The person I meant to become
would more easily forgive me
for not becoming that person
than the person I have become
ever could.
–David Park Musella,
Bigger Than They Appear:
Anthology of Very Short Poems
(Accents Publishing)
On the fire escape, one-Sarah Freligh
Bigger Than They Appear:
Anthology of Very Short Poems
(Accents Publishing)
Sarah Freligh is the author of Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Brevity, Barn Owl Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Woman, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, and Painted Bride Quarterly and on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and an Artist’s Exchange grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.
I was so sick of my home–Sasho Serafimov,
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger
Sasho Serafimov was born on August 30th, 1953 in Dobrich. He holds a degree from Slavic University in Sofia in social pedagogy. He is the author of six poetry books, most recently The Elderly Die at the End of the World, as well as a book of children’s stories, Confused Tales. Sasho’s play, The Teller of Tales, was awarded third place in the Golden Dolphin International Puppet Theatre Festival. He’s married and has a beard.
He lays prone on the smooth base,
with left arm pulled back across his body.
Take this arm, he says,
this hand.
This plaster cracked down the knucklebone.
It’s only symbol,
symbolon,
that small thing which has been wrenched apart
we seek to put back together.
Desperately.
Such disparity in our desperations.
If I were to compare this broken hand to yours
if you signed my cast in blood,
or the wine I stole from the tabernacle,
would I be healed?
It is in this way we are asked to pretend
to take the body into our mouth
but not to swallow;
to taste the blood and believe.
But I don’t believe.
This wine-dark liquid has no hand
on the treacle and spit that filled my mouth after a fight
how it tasted like the snipped tin
Chris dared me to eat off the floor of my grandfather’s shop.
Blood gathers these broken pieces, like sawdust
spread on bile, and settles them
into the tender and cursory holes left behind.
It’s not that I don’t understand how
different the sound is when the wound is ripped instead of cut;
or how the bruise turns
from black to red when it breathes.
It’s that you fill this cup again
and again from some glass carafe
and forget
that no one could ever believe in a blood that tastes so sweet.
–Matthew MiniCucci,
Reliquary, Accents Publishing
More from Reliquary:
Matthew Minicucci is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from numerous journals, including: The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cream City Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. He has also been featured on Verse Daily. He currently teaches writing at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois.
On the 7th of May the sea pulled away from Balchik.The minarets of Taj Mahal are leaning dangerously….
An airplane with three tons of drugs crashed….
Still the good news hides
in the cave of your silence, Ali Baba—
imprint of lipstick
on a shadow.
While I toyed with the unread
I put a few questions
in random order
with unvaried tone:
does deep meaning hide
behind every ordinary thing?
and do the cosmic dimensions
originate from there?
Suddenly
the past equated itself to today.
But no matter on which side
of the equation I stand,
the scale swings
in favor of the other.
I lighten like a pressed flower….
And not a single piece of good news.
–Roza Boyanova,
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger:
Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
(Accents Publishing)
like russian nesting
dolls
we climb
inside
each other’s
skin &
open
open
open up
to find
a tiny
thing
that is not
hollow
the spot
that has no void
–tina andry,
ransom notes
(Accents Publishing)
Whether the heart latches on first
like beggarticks on a passing pair
of socks, or if it’s the body
that stumbles and remembers
as it falls a world resplendent,
everything shines in that light.
Is the passing of that joy
written on the walls
of each heart by a fiery hand?
Or was it that you and I
found ourselves numbered
among those fated to fail?
–Jeremy Dae Paden,
Broken Tulips
Accents Publishing
If, as he says,
this strip of trees, a make
to wood enough of this home
for snakes and runners, is a place
for murder—those dwellers,
says he, body the crisis,
give it chances. Then only
the jungle comes, swallows
the watches he and his Eve
made. Names but tell,
but names
made Eve his, and he watches
the swallows. Come, jungle,
the only. Then chance it.
Give, crisis the body.
He says dwellers, those
murders for place, are runners,
and snake for home. This. Of enough
wood to make a tree of. Strip
this? says he. As if.
–Morgan Adams,
In Nonestica
Accents Publishing
Morgan Adams was born and raised in a bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky and wrote her own first “book” at the age of five. She graduated from Berea College and earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Indiana University. Her work often draws upon myth, folklore, and family history.
1.
n
bakes
a cake
2.
n
arranges
candles
in
the shape
of an s
3.
n
grants
a
special
wish
4.
n
swishes
her
skirt
–Nettie Farris,
Communion
Accents Publishing
Nettie Farris teaches writing as an adjunct instructor, roams the grounds of Mount Saint Francis Nature Sanctuary with her dog, and hikes the Millennium Trail at Bernheim Forest. Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Dark Woods I Cross: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisville Women Poets and Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana with her husband and three sons.
As if I’ve never seen you smile at my
friends right in front of my face, which I
straightened with all my strength.
As if I weren’t receiving daily phone calls
from my future self warning me of potholes
that I step in anyway because how do I know
my future self isn’t fucking with me?
I know myself, and it’s the kind of thing
I’d do. As if I could be king and you
could be queen, which David Bowie promised
but did he mean you and me?
Who’s been calling your cell, verse one.
Your hand on my best friend’s knee,
come on and admit it, verse two.
As if I say all this to you and you say
as if. As if I was a werewolf but now
I’m Scott again, and I say I’m sorry
I about bit your head off back there.
As if I could become your pet parrot and call
your new boyfriend Cracker, his penis peanut.
As if my heart darkened and you opened
the window blinds to make a sunlight square
to soak it in. As if you would ever leave me
for Richard Dawson. He kisses every female
Family Feud contestant. When I close my eyes
all I see are fruit flies. When they close their eyes
all they see is garbage. The garbage truck comes
with screeching brakes while they’re sleeping
and they wake bereft. Buzzing and banging heads
against screen doors. Like me after the inevitable
bull comes charging at me. After you’ve left.
–Tom C. Hunley,
Scotch Tape World
Accents Publishing
