Caitlin Boyd

Night Run

The desert has filled.
The dunes, once cut only by wild
winds and wild jackrabbits, have new scars:
silver veins,
tattered tracks that line the bedrock,
mined from the molten flow
below.

I hear them in the night:
the trains. The whistle,
like the cuckoo in the clock,
sounds each hour: a howl,
a scream, an owl-cry,
the harbinger of the rattling cars,
the hollow thump
of an engine faraway.

The headlights, jaundiced wolf-eyes,
cast their jaded stare over the blackened desert,
cut the smoke, the long thin stream
of condensed breath, huffed out like a sigh.
A gusty gasp at the end of a long early run.

Up ahead, the engine room.
The pulsing heart, the empty shell,
the lone dweller in a line of dead machinery.

The brakes squeal, a child dragging its feet.
In the station, the cars couple,
uncouple, the fumbling, tender hitch-and-lock,
the ecstasy of a long union, the final, sated slide
apart, after a heavy haul.

The animal sounds, alive in the night.
Alone, in my yellow-bright room, I look out,
into the dark.
I listen.

__________

Caitlin Boyd is a lifelong resident of the Coachella Valley who recently graduated from the University of Redlands with a degree in creative writing. She is currently pursuing an MFA through the University of California at Riverside. She is at work on a young-adult fantasy novel.

Nikia Chaney

ripping the letter

this
is a
letter
to it. this
letter is to
it. this is a
letter written
down and sent
to it. this letter is
to be read by it. this
letter is a question, a
timebomb. this letter smiles
looks to it so that it can breathe.
this letter’s smell will blur and sting.
this letter’s feel, for it, is heavy. this is
Edward’s letter. this is Jeffrey’s letter. this
is Richard’s leftover in the car, waiting for him,
letter. this letter is like that. this letter is made of
chicken wire pulled tight to cut out a name. this letter
is made of ice to clean out the room. this letter is pieces
of grass, of eggs of sunlight in the glass. this letter is a rip.
this letter will take dogeared hands of understanding and place them
back on road, where Yolanda can be clear, or at least love with her feet
next time. This letter, says, yes, Inshallah, but this letter is not cotton candy.
It is not that they left this letter to crawl slowly out of that place where medication
is sprinkled on shredded minds. It is not that they left this letter to it, the whispering,“I
can’t make him love me”, and the walls running with their skirts away from the war, and
the understanding of goodbye. This letter is it. This letter, this particular brand of cure.

__________
Nikia Chaney finds herself surrounded by very small people. She teaches poetry classes for children and she has five children of her own. Nikia also teaches community creative writing workshops at San Bernardino Valley College. She has an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, and she is currently in school for a second master’s degree at California State University, San Bernardino. She has been published in 491, Sugar House Review, Badlands, Pearl, with upcoming publishings in New York Quarterly and Saranac.

Lawrence Eby

Enigma

When radio waves get lost among the noise of sea,
A car fire burns its last cassette in the glove box,
Ignites a picture album,
A conversation about socks.

The forest shrugs it off—as nature does,
Just another bear-trapped raccoon with cheese in its mouth.

We spend the night in a tree house and play with a ghost spewing from candlelight.
Pretend its fog that calls us closer with a finger,
When it gets too real, we hide inside an orange we squeezed hollow.

Then we safety-pin our lips together—as mankind does,
But Mother grows mold in our showers to remind us:
We shouldn’t forget the dead.

___

Larry Eby writes from Southern California where he earned his BA in Creative Writing from CSUSB. His work has appeared in the Sand Canyon Review, Welter, Badlands, the Pacific Review, the Secret Handshake, and Call of the Wild: Being Human by Editions Bibliotekos press. He is a founding member of PoetrIE, an Inland Empire based literary community, and currently has plans to attend CSUSB’s MFA program in poetry. In addition, he also has plan to open a publishing house in the Inland Empire.

Mike Cluff

Reflections For A Lingering Summer
Raincross, California September 1919

Summer rains
bring them forward
dragonflies
but for too short a time.

Estelle Sampson
notices legends
parallel reality
a bit neatly
in this set of hills and valleys
and her periods of placid years
are placed too far apart
by all sorts of gods and demons
that romp and rampage
under the signal of
the double raincross
a blend of Catholic and Navajo
that defines this land
just a bit too well.

De Anza and his compadres
brought strife and persecution
to this inland place
of sharp peaks and deep arroyos
the flattest plains
and their soils,
waters and animals
now suffer
now more than even before
when the other gods
were more benevolent
when the earthbound people
just let them be.

Estelle looks to the western
always-hot sun
and thinks of dogwood winters
back home
in eastern
West Virginia
and smiles.

Yes she just sits bemused
before rest calls her home
between Jurupa and Mission Boulevards.

___

Del Rosa 1968

In the full moon
of an August Sunday,
the one before Labor Day,
just above San Bernardino,
the stingy musky slap-smell
of grapefruits
from the tree next
to the half-covered patio
on Holly Vista where
Dogwood does a “T”,
is another special specimen
of lanterns in the darkness
which add a sad spice
to such a series of nights
right before autumn
and elementary school
comes galumphing in.

