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
Hank Hudepohl
Crossed Words
I wonder, looking at the red-headed bird at the feeder,
if it is a woodpecker, or cardinal, or maybe a rare, hot-headed
warbler come to dine with me on my parent’s deck
as I visit with them for a long weekend. I am picking
over the seeds on my plate too, curious about how
I got here, which is to say, living a thousand miles away
and now just a rare visitor to their empty nest,
while my convalescent mom sleeps off her dizziness
in the back bedroom and my dad calls out to me
from the kitchen again to ask if I’d like anything more.
Yes, maybe to understand how migrations, digressions,
even casual addictions can lead to the brink of confusion
where simple questions like “what do you want to eat?”
and “when can you visit again?” can be as complicated to answer
as my dad’s Sunday crossword, locked as I am in my own state
of surprise, my children awaiting my return like Christmas,
my office chair awaiting my shape, my car awaiting my key,
my lips in search of a seven-letter word that rhymes with why.
The Furrier
His years and days and hours are threaded
and wound round the spool into the seam
of the joined hide, pressed there, eyed, sewed up
in a scarf or coat with a fur trim at the neckline.
He says, with a gentleman’s wink,
“This will look so wonderful on you, wear it.”
And his customers oblige him for hats, scarves,
coats of opossum, otter or the shine of mink.
The sewing machine, branded Never Stop.
His one hand over the next stitching
until the bifocaled seams of perfection
are set exquisitely in their proper place.
Anachronistic. Patient. Hopeful.
The spells of time and law are against his ways.
No apprentice now, not even his son
will learn the trade he learned in Istanbul.
“Take a candy,” he says, and feeling more bold,
“I will make you a scarf!” He picks off the floor
scraps of farm-raised mink and bends to his task
revived, unashamed, deliberate, and old.
Confidence
You know it
when you have it in hand.
The world. And you can become,
without it, so small
as to fit between
the letters of a single word
like if or why.
With it, you can lean casually
upon a capital I. Too much
and you grow so
infinite you believe you can balance
the Milky Way
on the back of your fingernail.
Without any at all,
you will grasp
like a child for an open hand
and fail.
Riverbank
Come, walk with me along the riverbank
with an old man & his stick, a shadow,
and a boy whistling into an empty bottle
that he found stuck in the soft mud.
The river never looks the same way twice.
The rusted barges float past full of coal.
It is late summer rising into fall. The river is life,
is earth, is the ground note of an ancient song
if you listen for it. Heraclitus once said:
You cannot step into the same river twice.
Let it move you by boat, by raft, by canoe,
by whatever means available to your luck.
Let it carry you away, purify you, inebriate you
with the intoxicating notes of frogs & crickets.
No one ever crosses the same river twice.
The river is daughter & sister, life giver
and lover of sky & bird & fish.
The river is the blood of condensation, of fog,
redeemer of lost ways, collector of light, a thief.
You can never cross the same river twice.
Henry, how long since you’ve crossed a river?
Artery of disarray, spare parts, rusted cans,
of sandstone, storm-tossed limbs, driftwood,
marshes and grasses, cache of wildflowers: this river
never says my name the same way twice.
Hank Hudepohl
graduated from Harvard, served in the US Navy, and earned an MFA from Hollins University in Virginia, where he also taught creative writing. He has published a book of poetry, The Journey of Hands, and he recently completed the manuscript for his second book, Riverbank. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines, and has been featured on the NPR show The Writer’s Almanac. He grew up in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky, and now lives with his family in Wellesley, Massachusetts.