Poetry
MARS AND RUMORS OF MARS by Bryan D. Dietrich
It was luscious once, some would say a garden.
Water grown pink, fonts without wall or warden
coursed past fields of almondine, steppes of finest jasper.
Here, over beryl, sand like alabaster,
the rivers descended, hollowing slow rills
one swallow at a time. Beneath mantled hills,
faded, rose-pressed skies, beneath a mountain
of fire long dormant, somewhere plain, the stain
of green must have spread slowly, in fits
punctuated by ice. The brute matrix
of life, the earliest leviathans. . . . What surprise
they must have weathered when rudimentary eyes
at last understood the sky was falling.
And that rock, some other mother’s child hauling
itself down out of darkness perhaps struck them
as funny. Perhaps not. Maybe in some dim
fashion they worried how their own children –
cast out by collision, borne off into the forbidden
vacuum above – would fare in another
place, a distant blue world whose own dither
and din would descend, then, from them. Did they,
these hypothetical parents, keen, preen, pray?
Should we, knowing they are gone, have words to say?
Everything we thought we knew last Tuesday
ended when that rock gave up its ghosts.
Microbes they say, fossils from another world. With boasts
full of what vast sadness comes from each new dream,
we pledged to return home, unpack the rocks, trace the stream
back from Nod and kill some nodding angel, steal
his flaming sword. No, it won’t be that surreal,
yet this is how Eden always ends, shining
so bright the rest grows dim, as if it were beginning.
Bryan D. Dietrich’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, Chelsea, Quarterly West, Nimrod, and the Bellingham Review. He was awarded the Paris Review Prize for his book Krypton Nights (Zoo Press), portions from which also won the Discovery/The Nation Prize.
WHAT WE CHOOSE OF EXILE by Virgil Suarez
“We choose exile as a vantage point;
from exile we look back on the rejected,
rejecting place – to make our poems
out of it and against it.”
– Donald Hall in his preface
to Above the River: The Complete
Poems, by James Wright
This rock my father brought over from Las Villas,
the place of his birth and which he kept in his shoe-
cleaning box kit, a copy of his first full paycheck
in the United States, $110 in 1974, a month’s salary
he brought to my mother as an offering of his love
to us, no? His blue tongue as he lay dying, entubed
throat, heart, his glands knowing so finally the clasp
and hold of God’s hands upon his body. We choose
nothing, and all. This is the way it is for those lost
into the eternal haze of dust, cobwebs, broken piano
strings, crow-cawing, a shrieking in the ear. A rusted
car, a 1965 Dodge Dart. A black comb with a couple
of broken teeth with which to comb the hair, scratch
that mosquito bite behind his arm. The way our elbows
dry out and become scaly. My mother’s arthritic hands,
fingers gone numb from years of sewing zippers at piece-
meal wages. Cufflinks, their dull glint inside her jewelry
box, a gift one Valentine’s, bought from the Avon lady.
What chooses us, that’s what my father wanted to know.
The moment, fate, life? Cold air in Manhattan, a river
in Kentucky. The mesas of New Mexico, where I’d love
to die one night only to have owls, crows, wolves, foxes
tear me apart, appease their hunger of place with my stolen
flesh, this exile’s heavy, musky meat – our bodies’ history
of place, those places left behind and those about to be
traversed. We can carry our lanterns to light the way,
or we can walk on with our eyes closed, our tongues tied,
our arms behind our backs, ready to sacrifice or surrender.
Virgil Suárez’s most recent poetry collections are Palm Crows (University of Arizona Press) and Banyan (LIU). His sixth collection, Guide to the Blue Tongue, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
IN THE OTHER TONGUE by Jacquelyn Pope
It is a doorless house
on a whitened hill.
It is an upright chair
square in the windpath.
It is a still life
with bread and knife
in honey and brine,
a slow, dark region
of its own. Letter
by letter, long after,
a drift of vowels.
One word nestles
in another, turns
to fugitive things.
Jacquelyn Pope’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Partisan Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, and Harvard Review.
SEX WITH STRANGERS by Jennifer Keller
Brisk dip, slow stroll, game of catch
at ninety miles, gentlemen’s bet, miraculous
action, inconsequential. It is not
without love. There can exist
a surfeit, sloppy well
runoff, excess to drench. Tender
as a broken place
in bone, tender as meat
hammered for the pan,
an unbuttoning, most earnest
whisper, a planting of fitful
flags, naming of territory:
call dandelions lilies
and give up the wishing.
Nights when the moon
is a leering uncle-by-marriage
they find each other, nonsense
verse, sweet with sound,
bleat with the bald seeking
of heat, pity the ones who eat
when they are hungry, never
sip after slaking a thirst
just for the taste. They take
the paint before it dries,
couple for heat, break
bone for marrow, and after
stare into new and passing
eyes and, like a smile
before happiness, the gesture nudges
something in the region
of the heart, and it surges.
Jennifer Keller’s poetry has appeared in The Journal and The Comstock Review.
MR. MANN CALLS EVERY MAN HIS DARLING by John Mann
What is resurrection?
The movement of his hands
as he emulates the birds.
The turn and counterturn of sand
under each wave.
The owl’s echo of night.
Her breath on his arm in sleep.
Surely, goodness and mercy follow.
He didn’t want it to be over
Moon, gorgeous angel,
come down from your black house.
John Mann’s poems have appeared in the Writers’ Forum, Bryant Literary Review, Salt Hill, and Many Mountains Moving.
STORIES TOLD IN INCONSTANT LIGHT by George Looney
The moon is cavalier.
–Richard Hugo
To say those homes went dark different hours
says nothing. Might as well say a brute
lived alone with his rancorous, knuckled god
in the last house of that cul-de-sac. Dogs flinched
at his scent. Or say a pale sliver of a woman
loved him despite it all, and dogs howled at her
sweeping that porch, dust doing sad acrobatics
in decaying orbits. It’s hard to say for sure
what love is. One night I snuck out late. I swear
there was music in the brute’s house and the light
inside flung shadows down the grass that danced
in something I’d have to say was joy. I’d never seen
anything like it. Every dog that roamed the street
lowered its long head and whined. This was worth
suffering for, I knew. The moon had nothing on
the light those figures flickered in. No screen
at a failing drive-in could tell a better story
or refurbish a tired heart and sell it despite
run-down shacks to either side. Who would
have thought the brute had the grace to dance?
Not one of us had the gumption to ask
the pale woman rarely seen out what love was,
though the faint marks on her arms the crudest
named seas surely were chants in some desperate
language, part of a ritual which left water confused
and the heart with every window open to dry out.
Nights, the inconstant light of the drive-in
across the road calls everything into question,
like that lawn where shadows danced to a music
I was too young to imagine. That none of us
had a clue was years off. That the brute knew sorrow
even further. That violence makes room for
love’s something no flickers on a screen can explain.
