For You:By
Becky Brinkerhoff
You make me feel invincible like my feet will finally not falter and my tongue will finally not fail to find the syllables to make me an artist, like I could throw up my hands – my pale, skinny hands – to stop my pervasive past and push it out of my head and out of my mouth by forgiving the friends who somehow forgot how to be friends, like my head bleeds brilliance and I could make my pen stomp out novels and my fingers could vomit symphonies or my fire-filled blueberry eyes could stare straight into the darkness that is the future and make it bend to my hopes and become what I make it, like I could become the next Emily Dickinson and Queen Elizabeth and Julie Andrews and Scarlett Johansson, or at least a better version of me, like I could spit something extraordinary from my explosive pencils and solve not only my problems but yours as well and hers and his and theirs, like I could live without wishing I had more of a spine.
You make me feel invincible like my feet will finally not falter and my tongue will finally not fail to find the syllables to make me an artist, like I could throw up my hands – my pale, skinny hands – to stop my pervasive past and push it out of my head and out of my mouth by forgiving the friends who somehow forgot how to be friends, like my head bleeds brilliance and I could make my pen stomp out novels and my fingers could vomit symphonies or my fire-filled blueberry eyes could stare straight into the darkness that is the future and make it bend to my hopes and become what I make it, like I could become the next Emily Dickinson and Queen Elizabeth and Julie Andrews and Scarlett Johansson, or at least a better version of me, like I could spit something extraordinary from my explosive pencils and solve not only my problems but yours as well and hers and his and theirs, like I could live without wishing I had more of a spine.
By
Becky Brinkerhoff
No one should ever give up on what they love; just because you eradicate it from your tangible life doesn’t mean it leaves your heart or your veins or your brain and every time you remember what you gave up and why it might shoot remorse through your head and it will twitch every so often like the legs of some beetle long after it’s been smashed. The bridges you didn’t build, the palms that didn’t sweat, the tries you let slide by and the chances you let fall through your feet because you told them not to move. So try. Try until you can’t sleep and you feel like you’re drowning the rejections that surround your feet.
No one should ever give up on what they love; just because you eradicate it from your tangible life doesn’t mean it leaves your heart or your veins or your brain and every time you remember what you gave up and why it might shoot remorse through your head and it will twitch every so often like the legs of some beetle long after it’s been smashed. The bridges you didn’t build, the palms that didn’t sweat, the tries you let slide by and the chances you let fall through your feet because you told them not to move. So try. Try until you can’t sleep and you feel like you’re drowning the rejections that surround your feet.
Undead Romance
By Diana Fernandez
Stay with me, don’t stray. We’ll kill a cliché and bring it back to life.
Mud-stained blood drips down our creased clenched fists. Hold me close this time.
Let it come back to life, lift itself out the grave and limp alive. Leave the running away to the rest.
Undead phrases, over-spoken vowels vowed to breathe again. Be bold with me.
Watch the world fade into the fog, uncertain and afraid while we stay behind in the forgotten clarity.
Surviving’s easier than they make it seem. No trains, no planes, no oil spills, no photo frames.
Let this be our apocalypse, our revived ruin of a candle-lit table for two.
And every morning we’ll wake up to a glazed-over untouched planet magnified in dew.
Just me and you.
When we’re done we’ll burn it down, let the air soak in the steam as our eyes soak in the light and we’ll see brighter than the jealous stars at night.
And when the earth grows sore of our antics and the day escorts us out, wrapping its envious roots around our wrists, steal one last wrinkled glance.
I’ll trade it for a tear-stained smile, a requiem to undead romantics.
Chalk
By Diana Fernandez
I haven’t seen you in a while, so this is for you.
This is for the he’s who break their fragile toys and trophies,
And this is for the she’s who burn the scented letters they receive.
And this is for you.
I know about your sidewalks and your constellations of chalk.
I know about your shapes, your maps, the rigid lines where you will and won’t walk.
I know you’d rather stare down at those white pastel galaxies than up at stars with me.
I would know, because that’s how I used to be.
Tell me, are your souls sore yet? Are your toes twisted from your contortion acts?
You make me laugh, the way you lift your knees and tip-toe towards the edge of the street so unnaturally.
There’s a thin line of chalk between love and your conceited claim of obsession. I’ll wait till you’re gone, then I’ll smudge it. Or… Perhaps not. Perhaps I’ll just watch you dance your way to work, dodging sidewalk stains every day until it rains.
Maybe I’ll…
Oh! There you are. I knew I’d find you here, towering over the rest in your elitist skeleton.
I remember when I knew you, when I walked with you on the other side of the street, when your cheeks pricked my forehead and my hair stung your eyes carelessly.
This is for you… the pixelated memory of you.
This is for you because, when I knew you, my heart was titanium. My lungs were steel. My mind was a spinning machine of sparks and steam and gears and my lips were the switch and you were the engineer.
So, this is for you, my unemployed mechanic.
You used to love rhythm, probably still do. But I can’t tell anymore, not when I watch your distorted stagger of a stride.
White wires are tied to your ears. I suspect that song is new, nothing like the ones we fell asleep to at five AM when falling asleep was impossible unless we tripped, and you tripped me.
Take this chalk, it was mine, now it’s worn out but it works fine.
Anyways, I hope you aren’t as lonely tonight as you are today. I hope you find your own bright-eyed chalk artist, one with a steady wrist and a knack for replication of society’s most sophisticated linearity.
I’ll be breaking all your rules on the other end of the road, and I won’t be alone, but,
I’ll be thinking of us, and the things we used to do.
So, here. Before I go, take it. This is for you.
Hipsters in Love
By Diana Fernandez
She’s a dancer and fighter,
A player and a writer,
Lined in black lace and bullet belts and worn leather.
Wrists cuffed to a chain to a bed of paranoia,
Less like a dream, more like a life-time in a coma.
She sharpies her own sneakers and dots her eyes with stars,
More like sparks.
She tries to make a subtle mark.
A signature in a world of scribbles.
She’s arrogant,
An uncommon kind of confidence
Combined with molten fear and other precious tricks.
She’s an alchemist with an off-beat tick.
He’s a half-empty type of man,
A tin boy in need of an oil can.
His elitist words cut through parachutes,
Like Autumn leaves that cover cracked roots.
She rolls her eyes and plays along,
Unafraid to take the fall.
He’s a realist,
Borderline pessimist,
Who clings to the ground.
His world is anything but round.
An eclipse.
He’s a sail without a ship.
She’s a flyer, free of any planet,
Abandoned by the riot.
We’ll be four AM listening to light rock, criticizing lyrics,
Talking about tattoos and trying out new tongue tricks.
Exchanging soap-stained innuendos and pale complexions,
Chugging caffeinated cans over a poorly pixelated webcam,
Imagining how it would be to hover above the crowd, stuck between polluted air
And dying suns in the ruins of an atmosphere.
No thorns, no roses,
No cheap romantic proses.
Pray to fake originality,
Stray hand in hand with inevitability.
We’ll be two dancers,
Two fighters,
Too humans,
Two tin men,
Too terrified to blend in.
The
Unofficial Catalogue of Poetic Attributions (A Parody)
By Diana Fernandez
1. A cage (size varies).
2. Repetition.
3. Space and stalwart shelves. Perhaps the most palpable of poetic wherewithal, space is an evident requirement for shelves, conceived to conceive anthologies of the most elegantly unreadable of sorts. The vigour of said shelves is hardly a detail worthy of triviality. For these anthologies, gilded by the blacksmith Time, will inevitably earn their pay in pounds of substantiality, respect, and rabbits of the phickuntiatus classification.
4. Repetition
5. Memory, for nimble recollection of quotations of the admirable variety.
6. Time, for the memorization of quotations of the admirable variety.
7. A License of Disregard for grammatical tenet.
8. Biblical Enlightenment, because all educated poets have read the Bible, be it by self-obligation, parental-force, or desire for accurate religious mockery.
9. Repetition.
10. Metaphor.
11. A Sapling of Digressive nature. Water weekly and eventually one may discover what breed it is. May produce fruit. Height varies.
12. Lexicon, for use of impressively excessive jargon, erudite phrasing, and multisyllabic complex terminology.
13. Idiosyncratic imagery: the surprisingly non-catastrophic bastard child of the promiscuous mother Ingenuity and a rebellious father still to be identified.
