POETRY
ARCHAEOPTERYX by Matthew Westbrook
I come across you in my rambles –
not down a dusty country lane
but in the glossy mausoleum
of my Field Guide to the Fossils.
Stilled by your impression –
those almost-wings akimbo,
that proto-beak splayed open –
I am moved to speak for you
by the simple knowledge
that you can’t be heard.
Neither skylark,
nightingale, nor thrush,
you can’t, for the life of you,
hear me either – nor lift a feather
against my version
of the truth.
There, at the crown
of a cycad, wings
aligned with intent
still glistening with scale-sheen,
you drop –
neck outstretched,
tail ruddering air
with all you know of gravity –
to swoop and lift
the unsuspecting serpent,
its flesh in your talons,
back to the heights.
Compressed
beyond the grasp
of ecstasy and sorrow,
unerased by time,
you come to me
as all I need:
an angel that to human ears
will never sing.
Mute and glorious,
you are what you’ve left us:
a page of shale and silence
published for the ages,
a message in form
that got one moment right:
a thing – with bare imagination –
capable of flight.
Matthew Westbrook’s poems have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Poetry, Redivider, Poetry East, and 32 Poems.
ARCHEOLOGY by Joan I. Siegal
Why assume that even if we are careful
not to break the years into dust, we will
break the silence of all she leaves
behind. Even as we breathe her smell
in woolen sweaters. Finger linen
handkerchiefs, strands of pearls. Hold
photographs to the lamplight, search
for family likeness in the shape
of a face. Piece scraps of letters pressed
like flowers between pages of books. Pry
words loose, turn them over for clues –
as if we could actually find our way
back, know what it was really all about.
Joan I. Siegel is the author of the poetry collection Hyacinth For The Soul (Deerbrook Editions, 2009). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, and Southern Humanities Review. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
THE MOONS OF AUGUST by Danusha Laméris
after Dorianne Laux
There are many names
for this sullied coin,
this brandy-soaked pearl:
Fruit Moon, Lightning Moon,
Moon When All Things Ripen.
We stand by the creek,
watch it float between the black
tips of the pine. Grain Moon,
Full Sturgeon Moon,
Green Corn Moon.
I count my losses in the dark.
Why not call it
Cracked Quartz Moon,
Roll of the Dice Moon,
Hard Luck Moon.
Must we always speak
of harvest? Crickets throb
in the dusky vines.
A bat flits above our heads.
Oh Watcher, you
who see all that is born
and all that dies
tonight I name you
Switchblade Moon,
Toss in the Towel Moon,
Moon Turning to Sand,
Empty Rice Bowl,
Dust Moon, Salt Moon,
Ash Moon
Blink of an Eye Moon.
Danusha Laméris’ poems have appeared in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The SUN Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
ETYMOLOGY by Kim Farrar
Today I used the word Pentimento,
stored since 1973 when Lillian Hellman’s
bestseller of the same title was the rage.
My friend explained in her flower-power
bedroom what Pentimento meant.
I was amazed by two things: First,
that a pencil trace can reappear
from beneath layers of thick paint.
Second, that it sounded like pimento.
I tucked that word away, one sock
inside another. Today, with the heavy fog,
I used it to describe the trees through mist.
I resurrected that word from beneath
32 years of living. It became an example
of what it means: A shadow emerged
of two young girls sitting on a bed
to plan their fame and fortune.
Kim Farrar is the author of the chapbook The Familiar (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Salamander, and Pirene’s Fountain.
ADOLESCENCE by Courtney Quenney
There was a ravine with a rain-choked creek,
water barreling down its cork-screwed spine.
When I paused on the bridge
to regard a twisted, rusted car hulk below,
the water muttered, I too am a way to escape.
The wreck pled, Dream me.
Courtney Queeney is the author of the poetry collection Filibuster to Delay a Kiss (Random House, 2007) and was included in Three New Poets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, McSweeney’s, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Notre Dame Review.
SWAN SONG by Kristin Robertson
Your body will fight forward-slash forearm cuts.
When you come undone, when you float toward the razor
on the lip of your bathtub, float down
the night-quiet hall like a swan through an inlet,
know your body won’t make this easy.
Its coagulants will render cells into syrup.
Skin fibers will interweave like microscopic fingers
playing here’s the church. Just like your body fights
cherry-clear moonshine from a thigh-held mason jar,
siphons it through the liver, into sugar, and gone,
know your body will squeeze beautiful oxygen
from a barren capillary, feed blood to the most resistant heart.