George Looney’s latest book, Attendant Ghosts, was published by Cleveland State University Press. His previous book, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, won the 1995 Bluestem Award. He has recent poems in The Kenyon Review, Witness, The Texas Review, West Branch, and The Gettysburg Review. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
SUNDAY NIGHT RAVENS by Jeanne Emmons
These minor darknesses descend tonight, heavy
and winged, onto the roof of the old church
and all the surrounding trees. How ponderously
they drop, hundreds of them, onto bare branches
or the cold slope of the shingles, corpulent
under their fluffed feathers. The stiff wind
does not blow them from their places on the pitch
behind the steeple, or the swaying limbs of the maples,
no more than my shivering can shake the leaded glass.
The church is emptied of its devotees, without strain
of organ, nor solemn hymns, mournfully sung.
Only the traffic, the wind, and an occasional flutter
ruffle the night. Yet the roof must give off a warmth
they are drawn to. How could they know these walls
define a larger darkness, vaulted, enclosed, as the absence
of something vaguely longed for? Now and then the sky
shades over with another settling. Their numbers
swell. They fatten their feathers and withdraw softly
into their inmost selves, so deep that, as I watch,
they nearly disappear into the blackening night,
wings indistinct, and eyes expressionless as nails.
Jeanne Emmons’ poetry collection, Rootbound (New Rivers Press), was winner of the Minnesota Voices Project competition and a Pipistrelle Best of the Small Press Award. She has recent poems in American Scholar, Calyx, Cream City Review, and Prairie Schooner. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
HEADS by Susan Eisenberg
for Renée (Mickey) Scott of the International Resistance
Always politicals argue.
Even Berlin ’42, in a room
seven stories belowground
(as close to hell as Gestapo
could build): the bodies
hanging from the walls–
some by wrists, some by the neck–
won’t agree.
The prisoner in the chair is shown photos.
One soon-among-the-dead
signals her (a shake of his head)
into silence. Another
nods for her to tell. Tell anything.
DOUBLE EXPOSURE by Susan Eisenberg
for Marilyn
An explanation arrives after forty years:
why her family left town without good-byes.
I pull out old photos and find her.
First Grade, there she is: back row. Her face
(I remember its sad tilt) the only one hidden
from the camera’s snapping lens.
I’m up front near the center, big grin,
Peter Pan collar blouse, jumper, white
anklets, patent leather Mary Janes–
ignorant until college of HUAC and blacklist.
Knowing only that my mother’s face pinched
at mention of certain last names. Nothing
my friend could have said then . . . nothing.
Susan Eisenberg is the author of a poetry collection, Pioneering, and a nonfiction book, We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction (both from Ilr Press).
THE CHILD ASTRONOMER by Sigman Byrd
Don’t tell him Galileo went blind
staring at sunspots or swashbuckling
Tycho Brahe had his nose
sliced off dueling over equations.
He’ll discover on his own one day
how even the noblest quests burn up
to nothing like so much solar wind.
Meanwhile, let him crack open
a geometry book, the playground is empty.
Let him squint through a telescope
at all the tinseled planets and stars,
Orion the hunter, Auriga the charioteer,
wheeling their incandescent teams.
Don’t tell him they’re all growing fainter,
gods and heroes and winged horses
breaking up, accelerating out of the frame.
Don’t tell him he too will become a world
of refracted light and myth, a ravishing
dream of long ago, spinning, remote,
barely visible to the naked eye.
Sigman Byrd’s recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Puerto del Sol.
ALEWIFE by Jesse Lee Kercheval
was the station where my husband
took the T to Boston every day
the year we lived in Massachusetts.
In Aaaahlington, as our landlady,
Mrs. Magakhian, would say.
She was Boston Irish but had married
an Armenian. Everybody else on
our street of double deckers
was Armenian or Greek. Greeks
even ran the corner pizza place
put a pinch of cinnamon
in the spaghetti sauce.
Coming from Florida, I’d imagined
Boston full of stiff Yankee widows,
but in Arlington, everyone spoke
with their hands and yelled
even when they were trying
to be friendly. What are alewives?
I asked Mrs. Magakhian as she swept
the Astroturf on her front porch.
Fish, she said, little silver ones.
When the kids were small we went
to the seashore on a holiday
and the beach was solid with
dead alewives. God, what a stink!
She leaned forward, whispered–
They have sex, and then they die.
My husband laughed when
I told him that, then kissed me.
Each day, it took my husband
one hour on the T to Boston,
one hour coming home–Red Line
to Green Line and back again.
Week days, it was Alewife
every morning. Alewife,
every night. On a Sunday,
we once made the trip,
driving, in eleven minutes. But
who works on a Sunday?
When I think of Boston, I can’t
help it. I think of those dead fish.
How my husband’s feet would
drag when he came up the street,
his head would nod as he ate–
already half asleep.
One Monday, he left for work
but called an hour later
to say no one was there. It was
a Massachusetts holiday
we’d never heard of. Just like
living in a foreign country,
is what he said to me.
So I met him at Alewife station
and we drove down to the shore.
I wanted to see alewives
but the beach was cold–empty
of both fish and other people.
We ate lobster and came home
wind-burned, late. We made love,
but unlike the alewives
we did not die the death
sex is said to bring. Instead,
though we didn’t know it,
our daughter sprang to life,
tiny fish in that big uncharted
ocean. Then we went to sleep,
woke to the alarm,
and my husband took the T.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of a poetry collection, World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University Press), and a memoir about growing up in Florida during the moon race, Space (Algonquin Books/Penguin). Her recent poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner.
WHAT NEXT by Peggy Shumaker
Lungs saddled up
for the embolus express
I am the nightmare.
Who is my rider?
Of all those who’ve gone before
could it be
the one I most
long to see?
Or, packhorse
overloaded,
am I lugging
heavy as slump blocks
strapped to my chest
all the children
I never nursed?
Spurring me
down the stretch,
let it be you
you, my love,
and gravid curiosity.
Peggy Shumaker’s poetry collections include Underground Rivers (Red Hen Press); Wings Moist from the Other World (University of Pittsburgh Press); The Circle of Totems (University of Pittsburgh Press); and Esperanza’s Hair (University of Alabama Press). She is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
VINCENT VAN GOGH: BOOTS WITH LACES (1886) by Joan I. Siegel
They look like two gaping mouths
about to speak, wounded
as Père Tanguy in his blue jacket
the postman Roulin
the woman he named Sorrow
these old brown boots crusted with mud
that travelled with him
to the cornfields of Arles and Saint-Remy
the night cafés of Montmartre
street lamps and prostitutes
under starry skies. And when his eyes
were blinded with sunflowers
his mind scorched
they lay worn out at the foot of his bed
patient as old faithful dogs.
