Jesse Bishop
Apotheosis
The
currency of leaves lifts the crow,
Christ-like, wings
outstretched
sins borne
in black shimmer
resurrected
to the power lines of omniscience.
The carrion
communion—fox and possum
roadside
relics of myths and magic:
take this in remembrance
of the fox
the body of the thief,
sly slitherer
with sticky paws stuck
in pause
highway haruspicy.
take this in remembrance
of the possum
that gnarl-toothed Judas
of life’s
performance, the
betrayer of death.
The black
beak speaks nothing,
caws and
calls for no one
save the
eighteen-wheel wind
swirling
down the highway
toward tomorrow, toward nothing.
***
Verse
(A
Cento)
Corpses are all gathered
at the gate
Hollow men, dancers,
heroes of the dance
Reckless, violent, and
famous for it
Hiding myself in the
leaves of a dark elm-tree
All that I shy away from
is a scrutiny
What use is there in
telling you how often
I have written, I have
asked for it.
I am
not
Your grave, a hollow in
a foreign sand
A man whose bones are
rotting somewhere now
Whoever it was who first
proposed the singing
I can say no more, for
the soft bark is creeping
Unwedded to the elm to
which it clings
A third of the universe,
it seems, denies us
In the silent leaves,
never a mention of air
(A
Cento)
A gully ran there, where
storm-water massed
I felt no tie with home,
no love for lingering
Like a black vapor from
a thunderhead
Those in the center,
though, endured the cloud
Harder to bend than
willow-withe and briony
The unimpeachable
witness of tradition
The faint refulgent
borderline of darkness
But when the passing
months and wheeling seasons
Were dancing, linked,
touching each other’s wrists
When the long lines met
at the point of contact
Laughing as they slipped
out, arm in arm
And gullied beds echoed
their hurly-burly
From a jutting bank, by
washing out what held it
I could let all the world swing in mid-heaven
Larry Bradley’s manuscript The Spirit of Gravity has been a finalist for the Yale Series, Walt Whitman Award, and The National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Southwest Review.
***
A Swiss Vintner in
the Land of Muscadines
Autumn, 1882: A Letter to His
Brother in the Old Country
It’s Sunday morning on
St. Mary’s Mount,
the Ozark sunrise a wet
watercolor
of pink and blue, a
hawk’s call the harshest sound.
Last year, I crossed the
swamp without a dollar
to rustle in my palm,
and now I stand
on my winegrowing
ground, a thousand feet
above the valley’s
hardwood bottomland,
patchwork fields of
whitening cotton
and sorghum-cane hewn
from the forest,
the silver slither of
the river.
Twining through my
cloud-hooded woods
are wild whiskery
vines
bearing grapes called
muscadines,
musky
dimes in local
speech,
some as big around as a
five franc piece.
Their shiny skins black
and dotted,
they resemble little
candied planets,
night-coated and flecked
with stars.
Honeysuckle, Akebia, and
other floral immigrants
strangle trees, while
muscadine goes easy on its host,
tendrils clinging
tightly
then lightly before they
rot off altogether,
fresh growth braceleting
the branch further upward.
This is Musky Dime Time,
the cool of autumn
blowing in.
Ozarkers gather ’dimes
by the basketful.
Careless of stains, boys
hold their shirts out to bag them.
I found these grapes
September a year ago.
When I walked into the
woods, their musky smell came over me
like memory somehow mine
though not yet made.
A young man and woman
were laughing,
eating from a loaded
vine.
Playing coy, she ran
away, dashing under high trees,
her scarlet hair
aflicker, muscadines squelching
under her bare white
feet.
He gave chase and caught
her in a tumbling kiss,
their lips likely
tingling,
sensitive from the acid
of the grapes.
Pure sin to watch, I
know.
I must be shriven
soon.
But could you have
looked away
when he kissed her
purple-blotched feet?
