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
Brent Foster
Golden Silk Orb Weaver
What was building a web
but a gustatory expression of hope?
—Adrian Tchaikovsky
The bridge is heavy
with fog’s dim gray,
so dark I almost miss
the blink of a spider splayed
like many fingers—
as if thrumming those strands
dripping with morning is enough
to call the world home.
The space between words
lingers on your tongue
till it rubs your teeth and you know
what you want to say
but it burns
like cinnamon up your nose.
Or maybe it
hums like prayer,
the difference
between drowning and songs
shimmering through time,
casting
long
shadows.
If only
I could find the voice of honeybees—
silent, yet in their dance
I sometimes think
I glimpse the after-blink
of understanding, the quiet
between ideas a bond strong as
thought
when the stuff of a moment
stretches
wide
as
eternity.
Ode to Darwin
Don’t you see, Darwin—
there’s no going back.
Not once you sketch your beaks
in your books and write
how each wing branches
from the tree of life. Your words
stick, a web that ties me
to a fruit fly.
But do you feel it, Charles?
The yearning still to be
more than genus and species
anatomized in a laboratory?
We see the world through smoke,
where brains decompose, where
death breeds life, where hearts tick
and wet lungs fill as if by chance.
But surely you see that breathing
is more subtle than living.
The truths you speak hide
like moths against black bark,
their edges blurred by our squinting eyes.
Through a glass, we see veins
of earth, ourselves, everything—
we look to the stars
and wonder where our thoughts fit
in this story you tell.
Tell me honestly—do you feel
a kinship with those distant lights, too?
Because we both know, unreachable
as they are, we are made
of those same atoms our ancestors
called the gods.
Grandma’s Dementia
You don’t remember
how we’d play
Scrabble on the floor—
you’d help me
find sense between words
and silence.
We’d laugh at silly nouns
like twaddle,
at ticklings on our tongues
and new things
shaped inside our throats.
The world was
a garden of word play
and stones flipped
belly up, but now words are lost
behind your eyes,
gummed in your nerves.
Your brain is
a lit universe
growing dark
gaping large in this zenith
of a life.
Here I am lost in what
I know, what
I think I know, trained
to understand
the suicide of your mind
as it drowns.
Your voice is empty of verbs
and your nouns—
mostly your lips remind me
of a fish,
the way they open,
the way they
close, soundless as
memory.
Do you remember when you
locked the door
and left without a word to walk
past headstones,
the way unfamiliar, lined with tulips
and cut grass?
I searched for you then—
I search now,
invoke your name to remember
that symbol
of character worn out
after all
the years. This is a genesis
of thought, time—
a wandering for meaning. Here,
denouement
is defined by its absence
and longing—
I only learn what
waning is
when memories break like
fraying strings.
Genesis
An ocean stretches, pulsing in the breeze
as sweeping fog throws shadows from the sea.
We wander the gray of beach; your fingers
squeeze my fingers, our edges cold and sharp
and melting, fluid as that place where sand
meets surf, the ebb and flow of tides
a whisper drifting on our skin. Brine dusts
our lips—a savor of our genesis
who thought the earth held promises beyond
the membrane of sea. While seagulls gawk
from cliffs, we walk the curve of wrack line,
toeing streams together with our pants rolled
mid-calf and crouching to touch a crab or rub
the polish of driftwood and imagine
the tumble and abrasion of salt
that smooth jagged edges with the patience
of chitons, their radulae scraping rocks
and tending gardens one diatom at a time.
Water licks our feet, brings the slime
of palm kelp and their bulbs that fit
in a slit of sand and stiff enough to stand
as if a tree, stranded on an island
where we might learn the shape and art
of building worlds with arthritic fingers.
Brent Foster
earned his BS in neuroscience, with minors in linguistics and creative writing from Brigham Young University. He is a laboratory technician at the University of Florida and a science writer. You can read more of his work at his website clippings.me/fosterwriting. Brent lives in Palm Coast, Florida with his wife, Alicia.