This cannonball of an issue also features many works by Mad Hatters’ founder, Carol Novack.  Drop by and have a gander!

Flock of Colombian birds flap and inspect tuffaceous
sweets by a lost duffel coat. With her hips she pulls
the wagon connected to a rope through a flooded plane
lining the boardwalk. The moon has messed up the tides
and their disposals of truth, again. The kids ask if they’re going to get wet.
She spits out all that has already headed into her mouth:
a male thumb, an evil eye, a savage assault on masturbation,
those minced steps, that cockeyed retaliation on a limp-wrist flick.
How can you ever brace yourself for the unknown, the boy asks.
Don’t lock your knees; keep ‘um bent, loose-y yet tight; lessens the blow, son. Mama’s vagina had become an amulet but they didn’t know that.
They thought she was their shipwrecked angel who never landed on her back.

Tricia Louvar lives on the fringe of a cool city, which she rarely penetrates, because she likes to hang out around the moth hatches and the turkey vultures. She builds rock sculptures in the backcountry and boulders. For more of her work, please visit www.tricialouvar.com.

The night denied the day and cursed light
But never forget the tale of the fair king:
Triumphant in all, but one-death.

Who, then are you to move?
Who sanctioned your progress?
Who willed your will?

But, on this path, they trudged
Frail and bowed limbs
Sketched on Virgin lands
If you will, tighten those bone pieces
With loose tendrils – We have a long way.

But, distance is vague, meaningless in this quest.
In this new realm, time is futile:
We breathe in endless sequence.

This Clock

Didn’t we just say it?
Predictable antique on a constant loop. There you are,
Making tickling turns. Pro-cyclic rings of little rest.

Again, if we ask, please don’t tell.
The sun plays your role; unending natural timepiece
Slow to burn or lie in faulty sequence.

We just noticed,
You’ve been on, and on: years and more and some more
Ticking and making unsolicited rounds, forever

Emmanuel Uweru Okoh is a Nigeria-based writer. His work has been published in NEXT, Saraba magazine, Sentinel Nigeria, Naijastories and ITCH magazine of South Africa. Emmanuel lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria.

We played with the whales in the shallows for a week until they beached
on the shore and became a mass of dead blubber. Several townsfolk
went insane after this – mothers killed babies, fathers slaughtered sons.
My parents took me to a rocky cliff top and told me to look out over the
water. The blood salt smell of whale meat filled my lungs, coating them
in thick, fatty oil. Somehow I still trusted my parents. They became gilt
framed daguerreotypes, suspended in mid air.

     I began to receive stories, jumbled at first, a riot of incident colliding,
like angry waves, splintered, like smashed hulls. The stories leapt up
from the sea, forming into long, arcing narratives, textured like rippling
water unspooling on the wind. Antique objects appeared on the cliff top
- clocks, dressers, chaise longues; setting and substance spilling out on
the rocks from unravelling narratives.

     Soon the whales were reborn as land mammals enacting elegant
cocktail parties around the furnishings adorning the cliff top. I found
myself paddling ankle deep in skipping waves, bemused, with a school of
silent children waking to the possibility of endless play.

His Suit

He left his hands at the piano and walked away. The window gave on to
a sloping field holding green air and a hot air balloon hovering green.
The green air filtered through gauze curtains and choked the room. His
mother’s voice, pale, disembodied, a melody. He tapped the window
and it cracked and gushed green air. With mother gone he could sail or
sleep in forests while ghost hands cracked black notes on the piano.

     Maybe all the lovers his mother entertained on slim, contoured sofas
would create a palanquin for her memory. Her memory in porcelain
figurines. Her memory in dried petals. They could rip up need like tissue
paper, spray jets of lust around her memory, leaving a wormy anxiety in
his chest.

     He walked back to the piano and played the sound of his mother’s
voice, the sound of her lovers’ moans, the hum of the balloon, outside,
hovering. This may induce memories, he thought. It could summon
ghosts. This could drive the lovers into pits of ash and oil.

     In the green smog hands appear, waving, the hands of dead mothers,
beckoning. He clings to the room, solid walls, substance; he remembers
to eat – meat, eggs, cheeses. The room begins to lose its familiarity as
the green smog clogs space, clings to the ceiling and drapes from walls
like fleshy nudes, turning certainty into vague recognition, mourning into
sensuality.