Joan I. Siegel’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Yankee, The American Scholar, Commonweal, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, and New Letters. She is the recipient of the New Letters Poetry Prize and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award.
APPEARANCES by Jeffrey Bahr
Harry’s in town but hasn’t called to dine and cover
six years of silence: Rachel’s dead and what did he do
with all her kimonos? They always conjured up my blue gown
the day Kyle’s head crowned, steel shears showing up
to cut the gray cord tethered to sudden blood–Rachel
never wanted kids. She and Harry lay on teak to harbor sway
and searched for new stars. Now, men catch neutrinos
just before the miracles of novae, like the ghost ring before
your sister calls to say your parents are fine and phoned
from Ouray. A small surprising thing can not be there,
and then it is: Rachel’s malignant visitor. The cat
on your chest licking your chin at midnight. Harry’s only stint
as godfather. The river raft threw Kyle into the Lower Klamath,
water and white skulls of rock, Harry probing the rough
with a paddle, me gripping the yellow rope, the bloodless
face of the river guide, Kyle’s blanched hands
on Harry’s wrist, his head breaching.
Jeffery Bahr has published poems in Barrow Street, Many Mountains Moving, Indiana Review, and Borderlands. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
NEITHER HERE NOR THERE by Marc Pietrzykowski
Alexander is an astronaut with a shrunken monkey’s head
Tucked inside a pocket of his jumpsuit–it pokes
Into his thigh as they leave the earth, a secret
Bit of luck his crew mates know nothing of,
Each pressed into their own upright cradle. The skin
Of his face pulls back as he remembers Carnaval,
How Diana’s mouth spread in amusement
When he traded money for a tiny, burnt head,
How the year she loved him seemed
As boundless as the inconclusive curve
Of space . . . he will show his charm, later,
Once the booster has leapt into the sea
And the station has been joined with;
Placing it on the bright, narrow shelf
Above his bed, he will call Paolo,
The botanist, over to see this thing
That held them safe in a cocoon of magic
As they rose through, and over, and then majestically above
Clouds. Holding the little knob in his hands, Paolo will think
How much it resembles an amaryllis bulb, and how
His grandfather may, at this very moment,
Be prodding holes in dirt with a stick and thrusting bulbs
Down into them, wiping his hands on his trousers,
And looking up at the blank sky, wondering
If they will be lucky enough
To see rain today.
Marc Pietrzykowski’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Antioch Review, No Exit, Poetry Motel, Rattle, and Exquisite Corpse.
IN A WAX VILLAGE by Marlys West
The homes were small as matchbooks,
placed carefully and with a cool hand
into the wax meadow; trees overhead,
the sun a distant light bulb, drapes stiff
as boards inside each tiny, blue window.
Outside, cars stood still, black cotton
stuck like rabbits’ tails to the back of
each, indicating motion, combustion,
heat and noise. The children stood in
uneven patterns, grown figures stood
evenly around them. Small brown
dogs dotted the neighborhoods. Red
roses, yellow spots of marigolds circled
every other house. A wax mountain
loomed on one side, blue-purple, with
wool tufts stuck up and down the sides,
indicating clouds, condensation, water,
rain. The sun blinked off at random
times, but nobody minded, no strange
religion sprang up in explanation.
When the nighttime came and stayed,
the temperature dropped. Everyone
felt their edges harden, the grass stood
straighter, road and meadow kept their
colors to themselves; pale-green on
one side, black on the other. When
summer came, the village in the attic
grew soft and softer. People bent over,
red roses slipped from their branches,
children lost their heads, everyone
moved a little bit and became one
with the blue mountain sliding into
their homes. Houses folded in,
children mixed with meadow
grasses, marigold dogs slipped
under cars. The new pattern
was busy, swirling, lovely, no one
came upstairs to remake them,
the villagers. Clumps of that blue
mountain slid to the attic floor.
Trees lost every limb and, leaning
back, rested in limp grass. Streets
enjoyed the sensation of moving;
everyone smiled and disappeared.
Marlys West’s collection of poetry is Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr (University of Akron Press). Her recent poems have appeared in Berkeley Review, Black Warrior Review, Borderlands, Mississippi Review, and Puerto del Sol.
PACKAGES FROM HOME by Marianne Taylor
Married weeks short of sixty-two years, all in one house,
wall-to-wall carpeted only twice, and just one furnace
after the coal-burner. They could measure decades
in draperies matched to bedspreads, scores by their cars (each black)
and Sundays still meant the wedding china and a toast.
Twelve o’clock masses of my childhood I would worry
the roast might burn down our house, so I’d light
candles, a whole row of votives, at Mary’s feet.
And pray for his oily rags in the garage, paint thinner
in the basement, her overloaded kitchen circuits.
And dream of fire engines and jumping into a net,
holding only the birdcage while neighbors gathered,
watching men in yellow suits drench us all.
It was rainy when we buried him, midday fog
at the cemetery hovering like steam, incense
smoking in the cadilla, ashen clothes. She placed
her bright rose on the coffin, barely leaning on my arm.
Weighing nothing.
Each week brings a heavy package–silver grape scissors,
milk-glass candy dishes, folding umbrellas and hedge
trimmers. Today it’s a clock, steak knives, a painting
from their bedroom of red flowers and birds like smoke.
How can I tell her my house will never hold it all?
Marianne Taylor’s poems have appeared in North American Review, The MacGuffin, Iowa Woman, and a University of Iowa publication entitled Infinite Respect, Enduring Dignity: Voices and Visions on the September Attacks.
THE PROPHESY OF JONAH by Amy Scattergood
He didn’t warrant much: it was the end
of the book, his story tacked on like bait
or parenthetical suffering (cast lots,
cut wires, pull lines, consult your God, throw him
overboard and flee the scene of the crime).
But imagine two and a half pages in a fish
you’ve mistaken for an underwater room
in hell. The pressure of the depths he’s plumbed
seals his ears with anvils of thunder, the bending seas
on all sides of him washing away direction,
his name, the memory of Nineveh–Galilee–any city–
any orders–any reason for God–no God–
until the terrible sluice in his head drowns him
out. There is more to the story: dry land
and a commission and some argument or another.
But I don’t think Jonah heard any of it.
(Another prophet? A different paragraph of water?)
For Jonah didn’t last three hours, let alone
those three days and three nights. Fighting
desperately for surfaces, light, any oxygen
that wasn’t steeped in chloroform or ambergris,
the ribs of the whale pressing in on him
(God’s bone corset) as the great fish sounded
in a voice louder than all seven oceans.
