Author: asitoughttobemagazine

Ryan Quinn Flanagan: “Chewy Circle”

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Chewy Circle

We watch this show 
where dogs compete in a series of things 
to see who is America’s Top Dog.

First, through a timed obstacle track
where the slowest timed dog and handler team
are eliminated.

Then through a scent challenge 
where they have to sniff out drugs or explosives.
The two slowest times are eliminated.

Lastly, the two remaining teams compete
through another obstacle course 
to see who can do it in the fastest time.

The winner gets to go into the Chewy Circle.
Have bragging rights and $5000 dollars donated 
to the charity of their choice.

The winner tonight wore these blue pair of doggles 
over his eyes.
Even though he was afraid to go in the water.
It was a straight fashion thing with this one,
you could tell.

His doggles made him feel sexy.
Beating out all the other police dogs
and one civilian trained entry.

So he could bark proudly from the Chewy Circle
in his bright blue doggles.

As Curt Menefee wondered how the hell he 
ever got roped into doing this gig.

And the studio audience 
cheered on.

 

About the Author: Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine The New York Quarterly, Cultural Weekly, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

 

More by Ryan Quinn Flanagan:

Robbie the Owl

Artisanal Birds

Listening to Blue Monday on a Friday

 

Image Credit: Henry Pointer: “Touch this if you dare [little dog guarding a cup]” (1870) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

 

Cody Sexton: “Heathen”

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Heathen

By Cody Sexton

 

Here’s my problem. I want to believe in God and religion. I do. I want the certainty that comes along with it. I also want the comfort in knowing that when I die, I could be reunited with the ones I love. But I can’t. I’ve tried. I have prayed to God for years to help make me believe. But all I’ve ever received back is silence. Which can mean only one of two things, so far as I can tell. That I am either damned and have been from birth, or, and more likely, that God doesn’t exist.

I tried to be a religious person. The impulse lasted approximately one year before it one day vanished. I went to sleep one night and when I awoke the next morning the capacity to believe was gone. It simply wasn’t there anymore.

The way I look at it is that I didn’t have the talent to believe. I’ve always had a hard time getting past the obvious fiction of the whole thing. Having grown up in relative poverty, religion held complete irrelevance to my life. I had no time for it and the religious leaders had nothing to say about it either and if they did it was only to say that suffering, on the whole, was a good thing. Which only infuriated me. Which is probably one of the reasons I was so angry as a young man. To a large extent I still am. As a result I lost all respect for any type of authority. Which has both served me as well as handicapped me in life.

Religion proved to me that authority was impotent when faced with real problems. So my eventual atheism had as much to do with human reason, as it did with a rejection of authority itself. But, digging deeper, I realize now, that my eventual atheism, had just as much to do with a rejection of family itself. Continue reading “Cody Sexton: “Heathen”” →

Timothy Tarkelly: “Hastings: A Remembrance”

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Hastings: A Remembrance

Ashley Judd graces the cover
of another thriller.
A two-hour testament
to the lengths men will go to for attention.
Two-day rental, just a few dollars.

It’s the act of course,
of perusing, compromise,
and finally the selection.

And the beauty in that green stamp
at the base of the books’ spines:
used.
Gently, but a real past,
a whole life of shelves and suitcases,
the pocket on the back of an airliner seat.
But I am not a jealous lover.
I will caress the creases
as if I made them myself.

A whole section devoted to dice,
twenty-sided windows into the future,
an eternity of game nights
and the compendium of canonical monsters
to guide us.
Plastic-wrapped, Fifth Edition, 
the best chapter of our lives.

And this was Friday evenings,
or the awkward hour between dinner’s end
and the movie’s beginning. The after-work walks
when you just can’t bear to go home yet.

The holy payday pilgrimages
of new books and novelty drinking horns,
of Pacific Rim posters for Christmas
and the perfect Frodo action figure
to live forever at your desk,
watching you write,
watching you live and record 
your most predictable adventures.

