POETRY
Alternative Etiologies of the Common Cold by Greg Vargo
1. Communication
Who slipped it into your pocket
had the delicate fingers of a thief
but a non-descript face you struggle to recall.
Was it the man in a suit who flung himself
onto the train as into paradise?
The waiter who took your order
like hearing a confession?
The kid at the bodega
who returned your change
like you were trading blows?
Now as in a black-and-white film,
you are shadowed by this stranger,
a mark in a city of sharps
followed down dismal streets
beneath the stupor of leaves turning
and billboards’ tattered come-ons.
Nights awake you ponder his loneliness,
how it is braided with your own,
wondering what grift is next, what angle, what con?
2. The Weather
Fault cliffs formed
in the night sky
when a continent of air
folded on its plate.
Flowers crested.
Stones filled the atmosphere.
Your little life,
hasped to a current
in the storm,
fell into a break.
The cage of the body
was lighted
by particles in the blood.
A fever rejoiced
in your throat
like a prophet
in his cave.
3. Susceptibility
Keepsake carried from the field,
seed in the chest’s loam,
fossil, arrowhead, totem,
fragment of the child’s fear.
Birds gather sugar
from the nocturnal bloom of your cough.
The sound of wings
through the thin curtain of sleep.
A Passage by Greg Vargo
Now you catch at words
like you did leaves in another season.
As careful as a potter,
you turn the wheel in your mouth,
fire loam into cups with which to carry
the river’s bright nonsense.
Then forgive my regret
for the sounds you stringed and knotted
and let roll away. Now, even the sea
is burdened with history.
Its name holds too much. The light’s petals
fall like scars across its open back.
Living with the War by Greg Vargo
After so long it’s still the little things,
Like his sullen advice for your night cough
And the way he plays a record over and over.
Then there’s his tic, how he steadies
One hand with the other, his maudlin talk of orphans.
But he is punctilious about clearing the dishes,
Using air freshener, putting the seat down.
And he introduces you to the girls he brings home
Before he fills the apartment with their musical cries,
So why be a moralist?
But you call bullshit when his penny-colored eyes
Turn sad and meditative, remembering how he grows restless
If you answer his questions or talk of the future.
You’re not sure if his silence is shtick.
His jokes have a threatening edge.
What a relief those weeks he’s away, out camping,
He says, seeing the country. But here he is
In the late afternoon, mumbling an apology about keys,
Finding you in a museum of antiquities
As you bend down with your neighbor’s twins
To admire a cabinet full of bright stones.
In the Gambler’s Loneliness, Intimations of the Eternal by Greg Vargo
To welcome luck’s storm
leave your windows unboarded.
Seek wishbones in slaughterhouses
and make Hieronymous Bosch a household saint.
After you’ve disowned your birth sign
and your aunt’s prophecy about your gifts,
then let go the night sky,
but break off a triangle
from an astronomer’s diagram
and become lost in it.
If you peer into the deck,
you’ll glimpse verses torn
from your first catechism.
Whatever ache these waken
should be stripped
and bent into a new shape
the way a sculptor
twists branches into a woman’s shoulder
or an alchemist dreams metal free
from service to the fallen world.
Once you mistrust the weight in things
and the objects in your room
float away from themselves,
then empty the day like an insomniac,
glean petals of divination
from the smallest patterns: salt gathered and spilled,
runiform shadows cast by crows,
the wind chime on the skin
when someone crosses ground
not yet claimed as your own.
Greg Vargo’s poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, The Chicago Review, and Canteen.
PULLING UP STAKES by David Wagoner
We still say that when we mean
we’re shutting down tonight
or this morning what we’ve been doing
and are moving on somewhere
to try to make a living
again. Evangelists
and circus roustabouts
and other tent-show troupers
and placer miners, kneeling
between the stakes of their claims
with their gold pans still empty,
have said that’s what they’ve come to
when they’ve had about enough
because they hadn’t found
enough and were moving on
to another kind of claim
on what might turn out to be
a home, a house full
of other true believers
in something wonderful
that wasn’t and still isn’t.
PUDDLE by David Wagoner
The puddle beside the path
in the neglected garden
is beginning to freeze over
as sunlight disappears
on the final day of December,
and from its shallow edges
the crystals at their perfect
sixty-degree angles
are moving inward now
slowly, zig-zaggedly,
to close one of the eyes
through which whatever is
responsible for mud
is taking a last look
at this year’s sky before
putting itself to sleep
above a vitreous humor
for however long it takes
to thaw. Again, I give thanks
to this eyelid. If it were
heavier than water,
it would sink now. It would blind
this and all other eyes,
pools, lakes, and rivers,
and stay there and keep on
staying there, no matter
what the wind or rain
or sun or stars or roots
or cells of anything
or anyone might wish for.
