POETRY
Godardian by Terese Coe
Let me put it this way. There is nothing
but love. Nothing worth saving, nothing
worth doing, nothing worth writing, nothing nothing.
And what you are and what I think you are,
they’re not the same.
I see this when I think
of coming to you, and when I am with you.
Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Tar River Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
PRISONERO by Circe Maia
la ciudad te ha de seguir
—Kavafis
Así que no hay manera de librarse:
bastará darse vuelta para verla.
Allá viene, siguiéndote
moviéndose – en apariencia lentamente –
y en realidad muy rápido.
Y si huyes por un momento sientes
muy lejano el ruido de las calles
discusiones, motores y ruidos y bocinas
son un sordo rumor.
Y de tan lejos
apenas brillan ahora las ventanas más altas
tal vez un campanario.
Pero cuando por fin llegas a otro
lugar, a otra ciudad desconocida
tu ciudad te ha alcanzado bruscamente:
ya no es cuestión de darse vuelta. Adentro
muy adentro de ella te paseas
y a la otra le ruegas que te espere
que no se vaya lejos . . .
La otra no se mueve, pero se decolora
pierde tibieza, sus sonidos bajan
sus olores apenas se perciben
y el viejo aroma de la que te envuelve
no te suelta.
PRISONER by Circe Maia
the city will follow you.
—Cavafy
So that there is no way to free yourself:
you have only to turn around to see it.
There it comes, following you
moving – apparently slowly –
but in reality very rapidly.
And if you escape for a moment you sense
far away the noise of the streets
arguments, engines and noise and horns
a dull murmur.
And from far away
now the highest windows faintly shine
maybe a bell tower.
But when, at last, you arrive at another
place, another unknown city
your city has suddenly caught up with you:
now it is not a question of turning around. Inside
deep inside of it you walk
and you beg the other to wait for you
to not go far away . . .
The other doesn’t move, but fades
loses warmth, its sounds dim
its smells barely perceptible
but the old aroma enfolds you
will not let you go.
– Translation by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Circe Maia is the author of nine books of poetry. Her first, En el tiempo, was published in Montevideo in 1958 and her ninth, Breve sol, was published in 2001. Her collected poems Circe Maia: Obra poética (Rebeka Linke Editores, Montevideo) was published in Uruguay in 2011. Translator Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of ten books, including the poetry collections The Alice Stories and Dog Angel, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2007 and 2004 respectively. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
JOB by Joseph Millar
I’ve just come from walking
to and fro in the earth
Satan tells God
right before they place the wager
that’s stood for centuries
as metaphor for man’s existence
pinned against fortune
like an insect under a microscope:
his disastrous ecology,
his ravaged immune system,
even his broken-nosed, wine-flushed face
looking back from the rearview mirror
parked here alone by the river.
Maybe he should have been born
with fins, he thinks
as the swans arch and preen
and attack one another
though some say they mate for life,
and the luminous late afternoon
keeps raising welts of sunlight
over the torqued and rippling surface
and the beautiful, ravenous fish.
WHEN A CHILD DIES by Joseph Millar
for CH
No one can find words to speak to you
in the icy trance of your grief
though the glass steams over in the beachfront cafe
where I have imagined you, the waitress emerging
from the shadows, to ask if you need more time.
The rest of us watch from a distance, finding
delight in our own sullen teenagers, hip-hop
rhythms that shake the garage. We gaze
deeply into their eyes, remembering
the long dream of childhood. But no one
can follow where you’ve gone, your memory
wandering the shoreline, its cold wind cresting
the dunes, raking the cracked gray struts
of the snack bar, fatherhood’s useless longing
scattered behind you like campfire embers.
No one can follow where you’ve gone, the ocean
dragging its hem of knives over the gravel shoals
like the robe of an exiled king.
Joseph Millar is the author of the poetry collections Blue Rust (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), Fortune, and Overtime, both from the Eastern Washington University Press in 2007 and 2001 respectively. His poems have appeared in DoubleTake, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and American Poetry Review. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
Prayer for Stones by Doug Ramspeck
The souls of migrating geese exist
for a moment in the air.
I would hold them there for longer
like a wisp of a cloud if not for this rake
and the sounds it makes in the fallen
leaves, sounds like a conversation
that turns back forever on itself.
In our early years of marriage,
my wife returned again and again
to the topic of the miscarriage,
as though you might construct
a funeral pyre from so many repeated
consonants and vowels. Often I watched
the pattern of words against her lips,
shadows of stasis and movement,
as though they resembled the most
primitive form of prayer, as ancient
as the first stone artifacts. You might say
the geese are praying, too, mostly
because they head out all in one
direction, the pelvis with its open V
giving birth to sky, the squawking
of the passage one more sorrowful
release. The first humans must have
imagined that birds ferried spirits
to their new home. At the hospital my wife
held my hand, the way the first
mother must have watched original grass
sway before her, must have felt
the lungs of a primal wind blowing out
across a landscape it had made.
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.
PRAYER 28 by Eva Saulitis
January 16, 2013
Imperfect birds, saffron finches, they don’t hail
from here, but from South America, where, caged,
the males are used for blood-sport. Two girls
for every boy, and territorial to boot, troopers,
they take to it. Tanagers, like the scarlet of my youth,
(my mother loved them at the feeder, look, look, pointing,
tan-en-jers, the –r rolled). She said also lino-lay-um.
