POETRY
Will they be waiting by Nancy Eimers
Will they be waiting, the eyes lost
in their faraway look,
the hands that forgot
they were holding ours,
will they be waiting, their houses
towed away by the waters,
cars and tents overflowed
in the dark, uprooted trees, the grasses scorched,
will they be waiting, their cats and dogs,
can’t they also be part of the question,
also the chairs and blankets
and bedspreads lined with fur,
will they be waiting, their things we discarded,
shoes and jokes we gave away,
letters we wrote and sent or
did not send and dearly wished
we had or words we thanked
the stars we did not say,
will they be waiting, the islands of reeds,
the heron stalking fish in the shallows,
paper hats and wrappers settled
like nests in the branches of trees,
the fires having died away
and the floods subsided,
the earth having shaken
its trembles off,
the cells no longer dividing,
the heart taking its own sweet time
not to frighten us?
Bird Kill by Nancy Eimers
– hundreds of yellow warblers and other migratory birds died this week when they flew into a lighted school building. . . .
What drew them on
must have been lovely,
the school a glare bomb
softened in fog, a sourceless
candlelight, airglow, a swarm of krill,
nothing like our windows
or the hard finality
of my mirror, nothing
to turn on them at last,
as gale winds or a towering
wave will slam a ship,
no brick wall to bash them
like a homicidal car,
not these but the lowered
Milky Way clothed in
its natural dark,
or a gauzy moonlit cloud,
a light so softly immaterial
they must head into it,
that part of themselves
already sleeping,
almost home.
Nancy Eimers is the author of four poetry collections: Oz (Carnegie Mellon, 2011), A Grammar to Waking (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), No Moon (Purdue University Press, 1997) and Destroying Angel (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). She is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
After My Sorrow by Ellen Bass
One crimson leaf sticks to the window,
a tiny hand pressed to the glass.
It’s a beautiful mess out there.
My neighbor comes to the door
bringing persimmons, tight-skinned suns
that recur each year, telling me
about a TV show she saw last night.
In ancient Rome a woman whose son
is going to war stands under a platform
that holds a ram. Then the priest slits
the ram’s throat, blood gushes over her.
And the priest says your son will be safe.
I feel the hot blood blinding me
and smell the sweet metal
drying to a sticky skin over my skin,
clotting my hair, gluing my lashes into spikes.
The world recreates itself each morning, the shine
smeared again on the curve of the kettle,
the white plastic lawn chair glowing
like an empty throne, my neighbor,
her hair silvering even as she stands here talking.
What I can’t understand is how this
gladness escapes its blind
and comes to me again, leaving its fingerprints
on all the hard surfaces of the world.
Ellen Bass is the author of several poetry collections, including The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Progressive, and The Kenyon Review. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Jews for Jesus by Valerie Bandura
I wish Jesus came to my sister on the electroshock table
as he had to Saul on the road to Damascus,
watched the wad of Vaseline ooze from the black
rubber nodes they strapped to her head
as they tried to shock her bad brain
into a good one, wish he’d been there
to watch her lip curl into a snarl
over the gag of the wooden bit,
the leather straps strain with restraint
as her back arched in the healing
of the electric pulse, a strobe
that blinded her into a three-second coma
from which she was to have risen converted
rather than fallen unconscious and stone stiff to the floor.
Carnage by Valerie Bandura
Go buy me dog food, she says her voices say, her own
over the phone stammering. Now eat it, they say, she says,
but – whimpers – I have no money left to shut them up.
She says Linda says turn on the radio
to drown them out. Raul says try a hair dryer.
It’s like a pack of them in there, she says
– knocking her head, I imagine. And drawing a line in the air,
says, And us out here.
Last month at a coffee shop, I saw some teenagers with laptops,
scattered at random tables. Why don’t they unplug
and talk? I thought. And then one by the bathroom yelled,
Shoot him, motherfucker! Another by the exit
barked, I’m trying, asshole!
Valerie Bandura’s poetry has appeared in Third Coast, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Beloit Poetry Review, and Best New Poets of 2005.
Without Snow by Melanie McCabe
It is hard to wake to a world sharp with all of its old edges
after being promised that white muffler, that cold swath
of bandaging, that anodyne that would turn to blank
all that I am tired of feeling, and instead, scatter glitter.
But today looks exactly like yesterday. In this mottled landscape,
I know my place. All of the borders are clearly marked;
I will not transgress and do what cannot be
undone. What I crave in burial by snow are erasures;
miles of lines swallowed, navigation instinctive
and subject to error. Life is circumscribed, but not in
the old way. No one can be sensible when the earth
has disappeared. Even the honorable wear disguises.
If the world tilted crazily beneath a glut of white, no one
could blame me if I lost my footing, if I forgot myself
and became again that girl who’d topple backwards into
anything, who’d open her mouth to sky to give the icy
stars a place to fall and burn, who’d drive through a blizzard
with the top down just so you could see trouble coming.
Melanie McCabe’s poems have appeared in Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, and Best New Poets 2010.
ADAM REPORTS FROM THE DISTANT FUTURE by Sean Bishop
To the old terrors were added the new terrors.
Still the coat rack in half-sleep looked like a body.