David Wagoner has published 18 books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and 10 novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, (Ballantine Books, 1982) was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Water saints by Kelli Russell Agodon
And a nervous bird on the edge
of a country. It is raining in Rome,
the Vatican sails on a pond
of two days straight from God,
from clouds that keep failing.
Water continues rushing and a woman
covers her shoulders, her child runs
through a puddle while apostles cry
acid rain. There is so much
sadness and just as much joy
as the boy continues jumping from puddle
to puddle. All of this, while his mother
shouts, pushes his father away, all this
and he only sees the sky reflected below him.
Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of the poetry collections Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), Small Knots (WordTech Communications, 2004), and the chapbook Geography (Floating Bridges Press, 2003).
Words for “Water” by Kathleen Spivack
The rounded brown earth is my body,
spider-veined and varicose;
the spurt of blue-wet
arteries, dendritic, underground,
streams so deep,
damp-ferned, that even
the word “desire” does not
describe them; nor the word “slake.”
Expressions blurt, a sudden
gust of wind across a lake
or brook, exposed
involuntary waterfall:
surprised, too loud,
escaping all restraints.
Forget “repression,” and
“containment,” little dry-pea
Humans: forget “dams.” Don’t
even try. Kneel
down, look up, and pray.
Teary, pulchritudinous,
I sprawl before you
like a large-hipped
woman waiting to be used.
Think: “wash away your troubles,”
and then take me; take me sixty-nine,
clamp your mouth
and sluice the liquid’s flow.
Drought’s the only way of getting
even; hypocritic with the rain:
“excuse my dust;” we’ll
drive each other wild.
You will think of the word
“replenishment.” You will think
“refreshment” and look for ways
to harness my wild power, wash away
your trash, the chemicals and dirt.
But to your greedy suction
rises my poisonous water-twin
ready to engulf and fill
you; alkaline and
bitter; the dry mucous
membranes, mud.
The Blind Skater by Kathleen Spivack
Turning and turning in the blinding light
that only you cannot see
you spin, head bowed,
in this crazy exercise.
The audience is silent. You have requested
only the sound of your own probing blades
against the ice to tell you, harshly,
where it is you are turning to.
And we are respectful. Your daring
under the hard blue lights
is almost a burden. You leap upward
into the fine cold air, off center.
And now you land, arms out,
balancing like an awkward bird, one-legged.
When the applause comes, you turn away.
But a great blind bird
rises inside us all, watching,
spreading its wings and weightless,
skating upward into the tent of seeing,
into the frozen spaces, tears.
Kathleen Spivack is the author of several poetry collections, including A History of Yearning (The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, 2010), Moments of Past Happiness (Earthwinds Editions, 2007), The Beds We Lie In: Selected and New Poems (Scarecrow Press, 1986), and Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood Books, 1981).
GENESIS, QUETZAL by Peggy Shumaker
Swallow at dawn one
tiny avocado. Hold so still
the world begins.
Love cry
of the jaguar dyes
crimson
your deepest belly
down. Each glance a
hummingbird, preening,
the narrow trail
of her open bill.
Copper green wing,
amethyst geode
throat. Blink once
and stars take flight –
sing like trogons, motmots,
yellow-thighed finches, sooty
robins, nightingale thrushes,
acorn carpinteros
tucked into carved-out holes,
wrens and siskins
seen or hidden.
Cataratas, water-
falls of song. Your chest,
vest of drip tips,
highland forest awake
after rain. Breeze-
ruffled streams,
your tails
run to the Pacific,
ocean waves hungry
to mingle
with reef and sand,
velvet green crest,
teal of tide pool.
When you push off,
flowerpiercers and
flycatchers fall
from your feathers.
When you push off,
earth gasps and sighs.
Wings stir root aromas
tangled underfoot.
When you push off,
cloud and sky
reshape around you.
When you push off,
a new world spins.
TENT REVIVAL by Peggy Shumaker
If after
afternoon rains
you hang
under a blue tarp
this worn bed sheet,
then position
behind it a lamp
& before it a bench,
all manner of visitors
will descend.
Most wish you no harm.
Invertebrates smaller
than the nail
on an infant’s little finger
tremble, backlit
beside luna moths
wide as masks
feathered for carnival.
Mosaic in motion,
triangles of tent-wings.
Tatted, bobbin spun,
hardanger, crewel work –
the delicacy and strength
of lace. Sepia ink
on hand-laid paper,
openwork cut
with manicure scissors.
One magnificent
jeweled fellow –
cloisonne patterns
red brown and tan
twirls antennae
twice his length,
draws the world
to him, to him, to him.
Dripping still,
water flows over us,
carves fresh paths
down the mountain,
& underground.
Strangers here,
we draw this world
to us, to us, to us,
world we’ve just begun
to sense, to take in.
STRANGLER FIG by Peggy Shumaker
Cousins, then,
the myriad orchids
of the mist forest
and this towering
strangler fig.
Both start
tenuous life
as stowaways
tossed aside
by wind or wing
dropped
without anyone’s
noticing
high above
the forest floor.
Air plants,
epiphytes, bromeliads
plastered so heavy
some branches
crack, tumble.
But the fig’s patient.
It settles in,
sucks up what it can
from leaf rot, from
breaks in bark,
drinks deep
from fine mist.
Then into air
fig tentacles
unfurl, aiming
toward the host’s
small patch of soil.
Fig leaves above
cover all else.
Not out of modesty.
Each fig takes its own
special wasp
to carry on,
wasp that swaps
pollen for protection.
Nearly gone,
the host lingers
within the fig
like the memory
of a difficult parent
who never knew
what she was taking on
when she got you,
mother who resented
being tied down,
mother whose face
you can’t quite
picture, mother
who changed so much
those last years
you barely knew her,
broken mother
asthmatic, wheezy,
who gave her all
so you might live.
Peggy Shumaker is the author of the lyric memoir Just Breathe Normally (University of Nebraska Press, 2007 and 2009), two poetry chapbooks, and six collections of poems, the most recent of which is Gnawed Bones (Red Hen Press, 2010). The poems in this issue are part of a new collection due out from Red Hen Press in 2013. Shumaker is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
What She Calls Eternity by Heather Kirn Lanier
What’s this, that each cell now aches
like it’s a little palm cupped
for some key or coin, for the one verb
it thinks it’s made for – holding?
Biological clock, say Redbook, websites and mothers,
the shorthand for some internal meter
ticking as each egg
passes through a tube like a thrill-seeker’s hips
rotate a silver turnstile
at a theme park. But I’ve never been one
for roller coasters.
When the cart hits its peak
and descends,
I grip the bar, believing
I’ll lose something. Like here,
at the Rosen Cancer Center.
Another dose of radiation
completes its orbit
around my mother’s abdomen. Caution:
Radioactive, read the doors
she walks through each afternoon,
the two menacing trefoils
like black, three-pronged fans
encased in yellow triangles,
and though I can’t join her
the young nurse does,
the tall one with the basketball-belly.
I worry her burgeoning shape
could get caught
in a toxic machine, but she just shakes
her waist-length hair
across her back and says hello
to patients with skin as pale as spackle,
then escorts them through the doors.
L-O, spells the top line
of her T-shirt today, and V-E,
spells the bottom,
stretched across her pregnancy like a grin.
I envy her
ability to wear it without apology,
without caveat or asterisk of irony.
No, it’s not a clock, or a ticker, this thing
that’s asking I follow her lead.
It’s a wa-wa pedal
wavering every cell, insisting I fill a hole
my body learned ten years ago.
My father had weeks, they said.
His belly ballooned
with fluid in another cancer center, my first,
and my mother asked, How long
will he have that? The doctor paused,
thought up an answer
but then revised it.
Forever, he said,
which is what my mother now says
when she hails the virtues of some cancer-killing tea
she’ll drink from now until
what she calls eternity.
Heather Kirn Lanier’s poetry collection, The Story You Tell Yourself, is forthcoming from Kent State University Press. She has had work in The Southern Review, Fourth Genre, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The San Francisco Chronicle. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Terminal Illness through the Wrong End of a Spyglass by Anna George Meek
The beginning comes toward. Distant ocean liner
under observation; all the decadent lives aboard
extend farther away, and my father does and does not
diminish; close to my face I hold
something beautiful, light and breath,
the back of his hand on my cheek.
I appear small to myself.
His mind, or mine far off, slips out
to a vanishing point. At the edge, he and I watch the slow growth
of word
loss. One end pointed at me,
the scope pulls in its lesser selves,
copper, scrimshaw, prism. Parts
of a secret reconceal: God, I want this to
end; I’m an alias, but he recognizes me, always.
Finally, his last words, “Hi Anna,” as if he were
stepping ashore.
Anna George Meek is the author of the poetry collection, Acts of Contortion (Wisconsin University Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Threepenny Review.
ECHOCARDIOGRAM by Meredith Davies
My mother’s beating heart – at 90, a solid
force – makes digital striations jump
and fall across a screen so black and cold
I feel a chill,
a tenderness for the body stretched on an
examining bench. Bruise and sinew.
