Issue 11: Natural Outlaws

Issue 11: Natural Outlaws (Jan-Feb 2017) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, videos, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.

I Have Me Some Hobbies

by on Jan 30, 2017

I take advantage of everything—mostly people and of these people mostly friends. I have other hobbies. Yes, I consider taking advantage a hobby and “found” items I display in my modest ranch house near the beach but the lists and the taking advantage summaries I keep hidden away in my knotty pine den with two boards that open to a secret closet by a spring opener. My found things are scattered all around the house, including my stash closet. One day in the supermarket I spotted an open purse in the baby carrier of a cart.  After watching the lady shopper walk off a few aisles and no one else was in the ethnic foods aisle I snagged the wallet and hit a mother lode of cash, credit cards, even a debit card with the password written on it. I sold that for five hundred dollars to some degenerate at a bar. Outside the hardware store I took a wheel barrel on display and filled it with bags of potting soil and wheeled it to my car at the far end of the parking lot and asked some young guy with the hardware store logo on his apron if he’d help me unload the soil and get the wheel barrel in my car. He couldn’t have been nicer so I gave him a $2 tip. That’s how my collections go. My bookshelves have a bunch of library books that I was able to walk out with in my backpack and my walls have pictures I’ve taken off of doctors office walls. You’d be surprised how many doctors are good photographers and like to display their work. I list the “found objects” in a moleskin notebook and keep it in my hide-a-way along with my “taking advantage” of moleskin. Who can remember so many items? I have to make some changes because my house is filling up with things I no longer treasure, Yesterday; I started dropping my collected wallets randomly into open purses in the supermarket.

 

—
Paul Beckman’s story, “Healing Time” was one of the winners in the 2016 The Best Small Fictions and his 100 word story, “Mom’s Goodbye” was chosen as the winner of the 2016  Fiction Southeast Editor’s Prize. His stories are widely published in print and online. His published story website is paulbeckmanstories.com and his latest collection of flash stories, PEEK, is available on his site.

There was a river

by on Jan 27, 2017

at the farm of a girl my age.
We were maybe nine or ten.
The length of her hair
galloped like a mane
as she splashed ahead into the water.
Cows drank from shallow banks.
The current was fast from rain
and pulled at our legs as we moved
around branches and stones.
We swept and fell outside the hours.
I don’t remember hot or cold
or the wet afterward.
We laughed at weakness
as we climbed from the water.
Our steps sought buoyance
upon return.

 

—
Micki Blenkush lives in St. Cloud MN and works as a social worker. She is a 2015 recipient of an emerging artist grant awarded by the Central MN Arts Board, funded by the McKnight Foundation. Her writing has also appeared in: Sequestrum, Naugatuck River Review, *82 Review, and elsewhere.

kite festival

by on Jan 26, 2017

 

kite festival –
my whole crayon set
up in the sky

 

—
Anthony Q. Rabang finished his BS Biology at the University of the Philippines – Baguio in 2015. He started writing haiku, senryu, and haibun while soul-searching in January 2016. He has poems published in the Asahi Haikuist Network, Failed Haiku, World Haiku Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Cattails, Wildplum, Akitsu Quarterly, Akisame, Makoto, Presence and Under the Basho. Website: Short Pauses

In the Clouds

by on Jan 25, 2017

out the porthole
a primordial sun
wears the colour it was born with
the stewardess keeps altering its flavor
sometimes it tastes like orange juice
other times, Chinese tea

I feel myself ascending
into the divine world
not far away, Zeus and the Jade Emperor
are comparing notes
about how to woo a lady
the gods’ lost chargers
hide in long sleeves of fairy maidens

night falls, moonless
stars are out
no other celebrations
in the firmament
except for a silent pair of wings
fashioned out of iron

 

///

Author’s note: The Jade Emperor in Chinese culture and traditional myth is one of the representations of the first god. In Taoist theology he is one of the three primordial emanations of the Tao.

 

—
Cui Yuwei is a bilingual poet and translator based in China. Her poems and translations are widely seen in Australia, the US, Canada, Vietnam and India. Her pocket poetry collection Fish Bones published by Flying Island Books is forthcoming soon in Macau. Currently, she works as an English lecturer in Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus in China.