Glad boy bandits came
yowling past me,
chucking ’dimes at one
another.
One boy, a grape
whirring toward his head,
made a mad leap for a
muscadine rope and swung across a ravine.
They called a truce and
ate themselves weary,
tongue-threshing,
spitting seeds and skins.
My curious hand
tendriling
the silver-smooth wood
of muscadine,
I didn’t think of
cobbler, syrup, sauce, jelly, jam,
hull pie, candied skins,
juice, not even wine.
All asizzle with
boyhood, wanting nothing but a taste,
I shuffled through the
leaves and plucked a pretty one,
dropped it sun-warm in
my mouth and bit the skin.
It burst, flesh shooting
on my tongue
with a gush of woodsy
flavor, no more tart than sweet,
the loose ball sliding
down my throat.
I sucked and tongued the
inner skin for a wet secret—
the sweetest juice and
tenderest fleshy lining.
After a punishing
summer, only here and there
have I found a shriveled
mummy
dime.
Let me bet on a fight
pitting these grapes
against disease, pests,
and drought—
my money’s on the
muscadines.
The bare feet of the
Grape Dance may not mash them evenly,
so thick and tough the
hulls. We will see.
Did you catch that we? Tell me something,
Brother.
Are you at home at home?
Unfolding Europe
on my desk tonight, I
tried to dream away
the distance, but
looking at that wrinkled map,
varicose with rivers, I
could say
“Old World.” Come. I
invite you with a quill
a hawk wafted my way. If
you’re vacillating,
hold this paper to your
face and smell.
I’m using muscadine juice for my ink.
***
Alicia Casey
Near Drowning at Sardis Lake
My baby’s not a baby
anymore. Her recently
acquired fear of bathwater
is forgotten the moment
her boat shoes hit the shore.
She adds the word hat to her
vastly expanding vocabulary,
and shucks her flowered cap
into the waves. Then arms
reach across the murky surface—
Mama, roll in, kick out, and Dada
to catch her on the other side.
We’ve brought the dog, half-wolf,
half-shepherd, who, head above
water, negotiates the lake on his leash.
Lila says, doggie, doggie,
woof
woof, woof. She wants to ride him
like a dolphin. She clings to his mane.
And I know it’s a bad idea, but I let her
try to mount him like her plastic zebra
tucked against our kitchen wall. A second
splits, and I feel the nylon threads of the leash
coil my ankles like a copperhead. This is how
quickly the brain works: I am underwater.
Do not breathe in. I am holding Lila who has
no flotation device, and I’d rather breathe in
than let her die. I read
an article in Parenting
last week that said, An infant may drown in the time
it takes to answer the phone. How long does it take
to answer the phone? And, more importantly, is she
face up or face down, while tangled in arms that are
losing oxygen? And then, her weight is lifted by her father,
close by with the leash in his hand. I emerge with one lost
contact lens, sputtering lake water from my mouth. Later, calmed,
I tell him my own survival instinct was on override. He said this
is how it should be—he last saw Lila, balanced on bodiless palms.
***
The
Field
It is flat and clear and
full of small black
birds. It is stubbled like a beard. The corn
stalks are sharp and
hard, their brown leaves
drag in the earth. Everything in the field
is tired. The birds are tired. The open
furrows are tired. The emptiness
is a limp, long-legged
emptiness.
It is December. The kernels are
black
with cold. The crows and starlings
open
their shiny throats and
the shriveled corn
goes down like
teeth. The
field
is full of molars—what
the combine leaves,
a hasty dentist. Cobs.
Mouths.
Leaves
like lips peeled
open. Its puckered emptiness
sits on the ear; the
silence of the field
is a flat silence. It enters the
black
tunnels with dead
pricking, sharp like the corn
stalks. I could touch something to it,
open
a hole, and
shatter. I could
open
my body like a
jacket. My ghost
leaves
in tiny, hard pieces:
white corn, dent corn,
flint corn. I am shaken to bits. I am emptiness,
with my bits flown
out. The small
black
birds are dark
hungry. This is the
field
in front of which I
stood. This is the
field
that swallowed me the
winter of the open
casket. It would not snow. The ground was
black
and hard. A box.
