R. S Thomas-

“The Furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the Furies. A mirror’s temperature is always at zero. It is ice in the veins, its camera is an x-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own”

'Reflections' by R.S Thomas

Gherasim Luca-

'If it is true, as the errors claim, that after death man continues a phantomatic existence, I will let you know. If you do not hear from me for one month, you will know that death is no different than the putrefecation of an onion, a chair, a hat...I commit suicide out of disgust.'
 

(Letter left on the table during the fifth suicide attempt.)

David McLean-

the face rising

                                                                                                         the face rising from the water is not her father 

or even the shattered mirror 

madness lives in, no cozy grin of psychosis 

in cold and sinless wards, 

between the walls of heaven 

and the words of hell 

the innocent cell 

like every cell in her forgotten 

flesh, wet stench of death 

or memories of sex.

nor is it even the self returning, 

no wrinkled crone, no witch 

on her humble chronicled hill 

where gods were never welcome 

much,

the face rising is the everyday flesh, 

covered with the recalcitrant silence 

of one choked scream that never stops: 

it is the death and madness 

she never chose to notice, 

all the everyday lakes where suicides 

stop

nothing is ever given us 

there is nothing to forgive 

or forget; the dead 

have never screamed, 

not as yet

  

between man and the empty


between man and man they have placed evil 

and cruelty, they have sung so eloquently 

of the gods we have forgotten, 

have let die from us as memories die

truthful at sunrise, broken like vampires 

in busy winds. and we sing today 

of man and the empty senseless, 

of bottles of muddy absolution

to wash our callused hands in, hands 

that have held in swords and engines, 

in other instruments of simple worship, 

that tell of the profound dignity of night

                                                                                                        and all its suicides stored up, 

hung out to dry like washing on a line, 

like everything dead and everything alive - 

memories are not made out of time

Gillian Prew-

No Ghosts

Her eyelids the world                         heavy and lost, her womb

a hole, a drifting husk - the winter of her wounds. Her blood                      

a beginning                 passed as innocent fire                  dirty

as her mother’s dust               her father’s flooded organs.

Her worry                 a crime      the fraudulent songs of glass and spires                     

the abject need for miracles.

Aubade for a Dead Man

Birthed from black, a rip of sky,

a bloody thigh and a scar of a man.

Year on year he raped himself invisible,

all his days the jizz of an afterthought.

The mist of conscience left with him as the sun turned;

words robust as smoke in the diary of his solitude.

From the edge of the autopsy I saw his heart a blackberry

rippling purple the black dough of his lungs.

This morning an anniversary of sunken blush

anchoring the ribs of his remoteness.

Into Any Morning

In the loud gloom lost these windy graveclothes fly

a little in the light deadly.

They hang soft

brief wedding gowns

lace wounds wrong with winter.

The wind’s rub clings inward:

a slow funeral. The haunt

of skin defeated.                    

Sun rises amber upon all the bones - some bright-edged,

some black stumps grieving.

Day, dust-drugged

and nothingness enough. 

http://gillianprew.posterous.com/

http://proudspotsandsolitudes.posterous.com/

RC Edrington-

Scarred Canvas

Like a lost car 

from a funeral promenade 

she drifts along the snow-lit shop fronts, 

with the collar of her long black trenchcoat 

cocked like a vulture wing 

against her pale neck and cheekbones. 

As she tosses her golden hair, 

wheatfields in Kansas sway. 

But she does not smile. 

She is tired of men 

who liken her hair to wheatfields, 

who claim to see mermaids puddling 

in the powder blue pools of her eyes. 

She does not smile. 

She does not want me 

to call her teeth pearls 

then pluck them away while she sleeps. 

Pausing, 

she stares through her reflection 

on a gallery window, 

and into a fresh stained canvas 

as though it were the familiar face 

of someone she once may have loved. 

A face which pulls her into a world 

draped in red and purple hues 

on nights she feels like shades of gray. 

A world where she almost... 

but she does not smile. 

As she raises her trembling hands 

to wipe fresh teardrops from her eyes, 

she's reminded of the thin scars 

carved up and down her frail tattooed wrists. 

And she slowly fades 

into an unlit alleyway... 

fades like a much too perfect rose 

in the violent hands 

of this narcissistic artist, 

brushed away by falling snow. 

Still In Hollywood 

We spoke, 

not remembering our lines 

so well rehearsed. 

For a moment, 

we shed our masks 

like soldiers after a war. 

I pulled the mirrored lenses from my eyes, 

hung my dusty leather on a rusty nail 

and held you...for the first time 

in a long time, with my own skin 

pressed firmly against yours. 

