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
Scylla of the Alabama
Scylla’s taking more
to men
than she’d ever
care to admit.
These days you’ll find her going through a few.
I saw her in the river once,
playing at ancient catfish—giant,
grotesque, ages-long whiskers mingled
with lights reflected from the bridge
all distorted, all crude and reconfigured
something elses.
All slicked and reforming bodies—
the fish, the lights, the water,
and us on a fish fry party boat,
eating them all.
Mapless in a Recurring Landscape
Everything is like this:
Air, brown cloud line, old
water stains on linen.
Life in sepia
dust-bowl, derelict.
I’ll ask the tumble
weed where to go.
I’ll ask the sage
what I smell.
Where is the yellow
page. Where the faint-
print words.
Thirteen Ways of Looking
after Wallace Stevens
1.
When in motion, attend
to the still.
2.
Out. For glinting yellows,
deer by the road.
3.
At a half-empty glass
as a drink.
4.
Behind you.
5.
Down. Watch for pennies.
Pennies are money, too.
6.
With mirrors
surrounding your head.
7.
Relax your eyes
and a picture pops out.
8.
Scan the tuna salad. Leave
no scales.
9.
Up, maybe
at a blackbird.
10.
Use binoculars. Use microscopes.
Point great lenses to the sky.
11.
Never at the sun. Never at the face
of the holy.
12.
At the news. Would you
look at the news?
13.
Seeing the crowd, populate it
with persons.
Things to Remember
The crunch of gravel under
sneakers at 6:30 in the morning
when the pine trees, even
the school buses, were gray.
The way the mailbox was always empty,
and a raised flag meant we would
meet later in marshy woods where
an old shack no one built fell
apart a little whenever we weren’t looking.
The long route to the county school where
whites and blacks were pretty
much equal in numbers. How we liked
to think we were enlightened, but lived
on the edge of town for a reason.
The ditch that ran up to the road,
perpendicular. The one
we called the Amazon,
when the Alabama was
only the river. How Selma is
a place of water and rust and blood
and ghosts. Dad’s fried deer.
Where the blackberries grew.
An empty trailer lot with no old
shack behind it, ancient Amazonian
tree stumps. A dull bus driving by
in gray morning.
Lost: Alvin the Aardvark
When Mom finally moved I’d forgotten
that toy, and we tore up the trailer,
because you can’t sell or relocate
wet pressed board and punched-in walls,
but when I saw it—
I’d had a plastic anteater. It rolled,
and it clicked, Velcro tongue
shooting out at blue-fuzz ants. I remembered orange
about it, and green. I remembered the mud
beneath us, how the water leaked and ran
below, through the floor.
I can’t remember, though, how it got
there, the anteater. I’d never go
under there with a toy:
Spiders and snakes settled the damp, the cold
aluminum skirting sometimes soundtracked
in the paw-scrapes of infant cats and dogs.
I’d crawl, flashlight in hand, toward the weak
yelps of a newborn litter. But not with an anteater—
When the wide trailer split, saturated particle
board shred open in mash-up of creak and hiss,
it was revelation:
the mud, the dirt, five-gallon buckets and beer cans,
a crooked Stonehenge of half-buried
cement blocks, rotting softballs, and among the brown
and gray, the orange.
Fifteen years and still
bright, undamaged polymer, but sticker-eyes
peeled, strange blind plastic creature,
the wet smack of suction popping,
anteater removed.
Jessica M. Lockhart
is from Selma, Alabama. She recently completed her MA studies at Mississippi State University, where she currently teaches English Composition.