14. Charm of rhyme.
15. A shovel (for depth).
16. A competitive tongue and a humble temple.
17. Repetition.
18. A concoction of pessimism and elitism, preferably in form of vapour as to present a subtle air without the blatancy of visibility.
19. Repetition.
20. A tortured cliché, twisted, beaten, broken, admonished for relentless rebellion, and bewitched by the tantalizing lips of a long lost lover, licentiously misunderstood, still do be identified.
21. An extra cartridge of red ink and black irony.
Once one has obtained the items of this catalogue, one is truly ready to become a respectable poet.
Simply lock up your mind in a cage and let it chirp away.
Some don’t bother with a cage, but I keep mine close by, sitting upon a stalwart shelf between the works of Poe and Twain.
My Sapling lived there once, but it’s overgrown now.
It’s a quaint little creature, although not the best of company.
It doesn’t shut up, to say the least.
Sometimes I consider putting it back.
Sometimes I consider setting it free.
By Diana Fernandez
1. A cage (size varies).
2. Repetition.
3. Space and stalwart shelves. Perhaps the most palpable of poetic wherewithal, space is an evident requirement for shelves, conceived to conceive anthologies of the most elegantly unreadable of sorts. The vigour of said shelves is hardly a detail worthy of triviality. For these anthologies, gilded by the blacksmith Time, will inevitably earn their pay in pounds of substantiality, respect, and rabbits of the phickuntiatus classification.
4. Repetition
5. Memory, for nimble recollection of quotations of the admirable variety.
6. Time, for the memorization of quotations of the admirable variety.
7. A License of Disregard for grammatical tenet.
8. Biblical Enlightenment, because all educated poets have read the Bible, be it by self-obligation, parental-force, or desire for accurate religious mockery.
9. Repetition.
10. Metaphor.
11. A Sapling of Digressive nature. Water weekly and eventually one may discover what breed it is. May produce fruit. Height varies.
12. Lexicon, for use of impressively excessive jargon, erudite phrasing, and multisyllabic complex terminology.
13. Idiosyncratic imagery: the surprisingly non-catastrophic bastard child of the promiscuous mother Ingenuity and a rebellious father still to be identified.
14. Charm of rhyme.
15. A shovel (for depth).
16. A competitive tongue and a humble temple.
17. Repetition.
18. A concoction of pessimism and elitism, preferably in form of vapour as to present a subtle air without the blatancy of visibility.
19. Repetition.
20. A tortured cliché, twisted, beaten, broken, admonished for relentless rebellion, and bewitched by the tantalizing lips of a long lost lover, licentiously misunderstood, still do be identified.
21. An extra cartridge of red ink and black irony.
Once one has obtained the items of this catalogue, one is truly ready to become a respectable poet.
Simply lock up your mind in a cage and let it chirp away.
Some don’t bother with a cage, but I keep mine close by, sitting upon a stalwart shelf between the works of Poe and Twain.
My Sapling lived there once, but it’s overgrown now.
It’s a quaint little creature, although not the best of company.
It doesn’t shut up, to say the least.
Sometimes I consider putting it back.
Sometimes I consider setting it free.
One With Nature
By Nikki Grossfeld
The winds drift overhead as I turn to face what once remained behind me. Glancing skyward, was a sea of ocean-blue embracing me - begging me to climb. A single ball of fluff remained off towards the boundaries of my peripheral vision - barely visible through the blur. Slanting my heavy head, I became aware of the shape that persisted within the sea up above.
Plopping down, I hit the crumpled mound of earth below me and began picking at its hairs. Handfuls at a time, I rip and yank from teh scalp, piling the hair-like fibers in front of me. Picking them up, I watch as they slip through my fingers along with eveyr thought inside my head.
I glance around me, my head continually spinning in ways that is unnatural to the human race, and I recognize what I’ve become. Everything is more than me. Everything is larger – taller – waiting to envelope me in their worldly knowledge. I remain seated, mind blank, hands empty, senses at ease. I’ve melted into my surroundings. I’ve become one with everything around me. I no longer exist – only it does... and it is me. That fluff ball off to the corner had followed in my footsteps, unsure of where to go – thus, it followed me. Without me there to follow, it shall remain... It shall remain, for me, as a remembrance of how to get back to where I first began.
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