Poetry Winter 2015 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Peter Rawlings
J. H Yun
Yesenia
& other poems
Colby Hansen
Killing Jar #37
& other poems
Melissa Bond
Freud's Asparagus
& other poems
Jane Schulman
When Krupa Played Those Drums
& other poems
Susan F. Glassmeyer
First Moon of a Blue Moon Month
& other poems
Melissa Tyndall
Haptics
& other poems
Micah Chatterton
Medicine
& other poems
Emily Graf
Toolbox
& other poems
Kate Magill
LV Winter, 2015
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Meeting Mrs. Ping
& other poems
Richard Parisio
Brown Creeper
& other poems
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
Circe in Business
& other poems
Laurel Eshelman
Tuckpointing
& other poems
Barry W. North
Molotov Cocktail of the Deep South
& other poems
Charles C. Childers
Privilege
& other poems
Ricky Ray
A Way to Work
& other poems
Cassandra Sanborn
Revelation
& other poems
Linda Sonia Miller
Full Circle
& other poems
J. Lee Strickland
Anna's Plague
& other poems
Erin Dorso
In the Kitchen
& other poems
Holly Lyn Walrath
Behind the Glass
& other poems
Jeff Lewis
Charles Ives, A Connecticut Yankee
& other poems
Karen Kraco
Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill
& other poems
Rafael Miguel Montes
Casket
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Desire
Bangkok, and even the name reeks of it.
The girls in the girlie bars on Patpong
Road, they know that smell, they sell that smell—shit,
cum, curry, poontang, bodies at play, songs
they know you know, dances they know you know,
the English words on their bikini butts,
twinkling in sequins—WINK. FOXY. GO-GO.
The smell of dollars, baht, dong, roasting nuts—
they’ve known that aroma all their lives, who
the hell doesn’t? Really, weren’t we all born
knowing that smell? The monks, they know it, too,
silent, single file, first dim light of morning,
bearing their bowls, a little day-old
rice, a bit of fish—want reduced to this.
It still smells of suffering—in the folds
of their robes, that whiff of death, saffron, bliss.
Khao-I-Dang
My britches got bigger the day I met you
in a bamboo room, at a bamboo table,
sizing me up (I didn’t have a clue)—
so damn sure of a world that never gave
less than what you demanded or deserved
or just made true. Couple of redheaded brats
like us, in a war zone—where’d we get the nerve
and what gave us the right, rat-a-tat-tat
mai pen lai days, Mekong nights . . . we recognized
refugees as people like us: alive,
moon-eyed, bee-stung but still there in the fight,
in a world that needed us, needed our jive—
Khao-I-Dang did too, back when we were brats,
eating up the last of our baby fat.
for Miss Lola
Lunch
They plopped him down (as we would later say)
like a big bag of potatoes, right there
on our long bamboo table, just the way
they (different they) plopped down lunch, right where
we were eating lunch, yes, that’s how it was,
right in the middle of lunch, rice with rocks
to break our teeth and stir-fried weeds and what
may have been chicken, or dog, and the docs
were there, and the nurses, and all of us but
the interpreters, just us and the buzz
of flies and the distant pop-pop that made
the border so exciting, good for our
stories, and then they burst in with that dead
kid soldier, Khmer Rouge, alive an hour
before, here for autopsy, just because.
The Voice of America
In Thailand, where it’s never cold, that one
day was cold, a bleak November day, raw, damp—
fresh misery to heap on sickness, guns
and hunger, madness, mud and fear. The camp
went quiet. Every stitch they had, they wore,
rags on rags. We had no more to give them.
We did have a radio, reception poor—
the Voice of America whispered, trembled
from the world we’d left, where election day
was ending, the polls were closing, Wyoming
clinched it: an old fool, nary a gray
hair on a head untroubled by wisdom,
would preside over perpetual morning
with a smile and thrilling hints of war.
Meeting Mrs Ping
Laughing, forty-two to my twenty-two,
and lovely, still the belle of Phnom Penh
even after college, marriage, kids—then
hell: the war that throttled the city, blew
in on rocket wings, the rumble and pop
closer, every day closer, till the city
fell quiet, faceless boys streamed in, no stopping
them, black clothes, tire sandals, eyes unlit,
jungle boys no bigger than their guns came
from darkness to empty the city, empty
everything, kill everything . . . and then
five years later here you were, tart-tongued,
smiling, sassy, the queen of Khao-I-Dang
Camp, reaching through the wire, to me, alone.
for Sunly
Michael Fleming 
was born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, and has lived and learned and worked all around the world, from Thailand, England, and Swaziland to Berkeley, New York City, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He’s been a teacher, a grad student, a carpenter, and always a writer; for the past decade he has edited literary anthologies for W. W. Norton. Read more at www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws