POETRY

The Waiting Room of Past Lives by Lauren Schmidt

No one likes it here. You can tell

by our bodies: this one chews

his cuticles; that one pretends

to read. A woman fingers the drag

in her stockings. A man watches

from across the room, blows steam

from his third cup of sludge.

He’s used up all the stirrers.

The girl behind the blurred glass

snaps her gum, watches the clock

for five. On the wall, CNN

bleats something about this

or that. The war here or there.

There seems to be only one channel,

but nobody bothers to check. We wait

in the glow of the red numbers. Now

Serving, the sign says, pinch our slips

like we’re waiting for lunchmeat.

It gets harder and harder to do this.

They put a note in my file. It explains

the crutches, the bandage on my brow.

I was eighty then, collapsed in the hedges

racking my brain for the line that came

before the dish ran away with the spoon.

When you’re eighty you don’t always

remember. The notes help. The last time

I was eighty I left notes on my front door

should a visitor happen by: Be right back,

in the bathroom, scrawled by my shaky hand,

letters like the eyelashes I pulled out

with my fingers and arranged

in my notebook during Physics

in the life before that. I loved

to watch them scatter in one full

breath, didn’t care much that girls

stared at my nest of hair or laughed

at my penchant for saying silly things.

So I chose my words carefully,

I spelled them with my lashes.

By senior year I had no brows

left either: two bleached seams

arched above my eyes, an eternity

of expressing horrified surprise.

My mother had them draw brows,

didn’t want me to look strange

in the casket. The irony, too much

for the man I shared it with here,

in the waiting room, a man

whose laughter made his jaw click,

like the snap of my infant neck

in the life I had that didn’t last very long.

My memory went only as far

as the garden of my mother’s

hair when she hovered above my crib

to kiss me. In the life I learned

what it meant to be a father,

I put my nose to the rose of my son’s

lips, waited for breath, contented

just to watch his infant chest rise

and fall, the feel of my own

stuttered breast as I lay in my mess

of wings in the middle of a street.

After the windshield, I remembered

the boy, the rock. The way he lifted

it above his head. Its shadow trembled

above me, dilated as it broke over me

like a dark corsage before the lights

went out and I was back in line again.

The rock was something like mercy

but do we really have the words

for the magician’s hat of how

our lives are made and taken? A rabbit

blinking in stiff confusion, some big hand

fisted around the ears, feet, pendulous,

marking time. Or sometimes, a flurry

of doves in a round of applause. I have been

the rabbit, would be the rabbit again

because there simply is no lover

Going forward looking back by Marge Piercy

Going forward looking backward—

it doesn’t work. Apt to fall bang

on your chin. Maybe break an arm

or a leg or maybe an ankle.

There’s no choice about proceeding

even if the moment is sweet as a ripe

melon. Even if you know this is really

the best it can get so you want to turn

around three times like a cat lying

down and just stay. Even if you reach

claws out, wrestle your legs tight

around the moment, it dissolves.

You don’t swim in time, you are carried

bumping against rocks and snags,

rushed while you flail into white water

and down blindly falling into whatever.

You can’t move forward looking back

no matter what you lose, your invisible

eroding tail dragging behind can’t even

slow you down with its weight of regret.

Long live the land by Marge Piercy

Up on the hill across from our land

before the summer people had houses

built, I used to find arrowheads the Nausets

left in the winters they spent here.

When I moved in, I could still locate

the cellar hole of a farmhouse, pear

trees gone wild and thorny, lilacs

some wife planted to comfort her.

I look out at the weeping beech,

sugar maples, birches I planted,

at the crooked rows of cabbages,

tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers,

and I wonder who will dig here

when we’re gone? I know daylilies,

lilacs and daffodils will outlive us:

they survive at old housesites in the pines.

We live on top of this land, tickling

it with our spades, sucking up water

from the deep rivers, but it endures,

fecund, swarming with life not ours.

Marge Piercy has published more than 30 books (poetry, novels, essays, and memoir), including the poetry collections Colors Passing Through Us, The Crooked Inheritance, What Are Big Girls Made Of? and most recently The Hunger Moon, all from Knopf.

