Camroc Press Review

David Ackley

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Joy of Wind

A gaunt, tasseled pine

rocks against the pale sky,

revising the shape

of wind. I have read

this text on high,

a boy, astride

a whipping limb,

and name it joy.

Consolations of Quantum Mechanics

For Clancy

In the "Many Worlds" theory, we inhabit only

one of the possible worlds in all possible universes

among which, every event that has ever occurred,

or will ever occur

(not to speak of those presently occurring)

leads at every moment

to some other outcome

than the one you could have done without

until all infinite possibilities are enacted,

somewhere,

which means that

the big-bellied grey cat with a weepy right eye

who failed to come back from a stroll

last October

is right now, in some other world,

sitting on our back stoop

waiting for the door to open

and welcome him home.

Express

Fall through the world

miss your stops

there's still time yet

there's time yet

there's time

CP

David Ackley writes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He has published work in THIS, A-Minor, Prick of the Spindle and others. Pieces in THIS and A-Minor were nominated respectively for The Best Of The Net Anthology and the Million Writers Award in 2011.

Bobbi Lurie

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Asylum

The patient people who work with the insane are not my kind of people. They are too entertained by the oddness of the inmates and act with a superior sense. I, on the other hand, am odd myself, searching for adherents to my view. The inmates know me as such and agree with me frequently.

I Drink with My Thinking Problem Intact

If only I could decipher the mightiness of the sword and put it into pen, I might free myself. But then again, I sought this duration of loss. I wrapped a fabric of lace around my body, stood stiffly at the garden party and asked to be captured.

Nothing I Carry Can Ever Save Me

I go through the boxes of once precious possessions, dredging up memories as I touch them: moth eaten, decomposing fibers. Swollen hands, shoulders, wrists, fingers in pain from packing so much crap in cardboard boxes: this is how the world ends: in dust and disintegrating filaments and fibers.

CP

Bobbi Lurie has worked as a visual artist and therapist. Her essays, short stories, and poems have been widely published in the U.S. and England. Her three poetry collections are The Book I Never Read, Letter from the Lawn and Grief Suite, all published by CW Books.

Amorak Huey

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

INDIANAPOLIS

"They said he didn't know anything about the real downlow blues.
All you had to do was look in his eyes to see that wasn't true."
June 26, 1977

Dull sweet ache of smoke in the air.
Blinding afterbite and motewhirl of lights
in ten thousand dusty shades of white -
I do not exist. The way a song's gone before
you know which notes you're hearing.
Bitter spotlight, glittering costume, so far from home
I cannot remember who I am
or whether I ever was. So many masks. Fear,
truth, lies, lines, bile, when everyone
is your friend no one is. Expectation
limits possibility and standing still
is impossible - silence a pain no pill
can swallow. Listen. They're calling for me.
You think I'm unhappy but that's not what I mean.

CP

Amorak Huey left the newspaper business in 2008 after 15 years as a reporter and editor. He teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Contrary, PANK, Rattle, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. More about him at www.amorakhuey.net.

Antonia Clark

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 02 May 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Among Pines in Winter

Anticipation leads you deeper,
makes you both eager and wary

the way a lone bird watches the sky
as if it were a mirror

waiting to appear to itself.

Shades of Gray

Swollen clouds rolling in, thunder
complaining to the west.
Cat shadow. Mouse's tail.
Silvery skin of the limp mackerel.
The damp wool coat of dusk.
Dull sheen of an old man's eyes
brimming with gratitude.
The dead woman's sweater
folded on a shelf.
The wolf. The distance.

Futility Boundary

The point at which the cure's no more
effective than the placebo

where all forms of matter revert
to their dreams, your old life
begins to melt

wax dripping into a dish, blood
into a basin

your name a stranger to your lips,
a foreign phrase
with no known translation

your hands transparent and cupped,
unable to grasp or open into a wave.

CP

Antonia Clark works for a medical software company in Vermont and co-administers an online poetry workshop, The Waters. Her poems have appeared in Anderbo, Apparatus, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Softblow, and elsewhere. She loves French picnics and plays French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.

