Three Poems by Rob Plath

cats & cigarettes

 

i read that camus
had a black cat
named cigarette
tonight i picture
the aloof pair
sitting together
a big yawn
opening up around
his companion’s fangs
as albert’s smoke
curls past his eye
like the silent tongue
of nothingness

____________

 

slabs 

i
am

a

portable

morgue

seldom

do

i

move

down

the

avenues

of

the

living

w/ out

slabs

of

blue

corpses

in

my

heart

____________

along the avenues of broken lamplights 

in this neighborhood

garbage drums are dragged

to the curb before dawn

sharpens yards of leaning fences

& pale stubble of lawns

the headlights of old cars

warming on narrow driveways

the only light cutting the darkness

& the empty pails roll around

unattended all day on pavement

cracked as the tired hands

of those who return to collect

them well after dusk

Three Poems by Cord Moreski

Brooklyn by the Sea

My friend Charlie tells me as we sit on a bench
and wait for the last train of the night to arrive
that he doesn’t even recognize his own city anymore.
The house he grew up in on Cookman is a hot yoga studio,
and the school he attended as a kid is now a block
full of luxury townhomes, even the landmarks
and mom-and-pop shops he used to haunt
are being traded in for trendy art murals and lots
for overpriced food trucks. But the contractors keep
buying and flipping, destroying and rebuilding,
so that it’s not so easy to hear those Springsteen songs
among the constant drilling along the boardwalk anymore.
Charlie tells me that his landlord is raising his rent again
and that maybe his luck would be better if he moves out of New Jersey.
Then he gets quiet for a moment as we watch our train pass us by
like a fleeting memory, like a lifetime flashing before the inevitable death.
So we both decide that all there’s left to do is walk
but have trouble figuring out which direction is home.

 

 

Disappearing Act

 

Ricky was always into magic.
That summer when my pals
and I were all twenty-two years old,
we bought a few cases of PBR each night,
lit a bonfire on the beach and watched
as Ricky did the damndest things.
He bent quarters with his forehead,
plucked rose petals from the back of earlobes
and always, for his final trick, helped make
the rest of our beer vanish into his belly.
But one day he stopped coming around.
Word was that his father tried to convince him
into joining the army, but Ricky ran away
before he could ever sign the papers.
His dad would ask us from time to time
if we had heard any news about his son,
but we all knew that magicians
never revealed their secrets.

 

Tomorrow

Back then, my friends and I
swore time would never catch us.
We drove fast. Brawled much.
Dragged Reds past the filters
and found God at the bottom of bottles.
We’d stay up all night mocking
the galaxies that had already died
not realizing it would eventually
become tomorrow.

 

 

 

.

Davo by George Anderson

 

 

He never caught anyone’s eye & by most accounts
he was ‘very ordinary’ apart from his beautiful long black hair.

The last report I wrote for him in Year 10 simply read:

‘Davo is a quiet student who is capable of making a more conscious effort to improve the length and quality of his written work, especially under exam conditions.’

One day everything changed.

The day he hanged himself from a tree in his family’s backyard.

There had been none of the obvious warning signs:
no desperate attempts at communication.
no suicide note-

just his blue unmarked face
swinging stiffly in the wind
in the purple pulse of the jacaranda.

His friends were dumb-founded, pissed-off. Devastated.

Trying to piece it all together
we recalled how he was a committed greenie
how during recess & lunch he would often collect
empty soft drink cans from the school bins
& sporting fields for recycling

but nothing more could be uncovered than that.

The school’s memorial service for his senseless loss
was a bleak affair-attended by his family
and a shaken Year 10 & school staff.

A memorial tree was planted for Davo that day
but was it was torn out at least three times over the next couple of months
& replaced before it was eventually left alone.

Now on my way to class
I often peer out towards the cricket nets
and see his tree now 15 metres in height

I think of Davo
of his silent crying out
& how none of us ever saw it coming.

 

 

Home by Timothy Tarkelly

 

 

We couldn’t help but jump, the speakers rattling something shitty against the noise of the dirt road, but we knew this song like we knew our families, like we knew each other, the only four people in the world with good taste in music, who understand what a refuge you can find circling your hometown, like we knew these roads, worn grains in the cracked Midwestern wood, soft to the touch, but look like a splintered mess. We couldn’t help but jump, thrashing our bodies to the bassline, la-la-la-ing along, la-la-la-ing like we knew what it was to be older, to be us in ten years, to be us still together, ‘cause surely that’s the way that works.

And Now This by Matt Dennison

And now there’s a leak
in the gravity-tank
toilet we never used,
that I tried to kill
from the inside-out—
propped a wooden spoon
under its arm, siliconed
its mouth, duct-taped
its drain. But in spite
of all this it’s recently
begun to leak and
it’s getting worse.
And it’s not that I’m lazy,
I tried to stop it once
and I’m sure I’ll try again,
but for now I think
I’ll let it grow until
it equals your showers,
your eternal sour
sips and endless
dripping rains of
penny complaints.

I’m paying for everything else,
why not pay for this?

OH WELL by Brian Rihlmann

this was just another morning

when I pulled into the parking lot

of the coffee shop

and saw the lilacs blooming

in the island

surrounded by the red curb

and didn’t feel like walking over

and smelling them

oh well…

I guess I’ve smelled them

before

haven’t I?

over half a century by J.J. Campbell

 

the good

die young

before i

know it

these bones

will have

over half

a century

of wear

and tear

on them

that should

remove any

thought of

being good

of course,

all these

stories

about

women

liking the

bad boys

seem to

be bullshit

as well