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
How to Save Your Self
First you must pack up all
your madnesses, from noon’s pink
nightgown to evening’s vulnerable confusions,
from the green silk of drink and pills,
to fear’s dark black compulsions. Shove
their angry coils into a sturdy army surplus bag,
slide its zippered teeth shut on the banging
of your lost souls.
They’ll escape, they always do.
So ignore them when they intrude
on your ordered days. Keep your face calm
as a swollen lake, a placid mirror, a surface
that hides so much. They will rise through
the bamboo floor, seat themselves in the oak
dining chairs. They’ll bang against the stovepipe,
a trapped starling frantically trying to get out,
they’ll pummel the door like a frustrated child,
they’ll wail, You think you’re free? You think
the wind outside is a mild breeze?
Focus on the coming storm. Notice
the drops of rain already spattering.
You’ll have to move quickly,
you’ll have to decide who to save.
You can’t keep hoarding them; you
can’t keep loving them. You must
go to the basement, find the room
with the treasured candlesticks,
the generations of photos, your cow
figurines, your treasures,
and your duffel bag.
Carry it to the pond behind the house,
wait until the last of the summer geese
has left, listen for the evening killdeer,
watch for the yellow black belly of this
year’s water snake, and when the bullfrogs
start their mournful bellow, and the fireflies
began their luminescence, you must drown
all but one. Choose carefully
which madness you keep
for it will be the only one
you have to battle loneliness, to walk
with late at night when the full moon hangs
so heavy, when your heart is tired,
when you want some reminder
of all that raged within.
Beating the Boundaries
You have asked and asked again,
beating nightly at my door. Clenched
fist, raised hand, questioning, insistent—
Why did I leave? Look at my eyes:
corn-yellow, barn-brown, irises shot
through with dust. How can you believe
I’ve succeeded? In this city I exhale
your landscape, my breath misty and fogged, hair
tangled, a bale of hay. I’ve left, and I’ve
left myself behind.
My great-grandfather slammed my
grandfather’s palms against the farm’s
border: rock, oak, post—slammed until his
blood smeared across barren stone, seeped
into old wood. Three months for his hands
to heal. My fingers are calloused,
lightly, at the tips. Still, I’ve memorized: This
is the northwest corner, the granite rock.
This is the southwest, the upright row of
devil’s walking sticks.
In sleep I walk deep in your
interior where pollen drifts
like rain, and creeks swirl with the quick silver
tails of minnows. I step into
your rivers, your limerock streams, clay banks.
Who says geography is the soul?
I know the answer: each time returning,
I return with nothing more than the dust
in a drowned man’s pockets. I am that dust,
scattering, then lost.
Those That Come Back
We are uneventful here, we who have returned:
the dutiful, the wounded, the living, the good,
the adult child. You may call us
by different names, but identify us
by the depth, the strength of our return.
Now back, we are forever here,
as rooted as the oaks and pines.
You can tell us by our patience,
the long lines of waiting in our face,
the settled air around us, the settled dust
within our homes. You can tell us
by our affinity for the winter night,
whose muffled layers soothe our memories
of other lives. We love the glazed, still
surfaces of our backfield ponds.
And yet, we try to make life
happen, to break this thick block ice
insulating us, but all we get are sharp rib pains,
labored breath, billowing across
the frozen fields.
Shades of summer birds haunt the pond;
their shadows brush the ghosts of former lives,
selves we buried so relentlessly. They’ve dug
themselves up, and dance just out of reach—
mocking . . . All that you could have been . . .
The other dead faded dreams would gather,
if they could, but they are trapped
still in their dank burial boxes,
weighted by sadness, love. Patiently,
they suffocate beneath the layers
of perpetual snow. So much lost along the way.
So much accepted, so much ground
down with the season. The drying husks,
the composting. Fat black tadpoles move
sluggishly below the pond’s ice. My life
barely moves within these bundled layers.
The years accumulate. The woodpile grows.
This winter bears down on us all.
Our houses weaken, the rafters shift,
mice grow bold in the hallways and shower,
the paint peels, and the windows loosen.
And, oh, how our parents dwindle.
They are beginning to look like distant
children, peering at the brutal landscape
fast approaching. Their tracks in the snow
grow lighter, footprints
smudged and rising.
Envelope
To enclose, to hold, to wrap
around. To cradle delicately, gently,
securely. To seal for safe transport,
to shelter the message, the words
sent far away, where they would travel
for days, through the post offices of Champaign,
and Carbondale, and Des Moines, bumping
in the back of dusty trucks, falling
away from our fingers, full
of intent. Submissions sent to the west,
and the east, to the editors, to the journals,
to those cities we had read of.
How we believed in sending the message,
loudly and hopefully, into the big,
bigger beyond us. Such dreams
penned in those writings. Our landscape
one of envelopes, and typewriters, and stamps,
and return address ink pads.
How we tried to speed it all up,
now we long for the slowing down,
so typical. The nostalgia, the remembrance,
the loving only after it is gone.
The image of my lonely typewriter in the plane’s
overhead compartment—its keys hot
with those early poems of love,
and escape.
Lucy M. Logsdon
lives in Southern Illinois. Her work has appeared in such publications as Nimrod, Poet Lore, California Quarterly, The Southern Poetry Review, Kalliope and Seventeen magazine. She received her MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Southeastern Illinois College.