Poetry Winter 2016 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Joel Filipe
Alexander McCoy
Questions to Ask a Mountain
& other poems
Alexandra Kamerling
Prairie
& other poems
Debbie Hall
She Walks Into Starbucks Carrying a 2 x 4
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Patience
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
Sheet and Exposed Feet
& other poems
Melissa Cantrell
Collision
& other poems
Martin Conte
Skin
& other poems
AJ Powell
The Road to Homer
& other poems
Paul W. Child
World Diverted
& other poems
Michael Eaton
Remembrances
& other poems
Lawrence Hayes
Walking the Earth
& other poems
Daniel Sinderson
Like a Bit of Harp and a Far Off Twinkle
& other poems
Sam Hersh
Las Trampas
& other poems
Margo Jodyne Dills
Babies and Young Lovers
& other poems
Nicole Anania
To the Dying Man's Daughter
& other poems
Lisa Zou
Under the Parlor
& other poems
Hazel Kight Witham
Hoofbeat Heartbeat
& other poems
Margaret Dawson
Daylily
& other poems
James Wolf
An Act of Kindness
& other poems
Jane A. Horvat
Psychedelic
& other poems
Bill Newby
Touring
& other poems
Jennifer Sclafani
Hindsight Twenty Twenty
& other poems
Daniel Sinderson
Glued Together then Burst Apart, the Pain Between Our Teeth
We wake together and see ourselves
as fractions, infinite geometries
boiled into ratios of space and time—
locked eyes, dawn-warmed sky,
i-love-yous from phlegm-choked throats—like a simplified bit of crystal
where we hope to find a me and you and us,
but we know that somewhere else along this surface
a living dog is eating a dead one,
and somewhere else is our microwave
or uncountable stars choking on iron.
Even outside of time we are stuck here with everything else.
Even considering questions like ‘who is happier?’ and ‘what is true?’
living an examined life seems like a wash.
How can I live with you and love you and want you
while feeling dissolved—like Cantor’s Set or a sugar cube
drowned in black coffee. We wake together and see
how we become us
choking and in love
with a few bright slivers
and another clogged holy book paged with floods.
Snapshot Under Vesuvius
Chinese takeout half eaten.
Cat’s head half inside the box
behind us. Bed sheets
crushed and messy. Fingers gripped
and cast in ash.
Our clothes tossed off as the sun cracked.
Lost for a moment. Then scorched.
Cracking Open, I think of Dido;
Using My Flesh as Surface
to Bind some Sense of Me
as Mine in this
I saw it again, the drowning
everywhere. Inside, we are not one thing,
but an endless ascension of ever more total
disasters. We stay for
the show—the cheers the tears the bets—
like it’s not our ribcage in this dream
between the sphinxes teeth. A few years
between psychotic breaks and counting. I hear
those words too loudly sometimes—echoed through the theater
until my ears grow claws, until I want to eat the world away and into me
except I am already full and leaking and finished
with all those hallelujahs from the back row.
Imagine that you and I are alone
like everything else. Imagine that the water is high
above our heads in a wave. Imagine everything
is a shrieking mouth, a light, a blade, a perspective
crawling past the shadows into snow.
Like a Bit of Harp
and a Far Off Twinkle
I’m told it happens all the time
in Heaven after the parades pass—our hands
sucked up into prayer, our organs
opened or replaced. That’s where
the music comes from—not harps,
but all that living caked up inside us
cut out and torched each morning.
The newbies enter freshly scorched,
not knowing yet that rapture means
a careful and eternal incineration.
Even in Heaven, death is routine.
As here, where the sun dries us out.
Where we smoke too much and
lose our voices and our fathers
lose themselves
one popped cell at a time
where we wrinkle and burn
and scream and cut ourselves
out of ourselves—half wild half nothing—
and all the knives and gas and radiation
ever do is simmer against the edges
of each fresh day as we smolder.
Those Tooth-Bright Lights
Ahead of Us
From something sharp in us, our eyes water.
Our mouths open, our throats quake
a few cracked sentences to keep
these flimsy cities of ours from starving.
Still, we’re no good
as singers. What held us is leaving.
What holds us
today seems much the same. Lost time,
old skins, everything slinks away
until all that’s left is a summer’s eve of fireflies—
wet nights walking
through brush, chasing wisps
to catch a bit of light in our hands
and crush it—streaking guts
beneath our eyes, like burst stars;
killing for a symbol in the night.
Daniel Sinderson
is a high-tech mechanic and a happily married man. He writes often, deeply enjoys puzzles, still listens to punk music, and mostly wears pants out of consideration for others.