PINSTRIPED ZINE - Writing: Issue 12

Jack Slade

7/5/2019

Venice based poet.

Mining Boy

The minging boy is not phased His mouth yawns,
Showcasing the neglect
An omnipresent sting reverberates Around his mouth
Like soft chords on an organ Getting louder,
With every pull of his drink And every pat from his pipe
“There will be great repentance”, She cried, “when
He can’t chew”.

The Rose

The burning pages curled up, Like a white rose
An ash, falling
Turned to water
And the rose grew yet
Oh flame!
Heat come, bring new relaxation I burn books for you!
Their pages are vile,
Inked by piss and wine,
A blackmarket deal for nothing and no one
Others,
Whom liquidate themselves into a shot glass, Beg to feel your lips,
And loiter in your throat, like a cough
When it’s late,
And everyone dreams
But i need to breath!
My god, cut me open
Let my lungs by satisfied
Like a junky,
All dressed up in her tourniquet
I move her on her side
And watch her thick junky drool, Drip,
Stupid,
Like a cow let off in a field
But never in her life bearing less freedom

D.W. Blake

7/5/2019

Banging Bangs

Better than chicken,
And even soup too,
No one is lovelier than
Gorgeous ol’ you. And
If I could love you
Nothing less than a lot,
Goodness I'd love you
    more than I sweat when I'm hot.
Beautiful downplays it,
And resplendent's no good.
No words can capture it as
Good as they should.
So, if I could show them
    My love described in one place,
    Google would break
    from searching your face.

Aren't We Each Other's Match? (Or Flames as a Cliché Metaphor for Love)

Run me through, and hope I strike.
My darling love, our lonely match
Is small but fending off darkness.
It's sorry but it's all we have--
Small, but here it is upon a plate.
(I ripped it off a birthday cake.)
Just don't blow it out--

Well… I hope you walked away wishing.

Art by Kelly Roberts (@kellykellykellykellykelly) from D.W. Blakes book.

Alexander Zepeda

7/5/2019

"I would like to paint, but I’m a terrible painter, so I write. I write about still moments and flurried thoughts and the memories that come before you sleep. "

IG: @______alexander______

Jangled JAw

Curbside, sun slice on its way Convenience snacks in a jacket pocket Candy rocket and spiced sweets full Tucking your hair, because it
means too much business and in this stare you give me the green
seeming to last like a sour coat
And here a crumb gets caught Causing you to cough
Yet not flipping off
As long as there’s a deal
Speaking in the desert night,
We’ve been hopping cars
Citrus scented interior and speakers blasting low
There are bats in the suburban streetlights, to scatter as you pull up Putting the glass to your bald lips taking the drip as a thick syrup
I cross the moon as often as I
cross your mind these nights
resting face in the rearview mirror
I feel your voice as it reaches the hills’ ears, yet it also falls deaf in the valley we’ve arrived
And there was cheaper perfume
1
---
The street where 70s half-dead trees hang
brushing the top of the bus in its pass
and the cars with axles on packs of cement grin.
In a story I wrote we walk down this
street, avoiding chores and honest responsibility.
But those rarely turn onto my mind as I am preoccupied with the chance with you. Out here by the many
cars we are finally alone. Making faces as they
park, seeing your laugh is all I could see for
days. Let’s make time to chase them down, those hours found in the dusk. I know it’s getting late,
I smile, and wish you hadn’t said it.
Along Charleston, Then
2
---
Here or
An exit away
This moment, my finger tracing the beauty the softness of you in a chest of pressed roses
This is yours and conditional
Grating the rest of me
The knowing that all of this is fragile high tight-roped
I return to your lips
The running of your glossy charm
It’s just moon and late stays now
It’s 1:44 it’s temporary
That’s why it shines so sharply
Just let the melting persist
Just hush and hum into me
Just be here so we both can be
I want you
Til the night is reminded to retire
Til the sun is chored to it’s height A frilled eye, a gussied up dime Look at what you’ve made
To cause me to dance
3

