theunpublishablezine

THREE POEMS BY KAUSTUV GHOSH

MISSING THE LAST FLIGHT OUT

Don’t know why the dickens we are standing on the wet street
Under the sad lamps. Even the strays are nowhere to be seen.
Show’s over, last call for fiery toddy done, this is no place to be.
I told you, didn’t I, we should have taken that last flight to JFK.
There is nothing here for us, Sidney, you can’t even die nobly.

DEAD DREAM, LIVING

Sulphur and ash in lungs
Dark snot as long as memory
Line items of invoices, rewards
Read revolution, forget life.

HYPOCRISY

Wax poetic about moons and stars.
Offline, count houses and cars.

Kaustuv Ghosh is an immigrant, technologist and believer in decentralization and the virtues of difficult concepts. He contributes poetry to The Poetry Palace, The Story Hall and The Creative Cafe (all on Medium) and has been published in the Singapore Poetry blog. His work has been accepted in the forthcoming issue of the Versification Poetry Zine. Kaustuv lives in Singapore with his painter wife.

VOODOO DOLL BY SIERRA EDWARDS

Trigger warning: this poem may be triggering to people who have experienced eating disorders.

It’s almost better.

the food I was bound to taste twice.

The colors’ almost brighter the second time.

Vomits falling out of my mouth

while I’m trying to speak.

Why can’t you hear me?

I’m screaming.

The acidity is burning at my tongue

but it seeps to my soul and it holds me.

Please- hold me.

Can your fingers still not wrap themselves

around my wrists?

When you tell me to wake up

And look in the mirror

I still see nothing.

Or everything.

I can’t really tell which.

I’m not sure who truly exists.

I’m sorry I’m not holding your hand

they’re filled with pills and pins

I know I hurt you

When I hurt myself

But you can hold your voodoo doll.

When she’s thin.

My name is Sierra; pronouns she/her/hers. Instagram: @sierrachrist. I hope this poem makes someone feel less alone.

FIVE POEMS BY SAMUEL STRATHMAN

EXCOMMUNICATOR

Flames enshroud firewood,
create a phantasm
of a flag
hanging starboard.

During a mission
in the river canyons,
treasure is excavated
and then squandered
by cannibals too hungry
to separate their sickness
from reality.

The gold remains there
under lock and key.

Only dead soldiers
mention its existence
like nimbuses rumbling
above their unmarked graves.

After seeing
the devil’s machinations,
instinct propels me
to a different town
under a new name.

I pacify my torment
by clawing at the mines
like a demented dog,
but instead of finding
diamonds and coal,
there are crystals
that make everything brighter.

Enough stories for tonight!

We are better off
drinking whiskey
in silence.

Far from any canyons.

ELECTRIC DOLL MOLLY

Molly is on
the fritz, skitters
across black ice
like Mario Kart.

At the end
of the street,
she double axel’s
into a station wagon.

WHAM!

Slits all four wheels
with her teeth
and then absconds,
puts herself back
in her box.

The original buyers
return the doll,
accept a grounding
from their child.

IMITATIONS IN THE WINDOW

Several childlike artworks
line the windows
of a bungalow.

The drawing that
stands out the most
is the one
of a dog eyed
octopus in a state
of repose.

Swimming in the deep
dark ocean must be
onerous for the little chum.

It’s a wonder
you don’t see more
of those tired heaps
tamped together.

My favourite shop
removes all the fish
from its counters, relocates
them to the frozen isle.

Display counters

make the transition
to imitation seafood.

There is a sudden
itch for me
to paint these replicants
right here, right now
before my hands
turn to hooks.

Perhaps these models
inspire some artists
more than others.

UNQUARANTINED

Man checks his phone
near the fire escape.

No WIFI.
Use data.

Chatrooms and online forums
are empty.

No eyes in the sky.

“Where is everyone?!”

Meeting.

MIST & MOTHS

After the film “Color Out of Space (2019) which is
based on the short story “The Colour Out of Space”
by H.P. Lovecraft.

Mist running through
the forest.

Learn to decode
the roving patterns
purple moths make
in the afterglow
of a sunset.

Back inside the house,
clocks slow
as the vermin
become accustomed
to a lighter shade
of dark.

Eclipse of a bodiless
bloodbath leaving the sink.

The fertilizer
outside is tainted.

How else could
the grass come alive?

911 Operator: What’s your emergency? Police,
ambulance, or fire? Medics?

Man: Hello? Operator? The plumbing is missing.
I think the grass stole it while I was sleeping.

Samuel Strathman is a poet and educator. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @_strathman_.