Your coffin had leaves
of black walnut. All I wanted was for the
emptiness
to be covered. To put a lid on it. The corn
was cut down. You were cut down like the
corn.
It was golden once. You stood in a
field
and the blade swept you
into emptiness.
I lost my faith. The lid of your coffin was
open
like an eye. Your face was waxed. The leaves
of the missal were
turned to a prayer. A
black
book. Come emptiness of snow on
corn.
Cover black. Cover bird.
Cover field.
Leave nothing open, so nothing leaves.
***
Freakshow
Other heights in
other lives, God willing.
Robert
Browning
Today, the sun and underside
Of your eyelid looks like the state fair’s fun-
House mirror. Ultraviolet cooks
The lid bright red so what was dull
And black last night and snug in bed
Plays a violent strike of flashes: kite-
Tail veins, blood blue, a rusted-trike-
Brick by the nose; deep Red. Now you
Keep staring and you’ll just get froze,
Missy, your chin up high to land
The heat, to seer, so your lid’s skin
May show you iris, pupil, mirror.
Mind changed, look up and eye
Big Brother, close, then op— a cup
(Ooh! Ah!) of ant-hilled ice is rose.
You’re wine. The Whack-a-Mole’s precise
Escapes, the Whipperwhirl, the yak,
Hogs, Walk-the-Plank, white clown, Mom’s slip
And madras dress? All red. Tell Frank
You’ve got magic eyes. And from the mess
Of buttons offered as a prize
For shooting bottles off a trough,
He hands you two: LOVE WHAT YOU GOT;
AMEN THE LORD AIN’T DONE WITH YOU.
The Lady with Umbilical Cord
And Baby Man stand by the plum-
Pie booth. Now open wide. You can,
Your eyes still shut. Reveal the scope
Of Llama’s chin and Thinman’s gut,
Three mares horned unicorns and twin,
Buxom and tall “Ms. Fortunes” (Soon,
They say). Let Goatboy laugh like a walrus.
Now try and see him pink. Now coat
Him blue. The mutability—
Body as shell, a twig as newt.
Whoa, you can’t stand. You hear a yell,
She may be small but see
a brand
Of little girl who saw
it all
(Ovid’s so proud), who died, turned
pearl,
Has oyster lips to sell the crowd
Goatboy! who claps his jaws. The tips
Of his boy-beard blow when he naps.
Remember, e then i in weird,
How sunspots split. Go long and spike
Them down. Play dumb. Eschew your wit.
Then guess your weight. Let cloudlets come
One size fits all as cloudlets bait
Their hooks as cloudlets march as pall-
Bearers while toy rifles bust loud
As crackerjack. The passive, coy
Crowd moves too active, back to back,
Too many winners on a stack
Of winning pumpkins. So, squash; spin
Yourself up at the top. Fist-pump.
You’ve earn it. Doff your wide-brimmed hat.
But mind your eyes sealed like a cut
And walk their lines, tic-tac-toe thin,
And, backwards, count from ten, nine, tens, nines…
Erica Dawson’s first collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid, won the 2006 Anthony
Hecht Poetry Prize and was named Best
Debut by Contemporary Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Barrow Street, Best American
Poetry 2008, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Ohio where she is completing a
PhD in English Literature at University of Cincinnati as the Elliston Fellow in
Poetry.
***
The Foundling
Wheel[1]
They swept the river and
caught the dead
in nets. Then a wheel
with a box
let someone leave a
child
without anyone seeing. I
wish that you
could see the church on
the shore.
Boats sway beneath the
great wall.
At low tide they lay in
mud
beside anchors and
tangled rope.
