POETRY
The Love Hotel by Heather Kirn
Not every stone here is laid
to mark what’s gone; (thank God)
not every brick is mortared
by grief.
While I paused at the paper
cranes, the baseball stadium roared.
I looked up, and five abacuses of light
stood like alien signs against the dusk-
blue sky to blaze on whatever player
must have hit himself home.
And as I bided at the edge
of a knoll comprised
of the ashes of seventy-thousand, children
passed with boxy yellow backpacks
stiff as top hats, and black-suited salary-men
piled into streetcars, and I remembered
hunger.
I can’t name the unmarked
noodle-shop by a river
I also cannot name, but the owner
made udon fresh with a rusty machine
while his overweight daughter sat her head
in her hand, watched marathon runners
on TV. The language of sweat
and lean muscle was something we both
understood.
And when I needed sleep,
I walked deep into the bar-district
where drunk couples stumbled
onto alley-sized streets. The women
leaned into their swaying
new suitors, all the way
to a love hotel, where I stayed
for cheap, where the plots repeated
on the three channels of twenty-four hour
porn did not make sense, but
the heart-shaped bed did
as I curled fetal in its cradle and joined
the whole city in surrendering
itself –
its name, its dates, its rivers,
its bodies that leapt into rivers,
its carp that braid through the vines
of seaweed –
surrendered everything
to sleep. I woke and for one passing
lovely instant forgot who
I was, where I was
from. My eyelids, blinking back
in the heart-shaped
mirror, were smooth as eggs.
The Peace Dome by Heather Kirn
The bomb left one building.
The city left it standing:
a half-blasted hall
of crumbling brick walls, a steel cupola
like a hollowed heart
the rain comes through.
When I stand inside, I draw my shoulders
in so they keep within
the boundaries of an umbrella. Bright
red and blue and green
become my little vinyl ceiling
in the architecture
of grief. No one speaks.
This is a godless church, a vacant
organ, a music note
that went mute. I look up
and see weather – slant lines of rain,
a gray water-stain of cloud
on cloud – between the steel
ribs of that skeletal dome.
This is a steeple
for a demon I did not know
I had. What language
is left to pray with? Some elders
wish the building razed.
Heather Kirn has published poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Fourteen Hills. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Water Notes by Carolyn Stoloff
consider
the exquisite accommodation
of water to what holds it
imagine a pitcher filled
with water on a kitchen table
pull the glass mold off
with your virtual nails
and you have –
pitcher-shaped water
a miracle!
a perfect cast
a work of art
too fluid to last . . .
to market
&
what does a river’s name name?
the ‘Seine’ – a proper noun
bestowed
on a stretch of bank? (a place
to safekeep I don’t think so)
. . . the bed? (where it never sleeps)
or its flow (as though naming
could contain it)
&
we have ‘bodies’ of water
about which you could ask
what species? what gender?
how old?
and never get told
&
sucking water from a bottle
named Evian, an infant
(with drain)
hastily handed back to her mom
&
stay stay at the window
observe a drop of rain
strike
then jerk down the pane
like minutes like stitches
then skid – just thread
(as if from a sick
sewing machine)
and break
&
from the lake’s shingle the boy
watches her white rubber cap
dwindle to moth ball small
he wants to be
the water clinging to her
every hollow and hill
Carolyn Stoloff is the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks, including Reaching for Honey (Red Hen Press, 2004), Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2003), and You Came to Meet Someone Else (Asylum Arts, 1993). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and BOMB Magazine.
Dream of Early Life Beneath the Waves by Dan Stryk
Bubbles rise above
my bulging eye
that never
closes on its
stem. A dangling shadow
muddying
my dream of you,
until
we’re sucked in
undertow,
our slimy flesh
now swept in
deep relief.
Each
milky billow
we secrete
warm against
chill,
we scoot
as one along the
rutted sands,
entering a warmer bay
we’ve sought & found
in throes of mindless
bliss. Now
like our fathers
& our mothers
long ago,
we’ve mounted
on the warm
back of a throbbing
urge,
whose jellied ghosts
appeared like
Genesis,
from Nowhere,
in the heaped silt
that our bellies
slide along –
sperm
beating
through the pulsing dark
to live again
forever
in the murk from which
we wake . . .
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-American Press, 2008), and Dimming Radiance (Wind Publications, 2009). He has published poems in TriQuarterly, The Nation, Rattle, Chelsea, and Ploughshares. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Rowboat by Michael Hettich
A rowboat, she tells me, out of sight of land
drifts in calm water. There is only one oar
and there are no humans. But there is a dog
sitting on the floor there, in the briny water.
