POETRY
DEATH, ETC. by Maxine Kumin
I have lived my whole life with death, said William Maxwell,
aetat 91, and haven’t we all. Amen to that.
It’s all right to gutter out like a candle but the odds are better
for succumbing to a stroke or pancreatic cancer.
I’m not being gloomy, this bright September
when everything around me shines with being:
hummingbirds still raptured in the jewelweed,
puffballs humping up out of the forest duff
and the whole voluptuous garden still putting forth
bright yellow pole beans, deep-pleated purple cauliflowers,
to say nothing of regal white corn that feeds us
night after gluttonous night, with a slobber of butter.
Nevertheless, what Maxwell said speaks to my body’s core,
this old body I trouble to keep up the way
I keep up my two old horses, wiping insect deterrent
on their ears, cleaning the corners of their eyes,
spraying their legs to defeat the gnats, currying burrs
out of their thickening coats. They go on grazing thoughtlessly
while winter is gathering in the wings. But it is not given
to us to travel blindly, all the pasture bars down,
to seek out the juiciest grasses, nor to predict
which of these two will predecease the other or to anticipate
the desperate whinnies for the missing that will ensue.
Which of us will go down first is also not given,
a subject that hangs unspoken between us
as with Oedipus, who begs Jocasta not to inquire further.
Meanwhile, it is pleasant to share opinions and mealtimes,
to swim together daily, I with my long slow back and forths,
he with his hundred freestyle strokes that wind him alarmingly.
A sinker, he would drown if he did not flail like this.
We have put behind us the State Department tour
of Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Japan that ended badly
as we leapt down the yellow chutes to safety after a botched takeoff.
We have been made at home in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland,
narrow, xenophobic Switzerland of clean bathrooms and much butter.
We have travelled by Tube and Metro o’er the realms of gold
paid obeisance to the Wingèd Victory and the dreaded Tower,
but now it is time to settle as the earth itself settles
in season, exhaling, dozing a little before the fall rains come.
Every August when the family gathers, we pose
under the ancient willow for a series of snapshots,
the same willow, its lumpish trunk sheathed in winking aluminum
that so perplexed us forty years ago, before we understood
the voracity of porcupines. Now hollowed by age and marauders,
its aluminum girdle painted dull brown, it is still leafing
out at the top, still housing a tumult of goldfinches. We try to hold still
and smile, squinting into the brilliance, the middleaged children,
the grown grandsons, the dogs of each era, always a pair
of grinning shelter dogs whose long lives are but as grasshoppers
compared to our own. We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward
stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last.
Maxine Kumin’s fifteenth book, Jack and Other New Poems, was published in January 2005. Her books include Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958–1988; The Long Marriage; a memoir titled Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery; and Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry. Her awards include the Poets’ Prize, the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1980–1981, before that post was renamed Poet Laureate of the United States, and as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994. She is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
HERE by Jesse Lee Kercheval
I am walking
along the banks
of the river
overgrown w/
elephant ears,
kudzu knitting
the palms together.
Here, when I was ten,
a boy in my class
shot his father
in the head.
There was a dock
here then;
you can still
see the pilings.
The boy and his father
had been fishing;
the gun was
in the tackle box,
under the hooks
& lures.
The boy, who sat
two desks to my right,
wouldn’t say
if he and his dad
had argued here.
He only said
he hadn’t caught anything
worth keeping –
just a saltwater cat.
His father, a man
with exacting standards,
threw the catfish
back.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of the poetry collections World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Poetry Series). Her recent poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
A CLEARING WILL COME by Nance Van Winckel
Prague, 2001
Snow here has a deeper history than the two girls
who’ve just received their icy fix. The girls
are new – single-file down a street of Gypsy boys
who pay no mind tonight to their bear.
Like a drunk bride with a silver train, the bear
carries his own chain. And he dances . . . wildly
under high windows, Rachmaninoff on a radio.
Fur-wrapped, the girls pass him without a glance.
