Poetry Winter 2019 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Florian Klauer
Meli Broderick Eaton
Three Mississippi
& other poems
Andrea Reisenauer
What quiet ache do you wear?
& other poems
Alex Wasalinko
Two Dreams of Vegas
& other poems
AJ Powell
The Grammar Between Us
& other poems
Emma Flattery
Our Shared Jungle, Mr. Conrad
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
The Desert Cometh
& other poems
Sarah W. Bartlett
Unexpected
& other poems
Abigail F. Taylor
Jaybird by the Fence
& other poems
Brandon Hansen
Bradley
& other poems
Andy Kerstetter
The Inferno Lessons
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Space Walk
& other poems
Richard Cole
Perfect Corporations
& other poems
Susan Bouchard
Circus Performers
& other poems
Edward Garvey
Nine Songs of Love
& other poems
Mehrnaz Sokhansanj
Sea of Detachment
& other poems
Jeffrey Haskey-Valerius
Aftershock
& other poems
Claudia Skutar
Homage II
& other poems
Donna French McArdle
Knitting Sample
& other poems
Megan Skelly
Puzzle Box Ghazal
& other poems
Tess Cooper
Charged
& other poems
Greg Tuleja
Auschwitz
& other poems
Catherine R. Cryan
Raven
& other poems
Catherine R. Cryan
Feather Shell Twig
I can’t remember if crossing the marsh
came first or crossing the windy spit of sand.
Weakfish bones apearl, dune-grass soldiers, blue in sealight.
Run the phragmites-flattened trail,
ride home darkly on brother’s shoulders.
How often I have seen this arrangement: feather, shell, twig.
The things I’d fill my pockets with—
the more I gained, the less my weight.
The feather flung from the sky, shell from sea, twig
leftover from a lightninged family tree.
What more do you want to know?
How no one ever told me how to stand
in a way that fit
what I carried in my body? What I carried
in my body never fit my arms, too hollow, too thin,
too used to sweeping dove-winged messes
under the bed. And even that I had to do better,
do better, not better, do right.
My mother told me to stand up straight. I assume
she meant otherwise the bars inside, the devil’s pikes
would pierce the place where my wings should grow.
I did not accept anything of myself except for wrack.
Detritus of my fear or things I had to cast off
to grow bigger than squalls, marauding jaegers, tides, wracking me inside.
The flood lines marked in me, signs of what it would take to drown.
What of me would linger on the surface?
What of my exterior but words I’ve used
to keep you all at bay?
Have you ever noticed,
all that must be shed is not, and always what should stay.
Shedding feathers proves that I had wings.
Uncovered
When I was nine I played for days
that were, in memory, weeks
with a scab at the back
of my neck, at the nape,
under hair the shortest
of any girl in my class.
Chicken-pox leftover, sure.
Until high in the arena at Notre Dame,
in the mezzanine.
And I loved the way
the new word sounded,
loved my sister, so graduated,
meridian in our familial cylinder,
loved my kinship’s momentary concurrence
in this place remote from our righthand coast
and so who could blame me
for my absentminded excoriation?
Such pomp. Such circumstance.
I scraped the scab free.
In my hand, it wiggled legs
from a swollen body. I dropped it, afraid
that someone would see not it
but the flinch.
It crawled beneath the seat ahead, fed,
spiderish in a cavernous space.
I never told.
Those the first notes of my ostinato,
a palilalial life and too close
to exposure of a sort I couldn’t afford.
Shroud the startle
as doggedly as the tick that cleaves.
If scars uncovered become parasites,
then scrape off the scab where the hollow beneath
is not quite flesh, not quite blood,
near to liquid, lava-like, neither fire nor stone.
Carry me, then, into the cavern,
the crevices, the interspaces.
Cut me a kerf and let me climb in.
Cecropia, Polyphemus, Luna
Like the three kings, they came from afar.
Shadow puppets at twilight.
Someone must be dangling them from strings,
they drop and bounce so in the backlit air.
The desert of suburbia requires
provisions
if you’re meant to cross
and endure
its incalculable expanse.
