Poetry Winter 2017 fiction all issues
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Cover Thought-Forms
Laura Apol
On My Fiftieth Birthday I Return
& other poems
Jihyun Yun
Aubade
& other poems
Jamie Ross
Red Jetta
& other poems
Sarah Blanchard
Carolina Clay
& other poems
lauren a. boisvert
Save a Seat for Me in the Void
& other poems
Faith Shearin
A Pirate at Midlife
& other poems
Helen Yeoman-Shaw
Calling Long Distance
& other poems
Sarah B. Sullivan
Iris
& other poems
Timothy Walsh
Metro Messenger
& other poems
Gabriel Spera
Scratch
& other poems
Zoë Harrison
Pattee Creek
& other poems
AJ Powell
Blanket
& other poems
Alexa Poteet
The Man Who Got off the Train Between Madrid and Valencia
& other poems
Marcie McGuire
Still Birth
& other poems
Kim Drew Wright
Elephants Standing
& other poems
Michael Jenkins
The Garden Next Door
& other poems
Nicky Nicholson-Klingerman
Costume
& other poems
Doni Faber
Man Moth
& other poems
M. Underwood
In Other Words
& other poems
Carson Pynes
Diet Coke
& other poems
Bucky Ignatius
Something Old, . . .
& other poems
Violet Mitchell
Deleting Emails the Week After Kevin Died
& other poems
Sam Collier
Nocturne in an Empty Sea
& other poems
Meryl Natchez
Equivocal Activist
& other poems
William Godbey
A Corn Field in Los Angeles
& other poems
Violet Mitchell
No One Lives at 1962 McCollum Road
wraparound
porch ties up the
stench of smoke
and 8x10s of me
and my brother
and cousin Kevin,
one from every
year but now
upstairs—
a ghost smoking Marlboros
next to the lady who
rented the top floor,
gone since August
and fled the Ohio farmhouse—
brought some whiskey to
the attic washed-out lemon
party—sour but real—
for Grandfather Rusty’s strict mother:
sworn Catholic, first
owner of the house,
rudely sat on his lighter
forgetting things could still
be solid—
doorknob spins, Kevin
crashes with
extra meds in hand
Rusty tells his life story
ends different
every time I ask
Deleting Emails the Week After Kevin Died
Sympathy note from a distant
great uncle who plays bass:
Know that I am thinking about you
and playing as much music as I can
for you right now. I can hear his
strings stretch and swirl in notes
I don’t know how to read. In his
hands, there’s a blueberry smoothie
with lavender foam the same shade
as my hair. The straw is too small,
but he’s trying hard to balance his
breath with the ground-up plants.
I wish I could draw on the bricks
of my building the way he can play.
I could remember the sound of just,
and forget the piercings in the crux.
[worked hard]
|
worked hard |
metal |
sprinkles |
|
lungs |
instead of |
nutrients |
|
failed |
moons |
like us |
|
spewing |
tulips |
not |
|
there was |
no |
difference |
|
what |
you |
gave |
Remington
I sit with my inherited
typewriter under rainbow
strung lights framing a frost-bitten
window. My fingernails chip
and rip when they catch
between the dusty keys.
The number 1 is missing
and at first I thought I broke it
but then I learned old Remingtons
don’t have 1s, so people
just used a lowercase “L”
instead. The stains on my fingers
from the ribbon smudge everything
I touch and I wonder if like
Midas I can turn the cat into
ink. The jags in the ribbon
older than my mother remind me
of teeth: baby teeth riding
the subway, yellowing teeth
hooked in my clenched jaw,
a baby tooth I found in a creaky
chest from McCollum Road that
I flung away because who
even knows whose it was.
A Wednesday I Can’t Remember
“The heart lies to itself because it must.” —Jack Gilbert
The sale
sticker on
the shampoo bottle is crinkled from
water-dry-water-dry and
reminds me of a sun if it had
a big
“1.99”
painted on it. The last of bacon
is a puddle of grease
and unhealthy burnt fat bits swimming
in the
American
Dream. At work, a ghost scrap of lint has its
toes trapped in the black frame
of the window. It shakes in the breeze,
forcib-
ly dancing.
Some sort of machine hiding in the
walls regulates the air
and washes the silence over with
an on-
going wave
that we filter into as silence.
When I looked down at my therapist’s
shoes, trying to avoid
her eyes
as mine dripped,
I said we have the same water bottle.
There’s glitter on the floor
from a dollar-store hat that
shed its
skin once the
cake was all gone. Dark brown lipstick on
a girl’s lips are perfect
until she opens her mouth, when you
can see
where the pen-
cil ends and her skin that hardly spends any time in the
light begins. A dryer
sheet fell out of my clean
clothes, and
a tangled
grayed silver USB cord is there
with a thin black sock that isn’t mine.
Violet Mitchell
is a Denver-based writer and artist. She is working toward a B.A S. in cognitive literary studies and a B.A. in creative writing, both from Regis University. Her work has been published in Loophole, Flourishing, Across the Canyon, and Who’s Who. Her poems about McCollum Road are experimental free verse that explore her relationship to her late Grandfather and her family dynamics.