For them all eight past tenses are snipped wires.
White pours down on the stone bridge. One girl
ahead, one behind: four high heels pick the way.
Careful, quiet – they resemble a good horse
travelling late, passing slumped pines, and trudging
on, sensing a path, a clearing, a barn full of hay.
90 WOUNDED MEN IN A BARN by Nance Van Winckel
1914, Galicia, Poland
Inside the barn, its brusque attendants – yoke,
plow-blade, and silver scythe – hover
and descend. . . . lamps slowly dimming
and men in their haybeds lowing.
Out of morphine, Lt. Trakl stands in the doorway,
eyeing the advance of weightless futures.
Sixteen hanged men droop from the trees.
Partings of clouds, partings of smoke –
the corpses stare holes in the ground.
A breeze lifts the birds into a flexuous drift.
Their wingbeats give off the sort of applause
that follows black songs, bad singing.
Among restless leaves sixteen dancers spin.
Nance Van Winckel’s recent poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Field, and Ploughshares. Her fourth collection, Beside Ourselves, was recently published by Miami University Press. Her third collection of short stories, Curtain Creek Farm, was published in 2000 by Persea Books. This is Van Winckel’s third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
REDUNDANCY OF LIGHT by Frank Montesonti
Outside this hotel room
rain falls as pure as its definition.
Call the French, tell them
there should be a word
for shadows of raindrops
on a hotel window.
Scientists say that if you could hear your own
heartbeat you’d slowly go insane.
I lie on the floor and the shadow rain
moves over my skin as I listen
to something bigger than my one heart:
billions of people
and their loneliness
rising like humidity.
I wish they would put a shot of whiskey
next to the Bible
in every hotel drawer
so I could warm to the idea
of living forever.
More shadows, more rain,
a pump, bigger and as constant
that I can’t turn it off.
Some trees step out of their shadows.
A few cars make incisions in the skin of water
on the road, but they heal.
They always heal. If, I mean when,
you also realize yours
is the only heartbeat you cannot hear,
I need to tell you something before it’s too late.
It’s too late.
DARK MATTER THEORY by Frank Montesonti
They say that only 1% of the galaxy is
made of stars, 5% heavy gasses
and planets. Less is garbage dumps
on Rhode Island, gulls crying in compassed
circles, and very little statistically
your stockpile of French-cut
green beans gathering dust
slow as the Arctic collects snow.
The rest of the weight of the world
is unattached subatomic particles, so small they can’t
even reflect light. They flow between
the space we feel between us – an ocean
we hardly notice because we are invisible
to most of what is out there. Sometimes a dark matter
particle collides with a visible particle
and the visible particle shakes. Imagine a man losing
his balance and careening
into a small tree. Imagine between each
tree a thousand miles.
In England a team of scientists are
deep in a mine, waiting for one
of these particles to shake an atom of rock.
Standing there, waiting for proof
that we can’t even touch
two thirds of the universe.
They’re just watching these otherwise-useless, nearly
priceless instruments: O my soul!
Frank Montesonti’s recent poems appear in Poet Lore, Spork, Cream City Review, and Black Warrior Review.
AT TEN SLEEP by Thomas Avena
Benches of red shale,
red clay
and strangely castellated cliffs –
as the car climbs
near a frozen lake is a moose
antlers shed, not awkward,
with an odd loping grace, picking
her legs gently and purposefully
out of the snow
dun brown, unhurried
Have you ever seen a moose
– you who can no longer –
See one through my eyes
she climbs through drifts
of snow and pine
“rare to find one”
A half mile away walks
another moose, a mile further
still another
stops and turns
* * *
In this cold, thin air
I’ve snow-shoed for two days
and now, find myself
still awake at 3 am,
windows open, panting;
is this the “crushed glass”
effect in the X-ray of my lungs?
Where the small metastasis was
(still, the doctor had murmured
“I don’t see crushed glass.
We don’t know what we’re seeing
exactly.”)
