Emily Williamson

I’m a very simple man. You’ve got to have, like, a computer nowadays to turn the TV on and off, and the nightmare continues.

— Ozzy Osbourne

Can’t blame the man who wants a simple choice,
A single flavor of things, like milk or bacon,
Or, hell, the joys of bat decapitation.
I share this with the OzMan — our nightmare of logins,
 
Reboots, control-deletes and verifications,
And tweets, repeat and post, like the whole damn world
Is a password lost, my mother’s maiden name,
The street where I grew up, my best friend’s dog.
 
If I were to slice a landfill clean as a loaf,
I’d find the thrown-out goods there stratified.
The patient possessions of the past still lie
There, flawless as Pompeii or Oetzi from the Alps.
 
I mean the Walkman layer. The one with gremlin heads,
Wall phones with cords, and decals like Baby on Board,
Warped VCRs, and carbon paper, Flowbees,
Monopoly thimbles, Moon Boots, Rotary dials,
 
Parachute pants, the moon, and Garfield’s ass,
(Poor fella, caught in all those crank-up windows)
The hollow carcass of the Millennium Falcon,
And a Breyer horse, a still-born Polaroid.
 
The trash tells all. From where it started out
To me — a dinosaur — now gone the way
Of the wallpaper store, the sewing machine repair.
We’re made of all the stuff we’ve thrown away,
 
From arrowheads to ear spools, fishing hooks
Of abalone shell, and ferrous awls,
The broken dish the maid could not abide,
The hand-wrought nails, the medicine bottle glass
 
Turned lavender by sun and manganese,
Patinaed window panes and baby teeth,
Old whiskey jugs, and ironstone, great stacks
Of broken headboards, chairs, steel barrel hoops,
 
Distorted wagon wheels, mining claims,
Red Bakelite casino chips and beads,
Bel Airs and Chesterfield tobacco tins,
Sweet Esther Williams’ face on a Wheaties box,
 
Ford engine blocks, and stirrup pants, and cans
Of faded Pabst Blue Ribbon, and like I said,
The gutted remains of Ozzy Osbourne’s tapes —
Their shiny ribbons flashing in the sun.
 
It’s all there, stacking up, still growing.
But if I had to pick one single thing,
One fragment of a temporary life,
The exceptional phenomenon of me,
 
It’s just this off-white café coffee mug,
Crazing and chipped, in a plain café, in a town
Where the coffee’s even plainer, when it comes,
Burnt black but weak, with cleverly tepid cream.
 
A coffee that won’t put on airs, that won’t
Declare its kinship with dry cabernet
Or camembert, where I can stare through panes
Of unwashed windows, to a steady mountain range
 
And all its folded age, its stoic frown.
Just watch. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t change
In the sunbaked sky and all I ever knew.
A simple thing that keeps on slowing time.

Formerly an archaeologist, EMILY WILLIAMSON is a writer, editor, and literary agent currently based in Baltimore, MD. Her poetry has appeared in The Waterhouse Review and is forthcoming in Measure. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Word Riot, Peacock Journal & Peacock Journal Anthology: Beauty First, another was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open 2012. She has a BA in Anthropology from American University and an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Askold Skalsky

When I grew up, I wanted to be a microcluster
and have a safe life, to be incorporated into larger
wholes, part of a clutch, like a hand holding out
its fingers, like globules of stars moving in the same
direction with nearly the same speed. Just a clot in a
coagulated mass, a portion of a roundish, viscous lump.
Later when my individual tendencies crystallized,
I opted for a pyrotechnic signal, a group of fireballs,
maybe a mineral formation like a bunch of grapes
or a decoration of silvery acorns and oak leaves.
But something had gone wrong: I began to feel thick
and nondescript as though degenerating into a canister.
My hopes diminished; my prospects fell like fragment-
ation bombs released from an aircraft at great height.

Originally from Ukraine, ASKOLD SKALSKY currently resides in Hagerstown, Maryland, and has had poems in over 300 magazines and online journals in the USA as well as in literary publications in Canada, England, Ireland, mainland Europe, Turkey, Australia, and Bangladesh. Over the years he has won several prizes for individual poems as well as two Individual Artist Awards in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. His first book of poems, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu, was published in 2011 by Horizon Tracts press in New York City.

C. M. Donahue

“‘Goodnight Earth. Goodnight humanity’: China’s Jade Rabbit Rover Tweets Its Own Death”

— The Independent, 03 February 2014

Upon landing on the moon,
I reach my robotic arm out
into the silence. My solar panels,
like metallic sunflowers, blossom
and angle to find light. The solar wind
coats my body with a layer of dust
as I take in the grey desert
and the vast darkness beyond it —
my new home.
 
After my first lunar night.
I trundle across the highlands
to survey the maria and craters stretching
in canyons before me. My wheels
plow through soil like snow
with a scent resembling spent gunpowder.
My arm extends to capture samples:
basaltic rock, volcanic glass beads,
the ubiquitous dust of comet particles.
I store them in my pockets, souvenirs
for the journey back.
 
Weeks later I awake to find
I can no longer move — a glitch
in the control circuit. Rooted
to the surface, I listen to the static crackle
from my radio as my mind wanders
to the image of a single boot print.
 
After two years, I still huddle
like a Rabbit, waiting
for Chang’e, the moon goddess
drunk on the elixir of immortality.
Between periods of blinding sun
and opaque shadow, I look out into space:
eddies of neon nebula amid
the scattering of stars hypnotize,
lull me into sleep mode
as I look back to earth, a blue crescent
pinned to this lonely horizon.

C. M. DONAHUE holds a BFA in Poetry from Emerson College and an MA in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Connecticut. Poetry by C. M. Donahue has recently appeared in Amaryllis and Sonic Boom.