Aberration Labyrinth
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
A Note From The Editors: Happy New Year! We hope this batch of AL poets knocks your socks off! Remember that we’re now quarterly. So, submissions for our May issue are now open! -AL
Vespers Jeffrey Park Clocks tremble, slow, begin to run backwards. From the tower a bell peals.
A Cypress Grows in Lebanon Chester Roush i keep writing poems to the dead.
Your bed calls impatient to feel the weight of your aching body.
gunshots ring out in my adverbs; anguished screams rhyme in quatrain
Dusk seeps heavy from the walls, breath comes labored, morning impossibly far away.
i keep writing poems to the dead; they smile Shakespeare & all in memory photographs--stand together close, reverent dads & moms, pretend you like each other & then go back to barbs & smart retorts
A day’s walk to the west hungry mountains leap up and devour the sun.
i keep writing poems to the dead, & i worry: do i leave roses on gravestones while living eyes wilt in the sun? How much love have i denied those starving for it?
It’s Too Late Now Anita Nahal He stood His arms stretched across the doorway Like a powerful unwanted dam What can he give me now? The cup of a failed marriage is brimming over With mouthfuls of anger And a chest full of abuses.
But you, Khalil Gibran, prophet still undead to me, every line to you is a kiss for my beloved earth: it needs no reply, this poem i keep writing to the dead: when i die, the living will answer.
“How black are you going to beat me? How harsh are you going to hurt me? My blackness now so strong Will put yours to shame And like a herd of elephants on the run I will pull your trunk off the ground
Jerking your stretched arms away.” How long will the callous tree hold the day? The tiniest Submerged root Finds a way.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015 My reincarnated sister is no longer alive Robert Quintana I. The smoky Scent of your sweater Still smells sweet to me I know Somewhere In some trailer park Cigarettes burn Smelling of the sweetest debris Or a face No longer yours Ebbing through a sea of faces In a city street In Beijing And I know now You were always Have always been A drifter Renting out Hotel rooms But someday I might flow Through your mirrors And find Your eyes Embedded in mine
II. I wept the day You overflowed And left your empty chalice On my kitchen floor Your hallow face Still drifts around my ceiling Dripping it’s pensiveness Down onto me No longer whole Now I find you With your silver shimmering Tongue Clinging to my spine
Issue #015 You Gold-glowing I would like to Swallow all of your halos And find you again Percolating In the puddle of faces On my kitchen floor
Dragons Rebekah Buchanan I remember those days. We used to sit around playing dungeons and dragons. Dungeon Master Party of Adventures on a campaign encountering characters. Using magic combat polyhedral dice in your mother’s basement. Drinking near beer smoking ditch weed knowing we were cooler and smarter than the kids who were actually cooler and smarter than we ever were when we were fifteen. But that didn’t matter, since by the time we figured it all out we had moved beyond campaigns adventures magic on paper And found time warps fantasy quests in real life. © This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
Snake Skin Ali Sohail This new sun splits us Our shadows wither like shed skin that cuffs itself to ankles- convulses darkly Thighbones break what’s left of tarmac till air Rings hollow. This, her waterfall tongue speaks in palindromes Sentence mirrors sentiment Backtracks the way forward For a second there’s fire in her flamenco eyes Pupils twist and moan in synchrony with their gravity- flung halves My own tongue lost in the labyrinth depths of shattered teeth and cut flesh bleeds over with a hemophiliac passion This firing range has no guns It’s a field of mangled furniture and broken light fixtures Empty shells from fired syllables litter the carpet The bodies like shed skin drape the wreckage tossed aside with the abandon and blasé conviction that comes only from moving on.