Words wafting from your lips 

like sweet smell of marijuana seeping 

from beneath the backstage door. 

The relief of touching you again. 

I'm sorry I left, but is that enough? 

The scars across my heart 

like the stale tattoos on my arms, 

still remain. 

Decades of playing cool. 

Days running into days into years. 

The caved veins of punk romance. 

The midnight amphetamine tremors 

that left me stumbling thru a corridor of mirrors, 

reaching out to find myself 

but only finding 

the cold hospital steel of polished glass. 

Too cool. Too smooth. 

Slam dancing in pneumonia infected dives 

to the thunderous crash of un-tuned guitars, 

as the blood of friends strangers enemies 

(god does it matter anymore?) 

slowly caked around 

the studded spikes I wore so proud. 

But here we are again, 

if only for one sacred moment, 

sobered by the death of a friend 

who placed her soul into a syringe 

and left it trembling 

on Hollywood Blvd. 

I'd thank god it wasn't you, 

if I could find one... 

walking alone down this suicide stained street 

who didn't believe salvation 

could be bought or sold in plastic bags. 

Seven wasted years and here we are... 

still in Hollywood, 

holding onto each other like 

a junkie to his bag. 

We're not 16 anymore, 

but are we starting to grow old? 

Am I growing old?

 

 

RC Edrington's latest collection, "Apocalypse Generation", was published by Tainted Coffee Press and is available through Zygote In My Coffee. His website is www.rcedrington.com. It contains links to his previous collections, reviews of his work, and links to journals and magazines he has been published in. 

 

Amber Decker-

Vermin

The possum that crawled up under my porch stayed there for three weeks squealing like a bitch and then just went quiet one day. I guess he died there in the dark, lonely and vile. When I look in the mirror, I see my mother’s face reflected back, her flat gray eyes like stagnant pools. She calls me up just about every day of the week when she’s drunk and wants to scream at something. I keep waiting for the day when the phone does not ring, when the bitch finally curls up alone in her dark house and dies.

Amber Decker is an undergraduate from West Virginia, USA majoring in English literature. Her most recent book of poems is Lost Girls. She blogs semi-regularly at http://roughverse.wordpress.com.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Gertrude Stein from Paris, 1940

I became a fish tank,

a typical Thanatos pattern

at the peak of its range.

How long the clamouring lasts!

Deep fractured landscape –

form transposed, the incidental

the body falls weeping for,

that makes us hate,

steering wheels obviously

the least expected parts. A man

takes his breath, bladderwrack,

crabgrass, demonstrations,

prisoners in striped coveralls.

Skin blistered long ago –

homes for the orphans, crack

doctors to perform amputations.

“Now we will all

have an occupation’.

Ben Nardolilli-

Red Gutter Ball
Under the calculating cynicism
Of one who remains
Unpunished in Dante’s Inferno,
We turn wheels and sweat
Our nights away in cages.

A good deal of fiction, we eat,
We endure with a few tales
Enriched without rations,
A blind man gathers us in
And speaks about revolution.

Ben Nardolilli currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, One Ghana One Voice, Caper Literary Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, Super Arrow, Grey Sparrow Journal, Pear Noir, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and Yes Poetry. His chapbook Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, has been
published by Folded Word Press. He maintains a blog at  mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is looking to publish his first novel.

Michael Mc Aloran-

Sketch #2-

…dead stop I, or I or not of, anchoring, the final blood’s vein unmasked in the breath of the flesh redeemed, sunk to nothing
…asked of, as if it were, deaf to blind to naught and then of else, rancour, not I, blood to let from broken glass, dusted with the char of ashen pulse, emptily, fragrant as a carcass…
…no hand to offer, blind of eye and gouge of mouth, building from spinal lights, in spit of desolate, adrift of no wind, sea scar and apathy of the castrated tongue…nothing, nothing…bleeding
                                                   out…sea swell of oscillation, a-grip, of ennui, sudden as if to freeze, echoing out of purpose, bind…
(…said without…)
…nothing’s blood upon stripped cadaver shores, headless all, burn aloud burn no nothing of it, stagnant…recede, step, no, non-step, back again, follow onward from out of the pale dark, lights in the throat of it…no no heart, breath escaping from a room of waste, dead alone, jolt, spasm, shot/ shot again, absent again…
…reconciled, phlegm, shit, pissing on the face of it, and drag, the drag of absentee breathing once again…absence of laughter, absence, trace of cold memory, jolt, spasm, skinning pit of the heart’s divulge…leaving the sun behind from which you were born…
(…traces,
                  the fucking avarice of teeth…)
…wrestling yet dead, stone, casket of rat’s skulls, and the pelt of, nectar of drenched, spliced through, given…vast, infinite loss of eye, dark all but for the echoes, from where, nothing no tracing one’s footsteps through…
(…I’ll go…)
…dead none, elixir of dread, and the quickened speech, the fragments scattered from the mind’s tract, flame or none of I, I none of nothing’s claim, as if it never had been before -lying through the teeth of it…
…false abandon…a…
…dead, stop, or I, no not turning aside, not ever of the once, so I believe, never, not a tooth of nail or grip of lax beheadedness…in a rip of eye, in a razor sadness, what else?…(I lie…)
…nothing claimed…

