Poetry Winter 2019 fiction all issues
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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
Andy Kerstetter
If God Made Adam from Snow
The children, those chilly Michelangelos
shaping their fresh take
on imago dei with winter’s
whitewash would be validated
most of all—they always knew
they nailed the first man’s sleek physique
with fine material, more supple than the dust
He might have used—some impurities
like splinters of ice inevitable.
Besides, what use is there for dust except
whirling through prairie tornadoes, choking
coal-miners’ throats, obscuring the name
on our ancestor’s bust or slipping through
these fingers, stiff with grief?
Dust offers no life, only shrouds.
Snow can cleanse, insulate, bury,
beautify—boreal rouge on the face of flame-
frayed shells of domesticity—
what is it but life suspended
in matrices of captive light, awaiting
the proper time to unravel
their frozen coils,
so when spring returns our bodies
dive into the elemental
sludge from which we’re free
to freeze and form ourselves anew.
Resting by a Stream
on a Summer Hike
In the shade of cottonwoods, I return
to my old coolness on a log while this
Monarch flutters from one tuft
to another in search of the source
of a sweetness neither of us can see.
On the other side
of this frothing mountain stream,
I see a stony shore burdened with weeping
willows where a pair of magpies roost,
vanishing beyond the boughs, wings
flashing blue. I take off my shoes,
hitch up my pants and step in, intent
to find out what the magpies know.
But the water’s bite is cold and sharp
rocks knife my heels. I stagger, fall, catch
myself on a branch and bungle back
to safety. Recalling younger crossings,
I wonder how my feet have weakened,
skin flinching from the kiss
of ice, freezing my efforts
of exploration.
Perhaps I lost my nerve
along the path, stashed beneath
a toadstool or mistaken for a nut,
taken for a squirrel’s winter cache.
Maybe the lightness of my child
body let me float over stones, this current
heaviness pressing harder from higher,
ossified strata driving the spikes deeper.
I guess it’s just my flesh has learned
all it needs, bearing knowledge
of enough crossings to know
the path on the other side
leads to a stand of aspens,
hiding a fawn waiting
for his mother to return
with a mouthful of foxgloves.
Liminal Spaces
1.
The hiss of the closing door
on this bus from here to who knows
where is the decompression
from this state of strangulation, inter-
personal manipulations: sunrays
dredging my riverbed, startling
dark-dwelling troglodytes
into foreign luminescence.
2.
Standing on the bank
of our leaving, your voice is
a river where I walk
on an old wooden dock, breaking
under my feet as I climb
into a driftwood raft, baling floodwaters
as I’m swept into your currents.
All I can do is keep my head
above the mire.
3.
Some pagan saint once told us heaven lies
a foot above the head of every man.
I should have known that angels lived
in my father’s liquor cabinet, the edge
of the cliff I couldn’t reach and this still
life hanging over our hotel bed, watching
from bowls of oranges swollen with sacred
juices, forever waiting for the one
who will split their flesh and release
a sugared baptism on our failed sacrament.
4.
They say, inside cocoons, that larvae must dissolve
themselves to fuel their necessary transformations,
soup soaking into imaginal discs, concretizing
adulthood around the bits of childhood that kept.
I guess it’s no surprise then, that, stepping off this bus
into haloes of stinging sand, this straightjacket
skin rips open and from my fingertips, forehead
and chest fly forth clouds of crimson
moths, spiraling straight into the sun.
Grounding
When I tell her about my blood-
-and-shadow dreams, my mystic friend
tells me that I am
too open to the other
world, that I am
too comfortable being
lost in astral fog, Neptune
presiding over my neuroses
like a drunk lifeguard falling
asleep while his charges
flounder in the mire.
She prescribes a ritual
of grounding: first, I need to seek
some earth on which to stand—
I think I’d like a patch of unworked
turf, maybe deep moss by a stream
beneath a gnarled beech—then plant
my bare feet firmly in the dust
and think about light:
a white ball of it piercing
my skull, slipping behind
my eyes, down my throat, between
my ribs, gathering negative
energy like roses sprouting
from dry bones till it bursts
from the soles of my feet, bearing its bouquet
through humus and clay
to some blind rift to wither
in its own darkness.
Then, imagine: new brightness rising
from Earth’s bones into mine, spreading
through marrow and vein till I’m flush
with primeval simplicity
of spirit, able to withstand
assault from legions
of the soul.
It all seems too good
to be true—I am loath
to believe, till I see the roots
of spirits speaking themselves
through the stones from my bones
to the center, my swaying body
tethered to truth like a tree
near running water, stooping gladly
in the muck.
The Inferno Lessons
Search teams are combing through
the ashes in your mouth
trying to find bathtubs or beds
where people might have taken
the tongue, also a fire, which left
no way to escape a world
of evil among the parts
of the body. All lost
some and some lost all.
The whole body sets the course
of one’s life on fire—wine glasses clinking
in a different bedroom, burning up
and down at once—take off your shoes
on holy ground: I lost you
long before the light of day
revealed your work for the fire
that it is—the strands
of your hair curling like spiders
baptized in the Holy Spirit, testing
the quality of your work, losing
yourself in your tongue-
flame, tongues of flame
lapping up your tears before
they fell—your ruined fingers fused
with blackened bedposts, kindred vines
reduced to elemental similarities.
I can’t pry you apart.
Andy Kerstetter
is a writer living in Idaho’s Wood River Valley, birthplace of Ezra Pound and death-place of Ernest Hemingway, where he freelances for magazines. He’s worked as a journalist since earning a degree in writing from Geneva College in his home state of Pennsylvania. He has recently begun publishing his poetry, which so far has appeared in the anthology Gravitas. Andy hopes to pursue an MFA in poetry in 2020.