Cosmology Sarah McCrackin Sometimes I think we love like the components of the night sky. Giant super-planets struggling within the confines of tight rings. Gas giants that seem so substantial -filled with little more than hot air. Maybe I'm trapped in orbit with no sign of escape velocity. Maybe your star has gone out and I'm left wishing on a ghost. Maybe you're an uninhabitable beauty with no trace of any lifeform, but dried up rivers of something that may have once resembled water. Maybe if I dig just a little bit deeper…
Xylem Sarah McCrackin You left me pale, exposed, vulnerable. One by one, year by year, I re-stacked myself and promised I would not be so easily moved again.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
Memories Mark Noack had shredded memories sugarcoated & 4 cups of coffee for breakfast once knew a poet who cleaned toilets in his spare time pilled up & sleepless he’d search for significance on late night tv riding manic highs he’d revise poems all night leaving the old versions in shredded memories on the kitchen table they’re great with sugar
Untitled Emily Folsom
It's an entirely plausible thing to want more than anything to be pulled into a warm embrace back rubbed and ears tickled with "everything will be okay" and at the same time have the undying desire to flick someone in the eyeballs with Tabasco soaked fingertips
A Priori John Macdonald I place a sheet on the ground and call it a bed; I am going to cry myself to sleep on this fifty percent-there are kids to raise and bills to not pay on the other side of that wall. So young. So young did I walk the jury aisle with something that didn’t care or care to pretend, but can make ball shrinking hate when the yard needs cleaning or your train is late. So sad. So sad I am with two cars and a tropical vacation. So unfair when compared to red earth poverty and starvation. Are there still drop anchor places to come ashore and be gods? So happy. So happy to wake in this camp with its humiliations, quicklime, and vaccinations. Free from the north worm that eats modern men, but not the hate with a head at each end.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
You Gave Him Your Blood Walter Ruhlmann The tenth of a dime is not much in my pocket anyway dimes don't exist around this place trees shelter, mountains encircle like nostalgias used to in the past. The past rushes back always in time o undo you and swallow you when the lost choir resurrects some ghosts from the ageless castle you once built yourself or paced smoothly to charm suckers. Dark blood-suckers, blood-thirsty wolves, not accepting overgrown flesh around your waist, longing for more, slurping each step you trod around the car park of the place. you gave your blood to these creatures, they sipped and regaled and relished before spitting it out at your face.
Untitled Emily Folsom Someday I'll tell the truth when the words "how've you been" stand before me in a daring inquiry. I'll trace the scar on my jaw and look down and away, a singular salty trail cutting the way to a confession; numb, healing, and a little ragged.
In Our Shrouded State Jake Grieco Two men were Beheaded on YouTube With pocket knives the size Of a Boy Scout’s ring finger I think about watching the video Every morning Right before I have something else to do But don’t I get in my Toyota Corolla Luxury Edition And go to wherever I’ve decided I need to be Because this is my life A spider web of responsibilities Only real because I’ve spun it in order to eat three meals a day and have a place to sleep and not imagine the images in the eyes of those two men the moment they felt the knife deep in their necks a place only words had felt before a message was sent to the world not the one we’ve all heard about us and them Jihads and conflicts Sunnis and Shiites and Republicans But a message with more truth Than Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Washington or Obama People are killing people again Still In viral videos with as many views as Come Together
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
Steam Punk Pygmallian Zachary Rosen
The Ministry of Dying Minhjan Dang
Her bones were made of stainless steal, Her skull out of blown glass, Her clothes out of macramé, And eyes out of diamonds and eggs faberge.
Silent river gnawing at bay my neighbor a couple years older drowned days before New Year. I am 7 or 8 years old burying my face in my father’s lap but curiosity forces me to look and to look at the body: hair perfectly combed, nails clipped, body washed & swathed in white cloth strewn with flowers. Incense sending smoke signals for hours prayers chanting with chimes and bells. Funeral procession – deafening sounds of weeping, wailing, sobbing and screaming the scene was mesmerizing. How does one comfort a parent?
Her hair out of yarn and copper wire, Her thumbs out of thimbles, Her boobs out of cymbals, And her lips were made of patent black leather. She had golden teeth, And platinum finger nails, Skin made of brass and iron and wood, And some silver covering her right shoulder. Her cheeks were rosy, With red dye five, Her smile serene, made, From an analog circuit on repeat. Her heart was a combustion engine, Her mind made of internet, Her soul made of ethernet, And a Turing tested personality. And she ran the world together, With her mistress maker friend, On feet that would not rust, And a journey would not end.
Untitled Emily Folsom I am a toy boat weighing anchor in a storm drain standing against the current if only to rebel a bit longer before I find the river and I am all but swept away
Decades later, a seminarian in practical training twelve funerals attended. One at a nursing home I helped the undertaker lift a body out of bed, the mouth was wide open. I know it wasn’t proper to ask but I was curious how do you keep the mouth closed? “a curved needle with a suture string threaded through gum and nostrils.” I remember approaching the coffin days later in cleansed and sanitized room children in dark suits like miniature adults quietly sitting and chatting. The eulogies moving and emotional but then registering something odd, I wonder: how many have washed & carried the body of a parent or a child? What does the weight feel like? If anything will they be haunted by this funeral?