…nothing claimed…

…nothing claimed…

…nothing…

Michael Mc Aloran's blog, where you can links to books, published poetry and reviews: Abattoir Whispers

‘Liquid Metropolis’, by Petra Whiteley: A Review By Dom Gabrielli

Petra Whiteley's defiant latest tome, The Liquid Metropolis, published by Erbacce Press, sets about a ferocious dismantling of the persistently flourishing Social-Christian tenets. Frame by frame, poem by poem, stone by stone, look by look, in a challenging long-metrage between diary and diatribe, poetic epiphany and novelistic dystopia, Whiteley walks the amazed reader through the post-apocalypse metropolis of misguided affects. The gaze of leering masculine eagles, the seething anaesthetic of cowardly hatred, did not waylay her from her task. No stone is left un-turned. This is a work of unabashed pride. To walk with these words is to understand the meaning of standing out in the rain, resolutely outside, where the rains do not feel the same, where something ripped from ugly becomes beautiful. From within the tree, poetry never abandons the reader throughout a thrilling conversation with the myths of cherished lies. Poetry emerges victorious as mind and body, as the seconds which exceed Time, as the bare statement which kicks and shouts as it is, in silence, as the nothing that lived and breathed, even these words, even the sun, even its fire, even the unattainable, which crawls 'as a syllable on a promised tongue/ forever no/thing.'

 I imagine this enterprise was not without risks and that therefore first it is our role as readers to salute the bravery of this author, who has paid no heed to fashion nor to commodity, but to has listened to her deepest sentiment and revealed with such harsh and beautiful invective, the bare bones of the post-capitalist predicament. 'The clock hands/ of my practical suicide turn/the light backwards, no outer/limits…'  Since Artaud, the necessity to un-live and un-think the colonial powers of Christian absurdities has been paramount. Here the manual to exist outside continues, in the rain and without lying. '(God's) endless fingers of words claw suicide/into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing/is the only life left.'  Or better still:

 'I was there, playing dead for them, the oak of silence growing

into my lungs. Was noise a bruise that spread whitely into me?

Yes. In that poisoned room within the tree, I left traces of death,

 
lived backwards, the slow drip of birthday butchery.

 
So long to language and its pain!

 
Breathe to break the hush of words into music,

unconstrained and unshattering.'.

 Hope is for the misguided but love entertains the brave, a love you build between the slow suicides of souls whose de-mystified sexualities can start to sing a song of muscle and beauteous, poetic bone. Disillusions many ripped from the misfortunes of previous identities can be stripped in a kind of ritual post-mortem of manners and realities. Can one say, following such adventurers in the domains of the Spirit such as Artaud that another body is possible:

 'I wanted you to watch

Me die, to watch the trees growing from my hands

Into the stark digits of night and be the monument

Of my liquid sex. To

Witness the opiate orgasms

In my resurrection.'

 What for convenience sake we still call man or woman suffers here a keen and rigorous un-thinking. 'I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute,/and as I,/you will/(desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.' The Liquid Metropolis is a book-machine in the great tradition of radical thinking, a book for new lover-thinkers, into the hope-less beyond of the naked end of the world. For those who, dare I say, have never bent their knees to kneel nor sheltered their eyes from the glaring truth of society's founding lies. This is a resistance song, a remarkable bottle hurled into the ocean of nought. To collect its messages is to accept that a book requires the reader to work, to pause for moments to collect one's whole intellectual history, to agree to be challenged, to be hurt, to be attacked by the anger of the author, to travel with her to the trees and the colours which sing on the other side: 'our laughter will echo like hard rain when we finally slip away.'