Then Jonah counted out the last sacs of his lungs
on the baleen abacus (one by one by half by none).
His knees dropped to a God who wasn’t
coming. The whale dove, dove till he stopped.
ARIADNE AT THE END OF THE LINE by Amy Scattergood
She starts out from the west and starts
rolling: the string she winds around her hands
a deepening maze of cuts, each one
a thread that binds her back to the center
of the labyrinth she remembers. Only bread and milk
and the way her mother cried as she vacuumed,
cut her hands on the knives when she washed them.
Above her the sky fills with spiders,
their webs spinning out into white sails, clouds, laundry.
The string fills her fingers, weaving
cords of black listening into her skin.
She hears her father breaking the windows of the house,
her sister sweeping up the glass,
her mother burning words into her sleep.
With each corner she turns into a new country,
deeper, darker than what she’d ever known.
She goes down, past corners cluttered with empty guns
and slumped suitors, past switches she begins to throw.
What darkness. What roaring.
There’s a man coming toward her, or maybe
not a man. She catches her dress, grabs her knife, cries out
what little she knows. No police. No sirens.
How endless the world is when there’s no one to help you:
repeating footsteps, the stopped wind,
Theseus dropping the string, dropping her hand.
Amy Scattergood’s collection of poetry is The Grammar of Nails (Creative Arts Book Company). Her recent poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Grand Street, New England Review, Epoch, and The New Republic.
CROWS by Moira Linehan
Whoever said Straight as a crow flies
never saw the crows in my back yard
zigzag tree to rock wall, garage roof, shrieking
back to wall, branch, gutter, crosshatching the air
in a fury of streaks. Try reading those lines
for a sense of the world, the heart’s weight,
what keeps you up in the air, keeps you going
back to where you’ve just come from. Force-field
around me, below me, this house my husband
died in and left me years ago now, rooms
I still crisscross, pulled as I am by something
in the earth’s depths, or maybe much closer:
his body buried two streets away, or those desires
that surfaced screeching, flying every which way
the months he was dying. Just when I think they’re gone,
they’re back en masse in swoops, shrill as ever.
Moira Linehan has published poems in Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
CROWS WHO TRY TO BE CORMORANTS DROWN by Lee Ann Roripaugh
7:00 a.m., and in the crepuscular gray-silk light
shimmering pairs of raised socket rings rimming
the eyes of goldfish glint like burnished mother-
of-pearl. Their shadowed bodies have the bored,
languorous air of fan dancers French-inhaling
Lucky Strikes backstage before the dusty velvet
curtain creaks, then comes clattering up. Peach
green tea dallies in my mouth like a nostalgia
of fat, silky petals, and the Siamese cat rests
one chill, suspiciously damp paw on my neck;
the other, claws curling in and out, like breath,
in my scalp, as she licks inside my ear with
her warm gritty tongue, purring and hiccupping.
The scent of sunburnt peaches arabesques in a fine
wraith of steam from the blue mug the way your
name kept twizzling, curlicuing and disappearing
through my sleep last night, slippery between
my fingers, smooth and fine as cinnamon.
I think of Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and how,
in her letters to friends, she kept exclaiming,
The snails here are as big as dinner plates!
Did you know snails are hermaphrodites?
Or that, during courtship, they slowly circle one
another, lightly touching each other along the neck
with their antennae-tipped eyes and nudging
their soft, blunt heads, forehead to forehead, before
firing off a pair of fierce love darts, to break
each other’s skin and pierce the tender flesh inside.
Isn’t it a strange thought? A love dart?
But really, aren’t we all strange fruit ripening
outward from our navels–dusky or pale, fleshy
and moonstruck–after being clipped from the vine?
And don’t we cushion our hearts like big cracked
seeds inside a tangled nest of membrane, skin
and pulp before they whirl away like dervishes
on propeller-light wings, or end up tucked into
the dark musky cheeks of squirrels, when the body’s
false promises have long been forgotten?
Although maybe that’s not true. Maybe our hearts
aren’t seeds, but birds. Maybe our hearts
are cormorants, diving at night for sweet fish
in a blaze of torch light on the Nagara River
in Japan, and our bodies are the leather rings
fishermen strap around the necks of the birds
to keep them from swallowing the fish. And still
mine keeps diving, diving through the night,
against a bone-hollowing hunger unfulfilled,
and even in spite of the old Japanese folk saying:
Crows who try to be cormorants drown.
My tea cools, morning grips the sun between
thumb and forefinger like a lemonade corkscrew
Akro Agate Popeye marble shooter. Outside
the windowpane, a wasp, arms and legs akimbo,
cleans her satin-banded body with the same
seductive gesture as a woman smoothing down
a cocktail dress over the swell of her hips.
And I circle around this poem too many times,
awkward even in the inching tarantellas of mollusk
love. But soon, soon I will find the words
that pierce clean through, and soon I will find
their center–like a slice of silver splitting
the air in a smoke-filled room. For the mean-
time, though, did you know, my love,
that a flock of larks is called an exaltation?
Lee Ann Roripaugh’s collection of poetry, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist in the 2000 Asian American Literature Awards. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, North American Review, and Grand Street.
THE ATROCITY OF WATER by Kirsten Hemmy
Water has a beautiful smell in certain places. Or it is the full,
wet air, which smells of water. As I write this we are
traveling by cab to my cousin’s house in Pearl City on the island
of O’ahu. We drive over a bridge that was bombed. We drive
past the military base where the water is so clear–a violent
violet that exposes the dialectics of war. (The sunken
USS Arizona, today a tourist site for which people line up
for hours to see.) The bridge we travel spans a great
historical distance: today the hellish orange halos of fire
are swallowed by water; they’ve even stopped bombing
practice off the island of Kaho’olawe. The lesson is
that you can own everything. The lesson is
that we can stand for anything, even water.
Our cab driver is impressed that my cousin teaches
at Keio University (“it is the Harvard of Japan”), and, using his broken
pidgin tries to engage us in a conversation about Heidegger’s “Question
Concerning Technology.” But I am thinking about water–all
the oceans that bring us together, that separate with
a nihilism that eats the oxygen from the water, from the skies,
leaving blue the color of guns, of corpse. Water can be deep
and voiceless. We can need it. We are almost over the bridge now.
Kirsten Hemmy’s poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Blueline, Pearl, Red Wheelbarrow, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Motel, and won the Academy of American Poets Prize.
ADRIFT by Barbara DeCesare
The pills are
orange,
I think of
lifejackets.
I cannot say what I think.
I start with falling overboard,
weeks go before
the sun decides
it doesn’t answer prayers.
I might ask what happened,
want to see the scars.
No one comes to the surface
long enough
to listen.
The beauty of loss is
the absence of worry.
