 
### Sixfold Poetry Summer 2015

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Sixfold and The Authors

www.sixfold.org

Sixfold is a completely writer-voted journal. The writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the prize-winning manuscripts and the short stories and poetry published in each issue. All participating writers' equally weighted votes act as the editor, instead of the usual editorial decision-making organization of one or a few judges, editors, or select editorial board.

Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October, each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.

Cover Art by Hannah Lansburgh. _Besichtigung der deutschen Gruppe_ (Tour of the German Group). 2014. Silkscreen. 12" x 18" https://hlansburgh.carbonmade.com

License Notes

Copyright 2015 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue are acknowledged. Thank you for your support.

Sixfold

Garrett Doherty, Publisher

sixfold@sixfold.org

www.sixfold.org

(203) 491-0242

### Sixfold Poetry Summer 2015

Jennifer Leigh Stevenson | For Your Own Good & other poems

Marianne S. Johnson | Tortious & other poems

Kate Magill | Nest Study #1 & other poems

Karen Kraco | Studio & other poems

Matt Daly | Beneath Your Bark & other poems

Paulette Guerin | Emergence & other poems

Hank Hudepohl | Crossed Words & other poems

Alma Eppchez | At the Back of the Road Atlas & other poems

Jim Burrows | At the Megachurch & other poems

Rachel Stolzman Gullo | Lioness & other poems

Yana Lyandres | New York Transplant & other poems

Heather Katzoff | Start & other poems

Tom Yori | Cana & other poems

Barth Landor | What Is Left & other poems

Abigail F. Taylor | Never So Still & other poems

George Longenecker | Polar Bears Drowning & other poems

Ben Cromwell | Sometimes a Flock of Birds & other poems

Robert Mammano | the way the ground shakes & other poems

Janet Smith | Rocket Ship & other poems

Gina Loring | Dementia & other poems

J. Lee Strickland | Minoan Elegy & other poems

Toni Hanner | Catching the Baby & other poems

Contributor Notes

Jennifer Leigh Stevenson

### For Your Own Good

Isn't it a wonder, the way someone fills

you up? Feasts on the least of you? She

knocked on the hollow part of me, a

master craftsman with shutters for eyes.

With little more than night's breath and

panty's breadth between me and her

that time and she kneaded my hip to a

bruise and sloppily hummed "Blue in

Green" while I shivered and learned

some things.

Her bright lipstick lingered everywhere,

on the steam-roller bong, the end of her

cigarettes. Once she left her mouth

mark on my earlobe which really required

some explaining.

On the bottom of the

tube: _Matte Finish_ , then _BRAZEN_.

So. It was me who always ate the jelly beans

she stashed in her glove box and it was me

who stole her quarters to call a guy.

It was him who made her want to die. At

least she said it was. She had a loose

relationship with telling.

Another time she painted our toe nails

black and plucked my eyebrows

super thin like Anaïs Nin's. Man did I

want her to love me but I just couldn't

balance all that fear and feasting

on my fingertip. I told her how the deep

divot between her nose and lip drove

me delirious, and she laughed, named

it a philtrum. Sometimes she put hickeys

on me in hidden places. Sometimes

she put her feet in my lap when I drove.

She left early one morning, I watched her go.

She put on her long dark skirt and peplum

jacket, rolled her hair into a ballet bun and

shed our yesterday like a too small snake skin.

### The Oracle Squints

She hears the clack of my prayer beads

I want lips sliding across my collarbone

She understands my lack and longing

I know who governs my neck and throat

I light candles

leave offerings

ink drawings wrapped in my hair

poems written small

things that drip with meaning

drown in feeling

things of touch and taste

and reason

I feel wanton but buttoned

so I turn on the night music

loud and honey-slow

start a fire to bring

a little atmosphere

in here

my shadow shivers on the wall

my feet are bare

these stones are cold

everyone is hungry

Some burn incense

to please a goddess

I sacrifice words

to woo her

### Harvest

A cigarette burns in an ashtray

lipstick on the filter a yelp of red

I know it must belong to an old

woman or a young one, no one

in-between bothers

sip at my scotch

she slinks up, a gorgeous graceless

thing, pale with dark bangs

and melamine eyes, gives

me a grin, those red lips dragging

a stain on her front tooth

oh she's a rock and roller

I smile, touch my own mouth

automatic, and she understands

draws her tongue back and forth

then bares her teeth at me

and I nod, serious

yes it's gone

she rejoins her cigarette, blinks

at me through the smoke and din

like some nocturnal creature

tiny and shivery and very alive

and I lean over

she smells of fall

firewood, apples and clove

I wince with sudden comfort

she will have Violent Femmes

records and she will touch

my cheeks with her thumbs

tender and kind

### Ghost Towns

Last spring your neighbor's cat laid a baby rabbit

on your front steps, a tribute bloody and very

much alive.

It's suffering

I sobbed.

Your face solemn, you told me

_Go inside_ , _Hummingbird._

I loved your country boy know-how

your mercy

and when I shook off my city girl shock I kissed you so

long and hard your mouth bruised

like fruit.

But now I only have this map.

I left at dusk, bought some cheap whiskey, a six pack of beer

drove all night and made it here with stars to spare

so I parked and drank the sun awake.

_Take exit 148 toward Luther_

I distrust this small hush, the lavender horizon now burning pink, too perfect

to be real. Windows down, air already

so hot it hurts. My car rumbles a sad thrum over the gravel.

_Turn left onto Hogback Rd_

Sweat licks down my neck.

Summer finds these back roads rutted by drought. Red dirt dust stirs lazy

in the molten August morning—everything sticks

but nothing stays.

_Pottawatomie Rd turns right_

A sort-of understanding dawns at golden hour:

_Fallis_ spelled in rock on a hillock.

I chose to visit this place first for three reasons:

poets and quiet and cock

You had southern rocker locks, wore aviator sunglasses like a traffic cop.

Your sublime Okie drawl hinted

at drowsy Sunday afternoons. Of black magic,

of limbs tangled in too warm sheets. Of swamps

and sweat and Jack. Your voice

like pecan pie.

One day you looked long at my hands, at my curls breeze blown.

You said

_You look like a radioactive Pre-Raphaelite, all hands_

_and eyes and hair._

Grinned around the Camel held in your teeth. Unabashed.

So of course I took you home. Tasted the sun without

burning my tongue and made you a habit.

That summer we just drove, took black and white photos

of ghost towns and gravestones. The best has you leaned against a

pleading angel,

a toothpick pointing jaunty from your smile. You caught

me candid that same day, hazy daylight roaring through my sundress

and my legs backlit. I lifted that skirt later and rode you

before the ride home,

my hair in your mouth.

_Take the 1st right onto 3rd St_

From the heavy trees an aggressive mailbox juts out

forward and to the left

like a boxer's jaw twisted and ruined:

_A.Whittaker Red Fox 1034_

An address long abandoned, hidden by overgrowth. Shadows dapple

the silvered eaves, and the wood shingles,

shaped like dragon scales, have gone

to stone.

I ease open the door, certain

all this honeyed peace is bait on a trap. Inside, a wingback chair

flower fabric rotted away

sits in a thrust of sunshine.

Maybe you caused all this damage

too. A pan on the stove

a canister of salt on the countertop.

Mrs. Whittaker washed coffee mugs one morning

lined them up on the window sill to dry

but she's gone now, some apocalypse,

maybe, some rapture come to claim the blameless

and I'm still here.

_Take exit 157 for OK-33_

Noon and the searing wind seethes,

slaps my cheeks red and oh lord all the booze

has caught up my head pounding

with heat and hangover and something else

something like fear.

_Turn right onto Coyote Trail_

On to Centralia, where a shell of a home stands

its west wall intact

a crocheted potholder faded dull dangles from a nail

the wallpaper bears pale scars where

framed pictures once hung.

_Slight right to stay on E 160 Rd_

I find a huge snakeskin in a church vestibule and soda cans

in the baptismal. Open a hymnal

to page seventy-three. Despite the dim I feel

see-through in this place and some angry weight makes me run

away with a thudding heart.

_Take the 3rd left onto W Grand Ave_

Another house.

This one suffered

bricks broken

walls scorched.

A mattress reduced to rusty springs shoved in the fireplace.

Beneath a window sits a claw-footed

tub filled with scat and shards of glass.

_Turn left onto E0740 Rd_

Suits under thick layers of dust lined up neat in a closet,

a wedding album

buried in rubble. No great catastrophe.

Just time.

As I drive I'm listening loud to songs with fiddles

harmony and heartache.

_Hiwassee Road_ declares a hand-painted sign, white on black.

I take my last right past a barn

smashed gray and silent

under a felled oak, my tank top sweated through—

but my eyes dry in the rearview.

Yes, loving me was a lonesome business. I saw your stillness as beautiful yet

I could not be still.

From the bed you said

_Come here, Hummingbird_

your face so bright I turned away. True,

your mouth was nectar, so I rubbed

gardenia petals into the pulse

of my throat.

Hummed a paean to you as I turned out the light.

Such solace, for a little while.

Yesterday morning

I watched your broad

back in sleep

a gentle up and down.

The curtains stirred and the open air felt like a failed spell,

heavy with cause

or maybe just Dread,

lurking with her black, rolling eyes, her demon mouth filled

with shotgun pellets and sweet tea rot.

I think she'd say

Bless your heart,

right before she gobbled it up.

Someone posted a sign, jarring in its shiny modernity:

_Welcome to Pleasant Valley!_

There's no real welcome, pleasant or otherwise, just a few store fronts

with broken windows and determined trees

growing twisted

though cracked foundations--

Mostly it's just desolate prairie and grassland

the post office gone

the outlaws too

and of course you

### Ardor Is Arson

I'd rather be an arsonist than a lover,

I'm better in an immediate crisis, better in all black,

silhouetted against a billowing conflagration.

(The conditions are right, no wind tonight, no moon.)

A book of matches or a bottle of wine,

it makes no difference in the end,

the outcome is the same:

someone without a home

someone left with sadness

that clings like a smoldering scent,

eats all the air in here, in the between.

I burned my house down and gave you the ashes.

Marianne S. Johnson

### Nine Feet East of Roadway Edge: One Shoe

The police report is staccato lines, check-the-box,

fill-in-the-blanks, measured. The mother hands it to me

over my desk with the files of minor tragedies, survivable

accidents piled between us. I knew she was coming,

so I put on a suit; she will want to see me as a lawyer,

not another mother of another nine-year old son.

I tell her that I will obtain the forty-one photos of the scene,

his small torso on the street, the ribs she tickled, his dark

hair unkempt. She doesn't have to see them, won't see

the red trails darkening the dirt shoulder, point of impact,

point of rest, in the school zone. The children knew

where to place the roadside flowers. Bright balloons

would leak like lungs, unlike a heart exploding

in a chest, a brain bursting in a skull, a breast

engorged and spurting with a baby's cry.

I fixate on his shoe: sole up, black as asphalt

with day-glo green laces, how she bought them

wondering if he would wear them out before

he outgrew them, how his feet slipped into

and then out of them as loose as he slipped

out of her and into breath of air.

### Tortious

Last night I dreamt of butterflies

fluttering soft upon the small boy's face,

his temple of asphalt wounds, blood

ponds, reflected in their stained glass wings.

The sound of my pounding heart

frightened them off, they rose

and strained against the gravity

of his hematoma chest. He was not mine.

A morgue shudder, my nightmare

hand clutched the bone cold table.

Monarchs circled above us, when my own

son's face morphed onto the broken body

as the head turned to me, pulpy lips mouthing

"It didn't hurt, mother." A scream

jackknifed my lungs, choked

on the gallows weight of night.

Tort, torture, contorted

tonight, I am wakeful very late

and watch my sleeping son in his bed.

His twelve-year old body thrashes itself awake,

I cocoon into the small of his small back,

the room fogged into a chrysalis. "Mom, I'm fine,"

he mutters annoyed, but I stay a little,

listening for his eyelashes to wing off in flight.

### Lessons for the Week

Tuesday night, my son studied

a Holocaust survivor, scrolling

the shrinking roll of Jewish names,

battered sepias of children before

their internments and tormentors.

Six million Jews were murdered,

and at least one million of them were children.

Yes, he is learning that.

My eighth-grader came home to news

of the Newtown 20, just nine days

left on the Christmas calendar.

Eyes stuck stoic in front of the TV

he asked if they were all first-graders

"like my buddy at school." Yes, I said,

like your buddy at school. "I helped

him get his lunch today," he stuttered

and I imagined the weed-stalk of him

bending low to hug his assigned bud,

look his little guy in the eye

and rustle him off into the wind.

Yes, he could do that.

Weekend deep in the terror of it,

I woke up screaming—his face

pasted onto dead children,

a young body in the morgue

thrown by a speeding car, swollen

with the violence of their embrace.

I fled the hysterical dark to his room,

his voice scraped awake with "what?"

but nothing escaped my throat.

In the morning whirl, he asked about

"that boy who skated" into the road

and I begged him never to do such things.

There was oatmeal and apple slices

in his promise. Yes, he could do that.

### Wrongful Death

1. _Plaintiff_

I can't move. An oddity on display.

They stare at me, a flightless bird-

creature from some obscure island

beyond any imaginable map's edge,

I have buried a child, wretched thing

that I am. My boy-egg broken on asphalt,

a boy-petal crushed in the road,

boy-flesh of my flesh ravaged by metal

rubber and gravel. The boy-less mother—

if I exist, then fate is indeed cruel

and unusual. The unthinkable happens,

savages the earth; it vultures 'round school

grounds and street corners. I'm the proof.

They can't take their eyes off me.

Waiting for me to puddle onto

the floor at the mention

of his name. I won't move.

If I move, the monsters under the bed

will know I am there, again. The monstrous

must account, the monstrous must

answer for this dark.

