I can’t remember my dreams
but they leave me bathed in sweat.
Maybe the problem is
I still haven’t figured out how
my family was replaced by three
goldfish, named after the Stooges.
The fourth, who arrived DOA,
was Shemp, and he appears to be
unmourned. Nor do they seem to miss
the jailbird daddy who left them behind.
But, I think the fish might love me
or at least they recognize me as
the food lady. They swim to
my gaze and mouth wet kisses.
The cat is surprisingly indifferent
or oblivious to these orphans.
I guess peaceful coexistence
for a cat and three fish is possible
as long the food lady comes through.

And although the sound
of their tank filter makes me
have to pee all the time,
I guess I love them too—
partly because they were
nearly flushed down the toilet
by someone from social services,
and partly because their water
is so hopeless murky, it’s like they’re
swimming around in my head.
But I love them most for rising
to the surface to look for one last
crumb of food that might be floating there.
Their optimism is so touching, and
when the sunlight works it alchemy
on their golden scales, they glow
incandescent inside algaed glass
sporting their punch lines of shit.

————

Tina Posner is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. John Ashbery once called her “Galileo” in an elevator because she said, “Up,” when he asked where the elevator was going. This has only contributed to her awkward relationship with the Church.

Your notes, left behind in the morning signed Tiny, I love you. The wine gums, only the black and red ones, cause that’s the ones you like. Me leaving a trail of bobby pins around your house so you could find them later, I bet you still find one once in a while, yeah you probably still find one gathering dust somewhere behind the couch.

The Lions Gate bridge, your post card that said “This is where you tell her, this is where you tell her, this is where you tell her that she is never to be forgotten”. Your eyes in the morning, between the sheets. Your sounds of breakfast making, of reading a book in another room. The sound of sprinklers—who knew that sounds could hurt?

Me crying on the phone, me suffocating under your presence, me punching a hole in my wall, me jumping out of the car.  Reading aloud from Wide Sargasso Sea: “Say die and I will die. I watched her die many times”.

Your hands crawling up my legs, that night you said that you can hold me like a six pack. Your whiskey breath, your ring, your eyes always looking back, always careful, always thinking: what if she does, what if she doesn’t.

Our nights in the cabin on the island and my Elegie in E minor.  With the lights off and the windows boarded up: city dwellers obsessed by the discovery of darkness. Elegie: a mournful, melancholic or plaintive funeral song or a lament for the dead.You know, that was the summer we still had a year ahead of us.

Our naps in the winter time with the rain falling outside. The rain falling outside while we were on a bus in Florence had a different quality. The belts tied to the bed, the ghost in the elevator.

Our time that we wasted, our endless numbered days. Our time when I  played the Elegie for you on the piano, this time at my mother’s house. I played it over and over, I didn’t want to play anything else because nothing else fit and nothing felt right at all. That same evening when we baked cherry pie. Was it all broken already then? Maybe the pie was blueberry, maybe I wasn’t lucky, maybe I was lonely, maybe we were both lonely, who can remember now.

But night after night I take myself back to us watching Blade Runner. The world was large but we were larger, do you remember? Us dancing to La Javanaise, Serge Gainsbourg in your living room, lasagna that took five hours to make burning to coals in the oven. You running to the gas station at 4:30 am on a Tuesday night to get us two Rolo ice cream cones and a pack of Dunhills Special Reserve. The breeze on my sweaty back, an arm dangling out the window. Do you remember?

Your love of the smell of rosemary. Your wooden table where I scratched the letters “TINY LOVE” and you added “S SOMEONE ELSE”.

You’re tired of saying sorry but I was touching those carved letters when I read your letters to her.

————

Anna Zoria is a student living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She grew up in Eastern Siberia, where it was too cold to do anything but read. She currently studies literature and painting in hopes of one day fulfilling her lifelong goal of becoming a barista.  In her free time Anna likes to post pictures of cats on Tumblr and contribute to her student newspaper, the Ubyssey.

his goat

would eye him suspiciously,

making sure he wrote nothing

that was anti-goat,

although usually the goat (whose

name happened to be Ivan)

wasn’t quite sure he understood what

the great man

was actually writing about.

But if Tolstoy should ever happen to write the word ‘goat’,

Ivan was instantly ready to butt him down off his wooden

chair as violently as he possibly could.

So Tolstoy

always watched himself very carefully and only wrote the word

‘goat’ when he was sure the goat wasn’t staring at him,

or else he wrote indoors.

————

Joseph Buehler lives with his wife Trish near Bethlehem, Georgia.  He is a retired deputy property appraiser for Sarasota County, Florida. He has published three short stories in the Kansas Magazine and a short story in the Canadian Forum and has published three poems recently in Bumble Jacket Miscellany. He enjoys all types of poetry, whether humorous or serious; many poems should combine both elements, and that is what he strives to do.

Potato.

————

Peter Cole Friedman recently graduated from Hunter College in NYC, with a degree in Religious Studies but a keen interest in everything. He is thin but healthy. He strums a guitar and writes songs. He makes vast batches of soup. For money, he takes pictures of people’s eyeballs in a medical office. The entire literary magazine circuit, save Nibble, Writers’ Bloc, and Right Hand Pointing, has prudently steered clear of his work. Check out his blog of illustrated witticisms at www.theidiotsage.wordpress.com

————

Mary Cresswell is a retired science editor from Los Angeles who lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti coast. Her third book, Trace Fossils, was just published in New Zealand. She has had work in Light Quarterly and LightenUpOnline, and she is also capable of taking things seriously. More about her at: www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/Cresswell,%20Mary

———–

Autumn Hayes is a freelance writer, creative writing teacher, and poet; her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Defenestration, Southern Women’s Review, Cuento, trapeze magazine, and Jersey Devil Press. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, she has taught reading, writing, public speaking, math, drama, and vocational welding in Los Angeles, Houston, and the Mississippi Delta. She is currently back in her hometown, hard at work on almost everything in her life, especially welding.

———–

Mason Johnson has been a sales associate at Claire’s Boutique, karate instructor, ghost writer for Stan Lee’s ghost writer, and many other things. Currently, he works at CBS writing articles for their Chicago-based news websites. You can find out about his reading series at www.pissfanatics.net, which happens the second Sunday of every month in Chicago.

————

Marit Ericson is a twentysomething, graduate student, and poet, among other things. Her work has lately appeared in various online journals. She begins each day—in dread, at peace, with pancakes—in northcentral New Jersey.

————

John S. Fields recently discovered a passion for writing, and has had fiction published in Full of Crow, The Camel Saloon, Atticus Review, Conceit Magazine, and Enigma. John receives encouragement from his lovely wife, and enjoys playful interruptions from their two rowdy boys.

————

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. When drunk, he tells people he’s the poet Laureate of the Westfield Train Station.