POETRY
THE QUEEN OF BAR-B-QUE EGYPT by Quentin Sherwood
Work here because I bought the place; who wouldn’t.
We got Euphrates Platter,
Papyrus Salad, Pork Cheops with gravy –
(but what the hell’s Egyptian about spare ribs?)
My coffee’s thinner, more brown than any Nile,
the sun I worship is a coward, he slinks behind
the Mini-Mart like a shoplifter, sinks
like a reed boat filling with bilge.
Who designed all this? It wasn’t Wally, “The Pharaoh”
(Night Manager) who built the Pyramid O’ Fire
(full back rib rack with hot-sauce);
What hand drew the Fertile Croissant?
For the love of art, for the swish of sin,
I was going to dance ballet and then
I started in here drooling coffee at
Drive-Thru Bar-B-Que Egypt,
Where all truth, all history, all of man’s endeavor
winds up (read it on the menu), life overflows
the banks of lunch, collects in silt
behind the Sphinx dishwasher, and mummifies.
The truth is hook and flail, cross my heart,
the blade to harvest, the whip to prod a slave
like me to labor; the embalmer’s art, the linen wrap,
cut stone is hollow refuge from the heat.
I am the Queen of Bar-B-Que Egypt: my drive-up pyramid.
I changed my name to Cleo – this place is mine, entombed
on U.S. 41 (my Nile), to reap a flood of tips –
Moon Queen of the dusk from three p.m. to midnight
Quentin Sherwood was a recipient of the William J. Shaw Memorial Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in New Letters, The Dunes Review, and Waiting for the Apples. The publication of “The Queen of Bar-B-Que Egypt” appears posthumously. Sherwood was killed in a bicycling accident in September 2002.
ON THE USE OF THE DECORATIVE by Anne Pitkin
after Matisse
Yes, I painted during two wars: odalisques,
interiors with goldfish and violins
while the world concerned itself with death.
You’d have had me confront the tiny spider gnawing
like Blake’s worm at the rose’s center,
when, like that spider, I’d navigate its universe.
The threat of destruction, like black,
sets off the urgency of yellow in two lemons,
the bounty of a red room where a woman plays a lute.
Picasso once told Gillot that one must rip and tear reality.
Must one break the sea’s rush toward
the bay’s blue welcome, rip sails
striking the air with yet another blue so pure
no wings can pierce it? Light
bestows its colors on all surfaces,
withdrawing when it falls into a bombed city,
though even then it seeks a bright rag,
a dropped earring, enters cracks
in a crazed heart. We are surely fallen,
and when I see a dead bird, I’m fascinated
by tonal variations in the sky
that lost it. Believing heaven longs for its earthly gardens,
I rescue the tulip, splash white, pink and violet anemones
across a black mirror. I open a window
onto a balcony, a white noon sky, a square of sea,
place a girl in white under a green parasol
next to the blue shutter –
a fugue of wind and color
waiting for me to complete it.
Oh yes, we are fallen.
See how the sun yearns through eons
toward an acacia swaying in and out of shadow
like the body of a woman dancing.
Anne Pitkin is the author of the poetry collection, Yellow. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Prairie Schooner, Malahat Review, and Two Rivers Review.
THE ONE ABOUT THE WOLF by Maggie Smith
Dead, you don’t forget my name, my face.
You never wander off. You don’t mistake
another’s house for yours. You never sleep.
Dead, your tuck-in’s done. You never tell
the one about the girl’s red hood. You never
snore yourself awake, forget to leave
the door ajar, and I believe the wolf
is just your breathing. Dead, you never cook
your cabbage soup. Or shoo me from your glass
of hozzem blozzem – bourbon, water, ice.
You never haunt. Or hear me ring the bell.
I wait, but no one answers. You’re a truant.
An awful hostess. Dead, you never give
the one about the wolf disguised as child,
malignant as benign, a happy ending.
It tricked us. Swallowed you alive. Inside,
no muffled cries. It’s just as well. The woodsman
can’t use his bowie knife to cut you out.
You’re dead. But now, you don’t forget my name
or call me by my mother’s. Dead, you never
speak to me. You never bare your teeth.
Maggie Smith was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award and first prize in Mid-America Review’s Fineline Competition in 2002. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Indiana Review, and the Beloit Poetry Journal.
from THE SILK ROAD: MARCO POLO’S WIFE by Daneen Wardop
And the goodness you don’t
And the goodness you don’t need to prove
because goodness is not
that different from curiosity for you –
Marco, you are good
where I feel random,
the mending almost done, a thread
not put to service yet, smoothed in length –
You seldom hesitate
and month by month you uncrumple more stories: a banquet of mare’s milk
turned into wine by the Khan’s sorcerers,
tens of thousands of white horses as yet unridden,
gerfalcons faster than sandstorms.
Out on the campo a petal catapults a bee from itself –
Our baby plays tigers hunching in chairs and chandeliers and curtains –
A small apple tree nods chins at me –
I can’t tell you any of this –
Were I to stand in
Were I to stand in a meadow and through my feet
feel the roots of grass knot and rosette underneath –
how early can the universe be?
I am used to my desire –
wear wasps to barrette my hair, but too –
unfold desire, a napkin, across my lap, but too –
in the giant eyes of the grasshopper, magnify, but –
I am not used to my desire.
Walk far enough with me,
we might meet the Blemmyae with faces on their breasts,
or the people who feed only on the smell of apple –
We need desire to shape our death.
I mean, a wisp of curtain,
flower-patterned, thrown across the moon,
the lover who takes you like the roots of grass.
Quest that tempts itself kiss
Quest that tempts itself,
kiss that scatters lips,
petals tick sky behind you
when you’re not looking.
Your ghost writer, Rustichello, made you a knight when you weren’t looking,
visor engraved with sand dunes and camel skulls.
Oh dear, not to be cruel –
but to buy what we tell with our own listening,
just to whisk-line the portraits of the children,
just to give their going-legs the quick to keep going.
I don’t know how I came to this archway, rattling jewels.
I don’t know how an echo lives in a doorway, but when it does
I can hear myself both coming and going.
How do you speak through a visor?
How do I speak –
like water can stir
limbs and debris? –
when the water can take us down into its town at the bottom.
Poling past swans, the boatman
Poling past swans, the boatman sees only white-ruffed reflections.
I can’t see his face.
Above him a traveler walks on cobble, rolled bedding on his shoulder.
He wears a face that says, this way –
Every week, at least one traveler stops to ask Marco advice,
and his stories point signs
for the new one heading down the Silk Road,
face saying this way –
this way and only this – if you have a face.
The boatman has disappeared in white-pasted swan water.