2. _Attorney_

I cannot smile. Retained woman,

smartly dressed at counsel table

made up face, disaster on my lips. No better

than the Barbie doll anchor serving up

the deaths of 135 in a plane

crash, live at five. I must speak

the unspeakable. A suit who filed suit

for the death of the boy. They hate me

already. How dare I ask

the value of a nine-year old in a grave?

Calculate the number of goodnight kisses

in a boy, compound the interest on his

soccer moves, the grades and grandchildren

left unearned. Price tag a love lost.

How can I? It is all I can do. He could have

been mine. He could have been theirs.

3. _Juror_

College is out, summer animates the halls.

This room, larger than I pictured, filled

with suited players, not the small,

swarmy stage of mockingbirds and

southern winds. The black robe

in charge crows to the lawyers

from his perch, captives in paper chains.

My name called and assigned

to seat number six, next to Five,

who looks like my Gramps when he

folds his arms. His children were grown

by a stay-at-home mom; they still breathe

and pay taxes and sweat in their beds.

What does Five know about single mom?

She could be a space alien to Five.

His bowels growl and it is still only morning.

Will I hear her womb scream, from here?

4. _Attorney_

Twelve faces lined up in an egg carton,

on the edge of breaking open in my hands

over the rail between the facts and their vanilla

safe, engineered, routine. They are about

to catch a nightmare, as if it could breed

like a germ I breathe on them. Tilt back

in the rack, as far as they can. Except for

number Six, whose body shifts toward me

and the horror I parade back and forth. She

wants to grab my hand as in a movie theater

when the music tenses just as blackbirds

murder on to a screen.

5. _Juror_

Mom shoulders into a fetal curl,

penitent as a nun. Only a handful

of years older than me, looking

a hundred years past dead.

She was me when she had him,

his tiny fingernails like fish scales

from pre-natal stew. A photo of his shoe

in the road, laces loose. He put them on that day

without a clue. His ten fingers, plump

as caterpillars gnawing a dirty palm,

would die within reach of her.

Her own hands weep in her lap.

A ruffle of crow wings. A bowel grumbles.

A throat clearing. A womb screaming.

6. _Plaintiff_

My ears are bleeding.

My eyes are blood-black.

My mouth is pooled black.

My uterus is pulpy road kill on the exhibit table.

Their eyes autopsy our lives—

every detail stitched with

womb memories, cut anew as a tomb

freshly hewn. Atrial muscle, a peeled

and sliced blood orange, pinned

to an emptied breast. They stare—

my hands bleed inconsolable.

7. _Attorney_

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,"

8. _Juror_

There are 100 trillion cells

in the human body, and one quarter

are red blood cells. I learned that

in biology class. Do her cells remember

his, laced in the membrane of red

between them? Her every breath sends

a purge of atoms that mourn him. The vein

in her neck is pounding out a dirge.

9. _Attorney_

"From the forensic, can you track the

boy's path until he was struck by the car?"

My ears are ringing.

Mouth of desert. Number Six

cradles her flat belly and rocks.

Photos swirl his youth, his eyes eclipse

in black. He could have been—

no, he was

ours.

### Anthony

was never ten. He was never a senior

with a license in his pocket, never

a rapper or a bagger at the market,

or a lover stockbroker with chardonnay

leather satchel. Dark eyes never saw

more than nine, once caught red-

handed with skateboard

on the roof of the school

by the super, after his homies

flew the coop. Call your mother, son,

to pick up you and your board, the dude

said. Still only nine at springtime,

black Vans and a natural tan, father-

less and stepfather-less again,

after mom came off a twelve hour

shift into a smackaround.

Anthony calmed his sisters, listened

to the walls heaving, his black hair

sweating like a highway in the desert.

_When I grow up_ , he thought, _when I grow_

_up_. Anthony did not see May break

into that April, never saw a girl's blouse

unbutton in the backseat throes,

never saw the silver sedan blow

through the school zone as he darted out—

Kate Magill

### Nest Study #1

The nest in dead branches is not an empty nest:

rimed over with questions and brimful with winter,

unperturbed by the wind that threatens to whisk it

from the place where it was made, needed, abandoned.

A room woven of leavings—red thread and tinsel—

bound up for a season and slowly dispersing.

To come home each day to such finely tuned debris:

I'm sure now, here, that I could make do as a bird.

To slip between currents and make of wind a home,

knowing every dwelling is weightless as your bones

and temporary as the blood that stirs about

your labyrinth, the headlong chambers of your heart.

### Nest Study #2

We built it of bottle caps and rusted barbed wire,

of green plastic army men abandoned on the beach.

We built it of sanded down seaglass, of seedpods,

of cow skulls revealed when the snow melts, pure and bleached.

We scavenged five-cent cans from culverts,

traded cap erasers for small stones,

caught frogs and fed them the right kinds of flies,

named them after villains, after heroes.

Maybe somewhere we saved up all the chewed stems

of the leaves of grass we plucked, sucking for sweet,

the buttercups we shone on chins,

the dandelions we unleashed,

propelled by whistles, pirouettes,

as we learned how our bodies,

their hither-thither breath and limbs,

could be the origin of wind.

### Whatever's Left

You need to stop reading.

The languor of someone else's structures

holds nothing, offers all the sustenance

of stone,

of floating.

You need to stop reading.

You need to change your gaze.

The words of others are not made

to hold your days,

the heat and strife and anguish

of your living living body.

Your body.

You are made

to contain and expel,

to hold and to tell

to go forth and put forth and hold forth and hold worth—

How to measure the worth

of a moment snagged from time?

How to measure the worth

of the hook, of the line?

It may all come to nothing.

How to frame the invisible,

make its elegance plain.

It will all come to nothing.

You need to change the gaze.

Double vision—not enough.

A singular vision—not enough.

Is it enough after dark

to feel the heat of the day

come up through the soles of your feet?

Enough to taste

the heart of the matter,

tongue its bloody pulp?

Enough to say you've tasted it?

Someday the heat will drain

from all the promises you've made

and whatever's left

will be printed

on someone else's page.

### Happy Here

an onion

an avocado overripe

stray garlic skins

and coffee grounds

a lingering smell of bleach

so deep in your skin

you can't scrub it out

sooty footprint from the peppermill

sweaters half knit with dog hair

fly shit speckling the windowsills

the grit of a year's worth of days

a day's worth of years

greying itself into your bare feet

a promise you'd be happy here

white mug half black with stale coffee

not enough room in a single sentence

for _happy_ and _here_ to coexist

here the cupboard full of nothing

where the mice like to shit

and over there the sack of rice

fifty dollars worth of rice

dribbling onto the floor

mingling with dead skin and flies' wings

the little bastards chewed a hole in it

keep coming back for more

failing fluorescence overhead

broken clock blinking an impossible time

and you struggling to remember the shape of the world

before the matter of _yours_ and _mine_

sour milk smell from the fridge

cream you never bother with

cream you keep for guests you never have

do you long for the days

the fugitive days

the promiseless places

empty cities

cities full of cold winds

colder faces

was it easier

it was

what is home but a ratsnest

a roach motel

a mad dog thrashing at the gate

to be let out

Karen Kraco

### Weeding While Contemplating a Break Up

I

Dig deep, get beneath it

or grab at the base and yank.

Tease out the thread

that snakes underground.

II

Mass murder. More than a little guilt

as I pull industrious lives

before they can fully express themselves.

Never to flower nor go to seed

yet propelled like the rest of us

by a desire to thrive.

III

Wrong place, wrong time, I tell them.

If only you had landed in crazy Mary's yard.

She would have let you live, talked with you all night.

IV

Just under an hour to clear the vegetable bed.

I would say I should have done this sooner

but it's easier to grasp what I do not want

after it's been around a while.

V

The ones I always miss

masquerade as the desired.

Same leaves, similar flowers,

but if you look closely

something's amiss.

VI

Damn. Sometimes

I make a big mistake

and get rid of the good.

A cucumber plant tangles

in my rip and yank, or an onion

just coming into onionhood

pulls up with a clump

of grass. I tell myself

it's an accident

but right now

I really don't know.

### Studio

Don't worry about death

at least that's what I thought he said

as we reach and reach toward the far wall, then hinge

into triangle pose. Glad for permission,

but still can't ignore the ache

the slow burn as I try to balance.

I'm missing two corners

of you-me-us.

Flatten it out, it's more about form than death.

As we stretch our right arms toward two o'clock

I'm not sure what he means

but I tuck in my fifty-year-old belly

sight along my upward arm

try out a position

that I fancy to be the stance

of a time-defiant warrior.

_Soften your gaze._ He walks over to me.

And don't worry about the depth of the pose.

_Depth,_ not _death,_ I realize, disappointed.

_Don't worry about depth._ So I bend

less deeply, flatten out, arranging myself

into a vertical plane so thin that I don't exist.

I surface many poses later

all of us in downward-facing dog.

### I Don't Need To Know

Not the name of the frog that sounds

like a ratchet, nor why it's calling

in the fall. That huge floriferous fungus

on top of the stump—I don't care to know

if it's safe to eat. It's not in me to ask myself

why I visited this patch of land this summer

hoping for a glimpse of the bright blue bunting

that we always looked for in the cottonwood.

Some of the hummingbirds by the bridge

today might be the same busy birds

that kept brushing our arms that year. I don't know

how long they live, and not knowing is okay with me.

I think I might know why the warblers are drab and silent in fall,

why they hawk for bugs and frantically work the branches.

I could probably explain why the wood ducks seem so brilliant now

after a mottled August. You taught me that, and more.

This morning, a green heron stretched his neck

farther than I ever could have imagined—

but these days, nothing surprises me.

I know exactly why I hold each season close,

as if it were my last visit. I remember

your last season, that fall when we heard

the chitter of the hummingbirds

in the bright orange jewelweed

long before we saw them

hovering to feed.

### Aftermath

We root for trees to stand upright

in the same way we want our parents

to live forever, our friends to stay loyal,

our passions to burn bright.

We nurture—or neglect—

that massive presence

and then it crashes.

How quickly we try to fix the tangle,

transform jagged edges

and dangling branches

tame the lightning's gash

the ragged rip of the wind

with smooth swift cuts

easy-to-handle chunks.

We gather branches in tidy bundles

place them where they won't be in our way.

Two years ago, after the tornado's sudden swath,

we wept to see the herons circle and circle

over the mass of trees that once harbored their young.

Can we really know what creatures feel?

Why were we so surprised at how fast

they settled in to feed, how the next year,

they returned to rebuild their lives?

Admire the diligence of the fungus

now awakened on the fallen trunk.

Celebrate its foresight and patience.

Its spores lie in wait

then seize the wet, wild gusts

as a chance to thrive.

Yesterday, the old pine lay across the front yard

sheltering a bat with two pups, furry little bumps

clinging to her breast. We couldn't read her sleepy gaze

but desperately needed to take charge, to heal

anxious as we waited for wildlife rescue to return our call.

All afternoon, the symphony of chainsaws and chippers

drowned out the _caw caw caw_ of the homeless crow.

Matt Daly

### Elk Hunting, 12 Below

What isn't like this? We make our daily

enterprises more difficult than we must

for the sake of giving memory fresh

meat for its freezer, or to have something

to chew when the morning is colder than

today. We add so much complexity

to what comes easily barreling down

the smooth shoulder of the black butte, darker

than the star-salted sky, in a fluid school

of hooves. Animal stench dodges between

dome lights illuminating the hunters

at ease in warm trucks pulled just off the road.

It is not only the coldest mornings

when we work our way deep down Long Hollow

that we nevertheless hear every shot

in the fusillade and know what is most

difficult is escaping the thoughts we

make, the cold projectiles we lob at what

wild life still courses through what we have left

of the vast wilderness inside each of us.

### Beneath Your Bark

Would I could be a pine beetle

tracing my underneath cursive

on the inside of your fascia

not that slick blue bugger

who girdled your phloem

who separated your roots

from your reaching

but this one who goes nowhere

save wiggling through your liquid thump

in cul-de-sacs and curlicues

I wish I could get under

your skin again begin again

in my black sheen

a radiant radical pellet

pinballing beneath your flakes

your scales around your heart wall

not a wall at all permeable

a tub for sap to be sludge swam

slithered in under there

inside the soft side of your skin

outside the wooden stem

of your still ringing heart

Wolf Hunter1

We strike up conversation

across the concrete island

between us. Sleet pelts

our faces as we refuel.

I am comfortable talking

in flurries to a man

in camouflage, but worry

about fumes roiling

out of our gas tanks.

I keep thinking about

warnings, pump stickers,

about the mass of fumes

collecting around us,

his idling engine,

my cell phone,

static electricity.

He tells me he shot a male

wolf earlier in the day.

He is specific about

the weight: one hundred

seventy pounds.2

I listen in October sleet,

have a most common thought:

the world is a strange place

for all of us to go on living

together, full of contradictions:

wolf pups wag tails when

packmates return from tearing

elk calves to pieces, people

advocate replacing lead

bullets with copper to reduce

unintended mortalities.3

I want to ask the hunter:

his reason for shooting the wolf,

the kind of bullet he used,

his justification for the claim

his wolf is almost as large

as any wolf ever killed

by any North America man.4

I want to understand:

his method for establishing

heft of a carcass, why he keeps

the bed of his truck covered,

why he does not shut off

the engine at the filling station

as instructed.

But more than that,

I want to be happy

to live in a place with wolves

as large as men, to live

in a place where men talk

over warning signs.

More than that, I want to live

in a place where no one

wants to shoot anything

for any reason

easy to document.5

_____________________

1 According to the Wikipedia

article "Gray Wolf," the largest

American wolf, killed on July 12,

1939, 70 Mile River, Alaska,

weighed 175 pounds.

2 According to the Wikipedia

article, "Human," 170 pounds

is about average for a human

male.

On screen, the Vitruvian man

looks uncomfortable, as do

the naked Asian man, the naked

blond woman in the sidebar.

This is the first time I have looked

at pictures of naked people

on Wikipedia.

3 Several of the citations at the end

of the article, "Gray Wolf,"

credit "Graves."

