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
Cynthia Robinson Young
Triple Dare
When I was four I was a stripper.
I guess I started early. The boy next door
DARED me, he said
I wasn’t born from my momma because
I didn’t have a belly button.
I had to prove him wrong.
My grandma told it was time to go
and get my own whuppin’ switch
from the thorniest bush in the backyard
because it “was time for you to learn
who you should take your clothes off for,
and who you shouldn’t.”
When I was five I was too short to hang
clothes on the rope line outside,
but not too young to identify
whose underwear was whose.
That same boy dared me,
and that same grandma spanked me,
but with a different switch that
she picked out herself,
claiming I wasn’t hard enough on myself to
pick a good one that sang in the wind
before it hit my legs.
That boy grew up to be a man who
kept daring women to do all sorts of things
they shouldn’na
been doing,
but I married him,
because he dared me.
Grandma wasn’t able to
teach me a dog gone thing.
Nancy Beal, 1820
(grandmother, 4 times removed)
I found you, Grandma,
hidden among the Archives
in a census. Did they even let you
give your name? Who asked
the questions, and who
gave the answers that would define
your life
two centuries later,
giving me so little
to understand
who you really were?
Nancy,
you have a granddaughter now
who carries your name
into a generation
where there are no slaves
such as you were.
She dances to tribal rhythms
embedded
in Hip Hop, in Jazz, in
melodic refrains
you might have hummed
unconsciously
as you toiled
in a hot North Carolina
field,
or baked bread in a humid southern
kitchen,
careful not be to overheard,
determined to remain silent
when the overseer passed,
lest it be mistaken
for contentment.
Cornered
I have stood on corners,
shaking with fear and cold, waiting
with my sister on a northeastern November
night, neon blinking “Budweiser”
in a ghoulish light
on
our young Black faces.
My sister wasn’t old enough
to protect herself,
so how could she
protect me?
The boys who could be men
were coming
toward us. The street lamp
lit up the mischief
in their eyes. I wished
the light would hypnotize and hold them
in that halo until
our mother could come out of the bar
to rescue us.
But the bar windows were tinted dark.
No one is meant to see through
them, dark enough to protect
the ones inside who start their drinking
early in the day
and stop
early the next.
Our mother did not do that, she was not like that.
She was the mother who says,
“I’ll only be a minute/
just wait right here on the corner/
by the door/ you’ll be safe/ I’ll be right back out.”
We had to believe her.
She was our mother.
We had no choice.
The men who could be boys
were saying things
our mother would have never
allowed her daughters to hear.
She would have shut them up. She would
have washed their mouths out
with Pure Ivory Soap,
and if they tried to
spit it out on the dirty street,
she would not have let them,
not until she thought their mouths would
not allow those words to live there.
But the damage was done.
I won’t forget
their words,
the sound of their laugh,
and the lie
that my sister gave to me, that
“this did not happen/ we will not tell Mommy/ she feels bad enough all the time
with her troubles/ don’t let her hear any more from us.”
So she wrapped her protection
Around our mother instead of me.
And an hour later we caught
the last bus running in the city,
staring out at our reflections against the darkness,
riding past so many corners,
some healthy and happy,
some not so much,
until our mother reached up
and pulled the cord.
Cynthia Robinson Young
currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she teaches in the Education department at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. She recently moved to the South with her husband and eight children after living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over thirty years. She has been published in journals over the years, including Radix, a 1970s Berkeley street paper. She is currently working on a genealogical book of prose poems.