POETRY
RECEPTION, CASCADE, INC. by David Guterson
One by one they come for chocolates,
The gorgeous men in sales.
Sweetly do they ask the young receptionist –
Redeem our day.
It’s come to this:
The highest meaning is to serve.
To gently telephone
Where kindness becomes them.
Cheap dainties in corrugated cups
And clean holiday vests while
Remembering an old football play –
The unpredictable reverse.
But sometimes they must wonder
Where they went,
Or if this is the same life they lived,
Triumphantly spent,
Before half-time when they were princes
And thieves.
David Guterson’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, and Conjunctions. He is the author of seven books, including two collections of short stories, a collection of essays, and the novels Snow Falling on Cedars (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1999), East of the Mountains (Vintage, 2003), Our Lady of the Forest (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2004), and The Other (Knopf, 2008).
Traffic by Elizabeth Bradfield
MacMillan brings back specimens, brings examples
of the daily stuff native: garb and tools.
He thinks dentistry and church were good
introductions. Isn’t sure about the rifle.
*
Summers in camp: at last a bag of mail
full of the war, daughters affianced,
other explorers.
Within the week, every man in camp
is hacking, snuffling above the page.
*
Basque whalers, a Viking’s lost coin glinting.
This is what they imagine as archaeology.
But the true reach here is west,
nouns pulled from Beringia’s high steppes.
*
Beside MacMillan’s machine, Ahlnayah
did her best for the wax cylinder.
He wasn’t sure a woman’s voice
could fix itself there. Still, she sang.
He brought that back, too.
Regarding the Absent Heat of Your Skin on Letters I Receive While at Sea by Elizabeth Bradfield
– the poet’s mirror-poem to Traffic
Paper wing Words smudged
in your hand’s stroke What
has been sealed Torn mouth
Lung-must
And a shiver along
my lateral line, olfactory
lobe lit up
Breath on the paper
Wind on the water (& off it)
Breath from the water
And ill wind Tear-salt
Fish near the surface, glinting
Plankton rising forced
Scent of panic (lung-must)
Petrels arrive because of
Patter and feed
Your eyes on the horizon
are greedy, could eat
leagues Call my name
Breeze Wind Gale
Let the air clock around your mouth
It pushes, unturned,
against your mouth
If you stand on the shore and call
I’ll know
In the Inner Harbor by Elizabeth Bradfield
You can still see it through the water
and, in the case of the mast and radar,
sticking up from it. Pilot house and deck a glow
that shifts with light, tide, and the seasons
of plankton. Some say scuttled.
But maybe just the natural fate
of an old boat that’s worked
itself to rust and rot by working
the waters through their fish,
down at last to what once was trash:
skates and dogs. Either way,
it’s tied to the pier where it sank,
ringed by orange containment booms,
still moored between the Carol Ann
and Jersey Princess.
Off the wharf’s end, gannets feed.
They soar with one eye tipped to water then
stall
fold wings
javelin
trajectory visible and true as guy wires
as they pull the silvered air down with them.
At the edge of light’s reach, a fish
caught and swallowed before
wings held half-open, a glow
in the bluegreen water, they rise
and shake the water from themselves.
The Chico Jess doesn’t rise,
though we want it to, this relic
of a time when we raised boats
not because of seepage but
for salvage. The town debates
who should foot the bill of its removal.
The gannets, hunting among the moorings
and pilings of the inner harbor, work
through water we once feared
would erase us and now hope,
despite all facts, might manage it.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010) and Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and Field. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Gringo Called Ñakak by Orlando Ricardo Menes
Based on Quechua folklore
White is the color of chalk. White is the sap from a rubber tree. I am translucent, just a faint shimmer, as I prowl your potato fields in the cold air, night turning to day, like soft ripples in a thawing brook. You might hear my feet crack an ice puddle, but you’re too slow for my flying poncho. My elastic mouth will swallow your child if she strays into the willows or the eucalyptus grove. These blue eyes, brighter than a cat’s, harder than gemstone, can track you in a moonless night. Don’t hide in a cave, behind a boulder, or among the haystacks. I can sense your heat from a footprint, a sigh, your arms as they brush against the maize. Get me mad, and I’ll breathe fire hot enough to boil a whole glacier to steam. I can grind your bones to powder with my diamond teeth, then sell it to druggists in China who’ll make pills, elixirs, unguents. My fingernails are scalpels that harvest eyes, kidneys, and hearts for whoever pays the most in dollars, Euros, or British pounds. I own your mountains, from dry foothill to snowy peak. Like sentinels atop the cordillera, smokestacks soar into glass-wool clouds, and my cauldrons of steel produce lucrative lubricants. Night and day, sleet or hail, they refine the vacuumed fat of those I kidnap, those I buy, those I trick, your neighbor, your wife’s cousin, your own daughter. Without them global progress would cease. Engines would die, guns would not fire, lasers would go dim, even satellites would fail to orbit the earth.
Ghazal for Mango by Orlando Ricardo Menes
Ballistic drupe, clan of anarchic Anacardiacea, kin to
cashew, sumac with red bobs on its bough.