Along the road, cows
graze
in green pastures, sheep
on the hillside
as you might imagine. I
imagine you
at home, painting—tarps
taped
to the floor. I stood in
line
behind a mother at the
store
who rolled the stroller
back and forth
looking at—the rain? In
the dark,
my mind drifts, a
current on the bank,
the sound of water
splashing from the roof.
The blue curtain glows
at dawn.
I hear the gulls and
don’t sleep well.
[1] The original foundling wheel, a rotating platform lodged in the wall of a church or convent, allowed women to anonymously leave their children.
Blas Falconer is an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University, where he serves as the poetry editor of Zone 3 Magazine/Zone 3 Press. He is the author of a chapbook, The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press), and a book-length collection of poems, A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press). He lives in Nashville.
***
Climbing
Eden
He stood in the rain near me, naked,
in my dream. I did not desire him
but was not unhappy to see him. Long flanks
and bony shoulders, he was young again.
I thought, perhaps after all he does not
hate me.
Our daughter says when he came
to meet the baby, he helped her plant her garden.
I trust he took care with the pink rose I gave her
to celebrate the birth,
called Climbing Eden.
Trust when he
held our new, first grandchild, he didn’t deplore
my mouth, the beestung lip, on her.
Long ago, when we walked the fire roads
in Palmer Canyon, the world lay all before us—
Time can make
nothing of us now. One day we’ll be dead,
he first, or I. Our long
catastrophe will be over.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s third book of poems,Carta Marina, has just been published by Wings Press. Her poem sequence Slide Shows placed second in the 2008 Finishing Line Chapbook competition and will appear in winter 2009. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.
***
Psyche
...some untrodden region—John
Keats
Ahead,
headland;
the ultimate
bluff—projecting out from all I have left to stand
for me. Behind
its sheer face, broad
tracts, their resources extracted, mind
turned
metaphor;
the chiseled,
picked-over, abandoned quarry; the seems; the
or;
the loaded,
vain
topos of topography—old
prospects, points made plain,
what I said I
meant
in legends, plotting,
low comic relief. Now, glacial
sediment,
the raw
material
world, beyond those
former footloose expeditions (the boring drill;
the dark
earth-bed;
the untold treasure,
briefly, brought to light; the fateful drop, the
fled-
from peril). Here,
no further ground for
assaying; no geminal facets glittering clear,
no features which
await
my cutting devices; the
platitude is wiped clean off the slate.
Yet, while I
breathe,
all is self-flattery,
long-winded drafts, and underneath
is
overblown,
well-worn, through
layers of hollowed figures, from headland to
headstone
(no more than a
toss
from the depths, the
surf that breaks the surface down to a fine gloss,
to nothing
less
than its still adamant
base elements, the parts of the process
of breaking
down
erosion itself: Eros and I, as always, leading on.
***
In the Beginning
That first night, you knew better
than to believe the sleep I feigned
on your couch was real. The party
ended, our friends drove home,
and you locked your doors against
the chilled wind October sent
blowing through the neighborhood
to which your Army lawyer husband
would soon fly back, and find you
absent. What were you thinking
when you took the blame, signed
the papers, and hauled your boxed
life across town to my small rental?
It took me a year to stop thinking
all you wanted was another escape
from that last of life plans gone awry.
When I came home early from work
to find you plucking bright crocuses
along the road, and arranging them
in a vase, I still wasn’t convinced.
What it took was that accidental
division of cells in the womb
you thought would never spark.
Maybe it wasn’t the pregnancy,
but your desire to hand over
your body, to give our daughter
my small and unremarkable name.
***
If men knew what others said of them, there wouldn’t be four friends
in the world.
—Pascal
A student is telling me that he
called his mom the other night
and thought he’d hung up
before a young woman came
to his dorm room so he
could teach her to smoke pot,
and later that evening, his mom
calls back to say she’d listened
to him for forty-five
minutes as he told his new friend to “take
it deeply into your
lungs” and “hold it as long as you can.”
