Creative Writers' Guild

John the Baptist

by Michael L. Stewart

—

I remember when I wanted to please my mother
so I ran with scissors —

up the asphalt Jordan, freshly paved,
past three doors — a pilgrimage for little legs.
My mission brought me under his window,
that old man with his loud dog inside,
tranquilized by television,
and there I sliced the heads 
from lilacs budding beside the house;
stole them from under his nose
and brought them to her on a silver platter.

She put them in a vase of hand-blown glass
so they could breathe on the kitchen windowsill —
they spent three days in their transparent prison,
falling prey to sweating sun and air thick,
as if from heavy bathhouse steam.
When they at last forfeited themselves,
she squeezed the color from their veins and
pressed them in a book, their new tomb between two pages
marked ‘Cecilia’ and ‘Valerian’ —

In the end, I hear they met God.
Will I be so fortunate?

Freight

by Rose Chiango

—

A blackness through deep green
shudders on the mountain
traveling West through cyads and cones.
Birds, swirling like the smoke,
deer scenting on the skirts of forests.

The transcontinental train slithers its way
through me, my children, 
rigid timeworn buttes 
buttressed against a blank sky
I am here; do they know?

Still the men squat low, swing long,
suffer languidly in our sun
sweating to see a vision realized.
They are searching for lost dreams
in the forest.

They forsook the east and hope to gain
the occident by accident
running with torches, yet without light.
A sparked Promethean fire guards
against engulfing green 
which creeps towards them, in the night.

Circled camps huddle, silently hoping
that this verdence bears no ill will —
though outwardly they show bravado.
Each is spinning tapestries in-mind
around the pines’ filigree fingers.

I observe they shall prevail —
yet awareness of my scrutiny?
A disquiet leaching through hearts,
a reticent fright 
that they destroy
what they are searching for.

Harold

by Alexandra Barbush

—

 When Harold looked into the mirror, he saw a face he felt was hard to recognize at first. Had he always looked so worn, jaded by the monotony of nine to five labor. His hair was black with spritz of gray white especially noticeable on the sides, closest to his ears. He pulled his wide palms across his face, as if to spread some energy between his wrinkles to smooth down the deepening cracks lining his mouth and eyes, almost overnight. His wise nose seemed flatter, bloated with drink and the inevitable heartache that either accompanies or causes it. With one swift tilt he emptied remainders of his flask down his throat. Empty, it felt heavy in his hand; the rust of overuse hardened it, he supposed. He wouldn’t even taste it- only feel the burn in his throat melt into a warmth that spread across his rib cage.

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Between You and Me and Ice Alley

by Tyler Barton

—

Call me creepy.

Dad does.

He says to me daily: “Nolan if you do not stop peeping out that forsaken window I will move your bed to the other side of the house.” Eavesdropping he calls it—calls me an eavesdropper. But, like, if the people down there in the alley wake me up every morning even before Dad is up boiling water for coffee or tying and retying his tie, how am I to blame? I’m a light sleeper and you can’t change that.

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On Marriage and becoming One

by Christian Stock

—

I am a weathered window pane.

I have blocked the lashings of

the wind so that you could

enjoy the breeze. I struggle

to get out of bed,

but no knows this better

than you love.

I have cracked

the skin from my elbows to my knees.

I am old on the inside,

my gears catch on one another

from years of rust.

My lungs scrape like

metal plates with each

breath.

My ankle is like a Mars rover, lost

on the desolate planet—still ticking

against an eternity of blackness.

I cannot feel, and you

feel too much. Repeatedly driving you

late at night from the warmth of your bed

and

leaving your face in the wind to grow cold

like museum marble. You are

a nerve

rubbed raw

throbbing

violently

against the suffocation

of social norms and I

will be the iron suit for your

naked self. I will walk with you

through this life, shielding you within my

dead nerves and snapped synapses

giving you shelter within the hollowed out

veins of my wrists and the heaving

of my heart. When it’s all said and done

tell me everything you felt.

Glass Melts (Snow)

by Tyler Barton

—

There seems to be nowhere that is without snow.
All the way across the flat country
on old, ancient, bled-out American roads,
dried-out,
crunchy snow drift prairies.

