POETRY
He Watches the Weather Channel by Carrie Shipers
After Reagan Lothes
Because nothing else is on so early
in the morning when he drinks coffee
in an empty house. Because almanacs
are of limited use compared to satellites.
Because spring will have to come somehow
and cold reminds him which bones
he’s broken.
Because every flight delayed
or canceled is one he won’t be on. Because
people should stay where they’re from,
except his children, who were right to leave.
Because a flood will take what it can
and move uphill.
Because just once
he’d like to see a tornado touch down
in an empty field and go away
hungry. Because his wife nearly died
on an icy road. Because he can’t prepare
for disasters he doesn’t understand.
Because wind keeps him awake. Because
his boots are by the door but his slicker
is in his truck. Because he can’t change
a damn thing forecast and uncertainty aches
like a tired muscle, an unhealed wound.
At the Sadness Factory, by Carrie Shipers
every shift
is overnight or double. Always, layoffs
loom. When the lunch-bell rings,
the line creaks to a halt and workers eat
dry sandwiches brought from home,
bruised fruit, leftovers in the fridge
too long. They have to swallow hard
to overcome their knotted throats.
Talk of weather or local sports can lead
to tears.
At the Sadness Factory,
the suggestion box is empty and quotas
go unmet. As the market shrank,
other plants diversified or just
shut down. Now most of their products
go overseas on cargo boats that sink
or simply vanish. Old-timers say
they used to work harder but for better pay.
They look forward to retirement,
small pensions and trips to the lake,
though they’ll miss the hum and bustle,
the birthdays marked with cake and used
balloons, bowling and softball teams
that lose or have to forfeit.
Supervisors
are sadder than folks on the line,
the managers saddest of all. The owner
used to be sad but now comes only
at Christmas, bringing whiskey
no one drinks. The Sadness Factory is,
as it’s always been, the town’s largest
employer. No one believes it could close.
Carrie Shipers is the author of the poetry collection Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press, 2010) and the chapbooks Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Connecticut Review, New England Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Love Poem for the Radium Girls by Eric Weinstein
5:00 pm: time to set aside the dials of the Radium Luminous Material Corporation & paint your lips & fingernails for a night out on the town. The undark of a February night. Glowing alone along the roadside, hailing a cab, you don’t imagine your jaw dissolving or the pending lawsuits. Glowing alone in your bed late that night, you don’t think of the false diagnosis of syphilis the doctor will deliver to explain away your illness. The dark heart of the Radium Luminous Material Corporation. You don’t picture your bones, already beginning to glow within you, lighting the inside of your lead-lined casket for decades while the sky blues on above. Tick-tock. You see only your own ghostly hands carefully limning the ghostlier hands of the clock.
Runaway Green Tea Effect by Eric Weinstein
Fill your cup to the brim and it will spill.
– Zen admonition
The water boiled away then so
did the kettle. Soon the whole stove
went up in rivering smoke.
The new parents in the downstairs
apartment stared at me through
the hole it made as if to say way to go,
you ruined our kid’s first birthday party
as the crêpe paper vaporized,
followed by the pastel hats and plates
the baby all the while sirening.
Then the party evaporated, too:
relatives, guests, birthday boy.
In a matter of minutes the whole
building dissolved in a sea of steam.
When it cleared I stood shivering
in the parking lot with only my evening
paper displaying, ink running, the headline
local man suffers mysterious loss
and a silver balloon I watched shrink
away into the otherwise starless sky.
Eric Weinstein’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Crazyhorse, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review.
Nouvelle Vague by Kathleen Winter
God, this garden bores me.
Only one man and the animals
talk too much. No café tables
beneath the tree canopy,
not a single boutique.
I could bear the tedium
till yesterday, when the snake
slipped me some pomegranate seeds.
Now I see how sweet the ocelot
would look as a coat,
the snake himself would make
a smashing jacket.
Even Adam might be
handsome if I could get him
into a turtleneck, a Citroën coupe.
That man is still incredibly naïve.
If I could stop his grinning
long enough to smoke a cigarette
I’d tell him about Sartre,
stare into his eyes
until this shrubbery
seemed only a strange dream.
The Garden Party by Kathleen Winter
after Katherine Mansfield
Her in her hat, him in his casket,
both covered with daisies.
Too many flowers in some houses banked callas
given an accident outside the gates.
Is there a way to eat cake without feeling,
without feeling greedy?
The band beneath an awning
and women on platforms again:
so many inches of wishing
to be slender see further be seen.
Order-taker, a carter
his horse jumps away from the engine.
Taste the bourbon vanilla, the egg.
We’re eating leaves of grass
in sandwiches, suffering
creatures in the corners of our eyes
children in cheap crepe like miniature servants.
* * *
He hummed the same jingle
always when he walked with them,
his hands on the backs
of their necks.
Scent of his sweat
clean as bread.
Strenuous to lift, to carry,
strenuous to bend and twist. Strenuous incense
masking morbidity, strenuous to use
the muscle, memory.
Strenuous to break
from a dream of him covered
with shaving soap
saying my
name in his near-
sighted eyes.
Kathleen Winter is the author of the poetry collection Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Tin House, The New Republic, Agni, The Cincinnati Review, and Field.
The River by Elizabeth Barnett
Trains go over the river –
no passengers, just freight.
Their whistles an old clock
chiming all night by mistake.
Your dreams aren’t fish in the river.
They’re the giant ferns holding the bank.
And even an empty train
makes the river shake.
You’re holding the baby.
You’re crying and awake.
The Horses Didn’t Die by Elizabeth Barnett
when we forgot them.
I went there once
and walked the fence line.