And I tell him he was lucky that he
didn’t know, unlike the time
we threw that party, and
on the sheet of paper with the list
of prospective guests,
we’ve also sketched out the buffet—
cheeses at this end, meats at the
other, veggies and dips
in the middle—and how
we’d left the sheet on the table,
and now the guests are
arriving, and I am across the room talking
to someone about her kids or her
haircut or some other staple
of party conversation
when suddenly I notice the sheet of paper
with guests’ names on it
along with question marks in some cases
and explicit comments in others:
“Talks only about self,”
for example, and “B.
says yes, D. says over my dead body.”
It’s between the pecan
log and the spiral-cut ham,
and there’s a piece of salmon on it,
right next to the name
of a couple who are
already in the room and are described
as “she’s okay—can’t
stand him.” There’s a tension, in other
words, of the kind Billy Collins
describes when he says that
poems have miserable
content (heartbreak, death) and happy
form (well-turned lines
and stanzas), that the triumph
of the form redeems the misery of
the content, which is why
poetry works and TV
doesn’t, because TV has happy form
and happy content, i.e.,
no tension. And just as I’m about
to dart over and stuff the sheet of
paper in my pocket, someone
I haven’t seen in weeks
kisses me on the cheek and says,
“Where should I put my
coat?” and I say, “I’ll take it”
and start toward the bedroom, though
not without looking
over my shoulder and
hoping Barbara will see the sheet
before someone else
does, and a few minutes later,
I hiss at her, “Get the paper off
the table!” and she says,
“What paper?” and I say,
“The paper! The stupid paper—
get it!”just as a couple
embraces us and says we’re sorry
to leave so early, there’s another
party, goodbye now, goodbye.
And just as I turn
toward the table again, someone says,
“I guess you heard about
Jon’s wedding,” and I say,
“I didn’t. Can you hold on a sec?”
But the speaker just
has to tell me how the
bride-to-be’s mother went off
on an anti-Semitic rant
against Jon, and when her
husband
calls her on it, she puts oleander
leaves in his soup, nearly
killing him, and then,
when the rest of the family calls her
on that, runs into the
backyard and blows her brains out.
And when I say, “That must have put
a damper on the wedding,”
the person telling me
the story says, “Not really,” because
for some time,
apparently, Mom had been acting out,
so while everyone wishes she’d kept
her foul mouth shut
and hadn’t tried to
murder Dad and had taken her own life
in some more decorous
manner, at least nobody had to worry
about the old bat jumping up in the
middle of the ceremony
and stabbing the rabbi.
And it’s things like this that make you
wonder what’s wrong with
people, including yourself,
and how much you know about them and
want to know
and whether or not it
makes any difference, given that
your mother loves you
anyway, no matter how much pot
you smoke, or that your marriage
will not only endure
but get better over
time, that the oleanders will flower
and die back and bloom
again, that the sheet of paper
on which you had written so many
hateful comments
about people who’d come
to your house when they could
have done a dozen other
things, had put on their most
handsome clothes and driven across
town and brought you
candy and flowers and
bottles of pinot noir, how that sheet
had disappeared that day, even though neither you nor your
wife
remember removing it, and you wait
for a day, a week,
two weeks, and no one
calls to say how hurt they were,
how awful you are, how
they’re going to tell everybody,
you’ll never be able to hold up your
head again,
at last, everyone will
know you for who you really are,
but no one calls, not a
person, nobody at all.
David Kirby has received many honors for his work,
including the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and his work appears frequently in the
Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. He has been awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Kirby is the author or co-author of twenty-nine books, including the poetry collections
The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, (which was a finalist for the 2007
National Book Award,) The Ha-Ha, The House of Blue Light, and
The Travelling Library. His verse has appeared in such publications as The Kenyon
Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares.