Nancy Stebbins

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:01:00 +0000

MINOTAUR

You: on the road, bowlegged, blue jeans, clean white Stetson you call your sombrero.

Me: at home, emailing my sister for her opinion on baby names. We like "Nathaniel" and "Alexander," though you've taken to calling our boy "Tex" ever since the ultrasound.

You: phoning from El Paso, unsnapping the pearl fastener on your breast pocket to get at your Marlboros, saying "Honey, I nearly died today," and that you've won a prize buckle that could double as a holiday platter.

Me: forehead against the wall, knowing better than to bring up that your life has already been saved by a dozen rodeo clowns and a woman named Georgina in Amarillo.

You: opening a bottle of beer to wash down the B.C. Powder you call cowboy cocaine, saying you'll be home Tuesday, and that you're bringing a present for little Tex—a miniature mechanical bull for the nursery, for when the little buckaroo can hold his head up by himself.

Me: saying we could've used a car seat, digging from the trashcan the recipe for buttermilk pie your mama sent me, along with a book of daily devotions for rodeo wives.

You: pulling your pickup truck into our driveway on Wednesday, bringing into our house the miniature mechanical bull and a rodeo clown named Johnny B, who keeps asking to touch my belly.

Me: scrubbing at white grease paint stains on the pillow case, writing an email to my sister, trying to type codependent, but auto complete keeps turning it into cowboy.

CP

Nancy Stebbins is a staff editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her stories have been published in Cutbank, The Los Angeles Review, Saint Ann's Review, and other places. Her MFA is from Pacific University.

Simon Jacobs

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Managing

Her fear came back as a note on a half-sheet of paper that her eight-year-old Gwen found on the bottom of the empty recycling bin. “prety woman”—in bold, uncertain sharpie, handwriting that to Mandy bespoke the failure of the public education system. She was terrified of what it meant.

“Who wrote that, Mommy?”

“I don’t know, honey. No one.”

She crumpled it up and threw it in the trash, then realized that whoever left it might find it again, if he were determined. She dug it out and put it in a drawer.

The following Friday she set her alarm for 5:15 to ensure she was up by six. Mandy padded to the front of the house in her nightgown and stood just to the right of the window next to the door, waiting.

By the time the truck appeared around the corner twenty minutes later, she could feel her heartbeat in her ears.

Eventually it stopped in front of their house and a dark-skinned man in a cap hopped off the back. He grabbed the bin with one hand. Mandy needn’t have put it out; the two of them didn’t generate enough recyclables to merit emptying it every week—and yet.

Her breath had fogged up the windowpane. She wiped it off with her sleeve. The man paused, holding the orange bin. His head tilted forward. Had she given herself away? Mandy panicked, ducked into the living room and crouched by the sofa until she heard the truck moving off.

She waited until its engine grew faint, then scrambled to her feet and unlocked the front door. Barefoot, her nightgown trailing white behind her, she ran toward the bin on the curb, anxious to see.

CP

Simon Jacobs edits Safety Pin Review.

Emily Severance

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Arctic Reticence
(Camp Clay, June 1884)

The rescuers arrived
two years and eighteen men too late.
Long, still able to stand,
waved a flag from his lookout
pointed over the hill where the others lay,
staggered towards the ice battered ship.

Outside the half collapsed tent
Brainard tried to salute. Inside
Greely swayed on hands and knees
--red skull cap, tattered dressing gown--
could find his eyeglasses, but not
his name.

Connell lay wide eyed and motionless.
Fredericks and Bierderbick
crouched nearby,
poured out the last
teaspoons of brandy to revive him
as they’d nursed the other dying and dead.

Empty tins scattered across the floor
spoke the sorrow of stomachs:
hope as a missed morsel.

Hands and feet
frozen off months before, Elison
lifted a spoon-tied right arm
from his sealskin cocoon. Jelly
boiled from strips of sealskin
the only visible food.

After mouthfuls of hardtack and pemmican
rejuvenated tongues
remembered meals of
reindeer moss and ptarmigan
droppings
but none of the seven
could speak of who
cut strips of flesh
from the rocky cemetery’s
unearthed dead.

