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
Gillian Freebody
Capture Myopathy
Marked morbidity and mortality in wild animals that arises from human-inflicted stress from intense pursuit, capture, or restraint.
the tawny stag limps immense
before my idling car
slowly
we watch
its breath
cloud its mouth
and disappear
movement three-legged delicate
muscled shoulders yoked
with massive weight
spine stone—
straight noble blade
unlike mine bent, shattered
into so many stippled shards
its quiet acceptance
stoically splits the street
across arterial by-ways
back left leg unusable stripped to
flaking peels of bone
mine pooled in the ciliatic delta
sharp as jagged teeth sawed
off the trunk
then tweezered out
before butchering the cord
You can’t touch it, you know
my daughter sighs
It’ll die
as it hauls its heavy-antlered head
around from the dry bank
for now
in its ink-black eyes
my face flashes frantic
forced into trauma’s wake
its waves bashing the battered
borders
of humanity and its spill into all
the wrong places
as I wonder
who has touched me
since the fall
eager hands moist, willing
sparking flame from where
I slapped them away
Roy’s Roadside Diner at Sherman’s Bog (an abecedarian poem)
Ain’t no man pining for an old
bitch like me, I
chortle as Roy’s grill singes my arm hair with grease.
Darlene, the world sure done got its fists into you good, girl as jukebox
Elvis croons a lonely blues, blue as the blood beneath my paper thin
frame while I hum and slop runny sunny-sides with hash in front of a phone-addicted trucker,
giving Roy a wink as my crow’s feet pucker in the
heat and the weight of so many long shifts smacks me broadside with its
isolation afterwards: tiny, immaculate apartment, silence crawling the walls
just past Main where the unfolding of no one just about
kills me. Can’t
love no man when my heart be
maimed and twisted as hoary knotted pine
nine miles deep in Sherman’s bog I sigh to the stone of quiet.
On certain days, I tell Roy: a
piece a’ me already out there, Roy, it ain’t coming back—
quiet, cracked to hell as it is and calling and
Roy says, Hush now. You just tired and wonders if he
should say something to someone but knows
talk is poisoned rough and I’m a’right—probably—
until I run myself empty as a sucked out tidal pool making
very sure everybody’s needs is met, not knowing mine or if I even have ‘em anymore:
waitress, widow, wreck of a woman,
expatriate from herself
yapping to Roy ‘bout nothing and more nothing in a roadside dive
zipped neat and far back from the road, bog behind the screen door beckoning me like a lover.
Ode to My Body in Middle-Age
I want to let a man love my body.
I want to forgive it its genetic miscues,
its deformities,
its pear-shaped absurdity.
I want a man to know where it’s been—
the night the porch swing broke free from its moorings,
the fragile silver necklace of support meant for a
delicate throat, not a plaster ceiling that would betray,
heave me off the porch, crash into my folded body
like a ship against a fogged-in jetty,
tumbling of vertebral fists
exploding inward in the inky interior until
L1 shattered entirely, lit up the spinal canal with bone
fragments, a dusty calisthenics of acrobats
not meant for exposure,
excision,
re-construction from the ground up.
I want the scar(s) deep in my gut to ignite Times Square.
Twice, the same cut—
first girl head-up, stubborn even then,
stuck enough for the doctor to put his foot on the table,
yank her from me so the 9.9 apgar came as no shock,
my body seizing on the table—
seven years before the second, a boy, torn from me the same way
while the surgeons discussed baseball and politics and my sister
covered my ears except when they were silent—
so much blood—
I shook in recovery like steel tracks before the train barrels down.
An absent man for the first.
No man for the second.
And this body, a map of what it’s seen.
Trauma, the scolding nurse said in the ER last week
as I watched the red line of blood pressure
spike on the screen, a second stroke: the elephant pacing the floor.
And you, a ghost at my wedding to a man I didn’t love.
I want you
to see me—
the roads I have walked beaten back,
grass dusted, blown flat,
but still, even now,
budding with the most intricate, nubile shoots.
The Uncivil War of Love
I
Loving you is a spool unspun:
my life-long fight in the world’s ring must be forfeited,
a letting go like air from a pierced balloon,
latex body emptied and thrown in a wild release
possibly recovered as mere flash of color on a curve of pavement
or not—instead swirled down a sewer drain when torrential rains
rush for the nearest decline.
I mean, how can a scarecrow strapped to a spike,
lips painted blood red with straw pushing up from the neck,
escape its straight-jacket for warmer October sun
and a view over its left shoulder?
I mean, you must gut yourself for love—
not fuel the battlefield tank each day.
No, all that scarring must be scrubbed away, so I can
at least stay clean enough
for your voice to blow through.
II
Let’s say your mother stands in your driveway one morning
with a laundry list of your wrongs
as a single parent—
each one a whip-strike to the soul so when you walk away slump-shouldered,
she cries, Do you want to hear the last one?
Let’s say your NO! hangs in the air like throat-choke smoke
and you wonder when conditions became claws
and the vacant lot she abandons rots and refuses
to be filled
even at rush hour, even with men, even with you.
We still divide ourselves as soldier or supplicant—
I mean how to make myself vulnerable after
a catalog of imperfections is waved in my face
like a flag pinned but pulling
in each furious gust of wind?
III
The cavern of self dies alone,
a whisper to some perhaps,
but not for long as way paves to way,
and the same slant of sun spills over the floorboards each day—
I mean this uncivil war of love amounts to nothing—
not attachments that strangle or save,
not unmet needs in an unwinnable tug of war.
It is the trunk and roots of you as you really are
that must satisfy so when what has lashed you to the ground weakens
and threatens to pull free, the hole that remains will not gape
or cave at the sides but instead turn itself
over for fresh growth, plow the earth new
and start again.
What We Learn From Birds
When a goose gets sick, wounded, or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again.
Slipped from formation, the drag is immediate—
feathers forged in the wake of absent bird:
an envelope of sky: open and willowing.
The warm goose body plummets to earth: an anvil
of dead weight, a force of gravity that becomes its last weapon,
its power in death.
Two healthy birds follow, a dive synced to the sick
and inevitable.
By the time the body cracks against my neighbor’s fence,
the inky muscular neck is bent into itself
like a tributary dammed and forgotten
but for the two who tuck their gristled feet
beneath their wings, hunker down, wait for the body to grow
cold.
There’s one on each side, my neighbor texts, sending a picture—
the vigil: a pixilation of autumnal sunset familiar
in its crimson filigree,
belts of black, and total
lack of sound. Three motionless
bodies huddled like boulders, one
without
breath.
By morning, the survivors are gone.
Whatever plagued the body has flown
and the shell of flight rests unencumbered,
feathers resolutely still, no whispery response
to the wind.
Will you help me bag it? she texts.
I don’t think I can do it alone.
Gillian Freebody
, a veteran writing teacher of 25 years, finds her lifeblood in poetry. Always teetering on the tightrope of chaos, Gillian only settles on her permanent precipice when formulating thoughts and emotions into poems. She lives with her two children and two cats in suburban New Jersey where a constant state of frenetic energy is the norm. She is indebted to her family and friends who tether her to the ground, so she can mother, teach and write poems.