POETRY
Upon the Tongue by Gary Fincke
This morning, two weeks into
A regimen of painkillers
And antibiotics, I’m thinking
Of Louisa Piccarto, who ate
Only communion wafers,
Feeding on medicinal doses
To fight the sicknesses of sin.
I’m remembering the way
I was instructed to accept
Those wafers upon my tongue –
Hold them, don’t chew – until
They softened sufficiently
To easily swallow
That brief diet of pledges.
I’m recalling how quickly
Resolutions were smothered
By the demands of desire,
How diseases originated
In secret shames, as self-deserved
As injuries earned by failure
To heed the lullaby of faith.
And I’m wondering how she felt
Between meals when hunger made
Her sick of promises, whether
She dreamt of acquiescence,
Because, just now, driving between
Exits spaced fifty miles apart,
Pain forced me to dry-mouth
An emergency dose, and I gagged
On relief so urgent I bit
That pill and chewed, swallowing
The tiny, vile paste of prayer,
Preparing to admit nothing
About necessity, whatever
Else was gathering to flourish.
Gary Fincke 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.
Book of Revelations by Alison Powell
Someone has given your mother
a white robe
in the waiting room of the hospital
and has told her
to wait
until when
you are through it
Inside the suite
you recall
having once seen
the black x-ray of a horse
the gray smoke
of its movement
head turned to look
impossibly behind itself
the barrel rib cage
the heart
a wide sunflower
heavy
as a bell
The time comes when the earth
is heavy as that heart
the moon separated from its host
begins to recoil and spin
in the brightness
a fray into which
someone has piled
an eternity of black hair
yours
you were a girl
your mother gave you
warm figs for dessert
– an island is part of the earth
its own birth
a kind of breech
into the hands of day –
For just a few minutes now
you
are still a child
you picture the x‑ray
your mother in the other room
alone nothing underfoot
Then he is born
placed upon you
This writes
over the child you were
(briskly –
as a dressmaker
undresses someone
before a fitting)
what familiar eyes
listen the open mouth of winter
Alison Powell is the author of the poetry collection On the Desire to Levitate (Ohio University Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Boston Review, Agni, Guernica, and Antioch Review and on the PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series.
Moral by Maxine Scates
One says it’s shame that isolates, another guilt,
but deep in the discussion of how a moral self is formed
I was drawn to the not so nice moment which claims
to be the basis for morality, sorry that it feeds me,
but it does. Yesterday, Mom and I hunted
through the sales racks at Penney’s because, even though
I hate shopping, much less sales, I want to be
a good daughter. In the dressing room, I helped her
with her buttons though she still doesn’t want me
to look. The philosopher offers how the first inkling
of morality occurs when a child understands she has hurt
the other – at an early age I did not save my mother
from my father who had her cornered in the kitchen
with a larger-than-life knife. She yelled, Run,
and I did. I ran away. Does this count? Or explain
my interest in the news from the police blotter telling how
the dog ran away after the man and woman
had been fighting all day, or how the woman took off too,
zig-zagging down two lanes of 101? Once I said my father
was not a “moral agent” and for days wondered
what I’d meant. But driving home past the orchards
of apricot and cherry, I thought he had no sense of others.
The trees were green, their heights uniform and no doubt
chemical – they seemed trees without souls. I remembered
how the apricot trees grew in Sicily, stunted, twisting
in the rocky soil, yet bowed with fruit.
Maxine Scates is the author of the poetry collections Undone (New Issues, 2011), Black Loam (WordTech Communications, 2005), and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989).
Nitpicking by Rachel Rose
When you imagined children, you pictured
new teeth, dimples, lace socks, budding
vocabulary. Not notes sent home
that lice have been found again
in Divisions 2, 3, 6, 8, 9 and 10,
with instructions on how to kill them.
No use crying into unwashed laundry.
Line them up, lollipops for silence,
small payment for the violence of the fanged comb
whose metal teeth scrape white scalps raw.