From Memoir of an Amnesiac by Henry Hart

The first person I met at the pig roast

was an ex-lobsterman from Maine.

He swore I looked like the poacher

who’d stolen his traps and shot up his boat.

Wearing an I Swim Topless in the Arctic T-shirt,

his daughter offered me tortilla chips and guacamole

the color of gangrene. Her tattoo of claws

and eyes on stalks warned me not to touch it.

“Remember me?” a woman in gold tights chirped.

“I fixed your H-drive last November.”

I stared at Chinese characters on her name tag,

said something I don’t remember.

A lawyer in a see-through kimono

tugged my shirt, asked if my wife and kids

had recovered from the accident.

I apologized at length for being single.

A Virginia Gazette reporter snickered:

“Ever hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic

insomniac who stayed awake each night

contemplating the existence of dog?”

“No,” I said, squeegeeing sweat from my cheek.

A yoga teacher fanned me with her Red Sox cap,

asked about our next session. I tried to peek

at the name tag dangling behind her right breast.

Somebody with blue beads in his dreadlocks quipped:

“Politics in emerging democracies is like group sex

with the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Laughing means you secretly agree.”

I wanted to talk, but he’d scribbled

his name into a Rorschach blot.

Loitering under an AC vent, reading the label

on my Samuel Adams, I felt cold wind

blow through the first snow cave I dug

on Great White Mountain. It was easier

to remember names when they hovered

like snowflakes lit by a flashlight.

Cracking ice with a steel tongue stud,

a girl said: “I just moved from Alaska.

Up there, we had no electricity in our cabin.

It was so boring we’d watch our breath

freeze into cartoon gardens on our windows.”

The hostess interrupted: “Be adventurous.

Try the king crab and curried squid.”

Surf gurgled in my stomach.

A man mopped his shaved head and laughed:

“There was a Florida doctor studying babies

cloned from extraterrestrial skin cells.

I know. His cousin was my patient!”

A tennis coach on crutches whispered:

“Maybe you could see my mother. Her ears

keep ringing, but nobody ever answers.

She remembers everything up to her wedding.”

Bronze leaves spun from the yard’s one elm.

A dog barked at a ball in a thorn bush.

When I left, kids chased each other with sticks,

calling each other terrible names.

Henry Hart’s poetry collections include Background Radiation (Salt, 2007), The Ghost Ship (Foxrock, 1990), and The Rooster Mask (University of Illinois Press, 1998). His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, The Southern Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry.

SOMEONE MUST HAVE SPOKEN by Antoinette Constable

He’s good, all good. She’s trusted him for two years now.

Then, in the small hours of the morning,

the police dragged him away. Where are you taking my husband?

she asked, as if it made a difference. He was greasing the chain

of his bike in the shed after dark, which proved, they said,

that he intended to break the curfew, and besides,

they had proof he was a Jew sympathizer.

He’s been in prison for nine weeks. She tries hard

not to imagine how he spends his time

or what they might be doing to him. But it is impossible to think

of other things. It takes two hours by bus to pick up his dirty

laundry bundle at the prison gate, kicked out

by the booted feet of smug, well-fed young men laughing

among themselves, who never answer questions,

but bellow his name. She leaves the long queue

of wives and girlfriends at the gate before returning home,

wanting to hug that filthy bundle, yet fearing the ticks

and lice she always found before. In the yard, hoping

against hope that this time, she will find a message.

Any message is a message of hope. So far, she’s found nothing

but sweaty, worn-out, familiar clothes stinking of cigarettes,

and she wants to throw them all into the henhouse

for the rooster to feast on the vermin-

infested seams. First, to make sure,

she turns each garment inside out,

at arm’s length. She finds only

shreds of paper, and in a pants pocket,

an ink stain in the shape of a sock.

A sock? She grabs both socks, turns them inside out

and finds nothing. Almost nothing, only

a piece of cigarette paper no larger than a nail

rolled tight, held to the heel by a thread.