Pretending they’re winged horses,
children by the fish market gallop and flap, hair flashing silver –
Daytime moon, not quite full, sits in.
Marco was ready to come back, more than twenty years ready.
I was never ready but always wanting
to start where water starts –
You took from your robes
You took from your robes
a piece of the Great Khan’s
money – paper – if it can be believed,
pannose, and big
as a veil or handkerchief that might hold a face.
Partly to sit here and unfold paper you rode
through ear-mirages of drums in the desert,
and crying flute sounds –
What your tracks give – the spines of camels, wind-contours of sands –
Money gives, money unfolds
need into the world.
A coin-shaped space on your arm where,
in several years, a mole will appear –
I will never buy but always believe it’s mine.
The trouble with desire – feeding it
just enough – lips to rim, first sip –
I’ll admit I’m concubine to this,
when the wind off the bay
touches tree leaves into spangles –
You can follow desire all the way into
your love for me, two parts curiosity,
three parts wind –
A little like fresh blood
A little like fresh blood, the fish smell
rucks in the breeze today from the wharf.
The people of Zardandan in China wear teeth of gold.
The city of Zardandan shines gold with every smile
or wail,
as Venice goes about its morning, thinking about itself going about its morning –
We Venetians cast nets to catch fish-gleams we thought carats,
and that is Marco’s face
when he remembers the twenty years gone.
Caught in this thought, I listen for the children
only to remember they’ve been taken
by Niccolò and Maffeo for the day,
to adventures of rubies and turquoise and pearls,
making ruby and turquoise and pearl luck,
to play at the Polo family trade: weighing rocks,
inspecting facets slicing
when ruby and turquoise and pearl luck is not part of a face
but worn on weighted fingers,
while sun enamels a wall.
Daneen Wardrop’s poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, TriQuarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southern Humanities Review. She is also the author of two books of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson’s Gothic (University of Iowa Press).
THE LAUGHING BUDDHA by Jeanne Emmons
He was shiny and white, and tiny porcelain children
swarmed him as if he were not a prophet, as if he were not
enlightened, but just some fat, jovial uncle, on a hot day,
his undershirt off and his belly glistening with sweat.
I brought him to sixth grade when we had a unit on China.
He had been given to my father by a student from Hong Kong
and stood a good foot high. I thought he was fine, with those
pendulous earlobes, those teeth, the babies, that bald head.
I sat him on a ledge by the window where there was,
alas, no Bodhi tree. And when a boy suddenly turned
and knocked him off, I knew it was over for me. Hot tears
swarmed me, and my teacher swept the thousand pieces.
The big one with two intact babies. The head, still smiling.
The sandaled feet. And all the shards. All his great form
reduced to what would fit into a shoebox to take home.
An entire tube of my brother’s model airplane glue
was not enough to make him whole, and I thought, if only
there were something to stick him to and not that emptiness
he had to be suspended around, like a ball of bees
in the air around the hive. It was no use. I lay on the bed
and waited for my father, pretending sleep, and then
his entry was like a storm about to burst, the air electric.
He stood over my bed, and he knew I was awake,
as I knew he would, and he said so to my mother.
Where did the moment go in which his hand came down?
Did he strike me? Did he thunder? How can I not know? I know
only the anticipation and the remembrance surrounding it,
and the sound of light breaking on all the shiny children.
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. Her second book, Baseball Nights and DDT, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. Her poetry has appeared in American Scholar, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, Wisconsin Review, and College English. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
ANGLES RATHER THAN ANGELS by John Morgan
What was odd inside the dome were all
the angles, lacking roundness, in the stifling
air, as we slogged up single-file past
easy breathing, each corner crammed
with fagged-out pilgrims fanning, and
glanced through ordinary panes of glass
at tiled roofs with concrete buttresses,
which showed the engineering, not the blessing,
after all that holy glitter down below,
and finally emerging at the bell,
gazed upon a miniature city
which seemed a blowsy fresco of itself,
yet almost natural, under an egg-shell sky,
as if it simply grew there like a rose.
John Morgan’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and the anthology, Mercy of Tides. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
COMPASS ROSE by Donald Platt
For my mother-in-law, Daingerfield Davis Roeser (1925–2002)
North
“A spot on the lungs,” and a new country
opens before you. The doctor’s words clear
the sky. Wind is a blackboard eraser
wiping the cloud nouns back to blue nowhere.
Ten degrees. After the leaves fall, there is
more sky. Learn here to read what lasts. Bare trees
scrawl the letters of their gnarled alphabets.
The teacher let me clean the erasers
at recess. I clapped them together, felt
cymbals, mute music, chalk dust I breathed in.
Northeast
In the house I grew up in, the windows
had bubbles. Some were the size of the fizz
in flutes of brut champagne. A steady stream
that rose to explode on my upper lip.
Others were clear blisters, which held the air
people were breathing in the mid-eighteen
hundreds. I wanted to pop the bubbles
and breathe that older, colder air. One was
the size of a microscope’s peephole. I
shut one eye, looked through it with the other,
and saw the world warp – shriveled crab-apple
globes swirled into blood gouts on a black branch
against snow, leopard gules and rampant, bend
sinister, white escutcheon of nothing.
East
While she is doing dying’s slow inch work
and the doctor orders more CAT scans and
radiation, I split wood near the cold
spring equinox, Canaan, Connecticut.
To be outside of time and place. To be
nowhere. Here I concentrate on the axe,
on swinging it down in a perfect arc
whose center is the point where my sternum
and clavicle meet, on finding the right
angle to split the hardwood asunder
and open what grew slowly in the dark,
its raw ripped grain, an inner aurora
borealis of the quickening mind,
concentric circles of the sun beneath
bark. What the whetted axe says as it thunks
again into the seasoned chopping block
is equinox, equinox, equinox.
Crocus spoken out of the frozen ground.
Southeast
One day I too will leave it all behind.
The Chock-Full-O’-Nuts coffee can brimming
with nails, screws, wing nuts. A basket you wove
from strips of supple pine, meant to hold eggs
warm from the fat brood-hen. That green hose coiled
in the shade by your mulched beds, the always-
about-to-strike snake of invisible
water, one hundred pounds of pressure per
square inch, held back by the nozzle’s trigger
finger, the spigot left on. April comes
and goes. Some days your hands are knotted pain.
They worked the soil and made hydrangeas bloom,
azaleas, gardenias, and sweet peas.
Outside, on the wrought-iron chair, I see
a sweat-stiffened, leather gardening glove
that still holds the shape of your closing hand.
South
Over your cell phone, the hiss and backwash
of each strained breath. “I don’t need a second
damn opinion.” Your diagnosis is
some unpronounceable carcinoma,
stage IV, both lungs. “Weeks,” the sole prognosis.