Kristin Robertson’s poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Bellevue Review, Willow Springs, Passages North, and Crab Orchard Review.
IT’S THE BLACK END OF A BLUE DAY by Carol Edelstein
It’s the black end of a blue day
It’s the sack open give away
So dance til you stagger and stagger til you fall.
27‑year-old African American female, obese, with history
of cardiomyopathy and psychiatric illness, admitted again
for chest pain at 1:23 a.m. on Sunday October 16.
I am so sorry to tell you this in a message.
Her name was Ashley. Her name was Richard. Her name
was Psyche. Her name was Starr. Her name was Matthew.
Psyche took care of the little ones, Molly and . . .
what’s your name?
I don’t know.
She liked to listen to hip hop.
She liked to read scary stories and watch horror films.
She used to cut herself. With a razor she made dozens
of cuts on her arms, belly, thighs, breasts.
They are small white scars now. Were.
She burned herself with cigarettes and lighters. Used to.
She inserted into her vagina batteries, pen caps. Used to.
She ate until she vomited. Used to.
She sang like an angel. Always. Still. I can hear her in my mind
and I can see her paintings of flowers, giant red sunflower heads
that fill the whole canvas. The fiery petals outlined in dark blue.
The odyssey has ended.
The odyssey from South to North.
From suffering to suffering.
From suffering to peace.
Deliver me unto the hands of strangers.
She was his little princess.
She was his daughter.
She was his granddaughter.
Her mother was her sister.
The river willows seemed to weep. They seemed to hang their heads and weep.
She choked a cat. She chased a cat and burned its tail.
Her name was Richard. Richard punched the white lady.
She often chose the story of the ducklings searching for a home
in the noise and traffic of the city.
What’s going to happen to me?
I don’t know.
Will this ever be over?
Yes.
When?
I don’t know. I wish I knew.
She wrote letters to her mother.
Unsigned, undated, the dots of her “i”s
always a large open circle.
I miss you. Happy Birthday. Happy Xmas.
Mailed without address or stamp.
She lived in three foster homes, two residential schools,
one staffed apartment.
In a closet in that apartment.
Packed into that closet awaiting the morning, all space
around her filled with pillows and stuffed animals.
Richard didn’t allow sleep. Sometimes no lying down.
Matthew prayed. Prayed and kept his bags packed.
Molly peed her pants.
You’re leaving out the laughter.
The dancing and the card games and holding Rebekah’s
baby and TV at Gramma’s. You’re leaving out the jokes
and the cuddling and the funny poster.
You’re leaving out the shawl. The diploma.
The visits with Karen. The popcorn necklace.
What is failure? What is heart failure?
What else fails when one heart fails?
Her face was wide open and her eyes were bright.
She was ready to laugh, not to mock but to take in.
I’m so lonely. So sad. So confused.
Please call me back if you can, thank you.
Please call me back if you can, thank you.
Her wish list of twenty-two items includes
#8. someday I want to work with autistic children
#13. I want to have tea with the Queen of England
#19. I want to help children that are elective mutes
No, you cannot have a cat. Because you are not ready.
When will I be ready?
That depends on you.
I’m ready. I’m ready.
You are not ready. Yet.
Snow on the driveway. Snow on the picnic table. Snow
on the bridge. Snow on the taxi. Snow on the hospital.
Snow on snow. Darkness on snow, first blue, then black.
Black like me. My name is Ashley. My heart hurts. A lot.
Right here. Right here.
Wash Ash, make her clean.
Lift Ash, make her light.
Find the chime in her name.
Make a charm of the harm.
Lift Ash, make her light.
Let a strong wind take her.
It’s the sack open give away
black end of a blue day.
Carol Edelstein is the author of the poetry collections The Disappearing Letters (Perugia Press, 2005) and The World Is Round (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 1996). Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, Kalliope, Denver Quarterly and The Colorado Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
FIRST WINTER by Doug Ramspeck
And if when we die we set fire to the fields of our memories,
our skin coming loose the way dusk sky peels
bright along its edges,
if mud dreams us and yet there are gates opening
and closing, rumors
of the loneliness of moonlight,
myths of existing through the centuries without knowing
what’s been lost, strangers to the lanterns that once
guided us, blind as fever,
must we still dress ourselves
from time to time in these old clothes, rise like mist above
the stone fence,
move out across the human cold?