 We have become accustomed to Whiteley's unstinting intellectual rigour, to the beauty of many of her poems, but never has her true instinct been able to express itself with such uncompromising clarity and fire. The Liquid Metropolis is what the burning libraries of 2012 will need, an at times brutal poetic pamphlet whose language prepares the audacious for the trees which will grow from their hands, for a new laughter for the living who do not wish to postpone their desires and abdicate their enjoyments. 'I dream of Thames at midnight, where at least a rabbit can choose/ the softness of one's own never ever after and push hard towards/the dawn in the city.

 'Liquid Metropolis', by Petra Whiteley, should be purchased from Erbacce Press, here
'

A Preview of 'Liquid Metropolis' by Petra Whiteley

                                            

Chapter I/ PartX
 
This is
   a place of my rotten blood.
       A rest for my glass skull stitched between olive shadows
           and dancing wings of owls turning children's dreams in
              the Russian wheels of their eyes
                           in shrieking midnights...universe of silences.
What is left here?
            The dainty mice fingers in patters of spasmodic ecstasies,
                    scratching the flesh to black veins, the curvy roads of my death.
                        All the sea softened red stones on my tongue
                                                                          were iridescent prophesies,
                                   rolling noise gurgling silhouettes of promise - eating from the palm
  of syllables  unspoken in a metallic shivering of a single word. Swallowing me
now
  nail by nail. Spitting my life back into a dark arch under his jaw. Chews on my mind.
          I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute, and as I,
you will
             (desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.

 
Chapter 3 – The Silence Manual/Part 6. Disposal – Sapiens be(fallen) 

The dialogue of hardened hands
is spoken through the cracks in skin,
the body is the night of glass with horizons sharpening.
The dialogue of darkened eyes
is stillness of afternoons, the heavy sound of sun,
hanging from dried mouth - the nails of mind, weighing.
Time’s weighing down the drumming
heart’s monologue and its own answers of blood
in the fast, tight fist of light and its prolonged suffocating absence.

The rhythm between silence and sound
is the breath’s weakness through the loyalty of lungs, miracles
of twins blossoming electricity of pain and endorphin religion
rushes.
The monologue of aging, the monologue of death,
the architectural bends in anatomy of the maps, the world,
unanswered and reactionary, the communion of perpetual suicide.
It’s so hard to understand the vacuum of colours, the void of flesh,
the charcoal post-mortem of mannequins sipping teas outside in the
storm
only punctuated by the fastened directions of wind.

Chapter 4/Frame II

Locus Amoenus (Goodbye To Eden)

I’ve laid in this dark green garden, this anaemic coffin
with intricate leaf patterns and cat-shit-stinking soil,
order of scars circling the longest days under thin branches
and devouring each of their ruby veins.
Suffocating clouds above my neck with their threats
were conceived in a swollen mass of judgements,
raining old blood
and egg bombs of noiseless screams, shading
darknesses behind the edge brutalities of drops, rushing
over and through my skin.
They say God’s voice is a beautiful song,
but His voice is Death, His eyes a singeing pain,
His endless fingers of words claw suicide
into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing
is the only life left. His moods of salvation a tool of hell.

There become, the I
a ship and as such descend into the distances
of the seas greying inside
always pulling into downward shores, strewn
with bones like stars pulsing white on the sand.
Silent
and indifferent.


'Liquid Metropolis' can be purchased from Erbacce Press, here

Gary J. Shipley-

COMING UP ON HEADLESS

The neck’s no cul-de-sac

Frayed bullets tussling 

Up and out open mouths about

Just about speaking, but they’re

Happy most the time

The monkey traps don’t bite

And the voltage is all teeth.

ARTIFICIAL LIMB

forum of the half-invented

hosted by non-donors

followed at distance

back to damp stacks

by their instruments

to percussion of stab heels

spoiling pliable skies in

sting estate of creepers

unique in flaws in echoed

soundscape of corpses

jangling in canning bomb

towers and mirrored parks

imagining ritual blindness

in late-night architecture

clap nerves in the metal

artistry in the tangle

fingers in commentaries

scalpels rocking clean

set tubes scorching out 

gram traces of ceremony

a world’s invisible centres

from a dying machine 

of clunk cut wire flowers

late in the fabricated

spectacle –paralyzed – 

a technical suffocation

fielding an asphyxiate seed

ROT GLUT

All my birthmarks have been erased

Ripped out like people out of senile brains

And yet no trace of espionage

Or fumes of droppings of Goya bats.

Genetic playthings of appetites grinded

Into various mutilations of fatigue

Looking to be bred from the mucus

of nuclear eyes prevented from forming.

The world a scab of particulate violations

Epileptic worms of light in sagging human turf. 

Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX). More details can be found here.

 

David M. Buhajla-

A Brief Understanding of What it Means to be Lucid

Fourteen feet under the rocky overhang, 

a man holds a fistful of pine needles.

