POETRY
EX-MONK AT THE PACKING HOUSE by Burlee Vang
Fearing heights
& drowning –
but not believing in hell
or heaven,
despite overhead swirls
of sawdust
or the oven-belly
of the warehouse,
his fifty-year-old legs
flickering like flames
when lifting boxes of sand
onto wooden pallets,
Luoung dreads only
the possibility
of returning
as an ocean bird,
flapping
between islands,
removing whole beaches
with his beak
one pebble
at a time.
Burlee Vang’s poetry has appeared in North American Review and Runes.
WHEN THE DEAD STOP BY by Joan L. Siegel
The screen door swings wide open from
an autumn long ago. This time
he enters without knocking, wears
his old brown shoes. Between the moon-
light and his face, the leaves rain gold
and orange on pale meadow sweet.
Two Adirondack chairs lean in.
Amazed he sees impatiens bloom
red hot. He won’t account for time.
Tell how it feels to be outside
of time. Instead he asks about
my mother. Isn’t she with you?
Just then the picture sputters, blinks,
unreels itself. The screen goes blank.
BLOOD by Joan I. Siegel
This morning a missile exploded
the house. His sister and brother blew up
with the chairs and windows. It rained
sister and brother on his face.
Now he sits on the hospital floor. Bleeding.
Waiting. His mother so still, her face
turned his way on the gurney. Her blood
finds his on the floor.
Long before he was born, their river
of blood was one. She told him –
when the world was a still place,
she’d listen to it murmuring through them.
Joan I. Siegel is co‑author of Peach Girl: Poems For A Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books, 2001). Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and in the anthologies Poetry Comes Up Where It Can (University of Utah, 2000), Beyond Lament (Northwestern, 1998), and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust 2nd edition (Time Being Books, 2007). This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
ANGIOGRAM OF A BRAIN by Carol Quinn
The rigging of the stranded vessel
glistens against a pure, opaque abyss.
Photos of the HMS Endurance
were taken when the ship was sealed in ice
and listing to one side. It’s dark –
Antarctic night – but the hull is lit up like
the moon. Who knows what source of light
they had – adrift in pack ice, 1915?
While others prayed for their return –
though no one yet had come back as
they would – perhaps the sailors also felt
the passing, cold aphasia of their place-
lessness when the taut timbers groaned.
How easily that outpost could go under.
Carol Quinn’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, The American Literary Review, California Quarterly, Pleiades and The National Poetry Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
STUDY OF ELSIE AS WINDOW A BIRD SMASHES AGAINST by Tom Christopher
There is nothing to forgive. Your domain is borrowed, released and held endlessly, light through skin, like air stilled in an open palm. There were signs, nothing transfers clearly. A haze, a ghost spot of the wren’s form. A bird’s simple act of faith, as if a heaven would exact no taxes. What a sudden sundering.
Joggers process past, averting their vision. Fly-hymns incensed with mourning. Your envy descends, roots among the feathers, the wings. Creaking. Blood muzzled. A feeding wish: some crack or splinter, a record in your surface. But you were poured and molded to be unnoticed. Pressed into service. A body invented to be gazed straight through.
Tom Christopher’s poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Spinning Jenny, and in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2006 and Cadence of Hooves.
NEW YEAR’S EVE by Catie Rosemurgy
The lake wouldn’t let us in. We had to walk on it
like a family of children talking to a mother’s grave.
The snow lifting from the ice was like a face
breaking apart. Our own skin held tight
but smelled crushed
like mint. The wind had licked the sky clean,
but then we showed up with our pulses
tucked in gloves. We stood out
against the blankness like creatures
that needed to be studied. Even the color
of my cousin’s jacket was portentous.
The darkness we stood on
would’ve been bottomless if it were summer
and we would’ve stood on it anyway.
What had crawled into our hearts?
We were losing track of one another
and the shore. My aunt appeared briefly
and touched my cheek
to reacquaint herself with flesh. We were at home in nothing
we could survive. The night had hardened
and gotten heavier. The stars dropped it.
We were sent to witness
our inability to pick it up.
We were our true selves briefly.
Catie Rosemurgy is the author of the poetry collections My Favorite Apocalypse (Graywolf Press, 2001) and the forthcoming, The Stranger Manual (Graywolf Press). Her recent poems appear in American Poetry Review and Boston Review.
SMOKEFALL AT SMOKE RISE by Robert Carnevale
Smoke falls at the same
time it rises, and fog,
as it forms, already lifts.
And the snow begins without
feeling whether it is
to fall or to rise,
lifting down
into the woodlot
and, as you can see,
there’s nothing to it:
you simply stretch out both legs on thin air.
Robert Carnevale’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker.
HEAVEN AND THE FALLEN WORLD by Eva Saulitis
To stand in the woods and watch the St. John’s Day fire,
the Latvians holding glasses of schnapps, to stand
in the woods unseen, to watch the women in knee-length
skirts, in pantyhose and pumps, the men stripped
of their ties and jackets. To see them
again, Mr. and Mrs. B, oak leaf wreaths crowning
their heads, leaning against each other
and singing, as if nothing’s happened.
As if Mr. B had never collapsed dead
at his carpentry bench, as if Mr. K had never
discovered the spot on his lung. To see the men light
each other’s smokes between songs, light them from
their own burning ends, tossing the butts into the fire.
