Paul Corman-Roberts

As Below, So Above

Heaven is a perv wishing
they too could squeal the
immaculate carnal joy release

the stellar high-country shuffle
coiling on sweet tar puppets say
we’ve been rehearsing
this pratfall for eons

& so, they leak
returned souls through
every half-assed vortex
sloughing over our deserts

Don’t kid yourself about
the one-way street afterlife
ain’t what it used to be
so below, as above

You see it wasn’t
merely the fabric of the walls
we tore apart when
we nuked the pearly gates

they are coming for us
the minions of a dominion
we dragged to the strip club
and god was never the same.

Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of Bone Moon Palace from Nomadic Press (2021) and most recently the graphic chapbook The Sincere from Libran Apocaplyse Books (2022.) An original founder and current organizer of the Beast Crawl Lit Festival (Summer Beast 2022 - Beast Crawl Literary Festival)  he currently teaches  workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab, the SF Creative Writing Institute and the Oakland Unified School District. He sometimes fills in as a drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service and the Poznansky Sisters, but mostly he is just exhausted. 

Laura Cherry

Faults

Sense of smell gone, most of the time, except
on days of a particular grace or drug.
One bum ear, constructed from scraps
like a clay ashtray. Lungs that suddenly fill
and close, except when sighing their great sweetness,
your astonishing gift.

Waking before dawn. A certain restlessness. A certain
propulsion. A hunger. Casting this way and that.
Even now, a wolfishness under the skin.
After the mammalian tears, the clear eye
of the lizard, the skittering limbs
and shed tail.

That head of hair, your breathless corona,
shedding silver. Those devil-like brows.
Hands strong and rough. All the pleasing parts
of you brought to please, as to a banquet
in a dream where I cannot eat so much as
a single bite.

The bright kind of dark. Eyes like clouds
sweeping in over mountains. Now I see:
I was only imagining the long spillway,
the rush to beautiful nowhere, the hidden fault
where the earth might split and we'd take hands
and dive in.

Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooksTwo White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press) with Robert Hartwell Fiske, and her work has been published in journals including The Glacier, Ekphrastic Review, Los Angeles Review, Cider Press Review, and DMQ Review. She earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She works as a technical writer and lives near Boston.

F. John Sharp

Coronary on Aisle Six

The EMT’s made great time
when minutes count, the vise
in my chest stretching seconds
to eons, my will rewritten
in my head on the floor
of the WalMart, next to the socks.

Then: electrodes, calm
reassurances that don’t
reassure, an IV, oxygen
in a mask that doesn’t hide
my face from voyeuristic
shoppers and clerks on a Saturday.

A gurney ride past the cashier
(I never got my socks) and out
the door, eyes following. I know what
everyone will be talking about at dinner.
A secret little part of me wishes
that would happen every day

F. John Sharp lives and works in Northeast Ohio. He is the fiction editor for Right Hand Pointing, and selected published works live at FJohnSharp.com. 

Gerry LaFemina

Post Card to Charles Wright from a Recording Studio in Bristol, Virginia

Charles, today in the birthplace of country music I recorded guttural rock & roll, then crossed the double yellow line on the main drag to enter Tennessee. Then back again. How easy to move between two states. Like the drop in your low rider line: both break and continuation. Like light: both wave and particle, even as it wanes in the dwarf orchard at dusk, reducing the corporeal world to shadow. How often have I oscillated between grief and joy, how readily one becomes the other. This is why I love the prose poem. There’s hunger’s pangs and the pleasure of anticipation, too. I went for dinner in a dive bar where Hank Williams stopped the night his heart surprised him with its final struck chord, a D minor, dissonant with only a bit of twang. He hadn’t eaten there, but let me tell you, the hamburgers were to die for.


Postcard to Jan Beatty from the CSX Rail Depot, Cumberland, Maryland

Dear Jan, I’m thinking of you on a train across Canada and of my earliest memory—the rattle and racket of the elevated F line out my window in Brooklyn, how that rhythm pulled me into dreams I can’t remember. The voice of my nightmares remains the screech of steel wheel brakes. What do we do with the blurry faces of absent fathers, the various ways they can be unknown? What do we do with the sparks sent flying so they seem to burn within us? What do we do with the fact that we all may be clown babies? The conductor as he passes counting passengers could be a lost relative he looks so familiar, after all. Or is this a lie we tell ourselves. Out here, the boxcars are being pushed together to make new trains from old. The way the cars hitch together like words or friendships. I used to walk with my son along the freight line that ran through our backyard in Michigan, the tracks another mad river of steel and speed: look in either direction and it was heading away, past the horizon, to whatever next town awaited.

Gerry LaFemina’s most recent books are The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (creative nonfiction) and Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (prose poems). A new collection of poems, After the War for Independence, will come out later this year.  A noted arts activist who has served on the Board of Directors of the AWP and edited numerous literary journals and anthologies, LaFemina founded the Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is a Professor of English, serves as a Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University, and is a current Fulbright Specialist in Writing, Literature, and American Culture. In his “off” time he is the principal songwriter and front man for western Maryland original rockers, The Downstrokes.