Poetry Winter 2013 fiction all issues
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Alysse Kathleen McCanna
Pentimento
& other poems
Peter Nash
Shooting Star
& other poems
Katherine Smith
House of Cards
& other poems
David Sloan
On the Rocks
& other poems
Alexandra Smyth
Exoskeleton Blues
& other poems
John Glowney
The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds
& other poems
Andrea Jurjević O’Rourke
It Was a Large Wardrobe...
& other poems
Lisa DeSiro
Babel Tree
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Reptiles
& other poems
Michael Berkowitz
As regards the tattoo on your wrist
& other poems
Michael Brokos
Landscape without Rest
& other poems
Michael H. Lythgoe
Orpheus In Asheville
& other poems
John Wentworth
morning people
& other poems
Christopher Jelley
Double Exposure
& other poems
Catherine Dierker
dinner party
& other poems
William Doreski
Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin
& other poems
Robert Barasch
Loons
& other poems
Rande Mack
bear
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Red Bird
& other poems
Anne Graue
Sky
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Tub Restoration
& other poems
Paul R. Davis
Landscape
& other poems
Philip Jackey
Garage drinking after 1989
& other poems
Karen Hoy
A Naturalist in New York
& other poems
Gary Sokolow
Underworld Goddess
& other poems
Michal Mechlovitz
The Early
& other poems
Henry Graziano
Last Apple
& other poems
Stephanie L. Harper
Unvoiced
& other poems
Roger Desy
anhinga
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Hangoverman
& other poems
Frederick L. Shiels
Driving Past the Oliver House
& other poems
Richard Sime
Berry Eater
& other poems
Jennifer Popoli
Generations in a wine dark sea
& other poems
The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds
It’s not that they are on their way to anywhere,
although standing at a bus stop might at first
make you believe as they do that they are
more than ready to be somewhere else.
It’s a late spring day in Seattle, a little rain
on the discolored facade of the courthouse,
and on this dampened, cracked sidewalk,
as if set aside for another time, they wait:
a slender black woman, her gold-painted fingernails
glorious coins, arguing with an afro-headed man,
who flashes the white blossom of a wandering eye;
a heavy silver-haired eastern European
grandmother, the spike of a cigarette jabbed
upwards from her mouth; a clump
of over-sized jackets and baggy pants
that are three swaggering young Latino boys
next to a tall stem of a young girl
shivering in a mini-skirt, pierced eyebrow
and lip, and an ex-hippie
turned public defender, his ponytail
fraying long gray hairs. In a moment or two
the sun will break through the low clouds
as if to examine all ordinary things, and everyone
will turn and squint, their faces lit
with expectation, as if they never intended
to be so plain, as if this was a chance
for them to shine beyond themselves,
and they can’t hide their secret beauty
any more than a flowerpot
can hold back unfurling
its little bundle of petals.
A Change In Circumstance
A small good deed, I thought, to haul away
the creepers and weeds my wife had, on a Saturday
spring afternoon until sunlight ran out,
cleared and plucked from the flower beds
into an unsightly pile. I scooped bunches
of dirt-besotted stalks and leaves into a bucket,
and heard from its depths then, as if just behind my ear,
the muted persistence of a bee’s stalled flight.
My efforts had also disturbed long, fat
earthworms from, I imagined, a pleasant
slumber, or more likely, from their steady
oeuvre of eating the world around them.
They stretched like lazy, elongated accordions,
and tunneled in. But the bee, lured in by the yellow
glimmer of an uprooted dandelion, trapped lover
of unframed air and pollen’s narcotic pull,
lover of light’s many doors to elsewhere,
is now done in, denied exit. Caught off-guard
by his burial afloat, he buzzes angrily.
His little motor grinds against a root-clouded
medium, no glare of petals to steer passage out of
his clabbered milieu. His circumstance utterly transformed
at the hand of an unwitting giant,
his beautifully engineered form rendered
incompetent, his whirring gossamer wings
beat furiously into the tangled atmosphere,
row him against the fouled heavens,
carry him nowhere.
From the Book
of Common Office Prayers
Let’s go where moths go for a smoke break,
or take a mental health day
with the accountants on pilgrimage
among the stub ends of pencils.
Let’s schedule a vacation at the monastery
of unpaid invoices,
or take a long lunch sipping martinis
with penguins
singing medieval drinking songs.
Let’s lie down
in the quiet room so we can hear
a golden pheasant
slipping through a white picket fence
into green thickets.
Let’s use up our sick leave
among the last wisps of breezes,
or take some personal time
in pollen’s sideways drift.
Let’s take a sabbatical and travel a year
with the sawdust,
or find a cheap apartment in the neighborhood
of the moment
the birds startle into silence
and work
on our novel. Let’s take a cruise
on the good ship
Two Week’s Notice.
Dear god, let’s quit.
Learning A Trade
Taught the mercy of butchering
the lame cow,
schooled that what is not useful
is waste,
we wised up, staggered
out of bed,
began earlier,
rubbing the dark
from our eyes. We worked
sun down to chaff,
shavings, stalks
discarded, stub-ends, the peelings
fed to swine, day unbuckled
from dawn,
laid all the fields
open, let in
as much light as the fences
would take,
lugged frayed bundles
of leaves, scraped
the branches raw,
cut the dull plow
into the stony reservoir
of topsoil, stored enough
to starve in the spring.
We shouldered up
to the best cows,
milk flowing
and pulsing
into silver cans, slopped
the dregs, straddled
drought’s dwindling
ruts, roads to next
to nothing, a bog
of stinking water,
black sky floating
to its end, flies
milling above. The nub
of not enough
our rough apprenticeship.
Zenith
All this beauty, billboards of women
fifty feet tall, yards of golden
flesh-tone paint. I am a prisoner of my lips
and eyes and hands and skin I said.
At the studio, they cut the lights,
gave me a shirt without buttons,
a robe without a belt.
I am lifted upon scaffolding, unfurled.
I am battered and shiny as tin.
Your ink stains my flesh.
My hair is not brushed for me.
How do I feel without clothes I ask.
Pandemonium of rush hour.
A thousand infidelities inch past.
The silk air.
All the eyes crawling over me are ants.
My open mouth, my white teeth.
The trucks on the road all night
from Detroit to Tallahassee
lathe my shape.
The moan of traffic.
The coyotes lie with me,
yellow-eyed, panting.
The moths that cover me at night,
stout, hairy bodies pulsing.
When they are finished with me,
they lower me like a corpse.
I suffer all those who come unto me.
John Glowney
has practiced commercial litigation with a large Pacific Northwest law firm, Stoel Rives LLP, for over 30 years. He is a past winner of several Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan, a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. He’s heard all the lawyer jokes and has repeated most of them. He lives in Seattle.