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
Winner of $500 for 1st-place-voted Poems
Debbra PalmerBake Sale
Don’t eat the wrapper.
Nobody doesn’t know this.
So when my mother ate the cupcake
paper and all, in one shoved-in bite and hissed
“don’t you say a word,”
all the way home
from the Ockley Green Middle School bake sale
I thought about the paper in her stomach.
What if anyone saw her?
What would they say? Like my best friend’s mother
who taught us how to count to ten in Cherokee
and caught my father’s eye. I thought
it was because he liked her slacks
or because she worked part-time at Sears,
but my mother said it was because
she was petite and had a stick
up her ass. What would she say?
I carried my cupcake in both hands, its top
a coiled green snake with gold sprinkles.
To want anything so much, to devour it like that,
must be deadly.
In The Week Before Her Death
My Mother Hallucinates in Email:
I was thirsty. I walked to the yard shed
where the women were selling water. I had
no money. I was so glad
to see the only friend I had at church.
I held out my hands and she filled them
with sweet, cool water.
I was followed by a priest. She said
she could see my unhappiness.
I told her everything
right there in the yard
it poured like white words, gushed
from my mouth like a river of tumors.
The priest said, “Come with me, my dear.”
I said the only thing I know
in Japanese, the word for pocket,
“ポケット, poketto”
and pulled from my own, a note
and unfolded it.
“Just love them,” it read.
Two great white Pyrenees came to tell me
all of the beautiful things in dying.
When I asked them to walk me there,
they stood at my side and waited. This is why
I’m afraid to close my eyes.
Breasts
The first time I kissed a woman’s breasts
I understood
men
how they root and paw
how they knead and pull
to prove they’re really here
how they suck a bruise
around the nipple
how they get completely lost
in between
how they smash and grab
apologize and hang on anyway
or, how they hold two birds so gently
they can only feel them
when they let go.
Late Bloomer
“Mama had a baby and its head popped off.”
The severed head of the dandelion
drops from my guillotine thumb
the yellow burst of weed
held under my chin
“Do you like butter?”
A little blonde girl whose parents are deaf
opens her mouth. “Talk like your parents,” I insist,
shoving in a cud of grass.
She cries without sound—so hard
that the daisy chain crown
shakes from her head.
I just want her to speak with her hands.
I Love Parasites
I love parasites for their barbs and hooks
for their many names & forms:
Tapeworm, Poinsettia, Blood Fluke,
Twin, Mother, Jehovah’s Witness.
I love them for their shameless
savagery & nerve.
I love fetuses—also parasites
who live off the mother’s body.
Then, as nature dictates,
the mother becomes the parasite,
depositing into her offspring
her tumors, hair & teeth.
I love my twin brother who stays
alive siphoning off my blood
& laughing about it from his lovely
teratoma mouth.
I love the Jehovah’s Witness ladies
who feed off my politeness.
I love to invite them in.
We take turns holding my mother’s upper denture
like a poison leaf. I love passing around
the bag that was my mother’s prosthetic breast,
the silicone pellets hissing inside.
I love the cup of my mother’s hair
the gray curls like smoke. Before we burned her body,
she asked me if I would wear her bones
around my neck.
I already wear them,
couldn’t take them off
if I wanted to.
Debbra Palmer
’s poems have appeared in BLOOM Magazine, Calyx Journal, Pectriloquy (CHEST Journal for the American College of chest physicians) and The Portland Review. She recently returned to her birth state of Idaho after spending most of her life in Portland, Oregon where she studied writing at Portland State University. Now home at last, she lives and works in Boise with her wife and their little dog, Tennessee.