Leathery leaves, evergreen, pregnant panicles in white,
ovoid fruit that clumps a sunlit bough.
Won’t you rummage my barrow? Slurp sweet-sweet
Alphonse. Sniff citrusy Nam Doc Mai.
Peel Ruby. Covet coquette Mallika. Elope with Jamaican
Julie, haughty on her plucked bough.
Red-blushed skin, mole-dappled, pastels of canary yellow
with cardamom green, a hairy stone.
Wicked apricot smeared in devil’s turpentine, warned the
English bishop beneath his pulpit’s bough.
Mango, a corruption of the Portuguese manga, sleeve, itself
a mangling of the Malaysian mangnga.
Fruit of friars, galleon’s fragrant cargo. A Goan Judas
would’ve swung from mango’s gibbet bough.
I love how the word cavorts in speech. To Indians, the dying
geezer is a mango about to drop.
In Cuba, mango filipino is the town tart, floozy in the shade,
her name carved on a svelte bough.
Arroz con mango, Mamá would say, when life got mixed up,
absurd, like exile, love’s madness.
How Uncle Manny got rich selling plumbing, just a fool
who’d monkey up any crooked bough.
Orlando’s first memory of Miami is of his grandmother’s
mango tree, scraggly, mushy fruit.
The boy from Lima saw rain for the first time, heard
thunder, smelled resin on a wet bough.
Orlando Ricardo Menes is the author of the poetry collections Furia (Milkweed, 2005), and Rumba Atop the Stones (Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2001). His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Indiana Review, and West Branch.
Serpentine by Susana Childress
After Andrei Rublev’s The Savior of Zvenigorod, 15th C.
I.
And when she wakes up, night after night,
her mother takes to holding her at dusk, wrists pinched
with fear, pleading the psalms inside her mouth. Jeremiah
said it first. Spoke straight to her deceitful heart – abrasive
prophet, incisive and unadorned, great cleft of self, damned
truth: above all things, that filthy heart. In the night it dreams
for her. By day, it beats and beats and beats, so that when the music
of years trembles as a human voice, she is no longer afraid
of those bright, black hours. Her fingers pet the yellow pages
of books, petals against her teeth. It is not the nose of Jesus, set
like a pencil upon his face in the tradition of the Greeks. It is
the muted violet around his eyes, congealed and weary,
this Jesus. She does not know if he dreamed, who took
to holding him when he woke, and what if he listened for birds
in early morning? How did the lapping Galilee sound?
His small lips, barely rose of gold on that old
parchment, they are closed. Shut lightly, like a pair
of eyes. Or a hand around a stone.
II.
The psalmist told her she could rest on God’s shoulders. She is
a lamb, flaccid slab of woman, rinsing out the stains
from her panties in the sink, her body seeping its black scallops
onto strips of fitted cloth. She would tell herself a dream:
holding the cheeks of the Savior of Zvenigorod. Set her mind
on disappearance. Tell her, Isaiah, perfume poured
from that sickening alabaster jar, hands on the Savior’s
face, say again, Comfort, Comfort. And there is some, shelled out
of a void. The print gives nothing so nicely: says one Russian
art historian, There is no trace of Byzantine severity. . . .
She falls asleep to this, arms tucked around herself, Mary
of Magdala, widow of Naim. Each night she has waited
for something to fall, and each morning she wakes, heavy
with mercy, to this damaged fresco of the Christ. A man
found him in a barn, four hundred years after Rublev set him
down. Staring up from the step of a barn, quiet Christ.
III.
How to unfrighten the most frightening affinity. Which
to the small, careening girl, serpentine, her singing mouth,
each rod of earth slipping from her hands. Which to the breasts
that rounded out like a fish’s gill with air, the legs and arms
grown long, patience that never did, which to the swiveling neck
on its baluster of vertebrae, to this, and to that, earnest bulbs of light
in the belly, tender folds of the genitals, dreams that helix
hot white: it is not the moustache of Jesus, a line of soil
running into his beard; it is the turning of his face
toward her. Slightly, like a curtain touched with wind. Or the door
an inch from closed. She fears nothing as she fears the loss
of such amity: thank God, his eyes do not search, they do not penetrate.
Susana Childress is the author of the poetry collection Jagged with Love (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Mississippi Review, Runes, and Blackbird.
THE WOMAN WHO LOOKS UP by Colette Inez
Andromeda rowed to the palace
by her rescuer, slayer of gorgons.
Medusa set loose the snakes of her hair.
Jupiter’s shower of gold through a locked vault
penetrating Danae.
Myths aren’t what this woman wants
when she reads a dim penmanship of galaxies
from a scraggly yard.
Dizzy with earth’s velocity, her penny-
saver day-to‑day, she asks you
to notice her as more than she appears –
neck strained like an astronomer horse
when she resolves the Pleiades
from haze to pail of abundant stars.