4 My comparison of footnotes

in the Wikipedia articles reveals:

146 citations, "Human,"

318 citations, "Gray Wolf."

I do not understand why wolves

require more than twice

the documentation of people.

5 I think most of us know

something about exaggerating

the weight of things.

### American Robin

Dun flight flares around the corner.

Mate or prospective mate gives chase,

red-breasted one who later waits

on a branch after the first hits

the back door's glass, collapses

panting, dull-eyed, on the new deck.

I hold the numb bird in my hands,

wrap her loosely in a green cloth,

keep a close eye out for magpies.

Given the opportunity

they would mob the male, chase him off,

whet the edges of their black bills.

My son comes outside only once

to touch with his index finger

between wings we think are broken.

We believe telling a story

could conjure that story straight out

of the air. Her story opens

in my palm. Braille points of talons

tug at whorls. A heartbeat pulses.

She regains her ability

to stand, to perch. Return to flight.

She reappears on a low branch,

unnoticed from inside the house.

No banner unfurls for this act:

saving one life from other lives,

from the windowed door between us.

Our story is hard as glass. We slam

against it with our hollow bones.

We slam against it with our bones.

### Eagle Cap Rekindling

We have not seen each other in twenty-five

years and even though back then I covered my

naked body with your naked body I do not expect

you to remember my name. I will speak

truly, there is no reason not to be honest

after so much time, I did not remember your name

until I read it on a signpost as I made my way

back to you although I have never forgotten

the feel of you wet and then you drying slow

on my skin, that glacial silt mud scent of you

mixed with the spare change tang of my sweat

how you washed me in your coldest springs

until the only odors were snow and stone.

You haven't changed as much as I have

or if so for the better having reintroduced

yourself to wolves. Whereas I am just as tongue-

tied around you as I always was. So I offer you

my flesh, softer now, clothed or naked as you wish

and the admission that you stunned the howl

right out of me all those years ago when my tongue

knew the feel of your skin better than it knew

this voice it has grown so familiar with

so resigned to. I have longed so long to revel

in your muck and reek as one wild body

savors the blood pulse thrum of every other

wild body no matter how rocky or old.

Paulette Guerin

### Emergence

The summer our parents split, we spent our days

at St. Mary's. June's heat had drawn the water

from the ground. As the sun incubated the air,

cicadas crawled from their burrows and screeched

into being. Males called out with ribbed bellies;

the females rubbed their wings in answer,

flitting on stone statues of saints, squirming

in the crevices of robes or folded hands.

The windows vibrated with mating calls,

sparse rugs hardly absorbing the sound.

Icons looked down from plaster walls,

their eyes distant like someone lost or in love.

### Emily Dickinson Floats the Buffalo River

She regrets wearing white,

the edge of her dress muddied.

Down she drifts—

catching a whiff of charred food

and a faint Skynyrd riff,

past purple flowers she deems gentians.

The canoe paddle

stirs the tawny fish. She calls them cod,

the water clear

down to the riverbed's

algaed stones.

Just beyond the shadow of a cliff,

the rapids come.

She cannot stop

thinking of the river's nonchalance—

its only thought, resistance;

its only love,

change. Evening light

shifts the tableau—

viridian and burnt ocher

blend to muted indigo.

Just when she seems at home,

Dickinson pens a postcard—

"How can I stand

this tighter Breathing,

this Zero

at the bone?"

### First Communion

The night before, Grandma made my pallet

on the couch with faded blue flowers.

Across the room, the iron-barrel stove loomed.

We learned not to touch it.

At midnight I woke. I'd never heard rain on a tin roof

and was sure what Revelation promised was true—

dark horses had come. In church we'd learned

about the wise and foolish virgins with their oil.

I had not confessed my sins. Everyone else slept—

or were they gone? Then the rain let up.

The dark turned dim. I chipped the polish

from my nails, ashamed they were not bare.

### Milking

The women slipped her head

between the fork of a tree.

I braced a board against the bark,

a makeshift stock. Mrs. Henry kept the rope

taut around the legs while Grandma

milked the bleating nanny.

The swollen bag shrank.

The runty kid approached slowly,

still afraid of hooves.

Smoothing out her wrinkled dress,

Mrs. Henry said her grandbaby

would be visiting soon.

Then softly, "But she's got

no fingers on one hand.

Umbilical cord, you know."

Grandma frowned, then said, "Still, you're lucky,"

placing her hand above her heart

just below the neck.

### Morrilton, Arkansas

Train cars jump in and out

of old storefront windows.

A boy in Levi's crosses the tracks

toward the monument company's headstones.

A few already have a chiseled name.

I wait for him behind a heap of brick

and corrugated tin. On windy days,

the paper-mill stink drifts into town.

He claims the money beats baling hay,

then closes his mouth over mine.

Hank Hudepohl

### Crossed Words

I wonder, looking at the red-headed bird at the feeder,

if it is a woodpecker, or cardinal, or maybe a rare, hot-headed

warbler come to dine with me on my parent's deck

as I visit with them for a long weekend. I am picking

over the seeds on my plate too, curious about how

I got here, which is to say, living a thousand miles away

and now just a rare visitor to their empty nest,

while my convalescent mom sleeps off her dizziness

in the back bedroom and my dad calls out to me

from the kitchen again to ask if I'd like anything more.

Yes, maybe to understand how migrations, digressions,

even casual addictions can lead to the brink of confusion

where simple questions like "what do you want to eat?"

and "when can you visit again?" can be as complicated to answer

as my dad's Sunday crossword, locked as I am in my own state

of surprise, my children awaiting my return like Christmas,

my office chair awaiting my shape, my car awaiting my key,

my lips in search of a seven-letter word that rhymes with why.

### The Furrier

His years and days and hours are threaded

and wound round the spool into the seam

of the joined hide, pressed there, eyed, sewed up

in a scarf or coat with a fur trim at the neckline.

He says, with a gentleman's wink,

"This will look so wonderful on you, wear it."

And his customers oblige him for hats, scarves,

coats of opossum, otter or the shine of mink.

The sewing machine, branded _Never Stop._

His one hand over the next stitching

until the bifocaled seams of perfection

are set exquisitely in their proper place.

Anachronistic. Patient. Hopeful.

The spells of time and law are against his ways.

No apprentice now, not even his son

will learn the trade he learned in Istanbul.

"Take a candy," he says, and feeling more bold,

"I will make you a scarf!" He picks off the floor

scraps of farm-raised mink and bends to his task

revived, unashamed, deliberate, and old.

### Confidence

You know it

when you have it in hand.

The world. And you can become,

without it, so small

as to fit between

the letters of a single word

like if or why.

With it, you can lean casually

upon a capital I. Too much

and you grow so

infinite you believe you can balance

the Milky Way

on the back of your fingernail.

Without any at all,

you will grasp

like a child for an open hand

and fail.

### Riverbank

Come, walk with me along the riverbank

with an old man & his stick, a shadow,

and a boy whistling into an empty bottle

that he found stuck in the soft mud.

The river never looks the same way twice.

The rusted barges float past full of coal.

It is late summer rising into fall. The river is life,

is earth, is the ground note of an ancient song

if you listen for it. Heraclitus once said:

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Let it move you by boat, by raft, by canoe,

by whatever means available to your luck.

Let it carry you away, purify you, inebriate you

with the intoxicating notes of frogs & crickets.

No one ever crosses the same river twice.

The river is daughter & sister, life giver

and lover of sky & bird & fish.

The river is the blood of condensation, of fog,

redeemer of lost ways, collector of light, a thief.

You can never cross the same river twice.

Henry, how long since you've crossed a river?

Artery of disarray, spare parts, rusted cans,

of sandstone, storm-tossed limbs, driftwood,

marshes and grasses, cache of wildflowers: this river

never says my name the same way twice.

Alma Eppchez

### At the Back of the Road Atlas

All text in quotes was found scrawled on the last page of a Rand McNally road atlas.

Chicago to Las Vegas dates unknown.

Eavesdropping on someone else's road trip.

It was America, is America, it will be America.

"I guess we solved The Free-will Question. (No)"

Hypothetical disillusionment—the Freeway makes monks out of men.

It's good, when it's good to be wrong.

"Tiny bladder"

16oz every meal—It became an issue.

Stiff joints, playing Fight Club in the Super 8 sleep.

"What's the closest airport?"

There is a fairground, and a strip

Where planes take off to spray the patchwork quilt.

"Little fuckers over in What Cheer, Iowa."

Exit 201 begged to be taken. Population: 678.

Some towns have only known hard times. What did you expect?

"Yes, but at least we'd never have a reason to see her again."

Women get easy to resent out here. Mile 937—don't look

At the burning crash. Forget to call on your mother's Birthday.

"Oh I'd say another two or three miles."

Tiny bladder. The country hangs along

Interstate 80, a cheap charm bracelet.

"What would Jesse do?"

In Bountiful, Utah did you piss in Salt Lake?

Take off your clothes but don't want to get wet.

"I'm still a guy."

Comfort in the 3am silence—it's not about passing.

Nod to the U-Haul speeding in the right lane.

"What is cold and wet down the back of my shorts?"

Tiny bladder. Crazy straws and watered down whiskey.

Barely any rest stops past Des Moines.

"Tie the kids to the back of the limousine."

What would you name them?

One night stands with funny labels.

"Gunpowder and lead (lace)"

And leather. Every station is The Best Country Music.

They love it in South Africa too—something about the slide guitar.

"Boomtime."

Will you father miss his police scanner?

Roll down the windows so the smoke falls out.

"The Virgin River: because it runs just fast enough"

Utah, Arizona, Nevada. Into the Colorado

Where it slows. What did you gain in these mountains?

"Your family and their fucking gum"

All these fat and shiny memories. Deep fried things.

Gum sticks, but you're growing up, moving on. You found the road.

"Next time we know how to have fun on a trip,

We just go to a restaurant then hangout

In the parking lot taking Boomtime pictures."

### Citizenship from Below

Mimi Sheller

The conquerors

keep easy

kinds of records—

that make it easy

for history to stay on the surface

just scratching at the paper trail.

I take solace in archeology.

As children

The conquerors—they

went to see the fossilized

dinosaurs foot prints on the banks

of the ancient river. It left such an impression.

And so they stomp heavy

dumbly fearing immortality.

Hoping to evade it

like the dinosaurs.

I take solace in extinction.

In their last will and testament

they request tall headstones,

afraid of their shadows

disappearing when they do.

I take solace in electric lights of citizenship shining up from below.

### The New Old-Hack

( _you remember fighting_ ) _(you remember defeat)_

Oh god! And you stopped doing

wouldn't it be like dying? the things you love.

You showed me a minefield And you don't

and told me how check out books

you walked across it from the library anymore.

every morning You took a job at McDonald's,

on your way to doing and you fell off

the things you love. out of the sky.

( _you remember fear)_ _(you remember a future)_

You had a lover once You tell me

a few steps ahead what the early 2000s

with heartbeat did to us.

like steamroller You tell me a story

and diamond colored dreams, about this paranoia

just as that shattered your bones,

sure—just as about a quiet

sharp. McCarthy era—

And when he was blown unobtrusive

up Secret Service

you grew love letters tapping through

from the dirt your maple bark

under your fingernails and revolution's sugar

and you cried, flowing out

but did not visit him in jail. on to the ground.

### My mother, the professor of childhood, gave a lecture on Snow White

My mother always sounds like she is about to weep.

Her students nod.

Mirrors mirror film.

Spinning

was a metaphor for telling.

She speaks

by jumping off the edge of thinking deeply.

Walt erased all the spinning mothers.

Who does the telling anyway?

Mother,

it's a man's world.

We held the apple in our hands and it filled with poison

It is called faulty pedagogy.

You teach about children,

so you know.

I absorb you

—with all your flaws.

You watch.

What is foreshadowing for, now that all the stories have been told?

My brother—

my father—

you

raspberry prologues into my belly.

Hold me like newborn ears,

because the world whispers soft and incessant.

Tell me a new story now.

No place for jealousy.

No motive but love.

### Echoes of Tuskegee

some notes on my experience during the night shift at the Fresno ER

I have a confession:

I wore blue latex gloves,

walked the linoleum hallway from triage and

in the early California morning,

under doctor's lax direction I

saved a woman's life.

She was still alive

at least

when my shift ended.

I am not proud;

I am terrified.

of what it means to owe someone

nothing after the night shift turns in.

Of what it means to research amateur

on a stranger's body

and never to say,

"May I"

or "Thank you."

Haunting me:

Alabama haunts me

from the thirties to the seventies.

For 40 years The Tuskegee

Institute kept black bodies

in petri dish

share crop quarters

growing cultures of medical atrocity

—growing cultures of "progress."

Brought to us by:

_Racialized front lines._

History has mouthfuls that

I don't know how to talk about and

when I try to swallow—

I cut up my throat.

I should bleed out lab rats.

I should bleed out syphilitic sores grown on black bodies after science had a cure.

I should bleed out their children; sick by birthright.

I should bleed when surviving means breathing, but does not mean life.

My platelets—my whiteness:

scab over like mercury and

underneath these seamless scars

we have not changed—

growing sores

on black bodies

after science had a cure.

Everything is syphilis,

from night stick, to

achievement gap, prison

bars, dreams unspoken,

fish tank overpass,

dying for my sins

Garner, Brown, Martin.

There is no consent in social experimentation.

So how can I condescend to ask for consent?

I want to apologize:

Woman,

You are probably dead by now.

You were maybe 40.

They said you had overdosed on something.

You were unconscious when they found your body.

Your body

I am sorry.

I know you had a life and

a story and

loved ones who remember you.

I know that your death is not a lesson and

I must learn to be better.

I do not know your name.

_I am sorry._

I know how your naked body fell

across the hospital cot

in coma humiliation.

The doctor asked me if I wanted to practice CPR and

I didn't say, "How is this practice?"

Your breasts spilling

milk over asphalt

away from my fists and

I didn't cry, but

I should have.

