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.


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INCANTATION by Nina Feng