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
Barth Landor
What Is Left
What is left of being right
when in the long run I am wrong?
At first I was just right
until at last I was just left.
Is it wrong to exit stage left
if the prompt is not in the script?
Merely to do no wrong
is a good way to be left,
although even the right way to be good
may still in the end be just wrong.
I lie down on our bed’s right side
while you go to sleep on the other’s.
If your right hand knew what your ring hand left,
then at least I am right that I am wrong.
Dalgairn House
Heaven came up for rent at thirty pounds a week
with no deposit down. We were freshly wed
and student-poor, and so we signed a lease
on paradise: we made our ascent
to the sunlit upper story of a Scottish
mansion on a hill in the Kingdom of Fife.
Brambles ripened in the hedgerows
and strawberries sweetened in the fields.
On the lawn that welcomed even pheasant,
a small boy nursed a patch of herbs.
All was fertile indoors, too:
stacks of books grew read, and the ribbon
of my little Olivetti seeded letters
for a garden of words I gave to you.
In the home beneath our feet, the noises
of children rose to our ears like Kansas corn,
while above the heads of our landlord family,
you turned to tell me
that one of our own had taken root in you.
That idyll ended long ago.
Garret companions in our salad days,
honeymoon scholars gaining fluency
in languages and love,
in our vinegar years we turned into
strangers even in our common tongue.
One of us yielded and one of us failed to,
both of us strayed and one of us stayed.
When one of us found—or lost—one’s truer self,
one of us wept as one of us left.
So the calamity happened.
But I tell you that this did, too:
we made bramble jam from berries
we gathered on country lanes.
We had little to our names.
We read psalms aloud before bed
above the room of a child called Jimbo,
that myopic and timid sibling
of important older sisters,
the pale boy who still lives in my mind
(we moved after a year and never returned)
In a fragile state of innocence.
Barth Landor
lives in Chicago. His novel, A Week in Winter, was published by the Permanent Press.