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
Dungeoness
The worst part about being the guy in the cartoon
hanging shackled to a dungeon wall is the mirror.
It wasn’t always here, like back when I was young
and sure of rescue, hurling curses at my jailers
wherever, whoever they were. I was vain enough then
I’d probably stare for hours, mugging at my reflection,
sucking in my gut. But no. They slipped it in
one night last year as I hung sleeping. When I awoke,
both I and the haggard old man across from me
screamed ourselves hoarse. Or is it as I hanged sleeping?
If I could shrug, he’d shrug too. Xylophone-ribbed.
Hair and beard an inseparable, lice-ridden thicket.
I know it’s just a mirror, but I also know he watches me
as I sleep, or pretend to sleep, dreaming that instead
of being stretched by time here in this god-lost dungeon,
I’m somewhere in the Caribbean or South Pacific maybe,
just me and a lone palm tree, no one who looks like me.
No one at all. One day if I’m lucky a bottle washes up,
a little rolled note inside that says only, “Look.”
And when I do, he’s there in the glass surface of the bottle,
hollow-eyed and screaming at me loud enough to wake me
but not to rouse my jailers. They wouldn’t come
if he screamed all night, the way he’s planning to.
Something about a Suicide
Something about a suicide makes us
tread more lightly as if the ground
once trod by the voluntary dead
grew spongy and unwell, as if to move
might send distress signals like a fly
in a web to whatever hungry mouth
might be waiting to eat us.
We make a thousand secret shrines
we think no one can see, but pass another faithful
on the street and you know. The bowed head.
Eyes looking straight at someone no longer here.
Every one a reliquary, bearing pieces
of the one true do-it-yourself cross,
ready to nurse doubt into belief and beyond.
The Edge
Go to the edge. We have always gone to the edge,
to the place where the land becomes the sea,
where with one more step we become something less
solid, less substantial as well. This is why we can’t stay,
why the edge compels us to take a bit of it away.
A handful of scallop shells. A bit of sea glass
bluer than our memory of the sea itself. Perhaps
one larger shell, one with an obstruction
that looks like a concrete seal, no way to hold it
to the ear and have the imagined sea remind us
of the edge. Take it away. Take it into your home.
Forget it for a day or two. You will find it or
it will find you, the way the wrong breeze
from the salt marsh finds you: by the nose.
You will find that the obstruction was a living foot
that dragged its spined and sacred safety
out of the closet and onto the bathroom floor
to its final rest on the rough, sea-less tile.
The edge never comes to us, and this is why.
We know no better than to think we have control,
that the edge will bow to us. Go to the edge
with your shell-shaped ear. A sound like the sea
will be waiting.
The Magi
The alpaca seemed resigned to the vultures
that ringed it where it lay in the mud.
The black-headed birds stood sentinel,
not moving a feather, just watching
as the alpaca’s chest rose and fell
and rose and fell again, rapid, shallow breaths.
The vultures waited. A soaking rain
had fallen for hours, only stopping
when the birds arrived. The alpaca lay
sunken so far in the black and deepening slop,
the stillborn cria beneath her breast
all but concealed, only a pair of legs
motionless in the mud. The mother panted
and tried to lick her child’s wool clean.
The cria disappeared into the muck
under its mother’s weight. The vultures
stood in a ring, watching, waiting.
The low skies promised rain.
The Maximist
When he thought he loved the human race
he wrote novels, brick-sized monuments to lives
in chaos, filling the holes in those lives
with every word he could. Then he fell in love
with days that certain people lived
and wrote short stories, road maps to guide them
through the intricacies of 24 hours in a life that
as a whole he could never love. Then he became a lover
of organs: heart, brain, liver, the generous lock and key
of penis and vagina. At last he was a poet,
scribbling 15 minute odes to love and loss,
drunks and other philosophers, and he would
stand up at a microphone and read them,
like a man fellating himself in public.
But now he is a hermit, more wisdom than love in his life.
He writes maxims in the sand, and when the tide comes in,
in the water. The wise man knows,
but tries to love nonetheless. A single fist
contains more truth than all the libraries in the land.
This is the sand. That is the sea.
Try to tell the difference to a word.
R. G. Evans
’s poems, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as Rattle, The Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Weird Tales. His original music, including the song “The Crows of Paterson,” was featured in the 2012 documentary film All That Lies Between Us, about the life and work of poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Evans teaches high school and university English and Creative Writing in southern New Jersey.