Subprimal Poetry Art/Music
Issue 13.0 – An Earnest Exodus

December 2018. Welcome. Here's some excerpts from out latest issue. Or see all of it here.
Song For Claude Neal
by Judith Roney
Listen: there is a lamb hanging in a tree by the Chattahoochee,
All night it hung there and sang till 3 am.
Those who hear it feel a hurt and think they’re hearing
The spring-song of the mockingbird.
Say: Sit up in your bed, then lay yourself back down if you can.
In October night-wind, the lamb’s head
Sways back and forth, and shines bright-black skin
The way moonlight shines on cotton fields and train tracks miles away.
The lamb’s fingers and toes cry for the body. Some boys
Hacked them off. It was harder work than they imagined.
The lamb cried like a man and struggled hard. But they finished
The job and ran off into the darkness that seems to hide
Everything. Men hang the bleeding body…
Another Poem About Fear
by Adrian S. Potter
Once we've latched the windows and deadbolted doors, we begin inventing our own monsters. Like most vile things, they’re scarier from afar but more believable as they get closer. Wielding machetes and hatchets, meat cleavers and baseball bats, but all the violence stops just short of the screen, even as we close our eyes and burrow deep into the false comfort of couch cushions. But now my friend says she hates horror, after her sister’s high school was splintered by gunfire one morning. Every murder onscreen feels like a gut punch in reality. Every sanctuary interrupted by a girl covered in blood, running and shrieking down a hallway. How she waited quietly, crouched in a bathroom stall, for death to arrive. But it didn't. And of course, it won’t, until it’s ready. Anxiety locked inside the cage of our bodies, incessantly banging, pleading to escape.
Musical composition by Victor David Sandiego
An Earnest Exodus: Directions To One Final Humiliation
by Kym Cunningham
drive stilettos over sunset until you reach the golden city that’s sold winter as vacation from sweating concrete and financed armageddon in the brittle grass of self-esteem
find prejudices lying in the cliff-side cheekbones of broken mountain ranges as you breathe sulfur and sea at the world’s end
watch mona lisa smiles climb up distilled glass cages, suffocating from egos too super for transcendence
believe in religion birthed from steel crates and know even the palm trees are transplants, appropriating the natural by pacific-named parasites as if you could…