POETRY
“SOUTH WILL RISE” BY Christopher Kempf
Once in a Kmart bathroom, Dayton. One
time, last year, the side of a grain silo
west of Muncie. Upstairs tonight – the town
my home now, the barroom themed – a phoenix
in black Sharpie sending itself into flight
on the wood-grain. The phrase, blade-cut. September
in Pennsylvania, late – our county’s tourists
thinned, now, to day-trippers, the first football
matches of the college season kicking off
on the bar’s flatscreens. I sip my Yuengling
& watch Samantha, our bartender, garnish
two sloshing manhattans with the spiral
of a lemon rind. He meant, I think, the man
who wrote this – in Michigan, a billboard
spray-painted, a barn in Racine once – not
swept porches in the shade of magnolias, not
malt shops or Dale Earnhardt, pitchers of tea
thick with sugar, though still I have not asked
the strict southerners who come here – Harleys
sailing their banners behind them, Chevy
Silverados caked with window stickers – if,
for them, the bronze statues on Baltimore
mark, too, the end of Skoal & line dancing,
of barn cats, tree swings, cotillion, as Lee,
defeated – July fourth, 1863 – staggered
south in the pouring rain. & wouldn’t it
be, for them, a kind of pilgrimage? Maybe
weeping, sometimes, for Louisiana they see
spread before them black men moving again
in the fields outside Gettysburg. Maybe
they watch some long ribbon of gray gather
itself & rise. Look – isn’t all myth this
faithful? A savior, Christ for instance, slipped
under & three days later the cave mouth
shining. Osiris. Dionysus – god
of wine & epiphany – ripped to pieces
by Hera’s titans then, to form, regrown
in Zeus’s thigh. I am who – Haven’t we
always, sad little death-species, understood
ourselves part, somehow, of the gods’ going
below – always like it is nothing – then
returning? When Persephone, indentured
to hell’s slow shade-meadows, lowers herself
back through the cleft earth – to Hades, to her
jeweled grenade – we too, the living, lay in
together our own lean harvest. Fort Wayne
once, in back of a Chipotle. On Steinwehr
this weekend, beyond the t‑shirt vendors
& ghost tours, twin-rotor combines clean
the fields of barley & sweet corn, their teeth
pressed to the dirt, dust columns rising, while
on television here some farm boy – this
the same essential pageantry – gathers
to his chest a late Hail Mary. The man
beside me raises his highball Makers
to the screen, the stadium’s klieg-lit fans
chanting their rites, the great vegetation
dances of our people – of pep-bands, freshmen
caked in body-paint, police – shuddering
into motion again like a corpse. Chris –
the man’s name. Which means, in myth, he is
of course a form of shadow self. Second half
vanished at birth. (Basket. Pack of wolves.) We
clink our glasses together. He tells me
he’s driven up from Charlotte. He says this
week it is crazy down there, & I know
he means that in Charlotte Tuesday morning
a man – Scott, 43 – who waited, neighbors
tell us, for his son school days in the lot
of his apartment complex, was shot – was two
times, in the back once, the chest – in a park
by the sworn & commissioned. We have seen,
we say, the video. We know the past
a word – was shot, in American – gathers
behind it like a train. In Ross once – cut
in a booth in the back of the Revel Room,
Chicago, the sconces dealing their tongues
of light across the pâtes de fruit, the young
rich of the north side – the South will . . . – sipping
their rieslings like peerage. He was holding
a wallet, we agree. Or he raises,
from one angle, almost – is it? – a book. Or
he was holding the hand of his son. No,
of history. Chris, bourbon flashing, asks me
where I am from. Ohio, I say – the South
of that place rising like a phoenix. See
it comes back that way. It was midnight. One.
