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
Alma Eppchez
At the Back of the Road Atlas
All text in quotes was found scrawled on the last page of a Rand McNally road atlas.
Chicago to Las Vegas dates unknown.
Eavesdropping on someone else’s road trip.
It was America, is America, it will be America.
“I guess we solved The Free-will Question. (No)”
Hypothetical disillusionment—the Freeway makes monks out of men.
It’s good, when it’s good to be wrong.
“Tiny bladder”
16oz every meal—It became an issue.
Stiff joints, playing Fight Club in the Super 8 sleep.
“What’s the closest airport?”
There is a fairground, and a strip
Where planes take off to spray the patchwork quilt.
“Little fuckers over in What Cheer, Iowa.”
Exit 201 begged to be taken. Population: 678.
Some towns have only known hard times. What did you expect?
“Yes, but at least we’d never have a reason to see her again.”
Women get easy to resent out here. Mile 937—don’t look
At the burning crash. Forget to call on your mother’s Birthday.
“Oh I’d say another two or three miles.”
Tiny bladder. The country hangs along
Interstate 80, a cheap charm bracelet.
“What would Jesse do?”
In Bountiful, Utah did you piss in Salt Lake?
Take off your clothes but don’t want to get wet.
“I’m still a guy.”
Comfort in the 3am silence—it’s not about passing.
Nod to the U-Haul speeding in the right lane.
“What is cold and wet down the back of my shorts?”
Tiny bladder. Crazy straws and watered down whiskey.
Barely any rest stops past Des Moines.
“Tie the kids to the back of the limousine.”
What would you name them?
One night stands with funny labels.
“Gunpowder and lead (lace)”
And leather. Every station is The Best Country Music.
They love it in South Africa too—something about the slide guitar.
“Boomtime.”
Will you father miss his police scanner?
Roll down the windows so the smoke falls out.
“The Virgin River: because it runs just fast enough”
Utah, Arizona, Nevada. Into the Colorado
Where it slows. What did you gain in these mountains?
“Your family and their fucking gum”
All these fat and shiny memories. Deep fried things.
Gum sticks, but you’re growing up, moving on. You found the road.
“Next time we know how to have fun on a trip,
We just go to a restaurant then hangout
In the parking lot taking Boomtime pictures.”
Citizenship from Below
Mimi Sheller
The conquerors
keep easy
kinds of records—
that make it easy
for history to stay on the surface
just scratching at the paper trail.
I take solace in archeology.
As children
The conquerors—they
went to see the fossilized
dinosaurs foot prints on the banks
of the ancient river. It left such an impression.
And so they stomp heavy
dumbly fearing immortality.
Hoping to evade it
like the dinosaurs.
I take solace in extinction.
In their last will and testament
they request tall headstones,
afraid of their shadows
disappearing when they do.
I take solace in electric lights of citizenship shining up from below.
The New Old-Hack
(you remember fighting)
Oh god!
wouldn’t it be like dying?
You showed me a minefield
and told me how
you walked across it
every morning
on your way to doing
the things you love.
(you remember fear)
You had a lover once
a few steps ahead
with heartbeat
like steamroller
and diamond colored dreams,
just as
sure—just as
sharp.
And when he was blown
up
you grew love letters
from the dirt
under your fingernails
and you cried,
but did not visit him in jail.
(you remember defeat)
And you stopped doing
the things you love.
And you don’t
check out books
from the library anymore.
You took a job at McDonald’s,
and you fell off
out of the sky.
(you remember a future)
You tell me
what the early 2000s
did to us.
You tell me a story
about this paranoia
that shattered your bones,
about a quiet
McCarthy era—
unobtrusive
Secret Service
tapping through
your maple bark
and revolution’s sugar
flowing out
on to the ground.
-
My mother, the professor of childhood, gave a lecture on Snow WhiteMy mother always sounds like she is about to weep.
Her students nod.
Mirrors mirror film.
Spinning
was a metaphor for telling.
