Poetry Summer 2016 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Carly Larsson
Sarah Sansolo
Bedtime Stories
& other poems
Miranda Cowley Heller
Things the Tide Has Discarded
& other poems
Alexa Poteet
Escobar's Hacienda Napoles
& other poems
Cynthia Robinson Young
Triple Dare
& other poems
Nicole Lachat
Of Infidelities
& other poems
Amy Nawrocki
Bad Girls
& other poems
Lawrence Hayes
Winter Climb
& other poems
AJ Powell
God the Baker
& other poems
Gisle Skeie
Rearranging
& other poems
Bruce Taylor
Always Expect a Train
& other poems
Ricky Ray
They Used to Be Things
& other poems
S. E. Ingraham
Storm Angels
& other poems
Laura Gamache
Outing
& other poems
Keighan Speer
It Rained Today
& other poems
Emma Atkinson
Grocery Stores Make Me Feel Mentally Ill
& other poems
Erin Lehrmann
Block
& other poems
D. H. Turtel
Margaret, Again
& other poems
Chris Haug
Bovine Paranoia
& other poems
Kimberly M. Russo
Definitive Definition
& other poems
Holly Walrath
A Tourist of Sorts
& other poems
Angel C. Dye
Beauty in Her Marrow
& other poems
Amy Nawrocki
Waiting for the Plowman
In the morning: Rousseau’s Confessions. Breakfast:
something forgettable and unfulfilling, toast,
the white of an egg circling a shiny yolk.
By midday, the desert of chalk buries the laurel
and watching juncos burrow under the feeder
suffices for motion. Blank under its plastic face
the kitchen dial signals two o’clock with sleek
anemic hands. Within the hour, sugar held
in the spoon’s mouth is let go into black liquid,
and boots, scuffed and sheltered alert the tangled
knit scarf to concoct itself. At four, shovel in hand
I depart to do the job myself. The man
and his truck are nowhere to be found
even though the blizzard’s end is new
and he promised and there is a lot of it.
Lighter than a pile of proverbial feathers
but sticky and heaping, the first bundle I take
begins to build a dune around the driveway
but there is nowhere else to go and no rest
and nothing to do to lessen the white
except to bend at the knees and let it fly.
Literally
She says without irony or modesty
I’m literally so irritated, as if irritation
could be anything other than literal, forget
the aching hyperbole of so and the blankness
of those other loosely placed modifiers that fill
space left empty by the dysfunction of sound,
the way fireflies pulse unevenly in the summer air.
She literally calls herself Mary C
on her cellphone when she asked for Saturday
night off to attend a “family gathering.”
I literally was like making fun of him,
and I told him: I was, like, I never would do
that and I like can’t even imagine you
trying to handle a girl like me, you literally
have been doing a shitty job lately. This was before
she told her brackishly tanned friend, who
sported a shiny ankle bracelet and had
her hair pinned back literally with a binder clip,
that she had thrown up in the parking lot
sometime after the office party. You can tell
this was the type of parking lot where
white lines had to be repainted and underneath
some faded ones still gloomed like
bad eye shadow on a clown. A very sad clown.
Literally, the clown is sad.
Mary C has dark auburn hair, like soil
found beneath piles of wet and decomposing
oak leaves that like the stasis underneath
the layers of newly dead foliage, storm-tossed
and musty. I guess he has, like, a superiority complex,
so like I would pick him up and take him on a date,
so he, like, would feel like he’s accomplishing
something. It’s very long hair, like long, literally
past her shoulders, which isn’t that long, not like
polygamy wife long or whatever, but long enough
for you to know she has never, in 30 some-odd years,
ever been confused with someone clownish, or even
someone with a superiority complex, not with those
pouty eyes and tailored eyebrows. Clowns, literally,
do not speak with such elegance or authority, like
not ever. Clowns are known to stumble and wear
cherry wigs and awkward shoes and bow ties, for
crying out loud. So funny, though, like literally,
so funny. It’s true, few of them mind picking
up people and chauffeuring them around
especially in very small cars. Mary C drives
a Nissan Sentra, so you can understand about
trying to handle a girl like that. Fireflies, you know,
filling a really humid night with sparkles, so
irritating, if you, like, aren’t paying attention.
Instead of Poems
Instead of poems, I weed the sidewalk
and empty crevices of intruders.
I find it helpful to harvest
their relentlessness. Maybe dirt,
maybe blood sacrifices, maybe
a shovel.
The words I wished would come
unprompted, stick like pollen
to my nose. But the heat has broken
enough for me to breathe.
Despite the scarlet beetle
that has scoured their stalks
to skeletal canes, the lilies’ perfume
layers into me like embroidered
handkerchiefs pocketed once,
then rediscovered in a pair
of comfortable pants.
Instead of poems, I savor
scents sung by saffron tongues
and listen to the striated pink
of unbeatable blooms.
Bad Girls
The boy at the pub had blonding hair
and a round face
and we were cruel to him.
If I sat under hypnosis with a police sketch artist,
I could recall exactly what he looked like, down to the earlobes
and cheek bones, down to the insignia on the shirt pocket,
the ironing board and the decision against a tie,
down to the comb, even the television show he watched
while he pressed that pale green shirt, reruns and
laugh tracks, the best anyone has to fill the time
preparing for a broken heart.
But everybody knows that eye witnesses mistake
what they see for what their mind conjures
out of conglomerates and jigsaw memories.
The pub had dark wood paneling and pockets
of light. Lily and Kate were there, talking
quickly and coyly, sometimes slipping into Serbian
through the privacy of a giggle or nod.
Maybe there were other reasons
to close the world out. We were often bad.
He never got past hello and we never
even bothered with ordinary niceties.
As far as brush-offs go, this might have been one
of the most perfectly written. Turn of shoulders,
the huddle, then the pantomime: you do not matter to us
because this is where we take our punishment
and you are not allowed to make us feel worthwhile.
What did the boy in was that he could not hide
the authenticity of his hopefulness.
We know how to preen thin skin
and screen smiles through bloody teeth.
Field Guide to North American Birds
In my dream, the call
came from a rose breasted
grosbeak, but I have seen
none, only recognize
sparrows and catbirds
and hummingbirds
whom I have heard
chittering in a blur,
tickled at their luck
at being born
with the ability
to fly backwards.
Discovering
that hummingbirds sing
shouldn’t have surprised me,
but it did. While they aim
toward silence
and an almost
sightless blur,
one could imagine
their quickness
as breaking some
inaudible sound barrier
that only hummingbirds
can break. Without looking
I can tell one
just passed by.
Between afternoons
I wander into
the forest just past
peach trees and raspberry
bushes, completely
oblivious
to the blueberries
ripening in a thick grove
in the center of the lawn.
Seeking the nest
of red-tails
whom I hear but
cannot see, I catch
something
between a screech
and a squeal, a plea
and a declaration:
I am not anonymous,
you know who I am.
After dreaming
I hear what can
only be called
laughter,
and on the table,
my breakfast bowl
is full of ripe,
misshapen blueberries.
A song sparrow
left them, though
I know she was not
the one laughing.
Listen, she said,
sing.
Amy Nawrocki
is the poetry editor for The Wayfarer and the author of five poetry collections, including Four Blue Eggs and Reconnaissance, released by Homebound Publications. She is the recipient of numerous awards including honors from The Connecticut Poetry Society, New Millennium Writings and Phi Kappa Phi. She teaches literature, composition, and creative writing at the University of Bridgeport and lives Hamden, Connecticut with her husband and their two cats.