#brian d. morrison

[ghostoceanmagazine]

National Poetry Month is a great time to dive into our latest (eighteenth!) issue, featuring poetry from Brian D. Morrison, Erin J. Mullikin, Doug Paul Case, Abigail Welhouse, A.E. Talbot, and David Antonio Moody; flash prose from Amy Lipman; and reviews by Abigail Zimmer, C.J. Opperthauser, and J. Scott Brownlee!

[motherground]

Lungful

I claim the insignificant, the vital— this river, these fish. I claim this is movement. And there's a chance

I'm crossing mud and tongue, that I'm spent useless in breath with the crossing—muckgill,

drowning. I say concrete, say unfailing. The abstraction from any instance as violent, as precise as so much

history almost waking. Nothing can be correct. Not a partshiver childhood, partwater skeleton, nuclei,

seeds, flesh, leaf all dissolved in murkwater. I tell you I'm the fish at the bottom feeding,

the bottom of this. Or I'm simpler, an unmovable log that gathers mud, gets moved. Leaves.

I am the rising of the lake, the lake itself, limbs of river heated, lifting to storm. So many arms, names.

I can tell you. I mean to. Loved ones have anchored to the bottom with me, down to the tossed stones, the moss,

the pharyngeal teeth I keep to grind. I tell you what I need to tell you, all of me cupped in shudders

I cannot repress. Something larger has hooked deep in my ribs. I've hooked in others',

causeeffect, and set. Deeper than father. I can tell you anything, Stranger. I choose to speak underwater.

-- brian d. morrison

[proustitute]

I claim the insignificant, the vital— this river, these fish. I claim this is movement.

Brian D. Morrison, from "Lungful"

[ghostoceanmagazine]

Ghost Ocean 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominations

Ghost Ocean Magazine is excited and proud to announce our 2011 Pushcart Prize nominations. We'd like to thank each author for crafting stories and poems that haunt, surprise, and move us in ways we could not have imagined.

Poetry

Brian D. Morrison – Salvage (Issue 7) Erika Eckart – Hiroshima (Issue 5)

Fiction

Robert Hill Long – Thirty Years Times Three Thousand Miles from the Summer of Peroxide Hair (Issue 5) Joshua Young – The Forest in Our Home (Issue 4) J.A. Tyler – [ the first fox /// reburned ] (Issue 6) Zana Previti – How To Get A Biopsy (Issue 7)

If you have not had the chance to read these incredible poems or stories, we encourage you to do so. You won't be disappointed.