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
Winner of $100 for 3rd-place-voted Poems
Tee IsemingerConstruction
They sold the empty lot next door last month,
the one with the tree, the tree my daughter
climbed all of those mercilessly long, stagnant
summers, made her teenage cradle in, read her
borrowed books. The tree whose limbs overgrew
the property line and rubbed against our lives until
we no longer remembered that it wasn’t our tree, and we,
or maybe it was only I who came to depend
on the sympathy of its freckled shade on our breakfast
table, the table where my husband and I sat suspended
each morning in forbearance, in our own early fall, these
seasons of not saying, of not knowing what else we might
possibly say, and so grateful for the scratching of branches.
It came down more quietly than any of us expected; one
day we simply noticed that we had poured our orange juice
in a spot of warm sun.
“We won’t be a bother,” the foreman had shouted from
over the fence as I as pulled tomatoes that Wednesday,
the last time I saw that tree.
I’m afraid you will, is a thing I could have said.
Tuesday Morning on the Way to Rehab
This is the you I will press to a clean new sheet of memory,
you asleep with your shaggy head against the dirty car
window—do you remember when I still cared to stop
and to wash things?—and with this newly exploding
sunrise in the glassy space beyond you, as pale as
you, as ignorant as you of a future I fear may not
include either one of us. Or maybe the memory
to keep is three years ago, when you were just
beginning to fall apart, when I was still sure
that there were so many chances, so many
chances out there for you. It’s getting late
and we should hurry, now. You are small
and changing fast, reducing. By sunset
you will have shrunken back from the
framed edges of this picture, farther
than you were yesterday, farther
even than you were early this
palid morning, less you than
just an instant ago—please,
is there no way to save it
now?—there is all of
this history and I
have nothing but
you to keep
it in.
Ways We May Have Been Wrong
I am watching your sister through the window, waiting for the bus.
The rising sun behind her has caught her in such a way that the
space around her has been set afire. I step away, intending to pick
up the camera to get a picture, but then stop, and decide only
to just be present.
You are not here and today is your birthday. I remember the day, I think
it was in the second grade, that I sat waiting on the front stoop for your
own school bus to arrive, and when it did you ran fast down its stairs
and up the walkway to where I sat, and with wide, frightened eyes you
cried: my friend died yesterday. He was seven, and had only been walking
home, only walking home—I can still hear so clearly that only—and he
just collapsed, and that was that. I remember feeling as we clung together,
and I think you did, too, that this is what made life the scariest thing.
Your birthday. When I was pregnant with you, had just begun to round out
in the belly, my back pulled in to follow as you stretched us both out into
unknown territory, and it was then that I felt the deep foreshadow of this
place where we live now, and so I sat down to write a poem. It was rough,
I was young, only twenty. But it was all you and me, all superhero duo and
scrappy fairy tale. I still believe in that version of us. Maybe just not in quite
the same costumes, now.
When you have made your bed, when you have finished with today’s group
and the nurse has watched you take your dose and sent you out into that
unnaturally bright and crowded room, please call. I’ll sing.
Occlusion
I take a swipe at your tight face
pull it back, brush the dustings off—
you were 22 then, your bright smile
gone fallow, your eyes anemic and
retreating.
I pinch the features hard, try by
brute force to bring you back to
your surface, to pull you forward
and out into this very particular,
particular light—
this place I have shaded
by not shading, drawn by
drawing around you,
more screened,
more diffuse, I see now,
than chiaroscuro.
Tee Iseminger
is a recovering advertising copywriter returning to roots in fiction, with two novels and a short story collection in progress, and is experimenting with poetry—particularly narrative style. She’s an alumni of Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshops, Fishtrap Writer’s Conference, Fine Arts Work Center’s online workshops, and one day will finally finish her BA, 10 years in the making, at the University of Nevada’s creative writing program. She lives with her husband and daughter in Reno.