Eyes see always behind so many layers of glass.
The car window, whitely marred with salt-spots,
dusty streaks.
Rolling it down: the white sky
and snowpacked road-banks not yet soiled
by passing trucks.
It is clear, pure focus.
Wind exhales harsh and loud.

The first of the Rocky Mountains
            —with it the first bare sun,
            blue watercolor mix of sky,
            visible, with snow still
            and shiny on a windless plain.

Each tree a photographed snowflake,
spread open like flowering fingers;
capillaries, all pumping blood into the
thin air of Colorado lungs.

Silent trains flow straight along
the entire length of the highway.
The whole long chain you can see
from start to finish. 

Dare I Eat A Peach?

by Tyler Barton

—

Could I touch toes?
Did the little electric jumper
that sprang from your broken earbud
hop on my knee
when they touched
beneath the coffee shop’s table?
Can I give it back to you?

Horizontally, a mental blocker
had taken over.
I needed to lean in closer,
but without embarrassed smiling.
Without red faces.
Sober, surefooted
Grown-up embraces.

When are you grown up?
How do you know?
Hybrid cursive words. 

The old mind

by Roos Bulthuis

—

There is no way to save words for later. Maybe you’ll die or even worse, the world will end, so just tell me now. I wash your face and see your memories floating in your eyes, it makes me curious, so I dig into your mind and try to find the words you’re saving. I find your life.

It started at a windy Wednesday morning, you were six years and seven days, but you still thought it was your birthday and that you were allowed to choose what to eat.  You said you wanted to eat pizza, like every time you were allowed to choose what to eat. Pizza and Pepsi, because you saw your older brother drinking Pepsi from a soda can while you were drinking lemonade with a straw and you admire your older brother, so you want to do everything he does. Mum said that you had to eat vegetables today and you cried.

A year minus seven days later you turned seven and you woke up at seven after seven so it was your lucky day. Usually you get your presents at eight, so you waited patiently until your mum came in to wake you up and take you to the breakfast table where a present was waiting for you. However, 53 minutes later, nobody walked in. You waited thirty seconds and decided to go to the breakfast table yourself. A present was waiting for you and you opened the box to find a new video game and you started playing it.

I try to find the end of the story, but there is nothing else. You gaze at me and smile, I smile back and change your socks. If the world ends, you better wear clean socks.

A World of Broken Bones

By Shelby Feeney

—

Tonight our bodies are born of smoke.

We are children, taught through the pits of heartache

held tightly in our stomach lining

and in years of love that dance across

our eyelids to settle into our pupils.

Tonight the earth has ceased to exist

and there is no dirt underneath my fingernails or

knives along your tongue.

Instead there is only you and I

teetering along the edge of this dead cities burning lights

where the stars forget to twinkle and the dandelions are nothing but weeds.

Our footsteps are earthquakes to the grass below us

And our voices creak like our breaking bones until the wind is pleading our names.

You told me that I would live forever. But my heart beats to fast and too hard for people I have loved too much for too long. Eventually my chest will cave in and then I will realize that forever cannot exist if we never learn to live.

You look at me with eyes like a fallen Ferris wheel

and together we lay above the earths skeleton.

You are quiet and I am screaming and we are two separate galaxies collided in fire and retractable razor blades.

Tonight your kiss tastes of iron and there is blood on my brow and we are intoxicated by burning lungs and gasoline kisses. .

Tonight you hold me in the center of your palms and the spark of your touch turns my oxygen to gunpowder.

We lay in a field of shattered spines and tonight

I am alive in a world of broken bones.

Migration

by Cat Ardes

—

The days of sun rays kissing my skin and the warm summer breeze running through my hair are over.
I welcome the mornings where I have to hug myself to feel warm
The changing colors of leaves remind me of the seasons overlap
Geese flock south above my head to flee from this new climate
I envy them.
They know where they are going
And understand what they are supposed to do
But I’m here
I watch them become a distant arrow in the sky
Maybe they’re pointing me to you
I’ll never know
I like to think I’ll see those geese again one day.