     The day progresses breathlessly to the point where his father steps out
from the lovers, dissolving in a 19th Century gentleman’s suit, an airless
suit of cuffs and collar, faceless. Outside his father attached to the
balloon by ropes and string, flags flapping around the arms and legs of
the suit, now blown up green and aerated. The boy wears the suit. The
boy and his father blow clouds through the arms and legs of the suit. The
boy and his father sailing through green clouds, arms and legs and face,
fading.

     Meanwhile, the white piano mother melody, lost to the room of lovers,
fashioned in grief, shaped by desertion, stirring the gauze curtains and
the slow curling air.

Stephen Nelson is in the grip of the Little People, but somehow still manages to write, mainly poetry, but occasionally fiction. He also creates visual poems and can be found at www.afterlights.blogspot.com.

Happily kept, as tightly as pins.
But who owns the lock?
Replying with snowy smartness and suspicion,
and who had no roof when cementing the night.
The green cat could run over the courtyard.
I will see better in the small flowerpot.
I must try not looking.
A little street of wishing that stood linked by.
 
And the gray sandy world that trembled with shape
became weeks and rose high in the space between walls.
 
The sun went to the valleys
while the boy bored two bees in it with his books.
How true he is,
the honey in his teeth.
The golden slowly around the city more slowly;
the silly city are together.
Go about it with fur beneath it closed again.
To pay his tin sunshine bore antennae for all that.

Water-Logged

At midnight we remove the boat from its hiding place.
In the dark, the lake seems less wet than the woods.
 
It is difficult to print the muffled slice of the shore,
with its short stems,
where around each new point
lies anxiety for unexplored coves—
might be a mirage in mind of some savage swamp.
It is a large decayed blue
of changeable and spacious black.
 
No more than a glimpse of a glimpse
of smooth-shouldered white stones like thunder,
excepting one or two
that make off vividly through the grass there,
where the family had been fishing from the shore.
Their swimming impressed me like a name in a kettle,
but made no improvements to mine.
 
I had come up and I hear the other birds,
and calm water so steep that only a moth can climb it.
The swallows which passed over my dwelling
were such as sweep over the day by boat.

Glenn R. Frantz is a native of southeastern Pennsylvania. His poetry has appeared in publications such as Otoliths, BlazeVOX, Blue & Yellow Dog, Cricket, and Great Works. His e-chapbook We Are You is available from Beard of Bees.

My sister and I are racing the condiments. Come on—catch-up. Wait—I must-turd. I don’t relish the thought of that. We are being given the silent treatment because yesterday we burnt down some evergreens using undergrowth and a magnifying glass. Do you understand now, my father had asked before going quiet, how fire can get away? He stands at the grill, recooking the chicken; he never knows when things are done. My mother has a skin disorder that makes red welts appear wherever she puts pressure. That’s how she taught me the alphabet, my writing each letter with a chopstick on the underside of her forearm, waiting for the letters to arise, scarlet. Tonight she shows me her arm, “Ice”—and I go inside.

In the window frame, there they all are. My sister in the burnt out grove trying to keep the hula hoop alive, my father turning the chicken over and over, and my mother pouring from a silver flask into her Fresca.

I often think of that fire, how quickly it got out of our hands. Power. It had something to do with that, wanting the feeling that we could affect the way things were.

It is my mom who turns to see me in the window. My sister will end up dead in high school, driving stoned; my father will join a far-off cult in the Adirondacks and, during an astral projection lesson, he will never return to his body.

My mother holds up her other arm. Hurry.

Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has been published widely, both online and in print, and blogs regularly at FlashFiction.Net. He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

I

affirmation sticks to me
like a porcupine’s quill

the dumb animal death—instinctively
a woman who has lain with pigs
keeps me going

where lions hunt
desires
silent in the bog

II

that wizened woman who has lain with goats
opens doors
that had been breathing

under closed lids

I watch her aghast
the air smelling briefly of love
breezes by humming
an old French song

the voice of the woman
has been extinguished
by its own extravagance
has been taken in
by wind
which makes gutteral sounds
inside

my body
so surprised by the opening
of doors

III

she speaks of that man
as if he were holy

her voice of bodies
closely woven
as knots of paradise
lovers

she wags her wand
& takes me back
to his shadow

as light deceives
it seems the shade
of a mountain
cast from her wand

‘climb’ she says
lifting her breasts

death’s tongue
flies away
wavering its notes
high above
the mountain

& i am alone
all sinew & bone
wrapped in the flesh
of his shadow

˜

 March 19 would have been Carol’s 63rd birthday.  She missed it by just over two months.

