Poetry Summer 2018 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Michael Lønfeldt
Carol Lischau
Son
& other poems
Noreen Ellis
Jesus Measured
& other poems
Amanda Moore
Learning to Surf
& other poems
Adin Zeviel Leavitt
Harvest
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
Stay a Minute, the Light is Beautiful
& other poems
Timothy Walsh
The Wellfleet Oyster
& other poems
Anna Hernandez-French
Watermelon Love
& other poems
J. L. Grothe
Six Pregnancies
& other poems
Sue Fagalde Lick
Beauty Confesses
& other poems
Abby Johnson
Finding Yourself on Google Maps
& other poems
Marisa Silva-Dunbar
Frisson
& other poems
Merre Larkin
Sensing June
& other poems
Savannah Grant
Saint
& other poems
Andrew Kuhn
Plains Weather
& other poems
Catherine Wald
Against Aubade
& other poems
Joe Couillard
Like New Houses Settling
& other poems
Faleeha Hassan
In Nights of War
& other poems
Olivia Dorsey Peacock
Thelma: ii
& other poems
Sarah Louise
Tremors
& other poems
Kimberly Russo
Inherent Injustice
& other poems
Frannie Deckas
Child for Sale
& other poems
Jacqueline Schaalje
Mouthings
& other poems
Nancy Rakoczy
Her Face
& other poems
Ashton Vaughn
Contrition
& other poems
Anna Hernandez-French
Mis·creant
Crouched before a spider’s web
a girlchild holds between
her thumb
and forefinger a
sky-bellied beetle, six
kicks
unheeded, she
has caught her eye along the whisper
of the light that plays
its fine vibrations
over eight-legged appetite, her
mouth
works on
a half-hope hum
in anticipation of empyrean
admonishment, she looks
up, but
Space
is a vacuum
and
with a flick of that divine
wrist made of rib
and ribbon
she throws her captive to the carnivorous
thread.
San Bernardino lullaby
laid out in the garden a funereal
star stuck hand
in hand we breathe burnt
orange blossoms and the smoke
folds into valleys.
the mountains are burning, and
in school they say the very pines that burn are born
of flame, itself wombed within the sky, sewn
seed by seed through thunderstorms, white iron
heat
run hissing through the rain;
a miracle, and
they say
flames flicked off the quick
click of a cigarette
lighter, leap leaf to leaf to cleave
the sweet dry grass into ashes and
if pines be birthed in such a fashion they are silver
lines on tragedy. so
we watch the coalish
clouds build black
across the sky, till ashes fall like tea leaves
shape
the death-defying dying of the trees, or
perhaps
the molten mouth of our own
nicotine need. we chant
until our voices buzz like bees
that rise onebody
in their killer yellow
jackets, lift
one another up like soft white nothing
clouds, till each has had her turn in flying
free.
Gardeners
To this day my mother is unfazed
by the sisyphean nature of a garden.
But in nurture she feared nothing more than our entropic tendency
toward anarchy, the graftlessness of being.
And we,
her most precious seedlings,
how she watched us
when the wind picked up, lest we be carried off
and scattered
far across the mountains, dropped into the sea and drowned,
or simply freed to wing across the sky.
As guard against
such leavening she hedged us in and rooted
us among her flowers, buried us
beneath the daisies, amid irises and bleeding hearts.
Our nursery was Sherwood, where the green was close
and clung
to sleeves or caught along
incorrigible hair. And
when summer overripened and our time grew
too abundant
she would prune the sweetest torpor
with her order:
pull the weeds that wrap their wastrel hands around the feet
of finer stalks;
snap the necks off roses, toothy hydras that will counter
their beheading
from the hip;
dig ditches till the daylight
pitches slowly into darkness,
hour after sodding
hour . . .
while behind us life made laughlines
of our borders.
Hooked Up
I wasn’t angling for anything
particular, grown cold
to shoals of flesh
and uniform
light bone. You
were out of season, something
temporal,
or so I thought
until
you soft moon-mouthed I love you
as you pulled
in too much oxygen,
and slept. I watched
the sun
cut edges to the sky,
watched a premature
beginning
suck the sand
beneath my feet like soup
from a spoon. And
in your wake I wondered
if that rufescent line
led back
to your unfettered
mouth
or mine.
Watermelon Love
I’ve never liked watermelon
much.
the way the ripe ones ring hollow
as an unsound
foundation, how they gape
open, gum-colored on their delicate
white rinds and silently endure
dissection.
each time
the flesh gives sweet and dull beneath
my teeth I cringe as those raw gutters
gather.
I was told from babyhood
to swallow any
seed was invitation
to invasion.
and believed
that carelessness
could rise my belly
melon-round and inside
vines would coil,
thread between my bones
and build up such insatiable sunlonging
they’d push out
through ears and eyes, and press
upon my tongue to leave me speaking
only in
prodigious green.
but
the other day
I missed one,
or, better said,
I gave in.
and when I felt
a greening in my gut,
a fruitful ache
down in the pit of me,
I found
that perverse joy we take
in our own
supplantation.
A California native, Anna Hernandez-French cut her baby teeth on the rhymes of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. As childhood progressed she began to write her own verse, weaving into it her deep love of the Pacific Northwest. Expanding her landscape eastward, she made Brooklyn her home, where her work received an honorable mention in the Women’s National Book Association’s 2017 contest, and was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Writers at Work Competition.