Grey Wolfe LaJoie
In a moment the little boy
will be surprised by the pop
of the big black balloon.
Hanging from his lips, a limp
flower, which he hands you
without hands.
There are bodies in the air
at all hours of the earth, but
you seem to be sinking into
your dainty dirty garden bed.
How carefully we spin
the bottle, and how soft
it sounds as its wet lips
whistle in motion.
GREY WOLFE LAJOIE is a Creative Writing undergraduate at UNC-Asheville. He is the senior poetry editor at The Rhapsodist Literature and Arts Journal, and his work can be found in his chapbook A Commando in Floral Remembers His Mother, and in the anthology Bits of Sugar and Other Stories, available through Grateful Steps. In his free time, he tries to remember what he used to do when he had free time.
‘Cause the October issue is in the chair, folks. (Apologies to Keats and Gaiman.)
Welcome to issue Seventy-One! This month is also our sixth anniversary, which has us so excited we just peed a little. (For you mathemagicians frantically gesticulating in the second row, the issue count is off because we briefly flirted with going quarterly during a transitional phase in 2011.)
We are deliriously happy to welcome five new voices to our warm electric pages. Matthew Myers kicks things off with demented and nightmarishly detailed directions to “The Best BBQ in This Town.” Next, Brian D. Morrison explores the bucolic longings of Mary Shelley’s tragic creation in a poem that perfectly complements the season. Shannon Noel Brady keeps things moving with a sweetly sad flash piece in which a spoiled child’s destructive greed is observed from an unusual yet familiar vantage point. After that, Michael Berkowitz finds a surprising impermanence of place in “Paper Cities.” Closing out the issue is Chad Schuster, who spoons up a “Taste of Fame” that packs the sort of BAM! you can’t get from an ordinary spice weasel. This month’s delicately creepy cover art slid from the talented mind and fingers of Jakub Gazmercik.
Ogle it online or pluck the .pdf.
Michael Berkowitz
As it turned out
the light of creation was the soft glow
of the lamp outside
a general store. One hour to the north,
there is a bend in the Willowemoc known only to fisherman
and map-makers, where
the golden hour hooks the trout, scales refracted silver
below the surface.
Along Route 17 nothing is drawn to scale.
Distances are measured in days and everything slopes
toward the east. When the sun has risen
and the trout have all been caught
and the house behind the general store has been torn down,
what is to say this town on the map
was ever anything more
than some cartographer’s folly?
Michael Berkowitz is a poet, web developer and aspiring trapeze artist living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Some of his recent work has appeared in Bird’s Thumb, Quarterly West, and Tinderbox Poetry.