This poem was first published in Carol’s chapbook, Living Alone without a Dictionary, in 1974 (Gargoyle Poets 11, Makar Press, Queenland University, Australia). 

Be sure to keep an eye out for the upcoming issue of Mad Hatters’ Review (Issue 13), where many of Carol’s works will be featured.

—for Carol  

If the year ends a plural spiral
Make it be so what a year is
If the winter begins again here
In the longest darkest place
Of the shortest bluest day
We play the stillness deep
Into the night song beside
All our sleeping family breath

Of the five friends I am holding
Who will last the winter
In their earthly spiral
In their spring trajectory
Move to lovely summer
One more lovely summer
Or further time to foil
Days whirl into nights

I move to see my parents
The ones who have born
Me out have born me up
I move to be with my sister
And her local love her ones
I move to join the circle
I am already in my kith

Acoustic winter sings a summer
A way to stay awake as the light
Brings back its basket its halo
Its wreath of line and berries
Pine hurries to the wind again
Night is here at its most clear
Sound across the zones a weave
I sing this song again for winter

May Venus never sever
Her move across the sun
To come upon the next
Transit the next music
In time to finger to find
The new way to unwind
Skeins of sound in mind

— love Lee Ann

Winter Solstice 2011

 Lee Ann Brown is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. A poet and filmmaker whose first book, Polyverse (Sun&Moon, 1999), won the New American Poetry Series Award. Her second book, The Sleep That Changed Everything, appeared in 2003 from Wesleyan. She is also the founder and editor of the small press Tender Buttons.

Farewell Carol. If death is a journey take it at a local

pace. Don’t hurry if no road presents the way. If no road presents the

way beneath your feet, let the narrative fail where it fails. Let the

narrative waft to a treble let it. If you hear a crackle of burning in

the forest of tokens walk around it and sigh at the apocalypse. If

this is the sweet spot of the poem this is the sweet spot of the poem.

If I thank you for showing us how to walk around with a broken shotgun

draped over a forearm I thank you. If art never offended you with the

music of being alone after the wild darkness settles on the cobbled

town center it never offended you. If you knew deep in your funny bone

that clarity should be avoided if possible you knew it. If you knew

that closure should be avoided if possible you knew that too.

Gene Tanta was born in Timisoara, Romania and lived there until 1984, when his family immigrated to the United States. Since then, he has lived in DeKalb, Iowa City, New York, Oaxaca City, Iasi, Milwaukee, and Chicago. He is a poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. His two poetry books are Unusual Woods and Pastoral Emergency.

His poems, translations, and artwork work may be found in journals such as: EPOCH, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Cream City Review, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, and Drunken Boat.

Gene is Arts Director of Mad Hatters’ Review.

Glebe, Sydney, Australia February, 1977
Fantasized drinking ouzo on a verandah in Greece
While the sun fell into the ocean

Molyvos, Greece, October to December 1977
Interviewed prospective landlords in the local cafeneon
over ouzo, feta and olives
Bargained hard for winter rent the best house in the village

Danced the Syrtaki and Tsifteteli, in public
And a forbidden males-only Greek dance too

Happily shared the secrets of Jewish Chicken Soup

Had a policy: “you eat, you wash up”
Greek men: No exceptions
Never minded the kitchen floor awash

Co-wrote the Traveller’s Hellenican Dictionary
Called it Musika in Yr Moussaka

London, England, February 1978
Faithfully attended her travelling companion in Earl’s Court
Didn’t catch the German Measles

New York City, December 1980
Taught us how to say 13th Street in American
for the benefit of taxi drivers.

Glebe, Sydney, Australia, August 1999
Fried swordfish for breakfast while dancing the tango
Didn’t notice our dog sitting in her suitcase

New York City, September 11, 2001
Laughed. Didn’t Write. But observed
“We are breathing in the ashes of dead people”

Leonie Blair
Gold Coast,
Queensland
Australia