Poetry Winter 2021 fiction all issues
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Cover
Andrej Lišakov
Laura Apol
I Take a Realtor through the House
& other poems
Rebekah Wolman
How I Want my Body Taken
& other poems
Devon Bohm
The Word
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Right Kind of Woman
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
Gravestone Flowers
& other poems
Laura Turnbull
Restoration
& other poems
Andre F. Peltier
A Fistful of Ennui
& other poems
Peter Kent
Reflections on the Late Nuclear Attack on Boston
& other poems
Carol Barrett
Canal Poem #8: Hides
& other poems
Alix Lowenthal
Abortion Clinic Waiting Room
& other poems
Latrise P. Johnson
From My Women
& other poems
Brenna Robinson
repurposed
& other poems
may panaguiton
MOON KILLER
& other poems
Elizabeth Farwell
The Life That Scattered
& other poems
Bill Cushing
Two Stairways
& other poems
Richard Baldo
A Note to Prepare You
& other poems
Blake Foster
Aubade from the Coast
& other poems
Bernard Horn
Glamour
& other poems
Harald Edwin Pfeffer
Still stiff with morning cold
& other poems
Nia Feren
Neon Orange Tree Trunks
& other poems
Everett Roberts
A Mourning Performance
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
The Way I Wander
& other poems
Olivia Dorsey Peacock
the iron maiden and other adornments
& other poems
Rebekah Wolman
Greetings from the Mezzanine
I’m writing from the mezzanine
where I’ve been put
in a vocabulary lesson
from my older brother’s fifth grade teacher
who suggested to her students
that they warn their younger siblings
If you don’t stop procrastinating
I’ll put you on the mezzanine.
I like the mezzanine seats.
The view is good
in a middle ground
happy medium
Goldilocks kind of way
not too close to see the whole stage
not too far to see the musician’s faces,
not so steep that it’s vertiginous.
Or it’s the mezzanine of a department store
where I’ve been put
and the furniture is just as just right
a couch stuffed full but not too full
a small upright piano not quite in tune
but good enough
and a well-stocked rack
of magazines for browsing.
I may stay for a while
inhabiting this story between stories
this liminal pause
considering my defense of procrastination
that it’s germination
or hibernation
both natural phases
in this cyclical living.
There’s a small café
with Sacher torte and Linzer torte
with linden tea and a sundae served
in a glass goblet with a dimple
where the bowl joins the stem
and the melted ice cream pools.
The final drop is never quite retrievable
but I’ll be here for a while, trying.
To-Do List, Items 1 & 2
1.
Rinse poems, it says.
I’ve soaked this poem in multiple changes
of water like the greens from last night’s
dinner prep, so much peppery mineral-vegetal
growth for each pale mud-caked moon
of turnip. I’ve given away the grit that sank
to the bottom with each discarded draft.
You can eat the cabbage aphids on the kale
and I’ve read that they have superpowers.
They metabolize the bitter compounds of their hosts
to fend off predators, and while the females wait for males
to fertilize their eggs, they manufacture clones
of their tiny round grey selves that clone themselves
in turn, up to thirty generations in a single summer.
They stay alive all winter clinging
to the frozen stalk until it thaws
into a long-awaited meal. It’s just as well
they’re too persistent to rinse off, I guess,
and is the rinsing my poems really need
the kind that some art can’t be made without—
rinsing off the acid from an etching plate
when it has reinforced the lines and marks
you’ve carved in ground to open them to ink
or rinsing the chemical coating from paper
you’ve exposed to sunlight to reveal
the ghostly image of whatever you laid on it
floating in its sea of Prussian Blue?
2.
Send out poems.
Send them out for
their 5000-mile service,
front-end alignment and new wipers.
Send them out on an errand.
Send them out with a list:
milk, eggs, butter, chips, lawn
and leaf bags, mousetrap.
Send them out with the mouse.
Have them release it from the wire
jaws of death. They won’t mind
the darkening drop of mouse blood
drying on the wood. Make sure
they wash their hands
when they come back.
Send the poems out to cool off.
Tell them they can come back in
when they are ready. When they’ve given
what they did some thought and are ready
to apologize. When they’re ready to focus
and can start again.
Send them out for coffee
and tell them to keep the change.
Get a little something for themselves
or pocket it for later.
Grateful
I’m not a grateful person,
I told Darcy at the post office
when she asked if I might want
the Thank You stamps, but I was joking.
I am grateful, I assured her. I just didn’t like the script
on the Thank You stamps, and I really wanted
the Raven stamps, the Western Wear stamps
with the faux woodcut cowboy boot complete
with star-shaped spur or the Ursula K. LeGuin
commemoratives, all the new issues
that hadn’t come in yet. But truly
I am grateful and I was that day.
