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
Jane Schulman
Final Crescent
Think of me on bruise-blue nights when
moons wane to wisps
and you scan the eastern sky.
Think of me as a crocus
cracking through matted leaves.
For I was born on ebbing days
of Adar, when winds blew out-of-tune
and the moon a final crescent.
My soul makes its way through
the world with hesitant footfalls.
Two of our sons were born in the month
of Nissan. Prankish as lion cubs,
hearts of honeycomb and voile.
I know my soul more by what it is not.
When Krupa Played Those Drums
Sometimes I can’t think in metaphors.
Rocks are rocks. Tumors are tumors.
Time in close present.
10 tomorrow, CT scan.
I lie in bed. Listen for signs of life.
A cough. A snore.
By 2 AM clack of Dad’s walker,
slipper-shuffle to the kitchen
for bourbon on ice.
9 AM He falls. I boost
from behind. He yanks
with still-strong arms
and he’s on the sofa.
Victory when we don’t
need to call 9-1-1.
9:45 He slips on his loafers.
Back in motion. We’re off for the test..
5 PM He leans back in his chair,
stares at a black TV.
No Jeopardy. No C-Span.
Not even Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo.
What is it you think about, Dad,
while you sit with the TV off?
I go back to the good years
when I’d just met your Mom
and Gene Krupa played those drums
till three in the morning.
He doesn’t ask about
the CT scan; I don’t say.
Krupa, the way
he beat out those heartbeats.
Overheard on the F Train
My iPod snatched from an unzipped purse,
I’m left to listen, overexposed
to snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
Ripped from my private universe,
of Dylan, Marley, Billy Joel
when my iPod’s snatched from an unzipped purse.
“Haven’t you heard, Karl’s cancer’s worse,
melanoma misdiagnosed.”
Snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
“Leah just lost her job as a nurse
and her crazy ex-husband’s out on parole”
now my iPod’s snatched from an unzipped purse
“My daughter’s pregnant with her fourth.
You’d think she’d never heard of birth control.”
Snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
A random act, what appeared a curse,
scattered totems of lives unposed.
My iPod snatched from an unzipped purse.
Gift of snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
Back and Forth
Dad hurled words across the table at Frank
and me, empty hollow volleys. We’d toss back
streptococcus or carnivorous.
Little by little, I quit relying on words, chose
near-silence instead. Syllables jagged crystals
spit from my mouth. Starts and stops
like stutterers’ struggles to let loose sounds.
Still I’m tongue-tied, weighing each word
for heft, holding each up to the light.
No wonder my work now is shaping baba
and mima into words, smoothing a child’s stutter,
releasing the “gorilla voice” in a boy who only whispers.
I strain to hear my own still voice beside
the black-ring doves calling back and forth
from the cottonwoods along the river.
After
I used to talk real good. I used
to tell the best stories, the funniest jokes.
But now. I’m shut down, trapped
in my own head. Since the stroke,
I know what I want to say but words
get tangled and twisted all up. I think
“coyote” and “crocus” comes out.
“Excited” turns into “extinct.”
My friends don’t have time to wait for me
to spit out words. They keep filling in
empty spaces. Half the time, I’d rather
just be by myself—rocking and thinking,
rocking and thinking. I’m a man of Babel,
punished for my pride. Unravelled.
Jane Schulman
is a poet and short story writer. She also works as a speech pathologist in a Brooklyn public school with young children with autism and significant cognitive delays. Jane has been a featured poet in local venues and taught senior citizens to write their lives in poetry, fiction, and memoir.