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
Le Bugue
An old woman (here you may not ask)
cranks her body up from the bench
submerged only days ago. The Vézère
has dropped to green once more, swarms of bees
cluster around our heads as we cross
the bridge. Cars chug past below on the quai,
released from the flood. The woman adjusts
her blouse, her fruit-colored hair. Walks,
a little bent, a little slow, away. I think of you,
sister, there is not a moment when I do not.
You go with me, in my pockets, in each slender
joy. I carry you up cobbled hills and eye for you
the shirtless workman repairing a stone wall
that has plunged down the hillside into fields
shouting with purple iris, wisteria,
yellow mustard. Every dog smiles for you,
and the birds—swifts and magpies,
sparrows singing in French
and the little tuxedo’d dipper riding the flood
on a broken branch, all these swoop and dive
for you, speak your name and watch me
for signs of you with round black eyes.
Le Bugue to Paris
Leaving Le Bugue, the philanthropy of rain
returns, fat clouds overflowing, filling the Vézère
once more. I wish I had your picture here with me,
posed for the cruise ship’s photographer,
embroidered blouses we bought for pennies
from the impenetrable Indians at Gatun Lake,
the big rimless glasses we wore in the ’80s,
our acrylic nails and turquoise
eye shadow. I was your shipmate then,
my 40th birthday lay in wait, a stone
that would wedge itself between us
for years. It’s taken death to shift it,
to bring us all the way back—our father,
cousin, aunt, brother. I’ve seen you
three times in the past year, each an unbearable
loss. The last time, I helped you from your bed
to the bathroom, washed and fed you,
stroking your white head as if you were a child,
crooning sweetheart, sweetheart.
The Houses of the Dead
for Franny
I want to be happy again, to stop thinking
about the dog on the floor at the side of the bed,
the dog who is only an outline, a dog-shape
made with a black Marks-A-Lot with no
corporeal body, no face. I want to stop
thinking about the scaly thing beginning,
always just beginning, to wind up the white
iron leg at the bottom of the bed, tiny bat’s wings
unfurled behind its flat head, tongue searching the air.
This morning at the end of sleep I dropped by your house,
stopped in for a chat and a cup of tea, the way I imagine
I remember doing when I lived just a few blocks away
but this time your granddaughter was there at your kitchen
table, you were gone, and when I resumed my walk I realized
you would always be gone and there would be no more of you
and me, and in my sleep, I dropped to the curb and howled
in that way I do not when I’m awake because the part of me
watching accuses me of being melodramatic
and when I woke I thought I must have made a sound
but my husband did not notice.
The city knows nothing, in the summer
it is molten, the asphalt gummy
beneath our shoes, everyone gathers up their cucumbers
and corkscrews and goes off to the islands
where the azure seas soothe and the ripe sun
blushes the shoulders of clerks and housewives,
where fir trees remind them that there once
was a life before Little League and diaper service,
the city’s leftovers baking on sidewalks, the little houses
in the old neighborhoods quietly flaking paint,
the old men and old women who remain being removed,
one by one, taken in ambulance or hearse,
leaving the granddaughters to clear away the rubble
and hand out corroded jewelry from the middle
of the last century no one really wants. The dogs will go
to new cities, the cats will fend for themselves.
I will not walk by your house again,
it’s been twenty years since we lived so close together,
I began losing you when I left that city you loved,
the strands that held us stretched and frayed.
And the scaly thing, the thing with fluttering wings,
I will get used to it, it will be my dog and follow me
faithfully through the streets of the city where I live without you.
I will feed it flecks of gold I find in the houses of the dead.
Weather
Sunday morning, waking to the slaughter,
the inconsolable smells, the smothering owlish light,
sixteen dead bolts on the door cannot blind us
to the stacking, bristling idiot mounds, horses
with their limbs ablaze, the piazza filled with smoke,
we try to disappear but all the roads are blocked
fascinated by the birdcage, the ash at the end of my mother’s
Kool, the runes on our kitchen linoleum, a bit of wither
under the bridge, suspended, the cables,
the rust, under the parking lot, the worm,
the ripening, under the narcotic sky, under the flames,
the weather builds, one egret at a time, plodding in
on snowshoes and waterskis, tossing pomegranates
to the crowds gathered to watch the drizzle set fire
to the dwarf shackled to the bike rack on the Herengracht.
The magpies gather like pickpockets, count your hands, hero,
when I was four I had a brother, I buried
my face in his sheets a cat rolling in grass
when I was four I had a sister bouffant and gauze,
far away in the never-never of our house
wasp down the soprano’s voice through the old black telephone,
the clacking bones of larkspur, the rot breaking through,
erupting, chewing and casting, leaving a trail, a wandering bruise,
the leaves of the birch across the intersection signaling wildly in the wind.
Elegy for December
This is an elegy for everyone who’s gotten in the way
this year. In the way of a bullet, in the way of a drunk,
in the way of a rampaging warlord or an invasion of cancer.
This is an elegy for those riding the #52 bus every day,
riding the bus to Fred Meyer for diapers and a 12-pack
of Diet Coke. For everyone who mucks through
the wet snow that fell all morning, slicking the black pavement
and drowning the sleeping bags of the homeless.
This is an elegy for the ones we lost, the ones who grew old
suddenly and died in spite of all our holding on,
this is for the way we dug our heels into the earth, the way
we heaved and yanked on the lines that broke even so,
the boat that drifted away without us. This is an elegy
for Ryan who told me Christmas is an ordeal
and for Marilyn in her Santa Claus hat,
and it is for everyone in the middle, dusting
banisters, pouring wine, pulling on damp work boots,
for everyone reading this poem or any other poem.
I give you my kind intentions, all I have really,
and this leafless maple outside my window
wearing a cloak of white, just for today.
Toni Hanner
’s poems appear in Yellow Medicine Review, Alehouse, Calyx, Gargoyle, and others. She is a member of Eugene’s Red Sofa Poets and Port Townsend’s Madrona Writers. She had two books published in 2012: The Ravelling Braid from Tebot Bach, and a chapbook of surrealist poems, Gertrude Poems and Other Objects from Traprock Books. Gertrude was selected by Mary Jo Bang as a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award.