Still the cicada woke saddened in its caved-in mine.
And the white threads wriggled awfully in the litter box;
the search party came back carrying a shoe.
When at long last the Cult of the Individual collapsed
some were given four arms and some got none.
Haphazardly were distributed the world’s humble sufferings
but so too the lotto winnings, and you looked so beautiful
in your new scarf and that lipstick of an as-yet-unachievable-
by-twenty-first-century-chemistry red.
We entered the café called The Garden where The Garden
two hundred thousand years back used to be,
and asked for our usual table.
I put my hand to your cheek,
and my other hand to your other cheek,
and with my other two hands I helped you pray:
“Lord,” you said, “I would like to remove
about twelve billion people from the world –
in this way I grow more like You every day.”
BLACK HOLE OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION by Sean Bishop
Hello. And welcome to One-of-Us,
however you came to be. Maybe one trailed you
to the highway’s charitable din, when,
lost at dusk in a Texan swamp, you discovered it
like a marvelous and terrifying orchid.
Maybe you’re a boy with a bucket of pondwater
or alternately a grown man honestly in love,
and you’ve learned at last that your tadpole is a minnow
or the woman in question will never grow to love you,
causing a grain-sized singularity to pearl itself
at the center of your disappointment.
It could be that you are very very ill
and there it was one day, like a pill among the others,
or someone died; maybe it was discovered
at the scattering: a marble in the empty urn.
Whatever the cause, though, – welcome, welcome –
there are things we feel you need to know:
You should name it, of course, but please don’t name it
Regret or Oblivion or Sadness or Hurt-
From-Which-I-Suspect-I-Will-Never-Recover.
“Oh Sadness,” you might say, “come lay
with me in bed for an hour
while the moon takes off its dress.”
Or: “Oh Oblivion, you’ve made such an awful mess
of things again.”
You shouldn’t encourage it. You shouldn’t feed it,
either, though it will seem to ask to be fed,
bending the space around its bowl . . .
Don’t give it a bowl. Don’t get too close – your black hole
is going to take a lot of time. Time will nearly stop,
in fact, in its vicinity. You will sleep for days
without knowing. Your minutes
will be your neighbors’ hours.
“What did you do this week?,”
your friends will ask, and you will say
you ate breakfast
or bought a t-shirt at the mall
or tried (and sort of liked) that new quadruple-flavor-
changing gum
while their lives will seem an impossible bustle
of joy and actual achievements.
Like a tortoise, your black hole will outlive you.
You will pass it on. Already
you should think of your small patch of darkness
as the darkness of your children. Late into the night and alone,
they will run their grownup hands along its outer regions
and be reminded of you.
Take comfort in that – though you are right to feel pity.
Your black hole, after all, is a sort of hell
that sulks in the corner and churns and churns
and renders all the nightlights useless
when, groggy and dream-spooked, they rise from bed to pee.
We’re sorry that by necessity we will never meet you.
On one of your walks, should you see another walker
with an impossible dimple of emptiness straining against its chain,
feel free to wave but please do not approach –
All tooth and gullet and terrible maw,
you have no idea what they would do to one another.
SECRET FELLOW SUFFERERS, by Sean Bishop
some of us
are cured. How terrible
to be suddenly well in the dayglo world
with one’s shaker of pills
like kaleidoscopic jewels, among
so many unbearable beauties.
If like me you are lucky,
when the old hurt lifts you’ll be left,
at least, with the hate you’d half-forgotten
in the woods behind your teenage home.
It may look like a heron in the brook.
It may iridesce like weird lichen in the night.
You might keep it as a trinket on your desk
at the Office of Sufferers’ Internal Affairs,
where with a sense of pride and duty
of which previously you were incapable
you will find and revoke the privileges of
the horrible, the healed.
SECRET FELLOW SUFFERERS, by Sean Bishop
once more our old wounds
like milkweed pods have opened, and we’re lovely again
as our winces break off in the wind.
When the mailman comes with his bright bouquet
of unbeatable deals, I’ll invite him in
and tend to his blisters. I will ask if he thinks
in the end, when the heart monitor blips its sonar
for the distance between here and gone, I mean –
what will he want the most: a hand to hold
or a mojito? a blowjob or a prosaic
declaration of spiritual love? We must identify
the ones of us who’ve lived whole years
with a wasp in their mouths, and our enemies
who believe the trick to ascending
to a bright hereafter is to tread so lightly
they float away – as if to give oneself to the wind
doesn’t require breaking apart, until
each piece of you seems ethereal and strange.
Sean Bishop’s poems have appeared in Harvard Review, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, Forklift Ohio, Mid-American Review, and Poetry.
“DIE HIGH” by Dana Roeser
Harold said
the Marine motto was,
though I don’t
think it appears
on any recruitment
literature. Then,
a storm, negative
ions, at last.
