Issue 7: Spring 2019
Poetry
Haymaker
Gale Acuff
I'll be dead before you know it I tell
Miss Hooker after Sunday School today
but that's all right since I'll get to see God
soon and she said Well, Gale, you need to be
saved first before anything else happens
good to you because where you're headed now
if the Lake of Everlasting Fire but
I don't even know how to swim in water,
then she smiled, her teeth are bright-white like new
tombstones, I mean if they're made of marble
but the ones in our church cemetery
are kind of a stubbly blue-gray granite
and her smile is like a small valley, maybe
meadow, it starts at a high point and then
dips and comes out on a high point again
and her nose is like a haystack but hay
-stack built by hand and not by baler and
as for her eyes, call 'em pools, Doc Savage
has such eyes but his are yellow or gold,
I think Miss Hooker's are about as
blue as you could want, the blue of clean pond
water or of course blue sky or how glass
appears blue-some if held up to the light
and as far as her face in general, milk
or maybe yogurt without fruit, maybe
the fruit's on the bottom and you haven't
stirred it up in the yogurt yet--you'd be
surprised how much detail you can notice
in just a few seconds, especially
if you're in love, which I am, I'm in love
with Miss Hooker and she's in love, too, though
with God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost
and not me, not like I'd like her to, not
that I know what I'd like, not all of it
anyway, I'm only 10, 25
is her sum so what do you do with love
that you try to send out but goes nowhere?
In fact I even asked Miss Hooker that
so as to change the subject, if it was
a change, I'm not sure, I don't want to go
to Hell but even more I don't want to
talk about it and she replied Maybe
that's why Jesus died and I said All right
and maybe it really is. Love's hopeless.
Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published and is the author of three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine, where he teaches at Arab American University.
Life Is
Candice Kelsey
a seven-mile stretch
of coastal road
in Carlsbad
California
North County
offering order
& form to the chaos
a gesture
of negotiable lines
paved sketch
astride
the ocean’s face
a reminder
as we drive
at any moment we could
become one
with vastness
the wine-dark voice
of sirens
this
grassy slight inland
village
calls us away
from curiosity
for pilgrim mercies
know
we will seize
the eastward road
toward
predictability
safety & land
never
turning west
toward the wild
terrifyingly
wild salt spray risk
smudged
sand-lick vignette
fools
we trust this coastal road
we miss
the billows we
miss
the beauty.
Candice Kelsey’s work has appeared in such journals as Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. She published a successful trade paperback with Da Capo Press, made it to the quarter finals of the 2017 Able Muse Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for Poetry Quarterly's 2018 Rebecca Lard Award, and recently was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An educator of 20 years' standing with her M.A. in literature from LMU, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
Up Here, All Things Float
Dan Cardoza
We know what makes
a balloon float,
clouds without string too.
After all, we built magic
up there, if just to redeem
prayer.
All things ascend somewhere.
So much so,
the dark vault of sky
impossibly sags
clouds buckle like
riveted steel beams with cracked
seams, impossibly so.
For now the patched stitches
won’t sieve, though a few
believe it’s only a matter of time.
Dan A. Cardoza has a MS Degree in Education from UC, Sacramento, Calif. He is the author of four poetry Chapbooks, and a new book of fiction, Second Stories.
VOID OF GOD
Paige McBride
after Elaine de Kooning's painting Bullfight
your painted breathing black feet lost all reflection
in the color of light in the world you never knew
the vacant ivory veil of bloodless snow covered
up your blind spiritless eyes of pallid uninspired
color
the choices to step void of head spoke little
as you watched your hand and brush melt
into the fast strokes of your colorless canvas
void of prayer void of divinity void of God
little dark dove with no soul while living
why did you abandon your gift from the light
at this moment as I stare into the bullfight
of once your mind once painted on a canvas
I think about the empty brush
strokes left by your overshadowed dark
hands and feel nothing.
