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
Maxi Wardcantori
That Summer, My Neighbor
slipped and fell in the bathtub,
was taken away in a gurney
while I watched with a bruised blue thumb,
and the sight poked holes in me.
I learned kickflips in his driveway
that was somehow blacker than my own,
and children chalked the sidewalk with
scraped knees and knuckles,
asphalt-dimpled soles
and a gashed palm pressed skyward that said look,
dripped a blood that mesmerized,
some strange secret pulled from within
that caught the sun, jeweled the skin,
the sky, the eyes of all who watched—
let’s call it witnessing.
Let’s call it mid-July,
and the wet coats us in its blanket,
licks the face of a small child
who does not know herself
to be verging on something.
Splashing in circles at night,
she watches the way her father leans a beer bottle
against the wall of his rubber float,
lets the cool glass kiss the water.
She pockets the gesture unknowingly.
In the years between then and now,
she finds herself accidentally recalling
all that she had forgotten to remember.
She takes inventory like a child
looking to spot the new:
a chess set cut from frosted glass,
a pale-yellow paperback.
Phantom objects visit at random
to remind her what she’d first learned of dying.
Bloodspots
I began to bleed and I could not stop,
trapped by the perimeter of time
and resigned, unfairly, to forgetting.
In the windowless room, all us girls stripped
from scratchy kilts and stood in stained underwear,
bodies bowing inward
like our predecessors: whipped women
showing bloodspots through hand-sewn liveries.
How even the strongest, shorn and strapped, would bleed,
and how that thing pulsing within her seeped
through tattered bindings
to bring about a disconcerting tenderness,
seedlike matter retched up from bile
and swallowed again with the contempt
of a half-digested pill.
My blood affronts me in bandages,
tissues and toilet paper, plumes of red
softening into near invisibility.
We dissipate together,
trace the perimeter of long-forgotten lives,
take nothing, break nothing,
and time is only some holy decoupage
but I’m wearing it every way I know how—
smeared on my face, stitched into the shape of valor.
Joni
From the far side of the hill she speaks
down to you from above.
You’ll always ramble when you tell this story—
how she borrows the moon’s voice to share her thoughts
and all her peace enters you.
You are new now.
You think of her in midsummer,
and when you need the courage to behave badly,
out of your own body, being bold and magnetic.
It makes you get your work done, too,
and it always makes you want
the mouth that is open.
You’ll forever feel the sour stomach of apology,
but you do not let it plague you anymore.
You are new,
and all that remained unsaid
is coming up fresh. You grow obsessed with
what you need to know and then,
teach yourself to ask.
You will know.
Joni is on your voicemail. She visits you in hallucinogenic
stages, sits beside you like you sat with her. Joni is
a protective eidolon, maternal gossip sentient in
flickering candles. Joni crawled under your skin
while you were not looking.
The Understory
Lately, I’ve grown obsessed
with all the ways a heart can be heard beating,
through water or glass, amplified by suffocating,
suffering quiet, or the insulative skin of a lover.
It’s a sin to throw out old to-do lists,
so I pray to them instead, my divine,
that today I might plant a fern
pulled up from the understory, frail roots
still humming with just-barely-alive.
That today I might capture on film
the light of an old house, coax a bee
somehow into my palm.
I am always gathering objects for one thing
or another, stringing words into a half-
remembered path to follow home
to all the beds I’ve shared,
and the littles ones burrowed
into blankets screech their love
and protest—won’t go to sleep
and wake to another one.
This Year
I never lost anything.
I shed my clothes now when the heat’s too high / my
hair bigger than before / I move
in vertical loops / through to the ceiling / I speak
through the veil / speak through the red
flushing my cheeks / I laugh with a full face / I forgot
I was a daughter / of the North Star / it cuts
through the tar-black river / I can play the drums
if I say I can / the same song a dozen times
hits sharp / and my head is a pendulum
to bring me home / when I forget
I walked through so many doors
as a child / an attempt to contend
with the bitter air / I stung my tongue
with cold / breathed myself into a delusion
that looked like clarity / a clarity
mimicking the delusion that I now know
sitting on the bathroom counter slick
with condensation / discarded shirts and underpants
on the tile / that I’ll be stepping over for days.
I run the shower early
to watch time move without me
and I’m shrouded in it.
Maxi Wardcantori
is a writer and multimedia artist from Baltimore. She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Rutgers University, where she teaches creative writing. She holds a B.A. in English from UMBC, where she received the Malcolm C. Braly creative writing award for her poem “Treasure.” Maxi’s current project, Sound Catalogue (soundcatalogue.com), is an interactive virtual installation that documents and interprets the sounds of daily life. Her written work has appeared in Bartleby.