Poetry Summer 2014 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Anne Rankin-Kotchek
Letter to the World
from a Dying Woman
& other poems
Sara Graybeal
Ghetto City
& other poems
Tee Iseminger
Construction
& other poems
Lisa Beth Fulgham
After They Sold the Cows...
& other poems
Mary Mills
The Practical Knowledge
of Women
& other poems
Monika Cassel
Waldschatten, Muttersprache
& other poems
Michael Fleming
To a Fighter
& other poems
Daniel Stewart
January
& other poems
John Glowney
Cigarettes
& other poems
Hannah Callahan
The Ptarmigan Suite
& other poems
Lee Kisling
How the Music Came
to My Father
& other poems
Jose A. Alcantara
Finding the God Particle
& other poems
David A. Bart
Veteran’s Park
& other poems
Greg Grummer
War Reportage
& other poems
Rande Mack
rat
& other poems
J. K. Kitchen
Anger Kills Himself
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
The Man Who Wished
He Was Lego
& other poems
Jessica M. Lockhart
Scylla of the Alabama
& other poems
James P. Leveque
Three Films of Jean Painlevé
& other poems
Kelsey Charles
Autobiography
& other poems
Therese L. Broderick
Polly
& other poems
Lane Falcon
Touch
& other poems
Ricky Ray
The Bird
& other poems
Phoebe Reeves
Every Petal
& other poems
David Livingstone Fore
Eternity is a very long time...
& other poems
Tim Hawkins
Northern Idyll
& other poems
Abigail F. Taylor
On the Pillow Where You Lie
& other poems
Joey DeSantis
Baby Names
& other poems
Cameron Price
Every Morning
& other poems
David Walker
Sestina for Housesitting
& other poems
Helen R. Peterson
Ablaut
& other poems
The Ptarmigan Suite
1.
When I first flew south
I was brown with white wings
And I lived above the timberline.
In winter, white with black tails,
I frequented the tundra,
Quiet farms, yards, and barren hills
And loved willow scrub the best.
If you’d sat down in a sheltered valley
I might have called to you
As I did in those days,
A deep and raucous holler
Had I pebbles in my voice box:
Go-out! Go-out!
Go-back!
Go-back!
2.
The first time I pore over A Field Guide to the Birds
I obsess over the ptarmigan, willow and rock. Why,
Here’s a sort of grouse shaped like a horn of plenty,
Unremarkable; once I was described as a plain Jane;
Stout, brown, pigeon-like, but lacking what it takes to live in density
And it makes the sound of a soul leading a body toward fire.
3.
Chimney Swift
Whippoorwill
Some birds look like sails when they fly
Or sound like harps when they sing
And the myth I’ve heard is that the Devil
Is where the birds sing through the night,
In winter white, off a quiet hill
Eclipsed by the willow scrub.
I’ve heard a big, big ghost
Is who shelters the sheltered valleys.
Truthfully, I’m not for superstition
But if you could change colors,
Could leave when it snowed, could
Fly off the moment you were scared,
There would be a name in the ether
For you.
4.
Despite the ways each bird in Heaven is superior to me
Only I step this far back when needing to look.
As for now, we’ve all gone: shot, caged, or eaten.
We sit around trying to arrive collectively at something real,
Something about what it meant to live as birds.
One bird says This is what the wind felt like,
One says This is what it felt like for the wind to blow,
One even says Here’s a sensation similar to the wind.
But the ptarmigan, the under-bird, the ground-feeder,
The last one being carried off in the teeth of a fox,
Says Me, I can still feel the wind.
I can go-back and feel it.
5.
Some nights this winter a great-horned owl was wont to perch outside my bedroom window.
I’d never once see him. But his call, working like boiling water over the ice-thick air,
Caused me several times to think he was right beside me in bed.
The Great-Horned Owl: As large as our largest hawks, and fierce-looking.
So much fiercer than my ptarmigan bird, nights he hooted to me through the glass,
I imagined him sky-stalking, with preternatural foresight, so that the motion of the stars
To him, was as jewels scattering across a floor.
Untrue, but the image struck me nevertheless, because I was smaller than he was.
Because he could see me through the dark, and often told me so.
Hannah Callahan
was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of four. She studied literature and printmaking at Bennington College in Vermont, and currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina. Hannah is a writer, collage artist, and extremely amateur thereminist. She is also the co-founder of falconswithcaps.tumblr.com. Her loftiest dream is to walk across country to Roswell, New Mexico to find a UFO.