From We Take Me Apart (A Novella)

by Molly Gaudry

 

A carafe, that is a blind glass. —Gertrude Stein

 

In a different version it was not a pea but a cocoa bean

you came to us in the night

soaked in cold

trembling with fatigue

Mother brought you inside where the last of our candles were burning

prepared for you a bed of many mattresses

in the morning she asked how you had slept

you nodded

I was the one who did the beds

knew you had not slept on those mattresses

had slept on the floor

why

I had never seen a being so beautiful as you

who in passing my cocoa-bean test brought me great inspiration

the dresses I fashioned from that point forward where winged creations made from the excesses of water on hand

each drop sewn one on top of the next so that the texture was rippling as a pond beneath the moon….

 

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2009), and the editor of Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (Flatmancrooked, 2010). She curates Walking Man Gallery, edits Willows Wept Press and Willows Wept Review, is a co-founding editor of Twelve Stories, and is an associate editor for Keyhole Magazine. She writes occasional book reviews for East&West Magazine, and she’s currently tweeting a chapter of her new verse novel, FLORA THE WHORE, every few days on Twitter.

 

One Veers Always Towards the Precipice of Familiarity

One Veers Always Towards the Precipice of Familiarity by Colin James

 

by Colin James

Our neighbors sun themselves indiscriminately.
See the after affects,
the linear contortions as chaise lounges buckle.
Oars replace legs,
to stand with the rows of canes
near the pool-house study.
We can sit quietly
our buttocks clutching the seats width,
until it’s time to dine
and I hold you like a drink.


Colin James lives in Massachusetts but used to live in England. He works in Energy Conservation. He has poems forthcoming in Oysters And Chocolate, Calliope Nerve and The Tower Journal.

Trailer Trash

His eyes didn’t smile. Thin lips and ungenerous, intermittent staying in the house and in it. And in it he took off and went places, no one knows. She. Wide hips, all the better to give birth, my dear. She wanted that baby more than anything. Still born with him standing arms at sides, helpless to fix. Only the old trailer truck. Go see Uncle Herman, ease the grief and grow up some. No more lies. He, handsome sputtering liar, new jacket, new name, new lady. Back at the ranch she waited, grief burning a hole in his heart. Made him want to be bad. Stick a knife in the wound. His wound.

 

<

p style=”text-align: justify;”>Dancer/choreographer turned abstract painter/writer, Neila Mezynski has fiction and poetry published on Kill Author, Snow Monkey, Word Riot, Dogzplot, Mud Luscious, Scrambler, Rumble among several others.