Bella Lee

7/5/2019

summer leftovers

i’ll never forget the way the air smelled summer of 2016
dollar pizza, bummed cigarettes, cheap white wine
you and your sweet nectar sweat. the way you looked
all those glowing twilights, back against the sunset holding
a cigarette between your fingers and then between your teeth. last i heard you divorced LA that same summer and ran off
to Napa with the coming fall. working at your uncle’s vineyard and drowning out my taste with an off brand pinot noir you step, craft, and bottle all by your lonesome. i sometimes wonder if watching the grapes bleed sweetened their taste
we met under the tyranny of an end-of-may-heat-wave
the kind of weather that demands some degree of nudity, even between the distant breeze of palm trees. the season’s ripeness had freshly painted you carmel. gathered around a semicircle of run down sneakers, shaggy hair, and a single spliff, we made eyes and snuck away to roam the boardwalk, laughing as we slugged along hot, hungry, and high finally stumbling into relief at that kitschy corner joint that knew you by name. too sticky for mexican but you insisted a locals discount, we were on your terf and provincial pride knows no temperature so beneath the pressing heat we stomached oily mouthfuls of enchiladas and soft shell tacos. eyes lit up you spoke of structuralism, psychosexual stages, your own oral fixation, and other things i’d never understand
by the time july rolled around the ocean was so blue it wasn’t
blue anymore. the sun melted my insides as you tasted them, eternal afternoons spent dipped in your linen sheets. arched hips and shut eyes, only occasionally could i catch the nosy sun, peeked through the blinds, casting shadows against your face tucked gently between my thighs. indulged in each other's carelessness, thinking only about our lack of thought, the beauty of our impulsivity. it was during these languid almost slumbers that i realized i’d never find a muse quite like the crinkle in your nose.
i would write about you until i ran the english language dry and even then i’d learn another tongue and do it all again. you told me you’d dream of me, dream of this, until the end of time in light that i would always be yours. i was so absorbed in the brief stillness of your celestial voice i forgot to ask if you would always be mine too.
my birthday approached as a nursed cocktail of anticipation
and avoidance. the end of an unending summer, of an uninterrupted innocence. we recognized the veiled urgency of our fading
romantic hourglass for the first and last time sitting across
the nail salon during the thirty minutes it took to polish those
last glossy coats. in five you chipped every last bit of them off.
said you hated the glamour of monochromatic fingertips. more than that you hated the breaking, the gradual wear of a fictitious
perfection and so just like everything else in your construction
of a deconstructed life you wanted it gone while it was still worth something, smashed to pieces on your own terms. by the time
i knew what you meant we both had wet, dripping eyes. through blurred vision i watched as you took my gentle hands and said they were the tenderness you feared most and so i let you burn me with your blazing cherry thinking a homage to chaos might make you stay. you turned around and left me, rotting flesh to be preyed by mosquitos and sun-dissolved into the pavement.

Elizabeth Gonzales

7/5/2019

"I am an aspiring poet who loves to write about loving one's skin and my struggles as a brown girl discovering self-love. My piece is a direct response to two documentaries: KKK: the Fight for Supremacy and Alt-Right: Age of Rage. Their ignorance had angered me when watching these documentaries and I felt like I had to express my frustrations through poetry. To send the message that we as people of color are here to stay despite what bigots are those who are people of color and defend ignorance say. "

IG: @lizthebetterwiz

They Try to Make a Hell for Us

Spiteful devils raise broken teeth and growl
Trembling heavy jowls
Their eyes reflecting only damned fires and green greeds
“You will not replace us”
“You will not replace us”
They shout
And before we can speak ,
Birds flock and fly in circles, their screeching protecting baleful hymns
Before we can speak
Birds who look like us have sung beside trees drowning out our voices
Their cowardice overshadowing our existence
Their assimilation revealing cheap white paint
And what else is true comedy
But To see a clown dance for spiteful devils
defending ignorance only to attack their being in the process
What else is true irony
Than When spiteful devils dare see us weak
dare claim white skin and blue eyes holy
When it’s their blue eyes and white hands holding hell fire in crosses
When they are preaching damnation and hell for us to burn in
I don’t even believe in God
But I see judgement day coming
They are trying to play creator with eugenics talk
Claim to have the higher IQ
That we are the beasts
That our brain and nerves are pervading darkness
Like we can’t see through an evil spirit’s facade
See how hard they work to feed the bottomless void of an ego
Their mouths foaming at the thought of not being special
That maybe they are not important after all but just a living image of stale bread
That without squawking birds idolizing their pale skin, they are nothing more than just ignorant salesmen
Trying to convince us of a post America
One where we are pushed into a corner and forced to sit
Watch as they conquer the world
Their united whiteness hailing victory
A renaissance dripped in bloodshed
But we are the new world
Even if assimilating birds try to convince us otherwise
Even if they squawk and yelp for us to hide,
Our restless souls could never
Not Since the day oppression started
For We have learned to stand
Since the day blood dripped on shackles
We have learned to break
To fight and scream
Scratch and march
Since the day spiteful devils prayed on our downfall
We have only risen
Become the spitting image of their nightmares
Show them what true judgement day looks like
Hope the fires that lick their wounds burn
Hope it teaches them to swallow the venom and sew their lipless mouths shut

Sarah Soltis

7/5/2019

"I'm a sixteen year-old girl from Maryland who loves the water and traveling and writing. Both poems are about time and growth, but Terracotta also speaks to feeling small and unheard."