To see anorexic Mrs. K crunching almonds
snuck from her pocket. As if she still had a stomach.
To see her again in her tan pantsuit, the amber
rings loose on her fingers, as if she still had limbs.
The men heave more logs onto the fire like there’s no tomorrow.
Through the dark back yard, my mother strides to the house
on two strong legs, she’s going to fetch the janu siers,
yellow and dense, studded with seeds.
Just this morning she must have unpeeled
the cheesecloth, placed the loaves on platters.
To see her hurrying like she’d never
had an aneurysm. To see my father reaching
for the next bottle. Like the past wasn’t banging
on the door of the house, wearing an SS uniform.
To see him pulling out the cork,
as if he had never, at 85, opened that door,
and invited the war back in.
Just like the old times. Soon the neighbors will call
the police, now that the fire’s so big, now that it’s
midnight and the ancestors have arrived, armed
with their kokles and pranks. To see them jumping
over the flames, singeing the hems
of their tautus terpas, chasing each other through
the garden. To hear the songs
getting older, calling up the gods
of thunder and fire. To see Mr. K
feeling up my mother, his big hand crawling along
her thigh. To see my father checking out
the breasts on a Baltic beauty who’s just arrived
from 1904, a basket of blackberries in her arms.
And that’s the last straw. I slip into
the woods like I did as a girl after crawling
out my bedroom window. I run through the trees,
up the bank to the vacant lot where the boyfriend
sits in the car, smoking, waiting for me,
waiting to take me out
of this nightmare, into his own American version,
his right hand on my thigh, the left handing me
the bottle of wine, the sweet kind that tastes
like blackberries, that makes me believe
there might be a heaven.
SONG OF THE JEALOUS BIRD by Eva Saulitis
In this perpetual
April light, how drab,
my garments. But not you,
my baby, my bunting, indigo,
or you the scarlet
tanager. I am jealous,
birds. You undo
my buttons. Rest, you say,
but there is much
to protect, so I sing night
and day, no matter that it comes
out as sobbing. And your buzz
and chortle. Don’t cross
over this line, bobolink.
white-crowned sparrow.
Birch trees, I drink your sap, I cast
a spell lest the telephone
ring, and you all asquabble.
Test me now. Why, you’ve
a glaucous gown, a veil
of ambition. Who shall
you wed, oh black-
backed woodpecker, oh violet-
green swallow? Succor of snowmelt
to hold you under. Silence
the jabber, whippoorwill
big mouth talker. Here, and here,
I mark my limits, with these bright
acoustics and this my
cape of rare feathers, skins
of small, precious birds
I’ve murdered.
Eva Saulitis is the author of the poetry collection Leaving Resurrection (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Seattle Review, and Carnet de Route. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
I FOUND A ONE-EYED HORSE by Rachel Mehl
On Jagger Street, a block from your house.
It was made of cloth and the size of my palm.
I am trying to unlearn dirtiness, the crotch
of my panties made stiff with love.
I have given up on taurene and marijuana.
We are walking your dogs
to the old concrete plant. And my guilt
is melting like hard candy on the tongue.
The city owns this place. They plan to kill
the weeds, to put in softball fields and hemlocks.
Now it is abandoned but for the potted plants
hidden by the river where a few years ago
one boy killed another. But your dogs are blue,
and beautiful and solid bodied. They catch
in their mouths what you throw.
The clouds are low today.
Three white birds fly under them.
The sun turns everything an inky shade of green.
So grab me now. Kiss me
above the witch grass and thistles.
I smell the cottonwood again,
this mix of yogurt and honey.
Rachel Mehl’s poems have appeared in StringTown and Nerve Cowboy.
MEAT-EATERS by Gary Fincke
In B‑films, the carnivorous plants
Are always huge. They swallow anyone
Who wanders near, a single knot of vines
Tugging a victim into the dark maw
Of horror, not discriminating
At all, as if eating were accident,
As if they were human. The real killers?
Some work together like the field
Of sundews, in England, that ate,
Within hours, millions of butterflies,
One true story that illustrates
The collective achievement of plants.
But working alone, selectivity
Is what matters. The Venus flytrap
Measures its meals so it doesn’t
Squander the down time of digestion
Upon the undersized. The jaw seals
Slowly, the spaces between its teeth
Allowing the escape of small insects.
So size-selective, its mouth, the young
Can flee, the tiny can skitter away,
Not through mercy, but efficiency,
What’s necessary for survival
When rooted in the earth’s poorest soil.
Gary Fincke is the author of the poetry collections Standing Around the Heart (University of Arkansas Press, 2005) and The Fire Landscape (University of Arkansas Press, 2008).
ODYSSEUS by Thom Satterlee
You know who you are? The original absentee father.
I was nearly thirty before I found you out.
A latecomer to literature, I read the books
I should have read when I was twelve.
You would have done me good then.
You would have been a model
by which to measure my own father,
who left me on Monday and returned to me on Friday,
sometimes of the same week, sometimes the next.
Like your son, Telemachus, I waited;
I doubled my practice at sport.
Come Saturday he arrived
and took his place on the sidelines, watching.
He promised me a dollar for every goal I scored,
and I scored – Lord, I scored! Four goals in one game,
seven in another, until he joked I’d bankrupt him
and we laughed together, which is all I ever wanted –
that and to ask him, “Why were you gone so long?”