Doug Ramspeck is the author of the poetry collections Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press, 2011), Possum Nocturne (University Of Akron Press, 2010), and Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
TABLE by Cynthia Atkins
For once, tell us your troubles –
turn your wobbly legs upside down
like an animal at rest. O frank surface,
weary of being both the anchor
or the wedge – where love and hate
sit across from one another,
unchallenged. Make no mistake,
this is where the education happens.
Even the straw lips of brooms
hug close, waiting for scraps, fighting
the dog for our fattening sorrows.
Flotsam can be grim. Salving wounds,
blueprints made, mugs clinked
at a good deed. Pencils sharpened
for a calculation or a sliver
of a thought. Once, the crayons melted
thick as guns. We blew wishes into
bottles as if tip-toeing in the graveyard.
Polishing our nails, hiking hems
for a date, that would later get broken.
As if a radio talk show host
at Sunday brunch. The slab of bacon,
newspaper, coffee – bones picked clean.
Quiet as a letter sealed for the mail.
A banjo is strummed, a knee is sat on.
We laugh at board games of chance
Petulance, and famine. Be still
chameleon, lay and rest with the objects.
We’ve come to cut our teeth
on the laws of your rings. All the plates
testing their cracks with
pathos and glue. Listen to the echoed
noises of our life – You are here
to remind us that we have our own
place to be together, to be separate.
Cynthia Atkins is the author of the poetry collection Psyche’s Weathers (Wordtech, 2007). Her poems have appeared in BOMB, Denver Quarterly, The North American Review, Sou’Wester, and Verse Daily. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
FLIES by Benjamin Grossberg
1.
My own small plague.
Very small. But the buzzing
behind the blinds,
gauzy and continuous,
is still an annoyance
on a day marked by solitude
for silence.
2.
In Eden, the lamb
and the lion. Also, the man
and the fly. Here, not so –
as if an antipathy lay
even in the shape of them:
an almost martial stance, poised
on forelegs ready
to leap, and the masked,
hardened face. If they could
kill me, they would
and think nothing of it.
Since they can’t, they’ll wait
till something else does.
Then comes the matter
of maggots – the word
itself jarring, like a vulgar
name for part of the body –
the eyeless white stubs
I found balled and wriggling
under a clump of wet food
the dog’s nose couldn’t reach.
Revealed by fork, they were
as dire and shocking
as a wound, infected,
weeping beneath the gauze.
It’s then I knew I had to
take matters in hand,
the flies and I squaring off
like fighters circling a ring:
my ham-thick fists
coming at them in slow motion;
them waiting till I tire out.
3.
Five at the window?
Dozens. I loop fly paper
into a kind of wand and slowly
approach, stalking
wizard with a single, sticky spell.
Perhaps one wave in twenty
I connect: the metallic
emerald of their backs,
the dusty maroon of their eyes,
the latticed-window wings
beautiful enough for a church.
And how to feel
about that? The furious
buzzing of one wing, while
the other presses to the glue,
like a man pinned at the shoulder
by the palm of a monster-god
that brings its enormous face
closer – and still closer –
until it rolls in front like a planet
blotting out the sky.
Knitted brow, pupils expanding
and expanding, it stares down
at the tiny suffering,
so interested, so very interested.
Benjamin Grossberg is the author of the poetry collections Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), and Underwater Lengths In A Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in New England Review, The North American Review, and The Best American Poetry.
THE RING TOSS LADY BREAKS A FIVE by Mark Kraushaar
It’s all of it rigged, she says,
Bust-one-wins, Hi-striker, even the Dozer.
It’s like you think you’ll score that giant panda
for the wife except you can’t, or not
without you drop another twenty
and then – what? – then you win
a thumb-sized monkey or a little comb.
She hands me five ones and then stands.
She’s worked the whole of the midway,
she says, funnel cake to corn-dogs.
She’s worked every game
plus half the rides, Krazy Koaster,
Avalanche, Wing-Ding, Tilt-a-Whirl
and if there’s somebody sick she’ll do
a kiddy ride too, Li’l Choo-choo, maybe
the Tea Cup.
There’s a collapsing soft sigh
and she sits, opens the paper, turns a page
and as if she were the one assigned to face forwards,
as if it were her job to intuit the world
and interpret the news,
Anymore, she says, it’s out of our hands,
it’s all we can do – it’s not up to you.
