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
Tom Freeman
On Foot, Joliet, Illinois
A girl heading the other way
stopped around 2 o’clock today,
rolled down her window, “Hey man, have a peach!”
It filled my fist. I recrossed the road pressing
my thumb into the fuzzy skin, just overripe.
My eyes moistened for a second.
Not yet hungry, I tucked away
the strange girl’s gift.
A juicy ball of sun medicine,
my soft secret hope.
Hidden peach in the pocket
of this rough, frayed work coat I wear.
At Sunset
Orange glow in the western sky,
rain has stopped,
dust plastered down along the dirt road
hedged with pungent wet sagebrush.
Passionate electrified guitar
wails from within adobe walls
of a small home at the base of a scrubby hill.
Out in the dusky road a lonely young man passing by
listens, smiles, says “thanks” under his breath.
Breaktime
After pulling mean musk thistles all morning,
sweating torrents in a rain coat and welder’s gloves,
I spread peanut butter with a skinning knife,
seated in the driver’s seat of my rusty pickup
parked in the pasture up to the side mirror in shining grass.
The cows browse, sun glaring
on the black muscles of their backs,
and test the new fence line.
The young calf ducks right under.
Sun spots and shade play in the field
as clouds shift shapes and float east.
The insect trill heightens with each flash of heat.
I want to learn to see the wind in the grass as a girl I love
and she as the grass in the wind.
I think that’d be my heaven.
Keep the rest.
I lick both sides
of the knife edge clean.
Thirty more minutes
lost track of and it’s
back to work.
Moon Chat Transcript #10
I get up too late, sit in soft moss,
and wait for some rustle
in the leaves to wake me.
No wind. Not even a breeze.
Past girls I might have tried harder for,
friends I lost track of, come to mind.
I wonder what screens me often from
that straight shot look into
the real skin of things.
Down ravine, the creek glints, out of earshot.
The word is another body turned up in the Cuyahoga valley.
Two kayaking ranger’s found her in the river north of Boston Mills.
She’d been missing ten days.
She’s not the first.
Men tend to dump them just off the trail
where they think no one will look.
I imagine, in their guilt, those few acres
seem like the only place to hide,
a shred of second-growth woods boxed in with blacktop,
shards of dim light beaming through the canopy,
a murderer’s one hope at forgiving himself.
Leaving my camp, I step carefully among the weeds.
and dead shades of brown leaves.
I’m not saying I forgive the killing of innocents. I don’t.
But if there’s any place that withholds judgment, it’s here,
deep in trees, where no one watches.
Where you take a leak wherever you please.
Where men leave their old bald tires and
mushrooms or coneflower grow up through.
Where the only trace of who you are,
or who you’ve been
is the leaping of frogs,
and shimmer of the surface that accepts them.
Yardwork
With each twig lifted from lush grass
I screw up my face to hold back tears.
I came here to scape land that I guess the man tends
so diligently in this narrow green floodplain
to escape the stark aridity
that might whisper him awake on the edge of town.
For weeks, before I bring the mower through the tallest grass,
I’ve been filling tarps with brittle fragments of Siberian elm,
sometimes brushing up against the little cabin
where he now tells me his son swallowed a gun
barrel one New Year’s Eve.
The boy had been found a month before
crossing the Bitteroots into Idaho half frozen
with only a pocket knife and blanket to his name,
committed to asylum then released.
He would be my age now.
I grow quiet, leaning on a leaf rake.
I would’ve walked beside him on the highway shoulder,
long into cold Bitteroot night,
borrowing hope against the darkness,
against the snow lit slantwise in the rush of headlights
like showers of Gemini.
Tom Freeman
, the oldest of six children, comes from a little, twenty acre, not-for-profit farm in the Cuyahoga Valley of northeast Ohio. He has lived there for most of his twenty-three years but has also spent a considerable amount of time traveling, working, and mountaineering across the western United States where he feels most welcome. He enjoys hiking with his fourteen-month-old husky-wolf dog, Denali. He recently graduated from Kent State University.