Colette Inez’s newest collection of poems, Horseplay, is forthcoming from Word Press in 2011. Among her other poetry collections are Spinoza Doesn’t Come Here Anymore (New York Poets Series, 2004); Clemency (Carnegie Mellon Poetry, 1998); Naming the Moons (Press of Appletree Alley, 1994); Getting Underway: New & Selected Poetry (Story Line Press, 1993); The Woman Who Loved Worms (Doubleday, 1972); Alive and Taking Names (Ohio University Press, 1977); Eight Minutes from the Sun (Saturday Press, 1983); and Family Life (Story Line Press, 1992). Her memoir is titled The Secret of M. Dulong (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
TELESCOPIC INTERIOR by Suzanne Buffam
Solar wind singing in a bottlecap.
Distant drone of stone
Drilled through for more stone
Less prone to collapse.
Add fire. Add feast days and photons
And glue the whole mess
Together in a nerve net
Swinging through the cosmos on a peg.
If you can sleep through this
Send me a lullaby
From your crib of green dreams.
Down here the weather’s red
And the century’s turning
Every storm back to port.
At the last resort
They’re selling sand as souvenirs.
The roses have never looked lonelier,
Less photogenic, but get this –
They’re going ahead with the festival.
They’re addressing the peacock dilemma.
They’re dredging the harbor.
They’re shooting pitchforks at the moon.
Through a cracked telescope
I watch the late show unfold
Its milky arabesque across the deep.
How could I sleep? The brightest star
In the sky tonight is a planet
Called Tomorrow.
I used to live there.
I should know.
Suzanne Buffam is the author of the poetry collections Past Imperfect (House of Anansi, 2005), and The Irrationalist (Canarium Books, 2010). Her work has recently appeared in A PublicSpace, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, and jubilat.
MAN ON THE DUMP by Donald Platt
The man thrown on the garbage heap in Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood
is not Wallace Stevens’s
“man on the dump.” He is and is not stanza my stone. The photographer
with the wide-angled lens
had to get down on his knees as if he were praying in the roadside dirt
to shoot the man
in the sand-colored wool slacks, still crisply creased
from the cleaners,
their pockets turned inside out. The man’s hands are tied
behind his white-shirted back
with thick black electrical wire. The bound hands, which are the center
of the photograph, have turned
blue. Well manicured, his blue nails have been trimmed and filed down
with an emery board.
One hand loosely clasps the other. I let my eyes detour
to the garbage strewn around
the man – clear plastic bottles with orange tops, empty tuna fish cans,
turquoise wrapping paper,
white styrofoam boxes in which something fragile must have been shipped.
I look away
along the long dirt highway, no traffic, along the dead power lines
to the block of apartment buildings
hazy on the horizon in early morning light. But my eyes always
return to the blue hands
of the man lying on his side, slumped over so I do not see
his face. Only his back,
buttocks, stout legs, and feet stripped of their shoes but still wearing
their expensive, beige, silk socks.
Let the atrocious images haunt us, Susan Sontag argues and urges
in her last book.
At sixteen I saw for the first time one of Chaim Soutine’s
paintings of beef
carcasses. The headless body was hung upside down
by its hind legs
and trussed with rope to a black beam. I looked into the gutted
chest cavity and found
a relief map of red, ocher, and blue slashes, swirls,
gobs, and gouts of paint
laid down to suggest the fresh, flayed meat. The red ribcage
quivered against the blue
background. It was stained glass for a slaughterhouse, hell’s cathedral.
Soutine poured buckets of blood
bought from a butcher over the carcass to keep the raw flesh
red. He painted it
for weeks. The stench made his neighbor vomit and call the police.
“Art is more
important than sanitation,” Soutine insisted and persuaded them
to let him keep
painting. “Once I saw the village butcher slice the neck
of a bird and drain the blood
out of it,” he told his biographer. “I wanted to cry out.
This cry, I always feel
it here.” He patted his throat. “When I painted the beef carcass, it was still
this cry that I wanted
to liberate. I have still not succeeded.” Let the atrocious
images haunt us.
Sontag couldn’t bear to look at Titian’s painting of the flaying
of Marsyas, at how
the satyr too is hung upside down from a tree. Apollo,
laurel-crowned, is gently
starting to peel back the skin below Marsyas’s left nipple
with his long hunting knife.
The blood runs down Marsyas’s left arm, over his bound
hands, to the ground
where a lapdog licks it up. A faun holds a wooden bucket.
Is it to collect
the blood? Or does it contain water for Marsyas to drink
so he won’t faint
and will not fail to feel the pain of being flayed alive?
Under the tree, a young man
in a rose robe draws his bow over a lira da braccio,
early version of the viola.
String music will only partially muffle Marsyas’s screams.
His panpipes hang
from a new-leafed branch. Why does sunlight turn his muscled torso
to the color of honey?
I cannot see the face of the man on the dump. He could be
Shiite or Sunni.
He could be the younger son of Ahmed Ali, a carpenter
famous for making lutes.
When Ahmed went to the morgue to identify the body
of his older son killed
a year ago, he saw holes drilled through the knee, ankle, wrist,
and elbow joints.
His younger son, thirty years old, is missing. “I made lutes
and sometimes
I played,” says Ahmed, “but my fingers are numb now.
I cannot play.
I want only to find my kidnapped son.” Waiting for his son to return,
Ahmed has carved
a bowl from flawed spalt wood. It holds sunlight and rotted
persimmons
that blue flies buzz about and orbit without end.
