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
Frederick Shiels
Toussaint Louverture,
Breda Plantation, 1791
Your Ayiti, Toussaint, your Haiti, blazes now
from the northern Cap to Tiburon, the fires of
sugar cane and fragrant white plantation bodies
blaze now in Jeremie, Jacmel, and Port-au-Prince
blood dries on the black backs of four hundred
thousand slaves now—your Legionnaires who
carry torches in the black nights. Slaves refusing
to be slaves brandish torches down sandy paths
to verandas and smoke-houses of the Blancs—
Mulattoes, too. Slaves who light, Identify, and
burn, light and burn.
The French rise too in Paris, Orleans, Marseilles and all
the paysage, Normandie to Pyrenee Departement, and
young Napoleon grows restless with his fellow troops
aching for order and for breath, Toussaint, he reads of you,
Toussaint, in his barracks, but does not sweat your sweat,
Yet.
Did You Ever
see the black cherry tree
guarding an ancient family
graveyard beside the road to
Watkins Glen from Ithaca along
Route 79? And touch the once
electric barbed wire fence rigged up years
ago to protect the tombstones marker from
lives lived in the Finger Lakes in the time
of the early Republic, Monroe, Jackson
those aching decades of working the rocky
land.
Who were they—Henry Sayre, Hannah Sayre,
young Daisy? what are they doing now in those
white oak and knotty pine coffins with the orange sugar
maples burning above them in October and the green
flames of hell burning below? I like to picture Hannah in
her blue calico dress arms folded at her boney chest,
skeletal fingers still holding a lock of her aughter’s hair
Daisy, 1819-1823, lying under the rocky loam Three feet
away, smaller stone.
Bad October: 2016
When I tell you this October
alone has seen Syrian sisters and
their brothers die cyanic blue
under chunks of concrete ripped
from the very walls round them
by their very own State-
sponsored bombs and sure
plenty of Russian rockets too
well you tell me life’s not fair.
These thugs look to us in
America so they say
inspired by how easy it was
for us to crush young
bones not on purpose but
as a distasteful side-effect,
a ‘collateral’ of
The Mission—say Vietnam 1968
and 1972—October was
especially bad those years. There.
Oh, and this October, 2016,
six hundred children—give or
take—Haiti saw erased:
choked battered by boards
from their own treasonous
houses tree and waterrocked:
Hurricane Matthew dumb,
relentless—mothers wail and
dead is dead. Whom do we
put on trial for all this
autumnal not- fairness?.
The Rebel
Saturdays when afternoons were
too steamy or too cold for outdoor play
our refuge and our culture too
were penny-wise enriched
by the none-too-proud Rebel Theater
on old Pine Street where
matinee double headers drew in
boisterous kids by the station-wagon-load.
Parents dropped (dumped) their offspring there—
(It was not a safe/sane place for them).
We the loved the faintly rancid the popcorn the pickle-for-a-nickel
the Junior Mints and Milk Duds that
though pricey in boxes obscenely large went quickly
Heck the tickets were only a quarter so a dollar
bought an afternoon. A better deal for Moms and Dads
is hard to imagine.
It was at the Rebel that I first stepped into Ancient Rome.
Charlton Heston’s chariot race deliverance from his galley oars or
not as high up on the cinematic ladder, the “Three Stooges Go Around the World in
a Daze”—the laughter began before the action with opening credits lifted by peppy
strains of “Three Blind Mice,” like lightening seen
before the thunder sound for Larry Curley Moe an
epic no less than Ben-Hur itself.
The Rebel, distinctly inferior to Hattiesburg’s other
downtown movie house the Saenger
gold ornamented, turquoise curtained
more adult more favoring
Romantic Evening Entertainment. I saw “The King and I” there
with my mother after dinner out. Dressed up—yes, pearls.
she would not have been caught dead
at the Rebel.
Red: High End of the Spectrum
Today in the bright Light of day a red deer
vaulted over my car on a curve and
dodged—I think—a line of cars in the
opposite lane to safety. My sedan,
oblivious to this drama, moved me on
down the road—shone midway between
Chinese and fire engine red; it was a red
day.
Nothing in Latvia will cause me to beg my friend to pull her
Volkswagon to the side of the road by a green sea of
rapsis/flax, like the splash between flax-stems—of
poppies—Magonites. They grow together. I always want to
cut some of these carmine stars to put in water, knowing
sadly that they will not last a day—out of soil.
Our eye chases red or red chases our eye to the
delicate feet of the mourning dove on snow, to
red’s tiny splash in a Vermeer—a girl’s hat, the
pearl ear-ringed girl’s lips.
What stop-light is ever Blue?
What stop sign?
Nor the eyes in your most perfect photo, no, there is no
‘Blue-eye’ setting on your Nikon.
You pomegranates
You oozing childcorpses You
cardinals lighting on bare-beeches or
in the Vatican, You sea-snapperfish on
my plate
You tell-tale hearts under the floorboards.
Do gently cut your boy’s-arm
just a bit and me mine, and we
touch, become brothers.
The 13.8 billion light—year farthest, farthest out
galaxy, colorized, perhaps
but what do you suppose that color is? And
when I die what red remaining within me
will be motionless
Frederick Shiels
is a poet and Prof. Emeritus of Politics and History at Mercy College. He has published in Avocet, Deep South Review, The Hudson River Anthology, The New Verse News, Sulphur and Honey (Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights), Sixfold (2013), and his most recent book is Preventable Disasters. He has been a Fulbright senior scholar in both Japan (1985-1986) and Latvia (2006).