Special FeaturerbdPrairie M. Faul, special feature, poetry

Prairie M. Faul: Keep Your Knives Sharp, There are Men in This World

Special FeaturerbdPrairie M. Faul, special feature, poetry
Prairie M. Faul: Keep Your Knives Sharp, There are Men in This World
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Keep Your Knives Sharp, There are Men in This World

 

I.

I piss in the sink at work

Wait for flowers to grow

Out of my pockets

 

My mothers mother

Was born in sugarcane

 

Lived as a whetstone

Let the pigs sleep outside

 

My mothers daughter

Took blade to pigs throat

 

Salted & stirred the whorls

that came out

 

II.

Look at this thing

A cast iron child

Nipping from steel

 

Too much copper blood

Too little paper in vein

 

The butcher hog learns calm

Fed fragment of oat & word

 

When hammer cracks open

There is no piss reply

 

No shit consecration

Or flowers to splay

 

 

 

III.

What grows from tapered light

Fills a fabric spliced

 

Drips from hand to hand

Pours down the sink

 

Here we dress our limbs in oil

A caul-fat shawl for our heads

 

Here larder is hands wanting

Cradling the fields without yield

 

Here heat holds in skin for years

Mother to mother to mother to mother

 

A house built of whetstone

An heirloom of sweating thorns

 

IV.

My daughters name

Will be soundless

 

A handle blessed outside

A hand freely holding

 

May she tend magnolias

When the trees finally fall

 

Let the knees we bent

Be repurposed prayer

 

In the dead of heat

I see her knotless

 

Drifting out to sea

 

Eyes like lotus leaves, no not even like

 

I grow, buttressed against

Window pane, along the surface

I smudge imprints

of my upper lip--imprints

From my teeth & the space

Between them--Think about asking

Questions, I don't ask you questions

I don't have answers to, I can tell you

Every living thing grows

In the direction of light--I spread

Myself out, along transparent pane

I spread my legs out, in the sun

I look so honest but at night we wait

 

Prairie M. Faul is a flagrant transsexual and the author/designer of Burnt Sugarcane (GloWorm Press). Her work can be found in TAGVVERK, Apogee, Reality Beach, Cosmonauts Ave. and elsewhere. She is running from something. 

 

Special FeaturerbdC. M. Keehl, special feature, poetry

C. M. Keehl: Getting Cold

C. M. Keehl is part dreamer / part destroyer but all alien. She currently lives in suburbs near Detroit with her PIC, a dog named Carver. She is the managing editor at Dirty Chai & has a microchap UNTIL THE FOXES with Ghost City Press. Her most recent poems are in/ forthcoming Fog Machine, Public Pool, Heavy Feather Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Vending Machine Press & Spy Kids Review. Keep your eyeballs peeled @CMKeehl // cmkeehl.tumbr.com

Special FeaturerbdC. M. Keehl, special feature, poetry
C. M. Keehl: Getting Cold
Special Featurerbdcarleen tibbets, poetry, special feature

Carleen Tibbetts: This Has Very Little To Do With Saving

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of several chapbooks, most recently “to exosk(elle), the last sugar” (Zoo Cake Press, 2015) and with Isobel O’Hare, coedits the experimental journal, Dream Pop. Recent work has appeared in TAGVVERK, DREGINALD, The Offending Adam, Deluge, Reality Beach, and jubilat, among others. 
 

Special Featurerbdcarleen tibbets, poetry, special feature
Carleen Tibbetts: This Has Very Little To Do With Saving
Special FeaturerbdTravis Sharp, poetry, special feature

Travis Sharp: No Body Is a Scapegoat

Travis Sharp is a queer writer, artist, and teacher living in Buffalo. He's an editor and designer at Essay Press and at Small Po[r]tions, the author of the chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press, forthcoming), and a PhD student in the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program. Other work has appeared with Columbia Poetry Review, LIT, Bombay Gin, Puerto del Sol, Entropy, and elsewhere.

Special FeaturerbdTravis Sharp, poetry, special feature
Travis Sharp: No Body Is a Scapegoat