Gush and stumble. Patterns still
in evidence.
Perhaps the first I ever heard, the sound
of chamber opening, chamber shut. So muscular –
this strange propulsion – we like to say it
never dies.
But this is bait and switch, a trick
of light that draws me in and shuts me
out. Such cruel machines,
these mothers.
Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of two poetry collections, Fishing Secrets of the Dead (2005) and The River is a Reason (2011), both from Word Press. Her poems have appeared in Apalachee Review, Cincinnati Review, Stand, Harpur Palate, and The Spoon River Poetry Review.
Sasquatch Goes All Darwin On Your Ass by Sherman Alexie
Yeah, I know they’re big.
That’s not breaking news.
My feet give me the blues.
Think of the splinters
And long-ass winters.
I’d build me some slippers
If I could build the right tools.
But there’s just some links
That I’m missing,
Along with my trousers.
So you’ve got religious, good,
And prayer hours, great,
But I’ve got bunions.
My feet have paid psychic dues.
So, my cousins, never underestimate
The evolutionary power
Of shoes.
Goodbye, DDT, Goodbye by Sherman Alexie
Did a genius bedbug – surprised by its tribe’s reprise –
Compose a blood-score – an honor song –
For the long-awaited return of humans as reluctant lovers?
Did that six-leg creature construct a dead-skin theater
On a trembling and numb man’s bedcovers – and assemble
Its genus – its orchestra and choir of little vampires –
And teach them to play trumpets, drums, flutes, and lyres?
Did that maestro gives himself the vocal solo?
O, who writes a symphony for the death of DDT?
Who writes a eulogy for DDT? Who builds a funeral pyre
For DDT? Who sleeps in hotel room bathtubs
Because he’s afraid, afraid of the indestructible bedbug?
Welcome back, bedbug, welcome back, we have missed
Your plasma kiss. Welcome back, bedbug, welcome back,
Thank you for the honor of being your midnight snack.
Sherman Alexie is the author of four novels, three short story collections, two screenplays, and 13 poetry collections including Face (Hanging Loose Press, 2009) and War Dances, stories and poems from Grove Press (2009).
but all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty by Sonja Livingston
(after Sappho, fragment 31)
should fling herself as if into the middle of next week
what she wants is solid as stone to the world
but to the heart need is a bit of shell
shaped like a wing
bleached from the sun at Saintes Maries de la mer
in the Camargue, where cowboys talk French and gypsies
pray to the dark-skinned daughter of Magdalene, and flamingos flap like sunrise
and even beggars have their oysters and red wine and fish stew;
do you understand
what this all means? Under the salt, under the sand,
take up your wing; taste it, ma pauvre petite
it is this moment:
it is honey, it is sweet.
Honky by Sonja Livingston
Honky n. [also spelled honkey or honkie] first heard in third grade, meaning white or light or otherwise cracker usually disparaging: used mainly in the United States not to be confused with honky tonk, honkey-tonk, honkatonk; a place for music and drink and sometimes dance and sometimes more as in underneath the ground, where all the fun is found, quite like juke joint, but more like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, banging out tunes for men stuck in cow towns and mine shafts, men with crude and coal on their hands may be a variant of hunky, which is a variant of Bohunk, a slur for Bohemian-Hungarian immigrants black workers in northern meatpacking plants applied it to Czechs and Poles and eventually all whites and don’t I know how fine it is to finally talk back, don’t I know how good it feels to grab hold of a word and make it your own might also derive from the term “honk nopp” which, in West African Wolof means “red-eared person” to look at the skin on your hand and see the way it gleams in the sun the term may have originated with Wolof-speaking slaves brought to the U.S. to push one’s lips into the neck of lover or child, to understand the glow and the shine, and know all is just right and let us not forget that white men called “johns” would honk their horns for prostitutes in the red-light districts of Harlem and I hope it’s not that, I hope the word began as a red ear to forced hands and not from hands on horns pressing down upon woman, calling her to him, taking the tiger from her hair, making her slip from the blue light of juke and jazz, and oh, how the wash of red light sallows the skin; oh, how this story colors us all.
Sonja Livingston is the author of Ghostbread (University of Georgia Press, 2010). She has had work in AGNI, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Cream City Review, and Gulf Coast. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
AMAZING GRACE MAN by Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Three in the afternoon. North
on Highway 27, city to his right
and Everglades to the left, thunder
gathering to the north and west,
and amid the flatness, the man
ponders a naked field of melaleuca trunks
blurring the horizon with their spokes.
A clearing in the grey betrays
a moon spooked in blue, spawning
on the tray of heaven like evidence
at a crime scene, the one fingerprint.