I was four, my father says. The doorbell
rang. & there, see, was the man’s face falling
in like an old pumpkin, his insides – so
much it lapped beneath him on the steps. Yes,
there was my father, four kids in the house,
in his left arm my brother – Nicholas
it was, or Eric – in the other the afghan
he wrapped him in, black man my daddy
watched lie down in the front yard & knelt with
til the sheriff showed. It was summertime,
he likes to tell me. The moon shone. I don’t
mention this to Chris. Or remember it
really. I remember, of Ohio, hay fields
rippling like a flag. The faces of cows
lifting as we pet them. I remember
Easter the April afterward – plastic eggs
bright in the morning grass, the clacking dimes
& chocolate, a dollar. What did we know
of myth? When God comes back – when Eostre,
that is, or Baldur, when the Christ I loved
once returns – he tows up with him whole fields
of sunlight. Lush cotton. When Sherman burns
Atlanta, he plans his march, after, on crop data
the papers freely publish. The past tense,
you will notice, is seldom used by the guides
of our northern battlefield. We believe,
here, in the present – twelve-pound artillery
lifting its fire from the Peach Orchard, or,
on Round Top, the Texas Fifth Infantry
pinned down, summer weekends, in the boulders
& tangled roots & backwater. One hell
of a landscape, Chris calls it. We toss back
our whiskeys. We are deep, at this point, Chris
& I, in that way men have – a Saturday
night, a small town, alone – of opening
up their darknesses to one another. On TV,
the late games are over. It is terrible,
we say, shaking our drunk heads, but also,
listen, he was holding – wasn’t he? – some kind
of banned weapon or other. Or wasn’t it
a switchblade? Bomb fuse? A gun? Wasn’t, we
are almost certain now, the Howitzer hung
down his pants leg? Yes, we are certain now
in ourselves, the South rising inside us
like a mob, the glossy river of wood
between us – of forgetting, the river, of
fire – unfurling. Above us the bar lights
flicker like stars in their wine glasses. Or that
is what I will think of Sunday morning,
mile six, on South Confederate. The fields
will spread their blanket on the dead. My legs
will turn like pinwheels. I will miss that
when I am ditchweed. It will be so early –
can you hear it? – even the church bells
will be silent. But I should tell you he lived,
that man. In the moonlit yard my father
held water to his mouth. Men came. Later
the Park Service will sweep the battlefield
in their pickups. They will gather the flags –
small, prohibited – the faithful furnish
their monuments with. When they are finished
they will dump them in a clearing. Come
winter they will burn them again.
Christopher Kempf’s poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, and PEN America.
OBIT: REASON by Victoria Chang
Reason – died on June 24, 2009, like
make-believe orange trees, they just
get taken down and put away. My
father’s words taken out of his brain
and left downstairs. Remote, but close
like a wound on your child or a curtain
blowing in the other room. This week,
he is obsessed with the scheduled
walks again. This week he doesn’t
want to wait for the other much older
but sharper residents. The memory of
reason is there, of once pulling the
ropes. When reason dies,
determination does not. As in, my
father is determined to walk at 10 am
at a certain pace. As in his body is
determined to move forward with or
without his brain which are two empty
slippers nailed into the ground.
OBIT: HINDSIGHT by Victoria Chang
Hindsight – never existed until August
3, 2015. Someone had painted over
hindsight. But if you paint over
something, it still exists. On some
nights, while the children brush their
teeth, I hide under their blankets and
jump out when they return. I try to
make myself as flat as possible, try not
to move as if I have died. Every time, I
run out of air. Every time, I realize I
don’t want to die. Every time, I realize
death doesn’t care what I want.
Sometimes, a child screams, but most
of the time, they see my shape or my
foot and know I am alive. I wish I had
known exactly when my mother would
die. As in an appointment. Then I
would have moved my feelings earlier.
I wouldn’t have painted over her
mouth. I wouldn’t have painted over my heart. Now that it’s over, I know
the heart doesn’t really shatter, but I
also can no longer feel it.
Victoria Chang is the author of five poetry collections: Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2017), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), and OBIT, which is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and New England Review.
PENELOPE’S LOOM by Donald Platt
So every day she wove on the great loom –
but every night by torchlight she unwove it . . .
– Odyssey, Book II: 112–13,
translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Penelope’s skilled fingers are still weaving
each new day, weft of shadow, warp of sunlight.
On life’s great loom, she wove my father, mother,
brother sitting together, drinking black tea
from a chipped teapot painted with red flowers.
Come night, she ripped them from the tapestry. She
weaves other days. Neither my family nor
the teapot half full of strong black tea are here.
I miss the tea, its taste of smoke, as I miss
them. My brother had Down syndrome. He slowly
wove placemats. It took him months to finish one.
He learned to pull cotton threads with a shuttle
through the warp, pack them tightly together
with the beater. One placemat is the color
of sunrise over desert: pink stripes above
brown. There’s nothing now to do but eat off it.
Penelope, gently inexorable,
weaves weft of shadows through the warp of sunlight.
On death’s great loom, my father, mother, brother
are still sitting together, drinking black tea.
SUNSET PAVILION by Donald Platt
Michael, dead brother,
I walk north along the beach as far as the Sunset Pavilion.
Grand name
for what is only a hut, no walls, patched roof on four-by-four posts
so that people can get
out of the sun or rain and shelter there. Or have a picnic on one
of the three warped picnic
tables underneath that leaky roof. Today no one is picnicking.
By the time I reach
the Sunset Pavilion, it is sunset. The sun becomes a gold doubloon
descending towards
the horizon. No, sun is a gleaming subway token
sliding into night’s
turnstile slot. Brother, everyone must pay the sun’s coin
and pass from day to night.