Albuquerque Westerly

Everybody’s going crazy from wind—
staying inside as much as they can.
Five days carefully opening doors
so they don’t tear off hinges or chop off a hand.
People walk backwards or with faces twisted to the side.
Sand erases the Sandias.

I leave cars huddled under
camera surveillance cottonwoods,
enter the treeless south where smashed glass curbs
mark where innocents parked.

A lizard’s scaly tail flicks
around stray cat lips.
A ten year old rides her pink three speed;
thighs pumping past the West Mesa crime scene.
Everyone else locked up
tight with tvs.

Days like this, women
who have to escape faux adobe homes
find exposed bones.
Sand that’s caressed strangled street walkers,
blasts across the Rio Grande,
batters police cruisers,
tears through our hair.

CP

Emily Severance has an MFA in studio art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blue Fifth Review, Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Juked, qarrtsiluni, and many other fine places. She teaches in New Mexico.

Helen Vitoria

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Cattail Song

if I bow back far enough
push harder, bend wildly
see more
touch less
ok, maybe touch more
pay the crickets
endorse all the right congregations
hard kiss the hand of ugly creeds
write all the Dear John letters
if I rinse with gasoline, straight up
navigate just so
then maybe, then
I might tell you my brief history

Fjord

my shark swims towards his greater pleasure of a shallow lagoon/bites glacial debris/distinguished by an inlet rise at his mouth/ I am the only one with a droplet of blood in the water

CP

Helen Vitoria lives in Effort, PA. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in many places including: elimae, PANK, MudLuscious Press, >kill author, and others. Her first full length poetry collection, Corn Exchange, is from Scrambler Books, 2011. She is the Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of THRUSH Poetry Journal. Find her here: http://helenvitoria-lexis.blogspot.com/

Rachel Perry Bergen

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Warsongs
On the tenth anniversary

The desert rises around them, still and baking
and grimly aware of its mission—

an oven, a graveyard, hallowed ground—

meanwhile, floating through the mirages, a warsong needles
its way into the soldiers' open ears,

whispers promises, says,
You've gone
too far. You can't
stop now.

Today, Nazik is seventy-three. She says she does not
fear the indescribable, but
hopes that her poetry,

like water through its cycles,
will come back renewed
on others' lips when she is gone.

A wartongue, she says, prays in the language of death,
bleeds out hymns of sacrifice, of faith
and faithful indifference;

for a badge of courage, it will hurl a thousand bodies
into the heat of the desert,
watch them crumble into burning sand, and it will turn away.

In the dark of the market, Nazik closes her eyes, puts a hand
to her tired cheek, and waits for her poem
to find her, seeking her out with doglike obedience.

When it comes, quiet and sure, she holds it in her fingers,
leads it through landmines, through desert air,
through the bins of rice and bright fruit.

By the produce, the boy walks carefully,
his steps sure and his lungs frozen
with breath withheld.

In his knapsack, the bomb is heavy
with expectancy. It whispers,
Just push the button already.

He hears his father's voice in his mind.

The boy grins to show he is not afraid—his teeth are missiles—
when the sky bursts and everything is white-hot

the smile drips down his chin and his eyes
are absent.

They might belong to some other child, somewhere else that isn't here.

The wartongue gives alms to the ashes that kiss the soil,
rubs them solemnly on its forehead in an "x."
It denounces the sacred.

When the explosion comes, it splits air molecules,
turns apples and lentils to mist.

Nazik, who saw the boy's hand move, lifts her palm to her lips
as the air breaks
and whispers the poem its freedom. Fifty-seven
words bloom and burst, clumsily,

into resurrection. They hang in the air

and wait.

CP

Rachel Perry Bergen lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband, Rob. She was the 2010 recipient of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize for Poetry. She has an M.A. in English from the University of Maine.

Eric Burke

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Autumnal Equinox

She is busy in the kitchen, pouring
vinegar into a pot,

making Christmas ornaments
out of milk.

Plate I (Frontispiece)

"In the crawl space beneath a bramble, a boy lies dying. If only he would stand up and ripen."

Beneath a Sky Without His Birth Sign

The emergency blanket blows away, gets caught
on the back fence.