In my dream I stay silent,
drink what is offered,
try to remember myself
walking.
This is lovely, adrift,
the bobbing horizon,
oceans of blood I’ve lost,
no solid thing as far
as my ear
can hear.
Barbara DeCesare’s poems have appeared in River Styx, Folio, Maryland Poetry Review, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Birmingham Poetry Review and Gargoyle. Her collection of poetry is jigsaweyesore (Anti-Man Press).
CHOPIN ETUDE by Claudia M. Reder
Hands poised above keys, wrists soft,
to fall on low G
the way I beg my father to brake imperceptibly
so I can’t feel the jerk of the car;
as when I lie down in a large field
my arms long as apron strings
to secure the sun, and
dusk mutes the sky;
I want low G to sound
as if it has always been there,
and we just notice it, saying,
“Ah, of course, low G,
that’s what I’ve been hearing all this time,”
Hands poised above keys, wrists soft,
some days I play well for M. Z.,
other times he says,
Perhaps your world has been too pink
and taps the keyboard with a pencil.
Claudia M. Reder is the author of the poetry collection My Father & Miro and Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Her poem sequence, “My Father & Miro,” won first prize from International Quarterly, and was reprinted in Universities West Anthology. Her recent poems have appeared in Café Review, Salt Hill Journal, and North American Review.
LAMAR COUNTY TRAINING SCHOOL, 1962 by Janice N. Harrington
This is Lamar County Training School,
its skirts raised on cinderblocks,
honeysuckle growing about the hem.
The colored children go here:
egg sandwiches in lard-bucket tins,
outdoor toilets, a one-armed pump,
and wasps humming in sleepy-headed heat.
At recess, they play house in houses
of pine limbs, on floors of pine needles,
the first-graders held and rocked like babies,
their pine cone faces, their laughter
sharp as turpentine, sharp
as needles in a pineywood.
Little Sally Walker sits in her saucer
watching the boys run football
in a red dirt pit, holding
the silver key to lock them up.
And here is Pennington Hall,
white-biscuit building, where
the big girls in pressed hair
and the best clothes they have, wait,
their shadows long as crokersacks
looking out, white cotton smiles
knowing they could be picked by anyone.
IN THE MORNING by Janice N. Harrington
I find red sand
on my mother’s pillow
and know that she dreamed
again of Alabama,
that her daddy
traveled furrows longer
than a man’s life,
through darkness heavier
than cast iron,
to find his only girl,
to find “I Betcha,”
what he called her.
Along red roads, her father,
a yella man in a yellow hat, in overalls,
a pendulum of legs, swinging
the distance.
They spend the night talking,
these two beloved,
singing of woodsmoke,
rolling memories thin as parchment,
shaking their days like a tin
of Prince Albert Tobacco, the hours only
a pinch of leaf
between finger and thumb.
Around father and daughter
a darkness heavier than kudzu
creeps over her husband’s belly
and over the mouths of her soft,
snoring children miles away.
In the darkness,
my mother lays her head
on her daddy’s lap,
her dreams, coming thick as clabber,
of lamplit waters and fatback,
of mules and molasses.
The past falls
from her mouth in parched peanuts,
shells cracked and husks blown away.
The night
wide as a cottonfield
and her daddy plowing.
Janice N. Harrington’s poems have appeared in The African American Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, and The Seattle Review.
WHY YOU LIKE HIM by David Blair
He’d been the fowl for too long already,
paddling in the cold current, waking up
from the mud, billing after the bits of crust.
And his hand hurt; sloppy bandage
like a raw jumbo shrimp across his palm.
He’d already cut too many clams for the customers,
and he got distracted by the ball game on the radio.
It was too easy for him to smile, to flash his baby
his new gold tooth, to draw his tongue
along his brown, cracked incisor
at the friendly girl sweeping the glass case
of bread dust at the bakery. When she saw him,
she thought he’d make a good drag queen,
so soft-featured, so moist looking.
The seat was too small for his girth,
and that’s how he’d look in heels, bubble-butting
and making the juke box skip at Wally’s.
He was like the effect of voiceless consonants
and spondees, heart-breaking. He keeps it up.
He passes me on the way out,
two salesmen in dark suits. The older version
of him wore a white shirt, but the other guy
had on a purple one so the other salesmen
saw him, and thought, that guy’s a salesman.
He was the last of his own bad effects,
had had his coffee, and now he was leaving.
His steps sound heavier coming home at night.
Now he sloshes down in his own deep barrel.
David Blair has published poems in Chicago Review, Greensboro Review, and AGNI. This is his fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
SEERS by Frances Ruhlen McConnel
Agamemnon: The whole tribe of seers is a curse with its ambition.
Menelaus: Yes, and good for nothing and useless when among us.
–Euripides, Iphigenia in Aules
People who see animals in the clouds
haven’t enough on their minds, or too much.
People who see mythical beings in clusters of stars
are people reaching to find themselves reflected
where there should only be astonishment.
People who use Roy G. Biv to memorize the hues
of the rainbow, people preparing
to be quizzed on those colors,
are people living their whole lives in drought.
People who try to identify the reverberations
coming through the walls at the multi-plex–
are they bombs or machine gun fire?–
and then no matter how tender the moment
in their own chick-flick, try to make up the plot
of the other one–well, I guess that’s me,
so no point in complaining.
And do others see faces when they close their eyes,
after the light’s been in them, faces made up
of flaws in your vision? For me the floaters
and crinkles in my retinas that make
star-burst halos out of headlights,
or sway like a web of seaweed across a page.
I too focus on those improbable beings,
almost as compelling as faces in a dream–
my father, say, thirty years dead,
or a friend who hasn’t spoken to me in five–
only these have no memory as template,
hover in no reflecting pool of longing–
yet what character in this nebulous portrait!
the sharp nose, the odd hairdo,
the imperative brow, the expression
full of bewildering significance–
fit to be studied, which I do until
the features blur, become clouds,
and then just a dot, strangely, of light.
Perhaps the dot of a place on a map
where I must some day arrive in my travels,
perhaps then, I too, will find something besides
no meaning there, on the other side of meanings
we have domesticated as our own.
Frances Ruhlen McConnel’s recent poems have been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Seattle Review, Solo, The Wilshire Review, and Crab Creek Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
AMERIGO VESPUCCI, 1506, CONTEMPLATES ANOTHER SHEET OF VELLUM by Benjamin Scott Grossberg
I was there. I saw the mouth of the Amazon, its tongue
of water sticking out into the Atlantic, trying to turn
its blue babble into speech. I saw Guanabara Bay,
when no living thing had recorded seeing it before, I saw it–
and imagined the inlet lit by spires, imagined the voice
of Pope and Emperor as towers pushed to the edge
of the water, bright at night . . . boats sailing the bay. In short,
I saw a city there, the crossing of boats in the crossing of birds,
towers in the trees.
