Full of Crow | Poetry

23 Jul 09

Mark Jackley

THE SECOND MARRIAGE REARS ITS HEAD
BUT DOES NOT ATTACK

One night in bed, slowly,
in between blackouts
and screaming matches, lamps hurled,
knives and ripped upholstery,
we ate a box of ginger snaps
as we stared at something
on TV, two mumbling,
fat and happy zombies,
and chased the cookies with cold milk,
languorously. We sipped,
the better to savor a little
sweetness on our lips

TO THE DEER THAT GLANCED OFF MY CAR UNHURT

Thank you. It was just a tap,
a startling reminder
that I must return before it is too late
to my own woods,
where the sudden movements of my life
have hurt the ones I love the most,
where perhaps confession
is taken in a tongue
like moss, wet, forgiving,
by a pond so deeply hidden we forgot it
and nearly died of thirst.

Mark Jackley is the author of three chapbooks and a full-length collection is forthcoming from Plain View Press. He lives in Sterling, VA, “…and God help me, work for a cable company.”

23 Jul 09

Doug Mathewson

In Seidel Eye

Doug Mathewson, July 2009

you protest it is ludicrous, being our age
after so many years together that
I find you intensely alluring
utterly fascinating and
so passionately desirable
“but I’m old” you protest,
dropping your china blue satin robe
in our candle lit hotel room, glaring your challenge
“look at me damn it, just look!”
I do, and take you in my ropey old arms,
gently stroking your lovely grey hair,
being so grateful that such a beauty as you
would love an old train wreck like me.

Doug Mathewson

Fiction, Full of Crow, June 2009

MiCrow, Summer 2009

For Phil

Poetry: In Seidel Eye July 2009

Doug

Doug Mathewson continues his love/hate relationship with reality from his home in eastern Connecticut.

He writes short fiction and essays. His work has appeared recently in The Boston Literary Magazine, Cezzane’s Carrot, Door Knobs & Body Paint, e-muse-zine, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), riverbabble, Shoots & Vines, Six Sentences, Tuesday Shorts, and 55 Words. Sporadically he is grasped by fits and starts of inspiration, equally he can be swept away into infinite worlds of busy-signals, radio static, and elevator-music. To read more, comment, or just poke-around please visit his current project, True Stories From Imaginary Lives, at www.little2say.org.

Doug is also a contributor to MUST Magazine as well as an active member of The Sphere collective.

MUST is available from Full of Crow and for download at The Sphere.

23 Jul 09

David E. Oprava

Cashed

David E. Oprava, July 2009

I am spent,
mostly by myself,
although best lied to
plans played a part.

For years I’ve been
picking at the hem
of my skin, slowly
scaling it’s better days

never thinking that once
undone, that’s the way
it stays, pieces once
sewn together in place

where they were born,
some stay, others visit,
but it’s been so long
I’ve lost the way back,

my skin once knew,
it’s youthful grin
before the stains,
its handsome hair

when there was still
some there, and a rosy
bloom that then drew
closer to grey

whilst I was busy
building a grand
façade to daydreams,
I called it anticipation,

expectation, deserved
reconciliation, but really
underneath it was
the flesh of folly,

how quickly the baby
fat goes down to the bone,
such poking pillows
under a balding pate

and now, that monolith
I began so long ago
has come down
to the modest mole

hill of me, it’s cramped
and closing down,
business done
for the day and the till

cashed out to sleep
on the lumpy couch,
and wait for inevitable

collectors.

Note: David E. Oprava is also a contributor in MiCrow Summer “Peek”.

David E. Oprava writes, because he has to. He is terrified of what
will happen otherwise. It makes him prolific. He has been in over
sixty journals online and in print and his first full-length book of
poems VS. was released in October 2008 by Erbacce Press. He is also the founding editor of the tiny poetry press, Grievous Jones. When he isn’t writing he is battling against his raging sobriety and trying to live up to the high moral expectations of husbandhood, fatherhood, and humanhood. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily succeeding.

23 Jul 09

George Anderson

Fracture

George Anderson, July 2009

The skeleton wind
like sheets of sound
sweeps in again from the south
the trees groaning-
a semi-trailer on the escarpment down gears;
grunting.

It is at this moment
I open my eyes
& realise I am dreaming.
I hear her breathing beside me
in the gasping, contorted gulps
for air, before she died.

I hold her close-
the familiar contours of her body
etched true.

She says to me, ‘You should give your beard a trim
I have to live with you’. In her red silk Japanese pyjamas
she swims towards me, laughing.

New Dark Ages

George Anderson, July 2009

In the new dark ages he
attempts to record an ironic

tribute to the facile
essence of man. A being

who will speculate, throw
away all- even his family.