TWO POEMS BY KRISTEN GREENWOOD

ON THE FIRST DAY THAT ALL OF THIS IS OVER,

i will kiss / the first / kind stranger i find / square on their lips, / our teeth clapping together / like tumbling pebbles, / like dice / in a gambler’s hand. / i will set up a table / and chairs / in the middle of the street / and sip on scalding tea / while traffic / angrily / whips by. / i will fall asleep / at the filthy counter / of the dive bar / down the street / where old / and toothless men / with silver hair / down to their asses / reeking of smoke / or manure / or motor oil / play pool / and i will / delight / when the bartender has to shake my shoulders / to wake me. / i will sample fruit / in the middle of the produce section / of the supermarket, / citrus juice / sticking down my arms, / slurping the wet flesh, / pawing the rinds / while mothers stare. / i will crash / the first wedding / in town, / the first wedding After, / get wildly drunk / on bourbon / and dance on a table holding the bride’s hands. / i will run / into the wilderness / for however many miles / it takes to find a fox, / screaming in their shrill tongue. / i will watch / their feline eyes, / for certainly they will have forgotten / the look / and smell / and beautiful, homely vulgarity / of humanity.

TRIGGER WARNING: The next poem has themes of childhood sexual trauma and PTSD.

THE JOURNEY

somewhere all is well.

strange, isn’t it,

how trauma holds on

to a body,

how in one drive home

the spectral hands

of a grandfather long dead

traipse

across the seatbelt

and crawl

under my shirt,

how, all at once,

I can

smell the withering

of his deodorant

on the shelf

feel the ribbed threads

of the wife beater

sitting across his

weak chest

the gray hairs

curling over

the neckline

and how,

in a time that is

both here and not-here,

the car that I am driving

meets a force both moving

and immovable,

the front tire sinking to

the pavement,

candy red fender

cracked and caving in,

shuddering,

how my very real hands

remember being thrown

to the windshield,

splitting seams of skin,

diamonds embedded

into the wells

of my knuckles

somewhere,

a girl makes love

and isn’t afraid

of who she’ll see

if she closes

her eyes.

somewhere, her

hands guide

her lover’s and

she knows

they’re his.

“I know, sometimes,

it feels like this

is all that you are,

but it isn’t.”

my love

leans his head on

my shoulder

and I wet

his beard.

doesn’t a body

ever grow

tired

of re-living?

doesn’t it want

to unravel

these memories

like a VHS tape,

its thin, black,

intestinal film

spilling into

a pile

at its feet?

somewhere

in a theater

400 miles from my home

a man picks

at a guitar,

bellows

that I am indelible

and unbreaking,

and it fills the warm room

to its baroque, circular

ceiling

as winds off the Erie

howl outside.

I quietly weep.

somewhere

may not be a place

I can reach

just yet

but somewhere

close to Appalachia

the pale

gray sky matches

the cracked road

leading me

along the snow-covered

lake

and a single shack

stands

in the golden

tall grass,

a row of upturned

and empty

kayaks

loaf on the shore

outside of its

locked door,

half submerged

in wet sand,

waiting

for summer.

Kristen Greenwood is a contributing poet and editor of the unpublishable zine, a Connecticut native, and a 25-year-old poet who dreams of becoming a witch and fleeing to a cottage in the woods with her fiancé. When a global crisis does not confine her to her apartment, she enjoys wandering through the stacks of her local library, hiking, and sipping iced coffee. When a global pandemic does confine her to her apartment, she enjoys playing an inordinate amount of Animal Crossing.

FIVE POEMS BY LARS BANQUO

DECEMBER’S SUNDAY IN SAVANNAH

It’s as if
all paper
& all ink
joined the wind &
fled for the hills—
as if Memory became God again—

the man bathed in rags
thundered
his psalms
in the cold park by the
old tree—

he wove his fingers
into the Moon’s most
precious strings
and
as master
he made purgatory lurch and
dance
across the afternoon—

THE ONLY WARFARE I KNOW I SAW ON TV

Absorbing metal on
metal
on Metal on
METAL:

chemical burns on the chest,
no need for gloves or jackets—
it’s nothing but blisters out here.

The city shakes with
rage, the rage
has its own
gravity,
its own orbit:

the city is alive—
the city is alive & open
to everything that drips—

     nothing but shovels &
     carcasses;
     poisoned ideas
     reduced to cutthroat pragmatism
     from the other side
     of the bullets.

WAKE

Fuck It, Dude, It’s Summer

She is restless in her silk—
red wine swimming in place for hours at a time,
looking at the moon, at the sunset.

We speak in tongues we learned only on Ambien.