Altocumulus clouds turn into golden cobblestones. With my cellphone
I take a photo of two
lovers walking the beach, two stunted black silhouettes
against the huge
blue sky and golden clouds. I take photos of the sunset that you,
brother, cannot see
from where you are. Sky darkens. Clouds go arterial,
suffused with light
the color of raw sockeye salmon. A thunderhead changes to two
pink lungs through which
light like blood pumps crimson. I stand within the vast ribcage of flayed
sky. Surf breaks silver
against the now black beach. Withdrawing, it leaves a wet sheen
that reflects all
the smudged colors of the sky above. Brother, the world
that you have left
is a sunset pavilion. I still shelter here. I take one more photo.
Against the last streak
of sunset, litmus line of saffron fading from the gray horizon,
a father
and small daughter climb carefully from one
seaweed-slick boulder
on a jetty to another. Father holds daughter’s hands in his and lifts her,
black rock to black rock.
Donald Platt’s sixth book of poems, Man Praying, appeared in 2017 from Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions. His fifth book, Tornadoesque, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Poetry, and The Yale Review.
EPISTEMOLOGY OF WOLVES by Alyse Knorr
We know the same as you
but the content differs:
you fear being little more
than a bone pile and a pair of ears
we will shake gratitude by the neck
if it must come to that
you cannot differentiate between
love and a rusted mirror
we love in a circle and eschew
all forms of equation
antonyms
homonyms
the river
the river encased in ice
when you imagine, again, a future
death you assume was enacted
by your own hand, is it dread
that shivers through you, or is it romance?
our pupils dilate to match the moon phases
your father and your mother
our fathers and mothers
this lesson
the trees when they disappear at night
Alyse Knorr is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review Books, 2016), Copper Mother (Switchback Books, 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Journal, and ZYZZYVA.
Hybrid by W.J. Herbert
Once extinct in the wild, reintroduced red
wolves look like a distinct species, but their
genetics show mixing with other canids.
– U.S. Fish and Wildlife
If you’re a red wolf,
you know what I’m talking about.
You’re almost gone.
Why wouldn’t you mate
with gray wolves, coyotes, dogs?
I’d do it, give up the coral edges
of my ears, my reddish brows,
even the tawny fur
that blossoms down my snout
and slips into my whiskers.
But, Red, don’t change your nose,
heady well that every scent falls into:
rotting cypress, mouse feces,
lynx pee wet in leaf fall.
Listen!
The tree frog’s throat is rattling
like little nails riveting into your skin,
the milk snake
shushing pine needles as you pass.
W.J. Herbert’s poems have appeared in Boulevard, Pleiades, Salamander, Southwest Review, and The Best American Poetry 2017.
Coma Storm by Rachel Morgan
I put a pebble in my mouth –
taste of river and riverbottom,
Strange primordial fish, a lifecycle,
then epochs in mud, a fossil blooms
to its second life of scientific speculation.
Coax the hand to unclench,
the harmed to be unharmed.
There is a scale for comas.
Let the pain be painful.
I remember you singing, but now
I remember it sounding like breathing.
Even in this dark, I listen beyond sound
for you to blink. I conjure the groan
of our back door opening or the ping
of rain so late it’s early, imaginary,
before the sympathetic surge storms.
– for Kycie
Rachel Morgan is the author of the chapbook Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey (Final Thursday Press, 2017), and she is the co‑editor of Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, Mid-American Review, and Barrow Street, and in the anthology Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America (Ice Cube Press, 2016).
CAUL by Heather Treseler
You are six times more likely to be twice struck by lightning
than born with an amniotic sac scarved about your head:
child of the veil, the old ones said, their Old World membranes
broken, by necessity, in New Canaan. Born in caul, she is not
holy or haunted, not friend to prophets or ghosts inherited, but
stirred by life’s bright brashness, its carousel sights that beg
for sound: as on an afternoon in late October, the ocher light
a famishing gold, a woman carries a harp across her back
and turns to face traffic, her profile like a Wyeth in an aqueous
meadow in Maine. She bears the instrument of her making,
walks as if steered by its inaudible weight: what remains hidden
in portage: the dearth before melody, blind birth of so
Heather Treseler’s poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and Boulevard.
EARLY ALZHEIMER’S DIAGNOSIS by Robin Chapman
you tell us you’ve learned they find
the years will strip away all you know
sooner rather than later and you find,
you tell us, how each moment flows
and that we should know you find
how important it is to know –
how you discover the grace that finds
its place in letting go
oh my friend, may you find
kindness in each face that shows
a friend as if for the first time, find
again a friendly place, may it be so –
may you, going back and back, find
each moment shines as you let it go
Robin Chapman is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Only Home We Know (Tebot Bach, 2019), Six True Things (Tebot Bach, 2017), and The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead (WordTech Communications, 2007). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, Poetry, American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Daily.