Is there food of any kind? No. Today I thought of you
swimming to that rowboat, she tells me, from somewhere
I can’t imagine. You pulled yourself aboard
and fell asleep, and dreamed. Your legs were pink and swollen.
The dog licked your body, all over, until you woke.
And then another human swam up to the rowboat,
she says. No one spoke. And then another dog,
followed by another human. Soon the boat would be too full.
We’re starving she called out in a voice not her own,
and I wondered how I came to marry this woman,
how we’d chanced to come together, to fall into each other
and raise such beautiful children. They were gone now
into their own lives. The ocean was too calm,
so I dove in and started off, it didn’t matter which direction,
and the dogs leaped behind me and the humans leaped behind the dogs,
until the boat was empty, like a rib cage in the dark.
Michael Hettich is the author of the poetry collections Swimmer Dreams (Wordtech Communications, 2005), Flock and Shadow: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers Press, 2005), and the chapbook Many Loves (Yellow Jacket Press, 2007). His poems and essays have appeared in Orion, TriQuarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, and Witness.
Old Sayings Apply in Here by Rob Talbert
It’s called the window, a long, thin band
in every cell where the polished light
feeds in between gang signs
etched into the Plexiglas with unfolded staples.
The cinderblock walls,
drenched in sketches of Latinas and low-riders,
glow faintly by the window
like cave paintings in shallow caverns.
If you press
your nose against the wall you can see
all of downtown, Loop 410, the clouds drifting
off to El Paso, the gravel tile by the tracks
where the guards park their cars.
They warned us in the academy, how
they’d memorize your car
and who drops you off
on the way to the markets.
When we’re hunters and toss all the cells
for tattoo rigs and weed I always look out
to my car, imagining myself walking in and trying
not to look up.
Hey boss. How about bringing me a pack of smokes?
I’d hate for something bad to happen to that Mazda,
or the blonde that drops you off on Wednesdays.
The world keeps going whether
you’re locked up
or dying. The clouds can’t
hear you taunt them.
The highways are forever
hushing your speech.
What better gift than approach?
One inmate tapped on the door,
said his name was Midas.
He wanted to show me
a picture of a baby tiger he’d bought for his girlfriend
with the money he made
selling coke. Her eyes
were prettier than the cat’s.
In another time, I would
have killed him to have her.
Jumper by Rob Talbert
He tied one end of the bed sheet to the second story rail,
the other wrapped around his neck like a snake made of sleep.
On the other side of the pod
I was guarding the nurse while she passed out meds,
all sleeping pills,
to a man who strangled his 3 month old son
in his crib.
Forty inmates hitting Plexiglas with their fists
is the bang of furniture going down the stairs.
Boss! Hey Boss! White Boy’s Gonna Jump!
When someone makes a decision about their life
protocol is bible verse: (Activate duress box, pop all doors,
verbally instruct inmates to rack up.)
When someone removes themselves from memory
wind takes their place: (Breath inside the name, kites anchored
to the photograph instead of the person
holding them.)
For ten minutes
he stood on the rail,
listening to the man
who’d killed his son on a little bed
read the New Testament aloud from his cell
before the sleeping pills dragged him off
into new hours.
He listened to where he could find
kingdoms and wings
over the Sergeant screaming threats
if he didn’t come down safely.
And when he shrugged his shoulders,
muttering fuck it and stepped off,
the sheet he wore as a noose inhaled, spread out and
billowed like a parachute trying to work.
Something about sleep
unlocks the reminder of where we’re all going.
From babies to inmates: sheets fail us.
Rob Talbert’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Poet Lore.
School Yard by Doug Ramspeck
The girls by the brick wall, smoking.
The gone teachers. The blackboards
inside the dark windows.
The girls whispering these boys
by the playground, their hands gripping
the chain-link fence.
While the sky is dense with snow
that isn’t falling, snow that eventually
will turn the world to statuary.
The boys marrow-scooped,
hollow-boned. Wiping their noses
on their sleeves.
Saying here is my chest
rising and falling.
The boys imagining the girls walking
toward the fence, putting
their mittened hands
through the openings.
The girls thinking
look at the ash that falls from this cigarette.
The boys noticing the girls glancing
their direction, but it is like the way
the moon opens its face
above the trees.
You are what glows in the dark
when I inhale.