We were all insane
from the heat. I stood
in the scuffed cement portico of
a student
rental. “The Brothel,”
it said in
neat block lettering
on the mailbox
with a two-period
ellipsis
after. A boy / man
in a buzz cut
opened the door
and offered
to let me in. I
saw several men’s
pairs of shoes
and one pair of black
baby doll high heels
heaped on the carpet
near the door. I ended
up with
a wooden chair
on the cement
slab watching
the rain
cascade
and surge
down the
street, hoping my garden
was getting
drenched,
hoping my hanging
plants
at home
on the porch were
getting “hydrated”
osmotically. I read an article
in Sunday’s paper
called “Addictive
Personality? You Might
Be a Leader” in which
it’s posited
“risk-takers” are
risk-takers because they
actually get high
less easily than
“normal” people do –
and need
more – and
hence keep seeking.
My only
risk,
running
in the fomenting
thunderstorm.
A high hot wind,
frenzied trees,
and a big wall
cloud from which
a tornado could
have extended
its slender foot. On
the bridge,
I took
off my hat with
its metal button
on the top and moved
my bobby pins
to the waist band
of my shorts. Linking
lightning strikes
to thunder
with Hail Marys.
Looking frantically
to make sure
I was not
the tallest
thing.
When
the lightning and
thunder pretty
much coincided
and the rain
got bad-heavy
I stopped in
the portico. I’ve gotten
good at timing
these things,
as in my bartender days
when I could
hold a bottle vertical
and pour and know whether
one shot, shot and
a half, or two
had gotten into the glass. A
student of
climax.
* * *
“Die high,”
Harold said
in his life story.
But now
he’s clean
and sober. He’s
crawling
the walls half
the time – more than
half, I know.
ADD, Type A, ADHD,
anxious, depressed,
sex-obsessed,
etc., etc. This is what the dead singer
Amy Winehouse
could not
get to, the daily
grinding of
sobriety. Not her
preferred
destination.
I didn’t
wear any makeup
to the rheumatology
floor; I wanted
Dr. J. to see the
allergic, migrainous
shiners under
my eyes, every sign
of the long
messed-up
nights, the slow, excruciating
mornings.
I even wrote
her a two-page
single-spaced
recitation of
my symptoms and
itemized them together
in groups
to show the clusters – like
migraine / IBS / fibromyalgia,
hypothyroid / mood
swings / sensitivity to cold fronts,
GERD /
hiatal
hernia / alcoholism. And oh
yes, R.A. – fodder
for some
Debbie Downer monologue
on SNL, “trying to fix
the mess in my
head with the mess
in my head.” I don’t
know if she
read it (because
she had an
annoying resident
there first, whom I summarized
everything for and gave
the list to), but she
got it. She said, Got it
Got it Got it
and listed
what she would
do were she
my doc – and
of course I stated
on the spot
that she was. A perfect
slim cute Michelle
Pfeiffer-type, in a
fitted print cotton
dress, with contemporary
glasses. She said
I want you off Tylenol
and onto this one –
it’s got a tiny bit
of anti-depressant,
holding up her fingers
in a pinch. Magic
bullet, Tramadol!
When I got home,
I looked it up
and read the
warning. “You should not take
this medication
if you have
ever been
addicted to drugs
or alcohol.”
* * *
Amy Winehouse
was “famously blunt
in her assessment of
her peers,
once describing
Dido’s sound as
‘background music – the
background to death’
and saying of pop
princess Kylie Minogue,
‘she’s not an artist . . .
she’s a pony.’” God love
her. Apart
from my horse
habit – Blue
ducking the jump
and me flying
over – my
sleep thing,
and, well, the sex
thing, I
am straight as
a German Baptist woman
from up north
in a starchy
transparent
voile cap. So tired
I live in the
twilight zone, can’t
get in the
swing
of anything.
* * *
Zoey, my new
calico
cat, now that
my daughters
and husband
aren’t at home,
gets on my chest
at night – I pull
up the covers
so she won’t
cut me with her
claws when she kneads me. She
drools
from her mouth
or her nose, hard to tell
which – a clear
drop dangles
from her tiny
septum. She purrs
loud. She sometimes
nudges me
for one second
on the lips
with her pink lip or
puts
her paw
practically around
my neck.
This morning
when I was talking to
Felicia, my neighbor,
about my flooded
basil planter, Zoey jumped
on the
porch
with a stricken bird in her
jaws. Striped wings
splayed as if
in flight. Determined
to show
me what her clever
mouth was
doing at that point!
Wow! I screamed,
gestured for
Felicia
to give me her
rake so I could
break it up
but Felicia was
still on the conversation about
the planter. Zoey
leapt off
the porch, crouched
under a bush
and Dieu merci,
after some scuffling, and me screaming
“No!,” the bird flew straight
away, patterned
wings extended, and across
the street. My little
lover, who
kisses me at night.
* * *
I was
crushed to
read on the internet
how Tramadol, “synthetic
opioid,”
was “addictive,”
“habit-forming,”
well-nigh impossible
to withdraw from –
and the “black box”
warning about
how it could not
be dispensed
to past or present addicts /
alcoholics. Kept trying
to figure out
how to fudge. Maybe
I was just
a pretend addict / alcoholic,
that kind of thing. Then
thinking of my
friends, with their
long, long
lists of psychotropic
drugs and painkillers. The
ones who can
no longer write,
fuck, feel.
It reminded me
of 1980 after
Kurt left
me; I was severely
anemic (didn’t
notice it) and quite thin. Dr. C.
took one
look at me and gave me
Valium (I mean daily). When
I said, six months
in, I was
worried about being
addicted, he
gave me Librium.
