Last Train Out Of Montmorenci Falls

It left the depot relatively unencumbered;
Passenger service having been discontinued the winter before,
So the engine and the few sad cars pulled out
Containing no more than a few sacks of mail and an antique air compressor
Headed down to Dubois for either repair or euthanasia.
In truth, you couldn’t blame the PRR folks;
The branch line hadn’t been profitable for decades, if ever at all,
The business of business being business and all that.
That said, the perfect reasonableness of events which transpired
Did not make them any more palatable.
Mind you, it was not just mere nostalgia
Which the engine’s farewell trip served up for those concerned:
Oh, there was a full complement of that,
For there was no telling how many folks
Had waited, ostensibly patiently, at trackside
For a new suit or bridal gown from Kaufman’s or Horne’s
Shipped all the way from Pittsburgh,
Or had waited, in tears one way or the other,
For a loved one coming home from one of the wars,
Stepping onto the platform all smiles, medals all but on fire in the sunlight,
Or carried off, flag-draped and cherry-lidded,
(The band playing in the tempo the particular case called for)
And the oldest of the old-timers still talked about the fateful day
When Tiger Joe Margiotti, Elk County born and bred,
Stood on the platform, the entire town there,
Cheering as one as they would never cheer again,
Waving farewell as he headed to Pittsburgh
To hear from Boss Lawrence the words we all knew would be said:
That he was too Italian, too Catholic, too rural
To receive benediction for the pursuit of statewide office,
And it wasn’t that you still couldn’t flag down the Trailways bus
Which ambled into town twice a day except Sundays,
Stopping at the jerry-built plywood shelter in front of the defunct Rexall
(Ostensibly a temporary measure, but there three years now.)
No, it was something more than that,
Intangible and yet portentous and awful,
For we had always suspected (and, deep down,
Known it to be as factual and true as our own names)
That though we had thrown rice and confetti at our successes
And wept or swore under our breaths at our failures
No differently than folks in Erie or Johnstown or Pittsburgh
Or, if we allowed ourselves the odd flight of fancy,
New York, London, or Beijing,
Our shortfall of tall buildings and traffic lights
Underscored the notion that our laughter, our cries,
Our dids and didn’ts were lesser things, of no real importance,
And the train’s final departure, its chugging labored and funereal,
Was the final sentence in an obituary written over an extended period of time
(The death itself a lingering, discomfiting affair,
Drawn out and piecemeal, like our fathers and uncles
Losing a finger here, a pinkie there
In the roller or pulp dryer back before the mills closed down),
Leaving us nothing but a pair of rails
Narrowing together like some middle schooler’s perspective drawing
Into a point in some faraway and unseen nothingness.

By W.K Kortas

W.k. kortas is an itinerant civil servant living in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains.  He lives and works by the axiom “Mediocre means better than some.”

Genesis

In the beginning,
we held the universe
in our mouths and
stardust dripped bloody
from our lips.

We were celestial and
we were hungry and
we were magic.

In the beginning,
we loved like monsters,
splitting our bones wide open,
setting our broken bodies on fire,
licking poison from our wrists.

We were hollow and
we were titans and
we were terrible.

In the beginning,
we reveled in our unholiness,
in the freedom of our sins.
We never asked for forgiveness and
the world burned and
burned and
burned.

We were wild and
we were wide-eyed and
we were forgotten.

We will rebuild the kingdom out of teeth.

By Emily Palermo

Biography:

Emily Palermo is a nineteen-year old aspiring writer from Louisiana, where she is currently pursuing a degree in English Literature. Her greatest influences include Richard Siken and Margaret Atwood. In her free time, she likes to frequent coffee shops and bookstores, talk about her dog, and wax poetic about Vincent van Gogh. More of her work can be found at http://starredsoul.tumblr.com/

The Sky Misses You Too

I’ll move to Oregon,
walk downtown, I won’t
avoid the puddles.

I want to live in a place
where the sky misses you
too.  I want to linger in
this damp body, shake with
all the ways we can’t touch,

they’ll say pneumonia.  I’ll
say your name.  They’ll list
the symptoms, I’ll say, she is
gone.  Treat my frame like
a diagnosis.  Fold my medical
bills like a love letter and

mail them without the postage.
I will find sleep that night
knowing something about you

will have to
come back to me.

