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
How natural you are
why are you wearing
that tangle of honeysuckle
around your neck
that torn blouse
of rose bush thorns
tight across your breasts
that brittle skirt
of oak bark breaking
against your thighs
everyone already knows
how natural you are
from the way you move
with baby sparrows
nesting in your hair
Ice storm in Boston Public Gardens
Trees have turned metal
Emblems
Of my own limbs
Bearing a weight
Of old love
Now wood and ice
Still there’s promise
Of spring thaw
Bark cracks
Crystal breaks
A sudden laugh
Through leaf
Branch trunk
The whole root of you
Domestic resolutions
It’s Saturday in the new year: I rise
at eight in domestic air to spread
lemon curd on toast and brew mint
tea in a clay pot; I carry a chaste tray
to the late bed you occupy in our
new resolve, egg and butter
beneath your creamy underwear
I’ll wash at nine. All week long
my list of resolutions grew: musk oil
for a man’s rub of leather in a woman’s
boots and beeswax for shine of oak
in your secret room: rise, old friend,
dance the winter sun: with a broom
of love I’ll sweep our closet clean.
Jasmine branch
the gold lights of Manhattan rise
and soon the jasmine branch plunges
once again in the childhood well
we crawled into for just five dollars
on a dare and there first smelled
the senseless odor of death now
hushed and violent upon this city’s
summer air to every overgrown child
migrated here from provincial town
in doomed hope that memory’s
quick shame and long haunt will dim
these thousand lights still shining
on that jasmine branch I break again
and thrust into your drowning hand
Tangerine peels
two women and a man
sit in winter light
eating chocolate and tangerines
from a crystal bowl
mint tea steams the turquoise pot
a green canary sings Mozart
among dying hibiscus
the man hears familiar talk
of transsexual politics
does gender hold the heart
at bay in heterosexual love
when bodies are the same
which can dominate the other
is coupling war or just a game
and if a game whose metaphors
furnish the players’ rules
how do they know to play
a game whose rules get written
even during the act of play
not sure what to say
or which to love
the man stands up
to clear the plates away
the woman in white
has eaten all her peels
only the chocolate’s
silver wrappings remain
on a single green leaf
the woman in black
has torn her peels
into tiny bits and stacked
them in three heaps
upon three green leaves
the man stacks three plates
in the turquoise sink
he wonders how
each woman’s hunger
can include a man
he chews a shred of bitter
peel to find the answer
pappa pappa pappageni
the canary’s song is clear
above the women’s laughter
tart tangerine in a wounded ear
Clifford Hill
has recently retired from Columbia University where he held an endowed chair at Teachers College, the Arthur I. Gates Professor of Language and Education. He also directed the Program in African Languages at the Institute of African Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs where he taught the Hausa language. During his retirement he continues to conduct research on cultural variation in the ways in which language represents space and time.