I know how your broken breastbone clicks

in and out as I pump your limping heart.

I know how half opened eyes roll back and

can't make contact and

what could an apology possibly mean to you now?

If I had said:

"Stay with me now."

You were never here with me.

Separate lives—separate lessons.

You had learned how to be victimized and

I was learning how to rape.

Woman,

Yes, your heart began to beat again

as I beat your chest.

I do not know how long

you survived after that—

brain dead and pale blue-black

on the cot.

I know there is nothing right

about living or dying

surrounded by white coat

strangers singing "Staying Alive"

by the Bee Gees

in bar room cacophony,

so a scared little white girl

can learn how

to keep the beat

on your still

breaking

heart.

The Tuskegee experiments

—echoes themselves—

echo through the nation a quiet and affecting call—

ignore—violate—ignore—

violate—ignore—violate—

ignore . . .

Jim Burrows

### At the Megachurch

Like any prophet, he denies his god

and is his god. These thousands worship him

because they know the soul may be eternal,

but immortality lies in the body,

and even faith cannot escape the flesh.

Tonight the church is full.

The inedible manna of miracles

begins to fall, invisibly. Their throats

are sapped by laughter jolting through their tears.

Limp bodies litter the carpeted stage,

anointed, cauterized, slain by his touch

and the dark water of his voice.

A crutch is tossed aside.

Its owner sprints away.

A blind man shields his eyes

as they fill up with light. A child,

crying, his asthma wheezing through his fear,

comes forward as his mother holds his hand.

Head back, eyes closed, he waits for God

to seal a kiss around his open, trembling mouth,

and blow the ashes from his lungs.

### Fishing

To feel without seeing

the force that pulls against us,

thrashing out its strength

beyond our measure, guess its weight and beauty,

and then to know, be certain: this is fishing.

Tradition took me to a secret pond,

taught me to bait a hook and cast a line,

to wait, relaxed, but ready for the strike,

ready to set the hook beyond the barb

deep in the creature's mouth, and not let go.

I felt the nibble first, a spasming

Did you imagine that?

then the plunge of the line and the whine of the reel,

the strain of a living thing bowing the rod

beneath the mystery of calm, dark water;

then above, writhing on my line,

suspended from somewhere in its gut,

the swallowed hook catching and shredding there,

much heavier in thin air, swimming still,

fighting the thing inside it

past all victory and wonder.

I dropped it, rod and all, into the boat.

What kind of fisherman was I

to fear the blood-gilled bass dying in bloody flops,

its belly bulging for the knife,

working its mouth and lying still at last?

### Hospital at Night

Something about the background quiet here.

The hum and clank of dinner on the roll,

a next-door neighbor rinsing out the fear

in something shallow, some event or bowl.

Beside each bed, a white contraption hums,

and suddenly a disembodied cough

erupts, but every separate sound becomes

a part of it: this hush you can't turn off.

The doors are all ajar, as if to keep

a child from being frightened of his sleep.

The doctors come and go as darkness falls,

and weary nurses, not one beautiful,

move in a chapel calm down long white halls,

turning off and on smiles like light snowfall.

### Wolf Hunting

Like some old fossil on the Isle of Wight,

some baron with a number in his name,

my grandfather kept a stable of hounds.

Like him, the dogs were poor Americans

descended from a place they'd never been,

a little taller than their counterparts

in Wales and England, built for taller game

and more wide open range, but with the same

look about them, sad but clean, saddlebacks

of black and lemon, spots of black and tan,

comical floppy ears and short rough coats:

not beautiful in any special way.

And on a weekend night, or any night,

since they were both retired old men by then,

he and his longtime sidekick used to wait

for nightfall, then sink slowly back in time.

They didn't go on horseback, and a kill

was rare as murder. They'd just drive around

and talk and listen, breathing in the stars.

Maybe a little whiskey in a sack,

or maybe not—I never saw the stuff

in action, just the bottles in the fridge

on the back porch, there with the silty brew

that tasted like a cellar, and the wine

as sickly-sweet as Kool-Aid.

But those dogs,

you could hear them far off, their voices wild

but somehow mournful, like the highway sound

that drifted through the window late at night,

a faraway life. My grandfather claimed to know

what they were after by the sound they made—

a rabbit had a certain sound, a coon—

as if the soul of the quarry had entered them

and all they did was give it back again.

What they were after were the little wolves

called coyotes, mostly scavengers, that stayed

and flourished when the bison disappeared

and deer were hunted down. The greater wolves

were all long gone by then, they'd blown away

with the dustbowl, or about that same time,

after a hundred years of poverty

and degradation. But to a young boy

they were still there—everything was still there,

it was just hidden. And none of those good dogs,

or even three or four, would have a chance

in hell against it. Something engineered

and driven in the blood might chase it down

and corner it, but then they'd have to fight,

and out of nowhere others would appear,

the rest of it. It would be like a bunch

of prep school boys against a prison gang.

They'd all go down like lambs.

Which never happened,

of course. It couldn't happen. Now and then

a bitch went missing or a wound appeared,

but there'd be no deep mystery in that.

The countryside itself could slash and tear.

Each year the busy highway took its share.

And then—a fact you wouldn't so much see

as hear, when you remembered afterward—

their bodies had this tendency to turn

on one another, out there in the dark

they had no business in but still longed for,

with nothing left to guide them but the moon.

### Sighting

The deer, a buck and doe,

appeared and stood

on the stage of the road,

and my father slowed

the Oldsmobile, then stopped it

completely, to wait them out.

Noble, aloof, undeniably

beautiful, like swans with hooves,

they craned their necks

and turned their gazes on us,

patiently, without apparent

curiosity. What did they see?

Two fully grown men

with boys in their eyes,

a father and son,

an old couple of sorts?

Or was it only distance,

_something else_ , a thing to be

appraised and moved away from

carefully, without words

or thought, at a gingerly trot?

_Look_ , the moment said,

receding all around us

like the future after love.

And then they leapt inside it,

fleeing, tender white bellies

over tightly-strung thorns.

Rachel Stolzman Gullo

### Lioness

When my man stood in the morning kitchen

His shadow cast an exact likeness.

Brown flecked yellow linoleum, his soot profile

Not a husband, round forehead, swollen lips, wandering eye.

In 1950, they call him Negro, they call me Jewess.

If he knew what I was carrying, would he have

sat at my table nine months?

A Jewess and a Negress both carry nine months.

Would anyone believe that in 1950?

Yes, a woman with child knows the turn of a day.

A Jew has nowhere to go on Sunday morning.

My man ducked his hard head out the door a June Sunday.

In January the shadows are short.

There were no shadows in the room when we glimpsed the crown.

I took her from them, we locked eyes

already familiar her heart smell

I could have licked her clean.

On berries, squash, ripe bananas, milk bottles with honey she grows.

There is heat on her belly when I put our skin to skin

There is a sun inside.

I know how to calm a tidal wave

I can put a hurricane down for a nap.

In 1954 my kitchen is set for a party.

All of our guests bring sunflowers

we have honey cake, four beeswax candles

All around I hear the buzzing of a hive.

I lean down to peer into her eyes,

golden, they are happily distracted.

"Mommy, look at me next to you!"

I scoop her up and our shadow is an unrecognizable animal.

At night in my clean house when I try to think,

the street noise through the window distracts me.

Out there the language hasn't changed,

but through a mere pane of glass it loses all meaning.

I step inside her room.

Her mane on the pillow thrills me

her eyelids gently lowered over a dream

lashes brush the night air.

I bend my mouth to her ear and carefully, "Lioness."

Her mouth curves into a tender smile at the sight of herself.

### The Diviner

When you cried for the first time, my new love

the stars skittered off the night's face

and I braced my arms

To keep the cloth on the table.

Then I understood

how a mere wall of stone

held back the crusaders

at the shore of Rhodes.

A salmon can press

through nine hundred pounds of river

upstream, to its birthplace, lay eggs

like thousands of pin-pricks.

A man with eyes closed

guided by a forked branch

can dig two stories, underground, with a shovel

to draw water for a herd of sheep, lying down.

I can fathom these powers,

I knew you enough.

What shocked was the strength

I'd never known—in crying.

### The Eighties Were Different

If your best friend was a child actress, you went on auditions with her.

And if you were sitting in a waiting room, and fourteen, you had a chance to audition too.

Once I almost got a Doritos spot

because my teeth were better than hers.

I bit into six Doritos for the camera

and I never felt more semitic.

But her everything else was better than mine, and neither of us got it.

When she landed a role on Charles in Charge, I spent the week on set with her.

The cast and crew treated us both like new friends.

The Eighties were more innocent, even when they were so gritty.

I asked Ricky Shroder what he wanted for his birthday.

He told me a box of condoms.

At the tender age of fifteen she lost her virginity to an overweight boy in the bedroom of a party.

She regretted it within minutes.

It was my brilliant idea that we tell him she was a prostitute and that he owed her a hundred bucks.

We both liked this idea.

We did it, but he didn't pay.

Yana Lyandres

### New York Transplant

I was born of the sound rain doesn't make

but masquerades,

of fleeting glances

across subway platforms

for my voice is too weak

to make thoughts collide with air

in the sex of speech

but the eye can't help but look.

I don't know how I got from trains 1 to 3 to E

from smoking in high school

parking lots to New York City

or what about taking headache pills

makes me wish for the headache back

but stop signs are the reds of Valentines

if you let them be

and flipping through old diaries

is a requiem

for relationships passed on.

Eleven years ago, in class, we tore up squishies,

the earthworms we kept like pets,

in the name of science

and I'm still shedding tears over their

shiny intestines exposed, embarrassed

for their vulnerability.

I harden my insides with cigarettes

so when these city streets break me

and they finally get to cut me up,

there will be no wet-looking pink, blue, grey sunsets

for them to write poems about

and the black that envelopes them

will mask the wounds of the scalpels I swallow daily.

The only thing they'll find

is what I want them to: the love letters

tucked away like children in the protection of my veins—

to the rat I saw scampering down east 10th street,

to the punk girl I met at the bodega who

thought _I_ was the one who's cool,

to all the people leftovers that still live inside me,

taking up space, not letting me leave.

### Procession of Late Night Confessions

Sometimes coffee spilled over all

the pages, post-its of my thoughts—

soaked-through milky smell

concealing tears felt—

is a ritual cleansing,

like baptism, spring cleaning

purging of sin.

I won't send a plague on this house,

I'm sorry, this house is not a home

rain-streaked windows

make this place more livable.

We like to talk of christenings

in lieu of baptisms in blood

I am not a martyr, I know I am not a martyr.

I know not who I am

but I know 5 AM

and its cousins—hunger sans appetite,

dry heaving over toilets, the silence

like scalpels, silence like UV rays

burning my skin with the lights turned off;

silence—

you wouldn't believe me if I told you how

5 AM is a scalding cup of chamomile

I pour down my throat every night

and every time I'm still surprised

when it burns.

### Cut Me Open, Make It Hurt

For Nancy Spungen

You cut up your arms with

love bite-heroin injection cocktails

but if you ask me about these markings

on my skin, I will bear my teeth.

This is not self-harm like my mother

tells me—it is survival.

Some people use the backs of their hands, veins—

feet because they're easy to cover—

as a sketchbook, the medium—dad's

toolbox nails, razors left in the med cabinet—

please

cut me open to prove

there is blood in these veins

instead of strings of copper, zirconium—

I don't hide hi-tech electronic tendrils

of synapses under my hair.

I can't tell you how to love your scars, Nancy—

like ones Barbie doesn't have—

but mine are my art history,

and if this sharp linework and shadings,

teacup, clover, fadings in the letters

reminds you of addiction—I'd say,

Hell yeah, these beauty marks—not scars—

chart my path through self-deprecation, hatred,

crises of identity I metaphorically injected

into my veins every day for the past eight years—

yet reveal, on close inspection,

a faint floor plan back

to self-love.

I gladly go under the needle,

pour ink into my skin

to be less human—

not bionic but stronger

than bones and teeth.

Nancy, close-read yourself, study

the patchwork quilt you wrote

on your own body—I don't talk smack.

What kind of love is this,

if you don't come back.

### Coast to Coast

I could not tell you why

I've never had the taste for Earl Grey tea

or why I've been craving shrimp lately

or why my little brother's hands

tightening reflexively around my wrists

makes me think

of low-tide wanderings,

hermit crab-chasings,

lobster rolls with Cape Cod chips

and sweater sleeves hanging limp past my fingertips

but home is bus windows looking out

onto the calm roads of Cambridgeshire,

friends who wander with you along shorelines

past town limits 'til you couldn't know what would follow

or if you would be swallowed up

by seaside winds and unsaid hope-filled mementos

of future meetings, hints of which wafted toward you

from the ocean depths.

I cannot say I have much to be proud of lately,

but last week I went to bed before 11 three nights consecutively,

didn't miss my stop on any of the trains I took,

and feasted on a love expressed in crêpes with jam

in a seaside town in Suffolk.

MD's Nu descendant un escalier n° 2

Cubist-Futurist Modernist classic

can't take my eyes off

that stroboscopic-, stop-

motion photography

those curves and lines

browns and ochres. Can this simply be

a dissection

of movement, human like a machine?

Faceless, emotionless

someone, teach me

how not to feel

give me a new word

for fucked-up hurting

instead of "broken"

there is a certain strength

in getting out of bed.

Can't walk

down a staircase right,

watch these Iron Man legs

and shapely thighs,

curvaceous ass like 3-D disks—

I trip over stairs that aren't there.

I've been told to stay away from

empty calories,

feminist arguments,

to keep my clothes on,

I drink my coffee black.

Marcel Duchamp,

where is a cause I can believe in?

Do away with art, with it all—

Marcel, give me something I can piss on.

