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
Brandon Hansen
A Bolt in Friday
When I palmed the spider on your mirror
we looked at the crossed legs and single tear
of all its fluids dripping
down the track of the biggest
line in my palm, and you said,
Jesus, use a paper towel next time.
But that was years ago. On Friday
we took turns dangling a dead mouse,
squeezed from its airlocked bag
and thawed in a bowl of warm water,
in front of your ex-girlfriend’s pet snake,
Waffle, who struck twice before plucking
its little body from the tweezers,
and hugging it tight.
On Friday I learned my old friend
Bradley killed himself—Bradley,
with whom I drew stick figure
death scenes in sixth grade study hall
every day, with whom I had not talked
since he moved away
when we were sophomores, maybe juniors.
You drove us to Echo Lake to wash
the dust of lonesome away—the whole bumpy ride,
I saw in my mind’s eye the fates
of stick figures arrowed through, napalmed,
thrown from mountains, eaten by snakes. But
I could hardly see Bradley. I could hardly see
Bradley even when I closed my eyes
as we dove into the lake,
I could hardly see Bradley even
as we smacked the drunk mosquitoes
from our dewy skin, even when, near dusk,
we watched a largemouth bass like a football inhale a bluegill
no bigger than our palms—which, in that moment,
I almost asked if you’d want to clasp together,
like we had once, years ago, before our life un-happened,
and we were so quiet to each other. I wanted
to clasp our palms, red with stolen blood,
so as not to lose you.
Tandem
When you sleep just feet from the river,
the sound, like a rambling confession,
is all you hear. And tonight,
all you see is weak moonlight, triple-filtered
through the clouds, the moth-littered window,
and the curtain of hair she lets down before bed.
Stargazers all your lives, this camper,
built by her grandfather, is a canopy you’re
unused to. You often joke
about getting a hotel room at the Hampton
down the street just to see what it’d be like,
but, pragmatists all your lives, you never do it.
And—something seems especially real about sleeping
in the same bed—even a big one. When you two rode tandem
on a bike she found, leaning against a stop sign somewhere,
with the necklace of a note reading “Free if you fix me!”
draped from its frame, you peddled like a mouse and watched
the muscles of her upper-back work the whole way
as she steered you. You hardly noticed an entire, winking lake unfurl to your left.
When you sat, hips tandem, jammed into each other
on a wooden swing at some trendy bar that your mutual friend’s friends,
who you love, but do not understand at all,
wanted to go to, you said strange things for hours
like—Oh, I heard we were supposed to be able to see
Mercury tonight, but these string lights on the balcony will have to do—
and, then, unlike now,
as you lay miles from each other on the mattress,
warm from the same heat beneath her grandfather’s quilt,
you weren’t shy about being strange at all.
Silence rounds the corner to silence,
in the night sky’s spare counterglow you barely see
her hands, clasped before her face,
and the residual soot of your campfire
in the cracks of her strong fingers,
and you love them.
You open your mouth wide just then
to say something—but you realize
you look like a fish.
Soul Call
Is that you? Is that you,
bounced image through the slatted windows
off the wide-cracked mirror and cast
upon the white, white wall, dotted
by the thumbtacked holes which I will
need to fill soon, where pictures
of friends and of you
used to hang, tiny holes in the landscapes
behind us, and yet over our heads?
Old televisions shut down the way
I imagine the universe collapsing, a sharp,
electric crack, a wink of light, a folding unto itself.
When sleep paralysis grabs me, it feels
the same way. My inner light clicked off,
a paradigm shift—I am an unshut eye
watching you.
I have this problem when I’m so tired
I fall asleep straight on my back—the nightmare
is in my spine, always. The first time,
I was 14. We talked about different kinds
of first times once, beneath a little tree doing its best
against the sun in a park. Like you might say
of all firsts—honestly, that shit
can fuck you up forever.
I hate to lie on my back, but I did
that day with you in the mottled shade.
I hate that I pulled the pictures down,
pinched and pulled the tacks. The groove
of their tiny handles haunted my thumb all day.
I hate that I can’t move; I hate the electric, phantom
tingling, I hate these bending ribs, I hate
that someone’s standing on my chest—I hate
that I can’t tell if it’s you.
Baby Blue Flashing Spoon
pinching the thin arch of its treble hook,
she lays the lure flat in your outstretched hand
like an heirloom.
All night you fish the Au Train
with the borrowed lure, which flashes back
even the particle glow of the streetlight on the old overpass,
where wooden bridges creak quietly beneath the concrete
ceiling of a highway constructed above them, meant
to hold more than an occasional horse and wagon, or
a load of split maple, or the sap that oozes down the bark,
and sometimes nosedives into the tumbling river below.
Night stretches—what is time, again? Somewhere
in the casting of your spoons you two went quiet,
are comfortable that way—when did you learn that trick?
When did you two learn to live in a city, by the way—
even a small one? A mist-carrying breeze off the river
wraps around you both. You shift sand
under your toes and stand just a little closer together.
With her borrowed baby blue flashing spoon
you pull old summers from the river. You pull dinosaur toys
like fossils from your old sandbox, you pull your dad’s rusty
socket wrenches and even his old impact drill,
which whirs a bit before going to sleep.
You pull a football helmet in by the facemask,
and throw it back. You pull in your old dog’s
chain collar, and another, and another. You pull in numerous
little plastic bottles of your mother’s vodka, hidden
amidst the cobwebbed baby clothes in her bedroom closet,
which you unhook and drop in the sand beside you,
but you don’t mind. You pull in handfuls of spent, wet cigarettes
from the bathroom sink, from the toilet; you pull in stolen
twenty-dollar bills that smell like grass you cut, leaves you raked.
You pull in orange pill bottles, from which
you dump the layered sediment of dust, mold, ashes, and dog hair
of your home. But, standing there, the whistle
of spinning line and the cold waves on both
your ankles, you don’t mind. Where did you
learn that? Standing next to her, you spend the night
dragging in the oldest things beside her casting form,
and you don’t know how—but you don’t mind at all.
Bradley
what a strange and fitful dream it’s been.
Once, I half-stepped on a toad, realized
it wasn’t a pinecone or tired leaf
too late. Half eviscerated in the grabbing dirt,
it flailed its arms weakly. It did not feel good.
I was with our friend, who you may remember,
and she yelled at me to put it out of its misery.
I grabbed a rock bigger than my hand
and crushed its prone body. When I lifted
it up, our friend, eyes through splayed fingers,
said, do it again!
but there was only thin liquid on the rock’s belly—
no toad in sight. Our friend said—
Oh. I think we’re good.
God—what else has happened?
I nearly lost a finger in shop class—
bandsaw.
But, you were there for that, weren’t you?
Yes—you helped clean up the blood I dripped
through the sawdust, the hallway carpet,
and the fresh-waxed floors, all the way
to the nurse’s office. That’s one of the last things
I remember of you, actually. As friends do
in those days, you vanished over the summer.
Years now, and I meant to write you.
And in our hometown newspaper it says
it’s too late. This is what happens
when you aren’t careful—you lose things.
Toad in the forest, sensation in the tip
of my pointer finger. And, well—
you and I would draw senseless, violent things
in sixth grade study hall—all the way
into high school. We’d trade stick-figure slasher
comics in the hallway, we’d laugh
about what happened in last night’s South Park.
Here it is: since you’ve killed yourself,
I’ve learned that the world is not, by default, good,
and violence is not a streak in the dark—it is not rare enough to be funny.
Brandon Hansen
is from a village named Long Lake. He can affirm that the lake is, indeed, long. He also writes.