They ran to me
still tame, but dirty
with torn hooves.
Then one by one coyotes
came out of the grass,
pushing me back
to the locked house.
Elizabeth Barnett’s poems have appeared in Harpur Palate and Slice.
The Blind Madonnas by Sylvia Foley
In Bogotá, the rains refused to stop.
Dad drove us down the mountain, taking curves
as if he’d learned the date of his own death.
The Rambler’s tires laid out tracks in the mud.
We veered past roadside crosses, white Madonnas
with lifted arms and cataracted eyes.
“A bus went off here,” he said. “Some
were kids. You two might count yourselves lucky.”
He smiled at nothing, and cranked up the heat.
The car roared with wet air that sank inside us,
the eucalyptus giving us headaches.
Through the rear glass I watched the spiraling sky,
felt the weightless wheels drag their shadows
over the precipice. As in sleep I twitched
loose the body’s wagon, let my heart fly.
Even now I feel the spirited babies,
their rock-damp hair, pulling on my hands.
Sylvia Foley’s poems have appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Conditions, and The Black River Review.
Attributed to Qu Ding by Mark Sullivan
Though we gather ourselves
out of this hush, out of these summer palaces
and mountainside pavilions, from the absence
of sound that attends the ending of a sudden shower,
and the return of daily sounds rushing into this void –
geese signaling their pleasure, laundry clapped
against stones – we will never be more
than apart from all this. It makes a kind of clothing
that we wear, outfit not fashioned
for comfort or protection, but as though an alb
made of mists hung in the vestry,
awaiting certain ceremonies
and sacraments, the evening’s late hesitation
above the river, the avenues turned to glass
in the chemistry of rain. Nothing, it goes
with everything, and so we bring it out
as one might have the imperial librarian descend
to the archives for the scroll on sized
silk and uncoil its soft cinema
between royal hands, right to left.
This pastiche of light, this allegory of weather
where the rain stands for the fertility of rain
and the host peak and its attendants range like a court
that will rule forever, but with the benign
impartiality of rock and water. Whether memory
or mirror we could hardly say,
yet this slip of cloth woven from unwound cocoons
and deepened with valleys and sheltered retreats
seems to give us back to ourselves,
an urgency of air we hadn’t noticed
but was with us all along, when the wind, for instance
came in through the window with transparent messages
that announced the storm and were the storm.
Mark Sullivan is the author of the poetry collection Slag (Texas Tech University Press, 2005). His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review.
Space Bears and Doxology by Charlotte Pence
First reports described a runaway bear wearing
a space helmet. I’m not surprised. It is Tennessee,
and black bears gone alien are a possibility.
Here, life not as it seems is the hope. So, after
a month, wildlife rescuers tracked the scat to find
a juvenile male with his head stuck in a plastic
Walmart candy jar. Bulk-sized Jujyfruits. Honey
of all hives. The vet judged the bear one winter
from death having lost half its body weight.
He had learned to drink by lying down in shallow
streams where the water would seep in slow enough
to keep him from drowning. This story reminds me
how as a child I sewed pink curtains onto roach
motels, figuring they would like it better this way,
both coming and going. The curtains a lure
and an escort. I know the bear doesn’t debate
about any of this, but if there were such a thing
as heaven, wouldn’t it be the moment the jar
was removed, that rush of autumn air on his face?
No barrier between paw and tongue, touch
and taste. The world as it is now and ever shall be,
suddenly right before him, roughing cheeks
with sun on autumn mornings, and if he’s lucky,
pricking his eyes with the sting of sleet come winter.
Wanted: A Pretty Picture by Charlotte Pence
Some visits we remember never happened.
Instead:
A woman takes a bike ride alone.
Sees the red bulge of carrion.
A maze of its own muscle on the back road.
A turkey buzzard,
So engorged it doesn’t fly when she bikes by.
Rather, it steadies its glare, and she gives it space.
One could say this is the path
Too often taken: One that swerves clear.
One that prefers a certain type of calm:
Day-burned road-gravel,
Red-flicked and firm.
Charlotte Pence’s poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Tar River, Southern Poetry Review, and North American Review.
Assumption by John Lundberg
I can just make out a deadrise,
nearly smothered by the dark,
pitching on the swells, its boatman
hauls a rope hand over hand
until the snap of claws ruins the quiet.
They scuttled with such secrecy
along the riverbed
or kept as still as stones.
A few lights are coming on,
locals waking for church.
When I was among them, propped up
by my father in a collared shirt
and the preaching faded to a drone,
I memorized the saints on the stained glass
and colored all the Os in the leaflet:
thou worship holy God God
Yesterday, the town’s lone greenhouse
broke the sunlight in fierce, golden angles
through the ivy and the climbing roses.
The grey-haired help kept circling,
her wagon overflowing with azaleas.
I held one to the light, checking for strength
under the stem, a diseased edge.
The flowers are my father’s job
but he’s gone home. He spends his mornings
watching ghosts form on the Hudson
and my grandmother burn with fever –
her body down to almost nothing now,
her mind already hovering.
O man of little faith, why did you doubt?
Christ said to Peter, I think,
as he pulled him from the water.
Sunlight snares the houses on the bank.
The boat turns toward us now.
She’s all aglow.
I try remembering her eyes wide open.
John Lundberg’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Antioch Review, and New England Review.
