Gap Tooth Volume 2
Volume TWO
Gap Tooth is a contemporary poetry publication started by Charlie Lynn and Emily Lakehomer in May of 2014. Our publication focuses on showcasing “comfy grotesque� poetry: for those of strong stomachs, and chattering teeth.
Contributors
Joseph Edwin Haeger When Garth Brooks and I are Best Friends
1
Erica Reed Appetite
4
Jamie Hunyor The world was so ugly
5
Jenni B. Baker Gumption
6
Brenda Beehler New Years Parties
12
Edward Lineberry No Such Agency
13
Amy Orazio Adam Bone
14
Beyza Ozer
15
DON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME WHILE I’M CRYING OVER HOW YOU DIED ON THE OREGON TRAIL
Sarah Mura Raquel Lion Baby
16
Isabelle Davis Meow Mix
18
Eric Benick Fox Hunt
19
Dana Hubanks Liver and Eyeballs Lost Language
21
Alan Mudd Had Nothing and Was Not
23
HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HÆR, HER, HERE
Timothy Dodd End of Cellular
26
Christian Patterson 카페베네
27
When Garth Brooks and I are Best Friends
Joseph Edwin Haeger
has had work published in RiverLit, at Zygote in My Coffee, Hippocampus Magazine, and others. He lives in Spokane, WA with his wife and son. His first book, Learn to Swim, is forthcoming from University of Hell Press.
When Garth Brooks and I are Best Friends we’ll play our acoustic guitars together. His will be a Martin. An expensive one. Mine will be an eighty dollar Yamaha. I’ll like the sound of mind more because I’m used to it, but won’t say anything because Garth Brooks spent a lot of money on his. We’ll jam. Only, he won’t call it jamming. He’ll call it practice. He’ll say everything we do in life has a purpose, so it’s all leading towards something. He’ll say, ‘Stop using bar chords. Play open notes. This isn’t the nineties.’ I’ll ask, ‘Aren’t you from the nineties?’ He’ll say, ‘This isn’t nineties’ alternative.’ I’ll ask, ‘Like Hootie and the Blowfish?’ ‘Use open chords,’ he’ll repeat. ‘Bar chords are for lazy people. If you use bar chords then we can’t be best friends.’ ‘Okay, sorry,’ I’ll say. I want to stay Garth Brooks’ best friend. I’ll move my hand into an open G and strum. I’ll smile. I’ll still like the tone of my guitar more. When Garth Brooks and I are best friends I won’t ever ask him why he gave birth to Chris Gaines. The only Chris Gaines question I’ll ask him is whether he regretted the soul patch. And how long did it take to grow it. ‘A week,’ he’ll say.
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Joseph Edwin Haeger
‘That’s pretty standard,’ I’ll tell him. ‘I know,’ he’ll say.
It will sound nice. I’ll still like the sound of my guitar more than his expensive Martin, but I won’t tell him that.
Joseph Edwin Haeger
Garth Brooks will be a little embarrassed that I brought up Chris Gaines. I’ll smile and try to reassure him that I don’t judge him for that time in his life. Hopefully my sympathetic smile will put him at ease. I’ll apologize because I said the soul patch question was going to be my only Chris Gaines question, then I’ll ask, ‘How close was Chris Gaines’ death to real death?’ Garth Brooks will make eye contact with me and smile. It’ll be a sad smile like he’s trying to reassure me of something. When Garth Brooks and I are best friends he’ll tell me “Friends in Low Places” is about the man in the mirror. ‘Michael Jackson?’ ‘No. I was trying to be symbolic.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘That song is about me.’ ‘Is it still?’ ‘Now it’s a reflection of the past.’ I’ll try to stop myself, but I can’t help but think that means he answered in the affirmative. Garth Brooks face will be shaved and he’ll be wearing a cowboy hat. Garth Brooks will sing under his breath and let an open D ring out on his guitar.
2 Summer 2015
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Erica Reed
I write to bare bones. I was one of the 2014 Sue C. Boynton Walk Award winners, and my poetry has been published in several of Bellingham’s local publications. I previously worked as a board member for poetrynight and as the host for Kitchen Sessions. I can be found at the downtown Bellingham Farmer’s Market typing madly at The Poem Store each Saturday.
Appetite
The world was so ugly
At the end there will be cancer and the insatiable appetite.
the radiant pink mass spiraled it into the singing ice to pass the time.
Father will become words like marrow and donor and cancer will become the family name.
Jamie Hunyor
lives in Athens, OH. He studies creative writing at Ohio University and helps edit the undergraduate literary journal. Some of his poems can be found online with a quick google search.
