Poetry Summer 2015 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Hannah Lansburgh
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
For Your Own Good
& other poems
Marianne S. Johnson
Tortious
& other poems
Kate Magill
Nest Study #1
& other poems
Karen Kraco
Studio
& other poems
Matt Daly
Beneath Your Bark
& other poems
Paulette Guerin
Emergence
& other poems
Hank Hudepohl
Crossed Words
& other poems
Alma Eppchez
At the Back of the Road Atlas
& other poems
Jim Burrows
At the Megachurch
& other poems
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Lioness
& other poems
Yana Lyandres
New York Transplant
& other poems
Heather Katzoff
Start
& other poems
Tom Yori
Cana
& other poems
Barth Landor
What Is Left
& other poems
Abigail F. Taylor
Never So Still
& other poems
George Longenecker
Polar Bears Drowning
& other poems
Ben Cromwell
Sometimes a Flock of Birds
& other poems
Robert Mammano
the way the ground shakes
& other poems
Janet Smith
Rocket Ship
& other poems
Gina Loring
Dementia
& other poems
J. Lee Strickland
Minoan Elegy
& other poems
Toni Hanner
Catching the Baby
& other poems
Matt Daly
Elk Hunting, 12 Below
What isn’t like this? We make our daily
enterprises more difficult than we must
for the sake of giving memory fresh
meat for its freezer, or to have something
to chew when the morning is colder than
today. We add so much complexity
to what comes easily barreling down
the smooth shoulder of the black butte, darker
than the star-salted sky, in a fluid school
of hooves. Animal stench dodges between
dome lights illuminating the hunters
at ease in warm trucks pulled just off the road.
It is not only the coldest mornings
when we work our way deep down Long Hollow
that we nevertheless hear every shot
in the fusillade and know what is most
difficult is escaping the thoughts we
make, the cold projectiles we lob at what
wild life still courses through what we have left
of the vast wilderness inside each of us.
Beneath Your Bark
Would I could be a pine beetle
tracing my underneath cursive
on the inside of your fascia
not that slick blue bugger
who girdled your phloem
who separated your roots
from your reaching
but this one who goes nowhere
save wiggling through your liquid thump
in cul-de-sacs and curlicues
I wish I could get under
your skin again begin again
in my black sheen
a radiant radical pellet
pinballing beneath your flakes
your scales around your heart wall
not a wall at all permeable
a tub for sap to be sludge swam
slithered in under there
inside the soft side of your skin
outside the wooden stem
of your still ringing heart
Wolf Hunter1
We strike up conversation
across the concrete island
between us. Sleet pelts
our faces as we refuel.
I am comfortable talking
in flurries to a man
in camouflage, but worry
about fumes roiling
out of our gas tanks.
I keep thinking about
warnings, pump stickers,
about the mass of fumes
collecting around us,
his idling engine,
my cell phone,
static electricity.
He tells me he shot a male
wolf earlier in the day.
He is specific about
the weight: one hundred
seventy pounds.2
I listen in October sleet,
have a most common thought:
the world is a strange place
for all of us to go on living
together, full of contradictions:
wolf pups wag tails when
packmates return from tearing
elk calves to pieces, people
advocate replacing lead
bullets with copper to reduce
unintended mortalities.3
I want to ask the hunter:
his reason for shooting the wolf,
the kind of bullet he used,
his justification for the claim
his wolf is almost as large
as any wolf ever killed
by any North America man.4
I want to understand:
his method for establishing
heft of a carcass, why he keeps
the bed of his truck covered,
why he does not shut off
the engine at the filling station
as instructed.
But more than that,
I want to be happy
to live in a place with wolves
as large as men, to live
in a place where men talk
over warning signs.
More than that, I want to live
in a place where no one
wants to shoot anything
for any reason
easy to document.5
_____________________
1 According to the Wikipedia
article “Gray Wolf,” the largest
American wolf, killed on July 12,
1939, 70 Mile River, Alaska,
weighed 175 pounds.
2 According to the Wikipedia
article, “Human,” 170 pounds
is about average for a human
male.
On screen, the Vitruvian man
looks uncomfortable, as do
the naked Asian man, the naked
blond woman in the sidebar.
This is the first time I have looked
at pictures of naked people
on Wikipedia.
3 Several of the citations at the end
of the article, “Gray Wolf,”
credit “Graves.”
4 My comparison of footnotes
in the Wikipedia articles reveals:
146 citations, “Human,”
318 citations, “Gray Wolf.”
I do not understand why wolves
require more than twice
the documentation of people.
5 I think most of us know
something about exaggerating
the weight of things.
American Robin
Dun flight flares around the corner.
Mate or prospective mate gives chase,
red-breasted one who later waits
on a branch after the first hits
the back door’s glass, collapses
panting, dull-eyed, on the new deck.
I hold the numb bird in my hands,
wrap her loosely in a green cloth,
keep a close eye out for magpies.
Given the opportunity
they would mob the male, chase him off,
whet the edges of their black bills.
My son comes outside only once
to touch with his index finger
between wings we think are broken.
We believe telling a story
could conjure that story straight out
of the air. Her story opens
in my palm. Braille points of talons
tug at whorls. A heartbeat pulses.
She regains her ability
to stand, to perch. Return to flight.
She reappears on a low branch,
unnoticed from inside the house.
No banner unfurls for this act:
saving one life from other lives,
from the windowed door between us.
Our story is hard as glass. We slam
against it with our hollow bones.
We slam against it with our bones.
Eagle Cap Rekindling
We have not seen each other in twenty-five
years and even though back then I covered my
naked body with your naked body I do not expect
you to remember my name. I will speak
truly, there is no reason not to be honest
after so much time, I did not remember your name
until I read it on a signpost as I made my way
back to you although I have never forgotten
the feel of you wet and then you drying slow
on my skin, that glacial silt mud scent of you
mixed with the spare change tang of my sweat
how you washed me in your coldest springs
until the only odors were snow and stone.
You haven’t changed as much as I have
or if so for the better having reintroduced
yourself to wolves. Whereas I am just as tongue-
tied around you as I always was. So I offer you
my flesh, softer now, clothed or naked as you wish
and the admission that you stunned the howl
right out of me all those years ago when my tongue
knew the feel of your skin better than it knew
this voice it has grown so familiar with
so resigned to. I have longed so long to revel
in your muck and reek as one wild body
savors the blood pulse thrum of every other
wild body no matter how rocky or old.
Matt Daly
is a poet and writing teacher from Jackson, Wyoming. His poetry has been published in Clerestory, The Cortland Review, Pilgrimage, Split Rock Review, The Screaming Sheep and elsewhere. In 2013, he received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council and is the 2015 recipient of the Neltje Blanchan Award for writing inspired by the natural world.