Paige McBride is an artist, a poet and a librarian who lives with her dog, Sir Simon, in Dunedin, Florida. She received a Bachelor degree in English (CRW) and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Her poems have appeared in the West Trade Review, Tulane Review, American Chordata, Convergence, Sunset Liminal Press, aaduna, Literary Juice, Burningword Literary Journal, and The Wayfarer among others.
Past the Millennium
Trent Busch
Nothing has come around the house
this morning I wasn’t expecting,
the wren’s quick song a false alarm;
still, winter’s first snow on the lawn
quite surprises me, and I recall Hardy’s
thrush announcing a new century.
To think it over a hundred years
ago he leaned upon his thicket gate
in woe far different from our own.
Could I, I would say to him, now
fully targeted as his Tennyson,
We still look up and give a start—
if sometimes from the fifteenth floor
on tubes you wouldn’t understand—
at the moon’s full gaze upon our art.
And add, could he listen, the bird’s song
I heard today still sounds its promise;
the century’s gate’s as it was then.
Trent Busch, a native of rural West Virginia, now lives in Georgia where he writes and makes furniture. His first book of poetry, not one bit of this is your fault, was published by Cyberwit in 2019. His poems have appeared in many journals including The Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Threepenny Review, North American Review, Chicago Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Kenyon Review, American Scholar, Shenandoah, and more recently Notre Dame Review, Evansville Review, Agni Online, Boston Review, Natural Bridge, Sou’wester, Poetry Daily, and Hudson Review. Also his poem “Edges of Roads” was the 2016 First Place winner of the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize, Published by Winning Writers.
Car Trip
Connie Jordan Green
Somewhere in the rain
and mist of a winter day
you travel with your family—
those souls that have fled
still united in the gray Ford,
your father’s cigarette smoke
eddying around your head,
your stomach turning, nausea
as dizzying as the steep mountains,
your mother’s cool hand
passing you a lemon slice,
the bitter bite of it like a fresh
wind that pushes down the bile,
and once more the world
is icicles hanging from stone
outcroppings, battered houses
clinging to the mountainsides,
the car turning, turning,
curves and drop-offs lurching
past like dreams that sometimes
pursue you through the night—
but for those few hours all
you hold dear secure in that car
making its way from shadow
into sunlight.
In the Leaves, Something
after Mary Oliver
Connie Jordan Green
In last fall’s brown leaves
something coiled,
not a rope
unless a rope is patterned
yellow and black,
more intricate
than the leaf’s own mottling,
unless a rope
waits like a spring.
The cats stand back, lean
toward the curled mass,
their curiosity
hovering thick as the snake’s
patience, birds sing
from the maples,
nests tucked among
this year’s
green leaves.
Trees breathe in, out, summer
and her extravagance
ready to strike.
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She is the author of two award-winning novels for young people, The War at Home and Emmy; two poetry chapbooks, Slow Children Playing and Regret Comes to Tea; and two poetry collections, Household Inventory, winner of the Brick Road Poetry Award, 2013, and most recently Darwin’s Breath from Iris Press. Since 1978 she has written a column for The Loudon County News Herald. She frequently leads writing workshops.
Last Evening in June
Cameron Morse
I hear the reports of fireworks—
or thunder—too early
for the fourth. Storm clouds unfurl
slowly in the smoke of their own
incineration, burning flags
draped over the coffin of the sky’s
west wing, obfuscating the truth.
Which I might as well tell you
is that I live for these moments of absolute
solitude, dogs already caged
inside the house, darkness gathering
in the arms of the rosebush,
arms already empty. Blossoms so soon
spilled, cake the elbow of the sidewalk,
dead-end receptacle for lavender
and white, piercingly
white lips.
Farther down
the fence line, honeysuckle leaves
lift up the beetles
in prayer which sleep and feast upon them,
little iridescent angels of death,
mandibles grinding like teeth.
The Sultriness
Cameron Morse
A bumblebee slips its long hairy tongue
down the throat of the Rose of Sharon blossom.
Below the branch, rosebuds encrust
the sidewalk. Wind roughens its caresses,
whispering in the dark morning sky.
