Poetry Summer 2019 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Antoine Petitteville
Laura Apol
Easter Morning
& other poems
Taylor Dibble
A Masterpiece in Progress
& other poems
Julia Roth
Lessons From My Menstrual Cup
& other poems
Jamie Ross
Ceaseless Wind. The Drying Sheaves
& other poems
Nicole Yackley
Mea Culpa
& other poems
George Longenecker
I’m sentimental for the Paleolithic
& other poems
Taylor Gardner
Short Observations by Angels
& other poems
Greg Tuleja
No Thomas Hardy
& other poems
Joanne Monte
War Casualties
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
Potato Harvest
& other poems
Steven Dale Davison
Wordsmouth Harbor Founder
& other poems
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
How I Named Her
& other poems
Greenheart
sunny ex
& other poems
Ashton Vaughn
Through the Valley of Mount Chimaera
& other poems
Linda Speckhals
Borderlands
& other poems
Lucy Griffith
Breathing Room
& other poems
Steven Valentine
Written
& other poems
Emily Varvel
B is for Boys and G is for Guys
& other poems
Jhazalyn Prince
Priceless Body
& other poems
Marte Stuart
Generation Snowflake
& other poems
S.J. Enloe
Kale Soup
& other poems
Meghan Dunsmuir
Our Path
& other poems
Jamie Ross
Ceaseless Wind. The Drying Sheaves
heave in their twine. A man can only
tie so much, and then move on. How often
have I found this road—two simple tracks
curving into darkness. They don’t explain
their readiness, or their appearance. I don’t
forget who lined this face. Every step I take
I learned from you. Every match I strike
trembles with your light. The old stone barn
sighs in its ruin. Carla’s two gray burros
flick their tails, doze against a wall. The ancient
towering cacti around my mother’s grave
wave back and forth, with spiked
familiar fingers. We all have nails
embedded in our hands. Every village
has a bus arriving from the distance,
each window with its curtains, TV’s
that play movies hours after dawn. So long
I’ve heard their rumble, deep along the river.
Turn back, my love. Look again, at me.
Let me comb your hair.
—Ajuchitlán, Guerrero
Last Stop on the Chili Line
—Rio Arriba, New Mexico
Now the tracks are gone at Taos Junction
but the stones remain—hammered plinths
and stelae that marked a freight train’s passage,
some still upright, others down to rubble,
each one etched with miles and chiseled towns,
a distant whistle moaning from Servilleta station,
the iron clack and thunder of drive-rods
and wheels, pine-fire steam and pistons
wheezing up the steep from the Embudo drop.
Henry Wilton in his vest and flannel shirt
smiling at the door, Susie in the kitchen
with her two-buck enchiladas. Brown-bottled
beer stacked in a machine: Ice Cold Coke 5¢.
How it got there is our story
with its lines bent and fractured, pounded
seven decades up from Silver City,
through Socorro, Antonito, Huerfano and north,
how wood became the coal, how the world
becomes its own harder instrument—
a two-man broadsaw gone pneumatic,
a river’s floating logs to a hopper freighting ore,
smoke choking Pueblo and gas fires
smelting steel. How the rails, cars and boilers
were shipped into the furnace, poured
into molds, the Rio Grande & Santa Fe
now just names for history. Where a stop
becomes a family or a lifeline or a place of
deep transference—the vanished town of Stong
with its rock-wall platform, houses and hotels
where Henry went to school, learned his
figures and the tonnage, surveys
for the highway, dorm rooms for workers
and headstones for the failures the war
would leave in fragments. Where a man like
Henry Wilton would still hold on, as Susie
ladles chile; while a group of boys
in pickups, beards, hemp and desperation
take their barstools with the others
at the flask-lined mirror—women
weaving horsehair, babies wrapped in burlap,
torn men in leather, soot-covered pants—
waiting with their whiskey, Schlitz
or soda, waiting for the sawmills, or foundries,
a hospital in Denver, a shack in La Petaca,
waiting, as we all wait, for the next train north,
or the next train south. Who was my father?
When can we go home?
Passers-by
—San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato
Many have flown or bussed
to escape the thrall of blizzards, frigid
months of erasable light.
But the stooped man
herding two burros past these café doors
has never seen snow.
His beasts are stacked with bulging
sun-bleached muslin sacks, from
the nearby cerros—hand-dug planting soil.
They amble easy, slow, through
robust mango, laurel and banana trees,
new-blossom lemon, redolent
gardenia. Every small front yard
a universe of roses, lily, starburst gladiola
and bird-of-paradise.
The campesino carries a mesquite switch
which he rarely uses. The burros
know their route by heart: each corner
and callejón, each entry that will open
at the moment of arrival; the woman,
man or child who’ll emerge
with the weekly five pesos, a saucer
of galletas, mug of hot atole, two ripe
apples—or, by fortune, a dish of figs.
For burros, figs are special. Perhaps
it’s in their blood, an ancestral
taste from their time near Bethlehem.
Always, they’ve carried gifts,
human needs, and needed humans
across the desert. Burros know winter
all too well, and this way of service.
Once it was Mary, about to birth Jesus.
Today it’s snow white sacks of dirt.
The Road Calls
Again. As much as I
deny her, as much as the red pickup
squeals in its belts, rattles
in its rust. I love you, says the truck. Always
the two mesas blue in the distance, always
this wracked highway, steep
in its declension, whipping like a rattler
down to the village. Always the café
with its wood-fired Ashley, stacked
split cedar, planked pine tables
for Mona’s enchiladas, her pinto beans and chile
for the stream of tourists, long-haul freighters;
a family from Chama with their 1950’s hay-rig
tow-roped to the trunk of a Ford LTD,
Jake Mora’s son Merle on his gas-route to Ratón;
two kids from Questa, with a yellow
bashed Camaro parked behind the dumpster,
her smeared day-glo lipstick, his left, swollen eye.
Always the dishes, scratched and steaming,
served in celebration—by Ronnie,
Mona’s sister, hair swept back, who knows
me like my sleep, every stock word,
knows every idling semi, every awkward gesture
of the teenagers’ hands. They don’t reach
for their sodas, or napkins, but for one another
as I once reached for her. And the engines
simmer quiet for one blessed moment, while
I sip my coffee, with a front moving in.
Until the crack of thunder, a school bus
rumbling by, the money and the tip. The one
she’s knows by now, more or less—
with a flip in her hair, the wave of her hand,
and mine, on the shift; half-turn of the wheel.
I love you, says the truck. Hey Ronnie,
says the truck. Headed up a mountain
in the oncoming rain.
—Rio Arriba, NM
Jamie Ross
writes, paints, hauls water and repairs his Toyota pickup on a mesa near Taos, NM. He also lives in Mexico. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Sixfold, Nimrod, the Northwest, Texas and Paris Reviews, also in Best New Poets 2007. His 2010 collection, Vinland, received the Intro Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.