At the Loom by James Doyle
After thirty minutes or so,
she puts one finger to her temple
as if admonishing thought
to stop interfering with God’s work,
love’s work, creased blood’s shadow
in the flowery patterns, and children
in the next room whispering. Her
dress is sly and severe, late autumn’s
last stand before turning it all
over to winter. She is likely to smile
if she senses me a century later
glimpsing her from the rustle
in a curtain, the yellowed cracks
of the family photo album. Around
her neck the medallion, blessed
by God’s own agent, the priest
who married them. This loom a wedding
present from the parents of both
families, she bends to resume it,
her fingers chubby and thin by turn
as the material bows, spins, a minuet
in precise quarter notes, and her
husband, a year after his funeral,
puts his hands on her shoulders.
James Doyle’s latest collection of poetry is The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water (Accents Publishing, 2012). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The South Carolina Review, and Hunger Mountain. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
Totem by Jeanne Emmons
From Mother it came down to me, the small
hinged box of baby teeth she kept
from her three children, unsorted, all
unlabeled and collected while we slept.
Now, from my children’s mouths, I have added
incisors, canines, molars I discovered
beneath the pillows where their heavy heads
were tangled up with dreams of wings and silver.
I snap the lid and wonder: Will our kin
in the far future dig out the pulp, unsettle
the DNA, and reconstitute their forebears,
all out of sorts and chattering in this tin?
Or will they seal them in some magic rattle,
a dried gourd – shaking – unhinged – disordered.
Jeanne Emmons is the author of the poetry collections The Glove of the World (The Backwaters Press, 2006), Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press, 2005), and Rootbound: Poems (New Rivers Press, 1998). Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The River Styx. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
Credo by Kathryn Hunt
I believe in the shining coins of rain
falling and falling on the garden, the fierce
good luck of that, the garden with its
sated roots, that scent. I believe in the hives
of rooms beneath the soil, insects toiling
in the dark among bones and the dust
of bones. The silvering clouds with their luster
of honey and despair, the young deer
watchful in tall grasses.
I believe in my mother who kept
two sons from war and the Purple Heart
she left in her drawer with her costume
jewelry. I believe in the halleluiah of time passing,
the strangeness of that. The way you
climb out of a dream and walk slowly
back to yourself, something beautiful there.
It moves among us like the wind moves
but is not the wind. It lives in our blood
like fear or love. I believe in the door
left open as the rain begins to fall,
and in the way, no matter what,
we’ll ever know.
Kathryn Hunt’s work has appeared in The Sun, Willow Springs, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, and Open Spaces. Her first collection, The Long Way Through Ruin, is forthcoming from Blue Begonia Press.
Epithalamium by Kara van de Graaf
In my family, we eat
our words like bread.
This is how we have not come
to speak of you.
This is how I learn
some things should not be spoken of.
Let us pretend we might have existed
in the same space, that your life
would not mean my death by omission.
Sometimes we shock a nerve so much it dies.
If you had not gone to war. If you had
come back. If she was
some other woman, in some other life:
the dresses fine and made
of cotton, the roses on the table
big as fists.
Kara van de Graaf’s poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Bellingham Review, and The Journal.
Foster Child by William Notter
He lived in our town a year or two,
had boxing trophies on his desk
and a history nobody mentioned.
Years later, I can barely recall his name
and remember just one thing he said –
Stabbing somebody
feels like sticking a potato.
He made it sound so easy.
Not even meat,
just something starchy with a little give
that a blade can slide right through.
William Notter is the author of the poetry collection Holding Everything Down (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in the anthologies Good Poems for Hard Times (Penguin Books, 2006), Good Poems, American Places (Penguin Books, 2012) and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Paddlewheeler to Sugarloaf Mountain by Andrew H. Oerke
Em-eye-ess-ess-eye-ess-ess-eye-pee-pee-eye:
she spelled it out loud when she imagined she was
homing in on the Sugar Loaf Mountain in her mind.
She had pinched enough nickels to buy the ticket,
and says she never told anyone that before.
Now she sniffs at the copper-tinted photos of Dad
now dead and says, “He didn’t last long, did he?”
as if she were sizing up a turnip.
One night she didn’t hear me tip-toe into
the whitewashed islands of her nursing home room:
it was like Mykonos in moonlight, and her whispers were caroming
in weary echoes around the four-square corners, pleading:
Aren’t ya even gonna try to take me home?
She kept running away to the paddlewheeler’s
muddy waters rushing downward toward Winona
below Sugarloaf Mountain, where they would
be waiting for her for pinching the peppermint
candy and sneaking out the back window to skip school
and ride the steamboat to someplace breathtakingly brand new.
When she thought about it, it smoothed away
the lines on her storyboard forehead, leaving
no clue as to where she would dock next, or to the
whereabouts of anything she was dying to find out more about
in a win-or-lose-it-all, forced bet-the-house on what?
And then the Captain hooted, “All aboard” and paddlewheelered her away
in a cloud painted pink in the shape of the steamboat she loved.
Andrew H. Oerke is the author of the poetry collections Never Seek to Tell Your Love (GCEEF Publishers, 2010) and San Miguel De Allende (Swan Books, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Agni, and California Quarterly.
Marx’s Family by Garret Keizer
As sure its kind would disappear
as Darwin was that man evolved,
old Mohr enjoyed his nuclear family –
a short nap’s respite from Kapital,
a chapter or two of Ivanhoe
aloud to the girls before supper.
He watched the old forms passing
like casserole dishes down to Jenny
from his place at the head of the table,
foresaw the suitors who would come,
the part he’d play of bourgeois papa,
because there is no fooling history
– we are no older than our times –
and it would not be bad. His world
contained less bad than good
that history would supersede.
“Play horsy, Mohr, our horsy!”
He could do that too, for hours on end
until the Worker State arrived
in draft with dear Herr Engels, who
would talk with Mohr deep into the night
while Jenny waited, and waited on them.
Garret Keizer’s poems have appeared in Agni, Cold Mountain Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry.
