UNTITLED
mark morgan
@anautumnroad_poetry
I.
Bless this eight-mile pilgrimage
the shambling holloweye machines
scavenge dirty coins
Beneath the tumbling copper sun
They trip on writhing roots
clawing the crumbling blacktop
like worms rising for air
oh what hungers have flooded
rusty voidgut station wagons
confined to yellow half-drawn prisons
between stops for black coffee
the roots split their windshields
coil round unwitting hips
and devour daring slivers of skin
crawling along highways
through supermarket aisles
plunging secret depths of any beach
with a trace of summer sparkle
II.
A flickering glow peels the eyelids
Of the dreaming child and drags him
To the living room by starving pupils
They wish to taste the countenances
Of the sighmoan choir
Chanting beneath a blanket
Of daddy’s snores
The television screen boils flesh
Into shapes familiar and new
And throws flames where daddy rests
His fingers stretch like pulsing roots
Along the walls and out the windows
His mouth agape and yielding
To a cruciform monolith
Of wood and bone piercing the ceiling
and gashing the night sky
until festering rivers of sunlight
pour from its wounds
and usher the birth of the next dead world
Mark Morgan is a Detroit native, teacher, and poet. His work is featured in The Rising Phoenix Review, Peninsula Poets by Poetry Society of Michigan, and the 2018-2025 editions of Sterling Script: A Local Author Collection by Walper Publishing. Mark also won Landmark Books' Fourth Annual Haiku Contest in 2018. When not teaching or writing, Mark may be found reading, playing chess, or listening to jazz.
the floorboards began at my ankles
Pip McGough
@manifest_gothic
They gave me a baby wrapped in cancer.
It mewed like guilt,
its face like a howl-shaped hole in the plaster.
I couldn’t breastfeed it—only rock it,
rock it,
rock it,
until my body blurred into the air.
Its eyes were black projectors,
casting the same instant again and again—
me, framed in the doorway,
but unsure which version of me it wanted.
The floorboards began at my ankles.
My fingers rattled in their sockets.
The baby’s gums clicked softly,
like beetles in a jar.
Henry—
with your Tarot tower of hair,
your sleep like the reconstruction of a crime scene.
You married meat, you made love to absence.
Your child is peeling open the dark
with its pink, wet hiss.
We are all this, after our fashion:
stammer of circuitry,
chemical stench of new skin,
the wasp-like refusal
of machines
to switch off.
the baby cries me an epiphany
nicholas grooms
@nicholasgroomsraps
Under the spell of magic fungi
the television garbles in lynchian remnants
dual portals, twin peeks into the vastness Lamplight, a bold apparatus
warmth felt under fuchsia velvet silk
this low glow of the devils ilk
This living room air plays victim
to the windswept county road
I draw then ruin a heart in the dust
on the end table, draw then ruin
a pentagram, wipe away
my name in cursive, point all blame
accursed, I sketch uncertainty
then wipe it into particles afloat
Adrift like my thoughts,
I hear the baby down the hall
and cannot sleep; Is this happening
or just the thickening plot on screen?
Does he wail from the womb
ashamed of his father
and this handful of capped doom?
The screaming will not stop!
I follow his wounded voice
with the tracking skills of my subpar VCR
to the warm, slow winding of its inner workings
I press eject and the tape spews forth
like a wagging tongue, relief and comfort
strike me like a cigarette smoked after sex
extremely long drags
pulled to the butt of the joke
I find brief lucidity in the fact
that soon the baby will cry again
this time, he will belong to me
and when he does I can’t be noosed up
by the golden snare of this lynch mob
hung higher than the ceiling
in a purge of escaping atoms
set on wasting the eve
Nicholas Grooms is a poet, writer and musician hailing from Garden City, Kansas. He has recently appeared in such periodicals as Suburban Witchcraft, Midsummer Dream House, Ionosphere and Villain Era Lit though he is best known for his work creating music for the Kansas City Chiefs organization. Grooms is also a revered sports and entertainment journalist and is author of the book “Me, Myself and I Hate You”. He currently resides in Austin, TX, forever learning and growing in his favorite role of proud father.
In search of a mooncalf
Sienna lee
@ms.erabilist
How will I ever go to America —
not obsess at lone trees
in fields and of that peculiar treasure —
a black-and-white mooncalf
stitched with wet root’s fingers?
Once white bandages rotted
to handfuls of dried worms —
eye sockets empty as two dark planets
tethered like dead twins in a womb —
rice-paper membrane of umbilical
cord for a throat puppeteered
by ants so slowly you'd think
the clock stopped. Through
open car windows I listen
for notes of a piano lodged
in a long throat of corridor —
a singing woman birthed
from asteroids squeezed between
the rusted blades of the wind
breathing around barbed wire
fences — crude-oil fed chickens —
cardboard cut-out refineries —
a place next-door to here.
The Leftovers
ryan di francesco
@ryan_difrancesco
The beach is closed and the image of the polluted bay reminds me of an old postcard / all still and perfect /
like a Lawren Harris or Tom Thomson painting of
the north shore rising,
where the women of the twenties once walked
in the summer, twirling white parasols,
talking about St. Martin-in-the-Fields
and the duty of helping the poor / leftovers /
strewn about like broken ornaments
along a future with sick children in redbrick cities,
boxed up on avenues reserved for the few,
sparkling like glints of light in the fog,
wishing for a happy ending in one of those timeless films—
like Night of the Living Dead or Eraserhead
always playing in this theatre.