Poetry Summer 2014 fiction all issues
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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
Waldschatten, Muttersprache
(in memory of Erik Cassel)
The tree is broken in the light.
Every rose folds shut—
Quiet, they say,
like the face of the woman
who looks up from her reflection in the forest pool
to gaze at you, at me, to hear the veery’s call.
You asked for dark and light, for here and gone.
The veery’s notes resound unseen;
they haven’t asked you here
to tender me again with yellow petals.
Marsh marigold, Dutchman’s breeches, lady’s slipper,
chilled medicines I tucked under your tongue, your tired whisper—
These are the hard coins of our dreams:
fish-breath, rain-slept, heart-kept.
Thrift, ca. 1946
“Die Fahne Hoch,” (“Raise the Flag”) co-anthem during the Third Reich, was composed by Horst Wessel, Nazi hero/martyr, and outlawed in Germany after 1945.
She made me a new red dress
when the schools opened again:
pulled the old flag out from a drawer,
clipped the stitches
from the circle in the center, held it up,
shook her head
at the black spider,
“good fabric
and a pity to waste it
but there’s just nothing
I can make out of this,”
spread the red rectangle
and cut the pattern;
just enough.
A lot of girls wear red
these days. At recess
boys patrol the playground,
yank up
our skirts. They sing
Horst Wessel’s song
as they run by,
“Die Fahne hoch!”
Hertha Tielsch to Maria Radler,
Garßen bei Celle, Germany,
January 1, 1947.
I’ve enclosed
your handkerchief
which I am returning
to you, unfortunately
still with the stain.
I just laid it in the snow
one more time
to bleach—
Maybe that
will help.
Monika Cassel
is the English department chair at New Mexico School for the Arts, a statewide public arts high school in Santa Fe. With the support of the Lannan Foundation, she has developed a successful creative writing minor at the school. She is working on a manuscript of poems on her German family’s WWII history; her translations of the poet Durs Grünbein are forthcoming in Asymptote and Structo Magazine.