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 May 2013 CR
Sarah
here
 May 2013 CR
Sarah
here i am watching myself fall
and here i am wondering why
here i am perplexed by freckles
and clementines
and friendship bracelets
and hang nails.
here i am watching rain.
letting it kiss my fingertips.
here i am wishing you were here.
wishing something changed.
here.
 May 2013 CR
mûre
the hardest surgery is the one you perform on yourself.
Steady?
Ready?
No anesthesia but a chuckle of nervous humor
the first incision across your heart.


When you finish (many months later)
you put the scalpel down, wave weakly
to the clapping colleagues hugging each other in disbelief
from the observatory, sterile and eager
you give them a wan grin
and hope they've watched closely
so that now they know how...
how to do this.

At twenty-something, I was taught by Fear
who said nothing matters
and then at twenty-something-else I was taught by Faith
who said anything matters
And she wasn't the Sunday kind of Faith that you find
clasped between your palms, clasped like you're afraid
that if you let go the Faith will just tumble out and break.
No, she was the Faith that was bigger than God and so intimate
that sometimes I was the Faith, sometimes you were the Faith,
and sometimes the Faith was me.
So really, Faith doesn't have a name.
But Faith and Fear, they both breathe, they're each lung
and when I fill one, the other billows, after all
you need two to breathe.

And so then I, feeling bold, learned about Bravery.
I had heard about it in newspapers and history book indexes
and in our local volunteer firefighters.
Wondered if I could buy it.
Wondered how much it goes for.
But I couldn't find Brave until the moment I gave up on it
and said, ***** it, I'm so scared but I don't care anymore,
I'll just do it, Brave be ******.  
And surely enough, it was hiding beneath the tremors.
So really, Brave was the Siamese twin of I'll Just Do It.
which, by the way, wasn't in the glossary of this or any history book.

Everything changes, you know?
I'm changing, you're changing.
Oh, it storms me like the sea!
I secretly raise my glass to stasis, my faraway frenemy.
Don't tell the other Sagittarians, they'd exile me surely.
Change, letting go of my old faces
feels too close to dying,
feels too close to leaving you behind.

And I'm not ready to leave you behind.

Oh the West, keep your Mountains.
If only for a little longer.

I've excised my soul again and again
transplanted and sutured
but there's just no time.

Even with these visions from under the knife-
there's just no time to heal
before I'm laid on the table again.

Faith hold me-
Fear teach me
so I can...


Steady.

Please- stay with me.

*Ready?
 May 2013 CR
Sara
first kiss
 May 2013 CR
Sara
The way you walk reminds me
of how I lost my front teeth,
on that playground, under those monkeybars,
where I “had my first kiss"
but didn’t
and said I did, because
I was six and I was afraid of
being alone
 May 2013 CR
Barton D Smock
wizardry
 May 2013 CR
Barton D Smock
I refuse it.  

this that says
it is the boredom
of boys
beats

a cow.

not even to death.

     will accept
on sight
the boredom
of girls
this that projects
a bovine
delirium.

will accept the exotic anxiety of my workaday father

as his cigarette falls
into the fibers
of a broom
made shovel.
 May 2013 CR
MacKenzie Turner
I used to keep my baby teeth in a butterscotch tin.
I guess I was making an investment
in tooth-fairy stock; trying to diversify my easter bunny portfolio.
Quarters: Like chocolate I could feed into a Coinstar and turn to dollar bills
which I could then use to buy more chocolate.

I just, hey, I just remembered that I have a butterscotch tin filled with quarters
sitting in the back of my closet right now. Funny,
when things move in circles like that--I can’t even remember
the last time I ate a butterscotch. Or even how my final tooth
came out, which I’d think would be a milestone.

I was eating an egg-salad sandwich when I lost one of the last ones--
I just took a bite and one tooth stayed behind.
For weeks I couldn’t even look at a sandwich,
I just kept thinking about the disturbing look of blood on mayonnaise.
I wonder if there’s much business for the tooth fairy these days--
my dad, winding blue ribbons around small stacks of quarters so they’d look nice;
my dad, stepping on LEGOs in the dark and stifling swears;
my dad, navigating bedroom geography to make a swift exchange
while I slept and turned a tidy profit, trading old small parts
for riches and a grown-up mouth.
Now I wonder what they did with my wisdom teeth,
after they pulled them out last year.
Were they drilled out, finally, into dust? Or did
a dental surgeon slip some pilfered teeth
beneath his pillow on the sly,
turning one last profit out of my face,
the summer someone noticed
I needed a grown-up mouth?