Household Gods

He didn't want to feed moldy bread to the birds.
He didn't want to attract hawks.

CP

Eric Burke works as a computer programmer in Columbus, Ohio. Recent work can be found in elimae, decomP, kill author, Right Hand Pointing, qarrtsiluni, A cappella Zoo, and Weave Magazine. You can read his blog at http://anomalocrinus.blogspot.com/

Chella Courington

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:01:00 +0000

Important Facts Remembered from Biology 250

He waited in the field for the Yellow Cab, conversing with men in overalls. He carried a pail of avocados, almost black, and gave one to each. The absence of streets and traffic lights was insignificant. Looking up just in time, he saw a kit of wild city pigeons, the sun brightening their feathers—morphs of rainbow. Rusty-red, white and pied-blue. He watched them stream through the rays and listened for the sound of tires.

CP

Chella Courington is the adoptive parent of two avocado trees. Her recent e-book, Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana, combines prose poetry and flash fiction. Available at Musa Publishing and Amazon.

David Greenspan

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 06:01:00 +0000

which one of you holds my heart, a light beam?

a) the woman who sings smashing pumpkins. we are on the grass in her front yard, my head in her lap. chain smoke Marlboro reds until her voice sounds like hard skin on granite.

b) the last woman i slept with. as i was on top of her i thought moans could replace strong emotion. i was right, now she withers in a pond of our sweat.

c) the woman whose window i peer in. i watch her bowl of oranges. their basketball skin reminds of her goose bumps upon stepping from the shower and realizing i am here.

d) the woman who reads my poems and thinks yes, he has beauty but can i fix it?

e) all of the above.

CP

David Greenspan is a student living in South Florida. His work has appeared in Mud Luscious, NAP and Red Lightbulbs, among others, and a chapbook is forthcoming from NAP. He has a pet rat named Annette whom he loves very much. Find David online at davidgreenspan.blogspot.com

Jules Jacob

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:01:00 +0000

Drive

Flying by my son’s old baseball fields
nascent thoughts sucked
through the sunroof
with the air conditioning,
a perfect memory resuscitated
of a strong seventh inning swing.
Boxing it like his golden
bubble wrapped trophies,

I’m driving faster than the pain.

Sixty second news flash:
eighty-seven degrees, slight wind
attack in Kabul kills ten
Spokane historic cemetery
coming around the next bend.
New deaths, old deaths, lost sons
pop my favorite CD mix in—
Alone, Pennies from Heaven and
Tom Petty’s Running Down a Dream.

We’re going wherever it leads.

Glass Sponge

Your sixth birthday
is a token held tightly
in a secure pocket
of my consciousness, safe from
your spite and destruction
your droopy eyed swaying stance
your consuming desires
and drug store alliances.

You resuscitate my heart
with trust and clever lies
to watch it stop again,
like a sea sponge injected
with endless amounts
of salt water tears
tainted with pharmaceuticals
and membrane clogging chemicals.

But I am a glass sponge love
made of silica, thriving in the sea
rapidly conducting electrical impulses
capable of living for 15,000 years
incapable of shattering on the reef
or forgetting the memory
of you
on your sixth birthday.

Seeds

Hope finds the open window
the break-crack-rift;
she drifts into
addicts and innocents
illegals and the illustrious
the homeless and insane.

She weaves around
anxiety-worry-fear
to plant forgotten seeds
in assorted cultivars,
forgiveness-new job-new toy-good deed,
any variety she needs

for the pope and pedophiles
the CEO and the centerfold
the abuser and the bruised
to wake from
their nightmares
and rise again in the morning.

CP

Jules Jacob lives in the Mark Twain National Forest and serves as a child advocate for the Thirty-first Judicial Circuit of Missouri. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Huffpost Women, Frogpond, Four and Twenty, The Binnacle and Grey Sparrow Journal among others. She blogs at www.redroom.com/member/julesjacob/

Deana Prock

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:01:00 +0000

BECAUSE HE ASKED WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG

I remember
you were still asleep
the morning I rushed home from class
and told you
that an airplane had crashed into the
two towers.
I can't recall
if you had worked the night shift
or just stayed up late,
but I do remember how
you never got out of bed.
Even when I came back and told you
the city was on fire
with people inside out
and that the Brooklyn Bridge
was so heavy with grief
I did not think it could bear the
weight of it,
you asked me to shut the door.
I remember how
I sat on our couch
watching CNN and
navigating the sadness
of the world alone
while you slept in the next room.
Later, you said that if you had understood
the magnitude
you would have gotten up to see it.
I remember how it was four days before our
first anniversary
and how I never loved you the same.