Now I know what his answer would have been, your own:
“It wasn’t that long. And now I’m back home, safe.”
Thom Satterlee is the author of the poetry collection Burning Wyclif (Texas Tech University Press). His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Notre Dame Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, and featured on Poetry Daily. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
FRIEDA LAWRENCE: BLOOD, LUST, DESPERATION by Sue Walker
Although she wouldn’t cook or clean,
seldom changed bed sheets,
had four affairs the first four months
of marriage, she loved him
like a cat asleep on a chair
a beast she would stroke,
running her fingers through mottled fur,
meow meow lost in her throat. Yes,
she believed in the purity of his work,
sapphires cooled out of molten chaos.
God, she hated poverty. A man should be rich.
David was thin as a slice of gammon,
not tall enough, and his mother, damn her,
crusted in hate and dissatisfaction.
In the great struggle of intangible chaos,
she would crawl nights into bed with her son
and his wife, scrunch up between them, a poor
desperate ghost who refused to vanish.
She smelled of lavender and loam, wrote
”Corporal existence is a kind of death,”
on a pad and left it on the kitchen table.
“You’ll never love him as I did,” his mamma said.
“He is my boy, my blood.” The rasp in her voice
chilled ardor. There is such a thing as too much love,
and when the seizure of morning came,
when the little eggy amoeba emerged out of foam,
Frieda washed in a brook of broken dream
and gave herself to a nameless carpenter
for a handful of nails, wormwood, and random screws.
Some nights she would imagine how sex might be:
A moment, pure in the yellow evening light, he was
the rise and rush of river, and she could
believe something more would come
of gambling and bet on rocking horses
without riders, without the constriction of reins as
a breath of vapour began to rise up.
Frieda Lawrence, Blood, Lust, and Desperation
Then, when her husband claimed she’d never loved her children
or she would not have left them to elope with him, he taunted her
saying: “Your son does not love you,”
“A slivered shard of betrayal cuts and is
forever felt in the soul,”
until there is nothing to look forward to,
just a limp, dry, bloodless marginal existence,
just the smell of spoiled uneaten fruit,
just the failures of a woman and a man ripped
darkly from the fecund cosmos, from the angry red sun.
Note: The lines in italics are from D.H. Lawrence’s The Body of God.
Sue Walker has published seven books of poetry as well as fiction and critical articles on Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, James Dickey, and Marge Piercy. She is the Poet Laureate of Alabama.
THE REMORSE OF NARCISSUS by Bruce Bond
It feels older, blinder, this April fog,
older than the ground it rises out of
everywhere, it seems, or no one place,
as if all of morning covered up its ears
to listen. Self, I say, you may not know me.
I am the keeper of the name you bear
into the plain speech of difficult hours.
I am the kindling of hands beneath you
as you sleep, the death-bed words too small
to whisper. I am smoke. I see that now.
I see time as a coin I never give, take,
return at last, flashing in a pool of coins.
To ask more is to ask forgiveness. I ask
forgiveness. I am the child lost in traffic,
the leaden brood of the anvil cloud
dragging a shadow of sirens into day.
I am the bridge that burns its way to see.
Tell me, self, where is your mentor now,
where the gentle smolder of his beard.
Where the spontaneity of wings
that weave a veil about the steeple.
I would walk into death and back for you.
I would eat my bitterness like a starved dream.
I would call out to the father buried
inside you, tell him I am trying, always,
the roof of my house in shambles, a storm
of needles crackling at my window. Self,
I say, come into the sphere by the fire,
take off your gloves. There’s more of the world
than sky to hold it, more ebb and flow
than a shore can bear. And the self turns
around to say what any echoing canyon
says, any vast, hard, and empty place.
Bruce Bond’s six full-length collections of poetry include Blind Rain (forthcoming from LSU Press), Independence Days, The Anteroom of Paradise, Radiography, The Throats of Narcissus, and Cinder. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
WATSON AND THE SHARK by John Bensko
– after John Singleton Copley
Once in the ocean, drifting bones require
flesh to hold them up. Skin grows pale, too pale.
Salt reaches for salt. The unearthly swelling makes,
like paint, a weak barrier. I can only
wait for blood to run.
Not always, but with luck, some arrive
to deliver the drowning. Their mouths open,
round, dark, ripened. Or else they hold
a thin determination.
Are the saviors frightened? I swim
like the shark, escape like the shark from hunger,
through no fault of my own. My body reaches out.
Waves shade to darkness.
Loving others reach down.
Is there a proper way to be naked
and die? Let thrashing hands be less
than doubt. Like you, savior, I stretch my arms
and backstroke through desire. Let us make ourselves
unsavory victims. Nightmare us.
Refuse, like me, to wake while skin
and bone feel the teeth cutting through.
Let us hone ourselves
across the water. When we bite each other’s
lips, taste the salt of our blood. Slick
as seals, dive onward.
John Bensko is the author of the poetry collections The Iron City (University of Illinois Press, 2000), Green Soldiers (Yale University Press, 1981), The Waterman’s Children (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), and the short story collection Sea Dogs (Graywolf Press, 2004).
A PERSONAL APOCALYPSE by Jennifer Gresham
If it happens now, Visa will get paid
but the lights will go out. A trip
to the grocery store means extra eggs
for the neighbor who discovers
her still warm body. Thirty minutes more
and her husband, home from a long day
smoothing asphalt onto cracked streets,
can have dinner before calling 911.
