Poetry Summer 2013 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Alice, Returning
Why did you return to our valley of illusions?
This the one thing about you I never understood,
or maybe that I denied.
Did you miss those skies darkened by black peat?
Or miss the ceaseless whine of water being
pumped—whoosh—to satisfy salt-leached fields?
Did you miss the glass coffin of summer heat
and the family trip that never was? Or did you lose
your way among rows of dust-cloaked vineyards and
paths that led to stucco houses with identical doors?
I railed against my tether, bawling, loud and belligerent
like a surprised heifer under the ax,
and bled out the lure of hookah springs
that quickly succumbed to the smell of decay.
I felt the glare of sun, heard the whirring swamp coolers,
and dreamed of other fantasy worlds.
The silent press of summer idled beneath high tension wires.
Those iron ladies-in-waiting pointed to escape,
a lunatic army bent on freedom.
So I left, feeling sure then that I could abandon you
and my childhood memories: Dead Dog Corner,
our father smiling into his last beer,
the silence of years between.
But you, Alice, how do you live now,
with your looking glass of tears
and your white rabbits just so?
The Laws of Motion on Acacia Street
Outside the ER doors at Dameron Hospital
a young woman is dancing
or mourning.
There is a whisper of fog in the air
after last night’s rain.
She moves in slow contortions,
perhaps laden with the damping chill
of oncoming winter.
Her arms struggle with some emotion,
wave in response like seaweed about her head.
No sound comes from her lips
but we onlookers may not hear it,
our windows rolled up tight.
The circle of traffic is noisy,
spinning through the roundabout,
she in the middle of the morning commute.
A few cars do slow to stare. Others,
blind to anything but the daily trajectory,
speed up, racing toward their own destinies.
Two lanes over
in the city park
are five shining black crows.
One keeps the focus intense,
poised to dip his beak
as night crawlers rise up
from the wet ground.
The Gift
I gift to you four white beech leaves
that ride upon last year’s embrace
within a solitary limb of my heart.
They flicker like a ship
without keel,
unable to sail.
The coldness of winter burns
them into single flames,
sears clean their juices
drop by drop.
When every bit has madly scattered
to the roaring winds,
I will make an empty bag of that heart,
small, yellowed, leathery,
which I will deliver to your doorstep
one afternoon.
In your newly begotten winter,
the first snow, even my coming and going
will be silent, hidden,
my footsteps drifted inward.
And you will never know when this inheritance
of emptiness arrived, except by the bitter strangeness
of those leaves as you suck ice crystals from their surface,
your tongue wrapping itself around a new coldness,
one which you did not recognize
before the damage was done.
Just a Little Death
for Maria
She stares up at me in her scarf.
She’s far away (Romania, she says)
though that’s something only the foreign postmark can verify.
She writes that she helped cut off a chicken’s head
and ate the soup.
She held its head when the ax fell.
The chicken soup, she says, was made only to entertain her;
she’s a guest. She asks if sometimes a little soup is indeed
good comfort. She asks would I have had the strength
to wield that ax, or to hold that head?
She also writes that she is tired of reading
Emily Dickinson’s nature poems, with all those dashes,
and asks me which Harvard genius
decided her poetry was amazing
anyway?
These are all questions I cannot answer.
I only envision my mother
perhaps her cotton wool head on a block.
I think what if sometimes a little death
is better than incoherence
or soundproofed green walls?
I hear the fall of the ax, see
how it swoops down through the cold air
out there somewhere in Romania.
I see the pinwheels of red
that must have arched upwards
toward a thin December sun
like the beginning of a rainbow.
In the Hush of Late Afternoon
I sit on our sagging deck,
hands clasped behind my head,
contemplating the meaning of “now,”
and how to attain the complaisance
(or is it the reticence?)
of our cat.
Pretending to be unmindful of my middle-aged paunch,
I want to loll like him on the deck
and bask in the heat with his easy ennui.
Only mine would be determined
detachment.
Not the same thing at all.
Instead, like him, I listen to the birds.
We both watch a swallow beat, then rest,
beat, then rest its wings against the paleness of sky.
And I think that is how to do it,
that is how to climb
a long tunnel of hollow air.
Tonight you and I will walk to the neighborhood bar,
telling ourselves we are mindful of the exercise,
but I think it is also because the phone rarely rings.
We will each drink one beer
to tide us over for the quiet walk home.
We are just occasional visitors there, unknown.
Later we will climb into bed,
draw the cover up to our chins.
The night air has become chillier.
Each of us will roll into our separate sighs,
give the other a reassuring pat,
glance for the third time at the round face of the clock.
And for a long time after your snoring has begun,
I gaze through the dormer window
at stars too far away to be touched,
knowing that somewhere in a field,
a field which has a certain false luminescence,
the green that plays tricks on you when you remember
once you were young and in the moonlight,
in that field a cow chews its cud,
indifferent to the consuming interests of the dead.
Susan Morse
was raised in California, but has lived in Maine for the past twenty-five years. She writes poems that seek to capture the essence of place, as well as poems that explore relationships that are changed by time and distance. She really enjoyed the Sixfold voting process and receiving the very worthwhile commentary from fellow writers. Her poems have appeared in The Mom Egg, Cream City Review, Literary Mama, and The Barefoot Review.