And in the vanishing-
land of static,
that is the X-ray room
I asked no more questions,
because I held no belief
in their ability to cure)
* * *
Let a stalactite drip
its precious poison into my lung,
or a ray of pure intention
burn the shadows out
* * *
Under starlight,
the moose is all lung
on spindly legs
lung –
like a luminous blue-lit egg
carried through the snow
(no cameras or electrical lines
only
the crushed-glass effect –
the snow powdering down)
* * *
In the silence a twig
cracks; she rears her monumental head
and slowly turns her torso. I see
she is an animal, gray and contained.
My concerns are not hers.
Her knobbed legs
branch thin
carving the frost
return her to momentary shelter –
a shallow cut within walls of granite –
the broken terrain of blue rock
is blanketed in white.
Her tracks powder over.
We are erased.
Ten Sleep, Wyoming
Sierra Nevada, California
Thomas Avena’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and The Best American Poetry 1996. He is the recipient of a 1995 American Book Award for editing and co-writing Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS. He was also the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature and the International Humanitas Award for his work in AIDS education and the arts.
MISSING HOME by Susan Rich
Three days. Enough for everything
to catch fire, a gas leak, a sinkhole,
a bathroom pipe to expire.
Whenever I step away
from my swath of sky, my water-lush
lip of the planet, I wonder
can a house survive
beyond the utterance of earthquakes –
And what about the cats?
Is Sarajevo shredding window screens?
Otis stalking brown paper bags?
When did I convert to domesticity with a house key?
Is the clematis blooming?
The postman clearing his throat
with that clicking noise as he laughs?
GUNFIRE AT THE GOSPIC HOTEL by Susan Rich
Here down on the ground
on a gleaming white porcelain floor,
six months after the end of the Bosnian war,
hunkered behind an S pipe, underneath the tip
of a well-scrubbed toilet seat,
I sob, scream, shake –
not from terror particularly,
although that, too,
but from this outrage: Tonko, Bornfree, me –
That these men will be forever mine,
congregants in a chocolate box
of bombed out bones,
in rooms of curtained flesh.
It is our skirmish of fellowship
unforeseen, not tied to one another
until this blast of aftermath that leads
me to unashamedly pray. Hand-grenades –
and Kalashnikovs exploding
I improvise to the gunmen’s rock ‘n’ roll beat –
Please God don’t take me in Gospic,
not to burn with Tonko and Bornfree.
Susan Rich was the recipient of the PEN West Poetry Award and the Peace Corps Writers Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World (White Pine Press). Her forthcoming collection, Not a Prayer: Poems for this World (White Pine Press), has a publication date of early 2006. This is Rich’s second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
ZAPATEO by Sonja Livingston
I.
Now to the place where men sink women
like pool balls into their pockets,
To the place where a man whose gold dust skin
looks like the earth just north of this city,
Pushes his palms together and wails.
Pushes his palms together and wails
like the Muslim call to prayer,
like an old woman wrapped in black,
Moans muffled by well-meaning relatives
’Til she’s out of the church
and they make their way from their casing,
Slip like the soul from the body.
He calls out the way she calls out,
the moment the body is lowered into the ground.
He lets loose the way she lets loose,
the moment she knows she’s lost.
Senseless pleading, animal sobbing,
mad longing, gut unfurled.
His cry is her cry.
Her cry is our cry.
Those funeral women, these guitar men,
And we, with euros tucked under our thumbs,
are nothing and everything like
The fevered voices, cool sweat of the chest,
the splitting open of the eyes,
The ragged desire for something long gone.
II.
But back to here.
Leave fistfuls of lavender to fall
on the open grave and come back to here.
Back to the tugging of lips with our teeth,
back to warm shroud of cigarette breath,
Back to red wine, red shoes, red flowered skirts.
Here comes the slow turning of the hand.
The dead stare. The moment of doing
And undoing.
Here comes what lies below – the place
we can’t get to without music or wine,
the place where sex wants to take us
and sometimes does take us
Or teases us with bite-sized pieces of.
