POETRY
What If The Hokey Pokey Really Is What It’s All About? by Mark Kraushaar
You put your right foot in,
You put your right foot out . . . ,
That’s what it’s all about.
– The Hokey Pokey, Larry LaPrise, 1948
Of an evening filled with wide-set
bright stars I think of my friends, Ray, Sara,
Father Hay, and Phil and Joe.
I think of them together and I think of them alone:
Friends, what better than to put your right foot in,
and what better than to take it out again?
What better than to leave your jacket
and your drink and join
the circled strangers on the floor?
What better than to put your left foot in
and then to take it out since
who’ll explain this strange life anyway,
the problems with love, the trouble with money?
It must be what is meant, this must be what’s intended.
What better than to leave your silent trying behind
and put your right foot in once more
then shake it all about?
What better than having said too little
or too much you join the farmer with his wife
and daughter, the couple with their
squeaky walkers, the FedEx man,
the florist and the LPN?
It must be what is meant,
this must be what it’s all about:
what better than to join the high-heeled,
high-haired waitress first pausing and laughing,
then leaning to her friend the grinning busboy
who, putting his elbow in then out again,
now shakes it all about.
– for Garby Leon
Mark Kraushaar is the author of the poetry collections The Uncertainty Principle (Waywiser Press, 2012) and Falling Brick Kills Local Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.
STROLLING DOWN EASY STREET by James Doyle
Note the parrots at every window.
When I stop to chat with one,
the others whine in tropical colors,
and I have to give them their
due, for who can argue with
the rainforest logic of palm
trees sweeping their horizon
to keep its monocle sun industrious?
The late afternoon on Easy Street
is a trifle and twilight so short-lived
I can play it like a child’s toy,
laughter from the fourth dimension
with its early casings of love.
No more wonder about the latest
curvatures of time since anyone
on Easy Street can juggle
clocks hand over hand and never
drop a minute. The stairs
are all ascendant, the houses
play ring-around-rosy, so
I am older or younger in a flash,
Ready to dance with flying
Things, or lie down with pastures
And never again turn in my sleep.
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.
FARMERS’ MARKET by George Bilgere
It’s Saturday, and the farmers’ market
is in full swing, all of us drifting
heavy-bodied and happy,
like figures out of Breughel,
among the fragrant stalls of strawberries
and apples and red peppers, honey
in amber jars, Amish cheese,
great brown loaves of bread,
the world proffering its bounty.
And then he comes gliding among us
on his tiny electric wheelchair, barely more
than a rolling pedestal since there’s not much
to move, just a head and torso, the little of him
Iraq gave back. He’s wearing a Grateful
Dead t-shirt which the girl walking with him
must have pulled over his head
and fitted tenderly over his stumps
before the two of them went out
to the market on this fall morning,
the rest of us suddenly staring hard
at the radishes and green sheaves of corn,
for we have never seen such vibrant carrots,
nor radishes quite so brazenly red,
nor come so close to understanding
the potatoes, wakened from their deep dream,
drowning in the world’s light.
George Bilgere is the author of the poetry collection Imperial (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Field, New England Review, and Sewanee Review.
WHERE YOU GO WHEN YOUR PARENTS DIE by Jo-Anne Cappeluti
You stand there
remembering the last time they moved
how you got lost
trying to find
their new address
and drove for miles
thinking the next street
and the next
would have to be it.
Then you remember
in second grade
falling asleep
riding the bus
home from school.
You woke in the school district parking lot
to the bus driver asking
Where do you think
you were going?
You ask yourself
that question now
feeling like you’re waking up
in some public place
with no sense of how lost
you’d feel
recognizing their names at your feet.
Jo-Anne Cappeluti’s poems have appeared in Spiritus, Grey Sparrow, Passager, and Blue Unicorn.
PARKED IN MY DRIVEWAY, I ATTEMPT TO MAKE SENSE OF THIS SINKING FEELING by Keetje Kuipers
In the neighbor’s backyard, a woman cuts
her husband’s hair, circling him in the chair
with her clippers, a bee readjusting
its approach. It’s a day so mild no one
cares about anything: the daffodils
shutting themselves at the base of a tree,
the fat dogs doing their best impressions
of the dead. I sit in my car, phone in
my hand, and wonder what makes it so hard
for one person to understand another
while my neighbor gently buzzes the fine
hairs around the golden petal of her
husband’s left ear. I look around the yard,
and ask myself which metaphor I am –
The winter-downed telephone line? The tree
pimpled with tiny unopened buds? Not
one of them can make it possible
for me to say the thing between us now.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of the poetry collections: Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA Editions, 2010) and The Keys to the Jail (BOA Editions, 2014). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI.
DARK MATTER by Robert Hunter Jones
No surprise here: darkness has mass, has light
on its back foot. We are made of the obvious
observations every child already imagined.
The universe is a closet door left slightly
ajar; the space beneath the bed breeds
galaxies. Light is heat conjured at the edge
of nothing, a necessary but conjectured
condition bounded by shadow. Consider
the terrible gap between intentions
and the multifarious realities that explode
from each, the meant and the unmeant
leapfrogging in directionless abandon.
We impose order to find a place
to stand, the cave mouth hanging agape,
its spark of light silhouetting us
against the absolute expanse of night.
Robert Hunter Jones is the author of the chapbook The Clever Man’s Forest (Traprock Books, 2011). His poems have appeared in Cumberland Poetry Review, West Wind Review, Northwest Review, and Poetry Northwest.
WRONG TURN IN A SNOWSTORM by Deborah Brown
Here I am on a tightrope, wrong answer
to the right, wrong answer to the left, black bear
up ahead. In other words, there are days
when I feel safe enough to take the plunge
into a hot cup of tea. Who knew that Thomas Beckett
wore a hair shirt and scourged himself –
a worldly Londoner and bon vivant – until
Henry tricked him – in one of those idle, selfish gestures
that transform a life. It’s enough to make me worry –
about what I say, even to friends, even to you.
Did you know that most birds are monogamous,
but finches cheat? Or that there are circadian rhythms
in your hair?
We took a wrong turn in a snowstorm,
plowed along a dirt road, saw a lonely house
and stayed, despite foundation walls that cracked
and tipped. A wrong turn in a snowstorm.
So much for the life I planned. No wonder we grow old
listening to music. We know what’s going to follow,
never does a Strauss waltz turn into reggae, not
after the first bar has been played.
Which is sort of how my life at the end of the road turned out.
Not a jazzy elegy, or a pompous villanelle.
Time crumples faster here, but silently.
We hear it underfoot and in the snow we watch fall.
Deborah Brown is the author of the poetry collection Walking the Dog’s Shadow (BOA Editions, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, New England Review, Mississippi Review, Rattle, and Stand.
A PRAYER FOR ANESTHETIC AND ILLUSION by Kyle McCord
Pluck me from these prairie grasses,
this armageddon
of withered Dutch elms.
The ditches are painted
with carcass and scorched oil.
The sunset’s flush remnants
enflame a farmhouse
and dissolve.
Tonight, I have so much
to say to you.
Tomorrow,
surgeons will slice
my father’s knee,
severing
to reveal tendons
in need of rewiring, pins.
I know material life
is the illusion,
the burden.
I know my onus is a stale hamburger,
radio spinning to
no station. Nothing for miles.
I count hours to the fireworks
separating south from
blank canvas. To a needle.
A sponge. My father’s galaxy
of fragile nerves.
Will you be the scalpel
dividing the veil of skin?
Or the germ?
Will you be the nerves
stung to disconnection?
To retain the onus
he needs no tenderness,
only nerves parlaying
baffled language.
You have heard me
in the abyss,
the batter of my mallet hands
on wheel.
You have sent me the green
tongues of saints,
the muted rain on glass.
PORTRAIT OF VINCENT IN NUENEN by Kyle McCord
After The Potato Eaters, 1885
Isn’t he happy here,
easel set toward the cottage,
bank of bluing clouds
scalded at their brink?
No boys hocking nests today,
no Margot lounging on the lawn.
Yes, it might have been pleasant
to trace roosts of her hair,
taut skin of her brow
serious
as he is young.
But instead hours
are mustard, dun,
dark mahogany
for varicose branchlets.
DeGroot’s wife
is a Levenslied, a life-song,
as she shuffles
candle to candle
in the windows of the hut.
He watches her
fill them with wisps,
watches her wash floors in ember.
He’d like to paint fire,
smolder;
the hut as flame
floods everything.
But how to detail ruin?
Its strokes unlike
the paced work of seasons,
the wrinkles lengthening
DeGroot’s gravedigger’s hands.
They remind him of roans
he watched last spring,
how their dark hides matted
with exhaustion.
How their bones shook
beneath a thunder
of muscles,
an elegance
so hideous it made him sick.
How could he amputate
those manes feathered
against gaunt snow?
How to paint beauty
that heedless?
To them, he’s no master,
another beast
howling
to a second sky.
A shade turning in for tubers,
black tea.
Hard to tell wife from daughter,
hard too
to tell workhorses
from roans scattering
poppies.
Left to their incivility,
they’d swallow potatoes whole.
Surely,
they’d snap the wind’s neck.
Kyle McCord is the author of the poetry collections You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze (Gold Wake, 2015) and Gentle, World, Gentler (Ampersand Books, 2015). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly.
WALLENBERG by David Moolten
“Each level of angel has a different name . . . the Chashmalim, the Malachim,
The Keruvim . . . the tenth. . . . speak with the Prophets and appear
To them in prophetic visions. They are therefore called Ishim - ‘men’ . . . ”
– Maimonides
After the war, after he returned to thin air,
They alleged that his antics vigorously
Predicted as in caused their sleepwalking
Back through heavy doors and down greasy ramps
As blooms of mist. Gabriel crushed chariots
And Michael whirled himself into a pillar
Of fire though not in Budapest by the Danube
Which took the dead minus their shoes saved for reuse
Or in the rail yard where Eichmann’s colonel
Had all the hierarchy and the rifles
And his boots shined in the rain. The Swede
Had an Eden hat for his bald spot, a job once
Cleaning windows, looked like an angry banker
As he thumbed his notebook, worked up to blackmail,
Or a bribe to go with each pass devised
On the spot. The visionaries lied,
Waved bus tickets, pulled out library cards;
They held up prescriptions in Hungarian
The Germans couldn’t read. No one seemed to notice
His stamp lacked the official pentagram
And two circles, the names of the winged
Astride the three heptagons, that he came
In the capacity of a windblown scrap,
His triumph sounding, his lips moving,
A few crumpled words, though serious, almost
Comical, whatever, anything, something.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS AT CHELMNO by David Moolten
And when the Jew was dying, the last words he said were,
“The bright sun will bring it to light.”
– The Brothers Grimm
Grass and weeds conspire like the rest of us
To hide the violins and suitcases.
After a while patience can pass for love,
Humus brushing off like years, whisk and dustpan
At last letting sky touch bone. But bringing up
The past just deepens the hole, finding cufflinks
Not missing justice, Mesopotamia
A pram wheel made in Lodz, every fact another
Blind spot, the dada logic of the dark. Rubbed,
A bent spoon gleams the same in Yiddish or German,
Cheap tin defying efforts to sift out
Straight answers. A cantor’s jaw becomes both
A synagogue and the humble gates of hell,
A girl’s locket another ineffable name.
David Moolten is the author of three poetry collections, including Primitive Mood (Truman State University Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southwest Review, and Epoch.
URBAN ARCHAEOLOGY by Robert Levy
After a class outing with my daughter to Jamaica Bay
Dead fish, syringes, mussel shells and crockery:
The news of the world draggles onto -slate-gray marl,
rank detritus of nature and urbanity
roiled in -algae-knotted stew. The children hoist
seines as, -rubber-booted, they ply the muddy
inlet,
wild for discovery, haul in a treasure trove
of condoms, crabs and -brine-soaked porno
magazines, exultant at their catch and quietly
aware
that it all, somehow, exemplifies the fraught lives
they inhabit. Across the bay the city’s limned
in silver mist against a nacreous surround
· that obscures and illumines their true
origins
as offspring of a fallen world. For every shrimp
or starfish they find there are razor blades, crack vials
and bullet casings. No prude, the teacher explains
they are practicing “urban archaeology,”
while the parents, aboard for the ride, are
nonplussed at the environmental outing
gone askew
with memos from a world they thought they’d left behind.
Today’s Lesson: “Nature” is an artificial
construct, an un-Disney realm of robins, crackheads,
prostitutes, horseshoe crabs, all betrothing
fragments of themselves into a river that is
fetid
with desire and loss, an unselective, piecemeal sump
of everything the city and the wild spews up
in profusion. At day’s end my daughter’s bounty
consists of pipefish, snails and the ceramic
head
of an ancient doll, long eroded by the tide,
its lone -shark-like eye staring accusingly,
at the muzzy sky, a child’s toy from long ago
cruelly tutored in the wreckage of the bay,
reduced to a fossil in a classroom
display,
its torso swimming wildly to catch up.
Robert Levy is the author of the poetry collections Whistle Maker (Anhinga, 1987) and In the Century of Small Gestures (Defined Providence, 2000). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review.
THE BRIDGE by Gary Allen
1. The Whanganui
When you are poor for a long time, you dream your own Jerusalem
and ask nothing more extravagant
than a place to lay your head
a wooden hut decorated with calendar prints
the loose planks letting in the wind and rain
a choking stove, somewhere up country, on the Whanganui
where there is a bridge without roads
and a little mission. Real poverty is of the soul
one gets used to leaking boots and the curious symptoms of hunger
the impulse to masturbation grows stronger, like hallucination
like the voices you imagine coming from the squeaking hinge doors
the forest animals, the pounding waves on the stony beach
the devil in the form of a large black dog
circling the upper hut
throwing burning logs on to the water
peppering the corrugated iron roof with pine cones.
Do I believe in a Catholic God? do I believe in the conceited heart?
Where man sets his footprint, there is only sadness.
Look how I go about like a bundle of rags in a storm
teaching myself to eat whatever is at hand
with only a bible as proof of paradise
as I set out poems and bits of poems
as I would a plate, a knife, a fork
because words are all I have left
to formulate a living life away from all the ears
and even Jesus went mad in a desert of his own making
while I lie low, like a sculptured driftwood
on the damp cold sands, my eyes level with the sea line
but turned in to focus on these nasty little spiders
that crawl over the wood, scintillating hieroglyphics.
I hope they don’t call me too soon to prayer
I hope both ends of the bridge will meet the beginnings of a road
that the dense trees will fall back
and the cleared land grow an abundance of food.
2. Horse
Here is a young man who is a horse
he is strong, and they have tattooed him
he is a hard man down among the tattooed and drunk Maori
throwing his strength against the sugar refinery
twisting up the iron lines of the railway yard
his brain is good, damn it, bending into shape
words that make poems of an uncompromising land
look how they have ripped their hands to shreds
on the punched cans of strange fish
caught deep out at sea, feet slithering about
on the fish guts and heads of the canning floor
this Pakeha will cut your pecker off
with his boning knife, who will buy a wife for a night
with a case of beer? out here, in the cigarette air
the sky is grey with thunder, the weeds and pebbles, and stones
of slipways, and the rust of pulleys, come almost to the door
of a land that started nowhere and has gone back on itself ever after.
3. Dunedin
I am in a high-rise flat, out by the motorways
hurtling car lights through the sheet rain into Dunedin.
I feel safe with my own lights on, they will keep the darkness of river
and mountain, and religion, at bay
there will be no earthquakes
there will be no tsunamis
the ark will rest quietly on the alluvial sands
of shopping malls, banks, housing projects, and rugby grounds.
I am reading the tiny lines on Keri’s nakedness
before she rises from the bed and dresses
eats a kiwi from the bowl - I wish she were gone
back to her children by different fathers
taking the quiet entrapment of her eyes away from me –
she makes me guilty, not of race or riches
but of time: I am reading the collected poems of James K. Baxter
I am drinking his blood through the curled pages
his picture on the back keeps changing
from a Presbyterian Ulster-Scots man, to Rasputin, to Kurtz –
where are you tonight? will you allow yourself Maori flesh?
will you become something other than the abject failure of a poet?
will you take this poet with you, lashed by the branches
of the trees along the Whanganui?
4. Conversion
Does Jesus keep all the people of the world
together in the kernel of his heart, or are some more precious?
What of the convert in his awkward suit and soft hat
whose face is grained with blue tattoos
who carries a cardboard suitcase full of issue socks and underwear
like his sensitive poverty and betrayal
for when you get between two fundamentals
you spin there like a child’s top
neither celebrating nor rising up the stations
like turning your back in the schoolyard
to the blows of sticks, and stones, and muck, and spittle
as they kick your feet from under you
into the overflowing drain.
This tall building will house you in God’s arms
the thick ledger at the door is full of poems
and the dormitory rooms with metal headed beds
chamber pots, wash basins, crucifixes
heave like rats twisting in the bellies of the dead
dancing out time on the barbed wire
the smiling faces on the fruit tins in British kitchens after the war
come, join hands and pray with me
or I’ll stick you as you sleep
and go through your pockets anyway
meet me in the alley out back
where they sell cheap, bitter, but potent hooch –
don’t you feel like a man again now?
keep your eyes off the young blood trying to act tough
on the bottom bed, he’s mine
and God be grateful for what we take.
5. Hiruharama
I had a dream, go to Jerusalem, and the soul asks penitence
work with your hands, build poems that celebrate
in this way each man is a dream of the other.
I have come back to the earth as an insect
crawling through everything, even the rotten seal flesh
thrown up by the vomiting sea
the earth is rich, with minerals, salt, nutrients, and memories
darkness gives to light, the poverty of clothes and want
becomes as nothing to what is given.
As the sun sets a muddy red above Whanganui
I smoke and listen to the chatter in the forest
and think things into being, the lodgings of farmers
and the uniform of tilled fields, and the great arc of lights
that flood into a bridge spanning the empty chambers of man’s heart
like the poems I gave God’s breath to –
go out friend, make something other than what is visible to your eyes.
6. Requiem
They have buried Baxter up on the Whanganui
I am telling you this because it is God’s truth
and Keri is dead too, a jealous Pakeha slit her parts like a breadfruit,
but that is not what I’m talking about
let’s get back to Baxter at Whanganui,
I have stopped writing poems, it is a meaningless thing
while there is so much going on, but as I’ve said,
they have buried the heavily bearded Baxter up on the Whanganui
and I’ll tell you the ins and outs of it before I go home myself,
took a coronary right out on the street in Auckland
they carried him like a dog into a house,
but he was as dead as wood, at forty-six, man
all those years of living it up, and then starving himself
took its toll, they gave him a real Maori tangi up at Jerusalem
buried him on Maori land in front of the top house
not bad for a Pakeha, one year on, they laid a boulder
on the grave – and oh, by the way, the bridge is still there
in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere,
just like Baxter dreamed it would.
Gary Allen is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently, Mexico (Agenda Editions, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, London Magazine, Stand, Australian Book Review, and Poetry NZ.
AT THE CUSP OF MIND AND WISH by Paula Marafino Bernett
– after Lyn Hejinian
Not thinking of a wingback chair in a snug 1620s house, or an iceberg on which to rest.
Or the sitting man dressed in goose down and layers of silk.
Or the heat of his body worked through the feathers where it meets the frozen air
which greets it as he might greet himself
lost for years in a whiteout.
A rivulet begins to flow against the tide, hydrating memory.
At the cusp of mind and wish the mingling.
Not thinking of creosote, mud, or exhumations.
Or a white hat with an albino peacock feather.
Or the switch to the downtown express to skip the local hesitations,
which are red.
I am happily scrutinized by a candid aria.
Not thinking of a pack of barristers, priests, whores and babies let out to play at night.
The high pitch of scrutiny is a woman running scared.
The shiver in the ash, the bluebird freed from the cold wood stove,
the stake of iridescence driven through my eye.
Bluebird, Bluebird I said.
Paula Marafino Bernett’s poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Margie, Tar River Poetry, Louisville Review, and Clackamas Literary Review.
FRACTIONS by John Bargowski
No kid in 4B laughed when Paulie Smith
was the only one to flunk the take-over quiz on fractions,
or when he pulled half a fried bologna on Wonder
from his oily brown lunch bag,
unwrapped the waxed paper and slapped
the sandwich down on his desk
for breakfast after 8 o’clock mass,
because we’d seen what his scabbed fists could do
in one of those empty lots we had to pass
on the walk home from St Nick’s,
knew he was spending a second year in Sister’s class
after his mom split on a Greyhound west,
and that his old man, after beating iron
in the Jersey Central yards all day,
would hammer Paulie when he brought the quiz
home to be signed,
no one to hold back those rust-stained hands
from pounding Paulie, bruising an eye
brighter than any of the cut-out flames
we’d colored and pinned to the bulletin board
over the crown of thorns that pierced and gashed
our Savior’s Sacred Heart.
John Bargowski is the author of the poetry collection Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighera Press, Bilingual edition, 2012). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, and New Letters.
MY BROTHER OPENS THE GROUND WITH SKY by Stephanie Glazier
The first tour, he was an armer –
after some time I understood this to mean he was the one
who hands out the guns and in my mind I put him in a room
with rows of weapons and lights, the air around him stale but still.
In our letters
from the second tour,
I ask about Arabic
the beauty of it –
He said nothing about
the language and spoke
only of the stars.
So many, he said you couldn’t pick out
a single formation.
Home, he pulls
tanks of pressurized air back and forth over
the mountains and when he gets to where he’s going
the air is breathed into water and channeled
into the ground for oil.
Are his dead alive in him now?
The patter of road – the shale and blow.
What I know is, my brother is at the bottom
of the sky in Colorado having survived
the world so far. I fear for him even the wind –
coming down those passes, the tonnage pressing,
a turn of his hand, a broken rail –
everything, the air, gone to flame.
Stephanie Glazier’s poems have appeared in Calyx, Iraq Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, and Foothill.
OLUMO’S FACE by D.M. Aderibigbe
walking across a bamboo
bridge spread on a marsh
which splintered Abeokuta
into two halves, a hoe clipped
to her shoulder, a peg to a cloth
on a line. Shadows
of Olumo Rock, fluttering
beneath the limbs of insects
perched on the face of the unholy water.
The air stopped moving, but
the water fluttered. My
grandmother’s eyes
walked on the water:
on the end of the bridge, a man pressed
a woman’s head into
the water over her
dead womb:
when did a
woman’s failure
lift her to the
throne of God,
or the seat of Darwin
to give reasons for life?
The man pressed
and pressed her face
into the water.
My grandmother, just nine, cried
and cried, before the woman became a ghost.
D.M. Aderibigbe’s poems have appeared in African American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, RHINO, Stand, and Verse Daily.
TULIPS by Charles Douthat
They’re still lovely today,
gathered in the mouth of a tall mason jar.
All week I’ve watched the aging stems
twist, lose strength and bend
as the weighty, waxy, sunrise-colored heads
prove too much for them.
A gift to my friend David.
A present from the elder half-sister
he despises. But because they smacked of her
and his own unwanted feelings
he couldn’t bear them in his house.
Urging the tulips on me, he nearly wept.
Poor David. Such an intimacy
in the magnified, water-swollen stems.
And with sunlight glancing down
and a dust-mote swirl above them
the blooms reach out
as the earth does to us, free of meaning.
Yet inwardly, crookedly, a man’s heart
beats against itself so
that even when these tulips finally fall,
even when I rinse the jar
and sweep the petals from the floor
my friend will see no end to them.
Charles Douthat is the author of the poetry collection Blue for Oceans (New Haven Review Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.
ANGER, ACCORDING TO MRS. by Rebecca Dunham
“As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.”
– Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
Before, anger was copper wire, sparked,
A furious halo of heat and electricity, everything laid to waste
– Ponds boiled, the charred trout, trees and grass blacked out –
Before, my anger was an acetylene torch.
Before, I was a girl and anger was a tantrum
And I was brushfire gorging myself and
It was the blooded palm applied to both my cheeks.
Before, like a spire, the direction of anger burned up.
Now I could hit this note
A thousand times and still it
Wouldn’t be enough. It is never
Enough. Now
Anger doesn’t catch and flower, but presses
Down and in, cold density of
Platinum on skin
As it demonstrates: Ice burns quite as well as any matchbook flame.
Anger is armor, two smelted plates harnessed to my frame.
Gait stiff. Deliberate.
And now my anger freezes ethanol in its tracks.
And now my anger writes thank you’s to those who would hold
Her back. She is tricky like that. Like
A fleet of black ships, spade-like bows arrowing sea and sky.
Rebecca Dunham is the author of the poetry collections Glass Armonica (Milkweed Editions, 2013), The Flight Cage (Tupelo Press, 2010), and Miniature Rooms (Truman State University Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, The Southern Review, and Kenyon Review.
UNDER THE COMB THE TANGLE AND THE STRAIGHT PATH ARE THE SAME by George Looney
– Heraclitus
Nothing comes to its end
the way the final notes
of “This Love of Mine” drop off
into the train whistle at the edge
of town, after Sinatra slows
the lyrics down almost to nonsense,
stopping just short of it – at pain.
No, nothing ends just like that.
Unless it’s the memory of a place
that is now fractured ruins.
To stand among toppled columns
on a bleak stretch of stone
flooring laid out in the remnants
of a pattern is like remembering
a passion for someone loved
but never touched, all that remembering
a gathering up of what wasn’t,
a structure never whole built as ruins
within you, a voice slowed down
enough to signify your sorrow,
as if it were swinging in a dire wind
that kicks up the ash
settled over everything inside you.
That voice is a woman laughing
as she runs between the rusted
jungle gym & the clinking swing set,
pretending to be chased
by a smiling fragment of a man.
George Looney is the author of the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through (Full/Crescent Press, 2014); and four poetry collections including Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012).
RIVER IN AUGUST by Candace Black
I’ve seen this color before. Celadon
milky with glacial chert. Uncoiled
sinews embrace secret boulders. Lace
boils around downed trees. I pull my paddle
through transience. All this water
in a hurry to the lake so deep and narrow snowmelt
turns blue, current hiding in the original
riverbed a thousand feet down, pulled to the Columbia
and a thirsty Pacific. Late summer. I float on conversation,
patterns of thaw and freeze feeding
rivers that carve mountains, new water
what inspired that ancient ceramic glaze.
Candace Black is the author of the poetry collection The Volunteer (New Rivers Press, 2003) and the chapbook Casa Marina (RopeWalk Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Quiddity, New Madrid, The Saranac Review and American Life in Poetry.
WHAT IS THE SOURCE? by Gary H. Holthaus
Is it this
openness to sun
understanding the role
of light swelling inside
the roots, transforming
everything above
to green?
Or is it
awareness of rain –
how the life of the ten
thousand things
swells into growth,
into seeds’
regenerative power?
Could it be
simply the combination
of earth beneath
our feet after pulling
on the boots,
that first step down
from the back porch,
the mown hay’s
scent in the nostrils
this green June
or the cold air
filling the lungs
at dawn in winter,
Or perhaps
the cows swaying
into the barn
black, white
Ayrshire brown
agreeing so readily
to give themselves?
What are
the sources of this
mysterious agrarian
mind that penetrates
the intricate, infinite
connections binding all
together this sacred whole?
Where does
this commitment
to soil, to nurturance
arise? Does it come
from the whuffling
noses of animals
nudging our palms
Or
rustle of fowl
settling to perch
in shadows at dusk
Or is it
the sense of what
this oak might become
given a little time
some shaping
sanding
a little oil?
Who knows
how we come
to know ourselves in-
separable from all the rest,
a part of that vastness
we feel when we stand before
the disappearing sun
knowing how delicate
the stance we take,
how fragile the light
we hold, how brief
our dance before the
darkening field
engulfs us?
What is the source
that shows us
how we can learn
what we need to know
to walk among the
ten thousand beings,
keep our balance,
create harmony,
discern the sacred,
find our way
to love it all?
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 books of nonfiction. Two of his essays, which first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, were cited as Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays.
THE BODY’S MUD by Doug Ramspeck
My brother raised the question, at sixteen,
how anyone might make love to the same person
for a lifetime, suggesting, in his tone,
that years were a basin of water into which
the body cleansed itself for decades, the sloshing
liquid growing ever more muddy and fouled.
But today, at the base of the creek that stops
at the edge of the woods along our property,
my wife is lifting shovelfuls of rich loam
to carry in the wheelbarrow back to the garden,
where tomatoes will later grow
in such profusion we won’t know how
we might ever consume them all.
HISTORY OF WINTER by Doug Ramspeck
The old men are wearing wool sweaters
in the summer. One forgets how small
the days are. Then it is winter, snow
forever modulating down, one more
vestment for the hours. As boys
the old men ran into the cemetery
to tempt ghosts, and once, in winter,
found a desiccated snakeskin they were
afraid to lift, as though it might dream
itself back into existence. The countryside,
then, was a slow torch of dead grass,
of missing crickets and their pilgrim sounds,
the long-dormant earth with its unimaginable
patience, the moon frozen primitive in the sky.
The leaves along the banks of the Escanaba River
were shaped like fists or hearts, and the old
men were thankful for the language
of prophecy, carrying it inside themselves
the way birds fold their wings around their
bodies on the ground. In their dreams the men
named themselves for the trees beyond
the fence, the skeletal hours and the frozen
mornings when the weeds were matted
down, unbodied. And because the field
ran parallel to the cemetery, they watched
the occultation of crows pushing their
bodies hard into a winter sky.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of three poetry collections, including Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.
ODE TO OF by Tina Kelley
God bless Kevin Fitzgerald, who took the job
at Webster’s in a desperate moment, and who,
because he had attended a school the senior definers
deemed snooty, was assigned the definition of of.
Kevin, freckled and sweet at 27,
loved his prepositions,
things you could do to a clown.
His agile brain created a hedge: of
is “used as a function word to indicate”
-a point of reckoning (southwest of a clown)
-an origin or derivation (a clown of Mormon descent)
-the component parts (clowns of gingham and push-up bras)
-belonging, or a possessive relationship (czarina of clowns)
-apposition (that clown of a husband) (for “husband of a clown,”
see previous bullet)
or sometimes it just meant “occurring in” (clowns, so many
clowns, of Trenton, NJ)
or “about” (heart-pounding nightmares of clowns)
In the end, Kevin loved the word,
its sparrow-like appearance in most places, most seasons,
its barely definable favors and ministrations,
the way it tucks one thing in or under another
in a dim room with a fireplace,
in a cramped Volkswagen under a big top.
Tina Kelley’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Fine Madness, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Best American Poetry.
CADAVER 28 by Laura Kolbe
I.
Male, pale -dishwater-color hair of
the former blond boy, now -sixty-
something, still near six feet, weight
declining each week as he is
exposed. I try not to take
it hard he’s less and less
there every time I come to see him.
I try to be gentle in case a soul-part
cares after it’s all done. What I learn is
parts, is a lessening. Pale signal
lamps are his nails strewing
declining light past my own dead
hair, my solid weight, past my hard care.
I know this body better than my own –
how often have I said that, and how often
been wrong? And now at last, here it is:
the known one, the solved – each piece petaled
and glossy, transected and fanned out for sight,
parody of fidelity, obediently still
and, in all but color, precisely “by the book” –
such rigor of limb and frame I am amazed
its hair snips soft and easy in my hand
when I am instructed to expose the neck.
I am not at home in my hands
so I look down and make a thought’s nest there:
mothy fasciae wrap white around each form,
a faint tang of olive rises from yellow swells
under the skin. I see all that can be seen
– more than I have of any man alive –
and of course see nothing
not available to sight.
II.
He entered my dreams
with the grim sashay of a pickup artist:
My legs are tired. I’ve been running
through your head all night.
– Say I see his wife
alone at a grocery till,
pulling lint from a good coat
or raising coffee to her lips
seated across from a grown daughter
in a -glass-fronted café –
will the tips of my fingers chill
to some word whispered
from the ditch below my throat –
soft, hard to catch – something
like occult, adult, a dust, adulteress?
He has a blue mole along the beach of his ear: “preauricular venous lake,”
I should say.
I would know her by the swimmer’s hunch, the spring
brimming under her feet.
He has the averted face of one hearing confession.
I would know her by the red beads encrusting
the lights in her matchbook.
I would know her by the beads on her lip.
I am his shadow, long and constant all winter.
She the parlor mirror, flinging beams without
his face in her facets, his/her witness
his/her white light.
I spray his feet to stop them drying out.
The way they keep turning into
spindled rinds of kabocha,
pitted meteorites, or the penitential
rasp of winter concrete
would be strange to her.
He has a silence.
I would know her by her hungry ears.
III.
I half-awoke to yellow light in a grey room,
combination so mucous it caught
my breath. My real man of the moment slept.
Cadaver 28, interred down the street,
sent me word. Toad-sized human hearts
tumbled against my porch, valentines
straight from pathology, embossed
“Conversation” candy messages
chattering across them,
pink ink all caps
SEE ME.
Dreaming of Cupid as a defibrillator.
the smug little archer, the peel-off current pads.
DROP ME A LINE.
Cadaver 28, I’m coming.
My real man kept sleeping.
#28 entered my dreams and laughed.
Dead legs don’t tire.
Don’t run either.
IV.
Like birds invisible until they move,
his death – each yellow eye quiet and absorbed,
on its branch near-weightless as a mood.
Once, when I worked the grit of a motel key
to enter a room in Pocatello, Idaho,
mid-March, snowing, three a.m.,
what awaited shed the same
oyster-light as that sunless lab.
He flattens where he touches
the steel table, again a tiny boy
mashing his cheek to the bus
window feeling the engine stroking
the yellow hull and unfurling
into his bones; again the boy
puzzling at the tv’s colicky blurps
alone in early morning
on a failing channel
pressed against velvety static
squinting at the snow
inside the box.
Laura Kolbe’s poems have appeared in Devil’s Lake and Softblow.
THE DANGER OF YAWNING by Gary Finke
Such long odds, certainly, for death from yawning,
But I’ve learned that over a thousand drivers
Per year die that way, distracted by the force
Of the ancient language for the need to sleep.
Who verifies such things? I wonder, thinking
Of the survivors testifying to cause.
And who am I, this afternoon, marveling
At the oddities of death, every victim
With a name I’m happy not to recognize.
Look, who doesn’t yawn while driving the freeways
That hurry us long distance, the radio
Tuned to news of a war so lengthy it sounds
Like songs piped from the dropped ceilings of dentists.
Consider the size and timing that shutters
A driver’s vision.Then imagine how once,
In Australia, a dwarf somersaulted
From a circus trampoline and plummeted,
Clown-costumed, into the incredible yawn
Of a hippopotamus, swallowed whole while
The audience applauded, then paused, waiting
With disbelief, like the parents of soldiers
Receiving a new, perfectly folded flag,
Impossibility laid precisely down
Upon the mother’s quiet, unfurled hands.
Gary Finke is the author of the poetry collection The History of Permanence (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Literary Review, and Prairie Schooner.
INSOMNIA by Shara McCallum
This night without end, you tune your ear
to the sounds of breathing, wind creaking
through trees, this house shuffling its feet.
Lightning stutters on bedroom walls
and to no one you say: This is living.
And to your other self, as if strained
through a sieve, you whisper: Is this living?
Please I need to know what,
in the next part of my life,
are the lessons I am meant to learn.
Dear one, why do you assume
there are lessons? Thunder cracks open
this night, in which the soul is a carpetbag,
dragged through the dimly lit streets of the body.
Shara McCallum is the author of the poetry collections The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2011), This Strange Land (Alice James Books, 2011), Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
MUZAK by Donald Platt
Back home in Indiana,
I watch two white butterflies flutter, light, and rest,
rest, flutter,
flit, and light upon the dark green leaves of broccoli,
kale,
and red-ribbed Swiss chard growing from the brown dirt
of our raised bed.
Lucy, our younger daughter, at five years old once got
a white-glitter
butterfly painted on her face by a clown weeping six orange tears,
still smiling
his large purple grin at the State Fair. She never wanted to wash
that butterfly off.
In the same way, but even more indelibly than any tattoo,
my dead mother
stays with me. Her death certificate says that she died
of lung cancer,
that coronary artery disease “contributed” to her death.
I keep talking
to her. As always, I tell her what we’ve been doing. Two days ago
Lucy and I drove
four hundred and eighty miles. We drove through a rainstorm.
It rained so hard
we could barely see. Lucy had to slow down to 20 m.p.h.
The rain stopped.
We drove into the mountains. We drove through low-lying cumulonimbus,
remnants of the storm.
I had never driven through clouds before. Lucy said it was like
flying. In the plains
we saw a semi lose a tire. First, there was a dusty puff of smoke.
Then the tire
blew and flew harmlessly past us onto the gravel shoulder.
The truck pulled
over. Mother, you are the clouds we drove through. You are
the blown tire
that could have hurt us, but didn’t. You are everywhere
around me.
Yesterday morning, I parted the motel drapes and walked
onto a balcony
into sunlight, into another day, into muzak – a trumpet riff
with a few
bongos for backup, ersatz jazz blaring from some hidden
outdoor speaker. I walked
smack into the red-pink cloud of blossoms floating up from a crepe myrtle
rooted in dirt.
I touched the frilly clusters of small flowers with yellow anthers
at their center.
Wind made the tree heave. I counted seven hawks, black specks riding
the updraft. A woman with a towel
walked by on her way to the pool. The day had the humid smell of heaven,
of blossom and wet soil.
Donald Platt is the author of four books of poetry, including Dirt Angels (New Issues Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry.
VESPERS by Jill Osier
Tonight my neighbor’s burning
a fire next to his trailer.
I catch glimpses of his red cap
through the smoke.
The people I’ve watched die
said, finally, You smell good
or Your hands are cold or You’ve left me
more confused than ever.
Outside the yard goes black.
My neighbor’s wife goes to him
by flashlight, and he bends
to greet the dogs.
Jill Osier is the author of the chapbooks Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (Bull City Press, 2013) and Bedful of Nebraskas (Sunnyoutside, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review.
CRANK-ARM PRAYER (KENNECOTT COPPER MINE) by Susanna Mishler
There are a thousand reasons why we’re unworthy
all resulting in a boat
with the ocean in it,
or the last train out of a factory town.
A glacier’s angle of repose perpetually changes.
It falls out from under itself, sinks into its own moulins,
refuses reckoning.
A poem is a love song for the monster living under the bed.
Because a monster leaves a poem-shaped hole in the world.
It’s a kind of ruin.
Sixty miles of tunnels.
There is no sadness like that of tools
mounted on a wall, relegated to ornaments.
The rusted chain, the splintered pick. The drum controller –
stripped of contacts, wires cut – now a crank-arm
with no consequence, its guts open
like a broken music box.
Is there
no saving what betrays itself?
I want to re-draw the mine, its blueprints,
with the drum controller at the center. To arrange its universe
in a mandala around its crank and drum.
Is this only pity or nostalgia?
Begin with the metal forge, the mind
that called it to the forge,
the forest that heated the forge, the earth
it was made from, the earth it unmade
in buckets and bags, the parts used to run other machines,
the contacts melted down for cash,
the boxcar museum,
the rust, the rust, the rust can
seem different
from what we imagined, and luckier . . .
Or is this a demand for sacrifice, to invent a contraption
called mercy?
And another called devotion?
Susanna Mishler is the author of the poetry collection Termination Dust (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Mid-American Review.
RATTLESNAKE by Amber Flora Thomas
Too much mouth, too much
gasping outward with teeth
of white cords stuck in warning.
The shovel you force into
the retreating neck sparks
on rock: the tooth of one enters
the other in your removal
of the head. The coil loosens,
infinite then slack ‘S’.
The rock lips shade and
you reach in there for
the body; the diamondback
loops your forearm, a gaping
red and white, a forsaken effort
to teach you, and banished
from another day.
Bring me a Friday. Bring me
your death so I may tire
in the shadow with inevitable
litany; this memory again:
you hold out the helix
for me to draw a finger
along cool smooth skin,
and the throat answers, life again.
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of two poetry collections, including The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Zyzzyva, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, American Literary Review, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.
GUTHRIE’S “TO PASTURES NEW” by Elisabeth Murawski
Seven geese, beaks orange
as their carrot webbed feet,
as Mary Stuart’s hair
before it turned grey
as the sky over Edinburgh.
They are heading west,
marching over the flat fenlands
of Lincolnshire,
their little mistress with a stick
comely in a white shawl
and yellow straw hat,
her back straight as a queen’s.
What thoughts cross her mind
like shadows of clouds?
Is she leading them to slaughter
in her sturdy walking shoes
and black hose? Guthrie
stops them in time,
the light good, beguiling
as the light at Holyrood
where Mendelssohn
first heard Scotland in the ruins.
Elisabeth Murawski is the author of four poetry collections, including Out-patients (Serving House Books, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Ontario Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, Field, and The Southern Review.
MARIE CURIE’S PASSION by Kate Gleason
1. Why Marie Curie Almost Didn’t Win Her Second Nobel Prize (and Her Response)
Because she was a woman
who knew love
was periodic,
and that bonded elements
could be broken down
and isolated,
or that nothing
is more dangerous
than the half-life
of regret,
she chose, yes,
to take a lover
(Didn’t Einstein
have his secrets
in a little black book,
the private being outside
the realm of science?),
and, no,
she would not be so kind
as to not appear
at the ceremony
in honor
of her strides.
2. Marie Curie’s Passion
It began with a key
that had been kept
in a drawer, kept
in the dark,
yet still made an impression
on a photographic plate,
appearing there somehow
with nothing to expose it
but a common-looking rock
with its hidden ore,
and suddenly she could see
her entire life’s work
rolling out like a carpet
she would daily shake
of the simple dust
of stars
until the universe gave up
its more elusive elements,
the years ahead with Pierre
in their makeshift lab,
the fragile necks
of so many alembics,
hope gleaming at the end
of a glass pipette,
the metric tons of pitchblende
distilled over time
and co-crystalized
until only radium remained,
the new element
they’d discover together,
the métal conjugal,
radium joining
the periodic table, Ra,
like the name of the god
who once ruled the sun,
though the glow was more
of a moonish blue, this
was her passion:
she didn’t want it locked inside
a rock that went on
invisibly shining.
Kate Gleason is the author of the poetry collection Measuring the Dark (Zone 3 Press, 2009) and the chapbook Reading Darwin While My Father Dies (Anabiosis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Sonora Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Verse Daily and The Best American Poetry.
THE ACCORDIONIST AT NINETEEN by John Surowiecki
When she was nine it looked like an Aztec war god,
silver and blood, snapping at us, flashing teeth.
She read sheet music the way we read newspapers
and could transpose mazurkas on the spot.
Now the thing looks like a toy on her lap, riding her
hiked-up skirt and run-ruined nylons, the enamel chipped,
the silver leaden, the bellows fleshy and smelling of mildew
and failed bleach and she of Kools and PBR: and her legs,
touching at the ankles, open as if sprung. She laughs as
she hits one wrong note after another and when someone
asks if she can still do her old Chopin trick, she droops
and sighs and so in a way does it.
John Surowiecki is the author of four poetry collections, including Flies (Ugly Duckling Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, West Branch, Cumberland Poetry Review, and Nimrod International Journal.
BAMBINO MALATO by Mark Sullivan
Medardo Rosso, c. 1895
He fevers within his tent of tempered glass,
an infant from Dante, a scald of wax for skin,
yet dreaming too, his eyelids sealed like letters
that will arrive too late with news of him.
Nothing but the head, and a cusp of shoulder
to lean his cheek on, as if the illness had
dissolved the rest. His life’s the crust left over
when plates are scraped, and welcome footsteps fade.
Alone, in a case, his forehead giving off gleams
like a polished place too many hands had touched.
His chest’s eroded coastline almost gone,
a strip of wood wedged in to keep it propped.
As if, a god, you’d labor on a leaf,
who could feel yourself shivering through the trees.
But valuing instead this blight, the soft
and terracotta look that makes the face
your own and not your own, something unpleasant,
and beautiful, and that must be kept with care.
This mere weakness protected from your wants
and from your language. And no help here.
Mark Sullivan is the author of the poetry collection Slag (Texas Tech University Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, The Laurel Review, and Notre Dame Review.
DEAR WHITE: by Holly Karapetkova
How white
my sheets are.
My pages. My
shirts. My hydran-
geas. If I had
a dog, it would
be white. A rhino,
the endangered ones.
Also a cat, rat, and fine-
toothed comb.
Even my
house is white.
My car. My eye-
balls. I wear you
everywhere I go.
I pull you out
of my sleeve like
a lottery ticket
with the win-
ning numbers.
Every time this
happens I scream
hallelujah, god
bless me.
DEAR WHITE: by Holly Karapetkova
I was born with sunscreen
smeared across my legs,
arms so white
they smelled like marshmallow cream.
I was so pale
the teacher sent me home
sick every day.
No, my mother told her
when she came to pick me up,
she’s just white.
When I stand at the white wall
you see nothing
but my eyes.
When I stand against the sky
you think I’m clouds
and maybe I am –
so full of nothing I float
clear into the blue.
DEAR WHITE: by Holly Karapetkova
Blue-eyed wonder of the universe,
you have all the answers.
If you stopped breathing
the world would wheeze to a stop,
milky way run out of milk
solar system spit out its moons,
rivers stop running bereft
of so many bodies.
No one can wreck
without your wrecking ball,
turn without your pages,
shoot without your six gauge,
piss without your chamber pot.
Though you paid fair market value
these legs are not yours.
Though they carry your baggage,
your produce, your children
through the mud
this head is another sun
with its own fat horizon –
one that spins
on a dime you can’t steal.
Holly Karapetkova is the author of the poetry collection Words We Might One Day Say (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2010). Her poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, 32 Poems, and Huffington Post.
CULTURAL EXCHANGE by Elizabeth Bradfield
Ucayali River, Peru
The passengers, as instructed, bring useful gifts
– pencils, hairbands, soccer balls – instead of candy
or money. I collect them, sweep them
into garbage bags to be locked in the ship’s hold
for later distribution in the villages.
Pedro wants to know if he can take
a bottle of gummy vitamins
home to his kids. I’ve got my eye
on some little notebooks. I suppose
we both refrain. But everyone wants
the tennis-racket-shaped bug zapper. So, after
some discussion about ethics, Juan keeps it
behind the bar. The captain stops by and swings
after he manages a tricky bend. The woman
from Cabin 12 who’s been sick all trip and now
is up and about, giddy, swings.
Diego and I watch, slap our ankles. At night,
the ship nudges into the bank and someone ties
the bow to a tree. The guards prop their rifles
by the hammocks on the stern. Fishing bats hit
the low-lit water. Someone has music on low.
Someone murmurs to home on his cell
and someone takes the racket out
and dances with what dances in tropical air,
swings through the swarm that swarms the dim deck lights,
accompanies himself with zap & flash.
In the morning someone sweeps the decks
of what is not confetti and yet is evidence
of some victory, some celebration we now share.
THE TRURO BEAR by Elizabeth Bradfield
I am lonely for the bear
two towns south and heading
here. The bear, too, is lonely.
For what other reason
would it swim the canal then walk
the whole of the Cape toward us?
Mornings, we rise early, drive, look
in places we’d like to see it. Evenings,
the same. Scat, a track, a tuft of hair
would be enough. We don’t mind
ticks or briars although we’re troubled
that highway drivers see it and not us.
One man catches it on infrared
in his back yard: lightbulb of a hind end,
narrow legs sauntering. Orleans, Wellfleet,
Depot Road, then at Bradford and Conwell,
the busiest corner in town. This
will be the summer I don’t return
to Alaska. This will be the summer
I won’t visit the woods where I learned
to walk with bears. One afternoon
in the height of it, steaming home
from a day on the water (no bear
at Race Point, no bear at High Head), we pick up
a distress call from a boat off Wood End Point:
the Black Bear has lost power, is being set
ashore. We turn west, stare. The Black Bear.
I’m not kidding. Rust stains every plank
of its dark hull. We watch the crew dig out
an anchor, drop it. We stand by
until they feel it catch. Bob says
they made the same call yesterday.
The next day or the one after, officials dispatch
teams with darts and nets and the bear
is gone. Things are fine for a while,
although our market chitchat feels
small and mean. Then we hear
it’s headed our way. We hear
it’s climbed a Boston suburb’s tree where
they shot it and trucked it west again
to the woods they think it came from. But
it was coming back. It had found plenty here:
berries, acorns, skate tails on the beach,
ground unclaimed. I was lonely at that
age. I wandered, restless. Now
I will be, the woods will be,
the ponds and bogs and briars will be so
lonely for the bear. We know how alive we were
at its low shrug. For a while, at least,
we were reenchanted, our gossip urgent
and hopeful. We loved our loneliness then.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Approaching Ice (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), Interpretive Work (Persea Books, 2010) and Once Removed (forthcoming from Persea Books). Founder of Broadsided Press, she is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.
ON THE CERTAINTY OF BRYAN by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Bryan is very certain about the Ocean Park paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.
They are very good.
He does not have to say (or see) much more.
He especially likes the almost empty light blue one that is like an iceberg.
He also likes dense black and white photography, Japanese.
Not a soul, empty are the streets and houses he looks at/makes.
Yet people (have) live(d) there.
I guess I can see what he is not talking about, (we can both smell Lyana’s super
stinkyfeet), but I would be unsure or even left out without the certainty of
Bryan. Bryan, should we have a drink? Sure.
Back in Alaska, I have opened the window to/on spring. New ideas are breezing in, like students. I am: like students.
Did you read Eileen Myles’s interview in that issue with the tongue
through/on the front? Despite my original skepticism, did she soothe me,
if only for a moment? I am completely unclear
on: my skepticism, ways, talents, dollars, “integrity”, days, art(s). My life, it felt hard,
hard, hard, hard, a little easier, fucking unbearable, hard, but was it?
Someone pretty smart was crying.
I did not know what to do.
“Now I’m tired and confused” I said, unable to tell what was going on
in someone (another someone) else’s loins.
Then, once or twice, scared all afternoon of something that ended up
tasting: like baby food. Bryan has a big house in Brooklyn, a big job downtown, a small child, a wife. His daughter goes to this little school in a basement in China Town. Eileen Myles might have passed them a year or two ago, on the way to fake beg.
Maybe if this was a short story the poignancy would hover in a short story atrium-y area,
maybe at the daycare/school and descend like light
on a certain mother or “wife”. She is now a few blocks away, catching
her own reflection in that worn warm mitt.
But why should I introduce any more characters?
We have Bryan, we have Diebenkorn, Myles, the Japanese, Bryan’s kid and Bryan’s
wife. “We” have “me”. Isn’t that poignant enough?
There are mothers at the school and there are motherlikebutyounger teachers, but so far they all look the same. Yes, they have sick problems, but: This is not by Sam Lipsyte!
Oh, shit, Lydia Davis, yes, sure, if it’s you, come in. Come in. Translate something
from Dutch. And BTW WTF did you learn to speak/translate from Dutch?
I always am afraid to say “Dutch” and “the Netherlands”;
Never “Holland”; rarely “de kooning”, And is that d fucking capital or what?
“One lip, tulips” and then they both laughed on my back deck cause
they liked each other so it was funny and of absolutely no interest to me, except here it is. somehow. again.
I have spent a month thinking about Bryan and his absolute certainty about certain
paintings and photographs and how he matter of factly but quietly admitted that this certainty did not translate to his work. his life.
Do I know what I like
even a little?
I keep looking at the Diebenkorns online, maybe
wanting the book, which if I got I would forget to look at.
Supposedly he flew over a lot of stuff and liked how that looked.
Empty was the earth below, yet full of lots of people, no?
So I said/asked: Bryan, I am thinking maybe of writing a poem
about your certainty. What was the title of that Diebenkorn that made you start to draw icebergs?
Bryan says he will look it up after he gets home from work. He says:
I hope it has a happy ending.
Later he says: Oh, that was John Zurier’s “The Future of Ice”. Never heard of
him, he says, absolutely unshaken.
Is there shit under my fingernail?
Is this meat I am feeding my children tainted?
When is the last time I had sex?
Meanwhile, Kary and I discuss the new New Yorker poem by Louise Glück.
She says: “I was waiting for you to love it to love it.” and “I like how she rhymed
“precipice” with “pillowcase”.”
I didn’t notice (pang), but
I liked the relief tainted by the need to respond and I have also been meaning to say/ask:
that one The Cave Singers song about getting younger? and
are you still flirting with Peter Richards online, cause:
“After a while I came to know that death was the hay . . . ”
Then, out of the blue, out of a southeast Alaskan clear blue-green pit,
actually, Dylan comes to visit, like some
traveling salesman of complexity. Jesus, he was
raised on a commune in Florida, he remembers the six buildings, the main dude who was some gay doctor, the way they had to sit and watch things burn, and he can see things before they happen
but what is happening that isn’t, that brings him here looking for a friend in
patient and kind yet so unwilling “me”?
patient and kind yet so unwilling, “I”
meant everything, my seventy two hours of statements,
but:
so?
Back to nothing.
Suicidal panic.
I am broke and I am old.
Or I am still pretty
young and are these riches,
or fucking what?
and:
What did you think
of the poem with the mouse in it?
What did you think of the mouse?
TRUTH PROCEDURE #1 by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Go to New York.
Stay with your friends.
Meet with your friends.
Drink with your friends.
Marijuana and cocaine with your friends.
Nobu with your friends and farm to table Chinese with your friends.
Zara and Uniqlo with one of your friends, your female friend.
Listen to your friends. All of them unhappy
with their girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, lives.
Two of your married friends want to sleep with each other, but don’t.
One night you get really drunk and maybe do.
Sleep with one of your friends.
It’s okay, you can forget about it, don’t tell anybody.
It was and it wasn’t awful. It was just stupid. It really didn’t happen.
Another night you get really drunk and end up at a table of not your friends.
Even the loud (one quiet sexy) black dudes turn out to be boring.
Yes, you did and said stupid things in New York.
You know this pretty well, it is up in your throat and down in your stomach, but it is also already becoming hazy.
Next time, you will do better, make arrangement to meet other friends,
artist friends, different friends, less known friends, and see more art.
(You did go to DIA Beacon).
Next time you will have more longer lasting memorable fun and discussions and really look at the art and not keep wondering how old you look, how dumb you are,
how broke, how alone.
Your heart will not ache at how they speak
to these girlfriends, to these husbands:
O familiar, I have just now forgotten to hate you. You will forget you forget you once had this. Next time
you will also prepare more effectively for your obligations, like lectures at NYU, so you don’t have to re-give them repeatedly and more successfully
in your head while you are running.
I mean, you didn’t even use what you had.
It was supposed to be like an episode of This American Life.
You were supposed to start off with the quote from Keats’ letters
that you were fingering for a while now: I feel in myself all the vices of a Poet – irritability, love of effect and admiration . . . but you couldn’t do it, and influenced by such devils I may at times say more ridiculous things than I am aware of cause Jhumpa Lahiri and the Oscar Wao guy who you love but can’t bring up his name right now and wish he was sexier and better built and then, maybe, with you, were all hanging there, in that back room, and Jonathan Lethem was there next, really, Jonathan Lethem next door and suddenly, your diatribe on the desire for fame and accolades and the necessity of a life, a daily practice, seemed wrong, too simple, too revealing of what you did not have, of how little you learned in twenty years, but I will put a stop to that in a manner I have long resolved upon how you can’t even tell if something uses a flexible hendecasyllabic meter I will buy a gold ring and put it on my finger – and from that time a man of superior head shall not have occasion to pity me, or one of inferior Nunskull to chuckle at me Who can?
You were supposed to tell them exactly how
you didn’t get the grant you so needed to survive this summer.
Exactly how
the judges were so stupid.
Instead, you were stupid. Are.
You faked it and it sucked. You sucked.
Now you know, now you know.
And each friend fit their form.
And each disappointed you in their own exact this friend that I love way.
They can do it, why can’t you? I am certainly more for greatness in a Shade than in the open day – I am speaking as a mortal – I should say I value more the priviledge of seeing great things in loneliness – than the fame of a prophet – yet here I am sinning . . .
Forty nine years to feel nostalgia,
fifty to get regret, these lines are for Rachel Zucker,
Deborah Landau, Catherine Barnett.
Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, The Poem She Didn’t Write And Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). She is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.
FECIT by Jane Hirshfield
for a person in love, the air looks no different
for a person in grief
in this my one lifetime,
while reading, arguing, cherishing, washing, watching a video, sleeping,
the numbers unseeably rise –
305 ppm, 317 ppm, 390, 400
shin of high granite ticking snow-less the compound fracture
I, who wrote this, sign this:
fecit.
Jane Hirshfield’s eighth book of poetry, The Beauty, and second collection of essays, Ten Windows, are newly published this spring by Knopf. She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.