inherited love

by Allison Rickert

—

i think of love in dog years,
of every blink of a doe
caught in her fawn’s eye.
i think of it filling
my mother to the edge
of her soul,
until she lets it spill
over the blond lashes
of her lower eyelid.
i think of her
as a young skinny thing
with a chasm in her chest
entering a house
where the dirty stuffing
is oozing from jagged rents
in the sofa, where the floors
have seen too many harsh heels
and they cry with every careful
tiptoed step my mother takes.
i think of my mother
stooping to touch the amber-eyed
kitten padding across the room;
i think of the chasm in her chest
aching when she watches
a heroin needle get driven
into the kitten’s gray fur,
straight between her shoulder blades.
and i imagine my mother
with that love spilling
out of her, tucking the kitten
underneath her shirt
and stealing her.
i think of my father
sitting on a tiled floor
for four hours
trying to get her bristled fur accustomed
to the sweep of his brown fingers
as her tiny paws shook
and she detoxed
until she finally looked at my father
and purred.
i think of my mother
with me tucked under her shirt
and her love caught
in the delicate spaces
between my black eyelashes,
my father
and his love infused
into the stretched webbing
between my fingers
that i can see clearly
when my hand is splayed.
i think of that cat,
clambering onto my father’s
shoulder every morning
as he made coffee
and that cat,
curled and purring
beneath my mother’s bed.

mother’s work

by Allison Rickert

—

at my mother’s work there is a water cooler. i like to fill styrofoam cups with cold water so that i can enjoy the novelty of sipping it through one of those neat coffee straws. sometimes i draw pictures and give them to my mother as she clacks away at a computer in her office. the sunshine streams in through a window; on the floor there is the striped pattern of bars, like a jail cell.

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Chapter 1: The Stranger in the Fields

by Nolan Dondero

—

“Urrrggggg.”

The boy dropped his tool and stretched back, hands on his hips. He wiped his brow. After a moment, he reached down to his canteen and brought it to his lips, squeezing out a pitiful amount of water. He allowed the canteen to fall back to his side, then fell back into sitting position on the ground with a sigh.

The boy was somewhere in his early twenties at about average height. His light brown hair was cropped short, as it always was during the summer. His honest eyes were light brown as well. At his side lay his personal scythe. Its rounded blade was slightly dulled and streaked with plant matter, but it gleamed under the midday sun. Behind him stretched a harvested corn field, a hard day’s work. It had been exhausting work for a one-man crew, but the boy took pride in his work as always.

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Twenty-One Summer

by Tyler Barton

—

This summer I started writing everything
down in journals,
everything that I did.
I also took fragmented videos and little pictures
of it all.
“If it’s here here and here then it is in more places than only my mind”
My fallible memory,
My evil tendency to rewrite history,
My lack of attention paid
day to day.
So I wrote it all down and taped it and framed it and filed it and kept
It all in a bookbag.

The bookbag is on my back
as I drag myself for miles across the freeway on my fritzy motorcycle,
and I’m entering the cattleshoot on the Thirty bridge.
You know the summer.
And I’m just flying,
the wind shakes me like a baby’s rattle,
and I’ve got it all.

Now I see my rear tire blowing
and me going over the low guardrail
into the water with my whole summer in my head,
in my journals and on my hard-drive.
All my life backed up and restored,
lost in the water when I splash.
When I return to the womb of my mother.

Mind you it is past midnight
on a Wednesday night.
No one is around
and no one hears the sound of the skidding bike,
the slicing of the fender on the concrete,
the screaming,
the muffled helmet screams,
all I’ve done in my head and on my back
not saved by the helpless helmet when I smack the
dark water.
No one to find me.
No trace of me left.

I need to start making marks on earth.
I should have gone to technical school.
A carpenter could die like this and his work would show forever.

I had a good summer but it’s all gone.
and no one knows.

[untitled]

by Tyler Barton

—

Twenty one and one half
And so little I have to say.
I have eight shoes.
I can say I have compulsions,
Compulsions to hear myself speak when I think, so I write.
I can say I have a receding hair line
And have never considered suicide
But
Thank god for letting us choose.

I can say I have spent time,
Decidedly, I’ve paid for it.
I can say I have a friend in prison,
I don’t know if he deserved it.
But I can say I am scared for him.
I can say I have read some novels,
Vonnegut I like.
I can say I have a newfound spitting habit
and an old one for biting the nails on the ends of my fingers close
and a judging personality
I can say I have defenses;
I can say I have offended
on purpose and not.
I have told jokes.

I hear myself thinking and it sounds delightful.
I don’t have much to show for it.