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
Carol Lischau
Son
for baby L.
I say I want a baby because no one says
I want a person.
I’m told it isn’t yet time, as if anyone
could determine which foggy breath a tinder will catch
and keep.
A life, the whole weight of it, cannot be carried
in a womb.
But we bear its progressions—
the size of a fig, a turnip, a pomegranate too alive
with red.
A stain. An ER wristband.
The spirit of every human is already
in the world wishing only
to be arranged. And when I look,
I find you waiting everywhere.
A scrap of blanket I was knitting,
a box of prenatal pills on the counter.
Or mushrooms clustering in a hollow of my garden bed
or winter rain spells tearing
from the sweet birch its last clinging leaves.
Why have I finished you, my unfinished?
If I could only offer you that gift, if I could find
your hand to place it in.
Red-Throated Anole
I was nearly nine when I found the limp lizard
under the porch swing. One eye bulged into a white knot,
two limbs were severed. I didn’t know whether to be grieved
or terrified as it wriggled what was left of itself across concrete.
My mother didn’t refuse, perhaps she couldn’t,
when I came inside, cupping the barely living, its tawny skin
faded to grey. This, my first moment of urgency.
We set up a tank of shallow water and a plastic container
of food on the counter, though I’ve forgotten what we thought
to feed it. I added a handful of twigs and plucked grass
as if what’s familiar would prompt the lungs into swelling.
That a shadow of home would usher in miracle. And what,
if not my gesture, could direct the body to survive? Cooing,
believing all this, I wondered where its ears were to understand me.
In the morning its jaw slacked open, the tongue
a bright red announcement. The heart unwilling to obey,
the milky eye refusing to blink. Like a pearl,
I wanted to think as I watched it not watching back.
Azalea House
He’s a drunk, my father explained
as they drove the slurring man away. An hour before,
he’d staggered to the road and smashed into our car
just in front of the house on Azalea.
My widowed aunt and her daughter lived there
with their German Shepherds, hair blanketing the floor
and everything inside the walls. The house collected
their collections—manicured Barbie dolls posed forever
behind glass, Carebears and other kaleidoscopic animals
huddled and peering down from upper shelves. Look,
but don’t touch my aunt would remind me on nights
my father would drop me there. Why did I want to evade
her words? To lose composure, to feel the frill and eyes
filled with plastic and another kind of life.
Look, but don’t touch my mind rehearsed.
How to resist the allure of what is forbidden?
After his arrest, the man’s anxious wife stood in the yard
as they asked her questions, her blue-bruised arm lifted
to a wordless mouth. What compelled her silence—love?
the private cosmos of a home? I watched from within
the locked car. Beyond me, the crime scene in the street,
and beyond the street, other homes and other private lives
interrupted, their frantic mouths through windows,
and from within window blinds like cage slats,
their gazes white-eyed and wanting.
Ice Storm, Post-Divorce
My father is freshly alone on the other end
of the line. He talks of all that’s rolling in.
I listen. Pacing my attic room, I see
where the pale walls are peeling to show sycamore.
And my eye catches, reels in—an unexpected color
clustered in a top corner of the wall.
Ladybugs. Dozens, red and huddled
like pomegranate seeds in the white meat
of winter. Did the wind force their retreat,
did the brightness against the ground?
My senses reorient to my father’s voice, and
I tell him what I see. He says they’re lucky.
Luck. I cannot connect our life with theirs—
vermillion cloister, elytra and abdomen,
brains like needle eyes open and clear,
and my father’s home cleared like a throat.
And what of me in this? What of home?
I cannot say if I am more afraid of loneliness
or its image. Our calls linger after they’re ended,
as do the ladybugs till the season passes.
I never can decide whether or not
I should have wanted them gone,
the pitifully beautiful red refuge
tucking further into itself and away
from the window’s biting draft. Still,
they collect in the corner of my mind—
crimson nest, endless days, till death
(O the sweet covenant) do they linger.
Birthday, An Elegy
Today a mother shot her daughters
before her husband breathed a wish over a cake.
And what this says about domestic
ennui or the right to bear arms, I do not know.
Smoke from the heirloomed pistol rises
with our questions, while in the kitchen 45 candles
have begun their forever burning.
A father searches for the right wish.
Where are we taken when longing hems
the edge of language, dares past the boundary of word?
The sound of a whimper. A gunshot. A neighbor’s ohmygod
from a parlor window. If ever a siren dopplers past,
I wonder what it means to speak. The lights too, frantic
and wordless, urging to transfigure.
The girls collapsed on their manicured lawn
20 miles west of my mother stirring again a pot of risotto,
her own mother propped in a La-Z-Boy straining
to make sense of Lauren Lake or Dow Jones
or Fox newscasters. Every evening, the world.
Every birth, death. You can never know what fears
or exhilarations such people have. Their daughters’ bodies held
in the grass there like last notes of the annual song.
To—you—she forces him to hear. Deep breath.
Make a wish sense of it if you can.
Carol Lischau
grew up in Southeast Texas, where her relatives have lived for the past 200 years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Notre Dame Review, and Common Ground Review, among others. Her manuscript was a finalist in the 2017 Literary Awards for the Tucson Festival of Books. She resides in Blacksburg, where she is pursuing an MFA at Virginia Tech.