Poetry Summer 2021 fiction all issues
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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
Holly Marie Roland
Womanhood: An Education
Fear, like a falsehood, hooded burlap, jute jostling against ears;
and when I can’t hear my escape from this old world to new,
draped rough around winter shoulders, I call to you.
A whoop or roar of quietness I snub out completely.
Dear self, don’t disentangle this nest I’ve been working—
the cattail fluff and dry leaves, whatever I could get my nails on:
The elevator closing while my child knee bled,
flights of stairs clamored and climbed;
we are not yet divine:
shaking plane wings and drunk pilot
I couldn’t see; my mother wheezing in another late
night room of waiting rainbows; strange vegetables;
sabulous lies, sinking into fossilized shorelines;
a fogged breath against a window, the only one
not picked up on snow days; my father thumbing a match;
the legacy of lunacy; loose dogs, snarling;
brain parasites; warnings: tornados; a stranger at my door;
tabby kittens lost; I am alone; a teacher frowning;
a friend in a tule dress crying; a memory melting,
ice beneath weak feet;
youth fading like the stories
I used to write in pencil, those too, floppy, disappearing;
my words, written
or not; realizing I am not held by any other and cannot hold any thing.
And death, surely.
Fear, like a truth, pitters and patters in this ravine of shoulders;
a track for the train to thunder down, shuddering, while my sore mouth tries muttering,
I have just one light and it flickers.
Take me as I am, take me as I come,
I will love you long,
my fear digging in beside yours, waves whet with the curious
moon, rising
and setting, again.
Clearfelling
The loggers start when the stars collapse
back into their canopy;
a bruised sky spins daybreak out in colored notches
as axels round the hairpin below my cabin.
Aloft, I pretend to sleep.
They say the harvest is healthy for men
and their lunch pails—
men who tug at the airhorn
because a woman shares the road
and in her morning smallness moves aside—
men who throw bones out an unseen window
watching if my dog salivates.
She hides rawhide in her rueful mouth
not knowing that for which she hungers.
Remember that fleshy vulnerability?
Seeded some moonstung
hour, howled in by a cutting wind, heedless and headless?
It is sprawled now naked in the clearcut.
Time and the turning of megrim days,
too many midnights caught up in my mind’s shrubbery,
idolatry of flesh, of one happiness licking another
in the mudmoist soil,
free in the forest, our once homeland,
free to flee,
free to call destruction regeneration—
all these named and unnamed swings
brought it to pieces.
Strangers see its skeletal shadows
from the opposite shore,
wildcats pounce upon the innards
and stalk what remains of its splintered ghost.
This poem is yet another sapling
aging too quickly,
just a junk tree in the end,
there one moment then gone,
replaced and repressed. I strain to see what’s left growing hillside,
stripped soil that’s supposed to look natural
to the untrained eye, that’s supposed
to spurt biodiversity from a barren floor.
I thought I made a new friend
with a young lumberjack.
He yesterday confessed a dream.
“A good one?” my words ventured.
“More than good,” he said. A woodshed
for his pleasure, as if that’s the natural order
of our small knowing: the inevitability
of our machinery, as if the scarred slopes
don’t remember a thing.
Across the Lake
The first ring of trees—
cottonwood, skinny trunked,
leaves spotted like the underside of a dying monarch,
watch clouds creep over a lonely lake.
The fire is tumbling tonight as the light dips down in strips
then dives and drowns, strangely.
If I said this elbow of woods was unholy
would you believe me?
If owls start tumbling from high branches
and carp stomachs leak lily pads,
would you then begin to believe me?
The fire is churning tonight,
spitting faces onto the soot-black glass,
but none yours, none mine.
My eyes scale the second ring of trees, unchanged
emerald, the tallest testaments, far from our dusty window,
and I imagine that sinking rowboat full of pieces,
my body:
like every fallen leaf within me,
at rest in all its parts, so beautifully crumpled:
my eyelids
to nostrils
to teeth to collarbone,
my nipples
to trunk
to pelvis to knees
to long leg hair
to hallux
not being held but seen by another.
It’s inevitable—the way the sky slinks back into itself, until slate,
until haloed by watermarks;
who we used to be.
Swamp Queen Deluxe
The pocket of Cajuns dancing
in Louisiana backwater, stewing fish heads, are the sons
of sons of daughters of Acadians who were run out of their wild-
woods because they chose not to fight.
Sharpen gator bones,
‘cause that man calls me catawampus. I’m a mermaid,
swamp queen deluxe, chasing back with these clapperclaws
as you steer my sisters and me into the cypresses,
but we cannot seek cool refuge,
or rest, breasts up, under a cathedral of mosses. There is no reprieve
from sunstroke; woman, you’re an outsider, but I’m an outsider too:
admire us, as you sometimes do—
float our way and in the same day fear and revere
Her. Our guttural growls put that gris gris down deep,
lacing black danger. That pin has been in my mouth since
momma’s waterwomb. Survival is
stitching an arm before they can bite out the thread.
Come sundown, we make camp. The pot froths over
and eyeballs spill and stain marching, shiny shoes.
Do not paddle here again
to make love to miry shadows. A choir of gowned ghosts,
we now swing. Pauvre ti bête how many times
can creatures drown and be resurrected?
Clutch my molar-marked hand.
Revolver
Newly cut grass kisses tops of feet, itches the inches.
Twenty-one weeks hasn’t seen your body so squarely
across from mine, that body next to this other,
like an inevitability, like the way night dips
her golden breasts into the mouth of day—twenty-one
weeks since you had stayed, lingered long in the doorway
before lounging on a faded futon, timer readied.
Ten tiny minutes: waved over,
pulled atop animal apex,
curls falling, tempting cheekbones;
eager breath exchanging,
belonging to no one, lips ascending
to their gathering place—meadow
of lupine and paintbrush,
where pure purple and red, rapt,
blended into brushfire haze.
That first time, true instead of teasing,
I like your touch. Then those other words,
long rooted, easily exposed—
a scoop away from the surface.
Here, I shoot a look at your shoes. For running away, I joke
clumsily. You stare down the legs of this overgrown season,
even after our small patch has barbed ugly and wild,
even now, when the struggle to share this verboten space
searches for the smoothest tip of conversation.
Let’s talk guns, why not?
Tell me about your rifle, its recoil,
the gravel lot where you could put a pistol
in my starved, shaking hand, the hand
that swirled between thighs,
careful not to touch the betrayal.
A shotgun would be too much punch,
kickback, bloody my unlocked mouth,
once whining for air as you slithered
down fragrant folds. We whisper
to that moment, now aged fantasy, and O’
how I think of it and a lifted
lemon dress fluttering against a fencepost,
long torso pressed into my back,
the bullets in your pocket indenting
stippled skin. I feel everything, dear,
before I feel nothing.
Once, you chased after a face pink and peaked,
but we’ve come to a standstill, straight, small speak,
knowing the buzzer has blared times up over and again.
Take me to grass grown from gunpowder, flailing tin cans,
an echo that comes back only to sever the silence,
half-cocked sorrys, wet toothed smiles glittering,
a steady touch, a peace offering,
sulfurous and dusty,
eyes rolled shut, then open—
all things dangerous if not deadly.
Holly Marie Roland
writes poems and short stories that speak to rural America, the complexity, joys and griefs of human relationships, and womanhood. She works as a therapist who specializes in expressive writing therapy. Holly is the recipient of the Kratz Fellowship for Creative Writing Abroad and most recently, a winner of the 2020 Atlanta International Poetry Contest. Originally from Appalachia, she now lives off grid in the foothills of the Olympic Peninsula.