The momentary ecstasy of
falling share prices. one

month earlier uptown
delighted by the critique

of CEO salaries: he is
lucky to be alive- the over

burdened truck, the dodgy
breaks, the over reliance

on reflex. Mullet’s indolent
joy of circles, his wheel of

logic- the dim white light
fragmenting now-

like falling leaves,
on the lit road ahead.

George Anderson lives in North Wollongong, Australia. He edits
the student print magazine Ephemeral now in its sixth issue. He writes poetry as a way to trace the devolution of his thought. His chapbook ‘Dancing On Thin Ice’ can be purchased through erbacce-press (UK). His most recent work can be found on The Thin Edge of Stirring, Cause & Effect, Opium Poems, Unlikely Stories 2.0, Lit Chaos, Social Alternatives and many other fine magazines. Find out more about his world at his blog.

23 Jul 09

Kyle Hemmings

Walking Backwards

Kyle Hemmings, July 2009

I want to return to St. Thomas
grow small and wooden,
a messenger for the nuns,
a puppet for the teacher who made us do
paper cut-outs of the presidents.
I will grow still and horizontal
in old hallways that hid the students’ names.
I will grow sparse at the sound
of rosary beads jingling,
the rush of Sister’s Adrian’s steps
striking panic into the heart of a boy
who gave away the shape of the sky
in his answers in Catechism,
who focused on nothing else
but the tremolo of a bluebird’s prediction
that someone’s future was in doubt.

The Last Days of Iowa Jones

Kyle Hemmings, July 2009

He wrapped his heart around the prairie
Made the White River flow through his veins
Thought of a woman back in Tucson
Whose soil was fertile as the wheat belt.

But now there were chest pains
And the maw of mountain lions too close
In Lawrence, Kansas he made his last stand:
Four old buddies who cheated him out of his gold.
One wore a red scarf and answered to the name of Quantrill.
The other three dropped like birds from his childhood.
He took a slug in the jug.

While the rains opened cracks in the earth,
He rode sideways on his mare, past the buttes, the promised hands of plains,
Near Missoula a Crow found him unconscious as stone
A Blackfoot made him rise from the Dead
But he died again or lived forever
So the folks say on the 4:40 to Tulsa
That never took them anywhere.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey where he dreams of playing surf guitar like Dick Dale or handle a wah-wah like Jeff Beck. He sometimes sings in the shower.

23 Jul 09

Peter Magliocco

nude descending a museum staircase

Peter Magliocco, July 2009

“whisper that french thing
into my ear –” she said
there’s the rampant grace
of surrealistic violence
Breton danced (in) visibly to
see gods open blood-bodice
for nipple-lobotomy caper:

femme of dark cocaine rues
pray for my redemption
in the minds’ inner ghetto
you dance forever in now
the last ballet of witches
fevering for a cockatoo
pecking our lambent cancer,
& shed the experienced skin
to plunge in pure arterial
wastelands of the retro-heart
the department zombies
proclaim will be missing

like the last chest piece
of undisguised gender

no one can
see the naked
motions of truth

blindly (un) dressing
your thoughts

before
mankind’s
fall

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, and has poetry at THE SMOKING POET, A HUDSON VIEW POETRY DIGEST, THE BEAT, HEELTAP and elsewhere… His new novel is The Burgher of Virtual Eden from Publish America (www.publishamerica.com). He was Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2008.

23 Jul 09

Daniel Crocker

Falling Off

Daniel Crocker, July 2009

Ashes like a Cathedral I
knock upon

I made Chili and you
weren’t hungry

Our house is a resultant tone
just for rhyme
I’ll say that I haven’t felt my bones in ages
fat grows when bodies stall

I ask you to eat
but there are the headaches again

Let’s strip this to the bare bones, shall we
I’m ill

The map hanging in the hall
is outdated
but walking my fingers across it tonight
Montana, Wyoming
someplace is warmer

I look for images
but they aren’t found
at this computer
they aren’t found in poems

It’s important that you eat
before you disappear

Sometimes I think
I’ve taken a curtain
in my sleep
and held it over you
made up a few words
and poof

This time the magic is real

you raked the yard
and the leaves are still falling

The tree strips
like a dark bone
full of fist

I noticed a knot in our pine
I thought of Freud
It didn’t even make me horny

My poems for you always turn out like this
snap out like a light

Do either of us
remember what it meant
to be young and in love

In love pays the bills
and takes us to the occasional movie

The risk is gone

We shit in front of each other
and the days stall
like that

And there are nights
when the fingers of my left hand
want to keep walking
And my right hand stops them
with a grasp more violent
than I’ve ever shown you

We are poor and we live

and if all the great poets
refuse to call this love
then they have never seen
you when you’re falling off

My Luck

Daniel Crocker, July 2009

There are so many
beautiful people
in the world
that it sometimes
makes your heart
cry stop

but not a one of them
is at the Wal-Mart
in Deslodge, Missouri
at three
in the morning.

Daniel Crocker is the author of two collections of poetry (People Everyday and Other Poems and Long Live the 2 of Spades) as well as a collection of short stories (Do Not Look Directly Into Me) and a novel (The Cornstalk Man) and several very out of print chapbooks. He is currently a student in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. In the mornings he practices his karate moves on unsuspecting pigeons. He’s also the editor of Trailer Park Quarterly.

23 Jul 09

Kenneth Pobo

Morning Coffee And Evening Stench

Kenneth Pobo, July 2009

Today God wears his favorite
fishnet stockings and makes the sun
whirr. I turn on

the coffee maker. Everyone into
making things and still
not even seven a.m. As hour

weeds out hour, I retain
my good mood, partly because
WFJL plays The Balloon Farm’s

“A Question of Temperature”
which I haven’t heard since ’68.
Evening—I plop on the porch glider,

like that word, glider,
it sounds so boogity and boffo,
until an awful stench

rolls in, something between
cat piss and burnt motor oil.
Oh, how quickly a day can

turn into a needle
with disease shot straight
in the arm! It stinks,

but garbage men will come
tomorrow, God will gas up
another sun. I’ll drink

more Maxwell House, dawn’s
red canes poking out
the window glass.

Cameron Anstee, July 2009

23 Jul 09

Cameron Anstee

Room Enough

your hair moving in water against clouds
the first line of a poem

broad stones skip where skies are sewn
and there is room between stitches there
is room enough

four cardinal lines
look like valleys from the sky
where continents bend away

always bent away from footsteps
turning straight lines into necessary parts of a wheel

bright through fast spokes

Two Circles

Cameron Anstee July 2009

its raining, slowly
clouds unravel

yours, the only shape
I have
a clear memory of

yours, the only shape
that holds

water in puddle remembers
in circles

grown to the edge and
returned

hydrogen bonds motioning
endurance

two circles
twice crossed

arms gathering suprise
at the return of something familiar
and how its changed

these are things of bodies, completely
and not forgetting

these are things of reappearing
and invention

this, a closed door, unlocked

a word needs judged
at its best

end,
and flower

yes, hello love.

Cameron Anstee is pursuing an M.A. in English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is a contributing editor at In/Words Magazine & Press.

23 Jul 09

Claudia Bierschenk

In Hohenschönhausen

(former East Berlin remand prison)

Claudia Bierschenk, July 2009

Where I am
for how long
I dont know
they wont say
could be anywhere
north, south
surely not West
the van black inside
hands and feet shackled
many hours
on a bumpy ride
neon lights catch me
by surprise
Get out!
Eyes down!
Move!
boots, uniforms
they all sounds alike
bare feet on leaf-patterned lino
I tipple like a child
on the way to
the headmasters office
the strip-search
each orifice checked
grey door shuts behind me
like a storys end
my name stays outside
I am ordered
to sit on a stool
at the centre of this cube
hands on knees
face down
they know how to get you
with an excuse of a window
glass bricks
de-construct sunlight
I can only tell day from night
and flush the toilet
when they say its alright
nights dont bring solace in sleep
the bulb they shine in my face
each time I turn
reminds me Im here
the interrogator is my new best friend
in his room a real window
where the same sky
pauses each day
after a while
they come for me at night
there must be others
at times a faint knocking
or is it the pipes
their torture is boredom
and deprivation
I want my parents
my sister
fresh air
sleep, laugh, cry, have a bath
I dont know
where I am
for how long
or how long
Ive been here
no chance of suicide
theyre so well prepared
I cant do nothing but
wait, wait, wait.

My mother’s file

Claudia Bierschenk, July 2009

‘It’s disappeared’
they said

most likely in shreds
crammed in with a million
others’ lives

in seventeen thousand
blue bin bags

Kaddish for Ms. Weinberg

Claudia Bierschenk, July 2009

a spinster, lady of style
well-read, and appalled
when they came into
her bedroom without knocking

in 1942 she was in her fifties
with no relations;
she had never been East
nor on a train for that long

a plaque on the pavement
outside my unsafe house
blackened by time
and countless innocent passers-by

while her charred bones are lost,
dusted with limestone, outside Riga

Claudia lives and works in Berlin. She is a part-time project manager and proofreader for a translation company. She teaches Business English one night a week and Spanish to two boisterous kids one afternoon a week. The rest of the time she walks through Berlin, tries to speak more German to her English boyfriend, drinks coffee, reads and writes. She discovered her love for writing in general and poetry in particular whilst living in England (now her second home), where she took a course in Creative Writing at Sheffield University.
Claudia spent her childhood and early teenage years in East Germany close to the former Iron Curtain, and a lot of her writing deals with life in East Germany before the re-unification with the West.

She has had a few pieces published in online poetry magazines, such as Alittlepoetry.com, Juice Magazine, and Public Republic. One of her poems has recently been published in an anthology by Forward Press, UK.

23 Jul 09

Glen Lantz

Eligos – Babbling Ghost #15

Glen Lantz, July 2009

you are the subject of hope and bewilderment your incandescent hovering ghost I find you at the Metropolitan Museum you are staring at a French Sculpture from the Renaissance you say it reminds you of revolution so many mediums a beautiful middleclass housewife living in the big city wanting to burn it all down throw it all into turmoil rather than vain mediocrity you draw the letters out when you say it as if it has a special meaning

I have no armor left I am defenseless you have taken it from me warmly burnished throwing out the first pitch looking at the people all of the people we walk along the gleaming white concrete the fools smitten with love another concrete blonde

Glen Lantz is 47 years old and lives in Dubuque, Iowa. He has a BA and a MA in Sociology from the University of Northern Iowa. His work has appeared in 10K Poets Zine, Bad Marmalade, Calliope Nerve, Clockwise Cat, the Curious Record, Deep Tissue Magazine, Heroin Love Songs, Madswirl, the Plebian Rag, and Zygote in my Coffee. Also, Glen has poems forthcoming in Poetry Now, and in the Dubuque Area Writer’s Guild 2009 Anthology Music & Dance.

Glen is also the managing editor of 2 poetry zines, Eviscerator Heaven and Deep Tissue Magazine.

You can find more of Glen’s work at MySpace.

23 Jul 09

Gillian Prew

the idea of wings

Gillian Prew, July 2009

never round was the shape of this day
never gentle
never a soft curiosity

today was the shape of an encyclopaedia
opened at random
showing her answers for which she had
no questions

her questions burned
& they had no answers

“what can we know?”
“does a crow know more than me?”

a crow knows what it needs to know

birds fly because they can

a human wing denies its own existence

her arms ached from flapping

the day was over
she pulled a swathe of night from the sky
stitched it into a bed as
her feathers returned to fingers

violation of circumstance

things come like jewels & promises
& shiny shoes

new indifferent
to lunacy

like sharp pencils
on pages of air

but they go
you know, they go

when the wind is radiant
with ash
& the silvered glass peels its way into
another room

they slip
into beyond

into the human way into decay

but new is not grow
& the shift of unblemished callow

into
a serendipitous age

is more than
a violation of circumstance

Gillian Prew lives in Scotland. She has a philosophy degree and a succession of low-paid, menial jobs to her credit. Having abandoned her first novel she currently writes poetry. Some of her poems can be found at Eviscerator Heaven, Up the Staircase, The Glasgow Review, Eleutheria and The Recusant. She is responsible for two collections of poems, ‘Moving on the Madness’ and ‘Standing Still in Motion’.

23 Jul 09

Don Pesavento

Skinny Dipping

Don Pesavento, July 2009

Star-glistened skin listening, she steps,
tadpole-tickled toes touching seaweed
mud-sunken under foot,

rippling the green pond’s deepening dream,
uubuttoning belly-buttoned memories,
placental-rustling bullrush cattails,

opening flood gates, swirling amniotic music,
awakening blue-river vena cava eddies,
aorta-whooshing like a chorus of life:

sentient sentient sentient

Unrequited

Don Pesavento, July 2009

a bull’s-eye at which many
eyes have thrown darts of love
and always missed their mark

a moving target only a marksman
can scope in the cross-hairs
of his rifle which misfires

an object of desire just beyond
reach, a grail from which
your lips will never drink

a treasure map X that marks her
phantom island, off which you drift
like a ship without a sail

a big-game trophy which turns
on you, the hunted, wounded
by her black eyelash arrows.

23 Jul 09

Belinda Subraman

0300

Belinda Subraman, July 2009

This room I splashed
with one third of my heart
keeps estranged dolls
under tables
and a mosaic bust
sexier than mine
guards the bed
where I hope to sleep.
The lace gown curtain
over a non-screened
gaping hole to the world
invites the flies of night
to my tiny light.
They are drunk on heat,
banging the lampshade.
Their abandon inspires me.
I open my drawer of secrets.

Belinda Subraman lives in Ruidoso, New Mexico. Her poetry has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Main Street Rag, Big Bridge, Babel Fruit, mgversion2, Electica, and Social Justice to name a few. Since 2005 she has been interviewing poets, musicians and activists on her radio show and podcast called Belinda Subraman Presents / The Gypsy Art Show http://belinda_subraman.podomatic.com . For ten years she was editor and publisher of Gypsy Literary Magazine and Vergin’ Press. Her main web site is http://belindasubraman.com