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Poetry Fall 2013    fiction    all issues

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Chris Joyner
Wrestlemania III
& other poems

Carey Russell
Visiting Hours
& other poems

Marc Pietrzykowski
Cabinet of Wonders
& other poems

Jonathan Travelstead
Prayer of the K-12
& other poems

Jennifer Lowers Warren
Our Daughter's Skin
& other poems

Jeff Burt
The Mapmaker's Legend
& other poems

Patricia Percival
Giving in to What If
& other poems

Toni Hanner
1960—Lanny
& other poems

Christopher Dulaney
Uncle
& other poems

Suzanne Burns
Window Shopping
& other poems

Katherine Smith
Mountain Lion
& other poems

Peter Kent
Surliness in the Green Mountains
& other poems

William Doreski
Gathering Sea Lavender
& other poems

Huso Liszt
Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin...
& other poems

Clifford Hill
How natural you are
& other poems

R. G. Evans
Dungeoness
& other poems

David Kann
Dead Reckoning
& other poems

Ricky Ray
The Music of As Is
& other poems

Tori Jane Quante
Creatio ex Materia
& other poems

G. L. Morrison
Baba Yaga
& other poems

Joe Freeman
In a Wood
& other poems

George Longenecker
Bear Lake
& other poems

Benjamin Dombroski
South of Paris
& other poems

Ryan Kerr
Pulp
& other poems

Josh Flaccavento
Glen Canyon Dam
& other poems
& other poems

Christine Stroud
Grandmother
& other poems

Abraham Moore
Inadvertent Landscape
& other poems

Chris Haug
Cow with Parasol
& other poems

Mariah Blankenship
Fiberglass Madonna
& other poems

Emily Hyland
The Hit
& other poems

Sam Pittman
Growth Memory
& other poems

Alex Linden
The Blues of In-Between
& other poems

Bobby Lynn Taylor
Lift
& other poems

D. Ellis Phelps
Five Poems

Alia Neaton
Cosmogony I
& other poems

Elisa Albo
Each Day More
& other poems

Noah B. Salamon
Sanctuary
& other poems

Mariah Blankenship

Fiberglass Madonna

Barbie was in her twenties I'd say

when we used to sew her clothes

on your Singer look-alike

back room of your maternal trailer

stitching time, saving none


I'd insist on bringing her

to the shower with us and she would

bathe in the Amazon River Basin created

from the drainage of your hair

and I would braid her hair

like your motorcycle hair sitting

there at your ankle

under the fall of your cleansed body


And her perfect plastic features

were a replica of you

reflecting in the basin

where a Narcissus flower once bloomed

and Adonis once bled into

the brushed nickel drain


Even your breasts were as plastic as hers

those same warrior breasts

but you fell down the drain of wisdom,

of vitality,

a break in the river current


And Barbie was fully clothed

when you tried to stitch yourself

together in an institute for the imperfect,

communicating with your Singer look-alike,

Sexton at her typewriter


You were in your twenties, I’d say,

when you drowned,

Anticlea at the river


And we are bathing eternally,

showering Madonna statue of

mother daughter Barbie

with your blood forever pouring over us

Barbie, that whore, lying naked in the drain



Lexapro Shortage

I am here to see a counselor today,

rotten psychology stinks to high hell

in my mind left on a shelf for 20 years

Bring me science

Bring me God

Anything but psychology


We came here together once,

you and I on the ironic love seat


I am staring at that brown seat now

It growls at me

I approach it like an enumerable caravan to my grave

and startled, I turn to the black, more appropriate colored chair,

holding the clipboard of my subconscious tight,

like a tiger you would say


And you are no longer here

They ask for an emergency contact now

and my God,

I have had an epiphany


I have no emergency contact now


Perhaps that is the worst of it

A permanent check mark next to divorced,

A blank next to emergency contact


They're all deceased, I say

(euphemism for rotting in graves

below Whitman’s democratic grass

Shut up

This is why you are here in the first place)


And my mother is damn sure in the painting

on the wall staring at me with an oil painted tear

mocking me for being like her

but there's no bullet in my head

no trickle of blood on my temple

just an empty loveseat



A Barren Grave, Walden Pond

I grow from the earth

as though houses were

formed on the eighth

day, emerging from

the dust like women

built from ribs.


Emerson, I join you

in the real houses

of this world,

the ones that

envelop the bottom

tier of gravity—

a pyramid of pressure,

our homes sprout

from the dirt under

our fingernails—

from atoms,

from bacteria,

from nothing.


The earth formed

deliberately from

the cabin and not

the other way

around, Thoreau.


I am a house,

empty,

barren of furniture

and my windows

are closed,

Venetian blinds

shut, smiling back

at me like Plath’s

tulips perched

on her windowsill,

they mock me.


Still I sit,

emerged from

the earth like

a cracked

politician.


I lie to ecology.


Mariah Blankenship received a Bachelors in English from Radford University and a Masters of Education. She currently teaches Creative Writing and English in Virginia where she lives with her tiny Yorkie and bearded boyfriend. She likes to read depressing feminist literature while watching trash reality television.

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