Two favorite literary e-zines, Ginosko and The Rose & Thorn, have just released new issues. Some poems and stories that held my attention:

Penny-Anne Beaudoin, “The Morning Routine”
(The Rose & Thorn, Spring 2008)

I can feel her cool blue eyes on my face as I struggle to pull her pressure stockings over her clawed feet, her shriveled calves.

“You’re not very pretty, are you?” she says.

I should have seen that coming, but I hesitate before replying.

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”

…

Read the rest here.

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Peter McGuire, “After ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes'”
(The Rose & Thorn, Spring 2008)

I love listening to bad poetry
Especially yours
The way you enunciate
Like a bus with cut brake lines
Veering for the bay
…

Read the rest here.

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Dane Myers, “Sleeping With God”
(Ginosko, Issue #6)

Cynthia lifted her head from Dubliners and stared at the pale north wall, opposite their bed. Albuquerque’s April evenings were growing long and the fading light created a shadow that made the ironwood cross above her dresser appear crooked. A rare drizzle filled the air with a smell other than dust and muted the yaps of the neighbor’s three schnauzers. Cynthia tried to think how she could get out of sex, at least for the night. Wednesday had become the worst day of the week: Bible study and sex. That night’s discussion had been on Isaiah—her favorite prophet, until Jim had nicknamed his penis Isaiah.
…

Read the rest here (PDF file, p.76).

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Randall Brown, “Let the Wind Have It”
(Ginosko, Issue #6)

I discover her in the basement, uncovered, her lips stained green. When the house ran dry, she drank mouthwash, then cough syrup, finally anti-freeze. I imagine her in the grave, still warm. Instead, they burn her, give her back to me in a vase, handing me the responsibility for the gesture that will define her death for me—the scattering of my mother.

A week after the funeral, my father calls. He wants the ashes. He will do lines of my mother until his synapses can no longer fire. She stopped loving him a year after the marriage— and told him so. He didn’t believe her, waited forty years for her to be proven wrong, forty years of asceticism and celibacy and silent waiting. He deserves the ashes, he really does, except my mother did not want to be with him, not in life, surely not in death.

Read the rest here (PDF file, p.10).