Against the Wind by Elisabeth Murawski
You twist and dive in the sheets,
sleek and undulant. An otter. A greased
Channel swimmer. With light,
regret. Hours of silence in the car
driving back from Ocean City.
I don’t drop you at a Metro stop,
take you to your door. Home,
a second shower to kill the scent
of cheap motel. I stare at the bracelet
bought with you looking on, bored
and impatient. A trigger. I may never
wear it. Years later, I meet
a man who links your name to mine
as if we’d been an item. Why
lie to him about a nonexistent
us? That night on the beach, snaking
your arm around my waist, you asked
my age. “You carry it well,” you said.
I thought of women in National
Geographic, sure-footed and poised,
balancing, resigned, heavy
jars of water on their heads.
I walked with you to the motel
against the wind. A war inside.
Elisabeth Murawski is the author of the poetry collections Out-patients (Serving House Books, 2010), Zorba’s Daughter (Utah State University Press, 2010), Troubled by an Angel (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997), and Moon and Mercury (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1990). Her poems have appeared in Ontario Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and The Southern Review.
The First Snowfall In The Al Anbar Province Since 1991 by Kyle Adamson
slowly dusted the icy muzzles of M-16s
& the heavy hills of stacked sandbags,
turning the sky into a flurry
of white bewilderment.
I knew it wouldn’t last. Yet somehow
these fragile flakes became
the story no one would believe.
It was like the earth was asking me
to forgive.
Kyle Adamson’s poems have appeared in Artful Dodge and Poetry City, USA.
How We Give Ourselves: by Gary H. Holthaus
Like Rock
for instance.
Even knowing
the possibilities
rock will take in
water, open itself
in fissures, cracks,
shallow indentations,
offers water dark and
comforting recesses.
Even knowing
the nature of water –
that it can turn
coldly upon one
such as rock
who opens itself
sheltering, harboring
all potential – rock
accepts water.
Or Trees
which give themselves
to sun, taking in turn
sun’s nourishment,
becoming shade
for rodents, or snakes
breathing quickly
in the cool shadows
trees lay so softly
against rock
they can be seen
but not felt.
Even knowing
the possibilities,
tree accepts the beetle
inside its bark,
gives itself to the
climbing of porcupines
knowing full well
how they love the bark
how, high up
they may girdle the trunk.
This tree offers itself
to birds. “Look,” says tree,
“I will be your home.
even if you do not
stay here long, take my
twigs, these stems,
whatever you can use.”
While Birds
become trees’ messengers.
“Look,” says tree, “I long
for that new country,
over there – though
yes, it is quite like this.”
Leaves reach out
trembling.
“Take my fruit. My
seeds,” tree whispers,
“They will provide for you.
You can carry them for me.”
And birds,
knowing their own needs,
the possibilities and dangers
inherent in long journeys
do.
“A Man,”
says the game warden
“has to live with some
danger.” But seeing
how things sometimes
work out, it is hard to
fathom the reckless
giving of rock, the
dangerous grace of
trees, the arduous flight
of birds, carrying the future,
the potential of shade,
its cool respite.
Yet, it is also true, even
among my own kind,
I have witnessed
the immanence of this
reciprocal grace,
the innocent gift
deliberately given,
utterly uncalculated.
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, two of his essays which first appeared in our pages were cited as a Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays.
A Tree Full of Cherries for the First Time by Anne Love Woodhull
Picking sour cherries with
my father, splitting the harvest with
the birds. It is noon in Ohio
and hot. We are drinking
beer. In the kitchen wearing aprons,
we pit cherries, measure,
add sugar and boil.
We have another beer, and then
another, no lunch. I say,
The jam wants a beer too,
and pour some in the pot.
My father’s laughing
spills and spreads,
and my thrill to make him so.
We satisfy the room. And now the jam,
still bubbling, won’t thicken. We wait
and stir and wait
then put it runny, invalid
in jars and slowly
some kind of ruin begins.
Anne Love Woodhull is the author of the poetry chapbook This is What We Have (March Street Press, 2001). Her poems have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Kalliope, and The Massachusetts Review.
Big Leaf Maple by Elizabeth Myhr
though the property was clear cut years back
by a man who’d bought it and said he wouldn’t
that maple made it out alive though it looks
smaller now for the field and light
we would run straight to her after dropping
little backpacks on the cabin floor
fly out with unzippered coats hatless
to that home in her rain drenched mansion of leaves
the sour smell of her rotting skirt
her arms dripped smack pock into
downed leaves in afternoons of wood snails
and though I could look into her high golden rooms
was too small to reach the first limbs and remained
chained by gravity to the slick moldering trenches
and when damp dusk came I’d have to turn
and trudge back to the places
where a mother can hunt her children down
by sink or stove
though human suffering does not cease
there is that which fails to reach the body of hoarded joy
and we inbreathe the green leaf’s gift
and join spring with each single breath
I was by bark and branch raised up
one and daughtered to the world
Elizabeth Myhr is the author of The Vanishings and Other Poems (Calypso Editions, 2011). This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
So Many by Donald Platt
“So many birds
her lover gave her!” exclaims my daughter Eleanor, shaking
her head in wonderment
at the munificence of love. Day before Thanksgiving and we’re
walking the beach
barefoot near sunset, cold sand and ocean turning our toes
pinkish purple
until we can no longer feel our freezing feet beneath us
and have to kick
the coarse, wave-pounded, hard-packed sand to get the feeling
back. Eleanor
wanted the two of us to sing that old, incrementally repeating
Christmas carol
at the top of our lungs, and so we belt out, off-key as always,
“On the first day
of Christmas My true love gave to me A partridge in
a pear tree.”