___

Emmaline Case

The lady in the moldy woolen cape
searches for the answer
to why all these years
have come up missing
or misplaced
and why children are in crosswalks
around three each afternoon
why the stores on Arlington
would not let her in
any more.

And those who give her rides
smile just a bit too much
for her taste:

Learning to drive in Arkansas
must have happened
was it yesterday
later today
sixty-seven years ago
or a week from now
but it occurred
and I was unbounded then.

___

Mike Cluff is a fulltime English and Creative Writing instructor at Norco College. He has lived steadily in the Highland and Redlands area since 1998. His eighth book of poetry Casino Evil was published in June 2009 by Petroglyph Books.

Jaime Garcia

Petrodollar

the hill has been butterflied
and everything that causes noise speaks
in a foreign language

a radio chokes itself
saying the sound of empty country is snow

the distance between freeways is arrested

as reports about frost come second-hand
(things the soldiers fell like:
trees, leaves, airplanes)

an owl blasts through the mountain,
angels, expatriated from our father’s paradise
do taxes in a public park

Overpasses arc like the rings of a dying planet

Nobody can find work

now kids have taken to demanding
explanations from god

while last night the anarchists
doing their best to imitate the pacific
found only the silence of constant traffic

___

Jaime Garcia is a 23 year old libertarian conspiracy theorist from Rubidoux, California. His work has appeared in dotdotdash and Voiceworks, and is forthcoming in Contrary Magazine.

Lauren Gordon

Once You’ve Seen Anything Die, You’ve Seen Everything Die

Mercury in retrograde  has us on a red-eye, lipstick on the fly,
racing on the 101
to get to the empty house,
afraid to ask aloud:
what if it smells like death?

We go first to the room where she fell and expect fluid, an outline,
not this mess of shredded paper from the starving dog.

One bent slipper under the bed, unmoved.
The picture frame
she must have grabbed wildly
before breaking her neck against the wall.

In the kitchen: rotten fruit,
Dishes in the sink,
a blinking light on the answering machine
that porcelain creamer cow
I have always loved.

The coroner won’t let us see her,
she’s “unfresh” – we reel.

We didn’t buy enough cold cuts,
I don’t know how to make her noodle kugel.

They play “Turn, Turn, Turn” at the memorial,
We can’t remember if she liked this song.

Someone asks if they can keep her throw pillow.
Lawyers randomly ring the door bell.
A cousin wants to grieve with the big screen tv.
Her sister searches the closet for a borrowed coat.

Later, everything is Lysol, blank, and on the market.
No one wants to pay, say anything small and true
So we tell ourselves the body is mostly just water, anyway.

___

Sometimes You Submit

Oscar the cat sniffs out death
in a Rhode Island nursing home
and thinks: life is a confluence of shambling
but not really, he’s just a cat
with a pinked nose and paw,
light-stepping biting-ball of the best way to say goodbye.

Now see the eternal hummingbird,
Jimmy
who flits the window as the couple paints
his bedroom, it’s been fifteen years
since a two by four sticking out the back of a truck
struck him dead; but they see him.

My fighting beta never did a damn thing
about the Northridge earthquake
which nearly killed me, or did he
paddle upside down, bubble like a pipe
sing like a green canary in the still darkness
while I slept?

___

Lauren Gordon grew up in Southern California and commuted between the San Fernando Valley and San Bernadino while working for the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in Midwest Literary Journal, Knocking at the Door with Birch Brook Press, Scapegoat Review, Web Del Sol, and has been featured on Iowa National Public Radio. She holds Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from New England College, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Iowa. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband.

Matthew Nadelson

Jim Morrison and Dionysus Sober Up in Riverside County

On the steps of the County Jail,
Jim Morrison and I sit, waiting
for the sun to sprout and crown the skyline
or at least a light for our smokes.
Behind us, the glass doors swing open.
Cops stampede past us and descend
into their chariots as orderly as Apollo,
unable to summon the sun.
Jim recalls poor Dionysus, drunk and barefoot,
cornered between nausea and oneness with all,
staring blankly at the blood and other fluids
splattered against the drunk tank’s walls,
stuffing his shirt with our cell’s last toilet
paper roll, and wrapping the rest
from rotten tree-stump feet to eggshell skull
to keep his brandy, dreams, and memories
from spilling out. All through the night
the sockless men keep stumbling in,
with their beltless slacks slipping down.
You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!
Jim tells the man kneeling in the far corner,
as I brush a fly from my eye,
yearning to spy from its body, any body
but this one, barefoot, slumped against
the numbing concrete floor, petitioning
the same irreconcilable cosmos
as you, Jim, shirtless and sockless,
reading Neruda on these walls
and finally understanding his desire
for socks— spun moonlight,
soft and warm as fire.

___

Matthew Nadelson is an English instructor at Norco College in Norco, CA. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, ByLine Magazine, Chiron Review, Connotation Press, Mobius, and other literary journals, and in the anthologies Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude and America Remembered. His first poetry collection, American Spirit, was published in August 2011 by Finishing Line Press.