Magnolias open their supernovas
among the dark-green leaves. A seam of ants
crawls across the creamy blossom. You see
everything for the first time because
it has become the last time. The solstice
holds us in its interminable light.
A hummingbird hovers the bergamot,
its wings vibrate eighty times per second.
Seventy years turn to iridescence.
Southwest
The place where neither moss nor rust corrupts,
where thieves do not break through and steal, exists
not behind some dead-bolted door, but here
at the center of the wilting desert
rose, whose outer petals turn almost black.
My fingers crumble them into a bowl
for potpourri, she loves me, she loves me
not, until I come to the inner red
velvet vellum plush of living petals
beneath the desiccated ones, faint smell
of must and green perfume, the day distilled
to two small words, I am, I am. Outside,
Carolyn Hall, my wife’s old friend, waters
hot peppers, diagnosed twelve years ago
with lymphoma. I am, I am. Six months
were all the doctors gave her. Chili pods
dried, sliced open, and the seeds sautéed
in cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oil
until our eyes sting and water. I am,
I am. Essence of sun and dirt is all
we are at best. Because the nozzle leaks,
a cuff of water curls around her wrist,
cool sleeve of seamless everlastingness.
Lizard’s tongue, quick as lightning, licks the air.
West
Tethered like a dog to her oxygen
tank by twenty feet of thin clear tubing,
my mother-in-law has traveled the world,
which is now reduced to one chair, one bed.
She waits for the movers to come and pack
up the house. Coughing for each breath, hacking
like a jackhammer, she must keep going
up and up into death’s thinner air with
no way down. Soon she will reach the summit,
stand still, and see three hundred and sixty
degrees, immeasurable blue distance,
mountains’ groundswell, rough chop in the middle
of the Pacific. She remembers when
she was a car-sick child in the back seat
of their black Buick and her stepmother
pointed out the green sweep of terraced hills.
“What are terrorist hills?” she had asked. Now
she must travel these badlands without her
oxygen. She sees clearly the mother
who abandoned her, who on their last day
together wore a white muslin dress, scent
of lavender. Her mother is bending
close to kiss her, and she shouts, “No, I hate
you. Go away!” And then she comes back to
the bare room, to faces she should know, to
someone stooping over her and giving
her a glass of ice water. Is it her
own daughter? Are the movers here at last?
Northwest
Yesterday you were cremated. The wind
comes out of the northwest with light rain. Men
in wet yellow hardhats slowly lower
concrete pipes suspended by swaying chains
from the meat-hook of an orange crane down
into the gouged, muddy, six-foot ditch. They
are laying a wastewater main. Who will
scatter your ashes above the high-tide
line at Cape May Point, those low dunes you used
to walk along? Your husband and younger
son will go there alone, dig a shallow
trench that measures one body length, and shake
white ashes, light as down, from a tin can.
While Douglas watches, Erwin will cover
the trough with sand. When he has brushed the last
grains back over you, he will howl once, cry
out your name. The sun opens and shuts like
a clam shell. Surf makes the noise of rending
metal. The sea slides in and out on its
slick ball bearings. You are here and nowhere.
True North
The first hurricane will wash your ashes
away. You’ll be swept south past Diamond Shoals,
whose soundings cannot be charted because
their sands keep shifting. No map will tell us
in what whirlpool-potholed five-knot riptide
you’ve dissolved. Where is true north? Compasses
spin wild. You will go beyond Ocracoke
Island, past Cape Fear and Frying Pan Shoals,
through shallow waters full of shipwrecks and
unexploded ordnance. You will pass through
the mouths of moray eels. One with the surge
and silt, you will be continually
translated. You are the compass rose’s
eight petals in which all directions meet.
Here
I stand in front of the raised beds of roses,
dumbly touch their torn, tissue-paper petals,
origami that no human hand can fold,
velvety vermilions, yellows tinged with blush
along their edges, salmons, creams, each hybrid
labeled with a metal nameplate stuck into
the dirt at its roots. Chrysler Imperial,
Queen Elizabeth, Tropicana, Peace,
I recite the names of the roses to ease
my mind full-blown with grief. On a single bush
I see together the unopened buds like
infants’ uncircumcised penises, full blooms
as big as small cabbages, and the wilting
heads with their disheveled petals. Paradise,
Shreveport, Summer Dream. It’s over so quickly.
The day before she died, my mother-in-law,
who could no longer speak, scrawled out her last words:
“I’m better. Cannot exert. Go out & play.”
The next day her older son, to whom she had
given power of attorney, bent his head
down to hers, hair spread out upon the pillow
like the rays of a gray sun in a drawing
by a child, and then told her that they had signed
the deed over, sold the old house. She nodded
and died. General Boener, French Lace, Honor.
A black woman, pushing an old white woman
in her wheelchair out for air, stops and points at
a squirrel, brown rat with a feather boa
curled over its back like a question mark. It’s
eating red-orange petals. “Well, I never
seen a squirrel eat no rose before. That’s a
first. Look at how his mouth is all red.” We stare.
The squirrel scares, literally ‘hightails’ it
up a scrub pine. A woman with a walker
comes and buries her wrinkled, made-up face deep
in Mister Lincoln’s big, luxurious blooms,
breathes in their scent. “That’s the best,” she says. “He’s just
a doll.” I can smell their perfume from three feet
away. It mixes with the salt onshore breeze.
Fragrant Cloud, Double Delight, Mister Lincoln.
Donald Platt’s second book, Cloud Atlas, was published in 2002 by Purdue University Press as the winner of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and the Southern Review. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
DON’T TRY by Virgil Suárez
What Bukowski wanted (and got)
put on his grave stone. Did he mean
the horses, the whores, writing?
Bad poetry? Cheap cigars on a cold,
homeless night on the granite-hard
stoop of some flophouse, or soup kitchen.
Life? Death, always outside the window
on the fire escape, that light that glows
from the bar across the street. Jump?
Suicide? Poems about writing poems?
Fame? Fortune? To hear someone
hack up phlegm in a rooming house,
other side of peeling plaster? Sure,
all this and more, and to live into a ripe
old age when even the budding flowers
will send you into an allergy attack,
a cat chasing a mockingbird up a branch,
a whooping cough someone, an old lady
crossing the street with her groceries
can even mistake for laughter, her skirt
halfway up the back of her legs. Heed
the advice or not, you will be doubly fooled.
JESÚS OF TOURETTE’S SYNDROME by Virgil Suárez
“Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come here to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
to the lepers in your head?”
– U2
We called him El Jeferson, because he pronounced
his name in Spanish: “Me llamo el Jeferson Fernández.”