By tomorrow, clean clothes for the funeral.
For every action, there’s an equal
and opposite reaction, which is not to say
she’ll see it coming. She doesn’t know
what makes her count life’s progress
on death’s bony fingers, except the comfort
of preparing for his perpetual arrival.
While the fervent spend time praying
for world peace, the atheist makes hers
one bed at a time. There is only the chopping
of onions until she cries, sweeping clean
the walk of leaves. She knows there won’t be time
for haunting a horrible dictator in the afterlife,
no ordering a flood for those sickened
with sloth, but at least her hands will be clean.
She knows that the only divinity lies
in diligence and a well mopped, shiny
kitchen floor. Even now, she’s counting down
as she scrapes the plates, knots the garbage, hangs
lilac-scented laundry in the back yard.
She’s listening hard for that loud, final click
of the clock, the one she’s imagined since
she was young, followed by the deep voice
that comes from faraway and always from behind.
The one that says your time is up, please
put your pencils down.
Jennifer Gresham is the author of Explaining Relativity to the Cat (Pudding House Press, 2004) and Diary of a Cell (Steel Toe Books, 2005). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, The Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rock & Sling, and Rattle.
FIMBULWINTER by Maggie Smith
What the ice gets, the ice keeps.
– Ernest Shackleford
At first the frost is like a second skin,
all silvery. It makes you look like magic,
your skyline like a row of wedding cakes –
domes, arches, spires frosted white.
Oh my city, my icebox full of sweets.
Everywhere, ice sculptures are hailing
taxi cabs, walking their dogs. Thick
ribbons of birds are fleeing. Oh my city,
the little bergs on your river interlock
like puzzle pieces. I could walk on water
from here to the edge of the earth if there
were anything left. But I won’t leave you.
I won’t stand on a rooftop, waving my arms,
striking the last spent match over and over.
No one’s coming. No one’s getting out.
Even the birds freeze into paperweights,
fall, and shatter. Oh my city, you’re still
and dark at the end. But when the moon
dangles overhead like a mirror ball,
every inch of you sparkles and writhes.
TWENTIETH CENTURY by Maggie Smith
I must have missed the last train out of this gray city.
I’m scrolling the radio through shhhhh. The streetlamps
fill with light, right on time, but no one is pouring it in.
Twentieth Century, you’re gone. You’re tucked into
a sleeping car, rolling to god-knows-where, and I’m
lonely for you. I know it’s naïve. But your horrors
were far away, and I thought I could stand them.
Twentieth Century, we had a good life more or less,
didn’t we? You made me. You wove the long braid
down my back. You kissed me in the snowy street
with everyone watching. You opened your mouth a little
and it scared me. Twentieth Century, it’s me, it’s me.
You said that to me once, as if I’d forgotten your face.
You strung me out until trees seemed to breathe,
expanding and contracting. You played “American Girl”
and turned it up loud. You said I was untouchable.
Do you remember the nights at Alum Creek, the lit
windows painting yellow Rothkos on the water?
Are they still there, or did you take them with you?
Say something. I’m here, waiting, scrolling the radio.
On every frequency, someone hushes me. Is it you?
Twentieth Century, are you there? I thought you were
a simpler time. I thought we’d live on a mountain
together, drinking melted snow, carving hawk totems
from downed pines. We’d never come back. Twentieth
Century, I was in so deep, I couldn’t see an end to you.
Maggie Smith is the author of the poetry collection Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, and Massachusetts Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
GREEN-STRIPED MELONS by Jane Hirshfield
They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.
Some people
are like this as well –
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.
An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.
Jane Hirshfield, a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review, is the author of five collections of poetry: Given Sugar, Given Salt, The Lives of the Heart, The October Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates. She also edited and co‑translated two poetry anthologies: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women.
LUMP by Julie L. Moore
Of coal. In your stocking. Solid mass in the toe. Or in your throat if you’re a coal miner right before the rush of rock like rain falls on your head. You know you’re trapped. The canary’s trilling long since silenced. Or, speaking of being underground, the hill by your drive. (The one you’re tempted to make into a mountain.) The mole’s tunnel leaving the soil soft as a freshly dug grave. Step. Sink. Feel the earth give way. The way it gave and gave and kept on giving when the doctor said, here, yes, here, I don’t want you to be overly concerned but right here (in your daughter’s breast – she’s fifteen) I can feel it.
Julie L. Moore is the author of the poetry chapbook Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in Sou’Wester, The MacGuffin, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Flint Hills Review, and The Christian Science Monitor.
BLIND PINK by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
I found it as if death had found me,
a rubbery fetus two girls from biology
had sneaked under my pillow.
Stink of pickling, the slickness
of that thick mute presence – to think
my sleep had spread over it all night
like a sow plastered with sun and grinning
at the wriggling under her magnificent slab.
Now, looking back, seeing the day thinning
and paling, I suppose the blind pink has always slept
with me, never moving at all, never
for all those nights, being more
than unfulfillment, like colors dreamed
and spilled on the hard ground of morning.
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is the author of the poetry collection What a Light Thing, This Stone (Sow’s Ear Press, 1999), the chapbook Weather of the House, and the poetry textbook, The Roar on the Other Side (Canon Press, 2000).