PALLADIUM SEEDS FOR PROSTATE CANCER by John Morgan
He says their half-life, halved
and halved again, means that in half
a year they’ll be used up. Meanwhile,
they’ll boil and burn, taking the tumor down,
those jail-break cells, those riotous lost souls
with creepy witchy lethal minds of their own.
The cure is not as risky as the disease,
so yielding to his penciled calculations,
leaving my loved-ones in the waiting room,
I lie between bolsters in a loose green gown,
half-conscious as he slits behind my scrotum,
inserts four dozen radiating seeds,
and sews me up again.
I dream of a distant airport, my arrival,
where, showing a luggage token to the guard,
I slip inside, but it’s a maze, Palladian,
high-ceilinged, multi-stair-cased, and no telling
where the bags will be.
In the recovery room, a nurse
leans over me. How do I feel? she asks.
Any nausea? No. But my vision
isn’t sharp. I doze till she returns.
“Can you wiggle your toes for me?”
and I say, “No.” But when she lifts
the bottom of the sheet, ten feisty toes
like Black Forest gnomes alive to her suggestion
are mocking me and wiggling on their own.
John Morgan is the author of five collections of poetry, including Archives of The Air (Salmon Poetry, 2015) and River Of Light: A Conversation With Kabir (University of Alaska Press), as well as four chapbooks and a collection of essays. His Collected Poems, 1965–2018 will be published next year by Salmon Poetry. Morgan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and The New Republic.
PROVENANCE by Patricia Clark
What do you think my necklace
is made of, she asked.
Something from the sea, someone guessed.
Abalone, sea shell.
Or perhaps used button turned
on a lathe.
No, the teeth of camels. That was
her answer. And we talked about
the personalities of camels and llamas
there in the living room.
If you comb a llama’s fur, stroking,
it will hum. And it might
puff out air, softly, like a young
child blowing out a candle.
They spit, though, someone said.
And I remembered the female llama
of a friend that ate the male llama’s
genitals.
There was a history to it.
Of aggression and nipping.
And we lifted forks, then, and ate
mixed berry pie. Delicious,
someone said.
A little sour, then sweet.
Patricia Clark’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and The Adirondack Review.
THE COMPANY OF TREES by Tina Kelley
Once I read a personal ad looking for Anne of Green Gables in blue jeans.
Me! Me! I wanted to reply, but I wasn’t really looking really at the time,
just skimming the back page. I always wondered what happened to him.
He must have written this book I’m reading on the mountain alder, tree of my ancestral lake,
tree I called Glittering in Its Own Applause. He shared how the stems grow at right angles
to the flat, heart-shaped leaves, so every breeze dandles each leaf in a skewed orbit.
His book includes the results of his doctoral thesis exploring how many times a century
all one tree’s leaves line up in the exact same way. His camera took a picture every daylit
second of the growing season. He hiked out to refresh the batteries, camped by the grove
and thought of me, perhaps. Extrapolated
over the decades the answer is three,
the number of children we would’ve had.
From him I learned why the leaves of this alder curl downward at the margins,
to cherish the dew in dry afternoons, and why a southeastern-reaching branch
sprouts exactly where it does, in hope for new light. He taught me how the roots
evolved to grow away from water, or else face-planted in the drink.
The lasting kind evolved to reach underground
in the dark of before, the next of now.
He taught me that alders have the great good luck to live near their grandchildren,
as we might have, and that each stem grows from the mother tree. The Salish people,
he writes, ate late April cambium for dessert and wove bracelets from thin roots,
and alder pilings supported the city of Venice, but the wood rots if left on the ground for a week.
It oozes red when cut, its oil helps the damp diseases. Rods of alder measured corpses and graves
in ancient Ireland, and, when submerged, turned rock-hard, made bridges. Its dye helped Robin Hood
hide in the forest, its roots fix nitrogen in glacial soil, in burned-out patches. I made whistles
from its shoots, to call in sprites, put leaves in my shoes on long hikes to prevent swelling.
532 pages in, I still wonder what the moon does to the seedlings, why that branch there spirals off.
Finishing the final chapters on how wind-blown seeds cross watersheds,
how the heart rots at 60, sitting here by the Bank of Shimmering Glory,
I will wait for him for an hour, to ask him, to thank him.
Tina Kelley is the author of three poetry collections: Abloom and Awry (CavanKerry Press, 2017), Precise (WordTech Communications, 2013), and The Gospel of Galore (WordTech Communications, 2003). She also co‑authored with Kevin Ryan the nonfiction book Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope (Wiley, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009.
