Poetry Summer 2013 fiction all issues
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Sharron Singleton
Five Poems
Sarah Giragosian
Five Poems
Jenna Kilic
Five Poems
Kristina McDonald
Five Poems
Toni Hanner
Five Poems
Annie Mascorro
Five Poems
Brittney Corrigan
Three Poems
S. E. Hudgens
Four Poems
Ali Doerscher
Four Poems
David Sloan
Three Poems
Olivia Cole
Five Poems
Lucy M. Logsdon
Four Poems
Marc Pietrzykowski
Four Poems
Donna Levine Gershon
Five Poems
Eva Heisler
The Olden Days
Stephanie Rose Adams
Five Poems
Jill Kelly
Five Encounters
Ben Bever
Five Poems
Michael Hugh Lythgoe
Five Poems
Arlene Zide
Three Poems
Harry Bauld
Five Poems
Lisa Zerkle
Four Poems
Peter Mishler
Five Poems
Tim Hawkins
Five Poems
Marqus Bobesich
Four Poems
Abigail Templeton-Greene
Five Poems
Eric Duenez
Five Poems
Anne Graue
Five Poems
Susan Laughter Meyers
Five Poems
Peter Kahn
Two Poems
D. Ellis Phelps
Five Poems
Linda Sonia Miller
The Kingdom
Nicklaus Wenzel
Skagit River
Holly Cian
Five Poems
Susan Morse
Five Poems
Daniel Lassell
Five Poems
Svetlana Lavochkina
Temperate Zones
Daniel Sinderson
Three Poems
Catherine Garland
Five Poems
Michael Fleming
Five Poems
Encounter
To live indeed is to be again our selves
—Sir Thomas Browne
I did my best to cheat the windows
in that plaque of hours just before my turn,
seeing round eye flit and glare through the starry knit,
not starlike but with a thick, opposing absence.
Thin as thread in a grey
bulk of body, I sang myself
a cradle song to float me through the hours:
I believe, I do believe
this is how the child dies
in us: turning colors like the leaves,
a red confetti to deceive us.
And finally tucked into the mouths
of loam it leaves us—to an empty house.
Listen for it:
I remember the hammer
falling in the kitchen.
Then beak and eye and a red surgeon’s glove:
a rude reaching into body
and tearing out that threshold
I hadn’t meant to lose—
coming at me with its red head raw
like a turkey vulture—
A schism.
Then my molted faces hinged back
into the jambs and the sunk spurs
pulled away, so I was human.
And the injury transmuted
to a faint ache in the skull.
Sparks drew the table-flowers down
into the candles
and the borders darkened:
I awoke to the dining room,
dressed, fed, hands occupied with mail.
I awoke to myself bereft
of waking, still missing the
beady hour of birth.
My chores doubled and balked
in domestic circuits; I sang a song
to the sink:
Life is a movement toward arrangement of a scene.
A red cloth. An apple. A cut stem
for the vase. For the knock at the door,
for the knock at the door.
There comes a time
when one gives herself completely
to the black-soaked cosmos
and so I stood still
in the room,
emptied of spirit,
for I had given it all away:
even the table was set with blank circles:
not like moons
but the absence of moons:
It was a Tuesday—
I walked heavy with its collar at my neck
to the window.
Here I am to be seen
in a yellow gown thickened to the skin,
carrying death, it seems.
Roses at the knees.
Like coming from a bath
to the mirror, I sensed the whiteness of steam
and a gathered heat:
Stalled things snapped from their bases
spindrift and open; I could smell
the brute perfume of—
O something else beside me
in the surge: her rising
throat in my throat, her fulvous lights
so much like Autumn (all of it,
the black slick rot of it, the whole sleet road
after rain, boot-soft, the breeze and crimson
sheafs of it) and her haunching out of fog:
what thing
—as with a horse’s bludgeoning thighs
and rippling with bloom, I could do nothing
but stand beside the bust of gates
and see how the wind itself tore like a soft lizard’s egg:
what thing
art thou?
what eyeless head
with gazes of the past all about it like light,
pushed out
with beady look and smell of
my own flesh, for I’d carried and carried it—
then there was the privacy of stone.