Donald Platt’s fourth book of poetry, Dirt Angels, appeared in 2009 from New Issues Press. His poems have been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize anthologies (2003 and 2005) and The Best American Poetry (2000 and 2006). He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
Landscape with a Dead Goat by Octavio Quintanilla
There are things you want
to remember before the night
becomes too thick to breathe.
But you only remember
the herbs your grandmother
boiled to make you strong.
They did. Remember
when you could raise
your kid above your head
with one hand?
Call it a dream.
Call it a field where you get lost
and no one goes out to find you.
Now you’re a lame animal
whose entrails God will use
to see His own future.
He knows where you are:
where faith is all there is
and you have no use for it.
Everything else is light lost in light.
Sonnet for Human Smugglers by Octavio Quintanilla
Take care of them. If they want water,
Dump them in the river. If they want
To live, let them loose among the rattlesnakes.
If they want to breathe, gag them with black hope.
Let the desert mouse nest in their white bones.
Give them shelter with your greed. With your rape.
The road kill is a sign you’re almost home.
Point to it and show them who they are.
Their life’s a documentary.
But for you, everything is possible.
You’re the map that leads them astray.
Priest leading a funeral procession.
Take them. Cripple them with promises.
Backaches that keep them from killing you.
Hector by Octavio Quintanilla
You could’ve been a god.
The sun pointed its finger at you.
You were a king in the fields, leading
his horse to water.
Water left its skin on your skin.
Your skin dawned you.
No god, Hector.
Your voice fades like a crippled footstep
down a dusty sidewalk. Your voice,
a toothless animal afraid of the city lights.
Hang you, Hector.
Drown you, Hector.
Humiliate you, Hector.
You were never the boy who ate
in order to have something to vomit.
No, Hector. You devoured your hand,
your testicles and the funny accent
the hood-rats loved.
You walk the streets, Hector,
wearing your dead brother’s shirt.
A car goes by and someone calls you
by his name. It could’ve been the vulture
that never asks for forgiveness, Hector.
Or the man who fears for his life.
Octavio Quintanilla’s poems have appeared in Bitter Oleander, Concho River Review, Rio Grande Review, Chaffin Journal and The Los Angeles Review.
Bus to Mnajdra Temple by Cathryn Hankla
Covering the blow hole
at his throat to speak,
the bus driver emitted
a mechanical syllable,
to indicate the bus to Mnajdra.
I could see the fringes of flesh
quaver, and the snaking tube
that was his airway.
I could see the sea curling
blue along the shore
beyond the narrow cove
below the twisting road.
And when I got off the bus
I could see his scarred
hole, bare and rough
enough to incubate
the future, to serve as a nest
for incurable secrets.
I could see a hole carved
in coralline limestone,
and the dark cubicle
where the oracle sat issuing
words to be unraveled
words to be made flesh,
words that could traverse
these visible ruins
the passage from the gut,
wind through the opening,
the planet earth,
to tell us our next stop.
Cathryn Hankla is the author of the poetry collections Last Exposure: A Sequence of Poems (LSU, 2004), Poems for the Pardoned (LSU, 2002), and Texas School Book Depository: Prose Poems (LSU, 2000). Her poetry has appeared in Shenandoah, Missouri Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and the anthology Common Wealth (UVA Press, 2003).
Postcards: {x, f(x), F(x)} by Mary Peelen
x
x obeys algebraic laws,
but resists particularity.
It’s the placeholder of uncertainty
like the notion of God.
A variable, a kiss, a chromosome, x signs
legal documents in two concise strokes.
It could be me, you, or the number of poppies
we planted out back by the fence last Sunday.
After so many days of rain, the afternoon
was sunlit, translucent. Perfect as an integer.
This is Mary Peelen’s first poem published in a national literary magazine.
In A Café On Corrientes by Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi
All day Mami you unpacked
street names
through childhood
recollections,
and Buenos Aires grew
small like barrio Flores
where your house still sits
with wet floor boards
and closets that hold.
Your parent’s divorce –
the scar under your chest.
The closets remembered
your mother, Mami,
spelled her name
in rubbing alcohol,
the kind she drank
when your father’s birds
lay dead on wet floor boards –
broken beaks,
crooked wings.
When he went away.
Your youngest sister drew
mandalas in the air,
trying to solve labyrinths
your parents laid out.
The door to your house
with its glass fingers,
packed in her throat
makes her stutter to this day.
And it was I, not your brother
pulling the owl out
from inside your throat
on that day
when the walls of your house
collapsed; when we sat
drinking coffee on Corrientes.
Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi’s work has appeared in the Afro-Hispanic Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Callaloo, and Hispanic Cultural Review.
REFLECTIONS ON A COUNTRY ROAD by David Wagoner
Your headlights pick them out
of the ditch, and they flash back
as well as they can, all quick
to give as well as they get
at a night game of catch
as catch can – the punctured
empties like negatives
of screech owls – each one winking
and flashing as you pass by
next to the stuttering
center streak and beside
the cat’s eyes and dead eyes
of luminous directions
and warnings of what’s ahead
or already happening
and even what might be right
or left behind, and now
there’s the unblinking, pale,
sudden angelic high-sign
to welcome you along
with your own glassily sealed
beams sent back from the sky
to enlighten you with the way
to turn toward Vacancy.