Mother will callous and chew and chew and chew until her meat becomes tasteless. Baby will always be hungry. The lump was found just before dinner.
4 Summer 2015
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Jenni B. Baker
is the editor-in-chief of The Found Poetry Review. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in more than three dozen literary journals, including DIAGRAM, Washington Square, BOAAT, Nashville Review, and Swarm. Her chapbook, Comings/Goings, will be released by Dancing Girl Press in 2015. In her current project, Erasing Infinite (erasinginfinite.com), she creates poetry from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, one page at a time.
6 Summer 2015
Gumption The pieces are in-line erasures sourced from the Apollo 14 Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription, available online at: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS14_TEC.PDF.
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8 Summer 2015
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Brenda Beehler
is a writer and nomad who splits her time between Alaska and Washington with forays to California and Mexico thrown in for good measure. Brenda’s work has appeared in Labyrinth and Jeopardy Magazine and she received a merit award for her poetry from the Sue C. Boynton foundation. She is also a columnist at the Kodiak Daily Mirror newspaper where she writes about how to eat food from the Alaska wild and not die.
New Year’s Parties
No Such Agency
Make love hunched over a crunched accordion. Watch it howl like a mooning wolf hungry for messy meat.
We sneak in hallways, coast through lunchrooms, slamming our lockers, filling our trays with unidentified helpings of you.
Bang on a grand piano with white split black teeth moaning hallelujahs. Shoot off fireworks! Splash scotch across thighs! Glitter! Gutters! Smeared eyeliner! Dream up! The French call it the little death and spill champagne on floorboards. We call it 3-2-1-MIDNIGHT and break bottles in the street.
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Edward Lineberry
is a native of Kentucky who now lives in Atlanta. He received his degree from The University of Georgia.
Our tongues slip on the familiar so we close our mouths against the reveal. We shut up and hold still until our pinks chameleon into whatever color it is that you are. Under cover, we become a part of your group. The cover conceals us from ourselves. And we become children hiding in our own dark you, unseen by us.
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Amy Orazio
I have work forthcoming in Crate, Bitterzoet, and FolkLA as well as a limitededition letterpress chapbook from Archteype Press (under my maiden name Amy Neilson). I received my MFA from Otis College of Art and Design, and I belong to a writing collective in Los Angeles called Partial Tongues. I divide my time between LA and Portland.
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Adam Bone Inside of your rib is the other half of my apricot We traveled together once I showed you Pollock’s technique we made stars haphazardly I’m back to knock on the nape of your neck and collect the rest of my souvenirs
DON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME WHILE I’M CRYING OVER HOW YOU DIED ON THE OREGON TRAIL why did you have to do that? why did you have to break your arm? you need to be careful isabelle, you need to be careful while you’re helping me caulk the wagon. you need to be careful not to get sick on the oregon trail, isabelle. this isn’t a game. think of scout & rory & the other person you’re supposed to name but i always just name them “dog” because i’m waiting for my dog to die like i waited for you to die. i wasn’t waiting. i was pacing & i was prolonging. i did everything i could. i stopped in all the towns with the best views of the stars because you liked staring at them with me when the kids & the dog were asleep, remember? remember the lake we found those pretty blue rocks in? they were so blue, isabelle, bluer than your eyes almost! i wanted to make a new life for you & scout & rory & the dog. i know i’m only a poor farmer but i tried, i’m trying. no, i tried. i’m tired now & the kids are asking ‘where’s mama’ & i can’t look into their eyes because they aren’t blue enough. i can’t tell them that we’ll never get to visit your grave because it’s somewhere along the border of wyoming & nebraska or was it idaho & fuck, i don’t know. we were so close, isabelle. we were almost at oregon. remember when we used to talk about this? living in oregon? breathing in the oregon air & kissing on top every damn waterfall we could find? the kids are gone now. they wanted to be with you. the dog couldn’t look at me anymore so she left right after. now i’m sitting here skipping these blue rocks we found, the ones from the lake. they’re too blue, isabelle, & i can’t just keep them in my pocket forever.
beyza ozer
is the winner of nothing in particular & a recipient of spam email. their work has appeared in/is forthcoming from skydeer helpking, electric cereal, in the end pretty much everything is mostly water, & other journals. beyza is the author of GOOD LUCK WITH THE MOON & STARS & STUFF
(bottlecap press 2015). they are the social media coordinator of the lettered streets press, an assistant editor of yesyes books, & an editor of probably crying review. beyza lives in chicago & on twitter @THEREALEMODAD.