CP

Deana Prock attends graduate school in Brooklyn. Her poetry has appeared in Breadcrumb Scabs.

Rachel Marsom-Richmond

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:01:00 +0000

Delaware

Come December, I will mail you a Christmas package with a jar of snow. I'll seal it tight to capture the noises of this thin air breeze—the blasting and chugging of trains. I've never been more comforted by the sounds of technology, you'll sleep better when you hear the music again. I'll wrap the jar in bubble wrap, gently place it in a cooler of dry ice. I'll write a warning on the outside of the box with a Sharpie: Do not touch the dry ice with bare hands, wear a pair of gloves to protect yourself. Almost 5 years ago you let me wear the gloves that smelled like your car when I drove up North and saw my first snow. Traveled through Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, but somehow missing Delaware—the state you ran away to. My friend Neesha says there's no such place as Delaware. It doesn't exist, you've been lying to me for all these years, making up a place and cities that you've never been to. I wondered why you couldn't take a photograph of your house or send me brochures from the museums. I never questioned your authority, but what kind of state has killed their music? My package may never make it across the country, heading off to an imaginary land, a mirage like Oz, but I've bought the box and packing materials just in case. The post office will be busy that time of year, but you're worth the wait in line.

CP

Rachel Marsom-Richmond has a recent M.F.A. Her writing has appeared in Camel Saloon, Three Line Poetry and others. She was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She teaches composition, makes sock monkeys, and dreams of moving back to the mountains of North Carolina. For more information visit her at www.rachelm.com

Michael Seidel

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:01:00 +0000

Dialysis

Two years into my dialysis treatments, the woman who tends me began draining my blood into a small, kidney-shaped pan, walking it carefully down several flights of stairs to the hospital’s cafeteria, and placing it in the microwave. She’d turn the knob for 4 minutes and 30 seconds, the same time it takes to cook four potatoes. The light would go on, and she’d watch it begin to boil through the perforated screen.

She’d return, pour the blood back into the dialysis machine, set it to do what it does, and feed it back into me. The first time, the sting was discomforting.

“Why are you doing this to me,” I asked her.

“We know each other so well. I care for you so much,” she replied.

Each time I went back after that, twice a week in those days, she’d repeat this. Sometimes she’d spill a bit on her walk down and have to call an orderly to come with a mop and bleach.

My veins got tunneled in callus, and eventually the feeling of the blood going back in was a kind of euphoria. Not hot; warming, good. Like a drug that hitches itself to your mind and gives you clarity by taking away all thought.

On the days I wasn’t there, my insides felt like paper-mâché.

So I’ve begun filling in. I line all the tools up, extract the blue until it goes red and fills the World’s Best Sister coffee cup I use to collect it. The lights of my house flicker at night from the power it takes to get it to the temperature I like—you can see it from the streets.

I stand outside sometimes while I wait, just watching that stutter of light, seeing it as others do.

Michael Seidel lives in a Milwaukee neighborhood called Tippecanoe. Honestly. His writing has appeared in Dogzplot and he blogs at http://oldstandby.tumblr.com/

William Cullen, Jr.

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:01:00 +0000

Fish

you say love’s a fish

that gets away too often

so we need good lures

to keep on bringing it back

or kind hearts to let it go

A Toast

you raise a wine glass

and propose a toast to me

as the startled guests

listen to you say divorce

is birth by cell division

William Cullen, Jr., works at a non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. He's married and has two college-age sons. His writing has appeared in Asahi/International Herald Tribune, Boston Literary Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Grey Sparrow Journal, among others. He was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2010.