The first time round, both of us have difficulty remembering
all the words.
It must be a decade since we sang it last together, when she
was still a child.
“Good for the brain,” she tells me, tapping her temple.
Exactly one year
ago, I signed the release papers to get her, then 20, out
of the Langone Center’s
locked psych ward in New York City, where she’d spent two weeks
after her first
manic break. We had walked out onto 1st Avenue
into the midst
of honking cabs, street vendors hawking watches, and hip hop
blaring from boom boxes
carried on the shoulders of young black men in leather jackets
with diamond studs
shining in their large-lobed royal ears. Overcome, Eleanor had had
to hold onto a lamppost.
“Dad,” she’d gasped. “I’ve been olfactorily deprived these last
two weeks. I can smell
the world again!” It was exhaust from gridlocked traffic
wafting with the charred,
sizzling, mouth-watering scent of souvlaki from a gyro shop.
Almost weeping
with relief that she was “sprung” from the hospital, we both
breathed it all in
again and again, basking in those smells, sights, sounds like sunlight.
“Seven swans a-swimming Six
geese a-laying Five go-old rings Four calling birds
Three French hens
Two turtledoves And a partridge in a pear tree.”
So many birds.
“Look,” Eleanor calls out. “I never noticed before
how the seagulls have
black-tipped tail feathers with white spots. How fashion-forward! And see
the sandpipers swoop
and land – so synchronized – as if they shared the same mind.
They’re my favorite
beach birds.” We watch the sandpipers run back and forth
on the sand’s wet margin,
avoiding the resounding surf, which to them must seem like some tsunami.
They play catch-me-if-you-can
with the breakers. Eleanor starts singing again, “Twelve drummers
drumming Eleven pipers
piping Ten lords a-leaping.” She can’t stop, is starting to speed up.
Perhaps she’s forgotten
to take her lithium. Or her holiday drinking – white wine, then gin thinned
with tonic – is messing with the meds.
Or I am the overprotective father hypersensitive to hypomania.
The other people on the beach –
college kids throwing footballs, young men in wet suits with surfboards under
their arms, grandparents looking after
children with orange plastic buckets, helping them build sandcastles – seem
to think nothing
of a father and daughter singing Christmas carols early, gearing up
for the holidays.
As she walks and sings, Eleanor waves her arms like windmills, says
she’s doing her tai-chi.
One prong of her silver bracelet snags on her crocheted purple skirt
and tears it
She stops singing to examine the rip, shrugs, then gives me
the bracelet to hold
for her, goes back to waving her arms. I put it in my back pocket.
The orange rim
of sunset circles the horizon like the dirt ring on a blue
bathtub inverted
over our heads. “Night is rising,” exclaims Eleanor and points
to the half-inch
of deep turquoise that seeps up across the sky from the ocean as the sun
sinks down behind
us. The sky is litmus paper for the sunset’s salmon tints
and gets reflected
pink and blue in the wet strip of sand the surf leaves when it recedes.
We’re walking the sky.
Dumb-struck, we can only point, open our arms wide to what is happening
above us, how sunset
cuts its wrists and lets them bleed. “It’s like being inside
someone else’s
body,” says Eleanor, “and trying to see out through her skin
and arteries.”
The gored sky is what our true love gives us, sunset’s five gold rings
which I must learn to wear
on each finger of my left hand to show I’m wedded to the falling
night. Diamond studs
of last light glint from the waves’ dark kingly ears. Ocean does not hear
our voices when we cry
out. It makes a music far beyond us, the surf’s loud litany
of all that is
and will be ground down to soundlessness and sand.
Above it, sandpipers
veer, wings catching light, so many many birds and always calling.
Donald Platt’s fourth book of poems, Dirt Angels, appeared in 2009 from New Issues Press. His poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
Dinner Party by Julia Lisella
On the edge of where we sat that night
marshland cradled so many fireflies
the grasses seemed to illumine themselves.
I sat beside a stranger
who was looking at the ink-dark sky.
Planets shine brightly; stars twinkle.
Twinkle. It’s a mommy word, not
a dinner party word. But I had said it
and now poked at the grilled chicken
shimmering in some sweet sauce.
And we all kept eating in the nearly black.
I wanted so much to love where I was,
so many of us spread up and down
the tableclothed picnic table, candles flickering,
like a scene from a French film.
But I only had my slight mortification
to keep me company, and the sound of the creatures
in the marsh who had no information
about the planets or the stars,
what would last, or what would dissolve
from our sight.
Julia Lisella is the author of the poetry collections Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007) and Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Ocean State Review, Literary Mama, Salamander, and Prairie Schooner.
Movie Drunks by Maxine Scates
Exiting the movie, but still back on the screen
feeling good because he’d gotten sober and the flash
forward seemed to say, stayed sober for at least
eighteen months of movie time, I heard a woman say,
The acting was pretty good, but how many ways
can you play a drunk? A drunk is a drunk . . .
which seemed a little less than charitable. Or maybe
I’m just sensitive because my father was a drunk,
a vet, a working drunk who stumbled home each night
in his dirty work clothes streaked with sweat and oil,
unlike Susie’s mother who whiled away the afternoons
drinking gin, filling ashtrays and playing bridge
and causing Susie no less grief. Bus drivers are drunks,
and priests and presidents and maybe that woman
is actually a drunk which might explain why
she doesn’t like us much because sometimes we do see
what we don’t like about ourselves so easily
in others. My father was a drunk and so am I
though I’d like to think we are quite different –
but maybe she meant that when we’re drunk we’re all
the same, and if you asked someone who knew me
in those years they’d no doubt say the bile they felt
spilling over them made them think of one of those countries
where the rivers we’d wish were clear and blue
bobbing with boats instead are flowing with used Pampers
and green bottles and unnameable sludge, just the way
the river in our state used to be before we stopped using it
for a toilet, the kind that woman has or has not
bent over. Yet once we stopped dumping Slurpee cups,
fast food wrappers and the dye and oils sparkling
with their otherworldly iridescence, the river began
to remember how the fish no longer swam and the ferns
had died on its banks and now the fish are back
though some are one-eyed, and the green along its banks
is growing and the river knows it will never be as pure
as it once was but is grateful for what it is
even if it knows we can’t trust ourselves to drink from it
because the sky still rains its acid rain.
