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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

Gary Sokolow

Underworld Goddess

Our eyes made contact through a slow drizzle

I bore through her soul, leaned face to face


Weeks later, other disturbances, broken bird wing,

The final descending.


Over past park benches the drunks gather, laugh

With breath of whiskey,


One lost in the gutter, the Captain they all call him

Ass in air, face down.


It was ten years ago they found me three days endlessly

Riding the trains,


Mother lighting her candles believing in small places,

Her dreams of the crisp uniforms,


Men under a hot morning sun,

Mailmen,


All of us, mailmen, delivering sliver thin notices

Final foreclosures like razors,


Petite bottles of French lavender water

For the lonely,


The dirty fingers waiting upon bare-breasted women

To burst through brown paper magazines.


It was in a book we first discovered the goddess every

Autumn stolen to the underworld,


We were children, the family beatings made him

Crazier than me,


We dug through piles of dirt, the shards of glass

In his broken backyard,


Down and down, we dug through earth toward

Our goddess,


Uncovering worms, scared and writhing on late

October afternoons,


Pliant worms below, and above us the stone face

Of a soon to be fading sun.



late evening fumes

at 4 am, it was treasure hunt, channel 9

3 jack in the boxes, 3 crazy contestants,


one winner, who got to pick the prize

one box to choose out of fifty, sixty


boxes of various shapes, sizes, colors, and bows

and that was the show, the remaining time


left to the torture of contestants, the chosen box’s

contents slowly revealed, and for the record


I don’t remember how I came upon the magic

of the nail polish,


bottles snuck from piles of dirty clothes and

missing homework of my sister’s room


smashed into paper bags

saturation


covered with plastic bag

maximum inhalation


every night through high school

and I was always the straight kid


never drank

never smoked


glue sniffer


most antisocial form of user known, they say

notch above pedophiles


and those nights lit with the glow of the tubes

inside the old black & white tvs as I watched


the odd couple, mary tyler moore, the saint,


sleep not so much coming as the haze descending

to awaken 4 am the jack straight out the box.



Any Monday Morning

Often it is how it all begins

the coldest day of the year

a man on 9th avenue walking

in nothing but a sweater,

arm around a basketball,

smoke from a cigarette,

and how by nightfall

the newest associate of a law firm

will admire herself in a bar mirror,

enjoy the buzz of happiness

co-workers buying the next round,

and how by morning the soldiers in full gear,

rifles poised, will have hit the beach,

crash like waves, like kindergartners pushing

and shoving their way from schoolyard

into school, insects climbing screens,


and how it may be 1987,

the man in the tightfitting uniform testifies

for the twenty-third day in a row how

incapable we are of comprehending

the deals made, the true costs of our comforts,

so the arms are sold, our bastard propped up

for one more rigged election.

the whitecaps violent,

the insects hit windshields,

beyond distant hills corporations have grown

enormous, force trees out of the landscape,

windblown seeds with nowhere to land,

the soldiers inch toward targets,

the children move beyond rainbows,

push against something dark and unknowable,

and this the way any Monday morning goes,

the man on Ninth Avenue with the basketball

fleeing his girlfriend’s apartment

with whatever he could find,

the cold seeping through his sweater,

and smokeless by his side the last cigarette.



Elegy

Unknown hard

bop jazz


soprano

sax


runs

feel


to loose

to be


Coltrane

on the


radio

a


long day’s

desk job’s


end

not any life


a life more

fragile


than

ever


my heart

and time


past, time

wasted


and time

spinning


and

at the


center


a man

in


the

ground


is

truth


no


other

way


but

shovels


of tears

and


in the

moment


a


bird

moved


by

the


pretty

day


to

sing


to the

shovel’s


rhythm


to the

dirt’s


falling


the pine coffin

innocence


was ours

was


everything

yet


only words

like stones


as

a


man


in

the


ground


whom

you


love


is

truth


Gary Sokolow has an aging MFA (Brooklyn College) and has been published in Blood Lotus Journal, Up the Staircase, and Chantarelle’s Notebook.

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