AMERICAN GOTHIC

by Richard O'Connell

Image source: Neatorama

It came with the house—
God in the attic
And a stream underground
That made him rheumatic.

Why shouldn't he be
Self-righteous?—the mortgage
Almost paid up & the kids gone
To war and marriage.

It's a good house
Still,  he tells himself,
And the heater may hold
Through another winter;

For the heavy ghost
Who creaks on the stairs
And stoops by the window
To peer out at stars.

Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Paris Review, Margie, Measure, Southern Humanities Reviw, Acumen, The Formalist.

PARAPHERNALIA

by Kristina England

Image source: TaxProf Blog (in response to “The Sex Toys in the Attic” in the NY Times, November 9, 2013).

The most popular article of the week:
New York Time's "Sex Toys in the Attic,"
some older woman's concerns
about her "romping" days,
some toy she collected from a boyfriend.
Surely she's seen the news -
child porn ring broken up in Canada,
over 300 people involved.
Maybe she wrote the article before
the Toronto mayor took crack,
got cracked, cracked a nation.
Or she wanted to lighten the load.
God knows we need a good laugh
and perhaps the occasional mishap
of some not-so-cozy artifact
found under our mother's bed
is enough to pause this avalanche.
There is, after all, some innocence
left in this disjointed world.
And if there's not,
let's keep pretending
vibrators matter
in all these earthquakes,
tsunamis, the tremor
of our minds.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, Found Poetry Review, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other journals.