IG: @sarah.soltis

Terracotta

I am wound in wind,
Weaved in wisps of air.
The universe screams in screeching brakes,
turning a corner, perhaps,
Spilling on the sidewalk, the sight
of the terracotta-hued roof.

I used to daydream in shotgun,
sitting still now, in another passenger seat
Wishes always shatter
somewhere around that curb.

Consciousness flutters in those shadows -
the tree in the parking lot,
evergreen and gravel, the taste
of nearly four just before
time changes.

If I opened my mouth, would you hear?
Cars rattling on –
A cycle from brakes to ignition
It’s no coincidence
It’s no
no

Halving

Almost summer itchy,
Like grass on bare skin, sticky
Like orange juice around your mouth -
Here, let me kiss it off.
The desire for closure, enough
Of this half season
Half in, half on,
Half here, half gone,
Half full.
I want to be full
But my days are still filled
By passivity, standing still.
Could we yet carry it away?
Come what may, it is only May
Bleeding into June
Spilling onto you.
and yet i feel it - that restless void.
Come quick and fulfill me,
As if you could help me.

Liam Kozak

7/4/2019

Writer, Musician

IG: @leum.cozack

Mercury in retrograde

she told me that
Mercury was in retrograde,
said it made her feel some
type of way

I told her of
the mercury in my brain
poisoning, and persuading me
insane

with sorrow in our hollow eyes,
and acid tainted rain
liquid mercury
courses through my veins.

and on top of everything,
Mercury is in retrograde.

Bare-Backed Dancers

her lips taste like strychnine
she kisses me
four times, five times, six times
my eyes are glued to hers
and in my soul,
I search for words
but none come.

thoughts lie dormant
on the tip of my tongue
smoke on my lips,
tar in my lungs.

I never took the time
to think
of what I said.
until
my time ran out,
and i could only think
of what I hadn’t said.

when it comes to
love and trances,
I’ll take my chances
with the bare-backed dancers.

Julia Eubanks

7/3/2019

"I live between Minneapolis, where I grew up, and Los Angeles where I am studying Diplomacy and Comparative Literature at Occidental College. I have been writing poetry for a while and started really composing and recording music in the past two years. I find music to be immensely cathartic whether it be listening or creating and it has always been an important force in my life."

IG: @j00liyuh
Twitter: @juliaaeubanks

I’m trapped in a forrest of cognitive dissonance. I feel the insurmountable urge to create without structured restraints. To practice, improve, and perhaps will emerge something good. The restraints leash up my brain nonetheless and the needles of pride and association abort takeoff. If it flops than I will.
The same feeling wraps my core regarding the way I look or identify with a certain aesthetic. If I indulge and immerse myself in a preconceived persona or external reflection it could be solidifying, or perhaps a brief detour to try something before putting my itchy sweater back on. But if I do this, am I eliminating whatever else I could become?
Sometimes my body feels like an itchy sweater.
How do I explain the ache of fitting a brain into a skull I do not know the shape of?
If I remain nameless and open to potential, is that any better than cutting off possibility and just becoming? When does well rounded roll to a halt?
A slit it cannot squeeze through. A slot shaped specifically for a few formulas of success?
Is foraging my own path ever comfortable? or even my own? Is digging away the rubble as I go selfish if others cannot walk it?
With a woven branch ceiling, the sky peaks through the trees. Minds set up in solitude just out of earshot. We all have different patterned light-leaks. My inability to see the clearing does not constitute feeling alone,
But I do anyways.

Tamarra Thomas

7/2/2019

"I am a filmmaker; actor, photographer and writer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. All forms of art helps me express me and others in ways we sometimes struggle to do."

IG: @tamarra_thomas15

Planet X

They told me to leap for the stars, so I did. Now I sit among them out of air with the rest of the burnt out dreamers. On my way up I hit my head on the galaxy's, breathless and blinded, floating in nothingness. A shooting star glided by me, giving me hope. I cling to it, riding on it's sharp back passing a cluster of dying stars, begging to shine again. But this is my chance to fight resistance and not be consumed by the dark hole pulling me into it's rotation. I steer clear of the sun and land on a planet fit for me.

Scott Mcconnel

7/2/2019

"I'm a 23 year old from Belfast, Northern Ireland. I began using writing and poetry as a cathartic and healing outlet a few years ago after developing a physical illness at 19 that halted my athletic dreams as a martial artist. My poetry consists mostly of the frustrations of unfulfilled potential and lost love."

IG: @scottmcconnell95
scottmcconnell95.wordpress.com

Clarity

It’s a mundane life ingrained,
Sustained,
Until we reach the grave,
We can open the door,

Or,

Continue to ignore,
And be a slave,
To the dull brain wave,
So be brave,
And look at the sky,
Why my dear,
Enjoy the view,
Because through the Void,
Stars are glowing,

Knowing,

We can start anew