Issue #12.1 A Poem by John Dorsey
Reading Allen Ginsberg in Eat N Park in 1992
for george rouse
the best minds of my generation craved gravy fries in trailers with empty ice boxes
riding bicycles into the heart of loneliness
with fathers who had metal plates in their heads
fathers with flashbacks
fathers who never knew what they wanted to do
or exactly what it was they were running from in the supermarket parking lot on sundays
at war with poverty & silence still raging
their sons becoming punching bags becoming scarecrows protecting them from their own uncertainty
their baby faces smiling back in the reflection of a dirty coffee cup.
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John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), and Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
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Issue #12.2 A Poem by Hannah Schultz
Comfort
My earliest memory is of my own small hands, pushing our blue couch—tattered, away from the wall to shape myself in between. Mom and Dad yell grainy
motherfucks in the kitchen like the sound in an old home video. I sit in the light that comes from the window and suck my thumb. Not for comfort—but because
my babydoll, too had a built in O in her mouth where the finger sat. I didn’t want to be back in the womb, just in a warm space that I could fit into. Now, my Mom says we slept in her car
that night. I don’t remember that part. Only my space behind the couch, the dust that swept under my breath, my thumb, the thrumming fucks, and yes, maybe a car window.
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Hannah Schultz is a poet from Southern California, and currently resides in San Francisco. Her work is published or forthcoming in Slipstream, Cultural Daily, Neon Door, and Anti-Heroin Chic.
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Issue #12.3 Three Poems by Adam Day
The Succession of Night and Day
Wind turning over secrets to the authorities
under the black cypress. Best to remain
indoors, avoid the errorists. Now,
how to translate this for tomorrow’s
Good Morning Show.
The Easy Sky
I can’t sleep – a cat-quarry
rabbit screaming in the bathtub.
Drive to ease me, or feel more real.
I know you don’t eat, swinging
always between presence and absence –
dreamer down in the floor, mirror
malady, feeding on fever,
bite that binds, gift that gives,
down on all four, show them
what all this howl is for. Dreamer,
I liked that when you slept,
across town I slept.
Reflected World
Neighbor says poetry is speech by someone
in trouble. Words commenting on
a curtailed self. Happiness not
a category of truth, but of being. The cat
lying at your feet every time you’re
on the toilet.
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Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN America Literary Award. He is the publisher of the cultural magazine, Action, Spectacle.
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Issue #12.4 A Poem by Julia Gaskill
omen.
We stood around the dead bird. Our bodies a crop circle; an imprint of what once had been.
A shoe nudge. A stick poke. A silent shuffle.
It was the first time any of us had come face-to-face with death.
An uninvited playmate. A rumor. A TV villain.
Us cul-de-sac kids were gods until suddenly we were not. We were brimming with pretend gunplay and imaginary Pokémon, until we happened upon this reality that grabbed us by our sympathetic throats.
I was the only one who reached down to cradle the bird like a skinned knee, say a silent prayer to a god I still believed in.
My mother later scolded me, told me of germs and disease. Big words. Justified anger aimed at a mourning child. Didn’t I know better?
A plague upon our house. A foreshadowed future.
To touch a dead thing as if it could not hurt me.
To touch a dead thing as if it could love me back.
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Julia Gaskill (she/her) is a professional daydreamer hailing from Portland, Oregon. She's competed multiple times on national stages and has toured with her poetry across North America. Her work has been published through Nailed Magazine, FreezeRay Poetry, Knight’s Library Magazine, and more, and has been featured on channels such as Button, SlamFind, and Write About Now. She was included in the 2020 anthology ‘In Absentia’ and collaborated with the band Impulse Control on the track “Television” off their latest album. Her poem ‘I Will Not Beg For Scraps’ was nominated for Best of the Net in 2015. Julia is the author of four chapbooks, runs the mic Slamlandia out of Portland, and is the creator of the spoken word album, Stouthearted Bitch. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming through Game Over Books in September 2022. Follow her at @geekgirlgrownup or https://www.facebook.com/jgaskpoetry/
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Issue #12.5 A Poem by Robert A. Morris
Cockatoo
Drinking dead water, he stares in the mirror, eating sunflower seeds, knowing only his cage, the room, and the silence that drowns them.
Tropical depression, tungsten-colored sky, lead heavy humidity, yellow grass surrendering to the wind, the thunderheads approach.
A blackbird yawps, dismantling silence with a peculiar tongue.
Downpour, the cockatoo tilts his head, hesitation then hysterics, hurling his body into the bars. “Tis tatt…ta tatt!” he pecks over and over until the rain softens to a brushed snare.
