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
Toni Hanner
Catching the Baby
My father’s birthday, the gypsy approaches,
gold ring poised on her palm, almost impossible
not to look, not to catch the baby, she knows you cannot
let it fall, allow its soft brown head to smack the cobbles,
you cannot stop your hand. Here is a cat dead in a bag,
you glance and pass by, you aren’t the kind of person
to touch, to look inside, to bury the bag in the dirt outside
your front door. You are just one of the people who glances,
remembers later to write the orange feet sticking up
out of the plastic bag as dead as anything and you’ll return to this cat
again and again, this cat serving as home if you can get there before
the patrol boat pa-pows its slow way up the canal
to your beach. If Jimmy’s on board he’ll catch the baby
and steal the gold ring. The cat was a runt and the gypsy
sighs back into the doorway of the cathedral, folding
a leg up under her skirt, putting on her hungriest face.
I stumble through cities the way I hug the wall for support
when I’m drunk, I need a description of that, how one flings oneself
at the bannister, then the next solid thing, the window ledge
at the stair landing, then the next, a lover’s shoulder, a mother’s
shadow. The cat is one of those things in a black week.
In between there are voids the ground solid enough for your feet
but the rest of your body is on its own. You are always reaching for the next
hold-fast, a wall, a bureau, a table. The softness of a lover’s hand
is comforting but only the dead are solid enough.
You keep them in jars bolted to the floor moving with you,
just far enough ahead so that you have always a destination.
Copernicus
This is only a single page, Copernicus,
I do not have what you would call a flexible
life I revolve around the sun like you said
my house does not pulse open for any passing
cousin, does not fold itself around the bereaved
no, my house holds us, the few, Copernicus.
We do not know which of us is the sun
we move into and around each other
anemones opening and closing and holding,
digesting what we need which is always.
Copernicus there is starch in my bones
I do not have what you would call a flexible
life there is city in me, boxes piled high
leaning against one another small boats ply
rivers of blood. Copernicus
I long to sunflower turning and turning heliotrope
but I creak in my body I must bring down the heat,
the light. This is only a single page, Copernicus
because we are far from the sun in January
of this murderous year we are spinning
back into the dark when all we can do
is reach and turn. I do not have what you
would call a flexible life, Copernicus.
I revolve around the sun bereaved and holding.
Splendid Angel
I’ve always wanted to see my mother with bees
in her hair, lifting her, turning her gold, the grammar
of lightness. My mother with ice blue, riding,
a banshee of knees and serpents, my mother
as galaxy, as interplanetary dust, comet-clicking,
deep black empty howling, rain falling through sunlight
in a grove of olive trees. My mother as ocher, as mustard,
as new as the stars, as boat and wind, her flesh to fruit,
bruised pear, secret hidden in an apple,
a splendid angel, a criminal. I would take her into the parlor,
let her see her father, know him in his coffin, shake the dead
from her fingers, from her feet, from her wings.
August Poem
realizing in my chest
i have no words my throat closes
over the beaks of all the birds
i have swallowed in the night
my hummingbirds stand on a column
of air looking at me
i am the most important display
in their museum of oddities
dusky august comes
cartwheeling down through the ninebark
our orbit quickens around whatever sun
or moon finds our gravity
i can spend sunshine
like coins in the machines of flowers
Toni Hanner
’s books include The Ravelling Braid (Tebot Bach, 2012), Gertrude, poems and other objects (Traprock, 2012), and The Book of Orange Dave (Chandelier Galaxy Books, 2015). Gertrude was a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. Hanner is a member of Red Sofa Poets and the Madrona Writers. She is a confirmed francophile who also loves Argentine tango. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with poet Michael Hanner.