***
Nick McRae
Salat
The trees lean, supple under the weight
of a western storm. Branches strain.
Below, trash bins roll about like Tonka trucks,
bolts rattling in their plastic sockets
as they careen into walls and curbs.
And boys traverse the sand-pit,
throwing their bodies this way and that,
a soccer ball pinballing back and forth
between the paddles of their feet.
Stormclouds mount. Rain thuds
on the chilly sand, and now, that hour
come round again, the ball rolls to a stop
as the boys lean toward Mecca to pray.
Their bodies wave like pine boughs,
whipped about by the blind of wind and rain.
They breathe the words in unison,
barely audible above the hum of Earth’s turning,
the drumming of rain and feet
and tires and bombs not too distant.
Near Vienna, the strain of wind too much
for the shallow roots of hill-trees,
a labored oak crushes a little Citroën,
the occupants just home from the bakery.
***
Adam
Million
from Growing Up Down
Gravel
They got the ladder from the barn, wanting to watch the fireworks from on top the wash shed. Her brother made it, scurrying up the shingles, waiting for her to summit. Their family, stuffed with sweet corn, potato chips, and cheeseburgers, congregated on the lawn, singing their cautions in a round. Mind your steps. Don’t act foolish. Help your sister. As she ascended one hand, one foot, one wooden rung at a time, the ladder bounced. She faltered coming to the zenith, unsure how to make the ultimate step, raising her hand toward the sky, reaching for, then grabbing the hot wire for sureness, as a guide. The shock caught her mid-step. She froze, fingers taut around the black wire, between brown grass, sapphire sky. The congregation shouted and waved their arms. Her grandfather grabbed his hammer from the porch, enduring the current of screams. Up the ladder, he put one hand to her arm, grabbing and pulling as the hammer descended upon her fist—pulling and hammering. Her brother watched her eyes rolled back in her head, then release as she fell back to Earth, to their feet, waiting, receiving her gasping body. Years later she would see him in the back yard smiling at clouds as he would ride the air backwards, his back straightened, arms at his side, and eyes wide open, waiting for something like hands to catch him, or a bird to pass above, or a voice to cry out.
***
Erin J.
Mullikin
South Carolina, July
(1988)
after Kimiko Hahn
1
When the boats charge through the marsh waterways, and when they meet the solitary road,
there is a bridge that lifts up for them to pass.
2
My mother tells us to look for ghosts, that they pour out of Spanish moss and ancient oaks when the last of the beach houses turn off their lights.
3
A Civil War battle was fought on Parkers Ferry Road, and I think about soldiers in wool
uniforms fighting men and heat.
4
At night, ghost lights frame the heat. We drive to them, all the little ones in the back of the
truck. I listen for the sound of the sea.
5
I hear bells, bells and ocean and my mother’s hair singing to me from where the wind originates.
I follow the map of sound.
6
Those ghosts do find paths. At night they tremble in windows. I hear their shells. Don’t tell me
they don’t have shells. I have seen how they pick them up.
7
I have seen my mother with those shells and who knows where she got them? Did my father
mail them from Korea along with my name?
8
Did my father kill men? Did he enjoy the warmth of a gun, foreign beer, women who didn’t
have to talk? I believe he did.
9
When we follow the road out to the island, the bridge swings. Oysters slide deep into brown
water. My mother, my father, this war now.
10
Out past the break line, I float. I leave this past behind to form a union with liquid, with hunger,
with blood. The tide comes in.
Erin J. Mullikin is currently a student at Clemson University, where she studies literature and poetry. Recent works of hers have appeared in Gloom Cupboard and Gently Read Literature. She is also this year’s recipient of The Clemson English Department's Creative Writing Award for Poetry. You can see what she's up to at http://www.everyredfiber.blogspot.com/.
