Poetry Summer 2023 fiction all issues
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Cover
Joel Filipe
Kristina Cecka
Rabble
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Uncivil War of Love
& other poems
LuAnn Keener-Mikenas
Skunks at Twilight
& other poems
Alyssa Sego
Passage
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
Forest of One
& other poems
Brent M. Foster
Ode to Darwin
& other poems
Jack Giaour
trans man is feeling blue
& other poems
Alan Gann
how strange
& other poems
Richard Baldo
The Privilege
& other poems
Michael Fleming
In
& other poems
Holly York
As it turned out, there was no bomb on board
& other poems
Celeste Briefs
Late Poppies
& other poems
Kayla E.L. Ybarra
Goose Song
& other poems
S.E. Ingraham
Leaving to Arrive
& other poems
Rachel Robb
Molting Scarlet Tanager
& other poems
Bruce Marsland
Sauna by a Finnish lake at Midsummer
& other poems
Ellen Romano
Seven Sisters
& other poems
Greg Hart
False Coordinates
& other poems
Greg Tuleja
Shanksville
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Southern Charm
& other poems
Kristina Cecka
Rabble
In the middle of Lake Superior, a ghost
mountain stands impediment to
kaleidoscopes of monarch butterflies
rushing south for the year.
The mountain is gone. Only the butterflies remember;
parting, river-like, around the emptiness
where it once stood, just one more step on the long
journey their ancestors carved over ten thousand years.
Do they know they won’t see it again?
The dark, wild forests and the deep canyons,
the frothy rush of the great rivers?
The trip is only one way.
There is no looking back.
They land in Mexico only days
before Día de Muertos.
The Aztecs looked at the black, open
eyes in monarch wings and named
them spirits of the dead. Tiny ghosts,
they rest in the arms of the fir trees,
huddling together, wings beating in unison,
until they can lay their precious, starry eggs
on the tips of the dusky milkweed leaves.
When death takes them on their last long journey,
their children will crawl into the world,
encoded with escapism, restlessness built in their
twitching antennae and tiny, sticky feet.
They will carry all their ghosts with them;
generations of the monarch rabbles
who made those endless, cyclical paths whispering
as they take to the sky in one huge leap,
bound for home.
Look: one perches on a skull’s empty eye
socket. Veined, velvet wings beat once, twice:
a slow blink of tiger’s eye and amber.
Six fiber-straw legs bend at the ready,
grasping cool, solid bone. Eyes
always open—faceted, fractured,
watching the world with the hunted’s attention.
Tiny Thing
The crushed bird on the sidewalk, smaller than my palm,
has its beak open to the sky. Tiny thing. Gray now after three days
crushed into bone pulp and sinew, but its feather might have been blue, once.
The hopping brown pigeons down the street don’t recognize it.
I barely do, only stepping around it at the last second. I hate to see
dead birds. I always look away, like they need privacy.
It’s not just the meat-and-gristle grisliness of an unclean death—
it’s the pitifulness. Aloneness. Left to die-ness.
In the space between recognition and avoidance, my soft
heart aches for a little bird who can’t sing or hop or fly. Dying on the sidewalk,
left to rot—not even in a green place, where rot might become life again,
but on cold concrete, where nothing grows and corpses are left behind
for the sun to pick clean. For more people to step on instead of around.
Tiny thing, once-upon-a-time blue bird: you deserved better than that.
The Dentist
My dentist appointment is in an hour and
I have to go—my teeth ache. I made it
four months ago, two months before you died
and your empty shell descended into
inky earth.
I can’t call. The phone and I are enemies these days.
It rings to remind me of the world and I, wise to
the perils of befriending the enemy, ignore it.
Besides, what would I say?
I pantomime the conversation to myself:
Hello, good morning, I can’t make my appointment;
I lost my heart.
I’m sorry, but even my teeth
miss her and I can’t stand to expose them to harsh light.
No human eyes should witness them.
I’m sorry, but my home is now in the warm,
soft quilts of my bed where I lay
entombed as in the womb.
(I dream of existing before infancy,
when heartbreak, tears, and grief
were not yet born.)
I can’t say it in reality. I know I can’t pick up the phone and
tell the sweet-faced secretary the fog has
subsumed me, and when I will emerge, cleansed, is
anyone’s guess. I can’t rage against her for reminding me
that even as your body cools and decays, there are still doctor
appointments and electric bills and dentist visits.
I can’t say it. So I put on my jeans. My unwashed sweater.
I go to the dentist.
to the boy who reached for me with both hands
You reach, feather-fingered,
to cradle my heart in your
unblemished palms, but
I am not a person. I am a
war zone, walking.
Bones dense with land mines;
tears, more gas than water.
Those breasts? Ticking grenades.
I have an atom bomb
heart—one wrong touch and
we both go up.
I believe in taking my enemies with me.
I warned the ones who came before.
They thought that if they rained down fire
I would be baptized: instead,
I burned.
They left me spiderwebbed,
stuttershook.
I’ll give you what you need, not
what you want: the truth of me.
I am lacuna, that avaricious maw
yawning,
hungry.
So reach, if you want.
Your touch may bloom
galaxies or birth stars but
you won’t make a garden out of me.
Notes on Building Human Beings
Teeth first. Blunted, not sharp.
Killing is too easy for them anyway.
Bones should follow: femur, scapula,
zygomatic, wishbone tibia-fibula;
all the knotted, tender vertebrae.
Detail work next. Caged ribs,
delicate hinged phalanges, metacarpals,
the all-important interphalangeal joints.
Fill them with marrow.
Thicken for seven days and seven nights.
Humans need to be sturdy.
Braid together muscle, sinew, nerves.
Drop in organs: the odd pear spleen;
wing spread lungs; coiled snake gut: gray, pulsing.
Pack tightly. They need them all—except the appendix.
Add it for fun, and to teach:
even useless things can be dangerous.
Brain, tongue, heart—no human is complete
without them. Set aside.
Skin, blooming and luscious. Smooth it carefully
over the messy organs, the sturdy bones. Bind your
love to their downy hair, feathery eyebrows.
They’ll remember. Not in the mind, but deeper—
blood and bone do not forget so easily.
Knit in the tongue, bless it with speech.
Settle the heart in the ribcage, cloistered
as a monk. Massage until it thumps.
Finally, the brain—hinge back the frontal bone.
Lower it into the deep bowl of the skull.
Gently. Gently.
(If you pray, pray.
Your thing of darkness has come alive,
and may need the guidance.)
Kristina Cecka
received her B.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. After several years living overseas and traveling, she returned to her hometown in Minneapolis, MN, where she lives with her two cats and a ridiculous amount of books. She has been published in Sixfold and Crosswinds Poetry.