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
Stephanie L. Harper
Painted Chickens
Twenty years ago
I received a birthday gift
from a close college buddy-slash-sometime lover
(What on earth were we thinking?).
Back then, our past was already in the past
and twenty-four was already not young.
He gave me a coffee mug
covered in chickens—
yes, painted chickens—
three plump specimens posed around the outside,
and one that looks like an index finger
with an eye, a comb, a beak and a wattle,
slapped onto the bottom.
How, I can’t fathom,
but my friend knew that those chickens
with their orange-red, expressionistic bodies
would be a boat-floater for me—
the one time I had slept with him
had been an epic shipwreck,
with a silent drive to the airport in its wake;
on the way, we choked down pancakes,
and I stifled sobs in my coffee,
averting my eyes
from the helpless horror in his.
I then flew off into the wild, wide sky,
bewildered, drowning.
Somehow, for years to come,
his southern gentlemanly charms
still served to allure:
he kept his promise to write
and took pains to catalogue for me
the details of his worldly escapades
and various, accompanying sexual conquests,
always making sure to emphasize
the ways in which they were hot for him,
so as to prove those trysts’ relative rightness.
Then, years later, for my birthday,
came, unexplainably gratifyingly,
the chicken cup.
Still burning hot
and feathered in their chili-pepper red,
royal purple and verdant green cloaks,
my static and impossibly happy
aphrodisiac chickens
blush like lovers on a Grecian urn;
clucking, urgent.
My southern gent,
now so long ago flown from this callous coop,
wooed another and had his own brood,
as, in due course, did I,
but the mug, no worse for wear, remains
a spectacular feature—
like a bright birthday piñata
(with its promise of sweet reward)—
of my sacred morning ritual.
These chickens,
still ecstatically surprised,
letting out unabashed, open-beaked caterwauls,
adorn my most aged and prized coffee mug;
a vessel, perfectly-sized,
it cups its contents so adoringly,
fiercely,
like an egg enveloping its cache of gold,
as I take privileged sips.
The big chicken on the left
might actually be a rooster
and that one on the bottom,
a middle finger.
The Artifice of Death
In Memory of My Beloved Friend, JPM
Before you came to my dreams,
I had believed your self-hatred
precluded love.
Had you actually known in life
that you could still create bonds
from the beyond?
The brief words you left behind
in the blackness of a vacuum
were vengeful, frozen reminders
that everyone and everything
had failed you.
You took your sun from the world
and returned to the ancestral night,
where all artifacts of mortality,
like splintered clay idols,
are pieced together from the dawn of time
and placed carefully on exhibit.
The Curator catalogues young deaths like yours
among those who died cynical and regretful in old age.
Did you suppose you’d be exempt
from an eternity of the sorrow
you left for those you’d claimed to love?
Did you somehow know that I
would preserve your warmth
in the ornate museum of my dreams?
How did you know where to find me, waiting
for you in the shadows of dusk?
I waited in an endless gallery,
lost within marble halls, gilding and
minute faces carved into tiny,
polished soapstone figurines.
Among the lapis lazuli
likenesses of Osiris and Anubis, I waited,
grew tired, and rested my head
against a marble portico
of a room that led to forgotten souls
drifting in everlasting twilight.
Would my deliberate remembering
resurrect a vestige of you
from the static crypt?
You finally came to me
as the evening sun
filtering in through a skylight,
and gently brushed my cheek as I dozed.
That warm gesture was the same,
entirely benevolent force
which I had once known as you in life.
It was you who had once rendered
out of the vague concept of me
a solid silhouette
that still cuts a dry island
into the murky ocean of living death
and stands against the firmament,
a testament.
Your kiss had gifted me
a quickening, a start, a far-off end,
a will, an enthusiasm to live,
a reassurance that every new
dawning is possible, because I know
you are the same, boundless heart
that once evinced such light.
Though I still believe when you left
you were resolved to your semblances
of self-loathing and violent whim,
I won’t presume to condemn
the rent apart, toppled effigy
of who you once were to me
and who you became
lying in slabs;
blame doesn’t mend brokenness—
In forgiveness, death becomes artifice.
In my dreams, these symbols of non-life
are subsumed by time
and life and death become interchangeable.
Aren’t we all relics to be exhumed
and polished to flawlessness?
Though I conjure
these burnished, ghostly cyphers of your being,
they are no less solid, no less substantial,
than my own, chiseled breath;
you are surely no less precious to me
sequestered now
behind protective glass.
I Am Alabaster
I am alabaster, polished, translucent—
and I am ashes, tamped in hollows,
crushed between the breath of the living and the souls of the dead.
No one will tell me if I will survive.
As the blush of dawn unfurls over dunes
and seagulls soar on ocean thermals,
I break apart and scatter in the wind,
losing the border where everything else ends
and I begin.
Lighter than air, a cloud of me rises up
to speak to the hawk perched on a streetlamp
and tells her I am fine, because I don’t know how to talk
about not being fine—
besides, I am flying . . .
I want to be the best version of myself,
the beautiful one,
carved in lucent crystal and buffed to a shine,
so that my face will reflect your eyes,
which will be mine, crying,
because you have recognized the truth of me.
Specters of what was and what is
are ground into fine, dark cinders
amassing as shadows
beneath my alabaster feet,
while my crimson heart
yet thrums
with faith in what will be.
If I Saw Aidan Turner
Walking Down the Street . . .
If I saw Aidan Turner walking down the street,
I would not stop to contemplate the earth beneath . . .
I would not for a second consider that I
was already in junior high when he was born,
or that my own daughter is now the age I was
when that brand new star-to-be emerged from the womb,
replete with a tuft of black curls, which I can’t help
but to surmise. My daughter views him in his full
adult glory—deep voice, dark eyes, just enough scruff
to pass as a vampire or Middle Earth heart-throb,
cloaked in black leather and adorable Irish
cadences wrapped about him like a lucky cloud.
My daughter is certain that she could reach him first—
fully trusting in her youthful abilities,
and in my usual habit to step aside
in favor of promoting her self-assurance.
I have not been tough enough on her in some ways—
for instance, I have not gone for a hard tackle,
stripping her of a ball at foot in one quick breath,
nor have I generally used my advantage
of momentum in everyday foot-races:
usually, I would feign a fall to foster
her sense of imperviousness to ill fortune;
in most cases, I would give her a head-start, but
if I saw Aidan Turner walking down the street,
I would at once utterly forget her youthful
sighs, her earnest blushing, her sweet, redolent gaze
transfixed in goofy stupefaction, innocent
through and through—the beauty of watching her feel
herself becoming a woman (through watching him
make love to cameras in a perfect balance
of feigned humility and stunning sex-appeal)
would extinguish in less than a blink of an eye.
The frightful scene that would ensue would estrange us,
my daughter and me, for a lifetime and a day—
such would be the nature of the abject horror
my actions would exact upon her fragile mien:
she would learn for certain that determination
does, in fact, pay handsomely . . . As for the handsome
Aidan Turner, hypothetically spotted
strutting blithely down the street by the likes of me—
the assault would surely mark a milestone for him.
Stephanie L. Harper
earned a BA in English and German from Grinnell College, and an MA in German literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives with her husband and two children in the Portland, OR, Metro area. Her work as a Writer and Home Schooling Parent has far-reaching extensions into social activism endeavors to promote a safe, just and vibrant world of possibility for future generations. http://www.slharperpoetry.wordpress.com/