Yvonne Strumecki

To Watch Her Lips

She prefers reds,

both in wine and lips,

the cherried variations

staining my thoughts,

as though the puckered print

she leaves behind on her

glass is inerasable.

I pick up the stem

she drank from, knowing

the scarlet imprint on its rim

will soon be washed away;

reminding me of our inevitable 

parting of ways, not the 

parting of lips which I could 

dream of, had I the courage 

to say so.

But my lips stay closed,

protecting those few moments I can

steal without her knowing;

thinking of rubies and fire trucks,

strawberries and flame,

forever in my mind

a stop sign.

Walk Me Away

I’ve never worn a pair of fuck-me-heels,
those three inch spikes that whores or

desperate women wear. The wanting

glances that travel - screaming sexy

from the ground up. I need just one pair 

to take the plaintive part of me 

away, one swaying step at a time.

If only my wish could walk me away,

straight-spined from masculine temptations

that tear away the truth of me, how easily 

I let them justify their use of my body;

hands lingering too long and too low.

The shoes I own are sneakers; old 

enough I should toss in the trash, but can’t

because these are the soles that do me 

some good; keeping my pace, the steady climb

on the road toward a virtue which I can only dream.



 

Yvonne Strumecki is a singer and writer living in New York City. Her poetry has appeared in Fearless Books’ anthology “Touching: Poems of Love, Longing, and Desire” and Another Chicago Magazine’s Issue 50, Vol 2. She has also toured nationally as a singer. You can find out more by visiting www.yvonnestrumecki.com.

 

 

Alexandra Smyth

Is For Lovers

August takes Virginia slow and heavy.
Inescapable, inevitable, the state leans
in with a feline stretch. Hyacinths bloom
in reverse. Everything bends, absorbing
the weight of water.

Nothing to do but wait this out.
Nothing to do but let the heat pull the air.

I think you are a fever dream.
I imagine the way cinnamon meets honey,
I feel warm sunlight casting shadows
through tree branches in a cemetery.
Nothing like this ever lasts.

Night Bloom

In the backseat of the car I bloom into witness.
Part of me knows this is slaughter. I watched
smoke emit from my skin as I fixed my hair in
the mirror while I waited in the foyer for you to
pick me up. Your skin glows blue in the eerie light
of the dashboard. The musk of fear mixes with
my perfume in the humid air. Roses and over-ripened
oranges, things beginning to rot. I touch you at the roots.
After, we stand on a bridge over a creek.
You hide your face by kissing me. Your tongue
is dry and mournful. I close my eyes and accept it
into my mouth like a communion wafer.
This is my body, which I have given up, for you.

A Mute

Touch rings through me.
I chime, hollow: a bell.
A golden echo chamber,
I offer up the same stale
answer to any question.

Not a sphynx with coy purrs,
instead an instrument with
a permanent dent. The sound
I make is still jubilant, but my
noise makes others cringe.

Desire is a hot coin burning
purple on my tongue, and its
heat induces me to dumbness,
yet I am still searching for
language to explain this collapse.

Make The Best

To receive is a form of compassion.
You call my body like a suicide hotline
five, six, seven times a day. I want to
call this indignity love, but it insists its
name is hunger. It all feels the same.

Your mouth blossoms into yawn on
the pillow next to mine, and I fight the
urge to stick my finger inside, the way
I used to tease danger, touching the
black rubber flaps of the garbage disposal

with the tines of my mother's silver forks.
I just want to make the beast inside purr,
press metal against grinding. God is the
sticky hands of the two year old down the
street missing his right front tooth. I want

to be angry at your demand but you hold the
door open and I feel myself sliding into the
passenger seat and buckling myself in.
I check my lipstick in the mirror as you lean
across my legs to open the glove compartment,
reassuring me that the pistol
is still there, that it is still loaded.

 

Night Bus

When you said "good-bye,"
what you meant to say
is "I am empty without your pain."

When I said "until we meet again,"
what I meant to say was
"not until the acid eats though my skin."

This Greyhound Express smells of piss
and barbeque potato chips.
I like to give credit

when it is due
and you may have created this
but really? Fuck you.

I am the original one
who loves these ghouls.
Their little fangs, their gnashing jaws

their hunger belongs to me,
even though you like to say
"sweet darling, I gave them to you."

I cradle these small demons,
rocking them tenderly in the dark.
You gave me enough to feed them with:

I nourish them with your rotted pig's heart.

Alexandra Smyth lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a receptionist by day and a MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the City College of New York by night. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rufous City Review, The Smoking Poet,Specter Magazine, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and Word Riot, among others.

Sy Roth

To Hell with Marcel Proust

To hell with Marcel Proust and his kvetching.

Lying in bed all day with his Madeleine’s

Dreaming fuzzily-yards-long pages of memories

waiting for his end somewhere atop his feather-down pillows.

Crumbs of the refined Madeleine’s litter his bed.

Pickle pricks my memory--

far more pungent and lively.

At lunch I bite into the Mount of Olives kosher dill pickle

To go along with my ham sandwich smothered in mayonnaise

And Avenue P in Brooklyn looms large.

On one corner the pickle palace of the world

Its wooden barrels crowding the street

with garlic and dill aromas and thousands of pickles

swimming lazily for weeks in the briny waters

concocting crispness and tanginess.

I open one barrel and the whelming odors

grab my soul uniting it with the

mustard seeds, pepper and horseradish.

Spices like crackling ice snap and pop their scents,

As pickle purveyors around me bite into the chosen ones.

My arm up to the elbow fishing for the best one,

the first bite a trip aboard a luxury liner

adrift on a sultry, salty sea.

The day is warm in my fermented Avenue P flashback.

Dad is chewing on a twenty-five cent slice of pizza,

ropey mozzarella cheese lassoing his lips.

He points silently to a bag lying in the street

and cajoles me into revealing its contents.

I chomp my pickle and consider his proffer.

He flicks his hands at me and in the direction of the bag.

Ultimately, tepid steps bring me to it.

Pickle held between my teeth, the

bag reveals a discarded diaper.

Its odor consumes the pungent pickle odor.

The Mount of Olives kosher dill pickle for lunch

Resurrects dirty diapers and the

wooden barrel-pools of floating pickles.

Perhaps that’s why Proust languished in bed.

Dad dripping in laughter.

Sy Roth comes riding in and then canters out. Oftentimes, the head is bowed by reality; years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai, far from Moses and the tablets. This has led him to find words for solace.   He spends his time writing and playing his guitar. He has published in many online publications such as BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Danse Macabre, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Bong is Bard, The Artistic Muse, Palimpsest,  Dead Snakes, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mindless(Muse), Em Dash, South Townsville Micropoetry Journal, Vox Poetica, Clutching at Straws, Downer Magazine, Every Day Poems, Avalon Literary Review and Kerouac’s Dog.  One of his poems, Forsaken Man, was selected for Best of 2012 poems in Storm Cycle.  Also he was selected Poet of the Month in Poetry Super Highway, September 2012.  His work was also read at Palimpsest Poetry Festival in December 2012.

Jillian Mukavetz

Ducks

Book Review On Froth, by Jarosław Mikołajewski
Published by Calypso Editions

Jarosław Mikołajewski’s collection of poetry Froth, translated into English by ­­­Piotr Florczyk is a playful tangled and tender humored love story. Mikołajewski was born in 1960 in Warsaw, Poland. He is poet, translator, essayist, short story author, and journalist. His ten volumes of poetry have been translated into Italian, German, Hebrew, and Greek. This is Mikołajewski’s first book of poetry to be translated into English. In this exposing blueprint we whisper in quotidian terms, in transcendence, and intimacy the masculine as it embodies the complexities of father, of lover, and husband. The love between the husband and wife stays complicit regardless of the transformation. How is immortality here outside of earth placed into family? It is in the exigency that we celebrate in the seconds of everyday life; in humor, in times of grandeur and the destitute grappling of placing a ponytail into a hair tie.

Self-alienation occurs when the speaker jumps into linear yet nonlinear juxtaposition. The place of self is disembodied if not only for a number, or letter, eluding, “my step – does it let you sleep and this letter.” When we begin the speaker can only physically internalize his dead father who is cast as hero; inhaling his captured breath in the plastic ribs of a regularly used air mattress. The music indelibly distances a sort of forced caesura: “rome is silent and I think so is the rest of the world.” But masculinity transforms. Development within this composition begins to illuminate colorful affects when we read about the speaker’s wife. Wife quantitates independence. In the poem “my wife’s spine,” soft tonal elements blend “her spine is a scarf / tightened around a slender neck” with raw “animal love” twisting around a “steel rope of the highest voltage.” This is similar to the way that he speaks of his daughters such as “tallow froth stayed behind,” “a scream twisted its mouth / it didn’t flat away,” finally admitting, “my liquid skeleton lay at my feet.” Humor transposes an ephemeral dissonance that is reinforced by an enlightened female body.