Heather Katzoff

### Start

Lining up near a throng

of other little girls

striped knee socks rising

from velcro sneakers of pink

and purple clashing with camp

shirts orange and white

we waited on dead grass

no longer green until

a whistle broke through

the air, startling our crowd

into motion, and in the middle

of the pack, with whipping

ponytails blinding sight

with elbows and knees

building barriers

locking us like puzzle pieces

keeping the herd together

I found my way out

and flew toward a splintered

makeshift totem pole finish

line upon discovering

that I could run.

### Into the West

highway transformations

criss-cross the country

turnpike entrances

dot the states

places recounted

by parkway exits

co-gen plants

give way

to corn fields

to the continental

divide

there exists a point

after industry

before complacency

where scenic overlooks

become contemplations

of prairie grasses

the journey

begins at a toll booth

entrance ramps

gas stations

rest stops

mile markers

of the passage of time

interstitial spaces

with roadside sculpture

and memorial crosses

replace mini-malls

and truck depots

where antelope

really do play

against barbed wire backdrops

and the unnatural

beauty

of a smog-inspired

neon pink sun

melting

into the horizon

but before I-80

dead ends

into the ocean

before you reach the salt flats

that were once

vast seas

before tumbleweed

adheres to the front

bumper

we

have already passed

into the west

### Desire

I want your lips,

lips that are mine

neither by birth

nor commitment,

I want them to kiss places

with no proper names

in the annals of anatomy.

We will name them

together.

We will baptize those places

with our breath

the order of consonants and vowels

secret

and idiosyncratic

and shared

in silence.

I want your eyes.

I want to claim them

in a way that I cannot.

I want them on me

following me

feeling their gaze move and rest

in time with my hips

and I want to see what I look like

inside them.

### The Naming of Things

We dance around the vocabulary

but there isn't a word

to suit

and all the ones tested

sit ill on tongue

and teeth

neither of us certain

that a words exists

to define our relationship

one to the other

neither of us certain

we need definition

Adam went about the garden

telling every bird and beast

what it ought to be called

ignoring the fact

that they were what they were

whether He liked it

or not

ignoring the fact

that the snake

would charm

and then bite

no matter what name

He gave him

### Eastbound

The wind chill

made the air

feel 14 degrees

below

when I left this morning

before the sun

showed its face

to a sky of perfect

sapphire

blue

and the sky is punctuated with stars

too bright and too many to name

and I want you

to tell me which ones they are

but I leave while you still sleep

gently kissing your forehead goodbye

and though you stir

your snoring continues

I drive east

and watch the sun

work its magic

on the Pennsylvania landscape

the colors of it breaking

my heart

over and over

I see the spectrum

everywhere

in fields of snow

on the rock walls

lining the highway

in the memory of your hair

as it catches the moonlight

before you wake

Tom Yori

### Cana

When they tipped the jars

—which were actually those old amphorae

that cradled wines from Rome to Tarsus,

Hellespont to Heliopolis

—it wasn't water any more.

It ran red as blood

and He fell silent

hearing the echo

of a word yet unspoken.

But the steward, an obsequious Greek

(graduate, All-But-Dissertation

—Pythagorean U., Corinth Campus)

won by his master casting lots

simpered at the rube.

Though, he said, it was quite a fine merlot,

the main course was fish.

Could you do something in a white?

And the guests, hearing a magician was

miraclizing out back,

almost stampeded to make requests:

They were a Zealot crowd.

So Mary, seeing Him clutch His stomach,

which threatened imminently that notorious, eruptive dyspepsia,

asked if He'd like to leave now.

For the strangest moment He cast on her His eyes so limpid

the world looked right through them

and He seemed to take measure again of the measuring human heart

its human limits, its bonds, its obligations,

its specificity, its universality

then as strangely as when He obeyed her to begin

He followed her direction again and parted.

However, the mysterious Q saw all.

He recounted it, raconteur he was,

to a scribbler, circa 60, in Thessaly,

who, à la Woodward / Bernstein, plied

Q—with wine, not coffee—

slurring his notes when Q left to refill.

The story, like the scribbler's head, and vision,

came out blurry.

But he workshopped it at Ephesus

where the first item to go was that charged-glance thing

What is that anyway?

You can give an Evil Eye or a Look of Love

either of which, to your mother, is creepy.

Next they realized the steward's expertise

in Sophocles and Aeschylus

detracted from focus on the wine,

which must have been— _must_ have been

—The Best.

They eliminated also that distracting byplay about the color.

And if anyone noticed they didn't care

that that steward, who's supposed to run the master's house

talked to his boss like someone

hired for the day

from Feasts R Us.

So anyway the point emerged:

Not what happened, but the Deeper Truth

the unschooled hungry heart always knew

but never knew it knew,

As fruit yearns to ripen.

### Blood Drive

They keep calling you "hero" as though you were a kid

having to be verbally nudged off the high dive

or even the low dive.

The literature does that I mean:

The people with the stealthoscopes are too busy asking you

Have you ever had sex even once since 1977 with another man?

Have you ever paid to have sex either with money or drugs?

Has anyone ever paid you for . . . since 1977 . . . even once

. . . shared a needle to inject drugs?

. . . spent six months or more total in the UK?

(so what, you wonder, do they do in the UK when they need it?)

. . . looked for an undue amount of time at a map of Africa?

Before you finally start

you've recited your Social Security number

five times.

But they know you now in this church hall,

people without pressure cuffs or red crossed coats or question or claim:

the cute white-haired Louise for instance who works the

reception table under the basketball net

(she reminds you of a first girl friend),

the bespectacled bustler at the recovery table

set up by the stage preempted with afterthoughts and unfinished by-play,

busted boxes herniating Christmas garlands in August heat.

They never seem to sport their own donation bandages.

Louise, looked at twice, may still not weigh the minimum 110 pounds.

And once upon a glance her eyes dodged to your shirt's _I Gave!_ stick-on

wanting to be wanted so.

Because there's nothing like it,

what you've got aplenty.

It's all-state biracial multinational

and every kind of natural.

You may feel that you are plodding on the treadmills of obscurity

especially Monday mornings

but you're not the LED-up machine over there in the corner

glaring neon colors

coughing up product

at the in-chink of coin.

You are instead the real Real Thing,

a coursing vehicle of sin and crimson essence

beating the byways the arteries

putting your damaged heart into it

take and give

give and give and take

just as yours

drew in their hour from these tangled roots this turf of streams.

This is what your preemie daughter needed,

your mother, that time she had cancer,

your brother when he wrecked that bike,

your buddy when he took that bullet,

all from alien folk

who owed you

zip.

Stranger yourself, you don't need what's called closure,

the story that a story must complete

because they don't just go on

the way they really do.

It doesn't matter, what happens to today's pint

what happened to the last one.

And it's amazingly easy:

you just like back and let it flow

seems the least you could do:

Run in this easy-flowing roadwork,

this highway

this interstate system

this over-arching network of veins

a-pulse

a-pulse

a-pulse.

### Since 1500

It's hard to see the difference

in 25 mere generations,

though your wife's brother Carl,

mouth full of turkey,

claims infallibility.

He loves to poke you in the ribs

or gouge your eye

with his faith moving mountains

of jobs to the world's truly

exploitable.

After each election he'll crow at you

How's that hope thing working for you

that faith thing.

You want to retort

but really he's a brother too throws back his head

laughs from his belly

sends huge packages at Christmas.

When he dies,

you will miss him,

and how he loved to tow your kids

behind his fun, godawful

powerboat.

But those blunt dull tools of God's wrath in 1500

came rude and wet to life

like you;

and so did those victim misbelievers disemboweled:

Martyr and holy murderer

all lanced toward something

dimly seen

on a father's spit, a mother's blood.

Here's the real confession:

I'm not so far beyond the burning rage,

the lune-y howls.

The suspicions Carl had for instance

that someone over there had a bigger,

better boat just _handed_ to him

—the welfare—for _nothing—_

that's not so far from the common cause I feel

for affordable care,

a holy spirit I long for

as I sing in the silent night,

or while I read the Times

Don Quixote

excuse me Walter Mitty

guzzling at the fountainhead.

I know the hunger and thirst

to purify this flag.

I've seen it all in the Before I read.

They're telling me with everything money can buy

I've lost and my father's grandfather's great-grandfather's

monumental struggles trashed

targets of cheap shots hollow points.

20-something punks smirk in crocodile shoes

boss PhD's review their speeches

investigate prosecutors not investigating non-existent fraud

create new forms scientifically crafted bullshit

moving needles

finding legs

life sacred CREP-form.

I've lost but

I could sell out my ass.

They'd love that.

It's not enough to win:

Everyone else has to lose

or else they just can't feel good

about themselves.

Everyone else has to ignore mere math mere fact

and hail bend over for The Unseen Hand

that gropes and violates.

Everyone else has to kiss the oily lips and beaches

of this petrochemical Savior

Christ You've Never Known

You Can't Recognize.

and now

I can feel my soles already flying like angels,

daily news slipped under my chin

the crowd mocking my union authorization cards

while the hoods whisper in my ear

one last time:

Abjure.

Barth Landor

### What Is Left

What is left of being right

when in the long run I am wrong?

At first I was just right

until at last I was just left.

Is it wrong to exit stage left

if the prompt is not in the script?

Merely to do no wrong

is a good way to be left,

although even the right way to be good

may still in the end be just wrong.

I lie down on our bed's right side

while you go to sleep on the other's.

If your right hand knew what your ring hand left,

then at least I am right that I am wrong.

### Dalgairn House

Heaven came up for rent at thirty pounds a week

with no deposit down. We were freshly wed

and student-poor, and so we signed a lease

on paradise: we made our ascent

to the sunlit upper story of a Scottish

mansion on a hill in the Kingdom of Fife.

Brambles ripened in the hedgerows

and strawberries sweetened in the fields.

On the lawn that welcomed even pheasant,

a small boy nursed a patch of herbs.

All was fertile indoors, too:

stacks of books grew read, and the ribbon

of my little Olivetti seeded letters

for a garden of words I gave to you.

In the home beneath our feet, the noises

of children rose to our ears like Kansas corn,

while above the heads of our landlord family,

you turned to tell me

that one of our own had taken root in you.

That idyll ended long ago.

Garret companions in our salad days,

honeymoon scholars gaining fluency

in languages and love,

in our vinegar years we turned into

strangers even in our common tongue.

One of us yielded and one of us failed to,

both of us strayed and one of us stayed.

When one of us found—or lost—one's truer self,

one of us wept as one of us left.

So the calamity happened.

But I tell you that this did, too:

we made bramble jam from berries

we gathered on country lanes.

We had little to our names.

We read psalms aloud before bed

above the room of a child called Jimbo,

that myopic and timid sibling

of important older sisters,

the pale boy who still lives in my mind

(we moved after a year and never returned)

In a fragile state of innocence.

Abigail F. Taylor

### Never So Still

See this wire-boned boy climbing

to the mangoes? Papi below

sings—Oh Dusty Venezuela!

Picked fruit falls to his blistered feet.

He bites into it, peel and all.

Ruben eats in the tree. Sublime

juice tickles his wrists. He, aglow

with Papi's New World tales, clumsy

in an old half-toothed mouth, retreats

to dreams: America! Baseball!

Papi taught him this, to throw fast

and hard. To love equally so.

Ruben, at sixteen, poor, tired,

and yearning, sent to shore to play

the game. To honor frail Papi,

who died between his first and last

crash into home plate. There were low

years when he fought to inspire

the song of himself in bad ways,

and listless days were choppy

with old promises. Then Ruben

swallowed up his grandfather's soul,

became that man of effortless

joy. And he loved so vibrantly.

He had a son and was happy.

I met him in the taste of sin.

His cross pressed to my breasts. His bold

grin and my paid for recklessness.

I miss our spare talks, privately

passed like school notes, that were sadly

never enough.

At Ruben's wake, his son sat quiet

and lonely in the front pew. He

marveled at the rosary breathed

into his father. I wanted

to say, he was never so still.

### While the Streetlamp Listened

She took

his callow face

and tipped it, nearly kissed

in the sacred glow of night. But

dawn came.

And he

felt her age press

into forbidden fruit

and her husk of wine-dark hair. The

lark sang.

### Wichita Falls

Can you remember dawn's dreary mist

as it curled and settled into the trees?

Autumn had a peculiar way of falling before leaves.

There are no loons on this side of the world,

but I think of their hallowed calls

fighting against a separate, peaceful cold.

She had paid for a cabin far off the road;

a hope of stitching back together a loveless

marriage she herself had caused to unfold.

But you and I found comfort in pitching camp

beneath a dripping candled moon.

Do you think that he returned to her arms

that night, their faithless kissing as joined up writing

or like that morning mist hugging brittle bark?

Perhaps they stayed as distant as the loons.

Either way, we woke with dawn.

Our dog, the only one to grin at such an hour,

rutted through pine needles, then leaped

into the thicket, while wind chimes

took on the beat of unseen hooves.

We, as children, were never allowed to stray.

It was the duty of grownups to strangle themselves

in the undergrowth of wayward passions.

Still, we followed the dog.

Despite the light, all of it slept:

The brambles. The hollied hill. The pale red robin.

Only the beck spoke over moss and stone.

We found the dog laying at the water in lazy company.

These fawns and young bucks, not quite into their points,

drank with caution.

As we called out, our echoes shepherded the deer

to distant corners, while the dog bounded to us

and licked flashes of bare skin.

He took a way back to the dark cabin

beyond the trees.

You pressed last night's coals to new tinder

and we tried to scramble eggs on a dry skillet.

A good fire had been made by your hands,

but breakfast turned brown, improved only

by a dashing of salt and the clear air.

He stepped onto the closed off deck.

His eyes blank against the breeze,

so remarkably outside the man we knew.

He saw us and dissolved into a familiar face,

then returned inside to prepare something better

than what we had eaten.

Do you remember how we spoke like this was home?

Our souls slumbered there with cold pine and warm fire.

We understood the dog's contentment to roll in sweet mud,

follow the deer, and ignore the shrillness of women in winter.

At peace in the wandering.

And you told me the cabin had a design like jazz.

Frozen in marrow. Harsh and vibrant.

