Poetry Winter 2020 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Paula Reed Nancarrow
Morning Coffee
& other poems
Jill Burkey
Mala
& other poems
Oak Morse
Boys Born out of Blues
& other poems
Beatrix Bondor
Engine Ode
& other poems
Monique Jonath
a mi sheberach
& other poems
Lisa Rachel Apple
Bounty
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Human Condition
& other poems
Kirsten Hippe-Rychlik
and we are echoes
& other poems
Devon Bohm
Forgiveness
& other poems
Jeddie Sophronius
I Rest My Mother Tongue
& other poems
John Delaney
Poem as Map
& other poems
Elizabeth Bayou-Grace
Fire in Paradise
& other poems
Monaye
In Utero
& other poems
Michelle Lerner
Ode to Exhaustion
& other poems
William French
I Have Never Been
& other poems
Josiah Patterson Wheatley
Coeur de Fleurs
& other poems
Karo Ska
womb song
& other poems
Robyn Joy
Sisyphus
& other poems
Han Raschka
Love Language
& other poems
Rebbekah Vega-Romero
The Memory in My Pinky
& other poems
Gilaine Fiezmont
Europe, too, Came from Somewhere Else
& other poems
Scott Ruescher
At the Childhood Home of Ozzy Osbourne
& other poems
Emily R. Daniel
Visitation Dreams
& other poems
Lindsay Gioffre
Toxicodendron Radicans [Sonnet 1]
& other poems
Lisa Rachel Apple
Bounty
As if lynching’s strange fruits and the rapes that devour
dates and the serial killers popping their victim’s
eyeballs like grapes weren’t bad enough I know
now there is violence even in this vegetarian’s
kitchen. The world makes monsters of us all. I too
must cast my breadcrumbs into the flowing bodies
of water for even I have peeled the eyes off a potato,
gnawed on an ear of corn, broke through the smooth
skin of a plum and carelessly bruised an apple. I’m sorry
to say I have crunched through heads of lettuce and, with
pleasure, slurped the juice that pools on the flesh of an overripe
peach. I know now it’s true: no one really gets through
life without doing damage. Just yesterday—let me confess
to you this one more—just yesterday my incisors sliced
through a mild-mannered artichoke’s bland, blameless
Heart.
Shrugging Jesus
Whose arms you think
Are open to you but
Really he’s saying,
Boy, I don’t know. Who
Did do the dishes last night?
Shrugging Jesus says, I’ve never
Seen a less lovely sunset, upon looking
At your painting,
But has no more specific critique.
He wants to play in the
Waves but not be
Photographed doing so. He wants
To adopt a dog but oh, too much,
The responsibility.
Shrugging Jesus will recycle if
The pickup is curbside, will compost
If he’s passing on the road
To the farmer’s market drop-off. He’ll deliver
A sermon on your soul, shepherd
The offering money into his hand-sewn pockets,
Give it all to the bum who was
Yesterday picking scraps from Murphy’s
Garbage, today strewn out
On the corner, asleep and half
A man. Not because he’s good.
But because oh, the weight
Of those coins
was too much
For shrugging Jesus
to carry.
Unprimed
After Unprimed Canvas 1944-N No. 2 by Clyfford Still
They used to sketch on cave walls,
bump of rock forming the hump
of a buffalo’s back. Slapping
bloody handprints onto the stone
to celebrate a successful hunt.
Centuries later, on church ceilings,
so eager to create they’d paint
over what was already there.
The rust-colored stain of hundreds
of winters worth of water damage
became an angel’s crown. A clot
of paint in a corner became a spire on heaven’s castle.
Now, people gravitate
towards only the primed canvases,
gliding past the rooms of shell mosaics
arranged on driftwood, not even glancing
at the shovel suspended from the ceiling.
But in one corner of the room
hangs an unprimed canvas. Deep, splotchy green
it challenges, who declared our surface
must be smooth even as our souls are cracked?
People stand and stare at the sterile and bright
seascape next to it as all the while it dares you to look,
whispering, who says
we cannot love
what is raw?
City Folks
1
We are city folks,
all of us,
waiting for the deer to cross our path.
We are,
all of us,
slightly in love with and slightly afraid
of their tangle of horns, umber skin,
suppressed muscles and cautious eyes.
We clump on the path as they
pass—nose in air and nose to tail—
single file, orderly, and silent—the ideal
elementary line.
2
I learned, in school deep back,
how Nacotchtank hunters bowed a deer once,
followed the blood spatters as the deer ran, watched,
still, as the deer lay down to die.
I imagine the hunter laying their hand on the deer’s cooling hide.
I wonder what it would be like to feel the last phantom pulse of the majestic dead.
We read this in a grainy packet
fastened with a staple that was too weak to clasp on the finished side so
when I turned the pages I’d sometimes prick my finger.
We were told the Algonquians used
every part of the deer—hooves, marrow, hearts.
I’d like someone to watch over me as I curl up
by a muddy creek and bed in the trampled grass.
I’d like to think that every part of me—fingertips, arches
of feet, blades where shoulders meet back—might be of use.
3
My body is asleep and too often
still. Sometimes I lie on my floor—
windows open in all seasons—
place my hands on my belly,
and breathe in time with the garbage truck’s yawn.
But we are,
none of us,
breathing now.
Committed to the fine art of not startling
these precious deer, these
excessive deer, who overrun parks and starve
without enough weeds to fill around.
It Won’t
After “Happy Anniversary” by David Lehman
You’ve been sober
three months
I think that’s
significant I do why
three is the number
of months it takes
all the leaves to drop
once they’ve changed from
green to red it’s
the number of lights on a
traffic light the number
of lives you changed the night
you ran that light while still
drunk the number of months
it takes me to fall
in love with you again after you
come home saying, “I promise,
it won’t happen again.”
Lisa Rachel Apple
is a writer, teacher, and learner who lives and works in Washington, DC. She studied creative writing at Drew University where she was the 2009 recipient of the Academy of American Poets College Prize and Christopher Goin Memorial Prize. When not writing, she can be found riding her bike around the city and providing special education services to middle school math students. This is her publishing debut.