I saw it from deck; I saw it from the sand
which winnowed between my fingers, which spread out
in the air like chaff; I almost see it in my head now, and struggle
to lean my head back from my desk, to feel on my face
the heat of a meridian sun.
But this is painful. Here are two empty pages. On one,
I must draw a map. Each line will condense entire weeks:
here, I plot a vector of coast, and you look at it, admire
its clean simplicity. That simplicity is a fabrication. What you
don’t see from the elevation gradients is how the cliff bled
a shadow on the pale water, dyeing it black, how I
misconstrued the distance and just barely turned the vessel
about in time. You have part of what you want here–
the destination–but you have it clean. And this is not natural:
to record experience
filtered through experience,
to make sure all the lines form only a single continent.
On this other page I must write a narrative. Truth may be
unavoidable, may exist on a continental scale. But you
only want that truth
which you can discover yourself. Not just the map, but
the evolution of the map, so that you can make the journey,
can rig up the boat of your imagination–so all Europe
can hitch their parlors to the keel of my ship, and be
dragged over the ocean. And this too, is artifice.
If the destination involves shaping a flip book of glances
into a coherent picture, then this requires breaking coherence
back into steps. So the chair under me is leather; the desk
in front of me is wood. But the world before me must be
the world I have left-
I must be there again, and here,
and still trying to reenter and reconstruct the voyage, to parse
a moonlight journey by lamplight, smell the wet air
of morning on Rio de Plata and remember how the glinting sun
brought to mind a river of silver. . . .
Artifice is our general burden. This continent of experience,
the geographical features of discovery and desire, they exist
only so far as they are shared. So I was there. Every line,
every nautical mile: the book will map myself, too–
as I stood on deck, as I sit at this desk, as I walk
the streets of Seville, thinking about where best to place
the color plates. But I can claim nothing in the experience,
nothing in the book, that you are not able to follow yourself.
In other words, so far as I can claim it is real, I promise:
the continent is also yours.
So I dip into the ink and start
another page. Without a visitation or a miracle,
that world will remain two thousand miles away.
You I imagine; the continent I remember. The rest
is in the hands of God.
Benjamin Scott Grossberg has published poems in Nimrod, The Malahat Review, Paris Review and Green Mountains Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
SHOOTING SCRIPT 4 by Amy Bleser
It is better to give you up now, to let you go
before the start of the story, to watch your graceful
departure, your elegant glide through the door
held open before you, disappointed but hopeful,
mainly hopeful. This is all that stands between you
and Beethoven: air and a piano, rage–destiny.
I cannot watch your silhouette come three-dimensional
out of the flat dawn light, and then the colors not quite
it, not the way I have imagined them to be. Your eyes
a shade of green I hadn’t dreamt of in the fallen light,
your hands not Picasso’s hands, blunt, strong and
certain and lost in blindness and need, and that one
moment in time unfocused like that other awareness
of that other place–the whole open-mouthed, close-eyed
breathlessness of you, and that blind open-handed
tremor gliding across the body. No. To let you go now
with just the space between us, and the blue sparked flash
between us–unspoken, the simple dark-eyed place,
before you can’t be Coltrane, anymore, before the turning
away into ourselves, into an imagining of ourselves,
into the tangled scent of it all–the lives we have,
the lives we cannot have, what we have touched
already ungrasping; and what we have not touched,
and that word like breathing, the whole yet implicit
in your departure, the return implied in that light
graceful step. This is all that separates you from Degas:
time, vision, paint, and a dance, and that other
return implied in your backward glance–you still perfect,
unbroken. Perfect desire, perfect want untouched–
one note, one chord, a story I tell myself at night.
Amy Bleser’s recent poems have appeared in ACM, Confrontations, Spoon River, The Minnesota Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
SUNSET BOULEVARD IN TRANSLATION by Lesley Jenike
Norma Desmond said it best when she said nothing
except, maybe: I refuse to speak, written in the suicide
note that killed off her career. With a jerking hand
she littered smeared sketches onto a cocktail napkin:
closed mouths, open eyes, the amputated head of John
the Baptist and above him a purple halo of spilt wine mixed
with tears. So went Norma’s farewell to Hollywood.
Talkies, in time, will fall out of style. This she wrote
in the milky light of her own face, a celluloid version
of herself dancing the dance of the seven veils, projected
onto a screen at the south end of her study. That version
of Norma, the one half-clothed and vicious, carried a sword
for the severance of head from heart, muting the already
muted. How sad, she must have thought, that we lose something
so precious. And just above the sound of twitching pen-
strokes, the almost imperceptible pulse of her lungs: silence.
She signed the letter, Forget ever seeing me again. With that
she vanished, taking with her the benefaction of her eyes.
Lesley Jenike’s poetry has appeared in The Beacon Street Review.
TO A FLICKER NESTING IN A TELEPHONE POLE by Elise Partridge
Your beak’s day begins at six.
I see you crisply discarding splinters,
rounding that gouge into a welcoming door.
But how could you have chosen this ex-tree–
requisitioned, positioned, slashed, gashed, bolted
like Frankenstein’s head?
Wouldn’t you rather cling where the calliope-chime of stars
won’t be blared away by sodium bulbs?
Whistle from a tower that adds to itself, ring after ring,
whose seed-pod odysseys
mime your fledglings’ gift of flight?
Here you will oversee no soft green debuts,
no flaming valedictions.
This ramrod cannot welcome guests–
epiphytes so helpful they’re asked to stay forever–
nor be caressed by a million grub-feet.
Turkeytail fungus
will never ladder to your perch like steps to heaven.
Yet on you build.
Can your defiance proliferate–
this pole claim kin to a nearby maple,
wake one morning urging phantom tendrils
to crack the macadam?
Will your raps remind us to uncommodify–
though dragooned and propped, dream of leafing;
pared by use, cradle eggs?
Elise Partridge’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Boulevard, AGNI, Cream City Review, and Fiddlehead.
NEEDLE AND THREAD by Anne Pierson Wiese
I am the accidental heiress
to my great aunts’ dish towels and tea
cloths. So many tiny stitches–
how could one dry dishes, or do whatever
one does with tea cloths, on the back
of such artistry? The seven earnest cats
performing their household tasks, one for each day
of the week–how to touch water to that fine creweled
fur? Rumple those hand-embroidered whiskers? Would one
ever risk the linen squares trimmed with crocheted blue
and yellow lace beneath a pot of Darjeeling?
What to do with the trumpet vine dresser scarf? I hate
to sew, myself–but if I don’t use them, who will?
My only child is the ragged edge of time.