Staring out, he wails, mimicking the blackbird’s call, shaping it into music, calling beyond walls, counterfeiting strange language, and I know just how he feels.
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Robert A. Morris is the author of Descending to Blue. His work has appeared in The Main Street Rag and The San Pedro River Review among others. He works as a teacher but is beginning to tackle more commercial writing projects in the hope to one day sleep later than 5 a.m. He is currently writing a novel. He lives in Baton Rouge and can be found at www.robertamorris.org
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Issue #12.6 A Poem by Tobi Alfier
Cheerless Morning, RAT Beach
Picture this summer scene… He wakes up, so hungover his headache hurts him in the knees, campervan crooked-parked across three spots in the empty beach parking, waves too loud even with windows closed and his Alka Seltzer fizzes like shock therapy.
He murders a thousand ants with his thumb, then fingers a can of bugspray. The floor looks like a chessboard of beer cans after someone surrendered— no wonder she’s gone, he doesn’t even know when she left. Not even one of her beloved refrigerator magnets stayed behind.
The dog park’s coming to life with the dawnlight. He straightens the van, heads on foot for carbs and coffee. Carbs and Joe, good name for a diner he thinks, then gives up thinking about anything but where he can get a Bloody Mary too, what he should have first, what time do they open.
He caroms through alleyways thin as bones, slinks in the back door of the not-yet-open Holly’s. She furrows her brow as she takes his measure, pours him a steaming mug, goes to make his drink. Her hair lit from the sun conjures plenty of promises, makes this morning believable—at last.
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Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Washington Square Review, Cholla Needles, The Ogham Stone, Permafrost, Gargoyle, Arkansas Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).
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Issue #12.7 Two Poems by Maxwell Rabb
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Maxwell Rabb lives in Chicago, but leaves his heart in New Orleans and Atlanta. He is a poet, pursuing his M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in GASHER, Dream Pop Journal, Spectra, Deluge, Kissing Dynamite, and others. He loves to move in every sense of the word.
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Issue #12.8 A Poem by Bruce Robinson
Eclipse of the Pen
I’ve begun to leave out letters from the words I write, slips of a pen. I tell myself, who’s going to see this, won’t matter, I can read. Shorthand. Shrthnd. I could be right. But then,
***
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Recent work by Bruce Robinson should be found, sooner or later in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Maintenant, New World Writing, Parliament, and the Loud Coffee Press Flower-Shaped Bullet anthology. His last appearance in Trampoline was in volume 8.
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Issue #12.9 A Poem by Abena Ntoso
Where Do We Go From Here?
textured as pineapples or the various I love yous that have been said
life has become an abundance of hunger on a national holiday
even if you wasted your energy being annoyed at fellow shoppers your reasons are yours alone
if you could stay with me figure out what we should contemplate next
as the sun sets a fading glow behind buildings and trees surely I sip across the rim of sky above, behind, beyond
a plastic cup and the bones of a tree that I fell from long ago
when we rode our bikes to 7-Eleven Doritos, Lays potato chips, Ruffles, Twinkies, Lemonheads, Tootsie Rolls… who would ingest that now and be satisfied?
surely we must be different people kneading an eraser to remove all of my mistakes from the approach of the recent past, those things that happened that we could never have imagined
pools of chlorinated wisdom have surrounded us and changed the way we bathe ourselves, this time as though it’s all we can do to save ourselves
I think I could go on, eventually figure something out discover or create something but I have to be productive in other grown-up ways isn’t that a pity? isn’t that pithy and trite?
to say that it would be nice to have more time would be an understatement
speaking in understatements we would never have allowed a bird’s babies to go unnoticed
I would have colored everything on the page, carried my markers and crayons and colored pencils with me everywhere I go
I could not have imagined surviving without making a spectacle of it
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Abena Ntoso is a full-time high school English teacher and mother of two, originally from New York City, and currently based in Houston, Texas. She returned to writing after a 20-year hiatus, during which she worked as an educational technologist at Columbia University and later served as a dentist in the U.S. Army. Her writing has been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Satirist, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree.
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Issue #12.10 Two Poems by C. Cimmone
WHEN I THINK ABOUT MY SPIDER VEINS
Men used to
swarm
like dragonflies
over
fresh cut
grass
CHRISTMAS WITH MY FATHER
My mother’s been dead
3 years now
Her car rots
in the drive:
tires flat
upholstery bald
I drink a coke,
Pluck my eyebrows
with her favorite
tweezers
And hope she’s not mad
we left the stove
Such a mess
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C. Cimmone is an author and comic from Texas. She’s alive and well on Twitter at @diefunnier.
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