Poetry Summer 2020 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Vecteezy
Rodrigo Dela Peña
If a Wound is an Entrance for Light
& other poems
Shellie Harwood
Early Evening, Late September
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
The Deacon’s Lament
& other poems
J. H. Hall
Immersion
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
Two Aphids
& other poems
Sugar le Fae
Bagging
& other poems
Lauren Sartor
Shopping Cart Woman
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
Mushroom Hunting, Jackson County, Kansas
& other poems
Elisa Carlsen
Cormorant
& other poems
Daniel Gorman
The Boy Achilles
& other poems
Samara Hill
I Look for Her Mostly Everywhere
& other poems
Nicole Justine Reid
Returning to Sensual
& other poems
David Ginsberg
Butterfly Wings
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Café Sant Ambroeus
& other poems
George R. Kramer
Young Odysseus
& other poems
Amy Swain
In Praise of Trees
& other poems
Frederick Shiels
Bad October: 2016
& other poems
Matthew A. Hamilton
Summer of '89
& other poems
Chris Kleinfelter
Getting from There to Here
& other poems
Martin Conte
Ghazal for the Shipwrecked
& other poems
Natalie LaFrance-Slack
I Do Not Owe You My Beauty
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Dark Water
& other poems
Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.
If a Wound is an Entrance for Light
then perhaps this hurting is both wave
and particle, a ripple on a pond,
a pebble. The scar on my mother’s sewn
up belly is a shadow, a partial
eclipse imprinted on her skin.
I am still trying to grasp how a nick
on a fingertip can bleed so much
and why a scan of my father’s body
showed constellations, a whole galaxy
that whirled within him. Think of bones and how
they keep our secrets, a history of hairline
fractures, phantom aches. Think of people
who wake up, cross the streets, with a bullet
beside the spine, shrapnel inside the skull.
My mother prays to saints whose miracle
it was to be suddenly graced with wounds.
My father has been reduced to ashes.
Who knows of all the brightness we carry?
Kinderszenen
1.
and there was light a flicker, a flood
something like a face unfurled
becoming mother as if the world
came into shape by being seen
her voice a song sparkle of water
in the distance it was almost
clear and there came shadows
the edge of things a blur
2.
Say there was a trinket in your hand,
beads of glass strung with a thread.
Say the names of each color, the tongue
baptizing what could be touched,
tasted. And here was a brother who took
and took, snatching your precious away.
Say shards, say fracture, how easy
it was for the world to be shattered.
3.
Mother was a soiled apron, clatter
of pots and knives and spoons, was broom
that swept the floor, was fingers
on forehead, chest, left then right shoulder.
Father was a cigarette, its glowing
ember, tendrils of smoke, was a gun
in a drawer, was a gravelly voice
and the silence that followed.
4.
The days stretched and repeated themselves.
Language began inhabiting the tongue.
I was told to wake up, obey, be quiet.
There was no way to outrun my own shadow.
A game: pass a finger quickly through a flame.
My knees always had cuts, scrapes, scratches.
A hand could be a claw, could be a fist.
I had yet to learn forgiveness.
Metamorphosis
Quick swerve along the highway
then suddenly there was a bus
hurtling toward us, and I saw
the wreckage that would happen,
felt the impact in my bones
as the vehicles drew closer,
air luminous and charged
with current at this instant,
the edges of things sharp, time
suspended as a pendulum
in its apex, though all I could
say then was no no no—I still
wanted to live,
and somehow
there was no collision, death
speeding, missing our skin
by a hair, breath so close
that I sensed its chill on my nape,
a flash that would return
to me, pierce me in the years
to come, the weight of it
settling, lightening on my chest,
only a moment but I knew
when we stopped, struck
by a god or a sliver of luck,
O, I was already changed.
Instead of a Letter
You who made a bracelet out of scars
on your wrist, how each slash inflicted
was a memento of getting through each week.
You from whom I learned how to drink cheap gin
straight out of the bottle, wincing at every
swig—where have you been after the tumble
of years, everyone else caught in the song
and dance of getting married, raising kids?
I heard you moved to Finland and I worry
that snow would come as a gradual
erasure of your world. You would have laughed
if I said that to you, this looking
at Nordic weather as metaphor, the way
you rolled your eyes when I wept at the ending
of a Mexican film where two stoner guys go
on a roadtrip with a woman who would lead their lips
to each other. Now the snow must be melting
in spring and I think about water draining into
sewage pipes, its many faces as liquid
on a glass, as ice cubes, as rain. You who would leave
and vanish, who would become history,
memory, elegy. Drink with me
in Manila, Singapore, Helsinki. Let me remember
your name when the credits scroll in a movie
theater. Maia, good mother in Greek,
illusion in Hindi. Aisha, meaning alive.
Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.
is the author of Aria and Trumpet Flourish (Math Paper Press, Singapore), as well as the chapbooks Requiem and Hymnal (Vagabond Press, Australia). His poems have been published in Rattle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Likhaan, Kritika Kultura, and other journals and anthologies. He has received prizes from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, Kokoy Guevara Poetry Competition, British Council, among others. Born in the Philippines, he has been based in Singapore since 2011.