The Zingara Project

Month: September 2018

  • Let Me Explain by F. J. Bergmann

    Center stage in the Theater of the Observed, who am I to say
    that my voice is pleasant or my manners abysmal? Or something
    cataclysmal: a nexus of disaster, like knots that form spontaneously
    in windblown hair, and you try to pass them off as incipient dreadlocks,
    but no one believes you.

    I’m reluctantly approaching the age when the light at the other end
    of the carpal tunnel is a hot flash of … of loss of memory or …
    or rage! that was it! when you find yourself in an existential backwater,
    indistinct drifting forms slowly decaying in the sick conviction
    of temperature gradients,

    saturated with the metameric violet of an interminable hour
    where the monitor screen radiates a sickly glare the ethereal hue
    of Himalayan poppies, flecked with rows of suspect symbols
    like maggots paralyzed in mid-writhe and just as capable of producing
    an itching, irritated brain.

    My soul is portable and an unpleasant shade of green that wants
    embroidering, which I take to mean ostentatious lying. I don’t know what
    to make for supper tonight—thinking of alcohol, but it’s too much trouble …
    so I’ll just recycle leftover bad moods that won’t invalidate the warranty
    on my liver and lights.

    And when that fails to delight, I’ll come up with an enhancement device
    to effortlessly trigger a slow roll into the next moment, temporary levitation
    resulting in a mysterious accident: a loud splash from the room next door,
    where you and your spotted dog run quickly to slip on that broken thing
    melting on the floor.

    —

    F. J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com) and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Work appears in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov’s SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. A Catalogue of the Further Suns won the 2017 Gold Line Press poetry chapbook contest.

  • Blue Sky Day by Tom Evans

    It sometimes amazes me
    On a crisp sunny blue sky day
    Like today,
    That when a policeman passes me
    On the sidewalk and says ‘hello,’
    And makes me feel like a normal person,
    That he hasn’t seen
    Through me, and recognized
    Me for the imposter I am.
    But how could he know
    When I dress myself in decent clothes,
    My workplace just around the corner,
    In this small town where everyone
    Knows everyone,
    That I don’t belong,
    Terrified of being found out
    At any moment?
    And I am extremely grateful
    He lets me go on my merry way
    To make it through another workday
    Though I’d rather be anywhere else than there
    On a crisp sunny blue sky day
    Like today.

    —

    Tom, a librarian living near NYC, has recently had poems and stories published in Litbreak and Tuck Magazine, poems accepted in the Ann Arbor Review and Wilderness House Literary Review, and a first novel due out in October from Black Rose Writing.

  • A Flower Rests by Jerry Wemple

    Daisy rose later in the morning each
    day until she barely rose at all. Ark
    was left to get his own breakfast: peanut
    butter smeared on doughy bread; a pale
    apple in a paper bag to take for school
    lunch. He would shuffle down the slate sidewalks
    parallel to the river street doing his
    best to slow time and the inevitable.
    After school, the return trip home and sometimes
    there deposited on the couch in front of
    a blurred television his mother
    like a monument to a forgotten
    whatever. Sometimes she would cook supper and
    sometimes not. And sometimes the old neighbor
    woman would stop by and say mind if I
    borrow you boy for a while and then sit
    him at her kitchen table and stuff him full
    on greasy hamburger and potatoes
    and sometimes apple pie that was not too bad.

    —

    Jerry Wemple is the author of three poetry collections: You Can See It from Here (winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award), The Civil War in Baltimore, and The Artemas Poems. His poems and essays have been published in numerous journal and anthologies. He teaches in the creative writing program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.