can’t play pictures out here

by Mike Foldes

jorge focused on taking the same photographs over and over. different people who all looked the same. mangold said “we can't keep writing the same poem, painting the same picture, shooting the same photo…. you must get out and away and come back with fresh flowers and wet sand.

i think there’s some down that alley.” jorge went to search for wet sand and fresh flowers. mangold never saw him again. when he returned, jorge was a different person, unrecognizable. his work was different, too. he’d taken up guitar and composed music for it that turned rivers green, the sky red and mountains mauve. when he put away his instrument, the world he played in went dark. mangold said, “let’s go inside. you can’t play pictures out here.”

The Other Muse

Nancy Gauquier

This is not about Pegasus,
but about a dark horse
born without wings,
& banished to an island lost
in the mists of Atlantis,
not a horse born to the sun
and bright soft clouds that
will never grow pregnant
with rain, but a horse born
in the sweat of your pain,
when you are too whipped
by work, by a world that
has a God but no Goddess,
a world that worships
its mountains of gold,
but never remembers the
nightmares of its buried soul.

When you are so sick & tired
& faith has leaked out of the holes
in your dream, that one in which
you are always treading water,
& thirsty for one sip of love,
she is surrounded by ravens
who caw & shriek &
fan her with their dark wings,
shielding her from the burn
of the sun.

Though you once longed for Pegasus
to take you up into his wings,
it is no longer Pegasus
you cry out for, but
an estranged dark horse
shrouded in the dust of Sisyphus.
If you are lying exhausted
under some dead indefinable tree
on an island lost, you may open
the soft eyes of the fog to believe
she has always been there,
like a dark wave,
waiting.

Found

by Savannah Stuitje

Love is, Her.
It is the feeling in your chest
When she is dripping from the shower
Combing her hair with patient strokes
Blue eyes trained on the liver spotted mirror
As you lay sprawled on her bed
Watching the water drip down her skin and roll over her nipples
Down her stomach
Not quite flat, the hipbones curved maternal to hold
Like offered palms, the well of her
A birthmark beaded with water glossy and distended
Looks to you like a cluster of stars
And you know if you kissed her, she would taste sweet
Where the soap was smoothed over her belly and between her thighs
Removing a tangy musk that you have breathed in, head pressed to her warmth
Eyelashes fluttering
She is automatic in her routine
But you are transfixed by her breasts moving as she does
Her shoulders softly rounded and peppered with freckles
Shielding herself without conscious thought as she continues to brush her hair
And from the bedspread you take in the lines where her bathing suit protects her from the sun
Wet fabric you have tenderly peeled down,
To kiss cold skin slightly gritty with sand, salty and pale
As your fingers ran up the flesh of her calves
Feeling the prick of dark stubble

The intimacies of every day
Are in the blotched pink around her mouth
A cut healing raised on her tanned forearm
A towel slung unevenly
The frayed terrycloth damp

How she slips into your tee shirt, climbs onto the bed
Hands bracing at the old springs give to her weight
The droplets of water left in a trail on the white bleached sheet
Love is when she is stretched out beneath you
And her hands are in your hair
Still ropey from a day at the beach
And you know she wants you to clean up
That she’s wary of the grains on the soles of your feet that will cling to the old cracked linoleum and pressed wooden planks
But for now
She will let you lie against her
And the afternoon sun travel up your back
Warm and yellow
Her taste in your mouth

Seasons of the Ape

by John Pursch

Nylon captives creak
in thermogenic motor
hovel blister hiss
compaction rituals,
plugging matrimonial
defection sprints with
newly sweating
pontoon spins,
cycling wheezes
into mourning.

Minnows foment
religious hyperbole
by the sextant’s
lusty gleaming
intersection teeth,
hemming integument
with pinochle breath’s
lonesome punch line.

Eruptive sidearms
capsize in moaning
glaucous schisms,
clubbing for pale red
seasons of the ape.