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Hey, kids. Franklin!s hopped the pond and
put me in charge. Do me proud: send me
your best, brightest offerings. –CE
email your poems to:
clareechterling@gmail.com
The city on the hill
Ballad of a Sailor’s Wanderings
Outside the U.N.
I saw an embarrassing sliver of chicken skin
In your hours of cave-ish night, I wish you would cry
A violent river of tears that would cover the Midwestern landscape
stuck to the tooth of the ambassador
With saltwater, and ocean friends would come into the water to live
Oh god! the ambassador! I want to be the am-
On the (Untimely?) Death of the
Naturally, and they would know the path of the river,
bassador!
New Year’s Baby
The grooves in the once carpeted prairies,
Cushy job yeah, but travel wears on you and it
And know which way was up and which way was
shows and I’m not sure Finally,
North, and our whale would call to me from your window,
that you step into yourself
incontrovertible proof that Satan is real:
Acting a soothsayer,
Letting me know of your impending adventure.
but press yourself up to a fence.
the first child born in this year
The winds blow with your shouting,
-Rich Smith
of our Lord, 2008,
In my imagination, and they fill a makeshift sail
murdered (shaken to death) by Like gunpowder used to fill barrels, and probably still do
an irresponsible, irascible, ignorant father.
Somewhere. Every blast pushes you closer to my coast, moving
A splintered raft with you on top of it.
I’m sorry that I made us this way, I’m sorry
Is it irredeemable to suggest the
That I made you do this, you are now a creator
metaphorical implications of the death
Of something wet and old. A bearded face with skin
of this boy are sadder than the death
That wrinkles with the tide and imperfect flecks of life swimming below the pores.
This
Is to me beautiful, though, this drowning joy
Walk
itself?
That splashes its arms like a goose leaving its watery perch. White
Suds float on top of the surface
What’s left of the metaphor of 2008 is Reminding me of the time we went to the Grandfather Tree and smiled
His magnetism belongs
buried somewhere in Ohio, rotting
At each other, two wrongs trying to make something right. And now
to the l e n g t h of his stride,
in a small oak coffin. Things
I think that was good.
the easy manner in which his hips never sway.
won’t change, perceptibly: traffic
Without a camera it is hard to say
His knees never tell their secrets,
will neither speed up nor slow down,
How we felt that day, under the sun’s mustard beams, hearing the screaming of
A million beings of dirt that we sat on. I have a bad memory
but the soles of his feet roll from heel ball toe
the skyline will remain jagged,
And you know that. Plus my mind likes to travel, and
as if the earth were a treadmill, billboards still everywhere- but
I am, at times, hard of hearing. But despite all of my canyons,
My gaps so graciously filled with unsatisfactory attributes, you still care
politely churning beneath him.
oh, that child will never know the sad silence
About me, and sometimes that scares me. Children fear the dark
of a beautiful woman sliding out of bed Because they fear what is hidden in its jungle leaves, and I fear
Space. It is big and it reminds me of a lake, the stars
-Clare Echterling
and slowly redressing.
Are fishes who light up the water with life and
Ripple forever. Aliens probably
-Franklin K.R. Cline
Look at these animals the same way that humans look at
Rabbits. The stars are eating up Martian cabbage gardens
And reproducing at light speed. Vermin.
With each stroke of my milky eyes across the galaxies
That I cannot pronounce, my knees become weaker,
I fall to the grassy floor that lies under a film of plastic. One slit will kill
On Being “Cool”
The freshness. Another crying moment. I don’t
Want to be stale, a crackled desert of everything that used to
If the giant jelly monster had grown up in Chicago, instead of St.
Be now and is currently then. Things you can’t see
Are stale. All I am is ideas, a head on top of a head, and ideas cannot
Louis, he probably wouldn’t be a vegetarian. As it is, he lives on the Reach out with fleshless fingers to act a
second story of a square building with his mother. They go down one
Bandit and steal the mind of a reader, hide it away
flight of stairs each morning to work at her beauty shop. The houses in
In a more comfortable place than the last one. Ideas will never
Use their dotted tongue to strip paper layers from a dome
his neighborhood are very close together, and in the crevasse between
Of ice cream, because ideas don’t have faces,
them alley cats knock over the trash cans. The giant jelly monster
Because they are not human. All they have is vapor,
And they ask the winds to move their bodies into
leaves work hairy, because hair sticks to his complexion. Sometimes
Shapes of principles.
he leaves in burnet, and other times he feels very red, and walks right
across Locust Street to smoke a cigarette at the bus stop with the
I wish that I could tie worms around my fingers, and birds
Might swoop to meet them,
commuters. On one day like this, Rene, who goes to the community
And they would lift me up into the air by my
college, looked at the giant jelly monster to say he doesn’t even inhale
Attachment to the worms. I feel
and that smoking can’t make him “cool”. The giant jelly monster didn’t
Like then we could just smile at each other, me up high
And you underneath me, and we would relax. But I can’t
think he was “cool” either way. Tie myself to worms, because worms are slimy looking
And I am afraid of them.

Brie Vuagniaux
-Raymond Holmes
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