Between us:
a mineral crush, and heat,
an eon like a slow breath
circled our meeting and I bowed to it,
and she bowed to nothing and was the plain
ecstasy of being, ever,
and after—
I could smell the turned earth
in my hands, and for this
I could not, not ever, diminish.
Bury My Hands in the Earth
First the thing and then its accidents
The brood conjuring of walking
into the lord’s tower
A constellate purr of part against part
humming down the
earth-hacked way unborn
And scuff of wings
in the rough-hewn walls
The future passage
like a widow’s eye rolling back light
down the tunnel—
Lost-one,
do you think you enter the dark?
You will bear it yourself
with the blindness of hands
to your dusky head for opening:
Split the thousand grains of self
Turn out the thorax
her multiple honeyed cores
and look again:
from the fracturing eye
which tessellates to eyes
and proliferates further
out from that dimension
to the eyeless spaceless
cramp of yearning
and opens further
beyond telling
And look:
how the round planet will suddenly open
her nearness, within you:
What shook magnet will shoot up the shafts
and gravity’s hands
to root between the loose chunk loam
of your pieces, saying:
stay, stay
sparing you whole in a buzzing sack
of song:
The strains breaking weave against the wing
—to say chrysalid
The pupils strung to leonids
—to say swarm
And deep tremors of a skull
so given to god
—to say sting
The Women
Just as the women had warned,
I had seen phantoms in the gardens
after wearing the tears of a dog.
Baptized twice in half-caste doberman illness,
around me the temple dusts glittered
on the lost remains of small and extinguished desires,
such objects spat with gums and slag.
My eyes lifted to a shroud suspended on high wire—
it took on suddenly the tic and fit of struggle,
took on damage and discolor,
calling to me only in its highness,
reach beyond the range of arms,
a moan hectares in length.
Then too, in dense brume of anesthesia,
there was one who rose in sheets
and spoke the dreams of Gaia,
making worm-holes through the fibers.
The earth bucked beneath the night, as sung:
The wailing one walked from one shook fountain to the next.
In Delhi or in Marrow
You are standing upright in sixteen atmospheres.
Otherwise, there is merely the light
which crumples that darkness down to your feet.
Once, your body was in savage hands, unworshipped.
Though lately it’s a boulder, geodic and poised
over the tiny carapaces of six dwindling men—
The searing presence of your planet.
It matters little who was witness and who was not.
I myself was not there, in Delhi,
and yet you’ve reached your hands through the fabrics and
lifted the dams to make me see you:
In that hour of suffering
your continents groaned; their plates crushed the minutes
and folded their blood away; their stars revolved
like a constellation at the tops of our skulls.
The violet burn of everything touching everything else.
Such figures of the night, such difficult reading.
Can you know how much I carry you?
You are past knowing.
I’ve carried you straight out from the story.
Now I keep you like I keep my bones.
A Mirror to See Me
Here is me.
A pearl
oblong blur, hung on a silver dish.
What are you, me,
if not the viridian, nether,
a swimminghole—
(a vapor that
collects in emptiness)
•
Light is sliding on a surface.
What is wavering in and out of time,
is it me?
Is it
a white chester drawer:
between scarves and folds
is my past
and several more besides:
our histories coil
and bite savagely at their tails
•
tight behind that symmetry
of doll form: rouge
egyptian eye, spice, demure—
•
How the borders seem
to cry
And yearning for a snap of husk:
My print-dress
muddied with the animal
synod of my ecstatic family,
is to be burned
for warmth.
•
O release
this tesserae of stinging blooms,
anemone, these mollusk arms of me,
shapes like nothing
you or I have ever known:
I am not ever what I am.
Should I be me,
I’ll take the ocean for my looking-glass.
Stephanie Rose Adams
is the author of The Sundering, chosen by Linda Gregg for a NY Chapbook Fellowship from The Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Sharkpack Poetry, and Orion Magazine. Stephanie lives in the Pacific Northwest with her wayward Guatemalan pup and a host of other willful creatures real and imaginary.