Wipe the sweat of irritation from your eyes. Force
patience. There are as many ways a mother can fail
as nits on a child’s soft head.
Each depends upon
your careful hands, glazed with mist
from a spray bottle’s pulse. Time is six fine hairs
cleaned and pinned. Now hush, now
lean in. Yawn. Yawn again.
Nits are stars in a sky
of midnight’s mane.
A tiny crab travels down your son’s nape –
you smash it between the nails
of your thumbs. You are the groom upon whom
they must depend. Calm your hands.
Love is made manifest in the lousy tasks, the ones
no one wants. Settle into the primal
grooming ritual.
Unknot the brambles of their buckled locks.
Kneel here, as if in prayer, scraping eggs from their hair.
Nitpicking. The unwanted work becomes its own gift.
Rachel Rose is the author of three poetry collections: Song & Spectacle (Harbour, 2012), Notes on Arrival and Departure (McClelland & Stewart, 2005), Giving My Body to Science (McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in Poetry and The Best American Poetry.
Said Gun’s America by Andrew Grace
1.
I loved the country
when I was a little boy.
My father killed birds
and farmed. He never paid
attention to where the dogs
and I were going,
even the eternally burning pile.
My mother must have misunderstood
my father or else
she just had bad taste
in humanity. She was dead
by the time I asked.
She did nothing
but love a wretched son
who didn’t learn wretchedness
until she became a rectangle
of landscape to tend
and curse more than the rest.
The moon became extinct.
My father grew talons
and repeated
whatever I said.
I drank a glass of smoke.
He grew funny,
wanting to hug and tickle,
calling me names
he used to call her.
We laughed weirdly and grew
tall as the thin oaks beside the fields.
One night he brought home
a new woman. I wanted
to crawl inside of her ear.
Instead, I threw a fit.
She didn’t flinch.
I was temporary to her.
“You’re cute,”
she said as she hugged him.
“You’re a doll.”
2.
We were dumb.
Our farm was dumb.
We broke the windows
of the dairy barn
in the middle of winter
with bottles and rosin bags.
Slew-footed sows
huddled closer
and let their milk die.
I’ll be at the right hand of God
when the wolves come
because I hauled out hessian bags
and covered his body
when he slept out
in white grass
and even curled next to him
like a domestic animal.
3.
My memory of mother receded.
When you kill chickens,
drive a couple of nails
into the tree stump
and place the neck in between
to get a clean cut.
I always wanted to become
no one’s boy but
I was her.
My mother was my horizon
strung up
by two nails.
4.
Why, when I trod
through mizzle
to retie the gate
some neighbor’s runt
has undone, do I now
feel an affinity to my father,
that tyrant, that bull?
Is it because he believed
good fences
made everything
someone’s, and so not free?
Or because
he was so afraid of his soul
he would invent
a last chore to do out
where fear becomes rain’s cousin?
5.
It rained while he died.
His liver was a pound of coal.
He told me to come closer
even though I wasn’t there.
He asked me to forgive
his voice, his bad soil.
His fists. His other son, work.
He left me his hatred of me.
He left me his house.
In absentia,
I accept.
6.
I don’t negotiate with gods.
I don’t believe in my parents.
I was born in a field.
I reject the sadness of the Midwest.
I reject your pity.
I reject your assumptions
about how my people are gone
or disappearing
or are happy without beauty.
I don’t believe in your America.
7.
When I was a boy
I loved the country.
A prairie eats man like bread.
Lush sad land,
culler of wishes and chaff,
unforgivable killer of your own,
how I love you still.
Andrew Grace is the author of three poetry collections: Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012), Shadowland (State University Press, 2008), and A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing, 2002). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Missouri Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, and Poet Lore.
CORN GOD by Bruce Snider
My upstairs neighbor says scientists
are making super corn by splicing
its DNA with chromosomes from fish,
sheep, aborted fetuses. Corn
is our nation’s largest crop and it turns
to glucose and is stored as animal
starch in the liver and muscles
and, according to the internet, is also
in hamburgers, plastic bottles, diapers,
lipstick, wax paper, gasoline,
and Windex. Apparently the Mayans
worshipped corn, which in one myth
came courtesy of a white she-buffalo
and, in another, of a fox, coyote, parrot
and crow and, in yet another, of the First
Mother, who asked her sons to drag
her body through the fields – where
her blood spilled, corn grew, covering
the earth with tassels silky as her hair.
Sometimes it seems the Mayans
were right, man himself is made
of corn, eyes like hard kernels, heart
a green cob about to be shucked. I like
to think of my neighbor pacing
in the apartment above me with his corn
hands and silky corn soul, how frightened
he is of what’s happening to this plant
whose leaves grip so tightly
to its fat starchy seeds that it can’t
reproduce without humans sowing,
watering, weeding. Cultivation,
scientists call it, which is a way
of saying how dependent we are on this
descendant of wild grasses. Or how
dependent it is on our constant care.
Or that ancient cob fossils show its
ears were once thumb-sized and are
technically flowers hemorrhaging
gold into green husks. The truth
is in July each tassel releases its five
million pollen grains until the town
where I was born is awash with a haze
that penetrates houses and cemeteries
where the bones of my ancestors
drink it in. It drifts through limestone
halls of the county courthouse down
hickory-lined streets into the lungs
of my fourth grade American history
teacher who, when I was ten, told us
what the Cherokee said millennia
ago, which is that the earth began
as water and darkness, but without us
and under a thundering stone sky.
Bruce Snider is the author of the poetry collections Paradise, Indiana (LSU Press, 2012) and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.
Fair / Fair / Fare by Martha Collins
religion and trade in Roman
medieval to trade or display
or other goods or animals
county state world
free from bias doesn’t play fair
beloved woman completely, quite
clean spotless pure
blond gracious
fair trade game play
the numbers buy sell deal
the not fair dark fare
well to be bought and sold
Pass / Pass / Pass by Martha Collins
through over across
the river gate way to the
other side world onto
one’s issue the torch the next
slip away of paper a test
into or onto or into a law or
off one’s self as something other
than what because one couldn’t
came to such a by on the other
side or over fallen all under
standing without not in
not from not on
Martha Collins’ most recent poetry collections are Admit One: An American Scrapbook (forthcoming from Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2014), and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2012). Collins has also published five earlier collections, three books of co‑translations from the Vietnamese, and two chapbooks.
IT’S ALL RIGHT by David Wagoner
The voice was coming softly
into all my ears
out of a dark spiral
at whose edge something
was tapping and then pausing
to let the silence grow
deeper, to turn into
tapping again. It’s all right,
the voice said, It’s all
right again, each time
slightly more intensely,
higher-pitched, gradually
shallowing to a whine,
a more snide and sinister
reassurance. I didn’t see
the slightest flickering sign
of the dentist hovering
over my mouth, screwed
and held wide open
at both my jawbone hinges
by his machinery
where my upper wisdom teeth
had sent four nerves apiece
up into where god knew
they had no business being,
but I was feeling no pain.
I laughed. It was a gas.
I felt I was understanding
for the first time and forever
the sham of all placation,
that I was seeing through
the lies of authority
born in my mouth and now
trying to get back down
my throat to be born again,
and when I realized
my hands were being held
by an actor in a gown
as green as a green room
and was told the very worst
was over and I could go back
to wherever I’d come from,
healed and whole and all right,
I became a disbeliever.
David Wagoner has published 20 books of poems, most recently, After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years.
Lights Out on San Lazaro by Tony Whedon
(Alcoholics Anonymous was “legalized” in Cuba in 1993)
Everyone’s newly sober here, their old skin dropping off,
wings freshly extended – save Pablo, in his rum bucket, whose
bare feet glow in the half-dark like the feet of Lazarus.
Sunday afternoon in Havana, I listen to how Manolo woke up
one three-o’clock shaking and saw the Virgin; how Ysmidra gnawed
at her knuckles till they turned blue. You tell your Mama ’bout that,
Ysmidra says, her eyes blazing righteous. I’ve sat half an hour,
sipping sweet water, watching Cuban baseball (Santa Clara vs.
Pinar del Rio) on a black & white TV. I’ve climbed three sets of
shaky stairs past stunted cilantro and red peppers in tin pots, past
slop pails and leaky latrines and dogs and cats so skinny
they aren’t even scrofulous: everyone save Pablo’s quit drinking.
Pablo keeps his rum under a rattan chair and takes sips
between innings. Ysmidra, his sober daughter, won’t blame him –
she’s already had her slip and prays & goes to meetings.
Just before lights flick off a Santa Clara batter thwacks
a long drive into the Rio bleachers and a cry, irreducible & fanatic,
rises over the barrio. Who’s that? (The knock-knock, the cock-crow)
and Manolo sighs a long forgiving sigh. But the night’s
not over – lights are out, the TV’s off, and in Central Havana
a siren wails ghost-like and you can hear “No puedo vivir
como asi,” sung by some lost soul of The Revolution. The darkness
swirls, the saints’ voices fill the air with such clarity I have to stop thinking.
Tony Whedon is the author of the poetry collections Things to Pray to in Vermont (Mid List Press, 2011) and The Falkland Quartet (Fomite, 2014). His poems have appeared in Harpers, American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Agni, and Ploughshares.
Lynchburg by Holly Karapetkova
Start with a river.
Let it be deep and wide.
Let it pass 10,000 cubic feet
of water per second.
There are still things that won’t
sink, that won’t be washed
to sea.
Start with what floats.
Start with what snags a log,
circles back in an eddy.
Start with a word, a whistle,
even a look will do.
Start with the source:
a trickle down a steep cliff
that stops for no breath.
And what is washed away
will not be made clean.
Holly Karapetkova is the author of the poetry collection Words We Might One Day Say (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2010). She is also the author of over 20 books for children.
Dark Sky by Alice Friman
Storming.
Three weeks straight now.
Our surrounding forest –
the wrap-around rock
and refuge we live in –
thrashes in desperation,
struggling in the running mud
to maintain a foothold.
When the winds whip up
we flee to the basement
armed with flashlight and radio,
hold our breath at each slow
rip giving up at the root.
We do not look at each other
straight, imagining every tilt
and crash, earth groaning open,
leaving behind a gaping O,
raw as any mother’s mouth,
having lost her child.
Who says
Earth doesn’t weep –
its canopy of cardinal heaven
shaken by the throat into patches?
What Pollyanna business is this
about respite: hint of stray starlight
and the heroic song of one wet bird?
The damage is done. Between storms
the only sound is the leaves’ drip drip:
Morse code for sorrow, for incomprehensible,
for one more blow coming through.
Alice Friman’s sixth poetry collection is The View from Saturn (LSU Press, 2014). Her recent poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner.
Trash Trees by Karen Leona Anderson
Be the tree of heaven, brittle under snow
and ice, duress. Cheap and fast,
brought up on trash. A crown
of green, if you don’t look too
close. The honey locust rooting
under men’s soles and women’s
heels. The city seems pledged
to pigweed, plantain, purple loosestrife,
but what is fealty when it requires
nothing: everyone likes money, but
no one loves it. Weeping, crack,
and pussy, all willows, all bent, that’s
more like it. Cottonwood filling the sky
with leaves, the air with feathers,
stars. Someone gets the saws
and the gall. Gingko’s fans go cold
and golden, reptile. The trees
are showing their teeth. It might
not be disloyal but misleading,
the like unlike, the smile that is not a smile.
Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Punish Honey (Caroline Wren Press, 2009) and Receipt (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions). Her poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, New American Writing, Fence, Volt, and The Best American Poetry.
Powder Creek by Michael McGriff
It’s true, I am full
of dead lawn chairs
and wet parking lots,
lottery tickets and gray fires
burning at the edges
of small towns.
Wild donkeys dusted
in frozen rain.
I am dumb as a cistern.
I am the wrong mix
of air and gasoline.
I am a piano
stored in a barn.
I can hear the snow fences
near Powder Creek
trying to draw my grave
on December’s maps.
But I have pressed my ear
to the hive of your back
with its blue vapors
and lost tribes.
I have listened
to the owls coursing
inside you.
I have held the night’s wrist
against my face,
which is also your wrist.
I am trying to get back
to your thin eyelids
and the signal fires
of your hips.
I am on the edge of the pier,
waiting for you
to pour your hot oil
through every machine in me.
Michael McGriff is the author of three collections of poetry, Early Hour (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2016), Home Burial (Copper Canyon, 2012) and Dismantling the Hills (Pittsburgh, 2008). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bookforum, Poetry London, and on the PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series and NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.
Natural Light by Nathaniel Bellows
“I don’t think I exist really as a person, particularly. I really don’t,
and I’d rather not.”
– Andrew Wyeth
Even frozen, the stream cuts through the forest, stubborn,
seaward, to carve its fingered fan in the sand and be erased,
daily, by water – tidal, temporary. The tide rises, raises the
seaweed to full height, ribbons and rushes stand suspended,
freed from the heap they will collapse into when the moon
pulls back the lip of foam. At night, stars slough off their
singe, engrave the deer’s shadow in the meadow, legs askew
as a saint’s hands, broken tapers targeting beyond the frame.
Each morning, there is nothing left – no cartoon, no lunar
outline. Time passes in the house where I speak to no one,
no human soul. I include myself in this total. The goal is to
go about seamlessly: the trees, the sea, that air of piercing
purity. The aim is to be worthy of it. Attachment is allergy,
controlled if not avoided. Acceptance. Accept it – how a
mind shifts, is in flux. I speak only for myself. Not seeking
cure or fix. The work’s voice is in three parts, this chorus,
a braided, turbulent discourse, invisible to the naked eye.
Nathaniel Bellows is the author of two novels and the poetry collection Why Speak? (W.W. Norton, 2008). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and Dossier.
Floating Epithalamium by Alyse Knorr
In the forests I have known –
Boreal, pine, kudzu, new and mint,
glinting, fallen, dry, or torn to ground,
dirt-caked ancient roots pointing up
to sky and space. Black bear, ptarmigan,
jackrabbit, and once, a coiled copperhead
your foot landed inches from crushing.
Forest of poisonous leaves and ticks,
red clay creek and its sweet muddy water,
tadpoles sprouting miraculous back legs
in the hot wet earth. Childhood forest
of patio table forts, where boards nailed to bark
make lookout towers and the neighbor’s
hounds snuffle below, circling in wait.
Forest where airplanes land. Forest where
moose birth their calves in the sunny night.
Forest my father made with his bare hands.
Toccoa forest where slow rain once woke me
in a flatbed and I knew your precise location
on Earth. You when I was young and nameless.
You when the hounds howl and the trees fall.
You in the before. You in all the years to come.
Alyse Knorr is the author of the poetry collections Copper Mother (Switchback Books, 2015) and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013), and the chapbook, Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ZYZZYVA, and The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2013).
Receiving Line by Natalie Garyet
Today there were many things that had just
stopped moving. Leaves clogged in grates.
Several crows stood in a gridlock around one crumb.
My serotonin smothered itself across the street where I couldn’t reach it.
I hadn’t known there was enough of it in the first place to leave me.
I have learned so much without even trying to.
Not everything ends, not everything has a limit. Men.
They grow inside their happiness until it fits them. Their happiness
is a receiving line. How can they always get to that place
they don’t know at all, the unclaimed country,
owning it outright, deserving it. The last to set out
and the first to be admitted into the land of no bartering.
It’s true – I have loved them for it
and for it I owe a debt of many nights
in which I couldn’t carry them. When they were so happy it seemed
like nothing could shake them out of it.
And then I did. I shook them.
Natalie Garyet is the author of the chapbook Slow Witness (Berberis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Lewis & Clark Literary Review, The Grove Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Phantom Limb.
22 years later by Betsy Johnson-Miller
Walking the gravel road
this afternoon
I came upon ribs spine
and head picked clean.
Blind as Saul,
between cornfields I saw
the common
converted
into the miraculous
the dead deer turned
into a dragon
who would never make it
back to her treasure.
Naked I am with you now.
Bed and breath, gold.
Betsy Johnson-Miller’s poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, Cortland Review, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.
What I Heard by Andrea Cohen
She was talking about Akhmatova
and Mandelstam, how there
was only one egg, which she
gave him. But what I heard
was one ache: there was one
ache, and they shared it.
Andrea Cohen is the author of five poetry collections: Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and The Threepenny Review.
Tiger, tiger, by Carrie Shipers
Mabel Stark, the world’s first female tiger trainer, had a career that spanned
nearly 60 years. She sometimes worked with as many as 18 cats at once.
The audience wanted to see me mauled,
see tigers do what they were made for
right before their eyes. I raised Rajah
from a cub, shared my bed with him
because of loneliness, because I’d feel
the mattress move before he pounced.
In the ring there’s room for just one thought:
Tiger, tiger, where they are, what mood
they’re in, if they seem likely to attack.
You can’t forget their brains are fast and hungry,
impossible to tame. When my cats turned
on me it was a test to see what I could take,
remind me of my place. Rajah went bad
later than most. He was always sweet
when we were alone, but with someone else
around – cat or man, it didn’t matter –
I lost all control. I couldn’t keep him as a pet
or use him in the ring, so he was sold
to an act in Mexico that did death matches –
Rajah against a bear, an elephant, a pack
of prairie wolves. I knew JungleLand
was my last job. The circuses were dying,
and my costumes barely hid my scars.
The cats I worked were mangy, limping, lazy,
but we got along all right till the owners
said Retire. I chose pills, a plastic bag.
What I wanted was the light in Rajah’s eyes,
softness of his nose above his awful teeth,
smile when he smelled meat under my skin.
Carrie Shipers is the author of the poetry collection Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press, 2010) and two forthcoming collections: Cause for Concern (Able Muse Press) and Resemblances (University of New Mexico Press). Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Connecticut Review, New England Review, North American Review and Southern Review.
Circus Trick in Window Draws Crowds; Sells Hats by Alexandra Teague
“Passersby were startled to see, among the several mannequin heads resting
atop pedestals, one living head.” Syracuse, New York, 1947
Like Niagara Falls makes the rest of the river
irrelevant and also more beautiful: that spray
of blue net fascinators; that wool beret, floating
above where her body isn’t, where she’s blinking
without a spine, makes people need to pay whatever
the price tag says. Because when does Pandora, unlatched
from her own hatbox, grace us with her presence?
Pretty as a canapé. Bloodless as John the Baptist, after
his head is buried, found, buried by a potter –
in mythology, what gods do: pinch people from clay
with hollows for souls. Who among us feels solid?
Where’s the feather wisping from the brim to lift us
out of legs, lungs, heartbreak? The perfect ode
to our faces: the person looking out. The person smudging
fingers on the windows of mystery. As if we haven’t
learned celestial mist can only drift so high before
it comes back as rain, and we don’t have a raincoat.
Just look how she’s smiling. She’s seen it before:
how carefully we carry our bodies – like receipts
for something we don’t remember buying.
Descending Night by Alexandra Teague
Audrey Munson poses for Adolph A. Weinman (1907)
Then, I couldn’t see it coming. Only,
blaring through high studio windows,
sunlight he wanted me to step into
as nature does. My body on the escalator
of his eyes. Glint and fold. Do you think
I can tell anything about a woman clothed?
Girl and fern. Rustle of petticoats
dropping behind the screen’s thin mesh.
I had to brazen it out – step one foot,
one leg, one body: cold into bare sight.
(I would have withdrawn if I could.)
Grecian yet warm like the modern public likes.
My arms (lifting to fix my hair) speaking
frailty to his charcoal – speaking tousle
of unselfconscious self-consciousness.
The world’s weight held in her arms – she
wants only to drift to slumber.
Was that how I felt? Like a caryatid
longing to simply be horizon? Like
my new, bright wings were magnets
to draw down the night. Until I saw
only his hands. Allegory’s thin robe
wrapping me. The page darkening.
Alexandra Teague is the author of the poetry collections The Wise and Foolish Builder (2015) and Mortal Geography (2010) both from Persea. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, Willow Springs, and The Best American Poetry.
Stone Monument at Les Bessons Before Dusk and the Mobilization of Troops by Linda Taylor
Boys play soccer by the monument
to the World War I dead. Headstones
dangle from the yews
like hanged men. Between mounds
of earth, rutted gullies spread
their colors to pull the fields toward night
with ribbons of blood smoke.
In smaller trenches, six-eight-
ten-fourteen boys a year
were lost. The town has only
twenty-five, and these ten now
in orange and white – Stephan, Eric,
David, Guy, Cedric – kick the ball
against the names:
“Constant, T.; Albuisson, J.R.;
Turriere, A. . . .” and one
who fell in Algiers in 1903 –
the ball bounding from their stone
body, stone boys, hard heavy
shadows, hitting where the rock is warm.
The oldest – with a long head, flowering
cheeks, a voice like small sticks growing,
mounts another boy’s crutch,
flies for the ball. All laugh. He climbs
the monument. Roses shiver
in the sun, the flies like sparks above the grass,
translucent as the honeyed stone
where thin weeds are lit. And light
stretches, sliding from the flesh – as much
as flesh can be seen in stone,
as much as stone will yield
to light floating with a face, still warm.
Linda Taylor’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Indiana Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Georgia Review.
Elliot Darling, When the Time Comes:
Do Not Resuscitate by Emily Yong
For ye shall go out with joy . . . and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
– Isaiah 55:12
Beyond all this, as though nothing
were, were it not the wish to be
perfect. Uneclipsed, as in trees
at sunset, which is the coherence,
intelligence, the vena cava careening
back to the atrium, to triumph
over the obscene metastasis; so strange
that in the end you give up trying, as in
this passage, the knowledge, reas-
semblage of loose teeth. Now in part, a thinned
articulation, which is to say frightening,
beautiful, regardless. Like a bird
skeleton soon to take flight. And I
have told you this, to grieve, just a little,
my bones, once elegant, once shook
with wonder & gold. From whence you came.
So as not to look at a tree, a mirror, & ask
of it Why are you still standing? Clapping,
you so old? This too is a bold metaphor, metamor-
phosis. For you will find, as you always do, your
way around, & into, & out of, passage –
which is the mind, the continuity of all
things. I Am . . . how could you love,
live, as though nothing were
a miracle? Love is . . . disintegrating. Over waters,
darkness, nakedness, mists. Unmistakably.
And tomorrow, as in how many
summer days, the scent of grasses, scented
light, lifting out of the valley. In the gold-
glade of evening. Vanishing. Returning.
There was evening, and there was morning.
As through the sky, trees, the trifoliate
leaves; their thin emerald veins, mouths
cannot stop breathing, shuddering,
as though nothing would remain;
not breathing.
Emily Yong’s poems have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Southampton Review.
Heaven by Mary Stewart Hammond
My plane slips the tarmac imperceptibly as the spirit
departing, and the shadow of the left wing follows aft
gliding over the lower world. There, in a hospital room
no bigger than the cell in a honeycomb, my mother
struggles to rise from her wheelchair. She must succeed
at this in order to go home. She believes
in the Resurrection of the body. The one she’s in, but
newer. Her arms tremble from Parkinson’s and effort.
Or from pain in the spine she fractured. Or from heart failure.
So far, she can raise herself only two inches.
Yesterday, while trying, she said she was ready
for her new body. My father claims she meant
she was ready to die. I claim she was joking. She meant
she could use that new body now, not in the hereafter.
When he leaves each night, they kiss goodbye as if parting
forever. In the morning, when he returns, and they see
the other is still here, they kiss as if reunited from death.
Today, driving me back to the airport he said he would do
anything to have her home again. Anything. And far below,
inside one of the toy cars I see scurrying over the causeways
threading Tampa Bay, the speck of my father speeds
my mother’s soiled laundry to the washer and dryer
at their earthly home. It’s a long drive. It’s something.
My plane turns north climbing into the future. There,
in Manhattan, not yet on the radar, my own love
strides from the market into the honeycomb of our apartment
preparing a lunch of bread and wine and cheese
to gather me in. And someday, he, too, will die.
The plane rocks so slightly it could be
hung from a bough, stopped dead
in kingdom come. The engines’ hum
swaddles me. We’ve reached altitude.
I push the button in my armrest. My seat reclines.
In its pitch, I am bigger than life, godly, unreachable.
I don’t want to return to the earth.
The windows are empty with clouds.
Mary Stewart Hammond is the author of the poetry collection Out of Canaan (W.W. Norton, 1993). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Field, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker.
Death Comes to the Dancer and Gardener by Robin Chapman
– for Norma Briggs
She fell in her garden, or tripped.
It was night, or maybe late afternoon,
with its slant light through the young
turkeyfoot grasses unsheathing
their height, and the prairie smoke
streaming in a light wind, the way
the white pines on the hill might have
loosed their pollen grains, a soft
yellow rain, and, later that night,
a red fox might have stepped out
under the moon and, curious,
watched over her. It was morning
when they found her, cold
among the many blooms intermixed,
native species and cultivars
that had gladdened so many hours.
I like to think that the fox,
if it was a fox, was as neat-footed
as all her Scottish dancers.
Robin Chapman’s most recent poetry collections are One Hundred White Pelicans (2013) and the eelgrass meadow (2011) both from Tebot. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Nimrod, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Scholar, and reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.
Diddley Bow by Carol Quinn
The old dive Rotor went under
like a shuttered carnival ride –
still bearing the centrifugal name
of one that gyred riders to the wall
at some Cold War Oktoberfest.
After so many beers and polkas,
perhaps it wasn’t strange to be spun
in an empty tun at 30 RPM.
One G more and test pilots tell
of passing out, seeing the light
or episodes from childhood
on the late, late show
of the old RCA goldfish bowl
of consciousness.
Once, a friend
told me about the tachycardia he had
as a child – how they had to stop
and restart his heart – and how gravity
is irresistible in the end,
as when,
on a spinning carnival ride,
the floor slips away.
* * *
Cathy needed a tutor/driver
for the escape car when
her mother went off her meds.
John sat at an upright piano
pounding out barrelhouse and stride.
Come over here he said, making
a space for me next to him.
He would try to explain
the microtonal ghosts around
the third and seventh of the scale –
how they persisted in the field holler
if not at the spinet.
Frank said the pin oak was the last
to lose its leaves, that his disease
had spared him and him alone.
A piano player may linger between
a note and its flat, tantalizing us –
as if some resolution were still possible.
* * *
John said Don’t show them what’s on
or up your sleeve. Cathy disagreed,
always laughing at the off-the-cuff.
None of us imagined we would die.
None of us imagined we’d outlive
the others, or stand alone outside
the place we used to meet, where
cords woven through winter branches
would be like the one-stringed instruments
John left on beams and old boards.
Where I’m from, you can find them on
the porches of abandoned houses.
In gyral winds, the wires still hum.
Primers for the blues he said.
And now, suddenly at evening,
the light bulbs in the bare branches
recall another season –
a harmonic
that can’t be resolved, a landmark
in the darkening wilderness –
and flicker in the place where it once was.
Carol Quinn is the author of the poetry collection Acetylene (Cider Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, River Styx, Pleiades, and The National Poetry Review.