The boys carrying this image
through their lives: the girls beyond
the fence in midwinter.
This dream of the snow
that never falls. The snow saying
touch me.
The clouds saying
I formed myself from smoke.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of the poetry collection Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press, 2008), and the chapbook Where We Come From (March Street Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Epoch, West Branch, Third Coast, and Northwest Review.
The Fat Man Sings of Despair by George Looney
after Pablo Neruda
Time memorizes everything I say,
the fat man sings to a sad, stubborn tune,
the brazen neon signs in the windows
of each and every tavern reflecting
in the lake. One sign flickers the curves of
a woman who could comfort the fat man
in his ragged loneliness, a woman
who could make him sing songs this lake has sung,
stone-cold sober, for centuries. In her,
everything sinks. Pablo, does the sinking
comfort you, or curse your fevered singing?
Has your voice gone hoarse with abandonment,
or is the fat man a resurrection
of singing meant for a woman you thought
no one could know without being swallowed,
a lump in the throat of a blind diver
who, drunk and croaking out songs that, sung right,
could stun any heart into love, waltzed with
his shadow along a neglected pier?
No fruit makes my mouth water near as much
as her flesh, the fat man croaks out, his voice
an echo among ruins that should have
names and histories but have been erased.
The moon, a low sickle pecked at by birds,
demented, hums a tune that drives stars mad
and gets them to form a constellation
that wants to know what it’s seen as. No broke,
aching body draped on a forlorn cross
with vinegar touched to its lips could sing
more sadly than this hunger-haunted wisp
of a sick moon. How terrible and brief
its false splash of light is tonight, how drunk
its stumbling through what must once have been
a cemetery, all the fractured stones
wordless, not a signifier in sight.
Her lips purse and whistle familiar tunes
the fat man can’t name. Under weathered stones,
the memories of what had been bodies
tangle together like passion. Maybe
it’s despair. And, in her, everything sinks.
Moonless stones the fat man would dive under
and swim soil blind are no more sorrow
than any stone-carved form can claim to be.
Bodies, stilled in a mimesis of grace,
can’t bear the thought they’re thought of as nothing
more than simple signifiers of grief.
The fat man would sing of one woman’s flesh
till the memories of what was once love,
skeletal, pull themselves out of soil
and take up the moon’s regret of a song.
George Looney’s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (Bluestem Press, 1996), and the novella Hymn of Ash (Elixir Press, 2008). He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
This Poem by Dan O’Brien
My handwriting
grew smaller for a time, Puritan
in the black ink I still favor: I felt compelled
to reign myself in, believing
the sin of pride governed me,
a child. I thought large print meant loud voice
and loud voice an affront
to God’s ears. So I chastened myself to grow smaller
while remaining still
the great thing I was – still
decipherable to myself at least,
and if not to me then to God.
I had other sins too, of course,
and prayers I knew by heart.
Or did I dwindle my self down
to this thread on the page
so my mother would find me and ask,
What’s this?
Dan O’Brien has published poems in Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, Margie, Iodine, and 32 Poems. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
My Mother, at Six, Speaks to Me by Jeanne Emmons
I am six years old, already too big, Daughter,
to fit under the mahogany buffet
of your imagination. My paper dolls
populate the space beneath. I kneel
in front to set them up inside the rooms
the eight legs make. I can feel you hovering.
I chew my lip and slowly turn a page.
You see my scissors pivot around the edge
of a baby carriage torn from the Sears catalogue.
I lean it against one of the wooden legs.
You watch me cut out a lady in a fur coat.
She’s the mother. I try to stand her up,
but she wants to bend. I feel you always
trying to make something out of me,
because this memory I will pass on to you
will be too thin. You’ll want to flesh it out.
It’s not that you want me real. I’m real enough,
but that won’t be enough for you. Here.
Take this page, these scissors. Don’t keep on
pondering what to do with me. It makes me
feel flat, pressed inside something not me,
heavy, thick with desire, full of ideas.
Jeanne Emmons is the author of poetry collections which include Rootbound (New Rivers, 1998), Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove, 2005), and The Glove of the World (Backwaters, 2006). Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Confrontation, Cream City Review, Prairie Schooner, and South Carolina Review. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
Cutting Apples by Michael Salcman
My father always carried a penknife
to pare his green apples, raising their skins
in perfect spirals. He never drew blood
slicing his bananas for breakfast,
their dark-seeded cores like little faces
dropping into the milk, one more item
in a life of a thousand chores,
one more notch in a life advancing
by millimeters or inches, not seconds or days.