We beat him up during the basketball games in gym,
dragged him over the cement until his knees bled.
His eyes rolled into the back of his head and frothy
saliva webbed the corners of his mouth, then he’d start
to mouth all these curses in Spanish: “Putos! Jotos!
Pendejos! Putosjotospendejos! Putosjotospendejos!”
He’d say it over and over until we were all bent over
holding our sides trying not to choke on our own
laughter. We kicked him, spat on his hair, kicked
up dirt into this mouth. Then when the teachers
ran toward us, we took off over the fence. How many
truancies didn’t we already have anyway? We only
came to school to kick Jeferson Fernández’s ass.
“Tijuanero!” we shouted back at him. “Wetback!”
Some said the trouble with Jeferson started at birth
when his mother dropped him on his head, and we
loved to watch him twitch, and then start shouting:
“Hijos de puta! Hijos de puta! Putosjotospendejos!”
Tantric quality of Spanish words still aglow fire-red.
Virgil Suárez is the author of three recent poetry collections, Palm Crows (University of Arizona Press), Banyan (LSU Press), and Guide to the Blue Tongue (University of Illinois Press). His selected and new poems, 90 Miles, is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press. This is his fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MY JOHN DONNE by Kurt S. Olsson
The boy who drew clowns and learned me
how to paint my eyes into bright buttons of pain.
John Donne, cattail flick and scalpel feet,
not just held back but (moron)
sent back two whole grades so he could sit behind me
and pour fuck down my first grade ear.
Who said his prayers each night, then unsaid them next day.
Whose smile shimmered like eels in a wheelbarrow.
John Donne, lost prince,
whose stepfather bet the Mustang in a card game,
while his mother, hidden behind a yellowing blind,
mimed the fleshy desire of trees.
Who smoked until his pupils drowned green
and chugged stupidity until his heart traded seats with his knees.
John Donne, who grew less and less until his voice disappeared
into the hiss of a saw blade, his brains soaked up with an eyedropper.
Who sprinted zigzag with the amputated grace of a chicken
and hid his genitals like the runt doused in every litter.
John Donne, master of the dialects of sorrow:
how, in his palm, a broken tooth, in certain light,
trembled like a key in a player piano.
Kurt S. Olsson is a recipient of a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. His chapbook, I Know Your Heart, Hieronymus Bosch, was winner of the Portandia Group’s chapbook contest in 2000. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Field, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Threepenny Review.
THE FURY OF ESCAPED BLOOD by Kurt Brown
All I knew of Europe was a farm somewhere
in upstate New York near Saratoga, a little place
my uncle owned, an immigrant – someone
from my mother’s side of the family,
fleeing the Nazis in Austria. He worked
for a big American oil company, the one
with a galloping red Pegasus, emblem
of winged transit, freedom of escaped blood.
A big guy with a toothy grin, he loved
to laugh, face flushed, eyes dull with fatigue,
skin already wizened, as if old, battered
from a boyhood spent herding cows.
And his wife, my aunt, would stand dead center
in her garden, arms chapped, hands
caked with clay, to squint against the hard light
flooding her rows – dusty spheres of lettuce,
rhubarb stretching waxy, pink necks;
pebbled sacks of cucumbers lolling in shade.
They spoke in phlegmy, throat-rattling
German, orders or endearments, I couldn’t tell,
though it’s clear they loved each other,
shared the rural pleasures of their farm –
dirt-daubed, remote, a single country lane
lost among maples and stone walls.
You’d think they were hiding, tucked away
like that. But my uncle must have driven
to his job – a little warehouse in the village
branded with the symbol of a red horse.
One time, he played a game with me.
While he sat sprawled in a wooden chair
behind the house, I fired arrows into the air
above his head – straight as I could –
so they’d fall around him, coming closer
with each shot. I was aghast, but he just laughed
and urged me on, taking pleasure
in my fear and the narrow margin
of his escapes. But that was years ago.
Their world has vanished, sylvan acres
gobbled up – all that sauerkraut and wurst,
pickled onions packed in crocks, clean
slices of potato steeped in brine.
You don’t see that red horse
much anymore. The sky’s clear over Europe.
No bright warheads puncturing peace,
no more flames that leapt a continent
as though on wings, hooved and jubilant,
spreading everywhere, then out.
Kurt Brown is the author of Return of the Prodigals (Four Way Books, 1999), More Things in Heaven and Earth (Four Way Books, 2002), Fables from the Ark (Custom Words, 2004), and a fourth collection, Future Ship, due out from Story Line Press in 2005. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MANPORTABLE GRAIL by Brian Turner
Imagine a spidery white film of chemicals
airbursting above the town, a helicopter’s engines
growling, rotor blades invisibly ruckling the air,
the streets full of sprinting panic, and adrenaline.
Imagine stumbling to crawl under a truck chassis,
watching tennis shoes and boots and high heels
landing on the pavement, the view from this angle
unreal, to see that chemical webbing drift down
to cover everything, like dirty snow in December,
to see a girl clawing at her own face, to free it,
people stripping under the rooftop awnings,
yelling for buckets of water, wet rags, and help.
There is no imagining fear. There is only this
shivering under a truck, its undercarriage black
as the belly of that helicopter above, an old man
laughing in the street, naked, touching his skin, his voice
breaking thin, saying this is ok, this is nothing at all.
* * *
A chemical was dispersed which was reported at first to be toxic to humans. It is named Manportable Grail. After analysis, it was determined to be non-toxic and not a chemical or biological warfare agent. However, the purpose of this material is still unknown. – from Bosnia Country Handbook, DOD-2630-BK-023-98, July 1998
Brian Turner’s poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Cimarron Review, and Rhino.
DRIVING TOWARD THE SUN by David Hernandez
Soon enough, after this slow bend
under the overpass, we will know
the story of this gridlock,
why the red eyes of brake lights
are opening their lids. We ease
around the turn and see the medallion
of the sun, a bonfire in the sky.
Every windshield blinded by gold,
but this is Southern California –
we fish-out sunglasses from glove
compartments, purses, shirt pockets.
By the roadside, two cars
shattered by velocity and glare.
Traffic unloosens as the rest of us
accelerate, every car towing
its own rectangular shadow,
the deepest lavender, the hole
of an open grave at dawn – Damn,
it’s barely seven a.m. and already
I’m confronted with death.
I dwell on my mortality, theirs,
then mine again. The pros and cons
of coffin and urn. One’s too
claustrophobic. The other
you’re cooked and cooked
until you’re seven pounds of ash.
No wonder some of us believe
in the afterlife, the spirit flitting
in the body, the spirit shuttling off
to heaven after it’s unzippered
from the body. Up ahead
our closest star blazes. Bumper
to bumper we make a beeline
toward its light, honeying our skin.
