Poetry Summer 2014 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Anger Kills Himself
I wanted to nap one afternoon.
Another row next door, I thought,
though the sound was so regular
when you woke me to listen.
We heard one long scream
followed by one long pause,
then another scream, same pitch,
and another pause, same length.
By the time I got up,
you had already crossed the alley
to find the cry and your neighbor,
cord circling his neck,
hanging on a branch of Dutch Elm,
the most beautiful tree for blocks.
His wife was still keeping the time
of stare, scream and head in hands
when the ambulance came.
That was ages ago.
But last night I heard them again,
only he was the one screaming,
and it was constant until all air left him.
Out of the sudden quiet her whisper told me
she should have combed her hair;
then he wouldn’t have gotten so mad.
Late in the morning
the lady from the dry-cleaners returned my call,
said my shirt’s pattern of crimson flowers
was already faded when I dropped it off.
I hung up and walked the seven blocks
to call her a liar. Enveloped in my yelling,
her thin cheeks had the clear sheen
of a crimped garment bag
when she lost her breath.
Then I myself could hardly breathe.
Our end will come in a picture-perfect, strutting blast of rage.
A postcard you sent from France years ago
still hangs on the fridge.
Most days I hardly notice it:
a burly man carved on a capital
in the choir of Notre-Dame-du-Port.
Crouching demons drape his shoulders,
their scaly arms choke his swelling biceps.
His whole body is smooth.
With thick long legs and a wide muscular torso,
only his soul would be light enough
to hurl into hell. His deep mouth gulps air.
His eyes are stretched. Above them,
two full waves of hair move in a stone flow
past his blown cheeks. His long sword,
its hilt gripped with both hands,
rises straight from the waist,
edges between hard breasts,
then points to his throat—
all power about to be spent.
To me he looks about as Romanesque
as a dimpled lifeguard:
athletic, handsome, mythical;
a kind of Saint George who could
slay Satan’s minions, or die trying.
Such chiseled vice might pass for virtue.
Perhaps the medieval sculptor gave
this Anger too flattering a personification.
I imagine someone must have noticed
the Sin’s lovely allure in proud relief—
a cleric once robbed of church plate
or a respected widow raped in youth;
someone who had suffered a knight’s rage
or a husband’s fist, who would have known
that such crafted beauty, so hard to resist,
demanded a deadly caption to warn us of stabbing fury,
how ruin follows the one unleashing it.
So at the top there is this: Ira se occidit.
Daydreams of California and a Phone Call
1
When February’s snow thickens and clumps,
the Berkeley Marina
is where tugging nostalgia
takes me to see kites,
some the size of giant centipedes,
others the shape of pre-historic birds;
their faces are totems and their flyers
take the name, sometimes even appearance,
of each floating animal, “the flag of a clan.”
In fact
the little round clouds here
remind me of Durkheim’s baldness,
the way it balloons over the blue border
on the cover of Elementary Forms.
I imagine him, with his glasses
pointed gently downward,
as a French rabbi
on an armchair that hangs in the sky.
A cloud among clouds
he observes and at last shares in
the rest of a nebulous Sabbath.
To the lighthearted sociologist
kites might resemble
impaired churingas
in slow and fluttered motion.
And in those parts of the air
where faces of reptiles
hover neck and neck
the wind makes quiet sounds
of slurred and whistled breaths.
The kited Marina,
imagined from the distance of a far-away winter,
is the measure of my dreams.
2
And my brother is always there
at the hollowed-out bottom
of a hill, his deck shoes
planted before the tide’s sandy arc.
His line stretches the highest.
It is attached to the sun.
The light he tethers
gives each saurian form
its airy iridescence.
Strands of his thick fire-and-ash hair
rise and fall with the gusts.
He needs me to take hold of the orange reel,
to free his fingers from the strain of the twine.
And I want to. And I do.
He feels for changes
in the breeze
as he walks and smokes.
I tug at the gentle glare.
Glancing back I see
his body blending into the bay,
his shirt filling with a squall,
his steps going
closer to the docks,
away from the knoll.
Gaunt and miniature
in the distance he waves to me.
His cupped and damaged hand,
afloat in the cigarette’s fog,
points to a striped spinnaker
about to fly off the bow of a puffed yawl.
When we get home
we’ll ask Mom
for cookies and cognac.
3
Beneath the kitchen lamp, eyes closed again,
I see that beautiful black roundness of a seal’s head.
It glistens and bobs, as the weaving streams
of the kites’ blissful tails twist beside the water.
My eyes open. Back in white Edmonton
I am still handling garlic, mayonnaise and oil
mixed in a mustard jar, with the lie of a shaky simile
riveting me to the wintery place I’m desperate to leave:
no matter what, scattered walnuts won’t ever
settle on top of lettuce like boats anchored in seaweed.
Conflated memories make better dreams.
My garlic, the milky package reads, comes from Gilroy,
that spot I visited once as a boy craving to smell what was raw.
Again to the shore of home I drift. The webbed feet
of a white albatross grip the top of a bulb-shaped buoy.
My eyes stay shut until the buzz of a phone.
4
Mother is calling to say I have jury duty
in Martinez: yet another oil town,
wet and windy and oceanless.
On the edge of a strait that looks
as hard as a shellacked box,
this county seat of Contra Costa
toils under the hot glint of refinery tanks.
The moiling waterway of Martinez
is as much a coffin to me
as the grim river that halves the city of Edmonton,
where the air dries out once the flow freezes.
5
The Californian official who sent home the letter
of my summons refuses to accept
her argument that my living in Canada
exempts me from judging those of my native land.
I tried to explain to the man . . . .
This praying mother’s protests rarely matter
by the time the special intentions of her lost ones
have inched their way along her rosary’s shivering beads.
Sorrowful mysteries, they can no longer plead for themselves.
Sleepless unto death, they are sentenced to the hard time
of eyes and testimony they can hardly close.
6
Changing the subject, she asked me
if I remembered (hell-bent-on-discipline)
Sister Monserat, my fifth-grade teacher.
She left her order years ago, distraught,
I was told, and then moved to a neighborhood
where hanging flowerpots line the streets,
somewhere—Mom forgot exactly—on the Marin side of the bridge.
Apparently, she had a pretty place.
From her view she could see sailboats
in their berths and windsurfers near the cove
where Donny, my brother, went to sleep
on water. Like a kite let go of,
he floated away on the same fogless morning
her usual fast-paced walk across the Gate
was cut short.
For all we know the former nun
closed her eyes before the parting splash,
rose numb to the surface of a green swell,
blew out from her belly his pieces of swallowed ash
then rolled her wailing body back into the sea.
Originally from California, 
J. K. Kitchen is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Alberta (Canada).