil, got sentimental, and fertilized the patch with liquid seaweed. With luck, the head would take root and grow. Into what? A full embodied star. —–Then I waited. But nothing came. In a way, I was relieved, though a larger part of me felt the weight of disappointment. I tried to ignore it: the pang of loneliness that came with a world free of your own, personal Jeff Goldblum. But in the end, that small seed of desire grew larger than a prize-winning cabbage head. It grew to fill me entirely, the height and weight of a man. —–Weeks later, when it was time to harvest the lettuce heads, I decided to unearth the actual head –the human head. When I dug down, I grazed two elastic ears to hit the broad foundations of a wide set of shoulders. I kicked aside the lettuces, no longer caring about the sauerkraut I had planned to make. I dug, and dug some more, six feet or maybe six-foot-three, because that’s how tall he is, that’s how tall the fully-formed body had grown beneath the ground among the writhing earthworms and teeming microbes. —–“Can you speak?” I asked him. —–Then, with the bedazzling charm and charisma one might expect from Jeff Goldblum, he spoke in rich, honeyed, tones –all confidence– his words streaming in profusion in that Jeff Goldblum way, a way in which one’s dialogue fails to keep up with a mind that is churning ideas faster than a cocaine-amped cheetah with its ass on fire, yet still flows from a set of delicious lips with adequate eloquence and a unique, amusing delivery. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said, but it left me weak at the knees. The one thing I do recall from that sermon of silver-tongued soliloquy was the comment and question that came at the end. —–“That’s a whole heck of a lot of cabbages there, my friend,” Jeff Goldblum said with jovial wonder. “Say, how would you like to gather those big boys up and make a tremendously large batch of sauerkraut, maybe some kimchi? That is, of course, if you’re a spice kind of person, and you strike me as a spicy kind of person, if you know what I mean.” His wink and smile was so Jeff Goldblum. I wasn’t about to say no to making sauerkraut with this wonderful man. So we gathered the cabbages and went inside. —–In the kitchen, we lay out the purple and green brassicas, each one like a furrowing rosebud the size of a human head. I fetched the great ceramic crocks that would house the fermenting cabbage while Jeff got busy with the grater. He was very lively, energetic, and like a newly-opened jar of pickled vegetables, was fizzing with enthusiasm for the task at hand. And it was his hand, in fact, that he nicked, somewhat careless, which took his graceful finger clean off his immaculate hand. —–“Whoops,” Jeff casually remarked, offering a comic, oops-a-daisy face and shrug, before placing his severed finger into the crock along with the shredded cabbage. I nearly dropped the cabbages bundled in my arms, such was my shock at seeing the layers of vegetable fibers on display across his open wound, no blood or bone to speak of. —–I set down the large vegetables and gathered my calm, finding both my voice and my courage, before asking a man who by all appearances seemed to be Jeff Goldblum, yet grown from the soil, apparently made entirely of cabbage, “Are you the real Jeff Goldblum?” —–“Of course,” he said, and smiled with the same knit eyebrows and are-you-crazy? expression that I had seen on the face of a beloved actor so many times in so many wonderful films over the decades. But then he sneezed and his forehead flapped open, a crisp and fresh green cabbage head. —–I asked for the grater, which the cabbage man yielded up, but not without a winning smile that nearly left me paralytic. I waded through his uncanny charm, his insanely weird sex appeal, and with effort, took up the grater. I looked at a man-shaped cabbage who was the spitting image of Jeff Goldblum and decided I couldn’t trust a brassica that had more charisma than me. With difficulty, I reasoned that I didn’t need a heartthrob vegetable in my life. —–So I took up the grater and shredded Jeff Goldblum into ten thousand tallies of anemic green. I stuffed every bit of him, every scrap of cabbage confetti, into one of the great ceramic crocks and entombed the Jeff jigsaw with the placement of its heavy lid. —–Weeks later, lonely yet again, I opened the lid in anticipation for I knew not what. A gentle fizz aerated with seductive song from underneath the cabbage leaf seal, which I peeled back and discarded like the clothes from a lover who was ready to be ravaged. I smelled its pungent odor, its astringent tang. —–I took a bite, shoveling a sample in my mouth with my bare hands, and gasped in a pleasure accentuated by the purest of pain. It was hot, like a flame, like kimchi on steroids. I thought of Jeff’s words, his assumption about what sort of person I am, how I struck him as a spice kind of person. —–I swooned and hit the floor. He was absolutely right.
James Callan is a dual citizen of the US and NZ. He grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota and lives on the Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand. His wife and son are human, but the remainder of his family are an assortment of animals, including cats, a dog, pigs, cows, goats, and chickens. His writing has appeared in Bridge Eight, White Wall Review, Maudlin House, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His novel, A Transcendental Habit, is available with Queer Space.
when the earliest shamans emerged from the primordial mist adorned in skins and skulls with fists full of mushrooms
the dimensions flowed freely like rivers cutting through the rock after the younger dryas impact
our spines and chakras were aligned to receive those dimensional outputs magnetic bands of frequencies flowering from the gravitational center of the universe like a fractal mandala
shiva and shakti creating and destroying everything all at once bringing balance and purpose to the whole
but we became too focused on the physical environment overly busy avoiding predators while hunting and gathering food
our powerful thoughts became consumed with fear bending our spines and misaligning our chakras filtering out the higher dimensions hardening the density of physical 3d space replacing balance with chaos adjusting our bandwidth away from the meridians of the universal body trapping us in the concrete filaments of our devolving human minds
South Broadway Ghost Society 