[warning: reenactment] by Alyse Bensel
Overripe blackberries grow at the edge of the boulder. A recreation of the barricades rots at the joists.
The reenactment is artifice fed with bloodied soil.
At the summit of Vesuvius they sell a wine, Lacryma Christi, the tears of Christ. You consume the tragedy. Pompeii’s ashes settle in your mouth.
You enter the memory. The ghost of the gunshot echoes in the open field. You enter the forest.
Everything seeps red. More wounds buried in the earth, the blackberries tinged with iron. An unholy communication. Your heart is a funeral march as you seek out the noise that has been growing inside you.
At the museum exhibit you are crowded into a small room with twenty other people. You are the only visitor who has ever been to Pompeii. The stray dogs near the square. You got lost. You forgot that this was a real city and not some theme park, easy to navigate.
The projection screen shows a time lapse of the city – before – during – during – after – when the dogs stopped howling. Then are you allowed to walk through the doorway to the plaster casts of the negative space bodies left in the face of volcanic ash. The space of your body as air. Singed away to nothing.
The sound of gunfire ricochets off tree trunks. You have to turn back. You walk back down the dormant volcano. You are on something volatile, something worth remembering. The acrid smell. The seeds lodged between your teeth.
[scale] by Alyse Bensel
You fit into the smallest number. Zeros in infinity.
To have a bulge. To smooth. To erase curve. Like peeling a carrot. The bumpy edges sliced away.
This piece of fabric, studded with metal and holes, is what you must prove. The mechanism of your control.
You give up desserts. Prepackaged honey buns and vanilla wafer cookies. That sharp artificial taste. Sometimes the thought of anything in a box makes you gag.
Your skin is a deflated balloon. You are all man-made. You walk down the street with sculpted unshaven legs. You wager what will happen when they get up close, see all the imperfections.
The girls you once knew competed for bragging rights to the smallest size. They pinched every part of themselves. You wished this was a game, that being able to disappear would offer some form of protection. That being able to take up space would offer something more.
You shed yourself and still see the remainder. You’d like to zero out the scale.
The constriction of panty hose, corset, fishnet, underwire. Your body bears the marks when you stretch out a new pair of jeans. They will vanish once you let yourself breathe a little more. Your ribcage gets in the way of button-down shirts. You wish you could allow your diaphragm to fully expand.
There are no more odd numbers. Just the respite of ripping off tags in the hope that no one will remember how you shrank and grew, then whittled into nothing
Alyse Bensel is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, South Dakota Review, Puerto del Sol, and West Branch.
DIESEL WORLD by Alpay Ulku
You’re on a planet moving through space. It rumbles along like a huge diesel rig reluctant to shift gears. One by one the lights turn green just as it approaches. The beat‑up Volvo trying to pass is constantly unlucky, first in one lane, then another, trapped in an endless orbit. A bicycle messenger almost clips the rig’s dirty fender; or a jaywalker saunters out of the way; and rarely, the sickening thwack of something that has hit the grill: some poor bird, debris from the road, and once there was a deer, which shook the engine on its mountings and dented the hood before bouncing off, which some take as proof that no one watches over us, and others take as proof of a promise.
Alpay Ulku is the author of Meteorology (BOA Editions, 1999). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, and FIELD.
ONE GRAND OBJECT by David Troupes
One grand object of this seminary was to furnish a supply of well qualified female teachers.
I’ve learned a bit of music, too,
since starting here –
how, for instance, the notes of a major scale
and its relative minor are the same. The difference
I understand now
is the tonic – which is to say
where we’ve set off from,
and where we settle.
Snow is piling in the window-corners.
Clumps of flakes move close
to the glass like faces
or fingertips and darken away. I crack my window
on the storm. It follows
if we could contrive to forget
where we’ve come from
and where we must go,
then, alone, perhaps, could we possess ourselves.
The candle is nearly spent.
The other girls will be asleep.
These letters I’ve written are laid out
like strips of skin all peeled
from the same willing body.
THE PIOUS TRAVELER STOPS by David Troupes
The squash are arriving slowly to the dawn,
my children are asleep, my wife, and the animals, and the brown-
boiled earth, and the few
sounds, the purring chickens.
The cold fat smell of the pan,
the mud smell of boots, the horse
smell of mud and the boot smell of horse.
I throw a leaf to last night’s embers and watch the brief event.
I disappointed myself yesterday.
I took no effort. I unbecame.
And the small demons crawled
from the table top
to my arm, and up, and around
my half-choked-already throat. Sunlight
found a far piece of the valley, and as it touched
it ignited an event, a foreign concern,
like my own funeral to which I
was not invited.
Then, last night, with the usual difficulty,
I read something given to me.
The last of the parsnips listened.
The apples, nearly perfect, listened.