The tattooed pistoleer wonders if the

grapes under the tarmac provide enough

bounce in the forests of Azerbaijan. The coolie

responds and smirks, the emerald in his forehead growing

to massive and incongruent proportions.

It's all proportion. Especially when six-fingered

ladies smack their sweaty ham-hands onto their thighs

in front of a standing ovation at the Orpheum. The

Georgians don't like it. But, the helmet-clad

spirits wish that they had the fruit that fell from the

tired old Joshua tree. That’s what they think.

Chalk one up to the misanthropes, and plead to the masters

and misers that control the radio waves that

vomit forth from the pulsar. It's all proportion.

Take the shiny blade that the kids want from the

catalogue, because there’s numbers to be had,

hidden in the hidden angles. Believe what the antennas

give to the people when their faces grow hair and their hair

grows faces. Make it and break the “it” that it controls.

Play the woodchuck song, Frank. The sun went nova.

Nothing left but proportions.

Bitter Yolk of an Angry Moon

Mundane, a pugilist lashes out

at a bitter protagonist,

confident in his swelling

pride and swelling face.

Three old men watch on. Their

gray skin hangs in folds

as they cackle and clap.

A drop of blood hits the middle man.

A sainted hunter pokes

the yolk of his egg, which seeps

like a septic wound. The blue

Montana sky behind him laughs

at his wardrobe of hair shirt and jeans.

In the distance, a coyote waits and dreams.

I sit and watch as the clown mocks my sight. His

one blind eye reveals a twinkle under its

filmy membrane. He yanks out the offending

orb, offering it to me as sacrament. I feast.

A child squeezes his favorite hamster

until it stops twitching. In the living room,

his mother lays silent and blue.

A general breakdown begins as the moon

goes dark and madmen shoot each other

across the dunes, sick from ocular wafer

hallucinations.

The disjunction of upper lobes

and membranes make a final resting

place at the old stone wall that crumbles

under the hanging prisoner.

It’s a bitter and frank discussion as I

speak to my internal minions that twitch

and breathe inside me. You call them

tapeworms but I call them brothers as

we revel in our symbiosis. 

Mary Perkins and Lester Holt Visited the Wallace Residence Thursday Night

      

A work boot with a tuft

of pink insulation clinging

onto the end of a brown

and tattered shoelace sits on

a worn wooden step in front

of a burning trailer house.

Cicadas buzz as a shadow moves

across the hot and broken

glass that rests and winks

on the sun-baked ground.

David M. Buhajla is a writer and poet living in Arkansas with his wife Marci and his daughter Maya. His work is available in Counterexample Poetics, Sex and Murder, Danse Macabre, Rose and Thorn Journal, The Gloaming Magazine, The Horror Zine, Death Head Grin, The Very Good Bad Comedy Show and the “Winter Canons” anthology from Midwest Literary Magazine.

Pd Lyons-

As Long As Its You

When you breathe it is my name.

When you stare,

Your own eyes black pools,

Liquid movements synchronize my own.

Who knows me any better?

Naked throat? Beating heart?

You may heal. You may feed.

Whatever you do, as long as its you.

Neptunian

My ugliness raised in both hands

Almost expecting something from you

And if only I had a gun I woulda’ made you

And hated myself forever for being so desperate

If only I could believe 

Then how easy it would be

Walking away leaving you alone

Free at last to wander endless starry nights I always dream of

Instead I let you

 Tattoo blue around my mouth

  Tell me that I’m privileged

   

 After Last Call

Puke my guts out in the after last call parking lot

Of the now what am I gonna do

Still hometown married jails unavoided

Lucky having nothing to do with being alive

Benches wrapped in paper, nightmares unelaborate

Just boys with lighter fluid searching for someone sleeping.

Small Places

Small places where no one would ever go

Unless like myself

They had to shunning stars.

Not likely to tell me anything I don’t already know,

Shut up you heart breaking fuck.

When will you leave my head alone?

Non-linear pissing all over the seat.

Secret lover of cities,

You spoke like something would matter,

Like a hundred years,

Like a gunga din,

Long into the locust day

You said it made all the difference

And what was it? Different than what?

Televisions and telephones no way related to any woman ever known

But wait,

Who is willing to be a mother when even she must do the killing?

PD Lyons has been writing for along time and hopes to continue for even longer. Work has appeared in mags and zines in North America and UK. Two collections of poetry published by Lapwing Belfast.
  visit pdlyons blog for poetry publishing info and new releases:
    http://pdlyons.wordpress.com/