I no longer feel like the carpenter ant
caught walking across the bathroom mirror
and coaxed into a Mason jar, bottlecap
screwed behind me. Moving back
into my parent’s basement, I wondered
if I’d returned to my place of birth
to die. Now, like the ant that has come
to rest at the bottom of its invisible
world, I’ve acclimated to the sultriness
of my own breath against the glass.
Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. He was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, and South Dakota Review. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His second, Father Me Again, is available from Spartan Press and chapbook Coming Home with Cancer is forthcoming in Blue Lyra Press’s Delphi Poetry Series.
The Mainland
Victoria Shippen
She was always here before now.
I’ve never had her not here at least.
I am confused without her. How could she be gone dead?
Is it the 49 years of always that makes this island of no motherness so cold and lonely?
I worry I’ll vomit from pain.
I wish I could.
My skin is hot and swollen.
I worry about its ends continuing to meet.
In my demented state, I like anorectics. They deny need.
I am sure we are kin. I feel less lonely.
Fleetingly I wish for membership:
skateguard collar bones and chicken wing shoulder blades.
Would I feel good then?
Is there hope? I cry so hard I get sore throats.
I cry wherever I am. I have lost all privacy.
I worry I’m insane; it is only me who howls,
a pup left too long, too late at night,
except I am 49, and half-person.
At 6 a.m. I have no gravelymothervoice to call,
I ache for her “Oh, there you are, dear”
me, a fundament of her universe,
a locating device I didn’t know I relied on.
All provinces, now met alone, seem demonically barren.
I am an estate of otherness, sure that pain and life are the same word.
It no longer matters that she was horribly cold, even malevolent.
My life’s internal horizon, was her, every day, not that I knew it.
I thought my soul inseparable from its points of arrival and departure
52 Trumbell Street
Victoria Shippen
My father, Robert Shippen, born to replace
his dead older brother, couldn't.
Raised by cook and nurse,
common to his culture, he was put
to his mother for afternoon tea.
Washed at 3, in his navy suit, by 4,
nurse would carry him downstairs:
"Be still, Bobbie, be good.
Remember she doesn't like you
to look at her, and don't talk.
That's a good boy."
Nurse didn't stay in the room. She was Irish.
She'd stand in the doorway, watch for his errors.
Obediently, as much as he could do, he did.
He'd hold his chubby little hands behind him, stand
still, look at the wallpaper, count and sort, play picture.
Sometimes, in those twenty minutes, his mother talked:
the sky, weather, flowers, the rug, cook, father.
But the usual sound was the two gold coins of her bracelet jingling,
or the tea cup landing on its plate, or the soft rub
of her fingers on a coin.
Once she'd had him on her lap, lifted him
to sit on her thick red dress.
He had leaned into her, the smell of her.
She stroked the bracelet, showed him his initials
but two dates: b. 3/’18 d. 8/’18. “Your brother who died,” she said:
“wonderful Robert, who played on my lap for hours.”
This son smiled up at her. He could sit still like this forever.
He could feel her warmth, and it was coming for him.
He reached out and touched the tingling coins.
She put him off her lap and called for nurse.
Victoria Shippen lives in the Boston area and works as a child, adult, and family psychotherapist. She has studied poetry with Tom Lux, Denise Duhamel, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Joan Houlihan. Victoria's poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Main Street Rag, Rise Up Review, Canary, and Constellations.
Removing a Colony
Sara Eddy
Pressing my cheek against the wall
I feel their industry in my skull
and smell the sweetness
of their hive bond before
I see any trace of them.
They’re invisible, the ghost
workers in our wall,
but we’ll have to make them leave.
The weight of their honey will
warp the wallboard and bring down
the house, and the sight of them
careening in and out through
their narrow entrance in the siding
will frighten the neighbors.
We call in a white suit with smoke
and tools and patience to open the wall
and slice out their comb,
relocating room and board and
bees into hive boxes. He takes
each laden leaf of comb gently,
his goatskin gloves dripping gold
and the house soon stinking
of bees and wax and honey.
