Issue 2
OUTDOOR
FEATURES:
May 2016
CONTENTS Prose Beseeching Camomiles Logistics The Kingfishers Yuppies
(Sarah Bigham ) 20 (Alina Stefanescu) 18 (Andrea N. Macalino) 15 (Rebecca Harrison)
9
(Anne Elizabeth Weisgerber) 14
Poetry At The Chain Bar Best Trans Performer of the Year Behind My Eyes Distance Embryo Higher Values I Need to be Free? If You Speak? Lapis Lazuli NO DOGS, NO DUMPING, NO LOUD MUSIC
On the Strawberry Hill Train, 18:35 Pornographers Salt on the Lips Shallow Water Siesta Subdued The Last Time I Ever Saw Jean Cocteau Wealth
(Mark Danowsky) (Joseph Goosey) (Mackenzie Dwyer) (Elaine Marie McKay) (Sujoy Bhattacharya) (Gary Beck) (Thomas O?Connell) (Thomas O?Connell) (Anton J. Rose)
10 7 21 4 16 4 2 1 17
(G.B. Ryan)
8
(Anne Britting Oleson) 1 (Colin James) 17 (Steve Nash) 6 (Barit Angharad) 11 (Hon-Wai Wong) 5 (Ruth Asch) 3 (Jeffrey Zable) 16 (Anton J. Rose) 3
Title Page / Copyright
Ink In Thirds - Issue 2, May 2016 Copyright Š 2016 Ink In Thirds
All rights reserved. Copyright in the body reproduced herein remains the property of the individual authors / artists and permission to publish acknowledged by the publisher. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author(s) or artist(s) herein.
I f you speak of trains speak of trains that br ing m e hom e br ing m e hom e to you by Thomas O?Connell
On the Strawberry Hill Train, 18:35 So crowded, we sit across from each other, conversation impossible in the late afternoon racket of the cross-city commute. Instead, you lean toward the teen-aged girls beside you, one black, one white, both wearing blue eyeshadow and silver hoop earrings the size of hubcaps, to ask? I think? about their music: they share the earphones of a single iPod. They laugh and exchange glances, eyebrows arching toward hair of surprising colors, the sound the peal of bells on this rainy Thursday. Who is this guy? Only you, you, my impossible boyfriend: sprightly, courtly, ironically teasing, straightening your lapels and running a spotted hand over your balding head, selling yourself in bookstores, at coffee houses, and now to strangers on a train, anywhere? laughing? always selling. by Anne Britting Oleson
1 | Ink In Thirds
Subdued
Colours are muted as though a dampened piano played them over the land; my bench, ankle-deep in water, reflects on flatness. Puddles shred images like wet-mascara eyes and that muddied mind of a pond gropes for the sky.
by Ruth Asch
Photo by Matt Adamik
Wealth If we spend time like currency, is each minute a pound, every second a penny? Is our birth a stipend, each new year a salary? In this hospital bed, My purse feels empty. by Anton J. Rose InkIn InThirds Thirds 39| |Ink
Slowly, I let my body sink into the afternoon.
Siesta by Hon-Wai Wong
Eyelids fall onto the cold banks of moss outside. The wind washes its feet in the canal. A cat yawns. I let my body disperse. Lifting off the cogon grass, butterflies float like open hands.
Photo by Alex Markovich 5 | Ink In Thirds
Best Trans Performer of the Year by Joseph Goosey
If the nerves are frayed it?s because you?ve woken. Be glad that the nerves are frayed. Or don?t. I don?t know your opinion on the living. Your Tofu Reuben comes with a side of crisis mode. No substitutions. I gag a little and return to the birds of the world. With what have you stabbed your palm? Not stigmata but a wine cork,
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popping our days.
7 | Ink In Thirds
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The Kingfishers Jane locked the books. Every evening, before leaving the library where she worked, she checked the corners for jewel flash and listened for floating feathers. The kingfishers were leaving the riversides. Across cities and towns, they flew swooping between pages to rest as ornaments of ink. The library books were bright with painted flight. They smelled of damp sunshine. Jane had found the first kingfisher in an antique classic. She carried the book to the town bridge, opened it to the right page, and waiting for the bird to fly, whispered all the words she knew for waters. But the bird didn?t wake. At dusk, she closed the cover. In the mornings, she studied each library book, counting the kingfishers. Soon, even the ragged paperbacks were crammed. When she found feathers on shelves, she hoarded them in her desk; they were as soft as cloud bellies. The riversides dulled. Folk lamented the drab streams. They were the colour of worn-away coins. Jane remembered the beasts and wonders in old manuscripts: once they?d lived in woods and skies. Then they?d crept onto paper. The kingfishers would now be just myths and stories, too. Tearing out the book pages, she smothered the walls with the kingfishers. She stuffed the library with buckets of river water. She tiptoed between them. She waited for the birds that would never wake.
by Rebecca Harrison 9 | Ink In Thirds
Shallow Water The tide pool water grave swallowed our death knell, keening over boulders ? ever smaller, ever ground down to sand and smaller motes ? you were still inside me but we were already skeletons, the hollow cicada shells and mantis claws, eaten peachflesh, and the rattle rattle of dice in dry, cupped paired palms we used to wipe the dust from our ribs, stand wet and sway, we wove our bones together. Carbon rings, forged mail, calcium chains and ball sockets, port wine reductions, foaming sunset seas, foaming, until effervescent, elemental, subatomic, we separated on a quantum level, a wave state where I was at a distance and you didn?t communicate anymore, we couldn?t tell each other when the lift became drowning or how something that didn?t exist anymore could suffocate. by Barit Angharad
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Photo by Boris Boden
Logistics by Andrea N. Macalino
Photo by Boris Boden
Moving between two cities? terrifies you. You are uncertain if you are one being or another; you imagine you are malleable enough, and no city, therefore, has a hold on you, I too am in love down there with the streets, but it is not love if you have not known anything else, if you have not been given the choice. In the paper house, I choose language that belittles me, belies my age? My language is anything but here, the imagination of unity, that any street I walk on matters less than how do I feel today? (like i can get it together like i can move on like i can do this like to-do lists and i?m on nobody?s lists i am untouchable i write the stories i have control of the synchronic and i can move on the vertical let you know that i am oppressive you are oppressive pls don?t cross the street i said a friend said she crossed a highway once she survived but missed her mother?s call on her phone) In one place I am the girl in the novel, and I must propose? (are you telling me that even my dreams must become real: a spoon on the table, a dirty window in a cafĂŠ, the memo going around, and so: mundane? if art is not formulaic then why must i share it with people, he said: remember that poet who died and they only discovered her thousand-poems after? i said, dickinson, you said, no, your father) But writing is only possible away from activity, so back to origami: oslo paper-walls, no privacy, free food, slower Internet, but it?ll do. In the morning you?ll send emails, life goes on, trim the unbearable, they said: Read some poetry, you are the majority.
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Lapis Lazuli by Anton J Rose
Her eyes are rock-hewn, stony-set, A depth to plumb, Lapis Lazuli Cuts of onyx on her neck, Each one replete, Lapis Lazuli
Words like anchors, bells and hammers, Hold the reigns, Lapis Lazuli Eyes, her eyes, Lapis Lazuli Her eyes, Lapis Lazuli
Photo by Frank Leahy
Voice is sticky, honey dew, Chimed-out virtue, Lapis Lazuli
by Colin James
17 | Ink In
Exploring is the same as sleeping. Luckily the trellis held, resilient vine entwined taut wood supportive foot and hand holds as we climbed the mansion. Sighs from our vengeance like virtues will save the stairs some wear. The host asleep, the boring cunt has invited us again for weekends. Searchlights scan in widening circles. Guests dressed down and glad to be, walk deafened by the indifference.
