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
Cigarettes
What was cool
was when an older boy snuck
a girlie magazine
out of Ross’ Five & Dime
inside his shirt.
No one knew girls like this
in slips and filigreed bras
with their compromised thighs
and their bared knees,
incongruous and lovely.
What was cool
was Bill the mechanic
at Schmitty’s Garage
with the cottony white
of a Lucky Strike
between two greasy black fingers
and the time someone jacked a pack
and we watched him smoke
back of the little league field
where the local bikers
popped wheelies and burned rubber
and he hacked and hacked
because he said
he liked it.
What was cool
was the chopped Harley
we swore we’d take across the country
the summer
after graduating from laying back on our beds
with our secret urges
and our evolving plans
and our mystical trances
and our detailed seduction
of the prettiest senior cheerleader
who willingly unbuttoned her blouse
gracefully as rain outside the upstairs window
and our copies of True Detective under the mattress,
the models’ eyes blocked
with a black rectangle
so they wouldn’t have to see
what we were about to do
as we lit up and lay there
revving our engines
in the glow and the ash and the smoke rings of ourselves.
Boys
A full nelson or Indian burn, jiu-jitsu
or the flying drop kick,
we smacked each other around in the parking lot
after Sunday School.
We caught the tomcats by their stringy tails
and swung them,
we peppered the granary eaves with bb shots
killing replaceable sparrows.
Slick green frogs, and mottled brown toads
that peed in our sticky hands,
we marooned in old washtubs
until they curled up like old shoes.
We pinched any girl we liked.
The slow boys, the boys who couldn’t throw,
we shoved into their lockers.
The substitute teachers, especially the one
with the lazy eye, weathered our snickers
and spitballs. We taunted
our retarded classmate until scolded,
unashamed, the wild green pulse
of our short attention spans
fizzing in the sugary glitter
of what comes next.
And when, in the delivery room,
our first-born arrives,
howling, a boy,
we sit there and blubber
like big old crybabies.
Paradise of Wounds
I’d have done anything in those days.
Cut off my ear. Smashed
my red convertible
through the mayor’s front window.
Played strip-poker with the nuns
under the table. I had no quarrel
with the universal laws of nature
or other local customs
but I ostentatiously rejected
the Pythagorean Theorem
and flouted gravity
by floating over the bright raft
of the tennis courts at night.
I’ve crawled under the bed sheets
of their hourly-rate motels
like an amorous cockroach,
I’ve waited at their bus stops
to taste the sublimities of cocaine,
the narcotic joys
they kept in coat pockets,
I’ve been jonesing
for their hammer and nail
sex, I’ve hung out with them
in our jail cell, our belts
around our necks.
I’ve shared the clear cold vision
of the damned,
who have seen the fruits
of their pleasures
and delights sour,
whose heads are the stinging jellyfish mothers
of a thousand motives.
At The Museum of Don’t Come Back
Memory’s a stranger in a diner
eating the blue plate special,
rubbing one hairy ear with a spoon.
Don’t look back the way a train
leaves the station and the countryside
shrinks, the tiny red barns
glowing in warm yellow light. I’ve
been riding with the crop-duster,
out-dated county map in hand,
wheel and dive, wind bucking the struts,
following my instincts into the cross-hatch
of fence-rows,
the drift of forgetfulness under telephone lines
poisonous beyond the fields’ lush edges.
Each time it’s like visiting a museum,
the early years taming this mid-west
glacial till. Scythes. Old threshing machines.
Frost on all the exhibits. Some kind
of raw rust on the plough-blades.
What I have laid aside extends for miles.
Sunday Morning
And the gray in the sky today is nothing
that a fresh coat of paint
and some flowers wouldn’t fix. Violets, fuchsia
arranged in the cloud-beds,
some wanton tulips,
and the wind blowsy in the trees
cluttering the air with the smell of fresh mown grass
and gasoline
and sparrows
like the change in your trousers
scattered on a bare patch of sidewalk.
And the sun, roused like a king
who demands all attention, then sleeps
like a baby as the party carries on.
No politics, just a silence
so clear you thought
you could sing it, or somebody could,
some gorgeous voice in the scuffed static,
the needle stuck in the groove.
John Glowney
has practiced commercial litigation with a large Pacific Northwest law firm, Stoel Rives LLP, for over 30 years. He is a past winner of several Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan, a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. He lives in Seattle and drinks a lot of coffee.