And the mule with his brow, and the dead moving leaves.
They are waiting now – the dry
sound of the mice, the dry sound of the corn.
It is too dark to read.
Dryly the pages give to my hand,
again
and again, like flowers.
David Troupes is the author of two collections of poetry, The Simple Men and Parsimony, both from Two Ravens Press in 2012 and 2009 respectively. His poems have appeared in Nimrod, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fugue, and PN Review. The two poems published here are from a work-in‑progress titled God of Corn. Each poem begins with a title from Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 1855 multi-volume book A History of Western Massachusetts.
FORWARD by Kelly Slivka
“What we call the future is a condition of increasing mess; what we call
the past is increasing tidiness. Our ability to easily distinguish between
the two shows that time in our world has a clear direction.”
– Alan Lightman, “What Came Before the Big Bang?”
Harper’s Magazine, January 2016
At 30 I came home and worked on a ski mountain.
This was last fall. I had been gone many years,
and my father had tired of work – would rather
tell me news of the owls nesting in our trees than
news of his business – and my mother had tired of
making meals – we always went out to eat – and
the valley roads had clogged with traffic. Each day
I drove up through the crevasses, up to the
whipped tips of the Rockies, a large and breathless
silence among the peaks, and I powered on
chairlift machinery, felt the steel quiver
in my teeth, watched the succession of chairs
swing past in endless, meditative monotony.
When no one needed a ride I took short circular
walks through snow drifts, up a little hill and down,
scouted ermine tracks and mountain hare, the crows
shiny black missiles in the bright sky, wary of my
lurching steps as I tamped down the thigh-deep snow.
Now and then I stopped to watch snow crystals blow off
spruce boughs in glamorous swirls, luminous, and I
foresaw how the ashes of my parents will move when
I cast them into the air above these peaks, who knows
how many years into the future. It is certain
they will die, and I will burn them. I long for the
meaning of that moment, long for the severance
life will provide as it takes things away from me,
always, year after year, proving its own maxim:
Decay will happen to everyone and everything:
The boulders will fall from the cliffside onto the road,
the oak bark will split, the land will slide from the hill
into the river and take you, too, if you’re standing
there. And the only way to escape these collapses
is to live through them and put them behind you,
and the only way to live through them is to build
a good life that will one day collapse.
This is why I have circled back home to watch the
chairlift spin, to guide my feet through the snow,
to listen for the owls at dawn with my father and
cook dinner now and then for my mother. I want
to live well enough to survive the countless undoings.
The world is going forward, no matter what, us
tucked in with it, farther into the wilderness, thickets,
brambles, marshes, the past at our backs brighter, easier,
criss-crossed with trails. Now and now, tidier.
Kelly Slivka’s poems have appeared in Anamesa Journal, Rise Up Review, and Wild Goose Poetry Review.
VALLEY OF THE GODS by Leah Poole Osowski
Utah roads wind long and I want to place
my forehead on their mesas cliffs, quantum tunnel our way into Arizona.
Lay physics down and slowly undress her.
Ask her how long it takes moving water to form natural bridges
when a river takes a shortcut through sandstone, abandons its meander.
Tell her how we drove out to the dugway, to three miles of carved
switchbacks, graded dirt clinging cliffside
and I swore the world had reached its edge, become a mass I wanted to get low and cling to like groundcover, like gravel.
Tell her how my body has a way of asking to stay earthbound –
when it feels like an underbelly, or a cloud passing over an inner thigh.
Confess that we backtracked 100 miles, chose sagebrush over sky, for the grip.
Decided against eroding into air.
And imagine her turning to me, like thunder but with an ear pressed
against the floor, how she shifts a quiet landslide,
hands me an extra ounce of gravity to swallow
whispers, you have your whole life to defy me, why not take it easy tonight?
And I sleep like a dead jackrabbit on the shore of Lake Powell, held
by the edge of time zones, for now, exhaustedly human.
Leah Poole Osowski is the author of the poetry collection Hover Over Her (The Kent State University Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, Salamander, and Ninth Letter.
exotic biological kinds that have no actual instances by Eleanor Stanford
The enormous shirtless man on all fours is being flogged. The woman with green hair indifferent and methodical.
It was said that the interior was once inhabited by ferocious tribes of fifteen-foot-tall men and women, or else by dwarfish people, small and docile as children.
I am drawn in by the passive voice, the self-effacing observer.
The pain has to have a purpose, you try to explain. A story.
It was said there were tribes whose legs tapered into birds’ claws, or whose feet were reversed, and faced backwards.
I’ve seen some women wear it as shirt, you said, of the electrical tape we’d bought to patch a faulty wire.
What I mean by we should see other people is tell me I’m the only one you want. What you meant by hit me harder, I see now, was don’t hurt me.