David Wagoner is the author of 18 collections of poetry including A Map of the Night (2008); Good Morning and Good Night (2005); The House of Song (2002); Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (1999); Walt Whitman Bathing (1996); Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems (1987); First Light (1983); Landfall (1981); In Broken Country (1979); Shall Be the Sun? (1978) and his Collected Poems, 1956–1976 was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977. He is also the author of 10 novels, one of which, The Escape Artist (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1965), was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola.
Deodand by Gary Fincke
n. An object directly causing death given to the king to offer to God
The misplaced pitchfork. The fallen tree limb.
The tumbled wagon and the capsized boat,
All of them anointed and burned to gain
Favor for the accidentally dead.
And now, because we’ve learned enough to claim
What kills us is less the strange will of God
Than tumors or arteries clogged and weak,
We’ve abandoned this ritual like faith,
Leaving ourselves with cigarettes and cars,
Alcohol and fatty meat, not thinking
Of hauling these things to authority.
Now, too, we think of those kings preparing
To torch a plow, a churn, a spinning wheel,
Marveling at the unfamiliar tools
Arranged for the assertive work of trust.
“Deodand,” we say only to ourselves,
Imagine an autopsy on the loved,
Taking that spongy mass or ruptured part
To the fire. What we see is the body
That shivers us back to superstition,
The universe contracting while God’s breath
Is felt against our thin, extended throats.
THE BEHEADED by Gary Fincke
Some scientists, this week, claim there was time
Before the Big Bang, citing evidence
That shrinks the cheap shirts of our lives until
Our bellies are revealed like perversions.
It’s enough to reconsider the time
Before the Big Bang of our conceptions,
The world at ease with our absence, taking
Its ordinary time through centuries,
None of them ending in apocalypse,
No one rising from graves but characters
In stories, and yet I’m thinking about
The brutal contractions of loneliness,
Its extraordinary, unheard screaming
Before the wailing of what’s become us.
My student, just yesterday, insisted
We’d recognize our beheaded bodies
As long as forty seconds, sufficient
For understanding. An insomniac,
She tells me she can see her sleepless self
The way the beheaded watch their bodies.
Such sight comes with wakefulness, she explains,
Her body prone for hours like a patient
Etherized, yet awake, one more story
I’ve read, someone hearing a surgeon speak
The soft, private language of hopelessness.
Or this common story, my father’s place,
This afternoon, among the nearly dead
In a room with a door that doesn’t lock.
He’s wrapped in flannel shirt and two sweaters,
Each buttoned to the throat while the heat hums
From every baseboard as he takes his pulse
Each hour, expecting to hear, I’m sure,
The incredible first silence of stopped.
I wheel him to the window he purchased
Thirteen years ago, the stained glass mural
For my mother nearly a decade dead,
And he recognizes nothing until
I set him inches from her name and his,
Saying “read every word” like a teacher,
Already looking back on my visit
As it topples headless into the past.
How the world ripens without us, how mouths
Welcome its beauty and we are sorely
Unmissed, becoming spirit or nothing
But a generation’s occasional
Remembering. And yet we are able
To answer annihilation with names
That science hasn’t slaughtered; not yet, not
If we refuse to relinquish the love
That extends our moments by embracing.
Gary Fincke has recent work in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Let Us Know by Knute Skinner
Let us know how it goes.
That hill looks calm tonight
where the new moon barely shows.
You move on sportive toes
and laugh in the evening light.
Let us know how it goes.
The high horizon glows
in fading Fahrenheit
where the new moon barely shows
and the path obligingly goes,
whetting your appetite.
Let us know how it goes.
God alone only knows
– and even God, not quite –
where the new moon barely shows,
but you, a stranger to woes,
would haste to impending height.
Knute Skinner is the author of ten poetry collections including The Fifty Years: Poems 1957–2007 (Salmon Poetry, 2008), seven poetry chapbooks, and a memoir, Help Me to a Getaway (Salmon Poetry, 2010).
WORDS FROM STORM MOUNTAIN by Dick Allen
Just as the taste of tea and the taste of Zen
are exactly the same,
and the experience of Satori is just like ordinary experience
except two inches off the ground,
so the Buddha in art
becomes a flowering branch, a rock, flowing water,
clouds, birds, a funny old man,
and in our time
a Coca-Cola bottle tilted to the lips,
that great applause
you hear at rock concerts, following some great song,
then all those cigarette lighters, held so tremblingly high.
Dick Allen is the author of Present Vanishing: Poems (Sarabande Books, 2008) and The Day Before: New Poems (Sarabande Books, 2003). His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, APR, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.
Lazarus Hearing His Name Called by Sheila Sanderson
Before, like a moment
in weather to the ear:
the last tantrum of winter running out of pearls
to throw at the daffodils,
or wind leaving off its shuffle through wheat;
Then, like a granite boulder rocked
into the thunder of pilgrimage
from the resting place
it imagined
it had been promised.
Sheila Sanderson’s poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, and Southern Poetry Review.