Our sun-warmed and borrowed skin.
David Hernandez is the author of the poetry collection, A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press). His poetry has appeared in Epoch, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Mississippi Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
CLIMBING TO 2000 FEET OVER BUCKLAND, ALASKA by Susanna Mishler
I don’t think this is what
the Wright Brothers had in mind
that winter day in North Carolina,
when Orville finally flew
a powered glider down Kill Devil Hill.
Maybe Wilbur’s mind leapt ahead
as he considered his airborne brother – to imagine
flight demonstrations in Paris,
or a cover design for his future biography,
or he may have been struck suddenly
by the military future of such a machine.
And perhaps Orville’s knuckles whitened
on the controls upon seeing the earth
and his thoughtful brother slide beneath him, overcome
with wordless, terrified joy
and by the eternity of those twelve seconds.
But it probably never occurred to them then
that anyone would regard this
Eskimo village from the fixed wings
of their invention. They did not foresee
the plywood cabins made tiny
from above or the snowmobiles pulling
toboggans over swells of drifted snow.
They did not think of how
people from distant villages would fly
here to eat fish and caribou
and potato salad together,
then sing off-key gospels into early morning,
their voices radiating from the village
in concentric circles as if their prayers
were pebbles dropped in a pool of water.
I wonder what the brothers would think
if their spirits could see these Eskimo families
climbing the stairs of this Cessna Caravan
today, dressed in their ruffed parkas;
see how some are now gratefully
asleep in their seats, and the few
who sit awake at the windows
hold sugared coffee and look
for herds of spring caribou migrating
over the outstretched palms of the land below.
Susanna Mishler is an MFA student at the University of Arizona, where she is a poetry editor for Sonora Review. Her poetry has appeared in Margie and Spoon River Poetry Review. She received first place in the UAA/Anchorage Daily News Statewide Writing Contest for Open Poetry (2000).
IN THE TIME IT TAKES by Susan Hutton
A man in Iowa tries to record everything that happens
in his life
and how long it takes. He’s become famous for his record,
a list of temperatures and gas prices, trips to the mailbox
and the time it takes to write it all down.
I once heard him read an excerpt on the radio: 12 minutes IGA,
4 cans creamed corn, on sale, 49 cents each; hello to Ann Fuller,
three minutes;
eight minutes coming home; as the interviewer talked over
his catalogue of worthless details.
Who knows what part will matter? The heart beats
100,000 times a day.
The space between North America and Europe widens.
We barely notice the neighbors’ houses until they’re painted.
We overlook the trees. We marry for love, expecting
the mornings together,
but we’ll remember the pear blossoms fluttering
down to the grass.
We get to choose what we think is important, but not
what survives.
Sundays, after supper, my great-aunt and my grandmother
would walk out the kitchen door to shake out
the good tablecloth.
Blackbirds flew across the sun, knitting the clouds together.
Susan Hutton’s poetry has appeared in Double Take, The New England Review, and Cream City Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
IN JULY by Marilyn Abildskov
The day before they had argued. He had
watched her walk down the hall smiling
and talking to that boy with a cracked front
tooth. And he hadn’t been able to say what
was the matter. All he could say was, You
were wearing that red silk Chinese shirt,
the one with two dozen buttons up the front
that he had fingered a thousand times in his
mind. And now they were quiet, driving on
this old country road, getting lost and liking it,
and he was thinking he liked this, this rhythm,
and he liked driving her into the night. And then
she started fiddling with the radio and swearing,
saying, Shit, there’s nothing but country here,
shit. And then she gave up and started moving
her hand from the radio to him and he was
liking it, the rhythm, the night, the static-as-
music, the way they were together and always
would be now, and he was liking it and not
liking it, this song caught between two songs.
Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country (University of Iowa Press Sightline Series). Her fiction and essays have appeared recently in Fourth Genre, Apalachee Review, New Orleans Review, and Quarterly West. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
LAVENDER DRESS by Maureen Clark
“The path up and down is one and the same.”
– Heraclitus
It would be interesting to do it all backwards,
start out old and grow young;
the arthritic knuckles bending like rivers
instead of wood, cataracts clearing
before your eyes.
Imagine the startling climax, foreplay
following, remorse before the sin, temptation.
a dangling leftover, breasts fading
into the slim girl-body.
To know starting out that the boy
you wait for at the 9th Grade dance
has already stood you up,
no matter how many times
you lean against the tiled wall
of the gymnasium.
And still, you will go out
and buy the lavender dress.
Maureen Clark’s poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Puerto del Sol, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry.
IN THE PINES by Paula Bohince
I conjure from this witchy air
my father –
his weightlessness
balanced on the lowest branches,
his needles a comb
for the wind to sing through.
When he falls, I’ll have my bed
beneath the boughs.
Wait, and he’ll bristle into
a hive of godliness,
the larger voice for which I listen,
clinging like a locust to the bark.
Paula Bohince’s poetry has appeared in Agni, Mississippi Review, Willow Springs, and The Midwest Quarterly.
AMERICAN GOTHIC by Bryan D. Dietrich
And suddenly I find something, hiding down some hall
in my head, though not my head but a house
– Mark Z. Danielewski
Sometimes it lurks just inside
the threshold, a formless figure
darker than the ink it inhabits
leaning on the yaw that is
your door. Other nights you hear it
in other rooms: the kitchen,
sweeping dead skin into wicker
baskets; the mud room, setting bones
in precise piles; the basement,
methodically knocking.
My father’s first house had three rooms.
Bath, dining, living. . . . These don’t count.
It’s the bedrooms life lingers in.
Here, where we pile up simply
all we’ve ever had, everything
we’ll never need. Partridge Family
albums, pennies in plastic buckets,
Bomba the Jungle Boy, photographs
of sink baths, old ledgers, old bills. . . .
Whatever we have to remember.
My room was filled with schooners,
tiny ships my father ferried back
from across seas he’d only skimmed
in DC-10s. A dragon prowed
Viking vessel. A Vietnamese
sloop tooled in teak. From Thailand,
two metal yawls. A Peruvian straw
junk that wouldn’t stay bound.
And then my favorite, a ketch, all
shells, even its sails, from Taipei.
My sisters’ room was crowded too.
A whole wall of dolls, homunculi
from Hawaii, Spain, Japan, the litter
of various lands. Ice, Green, Newfound.
Some dressed, some nude, a few whose heads
opened into odd, whole body purses,
but each color coordinated.
Purple equaled eldest, green, youngest,
red, right in the middle. From room
to room we wandered through the world.