You see that bald bronco tearing
tickets at the carousel?
We worked the Bottle-drop
and now he’s mine: he’s no genius
but he loves me and he’s mine.
Things happen, she says, you
can’t take them back.
Mark Kraushaar is the author of the poetry collections The Uncertainty Principle (Waywiser Press, 2012) and Falling Brick Kills Local Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, and The Best American Poetry.
WRITE ABOUT THIS by Deborah Brown
About somebody else’s past life:
about Theseus’ dark twists and turns
so like your own; about someone missing
in the ruthless country; the hundreds of delicate spirals
on the surface of Mars or the barn that droops
lower each year or about how it feels to be
stranded halfway between here and there.
Or write about the unhappiness in a dream of a funeral
or how animals make faces that look like people;
or when the burn pile is stacked like a street of offices
and the leaves shine golden as coins on hillsides
or when the wind whispers about the day that basks
in its own juices. Or write about being
worried by all the beauty, about missing it.
About when I can’t miss anything any more. How
will that work? Or write about an evening full
of squirrels flying between us, telling us.
These are recipes for what I am seeking,
or what I have seen in a portrait here and there
and in a story about where the nightingale has gone.
Deborah Brown is the author of the poetry collection Walking the Dog’s Shadow (BOA, 2011).With Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas she translated The Last Voyage: Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (Red Hen Press, 2010); and with Annie Finch and Maxine Kumin she edited Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (University of Arkansas Press, 2005). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
“ME AND MY PARROTS,” FRIDA KAHLO, 1941 by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Woolf told us any good biography
made her feel she understood that person
as no one ever had. I nodded, since
no one understands her as I do,
and that goes for Emily Dickinson,
Elizabeth I and Marilyn Monroe.
So many of our friends are dead or dying
(they all are dying) that it’s a relief
to have some safely dead before we meet.
Half the people Emily Dickinson loved
were dead before she reached sixteen, Woolf dreamed
of her dead mother every night for decades,
and both Elizabeth and Marilyn,
surrounded by people, were utterly alone.
One writer says that Marilyn’s greatest gift
was making everyone want to take care of her.
Reading, we believe we know their need,
that socket we would fill.
But Frida’s stare
is a bucketful of ice-cold absolution.
You’re not responsible for her happiness.
She isn’t grateful to you for her fame.
Each amiable, idiotic parrot
outlived her, but she loves them more than you.
Even the cigarette. Especially.
BLOOD GHAZAL by Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Only the poor can quote the price of blood.
Our summer demands a sacrifice of blood.
Rabbits have gnawed the scarlet lilies to bare stalks,
otherwise the garden would be a paradise of blood.
That tribe forbids looking one’s cousin in the eye.
They know not to roll the dice of blood.
Some dawns are subtle, pastel, delicate.
We need rain – carve me off a slice of blood.
All literature and most news is a transcription
of what comes from listening to the advice of blood.
Troy burned not because of Helen’s flesh
but because she was a vessel of ice, of blood.
Retaining the black well while adding the rams felt
not like a hatching but like a splice of blood.
Susan Blackwell Ramsey is the author of the poetry collection A Mind Like This (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and The Best American Poetry.
MONET PAINTS THE WILLOWS, 1918 by Patricia Hooper
He had just set down his brush
and closed his eyes – they seemed
much cloudier today – to see
the blue-washed leaves more clearly
in his mind. And then he heard,
or thought he heard, the sound
of distant thunder.
No,
no, he thought, no need
to put away his paints
and rush inside. It was
a burst of cannon fire in the Somme.
On the table near his chair
the maid had placed a slice
of cake and jam – so pretty
when he looked at it again – although
a vulgar fly had landed
on the tray. . . .
Just yesterday
he’d spurned the chance to leave
or send his paintings off
to safety. No, if the Germans came
they’d find him in his studio among
his waterlily canvases: he’d die
in the midst of what he’d done.
He dozed, and when he woke
the air was quiet: only
an intermittent breeze
and faint artillery fire from Amiens.
And since his rested eyes
no longer blurred, he’d work
a little longer in the balmy air.
It was
an almost-perfect day: late morning sun
high in the willow leaves, the pond
shimmering, undisturbed. . . .
Patricia Hooper is the author of the poetry collections Aristotle’s Garden (Bluestem Press, 2003) and At The Corner Of The Eye (Michigan State University Press, 1998). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Iowa Review.
