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
Barry W. North
The Molotov Cocktail
of the Deep South
I swore I would never
lie down with one of your kind,
and it was not even within
flying distance of possible
that I would ever let one of you
relive the slave days at my expense
by taking me from the rear,
although I must admit I had, on occasion,
used my vision of such a coupling
to amuse myself and others
with the image of a
modern-day wannabe aristocrat,
the color and texture of vanilla ice cream,
gone completely soft,
like so many of your tribe
have a tendency to do,
getting his rocks off
by mounting me from the posterior position,
in honor of his long departed heroes.
I pictured him
as a ludicrous caricature of his ancestors,
clad only in rolls of milky flab,
riding me, like one of his prized fillies,
while lashing my rump
with a tiny whip,
to match his annoying little node,
all the way to the finish line,
at which point,
wild-eyed and exuberant,
he raised his hand in victory,
as the Caucasian crowd,
overcome with generational nostalgia,
cheered for the triumphant return of privilege
as it was in the glorious slave and plantation days.
I must confess to you that
my unbridled enjoyment
in depicting of your people’s
moral corruption and physical debauchery
showed me how satiric ridicule of my own folk
might seem like great entertainment to certain
twisted members of your bloodline.
Then you,
white as a damn Ku Klux Klan robe,
came along, and
to hear my girlfriends tell it,
ruined everything.
Like a medicine man with a magic elixir,
they say you somehow managed to scramble
my little black circuit board.
They claim I am no longer myself
and with that I cannot argue.
I am so out of whack, at this point,
the only thing I know
is when I look at your face
I am struck colorblind
and at that mysterious
juncture inside my brain,
where animal meets human,
there is a fire raging,
sparking off boiling daydreams
of the two of us making what is still
the Molotov cocktail, here, in the deep South,
with me screaming,
like the fool I so clearly am,
as we burn old Dixie down.
The First Day
Today is the first day of the rest of your life. . .
—Charles Dederich, a reformed alcoholic and founder of Synanon.
The day after her
only daughter’s suicide,
she came out
of the upstairs bedroom,
dressed in white,
like a virgin bride instead
of a grieving mother
and now childless divorcee.
She hesitated at the top of the stairs,
and then slowly descended,
as though going once again
to unite with her man
and begin their life anew.
In an unexpected vision, she saw
the faces of her deceased parents
floating beneath her, their sparkling eyes
full of hope and love just as
they had been on her wedding day.
She stopped at the foot of the stairs,
stripped off all of her garments,
and trudged forward to the reality
waiting for her in the kitchen.
Inside the doorway, she paused
to take a few deep breaths,
and then started the ordeal.
With sponges, bleach, bucket, and mop
she cleaned the room for hours,
from ceiling to floor,
until, by mid-afternoon, the task was complete.
With her hands raw and bleeding,
she stood on the gleaming ceramic tile,
covered with her teenager’s insides,
her skin glistening
like the scales of a fish.
She left the kitchen,
went through the downstairs bedroom,
where her only child had been conceived,
entered the bathroom
and stepped into the shower.
She let the water flow over her
and watched what remained
of her fifteen-year-old daughter
swirl around and get
sucked down the bathtub drain,
at which she continued to stare until
she was looking at her three-year-old,
full of life,
waiting for her bathwater to disappear,
at which point, just like she always used to do,
she suddenly tossed her hip to the side,
flipped her hands out at shoulder height,
glanced up, and said:
“Look, mom, it’s all gone.”
All That Glitters
The trees at the edge of town
seek in vain to be heard
with every passing wind.
The crescent moon
and stunning array of stars
have not a single disciple
on the empty street,
but inside the pulsating nightclub,
women, wearing neon skirts
and perfume which smells like money,
sit cross-legged on high-backed stools,
sipping cocktails
not worthy of the name,
surrounded by men
whose clothes jingle
like pocket change when they move,
and whose eyes, when reflected
in the dazzling mirror behind the bar,
seem, at times, to flash
inside their heads like some sort of
genetic, next-generation bling
making its ghoulish debut
in the midst of a receptive crowd.
Thanks
Mom,
for the gift of life
because it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize Winner
to figure out that without it I would have been,
from the beginning of time
part of the black pall of absolute nothingness,
which, for some strange reason,
has just made Archibald MacLeish’s
stunning little work of art
The End of the World pop into my mind,
a gem, it occurs to me, I would never have had
the joy of reading for the first time,
or the pleasure of re-reading over the years
to remind myself that life is a circus
there is no way out of,
even if you try to play it safe
by being only a spectator.
And thanks, Dad,
for the unconditional love,
which I have carried with me
every single day of my seventy years,
like that little pocket knife
you always kept in your trousers
that seemed to be able to do more work
and get you out of more jams
than a truckload of specialty tools.
And thanks, God,
for letting us all die,
often in bizarre, unexpected, and brutal ways,
because without death,
life would just not seem so precious to us.
Funny how that works,
but I guess you would have to have your perspective
to fully appreciate the humor in it.
You Are Also What You Don’t Do
When my country went to war based on a lie,
I saw the face of my dear dead father
as he instructed me to always tell the truth.
When my country engaged in torture,
I thought about the astonishing irony
of every talk show host
and every concerned parent in America
condemning, with high moral indignation,
the act of bullying.
When my country said that the euphemism
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
had produced valuable results,
I wondered how it would be to
live in a world in which everyone believed
the end always justifies the means.
In spite of all that,
when my country violated its principles,
I did not take to the streets to protest.
Instead, I stayed in my comfortable
three bedroom house pretending
it was not being done in my name;
sat at my spacious dining room table,
enjoying the fruits of the land,
as though not a single thing had changed,
as though what was being
done on my property, somehow,
had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
Barry W. North 
is a seventy-one-year-old retired refrigeration mechanic. He was born and raised in New Orleans and presently lives with his wife, Diane, in Hahnville, Louisiana. Since his retirement in 2007, he has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, won the A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, and was recently named a finalist in the 2014 Lascaux Poetry Awards. He has had three chapbooks published. For more information please visit his website, www.barrynorth.org