And our parents? Their room always
seemed mostly Mother’s. Hearts blown
from carnival glass, a whole family
of porcelain mice, two hundred pairs
of shoes. On the walls, paintings
by my dead cousin, a Japanese
print of Mt. Fuji in winter,
a shadow box – one angel per
month. A bell beside the bed, a glass
of ice water, pills. Then, of course, her.
As long as you can remember
it’s been there, waiting at the edge
of each sleep’s door, in every house,
every city, guardian
at the lid to oblivion,
last ectoplast you see at night,
the black within black that harbors,
you suspect, a deeper darkness.
And though you’ve never seen them, you
imagine teeth too, row upon row.
On the front door hung a plaque.
THE DIETRICHS written in mock
Japanese characters, the Ts
and Hs tapered like miniature
pagodas. Six figures, weeble-ish
bubble people, wobbled beneath
the name in colored kimonos.
Black and white for my folks. Purple,
red, green for my sisters. Blue for me.
Round. All of us. Perfect and impervious.
Under this a peephole bored
through the door. On summer days,
around six, the sun shone through
that tiny glass and cast a dot,
rainbow-shot, on the opposite
wall, lighting another plaque inside.
In the corner behind Mother’s
rocker, it read, “For God so loved
the world. . . . ” Each August day
we would line up, let that light mark us.
In the evenings my sisters cooked,
usually pot pies, Spam. Sometimes
we went out. Tuesdays were Sirloin
Stockade night. I loved the bull
that stood like Bunyan’s blue ox
on rollers outside. Some nights Mother
came with us. Mostly not. That
Stockade isn’t anymore. In ’78,
before they were shot, six people
were locked in the freezer there.
During the afternoons, each taking
turns keeping Mother’s water filled,
we played Twister, Which Witch is Witch,
Old Maid, Who Stole the Diamonds?
Or, more often than not, TV.
I remember Jeannie and Bewitched,
The Flying Nun, so many strong,
powerless women. And Daddy?
Barring Tuesdays, he was off – France,
the Azores – bringing back our colors.
All canine, no cuspids, the teeth
accordion like Lon Chaney’s
in London After Midnight, the blindcrone’s in House on Haunted Hill.
They say we control what haunts us,
what we raise from these Boggy Creeks
called hearts, but tonight you know it
will be there again, bloodless,
bat-like, elbow walking its way
to the hem of your bed.
Some summers they dropped us off
at Maw Maw’s or Aunt Arleda’s.
Other times we’d head to Six Flags.
The last time Mother summered with us
rain made my father mad. Spent
the whole day on an Arctic raft.
The final trip of any kind we took
together was when we packed up
everything and headed to Lockney
for a week, another aunt’s house.
A fight – more father froth, wrath –
made him turn around the minute
we arrived. Six hours back home,
at midnight. Though the next day
they were reconciled, though we did
return in the end, it was Mother
who seemed to stay behind. Even later,
when it was just the girls, Daddy, me,
before I was old enough for haunted
houses, the scares had to come in bites.
So, Lion Country Safari, Seven
Seas, The Gun Fighter’s Hall of Fame.
Once, at the latter, wandering
around a display of a late night
lynching, past signs that said NOT
FOR CHILDREN, the whole thing
boarded up like an abandoned mine,
I peeped through the lowest knothole
and saw six would-be Bill Bonneys
dancing from the ceiling in shadows.
I never told anyone what I’d seen,
how the heads were almost off on two,
blood everywhere. Later that week,
on a ride called the Monster, maybe
the Tarantula, suspended between
tarmac and terror, head spinning,
the world walking away, I imagined
how it must have been for them.
I saw my cousin collapsing in sand.
I saw Mother ringing her bell.
Black-spatted vampire, cataract
wracked witch, night itch. . . . It could be
anything, nothing, all Lovecraft
ever dreamed. In “The Dreams in the Witch-
House” he tells us he’s heard “the wild
whispers of the chimney-corner,”
explains how even THE three evil books
don’t loosen cobbles between us
and “them” as easily as, say, odd
angles, numbers, a house’s history.
One Christmas, all my dad wanted
was three words. Little ones, he said.
And it would be maudlin if it weren’t
true. An act of language. A verb, two
pronouns. But as I hunkered under
the tinny rustling of our aluminum
tree, under red balls bathed in the tri-
colored fracture of manufactured
light spinning the tree turquoise,
magenta, stop-light orange. . . .
As I clutched each treasure up
from beneath our melted angel
perching drunk among the topmost
branches, wand and arm gone limp,
I didn’t find schwas or labials,
no voiceless interdentals,
only big red Xs, no mas.
My father gave her all he had
to give that year. Another ring.
Another cold circle of light.
And she took it, added it
to the others already growing
heavy on her hands, as if she were
that tree itself, adding rings with each
year, oblivious to all those old
saws that promised to bring her down,
woodman with her, unaware
of how far she had come from that
seventeen-year-old hanging bedsheets
over blinds over windows.
Each time, afraid. Each time watching
her husband leave. She who knew nothing
of sex. Even less of the man
who wooed her on the wing, whetted her
with the wail of jets. Now, four kids
and forty thousand dollars in debt. . . .
I don’t know if she ever told him
after that, returned what he thought
he had given. I just guessed
the words, aloud, like he wanted.
Dickens was right. Ghosts come in three
flavors: what you despise, yet can’t
escape; what you are and don’t wish
to be; what you crave, but cannot have.
Professional ghost hunters remain
torn. Some indeed say three, others, two,
and though folklorists make it worse,
by the thousands, haunting is simple,
like Christmas. The past. The future.
Divided by impossible presence.
Before the first divorce, another
room had to be added, this one
outside, away, on the other side
of town. As far from the old house
as she from her hysterectomy.
Mother’s new apartment, alive
with lava lamps and godseyes, paved
in paisley and leopard print, spotted
from bath to boudoir like all the new
panties and bras he’d bought her.
Three years later I’m shoveling skivvies
into the washer at our own new
apartment when Fayoma, third
aunt of four, phones my dad to get even.
While I portion out parts of Tide
to dirty laundry, Daddy takes the call.
She reveals what went on in that room.
Dozens she says. Our doctor, probably
the preacher, a TV repairman. The night
tumbles away. Wash, rinse, repeat.
“Whosoever shall put away his wife,
saving for the cause of fornication,
causeth her. . . . ” He had been saving.
He had bought. Apartment, clothes, second
marriage, three years. . . . But nobody knew
this then. Even the aunts just assumed
he’d had her committed. And me?
I had a new place to swim, a library
with The House With a Clock In Its Walls,
Bradbury’s “The Man Upstairs.”
