Love and Tucumcari

Hugh Simmons

After a day on the road, we ate
at Chester’s, drove a little more
on Route 66, then made love
at the Roadrunner Lodge Motel.
The next morning
we stopped at a local market
before heading out of town. It was
wonderful
riding in the desert with you.
Thanks, honey, for the lube
and fresh sandwiches.

1

Black Clouds

Blue Sunshine

you couldn’t
get it out of
the carpet—

you rejected it for days,
slosh of black, yellows
all over the floor.

you couldn’t
get it out of
the carpet—

parts of you in those
questioning stains:
a becoming.

you just couldn’t
get it out of
the carpet—

when you buried
the click clack of
queen bee’s teeth

under yours, guided her into
lordosis, face pressed flat
to floor, your fingers curling

into her larynx, her
tongue dipping,
desperate, into nylon.

2

Main Vestibule in Transition

Mina Cousins

Canvas, stylistic impression /press on me/
Dimensionless, Definition is
Imposed, oil paint spill
Fall through the wall, Trafalgar Cubed³
Come up from the protest, riot outside
Stone melts last under dead suns, you say

I am interactive art /brush past me/
Stage play filmed, flashed photography
Exposition, Exposure progresses
Skin coloured by pain(t), splats-tarred-sprayed
Gripped by your direction, history
I am nothing; that is woven into the curtain call

I eat a colour wheel /swallow my pride/
'Naked, the trans body represents...'
Consumption, Compulsion Curator
In 2085(%) transsexuals make up the nudes
For humors, torn apart by critics
Coward’s theatre da dum tish

Sweet music plays /give me lyres/
No stage directions
Chorus for a whipping girl I craved to be at 4.48am
Spectrum Spectators, Splintered Solitary
Walk out, English Horst Wessel plays across
It happened here in your ending

/endings are fascist/

3

the braille of fish scales

Samuel Noringriis

the braille of fish scales
can only be read
out of water,
eyes staring moonward
with lunar canyons etched
behind the pupil.
water quality as frail
as snakeskin–
it’s caught in filters
with broken fins,
bones neglected
searching for escape.
in places where waves
are foreign
with artificial oceans,
the sky seems
more of a home.

4

crossroads

Ally Fowler

someone a
climbed bright
into young
the thing
slow fell
cold from
of the
the rickety
attic eaves
and
met god
and
pumped was
full given
of the
damp easy
feathers sin
felt of
pushed quiet
to paralytic
fly indecision

5

Intimate With You

Lee Evans

I always wanted to go back in,
but I’ve never had the gumption.

Not just because I’m contrary—
though that's probably one reason.

Out, out, everybody out,
Everybody in everybody’s face!

It’s a secular sin to be inhibited.
Come out, come out, wherever you are!

But if I travel too much, I get homesick.
There’s no place like home, they say.

So really, I want to go back in,
Back before this Big Bang started.

You look askance; but if I were in,
Everybody would come out to see me.

I wouldn’t have to give myself away,
Like Watchtower tracts or political pamphlets.

You’d be knocking at my front door,
Wishing you could be like me.

You see, I’d be so far in,
I’d already be intimate with you.

6

Colouring Pencils

Samuel E. Blackburn

You pass some comment
about the sunlight on the loch, and
how you might feed the ducks.
She gives nothing in return.
Why should she care
about your opinions on
ducks and sunshine?

You play with a menu of
soft drinks, burgers and chips.
Try to put it down but
you can’t—
can’t put it down.

You look at the ashtray; a
crystal circle with ‘u’ grooves that
glisten like the loch.
Better not.
Not here.
Not now.
Then—

you remember.
‘I got you something.’
A colouring book (500 pages) and a
box of colouring pencils,
bringing relief from
constipated small talk, and
how tall you felt, how near
vertigo, when you walked
along the water’s edge.

She traps a pencil in
her ball of flesh and
goes to work,
tearing a line of blood
across the page and back.
Left, forward, diagonal, forward. She
throws it down and takes another.

‘Can I help?’ you ask.
‘Yes,’ she says to the page. So,
you take a pencil and
begin to make your
own marks,
colouring the sky with a
tight-knit string of
halfmoons.
You take your time,
allowing her scribbles to
advance upon yours.

7

Carpark Kisses

Edel Fitzpatrick

I can kiss her in carparks,
That aren’t too close to home.
I can hold her hand,
As long as we’re alone.

I can lie in her arms,
When nobody else is around.
I can whisper I love you,
And she’ll pretend she hasn't heard a sound.

8