Heart beating hard as the surf, she runs indoors

for her father’s magnifying glass.

Cancel the midwife. What midwife? She isn’t pregnant.

But already, her mind searches as her eyes

have done. He’s telling her that tonight, no

low-flying plane over their fallow field must risk

making a gun delivery. She must alert the group.

Someone must have spoken.

Perhaps it was him.

Antoinette Constable’s poems have appeared in California Quarterly, The Chaffin Journal, The Healing Muse, and The Louisville Review.

Where by Mark Irwin

my July cap had blown

by the cliff’s edge an

old mine shaft’s scaffold

half collapsed and below

one timber a small tin

can with cut lid closed on

some paper all wound

in plastic I unfurl

to find a photo of

Elsie, 1910, “to John

with love, Ever – ” the ink

coursing, coursing like

Chalk Creek now – “and when we

marry,” it says. I put it

back: can, lid, plastic, ten

years ago, a kind of

bell you can hear when

ever light strikes the mountain.

Mark Irwin is the author of six collections of poetry; the last three include White City (BOA, 2000), Bright Hunger (BOA, 2004), and Tall If (New Issues, 2008). His poems have appeared four times in the Pushcart Prize anthologies.

IN THE SPACE OF AN HOUR by David A. Axelrod

Sunday dawn, as I pull open the blinds,

a man is standing across the courtyard

three flights up, in the opposite block of flats.

He’s thrown open metal shutters,

bends over a pot, and scrubs at rings

of scorched mush he left to soak overnight.

On the concrete sill, he’s placed a yellow

bottle of cleanser with a green cap,

the sign by which I know (waving hello)

it’s scented with artificial citron

to mask the stale odor of last night’s goulash

in a kitchen as cold as my own.

Ice-fog interposes itself between us.

Nothing and no one else has stirred.

Pigeons keep to perches under eaves,

the bakery van hasn’t arrived, nor the first bus

lumbered roly-poly to the corner, pausing

with a fumy, apologetic sigh.

What calls us forth is not triumphant.

It is not the tigress on TV

batting aside her cubs to lower her face first

into the ribs of a roebuck, it is not

a benzene-poisoned river, it is not a pit

of charred swine, nor a child’s bronchial cough.

We live no larger than the distance

we can walk in an hour, whispering a vow

to shop windows, I will persist,

and with any luck, will not board

one of the trains that collide, nor cross

the bridge destined to collapse, but will

go on immersed in the lexicon of the local

and all it secures. I may not see my neighbor

through the fog, but I trust he’s up there

going at it still, really scrubbing, pausing only

to tip the pot toward the light, as though to inquire

higher up, where they’re better able to judge.

David A. Axelrod is the author of the poetry collection The Cartographer’s Melancholy (Eastern Washington University Press, 2005) and Departing by a Broken Gate (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2009). His work has appeared in New Letters, Boulevard, Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, and River Styx. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

Time by Robin Chapman

My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to ask

if I might have seen her clipping shears

that went missing a decade ago,

with a little red paint on their shaft,

or the iron turkey bank and the porcelain

coffee cup that disappeared a while back

when her friend, now dead, called the police

to break in to see if she were ill, and have we

had trouble with our phone line, hers

is dead and her car and driver’s license

are missing though she can drive perfectly

well, just memory problems, and her son

is coming this morning to take her up

to Sheboygan, where she was born

and where the family has its burial lots,

to wait on assisted living space, and she

just wanted to say we’d been good neighbors

all these how many? years, and how lucky

I am to have found such a nice man

and could she borrow a screwdriver,

the door lock to her house is jammed.

Robin Chapman is the author of the poetry collection Abundance (Cider Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in 5AM, Poetry East, and The Southern Poetry Review.

