Poetry Winter 2014 fiction all issues
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Debbra Palmer
Bake Sale
& other poems
Ann V. DeVilbiss
Far Away, Like a Mirror
& other poems
Michael Fleming
On the Bus
& other poems
Harold Schumacher
Dying To Say It
& other poems
Heather Erin Herbert
Georgia’s Advent
& other poems
Sharron Singleton
Sonnet for Small Rip-Rap
& other poems
Bryce Emley
College Beer
& other poems
Harry Bauld
On a Napkin
& other poems
George Mathon
Do You See Me Waving?
& other poems
Mariana Weisler
Soft Soap and Wishful Thinking
& other poems
Michael Kramer
Nighthawks, Kaua’i
& other poems
Jill Murphy
Migration
& other poems
Cassandra Sanborn
Remnants
& other poems
Kendall Grant
Winter Love Note
& other poems
Donna French McArdle
White Blossoms at Night
& other poems
Tom Freeman
On Foot, Joliet, Illinois
& other poems
George Longenecker
Nest
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
The Bitter Daughter
& other poems
Rebecca Irene
Woodpecker
& other poems
Savannah Grant
And Not As Shame
& other poems
Michael Hugh Lythgoe
Titian Left No Paper Trail
& other poems
Martin Conte
We’re Not There
& other poems
A. Sgroi
Sore Soles
& other poems
Miguel Coronado
Body-Poem
& other poems
Franklin Zawacki
Experience Before Memory
& other poems
Tracy Pitts
Stroke
& other poems
Rachel A. Girty
Collapse
& other poems
Ryan Flores
Language Without Lies
& other poems
Margie Curcio
Gravity
& other poems
Stephanie L. Harper
Painted Chickens
& other poems
Nicholas Petrone
Running Out of Space
& other poems
Danielle C. Robinson
A Taste of Family Business
& other poems
Meghan Kemp-Gee
A Rhyme Scheme
& other poems
Tania Brown
On Weeknights
& other poems
James Ph. Kotsybar
Unmeasured
& other poems
Matthew Scampoli
Paddle Ball
& other poems
Jamie Ross
Not Exactly
& other poems
Harry Bauld
On a Napkin
Imagine the table-bards
of yore, filling the scraps
with blotty elegies and kennings
depending so much on the unfolding
wheelbarrow-thoughts beside
the chewed white chicken bones. I pine
for the lost scop world of prescription
pads, envelope backs, menus, telephone pole
fliers and stub pencils borrowed
from fat salesmen on trains,
the crushed index cards
with jam stains retrieved from deli trash.
But now I’m back in front
of a moony screen, touching my eyes
and fingers to what can never
also be used to clean
that dollop of cream cheese
off your beautiful, hungry lip.
Swift River
Two brook trout flash in the current,
their iridescent shimmer a surrender
to the veiled hymn of gravity
and light. How small the self is.
Their bright wrinkling knows
they and the stream’s contralto
were born to the same tune,
as if their flicker and gleam
fires not just a stippled kinship
but the synapse between, invisible
gate of their own depths. Trout linger
in the rill but don’t know why or how long—
a while, with animal confidence, to turn orange
and find out why they stay. That is marriage.
The water has no words; I only imagine I hear
the pink and blue rings brookies wear
ping an ancient set of vows, history
of the recessional promise they whisper
to each other through the tips
of themselves: to face up
into the flood current that feeds
us minute particulars, the future’s
freestones ringing beneath us like bells.
Refusal
In the trivia contest blaring in the next room
at An Beal Bocht the question
seems to be Which states touch
other states? and after a 5th black pint I’m in a state
that touches several other states I will never
be able to name and the first rock&roll song was—————————?
and a vicious dispute breaks out over the number
of overtimes possible in some type of game
as outside the traffic waltzes by
like a tipsy girl in the night
and the college students smoke and wish
they could get served by the biceppy bartender with the Cork accent
while a Mexican cook makes more Irish curry
and then runs out (thanks be to God) of Irish pizza
and you drink under the glare of a big painting of Behan
and Beckett and Joyce and Flann O’Brien
and Patrick Kavanaugh, who in the painting
looks like someone (perhaps one of the Beatles, maybe Ringo)
playing Patrick Kavanaugh, and you are trying to remain
aware you are writing in a very small notebook
this five-pint poem and suddenly dreaming (One minute!
warns the quizmaster) in your remaining minute
of that Irish girl with waterfall hair
when you were sixteen, the two of you
trembling together in your trembling station wagon
in her driveway outside the barn
where her quarter horses trembled in their withers
in the suburbs and every synapse you had
fired with the electricity of her skin
and now—right through the stout and dried curry dustings
sparking under your nose—you can smell
that girl’s hair and you look in yet another unnamed state
toward the two sad white frosted cakes squatting like stones
on the shelf between the bar and kitchen
and you think, in spite of everything, no.
Jaundice
Two hours old, my son fingers
his monk’s cap like a conjurer
fanning four aces. Through the perfect feather
of a mouth, the quill of his cry
still echoes in the other cave
he came from that illuminated our margins
before the printing press was even
dreamt with its poisonous text,
its heavy leading. In a dawn light
flimsy as tissue I write
standing up with one finger
in his mouth while he pedals
and grabs for invisible boughs
under a flight of strong tubes burning
with their own full name—Biliruben—
to void the blood of what is
golden and deadly, this new pen
leeching its own dark cargo.
Harry Bauld
graduated from Medford High School in Massachusetts and studied art history and played shortstop at Columbia University. Selected by Matthew Dickman for inclusion in Best New Poets 2012 (University of Virginia Press), he has taught and coached at high schools in Vermont and New York.