The withdrawal from
that was hell – alone
in a beach house
with my mother! (Thank God
for alcohol.) Our sessions
consisted
of him talking
about “Monty” Clift
and “Jimmy” Dean.
I learned later (how
could I have
missed it?) he
was a “closet homosexual.” Plus
he came
from a family
that practically owned
the state. Those were days
I wanted never
to revisit – my mid-
twenties –
but it was
“back to black” again
and again. This morning,
for example,
something feathered and
other
struggled in my
mouth. A sudden snap of
wings as it
escaped. Then
the scumbled sky,
lightning on the bridge.
Dana Roeser is the author of two poetry collections, Beautiful Motion (2004) and In the Truth Room (2008), both from Northeastern University Press. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, The Laurel Review, and Cimarron Review.
MERCY SHIP by Josh Kalscheur
Here come the uniformed men with their cargo
and clean needles, their jackhammers and plaster bags,
their steel supports, drill bits and provisional masks
packed in airless crates, their locked guns tucked
on their belts, driving their big engines, their American
trucks in a convoy to the State Hospital, the trauma
center and TB ward, leper colony and insane asylum,
the HIV unit with one man no one touches.
Here they come with sterile gloves and test kits,
the strict measures of chain-of-command charts,
stripping the floor in the main hall and bleaching
dim rooms and broom closets, check-marking forms
for tainted blood, staph-soaked scalpels and towels,
soiled hands, faulty doorknobs and no-good doctors
who should quit. Here they come tearing down walls
eaten to nothing by termites, promising to build them
again with two by four boards of foreign wood.
Here they come through Mwan with their pink-tinted
triceps and tattoos, their buzz-cuts freshly groomed
from their time in Guam, throwing hard candy behind them
to the shirtless boy running a second-gear speed
through the road, dodging potholes and mackerel-cans,
slapping handprints on the back-hatch, yelling bombs away
and humvee, bobbing his head side to side, widening his stride
to a sprint, kicking up clouds of dust, disappearing.
A FAIR DEAL by Josh Kalscheur
You give me a good pack of weed seeds and ten pounds of rice
and I give you three bags of copra and fresh tuna meat.
I weigh and wrap them together, tie a string over each side
and make it easy to undo for you. I know what a dollar is worth
stateside, in your trumped-up markets, in your sky-scraped smog.
I have been to the city of LA. I have been to Runyon Canyon
and seen the houses’ endless sprawl. I have drunk your coffee
black with no cream. I have walked your cemented sidewalks,
your bricked paths. I have seen your mountain snow melting gray
through a rusted grate. I know what it means to mean business,
what a shook hand has to do with bravado and pressure,
what a proud posture has to do with a living wage.
I have been to your tented ghettos and bleak-eyed outskirts
with warehouse offices and half-lit signs. I know your eye contact
and stare-downs and timeliness, your tucked shirts and uniforms
with pockets embroidered with cursive. I have been your interview
voice, your small talk language, the exchange of pleasantries,
the double-windsor dialect, the professional shoulder-shrug,
the clearing of the throat, the perfectly-tailored suit, the well-off
and worldly. I have played the barely-getting-by, the Pacifican hustler,
the fake Latino accent, the ignorant newbie, the two-fisted
swindler who spits something red from his mouth. Or try this one –
I give you local chicken and tapioca, and you give me a license
for a gun and a buddy pass to Majuro or Suva or the Gilberts,
any island with a city and an airport job wrapping boxes with tape
and smuggling turtleshell combs on the side. You can trust me
to know my place. I have been a wooden cane made brittle
in the village. I have been the gentleman and tipped the doorman
and the shore-ladies. I give you a golden cowrie and the roots
of a pepper plant, and you give me your luggage. Loose change.
Money-clips. Boxes of smaller boxes. I have been an honorable man.
I know where you’re going once you leave here. I’ve walked
in those leather shoes. Put your hands up where I can see them.
I’ll tell you a story about the good old days.
RESTORE by Josh Kalscheur
In the beginning the whale loses track of the channel
and catches the underside of its body on the reef.
Its fat leaks from a gash and melts from the tops
of rocks into the water. The men spearing fish see birds
swooping and floating, wobbly with their wings, some
with bits in their beaks. The bigger waves stretch
the fins and cool its skin to a slick sheen. The men
drop anchor and for the first time see the eyes open
and close, go grey and spin to a kind of blur.
The mouth bites to breathe and the torn flesh
drapes the surface, tinting reddish and then a darker
kind of blue. One man wants to scream and touches
the mouth with the back of his hand and one man slides
his bandanna into the wound. The whale is strong
and when it breathes turns the rocks to their clean sides,
away from the algae. The men wedge ropes and wait
for a good wave, for the right rush to come and wash
to shore. In the back, by the tail, where the water
is deeper and the current thicker, the strongest man
stands and pushes what he can, and on the third try
the whale shakes its body free and into the channel.
