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Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Haley Lips



Jane Zemel


I liked it best in the summer
near the ocean
when the waves lapped
ever
so
gently
licking the sand-

an old lover
or something decidedly familiar.

We met on a bench.
you with a coffee
and I
with a sweet thing.

The crumbs falling
between cracks
familiar lovers
not yet
knowing-
perfect buttons
not yet
undone.

Haley Lips


Sunday in Savannah Vintage

Haley Lips is a periodic writer and artist who lives in Kansas City with her husband, son, and grumpy cat. In the Spring, she hopes to be accepted into a Masters of Library Science program and eventually be a world renowned librarian. You can see a previous project of hers at:  http://carrotsfordinner.tumblr.com/

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Danielle Lea Buchanan



Jane Zemel


CORN IS TOO KINKY TO BE PENTECOSTAL

Quiet as a cornfield, she hides her head in soil like others in Lamentations. She’s Pentecostal because why bind the feet with green, silk puffer pants? Girls from the Midwest dress husk tight in Victorian. Wind licks a hem. The grasshopper digs its tongue in chiffon. Cornsilk floats for its scalp, for the armpit of its angel.

Their voices vibrate through roots are telephone wires under earth. In every ring the dirt vibrates, the grass shakes. Cut a vegetable root, cut conversation, and that’s why electrical shock. Stand in a cornfield’s middle and hear laughter. Don’t confuse it for a lawnmower binge eating on dandelions then bulimia. Listen. It’s the corn girls. It comes at night when the sky bloats with sun stuffed through a woodchipper i.e. stars. Listen hard. Walk soft. Your footsteps are birds landing on underground telephone wires send vibrations so talk turns to whisper, then silence, then stop. 

Jane Zemel

Sometimes the sun says kinky things. Things like I want to suck every tooth out the socket of you, deflate nipple juice from every 300 teet of you. Corn can’t lather her legs with bubbly crème. She can’t floss herself before a date. Corn girls are still very serious ladies with the perfect posture of a spinal cord wrapped in ruffle and erect to the sky. Most times all the sun has to do is yawn, hiccup, burp or spittle. The corn girls clap their thighs. That’s when cornfields smell like flirt. Telephone poles fall. Black electrical lines coil underground. There is leak between every corn’s crack. This isn’t a malfunction. You need not caulk your cob. Under moan the earth lets a rip that caterpillars crawl in. Sometimes the girls would rather four-play like rubbing their thighs with spoons full of butter, splitting the sex of them while shaking in Mrs. Dash or gently grinding their bodies to grit.

Jane Zemel

Sometimes in a sunny cornfield on a hill next to a white barn lie lovers on a checkerboard cloth amongst a wooden box of gruyere and a butter knife wearing gooseberry chutney. When they touch one another it’s all spilled rim like bodies nothing but champagne toasts for the clanking, the bubbles and for the breaking. But it’s not from them. You turn your head at the moan just as birds pepper the sky. It’s from the fields, the being able to breathe again after being unpeeled from that husk tight, tight, tight dress. It’s all that shucking.

Danielle Lea Buchanan



Sunday in Savannah Vintage



Danielle Lea Buchanan pursues poetry in Baton Rouge. She is poetry editor of New Delta Review. Her work appears.