Poetry Summer 2014 fiction all issues
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Anne Rankin-Kotchek
Letter to the World
from a Dying Woman
& other poems
Sara Graybeal
Ghetto City
& other poems
Tee Iseminger
Construction
& other poems
Lisa Beth Fulgham
After They Sold the Cows...
& other poems
Mary Mills
The Practical Knowledge
of Women
& other poems
Monika Cassel
Waldschatten, Muttersprache
& other poems
Michael Fleming
To a Fighter
& other poems
Daniel Stewart
January
& other poems
John Glowney
Cigarettes
& other poems
Hannah Callahan
The Ptarmigan Suite
& other poems
Lee Kisling
How the Music Came
to My Father
& other poems
Jose A. Alcantara
Finding the God Particle
& other poems
David A. Bart
Veteran’s Park
& other poems
Greg Grummer
War Reportage
& other poems
Rande Mack
rat
& other poems
J. K. Kitchen
Anger Kills Himself
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
The Man Who Wished
He Was Lego
& other poems
Jessica M. Lockhart
Scylla of the Alabama
& other poems
James P. Leveque
Three Films of Jean Painlevé
& other poems
Kelsey Charles
Autobiography
& other poems
Therese L. Broderick
Polly
& other poems
Lane Falcon
Touch
& other poems
Ricky Ray
The Bird
& other poems
Phoebe Reeves
Every Petal
& other poems
David Livingstone Fore
Eternity is a very long time...
& other poems
Tim Hawkins
Northern Idyll
& other poems
Abigail F. Taylor
On the Pillow Where You Lie
& other poems
Joey DeSantis
Baby Names
& other poems
Cameron Price
Every Morning
& other poems
David Walker
Sestina for Housesitting
& other poems
Helen R. Peterson
Ablaut
& other poems
Northern Idyll
Flushed and fevered, appalled by the city,
you crept through nightfall over shards of glass
back to the Northern forest, whence you’d come;
An upland preserve of bear wallow and fattening deer
where tannic alder and maple-soaked rivers cool
like a tonic the color of tea or bourbon,
depending on your need.
You had planned to wade their timeless eddies,
to meander in their cloudy back currents,
to imagine lost loves and idylls
and absent friends,
until the night I arrived at your door
with furrowed brow and frown as tight
as my clenched and trembling fist
to solve the latter once and for all,
and to bring word from the late city
with its campaign slogans and broken bottles,
scorched pavement and red-rimmed,
downcast eyes,
word of the woman and child denied
this leafy province of despair.
The Leap
I hold your small hand in mine
while salmon lunge
and hurt themselves
on the rocks beneath us,
chasing death,
immortality
and a dim and watery notion
of home.
In the not-too-distant past,
folks from the east side of town
arrived in horse carts and carriages
on this bluff above the river,
hailing one another
in the cool of evening
as they gaped at the bounding rapids
and the bears
who fished below.
With a promise of ice cream in hand,
we make our way to the car
parked on the bluff—
now a park
surrounded by hospitals,
apartments
and schools.
One day you will return without me
and you will understand
like the generations of salmon and men,
that though the bears and horse carts
may be gone,
the poorly understood migrations
and countless wet dreams
remain.
The Gallery
My wife was born in a tropical climate
where trees flourish through sun and rain
and the four seasons are a myth passed down
and diluted like generations of conquistador blood.
Here, in Michigan, she is fascinated by the falling leaves,
how some nights they swirl and dance across the road
seeming to perform for our oncoming headlights,
and she chides me for failing to notice such beauty.
Thanks to her insistence I now have another experience
to reconsider, another image to call to mind
in the cold and austere days that will come
soon enough, in the long, white gallery of winter.
A Rain
A sudden chilling autumn rain
blows through darkening fields and towns,
drums on moss and weakens stones,
moistens eyes and dampens skin;
shrouds the bleak and withered hedge,
snaps the slender wavering branch,
floods a narrow wooden bridge,
and gathers battened skiffs to launch;
takes no heed of wall or fence
nor burnished plaque to mark the deed,
seeks the least resistant path,
deaf to human remonstrance
and blind to monuments of their dead.
The Archives
After the stabbing light of the sun
has dimmed to a wintery ache in the eye,
one grows accustomed to stark interiors,
intimate with corridors
and their convolutions
of gun-metal gray.
After a certain period of adjustment
amid the superficial scrape and glint
of marble halls and their distorted
echoes of coughing like laughter
in the rarefied air,
after the clatter of metal slamming
and footsteps marching away in lockstep,
then fading along the corridor,
something rare that we are gifted
and burdened to name
is bred in the silence that follows
and filed away.
There is a veneer of winter solitude
that can linger then, briefly,
like snowfall melting on clothing
or that can remain for a longer term
like wintering in some forest hollow,
marking a more remote frontier,
a knife’s claim on ragged bone
bounded by a feverish wind.
Perhaps that is the end of it, after all,
a sudden shiver, an abrupt decision
followed by the tinkling of ice
and a return to the sunny port
of conviviality.
Or perhaps, after numerous seasons,
after window-less years spent
locked in dutiful chambers
by turns airless or drafty,
idly tracing the torn and faded map
of one’s veins,
from some half-remembered story
rescued from the false bottom
of memory
one hears apocryphal footsteps
creeping away
along the chilly corridor
among the snowy drifts—
a second self
cloaked in the terrible
gift or burden
of a second skin.
One imagines archival landscapes,
even the frozen scar of a frown
so like a familiar horizon.
Tim Hawkins
has lived and traveled widely, working as a journalist and teacher in international schools, among other positions. He currently lives in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. His writing has appeared in more than two dozen print and online publications, including the Summer 2013 issue of Sixfold. In 2012, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published his first collection, Wanderings at Deadline (Aldrich Press). Find out more at: www.timhawkinspoetry.com