Poetry

Gemma Cooper-Novack

Leave a Comment

I DON’T BELONG HERE

by Gemma Cooper-Novack

Outside the plexiglass thousands
of sodden acres stretch and
not a single human
structure jars my sight. Ducks glide over
the water that floods
the plains and ripples from the wind
chase one another like
the way you speak: the lines

stroking and wavering and
vivid in sunlight,
the languages catching
each other’s whisking tails. In these rough clear

miles of America where you don’t
belong, your voice would shake
the brown trees and standing
water and sheets of earth from their
complacence: your lips catching
my throat, my blunt fingers catching the
tremors in your breath beneath
unmoving clouds.

============================================================================
Cooper-Novack author picGemma Cooper-Novack is a writer, writing coach, and arts educator based in Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Amethyst Arsenic (2013), ParkPages (2013), Blast Furnace Review (2013), Hanging Loose (1998, 2000, 2011, 2012), Lyre Lyre (2013), PressBoard Press (2013), Rufous City Review (2012), The Saint Ann’s Review (2003, 2005, 2009), and Spry (2013), and is forthcoming in Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Construction, and Referential. Her fiction is forthcoming in Elsewhere and Printer’s Devil Review. Her plays have been produced in Chicago and New York.

Gemma Cooper-Novack

Leave a Comment

LUXURY

by Gemma Cooper-Novack

She can lie
bare in dry
cedar heat
until her skin
stretches into
lizard geometry
and it's crisp
on her lips

delicious

She can gaze
through the haze
on the roiling
hills until
the water bubbling
up beneath her
arms
lies still
and the light
leaves her be

She can see
herself pore
by pore
streak by
streak and strand
by strand
the missed
stroke on her
fingernail

She can feel
the weight peel
from her hips
roll by
roll

so good 

She can wait
in this state
for hours
lemon slices
against her
eyelids
and the light
behind them
fracturing golden
until evening
floods her day

until she sweeps
into sleep
and a cavern
of inhalation
through her nose
exhalation
through her lips
rests around her

============================================================================
Cooper-Novack author picGemma Cooper-Novack is a writer, writing coach, and arts educator based in Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Amethyst Arsenic (2013), ParkPages (2013), Blast Furnace Review (2013), Hanging Loose (1998, 2000, 2011, 2012), Lyre Lyre (2013), PressBoard Press (2013), Rufous City Review (2012), The Saint Ann’s Review (2003, 2005, 2009), and Spry (2013), and is forthcoming in Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Construction, and Referential. Her fiction is forthcoming in Elsewhere and Printer’s Devil Review. Her plays have been produced in Chicago and New York.

Allison Serraes

Leave a Comment

THE WAY SHE PLAYS

by Allison Serraes

Ramona plays her ukulele
in an antique electric chair:

Nylon vibrates
under cool hands
like lightning
        strumming keys on kites
like finger-picking
        sonofusion
like palms
        on plasma lamps—
like electric.
Ukulele, ukulele,
        thick and cottony in the throat
like yucca. Booming
into the
        soundbox of the sky.
Ukulele,
ukulele, Leilani,
        luna, luminous—
electric eel,
lanikai, kilowatts under water
        like blow-dryers in a bathtub
bubbling tides
        waxing and waning
lanikai, lanikai,
        undercurrent,
               wave current
wavelength,
                lambda equals velocity over frequency,
amplitudes and
        oscillating acoustics
humming over humps
        and plucked
into atmospheric electrostatic discharge.
Fluid ukulele,
        of hands,
               of islands,
                       of mahogany, 
mahalo,
hula-hula dancing,
        medulla oblongata
of breathing and blood pressure
        ebbing and flowing,
of lobes,
        of stems,
               of auditory cortices,
                       of charged neurons—
electric.

============================================================================
Allison Serraes Author PhotoAllison Serraes is an executive editor of the forthcoming edition of The Mangrove Review. She is currently finishing her master’s degree in English at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida.

Bill Glose

Leave a Comment

RANGE PRACTICE

by Bill Glose

I practiced what to say while you
stomped about the kitchen,
slamming dishes and cabinets.

Just like range practice, I focused
on the target, took air slow as a turtle,
emptied my heart. Practice doesn’t always

make perfect. Punching holes downrange
easy when the torso bisected by
your front sight post isn’t breathing.

Lines rehearsed without emotion
seldom survive first contact.
Paper targets don’t fire back.

============================================================================
Bill GloseBill Glose is a former paratrooper, a Gulf War veteran, and author of the poetry collection, The Human Touch (San Francisco Bay Press, 2007). In 2011, he was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals and magazines as Narrative Magazine, New York Quarterly, and Poet Lore.

Bill Glose

Leave a Comment

R.H.I.P.

by Bill Glose

Ask any private pouring diesel
into a barrel of human waste,

lighting it afire, mixing with
a wooden paddle, standing

in the black smoke, he’ll tell you:
Shit flows downhill. All one-stripes

on latrine duty know the motto:
Rank has its privileges. Nothing to do

but bitch to pals who are also
stuck in the muck. Unless you have

too many stripes, too much brass. Then
wants and grievances get shoved

in a cargo pocket, beneath maps and
Op-Orders, beneath everything olive drab.

Solitude is the true gift of rank. Voices
muffled behind camouflage.

============================================================================
Bill GloseBill Glose is a former paratrooper, a Gulf War veteran, and author of the poetry collection, The Human Touch (San Francisco Bay Press, 2007). In 2011, he was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals and magazines as Narrative Magazine, New York Quarterly, and Poet Lore.