Hello Former Contributors and Other Interested Parties, We thought you might be interested to learn of an opportunity available to you at Cahoodaloodaling, a fine ezine we admire. Details follow: “Issue #12 – The Repeat Review Unlike many publications, we eagerly accept previously published work. Surprisingly, we receive very few. We want to get the word out. Our twelfth issue will comprised solely of previously published work (with the exception […]
Ronald Kirkland began writing in the Armed Forces Writers league in 1969 and was published in the Reader’s Digest “Humor in Uniform” series in January of 1970. Currently he contributes frequently to Connection, a Mount Zion Baptist Church Publication in the Harvest/Huntsville AL. area and in the online edited journal DailyHaiga.
you know it isn’t the pictures that hurt. it’s the second you remember realisation washing over you like far-flung west coast squalls: you wouldn’t be one of those girls, with the highlights in their hair, glowing auras, faces lacquered with availability. you sprayed peroxide & lemon juice over your dark brown curls; brassy, light at last– streaks to coat with kool-aid rainbows. your sudden curves a pale burden to […]
All day I curl up against the wall with black coffee, reading your old copy of Dorian Gray. I wait for December dusk, the top side of the feather duvet frosting my fingertips. Hiding away, I carve this trench in your room, persistent as rain. I push past gossip murmured by these walls, of who else slept in this bed that now holds my body’s shape. […]
You called it escapist love said if we transformed ourselves we could transform the world wanted to get so far so fast hurried incessantly I always trembled treaded in the deep-end of dread that you’d teach me the careless art of leaving dreamt of finding your empty clothes still warm on the door step your body gone gone not even the scent of you lingering on the borrowed hoodie in […]
In the horology of us Kandinsky’s Autumn in Bavaria sings at 6 o’clock: we walk idly along it, we debate composers. 3 o’clock paints that July wedding and the two slices of cake I ate. We’re making love on both hotel beds at 3:45. That letter to Los Angeles you never received? You are not receiving it at 8:15. Instead, you’re learning to tango/I’m reading Hejinian/you’re bicycling […]
Rain taps on the tin roof and I am in an unlit room not thinking of you. The air is cold, not like winter; it feels like your arms when they’re not wrapped across my ribs, your hand curling next to my lips, catching my more quiet breaths. 1:24 AM – the clock sits on the table next to the right side of my bed, where you slept. […]
I forget my reasons for staying, saying instead it’s what’s right– wrong, again. Again, I swallow it all: the anger, the regret. But it won’t stay down, as I do. It rises, likes the hot air you speak, corrodes the ceiling, takes my breath, leaves me gasping, choking on what you could not swallow. The indignant, after all, have no room for their own mistakes. […]
On Preparing For A Date I Don’t Care To Go On I debate with myself how to dress: casually, so as to hint at my lack of interest; or with care, to show him the shape of my body — the one he won’t be touching. Rachel Nix is from Northwest Alabama. Despite an irrational fear of frogs, she’s declared herself pretty content with living in the boonies. […]
Kraken is the definite form of “krake,” from the Norwegian, meaning an unhealthy animal or something twisted. I remember this as steam coats the shower glass like fog from the rising foam. I have fantasized here countless times, Alone, my hands finding the purchase that words could not. Not so long ago I could only imagine The cresting waves of your movements, rhythmic as the tides. […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 