Traders Joe. Nut-hatcher. Other Latvian-isms. To pray
is to follow one word to its next, a pilgrimage, a trail
of seeds, crumbs or dead grass, which saffron finches
hoard for nests. A pinch of precious saffron threads
heated in a pan of milk yellowed my mother’s klingers,
braid of yeasted, golden raisin-studded bread for
our name’s days. From memory to philology, the trail
goes. But the saffron finch has its story too, and I don’t
know, how it arrived, in whose cage or breast pocket, upon
which storm or consequence. Considered common, tolerant
of us, itself displacing native birds. No surprise, being lovely,
with its tangerine face as though dipped in the fruit’s bleeding
rind. My mother arrived by boat, the General Sherman, she
was raped by another immigrant. Never lost her accent,
never perfected English, for sixty years, never told
anyone. Said to her daughters only, from you, men just
want _____. We filled in the rest.
Eva Saulitis is the author of the poetry collection Many Ways to Say It (Red Hen Press, 2012) and two books of nonfiction: Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas (Beacon Press, 2013) and Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books, 2008). She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
THE RECIDIVIST by Robin Ekiss
How empty
God’s mind was
before he created
the lemon,
how empty
his hands
before the rind.
A little sweat
in the palm
was all, no more
taking money
from the till,
putting his fingers
again and again
into the fire,
loving me anyway.
His skin was
no thicker
than mine.
Then came zest,
some light
shining through.
Like any recidivist,
he kept going
back to the origin –
the peel,
the pulp,
the pith of it.
Robin Ekiss is the author of the poetry collection The Mansion of Happiness (University of Georgia Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and AGNI.
Digging Potatoes by Hannah Fries
Maggie is telling me about her past lives. They burst
through the surface of her days like silver
fish from a still pond: dreams
and the chilling, trancelike waking visions.
I have come to visit, and we are digging potatoes
in her garden, plunging our hands deep into the cold
soil of the early October morning. Plumes of fog
on the river, sun scattering on snapdragons,
cosmos, seedpods of love-in-a-mist.
Do you have nightmares here? she asks,
as we feel for the lumpy, hard potatoes,
clusters of them, working our fingers around
their circumferences to pry them out
because the shovel has sliced too many
already, so we are on our knees, fingernails
turning black – something happened here once,
she says, and shudders. Stares at her hands
like they’re stained with something other
than damp soil. I was a little girl, a little
girl my entire life . . . and lived alone,
with my father . . . a cabin in the woods. I knew you then –
she stares at me – I just don’t know how. I don’t know
what to say when she talks like this, when she starts to slip
into an intensity I can’t touch, and I want to drag her
out of the swampy past, the one where I couldn’t
save her, and dunk her in the river, press
a fistful of herbs to her face. Potatoes come up
like gold in a sieve, still skinned with dirt
but unmistakable – I spit on one and rub out
the mud: deep purple. Maggie’s wide dark eyes.
She reminds me of a childhood friend,
kindergarten, the girl with the serious face
and the outie bellybutton who lifted her t-shirt
to show me: little nubbin on her smooth white tummy –
it made me laugh, and she pulled her shirt back down
and held it there. But I wanted to see it again,
to touch that evidence of inversion, how
the inside can sometimes rise up and leave
itself exposed. I thought if I could grab
that knot and pull it, she might turn totally
inside-out, a shiny open tulip, red
and overbloomed, petals sprawled in a circle
of dangerous backbends around a deep brown
center. I have climbed down into the round sunken
room called a kiva in the Anasazi ruins –
in the center, a small hole in the soft stone,
sipapu, bellybutton of a people, where the ancestors
first emerged into the present world. Through what
hole they left again, or why, is not clear. Half-
ground corn in a smooth depression. The cliffs
resound with whispers, like the ones Maggie hears
rising out of the earth when she finds herself
in a place she has seen in a dream and it begins
to tell her stories and her body aches
with another life’s beating. I don’t know how
to pull her through, to keep her here where we are
still kneeling in the dirt, because she is telling me
of a forest that covered this field, a cabin and a stick
by the door and someone is coming. I remember
you, she says – and I see myself
hiding behind the door as she steps toward the anger
that crashes in, and our buckets are full of potatoes
tumbling from the edges, my hands stiff
and cracked from the cold, and I want to stop
now, but she keeps digging, wrenching more
from their loamy dark beds and piling them up,
little fists, clenched and knobby and strange.
Hannah Fries’ poems have appeared in Water~Stone Review, The Massachusetts Review, Drunken Boat, Calyx, and The Cortland Review.
SWEET by Amy Dryansky
Sap’s flowing, galvanized
buckets ride the maples, making little factories
lit from within
(factories or bodies)
and because my leg aches again
I’m certain what I’ve dreaded – a deviation, some key
linkage in my body’s chromosomal chain
askew –
has finally come to roost.
Injured bird, insistent song, my mother’s parting shot
from a bed she couldn’t leave:
No one gives you a gold star,
honey.
Meaning: give up fantasy, sweet distraction
I drink straight from the tap.
Meaning: I haven’t called to see if the hawk we found
recovered from its collision with a car.
I’d rather guess
from here, make a better story, but I can’t
invent a different ending
for the nine boys killed collecting firewood
in the desert
from high above
by drones
on a screen, with a joystick
by other boys (almost men)
recruited in video arcades. (Somebody’s brainstorm.)
It’s a job
(people need to eat)
someone still has to get firewood
and even the man in my town
who fixes birds
handled the injured hawk so casually
it was hard to reconcile.
He didn’t promise anything
and there’s another man I read about
who’s made it his work
to bring people together
with the people who’ve hurt them
he doesn’t try to get them to forgive
or be forgiven, but they have to look at each other
and listen.
I was afraid to hold the hawk
afraid more than the wing
might be broken
and I wanted to close my mother’s eyes
after she died
but I couldn’t
I was too late.