He is careful to find the queen
and lift her with deference
into her new kingdom.
The workers will all follow,
refugees now, and they’ll
ride in a pick-up for miles
through fields of strange flowers
to a new hive home, leaving me
strangely bereft, wondering
if there might have been
other possibilities.
Sara Eddy is a writing instructor at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some of her poems have appeared recently in Sum, One, and Zingara, and are forthcoming in Raw Art Review and the Tishman Review. Her poem “Peach Jam” won the Causeway Lit poetry competition in fall of 2018. She is currently working on a chapbook of food poems with the support of a Fellowship from the Kahn Institute at Smith College. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with a teenager and a black cat and three beehives.
Fingernails of Grain, Which Kept Safe My Childhood
For my father
after Aleš Šteger
Erin Wilson
I think there is no learning ahead of me. I think all of the learning to happen is behind me.
You gave the silk of your manness like a white flag. You surrendered. Oh, you gave yourself willingly, nightly, like the moon to the sky.
There were nights beyond the barn—but only in theory.
All else rested nearby, illuminated by your sphere.
We were swollen ticks, glamoured in the thickness of our bedclothes. The rooster quivered once, but it was only a settling of its feathers. The nervous hens closed their eyes and dropped all that was held by their bodies into their laps. Dappled slates, they awaited their fates, while the voracious weasel burrowed meticulously. Everything was in its place, from the forehead, to the furred paws.
The engendering:
Nest inside your body with now's narration: now come here, now shovel shit, now pound some nails. A saga, for instance, is a carrot pulled from the ground when you're hungry.
Hold things: axes, buckets, springs and greasy metal workings, knives, forks, mom, me, the thread fed through the eyes for jigging.
Be—and never worry.
The wheat is poor. Or the wheat is rich. The wheat is enough if parcelled stoically.
Everything is to be gained.
All will be lost.
It Happened a Long Time Ago and Keeps Happening
Erin Wilson
It's happening
right now
and I'm looking at it
but I'm startled
that each day
it could be told
in infinite ways.
i.
For instance, my mother,
at her kitchen table,
is wringing her hands.
The air between us
is gentle. I know her.
And because of my life
I know where she has been.
She addresses the loss.
The cornice of her face
hits the table
alongside the apple pie.
She keeps talking.
I'm very slowly
nodding, yesss.
ii.
Or, my mother is excited
by a thin strand of lights
she's strung up
over her kitchen sink.
It's off. She turns it on.
See? she asks hopefully.
I've learned to lie gently
over the years. Oh, I respond,
it's lovely.
But just how many lights
might it take to illuminate
this house as brightly
as she feels she needs to?
A house is made of time.
iii.
Even the plastic flowers
on his grave
fade.
Erin Wilson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, The American Journal of Poetry, The Adirondack Review, San Pedro River Review, The Meadow, The Sunlight Press and Sounding's East Magazine. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.
Driving in Puerto Rico After Hurricane María
Dorsía Smith Silva
I.
It’s dark now.
September.
Quite cruelly hot.
II.
Barreling down the streets, full of large chunks
of black tangled wires, shattered glass, and splintered stop signs,
I swing from lane to lane,
crisscrossing across the double yellow lines like bursting lattices.
Now that the earth has fallen around me,
my car crushes all that is underfoot.
Locked into its roaring appetite,
the tires take the asphalt hostage, so effortlessly
shake the concrete barriers,
gather the flesh of gravel pebbles.
III.
And here in a land without traffic lights: day after day,
there is a firm shade of understanding,
so that my car chops down all like a chainsaw,
forging a new path in the sea of debris.
In this season of hurricanes, I grow fearless:
a warrior consuming one road after another,
of the many wild domains.
Dorsía Smith Silva is a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published in several journals and magazines in the United States and the Caribbean, including Portland Review, Saw Palm, Aji Magazine, Gravel, Adanna, Mom Egg Review, and POUI: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing. She is also the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and the co-editor of six books.