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Lavender Wolves Literary Journal

Lavender Wolves Issue #7 May 2016

Picture







I SEE THAT LIFE MATTERS
 
By

Patrick Erickson



I see the live wires
the live footage
the live coverage
the story coming to us
live
 
I see that life matters
and lives matter most
 
And then
the line goes dead
 
the life support
with it
 
And then the cover up
 
The cover up begins
 
Then the cover up
is uncovered
 
The next stop
is the dead drop
 
that or the crypt.

Patrick Theron Erickson, a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself, resonates to a friend's notion of change coming at us a lot faster because you can punch a whole lot more, a whole lot faster down digital broadband "glass" fiber than an old copper co-axial landline cable. Secretariat is his mentor, though he has never been an achiever and has never gained on the competition. Patrick's work has appeared in Literati Quarterly, Burningword Literary Journal, Crack the Spine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Grey Sparrow Journal, among other publications, and will appear in Former People.

Two Poems

By

Kristi Weber


See to shining see 
 
The woman who slides 
a finger down the binding 
 
can't lose her place: 
smudges a history of prints 
 
when she adeptly plays  
to the front and back covers. 
 
Hands hard or soft with sweat  
read texture like Braille. 
 
This embrace in an aisle of dust 
yields an answer when open. 
 
Her eyes scan each page 
without a digital interruption. 
 
Mnemonic devices 
make clever bookmarks. 
 
She is the sole heiress 
and she was Miss America 
 
before everything slid from paper 
and tossed on waves of tumult 
 
in an electric bath. 




* * * * *


Sequestra

No one says
the pull of tooth
is often the pull 
of blasted bone
jutting the gum

Only when porcelain
thorns scrape to birth
do others whisper
this is nature
with possible seconds

The dentist plucked
with stainless tools
and proved proficient
yet shoddy as sports fans
eating chicken wings

In a yawn he saw the size
the Titanic saw and said 
to wait until someday
when the force of a kidney 
stone erupts from the face

A lady in a green paper mask
suctioned the mouth 
together after the balloons
of pus were launched 
into a biohazard bin

What The Author Says about her Pieces:

Sequestra: "Having a few teeth pulled in the last ten years has brought up many unexpected feelings. The loss is emotional as well as physical, the pain often unbearable, and there are moments that leave me wondering if I am a failure in the dental hygiene department (despite my best efforts). In this poem, I try to bring some levity and metaphor to what was a slightly terrifying series of events leading me back to the dentist's chair most recently. I didn't know bone shards could start poking out through the gums days after an extraction!"

See to shining see: "I wanted to write about the library experience in a manner that utilizes the senses. This is mostly a poem about reconnecting with the library after many years of relying on the internet as my primary resource for information."


K Weber writes just the right amount of poetry in Dayton, Ohio. She has self-published three books of her poems including "Midwestern Skirt" (2003), "Bluest Grey" (2012), and "I Should Have Changed That Stupid Lock" (2014). K has had work featured in various Words Dance and Miami University collections. Her website resides at http://midwesternskirt.moonfruit.com

Two Poems

By

Simon Perchik


*
You still land belly-down
though the mailbox has no key
--what you yank is an envelope
 
and your hand already in flames
--why now these patrols
waving the children back
 
while you gag on the gust
and what's left from your hand
--why only in the rain
 
then headlong the way each step
moves closer to the sea
becomes those rocks that expect sacrifice
 
and where you can be found
terrorized by streets boldly in print
yours and theirs, waiting in the open
 
--you vomit as if its stench
could clog the wound all these years
between one letter and another.
 
 
*
Now that the sky is homeless
you make your own season
and each morning for just a minute
 
the snow is not mentioned
--even in summer you set aside
one window for tracks, covered over
 
and the wind hiding in bells
--you use this makeshift silence
the way a rifle is still aimed
 
with a deep breath and hold
--it's not for long, your season
sets up and from its rivers
 
a blackness flowing, gathering
first as a rain that is not the sky
--it's new for you, a sister-season
 
open and bleeding :a minute
rescued from the others
and at each funeral it shows up
 
ready to party, still young
though you cry out loud for a mouth
for the air that will not come.
 