By Valentina Thompson

Biography:

Valentina is a 20-year-old queer writer out of Long Beach, CA with a habit of writing to people who don’t love her back and always smiling at strangers. She is currently majoring in English, Creative Writing with a minor in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, and if lost, can often be found in any small coffee shop on a rainy day. http://theseoverusedwords.tumblr.com/

100 Cups of Coffee Later

It will be September and your skin will be sun-kissed
and slightly worn from his rough hands
and wandering tongue
and you will feel as if you could
sprout wings from your vertebrae.
A few months will pass and you will find yourself tangled up
In his dark blue sheets in a room that smells like sex
and glade plug-ins
and you will wonder why nothing has smelled this good before.
Some days you will hear him laugh
and see him smile at old couples
and pet dogs that pass him by on the street.
A few months will go by
and he will stop gripping your hand so tightly
and will start to forget how you take your coffee.
Cream and sugar is fine.
You settle for tea.
A few weeks will go by and you will ache
and the veins in your arms will be the only
things that remind you that color still exists.
A few more weeks will go by and you will
take yourself on a long walk.
And just when you think you’re okay,
you will see him drive by in his beat up ford
listening to a song on the radio that probably reminds him
of a girl with brighter eyes
and steadier hands.
And just when you think you don’t need him anymore
you will leave him a 60 second voicemail of you crying
and you will try to hang up before he can start to smell the vodka
through the receiver.
It is over now and you can’t fall asleep at night
because you can’t close your eyes without thinking
about his favorite movies
or the way he licks his lips when he looks at you.
But you will meet someone else someday
who will start a fire in your belly
and will create a new light under your skin.
And when he asks you how you take your coffee,
smile at him with those beautiful teeth
and tell him you drink it black.

By Kimberly Siehl

Biography:

My name is Kimberly Siehl and I’m a 20 year old student at The College of New Jersey studying clinical psychology and spanish. I love writing, singing, dogs, and good food.

The Harvested Man

He nurses his coffee, by himself most days,
But occasionally with the one or two others
Who constitute the bulk of the clientele of the diner
(Low-slung building faceless, nameless
Although those who remember a day
When the village was at least borderline prosperous
And home to more than a few hundred wan souls
Still refer to it as “Kitty’s Place”,
Though its namesake has been dead and gone some five decades),
One of the few going concerns which implausibly remain,
Seemingly through nothing more than sheer inertia,
In the drab little downtown along Canton Street.

He languishes over his cup for as long as the mood hits him,
There being no discernible reason to hurry
(Indeed, the diner itself, once open before sunrise
Now dark and silent until a leisurely seven-thirty or so),
His place not really a working farm these days,
Just a smattering of beef cattle
(Milking and stripping out more than he can manage now)
And what acreage of corn he can get in the ground.
Eventually, he totters out of the front door,
One sleeve of his shirt rolled and pinned up
(Its former occupying member removed
After the incident with the ancient and malevolent corn binder),
Moving toward his truck with an all-but-one-legged gait,
His left-leg jigsaw-puzzled by an overturned Farmall
Some years back (most days he reckoned he’d tipped the tractor
By failing to shift his balance to accommodate driving one-armed,
Though if he was in a black enough mood he’d put it down
To an old Iroquois curse placed on the entire St. Lawrence valley.)

One could say, if he was a poet or some other damn philosophical fool,
That these partial sacrifices served to ward off some even more awful finality.
He would have none of that, of course–in his own cosmology
The gods and demons most likely have bigger fish to fry,
And, as to the prospect of some inexorable wreck and ruin,
He is of the opinion that what he has given up to this point
Is both ample and sufficient.

By W.K Kortas

Biography:

W.k. kortas is an itinerant civil servant living in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains.  He lives and works by the axiom “Mediocre means better than some.”

Saffron

She tied her shawl, saffron red,
tasseled at the ends, to the
bumper of a rickshaw and
watched it go, like blood through
wind’s veins.

Pakistan sky bending over,
as if in prayer, as if to cup its hands
and whisper into them, “Love my
people, kiss my children.”

Mama smells like alleyway shisha smoke
and equator summer and paprika.
I am three. Learning to walk.
Learning the cobblestone braille
of these streets. Skinning my knees,
learning again.

Peshawar is province frozen
in goodbye. I remember it as the place
I wanted to go home to, remap the
valleys of. Walk along the path
Mama used to take to school.

A hundred and forty kids.
Bent beneath desks. Air tastes
like metal, like iron. Saffron runs
through cracks in the floor.

Pakistan sky clenches its teeth.
Pakistan sky bites its tongue.
The rickshaws seem to cut their
engines all at once.

Pakistan sky lead heavy, like whistle
lost between lips, like shawl loosening
from bumper, trampled and beaten,
like a nation shedding its shards
after a day of target practice.

By Ramna Safeer

Biography:

Ramna Safeer is a pre-Law English Lit student. She is a writer, blogger, researcher, activist and perpetual coffee-spiller. Her poetry has been previously published in The ASUS Undergraduate Review, Atwood Mag and Words-on-Pages Magazine. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Huffington Post, New Canadian Media and The Queen’s Journal, where she works as the Editorials Editor. She is the founder and blogger at CherishChai.com, an online space that maps her journey to recapture her Pakistani, Muslim heritage.