Ralph-Michael Chiaia
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Sometimes Suicidal by Aimee DeLong
Sometimes a suicidal person fixes her hair. Sometimes she looks in the mirror to smooth it. Sometimes she goes four days without washing it.
Last Night at Southport by Justin Hyde
tell her i'm a butterfly
with sixteen wings
beating in
succinct
anarchy.Categorical Imperatives by Maurice Oliver
Try to imagine a small room where the only/ furniture is a TV. The TV has a hundred/ channels and two sets of memories.
1. A canoe full of moose meat
2. Beerwigs
3. The Great Vodka Massacre
4. The Bootlegger & the Professor
5. Puke-O-GramVisual Art by Claudio Parentela
Cat, Poem, and Notes
it wasn’t much of anything
the maples were turning
syrupy red and falling
at the sidewalks.
cats were playing in
the yard
crows brooded in
the crutches of old
treesit wasn’t much of anything
till the tires slipped
Notes:It’s an amazing thing. A relic really. The dad, a funny looking man from London, he’d had an Indonesian wife, always running around half-dressed. Bad skin. She disappeared one day. He said we couldn’t understand how she couldn’t take the U.S. Not important now. They lived in the house next to mine, not quite as big. Mine’s the best on the street. His new wife moved back to Texas after the accident. She’s cute—much more my type than the Filipina wife—short hair, small nose, freckles, and big teeth. I like big, strong teeth in a woman—gives ‘em character. Kathy was her name, with a ‘K’. I felt really bad for her. She came over one night to give me some of her stuff before she packed up and left. She left the boy’s cat with me. Now I have three, which is a handful but I couldn’t say no. I wanted to ask her to stay, with me—move in. She seemed so needy. She lost everything that mattered. But she went back home. All the way to Texas. The amazing thing is they found the poem in the wreck. She gave it to me with the cat, Rusty. Said to publish it, so here it is for all of you to read. The damnedest thing that accident. Those slippery leaves.
Biography:
You may already know Ralph-Michael Chiaia as the editor/layout guru of litchaos.com. He is also a fiction and poetry writer. He has a new book out called Ten Poems about East Asia & Kitsch Nebula Ampersands And which can be purchased from his blog (where you can find his publishing history also).