And now, Fridays have worn to antsy dust,
and a faded sign hangs from an empty husk
over a wasted parking lot. 

Except for every October
and its pop-up Halloween store. 

 

About the Author: Timothy Tarkelly’s work has appeared in From the Depths, Philosophical Idiot, Back Patio Press, Rusty Truck, Cauldron Anthology, and other magazines, online journals, etc. He has had two books of poetry published by Spartan Press: Luckhound (2020) and Gently in Manner, Strongly in Deed: Poems on Eisenhower (2019). He also runs Roaring Junior Press, a chapbook publisher that specializes in small runs of sci-fi/fantasy, horror, and pop-culture infused poetry. When he’s not writing and publishing, he teaches in Southeast Kansas.

 

Image Credit: A digital rendering of a public domain photo by Chase Dimock

Anna Saunders: “Thirteenth week of Lockdown- woke wondering if I were a ghost”

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Thirteenth week of Lockdown- woke wondering if I were a ghost.

I am too diffuse, fill the air like smoke
glide around empty rooms, feeling immaterial .

You would think it would be easier existing as ghost, 
airborn, iridescent as summer rain, 
but I am weightless only in mass -my psyche is ballast. 

To be a ghost means to live with the self undiluted.
Imagine who you are, but magnified.

I am too much at times, 
the condensed quick of myself,  
like a perfume oil or a 100 percent rum.  

Nothing touches me, and no-one.
And if they did, I am so tissue skinned 
their fingers would go right through me. 

At best I am inspiration, contain light,
but adrift and nebulous, like mist
all abstract antipathy and desire, 

and  invisible 
(who sees the ghost but the haunted?) 

I pull desperately at my own arm with this poem 
and claim 
I am here, I am here.

 

About the Author: Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018). Anna has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash, and The Museum of Light. Anna is the CEO and founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North and ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ by Bernard O’Donoghue.

 

More by Anna Saunders:

The Delusion of Glass

In The Drowned Woods

 

Image Credit: Julia Margaret Cameron “Julia Jackson” (1867) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Ajah Henry Ekene “Of Aging”

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Of Aging

Ma, your adult son is home. Things are not the way they look.
I have put a foot backwards. Many feet backwards. 
I have fried my dreams. My eyes are teary from smoke.
Ma, I cough. Bouts of sneezes. My internal rooms are hazy.
The dreams were large, too many. And when they burnt
They made enormous fire.
Growing up has been walking on hot oil. Each step tells me to hurry.
But hurry didn’t do ma. The sole peeled and peeled. 
Then I saw new skin and smiled.
Then it blistered ma!
My memory is turning. It cannot remember. 
Or it remembers too much; too much uncertainty. 
So, I do not know what I want to tell you:
Whether a confession of weakness; an acknowledgement of sorrow;
An admission of failure; or the subtle regret of not being enough. 
As I return to you, like we all do to dust, I know you will recognize me.
The familiarity of origin will absorb me home.
And should I have a choice in these things;
I will return to you once after this journey and refuse to be born again.

 

 

About the Author: Ajah Henry Ekene lives and writes from Nigeria. Some of his works are on Brittle Paper, New Contrast, AfricanWriters and The Kalahari Review.
He won 2nd place in NSPP (2017) and partly enjoys practising Medicine.

 

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Tahquitz Canyon” (2019)

 

 

John Grey: “I Read It Here First”

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I READ IT HERE FIRST

This copy of “Moby Dick” is repulsive.
I left it by the humidifier 
and now the pages are like sponge.
I bought that stupid machine 

because of this fixation I had
that my skin was drying out.
I never went anywhere.
I didn’t do anything

but sit in the parlor
in all that wretched humidity 
while one-legged Ahab 
went after that insufferable white whale. 

I’d ended up feeling like a stinking orchid.
But you see, I had to do something.
I couldn’t just let myself 
crumple up like old parchment.