We traverse to a primal focus on the body of his wife “between earth and not.” Her body is given a planetary command in force and openness. Earth which is traditionally negotiated as the feminine is initially ridiculed: “I throw her fruit / she yells … feed me with yourself.” While the children plead, “don’t do it,” the wife pleads, “do something about her.” At times the fatherly rhetoric is pulled into dimensions of self-deprivation where isolated aspects of father are mere manure in comparison to the fortitude of dominating female figures. The speaker tries to identify with the family in a space of nonidentity, yearning to grasp and or identify cross-generational and cultural gaps. But there is no resentment and finally we hear from, “white mom,” where the distinct title “mom” is given to his mother. The speaker’s mother represents another aspecting self where identity remembers the hushaby. Following, “hushaby hushaby mom / but so that I can hear,” the mother’s ascension is a lullaby different from the planetary movement of lover, child, parent, and fruition. Mother is peaceful masculinity in song.

At rest the book ends in a confessional titled, “question.” We read, “I was not a creation, but my senses, oh yes there was no me / but you were already the creator.” The focus, while the hero began as the dead stale plastic air of father, is no longer trapped. His wife is creator: as not mother, or planet or lover, but one who triumphs the ecological embrace of the feminine. This is a love confession to his wife. He reflects on how he would live if his family died in a plane crash saying, “At first I would mourn our children,” but to she her death would “seep” in. He says, “the second the one who would die from you / would be dying very slowly.” The seeming fear of death is not one situated around dying. Not the traditional masculine fear of the body that one would initially perceive, but rather, masculinity displayed in his love for his wife as whole. He will die yes, but in love intact; this assumes his immortality.

Jillian Mukavetz is a poet artist musician founder and editor of womens quarterly conversation. she received her mfa from new england college. her poems and photography have appeared in delirious hem, barnstorm, otoliths, ditch, poets and artists, among other publications. her cinepoem was screened at the 2011 cinepoetry festival at the henry miller library in big sur and published in prick of the spindle. she plays the fiddle and has performed with ambrose bye and anne waldman as well as eleni sikelianos. she has a chapbook forthcoming in spring of 2013 from Dancing Girl Press. jillian currently lives in south korea as an english teacher. 

Gideon Nachman

Pocketed

       He really didn’t know how his hand got in her pocket. They were both bounding up the station 

stairs, arms swinging with youthfulness long since alien to either of them, and it must have 

happened then. Her coat was loose on her, and those pockets just sagged so much, that it couldn’t

have been anything but an accident. A ‘coming-together’ as her mom would say. One haphazard 

swing of an arm and his clumsy mitt must have found its way into the damn thing. The fact that 

she shrieked really was a most unfortunate overreaction.

 

He knew how it must have looked: pretty young thing, far too young to have those 

wrinkles, wriggling to get free of his hand burrowed deep in her coat pocket. His puffy vest and 

stained shirt didn’t do him any favors either. But for Christ’s sake it was just a coat pocket, yes a 

coat pocket containing a wallet, but couldn’t everyone see he didn’t mean anything by it? He was

just going to let go, release the wallet, release the girl, give a sheepish apology and walk away. It

would just be chalked up as one of those moments; one column in the endless array of moments

that arise from bumps and nudges on the subway stairs.


       She knew it was nothing. She had seen him around the neighborhood, never knew him of

course, but he certainly wasn’t the type to be a thief. And she really didn’t mean to scream either;

it was more a scream of excitement, a scream of another pulse slipping into her clothing. She

didn’t shout ‘Police!’ or ‘Help!’ to her credit. She trusted it would be resolved soon. Everyone

has self-doubts, but she knew she was pretty enough and he was boorish enough that the rules of

civilized society would kick in any time now and he would shrink away for fear of public shame.

He must’ve known how this looked to the people streaming past them, rushing to catch trains,

running home just to take their shoes off that much faster. She also knew it was supposed to

happen by now. Convention was supposed to swoop in already, and she really wasn’t willing to

give in to the hot shame welling up in her cheeks.


       He wanted to pull his hand out, honest to God, he did. He certainly noticed the semicircle

amassed around the two of them now, and if nothing else, he wanted to do it for them. He had to

show them that as their neighbor, their buddy, he knew how silly this looked too. He agreed with

them, two minutes is entirely too long.


       She didn’t want to deal with this. Not here, not now. She was the one that was supposed

to cry, she was the one who was one second away from being robbed, but here he was blubbering

on the stairs for everyone to see. She slipped her hand into her pocket, took his hand, and led him

outside.

Gideon Nachman was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but now lives just outside of Boston. He splits his time between performing in improv comedy shows and writing. This is his first piece published in Scapegoat Review. His work has also appeared on ThoughtCatalog.