More shocking than the taser, than the crops or the Viking with an electric toothbrush in his holster, are the cigarettes: the glowing tips, smoke slinking along the plywood catwalk.
Translator’s note: the poem is a constellation of signs with light of their own.
Later, when I take off my shirt, the electrical tape in asterisks across my nipples, the air on my skin is almost unbearable.
Once on a rooftop in late June, the stars were dark exes like that. The heteronyms’ wine-stained teeth glinted in the moonlight. Why am I shivering? one wondered aloud. I’m not even cold.
Eleanor Stanford’s poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and Poetry Northwest.
NEIGHBORS AT 2 A.M. by Terry Lucas
They’re fighting again. Shouting and throwing
clothes off their balcony, several stories
above us – billowing silk blouses, distressed
jeans – flailing half-human forms plunging toward
cool sod like hapless suicides. One by one,
lights are coming on in the courtyard of the complex.
A humid night, gray-green fog has gathered
in damp St. Augustine, like the angel of death
in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.
Don’t we need to smear blood on our doorposts,
our lintels? Blood – isn’t that what they are after,
turning themselves inside out, drowning
each other in the rapids of their hearts,
getting swept over the falls, swearing a final oath
in Oblivion’s bittersweet name? Shouldn’t we all
gather at the river, tread its bright banks,
find a sacred spot where laurels exhale their long, unison breath –
every leaf a tongue, every branch a choir
canting its last overture? Don’t we need
to sit zazen in the midst of gnarled trunks,
offer confessions? Listen – now the sound
of furniture breaking on the rocks below
our window, a surfeit of hate shaking
like sequins falling from a wedding gown
through the tired light of our own closets.
Terry Lucas is the author of the poetry collections Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2016), In This Room (WordTech Communications, 2016) and a chapbook If They Have Ears to Hear (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Great River Review, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Best New Poets 2012.
FOUND by Ted Kooser
Digging out tree shoots and roots that had, over many
summers, entangled themselves in the net of my garden fence,
I turned up a rusty, iron, egg-shaped object that weighed
maybe a pound. I thought it might be a carpenter’s plumb bob,
though they are usually made from lead. It had a gently
rounded, cone-like shape with a base like a bolt screwed
partway in. If balanced on its base it would have looked like a
miniature fir tree.
You probably know what a plumb bob’s used for, but if you
don’t, they’re a weight knotted onto a length of string that a
person building something can use to tell what’s directly
beneath some other thing, and the end swings back and forth
until it slows and stops and points right at that very spot. And
I was looking at that spot, a muddy rust-encrusted socket in
the earth where the plumb bob had stopped and hung there
pointing down into the blackness.
I knew that there had never been a house or barn or even a
tool shed built on that spot, and there was nothing far above to
swing it down from but the cloudless sky, and yet it seemed to
insist that I complete what someone else had started all those
years before, or that whatever had been planned to stand
there had been finished, finally, and it was I who was what
that was, standing, done at last.
CAR IN THE DRIVEWAY by Ted Kooser
My wife, who is taller than I, had adjusted the rear-view
mirrors, and as I got behind the wheel I couldn’t see the world
behind me. I was almost eighty years old, and everywhere I’d
been and everything I’d learned was gone. I had opened the
driver’s-side door and lifted my creaky knees right into the
present, and I was suddenly lost and alone. And the seat was
of vinyl, and cold, and it crackled a little, like sleet on a
sidewalk, as I settled in to wait for whatever was coming. My
breath was out ahead on the windshield, each breath only
momentarily there against the gaping black hole of the open
garage, and then it would fade, as if I were too weak to make
any kind of an impression on the future. I then found that I
had keys in my fist, a burr of keys that I was squeezing hard,
as if it were an asteroid, crude, coarse and cold, that I’d
somehow seized hold of, and this asteroid, whose name was
my name, Kooser-79, was towing me into the nowhere of the
deep garage, nothing behind me that I could glance up and
wistfully see in the mirror, and very little I could see ahead.
SPIT by Ted Kooser
During the first few years of the ’fifties I was a teenager,
getting a few darker hairs on my lip, a hoarse voice and sore
nipples.
Afternoons after school I worked at a pool hall, not for pay, but
they’d let me look on if I’d stay out of the way and sweep up
the cigarette butts and, once a day, very carefully carry a
couple of tall paper cups, brim full of spit, out to the alley and
pour them out, trying not to vomit, averting my eyes from that
foamy, syrupy Skoal and Red Man that stained the dead grass
in the cracks.
I was learning that being a man was a lot about going to war
and making it back home in one piece, now and then wearing a
part of your uniform, about casually spitting into a cup while
maintaining a pose, spitting once while you chalked up your
cue, then tapping your cue on the rail, then leaning into a
spectacular three cushion bank shot, then spitting again.