 
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013).  For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.


 
 Fear, New And Old

by

Bruce McRae
 
 
You thought the spirit world
was a joke being told,
a joke about a dead man
in love with the wind,
a pun on dying.
 
You believed absolutely
in hard-core reality,
the thing the thing,
the matter the matter;
while all about you rang
the names of the dead.
 
Ghosts, you assumed,
were demons for savages –
until you heard night knocking
in the fifth dimension,
a spectral door opening,
icy footsteps in the yonder.
 
A voice in the dark
or icy draft in an empty room
is proof of this ghastly axiom.
A strange new terror evolves
and makes striking demands.
You’ve fallen in love
with that which is unknown
and never would have believed
how beautiful is fear.
How comforting is horror.

What Bruce says about is poem:

"Fear, New and Old' was written about 7 years ago, so the process at the time is lost to the fog of addled memory.
Re-reading the poem now it apparently concerns the supernatural and the human estimation of such.
Logic and reason are discarded when confronted with the unknown. We become unsettled when our 'reality'
is brought into question. We guess or cower. We have theories. We simply ignore the experience
and get on with our lives. This is why I enjoy quantum physics and the like. Nothing is as it seems.
There are deeper layers of 'beingness' than we can describe with language. Still, we try. We write poems
with one part of the mind and we explain them with another."




Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a Pushcart nominee with over
a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry and the North American Review. His latest book out now, ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ is available on Amazon and through Cawing Crow Press.




Threat Level

By

Gary Beck



The sparrows of Bryant Park
do not understand
the screech and bang
of man’s nest building,
that drives them away
from feeding grounds.
Unable to plan ahead,
they do not know
winter’s arrival
will bring starvation.

What Gary says about his piece:

"Threat Level, inspired by excessive construction in a vest size park that drives off the birds."

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. He has 11 published chapbooks. His poetry collections include: Days of Destruction (Skive Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press). Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways (Winter Goose Publishing). Perceptions, Displays, Fault Lines and Tremors will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. Conditioned Response (Nazar Look). His novels include: Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press) Acts of Defiance (Artema Press). Flawed Connections (Black Rose Writing). His short story collection, A Glimpse of Youth (Sweatshoppe Publications). His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City.


AN EVERYDAY LIFETIME OCCURRENCE

By

John Grey
 
Passing years show you a different kind of love.
It's the one your life does its best to hide,
to obscure to the point of nothing more than friendship.
It's the one your wife hints at
in this latest round of baked goods on a tray,
or in the music she plays and then you play.
 
It doesn't make the world go round
but it sure can shift air masses when necessary.
It whispers to you every morning,
"Here, have some more."
Unwitting or no, you take it at its word.
 
Yes, you're unloved now and then,
debased in various ways
and sometimes it's deserved.
But never long enough to suffer over.
Hang on, go about your business.
The pain recedes. The foul mood dissipates.
It's okay. Your feelings aren't counterfeit.
Happiness is legal tender.

John Grey On What his poem means to him:

"It's just a modest treatise on marriage, how the more ordinary parts fit into the loving whole."
 



John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in International Poetry Review, Sanskrit and the science fiction anthology, “Futuredaze” with work upcoming in Clackamas Literary Review, New Orphic Review and Nerve Cowboy.


 


Contributors This Issue: Simon Perchik, Kristi Weber, Patrick Erickson, Bruce McRae, Gary Beck, John Grey

Editor Note:

Dear Readers & Writers,

It's been a tumultuous past few months, I must admit, as we narrowly made it through with our newest release of LW. Multiple changes, including an editorial change,  delayed our reviewing process, as we found adequate suitors for our exceptional Lit Mag, and thus, finding pieces to publish took a considerable amount of time this round. That being said, this issue is exclusively a poetry issue.  In October, we will return with more beautifully written works of art which include fiction and flash! Thanks again for your dedication, it means a lot to us!

- Lavender Wolves Team



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