 

Brent Lucia

Slow Circles

A friend of mine, believing in shadows

and the benefits of a crawl space,

lost meaning all together.


We’ll study his kind one day,

displayed in glass cages,

labeled as “those who tried.”

Brent Lucia was born and raised in Massachusetts but has been living in New York City for the past ten years. He is currently an adjunct lecturer at City College of New York and has been teaching both writing and literature courses for the past four years. Last fall, his short story “Lady in The Albatross” was published in the online journal, Danse Macabre Du Jour. In the spring of 2012 his short story entitled “Dirty Branches” was published in the Promethean Literary Journal. 

 

Emily Lisker

Paintings by Emily Lisker

Target, oil on canvas, 20" x 16"


The Bird Maiden, oil on canvas, 16" x 20"


Rebus, oil on canvas, 16" x 20"

Spam Poem

Buy us contemporary

to obtain more low-down

and facts in the matter of

Come to see us now

to grasp more information

and facts in the matter of

Flash Poem from the 11:00 News 

She has lit

her boyfriend's clothing
on fire

before.

Emily Lisker is a painter, writer, and freelance illustrator. Her award-winning  illustrations for magazines and newspapers have appeared across the  country in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post,  and The New Yorker. She has illustrated over a dozen books, many of them for children. Her artwork has been used for theater sets and programs, posters, book covers, calendars, T shirts, and even milk bottles. She has had numerous shows of her paintings and illustrations in exhibitions, galleries, theaters, and restaurants. Her writing is featured on her blog The Urban Mermaid (theurbanmermaid.blogspot.com). Emily received a degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and has made Woonsocket, Rhode Island her home.


 

Anthony Cappo

Dream

I had my own Frankenstein monster he’d been
dormant I unwrapped him expecting him to lie
still but I went away for a minute and he slid under my bed
I coaxed him out I’d been reading this book
about how preemies are massaged by nurses’ aides
so I started stroking his chest and arms and this soothed
him a big smile so happy he squeezed my tit
real hard I told him to stop and relieved he did right away
his face charred all black slowly turned
marbled blue he looked like an extraterrestrial
burn victim I was scared but so glad to have a friend
who cared about me and maybe I should have a kid
whose limbs would shake and cry but I’d hug
and kiss him he’d reach his arms out and maybe fling
a smile right back at me

Hedging Bets

It’s cheating, I tell my nine-year-old nephew.
You can’t go to the Meadowlands to root for the Giants
and also hope the other team’s wide receiver scores
touchdowns cause he’s the top player
on your fantasy team. You have to be all in.
You can’t cushion your feelings. Your team
falls, you fall too. He declines this advice
from his gray-haired uncle. He’s having too much fun.
I don’t tell him how easy it is to highwire
my heart in sports, how hard in love.

Anthony Cappo received his M.F.A in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. His poetry has been published in Connotation Press – An Online Artifact, Lyre Lyre, The Boiler Journal, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, and other journals.  Although he’s lived in New York City for 18 years, he grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., and remains forever loyal to the Phillies.

 

Noah Burton

Bees

The boy keeps adding frogs
to his aquarium, rocks to his collection jar—
by afternoon, he takes water from the sink
to the dry well in the side yard.
Filling and carrying a bowl,
he spills a trail behind him.
His mother sorts mint on the table.
Stalks to the right and leaves to the left.
A new container of greek yogurt chills in the fridge.
A can of Raid, placed back with the cleaning supplies,
in the bottom pantry.
Sunlight sheets over the mortar and pestle
as she grinds the herb, makes a salve with the yogurt,
coats her legs and arms.
The screen door opens. The boy rounds the counter.
I got them, he says, They're drowned.

Noah Burton was born in Kansas City, Kansas, lived in New Jersey, grew up in Northern Virginia, moved to Richmond, VA, to attend Virginia Commonwealth University, and now he is up in New Hampshire attending UNH as a first year MFA Poetry student.

Scapegoat Review Spring 2013

Noah Burton • Bees Anthony Cappo • Dream • Hedging Bets Emily Lisker • Paintings by Emily Lisker • Spam Poem • Flash Poem from the 11:00 News Brent Lucia • Slow Circles		Jillian Mukavetz • Ducks (cinepoem) Sy Roth • To Hell with Marcel Proust Alexandra Smyth • Is For Lovers • Night Bloom • A Mute • Make The Best • Night Bus Yvonne Strumecki • To Watch Her Lips • Walk Me Away
Gideon Nachman • Pocketed		Jillian Mukavetz • Book Review on Froth, by Jarosław Mikołajewski