Maxine Scates is the author of the poetry collections Undone (New Issues, 2011), Black Loam (WordTech Communications, 2005), and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). She is also co‑editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2001).
Long Distance by Ciara Shuttleworth
You ask me
can I see it. As if. As if I can see through
phone lines and satellites. As if I can hold
your hand in one of mine
and a glass of something red in the other.
As if I can look through all the clouds
and light my sky, held to your dark
one, moonlit, full.
Ciara Shuttleworth’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, The New Yorker, Weber: the Contemporary West, and The Norton Introduction to Literature, 11/e.
LHOOQ by Lauren Hilger
He addresses this body
the way a firefighter
addresses an elevator
he must operate
within a burning building.
You know, I was not born in
a cabbage patch.
It’s that time we part.
I have to join the gang at the piano.
It’s urgent. They need me to sing right away.
Listen,
I don’t care how much room my aura takes up.
Give me a bateria.
Samba joint flex feel.
This exclamation point means everything
I’ve just said multiplied by itself, getting smaller!
Lauren Hilger’s poetry has appeared in Sonora Review and Washington Square Review.
Reveille with Fire Alarms by George David Clark
Attention Dollhouse: to the sound of stage drapes
furling back and a soft snap
almost like the striking
of a match. Suddenly you’re lit as by a flickering
nightlight at the still soft center of the downstairs couch.
The balsa floor lamp blooming like a tulip
while the chandelier shivers and flares, then pops
its white piñata
spraying firedrops through the room.
Attention Groomdoll: if each chair is cotton stuffing
in a cufflink box – if tissue – then you knew day one
you lived in kindling
but what else could you do?
The work of dolls
is small-scale drama,
but with no director and no plot, you mostly labored
at the hallway mirror, practicing extremes of feeling
on your plastic face. Here is the horror you perfected.
Attention Bridedoll: as a host of crackling yellows
climb the spiral stairs behind you, something
in your hollow parts is warming toward a climax.
What or who
have you been miming? How awful much
of you is costume? Singed now on one sleeve and torn,
your gown has let a little air in,
and the aria you’re always
on the verge of rises in you like a vow that’s been inverted.
Attention Dolls: your immolation’s imminent.
Already something’s at the door to the master bedroom
that you’re trapped in, is painting it red, will soon
lacquer it black.
I’ve been so lonely, someone says.
I know, the other answers. With that, the dialogue stalls.
You touch,
and then you’re burning. Somewhere,
past the flimsy panels, you can almost hear applause.
George David Clark’s poems have appeared in Field, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry Daily.
The Precious Book by Patricia Fargnoli
Gwen John, circa 1920, oil on canvas
Who among us becomes what we set out to be?
The girl in the long blue dress cradles the open book
in a handkerchief in her hands. Next to her on the table,
an empty white plate and a closed black book
that partly extends over the edge of the table
as if she had just put it away and taken up this other.
The book she is reading is red and the girl’s face is as devout
as a nun praying. The background, only a beige wall, nothing else.
Do the words of the valuable book enter her mind and change her?
Does she grow into the woman the artist later becomes?
A model for Rodin, his lover, that sad affair,
how she died overshadowed, unrecognized?
The red book is the only thing of bright color here, a light
in her hands. We give our hearts to her, don’t we?
The long blue dress of her life, this moment of stasis
when the future can’t touch her.
Patricia Fargnoli is the author of several collections of poetry including Then, Something (Tupelo Press, 2009), Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005), and Lives of Others (Oyster River Press, 2001). Her poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, and Images. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
First Day at Indiana State Teacher’s College, 1926 by Jill Kress Karn
for my grandmother
You stood beside her until she finished –
one of two new dresses for your year at school:
short sleeves, taupe chiffon, a lace panel
down the front. The relentless pedaling
of the sewing machine propelling you
farther away from home. To this field.
Lined with sycamore trees. The grass
covered over with clover, the sun warm
on your brown hair, the air too still to move
a curl. You wear your mother’s cameo,
pinned fast to the dress she made, your sister’s
pearls pale against your neck. Arms loose along
your sides, as if you learned the drape
of the lace, as if the slope of your curved
hips mimicked its fluid folds. Poised between
the rocking cadence of home and the edge
of a grassy field, when your body – trimmed
in delicate stitches – begins to stir.
Jill Kress Karn is the author of The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton (Routledge, 2002). Her poetry has appeared in Salamander.
Free Will With Small Yellow Truck by Marylen Grigas
For half an hour I’ve been speaking in the voice of a small yellow truck, whose wheels move across the coffee table at my will, just as my will moves at the whim of this two-year-old prime mover, who, I’ve just read yesterday, is scripted by the laws of physics, as he learns these laws through his moving vehicle, a red bulldozer with large black treads rolling next to and sometimes over my small yellow truck. I’ve been speaking as a truck for so long, my appearance has transformed. I back up and turn. Neuroscientists say no to free will. Shakespeare says we’re merely players, his many sad twists of fate, coincidences, happy and tragic. Will I ever write again? It won’t be my fault if I don’t. I’m busy following the bulldozer who’s driving slowly across the coffee table into a cardboard garage. I park next to him. But not for long. Because motion is endlessly fascinating. I’ve just forgotten why. I want to glance at his intense little face, but if I lose my place, will I stall? I follow him to the other end of the coffee table, where a blue box with a tasseled lid reigns. He will park there and want to open it.