SKIPPING STONES by Heather Kirn
Think of the way you cast that apple core
between the trees. Your dad derided, girl throw!
and you thought he meant, not hard enough.
You thought he meant, annihilate the seeds,
white meat, and stem with Popeye arms. Be male,
destroy, smash it at the trunk. But now,
You have to pivot from the waist, like this,
your husband shows you when you sink the stone
you want to skip. His hips torque like a dancer,
or a woman baiting come-hither with her hour-
glass shape. Just choose another bit, the flattest
limestone shard. No matter. Down it plunks.
You’ve got it wrong, still willing the rock
to skip by force, the way your father hacked
the hedges, opened jars, plowed snow, built walls
between his son and him. Not mine, he said,
not anymore, not since your brother hit
his own bride. Once in the jaw, twice in the eye.
Try again, your husband says. Whip your body
like a trebuchet. Turn it, snap the hip
and let your elbow follow, see, and there
his stone skims clear across the water like
a finger feeling glass, like your mother’s hand
would wipe the kitchen table. Therapy,
she called it, rope-spine taut and curled above
a stain. Like prayer, like pleading, she gave over
every cell to cleaning floors. You have to use
your whole body. He rests his fingers at
your sides, pulls the left back, thrusts the right,
says pop, repeats the motion. Feel that?
You hear the Pop your brother cried before
your father’s casket closed, the sobs your mother
wears in every bone, your brother’s lone
apology, the time you told your husband,
fuck yourself. How masculine it felt,
so you threw a hammer too. And now
you feel your husband’s ring against your side,
the swerve his body makes from behind, the way
he moves you from the core, the grace that follows
force, the reward. You feel the distance
to the other shore, his breath on the back
of your neck, the smooth stone, and you let go.
Heather Kirn’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, and Unsplendid.
THE BURNT FIELD by Kythe Heller
I am that last, unspeakable thing:
the body like a field
stripped to bare ground, then burnt –
Only the spirit keeps searching the ground;
no one knows how to comfort it.
It’s like the moment a stranger,
say, at dinner, asks you: where’s home? and you hesitate –
then lie, and tell him you live in Brooklyn.
What you see in that moment is
what the spirit sees: the scorched field –
char and emptiness.
Why should I lie; now my voice is
the blackened earth, the voice of cinder, of tar.
Listen to me when I speak to you:
this is private property. Do you hear me?
Who do you think you are, spirit skipping
from lightworld to lightworld like a stone –
Kythe Heller is the author of the poetry collection Immolation (Monk Honey, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Lyric, The Southern Review, and Big City Lit.
MOTOR IMAGERY by Beth Bachmann
Saying grace and thinking about saying grace are the same
when it comes to timing.
Same goes for distance between points and determining
whether you are looking at a picture of a left or right arm
pushing back the water. It doesn’t matter whether you are
swimming or imagining the koi fish on a swimmer’s shoulder.
Repetition is not the only way to manage an arc. Just watch
the way the girl on the dock raises her hands behind her head
to braid her wet hair.
Beth Bachmann’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Agni, Blackbird, and Best New Poets.
DES PLAINES, ILLINOIS 1978 by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
My mother answered the phone with fog in her voice,
illness a cloak against overdue books and bills.
For days, thermometer pressed to bed lamp,
I kept myself burning. Loved with saltines
and wet washrags.
They say a woman forgets labor
once the baby’s born, but Mother said
she never forgot, though her memory was bad.
She missed appointments with dentists, the counselor,
but she remembered to stop for soup, pour
canned broth into a bowl. She taught me
ice packs and ginger ale,
to wear slippers in the basement and feel my way
around rusty nails.
Sour damp sickness.
Like a rotten pear suffering openly
in a fruit bowl by the sill.
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s poems have appeared in APR, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, Bellevue Literary Review, and Barrow Street.
DAY’S END ON EEL POND by Mary Stewart Hammond
Sunlight falls through holes in the clouds
spotlighting the marsh grass here and not there,
whitening a sail out on the water, leaving
others in shadow, shining the transom
of the moored cat boat, its bow disappearing.
The bobwhite calls its name without knowing it.
Sparrows and swallows, fussing and twittering,
line up like deacons on the deck railing,
scooting off as one at some mysterious bidding.
The osprey’s mousey squeak disguises
its six-foot wing span, its preying nature.
Wind, rustling in the leaves of the choke cherry,
makes low whistles through the cedars
as it picks up, drops. Song birds crowd
the air as they flit from candle pine to spruce
to cedar, zipping across the foreground.
In the distance the town clock strikes eight.
Somewhere a halyard chimes on a mast.
White, webbed chairs on the grey deck,
sit facing out, empty. At the deck corners,
white planters bristle with rosy orange geraniums.
The sun blazes in one window across the pond
as the others, two and three at a time, fill
with artificial light. A gull catches
a current, hangs suspended in it, screeches
like the rusty hinges on a screen door,
and takes one last nose dive. The inlet sneaks
through beach grass and sand into the wide water
and the sky beyond. Dusk softens the colors,
the tang of geraniums hanging on until the last.
Mary Stewart Hammond is the author of the poetry collection Out of Canaan (W. W. Norton, 1993). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Field, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker.