One space, two
spaces
ahead in the winding
snaking line of past,
present and future throwers of dirt,
she lets her legs so white and unscathed
move slightly beneath the sashaying
of that dress—

the dress could be for church,
but it could also could catch vodka rain on winter mornings
on frozen angel streets—
the dress could be paired with glasses over auburn pools of
honey, a blazer, pink lips.
This time, though, she slipped her body into it
for a wake.

The line snakes around without movement,
lionized by the stench of parlor of
death
of
pomade and ill-fitting duds—

gazes blaze around this candy store
where death and guts are fed by
the lucky dozens who will still breathe more.

Touches her hair once, twice,
the river of red like mirage like crimson trauma
moving together in motion she flicks the cherry lock
back on her slender self,
cherubic mouth alive with the porcelain
freezing her at seventeen—
or is that just for me?

Brutal snow globe over the week,
covers all with stench,
the stench young boys shouldn’t smell,
or ever be burned in or cried over in.

Boys like this boy—
he should be kept whole, and marched to
the top of a snow-capped mountain,
and can only be joined, celebrated
perhaps rejuvenated,
by those who can climb to where the snow falls down from.

She is there twirling motionlessly,
and I breathe in the skin;
nonetheless, it feels like our prom again,
maybe our wedding,
our births,
our fights,
our smoke and our cancers,
our drugs and our cold,
our tears,
our funerals,
our wakes.

FRESH OUT

for Francesca

I
The moon we share is
yellow & cold; we’ve got the starless
black sea hovering all around us,
suspended like a lost underground city, like
jelly in stoned sleep parking lot—

my suicide stains the stars a violet velvet;
my bed’s still warm in the asylum.

Two leather boots in step with mine, she
breathes warmth into my wooden eyes &
time is like something ugly & dead.

I move toward what will surely be gallows,
belly & lungs full of everything new & foul.

II
She’s got a nickname—
every letter off her tongue rolls
from throat to
pearls to serpent & out over
thunderhills of wet peach lips—
every curl of cascading smile is
born & dies in her
Rocky Mountain eyes.

GREY HOUSE, K HOUSE

Jumbled rage & unfed jargon
pierce the frigid evening—
     orderlies everywhere
     swinging the needles like reapers swing silent Scythes—
they strike down Ophelia in a room
with no windows—

      in a cabin with no fireplace—

Lars Banquo writes unpublishable novels and poetry. He lives in Connecticut.

4 POEMS BY KUSHAL PODDAR

RIDDLES

One July your father disappears.

In his mind someday you will solve

the mystery of logics behind,

never understanding that to decipher

a riddle one needs a partial anamnesis

seeking the wholeness. One July

comes oblivion. A face. Then nothingness.

Most of the years chubasco blows this month.

Some leaves stick to their branches.

MURMURATION

Tim’s daughter’s loneliness kisses

her tutor’s.

The couch smells of spilled caffeine

dried into dust.

That night the tutor will bury a box in

his backyard –

ash to ashes, dust to dust.

Tim does not know about all these.

He moves his hand to birth a sterlings’ murmuration outside the old mill.

I have nothing more to report for now.

THE UNLOCKING OF THE PUBS

When the pubs open their mouths

between two thighs of pestilence

I bid for a pint of both black and tan.

Saqi, let the thirst die along with the thirsty.

You have a red plague mask on. I raise mine

to sip from the heavy chested glassware.

Social distance makes the squeak and squeal of the rats heard.

Shadows of people populate this ghost town.

Pour a second. I raise my glass, empty.

You can still give those expressions even wearing masks.

An evening for the lady. I order. Wind blows outside.

Everything is heard.

THE SONOGRAM OR A FAULTY MEMORY

The sonogram shows the drowned;

a deep breath begins to singe my inside;

I cannot quite reach the great depth

where the memories wrecked

and sunken turn into a shapeless green.

(Imagine something evergreen and yet never in vogue.)

The sonogram, if (“If” – you used to utter

like a long suppressed sneeze) anything,

questions me, “What do you see in this Rorschach?”

and I say, “One man toying with his braised chicken

thinking – the only company he has for dinner is fried and stewed.”

Imagine the object caught by the sonograph

feels and feels like confessing to someone

typing on an old world typewriter. He has to hit

some keys thrice to get the right impression.

(Oh, what does it say? I fail my diving instructions again.)

A poet and a father, Kushal Poddar has edited Words Surfacing, a poetry magazine, and is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including The Circus Came To My Island, A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Eternity Restoration Project – Selected and New Poems and Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse – A Prequel. Find and follow him on Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter.