Chandra Alderman

Mountain Ash

Outside the snow thick as fog.
A mountain ash in the distance.
Its branches shaking from the wind
and robins feeding on the berries.
Crimson beads falling on snow.
I think of your back,
as we stand in the shower
after untangling from the sheets.
Everything reminds me of you.
A snow plow passes by,
robins scatter, autumn leaves
caught in an updraft.
They vanish in the snow.
I close my eyes and blush
remembering our warm bodies,
damp from the shower,
lightly touching on the bed
by the window.

Stanley Kubrick

I’m driving home
lowering sun over my left shoulder.
It casts shadows of the bare trees,
guitar strings pulled taut
across the road. The rhythm of the car
moving over the shadows
takes me back to your attic.
We are piled on blankets, holding each other,
listening to Stanley Kubrick by Mogwai.
It might have been the drugs
or your gentle hands but every note
whispers love in my ear. These moments,
they come and find me, even in this desolate
salt-crusted winter landscape. The orange
lowering sun, the trees’ shadows
playing a song just for me.

Chandra Alderman lives in Northeast Ohio where she writes mostly letters and sometimes poetry. She is often seen out in the wild with a camera, spying on nature, everyday life, and writers. Her photography has been featured on chapbooks published by Nightballet Press and Crisis Chronicles Press, and also online at Thirteen Myna Birds, The City Poetry and The Octopus Review. Her poetry has appeared in Trailer Park Quarterly. More than all of this, she is trying to compose the perfect bowl of soup.

Comments

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet in those moments of a cold November day, we watched a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,

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