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
Winner of $200 for 2nd-place-voted Poems
Carey RussellVisiting Hours
Let’s build a tent of sweaters
and huddle like bullfrogs.
Come snuggle so close to me
you can hear my hair
chaff against your skull.
The sky is a dying violet
veined in silent oaks.
I leave you my voice
in nurses’ footsteps climbing
up the white linoleum.
That and clean socks.
Almostleaves haze about these
late March branches. They candle
to green in the last reaches
of the sunset before winking out.
Is that what you thought
your death would look like?
I am still coming home
to your hanging shirts.
Domestic
Through muscled roots, past black spring
soil, I buried your old dog.
Her old dog, you would say, watching him
search the house for her, hopeful,
her clothes still in the closet, hair still
in the brush. You still slept then
in linens embroidered in tight stitches,
her initials rising like scars. Now pale
ovals and rectangles hang where her
pictures had, shadows of those
boxed photographs you still avoid.
This is the season of her
dying. And deep into hard earth that scours
the shovel, I buried the dog.
Egret
At the end of summer the egret stands
where the green reeds blacken
into deep. White and alone, velvet
he greets
cranberry vines
crumpling his gown then smoothing it.
His yellow metal eye,
layered by millions of years, the unbroken
clouds of a storm, and all
the weight that keeps You
from me and holds us to the earth.
Egret tell me you’ve met a god
so reckless that he will love
us all equally.
After Hours
Clever sticks scratch the liver
spotted lake, the first green
unraveling. She is left.
Clouds cross her gaze
and a few unassembled stars.
How cold it is in this house.
These inescapable thoughts,
all that can and cannot be
healed, how and how long.
It is all still now, her vision
washed out. A history carved
in her feet and emptied space.
All night long the room shifts
to fit the absence. An act
of god could shake her,
a tremor in the earth
of her body and the stretch of
water so black it burns.
Into the Valley
I returned home for this, an Appalachian
valley where once-green hills hold
the breath of the dead between them and lift
from each morning a fresh bandage
of mist. I watched the lowering, her coffin
rocking into the ground, a cradle
swaddled in gravel and dirt. Early fog sank in
so dense I could tear it like bread.
The gaze of the mourners followed me,
their eyes black scattering birds.
A fine ice dusted, silently silvered
my hair into my mother’s.
Cupping my hands, I gathered cold globes
of breath, watched them whisper away.
Do the dead hold their mouths in their hands
like this to know what is left of them?
When I left, I took the valley with me,
the train slicing the fields, leaving
its stiff suture. She is survived by me.
Carey Russell
graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with degrees in English Literature and Mathematics. She moved to New York after graduation to work in Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. She now works as a writer and researcher at Columbia’s Office of Alumni and Development and is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia. Her work has most recently appeared in American Athenaeum, the Cumberland River Review, and Vex Literary Journal.