ELEGY THAT RETURNS WITH SOUVENIRS by Erika Meitner
Everything is like something else,
but not exactly; the vessels that contain
our lives like candle-less shrines
to the Saint of Entropology,
who watches us go by, singing
lawnmower lawnmower lawnmower,
singing stellar phenomena
while the other neighbor
freestyles on his porch
about hoodlums falling
from grace & unguarantees,
three layers of crickets
& our vast, unknowable insides
(beautiful beautiful terrible).
He holds a tupperware of
the fear that can’t be spoken
& another of borrowed held breath
to swim long stretches underwater.
He holds tin foil smoothed
with a nail, folded into a ring
to look like something valuable.
He holds the whole body of a girl
who disappeared months ago,
don’t let go scrawled down
her wrist in ballpoint tattoo.
The opposite of nostalgia is not
memory, but if I evoke a memory
of suffering, it is not general:
cistern filled with rainwater,
sneakers she meant to bring in
from her car, yarn fragments.
If we fling things out the window
they will come back to us,
like proverbs or homing pigeons:
Saint Austin said the ancients
would return to bed if they sneezed
while putting on a shoe. What
measures we take – have always
taken – to evade danger,
her fugitive bowl of rocks
by the door, everything stopgap,
everything mortal.
Erika Meitner is the author of the poetry collection Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in APR, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and on Slate.com.
TO THE MISTRESS OF THE MASTER
OF THE FEMALE HALF‑LENGTHS by Michael Salcman
– (c. 1520–1540)
At the day sale, you were not quite fit for the bins
so you settled into an auction of the Circle of,
in the Manner of, from the School of and other has-beens
in the house of Art, where your delicate porcelain face
arched brows and hair parted in the middle,
might better startle the casual reader of the catalog
looking upon your slender manicured fingers and,
balanced above, an oval head and bare shoulders
turned three-quarters at your writing desk.
One hand lifts a book page, the other rests near a metal pot
of salve, the emblem of the Magdalene,
and through the window a balustrade and beyond that
a blue and green smoky landscape lifted from Leonardo.
What does it mean if your painter is known today only
as a Follower of the Master of the Female Half-Lengths,
an unknown epigone or sly copyist of some other artist
barely better limned than you, a man without a proper name
or history, rescued from the Flemish dark at the start
of a more modern era?
In this sale of authentic unknowns, among the sad pieties
of forgotten old masters who never were more inspired
than a carpenter plumbing a joist for a door,
his picture of you carries the meanest price;
it seems at least two men painted you over and over
as if sawing in half the same woman in their minds,
and their bootless fame, free of any personal gain
has lit your face with the grace of anonymity.
Michael Salcman is the author of the poetry collection The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, 2007) and the chapbook, Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in New Letters, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, River Styx, New York Quarterly and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Euphoria (2005), a documentary on the brain and creativity.
THE DEAD GUY CLEARS THE AIR ABOUT ROADKILL by William Notter
The Denver talk show station had a lady call
and rave about rendering plants collecting pets –
grinding up cats with hair, flea collars,
little bells and all, making dog food
from people’s passed‑on dogs.
She said the drivers will even stop
to pick up roadkill deer, coyotes, prairie dogs,
and imagine the diseases that could pass
from kibble to pets to owners.
Now I can’t say how they do it
in the city, but I’m paid to pick up cattle –
beef mostly, sometimes dairy –
and every now and then a horse.
A full-grown hog is fine if it’s on my route,
but big operations usually bury theirs.
I’ve hauled away a donkey, and exotics
like one man’s ostrich, but left his neighbor’s dog
right where he’d shot it going under the fence.
Skunks, raccoons, possums, badgers, and deer
are a job for the county road crew,
trusties from the jail, or coyotes and crows.
I will not pick up a dog or cat for anyone
who needs to bury it or sneak it into the dump himself.
If you see me stopped along the road,
I’ll be checking tires or taking a leak,
not peeling bullsnakes off the blacktop
or hunting for smashed‑up turtles
to try and add more weight to my load.
William Notter is the author of the chapbook More Space Than Anyone Can Stand (Texas Review Press, 2002). His poems have appeared in Ascent, Chattahoochee Review, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and featured in Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems for Hard Times and NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.
JULY 8, DESTIN by Jesse Lee Kercheval
8 months after Katrina
I am sitting in the Lucky Snapper
drinking a cold beer,
watching the fishing fleet
sail into the Destin harbor
& I can’t help thinking
about the people swept
out of their beds & bathtubs
in Grand Isle, their houses
sucked down to foundations.
Or the shrimping fleet
in Biloxi that sailed out
into the Gulf like always
to ride out the storm, how
many didn’t sail back.
I think about bodies
floating on the warm
Gulf tide, then sinking,
then rising, the way dead
things do. About the fingers
the captain told me he found
in his drag net. I grew up
here. I’ll probably die
here one day too. So I
know what I’m doing when
I order a dozen oysters,
those filter feeders, full
of the truth of this world,
eat them w/ horseradish
& pure stinging pleasure –
as only the living can do.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of nine books including the poetry collections, Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004) and The Alice Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
BENEATH A SOMBER MOON by Dan Stryk
Not certain if you’ve ceased to dream,
you wriggle in the dark: the cat has brought
back something & left it in a moonlit pool
inside the slight-cracked door, something
that you deeply sense he doesn’t, & would
never, hunt. What’s more, he’s too old
now, & limps – you try to laugh – to catch
much anyway, beyond the swill he gobbles
from his cans. Still, you want to dress,
slip out, escape . . . But instead sit upright
in the bed, fixed there it seems – alone in
some vague trance. The cat only a dumpy
grey-furred surrogate of thought. Because
little bones that might be human, or might not,
lie ratlike under moonbeams near
the wardrobe,
where he’s left them,
in a heap.