The Field Guide to Ghosts breaks
them down into Revenants,
Apparitions and Harbingers,
some crisis, some non, some simply time
slips. The Ghost Hunter’s Bible posits
poltergeists are linked to human agents –
women, usually – who tick on,
hugger-mugger, like Typhoid Mary.
Anxiety, obsession, any emotional
tension sets the tables turning.
1976. Year of independence.
The first divorce is a lot like second
grade. Back during the bed days –
Mother ringing her bell, Daddy off
to elsewhere – they sent me to pre-school
every morning, real school only
after. When the final bell rang
I had to wait at the front of the school,
watch through vast, elementary
windows for a blue VW van.
Then Hillside Christian Daycare. More
waiting. The final leg. First day
of daycare I forgot, went to find
my mom at the school corner. An hour,
maybe more. Then to Mother’s stylist,
her house across the street, tears. Finally
she came for me. I found it was less
than three blocks only after Mother
took custody, when I started walking
home. I never passed that way again.
One night, unable to sleep, Lord
Dufferin goes to the window, sees
a man bearing a long box on his back.
The man turns, looks at the Lord.
Their eyes meet, Dufferin shudders
and he recognizes his casket. Years
later, in Paris, he sees the man again,
approaching an elevator. He steps
back, shocked, as the lift doors close,
the cable snaps and everybody dies.
Not long after that first divorce,
awkwardly dating my dad again,
Mother made a trade. Lay for loot.
Rights for rings. Daddy got me
in the deal, half of what he wanted, while
Mother walked away again, with her wampum.
The last night in our first house I woke
to see a familiar form lurking just inside
my door. I couldn’t breathe. I swear
at the hospital I saw it again.
Some say the gods have given up
their ghosts. Recent REM research
suggests we who half wake during dreams –
arms and legs anesthetized by nature,
by the body’s own stopgap to stop sleep
walking – we fill in futility, that fear,
with our best, most recent bogeys.
It’s what we’ve always done. What holds us
down, what’s now little grey men, was once
lamiai, Lilith, langsuyar. Wampir and witch.
Nothing, not even more marriages
set them free. Senior year. Two husbands,
six, maybe seven seasons later,
Mother, bruises still brilliant
on her neck, jumped ship, left her trucker
terror behind and stayed a few months
with Daddy and me. It wasn’t long
before my father’s furies cast her
adrift again, his money running short,
tired of trial-size redemption.
As such, The Presence of the Past
doesn’t tell us anything we shouldn’t
already know. What we do remains.
Wherever we do it resonates.
You’ve often wondered what happens
to Schrödinger’s cats, which one – it
or its twin, both trapped in six-sided
boxes – is living or dead, knowing
full well that if no one feeds them, both
will be both dead and alive, forever.
It’s going on six years now. Mother
and Daddy together again. Divorced,
yes, but still sharing towels. After
number three, my mom couldn’t make it
alone. My dad even called to ask
what I thought. “I’m going to have
a boarder,” he said. And I, “Just be
careful.” To her, “Are you sure? You
know he still loves you.” She, “I trust
it’ll only be temporary.”
A through Z. Animatronic
to zombie. Every haunted house
has to have them: pneumatic corpse
and neck stump, self-rocking chair
and asynchronous flickering lamp.
What hovers: dangling crank spider,
hanging skeleton cage. What emerges:
pond monster, Peter pumpkinhead.
What disturbs: blood transfusion
bottles, punchbowl babydoll.
My father’s new house has three rooms,
his and Mother’s. Another to separate
the two. Over the front door hangs,
unfaded, the old DIETRICHS plaque.
Betty Boop and Precious Moments
(Mother’s, all) cover every surface.
The old China cabinet stands again
in one corner of the kitchen, six
sheaves of dead roses interred on top.
Six more singles hang from the wall.
Ever since you first heard “The Man
With the Golden Arm,” the first time
you watched Dr. Phibes Rises Again
or at last recognized yourself
as stuck, sealed off in this body
we all have to ride to the grave. . . .
You’d think by then you would have known
what terrors lay ahead, what gothic
bluster a summer of sister pester
and cousin cluster had prepared for you.
Yet approaching Aunt Arleda’s
barn, its badly weathered wood whorl
lowing in the wind like a brinded
cow, Lee flares skirting devil’s
claw and pumpkin gourd, barely
ten, lurching between a rusted
limbo lattice of what everyone
around Carnegie called bob wire
to reach the door, your stomach still
stuttered up larynx rung by rung.
Just inside the door you had to pass
horse blanket curtains hung haphazard
to mute the light, step, stumble and enter
that ersatz haunted house the others
had made. It was your first. As you turned
the corner, set foot in the fear
factory proper, something approached,
a cowled figure darker than surrounding
shadow, a witch with teeth that glowed, blood
descending from her lowermost lip.
Her fingers clawed out to catch you
where you stood, frozen inside
the barn, behind its blind eyes, trapped
inside its mind, the Midwest, this red plain
you’d grown up in, believing it all.
Werewolves, witches who braid mare manes
at midnight. The story of “Lavender,”
Lugosi, Lanchester. You believed
in Price, in paradise, in your parents,
in everything coming after you.
Today, my father’s room is just as mad
as mine once was, his walls barnacled
with jets he never flew, with the future
of ships, the fabled Enterprise
in over 300 incarnations. Beside
Tarzan, Thuvia, maid of Mars,
beside White Fang and all the Holmes
he never understood, one room over
from my mother . . . his Trek collection.
Everything he craves, but cannot have.
You and your siblings list lost among
tombstones that appear like broken teeth
rising through fog. In the house, the first
room, a laboratory. The mad
staff, encephalitic, long-toothed elves.
A woman tied to a bloody gurney.
Hacksaw. Strobe. No anesthetic. The leg
comes off. As. She. Looks. Right through you.
Like your sister always did, chasing you
room to room, after you handed her the knife.
You and your father prowl the last passage
where you know by now a chainsaw
has to be. Near a small stone grove
meant to pass as ossuary, the man
in the hockey mask leaps from behind
PVC and papier maché elm.
As the two of you bolt for the final
door, you fall. Crossing to the threshold,
your father crosses you, his terror
nearly tearing you in half.
You and your best friend arrive late
at the haunted warehouse, downtown
Oklahoma City. The line’s backed
up to where the Federal Building
soon will only once have been.
Discussing Poe and Du Maurier,
what Derleth did to his betters,
all the masters, old and new –
Jacobs, Jackson, Barker, Brite –
you move with the line, you enter.
Somewhere between abattoir
and exit you abandon your hope
to the labyrinth, give in to the heart’s
vertigo, your eyes bootless, hands
begging braille from walls. As you turn yet
another blind corner, growing ever more
inverted, your fingers find it. It screams,
you both scream, the terror sudden,
but done. Now you have to consider
this kid, about ten, more lost even than you.