Here it is.
She stomps it out through her feet.
Slow. Deliberate. Stomping. Then flurry,
Flurry of stomping.
You know this kicking, this digging into the dirt,
this slapping of the floor with the flesh.
Watch her now, teeth to lip, hand to throat. And wait.
For what comes when the hand falls,
what follows the frenzy of limits: The tightened hold,
Pounding of palms, the circling in for, darkest of places,
swirl of skirt, the waiting,
The clapping, the crying. Come, come. Ven, ven.
We are beyond the bone now.
Come to me, Ven acá.
Sonja Livingston’s poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, Apalachee Review, and Whetstone. She received a 2003 Iowa Award and a 2002 Intro Award from the Associated Writing Programs.
NAMING THE END by James Allen Hall
I love you begins the lecture on ancient torture
or reveals the way back to Eve,
who spends her last night naming the flora
by stenciling their pale anatomies
in her husband’s somnolent skin.
The husband is a god. At daybreak,
they abandon the garden. He carries into the world
the only diagram we’ll ever have for devotion.
In the dark interrupted by sirens, I plant words
you’ll never know you carry on your back.
At dawn, you open your eyes to the light
in which you’ll leave me, you rinse that other world
of steam and whisper from your skin. Soon,
you’re filling your dented black car with all your clothes,
all your records and books and love.
When you leave, your skin repeats: I love you.
Gods never sleep and terrible fates await us.
You get to choose. Once.
James Allen Hall’s recent poems and essays have appeared in Margie, The Worcester Review, The Bellingham Review, and The James White Review.
EULOGY FOR THE GALAPÁGOS TORTOISE by Anne Coray
Like Hector, their armor
did them no good,
though they weren’t speared,
merely flipped by whalers,
then pinned with a rock.
Not dragged by chariot
around a tomb –
their legs were thonged,
their eighty-pound bodies
strapped to a human back.
The men must have cursed
that weight in the sweltering heat
as they struggled to the ship
but revenge was not a motive.
The worth of a tortoise?
4,500 calories per man,
equivalent to nine days’ hardtack.
Old pacifists of the slow blink,
they say you could live for up to a year
without any food or water.
I see you on the battlefield,
the open deck, bracing
each roll of waves
with your monumental legs,
swinging in bewilderment
your penile heads.
Surely you would have given up
on the tucked appendage,
and the dome
that was not quite heaven.
You must have understood at last
that only the vulnerable
come close to becoming immortal.
Anne Coray’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poetry, Commonweal, Northwest Review, North American Review, and The Women’s Review of Books. She is the author of the chapbooks Ivory (Anabiosis) and Soon the Wind (Finishing Line).
JULY ISSUE OF TIME PREDICTS HOW THE UNIVERSE WILL END by Katherine Maurer
Eight of ten scientists vote for a whimper
1040 years after these dark pink dogwood petals rotate and converge
on the surface of the pale apartment swimming pool.
Across the hall, the maintenance man sings loudly in Spanish.
Experts propose that time is the fiery film on the outside of the explosion.
Where we cling with the burning threads of ourselves. And they say
inside the explosion it’s empty, ash spinning to a stop, the chaotic drift
of burned paper. Pink galaxies curve in the deep end; across the hall, Barry has moved out.
The maintenance man prepares Barry’s apartment for someone else. He stirs paint,
changes filters, fills cracks around the bathtub with white caulk that oozes
like cake frosting, checks every light bulb. We don’t know where Barry went,
only that he was quiet, broad shouldered, worked in insurance. And that once,
a shy woman in a green dress came to our door looking for him, and once around Christmas
we saw him leave in a tuxedo.
At the edge of the universe, you could fall forever down the inside of a dark sphere.
Two shining black dogs run the corridors between buildings, pink tongues dangling
from the rough edges of their mouths. They come together and spread out to cover ground.
The silent anger of tenants collects at the edges: beer cans, dog shit, dead pigeons.