Fights by Keith Leidner

we watched sugar ray leonard clown

marvelous marvin hagler when I was ten and

we lived in the government housing in kodiak,

and our neighbors were the dollahites;

one year later when we lived in new jersey,

it was 1988 and mr. dollahite was dead,

and you stood in front of the television with

your thick arms folded and we watched iron

mike tyson make tony tnt tubbs dance like

he was on soul train live from tokyo;

on a saturday night in the spring of 1991

I watched as you and your friends drank

whiskey and beer and hollered at big george

foreman to throw the right, just throw it out

there, but the real deal was just too fast, and

too young and I was happy because I was

fourteen and everyone was yelling and

laughing, and evander was my favorite fighter;

it has been years, dad, since we watched a

good fight together, not counting 2003 when

gabbo and I got drunk and woke up you and

mom to sit on your bed (because your tv had

the blackbox) and see if delahoya could catch

mosley in the rematch; I was 26 and we spilled

beer, but mom just lay there asleep with her eyes

open; we stumbled down the spiral stairs and

camped out on the porch to smoke and drink beers

in the cape summer night; we talked about oscar

getting outworked, and the stars, and cheap land

in maine, and how you always taught us, dad, to

never start a fight but to defend ourselves, and that

if we were ever gonna go down, to go down swinging,

and the look on your face, dad, god knows the look, and

your clenched jaw, when we were kids and we saw

the brown leather in your eyes, and the quick

movements in the rooms of our houses,

and what is life anyway, we thought,

but one fight after another

Keith Leidner’s poetry has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review.

ZONNET by Michael Kriesel

The heart wants what the heart wants, sulking in blood’s

basement for days at a stretch, the soul’s sump pump,

suddenly busting its meaty red hump,

doing its best to keep up with flash floods

of lust, rage. Three inches of standing regret

say the drain’s plugged again, spawning blue mold.

My girlfriend swears I’m two, not forty-two years old.

Maybe Mayans were right. Or Aztecs. I forget

which, but teach that sullen muscle a good lesson.

Cold air tongues the divot in my chest,

baptizing the knife in my hand. Blessed,

I know why zombies moan: compassion

for the world’s groaning loneliness. Love burns my face.

The bathroom Pollocked in blood, I sway, transported by grace.

Michael Kriesel’s poetry collections include Chasing Saturday Night: Poems about Rural Wisconsin (Marsh River Editions, 2005), Feeding My Heart to the Wind: Selected Short Poems (Sunnyoutside, 2007), and Moths Mail the House (Sunnyoutside, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Progressive, North American Review, and Nimrod.

THE CARNEGIE SYSTEM by G. C. Waldrep

Another hearse parks in front of the library

and you think, “Whatever happened to all those nuns?”

You used to see them pretty much everywhere,

in the train and the bus stations,

in the hospital waiting rooms, at the library of course

on afternoons when the carpet mills weren’t running

and everybody else’s fathers were slugging

doubles over at the county park. I mean,

you’ve done your homework, you know all about

Vatican II, and what happened to the honeybees,

and which mid-state secessionist organization

is most likely to be financing its own secret militia;

you remembered your mother’s birthday

and even your sister’s wedding anniversary

which didn’t really matter, since she’s been divorced

for going on two years, but never mind,

it’s the principle of the thing that counts,

namely that when you set the poor in rows

and make them sing, there must be someone on hand

to take down the names and field measurements,

someone to hold the hands of the wounded

as they pose on their stretchers for the cameramen,

someone to kick the tires and polish the chrome

before the door on the driver’s side opens

and you find out which story it is you’ve been reading,

whether the hearse has come to pick up the body

or whether there’s already a body inside.

G. C. Waldrep’s latest collection is Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009). “The Carnegie System” is included in his forthcoming collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, coauthored with John Gallaher, due out from BOA Editions in 2011. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

Grammar School by Brandel France de Bravo

America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of the twenty-four

frames per second as bottomless, open as the holes in our desks

where the ink bottles weren’t, like the cloakroom without cloaks – just

parkas and yellow raincoats. Hands perpetually raised, the smell

of mimeographs redolent as our mothers’ perfume, violet fingers

quivering in the air. God shed your grace on me, which would be

the lavatory key, shackled to a wood brick bigger than a 7-year-old’s

hand, thighs, buttocks clenched against shame. And naps

at our amber waving desks on pillows of crossed arms, my soul

to keep, as the radiators, skeletal beneath the windows, sang

their hiss and clang lullaby. Waking, we tied on our thinking caps,

index fingers ready to march once more across the Weekly Reader,

to bushwhack through the dense green words,

fearful of ambush.