I watched him turn himself as carefully away
from violence as a lathe on a table leg,
cutting each curve and flourish
from the flat face of a block
clamped in his hand. His hand and its thumb
never shied from the blade; he knew
that what you do with any tool gives it its value,
like a life – not too eager or afraid.
Michael Salcman is the author of several chapbooks, most recently, Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press), and the poetry collection The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in New Letters, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, and Notre Dame Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Rubia Writes a Poem about Light for a Contest by Amy Groshek
Light, that old word, worn bare by biblical
metaphor – it turns a poem to stone.
Knobbed cliché, light, and its cousin, white,
sewn in fringes to black-and-white Westerns
my father watched as a child. Silly fool,
to believe that good guys dressed in white,
to believe in men entirely good or bad.
But the world has taught him. But light. But white,
adjective with which my Mexican girlfriend
labels the selfishness common to uninformed
Northerners. Nevertheless, light! My hand
on her thigh, my pale neck draped
with her black curls. Being gay makes me less
white, she says. Less. In Anchorage they speak of light
like a famous acquaintance. In November the light
goes away, they say, or, Today I saw the sun. Miracle
and cruelty, the daylight so far north.
Generous, careless, ubiquitous – true celebrity.
Light. White. Blessing unto the blessed
in their houses with big windows. Waking
the not-so-blessed to labor or exposing
their progress home at the end of third shift. Yet,
light! Don’t you want it? Don’t you sit
in the sun and read on a February day?
Amy Groshek is the author of the poetry chapbook, Shin Deep (Finishing Line Press, 2008). She has published poems in Bloom, Radical Society, Contrary, and the anthology Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Sky I Die By Will Be Grey by Todd Boss
and warm, and I
will walk all day
the icy Mississippi till my
little weight
on that great wintry way shocks
– with a thick
crack deep and sharp – a flock
of one of the more
inconsequential birds on
shore,
shakes them out of the woods’ core
like a shook rug shakes dried specks
of mud
into the air.
They’ll swirl awhile there before
they settle – swirling as a soul
might swirl
between worlds, in a light too slight,
and on
too sharply cold a night
to fly by.
Todd Boss is the author of the poetry collection Yellowrocket (W. W. Norton, 2008). His poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry.
The Death of A Scholar by Andrew Merton
He watches himself bleed out in the rain,
his left leg, in denim, not far off.
The Harley he loved like a lover
lies with its back to him,
twisted and smoking.
He tries to think of his wife.
But instead, feeling himself disappear,
he recalls the story
of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,
who arranged for the interment
of his own amputated leg
in a national shrine,
and of the ungrateful peasants
who, when the general was deposed,
dragged it through the streets.
Your Date With Death by Andrew Merton
starts with low expectations.
You don’t even bother to shave.
Well, forget what you’ve heard about her.
She’s Wendy, your high school sweetheart,
still eighteen, dressed in white.
(How could you have dumped her?)
She takes your hand
and you think peaches, waterfalls,
the smell of suntan lotion
on bare shoulders.
Now you can finally dance –
not the tango you once craved,
but a mannered waltz
in a mirrored ballroom,
ending with a curtsy and a bow.
Later, at her door, she thanks you.
Feeling shy, you ask,
What’s it like, being Death?
On good nights, she says,
it’s like this,
and she kisses you hard.
Andrew Merton has published work in Bellevue Literary Review, The Comstock Review, The Cranky Literary Journal, Powhatan Review, and Paper Street. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Mortician’s Fiancé by Sara McKinnon
I play my music loud
as tin cans smashing
on the ground behind a white limousine.
JUST BURIED I tell the man beside me,
whose hands are smooth
as Parisian frosting, I want
at our wedding. Before trips to the hospital
(where they keep death in the basement),
he asks if I want him
to bring something home. A milkshake,
maybe beer? Once, he brought Michelob Light
and a girl who couldn’t save herself
from drowning. I can still hear those soft hymns
serenading her tan, talcumed body.
Sara McKinnon’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Fugue, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and Quarterly West.
Mass Grave At Shiloh by James Doyle
The wind has no compass direction here.
It blows straight down, a funnel,
a Jacob’s ladder, so only the saintly
can make connections as they descend.