Anne Pierson Wiese has recent poems in Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Carolina Quarterly, and West Branch. She was the first place poetry winner in the 2002 Writers at Work fellowship competition.
GOODNIGHT, TEXAS by Kurt Brown
These fields belong to locusts–
not every seven years,
but every year. They cry out
in shrill voices,
and at night people
sleep in Childress or Clayton
or Goodnight, Texas.
I drive south from Denver
through a country of adobe houses
resting on sand like gutted boats.
At dawn, the crying pipes down.
By 8, oil derricks nod,
probe the outskirts of busted towns.
Through the Panhandle, cities thicken–
“Dan’s Barbecue and Steaks . . .” “The Last Corral . . .”
How will you fit into this calcified earth,
this cowboy’s dream of Heaven?
* * *
I won’t pretend we were close.
I’m half astonished
that we’ve found each other
even now
on this cracked prairie near Fort Worth.
What a place to die.
Was it shame or fear
that bred our secrets, then hushed us
like that bead of spittle
soldering the lips of the newly dead?
Aren’t you the point I once departed,
the blue wastage of my course?
* * *
You phoned once
from somewhere past Gibraltar, somewhere
in the heart of the Atlantic,
your voice scratchy and small
surrounded by a vast silence.
Your body floats, then fractures: first the legs,
the eyes, rent by diabetes,
absent limbs contrived of plastic
to make you look good–one last time–
in a blue suit
stuffed into a casket and set adrift.
* * *
Look, I’ve come this far to say hello.
It’s noon. The sun rings off my hood
like a struck bell.
Somewhere your body waits,
almost virginal, whole.
Now the city hovers in the distance.
The land swelters,
scarred with wheelruts of old journeys.
Pray for me, my father, too.
We are far from home.
–for Captain Alwin Robert Brown
Kurt Brown is the author of two poetry collections, Return of the Prodigals and More Things in Heaven and Earth, both from Four Way Books. He is the founder of the Aspen Writers’ Conference.
THE HANGED MAN by Mike Chasar
Several branches were broken–
Several branches were broken and I
stood like the tree which he hung from.
His shoes were clean, the breeze
rippled his pantcuffs and I
stared at his socks. I wasn’t prepared.
I was on lunch break, walking the trail
through the woods, trying to keep
my work shoes clean and thinking
of getting my car to the shop.
I’d come to a clearing,
was wiping my shoes with a leaf;
I’d stepped over trees which the storm
had uprooted;
I’d jumped over puddles,
considered that maybe I’d buy
a brand-new computer to finally
get online, and off,
over the glade in the trees,
cocooned in his suit, he hung
like a bat in the daylight. Several branches
were broken
but at last, at least,
he’d succeeded and looked,
save the purplish neck,
peaceful.
I wasn’t prepared so I stood there;
his shirt was still rather pressed and I wondered
should I look for his wallet–or retch
in the brush,
or cover my tracks,
or call the police. . . . So I stood there,
trying to give him a life so maybe
I’d know what to do.
Male, in his thirties,
a ring on his right hand
but not on his left.
A Honda, I figured, or Taurus, or maybe
something a little more sporty.
An apartment downtown,
a lab named Lee,
a satellite dish for the Packers.
Pete’s Wicked Ale in the fridge,
two percent milk, a six-pack
of yogurt, a slice
of pizza with olives and ham and not
unsuccessful at all. . . .
Several branches were broken. I thought
how awful it was–
must have been–
not to die here alone
but to die here in stages as branch
after branch bowed or broke,
to fight going out,
to re-tie the rope, re-hold his breath,
re-take the plunge in the hopes
that this one would hold.
A series of failed attempts. I looked
at my watch.
It was getting toward One.
There was work on my desk and I
was staring him down from the tree
in both of his shoes and argyle socks,
in his tie, his pants, his shirt,
the whole of him lowering on soft,
wobbly legs and tentative steps and there,
I straightened his collar and turned him
back down the path through the woods.
Mike Chasar’s recent poems have appeared in The Antioch Review and Black Warrior Review.
POEM FOR SIMONE WEIL by Jendi Reiter
To think of faith as mine
is to bar the door.
My precious, my purity,
truth’s little coin I can bestow
or hoard, or nail up to gleam
like the prize on Ahab’s mast.
Is it humility that dumbs
men who should beg for this?
They affront me who have not seen death
shining in the plattered fish’s eye
and on the sleek braided bread,
death diving through the blue air
on the metal wings they trust.
A spoonful of ashes
where the tower stood.
Or still stands. Time collapses
in my eyes like God’s.
This thing I believe
happened once to a man
who possessed nothing but his death–
father-forsaken, letting the light
of the nations go out
like a match dropped from burnt fingers.
What obedience to refuse
to set an example
of faith’s triumph, which is but a subtler
triumph of the will.
I was on that hill, on the spit of land
where the walls fell into flame
and all around me wept, amazed and bloody
as babies after a hard birth
into all that cold space called the world,
their first permanence shaken.
Now you see what I see,
I thought
with relief, God help me.
Jendi Reiter’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Motel, Tucumcari Literary Review, and The Best American Poetry. She was a finalist in the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets and the Discovery/The Nation 1999 competition. Along with her husband, she created the Web site “Poetry Contest Insider.”
ANATOMY OF A BALLET DANCER, A SCOLIOTIC by Kirsten Kaschock
Lay bare your sister. Naked her out.
Peel her back like a grape, let small split skin filter to the tile.
Peel her to find a telling lack of subcutaneous fat.
To find striated muscle so greyhound
that teenage girls on the L say “bitch” under their breath.
Mouth it.
Peel her to find bone. Her wrists used to be bluer than other wrists.
That was the just-bone of them.
Note the two breasts.
One is gummy with yellow droplets of fat. The other is
the red of pectoral. No mastectomy
scar. No whirling
to distract your eye from the no symmetry of it. The effect is
pure
crooked.
Ask why. Remove the muscle with a swift shearing action.
Use your serrated hunting knife. Avoid the floor.
Watch her ribs, their oddness. How they line
on one side
up, like rungs on a ladder. Tight
but climbable. How the right side’s ribs splay
spoke-like–like a fan.
Ask why.
Remove the organs. Each
a lump of blood. Weigh them. The lungs together–
so light–it is clear they managed air. The liver,
a discussion of wine
you shared at birthdays. Wakes.
Betrothals. Remove them all.
Her vertebrae.
The curved cobblestone of its S, a question to you.
You will not answer with a scalpel.
Dissection is a show of great love you say
don’t be clever she doesn’t
say she doesn’t say sew me back
she says
Aren’t you cold, Kaje? Aren’t you horribly cold?
Kirsten Kaschock’s poems have appeared in Pleiades, Quarter After Eight, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, and Fourteen Hills.