Tobias and the Archangel Raphael by Charles Wyatt
Pietro Perugino (1505)
Raphael’s got batwings with scales in this opera,
but Tobias steals the show – he could not be
more charming if he were cross-eyed.
Indeed, he might be – we can see only
his right eye – the left is hidden by his nose,
his gazing up at Raphael, right hand on hip,
his left fingers grasped by the angel delicately.
Tobias gazes up in trust and adoration.
Raphael, how else to say, is bored.
He’s been in paintings with much bigger fish –
this one is a minnow, hanging from Toby’s wrist,
and it’s been a long time at this last task.
Nothing keeps less well than fish, Raphael
knows, arching his wings, his subtle
double chin, his hair frizzy in the wind.
Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels by Charles Wyatt
Cimabue (1270)
These angels are both kind and stern, arranged in
two columns of three like a grocer’s stacked cans.
Their hands caress the throne they both guard and
decorate – their wings depend from the deepest shrug,
crowded like chickens in a coop with bright light
undercolors. Everything is gold: the halos, the base
of the throne, the background – heaven is gold and
gold on gold. Mary holds the child in her somber lap
and wraps huge hands and one skeletal index finger
around his distorted legs. Hands. Every hand stretches
fingers apart, yet seems in repose – the throne won’t stop
turning – Stop, pleads the Christ Child. Stop, sing the angels.
But there is no end to majesty – majesty must grind on
in gold and symmetry, fearsome and in double stops.
Charles Wyatt has recent poems in Subtropics, Southern Poetry Review, and Futurecycle. He is the author of the short story collections, Listening to Mozart (University of Iowa Press, 1995) and Swan of Tuonela, (Hanging Loose Press, 2006). This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
PREACHERBIRD by Martha Zweig
Hunchbacked, somewhat:
– pulpit posture. A long-nosed
nearsighted elder squinting the righteous
text, spelling it out: Dread,
dread the debauched spirit!
Ironhead, North America’s stork,
formerly bringer of human babies each in its own
snug spotless sling,
happier luck than a broken arm
to the good people:
when will it prod
the executive movers & shakers
together in strict ranks of strict
wooden rows
& make them kneel,
grant them a moment to bow down
their heads to pray,
– enough! –
& then bore them to death,
slowly, o
with its sermon?
Martha Zweig is the author of Monkey Lightning (Tupelo Press, 2010), Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), and What Kind (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Journal, Pequod, Boston Review, and The Gettysburg Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Catbird as Wladslawa Szymborska by John Surowiecki
Cousin Zosia arrives for lunch so Death must be nearby.
They’ve been seen waving to each other on the street,
respectful foes. Maybe an uncle is an hour cold
and she needs to line up pall bearers, maybe
she has to tell her Jaszu for the hundredth time
about the inevitability of loss and suffering
until he rocks on his heels and wishes he were
outside deadheading his irises and listening to me.
Maybe she’s not Death’s foe but his Muse.
She likes putting one of anyone’s hands in both of hers
and housing it as if it were a wren. O Muse: to wszystko
wszystko opowie. But she won’t admit that she needs money
or that her son is a lazy little prick or that her
Ford Falcon is at Death’s garage door.
When it’s time to leave she accepts a tin of cookies
and a bag of cukes and touches his fingertips with hers
as if passing along electricity; then she opens her arms
for a last embrace and holds on for as long as she can.
John Surowiecki is the author of two collections of poetry, The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats (Word Works, 2007) and Watching Cartoons before Attending a Funeral (White Pine Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Margie, Nimrod, Poetry, and West Branch.
Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow by Patricia Fargnoli
Then, the winter will have fallen all in white
and the hill will be rising to the north,
the night also rising and leaving,
dawn light just coming in, the fire out.
Down the hill running will come that flame
among the dancing skeletons of the ash trees.
I will leave the door open for him.
Patricia Fargnoli’s latest book is Then, Something (Tupelo Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Poetry, and Nimrod.
Under the Redwoods by Danusha Laméris
I unbutton my blouse
offer my lover
breasts, still heavy with milk.
My husband is gone
the last of his belongings
heaped in the garage.
This man
I hardly know
lowers his face
takes the dark nipple
in his mouth.
Somewhere in the trees
above our heads
a blue jay cries out
its sharp complaint,
while down the path
a horse gallops creekside
sharp hooves
grazing the flat stones.
Around us,
thousand-year-old trunks
hold winter light.
A swarm of gnats
hovers in midair.
I feel a cool hand
slip around my waist
and then that odd,
familiar ache
just before the milk lets down.
