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
Guadalupe
The virgin, she is everywhere. En todas
partes. Tiled into the corner store wall, painted on
houses along Chicon, hung around necks
and between breasts of the pious. Her mâchéd
figure lurks in the live oak groves that line
the río; she bows to cursing
lovers and the needles that line the curbs.
Shrouded in azul de bebé, the virgin watches
with a face impassive as plastic. She has learned
to expect little. Her heart flares. I know
she dreams of escape, of shattered tile and
crumbling brick, of God taking her
right there on the sidewalk in front of all the pimps.
The ladies de la noche will mistake her
for one of their own, offer her a cigarette
as she rises from the rubble. She’ll finally feel
what Magdalene felt—like a base
human being, like una criminal,
whole. The night will tattoo her onto its belly.
What will the men say as, for once,
she undresses con las estrellas?
Gift
It came as a gift—
a small sack of lavender
in the drawer of winter. Safe,
like an eye pillow or a
mousetrap. I crawled
in after it, let its moist
scent surround my hands
and feet, seep into
the small hairs of my thighs—
my bare body married to it,
buried with it. The drawer
seemed the best place
to wait for the snow to melt.
It fell and fell, until I fell,
finally, asleep.
In the spring I woke withered
and the sack was empty:
the scent was gone. What
is the half-life of lavender?
I searched for it under
my fingernails, shoved
my nose into the shrubs
outside. The sun was not
as I had remembered—it was
infinite and odorless,
and I was afraid
to get lost on its hills. I thought
if I made a new sack of mountain
laurel, I’d be protected
from its vast stare,
but summer came anyway,
relentless, smelling
of the last sweet
stages of death, of asphalt
pulsing up and up.
The first day of fall
brought a cloud
that did not leave
for six weeks. It took distant,
purple shapes each day,
and I liked to guess animal,
vegetable, or mineral. Finally,
it reached down and
stitched its rain
around my waist
and over my head
and said: You are the gift now.
And so I waited to meet my lover.
We walked through the cemetery
on the day he lost half his tooth; it was raining.
When we ducked under a balding branch,
he divined the lives of Work, William and Theresa.
They died on the same day—car wreck or hurricane;
their name a cruel prophesy of the rent
that remained unpaid no matter how many
hours they gave. Their children could afford only
flat grey slabs. When he spoke, the tiny partial tooth
hovered above his bottom lip, dust
roiled into mud in the indecisive wind, and for once
I didn’t wonder what it was like to be beautiful.
Instead I wiped drops from my earlobes,
began to walk again. Raliegh, Johanna—five white
irises on black marble. Dodd, Brett—mausoleum
in the style of melodrama’s vilest vampire.
Winthrop, John—three-foot cross engraved
over his name that would have rolled his puritan
ancestors in their graves. These ways we think
we honor them, assumptions we make for our own sake.
He said a blank slab would suffice, that a name
could never capture a life. All he needed was a new tooth.
I said if I could choose my tomb, it would be a song
that never failed to change—me, the melody
blooming inside—but what I wanted to tell you
is that he got on his knees and tried to quiet
that chorus of the dead long enough to explain,
to pray for an explanation, why he hadn’t joined them.
A Wedding
If I had believed this was the moment
I’d stop casting desire into a barren
lake, then I would have seen
the birds strung on the power
line like live garland—hundreds, exactly
evenly spaced. I would have heard
the strange wind stagnate at our feet
as the grass turned another
degree. I’d have noticed the sun toss its
most indulgent pinks into clouds when time
came to give up the day to birds and flies
and ghosts of fish preying on flies, the flies
playing with birds, the birds praying
for dark and wet and all of us
vowing to stay forever.
S. E. Hudgens
I aim for music, rhythm, and an image that comes back to you while clipping your nails three nights after reading it. I hope I have achieved these for at least one reader. My work has appeared in Hubbub, Knockout, and Farfelu, among other places. I hold an MFA from EWU’s Inland Center for Writers and work as an advertising editor/writer in Austin, Texas.