Jack Swenson

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:01:00 +0000

Sisters

Mimi and Nancy are sisters. They are immigrants from Vietnam. They do manicures and massage. They make a living; indeed, they do very well. They have a nice little shop on the Main Street of a suburb south of the Big City. Most but not all of their customers are women. It's the other ones–the men–who give them trouble. The men want their toenails clipped. They pay for the "special massage." The massage is just that–a back rub. Inevitably the men are disappointed; they want more. Sometimes they get angry when they don't get what they want.

Nancy and Mini keep a loaded .357 magnum in a drawer in the back room. If a customer gives them a lot of trouble, they open the drawer and take out the gun. The gun is heavy. The tiny women hold it in both hands. Generally, having a weapon the size of a cannon pointed at him is enough to discourage a troublesome customer. His eyes get big, and he vacates the premises. So far, the girls have never had to fire a round.

They would, though, if push came to shove. They are friendly and peaceful ladies. They pay their taxes; they are kind to small animals. But when they were little more than tots, they crossed the South China Sea in a tiny boat. They helped fend off pirates. They were armed then, too. Mimi shot a man between the eyes when he boarded their boat. Her father killed the others with an automatic weapon.

They are grown women now, but they are little and men are big. Most are bigger and stronger than they are, but not nearly as tough. When a man exits the back room and goes hurriedly out the door, Mimi follows and washes her hands at one of the sinks. She exchanges a glance with her sister. The women smile.

CP

Jack Swenson is an old cowboy who now wrangles words, not herds. He misses the wide open spaces. He does his keyboard punching in a suburban community south of San Francisco. He is married to a lovely woman who is mother to their seven cats.

Bill Yarrow

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:01:00 +0000

HITTING THE WALL

I hadn’t seen her since Carter was
President. Everything about her had
turned white, even her beauty marks.
I faced her strangeness and fumbled
for the past. The time we went crabbing
on the Chesapeake. Her imitation of
Nelson Mandela. Playing lawn darts
at my Mom’s. I tried to talk, but only
whispers slithered out. She pretended
to understand what I was saying,
then said, “Wasn’t it fungible to have
run across each other?” Fungible? I
questioned. She slapped me—hard.
Then her perfume returned—with a vengeance.

JOAN OF DARK

What happens in heaven stays in heaven.
“That’s not true,” she said to me. “You know
it’s not true.” Yes, the acts of paradise,
slippery like syrup, slide down the clouds
and drip onto the tops of the trees where
birds and squirrels reveal them to man.
“What color are the birds?” she asked. Pink.
The pink birds and checkerboard squirrels
reveal the sly doings of the chubby cherubs.
“What’s sly doings?” I meant “sky” doings.
Reveal the sky doings of half-pint angels.
“I love heaven, don’t you?” I’m not allowed to
tell. They will burn me at the stake if I tell.
“Like Joan of Dark?” Just like Joan of Dark.

EYES OFF THE ROAD

One by one I lost my desires.
Dirty ambition left first.
Knowledge raged but then it cooled.
Riches never had the hook very deep.
Achievement uncoupled from success seemed pointless.
Friendship became recursive.
Appetite lost its urgency.
Form declined into artifice.
Love stopped feeding me so I stopped feeding it.
Insight evaporated when memory left.
Lust lingered longest.
My desires, gaily arrayed, bolted to a
lapis slab, await me in Heaven.
With any luck I’ll go to Hell.

—These three poems appeared in FOURTEEN, 2011

CP

Bill Yarrow is the author of WRENCH (erbacce-press, 2009), Wound Jewelry (new aesthetic, 2010), and FOURTEEN (Naked Mannekin, 2011). His poems have appeared in Poetry International, Confrontation, Istanbul Literary Review, BLIP, DIAGRAM, PANK, and many others. He is one of the poetry editors of THIS Literary Magazine and lives in Illinois.

