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
Because Your Questions
on the Nature of Memory Have,
at Times, Threatened My Buzz
Ahead, the coal train enters a long curve
and here we watch it slow
as if into the memory of curve. Below
the river courses through evening
and the island goes skeletal
in shadow. Woody
spit of land from which captured Federal troops
once watched this city burn—
a light not unlike tonight’s lowering
on the horizon—and nothing grand
in those flames, what they promised
then; an end nearing
only in the slow exhaustion
that all fire reveals—ruins
to comb beneath empty
warehouse windows. It must be easier
here than at the yards upriver—
no one walking the rails,
cutting wide arcs of light
through the woods. So, from the balcony
we watch the boys creep through scrub pine
and up embankments, disappear
in the trains’ chuffing.
You tell me you’ve known coal
the promise of heat. You’ve written it.
Heaped in car on car of freights
pulled easy along the rim of these bluffs,
I think of it as memory
of the mountains which held it.
Bored, these boys hop the trains,
only to leap from them when again they slow
through the far side of the city
on their eastward slide to the ports
at Hampton, the bay
and sea. Doubtless you’ve dreamed the sea
a kind of memory. And the coal,
which carries to the sea
the weight of mountains, wears tonight
ragged coats of melting snow.
Oh, frozen wards of snow
carried down the mountains.
Oh, motion. Oh, absence
and he longing for shapes
of things the snows have covered.
I reach for your glass and refill it.
I reach for the night and stars.
I reach for the train. Let us speak plainly
now—as the wind dies, and the noise;
as the tail end of it disappears
like a dark thread
pulled through evening.
My mother called yesterday
with news of the fourth
suicide this month:
a girl this time, who stepped in front
of the 5:38 carrying traders
home to their suburbs by the sea.
In her voice I heard the reach
toward what question
the child’s mother must have asked.
No, she didn’t ask it.
Nor have we talked of the others.
Though I know
she wonders. I wonder. You must wonder.
But we talk instead of a room
walked out of, row of empty dresses
hanging in a closet. Or laundry; the scent
of someone else’s idea
of mountains in springtime.
If a mother needs answers, let her
find them. Let us have another drink.
And if we must speak of ghosts,
tonight they shall be the ghosts
of a boy’s hands on a window as a train starts:
fingertip, palm-print and the world
pulled through them like a sheet.
Tie and rail bed, parking lot and platform clock.
Bright sheet of the world
through which a few gulls glide.
South of Paris
. . . perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.
—Cesar Vallejo
Horrid to die on a market day
in a foreign town, like this one
in the Loire valley, in November, with a light rain
passing its secrets to the slate roofs
and opened umbrellas.
How ill, beneath the plane trees
and between the stalls of vegetables
and strange meats,
the fish and foreign, fish-like faces,
among gestures of buying and selling
how black, even surviving the Thursday
after feeling suddenly behind you the presence
on the cobblestones
and balking at a case of aged cheese
before asking in broken tongue for a taste.
Afternoon with My Nephew
Pushing your racecar through the grass,
you say, shooo, the car says, shooo.
The plane says, grrrr overhead.
Its shadow is t-shaped, or boy shaped,
when older, you’ll run with outspread arms
through a field. Its shadow says nothing.
The birds say hello, even the buzzards say hello,
but you can’t hear them, they’re too high.
Their shadows are eaten by the air.
There are people in the plane, you know.
A pilot, yes, and passengers too.
What do they say? All kinds of things.
They’re coming back from a war which isn’t yet over.
And if they’re talking about it
we don’t hear them either, only the plane,
which keeps on saying the only word it knows.
Benjamin Dombroski
is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2009 and Hunger Mountain.