The footprints of those with metal
detectors frame the dirt where they found
a copper tuft, the sheared clasp
of a buckle, for the collector’s table
at a convention, or the curio bottle
on their mantle. The anonymous dead
go deeper and deeper: a hundred years
for the glint of an arrowhead; millions,
maybe, to nuzzle up the last fossil
before the lava takes over. I float
across the top layer, lighten myself
with new wings, the sliver of an insect
out of the weight of history, that heavy
cocoon, and stagger against the downwind.
James Doyle is author of the book, Einstein Considers a Sand Dune (Steel Toe Books, 2004). He has published poems in The Iowa Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The South Carolina Review, and Hunger Mountain. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The May of Winter by Elizabeth Swados
The little country blows up on the map
a cap gun
a tiny crown of incense burned
to ash.
We all watch the smoke and falling bodies
on CNN
On one finger, a tiny blister
will grow hard
and red around its edges.
Elizabeth Swados is the author of the poetry collection The One and Only Human Galaxy (Hanging Loose Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Meridian Anthology, New American Writing, New York Quarterly, Confrontation, and Speakeasy.
Fight or Flight by Christine Butterworth-McDermott
Twenty dollar binoculars only let you see so far
and I’m straining here – leaning over the chair
in the upstairs room, parting the blinds with a finger.
I can’t tell if it’s an owl resting there in the dusk
or just a squirrel’s nest, a mass of leaves and twigs,
slightly golden in the amber light. The phone is ringing
in the background and I don’t know if you’re calling
to apologize or if the American Lung Society is asking
for money. I’m holding my breath anyway as if not breathing
(even inside the house) will comfort the bird, will let it move
naturally, as if I’m not stalking the flutter of every feather.
Your voice on the answering machine is another call
on the wind, shaking dead leaves from branches –
I glance back quickly as if I could will silence.
Then, out the window, the mass unfurls, the talons
release the branch, the wings spread as the owl reaches
outward, flies into air.
Christine Butterworth-McDermott’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, California Quarterly, Bellowing Ark, Quick Fiction, and North Atlantic Review.
Ultrasound Aubade by Amber Flora Thomas
The doctor shows me a sepia mushroom,
a cancerous orchid, a tether ball winding
and winding a pole.
You’re a lobster. You’re an old deflated inner tube.
You’re the weather in a tornado, muscles
funneling debris. Nothing
can be done. A thrashing salmon
swims into my gut. A brown bear
pushes his nose into my ribs. Dead spaces
and a web of blood vessels converge.
I still feel like that child digging
a hole with a spoon to bury a sparrow –
its eyes eaten out by ants, not old enough
to mother anyone.
Cavity in the Rubenesque Façade by Amber Flora Thomas
Lucid is a vein the nurse puts
the needle in. I am not sorry
for the sword. I pull and pull and
more bloody rope snakes to surface.
I never really wake. Drugs come and go.
I dream I have a wound, big as
Aphrodite’s shell. I have a head
full of Medusa snakes, so many tongues
I can’t keep them all! I say
thanks for the ship that sails across
choppy waters and lays me out on
the surgeon’s table, a dumb girl blinking
into operating room lights, a visage
of masked faces looking down
into my own. You see, a woman
is a bowl waiting for cups of rice,
or his car keys and candy bar wrappers.
A woman is round and floatable, buoyed
by her own excessive curves. The heart
monitor beeps endless for now.
I am blessed, finally released from
the hell that is rotten but not abstract
to their clamps, scalpels, and scopes.
And like old shards from Coors bottles
disappointment tips out of me.
Meditation on Four West by Amber Flora Thomas
Red tulips are against hospital policy.
Tuesday through Saturday I’m allowed
a cold cup of coffee with breakfast.
I am in the room between my ears.
I hear blueberry pie recipes and baseball
scores in the television static.
The candy striper yells, “Get your pills,
Get your pills!” the spokes clicking
in her cart wheels. Can I have
the pill for: I’ll try not to kill myself
with the red tulips on the nightstand?
Time for confessions: when I am
among towering Victorians, I become a thief
of the trellis. My puppy eats the eyes
out of the teddy-bear’s face. I’ll trade you
two fat blooms for the foghorn’s distant cry.
About disease: It’s no good inside the stout heart
of the colonizing cells; the blackness inside me
drinks, slaps cool waters into my throat
and sucks air. Confession:
I’ve pulled the seam so far open on the past
I’ll never get the dress closed.
Amber Flora Thomas’s first collection of poems, Eye of Water (2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize) was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Phoebe, Runes, Texas Poetry Review, and Southern Poetry Review.