Home Page     New Releases     Poetry Chapbook Contest     Back Issues     Video   Drawings by Ran Webber American Folk 8-4-73, Ran Webber © 2005 Neurosis 7-30-73, Ran Webber © 2005 Full Moon 7-15-73, Ran Webber © 2005   Poetry Getting Away  by Tony Gloeggler Secrets   by David Chorlton The Mother of the Lunatics   by Sarah Ruhlen The Crowning   by Martin Vest       >  Read a review of issue 25 at NewPages.com    See photos from Slipstream 25 Release Party / Poetry Reading, August 27, 2005 Getting Away By Tony Gloeggler July 18 1:59 am The kids bicker in the back seat. They’re sick of each other, these weekends in the Berkshires. They want to stay home, play with their friends. Maybe next week, I lie. My wife sits in the death seat, rolls down her window, smokes her cigarette and wonders if I will ever fix the damn air conditioner. Construction narrows the highway to two slow lanes. The radio spits the six o’clock news through static. Sweat slides down my spine. I grip the stick in a fist, punch the car closer to the toll booth, drop quarters in the basket, and the gate lifts. We hit open road. Wind whips my hair, the DJ spins Rosalita. I sing every word: 1979, Erica, her gypsy dresses, the silver crucifix hanging between her freckled breasts. The song ends. I look at my watch, picture myself unpacking bags, putting Kate and Jesse to bed. By ten, I should be sitting on the porch, my wife’s head nesting in my lap, trying to remember the names of stars. Later, she’ll drape her faded jeans over Grandma Melton’s rocking chair, lie back in bed and shut her eyes the first time I enter her. She’ll wrap her legs around my back, move to meet me, and I’ll think only of her until I fall asleep. Back to top Secrets By David Chorlton Secrets run cold among the scrub oak at night beneath a wash of galaxies whose landscapes we shall never know. A moth with brown and ochre wings has attached itself to the screen at a window facing the sky, just as we are talking about ghosts. Each of us has a story we find hard to believe but like to tell the way we have theories about conspiracy; the gunman on the grassy knoll, why the 9-11 planes weren’t intercepted, drugs and the CIA. What would we do if we knew, if the moth were our friend come from the other side listening to what we say about him? We get into our cars and ride home along the desert roads in darkness, guided by headlights through a universe of stars. Back to top The Mother of the Lunatics By Sarah Ruhlen There is a ladder in the middle of the Great Plains. The lunatics, after they have finished hoarding their bits of tin foil bathing in raw rice palming their meds they find their way to the ladder. It is not an easy journey. There are lunatic-eating tumbleweeds       that ghost up out of the night There are ranchers with devil-red eyes There are objects       hail, frogs, toasters       that the gods throw down upon lunatic heads. The way to the ladder is not clearly marked because only lunatics go there. Only lunatics know for certain whether it is in Oklahoma, Eastern Colorado, just off I-70 in a blizzard. They do not return to tell. The Moon reaches her arms down and they clamber crazy up this ladder pilgrims with their eyes on moonmilk and honey. They strain to rest their addled heads upon the Moon’s fat bosom. When they reach the top of the ladder, they jump. I do not know if they fall to their deaths. I do not know if there is a buffalo wallow filled with the lunatic dead or if the Moon pulls them up, a tide of sad mouths and startled eyes, of troubled limbs and mismatched overcoats that wash up through space and fold down at last into the soft pale dust of her heart. Back to top The Crowning By Martin Vest The first time it happened my mother and I hid out in motels and with relatives. I watched television, made a church of my fingers, and stared at the faceless congregation, wondering why we would ever hide from my father. Then one afternoon while we were at home gathering fresh clothes he surprised us, came crashing through the door, more real than movies or any bump in the night; a corpse from a dropped coffin, a naked nightmare burst from a cake; eyes yellow through bruises the size of fists, and on his cheekbone a gash, sticky and swollen black, like a tiny womb crowning a stillborn. Startled birds of urine and liquor flew from his clothing as he swung his arms through the air like broken dolls, bellowing? You motherfuckers don’t love me! You don’t love me! and my mother screamed like a sparkler in a bottle, and the floors crashed, and I ran into the other room to hide beneath a table as if the end of the world wouldn’t look there. Back to top