Had I known then how to tell you the rhythm of this wood,

I would have shared everything.

George Longenecker

### Polar Bears Drowning

the news isn't so bad today

two crows perch on a large stone in the meadow

then fly off looking for a few morsels

but the pasture is barren

the war isn't going as badly as it could

meanwhile I wait for the tax refund

which a lot of people will get this year

except people who have no income

but it's not so bad since they pay no taxes

the two crows perch on the stone again

haven't there been worse wars

I really don't mind reading the news

as much as most people

many more people have died in other wars

that's good news

this coffee isn't too bad

and the weather isn't as bad today

so the mail probably won't be too late

it's not as bad here as in some countries

polar bears drowning on page four

probably the president will do something

I think he cares about bears

the war isn't going so badly now

the check will be in the mail

if it comes today

those crows haven't moved

but one flaps its black wings

so it must be okay

A Protest Rally for the Bold-faced Hyphen

Protest the extinction

of the **Bold-faced Hyphen**!

The once-numerous hyphen

is all but extinct.

I have seen them

flying together in pairs,

making a mad dash

to safety—

fly, fly away quickly,

before you too become extinct

and forgotten—

or held captive and misused,

for that is the apostrophe's fate—

held prisoner in plurals,

on road signs,

in mis-punctuated ads.

Mourn the apostrophe's demise.

Solidarity!

Save the apostrophe

Save the hyphen

Free them from their sentences

Now!

Free the apostrophe

Now!

Save the **Bold-faced Hyphen**

Now!

### The Garter Snake

lies coiled on quartzite

high on Worcester Mountain

it's barely warm enough

for a reptile to emerge

onto its favorite stone

coiled facing west

in April sun

waiting for flies

for months he's waited

sheltered in a granite crevice

covered by three feet of snow

now he's ready for sun

who knows why people hate snakes

but human hatred runs deep as Genesis

hard as quartzite veins in stone

this year new people to hate

with the same old swords, nooses and missiles

his long beige stripe is still

his brown scales barely quiver

he watches me but doesn't

even flick his tongue

when hate's all around

and it gets too cold

I'd like to leave it all

crawl into a crevice

with the garter snake

maybe someday when the sun's warm again

slither out across stone

onto the mountain

### Alligators

Around the bend in the canal

we startle an enormous alligator

sunning, awakened by the clack

of our canoe paddles, he splashes

into dark water and slides beneath the canoe.

My heart beats faster— _you were scared_

she says— _well he was only six feet away—_

but other alligators ignore us, barely

turning their cloudy eyes, unwilling

to relinquish their sunny places.

Alligators are accustomed to daily

canoeists paddling the Loxahatchee,

maybe they know it's Sunday and surely

they know east, where the first sun warms

their cold hides as they slither to the bank

to bask—I offer him coffee from my thermos—

Coffee with sugar, alligator?

Sugar plantations and suburbs

have drained the Everglades and the Loxahatchee

nearly killing off the Seminole and the alligators

who now emblazon football pennants, sweatshirts

and coffee mugs: _Gators! Seminoles!_

The alligator basks and smiles,

he knows who's drifting to extinction first—

we canoe around the bend where five

more alligators sleep in the sun.

### I Want To Be Your Tom

Each night I climb your fence

I want to yowl at the moon

to growl and hiss at any other male

to crawl into your bed

I want to purr and lick inside your ears

to sniff you all over

to look in your eyes

to smell you so strongly there's no other scent

I want to lay with you and put my paws around you

to lap you until you cry _mrow tdrow_

to feel you in heat, to feel you purr and yelp

I want you to dig your claws into my fur

And if you'll have me across your fence

I want us to have ten kittens

I hope you dodge every car and dog

I want us to curl up together and purr when our fur is gray

Ben Cromwell

### Sometimes a Flock of Birds

for Gwendolyn 3/11/14

I don't believe in God

because if he exists,

he's an asshole

for giving me cancer

among other things.

But I love you more

than one animal should

be able to love another.

Sometimes a cloud passes

revealing the mountains

minted in new snow,

and the sun shines down

on us for the first time

lighting your sleeping face.

Sometimes a flock of birds

breaks from the treetops

and flies pellmell into

the blue distance.

My arms are indelibly marked

with your weight,

your shape.

Whatever is in me,

whatever I am at root,

whatever I hope

might one day be revealed;

You are.

### Assisted Living

I don't want this to be too sentimental,

so fuck you, Grandma.

I've been thinking about the dead,

those near to death like to a lover.

I am walking the wood paneled halls

of your small and immaculately kept home.

I am rearranging the furniture.

I am unstraightening pictures.

Especially the one of you on your wedding day,

The one where you look so beautiful,

The windblown curls of yellow hair,

Your bright blue eyes,

a smile like abandon,

Like luck.

I know you've moved to a center,

somewhere they can take care of you.

I know the walls must be bare, the cupboards empty,

the beds in storage.

Tell me, what have the days been like?

Do they let you wake early to walk the beach?

Does the pale blue light that tips in

through the bedroom window remind you of me?

Do they let you sleep

with the window propped?

Does the coolness of the morning air almost

stop your heart?

In my mind, I take down your picture, press fingers

sticky with Jiff to the glass over your lips.

I hold it against me,

hold onto you.

You'll have to wipe the smudges from the glass over the photograph.

You'll have to rehang it on this imaginary wall.

Once you were a tern or a loon,

Perhaps a frigate bird.

Something that returns to the water.

I rode on your back, all motion and wind,

and the sea was in us.

Salt water was in our veins.

You are not coming back

to tell me

we are kindred.

I've seen the gray mist of your eyes,

the curve of your body, like bent feathers,

like a drowned gull washed up on the beach.

This is why I never come.

I can't bear to watch

the stillness overtake you.

### Fox holes

Are there no atheists in fox holes? Perhaps you don't get into a fox hole unless you have something to believe in, but in my experience, most of the people in fox holes are in the process of giving up their gods.

The world will continue without me, will continue to turn without us, my love, though the thought makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.

I would like to believe that only you and I exist. I have believed such a thing. I believe both at once . . . in the world, and also in nothing beyond what I can taste.

I am the juice that runs down your fingers, I am the sweat that pours from you, the extravagant feeling of fingers parting your hair, an extra set of hands to let the world slide through.

Let us rejoice in each other, let us give thanks. Let us suffer in each other. Let us be tortured and meaningless and pass out of the world having mattered to no one, having no immortality beyond our mingled dirt.

Robert Mammano

### the way the ground shakes

or the holes in the walls

where you would be able to see the guts of the house

if the house had guts.

it makes good sense that our limitations are so

tight around our cute little necks

and our ambitions are knick-knacks

collected on end tables

sit for years and are eventually

thrown outdoors to get turned over

ashes to ashes junk to middens.

daylight from citrus oil

lampshimmer tomorrow,

the crunchy foot prints on the flash frozen grass

the architecture of the water structures that come

out of your sigh.

I'll watch till there is nothing to see,

let my fingers linger in your hair—

shivering whispers sew the buttons on the morning

the intrigue has been woven and fastened like this

for as long as the deep sky went blue

and blue to true and just, just

out of reach, your skin, so soft just under—

how do our weak wonders rest

their troubled feet and great heavy heads?

the steady lonesomeness lovely

almost passing as longing.

the fever climbs about cloud cover high

and stolen away

a bit longer you must.

### look at all them letters

all the damned things flitting about,

blustering and flummoxed

colliding and colluding!

just outside this window

on all the awnings

squatting and cosmic—

I want to talk about what holds me.

I want to talk about gravity,

the newspaper from two days ago

filled with rain stuffing the gutter.

we continue to be surprised by violins,

yell across the avenue

as if we were in a crowd.

we're just pieces.

there is nothing but life

happening between us,

but the sky

the atmosphere

and beyond our weather,

the whole mess.

consciousness is such a delicate accident.

stars don't cross .

two lines

expressed in tons

of wood, gold, and concrete

for twenty centuries.

"and by the way thanks for that"

half-assed over the shoulder disputes

lobbed like a split pomegranate in parting

we were in the kitchen cutting onions

and someone came in

we pretended we were at our wit's ends

that strange region where men weep

a tangle of ropes

the path of least resistance is atrophy

sometimes decisions waiting to be made

make themselves

evaporate opportunities

and inaction knots an expiration

no

living past tense

all the moments of knowing

you wanted everything changed

line up like constellations

flickering moot way way up

and I trace these stubborn lines

'look a seed

a bulb, a tuber'

back toward the last times I wasn't myself

those nights

when who knows who circulated

through the little back alleys

and sloppy veins

crocheted byways

underground amateur astrology

root structures drunk moon shine

risky

I still find a stray hair

here or there

a polka dotted sock

when my underwear drawer is almost empty

and how many years since that smile glinted

you won't remember

### the handkerchief situation isn't half as strange as it seems

because this contraption scratches

tilt your mouth

and what voice chooses

come clean for once

bones after the flesh has rotted away

a wolf big black bird with hunger

a feather a hair a plume of smoke

we'll go on and on

wondering how 2 people in complete agreement

could argue so long

"I'm not lazy I just don't see the point"

imagine if we picked any direction

and just went

but sometimes these directions loop

5 years in circles

there used to be formulas for these sorts of things

out of boredom

something pretty is molded

with my preachy voice

that clears out subway cars

mind the gaps

how many "well the names aren't important"

until the names disappear and the places follow

leaving dull skeleton stories waltzing around

I'm 2 stepping this 3 step dance

"my first love was a boat"

independent thought like buoys suspended

rope worn round the wrists and ankles

like cheap juvenile jewelry

lately through this strange irrelevant term

seems all my thoughts fall about

neither here nor there

I've been thinking about people living in their heads

I like imagining them miniature

pulling down eyelid curtains a warm glow still behind

I wonder how they'd leave if they wanted to

I know it's fancy but I'll bet the ants still get in

maybe through chimney ears

and march their numbers along the skull's walls

### a few resolutions ago

Nothing is set

run around and around

New Year's eve

we'll drop our own ball.

I'll try not to play the accordion.

My sweet, what?

I am almost out of space.

Oh what wonderful geese you have, ma'am

and what a sigh.

Even the mailman gets a raise

and here I am still jobless,

a big green apple.

She left last night

and they're all praying for you

green peppers . . . green peppers.

Cross the 'i's and dot the 't's

let them talk about despicable so-and-so's

and we'll throw in an orange wedge with our two cents.

Read it to me in your real voice.

Let us send messages on rays of light—

No, no, give me primitive construction any day

tic-tac fingers and swollen pulleys.

"Ain't no rest for the wicked."

a post-modern post-script:

Nothing is set

We moveable parts.

Run around

around

and I breathe deep.

Janet Smith

### Rocket Ship

Emery Park had a pretend rocket ship.

We walked there in the afternoon, and I,

legs straight, palms flat, dropped down

the metal slide onto the cold sand.

My mother made me wear dresses;

they fluttered up like frightened birds.

I wanted to walk by myself, but I was seven.

One man in a torn jacket stood by the fountain,

hands in his pockets, eyeing the merry-go-round.

"Don't talk to him," my mother said.

I wouldn't even talk to the girl my age,

who held a sucker in her mouth as she

slid down after me. That was dangerous.

Later, we walked across the street

to Crawford's Market. I stuck my hot, dry

hand deep into the barrel of hard candy.

The store clerk glowered over her counter.

_Watch your children_ , a sign shaped like

a pointing finger warned.

I unwrapped the candy Mother bought me

one by one, placed each on my tongue,

and moved so the wrappers in my sweater

pocket rustled. A red disk burned my mouth.

I spat it on the sidewalk. That was wrong.

We walked home past the park, and my mother

grabbed my hand.. The rocket ship

exploded with boys, yelling and hitting.

### Be Good

I once was pointed to the corner

of a room where the curtains swooned.

Red-eyed, hands tight as buds, I held

the pink tissue mother gave me.

She and father agreed, I was bad.

Dust motes drifting through daylight

fell on my head.

Puzzle box unlocked and smashed,

I moved into a fragment of myself.

Later they allowed me to set foot

where the lamps shone upon doilies

bright as lilies. _Be good_ , they said.

The dark boughs of my woods still

thrash upon themselves.

### Pockets

My mother sewed the pockets

of coats. She called it piecework.

After her shift, she slept on top

of the bedspread in her clothes

so as not to mess the covers.

Then the bed was straightened.

We went to a coffee shop called Earl's.

The meals came with cake or rice

pudding. She wore bright lipstick,

hairdo arrowed with bobby pins,

an ironed blouse with the dime store

brooch like a medal on her chest.

Practical daylight fell upon her things—

the nylon scarf, the curlers and the pins,

the pennies saved inside a jelly jar—

but it was the beige slip that slid

like a rattlesnake off the chair

onto the floor that scared me. She said

a slip stopped boys from looking

at the outline between your legs.

Smooth and supple as flayed skin,

the beige slip told me how my mother

became the red-lipped ghost. Listen,

she'd say, here's a coupon, a hairnet,

a pad, a needle and some thread.

The dresser and the nightstand

each adorned with scarves depicting

rosebuds, bluebirds, a shepherdess,

and a leering doe with red lips.

Where was the interior life?

So many pockets, and nothing

but bare hands to hide. I was told

to never touch the sharp scissors

she had honed. She wore dresses

with no sleeves in summer, arms freckled,

warm, and fat as rising loaves.

The change on the dresser

never added up. The nylon briefs

and bras lay cool and folded

in a narrow drawer that stuck.

She smiled at me as if her mouth

held straight pins. Here's a hanky,

a spare key, a dime for emergencies.

Stop eating cookies or you won't eat

your dinner. There's no one

now to accuse or defend her,

except me—her most loyal prisoner.

### It Surprises You

It could be a cold Wednesday.

Moving your feet along the ground,

shouldering through the air

is pleasure. Your heart fastens

on a house you always pass

that now needs looking at.

You love the nape of your own neck.