On the western beach the men’s sons stand stoic
and watch the rods of the spine, the lifted fins, the body
they’ve only seen drawn in the sand. They climb
the trees and knock the fruit with their feet to bring
the village elders and sisters, the women who’ve heard
and have their hair down, banging tin cans, stripping
from their tops, thumping their chest bones to bruises,
the boys slashing the tree branches and tying rope
to rebar posts. And when the men come they cut shapes
in their thighs, lines like the fins flapping futile on the shore,
and they circle the whale and watch as it rocks in place,
half its body coated with sand and the cloth-like leaves
gone grainy in the sun, the low-tide beach becoming small,
the men grazing the skin with their blades, and the village
crowding closer and rubbing its hands together
when the knives begin to sing and rise and divide.
Josh Kalscheur’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Witness, The Cincinnati Review and Copper Nickel.
Montage Obscura by Cynthia Atkins
Only your good side shows. You can jostle
a smile around dental work, and little murmurs
heckle you in a hall of mirrors.
It’s always the tail-end
of summer in our backyards. Cicadas
and crickets thrum in your throat –
You could almost cough up
your heart – that aching
hand-held device.
Because the past tense lives
in strictest confidence. Slightly
out-of-focus, waiting for the explorers
to come – We’re not very photogenic.
We heed to the infant
ones, who croon in the tiniest
of socks. Our sobbing is only
a chemical process. This is an elixir,
our secrets are kept
radiant and illumined –
Not that they meant you any harm,
shadows folded on shadows,
an industry unto themselves.
Now juxtaposed and cross-referenced,
For brace yourself –
a kind of happiness!
It’s 2011, Lady Gaga is a volume
balloon grandfathered in to say,
We were born this way.
The clouds are brass bands. The sky
is bluer than a rumor. Your siblings will be forever
dripping in their swimsuits.
We were happy and wide-open
like hotels where all the people
have now left for home.
We were loved and gathered,
and washed away with the tide.
Your son’s breath smells
of pencil erasers and lavender,
the medicine from your father’s liver.
Your sister’s laugh is filtered
with quivers, cropped to pierce
the heart, high in the pixilated trees.
Cynthia Atkins is the author of the poetry collection Psyche’s Weathers (Wordtech, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Bloomsbury Review, BOMB, The Journal, North American Review, and Sou’wester.
CEMETERY COMPOST by Murray Reiss
The man, frail and elderly, memorable star of last night’s dream,
has been practicing for this moment all his life
and now that he’s dying he is ready to live forever
through a maneuver so deft, so adroit that even as his heart skids
to the end of its lifelong rhythmic thud he exults
in the honed perfection with which he simply
concentrates,
shrugs his shoulders, squints his eyes, rolls his head deceptively
and flicks
his mind into the closest neighbouring body,
through whose eyes he now watches, impassively, his former body,
already a stranger’s, die, while rejoicing:
It works! It works! I’ve outwitted death! –
Naturally, there’s a catch. Oops, he gulps
I should have thought of that
before – he’s waited too long and the only available bodies,
in this nursing home where he was abandoned to the fate
he’s just temporarily escaped,
are at least as old and decrepit as the one he’s left behind;
and I’m thinking, Yeah, so he learns his lesson,
he gets out more, and the next time he pulls it off’s
at the mall with his pick of fresh young bodies – he’s still just putting off
the inevitable moment when he has to jump bodies again,
and after that again, and after that again, and after a while don’t you
have to question the point? I’ve never understood this mad urge
for replication, to fill the world with more and more of me.
Take my garden. It’s a late fall afternoon
and I’m pulling out all the arugula
that’s already gone to seed, weighed down, top-heavy,
flopping over onto the next bed’s yellow and purple beans,
crowding out the cilantro, also beginning to bolt, I’m shaking the dirt
off the roots and my mind is idling, thinking that bolt’s an odd word
for a plant that’s going to seed
and, come to think of it, going to seed – where did it pick up that aura
of glamorous squalor, tropical verandahs,
your bourbon-soaked Tennessee Williams, your gin-soaked Somerset Maugham,
and besides, the cilantro and arugula aren’t “gulping down their food
in unseemly haste” as my CanOx would have it. They’re done with that and their only haste
is a mad dash to fling their seed in all directions,
colonize every inch of my garden with nothing but themselves
and I’m pulling them up by the roots, clipping their stems and branches
into bite-sized bits for the compost,
food for next year’s soil.
They must be more than a little pissed off –
I’m not only not growing them out for seed,
I’m not even growing them for food.
Over the years I’ve redefined the way I garden, deconstructed
ends and means, upended cause and effect, short-
circuited all the rudimentary reproductive processes.
I’m no longer growing food for my table
but – lettuce, broccoli, bush beans, peas –
fodder for my compost;
not enriching my soil to grow more food,
but growing food to make richer soil.
Or take the leatherback turtle. There we were in Costa Rica,
watching this massive lumbering creature,
easily half a ton, six maybe seven feet long, drag herself out of the water,
having somehow zeroed in on this one strip of sand, from who knows how far out
in the trackless ocean, this beach where she herself was supposedly born
25, 30 years ago and ever since
she’s paddled around out there in the tumult, living on jellyfish, spitting out
all the plastic bags that look just like a jellyfish to a turtle,
and now she’s ready to lay her hundred eggs. Well, we all know
what it’s like digging holes in sand. As fast as her flippers can fling
the tiny grains behind her,
the hole keeps caving in; but the turtle, as her kind
has for millennia, can only persevere. She scoops and flings, the sand
flies faster, the hole grows deeper, until it holds firm
and she fills it with tamped-down eggs.