The pheromone that summons
goes undetected
by the human sense—
no sight, no smell, no sound we know,
no way of knowing
if you’re not a moth.
Through the screen door I watch
their juddering dance above the yew hedge.
I am ten years old this July
and in daylight watch truculent cardinals
bolt the Taxus berries
and I take their cues. It is my job
to sweep the ones they drop,
red outside green like reversed pimento olives
or like me. I burn and mutter and wait
for the night’s evanescors. I am bellicose
of late, and abashed.
I am youngest, feel weakest, but only
think I fear darkest.
It has been a year of not
being told.
There is familial action in the night air.
Distances covered, at question
retrievals undertaken and assurances received.
I believe. The silk moths promise to be there
each night and heed the call if the wind is honest.
Easy to tell the females from males
if you know what to look for.
I thought, then, that this was always the way:
the ladies’ abdomens extend,
the boys’ antennae rise erect and vain.
Always ladies and boys when in truth it was about
girls and gentlemen.
It is not the porch light that draws them:
it’s been shut. It’s the call
of something pungent and dispersed.
How do I accentuate their consequence,
these incarnate things of nearly nothing weight?
If they were asking of me, I did not hear.
I’d follow their star
of wonder if I knew
the compass point to choose.
I don’t know who the gifts they bore were for,
but I secreted some away
and wish all this time on
that I’d stolen
their dromedary wings.
Raven
I practiced calling from my own unfeathered throat.
My mother remembered how angry
he was, the man who fed the bears
horsemeat outside Onchiota.
The vultures came, the dainty fox.
Too pale to recognize totems
when he read them aloud, I saw only what I wanted.
Crows. A dark difference altogether.
We would have counted one for sorrow, three for a wedding,
had we known. Misplacing the middle joy.
My father, cautious with gifts, bought me a bearclaw,
jasper and turquoise on silver. Around his neck—
Hibernian and Teuton sides
of the same polished, august coin -
a cross, medal miraculous, proof of rank and name.
Quicksilver under his collar, metal his substitute for a river gone to ice.
In the dark, on a ladder, cawing and croaking and ruffling
feathers (all twenty-five hundred and hundreds more), flexing wing, arching claw,
destroying a shadow already invisible in the night.
The ravens picked the bones clean during absences of the bears. My imitations,
eight rungs high, required painted wings.
Echo, Test
I call myself sixth daughter, fifth sister to each sister,
aunt to five, wary and unknowing
that it all begins and ends with one small heart.
I say eighth of eight as if my heart could beat
for yours, small sister, the always-infant, tiny-hearted,
who ought be older than I. Perhaps I am you grown.
We were all the praying sort then. We were asked
to offer intentions, such little intentions
as eight-year-olds are capable and I wanted us to pray for you,
dead before I was born, and the priest asked if I meant
for your short life or my long one.
In the womb, your heart lay high in your chest, so large
compared with the rest of you, so small in a warm-aired world, beating
as a hummingbird’s in summer. It was meant to slow, like all hearts do.
In ten years the doctors learned all they would need to keep
my newborn heart beating had it required it. The defect of your heart
was that it came too soon.
My heart has grown, as all hearts do, to the size of my fist,
clenched still at the thought.
I could make the tedious list of things you will never do.
I am conscious of it at times—capping a pen, stifling a sneeze,
furtively examining
a picture crooked in a mirror frame.
My sisters, all elder, say they remember only red hair
and cries
and I remember nothing,
youngest child stripped of tears.
Three decades more and comes my turn; they call the test an echo, and it is.
The technician tips the screen and I can see the open and close
of the valve, hear the rhythm, unmistakable,
unimagined.
With a catch of breath the pulsing jumps then starts again.
I fill my lungs and empty them.
Catherine R. Cryan
loves old tools, new pencils, owl pellets, and the Oxford comma. Her poems have been published by Broadsided Press, The Outrider Review, The Comstock Review, The Poet’s Billow, Evening Street, and others. She lives in Rhode Island, juggling the various roles of writer, science educator, farmer, college sports statistician, and parent of young twin sons.