Or to be my age, slowly and painfully becoming a man with his
back to a wall in an alley, smoking a Kool and trying not to
cough, a recent volunteer for manhood, pouring warm spit
onto broken up concrete that sagged down the middle like a
flattened old mattress, the kind that a man back from fighting
a battle might find to lie down on, somewhere in freedom, after
shooting four hours of mid-afternoon dollar-a-ball rotation,
spitting into a cup, and then later, taking a nap on top of a
bedspread in a room of one’s own in the town’s one cheap
hotel, buck naked but for baggy Army underpants and slowly
healing overseas tattoos.
A NEIGHBORHOOD SALE by Ted Kooser
If on a given day there might be five garage and yard sales up
and down the block, pickups coming and going, doors creaking
open, slamming shut, three of the sales on the east side, two
on the west. Four of those five will be cheerful as carnivals,
with colorful piles of baby clothes as neatly positioned as
watercolors in their tin, the tiny shirts and dresses arranged
by size on doors laid over sawhorses, and all manner of used
or bruised belongings, belonging to someone who dropped
them off for a sister to sell. And over it all, the distinctive
fragrance of fabric softener.
The fifth of these neighborhood sales is guaranteed to have
half-heartedness written all over it, with a few trinkets placed
on a folding table for whatever they’re worth, one pair of
blocky cedar souvenir salt-and-peppers with little fish decals
from the Dells of Wisconsin, and an ancient oscillating window
fan like a crow in a cage, with a tarry cord so frayed that the
copper shows, a Zip-lock bag with maybe two dozen unused
birthday and sympathy cards, and a woman of maybe seventy
years well back from the door, in a dress that blends with the
shadows, waiting the afternoon out, peering so wearily into a
world that rolls past without stopping to see what she offers.
A STAIRCASE ON WHEELS by Ted Kooser
It was nine in the evening, and a crew of raindrops out on the tarmac were leaping to catch little bubbles of light floating down from the terminal’s great glowing windows. Others were carrying handfuls of sparks they’d been picking up under the blue lamps lined up far out along the runway.
Among the busy raindrops stood a gleaming staircase on wheels, black rubber tires like an airliner’s, though smaller of course, with chocks to keep the wind from rolling it away.
This stair, which was unattended, was of metal, probably a steel understructure with aluminum steps riveted onto the frame. It had
bannisters, too, that on this evening would have felt slippery, cold and wet, and at the top it had a platform with rain-beaded side-rails, much like one that a lifeguard might leap from if a passenger were to swim too far out on the runway, pushing his luggage before him. But for now no lifeguard was on duty and I was alone at a window in a Waiting Area, watching the rain
fall on travel.
The stair was in its own way beautiful, a marvel of engineering harkening back to medieval sieges, designed to be rolled up to a wall, then clambered up and leapt over with a sword in your hand.
It glittered, too, like a sequined wedding dress, to be worn by one bride once and once only, trailing her train over the white petals of raindrops.
It was, though, really, no more than it was, not a siege machine nor a glittery gown, not a stairway to heaven nor a step to the stars. It was only a portable airport staircase waiting for someone to need it. I might not otherwise have noticed it at all as it stood there, stripped of all metaphor, had I not been above, at the black slate of a rain-spotted window, killing time as I waited there, too.
A REAPPEARANCE by Ted Kooser
Settled in nettles and brush by an old barn near Nevada, Iowa, parked at a tilt where the rusty wheel rims on the barn side sunk into the sod made spongy by sixty years of rain and snowmelt, sits a semi trailer holding up fourteen letters fading from red, (Medium Red, in Glidden’s Bulletin Colors) painted sans serif and canted to the right to suggest speed, nearly all of the strokes showing through from behind, some smooth and skillful as if made with a light flourish, lettered by J. Laverne Mullica, the others more jerky and hesitant by his apprentice, Ted Kooser, Jr., sixteen or seventeen then, learning a skill from a master.
Verne now dead more than forty years, the lofty shop next to his house now someone’s garage, the cigarette smoke, paint fumes and thinner wafted away, the portable Crosley with news of the ‘fifties shut off. Somewhere in there, he and I are side by side with quill brushes and mahl sticks, shaping the letters, his wife, Jane, calling us in for an afternoon break, cigarettes burning away on our paint lids behind us, red letters now washy and thin on the trailer’s side facing the highway, NEVADA TRANSFER, and on the back side shaded by the barn, the word nobody sees but me, four letters: GONE.
Ted Kooser is the author of five nonfiction books, six children’s books, and fourteen collections of poetry including Kindest Regards (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press 2014), Valentines (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), and Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). His collection Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Kooser served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2004–2006.