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Sarah Mura
is a student at Portland State University and a poet who writes about family dynamics, woman versus nature, woman as nature, gender issues and mental health issues. She enjoys performing, mothering, adventuring, eating sweet and savory crepes, and shamelessly singing karaoke as loudly as possible.
Raquel
Lion Baby
Blackberry blossoms are on the verge of being honest
Lion Baby looks so severe—
Red poppies make me want to light up hope and smoke it
Sunlight shines on her squinting eyes and fat dimpled fingers
Dream journals are for pussies, they’re always full of dicks
Blades of grass cast shadows on her muddied white summer dress
Dewdrops on grass consistently serve as my own private rainbows
She scowls, blowing spit bubbles from her tiny, angry mouth
The park is empty except for all the bird droppings
She scratches her neck with untrimmed fingernails
Parents never know how to act
And pulls at the chestnut-colored curls framing her saucer face
Tracing letters into wet cement is known to lead to orgasm
She reaches for speckled snails on the back patio
Ladybugs are predators but everyone knows that
Grasping at their hard shells with a reckless screech
Giving birth involves a lot of pressure
Reflections of silver orbs in her eyes,
On the days I don’t create anything, I cease to exist
Lips puckered, brows pursed, she curls up in the icebox
Sarah Mura
Then runs inside to hide under the davenport with the mice She wants to bite on lemon-sugar cookies She wants to suckle milk and mother’s butter She wants a soft and sparkling teddy bear So that she can stare at him with her disapproving eye
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isabelle davis
is trying to remember to floss every day, she really is. her work has previously appeared or is upcoming in glitterMOB, skydeer helpking, the NewerYork, and elsewhere. you can find her on twitter @verytinygalaxies
meow mix
Fox Hunt
my sister knows a girl who cut off her own eyelids & this is why i wonder if katie meant to send this message to me: you are important.
Reconnaissance approx. 0800 in the stables
my cat is staring at me or at the poinsettias behind me but those are poison when he eats them & i read that if i died alone he would eat me & be just fine. i am important. i can feed my cat.
just outside Cambridge Most probably suicide but maybe can find things out perhaps not dying an option
Eric Tyler Benick
lives in Portland, OR. He works with knives. He climbs walls. He makes an effort. He enjoys syntax. He recently discovered emojis and thinks they are beautiful, semiotic phenomena, although he feels pressured to refer to them as semiotic phenomena so he won’t feel embarrassed. His poems exist both elsewhere and nowhere. He is very nervous.
This I assume why cigarettes were invented though have heard more sinister explanations Death is easier with bourbon so say sad sacks and southerners Pretty sure I’ve died before that it feels more like a warm hand than anything else Foxes are good with espionage it’s one half of predation
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But not as good reading dossiers
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Eric Tyler Benick
Foxes don’t read shit unless it’s moving
Liver and Eyeballs
Perhaps I want to feel bloodshot stares and teeth in larynx stomach ripped out of asshole
In darkness, you fed me liver and eyeballs, thumbing the membranes into my mouth like a mother.
Perhaps I want black roses eternal effigy fields and apparitions Wouldn’t even know what to look for if I found it Screams from a chasm maybe or a broken child unfolding its evidence Scrambling through dirt belly full of fuck yous
Was it then that I learned to see beneath the water? To filter you like a toxin from my blood?
Dana Hubanks
lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest, at the confluence of forest, river, and salt water that is Bellingham, WA. Her work has been featured in Extract(s), Enigma Rag, AbSoc Zine and InkSpeak. In 2013, her first chapbook, Songs from the Hollow Alder, was published by the Black Dog Arts Coalition.
I felt the organs disassemble in the solvent of my spittle, slithering through the folds of my throat.
Whole pack at my tail the soft moon resting in the water shattering repiecing
in its clever element
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Dana Hubanks
Lost Language
HAD NOTHING AND WAS NOT
When my mother was a child her step-father used a paring knife to cut out her tongue.
remembers where his father’s hands gripped the wheel. The way a man the man is when the man is running along behind the force of his machine in the mountains over October clock of colors shifting in the cool wind I lay in the physical law of nowhere not ache from hunger not starve and die in fever seem of death and love describing themselves to themselves straight on begging for tenuous walls in a drastic flail to find a seems odd call carry
With a hooked needle he attached a new organ, one that would only speak words he could understand. Hello. Good morning. Yes, sir. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. Lost to her language, she still speaks of Marmara, of salt-crusted fishermen tying nets with sun-scorched fingers. White walls and blue roofs and ruins, the severed organ, the crippled tongue shape my unnamable name. (We could be born a thousand times and still find our way back to the sea.) Froth-lipped waves call me home beating like the heart of the unborn.