When you were seven and wandered

from your parents' sight,

this was how you saw the world:

every edge hardened with reality.

That's why you drew lines

around the pictures before you filled

them in in your coloring book.

You begged for a pet, even a fish

or a bird, because you loved the world

and needed a body to put that in.

One day you stared out your bedroom

window: roofs, stars, moon,

the crowns of trees reached for you.

You were already falling.

The days dream us and the nights

wake in our ears. Today, sitting

at a desk or driving a car,

you wonder, what was all that childhood

longing about? When you enter

the black room of your aloneness,

nothing bad happens after all.

Nobody walks more solitary

than a child. You could ask now

for a piece of that slow waiting

that married you to your hunger.

An hour might spring on you with

a daydream hidden in its claws,

your old loneliness in its mouth.

### Fireworks over Chain Lake

One July 4th I stayed at your house

on Chain Lake. We opened

two bottles of pinot noir and put

swimsuits on. Across the water,

fireworks exploded like cannons

aimed upon us. I woke at 3 AM

to rain splashing against the house.

You were asleep downstairs

in your wet swimsuit with the TV on.

When the first bursts exploded,

light fell like pollen on our heads.

We jumped up and down on the dock,

drunk and shouting. Why have we

waited so long to be found good enough?

As children we loved any tree,

any mountain, any sky.

Others appeared. They yelled for us.

We hid. We went hungry.

Gina Loring

### Dementia

the women. the women. the women.

the babies. the babies. the babies.

How lucky not to remember

the mountain of missed milestones.

The spirit spark dusted over and dimmed.

How lucky to melt into yourself like that,

the entire muddy footprint path erased.

In lucid moments

few and far between

when the room comes into focus,

you remember me.

A stranger with your eyes.

You know

the straw I hold to your lips

the lullabies I sing low

the monologue prayer hymns I write in your palm:

redemption.

### His

Here to see your father?

I ask how she knows.

You look just like him.

She waves her clipboard,

motions for me to follow.

It takes three nurses to administer the medication today.

He is a restless windstorm trying to break free.

_Daddy,_ I say, _sing with me._

I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield

Down by the river side, down by the river side, down by the river side

The silver smooth of the needle shines like a tiny skyscraper.

He meets its eye in resignation, watches it disappear into his arm.

I've always been the type to avert the eyes,

learned early not to look.

I don't remember the pinch of the needle sliding through skin

I don't remember the blood draining from vein to tube

I don't remember the waiting room or the walk back to the car

all I remember is the Polaroid of him

protocol for paternity testing, verify identity.

I was ten

and already a man had ripped apart the ribcage,

sliced my heart open

just to see.

I ain't gonna study war no more

I ain't gonna study war no more

I ain't gonna study war no more

The nurses exit the room.

For now, their job is done.

Eyes closed, he claps his hands to the beat.

We sing.

### Our Last Days

I. _Monday, April 14th_

Convalescent homes

house blank stares where

urine stank and ammonia air

fistfight florescent lights

straining to see

the million memories

suspended from the stucco ceiling

prayers scattered everywhere like rogue shooting stars, dying as they soar.

A backwards culture we must be

leaving our elders to endless claustrophobic days and cherry Jell-O.

II. _Tuesday, May 20th_

My voice dangles mute from my neck

as I wipe the running from his nose

try to console the boy inside his eyes.

Sometimes he recognizes me

always meets my gaze at least once during the visit

the illusive layered dimension is lifted

together we march this sorrowful slow dance to music we cannot remember

while earthly things like apologies and birthdays spin weightless around us.

I want to relieve him. I cry into his chest,

savor the gift of time like a peasant at the Queen's feet.

Wish him a good journey, free him from himself.

III. _Wednesday, June 11th_

Morning.

We're calling to inform you that the patient has expired.

As if he were a quart of milk.

I had seen him on Saturday, sang "His Eye is on the Sparrow,"

held his warm hand, long brown fingers against the smaller beige version, mine.

The three days between Saturday and Wednesday trampled me, a stampede of sorrow.

Rushed to the mirror to look at him in my face.

### Angry fireflies

Traumatic experiences do not dissolve in the wind,

sweep away like dandelion petals

they do not eat themselves for dinner

disappear, a gruesome sliver

they like to hang around

pacing like an alligator in an elevator,

a swarm of angry fireflies, spelling out the same story in the sky each night

intrusive visitors who climb in through windows, defecate on dreams

blues and greens is the song they sing

when you are in a yellow mood

admiring the moon

they tip toe in through the back door and hijack your laughter

lift your eyelids to paint a dull hue

force you to look through fun house mirrors

long after the circus has left town

### being angry with god will get you nowhere on a fast train

after the halo of stars has stopped windmilling around your head

and your face stings like a cement wall has kissed you hard and long

and you try to get up but can not make your body move

just when the world is coming back into focus

and your ribs are kicked in

the train will arrive shiny and smooth

serving complimentary champagne and warm croissants

the window seat view will be beautiful

you will have time to replay every moment

a swarm of broken and bent promise

flashes of half-hearted dreams rotting in the wind

you will lock yourself in the bathroom

the woman in the mirror will greet you with a piercing gaze

she will say you are meant to fall

to understand the meaning of flight

there is no bargaining

look down at the blueprint map on your palm, make a choice

healing is a profound art

no one can free you but yourself

the damn train is going nowhere

and you might stay on that motherfucker for years if you're not careful

you may even drift to sleep, a cozy still

they will bring you a pillow and a mint

the tracks rocking in rhythm like a mantra

the angels will not give up on you

even when you have traveled miles and miles

they will keep the faith of your return

the porch light stays on so you know you are welcome

inside where your life is waiting

J. Lee Strickland

### Minoan Elegy

Starting with Europa and with Zeus,

the flowers and the beach, the rape and rapture.

All the sordid excesses of gods

that lead us, in the end, to what we are.

Torches flare

and break into the long oppressive night.

The labyrinth walls, the floor, the vaulted heights

are tortured into hardened shapes

by leaping blades of light.

The glare wounds eyes pulled wide

by timeless time in lightless dark

and Minotaur recoils (a move he instantly regrets).

The brilliant feast is crumbs now snatched away

as darkness falls again,

broken by false ghostly shapes

that dance across his eyes.

If we could see him now what would we see?

Skin bleached white by life in constant night.

A massive taurine head perched on

a lean, hard-muscled, naked frame.

A body fitting of the offspring of a god.

And sadness . . .

So great a sadness the beast in him

must bear the whole.

That, too, worthy of the gods

if ever gods showed feeling for

the sorrows that they wrought.

In darkness he listens.

The first low moans come

mixed with whispered bits of speech

as the sharp smell of fear reaches his nose.

The voices are new. The ritual is old.

He doesn't know how old, for

he cannot say, awake or in his dreams,

how time goes by,

the calculation linked to long ago

when light and dark had equal weight,

their alternations ticked the passing days.

Now, like the only tick of some great clock,

the torches flare and unseen hands thrust victims

to their final night,

to Minotaur a signal that

the senseless dance of humankind

continues just above.

The moans grow more despairing

as these lost souls slowly move apart.

Each thinks to find a way back to the gate

through which they came,

but all are wrong.

Fear and darkness confound every sense

as tortured angles of the labyrinth

do their part to trump the unaccustomed ear.

The Bull-man's nostrils flare.

His ears keen to each separate, novel sound.

He moves easily in the inky dark

going toward the gate.

He knows each scruple of the stone-strewn floor,

each crevice of the chiseled walls.

His hands trace knowing patterns as he walks.

He knows already the fate

of these sorry pawns of sacrifice.

They, like all those come before, will stumble

through the labyrinth's twisted gut

first thinking to discover some way out,

then hoping to rejoin their doomed companions.

Finally, failing all,

just moving, moving to out-pace

the brutal fear that eats at their insides.

Perhaps a ravening monster would be

mercy measured by this bleak prospect,

but such a one will not be found

within these damp, dark walls. Instead

each will find a separate cul-de-sac

among the labyrinth's countless halls,

there to wait upon the cruelest beasts

of hunger and of thirst.

A hundred twisted steps before the gate

the Bull-man stops. There's something different

in this group, a novel hint that slices through

the spreading cloud of fear.

There's one who has not moved.

Minotaur smells the strong odor

of a male

and hears the even breathing, calm

without a hint of panic.

He senses the repose of one at easy rest.

Then torchlight flares anew

and burns his eyes

as voices rise, a woman's, then a man's.

He knows his sister's voice

though he's not heard Ariadne since a child.

"I have your sword and here, a shuttled thread

that you'll unwind as you go on.

The other end I'll fix here at the gate.

Be careful.

Daedalus himself was nearly lost

among these walls," she says and

fear adds its harmonic to

the quaver in her voice.

The man replies, curt words of one

intent upon a task.

The light withdraws.

Here the moment dreams foretold.

He wonders if his lips will form a word.

"Theseus," he whispers with unpracticed tongue.

"My brother, come to take my life."

The Pantheon is littered with the spawn

of venal lust. Poseidon's whelps, these two.

Though innocent, they bear the tragic stamp,

cursed to be clothed each in the other's fate.

He waits unmeasured time, unmoving.

In Theseus' stumbling, halting steps

he hears no plan, just blind wandering

marked here and there by muttered curses.

He moves to intercept the human's course.

"Theseus, you have come at last."

"Who speaks with such strange accents?"

Surprise quickens Theseus' speech.

"You are no Greek who calls me thus."

"I am the one you seek, Theseus.

The one that you call Minos' Bull."

"A monster who can mimic human speech?"

"I am cursed to have a human part,

to be not wholly one thing or another,

but I speak."

"You speak? Then tell me. Where are the bones?

I thought to find it strewn with bones.

You keep a tidy house."

"I do not disrespect the dead

that others choose to kill.

I've honored them as decency

and circumstance permit."

For Theseus the hunt is joined. He reaches

toward the voice. His outstretched hand

meets only rough-hewn stone.

"Honor me and tell me how you

come to know my name then, Freak?"

"I have dreamt the smallest detail of this day,

although I laugh to call it day.

But, tell me, is it day or is it night

beyond the gate?"

"There was darkness everywhere when I came in,

but why this talk?

You could be feasting on the flesh

of my compatriots."

He moves with care,

His fingers on the clammy wall.

"You and all your human cohort

forget who I am.

The beast in me is sickened by

the thought of eating flesh.

You press the worst of yourself

into a mold and call it 'Monster'

but it is you, just you.

A mirror works as well."

"I do not eat the flesh of my own kind."

The Greek's response is clipped.

He wants the beacon of that other voice

To light his path.

"On this day you will kill your own brother

who you call Beast and Monster.

Do you think the goat or lamb,

the wild bird of the field, the mountain stag

are any less your brethren than I?"

"Brethren? Bah! Your talk is babble, Beast.

I have no brothers.

I am my father's only child."

The Bull-man laughs, a strange and fractured laugh.

"Your father cannot keep his girdle tied.

His progeny are spread from Attica

to far-off Tyre.

His blood informs a mighty, ragged tribe."

"Your pointless riddles bore me, Monster.

Tell me something plain." His tone is mocking.

"If you do not foul your virtuous lips

with human sacrifice what do you eat?"

"There are roots that break through from above.

I graze on them and . . ." he hesitates

and wonders at the pain of speech that plods

so far behind the lightning of his thoughts.

"I am otherwise provided for."

"By who? That fornicating beast-lover

you call Mother?"

"Do not provoke me, Theseus, with

your market-place vulgarities.

Poseidon raped my mother

just as he raped yours."

The voice so close it is as if

the stones beneath his fingers speak,

And yet his way is blocked.

"Aegeus is my father!" Theseus shouts.

"Poseidon is your father

as he is mine.

You forget I am a beast of those

who smell their kin and love them.

We do not stalk our kin and kill them.

Your nose is plugged with fairy-tales.

Breathe for once and try to smell the truth."

"Enough talk!" The air is hot with Theseus' rage.

"I've come to kill you.

Let me be done with that."

"You've come to set me free."

"If death is freedom, freedom you shall have,

and so will I the Greek bones here avenge."

Theseus' anger makes him careless

and he stumbles once again.

"Your sword is poorly aimed for that blood-task.

The blame you would abate lies higher up."

"With Minos and his copulating cow?"

"Higher still, my brother."

It is Minotaur who moves this time,

bringing new acoustics to his speech.

"The gods spill all this blood for their dark sport,

then goad us into spilling more and more.

The killing will not end

until you make yourself. Throw off the stamp

of petty tyrant-gods that you call fate

and recognize your own will is your power."

Gods tremble when they hear these words.

Their power hangs on ignorance. If such

a tool as Theseus learns to choose his fate

their temples built on faith begin to fall.

Theseus has turned around.

He loses contact with the walls,

trying to assess the vector of the voice.

"Your poetry is touching for a beast

but empty babble to my ear.

What meaning can it have to make myself?

The gods make everything.

We are but their thinking turned to flesh.

Just as now, I think I hear you talking.

This talk I seem to hear from you

is but the crazed imaginings

of a mind twisted by this curséd dark.

I'll be glad to see the end of this."

He tries to get a hand on stone

but even that is gone.

"The end of this will not make you glad, Theseus.

Your life, however long, will be for its

full length cursed by what you do this day."

"Cursed? By what? Killing you?

I've killed many in my life."

He grips his sword hilt.

"You will be but one more."

"Cursed with truth, my Brother.

Surrounded by the fantasies of others

you will be cursed with truth."

"So, Beast, you know, too, what is to come?"

"Here in the labyrinth time is naught to me,

past and future all the same

and equal to imagination's sight.

I see what was and what is to be

with equal clarity."

Theseus, forced to crawl, has recovered

the comfort of the wall and moves again.

"Entertain me, Beast. Give me some bit

from your vast store of prophecy."

"Men always wish they knew the future

'til they see it writ . . ."

"Come, Monster, just a sporting hint?"