Danusha Laméris’ poems have appeared in Lyric, Poetry Northwest, The Sun, and The Crab Orchard Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
While Camping at Fortescue Bay, Tasmania by Stuart Cooke
Though I’ve been frustrated by an inability to dwell
on any one thing, on any particular sport
or instrument, for example, though my
relationships always flare up then wither,
so that I’ve tended to drift through life, succeeding
at very little, rooted in almost nothing, I’m comforted now
by a mango-orange lichen sprayed over these rocks
and left to dry: a huddled collection
of lichen settlements: spotted, stone-fringed and
huddled; and by my girlfriend there, her fiery hair
flowing out with the sweeping fan of the Tasman
Sea. Despite my lack of success I’ve succeeded,
incrementally, in making a sort of peace
with the future – by which I mean I’ve been calmed
by poems with freer lines, their voices trailing
off behind me, city harbours smeared with five
o’clock sunlight: these are the sweating hearts
of places within me, though I hover on their peripheries
where the dry, aching spaces absent of canyons
or signatures close in. Their flat time keeps with-
drawing while the wet places sing, sing to those
whose land I thought we had stolen, people
of the flying signs, your wind speech, never the dried
carcasses sprayed over rocks. All worry, shame,
jealousy, spite, these big city numbers; out here,
settlements of old peace and then of various,
unresolved murmurs: collections of mango, molten
glass, tragically enormous trees rising up: blue,
wooden, huddled. And the sense that, amongst
them all, we are still growing. If some of these things
include you, only to then dissolve before you return –
as you probably ought – to thoughts of bills,
conversations, snippets of films, think now of sodden
rocks breathing in and out of the bay, gently lapped,
submerged, magnified, heaving out
– not to say that meaning is this simple
or innate, but to suggest a slow growth,
a gentle addition, places and warm
sunlight tumbling down quietly
over pale, gathered forest.
Stuart Cooke’s poems have appeared in Best Australian Poems 2009, Meanjin, Southerly, Overland, and Cordite. His translation of Juan Garrido Salgado’s Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 was published by Picaro Press in 2007.
Sky-Blue, Grass-Green by Melissa Stein
Wait. It will come to you –
the unexpected frisson,
the trees chock-full
of tailfeathers and eyes.
If you stand stock-still
in the pencil-shadow
of a birch – O I am
amazed by the wind,
allowed to stroke anything
anywhere it wants.
If a wind lifts your
skirt, to whom will you
complain? Compassion,
the wise man said, is
holy. I felt a great
expansion in the heart
region whenever a certain
R. appeared; it was
a kind of internal
breeze pulling outward –
later I refused to call it
“love.” The day starry
with milkweed, a peeling
red barn shoved up
against the sky’s rude
blue, and equally in
the neon, unreal grass –
Why doesn’t anyone churn
butter anymore? What
is homemade now?
Not even the news. My dog
knows this and buries the paper
before we get to it. Daily
we thank him.
Melissa Stein’s poetry has appeared in Southern Review, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Gulf Coast, North American Review, and Best New Poets 2009.
THE COLOR ZERO by Pack Browning
On the Salt Flats
Cataleptic landscape: its earliest tourist,
some ignorant galoot in snowshoes who
mumbled his French and ate jerk, must have
modified somewhat his concept of God
or added some new ones to his pantheon.
For us, the question “Did that same Grandfatherly
Personage who, though He seems fully to have
defoliated Eden, has tolerated, say, Central
Park – did He think this up?” – such a question,
while possibly impertinent, is only natural.
This is the bone without any hint of flesh.
Once, all the local rivers flowed toward this.
It was the sea, its undulant body as warm
and bountiful as a woman’s. If you had seen it,
you might have named it Pacific or even Sargasso.
It was ocean, the total, that sum to which
all geography adds up. Now
it is the sum behind the sum, that incalculably
higher number that was there always, waiting
to be written. It is the color zero.
Beyond the abandoned gas station at Knolls,
shark-skin hummocks, hills with the pallor of old
grease, like the dorsal fins of something we’d rather
not see the rest of, rise above the ossified
froth of this retired ocean as though
they could expect to swim here always.
Pack Browning is a poet who also wrote the libretto for Samuel Barber’s Easter Chorale.
Theodicy by Joe Wilkins
On her way to the mission school
my grandmother saw
how they’d put the Warman baby up
in the crook of a cottonwood –
wrapped him in skins,
tied an old board to his back,
and put him up in a cottonwood.
That was 1923 and the Crow
were dying. That was down on the Big Horn,
my grandmother, just six years old,
riding a paint horse
up the dry wash of the creek,
where she turned north each day,
where that morning mother Warman
sat in the dirt and weeds and wailed,
tore at the skin of her neck and arms,
watched this little white girl come by,
alive. My grandmother’s eyes
see nothing now –
her hair a white confusion,
skin the color of driftwood,
face a dry wash. Whatever it is,
she says to me, lost again in story,
you must love it. As you come
naked from the river, let the wind
shiver you. There will be babies in the trees,
women taking strips of their own skin.
I don’t know if there is a God,
but stay alive. Be sad awhile.
But stay alive.
The Day We Finish Painting the Bedroom, My Wife’s Father Emails Us His Suicide Note by Joe Wilkins
The west wall,
back of the headboard,
is Tuscan Hillside.
The rest: Aged Olive.
It looks nice. Better,
I think, than the wine
and pale salmon
of the couple
before us. The realtor
mentioned they
were “a good
Christian family,” so
as we painted,
we played at divining
from each choice
something
of their lives: What
does such a dark red
say about eschatology?
Maybe fishbelly
has something to do
with forgiveness?
And did he weep then
only that once,
when the traveling choir,
robed in resplendent
vermilion, went silent?