Alan Mudd
lives in Estes Park, Colorado.
only window it is true that we are already breathing in the room we smoke a slow in the room I smoke a slow daguerreotype of moon in blue chair have fashioned little where I am when we get there I’ll be where I am when we get there
in the book in the book in the book is the clay to call home is the clay to call home
in the aa in the aa in the aa is the water is the water is the clock all holler
in the drum in the drum in the drum the beast beating water all holler all home
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from the string from the key from the tin tin tuc forgot my my name forgot my name
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Alan Mudd
Earth & Sky Book&Song Call’tClay pretense of poet instinct needing not a name a dream to its conclusions elephant&mountain blue&beast blue and snow and star and stone a lotus thousand ofem singing . It. All of it. Nothing. You know. was trying to talk to the moon was shouting so she could hear Was driving East had all these maps tattooed clunker in the greasy garage where the tea cup takes up the whole kitchen table
this path this path it where was head it wear
will heed for the fuck of a map fair a flick lip flame this and that
Dust somewhere lungs forehead eyes. Dust somewhere guitar making with hands.
HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HÆR, HER, HERE
Alan Mudd
the word is dead to god the is so say we see to go out to god the is so say we see to go dead the word is out is god word the dead go is so the see say to out to we to out to say see the so is go dead the word god is we so is go dead out to say the see to god is we the word dead god word go say see we so is out to the is to the word is dead to god the is the to go out so say we see we kill sweetly sip wine savage falling sand calamity bright and with us we kill sweetly bright and savage with us wine sip sand calamity falling falling mity call sand sip wine us with savage and bright sweetly kill we kill falling sweetly calm amity bright and sand savage sip with us wine and amity savage sweetly bright with us calm wine sip kill sand falling savage sweetly with us falling calm and kill sip sand bright falling wine with us falling calm. with us wine and falling.with us sip and sweetly kill.
Make listen with the water. Listen. All jacked in in.
Woke before sunrise and stood
in the colors on the mountain. White is sometimes something red. mountain in the sun over coming on. had nothing for it and was not. I see dogs barking out there in the dark a buried bird of starlight. A street lamp. A pickup. Shade of mountains. Night time. Smells wet like leaves and smoke. O fences turning red and black again in the passing light of a car! Satellite. Airplane. Bear, Elk, and Elephant of Planets, Stars, and Atmosphere. Nighttime in the room in the windowphone looks bright. The view.
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Timothy B. Dodd
is from Mink Shoals, WV. He is a real gap tooth (between the front two...). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Roanoke Review, Big River Poetry Review, Floodwall, Two Thirds North, and elsewhere. He is currently in the MFA program at the University of Texas El Paso.
The End of Cellular “He’s just a dreamer,” his aunt Carol says outside Lucille Roberts, black Nokia to ear, discretely picking her nose after a short workout with rope and treadmill. “Just young and naïve. You know.” “Are you sure he’ll change?” his mother asks from an old leather sofa between bites of sour cream Lays, her Pekinese licking salty smells off her red painted toenails. “I sure hope so.” But in the woods, his body lies propped against an elm, ants arriving for a feast funded by pharmaceutical sales, parading in a narrow black line from the house on Cardamom Street where maternal smoke still rises, wishing to herd a kid’s brain.
카페베네 1 outside the window, six old shoes hang from different branches of the same tree across the street, a flat roof covers two restaurants and a bar, with vents and chimneys the furthest quadrant is actually a sharp point growing from the flat roof, while green neon on the bar’s awning can’t stop distracting me
Christian M. Patterson
was born in 1991 in Auburn WA and lives in Portland OR. One time he met the dad from Drake and Josh at Disneyland, waiting in line for Space Mountain. The dad was alone, but wearing Drake and Josh gear.
I remember one night in downtown Seoul, in an open-air, fourth floor cafe, I was a speck in a Hangul sea, reflecting neon off the monsoon clouds, and writing poems, thinking for the first time ‘I feel glad to be depressed here, of all places in the world, now’ 2 I took out a card and little stickers and wrote you a letter, then sent it the next morning, for ₩350, to New Hampshire, a place I would like to visit someday, a place that seems different from Korea, but they both have Dunkin Donuts then that fall, we sat on your porch in the dead of night, on green plastic chairs with Christmas lights hanging from bushes a slug crawled at your feet you asked me if I ever wanted to sink in to the earth, and I said no but after you asked, I kinda did
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