All I know is that for days
I stayed at home moaning into my pillow,
strung out on percocet and eating anything
that could be sipped through a straw.
(It was only then I discovered the Sonic had stopped
serving butterscotch shakes--years ago, apparently.
You’d think I’d have noticed. But then, you’d think
I’d notice lots of things.)

I wonder how much my teeth would be worth now.
I wonder if the tooth-fairy has adjusted for inflation.
I still get excited over stray quarters,
but now I guess I just have to find them on the street
like everyone else does.
It's been awhile. I stopped posting about a year ago for reasons. I'm not dead.
 May 2013 CR
Third Eye Candy
" i always wondered if fish drooled ? "  she said... and left it there like a cartoon tumbleweed, caked in glitter and sprite phlegm. she stood across an ocean on an island of outlandish abandonment, where all the mirrors crack.  her passing quakes the stain off her daily betrothal
to a toothless bigot in the land of freedom's end in the hovel of her heart's fall from appointed grace. a place of a thousand cuts and no car. waaaay out in the country of her diminished affections, her eyes could be seen wandering the burnt out villa of her lost love, where she recalls the fairy rings piercing her lips and the trembling of her youth, finding a slow hand to explore the wet *** without peril, soaring with her palm, plastered to a feathered bed in a guest room, in a time-share.
grampa sleep. and bird's nest pitch black.

" i always wondered if fish drooled ? " she said... she slept through it... on to the next disconnect  to get intimate with. she left me there, like a chocolate mint resting on a pillow made of shards of habitual flagellation by candle light and instinct; resting on a bed of nails rusting
in the flood plain of her fondest wish.
she left me there
to conspire with her better demons, to witness - the benign desperation of her frenzied exploration
of actual actualization... to watch her ****** from the jaws of a dire wolf,
her bleeding heart and her ransom.
with her bare teeth and a naked
Truth.

you should have seen her face.

i tattooed her secrets on the iris of a blind ghost, i swore it " abide in her broken heart like an open door with a cool breeze slinking through the fetid air of her self defeat and stale bread bumble bees.
and to abide by her rules
when she finds them... then to ghostly fall
upon his ghost sword by midnight
with a smile that tells hell it cannot claim what rises.
a smile that spat at the devil and pitied his children.
a ghost smile that stole a book from a museum
and never told his other
books why.
 May 2013 CR
Carlotta Gamboa
“I like to pretend that sometimes” I said. He looked at me, in a way as though asking why or how without the desire to physically say the words.
“What I mean is that sometimes I like to pretend you were my first, instead of your older boy summer romance cliche. I don't know why though. Maybe I want to keep a bit of you with me when you leave. I think that when I’m old, or even just in college I’ll tell people how I lost my virginity to my bestfriend and how special it was. Maybe after I tell enough people I’ll even start to believe it too. Not that Michael isn't sumptuous or anything. Maybe its because when I tell people that story I’ll leave them with piece of you, and you’re great.”
He snapped the last of the bowl and kinda just sat there with a weird expression. It wasn't confusion or even melancholy. He seemed upset over something. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” he said.
“It won’t always be.”
I didn't feel sad, or happy, or angry with the silence. It was cold that night and we both kind of just sat there looking at the bright Los Angeles skyline we were so used to. He packed another bowl but I was done smoking for the night. Perhaps he didn't realize I’d been dying to tell that to him for a while. Killing myself thinking about him. Maybe I loved him, then, truth be told, I didn't know. I felt empty. Like I’d just thrown up everything I’d eaten that day. My head was as blank as the smoke coming from his mouth. He slowly put his arm around me and kissed me that way you see in movies. The way your friends sometimes talk about but you don’t really understand until it happens. He then put the **** down and fell on my lap. I quietly ran my fingers through his hair. Then he said, “Did I ever tell you about this fantastic girl whose virginity I took in the schools parking lot?”
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