Did she, despite his protests
and in front of the deacon,
put her mouth to his
ear and whisper?
Did they fight, then?
Did they hide inside
silence? Did they even
know one another?
It was fun, while
it lasted. But now,
brushes drying,
dropcloth rolled away,
we’re left with our own
strange greens.
Joe Wilkins’ poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Sun, Mid-American Review, Harvard Review, and Best New Poets 2009.
THE PROTECTOR by Thea Lawson
My father said that
in his dream,
he handed me
a small suitcase, saying
“The waters are
coming. Whatever
fits in here, you can
keep.” Is that what it is
to be a parent? To stay
vigilant for catastrophe
at all times, to wait always
for something terrible
to happen, something
you can’t predict, so
you try to be ready
for everything: fire
and locusts and plague,
until one day you realize
your disaster has arrived,
and it is in fact your children
who cannot save you,
who can only keep you
company, and try to keep you
comfortable as you drift
away, and the waters
continue to rise.
“The Protector” is Thea Lawson’s first poem published in a national literary magazine.
What I Was Thinking Before Giving the Eulogy at my Mom’s Funeral by Jo-Anne Cappeluti
They turn into birds, maybe. I like
the idea of a metamorphosis into wings
of rising above the situation – as opposed
to being sent below
re-routed through some underground postal
service, stamped, “No Longer at This
Address” or “Deceased: Return to Sender.”
Mail gets lost, after all – still, it somehow
does go through. Once I got a Christmas card
in July two years after it was sent, and when I told Mom
she laughed and said, “See: you just have to have faith.”
Mom used to laugh about socks getting lost
in the dryer – always one sock, of course –
and how she’d get so busy she’d be running
around like a chicken with her head chopped
off and how it never rains
it pours. And while all of that seems highly
suggestive, it tells me nothing, and all
I can think right now in this damned July
humidity is that a coffin is shaped like a
shoe box and Mom had long narrow
feet and could do cartwheels across the
back lawn, and she’d always stop
whatever she was doing to listen to birds
even mockingbirds sing.
“Listen,” she’d breathe
as if the birds singing meant everything.
I wish there was even one bird here now
to help me give Mom a good send-off.
My thoughts are lost, going back and forth
between rising above it all
and sinking below, and all I can think of now
is that Christmas it got really hot. Mom ended up
doing rotisserie chicken
on the barbecue, and we all
laughed when Dad said she
had done a good job of winging it.
We laughed till it hurt.
Jo-Anne Cappeluti’s poems have appeared in Lyric, The Literary Review, New York Quarterly, Negative Capability, and The Journal.
Miners Trapped in Crandall Canyon Mine by John Spaulding
(Huntington, Utah, August 2007)
Desperate for relief, we are all
nodding toward death. So it is
when life becomes nothing
but disease and disappointment.
We listen for the tick of the clock
to stop, wait for the circus lights
in our blood to shut off,
for the arteries and lungs to close
behind us until nothing is left
but the dirt under our hearts.
If history is a way of lying about ourselves,
a place where people who did not exist
can sometimes live in luxury,
then we will always be here, like ghosts
calling in your sleep, secretly
saying our names when no one can hear.
We will live on and on
in the endlessness of daily work,
in the exhaustion of sleep,
the pangs of starvation, and
the red cries of suffocation.
We will live in the darkness
that flows from the hole in the heart of God,
that flows like a silent river,
cool and deep, inside the earth.
John Spaulding is the author of the poetry collections The White Train (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Roses of Starvation (Riverstone, 1987) and Walking in Stone (Wesleyan, 1989). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Iowa Review, Nimrod, APR, and Poetry.
Afterlife: Without Apples by Susanna Mishler
Against what kinds of threats must the psyche
Of the Arctic child protect itself in sleep?
– Pattiann Rogers
Our logic is the shrew
burrowing tunnels in snow.
Ravens in winter roost hundreds
to a cottonwood, shaking their feathers,
slowing their hearts, black on black.
Each remembers how he held
the sun in his dark beak,
understands that all light
is stolen. Wintering animals
live as thieves. Listen:
the best conceit for frailty
is our own bodies.
We steal our way through winter,
stumble our way through spring, agog
then, at how skin exposed isn’t bitten,
how the sun keeps generous hours.
Step out of the car and walk to budding trees.
Now sit on a log and unlace your boots.
Give your keys and shirt
to a bush and keep walking.
Apples don’t grow here.
We have no gardens but these.
Afterlife: Dust in Her Clothes by Susanna Mishler
How naked this farmhouse is
and your frown, too, over all
those unfolded gunnysacks.
Stand tiptoe at the screen door,
daughter: the unblinking sky
seems empty these summer days.
You sleep late since Mama
vanished, her feet, her thin hips,
her calves, her dark hair falling
out in handfuls. Your brothers
missed the urn today, they saw
how you rose into yourself;
the sun on your nightshirt as
you walked Mama barefoot
down the steps and through the yard,
and sprinkled her for the hens.
Susanna Mishler’s poetry has appeared in The Iowa Review, Margie, Michigan Quarterly Review, RATTLE, and Spoon River Poetry Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.