FINANCIAL CRISIS
by Alex Norelli
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Financial-Crisis-Poem.mp3|titles=Financial Crisis Poem]

so
far
gone
the stars wake
to me from dreams

there is no bottom
to this hill
and the top’s the end
of the highway

years of unchecked
simplification

PATHFINDER
by Jordan Blair

RESPONSIBILITY
by Sarah O’Connor
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Responsibility.mp3|titles=Responsibility]

The oldest sits surrounded by her three younger siblings who want to hypnotize her
after watching an episode of “Blinky’s Fun Club.”

A rusty washer tied to the end of dental floss swings before her face. One of the
siblings chants, “You need to sleep.”

Once her eyes have closed they tell her to stand, sit, bark, but the youngest tries
calling the bluff.

“Pull down your pants!” She commands.

She’s a non-believer.

Staying in character, the oldest drops her pants, but can’t help giggle when they all
start screaming, “My turn, my turn!”

FEVER DREAMS 1
by Kathryn Pilles-Genaw
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Fever-Dreams-1.mp3|titles=Fever Dreams 1]

And then, one time, in a fever dream: the pull
of recognition, I’d do it all again for you,
the angles of your limbs expansive, opening,
my dumb love deaf and voiceless,
offering a peach, all sweet and stone,
cool pale fur, summer in our bed, the snow outside
forgotten in the stretch of us, the length. Listen.
Let me fold my hands in yours. That peach,
all fat wet flesh, is breathing, too.

CUMULONIMBUS
by Caroline Zarlengo Sposto
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Cumulonimbus.mp3|titles=Cumulonimbus]

My husband used to see another woman. Once he saw a bunny
that turned into a cow. I see a therapist at eleven
O’clock. See him? He’s not naked. That’s just his cigar. It
takes two hundred years for the light from the nearest
cloud to reach us and there’s a lake in Oregon where a
cloud once fell and made a crater. I hate pictures of
people on clouds with wings and harps. In real life they
have propellers and accordions.

—

Alex Norelli paints and gardens, indiscriminately trying to sweep the dust off genres and see and express things in a new way. Based in Manahatta, who knows where the winds of change will take him?

Jordan Blair is a fiction writer in Austin, Texas where she currently resides with two tigers.

Sarah O’Connor enjoys risky walks in the hood and blogs about the absurdity of her life at FiercelyYours.wordpress.com.

Caroline Zarlengo Sposto lives in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the poetry editor for Humor in America. http://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/