Privacy by Kay Bell

Remote

little/big women

with prodigies

tugging on their Levi’s

lie bare/open

in public

with no privacy or cover up

for their atrocities

They stay

awake

summer nights

boiling in their mistakes;

the deep dark secrets

everyone knows

Afraid,

of the one step

closer

to no where;

hotel rooms fuming

in frustrated showers

of cold water

and heating pads

with no emotion

These little/big

women,

empty

of support,

cover their faces in the meetings that

assassinate their character

and question

whether they know

which man

   fathered their children

 

I cling to them.

We remind ourselves of the return

of Jesus

and how He will carry us,

up each dusty flight of the four floor walk up.

“What will you do when you get out?”

She asked

And I say: “take a bubble bath, while my son sleeps in a bed of his own”

Kay Bell (Kerryanne Mayers) has been writing since her 6th grade teacher introduced her to the poetry form: Haiku. Currently, Kay Bell is earning an M.F.A. in creative writing and can be quoted: “If it makes me cry, sweat or bleed, then it is worth writing about”. Kay Bell’s work appears in the online quarterly journal “The American Aesthetic” and in the book “Brown Molasses Sunday: An Anthology of Black Women Writers” as well as in other venues. She lives in the Bronx with her husband and two sons. Read more of her work here:www.poeticnoise.weebly.com

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Room Service by Aaron White

The whole affair

was quick, like biscuits from a can,

and tonight

            you’ll chew through cheap steak

            you cooked on the stove,

            you’ll stain your white teeth

            with dark divorce wine.

All of the papers

claim us as children of circumstance,

and tonight

            I’ll take time to look nice,

            I’ll practice my windsor

            I’ll make a half-windsor,  

            I’ll knot it in a noose

            because there’s no difference.

In all these goddamn towns,

every baptist church brags that it’s the first,

and tonight

            we’ll be leopards of white dream,

            we’ll stalk pampa pubic hair

            we’ll roam plains of prairie grass

            we’ll raze soy city motels,

            we’ll admit that all these rooms

            have started to look the same.

So tonight,

our tongues will be a fire,

and when we turn off our headlights

the black road will look limitless.

Aaron White’s work has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine; Mothers Always Write; 13th Dimension; Parent Co; Forth Magazine; Change Seven Magazine and others. His days are spent raising a toddler, navigating academia, trying to sell a novel, and wallowing in obscurity. Connect with him at amwhite90.tumblr.com or Twitter @amwhite90.

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from my end of our sequence by Karen Neuberg

Sure took her time/           in appetite & squander,

in preponderance of aspects of         self/sky/creator/           & then:

consumed time seeking           (right hairdo, sexy response, … )

Somehow, she always thought             she failed

How to tell her, let her know

(as though she still exists)

she did okay.

Karen Neuberg’s recent and poetry and collages appear in Canary, Forage, Gyroscope, Otoliths, and S/tick, among others. Her chapbook “the elephants are asking” is forthcoming in winter 2017 from Glass Lyre Press. She holds an MFA from The New School and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown talking by Abigail George

You’re the hourglass and
I’m the ungrateful child.
I’m always pouring your
tea into the cup that is as
radiant as the sun. Tea that is as
fresh as water. Away from
her I could only imagine the
sorrows of a grandmother.
Children growing up in
apartheid. Being forcibly

removed. The Garden City Clinic of my dreams looms in the distance while

I touch up my magazine hair,
my face as if making myself
ready for a date. This is just a
refresher course for me. Same
diagnosis. It means another bed
with hospital corners for me.

I’m turning into my father
and I hate it. It means that
every day I meet the end
of the sky. You can see it
in my face. Its skull like its
sweet tooth is intact. The
universe is amplified as is
birdsong in the air. The colour
of June. The shadows of
history. You think that you
will grow out of it like the
body of falling rain. I found
the preacher’s voice after
silence where the world is
too big to be shy. Its goals,
strategies, actions. I have
discovered that peoples’ faces
look different in the morning.

Abigail George is a South African blogger, essayist, poet, and fiction writer. She briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Birds Piled Loosely, Brittle Paper, Dead Snakes, Literary Orphans, The Writing Disorder, Vigil Pub Mag, Toad Suck Review. She has written two electronic books which are available for free to download from Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine. She blogs at Goodreads. Her stories have appeared in Hackwriters Magazine, Spontaneity, The Copperfield Review, Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine, Africanwriter.com. Her fiction ‘Wash Away My Sins’ was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection Africa Where Art Thou (2011) was launched at the South End Museum at a poetry evening and her second, Feeding the Beasts (2012) was launched at the Grahamstown Arts Festival.

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Docility by Stephanie Rose Guerrero

We Boiled the water

That kept
vessels of our blood from expanding

The heat from human error

Created just enough room in our veins

for sailing ships

That herd the water

 

There is a list;

The primary color of reasons

to stay away from our

lovers

Using index and middle

To calculate the past of our fathers

 

And we kept our mouths Silent

To not disturb the wind that moves

our Mother

Our Oceans, our mirror to the Moon.

Stephanie Rose Guerrero is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. Dancing Girl Press recently published a chapbook of hers titled “The Breathing of Similar Patterns” and her poetry book Jumprope is available on Amazon.

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