Photo by Frank Leahy
Pornographers
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19 | Ink In
Behind My Eyes
II. And I regard them coolly, hunched below the ledge. Above me one croons notes that dust expectant loam. The shape of words: leaves crumpled at the edge. It numbs to linger in this rainless dome ? How waiting grays the lushness of a face. Take my hand, you, and lead me to your home. Some hill not earthen rears back, casts us to its base. Here you or I live, in the marker of a grave. We part the curtain of cement and stilted grace Beyond which naught ceilings this swelt?ring cave. But a broken table, marooned in the middle, its jagged halves claw upward like two staves. You motion to its heart, under planks like costly riddles, where a mass of roots pulse and swell. You tell me this is where we?ve kept our selves. 21 | Ink In
Photo by Frank Leahy
I. Mandibles: flaccid, still, in trenches of quivering axons. Cells and seconds bloating across shiftless nights before they calcify. Incisors, dream-shuttling, tow molars upward, two of each. Aunts turned great-aunts, they hunch together and cradle the cuspids which merlot hues rim ? it takes but this tang of dusk and these pucker. Their forebears fold outward, nod, and shave the cream from the jaw. I rise, the inner maw, able artlessly to cleave the skull.
CONTRIBUTORS Barit Angharad Barit Angharad is the shallowest part of the North Atlantic Current. She currently lives in a boat between the shores Nefyn, Wales and Rye, New Hampshire where she writes poems with fish bones and octopus ink. You are the first to decipher her scrawl. @squallcannon
Ruth Asch Ruth Asch is a mother, sometimes teacher, by day, a poet by night. Consequently, she sleeps little and daydreams a lot. St Austin Press published a slim volume of her (early) work in 2009, Reflections, since when she has been hoarding and sometimes publishing poems for a more substantial book in the future.
Gary Beck Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and as an art dealer when he couldn?t make a living in theater. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanesand Sophocleshave been produced Off Broadway. He has eleven published chapbooks. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City. http://www.garycbeck.com
Mackenzie Dwyer At age six months she became enamored with words? accomplishments since then include dropping out of the Junior Olympics marksmanship qualifying rounds to go get a black belt and a concussion. Poems have received a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards honorable mention.
Joseph Goosey Joseph Goosey lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina. A dropout of the MFA program at George Mason University, he is the author of four chapbooks.
Rebecca Harrison Rebecca Harrison sneezes like Donald Duck and can be summoned by a cake signal in the sky. Her best friend is a dog who can count. Through the WoMentoring Project, she was chosen by Kirsty Logan as her mentee. Rebecca?s been nominated for Best of the Net, and was a finalist in the first Wyvern Lit flash fiction contest. Her stories can also be read at Rose Red Review, Maudlin House, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. http://bluebellhunter.wordpress.com
Steve Nash Steve Nash is a writer, lecturer, and musician from Yorkshire. He is a winner of the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Performer, and his first collection, Takingthe LongWay Home, is available from Stairwell Books. Steve?s next publication, The Calder Valley Codex, will be released later this year. http://starlighttocasualmoths.blogspot.co.uk/ @stevenashyork
Thomas O'Connell Thomas O?Connell is a librarian living on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, NY, where he happens to be the 2015-2016 poet laureate. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Elm Leaves Journal, Caketrain, Jellyfish Review, Otoliths, and The LosAngelesReview, as well as other print and online journals.
Anne Britting Oleson Anne Britting Oleson has been published widely on four continents. She earned her MFA at the Stonecoast program of USM. She has published two chapbooks,The Church of St. Materiana (2007) and The Beauty of It (2010). A third chapbook, Countingthe Days, is forthcoming from Pink Girl Ink, and a novel, The Book of the Mandolin Player, is forthcoming from B Ink Publishing--both in spring 2016. http://anneboleson.wordpress.com @anneboleson
Anne Elizabeth Weisgerber AnneElizabeth Weisgerber has recent stories inNew South,Tahoma Literary Review,The Journal of Compressed Creative Artsand she is a Best Small Fictions 2016 Finalist.She is assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel, and writes reviews for Change Seven Magazine. http://anneweisgerber.com @aeweisgerber
Hon-Wai Wong Hon-Wai Wong grew up in the valley-city of Ipoh, Malaysia and studied at the Johns Hopkins University. Exploring the body as landscape, Hon-Wai?s poems (will) appear in Random Sample, The Bitchin?Kitsch, Heather, and The HopkinsReview. @HonWaiW
Jeffery Zable Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer (grey & white striped shirt) who plays Afro-Cuban folkloric music for dance classes and Rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area. Present or upcoming writing in Dead King, Corvus, DogPlotz, ServingHouse Journal, Futures Trading, Unscooped Bagel, VendingMachine Pressand many others.
Cover photo by Boris Boden