And we rise from the water, petals clinging to us like gaudy insects.
The maintenance man’s irrepressible tenor rings at my door.
Katherine Maurer’s recent poems have appeared in The Texas Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
CREDO FOR ODDS AND ENDS by Karen Harryman
I believe in the good pen bleeding black
across scraps of paper, backs of envelopes,
receipts, half-spent notebooks, cardboard
covers long-ripped from spiral wire.
I believe in thick coffee tables and crumbs
from last night’s dinner, rings from glasses
of once-cool water. I believe in the house
that is never clean, in quilt scraps and bits
of yarn, ravelings, and threads. I believe in piles
and crooked stacks and palm fronds that drop
without warning to muddle the lawn.
In batteries and bulbs, hard evidence
of the junk drawer, the knot of forgotten wire,
loose leaves of gum. And I will not turn now,
windless, to the stars. I will hang my life
on one spare screw. Who does not want,
does not need a broken lock, a red oven mitt
to turn over and over – tenuous, precious, useful.
Let me start again. A little girl has died.
A father touches one yellow sock to his lips.
Karen Harryman’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Poetry New Zealand, and Connecticut River Review.
AGAINST PASTORALS by Michael Walsh
Sometimes a calf thrashed like a fish
inside a cow and I’d lay my hand
on her warm hide where I last saw
the ripple. And a hoof
would kick my palm, a splash
no one else could hear.
I’d leave to feed the newborns,
able to turn but just barely,
plastic tags popped through their ears
and black scabs in between
where I burned off their horns,
white nubs soft as roots.
That scorched fur stank like human hair.
I turned and knew what I had to celebrate.
Outside I saw our pastures,
fences, the gates that connected it all
and the stockpond, brackish water
where the cows would stand
for hours and swat flies, a kind of time
their tails kept, no different than the piece
of straw in my mouth, a dirty reed
I sucked and blew, tuneless and foul.
Michael Walsh’s chapbook, Adam Walking the Garden, was published last year by Red Dragonfly Press. Those poems were the outgrowth of a 2001 Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in poetry.
TOTAL BALANCE FARM by Clint McCown
What we can’t say
is everywhere.
This morning while the younger stallion
rolls in dust to coat himself
against the flies, I pull thistles from
the barbed-wire stretch behind the pond.
The purple blooms look soft
and bright as childhood,
but sting as deeply as the stalks.
Nothing friendly grows in fence rows.
I duck with care through the
spotted shade of the Osage orange –
hedge apple, we call it here –
its branches lined with slender spikes.
By afternoon I’ve moved on to
the tight weave of buckthorn and briar
that curves across the floodplain
of the low front field.
Every fencepost leans rotten against
the slack of unstrung wire.
I bake beneath the glare of a clear sky,
my arms bloody with reprimands.
Back at the sheet-metal barn,
a small frog clings to a windowpane.
A stork, the first I’ve ever seen,
passes purposefully overhead.
The house waits quietly,
though five blue-backed baby swallows
clamor from a nest above the porch.
The sun goes silver behind its usual hill.
Moments gather, possibly without end.
Still, what I can’t say
is everywhere.
Dark is a narrow easement.
Dawn is a word I love.
Sometimes storms wash through the valley,
and the cold stream strays across the road,
but not today.
I scrape my boots clean
with a goat bone
left over from the dogs’ night out
and think which portions
of the widening earth
I’ll try to move tomorrow.
for D. L. Cooper
Clint McCown’s recent poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Nimrod, Sewanee Review, North American Review, and Ascent. His third novel won this year’s Gable Prize at Graywolf Press.
EXILE IN JAPAN by James Doyle
He washes his hands in the stream
and dries them on the cherry blossoms.
The water of his home province will run
through his wife’s fingers when she lifts
them to her lips. His children are still
asleep though they have kicked the quilt
to the floor. The farmers here wear
the same bamboo hats and walk beside
the same oxen. The soil churns up
as slowly as the foam in the coast’s
shallows. Those pools are up to his knees
and the tides of an ocean between him and China.