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
The Automata Matthew Luther
Betrayal Vidya Panicker
Here stands the great golem of muscle sewed to bone, caressed into physicality from a nucleotide clay
they tell me the swollen blue body with a half rotten nose and missing eyeball fished out of the lake after the accident is yours
See it now, upright and stern, an aggragate of unseen flora, the biosphere above and below its sallow skin
liars, the whole bunch of them
See the edifices sculpted in the electrical nebulae, and see a figure outlined in the haze blood and sinew, face and fog They are The Automata: holograms made flesh, designers of worlds
foolish liars i tell them you are in a hotel miles away, attending a conference of importance just a clerical error that the hotel has no records of your stay they tell me the story of a woman with you, as dead as you are your mistress, they claim i laugh at the joke and what about the wallet? they ask
Watching Other People Read Chester Roush
the wallet with my photograph and a wedding ring wrapped in toilet tissue
i see a book and want to know the cover. it's not seeing a woman with her clothes off
don't they see the facts? I do you have been pick pocketed
it's not even hearing her name
i don't tell them but i know
it's hello
i know you got lost in the unfamiliar city where you are still hunting for the perfect souvenir to bring home to me
perhaps we’ve met before
then where is he now? they ask with a smirk
Š This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
Older Women Erik Tate The first time I felt erotic was in fifth grade, watching my former kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Lewis
Clay Houses Prairie Markussen
dancing around the stage in her pink and blue leotard,
after Isabelle Eberhardt
lip-synching to Olivia Newton-John's Let's Get Physical
She goes by another name here, and you’d hardly know her face for the dunes.
on a day when a bunch of the teachers put on a talent show for us kids in the school auditorium.
When she married a soldier, there were some who wondered how he knew there was beauty beneath
I remember my hard-on and that night, I ejaculated in my sleep dreaming of Mrs. Lewis wearing crotchless panties,
those layers, that thick cloth. It seemed to matter. It was a mystery. What name does he call her—is it Isabelle or Si Mahmoud? To what does she answer? Does she hear her father’s voice, layered there? His name— a whispered benediction, or a curse—as she robes herself, as she transforms, as her Islam shows
kneeling in my bedroom closet, and bleeds like ink. Alexandre. Hairik. guiding my penis slowly into herself through the hole. I slept with the radio on and when I woke up, sticky, The Pointers Sisters' I'm So Excited was just ending.
And his voice, did it rumble like floods to warn when the sabre rose and fell, severing her arm? Like language, she learned forgiveness. Who, but she (but woman) would pardon? So long to heal. A year, perhaps. But the disguise was too important to discard or reveal. She wreathed her arm in bandages herself. She wound her robes around her body, her damaged arm, cherishing it like a fragile Swiss summer.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
I Tay Greenleaf
Moonstruck Minhjan Dang
i wanted to look like those pretty girls with McDonalds hamburger breasts and one in the back pocket for the road that could kiss strange boys in the supermarket and wear those tight pants that every celebrity walks down hotel California wearing i want to be able to go to parties and not think about if this red shirt brings out the orange or rearrange my clothes to make me look thinner i want to be able to go into a taco bell and eat five hundred twenty five thousand 600 chalupas and everyone will still think i’m pretty because i am pretty but i’m not pretty i’m not that girl on TV with the beautiful blond hair and the exotic spine I am me and that is not good enough.
Some years ago summer on the West Hill house-sitting on a man made lake. With corn cob pipe in mouth I saw you at a wedding – swinging hip as you walked by your gracious slowness charmed my eyes, felt the blood goes to my feet.
Canebrakes Michael Brown Canebrakes wrapped in smoke, searing my eyes shut, with burning, brighter than pallid veins of sun, Swallowing the hungering,
As you gently bend over reaching for water there was a gap – a glimpse into your blouse. That form we all learn too well the source of all goodness: of childhood love and comfort. I saw your humble breast and I was lost. This morning, a stroll through wild orchards thinking of you and the little ones so bright and certain. Bending – left hand on back gently reaching rotten apple in it a hornet, buzzing in frantic frenzy wild and lost in succulent juice. I must admit, I too spun crazily when we first met under the moon.
of a body, watching the blackening marrow, just wash away in the folds of canebrakes.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
February 2015
Issue #015
Untitled #2 Robert Leander We fucked as the sun went down. Fucked. Not made love. Fucked. It was the last time.
Cannibal Alex Lima With the edge of my tongue I carve into emotions revealing the insides of language and reality. Are they the same?
Untitled #6 Robert Leander Desire. It isn't lust. Lust is a raging flame. Desire, desire is the hot smoldering coals of lust's fire. It burns more intensely It is the eternal charred scar of lust's lost flame. I much prefer lust.
I hang chunks of meat out there in the market Some sell, some are given away, some go to waste. Eat them raw, bleeding, no seasoning. Make them you. When asked what you are eating, say the truth: the flesh of Hydra, the body of Phoenix. Let everybody know you are a cannibal.
Not the Wrong Place Tempest Brew this is not the wrong place but perhaps the wrong time to start showing our teeth. we should maintain decorum (they are watching closely) but perhaps later we can drop these smiles, masks, and robes to reveal our fur and skins.
Š This work is the property of the individual authors within.
All artwork for this issue has been provided by Ben Mohr