Lorine Parks

the man who wrote in his hat
I kept saying it’s a miracle Ed Rosenthal

because he is a poet
he always carries a pen for jotting down phrases
but now he is lost in a desert of grotesqueries
Joshua trees contorted like tongues tasting salt
he forgot to top off his water bottle
that was six days ago     when he left the resort
he thinks   thirst is rocks   sand and rocks
which he wants to write down but he hasn’t a pad
he will do without paper and still write his poem
he drags a stick in the hard-crust dirt to draw letters
then sketches on orange rocks with a black stone    then
erases his illegible lines with the back of his trembling hand

he wanders farther he tries to drink his urine
but the output of his body disgusts him
he won’t dig a cool shallow pit in the sand
because it looks like a grave
he tries to remember the Sh’ma
but only a few syllables of Hebrew
remain in his cupboard of prayer

he hallucinates he believes he has won the Nobel for Poetry
and the Peace Prize for Achieving Understanding at Sinai
till at last   from the low reptilian stem of his brain
an instinct claws its way over his city mind
the desert insists on economy   the kestrel and buzzard
do not flutter in their search   they glide
there is wisdom in staying still and letting it come to him

he stops moving in circles and collapses
flat as parchment    parched as his hat
he takes off his headgear to write on it
he still has his pen    his stylus for poetic inscribing
but instead of a new Xanadu    distilled from delirium
he scribbles his ethical will and testament in his floppy hat
naming his pallbearers   giving advice   leaving love and
now he recalls his Hebrew   shalom to daughter and wife
his witnesses a long-tailed pocket mouse chewing a seed
and a basking gecko    his notary a night moth
his signature validated by a black blob of a spider
sprawled like sealing wax on the hat’s brim

he waits    near expiring   the sun like a burning bush
for whichever piece of paper comes first
a coroner’s certificate   or a tabloid with rescue headlines
or a banner of light made by night stars over the desert
saying mazel tov   good fortune
a great miracle has happened here

___

Lorine Parks knows the high desert from having lived on an Indian Reservation in Nevada for a year. In 2008 she took a plein air Tebot Bach Foundation poetry workshop in Joshua Tree National Forest and stayed at the legendary Twenty-nine Palms Hotel. From that it was easy enough to imagine the trials of the poet-hiker who was lost in the Joshua Tree wilderness. One must always respect Mother Nature, especially so in the strict economy of the desert.

Ryan Mattern

Dream Songs

When you sleep beside me
your dreams seep from your ears.

I see milky images of you
dressed in braided rope,

twisting down tree roots.
You pin hummingbird markers

in the bark for place,
to find your way awake.

Dreams are like this,
I think.

A song in made-up language.
Airy twine sewn of Latin,

of French and German.
A place where Columbus falls into orbit.

You are singing in your dream,
so beautifully the sun cries.

Your voice wrings water
from knotted light.

Outside our bedroom window,
the katydids saw through their legs.

What We Become

I became a man in the marbled eye of a harelipped pronghorn bound at the hooves
to the pulley of an A-frame. Tongue-splayed shock heat fogged from its open mouth.
I smelled life in those winter morning ghosts. My father gripped my hands. We muscled
a buck knife throat to tail, etching through piebald fur. He reached into steaming
yolk center and yanked syrupy twin antelopes from beneath their mother’s lungs.
He held them at arms length and became a blackening shadow.

My son will speak of rivers and of the animals that leap them. I will give him my father’s
first .240 with notches on the stock. My son will close one eye and focus on mirror
images of pronghorns and their negatives becoming one as they waver above a spring.
Trees’ leaves morph into locusts who wing away as the antelope collapses.

___

Ryan Mattern is a recent graduate of California State University, San Bernardino, where he earned his B.A. in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in THE2NDHAND, Criminal Class Review, The Pacific Review, Burning Word, as well as others. He is an active member of poetrIE, a reading series dedicated to showcasing the literary voices of California’s Inland Empire. He is the co-founder and fiction editor of The Halfpenny Marvel, a journal for flash fiction and prose poetry. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at various California universities. He lives and writes in southern California.

Suzanne Maguire

Not Yet

spring, scratching at my skin and burning my eyes
the persistent chirping of a mockingbird
the sun too hot too early, on cold dry skin
long shadows on longer evenings

wild mustard and fescue
pushing through what has been carefully planted
exhaling hay fever
gnats, fruit flies, mosquitoes
sagging fruit trees
too full, too fast

cars whisk by leaving flashes of sound: rock music, mariachi, angry voices
there are new neighbors
unfamiliar voices filtering through the fence lined thick with xylosma
there are foxtails poking through my socks
but I am like the iris bulbs in the earth
waiting for their resurrection
not yet, not yet

___

Suzanne Maguire grew up running in the hills behind La Sierra University, playing hide and seek among the orange groves on Irving and Victoria Avenue, and racing her brother and sisters along the Gage canal. She took classes at Riverside Community College and received her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Riverside. The more she writes the more she realizes that this city, or some fictional version of it, is not only the setting of her stories and poems, but a major character as well.