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
The Practical Knowledge of Women
A pragmatist
to all appearances, my father
has spent his life
with steel and fire
but again brings out the little bird
and trusts her to her mate,
her life the size of a wine cork
and fragile as apple blossom.
“He misses her,” he explains,
and it is I
with my supposedly impractical education
who can see the mistake.
She spends a week or so
in the larger cage,
sleeping beside him
on a spindly branch
and it convinces my father,
but not me.
It is The Practical Knowledge of Women:
the man who will pluck a feather
will pick your wings bare,
and he who will nearly kill you
will kill you, eventually.
My father believes in love.
So do I, but I also believe
in the bone-cold January days
I spent in an old farmhouse
away from a sharp beak.
I believe in many things
that only look like love
from odd angles, that cannot be
proven beyond any shadows,
but speak the lack.
I believe
in the bare places
where feathers
have never
grown back
Peas
My mother could make me eat peas,
but not chew them.
I must have swallowed a gallon
whole like medication,
her motives
vitamins dipped in gall.
Later, she could make me tell her
events, but not how I felt.
I’d hold crushes or despair in my mouth
for hours until I could excuse myself
to the cold altar of the bathroom,
offer up the green
flesh of my teenage heart
to an empty room.
Even now, she tiptoes
around perceived scorn,
recoils from the black pits
of old fires
as if the specter of their heat
still frightens her, as if
they might reignite
spontaneously
and swallow her
whole
Earth from Space
I love best alone,
our apartment
at the bottom of the hill a sunken glow.
There’s our life,
I want to say (but don’t). We watch the glass door,
waiting to see
ourselves walk by, inside,
astronauts watching Earth from space.
It reminds me of you
last winter, on skates—
how I expected your clumsiness,
but you glided away. How you looked
from the long end of the rink:
oblivious, distant, whole in a way
that crushed my ribs like paper.
I’m never
this close up close, I didn’t want to say.
30,000
Pushed off
like a swimmer from a pool wall
deep into a cold ripple
of burned pearls.
Our flying dollhouse.
I pretend to read
but how?
the lush whirl of earth, below;
my eyes drag back
like dogs pulling leashes,
resentful of my insistence
on the banal.
my god, I think, listening
for the silence
that coats the world,
but the engines
bored as cattle
lumber on. My open book
tells its story
to the wall.
Mary Mills
is a recent graduate of King University in Bristol, TN. She lives in Virginia, in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, with her husband and their four birds. Her work has appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Four and Twenty, and The Clinch Mountain Review.