Sometimes the Water

by on Jan 24, 2017

(Watch Marie Craven’s video “Sometimes the Water” on Vimeo)

Editor’s note: Poem by Kallie Falandays was at the Poetry Storehouse but is no longer available to read online. Full credits at Vimeo.

 

—
Marie Craven is a media maker and musician from the Gold Coast, Australia. She has been engaged in online collaboration since 2007 and has contributed to works with artists in many different parts of the world. Website: pixieguts.com

In Merciless Air

by on Jan 23, 2017

You shouldn’t venture into fog,
where a mountain’s head rises,

a face without eyes, arrowhead
jammed into the flesh of sky.

It may be, someday
that the world will flip to face

another sun, and you the fish
choking at the bottom

of a wooden-ribbed boat,
your eyes smoke and glass,

your desperate lips pouting
as you drown in the merciless air.

 

—
Steve Klepetar has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including four in 2016. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems. Family Reunion and A Landscape in Hell are forthcoming in 2017.

In the Feet of a Refugee

by on Jan 20, 2017

-At the Internally Displaced Persons Camp, Kuje, April, 2015.

I know where daffodils trade their yellows for crimsons;

I know where they are, too weary and weathered with war;

Yes, I know where their cornet-cast crowns are full of furrows:

The soles of a refugee’s feet—bloodied, broken into lines of latitude and longitude of longing;

Longing for home on whose pristine paths sprout earth’s most prickly plants:

Bombs, blades and crying kalashnikovs.

 

—
Frank Eze lives in, and writes from, Ibadan, Nigeria. He recently won the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize. His works have been published in online journals—Praxis, WritiVision, COAL and many others. Frank is working on his debut poetry collection, AMARANTHINE.

The Teenager Who Became My Mother

by on Jan 19, 2017

The teenager who became my mother had a way of feeling, seeing and hoping.
It was hope in particular rafted her through the war.
She was not one-eyed either were her hairs curly,
She had a body of one colour: black.
I remember when I asked her if she has ever seen anyone die.
She moved her head up and down: A kind of Yes.
She said she saw five and twenty and more;
That most of them drowned inside of her.

I looked her in the eyes after she had exhausted her dying tales before me.
I saw the teenager who became my mother
and was a graveyard for those drowned inside of her
to see us crawl through the war.

 

—
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is a Nigerian who likes reading and writing.

The Past Is Not Where I Left It

by on Jan 18, 2017

Last time I saw it, it was shivering in blackness
wrapped tight in layers of shame
squeezed small with no room to breathe
locked up as he never would be.

I searched that space, that hole, that valley.
And in its place, the compressed past
formed diamonds so hard and bright
I placed them in my eyes and faced forward.

 

—
Stephanie Hutton is a writer and clinical psychologist in the UK  who believes in the therapeutic value of short creative works. She has published flash fiction, short stories and poetry online and in print. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Brighton Prize for flash fiction. She can be found at stephaniehutton.com

Natural Outlaws

by on Jan 17, 2017

I. Hubble’s Law

The Universe’s overriding impulse is to back away. The further that galaxies are from each other, the faster they move to increase that separation. For almost fourteen billion years, the Universe has been accelerating away from connection, away from communion. This makes me immeasurably sad: what could be lonelier than a Universe full of galaxies whose first principle is to recede from one another at an ever increasing speed?

II. Length contraction

If you make a long bus go fast enough, you can enclose it in a short barn. You need to be snappy with the doors, though. By this logic, you can fit a metre rule in a thimble if your sleight of hand moves likes lightning. You can even stick a length of swiftly moving truth in the fine cracks across your beliefs.

III. Illumination

Seeing is subtraction. Leaves are green only because of all the colours of light, green is the only hue the leaf refuses to embrace. It happily absorbs enlightenment from red to violet, gaining heat and energy whilst hopscotching over the middle ground of green. And so it is that a black hole accepts all, absorbs all, embraces every colour, every wavelength of light.  Likewise, white results from complete indifference, lack of engagement at any frequency, deflecting away every encounter with the light.

 

—
Melissa Fu grew up in Northern New Mexico and now lives Cambridgeshire, UK. Skeletons in her closet include a couple of physics degrees and many valiant but disastrous attempts at classroom teaching. Learn more at Spillingtheink.com or onetreebohemia.com