She speaks
by jumping off the edge of thinking deeply.
Walt erased all the spinning mothers.
Who does the telling anyway?
Mother,
it’s a man’s world.
We held the apple in our hands and it filled with poison
It is called faulty pedagogy.
You teach about children,
so you know.
I absorb you
—with all your flaws.
You watch.
What is foreshadowing for, now that all the stories have been told?
My brother—
my father—
you
raspberry prologues into my belly.
Hold me like newborn ears,
because the world whispers soft and incessant.
Tell me a new story now.
No place for jealousy.
No motive but love.
Echoes of Tuskegee
some notes on my experience
during the night shift at the Fresno ER
I have a confession:
I wore blue latex gloves,
walked the linoleum hallway from triage and
in the early California morning,
under doctor’s lax direction I
saved a woman’s life.
She was still alive
at least
when my shift ended.
I am not proud;
I am terrified.
of what it means to owe someone
nothing after the night shift turns in.
Of what it means to research amateur
on a stranger’s body
and never to say,
“May I”
or “Thank you.”
Haunting me:
Alabama haunts me
from the thirties to the seventies.
For 40 years The Tuskegee
Institute kept black bodies
in petri dish
share crop quarters
growing cultures of medical atrocity
—growing cultures of “progress.”
Brought to us by:
Racialized front lines.
History has mouthfuls that
I don’t know how to talk about and
when I try to swallow—
I cut up my throat.
I should bleed out lab rats.
I should bleed out syphilitic sores grown on black bodies after science had a cure.
I should bleed out their children; sick by birthright.
I should bleed when surviving means breathing, but does not mean life.
My platelets—my whiteness:
scab over like mercury and
underneath these seamless scars
we have not changed—
growing sores
on black bodies
after science had a cure.
Everything is syphilis,
from night stick, to
achievement gap, prison
bars, dreams unspoken,
fish tank overpass,
dying for my sins
Garner, Brown, Martin.
There is no consent in social experimentation.
So how can I condescend to ask for consent?
I want to apologize:
Woman,
You are probably dead by now.
You were maybe 40.
They said you had overdosed on something.
You were unconscious when they found your body.
Your body
I am sorry.
I know you had a life and
a story and
loved ones who remember you.
I know that your death is not a lesson and
I must learn to be better.
I do not know your name.
I am sorry.
I know how your naked body fell
across the hospital cot
in coma humiliation.
The doctor asked me if I wanted to practice CPR and
I didn’t say, “How is this practice?”
Your breasts spilling
milk over asphalt
away from my fists and
I didn’t cry, but
I should have.
I know how your broken breastbone clicks
in and out as I pump your limping heart.
I know how half opened eyes roll back and
can’t make contact and
what could an apology possibly mean to you now?
If I had said:
“Stay with me now.”
You were never here with me.
Separate lives—separate lessons.
You had learned how to be victimized and
I was learning how to rape.
Woman,
Yes, your heart began to beat again
as I beat your chest.
I do not know how long
you survived after that—
brain dead and pale blue-black
on the cot.
I know there is nothing right
about living or dying
surrounded by white coat
strangers singing “Staying Alive”
by the Bee Gees
in bar room cacophony,
so a scared little white girl
can learn how
to keep the beat
on your still
breaking
heart.
The Tuskegee experiments
—echoes themselves—
echo through the nation a quiet and affecting call—
ignore—violate—ignore—
violate—ignore—violate—
ignore . . .
Alma Eppchez
is a genderqueer writer, theater artist, musician, and Quaker based in Philadelphia. Currently, ey* has two plays looking for homes, a dance film in the oven, and is developing a workshop using our bodies to notice internal biases. Ey was socialized as a white girl in Western Massachusetts. This was not a bad experience, but one that gave em many privileges, biases, and misconceptions of identity that ey is compelled to now unlearn. *Alma Eppchez’s chosen pronouns are Elverson pronouns (ey/em/eir/eirs/emself)