America the Beautiful was our soundtrack, each of us a majestic

purple note, and each of the twenty-four frames a forspacious story,

until the projector, its young eaten, stutters to white, until Mrs. Boston,

roaming the aisles, would single out the one not seated

to teach us proper speech. “Where’s Antony?” she’d ask, or “Where’s

Jerome?” and Denise, Deborah and “T,” falling like straight men,

hang men every time would point to the student clapping erasers

or standing startled at the pencil sharpener, and shout, proud

to know the answer to something, “There he go!” And Mrs. Boston,

hands on hips, would turn to us, smirking slightly and using

the double negative I found so thrilling – my white mother would have

slapped me for it – to correct: “I don’t see him going nowhere.

There he is,” she scolded. I knew the difference between the two verbs

but the lesson came too late for me, going always a substitute

for being in a life spent leaving: this classroom, this brotherhood,

this sea to shining, and Antony still

not nowhere.

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collection Provenance (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, The Kenyon Review, Natural Bridge, and The Beacon Best: Writing by Men and Women of All Colors.

In a Cemetery by the Sea: One Definition of a Circle by Katherine Larson

You lie on the stone slab of St. Caomhan’s grave,

the rain inking around us. On your forehead

you place the purple blade of the scallop.

It shines like a watermark between your eyes.

This pilgrim’s badge, the islanders told us,

was supposed to heal you.

Instead, it makes your body transparent.

Runes carved in the stone beneath you I read

as one of the early histories of our refractory bodies;

I understand St. Caomhan was a fisherman who longed as I do

for the arms of a God.

Early that morning, I watched the postman on his bicycle delivering letters.

Two wheels turning so slowly over the cobbles,

I thought he had to fall.

Things that are equal to the same things are equal to each other, says Euclid.

Here, the morning birds are equal to the dawn.

The stone wall to the shore, where jellyfish like terrible offerings

present themselves each day to rot,

sheer centers surrounded by violet circles.

I trace them as he would have—beginning to end.

Katherine Larson’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Notre Dame Review, and Poetry Daily.

The Woman Who Can’t Forget: Flooding by Carrie Shipers

In Greek mythology, the river Mnemosyne, named for the goddess of Memory, runs through Hades and is the counterpart to Lethe, the river of forgetting.

Rain, rising water, sirens crying disaster.

Sandbags, shovels, everything you love

on the highest shelf. Instinct says swim,

but you can hardly tread water. No rescue boats,

helicopters; no one to throw a rope, hold out

a branch. Amid floating trash, debris

you recognize: yearbooks, toys you had

or wanted, wedding gown. Your head

goes under once, twice. When the flood

recedes, you spit brown water, grit,

something sour like regret. While you

were under water, the landscape changed.

People look at you strangely, wonder why

your clothes are wet, why you track sand

with every step. You smell of mud and rotting

fish, memories meant to stay submerged.

Carrie Shipers is the author of the poetry collection Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press, 2010), and two chapbooks: Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Connecticut Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Antigonish Review.

Night Mud by Doug Ramspeck

It began in childhood, the belief

that the moon was buried in the sky.

A fragment of bone, perhaps,

or chipped stone. To understand

that what was visible was lost: a strange

luminescence above the fields

at night, stars like frog eggs smearing

above pitch pines. And the grave-

yard down the road alive with the dead,

all of them crowding into

the earth. In my dreams there was

blood on the snow in winter,

red smears by the swimming pool diving

board where a boy slipped and fell,

blood on the bandages and above the ridge

at dusk, the red blotches

on chests of soldiers in my father’s

Civil War book, the lost

limbs and the stumps of days.

Then the calf that wouldn’t

suckle and so died, and the mare

my father dragged with his tractor

to be buried past the woods.

