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Better Than Starbucks
Poetry and Fiction Journal
. . . if you love diversity and creative writing in any and every form, then you’re in the right place . . .
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May 2021
Vol VI No II
Published quarterly:
February, May, August,
and November.
Experimental Poetry
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Geometric Forms by Jean Arp
A Fall Through the Internet
Featured
There was light in the beginning at the first words
from you and we wove our webs of language through
minds, fingers, keyboards—moments that bound us
tightly for a spell creating our worlds in our own images.
We were charged with traces left by each typed word—
the palimpsest of the said and not said. In the power
of lines and letters, ideas haunted between the lines
in numinous surfaces and texts. We were almost angels,
bodiless and sublime in our sentences as we keyed
over the faint hiss of the monitor, bound by a center
that radiated farther than any worlds we’d ever known—
outside the matrix of our bold new words. We laughed
and called it good. But something began eating the edges,
signals scrambled in white noise of chaos—there were
elisions and evasions, hard readings between lines,
an entropy of our compositions. Then you slowed,
finally pulled yourself back into the screen—left me
spinning on the save key, my fingers stained with fig.
Pamelyn Casto has articles on flash fiction in Writer’s Digest, Fiction Southeast, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading, and Critical Insights: Flash Fiction. Her poems have appeared in several publications.
Exile
தமிழ் தமிழ் தமிழ் — மொழி மொழி மொழி
English, English, English — language, language, language
Migrating from childhood to adulthood
A voyage, a pilgrimage to the unknown new.
Journeying wild, unhampered, into a new heritage
Between and betwixt, an unbelonging
Tamil, mother tongue, suckled at breast
Cadences lost, bonded to an enigmatic new language.
Glossary:
தமிழ Tamil
மொழி language.
Leela Soma was born in Madras, India, and now lives in Glasgow, Scotland. She has published three novels, short stories and two collections of poetry. Her poems have been published in Gutter, The Blue Nib, Anthropocene, Black Bough Poems, and many others.
Wavelet Well Met
Love makes a ceremony of everything.
Disguised as a boy, I fled your harem.
Quickly found myself robed in the troubles of a king;
Osiris knew less of dismemberment.
Performing my own caesareans,
reversing Tabitha’s song.
Then
my words
like diving birds
reveled each night until dawn.
Dana Miller is a wordsmith and melomaniac from Atlanta, Georgia. When not wielding a lethal pen, she adores surf culture, Australian grunge rockers, muscle cars, vintage clothing, Epiphone guitars, glitter, Doc Martens, and horses of every ilk.
Biography of a Magnolia
Planted, swelling in the sticky South
the soft white petals starting
the red pistil,
a loud heart flung out of your mouth.
Warblers hover whistling love songs
and Beetles ask for pollen
you take visitors
again and again.
You left your exes in the cracks
of the Devil’s Backbone outside Boulder, Colorado
and made the Sun give you it’s fire.
Your petals drooped and stem yellowed
the doctor found rot in your roots
when you coded in the ER the world turned dark and cool
like black water revival
Raphael held you up to Heaven time moving fast
but the call of your wild boy pulled you back from the deep.
You told me,
I’ve never lived like I do now.
and the blooms in you
cry out, out, out.
Rachel Bollinger recently graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University with her Masters in Creative Writing. Rachel enjoys writing about the thin line between reality and fantasy, between the physical and the spiritual. She has also been published in the online magazine, Psaltery&Lyre.
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Lobster Telephone by Salvador Dali
Allegories for a Sky weaponed in Tears & Bullets
whey dressed,
we agree it’s someone’s mess:
the sprawled template of the welkin.
heaped catalogue of our names held in space
for brief comets to sign their weathered punctuations.
a whiff of clarity foot past the underbrush of maze mouth, projecting my lips.
Life’s core unscathed in the red erasure.
were we scatter rugs at first? sounding all library
with floored intentions to sop the sky’s mix into our skin,
tone white when we play dead & the stars sit right there,
like they were something before the trick.
understand, we have our jokes for loss.
God cracks his rib, clueless of his own magic.
It takes a juvenile like me to reach out to this talent when no one does.
when night here means morning in a different clime
& not one shine to show for it, save for the glowworms.
the firearms mapping the heavens,
seizing teenagers in their young numbers
& willing them to dust at roll calls.
Ashley Sophia is an Alumni of Alberta University. She is the winner of the Canadian Drawer Contest 2020 and a Pushcart nominee.
Prose & Form Poetry
The Break Up
She said we should meet there. I was glad to go out. Normally we just sit in front of the telly,
You know.
She arrived first. She always does. I could see her through the window: eyes pursed, neck arched, lips thin as splinters. Her jacket erect on its own chair.
I smile and flop beside her. Lean to kiss her, touch her arm, but somehow I can’t quite reach. A sliver of space moves with us.
Odd.
Anyway, I order my cappuccino. Love those. It comes high and round like a bubble bath. I watch it for a while. There are tiny explosions on the surface.
You ever notice that?
She’s watching me, but I don’t look up. I reach for the sugar bowl. It’s full of pale brown rocks. That’s how I know it’s a fancy place. I pick one up. It has no corners, like someone has smashed it on the table. What’s the word? Distressed.
She’s talking now.
Are you listening to me, Graham? She says. I lay my rock so lightly, so gently on the curved surface. For a moment I think it might just stay there but then I realize I haven’t let go yet. When I do, I watch it sink. Ever so slowly. It carves smooth walls and disappears, leaving a dull grey patch in my perfect foam. I find a spoon and smooth it over. All white now, but there’s a dip where it sank. You can hardly tell though. Not really.
I look up to show her.
But she’s gone.
Olivia Hajioff’s poetry has appeared in Front Porch Review and Ginosko Literary Journal. She is the Grand Choice winner of the Laura Jackson 2020 Poetry Competition. She is a Fulbright scholar.
bad habits, good conscience
i have a bad habit of meeting people when i’m drunk and then not remembering them at all. i think i’ve sold so many donuts to the meter man over the years that i’m immune to parking tickets. someone who was a sexist asshole to me this year broke a limb and i believe that it was karma. sometimes the way i love people makes me physically sick. i do consider Guinness a meal replacement. peas in guacamole will never not be wrong like wtf is your problem. your thread count is more important than your body count. could we get a blizzard over here in the eastern P?