The man is glad the invasive plants
are dead or dying so the ground might
recoup the theft of waters. The birds
and all the native croplings, he muses,
will rejoice. How did they die?
Did the experts decipher how to rid
the earth of an invited plague?
Or is it just the call of season,
winter finally wilting before the rains,
and this bleak sight but a swindling hope?
And so, the man figures, the topaz
of clouds, the gusts piling like words,
will restore nothing, feed what kills,
and otherwise ignore in its machinery.
The man tracks the daytime moon
before the system clamps spring down
and knows it foretells, among other things,
tonight’s unbending night. He calls ahead,
late again. Better to call so no one worries.
Ricardo Pau-Llosa is the author of six poetry collections including Cuba (1993), Vereda Tropical (1999), Mastery Impulse (2003), and Parable Hunter (2008), all from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
A Hundred Words For Loser by Rebecca Lehmann
Dear glove-puppet, you should come here;
it’s grey and everybody hates you. A man
tells a bible story about a town filled
with prostitutes and a father who sleeps
with his two daughters. Their syphilitic shadows
slink across the ceiling tiles. And who cares
about the movements of their hidden girly ribbons?
They collect, but, don’t worry; they stink
of sulfur and twist. In the back alley: half
a bologna sandwich, a flattened refrigerator box,
a hundred words for loser. You finger the rat’s nest
at the base of my skull. Some suitor you are –
hey pussyfoot, hey horn-ball. Hey stupid,
bring me dead things and a flat stomach.
Rebecca Lehmann’s poetry collection, Between the Crackups, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Best New Poets 2010.
Tunnel by Susan Rich
The wind blows through
the chain linked yards of Allston Street.
It lifts the neighbor’s forsythia into a cartography
of light and tips the girl aloft for the first time.
Now the petals follow her
along the cellar stairs in a yellow yelp
of March, passing the candy dish, filled
to overflowing by invisible hands –
the ominous Bull’s Eyes, the endless M & M’s.
To the first floor tenants – newly married,
the glamorous man with a green anchor on his arm,
re-names the child “pea-nut” and drives diesel trucks
which excites her, tremendously.
In the wind tunnel, now their living room,
the couple talk as if they live
among horses and lobster pots.
As they embrace her, she knows
this is the encyclopedia
of her real world. The life of undershirts
and pipe smoke –
penny candy. Love so fresh
it appears
palpable even to her four-year-old self.
The wind of her heart now
follows her up the stairs to the other mother,
other father, then drifts through
the hallways so grim it seems as if an aunt
in Cincinnati has just died
and then nine cousins, drowned, too.
The wind follows her through the attic of the dead
where she touches their beautiful
lips with her thumb. It is peaceful here
when she walks through herself
leaning through to the current’s edge.
Susan Rich is the author of the poetry collections The Alchemist’s Kitchen (White Pine Press, 2010), Cures Include Travel (White Pine Press, 2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue (White Pine Press, 2000). This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Picking The Kitten by Faith Shearin
You had to hold it awhile in your hand.
It was important to look into the box
of blind fur and notice who needed you.
Not the one who chased its tail,
not the one who slept in a corner
with an air of indifference. There were
colors and markings to consider.
Which would you want to find
on your pillow? The one I took home
was warm as fever. I held her purr
in my pocket, her roughness on my
bedroom rug. I pour out this memory
the way I poured out her evening cream.
Faith Shearin is the author of two books of poetry: The Owl Question (2002 May Swenson Award) and The Empty House (Word Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Salamander, North American Review, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.
OF MOMENT by Margaret B. Ingraham
Does it matter where the birds go? Does it even matter
What species they are?
They leave here, that’s the point,
First their bodies, then their sad cries.
Parable of Flight, Louise Glück
Knowing your fondness for her and your walks together
through the woods, I admit I was surprised to learn that
you did not share her fascination with the birds. There is
certainly no point in trying to argue you into that now. But
I will make the case that it does matter what species the
birds are. Finches are not falcons and no wren, or even
mockingbird for that matter, can mimic the heron’s shriek.
Nor is it their leaving that is of consequence; their
departures are little different from our own, except that
ours are more easily described as pointless or necessary,
inevitable or untimely. Rather the import is in their
returning: how buntings, for example, brood after long
forgotten brood, maintain forever their migratory fidelity,
often guided by Polaris, other times by path integration so
that their navigation is at once celestial and dead reckoning,
and so that those differing methods coalesce into a single
predictable mystery that defies us, even as it kindles our
anticipation and defines our desire to reclaim the first
sighting, as when she grasped your tiny wrist with one hand
and pointed to the poplar branch with the other. Whether I
tell it like this or fashioned into some private parable,
one thing is certain: The moment is in their coming once
more by memory – theirs and ours.
