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
Sarah B. Sullivan
Iris
—after Audre Lorde’s Coal
The indigo between violet and blue,
a setting on the field’s table.
There are many kinds of births.
How a bulb sprouts wings.
How a bee gathers pollen from the stamen.
Pollen births honey.
Like a bulb planted upside-down
curling itself around and toward the sun.
There are births wanted and unwanted,
in the middle of a field, under a table,
in whatever corner the queen is forced to squat.
Some births live in her belly,
bubbling like drowning fish. Others grow
beneath her feet, throw her off her heels,
like wild horses tired of their passengers.
Tired of being passengers.
A bulb is another kind of birth:
an iris blossoms into a bouquet.
She is indigo because she is an iris.
Take the pollen from the stamen for your queen.
Our Stone Wall
Froot Loops spatter the table—red orange yellow.
My grandson created the art when he raised his arms,
exclaimed, “Look, Bambi!” while pointing out the window.
I am lost in the kitchen sink, in this house with my family,
washing the same pans and mixing bowls
over and over again.
My Uncle, too, is lost. In shadowy solitude. Memory
has betrayed him. The words no longer emerge
in those seven jumbled tiles he once placed strategically.
Did it all start when we buried the dog, the cat,
our childhood loves, by the stone wall
where our home ended and our imaginations began?
My solitude a sapling rooted in a crack of the dilapidated wall.
My uncle’s loneliness: crumbling mortar.
My grandson never knew the dog, the cat.
He misses nothing, yet. He runs
out the door, into his yard, his imagination, to find Bambi.
The Froot Loop mess is left for us to wipe away.
With My Luck
Is anyone so special—
to suffer the worst outcome
in every given situation?
Is there a lily in the field
whose good fortune is less than its neighbors’
even if the shade shines darker upon it?
Life isn’t fair, my mother told me
when I was six, or maybe three—
A terrible wonderful truth.
—A tantrum.
—A turning away
to lie on the lawn and watch some ants
march by, lugging their loads
while others seemed to stroll.
So many lilies in the field.
A child wondering in the grass.
An ancient man wandering vacant streets.
Boston
after Joy Harjo’s Juno
This city is made of bricks, boats, boxes of tea.
The Atlantic to the east, the curling Cape.
The suburbs to the west.
It’s always been this way, since 1630,
because pilgrims who were rebels,
fleeing and invading, claimed this land,
molded it with cobblestones and puritans.
Once, a well-dressed silversmith
rode through the streets, hollering.
The bells tolled. They still do,
hourly. The dead
buried beneath their headstones—
which is a world below this world—
watch, judge, murmur of our ignorant follies, sins.
I follow my Freedom Trail,
past chic cafes, up Beacon Hill,
toward the gold-domed capital.
In the Gardens I see No-one’s native
son, head against the rough damp bark.
Too dark to see who he might be.
He does not open his eyes.
I keep staring as I walk, my head
turned back. The grass a muddy carpet.
The swans paddle by without looking.
Should I touch his shoulder—him
at the foot of the tree? Say I’m sorry
for those racist remarks yelled out at Fenway Park,
where our city’s hopes and spirits rally round?
And I think of all I barely know:
a barber’s dealings in a back room in Little Italy,
a fisherman scrubbing the wharf’s film from his skin,
a forgotten toddler staring at a broken TV,
the plucked-chicken smell of Chinatown sidewalks,
the violent violations of the Combat Zone,
the Irish pubs bursting with
false glee.
Disclosure
I want to tell you—my body,
how it looks to me,
how much I ate or didn’t,
how much I exercised or didn’t.
I did not not eat, or eat, to draw attention.
(I did not want you to notice.)
I needed to eat nothing. to eat everything.
To get rid of it all in any way possible.
This body is my loneliness,
a shameful secret.
But I want to share these fears
which have haunted me for years.
I cannot hold them alone.
I want to admit to you—my drinking,
now that it has stopped,
or I have stopped, or both.
I did not drink to draw attention.
(I did not want you to notice.)
I drank to be free to be me, to escape me.
Neither worked.
The drinking was more loneliness,
a shameful secret.
I dare not say how much I drank,
what I did and where and when.
But I need to share these secrets.
I cannot hold them alone.
I want to show you—my scars,
now that they have healed.
I did not carve them to draw attention.
(I did not want you to notice.)
I needed those cuts
those wounds that blood
to say what I could not say.
But they are my loneliness,
a shameful secret I regret
and do not regret.
I need these scars to remember.
I need to share these memories.
I cannot hold them alone.
Sarah Sullivan
, a resident of Northampton, MA, is a physician, poet, teacher, editor, lover of ocean and sun, partner, parent, friend, meditator, searcher. She is published in Switchgrass Review, Worcester Medicine Magazine, several anthologies, and her chapbook While it Happened: 30 Poems in November! 2016, and her next chapbook in press, Together, In Pieces: 30 Pomes in November! 2017.