Dan Stryk is the author of the poetry collections The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press, 1984), Solace of the Aging Mare (The Mid-America Press, 2008), and Dimming Radiance (Wind Publications, 2008). His poems have appeared in Chelsea, Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and The Fiddlehead.
MY FATHER’S LEFT HAND by David Bottoms
Sometimes my old man’s hand flutters over his knee, flaps
in crazy circles, and falls back to his leg.
Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge.
And sometimes when my old man tries to speak, his hand waggles
in the air, chasing a word, then perches again
on the bar of his walker or the arm of a chair.
Sometimes when evening closes down his window and rain
blackens into ice on the sill, it trembles like a sparrow in a storm.
Then full dark falls, and it trembles less, and less, until it’s still.
David Bottoms is the author of seven books of poems including the recent Waltzing Through the Endtime (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review. He is the Poet Laureate of Georgia.
MY FATHER’S BROTHER by William Lychack
Pautipaug Hill, Franklin, Connecticut, bright summer and we stop, unannounced, to see my uncle Daniel, my father’s only brother, my two-year-old son in my arms as we cross the lawn to the house, to see if anyone is home. The door to the basement propped open,
and we taste the cinderblock cool from below, hear the scrape and sweep, a man pushing water with a broom, the perfect vision of futility, this moment all hunch-shouldered and shirtless in the heat, muttering who knows what to whom, me calling down the stairs before he finds us hovering over him like this.
And did I mention it was hot?
That it was August?
That I never really knew
my father? That he died when
I was ten? Met him twice? That
my uncle, a version of my father, is dead
now, too, gone a few weeks after this visit,
one of how many times I went to see him?
Three? Four? Five at the most?
Out in the bright of day, even after I remind him again who I am and how he should know me, he squints and doesn’t seem to recognize whose hand he’s shaking right now. Bob’s boy, he says, Billy Joe – so, what d’you need? And it has, I realize, taken me forty years to say nothing – I don’t need anything,
I say – just wanted to introduce him to my son. We stand there in the garage a moment and wait, as if this man is about to become my father, my father almost becoming me now, and the boy? In every version of this I set him down, the kid off quick suddenly, the two of us toddling after him, smiling – sometimes more wistfully than we wish, sometimes less.
William Lychack is the author of the novel The Wasp Eater (Mariner Books, 2005), and a forthcoming short story collection The Architect of Flowers (Houghton Mifflin).
THE WAY A DOG MEETS THE DAY by Diane Seuss
Even a bad dog, one with tricks up his sleeve.
One who draws blood the old fashioned way.
How the dog steps into the world
like a bridesmaid into a green dress
she wouldn’t have chosen herself,
a dress she nonetheless paid for.
To honor the bride.
A friend? No,
the girl on the cake,
the girl who brings blossoms,
the blue-tinged, heavenly ones.
And frosting. The kind piped
into doves and rosettes.
The dog like a bridesmaid who will never be a bride.
To be a bride is not her way.
Walks into the world as into an ill-fitting dress,
but zips herself into it anyway.
The dog walks with intention, but carefully,
like a bridesmaid in unaccustomed
shoes. Shoes dyed an earth-tone
to match a color scheme she does not comprehend.
The dog raises
his head and takes in the morning
air but not ravenously,
like a bridesmaid at the buffet table.
A little rice. A bit
of chicken with mushroom sauce.
Five unsnapped green beans, steamed
to retain their bright color. A dinner
roll. One, though she likes bread,
though she’d like to eat five rolls
with real butter, she’d like to never
stop with the rolls.
Then the dog walks the periphery of land that is not his.
He notices, but does not act. Mourning doves
within easy reach, ground-feeders.
Squirrel in the redbud, plotting out its day.
Spider, waiting at the hub of its damp web.
Pink fists of the wild roses.
Like a bridesmaid dwarfed by a cathedral
of someone else’s design, in whose canon
she does not participate, yet still she walks
forward, always forward, past the stages
of the cross in stained glass, following the hem
of the bridal train, the train sewed with seed pearls
and crystals, following a bride whose face she cannot
remember, toward a groom whose smile is lopsided,
whose character is suspicious,
who may or may not like dogs.
Diane Seuss is the author of the poetry collection It Blows You Hollow (New Issues Press, 1998). Her poems have appeared in The North American Review, Indiana Review, The Georgia Review and in the anthologies Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press, 1999), Are You Experienced (University of Iowa Press, 2003), and Sweeping Beauty (University of Iowa Press, 2005). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
HEEL by Nance Van Winckel
First the twitch of
our dog in her dream,
then the half-green,
half-burnt log
turns over
& takes on
the cold side of night.
Nance Van Winckel’s fifth poetry collection is No Starling (University of Washington Press, 2007). Her recent poems appear in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Field, and The Gettysburg Review. This is her fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
THE SLEEPWALKER MAKES PLANS by Sigman Byrd
Don’t wake him, the old wisdom says.