***
Ren Powell
Inner Space Qasidah
I can see that nothing is solid, no matter how it appears.
from the “atomobile” script for Adventures Thru Inner Space, Disneyland, 1973
Tomorrowland has new attractions
though everything is still a shiny plastic
with sticky finger touch and mouth and hips
and handrails hot then cold through every shadow
That day I stood beside the ticket-taker
and watched the people in the plastic cars
as some climbed out and others took their places
the cars would spin but never stop or slow
Like luggage on a banded carousel
the people disappeared behind a wall
but reappeared inside a glass-like tube
that tapered into shrinking into snowflakes
Because is not a reason, but it is
Just am is blue like woozy boat-fishing scared
my sister sat alone inside a car
a gust of air conditioning took her
The ticket-taker pointed to the tube
and winked No one really shrinks, you know
then Mickey Mouse led me to the exit
to see my sister’s five-foot five all still there
It’s okay, Chicken my sister pinched my nose
she’d seen the wrong-way through a microscope
an enormous eye was looking back at her
her every cell the spaces in between
It’s not a long drive from Disneyland
to home but still we had to stop for gas
the attendant pulled the squeegee over the window
he smiled—my every atom jumped orbit.
My sister’s key ring had a rabbit’s foot
my fourth-grade science teacher knows mitosis
I know the human body is too fluid
I hold these truths to be self-evident.
Ren Powell is the author of two books of poetry (Fairy Tales and Soil, 1999, and mixed states, 2004: Wigestrand Press), and ten books of translations. Thanks for the Cornflakes, her third collection, is forthcoming in 2009. Her poetry has been translated and published in several languages, and has appeared in journals such as International PEN's Magazine, Segue, Beacons, and Yalobusha Review. She is the founding editor of Babel Fruit: writing under the influence.
***
After the Gold
Rush
1.
When I was
born
They said I
should
Have a
sister
Fifteen
seconds later
I had a
sister
They laid
us out
Like
corn
Pulled
& stretched
Our
arms
Said this
is yours
This is
yours
2.
Hum of
halogen
Click
luminary
So many
halos
So many
hollows
Hidden
The eye
And the
spleen
Like large
Carnivorous
birds
3.
Late
night
Gentle whir
of wipers
Always the
turning
And
returning
Always the
gentle
Fracture of
the streetlights
The quick
click of a door
The slow
walk of steps
Echoing
along hallways
4.
Return to
the house
The
childhood home
Impossible
To
begin
At the
beginning
Unfortunate
sad hours
Sad clocks
tick ticking
My
mother
Always
older
Says
something
Of the
Their
field’s
Return to
native
Prairie
grass
Says
The grocery
doesn’t
Carry
tahini
Perhaps we
should make
The
potatoes wedges
Lynn
Wagner This is not meant
to be important or apparent but I’ll put it all down: I was the poet of simple
things. Night-forced seedling born in an aluminum-sided house in the suburbs.
The one with the Chrysler station wagon in the drive. The patient who was happy
but forgot her childhood. One who stayed close to the womb. I was junior manager
of choked dreams and wrong-headed responsibility, forever clapping erasers for
dark-habited nuns. When strangers told me their secrets I bit my lip. Of me I
sing: tight-fisted detailer, O counter of coins and commas. Remover of scuff
marks from gymnasium floors. Each spring I lost
faith in the seed, took up my shovel to dig. Come autumn, the birds dropped dead
from the trees. I buried them there under leaf litter, yet someone else was
singing. The voice inside my head was never my own; I listen for it in the keen
squalls of tea kettles. Those who say I didn’t love are liars. I loved
dangerously: suicides and lost ones, but also knew my own skin. Need I say I was
best friends with blonds and beautiful women. I did their dishes and cared for
their houseplants and dogs. Because we all die, I have left this small note.
From it you might make a toy sailboat—to be launched at night in the
rain.
***
Note
Tremors
Over the counter, my
mother’s hands flutter:
bread to cream cheese to
mayonnaise
to chips of candied
ginger. My son’s favorite
sandwich for his field
trip tomorrow.