DAYTRIP by Sarah Kortemeier
It looks like the States, someone murmurs,
and we stare at the wideness of the road, the space
spent on boulevards. Where Tokyo
has multiple stories of everything, lights
and stairwells and alleys that twist
against themselves like human intestines,
Hiroshima is drivable. It has space
for the sun to expand.
We’ve been told to try the okonomiyaki here,
a word that means whatever you like,
grilled. The Peace Park is the greenest space
in this plant-loving city. They’ve hung chains
of origami on a rod, so that the chains
and chains of paper cranes look like jackets in party colors,
clothes for a manic phase. Think your hometown pride
parade. Think “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat.” Think of something else. We try to sing
for the cranes, dona nobis, and here we begin
to see the false beauty of harmony, give us,
give us, as if singing will bring us
pacem.
In the museum, a lunch box.
It’s open and black. Inside, the placard says,
it held some rice. I’m pretty sure there was
some fish as well. I remember the color, the mass, the blacks.
I can’t see the child without the mess
that’s left of her meal, the crumbling fuzz
of ash, the shadows of stains. The opened locks.
Okonomiyaki
turns out to be a savory pancake. Mine has egg
and squid and a breath of something
terribly familiar.
Sarah Kortemeier’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Folio, Sliver of Stone, and Spiral Orb.
MEADOW AT NIGHT by Gary H. Holthaus
The edge of the moon
crossing this high desert
is not as silent as you are gone.
I think of your end,
the metal crumpling in,
remember that other meadow
now empty as a darkened house
on a quiet street, with trees,
where someone who loved you
used to live.
How can you miss
what you never had?
You see there
everything that might have been
but never will be,
substance of a dream
impossible to recall.
Tonight,
every moonless coulee
every empty meadow
calls your name.
Gary H. Holthaus is the author of eight poetry collections and chapbooks including Unexpected Manna (Copper Canyon, 1978) and Circling Back (Gibbs Smith, 1984) and three nonfiction books including a collection of essays, Wide Skies: Finding a Home in the American West (University of Arizona Press, 1997). A frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review, his essay “Whiteout,” which first appeared in our pages, was cited as a Notable Essay of the Year in The Best American Essays.
SOMETIMES NIGHT IS A CREEK TOO WIDE TO LEAP by Gail Martin
The sky wears black serge pants while
hemming up another pair for tomorrow
night. A bit shorter, but you won’t notice.
Some nights the blue pill brings a dream
where a young girl is trying not to cry
in the sheep pasture, stuck where her brothers
eyed the watery gap and mossy stones and sailed
to the other side. We didn’t know about E. coli
then, how our waders must have buzzed with it.
By the time I was ten, I’d pared my list of things
I was scared of down to four: the high board,
hoods and kidnappers, blue racers, and shaking
hands with Uncle John who’d lost four fingers
in the cornpicker. I pushed the scared parts of me
away, like the two finches my mother watched
nudge a dead fledgling off the edge of her deck.
Gail Martin is the author of the poetry collection The Hourglass Heart (New Issues, 2003). Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Indiana Review, Rattle, and the anthology Sweeping Beauty (University of Iowa Press, 2005).
THINKING OF YOU by Laura Read
My mother tells me she saw Pete
and he asked if I was married,
and I think of how he used to run down the hall
of my high school to open the doors for me
into Senior Hall with its rows
of blue lockers, the smell of amphibians
in jars, how he sent me roses in a box
with Thinking of You printed on it,
and he was, turning his flushed face
towards me like a lamp during Religion.
My mother tells me Pete
lives alone now on his family farm,
growing wheat and alfalfa. I can see him there,
behind his gingham curtains, and I think
this is where youth is kept,
all these years since have been moving
like the creek at the edge of Pete’s property
but the farm is the same, the grain turning
gold every night. This was the color
of the future. The color of the walls
of the restaurant where the boy I really loved
works now, his hair a little thinner.
I don’t have the courage
or I’d go there sometime, sit alone
at a table with a silk rose or a candle,
order Chardonnay and watch the light
catch in the glass. Pete thought I was kind.
When someone loves you like that,
you should pay attention.
You shouldn’t drive all night with Dave
up into the mountains of Idaho
until Coeur d’Alene Lake is farther and farther
below you, a black hole like the ones
you read about in school.
You could float on that lake forever
until people noticed and watched to see
when your arms and legs would begin to sink,
but you stayed up and listened
to the dragonflies skimming the surface,
the sound of a motor telling you its story
of speed, how it can turn water over
so you can see its white underside,
how you could get caught in it,
your body a red bloom in the water.
Laura Read is the author of the poetry collection Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburg Press, 2011), and the chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (Floating Bridge Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The Mississippi Review, and Willow Springs.
THE P.O. BOX by Maria DiLorenzo
Every Saturday I check for a letter
from a quadruple murderer
locked up at Riker’s Island.
I never met him but feel like I should
know why he hates women
enough to kill them and why afterwards
his eyes are choked up in all the pictures
as if he’s about to stick a piece of straw
in his mouth and wail the blues.
So I check and recheck.
I’ve always hated an empty box –
the one the engagement ring
comes in after the girl says yes,
the TV that runs out of things to say,
my grandfather’s tool box.
I dip my hand in as far as it can go
to feel for an envelope.
It’s the dark hole a nail leaves
when a picture is taken down.
This goes on for months.
One day I turn my key, find a crinkled
envelope. It’s as if I’m fishing
through a messy drawer in the kitchen,
grabbing the wrong end of a knife.
Maria DiLorenzo’s poems have appeared in Barrier Islands Review, Connotations Press, The Flea, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Pennsylvania Literary Journal.
REMNANTS by Don Stap
You can’t have any of it, not
the five walnuts from the black
walnut tree in your grandfather’s yard,
two still enclosed in green, leathery
skin as pungent as turpentine.
And not the Indian corn that the old
Dutchman hung from a nail
on the porch, the papery husks smelling
like the pages of the encyclopedias
your father bought and never opened.
You can’t have the brick-red leaves
from the black tupelo next to the pond.
You can’t have the scrub oak acorn,
no larger than a garlic clove, that a blue jay
hammered open as you watched –
the imprints of his bill punched
into what’s left of the meat.
And you can’t have the aloe-green
wings of the Luna moth: a Rorschach
test from a dream of water.
Nor the medieval, spiked armor
of a horse chestnut, the shell
of a box turtle, the two bones
from a duck – chalky white after
months at the bottom of a marsh pond.
You can’t have the sprig of Christmasberry,
and not the amber shell of an apple snail,
and you can’t have what you prize
most: the oriole nest with twigs
of a beech still growing through it.
– And the three secondary feathers
from the barred owls that frequent
your yard? No, you can’t have them either.
Nor the feathers from a redstart,
a chuck-will’s-widow, cedar waxwing.
And not the two roseate spoonbill feathers
picked out of the mud one lucky day,
pink vanes the color of roses under ice.
– And the husk of a milkweed
from the fields where 50 years ago
a dog parted the grasses with his nose?
Let it go. And forget the house sparrow
nest with its four brown speckled eggs,
and the two cardinal nests – twigs, vines,
and Spanish moss. You can’t have them.
Nor the round stone, a conglomerate,
heavy as lead, from the bed of the railroad
tracks, Kalamazoo, autumn, 1971, dusk.
And the exotica? The five stones
from the Bay of Fundy, first week
of August, 1999; three black tail feathers
from a razor-billed curassow:
terra incognita, 1987, eastern Peru;
and the jawbone of a piranha,
Rio Shesha camp, also Peru;
four scallop shells big as your palm,
Massacre Bay, Tasman Sea, New Zealand,
February, 1998? Again, no.
Nor can you have the glob of lava
from the Chiricahua Mountains
that was flung skyward 27 million
years ago, and is now a faded-red,
pin-pricked, fist-sized volcanic cinder.
And, finally, not the glacier-licked fieldstone,
that ash-speckled boulder, that egg
of the Pleistocene: the cornerstone
from your grandfather’s house, left
behind after it was razed, something
he never noticed all those years when
he slept above it on the side porch
as the days flowed past him, then
past you while you went along picking
up these things you can’t have.
CHRISTMAS EVE, FLORIDA by Don Stap
A stranger, once
my boyhood friend,
was found
in his truck nose down
for four days
through the ice of Long Lake.
My mother sent
the obituary
with her Christmas card.
* * *
Last week the wind
pushed a rowboat
across the pond.
It drifted near our shore
in the shallows
among the thinning
grasses that grew up
in the drought
three years ago.
