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
Winner of $100 for 3rd-place-voted Poems
Katherine SmithHouse of Cards
January 1871
When I was in Richmond I met a man.
I touched pulp where a sword had pierced his eye,
dressed the bloody bruise of his crushed thigh
where hooves trampled his femur and pelvis. I caressed
his fragile parts to health until his hard mouth broke
into a smile. I dream now that he commands me
to escape my father and brothers, run back
to Richmond. But before he left the hospital
for the battlefield where he died he asked me
to marry him and I refused. I don’t regret it.
I’ve learned too much belief in any man,
even a good one, can drive a woman mad.
The night when I dreamed he lay on me
and I screamed so loud I woke with Daddy
and the boys standing over my bed,
I told them it was nothing.
It’s hard to be the only woman
in a house full of men. I wept last night,
and when I opened my eyes the stars
were beginning to fade in the dawn light.
Come spring when the quince is red as passion,
I’m determined to set out on that train,
seeking nothing. I’ll never marry. For now
the quince orchard lies buried under snow
and a crust of ice thickens on the river.
I’m done looking for portents in voices,
tea leaves, dreams. I believe in the cold, real
and sharp. When I walk this morning to the coop
the hens make the soft clucking sounds
that comfort me The rooster puts his beak
under his wing and goes back to sleep.
I steal from each hen a warm brown egg
and follow my footprints in the snow
back to the house. The weight of my family
settles on me like a shawl crocheted of iron.
I head to the kitchen to boil coffee.
Daddy and the boys will say it’s too bitter.
When they come in from milking the cows,
drop the load of firewood for the stove
they labor to keep burning all winter,
I’ll add cream to theirs and drink mine black.
Bad
Spring 1870
Mother didn’t like for me to climb the mountain,
warned me of black bears, ghosts. Now she’s gone
I wouldn’t mind meeting either just to know
I wasn’t alone. Beneath my wool skirts my legs warm.
Quince perfumes the air, crimson, sharp as pepper.
The gnarled apple trees grow delicate curls,
white petals like my baby brother’s fine blond hair.
The wind chases clouds over the mountains.
I can’t imagine a world without me or the mountains.
Some folks might call it selfish, but what has come
to pass is so different from what I thought
I don’t mind what folks call me. There is in me
a flame, a fire I used to be ashamed of,
that keeps my mind from wandering
at the creek where the path doglegs right
into valley ruins, a melancholy patchwork
quilted by women’s hands and passed down
to daughters. On her death bed my mother’s
barbed look snagged me as if she knew I’d turn
from memory like a man towards reason,
run away from what was certain as the home
that once held me fast, beloved as Priest mountain.
Top
September 1870
My father helps to gather apples, little gnarled
things that’ll last all winter baked into pie.
While summer lingers I stew them with rhubarb,
ladle into a white bowl, covered with cream,
the summer fruit that slides down the dark throats
of brothers raw with weeping. For six months
the frogs’ croak from the river winds up
and stops, a toy that topples instead of spinning.
Daddy repeats time to plant, time to harvest
and his words fall short of meaning as if
something were chipped or missing at the bottom
of him that sets thought gyrating into the world.
The men and boys won’t stop looking
as if they were waiting for a miracle
but all I can do is boil the clothes with lye,
wash the dusty floors, put food on the table.
I skip church on Sundays when other girls float
in taffeta to church on Norwood road.
Through crepe myrtle’s blazing branches, I watch,
and bite a tongue of iron. When I feed the pigs
I slap the sow so hard with the rusty pail
that she no longer comes running for slops,
squints at me with knowing eyes. I don’t have it
in me to believe a thing except the secret
of silver I saved nursing soldiers in Richmond.
Next spring I’ll lay ten coins on the palm of the man
at the train depot with the tin roof that flashes
in the sun between the river and the church,
run away to nurse again in Richmond, instead
of a heart lay the rest on the kitchen table.
Altar
Richmond 1880
I was just a girl, could never hope
to make the sun rise and set by milking cows
My body wouldn’t chant the silent prayer
of broom-work and feather duster. There was
a hardness in me better suited to dressing wounds
or stopping the flow of gushing blood and pus
than to mopping floors. Years after I ran off
I knew myself flawed as if by making me God
had left a chink of doubt for men to slip
through to nothingness. Twice, though I knew
it meant wearing the men’s rage till death
like shame at the flesh that cloaked me,
I almost went back and didn’t. I went to work
in hospitals nursing the sick to whom I didn’t belong.
I still wonder at night what happened to my kin,
but wear my concern lightly as a crust of thin ice
that melts in the April sun. Sometimes I think
with what I’ve understood I could have borne
to stay except I’ve learned that mother love
left behind that day the train pulled away
from dwindling mountains isn’t enough
to keep anyone at home.
Red Sea
It was just me and the bleak world
of scrub pine, red clay, rattling husks
of dead sumac. It was just me
and the massive earth and the stone house
no one had lived in for a long time. My life
a fact, without illumination. I followed
the yellow dog up the overgrown path
to where the bare Virginia mountain
crouched under the grey sky,
turned to walk the three miles home
down the same road I’d come.
The Blue Ridge turned red, then
a pale yellow without the usual
crescendo of dusk. I heard a laughter
like the bones of winter sun.
My daughter had been gone months,
her childhood like a sea
that had parted
and swallowed up half my life.
What was I doing alone
on this mountain? The grey sky
let go of snow as if releasing letters,
an alphabet of wordless understanding
that fluttered through the remaining light.
Good-Bye
Good-bye third-floor room with maples leaves,
green seedpod that taps the window,
morning mist swirling over the James River.
beautiful light, thunder on the mountain.
Good-bye ash tree, sumac, wisteria.
Good-bye blackberry bramble.
Good-bye yellow dog, Maizie.
Good-bye peace.
Some say peace is carried within,
but can I fold up valleys
and take them with me?
Can I fold the James River,
the light, the blackberry bramble,
the yellow dog, and the maple tree
like silk dresses I slip into my suitcase?
Can I unpack a mountain?
Katherine Smith
’s poems and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, among them Mezzo Cammin, Unsplendid, Measure, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Ploughshares, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage. Her first book, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), appeared in 2003. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.