Marylen Grigas’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod International Journal, Margie, and The Pedestal Magazine.
Playing Bach’s Three-Part Invention #9 by Jean Janzen
Bach marks it getragen, then klagend:
solemn, complaining. Three voices
intertwining in dissonance and harmony.
After fifteen two-part inventions, these
journeys in trio, this one with heavy questions
interrupting the intimacy of two.
Outside the window new leaves
are a thousand easy hands playing
sun and air. Buds fatten on iris stems
and finches dip toward the feeder,
then back into the cedar to sing
their long arias. All within the rhythms
of earth and sun, while my fingers
on piano keys walk into the dark,
the third voice insistent and warning
that love is rooted in risk, our thirst
for the other rising like new grass
easily trampled. Still the wild mustard
opens its soft petals, and listen
to the wind in the cherry tree,
how her fragrant hair loosens.
Jean Janzen is the author of several poetry collections from Good Books including Paper House: Poems (2008), Piano in the Vineyard (2004), Tasting the Dust (2001), and Snake in the Parsonage (1995).
Sedna the Arctic Sea Goddess by Hila Ratzabi
The men fashioned their bitch goddess into a fat girl.
Daughter of Anguta, creator-god, angry dad.
In every legend your father throws you to sea.
You cling to kayak: he cuts off your fingers
One by one. You drown.
Your fingers grow tails and flippers
Become seals, walruses, whales,
Creature-fingers sprung from sea-blood.
You leash your seals
Hold back fish in your silky palm
Till the hunters hunger so much they send shamans
To wash and comb your hair.
Only a man’s goddess would lose use of her hands.
Only a man’s goddess would withhold food in exchange for praise.
No wonder you rage at the bottom of the sea.
No wonder you explode with hurricanes when man’s heat
Sends you to a frenzy and you shake
Your stump of a fist at dry land.
Hila Ratzabi is the author of the poetry chapbook The Apparatus of Visible Things (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, Columbia Review, Margie, and Lumina.
Revelations of the Parietal by Angie Macri
She walks with the slap of bare feet
on concrete
(wet, step, if sound becomes word), having slept
enough to not interrupt a dream
on waking. She sees
and moves.
You have left your first love,
him belonging now to walls
where the lobes
divide and cells
break down. She’s too young
to know it. We have found the walls
of woods and valley
stone, the ridges that divide,
red oak and pine
facing south, richer
forests facing north, as seen by god, by satellite,
miles of folded ridges. We live
on the ridge above the river
named for the place to hunt.
Break it to us gently.
For we have gone out barefoot
to look
at the stars, cooling
off in August,
concrete still warm from the sun
of the day vibrating with the song
of it, as the clouds gust
over the half moon, a dust
of wildfires through pine
and stars on the side of a wine
goblet, condensation, sliding,
and I know only some
of their names.
Angie Macri’s poems have appeared in The Pinch, Sou’wester, and The Southern Review.
Music at My Mother’s Funeral by Faith Shearin
During the weeks when we all believed my mother
was likely to die she began to plan
her funeral and she wanted us, her children,
to consider the music we would play there. We remembered
the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept
the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings,
the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album
about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months
each errand was accompanied by some kind
of dramatic movement. After my brother was born,
there was a period during which she wore a muumuu
and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his
African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted
to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused
to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music
of an automated bell going off every few minutes,
which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter
to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval,
its insistence that someone was unsafe.
Things We’re All Too Young To Know by Faith Shearin
We’re all too young to know when we will die,
or what will cause it, too young to discover how little
our lives matter, how no amount of planning
or caution will save us. We are too young
to know this is the last vacation we will take
with our grandfather: this one by the shore
where the wind blows only from the east.
We’re too young to have grown children
or arthritis or thin hair, too young to choose
a spouse or profession, to drive a car safely
through the narrow streets of winter.
We’re always too young to have someone
we love tell us they are leaving. We’re too young
for root canals and retirement, too young
for sex, or even the pictures that suggest
its intimate details. We’re too young to play
with matches or to understand why chocolate
is usually eaten after dinner. We’re certainly
too young to know who we will be when
we grow up, to know that the sky’s blues
and grays are indifferent to our luck.
We’re too young for taxes or childbirth,
for dead pets, or the day when we no longer
have parents. We’re too young to find
our own faces foreign: the happiness and sorrow
visible, our skin folded like paper. And we’re
definitely too young for high heels and lipstick,
too young to sit at a bar with a glass of something hard.
My Weight on Other Planets by Faith Shearin
My daughter told me I would weigh 25 pounds on the moon:
my boots pale, my hair made of wind. On Venus or Uranus
I would be my ideal weight: 120 pounds,
my mouth as soft as clouds. On Pluto I would weigh
as much as our tiny dog, who could fit easily
in anyone’s pocket, her nose cold. It was Jupiter
I should avoid, she said, for here I would become
so heavy I might be related to elephants
or death. I suppose I knew this already?
On earth I weigh more during an argument
but less when I am swimming, more
when I am disliked, less when I have been
singing in the trees. Once, in a field with a friend,
I was weightless: my breath invisible,
my thoughts like angels or kites.