* * *
Watching the boat
I noticed the Chinese tallow tree
at the water’s edge
its heart-shaped leaves
turning every color
a ripening peach could be.
Today, a quiet season here,
I’ve gone to stand at the window
over and over.
Don Stap is the author of the poetry collection Letter at the End of Winter (University Press of Florida, 1987). His poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Poetry, Northwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The American Scholar.
THE CHILDREN OF LOVERS ARE ORPHANS by Alice Weiss
When our mother posed in the mirror
she swiveled her eyes to the side,
let the smoke rise from her cigarette
past her in eddies and swirls.
Naked, she posed as if she were flat
like a photograph, her breast and her hip
to the side so just a third of her showed.
His face cross like a monkey,
our father watched like he knew
if he remembered to not ask too much,
he got to suck her bottom juices
and make her utter and utter,
and then it didn’t matter if she never
looked at him. Look at him.
Alice Weiss’ poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street 31, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Jewish Currents, and Liberty’s Vigil: The Occupy Anthology.
THE ILLITERATE IN NEW MEXICO by Gary Finke
After I failed calculus, my father,
A maintenance man, asked me if I knew
The story of how janitors were hired
In Alamogordo, New Mexico,
Whether the name of that town meant something
Or if I’d stopped thinking altogether
About anything but my present self.
“F,” he hurled, “is your failure,” and I said,
“The atomic bomb” before he shouted,
“If you couldn’t read a word, you were hired,
An illiterate in New Mexico.”
We were together in a restaurant.
I was as old, within days, as the bomb
And was supposed to become a doctor,
Not clean up after their accomplishments,
Somebody who’d never know their secrets,
A failure sweeping up in ignorance.
All I’d ever be was a patient; all
I’d be able to do was listen while
The way my life would close was decided,
An illiterate in New Mexico.
The scientists, he said, were creating
The end of the world while those janitors,
Excluded from their secrets, emptied trash.
Lips moving, he calculated a tip
Before sliding three quarters and two dimes
Under his plate, waiting for me to stand.
Leaving my grades open on the table
Because I needed to understand that
Anyone, even a goddamned busboy,
Could recognize I was as helpless as
The illiterate in New Mexico.
BOYS’ CHOIR by Gary Finke
Always, before we sang,
Miss Quigley gathered us,
saying after the Bomb,
after the fire next time
or barring that, after
heart attack, cancer, stroke,
all of us would be free
of our bodies, the vague,
invisible feather
within us reforming
as our ideal selves who
would sing in harmony.
In the next life, she said,
you will become voices,
all of you a boys’ choir.
In the next life, listen,
you will be eight years old
for a thousand years, nine
for a thousand more, ten
forever, beautiful,
smooth, eternally sweet
altos and sopranos
in paradise.
And then,
after we filed on stage,
after we were arranged
in quiet, measured rows,
after the stage was lit,
and our surplices glowed,
Miss Quigley beamed and raised
her gloved hands to begin
our preview of heaven,
shrill, young, and shimmering,
so gorgeous as we sang
our enchanted sermons,
oracles for promise.
Gary Finke’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Literary Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
BROKE by Jared Harel
As a kid I’d count my father’s earnings,
sit Indian-style on the carpet by his desk
and while dad made phone calls, paid bills,
I’d split his workday into neat green stacks,
keeping any quarters or nickels left over.
But now that nearly every penny is lost,
what to make of a memory like that?
In our family, there was nothing mysterious
about money: oily sheets with pen-marks
and stains you could run your thumb over
and feel a little breeze. My parents
would hand me forty for a movie, twenty more
for the taxi back. They expanded our perfectly
sizeable home into something I knew
not to bring my friends to, with tablet
windows, white marble floors, and the warm
sticky scent of vanilla. How they got so broke
is like asking a smoker why he smokes
even though he knows it will kill him.
Yesterday for instance, I tried paying for dinner,
but Dad just winked, fingered each note,
then laid it on the table to be taken away.
Jared Harel is the author of the chapbook The Body Double (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in Tin House, American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, and Ecotone.
MY MOTHER ASKS ME WHAT I WANTED by Kirsten Anderson
At the door of the drunk tank
my mother asks me what I wanted.
I say distance, as in two dark points
pushed apart on a map, or the short length
of the officer’s tight-lipped mouth,
the miles between my mug shot
and my actual face in the stall.
People say the same things to me.
