Big White House 
 
That huge old boxed white house sitting in green out in the blue in back, where he lived turning out those pictures of gas tanks in the middle of nothing making it something. White and red dots, Pegasus.  Old naked ladies standing alone on porches of brand new days with red hair, always red, his wife and a particular light streaming her flesh color, Jo.  Can’t live and paint the old broad. No use, no need, for only paint. To make the light stream down on Jo’s bedded, slippery, streaming, pink nippled flesh. That’s all. In the corner of windows, in the theater, behind the rich tapestries. Secretive. People rooms. Only.
 

THE AUTHOR
Neila Mezynski has fiction and poetry published on Snow Monkey Journal , Word Riot, elimae, Rumble, Northville Review, Mud Luscious, The Scrambler, Dogzplot, Monkey Bicycle, Short Fast and Deadly  among several other journals and reviews.
 

mouth glue 

he sells porcelain teeth
from a box
on the curb--
broken mirror, wafting
glue, the open
anxious mouth. 

crouching, he brings
the new body 

together. enter bicuspids
off-white, not the yolk
yellow of tea
& tobacco. 

if the heart

falls out, are there vendors
 
with cardboard boxes
of plastic valves
moving already, impatient 

for a new rhythm to beat
on the body instrument 

like tongues
that keep swallowing
the life blood down 

 
Crown

You fell down when we were getting water from the well. early spring, the mud was frozen in places, the bones of your feet cracked out rhythms. You sound so much older than you are when you walk, brittle-ankled boy, like you are stepping on acorns. I remember when we were children, you broke your arm in three places when you fell from the fence. You walked catlike and porcelain, moving your body as though your tail would follow. The neighbor boys threw rocks that missed you, mostly. thrice-broken arms with knobs in the bone from self-repair, where the calcium fused to itself.  You showed me, holding my fingers to the spot on your forearm that is thick like old chewing gum, and told me our bodies are strongest where we have broken. Hair-thin boy, slight as an apology. You fell at the top of the hill, I ran after you, skinning my knee. Your forehead kissed out blood on the frost. You looked so irreversible.

THE AUTHOR
Erika Suni is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. A Pittsburgh
native, she now lives in New Orleans. Her work has appeared in
Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics.

Cathedral Garden

she walks through
the mist of perceptions of
the texture of previous
lives brushed from her
mind in the harvest of feeling
not yet intact her eyes
searching among the heavy
angels half blind with pressure
of now the yellow image of
a tarot card a falcon trapped
and feeding on her hand
grapes in the background no
not grapes gray angels
the city below the space of
now again with its burdens
lust pressure sex
the whirlpool of what
could be should be dragging
her beyond the cross of Latin
words drifting low
in the mélange smoke lights
pollution windows falling deeper
dawn fusing distant stones
as the breath of the wind
welds sunlight to her skin
her spine incandescence
the lives not stuttering stone
angel phrases but breathing
through her blood the stunning
silence this
I always will be here

-------

The Naked Rose

If that rose thought of serving
only, she’d be shedding petals
at every touch and then
she would stand naked.

Once you love your darkness,
will it then go away?

-------

Divorce

You cannot kill a heron
to pay for the woodpecker’s nest
that was damaged in storm –
or can you?
Supposing you could – meanwhile
the forest in unstoppable.

Three times a Pushcart Prize nominee, Beate Sigriddaughter has published prose and poetry in many print and online magazines.  Her most recent book Snow White: A Mirror In Several Voices, was published in 2009.  She has also established the Glass Woman Prize to honor authentic women’s voices (details at www.sigriddaughter.com).

Excerpts from the Diary of Johann Hauser's "Woman" (1985)
Bonn Psychiatric Facility

January 14th/1986

Today, I played the piano with my breasts. Why not?
They are like torpedoes, like the bosom of God.
I played Chopin and the crazy man turned the pages for me.
We tried to play a duet but my hips are too big.
They curve out in layers like onion skins.
They echo like the sounds of a bell.
Just as we began the Revolutionary Etude, he lost
his balance on the stool and down he went to the floor.
I had to play the rest from memory while he lay
there like a worm.
My breasts became bruised with all that fortissimo.

March 26th/1989

My mother used to say I have the face of the Pieta.
I do not know whether she meant gracious
or long suffering.

March 27th/1989

The problem, when it comes down to it, is the structure
of it all. A body that bleeds out of the margins of the Bible
and is still expected to be holy.
My vagina is an old pear.
Pears have always been, from the beginning of time,
heathen.

October 5th/1990

For a long time, they tied me up. For my own good of course.
I had been trying to climb inside my navel, to be reborn
in the dark plum of my womb.
Boredom makes me inventive.
I had cross-stitched and painted and square danced
enough.

November 13th/1991

The crazy man visited me today. He shouldn't be in my room.
He'd heard my rays calling out to his rays.
Sometimes this happens. He kissed the top of my tiny head
and my large red body quivered.
That's all I can say about it.
Dinner was served.
And the pills came around again.

THE AUTHOR
Catherine Owen is a writer and musician from Vancouver BC. Her work has recently appeared in Splash of Red, The Danforth Review, Prick of the Spindle and Poetry Salzburg. Her sixth collection is called Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009), with a seventh, Seeing Lessons, due out from Wolsak and Wynn in 2010. Frenzy recently won the Alberta Literary Award. One of her poems, White Sale, will be in the 2010 Best Canadian Poetry Anthology.

soil births

pricking toys

leaves die into roots

answered of the answered not:

unforgotten as the gotten not:

antithesis as the theses begot:

these trees once the light had sought:

as children the holy priest had not.

THE AUTHOR
Jed Bickman is a writer and editor in New York, where he is getting an MFA in nonfiction from The New School.  His first book, A Literal Journey, a nonfiction engagement with contemporary literature in India, was published by Writers Workshop in 2009.  His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Ashé Journal of Alternative Spirituality, Big Bridge, and Clerestory. He occasionally puts unpublishable or unpalatable scraps of notebooking here: www.jedicist.org/blog