Margaret B. Ingraham is the author of This Holy Alphabet, (Paraclete Press, 2009), a cycle of lyric poems based on her original translation from the Hebrew of Psalm 119; and the chapbook: Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Baltimore Review, and Flyway.
Smoking Together by Carl Mayfield
Six geese at treetop level
flying from one now
to another, twelve wings beating
the hurry out of me.
The morning is full of noise –
a few souls decked out
as painters, spreading a cloth
next to a fence, a living
to be made traveling the rainbow.
I think of nothing, the geese
out of sight now, the painters
smoking together before
the paddle dips into
a bucket of yellow.
Carl Mayfield’s poems have appeared in Slipstream, Lilliput Review, Bear Creek Haiku, Abbey, and Modern Haiku.
Zero by Bruce Bond
The shape of nothing is unruly
for a child, its curve closed,
complete, though open as an eye.
It is, as such, of two worlds,
the way an eclipse is both
the sun and the cold shadow
that fits perfectly inside it.
So snug, this darkness, this face
laid over the faces we meet.
To return the circle’s stare
is to vanish through, to fledge
the watchful target with an arrow.
But the zero keeps the distance
of things so close we cannot see.
Picture a clock. No hands. No ratchet.
No numbers even. How odd
it does not think of itself
as an hour among the hours.
Once I felt a woman’s mouth
open against mine, in each
a zero echoed by the other.
I wanted hers the way light
wants a window, a window light,
a voice the space of the unspoken.
Later I woke to the distant
breathing of the waves. Zero
minus zero minus zero.
Without a halo here and there,
how would I number the light
years between here and hereafter.
Some stars went out long ago
of course, and yet they slip through
the ring of the human gaze.
When my mother died, her jaw
gaped with a dark song like one
of the choir. None knows the meaning
of our word for what she is.
When I close my eyes I see
it still, her face in the lamplight,
just before I enter sleep.
One, I say, over and over,
as if one plus one were still one.
Bruce Bond is the author of the poetry collections Peal (Etruscan, 2009) and Blind Rain (LSU Press, 2008). He has had poems in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, The New Republic, The Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Poetry. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Need by Michael Hettich
If the morning were a different kind of animal, gray
furred and snouted, which roots around in
the undergrowth and snorts when it finds something particularly
delicious, something rotted perhaps, or a nest
of insects; if the morning could wake us with its moving
through the bushes and flowers while we teetered on the edge
of sleep, in that wonderful noplace where we know
we are sleeping but actually wake, where we might seem
to walk away from ourselves while we lie there, into
those very woods where that morning-animal
seems to pull the light from the ground as he walks.
It’s not the white birds who do this, and it’s not
the lakes stretching out now, reflecting the sky,
calling to the cranes and all the little birds
we barely even notice because their almost-secret beauty
is close to the beauty of this perfect air,
so different from the beauty of that strange animal
moving now through the rooms of the houses we remember,
moving now through our closets, slipping into our beds
to wake us. And we wake up without ourselves for once,
fully rested for a moment, and we try on other lives –
the frogs beyond the window, the insects in the air –
until we can dress in our own skin again
and vanish from ourselves for a while.
Michael Hettich is the author of three poetry collections: Like Happiness (Anhinga Press, 2010), Swimmer Dreams (Wordtech Communications, 2005), Flock and Shadow: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers Press, 2005), and the chapbook Many Loves (Yellow Jacket Press, 2007). This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Two Horned Lizards That Were Not My Newly-Divorced Parents by Jon Boisvert
With their newly-warmed hearts beating in my cupped hands
I walked out, set them in the patch of dirt below the tire swing.
To absorb more sun, they pressed themselves wide and flat,
So much so I thought the ribs, all their bones, impossible.
They stood over ant holes in the most alien ways,
Their craggy heads cocked, firing long gel-tongues
At the ants coming up. Then I caught them, brought them back
In their glass tank full of the smell of store-bought crickets
And white sand roasting under a heat lamp.
I had only asked for one, but my father knew, somehow,
That horned lizards feared loneliness, too,
And finding only two at the store, couldn’t bear the thought.
Even then, at twelve, I knew what these jagged desert things
Were in his eyes, knew that he watched them catch crickets,
Thinking, Here we are at dinner; Or, thin as stony silver dollars
Under the brilliant heat lamp: That’s us vacationing in Florida.
Jon Boisvert’s poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Slipstream, Blood Orange Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and Verse Wisconsin.
At the Angel Museum by Gary Fincke
Memorials. Stone figures
Disconnected from the names
They’ve descended to care for.