I bought the Sun Science stamps, the full sheet
with six different solar phenomena, four each
of the coronal loops and holes, the solar flares
(royal blue and teal versions) and the plasma blast,
and one each of the sunspots and the Active sun.
I’ve learned just enough about all of this to know
that I am grateful for the Quiet sun
and its predictable stream of steady light,
a flash of which shone through the fog
when I went back out into the street.
At the bookstore, I found a copy—used—
of the book I wanted—the extraordinary Olio
by Tyehimba Jess. (You should read it if you haven’t.)
Two women were squeezed in with me in the narrow aisle
between Poetry and Spirituality, and I couldn’t help
but overhear their conversation. “My friend’s husband,”
one said, “was telling me about this book.
The writer starts each section with a thank-you note
to someone in his life and then goes on
into a meditation.” Then they started talking about Rumi
and I asked if they knew his poem
about the guesthouse, the one with the lines
This being human is a guesthouse/
Every morning a new arrival. . .
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows. . .
Be grateful for whoever comes. . .
They didn’t, and I couldn’t find it in the book
she had picked out but I told her she would find it
if she did a search for “Rumi guesthouse”
and she was grateful.
At the ice cream shop, the flavor of the week
was Golden Milk, salubrious tonic of ginger
and turmeric, almost too good to be true.
And when I stopped at the community garden
to finish the melting frozen Golden Milk,
the evening primrose was in bloom, a crown
of watery yellow blossoms atop each spire
of layered upturned leaves. The leaves are all
that has emerged so far of the evening primrose
in our garden, and now I know what I have
to look forward to.
In response to being told I admire your poems
I want to say that I too feel a tender kind
of admiration for them, meaning that I wonder
at them, that I regard them with pleasant surprise
and maybe even marvel at them as if holding them
out at arm’s length from my body and lifting and turning
them gently or walking around them tilting my head
slightly or squinting to take them in from all angles
these things I’ve made but think may not be all of my own
making, like the domed and golden loaves I mix and knead
but whose chemistry of sugar, yeast and acid is only partly
in my control, or the garden in its prime that I planted but am not
the rain or sun for or the wind or birds whose visits scatter seeds
and make surprise revisions; and meaning, having entered
the atmosphere of admiration, that I see them as a kind of miracle
I can’t quite explain or that like mirages they may not look
exactly as I thought they would when I get closer
and you may not see in them what I see.
I aspire as we do with those we hold in high esteem
to the qualities of their small inanimate selves, nerveless
but also nervy, brave and unapologetic in their presence
on the page, and when I say thank you for admiring them
I am thanking you on their behalf for your attention
to them but I want to thank them too, say thank you
to them for their patience while I dawdled and left them
waiting and for letting me catch up or find them
in their hiding places, and thank you to the other poets
the steady shower of whose voices sings and soaks
deep to the roots of the poems, and I want to say
thank you to the burs of language that catch
on the trouser legs of my mind as I wander
across the fields and stumble through the thickets
of my days, thank you to the poems for their willingness
to not just take but be small leaps of faith.
How I Want My Body Taken
I don’t want a horse or car
to carry me. I want to be brought
in the arms of some beloved, held
tenderly and passed from friend
to friend, warmed against each heart
around a circle or up and down each row.
And then I want to be taken
by the weather, the way our friend
was flung, his son perched
on a steep hillside with tears
of afternoon sun and cold wind off the Pacific
in his eyes despite his squint
as he opened a white container,
tilted it to the air and swung his arm wide,
casting his father out to sea, his father
blowing back at him in sunlit motes
and drops of fog and settling
on his hair and shoulders,
or entombed like a Viking in a ship
I’d traveled in alive, my grandfather’s
heavy but fragile wood and canvas canoe,
the grey paint and shellac cracked
but still watertight for a final paddle
through a beaver creek at sunset,
the full moon rising at the other end
of the lake, and then buried under layers
of pine needles and rotting aspen leaves
in the Northern Ontario woods.
But what I really want is to ride
in a wire basket on the handlebars
of the bike I dreamt I was riding
the night I learned how,
my being still tingling with the thrill
of letting momentum take me,
the perfect balance of stillness
and motion, of abandon and control.
I want the night to be as dark
as it was in that dream, the streetlights
cycling off, streamers flying
from the bar grips and the rider
pedaling hard, then harder,
building speed and with it levitating,
the bike ascending at a slant
above the trunk of the last parked car
and then leveling off at its cruising altitude
taking flight over the whole row of them,
and leaving a wake of light behind it.
Rebekah Wolman
is a retired educator living in San Francisco, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. Her poems have appeared in Essential Love, an anthology of poems about parents and children, and in The New Verse News and Limp Wrist. She is a 2021 winner of Cultural Daily’s Jack Grapes Poetry Prize.