A scatter of sand to confuse any raptors, and she’s waddling exhausted
back to the sea, and I’m thinking, this never ends.
The hatchlings will hatch, they’ll bolt
for the sea, a few of them will make it, most of them flipped
by the gulls for their bite of meat, and the lucky few will paddle around in the ocean,
eating their jellyfish, dodging the shopping bags, swimming and mating,
until they find their way back to their natal beach,
drag themselves up this same sandy slope,
dig a hole that keeps collapsing, scoop and fling and lay their eggs,
so more turtles can lay more eggs from which more turtles will hatch
to lay more eggs. Or take the virus.
As pure and ferocious an engine of self-perpetuation as Nature’s designed,
nothing but avaricious RNA
in a protein coat. It reproduces only to survive, survives only to reproduce, reproduces only to –
you get the picture. Just like that body-jumping geezer
from last night’s dream. I want to die in Sweden, in the town
of Jönköping. O sagacious Swedes of cemetery science –
plunge my body in your liquid nitrogen baths.
Shatter my freeze-dried corpse with the hefty hammer of Thor.
Stir the sweet pink crumbly powder
into your municipal compost heap,
to be in the end only an end in itself.
Murray Reiss is the author of the chapbook Distance from the Locus (Mother Tongue Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, Literal Latte, and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B. C. Poetry.
November Tritina by Kathleen Flenniken
November is a necklace of daytime headlights
crossing the floating bridge. Silk
breast of a winter wren, scarf tied loosely at the neck. It’s the sun
or more correctly, its lack. No, you’re my sun,
parsing the fog, light
spun and suspended in a web. November is a grey silk
suit, white shirt, dark silk
tie with a wine stain, Sun-
day coat, all in a pile, headlight
beams through a scrim and a distant horn. Light head, silky breath, sun going down.
Kathleen Flenniken is the author of the poetry collections Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012) and Famous (Bison Books, 2006). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXVI.
IN THE DESERT by Marge Piercy
In the desert you are given everything
sharp – a paper cut on the eyeball –
the edges of distant mountains
precise as lines on graph paper.
In the desert every Joshua tree
bristles with importance. Every
flower the March rain has pulled
out of sand and rock, dazzles.
In the desert you walk and walk
for hours, yet the red mountain
is no nearer, that seemed
a short wander, a trot away.
In the desert at twilight when
something moves, a lizard
a rat, a snake, it is proof
life accommodates, thrives
where even shadows are rare
precious as pools of water. But
if you stand still too long
at noon, the air will eat you.
Marge Piercy has published 17 poetry collections, including What are Big Girls Made Of (1997), Colors Passing Through Us (2004), and most recently, The Crooked Inheritance (2009), all from Knopf. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
THE FUNAMBULIST BY David Moolten
For Odette
The only woman to ever walk
Across Niagara Falls wears peach baskets
For shoes, does it again backward, then dancing,
Then with a blind fold, then with her feet and hands
Manacled, each time with form to match
The Great Blondin, though they never gushed
About his figure in the papers.
She propagates the void like rope, spans the thin
Air of belief, gripping a pole above the gorge
And the pointing multitudes like a great bird
Shifting in place as it soars, adjusting
Its invisible wings, then vanishes
Into the cataract of events, good
For just one thing, a fact then a mystery,
Where she goes and what becomes of her.
I’m making things up, as people will
When they don’t know. I’m telling you years
Later she performed without the roaring mist
Or the sky’s breathtaking solitude, swayed
For no crowd and from the least height. The act
By then had lost its suspense, little left
But the metaphor, the brave unavailing
For posterity, the vacuous martyrdom
In that bottomless word grace she dares
As much as death, the risk of everyday
Gravity, say that of a dancer on point
Or a woman in heels crossing the street.
David Moolten is the author of the poetry collections Primitive Mood (Truman State University Press, 2009), Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005), and Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University Press, 1994). His poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, and Southern Review.
Lilith, Happily BY Janet McNally
1.
The second time they started from scratch,
rolling the clay with their own hands. God sighed
as he did it, knees sinking into the loose dirt
beneath his favorite tree. He held one rib, curved
and tender, for its magic.
As for Adam, he was slow to start the potter’s wheel
spinning, afraid she’d turn out like the last one:
long-limbed, furious, full of laughter.
But he wanted her willing, so he got dirty,
plunged his fingers into the earth.
When they finished, they stood back,
happy, and watched the second one’s
first steps. She was a doll.
2.
Later, Lilith would laugh when she heard
about her replacement, the lolling eyelids
and too-wide mouth. By then she was sending
postcards with no return address, stopping
at mailboxes in dusty Midwestern towns.
She leaned out the window of her blue
Chevrolet pickup just to feel the sun
on her shoulders.
When she heard the girl had eaten the fruit,
Lilith shook her head though no one
was watching. Hadn’t the woman ever
read Snow White? Even if you forget
the glass casket and pig’s heart
in a box, apples from strangers
are never a good idea.
For the first time she considered calling.
She stood in the phone booth, held the receiver
in her hand. But would she ask to speak with Adam
or the girl?
3.
Now she lives near the Pacific with a stuntman
from the movies, making jewelry out of copper and jade.
Adam moved, she heard; left no forwarding address.
Strange, she thinks, that it’s him she remembers
as she watches the manufactured accidents,
each imaginary explosion as unsurprising
as the death of a minor star.
Janet McNally’s poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Confrontation, and Poet.
Blackout BY David Hernandez
Night fills the boxes that make up a house.
I’m down to four senses, my eyes inside a pouch
cinched closed. There’s a cricket in the yard,
his loyalty to a single note. Slowly
I feel my way across the living room –
never have I touched the ribcage of a bookcase
so lovingly before. On the hardwood floor,
a blue square the moon and window
stenciled together. To every wick I bring
the wavering tongue of a match, to every wall
the little flames bring a little yellow.
What is my wish for the afterlife? Sunlight
filling the rooms of my body. I recognize
my name, your voice the one signaling me,
the beacon of your glowing tongue. Our hands
five-petaled and uncurling. We touch.
David Hernandez is the author of the poetry collections Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), Always Danger (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in Field, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Teaching the Midget Team the Suicide Squeeze by Kevin Boyle
We have the field, the storm still caught up in the wires beyond town,
Practice is drawing to a close and the raw girls want something new –
Don’t we all? – not just taking grounders and hitting the cut-off man,
So I try to explain the suicide squeeze, though the girls
Are still stopping just before reaching first base
On an error because the throw from second or short
Might cut it close to their heads and they are afraid, and they are afraid
Of ground balls in the hole or right at their shins, and they are afraid of me
Because I am the man-coach they call Mister.
Clearly they have been overhearing the news or they know
Too much of their family histories, because they all
Are afraid, even as I try to explain you don’t really commit suicide,
You don’t need to wear a weapons-vest beneath the Panthers shirt,
You don’t need a noose or steak knife or Momma’s pills, just keep your left hand
Still and push your right hand up to the trademark,
There’s only one out, and the runner will break for home
Just as you, perhaps, die for the team. “Who wants to volunteer?”
I say this silence is the opposite of a rhubarb,
This is not a bench-clearing brawl, and it’s the dour assistant coach
Who got the funeral home to sponsor the team in the first place
Who suggests we wear a black patch on our sleeve
For the rest of the season, in mourning for ourselves,
And they all agree, come close, then scatter in clusters,
Then drift off the diamond completely.
Kevin Boyle is the author of the collection A Home for Wayward Girls (New Issues Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Poetry East and Virginia Quarterly Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Counting the Cash Drawer at the D & J Bar by John Bargowski
My guess is
he didn’t want me to see it,
that if my old man knew
I’d finished stacking
last night’s empties
he would’ve kept it stashed
beneath the fat wad of twenties
near the back of the drawer.
Never mind
that it had no cylinder,
no magazine, one chamber
for one round,
it was small enough to fit
in the palm of his hand,
and what my 12 year old
brain loved most was how
the snubbed barrel gleamed
with the red glow of his Chesterfield,
and the pearled handle
drew in the color
from every neon sign
over the bar-back,
Rheingold red, Pabst blue,
Ballantine green,
even my old man’s gold front
tooth sharing some of its lustre
when he cocked
his head to the side,
slowly locked his fingers
around the grip
and worked the action.
John Bargowski’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, and Prairie Schooner.
Teabags by Robert Levy
Sad sack of pekoe steeped repeatedly
for thrift, it lolled on the trivet, cooling
in juices clear as tap water. Mother
used the same teabag for days. What she brewed
as the weekend neared was vestigial,
tannic memories flavored by Father’s
departure, which kept her funereal
and meant we must always live as though poor.
When friends came by, I stashed it, embarrassed.
Sometimes I dreamed of a penury
so liberating I could hold my head
up high, knowing our poverty was real.
One night I crept into the kitchen, junked
the bag, and replaced it with a fresh one,
barely moistened, from the box. A whole week
I replayed that routine while Mother quaffed
real tea, not sepia-tinted water.
It ended when, scrounging in the cupboard,
I found a small tin can: Inside it were
The seven teabags I had thrown away.
Mother had fished them from the trash to use
when I was out, a way of whispering,
I’m poor. I’m poor. And I will live this dream.
As though life were a cup, and she the steam.
Robert Levy is the author of the poetry collections Whistle Maker (Anhinga, 1987) and In the Century of Small Gestures (Defined Providence, 2000). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review.
A Human Throat by Richard Lyons
I’m making exaltations, I’m making lamentations.
I whistle dirges, uncomfortable with my own excuses.
That’s when the angels track me down.
They dance around a dwarf apple tree
filled with beetles already nine-tenths ash and water.
Woodpeckers rehearsing suicide drop from the branches,
black, red and white wrappers changing their minds
at the last second and flying through honeysuckle.
The angels applaud, hooting and hollering.
They construct guitars with wood and wire.
The doves add what they can,
melancholy slipping into release, a musical form.
