Ain’t Got No
by Claudia Putnam
In grade three Scotty said I ain’t got no
lunch money. We were delighted.
We crowed, That means you do.
If you don’t have none, then you have
some. Mrs. Cole, otherwise kind,
had just taught us the double negative.
But Scotty, one of those kids always
moving, dirty, in trouble, starved for food,
kisses, laughter, anything and everything,
still had no money for lunch.
Some languages would let Scotty
have his doubled poverty. Russian,
for instance, negates everything.
U nevo ne bylo nichevo. Literally:
In his possession nothing of anything wasn’t.
U nevo is interesting. With him, beside him,
near him, in his possession, in his situation,
in his position, he is characterized by.
Most common English translation: he has.
U nevo nichevo. He has nothing.
English gathers round Scotty, jeering.
Don’t you know how to talk? Haven’t
you learned anything? Can’t you think?
Russian isn’t concerned with that logic.
Russian is concerned with nyet.
Nikovo nikogda nigde nichevo ne bylo.
No one never nowhere nothing was not.
A person with no lunch money could say,
U menya nichevo, ni deneg, ni obeda.
I am characterized by nothing,
nothing of money, nothing of lunch.
This Isn’t Really Happening
My black bird was bigger,
my mountains were burning.
The snows stopped coming
sometime around 1999. The wells
dried. The shower sputtering
with soap in my hair
so I was always late. That tame crow
someone set loose spying
through the skylight, jeering.
How many ways is that? Each year
the river running thinner,
fleeing its shrinking glacier.
The Arapaho said the thunderbird,
black as any bird
gets, lived just west of here.
Someone must have seen it,
the day it flapped away.
We don’t get regular afternoon
stunners the way we used to.
You could set your heart on
those 2 PM monsoons. Biblical
lightning, all that water. Now: rusting
Ponderosas, centuries old,
disrobing. All good things
must end. Perhaps nightmares
also end. Not perhaps
in our lifetimes.
Poor lost crow, these are not
the best of times
to be falling asleep.
Sync
A few months with other women,
a woman bleeds.
Ten years’ time, a woman synchronizes
with her man.
Over thousands of miles, your arousal
brings my body astir.
Men make movies, you said—now they loop
through my head.
Golden locks on our dark headboard,
naked ass raised.
If I were making this up, I’d be watching you
both; the camera’s on her.
Your currents churn through my body;
don’t think I don’t know.
BIO
Claudia Putnam’s work appears in I-70 Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Literary Mama, Barrow Street, Artful Dodge, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, and in many other journals. A chapbook, Wild Thing in Our Known World, came out last year from Finishing Line and is available from Finishing Line Press and on Amazon. In 2011-12, she had the George Bennett Fellowship. In 2015, she’ll be at Kimmel Harding Nelson. www.claudiaputnam.com
Kelly Thompson’s writing has been published in 49 Writers, Manifest Station, Metrosphere, Limp Wrist, and Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping. She has won awards for her poetry from Writer’s Digest and was awarded funding to attend Key West Literary Seminar based on her short fiction. She is currently working on a memoir entitled Oh Darling Girl. Just as the narrator gets sober, one of her two barely adolescent daughters descends into addiction and rebels against her mother’s new found lifestyle of recovery. As the narrator struggles to save her daughter and face down a transgenerational legacy of violence, addiction, and shame, the lives of grandchildren hang in the balance and heartbreaking choices must be made. Kelly is also currently working on a chapbook of poetry focused on the themes of ancestry, transgenerational trauma, and legacy. Besides writing, Kelly is a psychotherapist who primarily works with soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado, in the sunshine of the spirit. You can follow her on Twitter @stareenite.
John Lowther’s work appears in the Atlanta Poets Group’s anthology, The Lattice Inside (UNO Press, 2012) and in Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama, 2003). Held to the Letter, co-authored with Dana Lisa Young is forthcoming from Lavender Ink in 2015. John also works in video, photography, paint, performance and other mediums as the need arises. He’s writing a dissertation to reimagine psychoanalysis had intersex and transgender lives been taken as foundational for understanding subjective possibility. He blogs as Lowtherpoet at WordPress.
