Poetry Fall 2013 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Family Tree Says:
Our ancestors cannot be touched. They sleep
with lights blaring. Their bodies
become centripetal, moving always toward
their houses of death. The snap
of their flat shoes against wood mimics
each floating moment:
a horse gives birth to twins and vibrates
feverishly. Her body’s cadence sends
my grandfather into a panic: his truck careens
into a ditch. He quits downing brown
liquor in the afternoon.
What I’m trying to say is that
clocks sync predictably.
My mother grew in the country, in
the country’s country, embedded in a field
of corn or a mine. In the aching farm
house the dogs could not quit mouthing
their versions of truth.
Look: either this is true or it isn’t.
One day a man entered my mother’s house, axe
in hand, copper-handed, hands like glass
or a spider unwinding. The German Shepherd sank
into him from behind.
In that moment she wasn’t a dog.
Family Tree says: apparitions become real
once they are spoken of.
This man became my father
or a ghost or both. He became
a transient I knew in Tempe, Arizona. The hot
crackle of that state melted his shoes. He became
a transient I knew in Dallas or Oklahoma and
he spoke with a lilt. He became so transient
that in his disappearance clocks whined
and refused to be wound. Lights moved as animals; blue
ness became obsolete. The ground under
my feet soared upward like a chime and I
only knew concrete things: pendulums click trochaic, loop
always back to simple paths.
The Blues of In-Between
A woman flicks
a pinch of hair between her lips
every 28 seconds.
I am counting the interval
and I can’t stop.
On the bus I am trying to decode family signs
but there is no clicking, no machinery.
Finally, in a deafening moment
something prompts a recollection:
father throws tennis shoes onto the ruddy porch
(thank God sister isn’t too heavy to carry).
I can punch the wall if a person deserves punching.
(Keep the doors locked and we might be fine).
Our tires are slashed in the theatre parking lot.
(Mother says mother but won’t finish the word).
On the bus I anticipate
this hair-eating woman like a downbeat.
I know her like myself
if I were to misplace my teeth.
She grinds those exposed bones like a ritual.
Her daughter is eight, obese, she’s
combed her own hair into two neat pigtails.
She offers her doll to everyone.
This bus is going to:
a. Disneyland
b. The neighborhoods we grew up in (we’re too good for them now).
c. the white and violent blocks we assume
will stress fracture our feet.
In another world, mother brushes her teeth
an hour per day.
She says People are judged by the shape of their mouths,
as a woman you must accept this in order to move up, and out.
Body Murmur
What luck to live
next to a harpist,
to learn through symbiosis
the callus behind the nail
and the trail of the fingers,
brush of nylon or wire.
I was so busy counting the specks
of dust in the atmosphere
which attach to a droplet
and freeze in their descent
that I forgot to call it snow
and lost the concept of any name,
of any drifting through my window.
Yet even after winter’s release
I begged for a moment whose atoms
could not materialize,
and when I knew you, those bending
strings across my ribcage, had gone
I got going on myself,
yet held this hereditary
pathogen, some incalculable integer,
and it pulsed forth a blood-born
murmur, rushed from your chest
toward a stethoscope, through my window,
through my chest.
Trading Sacrifices
1.
As a child I watch her stop traffic.
May brings indelicate heat.
The ground cracks into a puzzle.
We walk hand in hand
through the parking lot
of a grocery store named Smitty’s.
The butcher is in love with my mother,
he is getting a divorce.
I think about this as he meticulously cuts meat.
I see words as shapes, hear names and picture foods.
His name, David, is pepperoni.
I am some type of pasta
and Diana is cantaloupe.
We are playing this game in the parking lot
and David turns to wave goodbye.
Distracted, I do not see the car barrel toward me.
My wrist becomes a rope.
I turn in time to see her shoulder jam
into the side of a stranger’s car.
2.
At twenty-four I watch her fall.
I am driving across the Great Plains.
Last night after I heard she swallowed a bottle of pills
I lapped whiskey from the bottle.
The only time I cry is when I think of the Mormons
who touched oil to my head, a gift from a friend.
I do think of this, and the car nearly flies
from the road.
I clutch the can in my hand and it is her shoulder.
It cuts my palm.
From this moment forward I can’t remember
much of the drive, except the barrels of hay
rising up from each hill like roughened knuckles,
drumming the beats of our collision.
Retroverted Uterus
When the baby came all
pale and thin flecks
of cotton floated through
the air and I told the girl
all of my names. I asked
my husband to fill his
hands with the drifting
cotton but he said
its texture, like that of
chalk, would render him
weak and queasy.
I recalled, then, the time
I almost fell in love
with someone else:
the next day
I puked until my stomach
bruised, until I could
feel my abdomen growing
taut and southward, pushing
my uterus into its compliant
position—crowding it
up against my spine. When
I explained my situation
to the male gynecologist
he told me I should quit
sit-ups and nausea and focus
more on cardio, and my child.
Even still, sometimes when I hold
my daughter I feel my uterus
nudging along my vertebrae
and for the life of me
I cannot decide if it’s a threat
or a dance.
Creating Distances and Asteroids
She leapt too soon.
In Amsterdam I pretended her death.
I slept not alone but scattered across the hotel.
I left notes: bobby pins, straws,
a man and a pink bra.
I pretended as the plane touched down.
I worried about papers to grade.
She wouldn’t set foot on a plane,
didn’t trust the churning
in the air and under her feet.
Did I admire suicide until my mother
tried it on?
In the weeks after her scattered pills
I imagined her carrying oyster shells,
shucking them bare-handed, loving
a pearl, loving a cut finger—but no,
that was me in New Orleans eating
the aphrodisiac, drinking the aphrodisiac
with a solid man who didn’t
know my mother.
She leapt too soon.
Is she touching down now?
In Tucson I remembered her birthplace.
I buried the thought of her and wandered
the tired desert.
Fallen spines cracked under my feet, permeated
the dual soles.
I pretended in every corner of the world,
lapped up her sickness
and let it become molasses.
•
Sometimes I awake at 3 a.m
and see that an asteroid
has grown between my teeth.
I spit—just softly—and watch it sink
deep into the ground between us.
Alex Linden
hails from Tempe, Arizona. She holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and is currently a PhD student at Texas Tech University. Other poems have appeared in Blue Earth Review, Blood Lotus, Juked, and Burner magazine. She has poems forthcoming in Bayou Magazine.