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When La Llorona met Billy the Kid in the trenches of the Cimarron canyon, the world was black with smokestacks, burning as buildings became tumbleweeds. The scars of the trees were brighter than the mountains, now rounded hills of charcoal and we were all mountain men, bleary-eyed and mad with thirst.

From the gorge, under great gray palisade cliffs we see the flames light the sky and it makes us wild like the men who first laid their hands on fire, who burned off their fingerprints so that we cannot find them beyond bones and needles and old spearheads stuck into the ground like pennies in a gutter.

Billy raises his six-shooter, left handed, crooked smile, unburied. His famous laugh breaks the wailing woman’s cry and she stops, and listens to his voice rattle like a baby snake.

            ‘We’re all made of wild things.

            We’re made of touch, of caress,

            And of the way your eyes flutter over me.’

She doesn’t know whether to rip him open with her desperation, or to meld hers with his somehow in the midst of the burning world.

How I want to be there, in that ocean when Noah’s ark rocked away in the darkness. The world underneath new–in that ancient tumbler of boulders—and I’d be as smooth and slick as a sugared strawberry.

Finally she says:

            ‘There’s no space here, in this air, in the remaking, for old, sharpness.

            The love here moves us. Makes us. Wild to understand.’

And I think here, in the gorge, under walls of these stone giants, I’ve found the kind of twister that slung Slue-foot Sue into oblivion. I wonder–I’ve forgotten–if she wore her wedding dress? Her veil twisted and gauzy with creek water. As she rode, wielded, conquered, crashed that mammoth catfish into the howling moon.

            I wonder if the twister made her–

            made her hot– like the desert sea of sand and rattlers.

            made her cool down in the night– like a bride uncovered.

            made her mad– like the catfish who could live out of water:

            alive like an inside out stallion. It’s inside a flurry of flesh and fur and a

    dazzling mane that set free would have colored the wind on the plains.

On the day when the giants froze into mountains, staring at each other across the Cimarron river, the moon wolves yelped and withered into coy-otes: howl-less and brown like dirt. And our legends met our ghosts with pistolas and lagrimas.

On the days of our births we breath the dust of memories

And it scours our flesh, smooths our skin, fills up our lungs.

And God says at each beginning and beginning again that it is good.

He said we are perfect.

And so we breathe now. As we breathe again. And we continue our remaking.

But the earth is cracked like a battleground.

Like footsteps. Like a mine of years and stones:

Rough and brilliant.

Sharp and smooth.

For one whole decade I was a giant:
my tunic smelled of rotten milk and frying meat;
my knuckles cracked all on their own;
and I had enormous, tired, watery eyes.

Yet the children’s faces lit up at mine;
I was good—when I ate them,
I spit them up again, nom, nom, nom.
Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

Once upon a time I was a lover too,
cavorting among the fairies, queens,
all of us in rolled-up denims,
balling, in so many ways,  and illegal.

Now, I am shrinking—my son’s hair overtakes me,
standing up like a chariot horse’s mane—
and I am dragged behind him into battle,
my hands bleed and the wind singes my jowls.

In the Wellspring, a cop half my age
shoots the breeze with me, then leaves,
saying Have a nice day, ma’am.
What business have I, being a ma’am?

I very-almost parked in handicapped
but my hybrid wagon, blue fish that carries me

hither and yon, swam in the large spot,
and I thought better of it.

The scabrous odors of war are thick upon me,
I want a ticket out. But I’m so tiny now,

I slip through all the rails,
like jacks through my once-gigantic hands.

when he comes home
steer heavenward
like a movie about flying into the sun

 

airlift cattle to a terrace with orange trees
I’m the last thing he wants
nothing to see from here but villas in Tuscany

 

computer his raw pet
bone bad
spinning silk in his lap

 

sky stops giving out lilac trump cards
I retreat to the windowsill
enough small cows there to flatten a city

 

 

When I am dead, I will still be your lamb, still listening for your bleating.

In your bed, when you are jolted awake by the usual neighbors, police cars,

I will finally move toward you, undefended, I will be headlights in the dark.

By your bed, I will be the green light, always on, faxing from your faulty heart.

In the morning, I will be the car that drives you to the creek, the bench,

where you watch walkers, not lambs, move across a steel bridge, sturdy.

If you are holding a book, and you will be, it will be The Sparrow.

I will be the alien I refused to read about in life.  I couldn’t give you that.

Instead, I wanted to move back, into black and white, the pewter pitcher,

a pigeon  on the  bowler hat.