My mother’s room reminds me
of my sisters’. Chock-a-block with dolls.
In here, it’s always dark, door forever
closed. A towel at the entrance to keep
her smoke from escaping. More Precious
Moments, tiny green dragons, a chair where
she sits listening for what she despises
yet can’t escape. Over the door,
another plaque. THE WITCH IS IN.
When all she wants is out.
The Gothic is not what scares us,
it’s not what waits in grates, below
floorboards. It isn’t what wails
across tarn or tunnels between
studs behind drywall. It doesn’t live
even in stone, though stone, you might
suppose, is closer to the heart
of the matter. From Headlong Hall
to Harvest Home, Dorian to Denver,
each Gothic says the same. Stay, die.
But then we’re all afraid of what lies
outside the fire. When the embers
gutter, when wind fans that old glow
and it wanders up and out of the pit
threatening, finally, the home
you’ve built around what was once
only warmth, when you find yourself
running from that light out into a dark
whose cold is less convivial, yes,
but also holds less terror than being. . . .
What? Consumed by the sublime?
When the stars call down coldly, crow’s
wing touches hair, and the knowledge
finally arrives that you are, indeed,
alone again, there must always come
an even greater terror, that of having
left the wrong dread behind. So,
primitive in your longing, tentative
and green, stained by your own mad thrust
into pine you begin the trip back
and you find, I find, my father
standing just outside the threshold
of my mother’s door, formless,
a figure darker than the ink
he inhabits, arm raised as if
to knock. Inside, my mother
sits in her chair, what’s left of her
life, smoking, blinds drawn, sheets
tacked to windows. Both afraid.
Both aware the knock will never come.
Bryan D. Dietrich is a recipient of the Paris Review Prize in Poetry, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and the Eve of St. Agnes Prize. His first book, Krypton Nights, was published by Zoo Press in 2002. His poetry has appeared in the Paris Review, The Nation, Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MARRIED COUPLE, SINGING by Eva Saulitis
Aglona, Latvia, 1964
And speaking of history,
fifty-seven years
we have been married, so long,
when we sing, our mouths
form the same “oh,” our heads
incline together, our eyes
do not meet. His stiff back
my arthritic wrists, noses
the same potato shape,
forgotten tubers in the center
of our faces. The exiled
grandchildren call us
zemnieki, peasants, this place
“old country.” They want
to inherit our ethnic
names, my flowered
shawl, his strong
hands. Not our histories.
Not this place – the wrecked
thatched-roof farmhouse
where I bore their father,
where we slept nights
through the occupation,
on mattresses stuffed with straw.
Not our memories
of the war. They keep us
like a photograph over a mantle,
a farm couple, singing
folksongs: scarved, booted, wrinkled
rotten apple faces, his tight
tweed vest, straining buttons,
dingy undershirt
smelling of onions, smoke,
manure. My coarse
cotton skirt, apron cinched
above a belly bulge
where I rest my hands.
Relics. Discarded
by history. Vanishing
people. And so
it would be equally
quaint for me
to sigh, say, I was
young once. Instead,
I give them this.
They can call it
inheritance if they
wish, a dream
I had last night:
in the center of our
far Latgalian pasture
a brushfire blazed,
heat driving flames
upward from feverish
coals into the flat, pot-
metal sky of early spring, so hot
it had sunk a black
trench into the ground.
Around the periphery,
two panicked ash-gray
mares galloped.
My body not
in the flames
or on the trampled grass.
I saw it as God
might, a scene
with no one
in it. That fire still
burning a great pit
in the center
of my life around which
something never stops running.
Eva Saulitis was a recipient of a creative writing fellowship from The Alaska State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Connotations, and in several anthologies.
THE BATH by Holly J. Hughes
The tub fills inch by inch,
as I kneel beside it, trail my fingers
in the bright braid of water.
Mom perches on the toilet seat,
entranced by the ritual until
she realizes the bath’s for her.
Oh no, she says, drawing her
three layers of shirts to her chest,
crossing her arms and legs.
Oh no, I couldn’t, she repeats,
brow furrowing, that look I now
recognize like an approaching squall.
I abandon reason, the hygiene argument,
promise a Hershey’s bar, if she will just,
please, take off her clothes. Oh no,
she repeats, her voice rising.
Meanwhile, the water is cooling.
I strip off my clothes, step into it,
let the warm water take me
completely, slipping down until
only my face shines up, a moon mask.
Mom stays with me, interested now
in this turn of events. I sit up.
Will you wash my back, Mom?
So much gone, but let this
still be there. She bends over
to dip the washcloth in the still
warm water, squeezes it,
lets it dribble down my back,
leans over to rub the butter pat
of soap, swiping each armpit,
then rinses off the suds with long
practiced strokes. I turn around
to thank her, catch her smiling,
lips pursed, humming,
still a mother with a daughter
whose back needs washing.
Holly J. Hughes’ poetry has appeared in Crosscurrents, The Midwest Quarterly Review, Pontoon, The Hedgebrook Journal, and Salt in Our Veins.
RESUMÉ by Edward Weismiller
The books I thought I would never forget I have forgotten,
or laid aside. I may still have them somewhere:
Pliny’s Natural History; The Travels
of Sir John de Mandeville, with enchanting old woodcuts
of the misshapen wonders that were imagined
to lie ahead.
The farm I thought I would never forget sleeps in the dark
of my mind, the crooked outbuildings
without their strong smells, without particulars
except, perhaps, to wasps, barn swallows,
porcupines, a wandering skunk.
The boy I yearned not to be I am not,
unskilled, myopic, a prey to humiliating
heats, mishaps, degradations. Ugly ducklings
change and change, not often into swans.
The gait I could not have imagined would ever be mine is mine,
stiff, uncertain, necessarily slow, canted
a little sidewise. I do not so much not see
as not risk not seeing. I think mostly
about what lies ahead.
I expect to live to be a hundred.
REMAINDERS by Edward Weismiller
The ragged flowers of winter lean
rattling against the walls of cold,
their leaves the sapless death of green,
their petals clenched upon some gold
or red remainder. As if they knew,
and mimicked us, who grow aware
that this high canopy of blue
is also breath and freezing air,
and that, once done with seed, we fend
off death with all in us not dead,
determined both to save and spend
what’s left of gold, what’s left of red.
Edward Weismiller’s fourth collection of poems is Walking Toward the Sun (Yale, 2002). His uncollected poems have appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Nation, and The Atlantic Monthly. In 1936, the twenty-year-old Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Today, more than sixty years later, he retains that distinction and adds another – he is now the oldest living Younger poet.