Faith Shearin’s poetry collections include The Owl Question (Utah State University Press, 2004), The Empty House (WordTech Communications, 2008), and Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Southern Review, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poets (Autumn House Press, 2011), Good Poems, American Places (Penguin Books, 2012) and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Galaxias Kyklos by Sarah M. Brownsberger
We named our galaxy, seen edge-on,
for the first substance we ever knew:
the sugary trickle from salty teats
that waxes creamy at high delight
and wanes to bluish whey. Arms of night,
dark and vibrant, held us to it; back then
sleep flowed as liquor through our veins
and sleep and liquor both were brewed by gods
– as, secretly, they still are, in the sense
that no mercies have yet been suspended:
behold how slow our dissolution
as we fly toward Hydra
and the Great Attractor
at six hundred kilometers per second.
Cesarean Section by Sarah M. Brownsberger
(Isaiah 66)
In a dim room a man scans the dome of my belly
to trace a constellation of tissue and bone,
to count the flutter of cloudy ribs. Then I see
her face, pinched by unnatural light,
gazing from a night of broken promise.
Shall I bring to birth and not cause to bring forth?
Shall I who cause to bring forth shut the womb?
The oxygen mask slips on my tears.
Like a ewe brought in half-dead from pasture,
I can only quiver at the lamb they show me,
can scarcely see her rose-dusk skin let alone
the cobalt gaze beaming up at the doctor.
Before her pain came upon her she was delivered . . .
Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things?
Not I. I’m so simple that for weeks
I dream her turning, inside me again,
ready to be born, pressing and pummeling;
yet it’s nothing to the daylight shock of her sweet face.
Soon when fools say, You could not give birth,
I smile at the happiness of my arms, certain
Her bones shall flourish like the grass.
Sarah M. Brownsberger’s poems have appeared in Salamander, Field, Meridian, The Hudson Review, and OnEarth.
Deliquescence: A Meditation in Seven Parts by Elizabeth Bradfield
I. Verb: To melt away or disappear as if by melting
How many hours have I stood before water
attempting this? And when did the urge begin?
I can feel concrete beneath my feet, wooden rail under hand,
wind, blackberries scenting up the steep, clay bank
that the stairs followed down
in a suspended, wobbled reach to the beach. Always
a gull hovering at eye level, at rest in wind. Was I five?
Five, nine, sixteen, I stood and stared at the bay,
at water, at what I might (oh, soft persistent hope) dissolve to.
Italian has a better word: liquescere. To
become liquid.
Liquiscere. Liquiscere.
The world whispered, whispers to me.
II. Chemistry: Become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air
Dawn on the bow. Or some hour early enough to be, for at least a while,
alone. Firm horizon denied by mist. Prow rocking forward
into swell (forward, only forward, it seems). The air’s liquid palpable
in silence. Horizon of skin blurred. The body’s liquid not
separate. Pulsing, held, selfless.
We are, by vast percentage, sea.
The eye can stand to be open only through tears. We see
wetly. Salt wet sea. A bit of spray and I taste it. Ocean.
There is no voice, no other to ask or exclaim and so disrupt
this delicate experiment that, to survive, I run.
Sky becomes water, water, sky. And I . . .
dissolve dwindle
disband disperse dissipate
become delinquent to the self
III. Liquidare, Italian. To liquidate. To get rid of.
Yes, says the tide edge. Yes the spindrift,
the mare’s tail, the nimbus, the veil cloud’s velum
upon which nothing can be written.
Yes, ice slurries from a glacier.
Yes, ice brash and rafted, driven by wind.
Willing to dissolve, despite the fact that it
could not resist.
IV. Origin: From the Latin “dissolve,” mid 18th century
Enlightenment, what you’ve given us.
The unweighting of ideas, architecture,
science itself freed to reach beyond
earth’s edge, peer beneath the ocean’s lens:
Halley’s diving bell lowered, a man
as its clapper (church of sea),
breathing not with but at least beside
fish, squid, barnacle, scallop.
And the sky, too, breached. Stars
seen not as a dome’s flaws
but tidal, drifting heat.
I never wanted to become the night sky,
to disappear into that height. The heavens
are a poor attempt of sea.
They whisper nothing, just burn
in silence. At night the sea
has much to say to itself, to us.
It has its own stars. To be within
them, body a shadow in phosphor,
is at once closer and further from my goal
than anything. I am nearly . . . I am not.
deliquesce, hisses a wave to the sand
deliquesce, deliquesce, deliquesce
Yes
V. Biology: To branch into many fine divisions, as leaf veins
Tide flows in, floods into all narrowings, all ends and origins.
What can float is lifted. What can’t be lifted
is covered. Surface glint hides
resistance in sky.
VI. Botany: To become fluid or soft on maturing, as some fungi
Do we become softer with age, or more brittle? Lunar empathy
and solar habit each have their pull by which
the tides of self are governed. It
is harder and harder to leave the stiff forest of I, I, I
a life cultivates. The trunks of self
thicken, saplings rise, ready to replace
whatever falls. The wafted drift of meadow
in which I began has been supplanted. But wind
moves through. Rain slides every leaf. I try
to remind myself, thick and stolid as I feel, much as I’m able
to resist it, to bend. I try to remember how I flew
weightless in an ocean of womb.
liquescere, liquiscere
and also
liquifare. To melt. Amore
liquifare
afternoons in bed, light filtered through the curtain
we manage to drift
beyond singularity
VII. Deliquescence: The liquid resulting from the process of deliquescing
This water. This water. This
cloud light liquid shiftless resistance this
rendering of all we might become.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010) and Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Field, Orion, and Green Mountains Review. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.