Poetry Summer 2021 fiction all issues
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Cover
Diana Akhmetianova
Monique Jonath
Viscosity
& other poems
Alix Christofides Lowenthal
Before and After
& other poems
Rebbekah Vega-Romero
La Persona Que Quiero Ser
& other poems
Oak Morse
Incandescent Light That Peeks Through Secrets
& other poems
George Kramer
The Last Aspen Stand
& other poems
Elizabeth Sutterlin
Meditations on Mars
& other poems
Holly Marie Roland
Clearfelling
& other poems
Devon Bohm
A Bouquet of Cherry Blossoms
& other poems
Ana Reisens
In praise of an everyday object
& other poems
Maxi Wardcantori
The Understory
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
Sometimes
& other poems
Karen L Kilcup
The Sky Is Just About to Fall
& other poems
Pamela Wax
He dreams of birds
& other poems
Mary Jane Panke
Apophasis
& other poems
a mykl herdklotz
Mouettes et Mastodontes
& other poems
Claudia Maurino
Good Pilgrim
& other poems
Mary Pacifico Curtis
One Mystical Day
& other poems
Tess Cooper
Airport Poem
& other poems
Peter Kent
Congress of Ravens
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
White Women Running
& other poems
Bill Cushing
Creating a Corpse
& other poems
Everett Roberts
Hagar
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Canada Geese
& other poems
Claudia Maurino
Double Body Baptism
it is a baptism.
myself a double body:
performer
and performed upon
the baptizer
and the blessed
both God
and woman
cold water crashes over my face
and slips down my body
touching the dark places like fingers in the night
it lights them up to magnificence
resplendence,
even
steam rises from the bath as from a pit
to the hell
I (self-flagellating arsonist phoenix)
rise from
I dare not look myself in the mirror;
there is something too sinful and holy in that:
eye contact with the divine as she descends
to mortal flesh
my head pounds; I may pass out
of this body
and into something greater
already my hearing is leaving me
and I need to sit down:
I kneel on the grimy bath mat
supplicate myself to whatever is holier
than the vision I see in the mirror when my eyes come back
to my body:
flesh and bone and sockets that bleed
blue and grey; my womanhood slipping
out of me like divine tears
as I crumple further within what now is
(and only ever was)
my wet and naked body
curled on the floor of the bathroom
dust motes and dank air rising around me
up to heaven
(even these particulates reach higher
go further
than I
)
Note:
the idea of disaster
seems like it ought to be a
(n unfortunate) by-product of chaos
of the unruly cynic god who rules us all
by way of doing nothing
but our etymological foremothers
( or perhaps four mothers?
what is it again that conceives and births us?
chaos (1)
hope (2)
love (3)
and spirit (4)
Note: spirit:
see: spir see: respiration
see: breath see: invisible sustenance
see: God see: ‘holy spirit’
see: ‘blow blow thou winter wind’
see: blow
(us—away) )
tell us a disaster
is (Note:) the “unlucky placement of an ill star”
see: dis: pejorative, mis—
see: aster: star
(consider the astronaut: star-sailor
hopelessly lost little man making himself small by
proximity to bigness.
loss is our one (1) fore father)
etymology suggests you can blame the stars for your misfortune
but I would not lean in to that notion
if I were you
(and atomically, genetically, I very nearly am. what are you but nitrogen?)
my last note to you:
chaos.
see: gaping see: yawning see: abyss.
see the star-sailor floating through all that black nothing
see him gasp, all alone. see him yawn and blow
through so much empty space
see the nearest star pull him in
(Note: love is only ever hot and cruel.)
see the final disaster: the astronaut dissolving, every atom resonant
and pre-determined
(we hope)
Good Pilgrim
Do your thoughts wander?
Is your mind, like mine, an empty church
hollow and cavernous, carved from ancient stone
with a great stained-glass window at its front—
a heavenly host of blue and gold, green and red
in a haunting, hollow medley?
Do the great wooden doors in the church of your mind
swing open and bang on their hinges
allowing every gust of vagrant, lusty wind
to touch and tickle all the nooks and crannies
every desolate pew—does it rustle the pages
of ancient books, teasing their covers open to allow
disconsolately lonely words to lift from their pages
and fly heaven-wards, lazily and vibrantly
to bounce and echo on the imperturbably heavy stone?