But now the pages of the novel 
are stuck together.
I overreacted as I always do. 
In my own way, I was Ahab.

But now, thankfully, I’m Ishmael,
the guy who survives to tell the tale. 
I ditched the humidifier.
My skin is just fine.

Now I’ve taken up with yogurt
because of some concern 
about not getting enough B12.
Besides, I haven’t read “The Andromeda Strain”
        in years.

 

About the Author: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in
Hawaii Pacific Review, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming
in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Clade Song.

 

More By John Grey:

Maud

Downsizing

Move On

 

Image Credit: “Stack of Old Books” Chase Dimock

Ace Boggess: “Rain/Snow Mix”

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Rain/Snow Mix

Don’t know whether to wear my gloves
or grab the cobalt umbrella 
with its one bent, awkward arm.

I’ll get wet, but maybe it’s one of those dry wets.

If the temp were ten degrees cooler,
every question would have an answer
rather than another question:
should I stay home? risk it for a quick trip to the store?

The meteorologist mocks & prattles, 
goofing like an Auguste clown.
I think it’s funny we never see his shoes.

 

About the Author: Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—and the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia. His sixth collection, Escape Envy, is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press in 2021.

 

More by Ace Boggess:

Rock Garden

And Why Am I A Free Man?

Why Did You Try To Sober Up?

 

Image Credit: “Unidentified man with umbrella standing in street with building in background” (1921) The Library of Congress

Fabrice Poussin: “Getting Old”

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Getting Old

She stared into a worn-out mirror
familiar motion of early morning rises
seeking the imperfection born of the darkness.

Uncertain in the first hours of early frosts
she Passed her personal inspection
with the gaze of an unmatched surgeon.

Robed in the purity of the soft cotton
she caresses the gentle envelope of the years
complete in the glee that life still loans.

Remembering birthdays of another century
she wonders at the purity of the white satin
where not a line yet has written a somber destiny.

The certainty of time has gone into another realm
where dimensions come together into space
and she smiles even when they call her granny.

 

About the Author: Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.

 

Image Credit: Jacob Byerly “Portrait of an Elderly Woman in Matron Cap” (1844) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Geoffrey Heptonstall: “One for Sorrow, Two for Sorrow”

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ONE FOR SORROW, TWO FOR SORROW

The bird that sings a stolen song 
leaves echoes of another sound 
from a tongue bereft of voice.
‘Pica, pica,’ the magpie cries, 
naming its nature in air.
Joytaker, heartbreaker, 
what it sees it steals 
in glistening desire, 
feathered with wildness 
to plunder the beauty of things.
The joker in a pack of lies, 
it lives on sorrow alone.

 

About the Author: Geoffrey Heptonstall is the author of a novel, Heaven’s Invention [revised paperback edition Black Wolf, 2017] and a collection of poetry, The Rites of Paradise [Cyberwit 2020].

 

Image Credit: Australian Magpie courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Tony Pena: “Birds of a Feather”

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Birds of a Feather

The black birds caw
as I hobble to my Honda
CRV noir like Mister
no meniscus on the lam
from hard boiled critics
who put Clarice Starling
on my case for killing
so many of my darlings.
In my standard literary
issue of charcoal satin
shirt and dungarees,
I ask of the evening
in iambic slang,
if the crows consider
me an accomplice
to their murder
or just another
Edgar Allan wannabe.

 

 

About the Author: Tony Pena was formerly 2017-2018 Poet Laureate for the city of Beacon, New York.  His work has appeared in several publications over the years. Recently, poems have appeared in 1870, Museum of Poetry, and the Rye Whiskey Review. A volume of poetry and flash fiction, “Blood and Beats and Rock n Roll,” is available at Amazon.  A chapbook of poetry, “Opening night in Gehenna,” is available from author. Colorful compositions and caterwauling with a couple of chords can be seen at:

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Image Credit: illustration from A synopsis of the birds of Australia, and the adjacent Islands. London: John Gould, 1837. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library