Nothing soft was left.
Amy Dryansky is the author of the poetry collections Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry, 2013) and How I Got Lost So Close to Home (Alice James Books, 1999). Her poems have appeared in Orion, New England Review, and Harvard Review.
Lemon Blossom Lane by Michele Karas
after Rebecca Lehmann
For every bedtime story, there is a child whining
like a string trimmer about the witch who lives
in the wall. For every fist hole in the drywall,
there is a grazed eyebrow that’s already begun
to heal. For every Neanderthal encountered
on a fieldtrip to the Museum of Man, a 16-year-old
is leaving condom wrappers in the back seat
of his parents’ van. For every time I remember
how I tried to murder you at the dog show,
dear brother, whose taunts enraged like yellow
jackets, another memory of our dad cracking you on
your cowlick and promising to take me to ballet class,
his breast pocket bulging with secrets. For every
Swan Lake recital, a bevy of preening swans. For every
baby ballerina, a pair of breast buds, a set of hips.
For every breakup, a line of coke, a shot of tequila
or a curling iron to the chin. For every cat that is eaten
by coyotes, for every detached retina, our sister
gets a new gerbil. For every softball game we lose,
another gardener gets deported to Tijuana. For every
ride in an unmarked police car, a hummingbird’s nest
in the bougainvillea. One day the witch in the wall
will be silent, and the gardeners will wield their
string trimmers unmolested, pausing long enough
to watch the baby birds clinging to a uterus
of tangled cat hair and tulle, launch themselves
into the fragrant refuge of our neighbors’ lemon grove.
Michele Karas’ poems have appeared in Chronogram, Bohemia, and Right Hand Pointing.
I’m Dropping Things I Want to Keep Hidden by Brittney Scott
A split branch broke
through our window last night,
slicing my brother’s head
clean from his body.
All day, I tell this story to my classmates
until it is as true as that windy night –
True as the elm in my front yard
with branches that eat at the siding,
true as the two floor-to-ceiling windows
with mammoth glowing curtains
that puff in the moonlight like giant jellyfish.
These are facts.
Someone tells the teacher,
not because he is dead, but because I am lying.
My brother is three years ahead of me,
down the hall, checking his spelling
while news spreads of his death.
I am confronted about this lie in the red playhouse
behind our cubbies.
The teacher sits in a small chair shaped like a bear
ready to grip.
Confronted by a grown woman being mauled by a bear,
she asks if I am confused or mistaken.
She asks if bad dreams
misplace reality.
It hurts to put it back together the right way.
There is a naked Barbie in my backpack,
which is in my cubbie, and I am embarrassed that she is listening.
I want my brother’s head to vanish,
rain to mold the carpet into map lichen.
I want to wake
in the forest with walking sticks and a headless shaman
who leads me to a valley
instead of grinding his boot into my back,
instead of locking me in the root cellar for two days.
I’m dropping things I want to keep hidden
down the holes he’s punched in the walls.
By lunch some girl will lean close to his ear,
and say, “I heard you died, I heard you
died before the sun came up.”
And for the rest of the day his letters will glow
off the woody page. With his pencil,
at the peak of its sharpness,
he will pause for once
before pressing too hard,
before breaking the lead and losing the word.
Brittney Scott’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New Republic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, and The Malahat Review.
Treason by CJ Evans
Never-ending speeches whir
through the wires, and though I listen,
I know that the words hold
ever less. They drown out
the chum of the swollen river
as it breaks its banks, the prisoners
sleeping on concrete, the cries
of the babies in cold rooms.
They drown out our eviction notices,
tanks, batons, and writhing
skyscrapers. Even the speakers hear
only their own words, ringing like heavy
bells. All these voices wandering
like boys, lost in a far field.
CJ Evans is the author of the poetry collection A Penance (New Issues Press, 2012). His work has appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Irreconcilable Differences by Kathleen Winter
You got toothpaste on the algebra.
You glazed my glasses with a foam of mutant lace.
You broke the bullfrog’s croak.
You drank and overturned a fishtank in the living room.
Seconded by two black dogs, you plunged your horse into a moat created by the last century.
You gave déjà vu a black eye.
You germinated slang in storm clouds thick with flecks of husk.
In Navajo, you mistranslated On Grammatology.
You made tuna-loaf with raisins from the Fire Lookout Cookbook
and served it with canned milk.
Now you’re smoking. Let’s just leave it at that.
You’re smoking cigarillos in the back seat of my wagon as the rain slams down.
The brand of beer you buy is cheap.
Evapo-transpiration makes you want to spit.
You built an empire on team-building clichés.
You dangerous-liaisoned your life coach.
For Thanksgiving, you invited our demiurge concierge.
You used your phone in Ernie’s Tin Bar and had to buy a round.
You took a shine to my bête noire.
You sold my stamp collection to make Tea Party donations.
In the boiler room, my brain, you change the syntax of my thoughts.
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. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Forgiveness: A Fairy Tale by Cathryn Essinger
with apologies to James Thurber
The scapegoat is in the garden eating a lily.
I would like to talk to him about the nature of sin,
but now he is in among the roses, wagging his tail,
spreading pellets, oblivious to the damage he is doing.
I want to know about the sins of omission. I waggle
a carrot under his nose, but he moves on to the parsley
before I can put a hand on him. I suppose it all depends
upon how consciously you commit the sin of omission,
and yes I am guilty of those things – things I choose
not to do. I would like to tether him to the trellis,
while I tell him about all of the infidelities that rankle
mankind – the spite, the jealousies, and the vainglorious,
always the vainglorious, but he is deep among the hostas
chewing at a rope I have thrown about his neck. Besides,
for an animal about to assume the sins of humanity,
he seems remarkably happy. Now he has eaten the top
off the little peach tree, the Red Haven, the one I grew
from a seedling. I take an angry swipe at his bony flank,
and his flat pupils widen in surprise. I thought this was about
forgiveness, he says, and immediately I forgive him everything –
the roses, the lettuce, the tulips, and even the little peach tree,
which will take years to recover. I give up the chase,
sit down on the step, offer to make him a sandwich.
Where did you get all of this Old Testament guilt? he asks.
I weave a violet chain to lay across his neck. He nibbles
at it delicately, as if each blossom were a gift. He sighs
sleepily and invites me to lie down in my own backyard,
Start at the beginning . . . he says.
Cathryn Essinger is the author of the poetry collections What I Know About Innocence and My Dog Does Not Read Plato both from Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2004 respectively, and A Desk in the Elephant House (Texas Tech University Press, 1998). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West.
ECLOGUE SIX
(log of the sick susan poor susan her son)
by Roger Sedarat
susan’s son’s strung out on heroin
who’s susan what’s wrong her son
so strung out so sorry susan strong
be strong for your strung out son
laughing at the joke he says
why fasten me with chains
my first muse plays sicilian
music susan your son your son
they tied him with his own wreaths
garlands of youth fall from his sick head
see susan paint his face now
with crimson mulberries
his veins swollen as ever with yesterday’s wine
she’s painting his face and brow
his veins full of orpheus’ elemental song
the earth awed by the new sun shining
but your son susan rain falls from clouds
nearby lay the garlands fallen from his head
and his weighty bowl hung by its well-worn handle
poor susan unhappy girl now you wander in the hills
he chews pale grass under a dark oak tree
sad dying lamb your son his snowy side
pillowed on sweet hyacinths he dreams
of chasing another amongst the vast herd
his hair crowned with bitter celery and flowers
his reedy veins given to the muses
as to old ascraen hesiod before drawing
unyielding manna ash-trees from the hills
the burning blood the ash song of the reeds
your son’s veins susan there’s no grove
apollo delights no more sad susan the song
howling monsters around her white thighs
in the deep abyss attacking ithaca’s ships
fearful sailors torn apart with ocean hounds
the feast upon your own lost son laid to waste
with what wings susan unhappy one
could you have flown home your son
his laurels to learn by heart the song
of your son echoing in the valley
carried to the stars vesper commanding
the flocks to gather and be counted
in the fold the music of your son susan
as he progresses through the unwilling sky
Nooroz, 2012, Gallery VII Dumbo, Brooklyn by Roger Sedarat
Two hundred plus hipsters, ironic, cool
Iranians in cowboy boots ignite
The spirit of Zoroastrian fire.
An artist breaks out of a cloth cocoon;
A country band plays old country folk songs
As well as classic Brooklyn western tunes.
Then poetry, projected on a wall,
A mix of old and new, and a ghazal
With fill in the blank spaces. The crowd shouts
Beloveds by name (sufi-punk babel).
Stop telling me New York’s sold itself out
And neighborhoods are gentrified chain stores.
There’s truth to it, I know, and yet there’s this
Postmodern royal court: men and women
Attractive enough to make retro art.
No modern Persian poet, not even
Sohrab Sephardi, could have positioned
The singer Mona, who happened to step
Into the light projected from the van,
Her silhouette framed by words of Hafez,
As if strands of her hair brushed through the text:
Her light filled moon-face shone no more, she left.
What fleeting beauty upon a brick wall
Beneath the moon above the Brooklyn Bridge,
As if finding New York for the first time
By practicing aesthetic rituals
Like long ago forgotten rites of spring.
Roger Sedarat is the author of the poetry collections Ghazal Games and Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic both from Ohio University Press in 2011 and 2007 respectively.
May Milton Leaves The Moulin Rouge by Alexandra Teague
At the Moulin Rouge was apparently cut down along the right and bottom after [Lautrec’s] death, perhaps to moderate its radical composition. (It was restored sometime before 1924.)
– The Art Institute of Chicago
Because your brazen face – blue-green
as an iceberg – accosted, and your gaze refused
to fold like a hand of cards. Because you stood
for absinthe and spotlight. Off-center. Glow
of the morgue. What we fear we will be: unable
to blink when we stare out at death. The century
blazing at our backs: can-can of years when one
cane-backed chair frames its one loop of air; someone
fixes her hair; someone jangles the ice in his scotch.
Such predictable nights; such precarious
lives. And you – like a door half-ajar – forcing
the scene to be ours. Because amputation
is cleaner than thought. A few easy cuts:
the banister’s skew, your lips blaring red like a street-
car, a dancer: all stage and no moves. The harsh angles
the mind takes at the end of long nights
evened out, brass-polished and closed. Brothels
and hospitals, top hats and scandal tucked safe
in the past as you waited outside with no coat. Feathers
wisped over curls; black billows of sleeve
leading only back to your skin. Bright scrap
of the self. Compass rose with no world, no map.
Ofelia Plays Like a Girl by Alexandra Teague
Because no one tells her not to – not
at first: her hands like high-desert clouds:
more shadow than rain – she presses the piano’s
pedal to sustain herself inside her skin: flicker
of tomboy on a barbed-wire fence –
pockets stuffed with bread for invisible
horses. Their hooves’ soft notes. Dust storms
swirling between the bars of music. Every good
bird does. Fly-spangled buzz of afternoon.
Empty washes between keys. Her mother
in the kitchen – how the mixer sings
like Mozart’s starling (she’s read somewhere
he heard it in a pet store cage – whistling
his piano concerto in G in perfect time).