ROAD TRIP by Ionna Carlsen
I’ve always wanted to paint
the way the road eats up your life,
the way you drive right into it,
how at night the street signs, catching your lights,
take on the mood of the music on the radio, tilting sadly to the right–
how even during the morning the soft whir of the car
brings you so close to sleep
you can see the wheat in the fields
through your eyelids,
how in the late afternoon,
over small poolings of water reflecting trees against the sky,
birds fly through birds,
one flock through another–
wings almost touching wings
in spite of so much space around them–
how barns were called hip-roofed,
how words exist in time like anything else,
and fly through other words,
their wingtips brushing other wings,
how some sleep now
under the fields behind closed eyelids,
how tonight, after the substructure of the rural,
we look forward, toward
the hard edges of the city,
how it all passes
how all the things you dread
shall come to pass,
and also pass,
wings whirring by wings
and the idea of infinity.
Ioanna Carlsen has recent poems in Poetry, Field, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, and Quarterly West. Billy Collins selected one of her poems to be read in the nation’s high schools as part of the “Poetry 180” program. She also won the 2002 Glimmer Train Poetry Open. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
SUNDOWNING EXIT-SEEKER by Donald Platt
Welcome to Greer
Memorial Nursing Home. Today is: Friday, August 16th, 2002.
The next holiday is:
Labor Day. The season is: Summer. The weather is:
Sunny & Hot–
“That’s all you need to know,” I tell my father and gesture jokingly
towards the sign
on the wall of North Three, the nursing home’s locked unit.
It’s after his supper
of fried chicken, vegetable medley, mashed potatoes with gravy
and chocolate pudding,
which my father ate with the back of his spoon. “Do you own
this bit of real
estate?” Dad asks, motioning around the ward hung with Van Gogh’s
sunflowers. “How many
people live in this house? Can anyone tell me why I’m here?”
I explain again
his stroke. “Oh, I see,” he says, sighs, and doesn’t see. Purple
bruises splotch
both of his bare arms like Rorschachs, like black irises in late April,
where the hospital nurses
tried to draw blood, but missed the veins. “Looks like they roughed
you up good,”
Judy, the charge nurse, says. We all smile. A white-haired
stooped woman
in a wheelchair tries to propel herself with slippered feet towards the wooden
handrail that runs along the wall,
but she goes nowhere. Her frantic feet are bicycling a paddle boat.
Dad gives her
a push so she can grip the rail and work her way
slowly down
the hall, dragging herself along. “Your father’s a sweet old guy,
but stubborn,”
says Judy. “He turns off all the residents’ air-conditioners,
unplugs their TVs,
and winds up their alarm clocks. Last night he made it down
the elevator
to the lobby and out the front door twice before security
got him. He’s
a very mobile exit-seeker, so we had to move him
up here.”
Judy winks at him. Dad grins. A black man in an armchair
pulled out
into the hall wakes up and shouts, “What you doin’ up so early?
You don’t have to go
to work now.” A woman in nothing but a Mickey Mouse T-shirt
too short
to cover her wrinkled thighs and balding pudendum’s
few white wisps
holds out to Judy her soiled sweatpants and underwear.
“It’s alright,
Estelle,” says Judy. “Juanita will take you back to your room
and get you all
cleaned up.” She turns to me, “Everyone here is
sundowning.”
When she sees that I don’t understand, she adds, “Residents
with dementia
often go bonkers in the late afternoon. No one knows why.
They’re fine
in the morning. We in the field call it ‘sundowning.’”
I see rows
on rows of Van Gogh’s heavy-headed sunflowers turning their round, blank
faces haloed
with golden manes towards the sun sinking over a field
of unscythed hay.
Aren’t we all phototropic? Or is my father’s pale
unshaven face,
from which I wipe a crusted glob of chocolate pudding,
more a rare, night-blooming
orchid cactus that opens its white petals only to the darkness?
He stands
and rearranges for hours the photographs and stuffed teddy bears
on his roommate’s
dresser. They’re never right, and he must move them a quarter inch
to left or right.
When I tell him I must go, he stops and says hopefully, “Good, then we
can go home together.
I’ll pack my stuff. I’ll only be a minute.” I lie and tell him no,
not yet. The nurses
need to run more tests. His shoulders sag. Father, sundowning exit-seeker,
you’ll leave here soon enough.
Donald Platt’s second book of poems, Cloud Atlas, was published by Purdue University Press in 2002. His recent poems appear in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and The Pushcart Prize XXVII (2003). This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
WHITE-THROAT by Brendan Galvin
Maybe the conflagration is touched off each year
when the first matchhead of a crocus flares,
which no one ever sees, but here in the planter
on the railing is a white-throated sparrow,
looking ragged as something a chef
just threw in a rage at an exhaust fan,
a peabody bird bathing in icemelt,
sending its golden droplets up as though
seeding the sunlight, not a crocus yet in sight.
So this is the source of those controlled
burns of forsythia by our houses
two weeks in April, lanterns in the drawn-out
noirs of fog, lights private as ships at sea, whereby
the mailman navigates from house to house.
A long time before we’ll hear
Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,
but immersed in total pleasure for at least
five minutes now, splashing itself, feet sunk
in the planter’s mud, this bird knows the water
will freeze again, and maybe that everything
coming after–even lilacs, and shadbush ghosting
among unlit trees–depends on these yellows
it’s flipping into being with its wings.
For bracts and mayapples, for a goldfinch
knocking at a window’s conundrum,
this white-throat’s whipping up the sunlit modulations,
sulfur, citrines, gilt, canary, amber,
for pollen, and month to month across monotonous greens,
for the wings of fritillaries thinner than onionskin,
until seaside goldenrod gathers and concentrates
saffron, packing it in for cold storage.
A FOOTNOTE TO POWER by Brendan Galvin
On a day so still you might think
that saying wind out loud
could start a crack the equinox
would ooze golden from,
I found a bolt on Corn Hill Road,
and weighed it in my hand,
feeling its otherworldly cold,
as though it had dropped
from the undercarriage of a cloud,
and listened to the nuthatch
telegraph in bushes whose maroon haze
signified their readiness
to begin again, a few natural egg cups
woven in them here and there,
abandoned but waiting.
Thick as my thumb and longer
than any teacup-sized warbler’s nest
is deep, that heavy-duty piece
had an octagonal head on it
larger than any resting place
a hummingbird might bind
to the merest knuckle
of an apple tree, a steel bolt shaken
to unthreading, and fallen.
Brendan Galvin’s poetry collections include Hotel Malabar (Iowa Poetry Prize), Sky and Island Light (LSU), and The Strength of a Named Thing (LSU), and a translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (Penn Classical Drama Series). His recent poems have appeared in Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and Crab Orchard Review.