Gerard Sarnat is the author of three collections, 2010’s HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man, 2012’s Disputes, and September 2014’s 17s. He is now working on Patriarchs. Harvard and Stanford educated, Gerry’s set up and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised, been a CEO of healthcare organizations and a Stanford professor. For Huffington Post reviews, future reading dates and more, visit Gerard Sarnat.com. His books are available at select bookstores and on Amazon.
Ho Cheung (Peter) Lee, Ed.D., resides in Hong Kong where he teaches and writes. He earned his doctorate from The University of Hong Kong with a thesis on teaching reading. His poetry has appeared in aaduna, FIVE Poetry Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Red Booth Review, The Chaffey Review, The Interpreter’s House and elsewhere. His short stories have also been published in Eastlit, Miracle Magazine, River Poets Journal and The Oddville Press. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BALLOONS Lit. Journal (www.balloons-lit-journal.com).
Kevin McCoy’s works have appeared in Forge, Wisconsin Review, Crate, Natural Bridge and several other journals. His collection “Tea in a Bowl” will be published by Unsolicited Press in January 2015.
John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA – is now a retired comma herder / Phonics Coach after teaching for 41 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.
Tamer Mostafa’s work has been featured in California Quarterly, The Rag Literary Magazine, Poets Espresso Review, Confrontation Literary Magazine, Stone Highway Review, and No Infinite. He was the recipient of the 2011 CSU Sacramento Bazzanella Literary Award in Creative Non-Fiction and the 2013 Lois Ann Latin Rosenburg Prize for Poetry.
Christopher Suda’s poetry has been published in blazeVOX, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Aura Literary Review, Poetry Super Highway, The Wayfarer, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys, and other literary journals. Christopher is currently a twenty-four year old undergraduate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is a musician involved in three current music projects: Philos Moore (singer-songwriter) In Snow (Instrumental), and Loveislight (Experimental Hip-Hop).
Raised in New Jersey, Robert Lavett Smith has lived since 1987 in San Francisco, where for the past fifteen years he has worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional. He has studied with Charles Simic and Galway Kinnell. He is the author of several chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is Smoke in Cold Weather: A Gathering of Sonnets (Full Court Press, 2013).
R.A. Allen’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Night Train, Mantis, RHINO Poetry, Gargoyle, The Recusant (UK), and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Memphis for the humidity. More at http://poets.nyq.org/poet/raallen
Adefisayo Adeyeye lives and works in Southern California. He enjoys the connections between the cosmically large and the infinitely small. He has had works published by Petrichor Machine, Ohio Edit, and Near Rhyme, and he is the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine named Ant vs. Whale.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at 
Joseph Ferguson is an author, poet, and journalist appearing in a variety of small press, regional and national publications. He wrote propaganda for a living for a variety of entities for some 25 years. He is a former editor and critic for Hudson Valley, ran the Fiction Workshop for the Poughkeepsie Library District, and regularly reviews books and videos for Climbing, The American Book Review, Kirkus Indie, and a number of other publications.
Dan Fitzgerald started writing a number of years ago. It has only been in the last few years that he has been published. He worked for a long time in the prepress print industry but technology has taken those jobs away. He is currently employed in the meat and bakery departments of a local grocer in Pontiac, Ill. He is hoping that they will open a candle department to further his career.
Persephone Abbott has been composing poems in her head for years. In this way, before they have the opportunity to meet paper, many poems have already been lost, or heavily edited. A book of her short stories, A Sample of Gouda (2014), as well as an alternative walking guidebook, The Bee’s Tour of Gouda, Buzzing Though Vinita’s Lens (2012), have been published and she is currently working on a chapbook, Flowers of Amsterdam. This last item is a result of her recent move from Gouda to Amsterdam, both situated in the Netherlands. Persephone finds poetically she prefers urban vines to rural pastures.
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