The day is at his waist now and rising
more quickly. Soon it will be over his head,
his only thought to keep from drowning.
So many thoughts he has already mistaken for breath.
James Doyle’s book, Einstein Considers a Sand Dune (2004), won the Steel Toe Books contest. His recent poems have appeared in The South Carolina Review, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, and Hunger Mountain. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
GDZIE NAPISANE by Amy Groshek
for Cornelia
On the porch, in dappled sun that shines
through the leaves of the apple tree,
an old woman helps to fold
a young woman’s clothes.
Knuckles, sunmoled and marled,
lift panty after panty to the summer light:
red lace, black thong, silk bikini.
I can’t make front or tail of these,
the old woman laughs, and the young woman too
begins to laugh, no longer embarrassed.
In the kitchen the sun retracts its care
from the battered sill, the vial of pills there
for denying the old woman’s forgetting.
Slowly her life of stories will tangle
like so much lace, so much silk,
to be lifted and puzzled,
or folded loose,
forever packed away.
To watch is to feel illness begin in you,
to know there is a day, however far,
when you will fail all you think you have become.
The apples will fall and no one
will bake pies of them.
The dryer will buzz its last roll
and rattle to silence.
And whoever lived there
will not answer the door
though the young world knocks and knocks:
Let me in. I remember
who you were.
ALZHEIMER’S WELTANSCHAUUNG by Amy Groshek
for Cornelia
Who could have thought
such things would go first:
yesterday’s shirt, what you ate for breakfast,
that the fridge door must be closed.
The name of your first husky mutt
you will keep until the end. The number of kisses
your lover gave you on the night
you turned twenty-one.
You cannot tie your laces
or button a shirt but you remember that day,
a kiss for each oak along the drive.
Around you move people
whose minds can hold the moment,
but you have holes,
a sieve, a torn sail
waiting for time to set you down.
They want you to speak, to follow,
they believe you are human still.
But the soft ruff of that dog,
his ice-blue eye
that opens on your stationary life.
Amy Groshek’s poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review and Ice Floe. The title of the poem comes from the phrase her grandmother used to chastise her: Gdzie napisane, na kominie (It has been written on the chimneytop).
TALKING TO THE BLIND & DEAF DOG AT NIGHT by Joan I. Siegel
for Lois
After the house is quiet you take the dog out
in the late night woods when the winter moon
looks on like a blind eye among the branches.
The air is still, snow crunches underfoot,
the dog doesn’t hear. Maybe he turns around
to smell that you are still behind him.
There’s always the matter of love.
He wants to see you. You tell him a memory.
Whatever comes to mind. It doesn’t matter.
You live your life in the order that things happen
but afterwards it comes to you out of sequence
– one moment or another refracted through time
like a chip of broken glass. You see how it fits together.
Then darkness. The dog understands darkness.
He stops, pricks up his ears.
DISTANT LIGHT by Joan I. Siegel
Three bright points of a triangle shine
outside my mother’s window:
Venus, the moon & a starwhose light, astronomers say, first set out
to reach earth seventy-two years ago
when she was a girl of fifteen
drinking a glass of cold milk
at the kitchen table thinking
about a boy in her class
while her mother hung laundry
out the tenement window
and the screech of the clothesline
the boy
the leaves blowing off trees in St. Mary’s Park
the taste of milk
were all one.
Joan I. Siegel’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry East. Her collection, Peach Girl: Poems of a Chinese Daughter, was published by Grayson Books, 2002.