Or once a mouse that succumbed

in our walls but couldn’t be found:

the smell of death bitter in the nostrils,

as though each body ripens and returns

to the manure field, what clings

to the bottoms of your boots. Or say

the bright green algae on the pond

where the neighbor girl drowned. To gaze

at the unmoving waters as though

they know something you don’t.

As though to congeal that slowly

is a form of belief: the world dark

with a sky formed from mud.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of the poetry collection Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, and Northwest Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

East River by Richard Schiffman

Leaning over the barbed railing above the river,

which is not a river, but a sludgy sea sump flipping direction

twice daily—toward the harbor, toward the sound.

Urban tides my grandfather swam with his urchin buddies

off pylons at Turtle Bay. Turtles all gone now to Aruba.

Only the plunging black assassins, the cormorants,

and their cohorts, the gangster gulls skimming the knife-bright

waters, which abashed a boy once: shades of snitches

in concrete overcoats communing with the fishes,

of sailing ships sucked under by the eddies at Hell’s Gate,

and Chevys plunging off the last tarred planks of lover’s lane

into deeper waters than even a star-crossed romance.

River where romance drowns, and the glass towers fling

their shimmered ghosts, and the luck of the numbered streets

finally runs out—and all of the bright certitudes

that a child might cling to. Which is why I myself once stood

and stared into these mirrored waters where childhood ends,

half expecting the face of a dead man to float up grinning.

Or my own face, slain by age, as it is today. Every kid’s

worst nightmare: the grownup they harbor inside them

rising, rising out of the black waters of the future.

Richard Schiffman’s poems have appeared in Poetry East, The North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, 32 Poems, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

36 by Sean Lause

Thomas Null, machine 36, the hole-puncher,

was secretly apprenticed to despair.

I thought he was wise, since he laughed at silence.

Then one day he disappeared mid-shift,

and I found him dead on his front porch swing.

It was only when I walked his route alone

I saw the cruel genius of his escape.

Saints & Sinners, No Answer, The Alibi,

Utopia—a bar on each corner.

He must have seen he could drink his way home.

His eyes had captured something of the sky,

lonely angels still clinging to the wind.

Sean Lause’s work has appeared in The Mid-American Review, The Minnesota Review, Poetry International, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Beloit Poetry Journal.

X by Julie Marie Wade

Alone, it was all we needed—

one letter to initiate life, one

letter to sign on the dotted line,

whether you knew how to spell

your own name or not. An initial.

A skewed cross. Signpost for

an algebraic equation. First

variable, inherently unstable.

[Tuner’s syndrome: monosomy or

mosaicism. Absence or incompletion

of the Second X. Hard to form a

Second Sex without it.]

Letters, as we well know, are amoral,

indifferent. The X-box doesn’t care

how many hours you play, the Dos Equis

how many bottles you chug or break.

The X-ray is not sensitive to your soft,

exposed skin. The triple-X site simply

craves 16 digits from someone’s credit card

& a finger to click, “Yes, I’m 18.”

[Trisomy X: meta-females. Exes in

excess. Too many hugs & not enough kisses.]

The only letter that means both here &

anonymous, context-dependent on broken

hearts & treasure maps—what exactly it is

that “marks the spot.” Shorthand for all things

extra & extreme, the X suggests danger,

four-pronged arrow on a warning label,

letter of consequence with big payoffs &

sharp negations & always the power of

unexpected reversals. O fateful chiasmus,

where the last shall be first, & the first shall be last.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of two books of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and In Lieu of Flowers (Sarabande, 2011), and a poetry chapbook, Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

dx by Mary Peelen

The scope of transformation was

infinitesimal. Microscopic really.

It might have gone undetected

for years except for the way it

altered everything else, like

the way we calculate time.

Instantaneous change isn’t derived

by simple addition or subtraction

but a more careful way of

inhabiting the calendar.

Days and hours split apart,

milliseconds subdivide growing

thinner and thinner, an

infinite regression until

just as the moment collapses

into nothing at all it

flashes, brilliant as logic,

a convergence of pinks

in your forearms—

poppies, penstemon, peonies.