Does the grand and holy temple of your thoughts
ever stand so naked, so shorn of fancy and illusion—
a simple building in a simple world, echoing out
the tune of a choir long since gone?
Are you, like I am, so desperately hungry
to let your every godly atom stand so open
and so vulnerable? Do you ever ache and echo
trembling with desire for reverberation, for resonance?
And do you ever play the pilgrim, walking empty-handed
into the home of the Lord your mind, to sit and stare, to pray
without words at the foot of a shrine dedicated to a missing god?
Do your footsteps echo as you take communion from a ghost
smelling nothing but time itself and the memory
of a candle someone extinguished in a moment in a time long gone?
Do you ever throw your patient palms up
and feel the roof lifting off, a banquet
of delicate and dangerous stars descending, shedding
their ancient silvery light into the little lonely church
you have made yourself?
Are you ever deliciously empty?
Do you want more than anything someday to be full?
A Promise
Someday I will have a potluck and I will invite you
it will be in a home I don’t live in yet, on a porch I have yet to see
there will be hours and hours of soft afternoon light
the kind that stains everybody gold and glittery
I will say tender and gentle things like “I made pasta”
and “you don’t have to bring anything, but you can
because I know how much you like to cook.”
And you will bring a rhubarb pie. And I will smile.
We will drink wine and talk about art and share
the things that make our hearts excited
and there will be music playing in the background
and it will be called laughter, called joy.
We will be surrounded by friends we have yet to meet
who will bring gifts like recipes from their time abroad
and new ways of doing everything from folding napkins
to building a community of activists and artists.
My potluck might be in a city, but there will be plants.
I will have learned how not to kill them by then.
I will have learned all sorts of tender and gentle things.
Like how to cook. How not to worry.
By this time, I will have collected so much joy
from so many different humans and places, old and new
and my little home will be so full of it
that you will smile without thinking when you walk in.
On the walls there will be poetry I wrote in high school.
And photos from the river and the fields and the mountains.
There will be paintings and pictures and maybe a collage
from cities and countries and towns I’ve haven’t even seen yet.
When you walk in, I will greet you with a hug
and your favorite drink. I will take your pie
and put it next to my pasta. I will take your hand
and bring you into the sun. I will exclaim, loudly—
“look at all this light! I have so many things to show you.”
Road Map
“It makes a lot more sense to me than the bible.”
he says of his favorite book
as we burrow deeper into the unknown terrain, climbing
steadily upwards till the air is so thin
the truth just slips out
This bus has been moving
for an uncountable number of hours—my whole life
maybe. The lines that usually govern us
fade into the dirt that coats our shoes, our clothes
our throats.
He has been staring out the window for miles
not moving or commenting, but watching
with a hunger and an earnestness I can’t help but love.
While he watches the terrain, I watch other people watch it.
This is a sport I could spend days at.
Their eyes light in conjunction with hills and valleys
the delicate and rugged contours of the earth
and I am overwhelmed by how much I love
the intricacies of every human being I have ever met.
Sometimes it’s almost too much to bear.
Days later, we drive deep into a valley
the dark walls of barren Earth, the great behemoth mountains
circling us on all sides—acting neither
as a threat nor a comfort.
“It was my road map,” he adds, “to love. To being a person”
In less than two months, I am leaving for college.
Every semblance of normality, every ritual
robbed from me, in favor of an exploration
I am too trepidatious to look forward to.
What I wouldn’t give for a road map right now.
Every emotion all at once lives in me somewhere
pushing up like tectonic plates—I am well on my way
to becoming a mountain, so close
to bursting I’m surprised you can’t see the Earth move.
But you can’t.
None of this comes in the form of words, so I listen:
to him talk about his book, to the bus jolt over rocks,
to my heart: little and big at the same time
and so full, as it whispers
that to love people is the greatest pleasure of being alive.
So I do.
I do.
Claudia Maurino
is a twenty-year-old writer from Western Massachusetts. She spent the last year traveling the country assisting natural disaster relief and vaccine distribution as part of a term of service with AmeriCorps NCCC. In the fall, she will be returning to the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, where she studies English, social thought & political economy, and theater.