THE CHILD’S SHOE by Dag T. Straumsvåg
A child’s shoe sprouts up between two cobblestones in the street. A man notices and thinks something is missing – a child or, at least, a child’s foot. He buys baby food, and matches so he can build a picket fence around the shoe. Patiently, he feeds the toothless hole; patiently, he paints the tiny fence. By the gate, he puts up a straw sign with the caption: Home, home, sweet, sweet home. There’s no place like home. And slowly something begins to grow in the shoe – a toe, then another and another. A sole with toes takes shape, an ankle. Passers-by stop and say, “That certainly is a handsome ankle. Is it yours?” Later, a leg rises from the shoe, a knee. Then the foot wants no more. But the man is pleased. He pulls the foot up, brings it home with him, and replants it in a pot on the bookshelf. Meanwhile, the shoe is standing out in the street, digging with its tip between the cobblestones, digging until the sole disappears, the upper vamp, the laces. Finally, only the red tip of the tongue is visible above the gravel . . .
– Translated from the Norwegian
by Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg
SOCIABLE by Dag T. Straumsvåg
He got this disease, a small disease, but it was all he had. His parents were dead, his friends gone. At first he was reserved. Then he noticed the disease had social skills that he lacked himself. People opened up when they arrived, talked more. He cared for the disease with a loving hand, carried it with him wherever he went. He watched it grow into a strain no one had ever seen before, and he blossomed in the attention they got. Then the disease grew stronger, took more and more control. It participated in TV debates, went out on the town alone. “It will only be specialists there, you wouldn’t understand a thing.” Late one night the disease told him they had to talk. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you and I have grown apart. I’m moving in with Dr. Alfred. You remember Alfred? We’ve been seeing each other secretly for several months. We’re so good together.”
– Translated from the Norwegian
by Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg
RESURGAM IN THE DELTA PAVONIS SYSTEM by Dag T. Straumsvåg
Most inventions are inspired by things in nature. Think of the wheel. Or the computer. The computer is not unlike the human brain, complex and frail, a bearer of bad tidings: “A fatal error has been detected in Station C.” Station C is the base-camp for a group of archaeologists, who for three years has been looking for proof of intelligent life in the Mantell Sector, North Nekhebet, Resurgam in the Delta Pavonis System. A cold and relentless wind blows across the dry plains. The only things the three-days-long hurricane didn’t destroy are an iron shovel and the ship’s log. I’koor, the last survivor from Station C, writes: “This expedition has been a failure from day one. There wasn’t any sign of intelligent life out here until we arrived, and now I’m going to hit myself over the head with this shovel.”
– Translated from the Norwegian
by Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg
POSTER POEM by Dag T. Straumsvåg
It’s one of those glossy posters with a motif from the Rocky Mountains that kids like to hang up in their rooms. A green lake, hillsides in clear autumn colors, high snow-capped mountains. In the near end of the lake there’s a log cabin. Two men appear on the front steps, stretching and yawning in the chill morning air. “I could get used to this,” Harold says, “fishing in the lake, hiking in the mountains.” “I’m not sure,” Frank whispers, “but I think we’re being watched.”
– Translated from the Norwegian
by Robert Hedin and Dag T. Straumsvåg
Dag T. Straumsvåg was born in Kristiansund, Norway, in 1964 and has lived in Trondheim since 1984. His first book, Eg er Simen Gut, was published in 1999 by Aschehoug. Translator Robert Hedin’s most recent book is Old Glory: American War Poems from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism (Persea Books, 2004). He is the director of the Anderson Center, an artist community in Red Wing, Minnesota, and edits Great River Review.
MR. GRIM’S FAIRY TALES by Ronald Wallace
Like you, I was once the child who
pricked the finger,
got lost in the woods,
took goodies to grandmother’s house.
But who could expect to
have axed a wolf,
outsmarted a dwarf,
shoved an old woman into an oven,
without, somehow, being changed?
Now I stay in my house.
And when I glower at you, who
tromp on my flowers,
cut through my backyard,
drop your bread crumbs on my lawn,
I’m the troll, the ogre, the giant, the thing
in the stories that rocks you to sleep,
that fuels your imaginations,
that lights up your tiny dreams.
Ronald Wallace’s Long for This World: New and Selected Poems was published by
University of Pittsburgh Press in 2003. He is the editor of the University of Wisconsin
Press poetry series.