Treehouse

Kyle Hemmings

When Zin gropes love handles & shaky slim-boy loves. When she goes boom boom bust with bakery lists, scratching & crossing out until there’s nothing left but pineapple cheesecake too much for one sugar-girl. Or if she gets too crazy looking for the perfect enchilada. Even her best phat girlz hum from boredom.

When she’s hooked on some crank-czar who has her by both body-chord & iPhone. When he traps her in the late-hour desperate voice messages.

When the signal fails.

Me, I’m dying in the crosstalk. I want to re-wire her, tell her that it doesn’t take much. You could use what you have. Some early rapper once made soup out of butterflies. A retired DJ created a paste from old love letters.

I store my love in the oldest part of my brain. My brain is a crude one-note oscillator. All day I compose pop tunes that end at the bridge.

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Matchbook, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and other zines. He lives and writes in New Jersey. He loves cats and dogs and sixties’ garage bands.

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Fred MacVaugh

Paddle-shaped leaves like tiny flags
Bid farewell above sandbagged levees.
Their backs to banks, governors condemn
The weathermen for failed forecasts:
The record snows in the Rockies,
The unseasonable rains, and 100-year floods.
They blame the Corps of Engineers
For damming too much water
And not enough, its flood controls ineffective,
Its five-year plans obsolete.
The cottonwood care nothing for planning
Or blame. When muddy waters rise,
Something gives: Earth first then roots.
They fall the second soils weaken.

Later this month, Fred MacVaugh will arrive at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site in western North Dakota, where he’ll work as a museum technician. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Plainsongs, Plains Song Review, South Dakota Review, and Watershed. He is the Science Editor at Hothouse: A Place of Inquiry, for which he writes a monthly blog that explores the intersections of art, culture, nature, place, and science.

See Fred’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

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