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
Faith Shearin
Jonestown
I was a child, so it was the children I thought of,
in a remote commune, off the coast of South America,
forced to call Jim Jones father. Evenings,
when my own father took off his business suit to drink
scotch and watch the news, I listened to the stories
of disobedient Jonestown children, forced
to spend the night at the bottom
of wells, or locked in plywood boxes;
I knew they were learning to be compliant.
Anyone who tried to escape the cult
was drugged; the Jonestown children lived in huts
woven from Troolie Palm and many
suffered fevers; before they drank
the Kool-Aid laced with cyanide they were called
from bed, during an exercise called white nights,
asked to line up and swallow a cup
of juice without asking questions.
I was asked to line up too, all the time, at school.
I was a child, so it was the children I thought of,
and they were the first to die, opening their mouths
for parents or nurses, in a pavilion, in the middle
of a jungle, in the trembling tropical afternoon.
A Pirate at Midlife
At midlife, Stede Bonnet grew tired of his wife
and children so he built a ship with a library,
named it Revenge. He left behind
his sugar plantation in Barbados, swaying
under the sun, and became a pirate
though he knew nothing of sailing.
This is midlife: the nagging wife, the plantation
growing thirsty at noon. Bonnet was a terrible
pirate but he did meet Blackbeard
and, for a moment, was his partner,
which involved walking around
his hero’s deck in a nightshirt, recovering
from a lost battle by reading a book.
Bonnet died two years after he went to sea
but, before he was hanged, he learned
to fire cannons, quit paying his crew,
realizing, finally, that money made them lazy.
He was pardoned for awhile by Governor Eden
who lived in the town beside my grandfather’s cottage,
just beyond the river of my childhood, and I
liked the drawings of Bonnet in my storybook of pirates
with his fancy jacket and powdered wig. I knew
nothing yet of middle age, of the desire
for excitement before death. I used my crayons
to decorate a picture of Bonnet’s children:
waving to him from fields of sugar, while he
raised a Jolly Roger and floated away.
1901 Mourning Portrait
of Michael Fitzgibbons
after the daguerreotype
I can make out a fence and two bare trees behind
the coffin which has been opened and propped upright
so the man inside stands, one last time,
beside his wife who is still young, squinting
into the future, with her hair tied in a knot,
a baby in her arms. The older children
are windblown and one turns her face
towards something unseen, outside the frame,
while her brother looks steadily into the distance,
unsmiling, choked by a tie. There is white
behind the dead man’s head, and white
on the collars of his children; the baby’s dress
is so white her mother holds her tightly
to keep her from floating away.
In 18th Century Britain
It was fashionable for owners of country estates
to have a hermit reside in their garden grotto:
unwashed, hair long. He was paid
to go barefoot, or recite poetry for party guests,
asked to sit in silence at a desk in a hut
with a skull, a book, an hourglass. The hermit
was supposed to embody melancholy
in his druid costume, with his unclipped
fingernails, and he lived in solitude among
ponds and flower beds, his presence unmanicured.
Gardens became less geometric, more free-form,
and a hermit was hired to live in a state
of contemplation, at the edge of a deep woods,
near the shed with its rakes and spades,
beyond ladies in pale silk gowns, taking tea.
Deceased Child With Flowers
after a memento mori
In this nineteenth century mourning portrait a child
has died and now lies in a formal bedroom beneath
wreaths of flowers. What we see is a face
on a pillow—brown hair, long eyelashes—
and it is as if the tiny body is becoming a garden
of white irises and baby’s breath, as if grief
has erupted in blossoms and climbed the headboard,
as if the flowers in a nearby meadow
blew through a window and took root in this
mattress which is as soft as earth. There is
no sign, anymore, of fever or infection,
worry or doctors. The medicines, whatever
they were, vanished from the bedside table,
and now the child is becoming the flowers
which are also temporary: cut,
unable to drink, their petals tender.
Faith Shearin
’s books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), and Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize). She has received awards from the NEA and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poetry has been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. Shearin’s short stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Frigg, Meridian, and The Atticus Review. She lives with her husband, her daughter, and two dogs, in a cabin on top of a mountain in West Virginia.