The August Editor's Pick Poet is Kyle Hemmings

Please feel free to email Kyle at: hemming06@hotmail.com

WHY ALICE MUST LIVE ALONE

Alice White hated her new father,
especially the one-gloved hand
hiding nasty myoelectric impulses.
Her organic daddy died when
his grandfather’s ceramic raven
fell to the floor at the stroke
of midnight, radiating ugly bits of beak,
the outer vanes of misshapen luck.
It was foretold in the family's 1802 diary.

Alice White suspected that her
new father was not entirely human,
that he should be returned to black boxes,
to the secret messages from candles burning
under wicker men. While he slept,
she crept into his bedroom, opened him
up with a brass master key, and pulled apart
his intricate network of wires.
He began to smoke and seize.

Knowing that he was grossly deficient
in the avuncular intuitions
of human brain matter,
the un-cryptic warmth of a blood relative,
she could now sleep in peace.

ALICE WILL NOT APOLOGIZE

Alice White confessed under oath
that she had fed bits of herself
to the strawberry pickers
scrawny and rigid from fluctuations
in weather, but still
with excellent finger technique,
the freshwater fish mongers
for whom nothing was too deep,
the tarot card readers
with sagging cheeks and erect nipples,
but they all ended up hungry, anyway,
or empty handed
or were found floating upon
rivers with bloated bellies.

In local interviews,
Alice White explained
that she was merely part
of the expanding darkness,
that day was only a shade of night,
that she was only a girl
never meant to be shaped
as a star, or her smile
only reflected the illusive joy
of catching a comet, or that the poison
of her flesh could make a person
curl into curious obloid shapes,
the way the universe will someday
stop expanding and the core of darkness
will crack, will fold in upon itself.

SWEET ALICE

Alice White will make you
chocolate chip cookies
when Sundays
are full of glassy-eye lust
or banana bread
when Tuesdays
become too fat
to regurgitate
mid-life emptiness,
but the flowers that
will kill you,
the ones shaped
like trumpets
like flared lobes
like mouths big enough
to swallow you whole,
will be your own.

WIGS AND PRETENTIONS

For months,
Alice White has been
coy with you,
flirting like a night breeze,
sharing lemon meringue cupcakes
under the gross shade of grafted
two-legged sycamores.
With her diagonal other-worldly glare,
the subtle shifts in her sly smile,
perhaps she wishes to turn your dreams
into dimpled sweet buttery dough.
If you reject her with that carefree shrug
that thick tuft of red-brown hair tossing
in the wind, those eyes twinkling with
the thought of endless cornfields,
Alice White will come through your door
at night, bare feet two inches off the floor,
and attack you with the same Miyabi chopping knife
her mother used after donning a strawberry wig,
turning Alice's father into a river
and seventeen tributaries of lost loves.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Blaze Vox, Matchbook, and elsewhere. He loves 50s Sci-Fi movies, manga comics, and pre-punk garage bands of the 60s. He blogs HERE