Poetry Fall 2013 fiction all issues
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Chris Joyner
Wrestlemania III
& other poems
Carey Russell
Visiting Hours
& other poems
Marc Pietrzykowski
Cabinet of Wonders
& other poems
Jonathan Travelstead
Prayer of the K-12
& other poems
Jennifer Lowers Warren
Our Daughter's Skin
& other poems
Jeff Burt
The Mapmaker's Legend
& other poems
Patricia Percival
Giving in to What If
& other poems
Toni Hanner
1960—Lanny
& other poems
Christopher Dulaney
Uncle
& other poems
Suzanne Burns
Window Shopping
& other poems
Katherine Smith
Mountain Lion
& other poems
Peter Kent
Surliness in the Green Mountains
& other poems
William Doreski
Gathering Sea Lavender
& other poems
Huso Liszt
Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin...
& other poems
Clifford Hill
How natural you are
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Dungeoness
& other poems
David Kann
Dead Reckoning
& other poems
Ricky Ray
The Music of As Is
& other poems
Tori Jane Quante
Creatio ex Materia
& other poems
G. L. Morrison
Baba Yaga
& other poems
Joe Freeman
In a Wood
& other poems
George Longenecker
Bear Lake
& other poems
Benjamin Dombroski
South of Paris
& other poems
Ryan Kerr
Pulp
& other poems
Josh Flaccavento
Glen Canyon Dam
& other poems
& other poems
Christine Stroud
Grandmother
& other poems
Abraham Moore
Inadvertent Landscape
& other poems
Chris Haug
Cow with Parasol
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Fiberglass Madonna
& other poems
Emily Hyland
The Hit
& other poems
Sam Pittman
Growth Memory
& other poems
Alex Linden
The Blues of In-Between
& other poems
Bobby Lynn Taylor
Lift
& other poems
D. Ellis Phelps
Five Poems
Alia Neaton
Cosmogony I
& other poems
Elisa Albo
Each Day More
& other poems
Noah B. Salamon
Sanctuary
& other poems
Each Day More
for Alexander Standiford
How do we negotiate
this one, the utter fragility
between here and gone,
the thinnest filament?
An eighteen-year-old,
your youngest, the baby
you carried, fed with
your mother fingers,
your father hands,
the boy you photographed
to capture and keep still,
present. How you fussed
and worried, driving him
to games, movies so many
lessons, to college, away,
into the world. How do we
carry on? How do we look
into your mother eyes, your
father face, the sibling hearts?
His life loomed large with yours,
buoyed by books art food drink,
by the laughter we gathered
each August of his life
to welcome new students
with the old. Then we entered
your home not in summer,
to a space suspended
between the ache of the gravel
driveway and the blades
of grass in the backyard,
the chill of the pool water
and the shade on the rooftop
patio, leaving us poised
with pain in air we’re made
to breathe, untethered,
as if the gravity that holds
each child to the earth
has lost some of its force,
and there is too much sky,
each day more.
Artie
Accountant. A startled bird, the word
escaped three times the next day,
flit from the radio, dropped out
of the mouth of a salesman, then
from a stranger in the street. I didn’t
want to hear it. I didn’t want to know
of numbers—bills, taxes. His age: 46.
Three, his children: 16, 12, 9. The date,
the last day of Passover, forever
marked in the Blackberry mind
like birthdays on or near deaths—
my sister’s next to my grandmother’s,
my daughter’s on my cousins’—
or like the ages one holds one’s breath
to pass over, those regular doves,
because my grandfather didn’t and
my uncle didn’t and my cousins
who flew suddenly, their skin still
smooth. I don’t want to hear of numbers,
calculators, balances. A moth taps
on my bathroom window, trapped
when I closed it earlier. Debit, credit.
If I crank it open, I’ll wake the sleeping.
If I don’t, it will die, sooner. Too soon.
The last time I saw Artie was at our nephew’s
bar mitzvah, November 17th. Thirteen.
Three times that weekend—Saturday
morning service, evening celebration,
Sunday brunch. He and I stood in
my brother’s living room, spoke of his
daughter, 12. Her three black belts.
She played with my daughter, 5.
I don’t want to know of numbers,
parties, food, though I made a cake
to take to his house, their house
minus one. To make the cake,
separate four eggs, measure a cup
of sugar, a half cup of cocoa, set the oven
temperature, the timer, for . . . . how long?