The wooden. The gilt cardboard.
The intricate from paper
Shaped for full shelves of wishes.
Just before closing, a bus
Idles in the parking lot,
My wife and I surrounded
By the elderly, many,
I’m sure, younger than we are.
They carry tiny angels
They’ve created from ribbon
And tissues and directions
Recited by the angel
Who still flutters among them,
Glittery in her gold robe,
Keeping her white wings folded
Like some luminescent moth
At rest, those fragile keepsakes
Taken to Minnesota
Where that bus is housed, even
By the woman who uses
A walker, her pale beauty
Tied to the embroidery
Of her deep-veined wrist. Eight canes
Rest in an umbrella stand
Just inside the door, and when
I see they’re a courtesy,
There is so much imminence,
So close, that the near future
Almost collapses my knees.
And though each cane has a winged
Woman clinging to its side,
There is such shuffling to where
A pair of haloed women
Hover at the tour bus stairs
That I am shamed by my smile
And flagrantly empty hands.
Gary Fincke has had poems in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Literary Review, and Prairie Schooner. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
The Smallest Barometer by Jen McClanaghan
Meanwhile,
I have a forty year old’s
calves.
I take naps on the sofa
like so many in my family
before me,
before they scotch-
tape a will
to the medicine cabinet,
shimmering
with talc fingerprints.
What happened to
the barometer
shaped like a farmhouse?
On sunny days
the farmer’s wife came out
for cow milking.
The farmer saddled
storm clouds
as if they were his horse –
a vinegar smile,
shaking one angry fist at God.
Jen McClanaghan’s work has appeared in New England Review, Indiana Review, AGNI Online, and The Iowa Review.
The Jewish Woman Remembers Deuteronomy 6: 6 - 9 by Rachel Mennies
We cry for God in worship, later
in bed, witness to the power of giving
up our power. Outside, the wind
crying for God, outside
in the fit of rain a God
just forming. Our bodies
naked before men are God, as sure
as the force that pushes them
toward and toward us, what they search
for is a noise in the earth
like God growing crops, still saving
room enough for the cemeteries.
The lungs expand with our God, God
in the scream, also the moan.
In the splitting of wood and the spilling
of blood, the slaughtered bull and the
dismounted horse. God of the summoning
curling finger. The broken limb
and its setting right. God in
the memory and the forgetting,
the sheepskin paper and the pulp. The words
we can recite, their loosening as we
walk to our end – God, that keeps our eyes
reading. God in the hands that close
the book, remove the spectacles,
and turn off the light. God
in our night, which never can stay night.
Rachel Mennies’ poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, and DIAGRAM.
Shark Week by John Hodgen
She says she likes Shark Week, adjusts her schedule each time it comes around,
says it terrifies her in the most satisfying way, the room preternaturally dark,
the TV light coming at her as if from the shark itself, from its God eye, as if she’s living
underwater, life circling constantly, then coming in, trying to kill her, honest, relentless as hell.
Just like God, she says, his steady dorsal fin. It is what it is, she says, it is the wages of sin.
She remembers in eighth grade swimming across White’s Pond with the others, panicking,
struggling mightily to quiet her breathing, each of them thinking they never would make it,
yet arriving somehow, like survivors, to drink what the boys had brought, shot after shot,
the whiskey wriggling inside her, constricting, like a fish that she swallowed, that snakes in her,
breaks in her still, the thing she still wakes to, clings to each morning as it slithers away.
Sometimes she remembers back farther than that, an old postcard her grandfather sent her
that she never threw away, an Indian in a canoe on a lake. Hiawatha, she thinks, staring
into the water, the water so still he could see his reflection, and then, even deeper, below,
a great fish underneath, the arc of its body exactly the same as the curved bow of the canoe.
Which is it, her grandfather asked her. Is the fish trying to be like us in the boat?
Or are we the ones swimming, trembling, always trying to be like the fish?
John Hodgen is the author of four poetry collections: Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), In My Father’s House (Emporia State University Press, 1993), and Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Slate, Crazyhorse, and The Sun.
Night Driving by Lucy Bucknell
Driving at night
the things
you almost see:
ghost deer
in ghost trees,
frog’s leap,
that owl on the rez
in Nebraska.
What if death
were nightfall,
when all
the differentiated
bits resolve
into one utter
dark – a desert,
a plain,
a wood swept
by headlights;
you in your bark
with radio
waves and old
coffee, hurtling
through absence,
in here
through the size
of out there,
and only
that much proof
of what you knew –
just glimpses,
illuminated.
Lucy Bucknell’s poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review and Natural Bridge.