All cows eat grass. All music is caged inside
some body, some motor – some dry wind
rattling the metal on the porch. What more
can she be? Two hands scattering seeds.
Chord of sunburned and lonely and learning.
Girl with scorpions in the piano’s strings.
Alexandra Teague is the author of the poetry collections Mortal Geography (Persea, 2010) and The Wise and Foolish Builders (forthcoming from Persea in 2015). Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, Willow Springs, and The Best American Poetry.
Picaresque Fiction by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton
I was born right in this junkyard, on a green vinyl backseat,
the body of the car long gone. My mother—well, what can I say?
She moved on. My father, I suppose, is somewhere.
There were foster families and social workers, all (well, most)
nice people, but I was used to the open air. I got a fine education
from discarded books—Iris Murdoch, Charles Dickens,
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. So, yeah, I know
it’s a heterosexist assumption to think my other parent was a man.
My first nightlight was a red strobe from a smashed cop car.
My first alarm clock, the police siren. So nothing much scares me.
Not jail or death or political correctness. There is always something
to be made of your circumstance. We scrappies here sell stuff “as is,”
pick and pull—a washing machine belt, a microwave oven door,
a banged-up coffee table some hipster thinks she can strip and refinish.
I come “as is,” too. Dumpster-diver, huckster, vandal.
I sometimes prop up a wooden door just to remind myself
I can go around it, not through. And even though I can walk,
I’d rather zoom around this Rascal Scooter I refurbished myself.
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have collaborated on three volumes: Little Novels (Pearl Editions, 2002), Oyl (Pearl Editions, 2000), and Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press, 1997). Individually, Duhamel is the author of twelve poetry titles including Blowout and Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013 and 2009 respectively). Maureen Seaton is the author of six poetry collections, including Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009) and Furious Cooking (University of Iowa Press, 1996).
Scott’s Rocking Horse by Elisabeth Murawski
It doesn’t look much like a horse –
its primitive lines
merely suggest the equine.
One footrest’s raked to adjust
for his shorter right leg
crippled by polio.
Mounted, he could morph
into a soldier or a prince, lose
himself, wave a wooden sword.
The man who bought for Abbotsford
the purse and dirk
of Rob Roy, the gold clasp
of Napoleon’s cloak, kept it
all his life. We
build statues out of snow,
he wrote, and weep to see them
melt. Today, it sits
in the Writers’ Museum
halfway up the Mound
on Lady Stair Close,
not to be touched
or photographed, lonely
for the child, it seems,
who limped and could not run.
Elisabeth Murawski is the author of the poetry collections Zorba’s Daughter (Utah State University Press, 2010), Out-patients (Serving House Books, 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 Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, Field, The Southern Review, and Poetry Daily. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
OLD MODEL GALLEON by Daniel Osman
Down the hall they breathe softly.
It’s hard to hold a grudge
when they sleep like children.
An hour ago we passed on the stairs.
Dad’s hearing aid whined.
(He’s deaf now rather than heedless.)
Mom took one step at a time,
her knees a surgeon’s magic.
Earlier she prepared my room:
made the bed, removed her sewing machine.
On the nightstand she placed an
old wooden galleon with linen sails
and four proud spars, their
gift to me on my fourth birthday.
I never had any use for it.
But tonight I notice the careful
rigging, the touches of paint, the
little lifeboats lashed to the hull.
Daniel Osman’s poetry has appeared in River’s Voice.
LEMONS ARE NOT NIPPLES by Charlotte Pence
The tip of a lemon is not a nipple. The spine
of a book is not the spine of a man’s back.
No thing is anything else. These are lies
a poet tells to avoid certain truths. The closest
I have come to holding a dying man’s hand
is witnessing a buffalo slaughtered. The blood
glugged out in rhythm with his tapering heartbeat,
but I couldn’t tell when the animal finally quit,
when life switched off. An hour maybe
before the animal was still. I think of my father,
a man who must keep moving, who is never
without a suitcase or place to leave. It will happen
while he waits to cross the street, a bag
in each hand. He does not notice the light
changing, blank-faced suits bumping his shoulders.
Curb empties in seconds, and he remains,
drivers at the red light marveling at such stillness.
Maybe not so much a man, one of them will think,
but a metaphor, pointing someplace else.
Charlotte Pence’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and North American Review. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
BILLET DOUX by Angela Ball
A woman writes, “We can meet at the car dealer’s
If you want.” They pretend to be married, shopping for
Transport.
On a particular retaining wall
At the bend of an exit, blurry boys spray paint
Love over love.
A walk along the sea must skirt the lines
Of jealous fishermen
Guarding their silver.
A woman says, “A transistor radio
Was my first love.” Her body directed
Through a primitive earpiece.
The great cities hunt their sisters
With mixed success.
It’s hard for them to throw a voice,
Pressed as they are
On their seaboards,
Like too many adult teeth.
Angela Ball is the author of five poetry collections, including Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999), and Possession (Red Hen Press, 1995). Her poems and translations have appeared in Field, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.
FOR WELDON KEES by Rebecca Black
In California
so much sun
sheds like a dog
on everything.
Sudden tragedy
seems easier to bear
than the melancholic
accretions – back East
the beach dawdles into the sea,
but here our bluffs
rise tectonic.
We must change
our lives, it’s true:
but when I felt
the despair I imagine you felt
I got through by counting
the same color, say green,
in the cars, the redwood needles,
a mural on some Mission building.
I stood on my head for a full year,
walked to the same spots you walked,
and at Land’s End,
some soft fascination
of air waved the branches
of the Monterey pine
into the tangled oval of a brain.
The wind my constant friend,
my life my own and no one
else’s. But I shouldn’t
judge you – you like the fog
who spent yourself on us
so lavishly.
Rebecca Black is the author of the poetry collection Cottonlandia (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, and Blackbird.
FLANNERY’S CROWN by Rita Mae Reese
with lines borrowed from the notebooks of Simone Weil
The Grandmother’s Sonnet
There is the nothingness from which you would flee
& the nothingness toward which you go.
There is a secret room in a house in Tennessee
that you fill with antebellum silver
& your own beauty which flashed so quick
no one else saw. You fill it with a good husband
& you the necessary wife & mother.
In this room all your patience & grace.
Every step you take is directed at that room,
every step another detour until suddenly you
arrive at the door & there’s nothing – not even
a room. There never was a house in Tennessee.
No matter where you turn, here you are,
rooted to the absence of your secret room.
Hazel Motes’s Sonnet
To be rooted in the absence of a definite place,
is to find only an old half-busted chifferobe
when you go home. Home just a house
that’d fall over if you lean on it, the town,
if that’s what it was, withered up and slunk away
like an old dog that knows it’ll never be fed again.
Home after some sort of war (what sort
you still don’t know, don’t care now that
it’s spit you out). What you need is a few nights,
as many as are left, in a friendly bed,
something to eat that wouldn’t nobody
call rations, something in your head
other than what you’ve been told, something other
than what Pavlov’s dogs & the other martyrs know.
The Misfit’s Sonnet
What Pavlov’s dogs & other martyrs know
is all some people’s ever fit to learn.
Obedience never was my cup of tea, or coffee.
Listen, nobody came along
to raise my daddy after he passed.
I sat up and watched & he ain’t never moved
all that night. I put my hands on him & said rise!
Rise rise rise, you sonafabitch.
Nothing, just Mama crying in the corner,
begging me to stop. So I left & kept leaving.
That’s me there on the side of the road.
You think you’ve done gone past, don’t you?
When I’m done with you, you’re gonna know
how to give like someone begging.
The Lame Shall Enter First
Everything here is given in the spirit of begging.
Hulga, 19, at the drive-in movie theater flea market
drifting among tables carefully arranged
with Matchbox cars, doilies, kitchen utensils,
car tires (with rims) stacked in solemn
but cheerful black columns. Behind each
intricate taxonomy is a hard-used human body
with eyes that light on Hulga & move on.
O theater of matchbox ambitions, you have
reconstituted Eden with doilies & kitchen utensils!
The three-story screen above the scene
a billboard for silence –
as blank as a God who finally sees
the stories about miracles confuse everything.
With Regina at Lourdes
The stories about miracles confuse everything.
Your mother still believes in them
as if they are pebbles she is following out
of the forest. Her faith stands still while she
waits for another one to drop from the sky.
You make your own path, stump along on it
while the wolf inside you is tearing
the place apart. Let it out, God, let it out.
When the airfare is booked for Lourdes,
you protest but go. Love is to mortality
as cure is to disease & all of them
are killing you. In line for the baths,
you are lost again in the hell that is your body
until her pain for you opens another door
Learning to Pray. Again.
The pain that opens doors is the closest thing
to a miracle you’ll allow. You never wanted
to be a saint though you could’ve been
a martyr if only they killed you quick enough.
Your death’s not quick. The wolf devours
you patiently. You listen to the gnawing
on bone and to doors closing again inside
of you. The wolf always on the wrong side,
as if your body is a trap he got caught in, a trap
growing smaller. You & he both know the world
is made up not of atoms & molecules
but of pain & closing doors. You’ve opened
all of them save one. Behind that door
God has stored the usage for all of your errors.
Isn’t
There’s a purpose for every kind of error
or there isn’t. Everything has a use,
or there is a landfill with a fire always
burning and this is hell. Or there isn’t.
(The always a burr in her shoe. Hundreds
of years, thousands, yes, but always?)
There is a dog licking its paw until
it bleeds, until teeth scrape bone.
There is a girl, a girl like fire afraid
there’s nothing left to burn. There’s a panther
behind bars 100 years & beyond the bars,
a nothingness draining the world.
Always this nothingness from which she flees,
this nothingness toward which she goes.
Rita Mae Reese’s poems have appeared in jubilat, Blackbird, New England Review, The Nation, and Prairie Schooner.
Incipient by Elizabeth Bradfield
She buys a maternity shirt. He says
ooh mommy to her chest. She buys
a laptop so she can work from home
when the baby’s born. To test the signal
in the bedroom, they stream porn.
Who will she, my sister, become when it –
future resident of the room stocked
with stuffed animals from our childhood
and games salvaged from our grandmother’s
just-sold-for-a-sad-apartment house – is born?
Across the country, I vow to learn Spanish,
start cooking with turmeric,
write a different kind of book. No one
will help make me new for you, no one
will distract us.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010) and Interpretive Work (Red Hen Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Field, Orion, and The New Yorker. She is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
First Shot by John Bargowski
Decorated sharpshooter, my old man
probably should have been there
to tuck the gun butt into the crook
of my shoulder and steady
the grip of my 12-year-old hand
on the rifle’s polished stock,
but only my best friend
and his teen sister with me
at their back window shooting rats
in the infested lot
between Kessler’s Coffin Factory
and 206 Ogden,
her tossing rolled slices of American
to lure them into the open,
the three of us on our knees
peering over the sill waiting
for them to slink from their holes
and take the bait,
Ginny sidling nearer
when it was my turn to fire,
whispering for me to flip the sight up
and brace for the kick,
her arm and shoulder pressed close,
fingers sliding over mine
when it was time to click off the safety
and slowly squeeze the trigger,
her long auburn coils
brushing against my cheek
fixed already with the scorch
of spent powder.
John Bargowski is the author of the poetry collection Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighera Press; Bilingual edition, 2012). His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, and The Sun. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Musica Universalis in Fairbanks by Sean Hill
Each night when this 21st century frontier town settles
Enough for me to hear the thrum and hiss in my ears,
My tinnitus, which I choose to think of as the harmony
Of my firmament – all so far away – like the shush
And hiss from Nana’s gas heater that warmed the winter-
Chilled bedroom in Georgia while she got the skillet sizzling
With country-cured ham in the kitchen. My refrigerator
Occasionally wakes this hour to clear its throat and rumble
On over the sounds in my ears. And some nights I get out
Of bed to go stand under the generosity of stars here – I’ve
Decided that must be the collective noun for all the stars
In one’s gaze as it must be for any number of stars, the way
We refer to a flock of starlings as a murmuration. I stand
There and use my hand to shade my eyes from the streetlights
To better see the stars. Our new light competes with the old
The way the clamor of our fleets in this age after sails is said
To interfere with the songs of whales. Here I sometimes see
The aurora borealis, silent, which seems impossible like the end
Of the world for what we know of light in the sky – lightning
And, its often not far off companion, thunder, seem to say
Something will always follow. Some say the northern lights
Sizzle – an impossibility, a synesthetic weaving of the senses
Exalting this light, or a lark like the bird which we call
An exaltation when in numbers great or small – more than
A handful, the way a friend used to count lovers when we
Were younger, told me he was on to the second hand,
Love, while a lark, still handled carefully in those days.
I should drive out of town to view these lights against
The sky black as a raven. They often fly in pairs or groups –
A conspiracy, a storytelling, an unkindness of ravens.
Sean Hill is the author of the poetry collections Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, Poetry, and Tin House.
Fort Worden by Kathy Davis
Olympic Peninsula, Washington
Cliffside, above currents
the locals portage
to avoid, each weekend
couples exchange
vows. No matter
that the Scottish tower
no bride ever graced
rises like a middle finger
on the path there
and back. A housewife
secured with a bow
was once
in every soldier’s duffel –
the standard issue
mending kit. Squint,
thread the eye,
repair. Sew
one ragged edge
to the other. Forget
combat. The men
buried here died of Spanish
influenza, and the fort,
now packed
with Winnebagos, never
fired a hostile
shot. Each morning,
from the battery
that holds
the high bluff, I lob
a captured sunrise
cross continent to your phone –
work keeping you
back east. Beyond
this point,
the Salish Sea gentles
into waterways
so intricate
and intertwined, they need
to be protected. Debris
washing up
on shore, invasive species.
Our vows a keepsake
on cassette
tucked somewhere
in a drawer.
Kathy Davis’ work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and Willow Springs.
Bucolic by Keith Ekiss
Bored, ready to ditch the suburbs,
I’d drive Pierce Road into the hills.
I heard the train bearing down the rails,
one straight line like a father’s intention.
Copper glinted along the tracks
like money I couldn’t spend.
Inside crooked houses the owners
spent more time in shadow.
Curves demanded attention;
the mailboxes were homemade.
I wanted to travel higher,
past gullies of leaf mulch,
abandoned orchards
where no one tends the trees
but the summer birds.
The windows of her cabin were open
to the smell of land
and the sight of a neighbor’s horses.
In her room, the floorboards were unfinished
one hundred years after the house was built.
Planks fresh as the day
the horses carted them up from the mill.
Interior light, the soul of pine.
The grooves of the saw still visible.
Keith Ekiss is the author of the poetry collection Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010). His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Blackbird.
Scottish Melodies by Robin Becker
for Harvey
When they play the strathspey
Marshall wrote for Mrs. Gordon of Park,
the fiddler remembers the mowing
meadow once on common land,
and when they play Marquis of Huntley’s Farewell
the pianist knows the son must leave his home,
and the open field system
must give way to enclosure and lament.
To the Mortlach Reel and
Anderson’s Rant we will dance
in the hills of displacement
and in the town hall of good manners
where the youngest learns to keep
her weight on the outside foot
and circle right. Of the history
of northeast Scotland, we have 262 tunes
that may be played at different speeds
whether for dancing or listening
to the tragedy of the commons,
in matters of resources like air and water
which must be taught to every generation –
like learning to spot by keeping your eyes
on your partner’s eyes when dancing,
so as not to get dizzy and spin
down the middle without your feet.
To the tunes of William Marshall,
played in Nelson, New Hampshire, the caller
will ask all dancers to bow to their neighbors,
a practice the Highlanders carried with them
from the Clearances to Cape Breton and Cape Fear.
Robin Becker is the author of several poetry collections published by the University of Pittsburgh Press including Tiger Heron (2014), Domain of Perfect Affection (2006), The Horse Fair (2000), All-American Girl (1996), and Giacometti’s Dog (1990).
The Shells by Michael Hettich
As the tide rises, tiny shells
tumble and wait, and tumble. There is nothing
alive inside most of them,
but the kind of light
in a room whose curtains have been drawn for years,
a room whose window
faces a street
where people sit late into the evenings at cafes
and the palm fronds flutter. Someone sits quietly
in that room most afternoons, listening
to the chatter, trying to hear a voice
she might recognize. At dusk she gets dressed,
goes down to the cafe, and drinks a glass of wine.
