Poetry Winter 2015 fiction all issues
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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
Karen Kraco
Stuck
Infidelity
For the months you’ve carried this
you’ve had the wild look of a man
who’s been ordered to drive a cab
in a city he doesn’t know.
You keep turning: right, right again
but then wrong, wrong, wrong
forgetting to remember that if only you’d ask
I’d show you the map: you might find your way home.
Impasse
A mountain fills the room
and neither of us understands the why
of moving it. Wall-to-wall silence
windows black doors jammed
cut off from the cities
that twinkle in its valleys.
Irreconcilable
I weep for the speck of the egg
that might have become feathers and cluck
but still can relish the omelet. You, you
crack the shell, see bright red, and swear
off eating eggs for months.
Steaming meals now cold
company no longer invited
silence seated
in the place
of grace.
Postcard Poems: Animal Attitude
Bull
You stick your finger in a can of tuna
then insist the orange cat likes you
for who you are—as flimsy as the red silk cape
you flash in front of your black lab
so proud of your posture
as you call in the picadors!
You knew I was watching
as you dressed down your duck—
webbed footprints up and down
the stairs, across the kitchen floor.
Prairie Dog
Your first line of defense—
go underground. You burrow deep
digging a tangle of tunnels
so that at each choice of paths
I wonder where you’ve gone.
Once, I did catch up, and instead
of turning to face me, you sat back
on your haunches, blocking the passage,
your arguments lost to me
in the hollowness ahead.
You’ll pop up again, I know,
but you won’t find me
waiting at your hole.
Roadrunner
How much farther
can you stretch your stress?
Take your taut chicken-neck pulse
then chill. Yesterday, you looked
over your shoulder, ran
without choosing to run
and when you stopped short
no one, not even you, knew.
Whale
What remains unseen
haunts us more
than that flash of black fin
as the water parts.
You surface only
to slip out of my hands
when you sink so deep
that it’s too risky to follow.
Watch that bobber drown,
then spring up, wobbling wildly
when it loses the life
to which it’s tethered.
Jackalope
You photoshop an effigy of yourself
onto places you’d like to visit
send postcards from everywhere
except where you’ve been
use some other number
to call the people you love.
When I finally trace you
a total stranger answers, asks
How’s he been?
Rough Dreams
Just when you thought it was safe, the cat
in the corner bats rattlesnakes across the room,
and your parakeet, free, sings off-key.
The man for whom you’ve secretly longed
moves closer, strokes your cheek, and nyuk, nyuk, nyuks
like one of the Three Stooges. Get up.
What’s that banging at the door?
A neighbor, with an invitation for your goat.
Main course, his mother-in-law’s windshield wiper blades.
While you negotiate who will be responsible
for the hoofprints on the hood—you, him, or the goat—
the phone rings.
It’s your brother, dead two years today,
wondering what you’re going to do
with the clothes still hanging
in the closet: a brown tweed jacket,
his two favorite shirts.
Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill
The last remaining Shaker at Pleasant Hill,
Sister Mary Settles, died in 1923.
One baritone sows overtones
of every register.
Brothers here.
Sisters there.
Simple Gifts
word for word
note for note
a’s and o’s shaped true
to the way they sang them.
He stamps their beat back
into the original floorboards.
Steps toward us with open arms,
broadcasting the smile of every Shaker
who ever danced in this hall.
Nods greetings to each guest on each bench
as he walks down the aisle, singing verses
in rhythm that works on us, row by row.
One by one we offer shy, tight smiles.
A woman in front moans along, monotone.
The couple beside me sways from side to side.
Costume. His rough woven vest is costume, I say,
but I watch two Shakers take his outstretched hands,
then two more, theirs, until the hundreds who we’re told
circled and whirled in this empty room grab hands, winding
their way around until we either find ourselves against the wall
or choose to join in.
My foot begins to tap,
longing to belong to this larger thunder.
Three miles away, a farmer lifts his head.
Karen Kraco
lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches high-school chemistry. Over the years she has alternated teaching gigs with stints as an editor and freelance writer. Her profiles, feature articles, and poems have appeared in local and regional publications, and she was co-editor and publisher of the poetry journal ArtWord Quarterly.