Andrew Stancek

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:01:00 +0000

All I Needed Now

The apartment Mami, Oci, and I moved into was on the third floor of a decrepit building in the center of Bratislava. The streets were narrow and winding, most of the streetlights broken by gangs. Tattered Soviet and Czechoslovak flags fluttered from flagpoles; the ever-present banners proclaiming “With the Soviet Union Forever” were covered with graffiti. Scraps of ripped newspapers were blown around, along with greasy cardboard cones, and pieces of chestnut shells. The dark passageways reeked of urine. Wet sand and cement dust crunched underfoot. Grim soldiers marched in formation throughout the squares. People spoke in whispers of robberies, rapes and beatings of pedestrians. Policemen were seen in the daylight, directing traffic, but never at night. After dark no one ventured out. I was frightened, not only at night, but in the daytime as well, unless I was walking with protective adults. Yet I was also happier than I had ever been. I had a Mami and an Oci. I had made friends among the hundreds of kids crammed into the other apartments, in buildings just like ours. All I needed now was a dog.

CP

Andrew Stancek was born in Bratislava and now dreams in southwestern Ontario. His work has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Pure Slush, Negative Suck, Left Hand Waving, THIS Literary Review, among others.

Rebecca Gaffron

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:01:00 +0000

Gravity

It’s midnight. What’s stopping me from jumping in the car and driving three and a half hours to pick up a book of short stories written by some guy I’ve never met?

Nothing.

No one to miss me, no job to be late for, no pets requiring attention. Even the house plants are long dead. And he’s fun online.

I exchange hot-pink tights for my best ass-hugging jeans and grab the car keys.

I’m almost on the highway before it occurs to me that Chris might stop by. See, someone would notice. I ease my foot off the gas. Then reality checks in. Chris won’t show. The Chris thing is over.

The road’s empty. I use my phone to post on his FB page. Tell him I’m on my way and leave my number. A few miles later I feel vibrating in my pocket.

“Are you fucking serious?” His voice is strange. Not odd, but unknown. It makes me think the whole idea is crazy. Then I notice his enthusiasm.

“You’re really driving here? Tonight?”

“Yeah.” I sound breathless.

“Fuck.”

“You offered.” I turn breathless to confident.

“I know but….” The pause is long. “I never thought you would.”

“I don’t have a clue where I’m headed.” He misses the broader implications and gives me directions.

We meet at a diner around 3:45am. Conversation in person isn’t as playful. But he insists on buying me breakfast. We finish as the sun peeks over the eastern horizon.

“You could come back to my place…”

It’s what I’ve been waiting for. Going home with a stranger, in a strange city. Gravity pulls. The force makes me shiver.

CP

Rebecca Gaffron is fascinated by sea-green spaces, words, and men who behave like cats. She is a sometimes writer and can be found at her virtual home, rebeccawriting.wordpress.com.

Cath Barton

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:01:00 +0000

Dollies

There was, even now, a strong smell of chicken shit in the shed. It caught me in the throat. But the creatures in the shed now were not chickens. And I could not see them. All the wooden pegs had been scattered on the dusty floor. Looking now, with my eyes of all the years, I finally understood why my sisters had called them dolly pegs: faces blanked, bodies naked and defiled. Now the half-made dress on the old iron dressmaker’s dummy was torn, the stuffing was bursting out and something was moving in there. I held the chains on the door tight and the cold metal froze my fingers. I heard shards of laughter beyond the chains, between the slats, and I knew I would fall, just like the little disemboweled pottery owl lying there by the pegs. I would be on the floor, naked and squirming like the rest of them. Until I fell still. Unless. Unless you arrived, and you wouldn’t. You had gone with the chickens and the harvest, which had been late that year. I had the flavour of you in my mind, just that. A frill of something underwater, receding.

CP

Cath Barton lives in Abergavenny, South Wales, where she sings, writes, takes photographs and grows unusual and delicious vegetables.

Suzy Devere

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:01:00 +0000

Tulips and Tourniquets

And you are before me with a twitching eye and something else that tells me you aren't comfortable...haven't been comfortable for a hundred years. Since the dogs stopped fucking next door and bit the ear off the little girl who was picking the tulip in the yard while your mother was boiling water for tea. Since the stars were constellations you wanted to know the names of, you haven't been comfortable with me. Because you know I ache. It starts when I open my eyes and realize we are still together, and that the day will bring minutes that we'll spend together. Our lives will be about taking my medicine on time and getting the insurance forms filled out right so the adjustments don't come back to us over and over again, like Australian boomerangs. You want me to feel loved. I want you to go away because my body aches from ills too numerous to list and my heart aches from falling out of love with you. Our long night—another in a string of many that will last until you become too tired to care for me, or I die—will start after Charlie's Angels re-runs and Dairy Queen, because a shake is all I can get down. We will never again be lovers, and I want to be small so you cannot see me in this bed of white bleached sheets and spit towels. I ache. And I don't want you to watch it.

CP

Suzy Devere appears and disappears seemingly at will. She could be camping in the underground right now, or back in Pattaya, sitting in a rattan chair at a bar overlooking the harbor, having drinks with some old ghosts of Vietnam.

Robert Vaughan

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:01:00 +0000

Fling

“Poor little me,” she mused. She is dripping with sweat while the rain spits bullets. She feels like flinging coffee at the Pope. What could be worse than an abortion in a Boston alley, the doctor a stranger. The father stranger still.

The Wedding March

The congregation whispers, fidgets, and breathes like bellows. The wedding party are running way behind schedule. Tensions mount as the ceremonial time passes. The bald pastor rearranges his papers. Checks his watch, the lines deepening on his face.

Her wedding party fixes, adjusts, makes last minute preparations. She can't seem to get her ringlets to behave, to twist in the manner they did at her run-through. “Do something,” she pleads with her maid of honor. Her panic mounts. She grabs the curling iron, snaps, “You're just making it worse!”

To calm her, dad leads her aside, into the narrow hallway. He wants to savor these last moments with his sole daughter. His pride and joy. He takes her hand, opens it face up in both of his. Says, “When I was your age, we could fit everything we owned right here.” Traces a circle in her hand with his finger. “We had nothing.” He sighs, thinks of his own failed marriage. He asks her, “You're sure you wanna do this?”

It takes her by complete surprise. The one question she wishes he might have avoided. She glances outside to steel herself, into the churchyard. The sun gleams on the gravestones. It feels like she's wearing ankle weights as the organ barks the wedding march.

CP

Robert Vaughan’s plays have been produced in N.Y.C., L.A., S.F., and Milwaukee, where he resides. He leads two writing roundtables for Redbird- Redoak Studio. His prose and poetry have been published in over 150 literary journals such as Elimae, Metazen and BlazeVOX. He is a fiction editor at JMWW and Thunderclap! Press. He co-hosts Flash Fiction Fridays for WUWM’s Lake Effect. His blog: http://rgv7735.wordpress.com.

Randall Brown

noreply@blogger.com (Camroc Press Review) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 06:01:00 +0000

Chorus

They flooded the valley and made the lake, left the houses intact, not knowing, hidden in the cellar, tied to the supporting pole as if to the mast was my grandfather. They didn't know what he said until it bubbled to the surface amid the motorboats, lake houses, water-skiers, jet skis, until it died under that endless roar.

Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.

In the walls of my father's apartment, they discovered nothing but millions of pellet holes. Him, they found wandering in the back parking lot. No one was there, they told him. But he didn't believe. He saw disembodiment, limbs afloat. The shotgun, tapping like a cane, sounding like a song. He raised it. There was nothing else they could do.

Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.

Every night, starting at seven, my son cried. He said he could not live with knowing he'd awake one day to death, with not knowing what happens during sleep. I told him he wasn't missing much. One night, we stayed up all night, waiting. The night could barely be heard, like a faraway past. Near dawn, they turned on all the sprinklers. Now I know,
he said.

Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.
Sha la la la la la la la.

Each day, after the stroke, fewer words become available. Finally, only "stroke" remains. An image of a boat, its wake like time, its prow pointed toward the end of the world. As the boat makes its soundless way forward, a tiny, damp hand strokes a father's cheek. A son hums a tiny song through that endless roar, beyond that nothing else they could do. Now I know, he says. The world gets washed.

CP

Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live. He teaches at and directs Rosemont College's MFA in Creative Writing Program. His short and very short fiction has been published widely, and his essay "Making Flash Count" appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. He founded and currently manages Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.