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
Meghan Kemp-Gee
A Rhyme Scheme
Your broken heart knows it’s about time,
a beat away from a healthy sense of play,
that you learned to ask for your own advice.
Please take a moment to fill out the form.
Now, all of the legalities aside,
listen close enough to realize
this is the kind of lie you could take pride in,
when truth writes itself from the outside in,
when you weave the wool pulled over your eyes
into sheep’s clothing and when, sheep-eyed,
you parade in wool rags rather wolfly worn,
or rather, rags washed in the same river twice.
Even broken hearts are right twice a day.
Listen close enough, and anything can rhyme.
Pantoum
The world unfolds itself at night.
It’s getting late, but I don’t mind.
This is a game I like to play.
I play these games to stay awake.
It’s getting late, but I don’t mind
explaining all the rules to you.
I play these games to stay awake,
and make the rules up as I go.
Explaining all the rules—to you,
that’s a game, too. You say I cheat
and make the rules up as I go.
I say we’ll do away with rules.
That’s a game too, you say. I cheat
at almost everything these days,
I say. We’ll do away with rules.
You let them in, they’ll eat away
at almost everything. These days
we keep them all at bay. At night
you let them in. They’ll eat away
what we don’t know we love. And yet
we keep them all at bay at night.
We fight but sometimes we forget
what we don’t know we love. And yet
I still like it. I like the way
we fight, but sometimes we forget
this is a game. I like to play.
I still like it. I like the way
the world unfolds itself at night.
Saxa atque solitudines voci respondent
Still, all we wanted was some inspiration,
and so we tuned our ears to the unknown.
We heard the one about the heart of stone,
and so we all set out to fashion one.
At heart, the change remains just what it seems.
You reinvent the secrets that you keep,
you recognize disguises, you enclose
the call inside the answer. Don’t suppose
that just because we always looked asleep,
the answers came to us as if in dreams.
We found that we were sprouting mossy wings.
We slumbered darkly, rocked by noises,
until we woke up to the sound of voices
lisping the truest sense of holy things.
Bestiae saepe immanes cantu flectuntur atque consistent
We found the things our stillness recommends,
some holy ground, a stash of songs, some new
sets of teeth that charm as sure as they cut,
new loves that wink and promise to be true
and whisper oh it doesn’t matter what
you do I’ll love you anyway, new friends,
false selves that trim the fat from fight or flight,
false faces, the ability to lie,
a new proclivity to meet the eye
of what we want to eat, a muscle curled
and crouched and looking backwards at the night,
a wicked shift that we still strain to feel,
new arsenals that could unmake the world:
the things we need to make the world real.
Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar
Certain moods are required as a sign of subordination.
These methods make darling a distinction
between purpose and result,
pending the exalting so or so much.
Fostering confusion between causal and concessive
easily slips into matters of time,
time when, or maybe with.
Maybe—what is relative usually isn’t indicative.
Sometimes the truest way of things
is best expressed by a past contrary to fact—
the curse of chaos barely shuffled off
by the blessing of what didn’t happen to happen.
Likewise,
we less superstitious assent to utopian literature—
a future more vivid,
tricks of timetravel, tomorrows and tropes.
Doomed little things—
a beautiful excuse for the use of lest,
for the charm of this mad king’s dream,
a language full of invisible subjects.
Or like Macbeth we find
things no sooner uttered
than delivered,
then—
nothing is but what is not, or
nothing is but what is said.
Just try it.
Just try to just say nothing.
These are the words of bestial dispositions,
a screwing of sound,
a court masquing for our panting,
the libertine’s love of letters, of reported speech.
Begin the staged exorcism of the volitional,
let the gilded butterflies laugh back,
let the speech all be an act—
this is how to do things with words.
Meanwhile, somewhere in ancient Rome,
it trembles for its antecedent.
Little does it know what the world becomes—
dreams after dreams, endless dependent clauses.
Fortunately, the partitive genitive
keeps the show going,
a part of the whole
with the whole of a thing—
synecdoche, a wet dream
of the truly infinitive,
which by definition
cannot be modified.
Here—hic, in haec re, in hoc—
this is where the story might end.
The old stories don’t get along
with the new grammar.
Once upon a time,
when one thing led to another,
you wouldn’t write about your death
in perfect tense.
Nowadays, the thing you take in becomes
everything.
Everything comes home with us
to be played and replayed.
Like taking home a Christmas tree
and waking up deep in the forest,
like the end beginning,
like a dead man poised to make a poem,
this is the conceit of the complementary infinitive.
The Christmas Tree takes us from to be to praise—
brought down at last,
it couldn’t be any other way.
Meghan Kemp-Gee
is a screenwriter, playwright, and award-winning poet. She lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.