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
Milk + Honey, Whiskey + Ginger Ale
well that’s how it goes
weather always lingering too long
a casual blue fourteen percent grey
there were any number of things
we could have been talking about:
the stiffness of morning
the best way to purchase stamps
how to walk great distances
but then days and days of rain
I said let’s keep sleeping together
casually
it was like a finch swallowing milkweed
it was probably bored
Temporal, Flickerlike
I remember I lost the clear night
you had tied around my thigh
and today I hate you
even though winter is far away
I’m living in a low voice
I’m throwing the hillside
making a mess of myself and running
around with one eye closed:
it requires the ability to judge distance
his body firmly in order
looking for blood in the sunlight
[...]
what you said was careless
death at the cape and everywhere
tiny birds making false landings
embers felling leaves like feathers like
bodies fumbling underwater
and disappearing is always simplest
in massachusetts is darkest blue
I wanted to ask
if I looked any different standing up
if dizziness is an affliction of the lips
and if I were
to catalogue our weaknesses by name
it would be scoured or hysterical
tenuously coupled lungs blistered
in the young light and the snow
in december
you lost your last cigarette
you told me not to die
you picked burnt leaves from your carpet
inside a fever dream
we made ourselves a home movie:
me, plunging the hawk
through the bedsheets
and of course you’re miserable
like a steady brow
like home
if one of us were to stand up
our inflections would no longer be
compatible so equivocal
death at the cape
so we stop at the liquor store
I hold the flashlight
while you fill your tires with air
you’re miserable of course
(if I am standing then you are standing
and we both look the same)
and if this is darkest blue
we are coupled by blood and anxiety
thick and red like molasses on tobacco
like being pulled to bed at 4 am
because it is not yet december
and somehow this means we are safe
I rip a shard of amber glass from my palm
but the skin is still translucent
in the fever dream I tell you
winter lives in naked bodies, an ode
to sex or death or birds
or something
what I really mean is
you drive beautifully at night
Neither Here Nor There
I’m still pulling blood out from under things
nails and telescopes and cotton swabs
it’s sweet it really is
how you try to smile one tooth at a time...
I made you a sweater
and you didn’t even know it was yours
when you asked if you could have it
I haven’t gotten it all sorted out yet
how one slow mechanism is wedded to the next
a convulsive fit of the lips and then
it is april and I am all liquored up
basking in the tickled heather
one crushed thing after the other
Ali Doerscher
is currently working towards her undergraduate degree in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Other recent publications of her poetry include the Columbia Poetry Review and CutBank.