But let him traipse the dreaming
planks of this world
as if he were walking on board
a ghost ship about to set sail for that remote
and tropical island paradise called the future.
It’s the story of his life and won’t let go.
He scribbles his name to it and gnaws
at the bitter root because his departure is delayed again.
He complains with words he finds on his lips,
sea-wracked, foam-heavy words
as if he were actually speaking.
Even now, he believes,
people like him dressed in festively colored,
micro-fiber sunwear somewhere are
sipping drinks with exotic names
and listening to the pleasing cadences of pulsing
steel drums. Even now the earth is turning
and tomorrow, somewhere, knit from
premium combed air for exceptional softness
and durability, is rising.
Wake up, sleepwalker. But it’s too late.
The mind, like a ship’s engine grumbling to life,
shreds the moment, as if it, too, had somewhere
necessary to get to.
He stands on the deck and waves,
among others like him,
passengers who think they are leaving,
like him with their voice-activated mouths,
their eyes burdened and blinking with images.
APOTHEOSIS OF THE SLEEPWALKER by Sigman Byrd
So the years began to pass like a giant sequoia
on the slow road to becoming a hand-carved footstool.
Everywhere I turned there I was: the street of sleepwalkers
on their secret pilgrimage, that dark, anonymous
street of original sorrow. As if God were everywhere,
said an old man I saw there once who had stumps for legs
and little lichen-flesh handkerchiefs for arms.
He was dancing across a greasy cardboard stage,
hobbled and weaving in the grip of some private tarantella.
As if God were everywhere, he kept saying,
and I, who knew nothing about the intimate
choreography of flesh, suddenly without warning,
as if for the first time, felt my arms
begin to sway and my feet begin to tap.
Sigman Byrd is the author of the poetry collection Under the Wanderer’s Star (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006). His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
THE DEFT TOUCH OF ANGELS by John Rybicki
Can you see my love outside,
a pink and white swan there
on the moonless side of our cottage?
There’s a rose-like flame
rising from the earth where she stands.
When I reach for her the tips
of my fingers go drowning in it,
press through the flames to touch
the little blood house she lives in.
She’s weeping inside a barn
that’s held underwater, the roses spawning up
so they brushstroke and burn.
If I had the proper arms, say,
the deft touch of angels, I’d tend her from above,
make one flag from the rag flames
moving through her, run that flag
up every pole, flutter it over the nations.
The red bird in my chest
keeps repeating, you’re just a man,
just a man who wants to push
the tombstones away and live,
to eat my oats and run long miles
until the beasts lie down in my blood
to chew a blade of grass and rest.
I will row with my breath and greet her
in that country, rub another sunset over her skin,
sit across from her on our porch,
two elementals with our morning coffee,
a slender stick of lightning
in each of our hands.
John Rybicki is the author of the poetry collection We Bed Down into Water (TriQuarterly Books, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Quarterly, Poetry East, Yankee, New York Quarterly, and The Best American Poetry. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
POLAR EXPLORER # 8
Robert Falcon Scott – 1912 by Elizabeth Bradfield
”He cried more easily than any man I have ever known.”
– Apsely Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
Each icefall and massif he’d search for a touch
of his sculptress wife’s hand. By all reports,
he was a mess. Ambitious and sensitive,
sputtering at each gripe
of his disenchanted crew, and
romantic past all sense. Take,
for example: man-hauling –
While Amundsen slid to the pole
on Nordic skis, the English under Scott
trudged – better to know each jar, each pound
of need pulled along, better to have felt
the hard accomplishment of each mile. Ah, Kathleen,
he thought to his own slogged pace,
you’d be proud. But she was off
flirting with his rival, Nansen, wreaking havoc
with the image of the stoic wife, hungry
for her own adventures.
And when at last he reached the pole he found
another flag, fresh and untattered, waving
the news of his defeat. Then
his doomed march home . . . O
think of Shelley lost to suspect drowning, Byron
slain by passion’s fever, and then Scott, starving
in his tent eleven miles from cached supplies
he couldn’t find.
And now, as I’m telling this, ninety years later,
his body, still wrapped in its reindeer bag, still swaddled
in his tent’s frayed silk, flag still tattering, his body
may have reached the Ross Sea
through the slow torrent
of the ice shelf. All the days he plodded,
the land was sliding back beneath him, treadmill
to the sea where he at last is given
a sailor’s burial,
maybe today, sunk and drifting.
CROCKER LAND by Elizabeth Bradfield
There are atmospheric tricks of cold
to explain it: how Peary saw the peaks
and shores, how MacMillan, seven years
later, did too. Pujok, said Peeawahto. Mist
that in frozen air seemed
like a broad shore, like hills.
For symmetry, there should be land. The North
should be a beautiful stipple from Maine
to Siberia, point after point to name.
Only when they stood on the map’s brown spot,
thirty miles in on its vague outline, they felt
the sea beneath them, new ice flexing like leather,
and saw
further off, another summit. Pujok. Another
fog. Months ago, when rations weren’t considered
and when known shores made the horizon,
someone baked a cake and iced it thickly white.
They gathered around a table in the main saloon,
raised forks, Crocker Land in their mouths, a confection
so sweet their teeth ached and dreams warped strange.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collection Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and Field. This is her fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.