Over the sequencing, my
mother’s focus flutters.
Creamy, sharp, sugary
spread never blends,
never slathers across
the bread. Again and again
she tries.
My son has no field trip.
This is the first
tremor, or perhaps the second
if the first was her
concussion six years back,
when she was pulled,
bloody, from the wrecked car—
conscious again, she
chatted of books and politics
through an hour-long
ambulance ride
and by evening had
forgotten it all. Tonight
she can’t get her words
out whole, can’t be calmed.
My father spreads his
helpless hands.
This time I drive her to
ER, sit with her
through two days of
tests. Reaction to the new drug,
delirium from fever,
both, or neither. She’s seventy,
her dementia ten years
away from diagnosis. Now
she recovers fast, now I
can believe the episode
an isolated flutter in
the brain, ignore the fault lines
that will open again,
again to pull her in.
God of bark and sap and
flame, bonfire god of headlong
and balance, desire, not satisfaction (it burned with
fire and was not consumed), like the forest fire
in low-country pines,
resins spewing out oily smoke, a glow
against the dark. My father cruises the
road between the burning trees, his cigarette
another glow against the bare black trunks backlit
across the firemen’s ditch. And, look, he’s telling me, the fire is
eating that tree. And I see the fire as real
hunger, not metaphor for
hunger—gorging and growing. The tree
blackens, contracts, drops limbs. The fire
keeps on ravening, all gullet still. It’s
the flame that’s not consumed. Or consumed over days
and weeks, forty years, a lifetime.
Past sixty, cooling to ash, I envy you lurching
through the wilderness, smoldering like a mound
of tires, your hunger for anything. This is not the sated river
gods but promise of milk and honey—and
you must stand barefoot on
the coals, nothing between your
sole and the holy soot. These Two Children Were Being
Threatened By Nightingales The long path ran out
from the third grade door to the flagpole.
I had no business at that door so many years into life, but certainly the
flagpole – and the veteran’s memorial in which it stood – had been there since I
had. It had been there since the first
Velcro sneaker. Or the sneaker with the
zip-up pocket on the side. Those didn’t
last long, not nearly as long as me and the flagpole; we were built of cartilage
and cement, adipose and steel. But someone had to help
these children. For me it took balls,
and I didn’t have them. I was afraid I’d
cross the line, stamp on the newly laid sod beside the path. I saw them both perched on benches. The benches with rusty plates nailed to them:
VFW names. They ate grape jelly
sandwiches, having refused peanut butter in some morning-lit kitchen. Before they had finished their lunch, the
nightingales attacked. I’m sure the
children wanted to make a break for it, but their mothers had ordered them to
stay. They probably thought to climb for
the stars and stripes, but that flew too low to escape the nightingales’
wings. It was up to me. Nightingales clung to
one’s shoulder and the other’s head. I
thought it would be worse for the one with the pecked head. But he covered his crown and the birds’ beaks
searched for scalp between his fingers, playing cat-and-mouse. The nightingales on the shoulder found the
neck. There the skin was stretched
tight, the veins below revealed, asking to be pulled through the dermal
layers. At the neck, there is no thick
skull to protect our innards. The two children didn’t
even swat. Red-faced, I ran to the
flagpole. I let my arms flail when I
arrived. My adult bulk and hysteria sent
the nightingales into the air. They
would migrate, I felt quite sure. I
looked at the two children, who had now come together. I couldn’t tell if they held one another, or
if the second was simply wrapped around the first.
Susan Settlemyre Williams is the author of Ashes in Midair, which was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Contest (Many Mountains Moving Press, 2008) and a chapbook, Possession (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in Mississippi Review, diode, Sycamore Review, Diner, and Shenandoah, among other journals, and in the anthologies Best New Poets 2006 and Letters to the World. She is book review editor and associate literary editor of the online journal Blackbird and lives in Richmond, Virginia.