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
Dead Reckoning
For Beth Buxton
Well, you died by inches
fighting the filthy crab,
surgeons carving important pieces
from you,
always one step behind.
Tell me:
when you lay
together with your lover,
though your desire had become
no more than an echo,
and when you let him
uncover you
and reveal the gnarled landscape
your body had become,
did you turn your head away
in the slant lamp-shadows,
like a child believing
not to see him meant
you were free
of his gaze
while he read
the chart of scars,
some red and purple and new,
some tallow-yellow and settled-in—
that odyssey of agony—
could he squint through the map
and regain the territory,
and navigating by dead reckoning,
did he lay his cheek by your tender navel
and breathe you in,
honey-sweet as an infant?
Bolus of Flame in the Sistine Chapel
The moment after Michelangelo
finished
the Sistine ceiling,
he cleaned his brushes,
snuffed
his lanterns, turned and walked away
for wine and a lover, needful,
stunned
by completion’s void,
leaving the room, leaving God
swaddled
in a cloak red as sunrise,
by pink, cloud-rounded cherubim
lifted,
with his finger almost touching Adam’s.
In the reeking dark,
filled
with snuffed candle-smoke and drying plaster’s smell,
life’s bright unruly spark
leaped
from God’s finger to Adam’s,
and like sunstruck oil
flowed
and filled his palm, while God
rose into the night and
faded
indifferent, leaving
His orphan reclining on bare rock. Adam
raised
his burning hand to his mouth,
swallowed the bolus of flame, then
stood,
staggering under the weight of conscious flesh,
found his fiery tongue and
spoke
himself and all his get into time.
Report from Planet Senex
Whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
—Lorca
Oh, but this is a hard land
to love.
Grey hills slump
and thick rivers
sprawl in deltas
splayed like dead hands.
Tan sand’s strewn
with flakes of flint and chert.
No steel to strike.
No kindling.
Nothing to slice
but brown lichen,
rags of dead flesh
on empty skulls.
The shambling wind skins
dust from the ground.
Sunrise is a gray smear,
and sunset stains
the sky with spilled ink.
All night
in the dark
sick fish wail
from a stagnant lake,
tearing the clouds.
In the black gashes
a few stars dim,
their voices growing red,
like opals sinking
in thick oil.
Pieta in Red
I found a liquidambar tree,
blazestruck with autumn and sunset.
Among its five-point leaves,
a red-tail hawk
pinned a sprawled dove
to a branch.
She dipped her sickle beak
to shredded pink meat.
The naked dove didn’t move,
complicit in the slow
tearing toward its heart.
In the windless evening
the red light died
in night’s slow slide
up the flaming tree.
When the Red-Tail gutted me
with her eye.
I filled
with the icy consent
of lichen, mushroom and frost.
Then she closed
her switchblade talons
and rose above
the leaves
with the lolling dove.
David Kann
escaped academic administration and returned to poetry and just-teaching. In the process he discovered that writing poetry makes him feel more like himself than most activities. In pursuit of himself and better poetry he recently completed an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been published in Stoneboat and The Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.