I mouth along with their bird calls
and the cries of the exasperated,
come down on the wrong side
of the afterlife: the dusty place that Christ
once sketched with a stick, where my index finger
is crushed beneath a boot heel, the nail bed
red and exposed, my hands in the air
to signal pause, to mark some distance.
Kirsten Anderson’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Court Green, and Crab Orchard Review.
H by Stephen Gibson
H – never did it; grass, of course; coke, once.
When I lived near 72nd and Broadway, others did.
H – for our apartment, 1H, in the Bronx; the Fifties;
my father’s arrests, always for things my mother did.
H – the first element or the next in the periodic table
when I didn’t give a shit; the Christian Brothers did.
H – not for Hiss, Chambers, Greenglass; microfilm
in a pumpkin; who gives a fuck what one or the other did?
H – the hell of remembering bathroom tiles, not the girl,
as look-out for what some guys and my older brother did.
Stephen Gibson is the author of the poetry collections Paradise (Arkansas Press, 2011), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press, 2009), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House, 2008), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen, 2001). His poems have appeared in Alimentum, Field, Mid-American Review, New York Quarterly, and River Styx.
THE MAGIC CARPET by Andrea Fry
They threw out that old rug about the same time
they threw out the marriage.
I found it in a coil leaning against our house like a drunk,
kinked in its middle, the water meter keeping its head upright.
Steadying its bent neck, I hauled it into the sun,
then lowered it into a rectangle of perfect noon light.
On my knees I unrolled it, spread it out,
coaxing its crooked spine to lie flat.
I studied its weave,
four shades of brown pinned by a grid of black tracks.
My brother Rob drifted up
and I whispered to him just what this rug was.
My voice was soft and slow as if beginning a story.
I told him it would fly first to Alba Kurky
and then to Bucking Ham Palace and then to ASIA, in that order.
I discovered my embellishments as I uttered them,
felt my power grow as my voice became bolder in its pronouncements.
I beckoned Rob closer, signaling that the time was approaching.
He listened with gravity and ceremoniously we both
sat down on the rug to wait for takeoff.
In late evening when the belly of the sun had dropped below the horizon,
and its rose sheen backlit our world,
we got up and went into our house
unaware that it hadn’t happened,
that we hadn’t invoked magic.
Because we had left with the night sky still glowing and the peepers still speaking.
Because nothing was finished.
Andrea Fry’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Sequoia Stanford Literary Review, Graham House Review, J Journal, and Podium.
MY DAUGHTER’S JOURNAL by Steve Gehrke
One day her secrets might make the pages glow,
but for now what she sees is a white owl
camouflaged by snow, a kind of animal
blankness hidden in the page, a projection
of her own need to say something, to call
some part of herself forward in her mind,
but she can’t quite capture whatever feeling’s
swooping through her, at least that’s how I
imagine it as she frowns and scowls and fidgets
above the page, not wanting me to tell her
what to write, but not yet able to begin herself.
Someday she might tear pages from her journal
and feed them to the moon. Someday her feelings
will outgrow her, and she’ll walk the rest
of her life inside of them like a cartoon fog.
But for now she writes her entries in a strange
haiku: I saw a dead frog in the yard. I wish
that I could glow in the dark. How long
before the atlas is smothered in roadblocks?
How long before she’ll block us from her
Facebook? It’s not her privacy I resist,
but the way I can already see the freshness
of the world begin to fade in her, that root system
of other selves that boredom or discontent
nourishes inside of us as we age. I got
a new locket. I don’t have a picture small
enough to fit it. Sometimes I think her
refusal to elaborate is a kind of morality,
a dedication to truth that only the youngest
children can maintain. But already she is flying
away from this radical innocence, turning
the pencil over in her hand, erasing, telling me
she can’t think of anything very interesting
to say. Daughter, I have heard the dead frog
singing from your locket. I have seen the dark
yard begin to glow. And I know: the world made
small is the ultimate good. Say things simply while
you can, because already the owl shakes the last
threads of snow from its enormous wings, and
the world before you is the shadow of a lone mouse
skittering towards safety as you turn the page.
Steve Gehrke is the author of the poetry collections Michelangelo’s Seizure (University of Illinois Press, 2007), The Pyramids of Malpighi (Anhinga Pres, 2004), and The Resurrection Machine (Bkmk Pr/Umkc, 2000). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Crazyhorse.