I promise you, I will be the other, the one you long to talk to.

In the oven there are secrets:
drippings,
crusts burned and flaked,
black bubbles that still smoke every time she fires up.

She says:

Give me bitter lemons; I will sweeten them.
Give me brown bananas, sour milk.
Give me the chocolate so dark it chokes you.

You train yourself to listen.
Give the oven what she wants,
and she gives you
coconut custard, marble pound,
red velvet cupcakes, cranberry scones.
You tune out the cacophony:
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
the doorbell bringing women who want
to know if you’re saved,
men who want
to know if you’re saving enough on your gas bill.

Sometimes the oven says
eggs, bacon, gruyere, chives.
And you obey
without hesitation.

Other voices hurl pages
of unwritten poems, echos of your husband’s lover
singing “Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh god, yes!”
And him: “There has never been another woman
so beautiful.”

You don’t listen to them.
You lean in closer to the oven.
Closer still.
Deep inside where it’s quietest.
Maybe today will be your day
to change, to puff and flake,
turn golden and rise
without sinking in the center.

---

Autumn Konopka’s poems have appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Literary Mama, Crab Orchard Review, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and others. In 2014, her chapbook, a chain of paper dolls, was published by the Head & the Hand Press. When not frantically tapping poems into her iPhone, Autumn runs, reads with her kiddos, rewards well-placed semicolons, and watches embarrassingly bad tv.
Find her online:autumnkonopka.com.

       Etching by Leonora Carrington

At night when barred owls
ask who cooks for you, she sits
by the window.  No one

cooks for her.  She has a black dog
and coral night.  The moon
offers stepladders of gleam.  Preferring the dark,

she closes shutters at dawn.  Of course
people say she must be lonely.  They’re right.
She thinks loneliness is like a maple tree

she counts on to change colors.  Besides,
with a black dog who could feel too alone?
His tail made of butterflies and

zinnias.  He barks and a glass of red wine
appears.  Quite the dog about town
yet faithful as a hard crossword puzzle

in a Sunday paper.  Her windows open
and close but rarely break.  She knows
that cracking glass will announce

her own death.  She sees it faintly
through dusty panes, smiles
before turning away.

---

Kenneth Pobo has a new book forthcoming from Blue Light Press called Bend Of Quiet. His work has appeared in: Hawaii Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and English at Widener University in Chester.

Philly all the emo with none of the moshpit.
Philly free jazz in a trashbag.

Philly’s a synthetic weave tumbleweed down 69th street.
Philly’s Schuylkill punch brown and meek mill’s cadence for an anti-depressant.

Philly’s a rust covered trolley rail used as a balance beam for cat sized rats.
Philly’s a mouse that stands in the middle your living-room wondering what you staring at.

Philly’s when the scent of urine feels comfortable.
Philly’s a crackhouse where someone pulls out an ipod touch.

Philly’s the seasoning left in potato chip bag, littered because fuck you.
Philly’s bulletproof glass protecting blunt wrappers and raisinets.

Philly’s a bed sheet ad for pet colonics.
Philly’s four empty barber shops in a two block radius.

Philly is abandoned midnight unsafe even if desert.
Philly looks at anything but you as intensely as it can.

Philly is dubstep basement row-home hot pagan light-show for nobody Philly.
Philly’s a cafe a bored new jersey dreamed into existence.

Philly bucktoothed street with caution tape floss.
Philly flosses through beirut in a hooptee.
Philly ain’t no white car.
Philly For Sale sign.

Philly loose dutch tobacco on the 23. Philly loose money. Philly is cheap.
Philly chirps. Philly speaks it’s first words. Philly lounges.

Philly is waiting.
Philly is waiting.
Philly is waiting and the teams choke.
The kids choke.

The fey smokers identical outside the whiskey bar chain smoke like it’s new orleans downtown.
The buses weeze.

The roads are cracked and the sidewalk’s grow flowerbeds beneath them.
Philly grows and shrinks. Screams “back door” but doesn’t tell you to step down.

Doesn’t speak. Gets cut. Names.
A paradox laughing at itself. The old friend with no money

            and a ugly mouth.

---

Warren Longmire is a web programmer, game developer, poet and part-time philosopher. He’s been published in Painted Bride Quarterly, Metropolary, Eleven Eleven and two chapbooks: Ripped Winters and Do.Until.True, but what he really wants to do is direct. He currently resides in Philly across from a former Mausoleum with one roommate, one bluetooth karaoke machine and a pet python named Fugee.
You can find his writings, essays, videos and sounds at dountiltrue.tumblr.com and soundcloud.com/wclongmire.