Tocsin by Kurt Olsson
Some talk about a horse, a dead horse,
back up the road, by the cow pond,
and I go along, not to see the horse
exactly, but because there’s this girl,
and it’s Independence Day, also my birthday,
though I can’t bring myself to tell anyone.
From a quarter mile off I say,
That’s no horse, it’s a cow, but someone,
this girl, says, It’s a horse, and it is,
tipped on its side, legs stuck out stiff
like a knocked over chair. And there’s still
this girl, so I get close to the horse,
and it’s beautiful, the coat spit-shiny
in the sun, the flies glinting madly
like savage race cars as they swim over
the soft parts, asshole gaping, and I want,
no, I need to see this, and someone, maybe
the girl, says, What’s his problem?
I hunker closer and I hear a voice,
maybe it’s the weed, but I swear
it’s a voice, telling, not words exactly,
and when it’s done, I turn to everyone,
even the girl: I want them to see this shining
in my face, but they’re gone, long gone.
Kurt Olsson is the author of the poetry collection What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Gettysburg Review and FIELD.
Darkened and Forgetful by Doug Ramspeck
This grass is forgetful beyond the fence,
and made of angels that masquerade
as crows. And east of the railroad tracks,
behind brick walls of a farm house built
long before anyone alive was ever born,
our neighbor woman is counting down her last breaths, the way these crows stir
dimming air into a frenzy. And down here,
down in the lowlands where mosquitoes are
made of mud and loam of flesh, I swing
this scythe against weeds and towering grass,
a small death assignable to nothing,
our moon kneeling between the river birches.
While our neighbor, I’ve been told,
reels her last breaths to shore,
and the crows, untouchable beyond
the fence, are black then becoming blacker –
drifting soot from the great and distant fire.
Dream Snake by Doug Ramspeck
The lovers have skinned their own bodies,
are decaying in the woods.
They dream this the way a snake dreams
the grass trembling when it muscles past.
In the dream the snake has lost its own skin
beside the river, or the river has lost
its own skin and is hardened mud. There are cracks
in the mud that must be the fissures
of an ancient face. The lovers have swept out
their house so that dust drifts
in a leisurely fashion toward the river,
hangs in the air as though from
an invisible noose. The lovers know it is the daily
rituals that last: to watch the shadows
falling against the sweetbay trees, staining
the trunks. To walk down to the mailbox
and see the dandelions becoming ghosts.
Sometimes they sense the openness
of their bodies, the way the skin of a snake believes
that what is left behind is still a life.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of the poetry collections Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press, 2008), Where We Come From (March Street Press, 2008), Possum Nocturne (University of Akron Press, 2010) and Mechanical Fireflies (March Street Press, 2011). He has had poems in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, and Northwest Review. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
ONE LIFE by Jonathan Wells
One life is long enough. Please
don’t ask for days or months
or wait until the bottom of the page
to visit the doves she named for you,
the bed she kept made for you, her hair
that grew into your head, her hush
that passed your lips.
One life is long enough to remember
what you have forgotten – the attic swings
laughing on their chains, shoe prints on
the ceiling, scrimshaw shadows the pine tree
scratched into the wall’s back when the branches
shook, the lantern on the dock blinking
off and on as somber now as a beehive
in winter . . . All the things
you couldn’t pack.
One life is long enough to know
what you’ve forgotten and will forget
again: the Russian mowers who came
on Saturdays and taught you how to say
Dosvidan’ya.
Goodbye.
Jonathan Wells is the author of the poetry collection, Train Dance, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2011. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Rattle, and Confrontation.
After Curfew by Hugh Martin
– Jalula Police Station
A black dog sniffs the bag of smashed tomatoes
beneath the blinking lampposts.
Jameel, the bum with bandaged feet,
snores face-down on a piece of cardboard
beside the concertina wire that catches trash.
There hasn’t been a gunshot all night.
The police don’t speak English,
so we smile, give the thumbs-up, and say good
as they point at our machine-guns, flashlights,
Night-Vision, and other equipment
they don’t have. When there’s nothing left to point at,
two of them open the doors of a Nissan Jeep,
turn up the radio’s volume.
A Kurdish lute scratches
over a man’s singing voice, his pitch
somewhere between a cry and a scream.
Next to the black streams, under a lamp like a spotlight,
three police, slowly, begin to dance. They lip-sync
through cigarettes, blow breaths of smoke at the sky,
hold their loaded Kalashnikovs
against their bodies, a hand on the butt,
a hand on the muzzle,
and their feet shuffle, their heads roll
in slow circles; they follow the rifle’s lead.
Hugh Martin is the author of the chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State University Press, 2010). He has recent work in Willow Springs and Nashville Review.