Mary Peelen’s recent work has appeared in Crab Creek Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.

Hat by Mark Kraushaar

I’m together with these three friends

after work and we’re talking cars, then books

then bars, then asian fruit, and formica tile when

I think, I don’t have a clue.

Still, I sit there.

I look around but I sit there because,

I know I’m missing something, in fact, I’m

missing the whole point here not

just tonight, but maybe

I’ve missed the whole point of everything always

and I don’t get it, or, I thought I might but I don’t but

I’m trying to stay calm, I’m trying

to relax except nothing’s

what it seems and nothing’s wholly actual,

and true, and right and real, you

know how it is: this is why you

have to love

the hipster’s use of like, not like

meaning indicative of as in, Looks

like disaster, and not meaning

inclined to as in, He felt like taking off, but like

meaning closely resembling, meaning similar to,

like as it’s strewn though speech like magnesium

in squash because as far as the real and the right now,

we’ve got approximate, we’ve got

nearly, we’ve got somewhat, and almost,

and similar and resembling, and so I take off my hat

to the beats, or, it’s like I do, it’s like I take off my figurative hat,

the hat with the feather and the phony jewel,

the hat with the chin strap and curved bill,

the hat with the button saying Peace,

the patch saying, Breathe.

Mark Kraushaar is the author of the poetry collection Falling Brick Kills Local Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Michigan Quarterly, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares.

BEFORE THE BRIDAL SHOP by Shara Lessley

Even the mannequin sleeps standing up,

her cool resolve outshining the street-lamps.

Is this what it means – arm fused to shoulder,

eye hardened to a single vanishing point –

to be a wife? The figures are made to touch

behind the glass, pressed firmly to each

other, as in some candid snapshot.

The mannequin’s hair is human; her dress,

lace looping concentric rings into a lye-

dyed rope. What to make of her beautiful

grieving, the drunken fall of silk? Should

the church bells sound this hour, which way

would she run? The moon burns

cool as stamped wax. Night and day

she smiles through painted-on lips,

as if she could hold the expression

forever: her torso empty, no rhythmic

tick to prove there’s more to love

than matter and light; no task but to stand

in someone else’s design, saying nothing.

ON THE SUBJECT OF WANT: THE SUNDEW by Shara Lessley

Phosphorus in short supply, a damsel-

fly’s no better than dung midge or gall:

shiver of wing and the tentacle seizes –

each kiss an acidic whip-stitch needling

the gnat deeper in basal rosette. Condemned

carnivorous, boggy assassin – I say

we’ve much to learn from you, ruby.

What’s beauty, really, to do with lust?

Leave pearly-eyed pipevines their minute

to mate in chalky stalks of moss;

bedded in sludge, let northern emeralds

divide the seconds. Save, instead, this

night coaxed into the next – black

remains of inedible leg dismantled

then spat back for days – your sticky

fists reluctant to unclutch what’s

wanted, your leaves so pungent with glue,

touched once, no lover can return to.

Shara Lessley’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, New South, and The Cincinnati Review.

NOTES FROM A TENEMENT DOWNTOWN by Terese Coe

The more original it is, the more

enigmatic. That could be said

of this apartment, which is

133 years old. Alexander Cockburn

was here to talk about a mutual friend’s

suicide. Drag comedian Jackie Curtis

in his 70s heyday acting out his fantasy of

“Three Girls at a Bus Stop” on an audio

tape. Up the block Eddie Condon and Phyllis before

they gave over their Washington Square apartment

to their daughter Maggie, Eddie in his

chenille bathrobe, Phyllis finally understanding

when I said their younger daughter was

alienated. That put it into perspective for

Phyllis, a 1940s intellectual. Don Barthelme

climbed three flights of stairs to pick up

his daughter from a play date. I didn’t

read fiction at the time and had the indifference or

the temerity to say so. He was inscrutable, bright-

eyed as we picked our way through wooden blocks

and railroad bridges to the toddlers with

Botticelli in their eyes. Ron Rosenbaum fell by

the night of the ’77 Blackout, more than

enough temptation for an all-night walk

downtown, the only light a cop car’s

spotlights swirling red on tunnels of brick

facades. We took those images in the mind.

Terese Coe is the author of a collection of poems, The Everyday Uncommon (Wordtech Communications, 2005). Her poems and translations have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and New American Writing.

Billy and Stephen and Me by Jim Tilley

—for Billy Collins and Stephen Dunn

Billy would tell you about the little flame

at the end of his pen while he rocks in the hammock

listening to wild turkeys rustle last autumn’s leaves

as they run toward and away from the stream.

Stephen would tell you he’s like the turkeys,

unsure whether he’s coming or going,

how that confusion has a certain beauty

which can’t be uprooted once it takes hold, and I—

I’m the one in the hammock, reading both

on this first warm day of spring, coming from one

to the other, going back, stopping every few pages

to let the words plant themselves,

and thinking how hard it was last fall

to drill holes in each urn’s composite base

so this year’s flowers wouldn’t drown—

likely red, white, and pink impatiens again,

because habits don’t break easily

and those flowers crave shade. Billy would say

there’s too much shade in the world,

and Stephen that we cast too much on ourselves.

Jim Tilley is the author of the poetry collection In Confidence (Red Hen Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Atlanta Review.

About Doctor G. by Ann Emerson

He goes out of his way every time to ask

how I’m doing. He is the tree whispering through

the cracked hospital window, the shiver of white

narcissus, the breeze lifting the skirt of the nurse

opening my door. He is the song in my head that

doesn’t stop at night, the way curious medicine

wanders my blood—I no longer go out of my way to

picture the mound of earth dug just my size.

Sometimes someone touches your hand in an

unexpected room and you close your eyes

like the lid of a music box that’s been wanting

quiet for years. When I start to die, this is

how it will be: no terrible music, no one taking

my place, his footsteps in silence carrying on.

“About Dr. G.” is Ann Emerson’s first poem to be published in a national literary magazine.

Blackbirds by Christopher Robinson

Fat blackbirds lift off like space shuttles

then swirl like loose tea in a cold pot,

or perch on tree limbs like burs on pant legs.

But they’re just blackbirds, not like

anything. Not McCartney’s black

birds, which were really men. Not

Poe’s raven, which was a dead woman.

Not even Roethke’s crow,

which was a shape in the primal mind, a deity

from a world of deities—Borges’

inconceivable flock? Plath’s rook?

I find no proof that God exists,

no spasmodic trick of radiance.

Stevens perhaps, in snowy mountains, in Connecticut,

a man and a woman, and the barbaric

icicles and the snow and the snow

that would be? Looking out the window,

I find only transient, disconnected metaphors, iron

fragments scattered on a plate, polarized

then blown wide. Some would say, there is

no truer definition of a thing, and the Word

is a convenience. I cannot collect the stars

into another sun. It is night now

and the birds have flown.

Christopher Robinson’s work has appeared in Night Train, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Chiron Review, Mare Nostrum, and Flatmancrooked.

Firefly by Jessica Greenbaum

Lightning it wasn’t and camera flash

it couldn’t be, not in this high story or late hour

of life. I kept waking up happy

(or I kept falling asleep) to a mini-lighthouse—

patient, steady—in the rafters’ pitch,

whose on-and-off fit all days’ end:

the yes and no, our land and sea,

the halves and opposites life pins in pairs.

I blinked, or it did, Tinkerbelle

come back with semaphores of positive

and negative, a glimpse of heaven

then of the chasm, the strobe above a ballroom

floor which saw, in fractions, who

we were and who we weren’t, when now

you saw us now you didn’t. O

magic spark, you something-from-nothing,

before I fell asleep, your miner’s cap

excavated headlines in their black

and white from deeper in the checkered world

then left the bad news in the dark,

and though I floated full upon my back

and wished to stay where half-full joy

defined this life, I saw you last

as signals from our other side, white jottings

practiced steadily and patiently,

pressed in a code too soon gone black.

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of the poetry collection Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review, 2000). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harvard Review, Orion, and Salamander.

TWS