From Mexico I brought you a silver and red heart:

                                    a tin corazon to decorate our Christmas tree.

            And after a night in a luckless bar—El Gato Negro—

a cocktail recipe: tequila and grapefruit soda—Poloma,

            the Spanish word for ‘dove’, the same pale name

as the stubborn horse I rode

                                                   through Guanajuato

                        without you by my side.

 

                                                I don’t know what I drank

that other night, an even unluckier bar in old San Miguel.

            Tecate? Negra Modelo? Some other cheap local beer?

La Cucaracha—the Cockroach dive that would not die,

            where Beats like Kerouac and Cassidy loved and fought.

And where local drunkards sighed at my American jibes

            as doe-eyed jotos sized me up from the back wall.

 

I missed you then, like I did this summer in Shanghai

            on wild Nanjing Road drinking Heinekens with a Hawaiian

named Billy, who never met a bottle of baiju he didn’t like

            —it helped him chase hookers along the city’s neon strip.

Baiju: rotgut Chinese white lightning distilled from sorghum,

            barley or millet. One swig from Billy’s tiny green bottle

and I quickly had my fill of it.

 

Never brought any home from the trip         —only stories:

of strange fruits, fried scorpions, whiskered fish.

Of the giant Buddhas carved from the Yungang Grottoes,

of the ancient monastery clinging to the Hengshan cliffs.

            I climbed the Great Wall, sang karaoke in Pingyao,

made a friend or two over a bottle of scotch—but for three weeks

among strangers in dirty coal-burning country

                                    it wasn’t just blue sky I missed.

 

                                                            On my way home

I bought you a bottle of Crown Royal from Toronto,

            duty-free and flavored with maple,

 

because I liked to imagine the sight of you in your boxers

            bringing pancakes to our breakfast table.

                        Something new to slake your thirst, I said,

handing the brown bottle over.

            You told me to add ice cubes and keep the drink simple:

                                       “We’ll call it a Mrs. Butterworth.”

 

These days,

            it seems I’m always returning from somewhere far off,

                        even if it’s just back to our conversation at the table.

Our lives drink up the years, I want to say.

                        They burn like a dragon, they sing like a dove.

            Don’t hate me because I can’t keep still

                        and need to fill my cup up to the brim—

                                    I’d drink your heart right now if I could,

                        even if it were silver

                                                        and red

                                                                           and made of tin.

---

Kelly McQuain will be a 2015 Fellow at the Lambda Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices in Los Angeles this June. McQuain has published poetry and prose in Painted Bride Quarterly, Redivider, The Philadelphia Inquirer, A&U, Kestrel, The Pinch, Weave and Cleaver, as well as in numerous anthologies, the newest of which is Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (New York Quarterly Books).  His chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won Bloom magazine’s poetry prize. He hosts Poetdelphia, a literary salon in the City of Brotherly Love. www.KellyMcQuain.wordpress.com

I don’t like girls—our big, ugly nipples,
slumber parties, cucumbers damming

our eyes—no crying about lunar bleeding,
our chromosome overdose sans the ‘Y,’

and our murderous designs against womankind
in magazines for smiling all the goddamn time.

I’m a slouch—camoflauged in boyfriend jeans,
elastic-muzzled boobs, and a noodle physique.

She’s a lady—velvet boots, earring medallions
dangling, keeps her derrière curved, always

tucked away in sugared sundresses and skirt-
train fringe that might melt in the rain.

Curls pinned in pouf. Mane slung sideways,
not quite dusting ankle but,

 oh, if she’d unleash
the wild—roar like she did that Sunday night,

after three whiskeys and an oyster dozen,
she unbuttoned once, breathing in my ear,

Baby, it’s a warm October, from two tables over,
slipping off her jean jacket and not needing

to make eyes with me like we do on Tuesdays
across the classroom. She lingers, unblinking,

mascaraed bivalves, widening to figure out
if it’s my jitterbug fingers or feet ker-thumping.

I square her gaze and I don’t know why
I think she’s waiting for me to cry already.

I should tell her—I don’t love—I shiver
even in summer, my heart hummingbirds,

flies backwards, dreams of her
strutting across the room,

wielding her oyster fork
poised to pluck out my eyes,

slurping while she excavates
the raisined pearls inside.

---

Nadia Sheikh is a first-year MFA student at Florida State University, a rhyme enthusiast, a waffle connoisseur, a human.