Hurricane Sandy, 2012
Perhaps she dreams they are swimming,
propelled by waves that collected them
from her arms, small legs kicking to stay
afloat now that they’ve learned to swim
the waters of Staten Island. They are thrilled,
as children are when they learn to swim,
to read, to ride a bike. Holding hands,
the four-year-old protective of the two-year-old—
that’s how she sees them when she wakes,
when she walks through the neatness
of emptiness and half expects to find
small forms on their big boy beds, blankets
kicked off, so that she’ll enter quietly, navigate
toys strewn on the floor, cover their bodies.
She used to run her hand across the forehead
of one, the curly hair of the other, and smile,
thinking, They’re beautiful when they sleep.
With their births, she became a light sleeper,
listening for a cry, a cough, for her name.
At the grocery store, she reaches for cereal,
moves past apple juice boxes. Driving home,
she sees neighbors still cleaning up after
the storm, clearing debris, repairing homes.
For many, the lights have come back on.
Inside her house, she rests her head against
a window frame. Where are the small, bright
faces that so resemble hers? She waits for
a faint knock on the door, to open it, to find them
before her, a little taller, wet, so happy to see her.
The Pianist, Final Scene
Once again he sits at the piano in the Polish radio station,
the studio wood shiny and intact, no bombs exploding,
no plaster dust falling or young men diving for cover.
Once again he sits at the piano, tall and clean shaven,
healthy. The waterfalls and rustling leaves of Bach fly
from his fingers, filling the air with their light, the sound
engineer behind glass, smiling, rapt. Once again he is
playing this piano. When a friend he hasn’t seen since before
the war enters, the pianist, still playing, looks over, smiles
a joyful greeting that, unlike the notes, fades, gradually
saddens to include the faces of his mother, his father,
a brother, two sisters who listened and laughed each day
as he played in their home, who perished in the camps
while he ran, hid, froze, starved nearly to death, and once
again plays on the radio and in concert halls for survivors.
Terezin
1997
The camp sits empty now. Knots of tour groups peer
into dusty barracks, glance at communal toilets, over
stone walls rising from a dry moat that never defended
a thing or being. Along the paths between buildings,
gravel cracks, crunches. The noise wrecks the air,
my ears, the inner barracks of my heart each time I step
like stepping on bones, graves—who knows in this dust
what remains? Ushered into a low building we scurry
through a long, narrow passage and abruptly out to,
the guide informs, the very spot where people were
shot. I look down to my feet. I want to rise above
the ground, to not step anywhere. During the war,
did Red Cross workers who visited this model camp
an hour east of Prague believe the Nazi propaganda
film, makeshift stores, soccer games and cheering
crowds were real? Stopping at a memorial that holds
a fistful of soil from other camps, Sara, a young woman
from New York, bends down for a stone to place on
the marble and in a parallel gesture, I bend with her,
as I’ve done at my grandmother’s grave, to remember . . .
yisgadal, v’yisgadash, sh’ may rabo . . . the Kaddish
spills from my lips, first lines, all I recall of the Hebrew
prayer for the dead. I rush out of the compound—
past rows of bright white crosses, Stars of David,
bunches of red carnations like thousands of small
explosions or individual burning bushes in front
of each unnamed marker—into the parking lot
past food stands, tourists eating candy and rapidly
dissolving ice cream, cameras strung from their necks.
The floor in the Terezin Museum is carpeted, voices
hushed. Galleries split with partitions display pictures
and papers—an edict, a warning, several orders, plans,
charts, drawings, photographs, records, so many careful
records naming victims, giving them faces, people who
passed through trains to Belzec, Chelmo, Majdanek,
Sobibor, Treblinka, and Osvetim, Czech for Auschwitz,
everything typed up, written down, catalogued, thoroughly
documented, as if someone someday would need to know
exactly to whom, precisely when, where, how many . . .
why? On a monitor in several galleries, an elderly woman
recounts her days in Terezin, her words close captioned
in English for the multitudes of tourists, many of whom sigh,
having had enough of death and despair for one day. But
the videotape is on a loop—she cannot stop telling her story.
Elisa Albo
’s chapbook, Passage to America, is now available as an e-book. Born in Havana and raised in central Florida, her poems have appeared in Alimentum, Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, InterLitQ, Irrepressible Appetites, The Potomac Journal, Tigertail: A South Florida Annual. She recently completed To Sweeten the Flesh, a collection of food poems, and teaches English and ESL at Broward College. She lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.