No one ever talks to her. Of course the ocean never stops
pulling its shells from the deep; some of them
still have creatures alive inside them,
even as they’re stranded by the falling tide,
to dry up and die, or be eaten by the little birds
who run along the beach, willets or terns,
or picked up by someone who admires their beauty
then throws them back into the ocean.
Michael Hettich is the author of the poetry collections The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers Press, 2011) and Like Happiness (Anhinga Press, 2010). This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MID-MARCH by Tess Taylor
Watching a floe
slide from a precipice
over the waterfall out of the ice-pond
is like watching obsidian.
Glass at a million degrees –
But I touched it, it dented in fluid cold.
Now in the gorges
the last ice shells
are skulls. Cold trolls
the hills even as
lakes grow cloudy
& open glaucous eyes –
but to look at what? This thorny
landscape’s bony
as a November. Melt reveals
all the half-rotten souls:
husks, garbage snow hid.
Foul wrappers choke marshes.
O water, you move,
but you feel black as stillness.
Tess Taylor is the author of the poetry collection The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013) and the chapbook The Misremembered World (Poetry Society of America, 2003). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker.
HARDWOODS by Nancy K. Pearson
Every year I forget the hardwoods.
Which trees are which,
Which ones idle for awhile,
Which ones burn with fever by September.
Sweet tree, unpacking your blue red leaves.
Sweet tree, gathering ink.
Why lift up your arms in sequence thus?[1]1
Sweet tree, you heighten me
falling. Sweet tree, you cannot sustain me
fallen. Like the bee’s plunge
into the hair
inside the ear
of the flower.
Oh honey bee,
I miss you, for one thing,
complaining all summer.
The trees get so quiet with their ruin.
[1] Marcus to Lavinia, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
APHASIA by Nancy K. Pearson
Cradle my tongue
like you hold my head some nights, my neck heavy.
The feathers in my throat –
the words have flown.
My tongue’s trouble:
articulating its two ounce heart.
I talk to myself:
Christ, I’m freaking out.
My thoughts are bound
to solid bones. A cormorant sinks
from a surface
I am not breaking through
but tied to
like two notes braced by a slur
my words confuse
a ligature no longer used.
* * *
The green boat
I hiss through
brushes the oily bird trying
to a distant blue
I cannot touch.
I can’t explain a longing for being lost.
My tongue complains, such self-extension
tires me, you.
* * *
Paddle me toward a tendon of night,
away from the morning beating secretions,
the creatures underneath, an itch
on the surface. They speak with fire,
deeply, a viperfish’s fin
dangling. My modifiers abuse
one thing for another.
In that darkness, it doesn’t matter.
* * *
On the horizon I drill together
pipe-oil-mud-pump, the derrick
blowing fire through the weeds. The pamphlet reads:
ask yes and no questions,
use visual clues, a layered painting –
yellow rushes touch me first.
Sea-blue distances my awkward gazing,
pulls me from the TV re-runs, the episode
where Chrissy moves to Fresno
leaving Jack and Janet misunderstanding each other in Santa Monica.
* * *
Till now, I never saw a cow by the sea
crushing acorns
where there are no trees.
Its mute shadow is a drug I can handle.
Some silences are ligaments
between land and sea.
There are no roots.
A morning glory clings.
Nancy K. Pearson is the author of the poetry collection Two Minutes of Light (Perugia Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Sonora Review, The Iowa Review, and Margie.
Where the World Ends by William Jolliff
So I know the world did not begin here,
that Fulton Creek may not have been
a creek until men tiled a century of fields
and drained too much water, too fast, in a ditch.
If you walk the twenty miles to its source,
all you find worth sinking a boot in
is a field pipe somewhere near Mt. Victory.
No eternal spring gushing clear. No oracle.
But when my boy-mind still had feathers,
I dreamed my summer heat here, sat out storms
beneath the low canopy of honey locusts,
their branches over-lacing thorny bottoms.
And there were catfish and suckers enough
to make me glad for an afternoon off work.
I caught them, gutted them, cooked and ate them,
and hoped for a carp with a coin in its mouth.
It never happened. Now I’ve learned a Fulton
is a place where birds settle, and though this creek
may have been named for some local reprobate,
I’d settle here myself, coming into that season.
William Jolliff is the author of the poetry chapbooks Searching for a White Crow (Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2009) and Whatever Was Ripe (Bright Hill Press, 1998). His poetry and criticism have appeared in West Branch, Southern Humanities Review, Northwest Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poet Lore.
GRATITUDE by Melanie Braverman
Gratitude: it’s the constant need for fixing, for repair, electricity failing in the last big wind causing our docks to blink in the dark. We set the time, set towels against the chimney to staunch the leak, measure the door for repair. One sets out pills in the morning and afternoon, the other knits hats against the cold. Pipes freeze. One mother has cancer, one has an intermittent heart like the blinking clocks. One is here, one far away. When we hit the lights at night it is a fitful sleep that greets us, dreams full of instruction as to what needs doing next, and we wake grateful for help. We drink our coffee strong, we walk the happy dog. Happiness, what is it. Six in the morning, three in the afternoon, quiet sweeps in from the corners like dust. Dusk not long after on the shortest days, evening stretched before us like a sheet, smooth after dinner and a glass of wine and television and knitting and sleep. One helps with the shower, one feeds. One makes a cashmere cap for the mother who will lose her hair to drugs. This happens here where the clocks slow down, where the tides shift imperceptibly until once again the stairs are gone and water overflows the shore. Gull-buoys mark the swells, wind shoves sand round the rocks. It’s a battle out there in the wind or it’s a joy ride, depending on which direction you walk. If you want to get home you have to walk both ways: oppose and acquiesce.
Melanie Braverman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Drunken Boat, and Iowa Review.