In my dream I’m shooting a human throat,
a peculiar sort of plasma rifle.
A dog with a black mouth chomps its jaws
on something with a tail, maybe a squirrel.
The angels play acoustic whistle and simple drum,
centuries passing between the first note and the second.
A little leery, I wrestle with the angels.
They can’t tell the male from the female body.
It is the touching that thrills them,
hands flexing muscles, the hesitation of ligaments
when the mind sends mixed signals.
I love the way my skin tingles.
I love the smell of my sandals burning.
I look like John Brown, aphasiac grin, beard bristling.
I am ready to pay every last dollar and drop of blood.
I am blowing harmonica past pride and desire.
It is too late to start over. I look like the French painter
far from home, watching his brown-skinned love
lift a clay pot over blue fields of water. Inside it
is the water of satisfaction, inside it is all the time in the world.
Richard Lyons is the author of the poetry collections These Modern Nights (University of Missouri Press, 1988), Hours of the Cardinal (University of South Carolina Press, 2000), and Fleur Carnivore (The Word Works, 2006). This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
ALMOST by Victoria Kelly
I can imagine living a whole life
in the house my parents almost bought
in Morris Plains, across from the train station;
the way I almost played Red Light, Green Light
in that park next to the library
and almost went to school
at St. Virgil’s Parish, on Speedwell Avenue;
the way my father almost made thirty years
of slow, moonlit walks to the station in winter,
my mother
waving from the kitchen window.
I can imagine growing up,
and almost taking the same train
to some publishing job in the city,
and coming home
to dinner with my parents next door,
to children who, on weekends,
almost hunt for clovers in the same park
I almost knew the name of once.
And how different
that life that barely passed me by
seems now
from this lonely, sunny afternoon at the beach
on some base in Virginia
under the brick-red blaze of summer –
the mothers fortified under hats and sunblock,
the tired children slowing down around me,
and a man
who could almost be my father
waving
to the person behind me.
THE MESSENGERS by Victoria Kelly
How can you help
picturing it,
the small huddle on your doorstep –
the commander; the priest who married you;
the women with their sad, drawn faces.
You know
the only message you will get
from the pink, blistered mountains of Kabul
is the one that comes when you’re thinking about the dishes
or out buying oranges.
And how can you not see
the faces of these people
in every housewife or postman who pauses
at the edge of your driveway;
even a sack of letters, the dog sniffing in the street
doesn’t stop you from sleeping
with the bedside light on.
“Almost” and “The Messengers” are Victoria Kelly’s first poems to be published in a national literary magazine.
HELP by Jill Osier
When I got there, it was mostly over, the ballooner
leaning hard against the green dusk of the field,
reining in like a great steed this bright cloud
whipping into collapse. I watched it calm
and lose its breath. It was hard not to think
of an accident, the basket tipped on its side,
a quiet dirt road one-lane and remote. The sun
had done its skimming, exhausted
once again its lovely argument.
Jill Osier’s poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner.
HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH THE IMAGINATION by Jennifer Chapis
We were making another –
half you half me,
two wings
of a bowl not yet broken.
In moonlight a ladle
of stewed goat
looks like green glass fragments.
Your camera shot two of everything.
Each persimmon has a skylight with a sun in it.
The sonogram resembles twin squirrels
wrapped in carpet. Lifetimes
you have entered and entered
and entered me.
The veins in your neck
a binding ribbon. I should have kept
the antique dinner bell
your grandmother struck
like a small gong.
The half-naked orphans
wearing mis-matched villages
in your photographs
don’t believe in souvenirs.
Buttonholes large as limes.
Jennifer Chapis has recent poems published or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, North American Review, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker.
Preparation for an Elegy by Jeanne Wagner
I keep thinking of the word
gravid,
of the pull and pear-weight of drops
when they dangle
from the faucet’s mouth.
Its metal lip slick and lascivious
as light.
Other times,
I imagine the capillary’s
self-embrace,
myopic squint of the hypodermic needle,
its pin-prick pain, its unwavering
answer to your constant
I want, I want.
The way the liquid inside it rises
with such longing.
I know how hard the pupils
concentrate –
only a circle can explain
such stringency.
Your vision’s an inland
sea now,
with its vaporous losses,
salt compounding
your tears.
Like Pilgrims by Jeanne Wagner
When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.
– Elizabeth Hardwick
Here in the anonymous seat that half-enfolds, next to a small window where the complacency of blue air tells me that loneliness was never the failed white cuffs of livery, but a monochrome pure as summer’s eye. Here in this second-class Nirvana of the air, I seek absenteeism for the soul, the kind that saints and hermits starved themselves for, but comes easy to me now as I consider the food in its foiled wrappings, each compartment in the molded plate; I pull the tray down tight against my knees and reach for a cup of warmed-over coffee served in a sky stretched between continents, clouds piled up against the light, but like all saints, I’ve grown impervious to the miracles of others, and like all pilgrims, I pull down the shade and lie back in my bed of erasures, calling it travel – calling it renewal.
Jeanne Wagner is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Zen Piano-Mover (NFSPS Press, 2004), and her most recent, In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Rhino, Mississippi Review and Southern Poetry Review.