kingsoftrain

Gutter
poems, Lauren Brazeal
YESYES BOOKS, 2018

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Lauren Brazeal’s Gutter is a fast melancholy. A destination that seems to have been masquerading as a journey might it paint itself too plainly and be mistaken for a church. Its hunger has power. Is an invisibility brought on by an imagined eating. It devours everything not in its path. You. Me. It is saying we weren’t there. It is saying it knows more than one person whose other tail is a removed tattoo. With erasures that test the boundaries of redaction and checklists that summon the grocer’s gaze of otherhood, Gutter returns to pain its blue doorbell and to desperation, color. As the body, here, makes its moonless bargain with bread, one is best to see it before the angels get to staring.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
https://www.yesyesbooks.com/product-page/gutter

Geraldine Fernandez (Dray) is a graduate of Bachelor in Secondary Education Major in English and a second year law student from the Philippines. Her works have appeared in various papers and poetry journals namely The Hundred Islands, The Plebeians, The Birds We Piled Loosely, The Fem Literary Magazine, Spillwords Press, etc.

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Notes To D

D,
I wonder if you read back
through our message history.
Are you sometimes turned on
by my silence?
After all, that’s my best nude.

D,
What’s on my mind?
I want a soul to sit with
over a few glasses of gin
while I contemplate
how to bid the world
goodbye
without breaking
anything
or anyone.

D,
Lust has a mind of its own.
I am a participant
in one too many sex
scenes in my dreams,
you the leading actor
in some of them.

D,
We don’t know each other but I miss…

David Bankson lives in Texas. He was finalist in the 2017 Concīs Pith of Prose and Poem contest, and his poetry and microfiction can be found in concis, (b)oink, Thank You for Swallowing, Artifact Nouveau, Riggwelter Press, Five 2 One Magazine, etc.

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“What Dad Saw at the Reunion”

The blind see paintings
like soft music.
On the back porch

my father is a sightless pine,
receives the blur
of familial body language,

cannot digest
strewn needles
of our visages.

My son’s crayon,
my wife’s painting,
my sister’s makeup

all make vague patterns:
Chimes ring clear
from the front porch,

laughing faces
unfold like origami
in a bell jar,

cardinals land as paint spots,
twirl and alight here
into a whirlpool of colors.

A visual orchestra.
Pine shines aloud, then profound.
The trunk sways

with the colors in his mind,
his ears alive from outside,
the euphonious pine.

~

“The…

Rachel Nix is an editor for cahoodaloodaling, Hobo Camp Review and Screen Door Review. Her own work has appeared or is forthcoming in L’Éphémère Review, Occulum and Pidgeonholes. She resides in Northwest Alabama and can be followed at @rachelnix_poet on Twitter.

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I Was Five Years Old the First Time I Saw Anyone Different

In kindergarten, the year: 1989;
she arrived wearing a red dress, white polka-dots all over.

Her skin was dark, bright.
She looked like the first doll my mother gave me.

I wanted to hug her; instead, bashfully, I looked to her & smiled.
She smiled back, & that is all I recall.

Days later she was gone; a man,
someone less than a man,
follower of the KKK,

burned a cross in her Momma’s yard.

He did it, I presume, in the name of a god,
not one I’d care to claim. I…

Cold House
poems, Jon Cone
espresso, 2017

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Jon Cone has words for language enough to convince one it has not been, nor will it be, a waste to daily attend in-person the decorating of the same small room. It’s not that his Cold House stole my breath and not that it left me speechless, but that it made me feel, in its transcribing of what the future predicts, that I’d at least partially proven the interior life of my shapeless informant. If long ago you took, or recently you’ve taken, your own temperature as something motherless to do for a lonely sickness, and if you want to hear again the orphan pulse of those who ball their pillows while waiting for absence to let itself in, this expertly emptied book is a clarity that clears the head of any distant body once too readily given over to the distilled…