The Minotaur draws a great breath, a sigh

and says,

"Before you see your Attic soil again

Ariadne, who loves you

beyond all reason, will be left by you,

abandoned on some bleak stretch of beach.

And, too, the one who calls you son will die

because of your own thoughtlessness."

"You say these things but to provoke my wrath.

I'll not leave Ariadne!

I have pledged myself to her."

"Think of the snow that caps

your sacred Mount Olymbos (here

Minotaur stops to savor that

one word so fitting to his tongue and lips).

Your pledge is like that snow,

beautiful to see but try to hold

it in your hands and it is gone.

You will leave Ariadne.

By the sorcery of your own mind you will hear

my voice in hers, my imagined touch

in her touch. My hideous face

will spoil her beauty.

And you will see my death in her eyes.

You will see in her the brother

you have killed. That terrible vision

will haunt you long after

you have left her on the sand."

"A pox on your stories!

Your mindless rant torments me. Leave it off!

You who've spent your whole time in this maze,

what can you know?

Leave me, phantom voice, that I may find

that curséd beast and end this sordid farce."

Theseus thinks his string will lead him home,

but there's no turning back from his black deed.

This violent thread, once peeled from the spool,

will not rewind. Its trace is sealed in blood.

Minotaur obliges this demand

and moves with slow deliberation

paralleling Theseus' stumbling gait

with his sure-footed pace.

His bare feet are his eyes in this dark hall

and quickly find the object that he seeks.

"How fares your clew, Theseus?"

"Leave off, Voice. I told you once,

you're but an ill imagining.

I hear you not."

"And this? Is this imagination, too?"

Minotaur picks up the thread he's found

and gently tugs it taut.

"Tell me, Brother. Does your thread dwindle?"

Theseus is silent long

and when he speaks the first dark wisps

of fear invade his voice.

"Do not call me brother, Beast. It is

your thread that dwindles. You'll regret

that you spoke thus to me."

"It is you who will regret who come

to slay a dumb monster and instead

will leave soaked in your brother's blood."

"Ariadne wants you dead."

"Ariadne knows not what she asks,

but wishes only that you live.

She, too, will know the luxury of regret."

Theseus, his fear near panic, has begun

to gather in the thread that he's paid out.

He stumbles hard into the unseen walls.

"Whence flew your courage, Greek?

You are right to be afraid

for I can break this thread and end

right now this thing that you call farce.

But, hear me. I will not. Not yet.

You see, Theseus, in far-off Athens

people bow to Aegeus as their king

while, above our heads, in Cretan lands

and on the seas, Minos is the sovereign.

But here in this piteous realm

I am doomed to rule.

My power is not so easily usurped.

You are, my Brother, guest in my dark house."

The Minotaur relaxes in his place.

He knows that Theseus' searching nears its end

and harvests comfort from that thought.

"Another thing, Brother, I would have you know.

My mother called me Little Star and

suckled me when I was born,

but later fled in horror from

the signal of her shame.

I have known love, however brief,

and I love you, Brother.

I love all humans though they are a band

that I can never join.

And, too, I pity them that they should fall so short.

I have no place in this world save here.

I will love you more that you deliver

me from this cruel solitude."

As the Bull-man speaks he senses

his kin drawing near.

He lowers himself to hands and knees

and draws himself to Theseus' side.

His great horns tangle in among

the folds of Theseus' robe and gently pull

then slide away as Theseus spins

with wildly swinging sword.

The sound of Theseus' thundering heart

fills the Bull-man's ears he is so close.

"Show some courage, man. You mark the lines

of ritual where others not yet born

will step in ages hence. Show them some grace."

Theseus flails again, his weapon cutting air.

"Do not beat at me like a frightened child.

I am already bled by years of solitude.

You need but make the final cut."

The Minotaur has bowed his massive head

and Theseus with a desperate lunge

thrusts his sword between the down-curved shoulders.

Plunging through hard-muscled flesh and bone

the knowing tip seeks out the beating heart

as Theseus collapses to the floor.

His quivering thighs are bathed in blood as

his brother's massive head sinks to his lap.

In Minotaur's exhaled breath the smell,

sweet-sour, of fermented grass recalls

to Theseus a childhood vision of

a flower-strewn field and a sand-rimmed stretch

of passive sea. A sharp pain grips his heart

as he hears Ariadne's voice

praying to the gods to save his life.

Toni Hanner

### Catching the Baby

My father's birthday, the gypsy approaches,

gold ring poised on her palm, almost impossible

not to look, not to catch the baby, she knows you cannot

let it fall, allow its soft brown head to smack the cobbles,

you cannot stop your hand. Here is a cat dead in a bag,

you glance and pass by, you aren't the kind of person

to touch, to look inside, to bury the bag in the dirt outside

your front door. You are just one of the people who glances,

remembers later to write the orange feet sticking up

out of the plastic bag as dead as anything and you'll return to this cat

again and again, this cat serving as home if you can get there before

the patrol boat pa-pows its slow way up the canal

to your beach. If Jimmy's on board he'll catch the baby

_and_ steal the gold ring. The cat was a runt and the gypsy

sighs back into the doorway of the cathedral, folding

a leg up under her skirt, putting on her hungriest face.

I stumble through cities the way I hug the wall for support

when I'm drunk, I need a description of that, how one flings oneself

at the bannister, then the next solid thing, the window ledge

at the stair landing, then the next, a lover's shoulder, a mother's

shadow. The cat is one of those things in a black week.

In between there are voids the ground solid enough for your feet

but the rest of your body is on its own. You are always reaching for the next

hold-fast, a wall, a bureau, a table. The softness of a lover's hand

is comforting but only the dead are solid enough.

You keep them in jars bolted to the floor moving with you,

just far enough ahead so that you have always a destination.

### Copernicus

This is only a single page, Copernicus,

I do not have what you would call a flexible

life I revolve around the sun like you said

my house does not pulse open for any passing

cousin, does not fold itself around the bereaved

no, my house holds us, the few, Copernicus.

We do not know which of us is the sun

we move into and around each other

anemones opening and closing and holding,

digesting what we need which is always.

Copernicus there is starch in my bones

I do not have what you would call a flexible

life there is city in me, boxes piled high

leaning against one another small boats ply

rivers of blood. Copernicus

I long to sunflower turning and turning heliotrope

but I creak in my body I must bring down the heat,

the light. This is only a single page, Copernicus

because we are far from the sun in January

of this murderous year we are spinning

back into the dark when all we can do

is reach and turn. I do not have what you

would call a flexible life, Copernicus.

I revolve around the sun bereaved and holding.

### Splendid Angel

I've always wanted to see my mother with bees

in her hair, lifting her, turning her gold, the grammar

of lightness. My mother with ice blue, riding,

a banshee of knees and serpents, my mother

as galaxy, as interplanetary dust, comet-clicking,

deep black empty howling, rain falling through sunlight

in a grove of olive trees. My mother as ocher, as mustard,

as new as the stars, as boat and wind, her flesh to fruit,

bruised pear, secret hidden in an apple,

a splendid angel, a criminal. I would take her into the parlor,

let her see her father, know him in his coffin, shake the dead

from her fingers, from her feet, from her wings.

### August Poem

realizing in my chest

i have no words my throat closes

over the beaks of all the birds

i have swallowed in the night

my hummingbirds stand on a column

of air looking at me

i am the most important display

in their museum of oddities

dusky august comes

cartwheeling down through the ninebark

our orbit quickens around whatever sun

or moon finds our gravity

i can spend sunshine

like coins in the machines of flowers

Contributor Notes

 Jim Burrows lives in Cordell, Oklahoma. His first book, Back Road, was published by Barefoot Muse Press in January, 2015. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online magazines in the UK, Canada, and the United States, including 32 Poems, Antiphon, Measure, The Rotary Dial, and the Raintown Review.

 Ben Cromwell lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Raven, and two children. He is a program director for Playworks and the author of Touch: Making Contact with Climate Change. His work has appeared in Flyway, High Desert Journal, and Sugarhouse Review.

 Matt Daly is a poet and writing teacher from Jackson, Wyoming. His poetry has been published in Clerestory, The Cortland Review, Pilgrimage, Split Rock Review, The Screaming Sheep and elsewhere. In 2013, he received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council and is the 2015 recipient of the Neltje Blanchan Award for writing inspired by the natural world.

 Alma Eppchez is a genderqueer writer, theater artist, musician, and Quaker based in Philadelphia. Currently, ey* has two plays looking for homes, a dance film in the oven, and is developing a workshop using our bodies to notice internal biases. Ey was socialized as a white girl in Western Massachusetts. This was not a bad experience, but one that gave em many privileges, biases, and misconceptions of identity that ey is compelled to now unlearn. *Alma Eppchez's chosen pronouns are Elverson pronouns (ey/em/eir/eirs/emself)

 Paulette Guerin is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. She lives in Arkansas and works as a freelance writer and editor. She is currently building a tiny house on seven acres and blogging about the experience at pauletteguerinbane.wordpress.com. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Subtropics, Cellpoems, SLANT, and Euphony (online). She also has a chapbook, Polishing Silver.

 Toni Hanner's books include The Ravelling Braid (Tebot Bach, 2012), Gertrude, poems and other objects (Traprock, 2012), and The Book of Orange Dave (Chandelier Galaxy Books, 2015). Gertrude was a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. Hanner is a member of Red Sofa Poets and the Madrona Writers. She is a confirmed francophile who also loves Argentine tango. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with poet Michael Hanner.

 Hank Hudepohl graduated from Harvard, served in the US Navy, and earned an MFA from Hollins University in Virginia, where he also taught creative writing. He has published a book of poetry, The Journey of Hands, and he recently completed the manuscript for his second book, Riverbank. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines, and has been featured on the NPR show The Writer's Almanac. He grew up in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky, and now lives with his family in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

 Marianne S. Johnson is married with two children, and a practicing attorney in San Diego, CA. Her poetry is published in several journals including Calyx, Sport Literate, Slant, The Kerf, and in the anthologies Lavanderia, Mamas and Papas, and The Far East Project. Her first chapbook of poems, Tender Collisions, is forthcoming from Aldrich Press in 2015. "Wrongful Death" is dedicated herein to the mother, and her son.

 After an on-again/off-again relationship with higher education and a decade working in retail management, Heather Katzoff returned to school and now holds a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy and an MFA in poetry, both from Rutgers University. Her work has appeared in the Paterson Literary Review and online at Selfies in Ink. She currently teaches at the Harrisburg Area Community College in central Pennsylvania.

 Karen Kraco lives in Minneapolis where she periodically alternates teaching high school science with working as an editor or freelance writer. Her profiles, feature articles, and poems have appeared in local and regional publications, and she was co-editor and publisher of the poetry journal ArtWord Quarterly. Karen shares a home with Owen and Harriet, a mischievous Senegal parrot and an anxious cockatiel whose antics might land them in a children's story someday.

 Barth Landor lives in Chicago. His novel, A Week in Winter, was published by the Permanent Press.

 George Longenecker's recent poetry can be found in Atlanta Review, Penumbra and Santa Fe Review. He likes to find absurdity and surprises in daily life and turn these into evocative poetry. Much of his inspiration comes from the news and from the forest which surrounds his home in Middlesex, Vermont.

 Gina Loring holds a BA from Spelman College and an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. She was featured on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry, and has performed her music and poetry in over ten countries as guest artist of the American Embassy. She is a professor in the Los Angeles community college school district and volunteers with Inside Out Writers, working with incarcerated teens. She lives in Los Angeles, and she believes in mermaids. Contact her at www.ginaloring.com

 Yana Lyandres is a student studying French and English as well as minoring in Creative Writing at New York University and plans to teach high school when she graduates.

 Kate Magill is a Vermont native and a devoted backcountry wanderer. She currently resides in the Mojave Desert with her family. Her first volume of poetry, Roadworthy Creature, Roadworthy Craft, was published in 2011 by Fomite Press.

 Robert Mammano was born and raised in New York City. He graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Geneseo in 2009. He has spent the last few years wandering around the United States, working odd jobs, and writing as the mood strikes. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon, where he is enjoying the natural wonders of the region every chance he gets.

 Janet Smith began college at thirty-five after a string of jobs in Yosemite National Park. She graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota in 2001. She is a past recipient of a Nevada Arts Board Fellowship in poetry and the Guy Owens Prize. Her first book of poetry, All of a Sudden Nothing Happened, was published in 2010. She is on faculty in the English Department at Lake Tahoe Community College.

 A born and bred Oklahoman, Jennifer Leigh Stevenson loves the backroads. She began writing poetry in ninth grade, studied music and theater at University of Central Oklahoma and wound up (somehow) in banking. For years she scribbled lines on napkins and wrote rhymes on the back of receipts, until she realized she wanted to be a writer more than anything. This marks Jennifer's first time to be published.

 Rachel Stolzman's novel, The Sign for Drowning, was published by Trumpeter in 2008. She received her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her fiction and poetry have received numerous awards. She lives in the old Brooklyn and is invisible to the bearded, artisanal hipsters of the new Brooklyn. She can be found at her son's public school or writing at the Brooklyn public library or working at her government job, where sometimes poems are conceived under the fluorescents.

 J. Lee Strickland is a freelance writer and poet living in upstate New York. In addition to fiction, he has written extensively on the subjects of rural living, modern homesteading and voluntary simplicity both online and for various print publications. He is a member of the Mohawk Valley Writers' Group and is currently at work on a novel drawing upon his experiences as a youth in the anthracite coal strip-mining area of northeast Pennsylvania.

 Abigail F. Taylor is a North Texas Poet published in Illya's Honey, Red River Review, and Sixfold. She worked as the script editor and assistant director to Raptor Ranch, a gore-comedy now known as The Dinosaur Experiment. You can visit her on the web: http://wordpirate.webs.com

 This is Tom Yori's first published poetry. He has published short fiction in numerous literary journals such as New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Long Story, Sou'Wester, and others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was recognized in Passages North's 2010 very short fiction contest.
