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
Watson and Crick with Double Helix
I’m behind the lens.
Crick says Should we pose?
He mocks professors with a smug grin and pointer,
while Watson plays student,
mouth agape with trepid ignorance.
They are school children on picture day;
Shirts tucked in like
mother told them to,
electric balding heads of hair,
neckties pulled a little too tight.
In their bodies, DNA is unzipping
and gathering up its other halves.
Somewhere along the twisted necklace
of their genes is that “pearl” of a paper,
the one that simply held a mirror up
and pointed it inward.
Their faces are beginning to break
into laughter right as I snap the shutter.
Oh, to be so young
and so sure you’ve changed the world.
To be dead right.
Creatio ex Materia
It’s not the kind of thing you can accept outright,
genesis, happening in your trashcan.
I imagine it started at the beginning.
Darkness over the stagnant water, the trash can sludge:
banana peels and coffee grounds, used tampons
and the cat’s feces, liquefying together
in the neglected outdoor can until something
started growing. Something new.
Phospholipid bilayers forming at an alarming rate,
the advent of spines and skins, all happening
unnoticed, as things often are,
over the course of a week.
So when that woman, that rank smelling creature
emerged from her womb of garbage,
innocent of all but warm, putrid smells,
her thick mat of hair growing woven like a tapestry,
hips slender as a child’s, body tarnished and hard
like a once golden Greek daughter of Chaos’ own
how could I feel anything but awe,
even as she munched on a half eaten banana?
No, this was no daughter of a god.
She was mine. This creature—
she is what we breed when no one is watching.
I know now, that
out there, in oceanic miles
of garbage, landfills overflowing
with an abundance of new life,
a nation is rising up, born of our neglect.
The eternal matter is this moment,
giving way. Creatio ex purgamentum,
the gods whisper in their sleep.
We have left nothing else.
World Leaders at the Premiere
The evening has just begun. See how those
monumental men, pillars of the Earth, stroll by?
Here’s Vladimir, a vision in undulant gold,
the skirt of his dress a caress,
and fox fur scarves, no one has told him they’re out of fashion.
Who cares? We love you Vladimir.
Notice, even the Dalai Lama has come off his mountain.
He’s chatting with Pope Benedict, takes his hand in both his own and shakes
the fragile man vigorously by the arm, disrupting his pointy hat.
And everyone’s darling Barack is wearing a slick little number
in simple shimmering black, curved
to the contours of his graceful neck and back.
King Abdullah stops for an interview.
Tonight he says (he’s wearing Valentino, the fall line)
Tonight we celebrate. And maybe, we bury the hatchet for good.
Because, of course, who in his right mind
wields a hatchet in Valentino?
They gather in the theater now,
file into neat lines of red velvet seats,
and jostle for armrests, suck in as others squeeze by.
Light flickers against their painted faces,
catches the gleam of their nails and jewels.
Elijah
In the video he’s running. He stumbles in sand,
barrel rolls back onto his feet and keeps running
and looking back and running until
he stops, his eyes and
his whole body searching the air.
For what? What ladder rolled out from the sky
is going to spirit him away from here?—
The wide Arizona desert. The car spinning its wheels in sand.
The police sirens drawing in close, closer.
Then he turns his back on the camera,
the one he must know is watching from a helicopter above.
I also want to turn away,
but I don’t. I inhale and keep one breath.
I hold perfectly still.
Seconds later, he’s put a bullet in his brain, and he’s still standing,
a broomstick on the palm of the earth.
I start to think he’ll stay there and wait for that ladder after all,
or for the sky to swallow him.
Drinking Wine with your Neighbors
It is Sunday, after church.
A mammoth of a woman totters past me wearing
the most imposing yellow mu-mu I have ever seen.
She is a sun, a goddess among us.
I sit here
redefining my concept of beauty
to include this woman, her massive presence,
inelegance, my god, how my eye is drawn
helplessly inward and upward
to the edges of vision and reason.
And suddenly I think of heat collapsing
into fall, muscadines fermenting on the vine
even before they are pressed into wine. How
can I think for even a moment that these things,
sun and grapes, streets and
this temporary home, are not the embodiment
of blessing?—
A sun, a goddess,
Reaching upward and outward—
It is well, it is well, with my soul.
Tori Jane Quante
recently graduated from Georgia College & State University with a BA in English, Biology minor, and a headache. While attending Georgia College, she was the poetry editor and editor-in-chief of The Peacock’s Feet, an undergraduate-run literary journal. In addition to writing, she enjoys yoga, baking, and fretting over global warming.