Poetry Summer 2015 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Hannah Lansburgh
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
For Your Own Good
& other poems
Marianne S. Johnson
Tortious
& other poems
Kate Magill
Nest Study #1
& other poems
Karen Kraco
Studio
& other poems
Matt Daly
Beneath Your Bark
& other poems
Paulette Guerin
Emergence
& other poems
Hank Hudepohl
Crossed Words
& other poems
Alma Eppchez
At the Back of the Road Atlas
& other poems
Jim Burrows
At the Megachurch
& other poems
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Lioness
& other poems
Yana Lyandres
New York Transplant
& other poems
Heather Katzoff
Start
& other poems
Tom Yori
Cana
& other poems
Barth Landor
What Is Left
& other poems
Abigail F. Taylor
Never So Still
& other poems
George Longenecker
Polar Bears Drowning
& other poems
Ben Cromwell
Sometimes a Flock of Birds
& other poems
Robert Mammano
the way the ground shakes
& other poems
Janet Smith
Rocket Ship
& other poems
Gina Loring
Dementia
& other poems
J. Lee Strickland
Minoan Elegy
& other poems
Toni Hanner
Catching the Baby
& other poems
Paulette Guerin
Emergence
The summer our parents split, we spent our days
at St. Mary’s. June’s heat had drawn the water
from the ground. As the sun incubated the air,
cicadas crawled from their burrows and screeched
into being. Males called out with ribbed bellies;
the females rubbed their wings in answer,
flitting on stone statues of saints, squirming
in the crevices of robes or folded hands.
The windows vibrated with mating calls,
sparse rugs hardly absorbing the sound.
Icons looked down from plaster walls,
their eyes distant like someone lost or in love.
Emily Dickinson Floats
the Buffalo River
She regrets wearing white,
the edge of her dress muddied.
Down she drifts—
catching a whiff of charred food
and a faint Skynyrd riff,
past purple flowers she deems gentians.
The canoe paddle
stirs the tawny fish. She calls them cod,
the water clear
down to the riverbed’s
algaed stones.
Just beyond the shadow of a cliff,
the rapids come.
She cannot stop
thinking of the river’s nonchalance—
its only thought, resistance;
its only love,
change. Evening light
shifts the tableau—
viridian and burnt ocher
blend to muted indigo.
Just when she seems at home,
Dickinson pens a postcard—
“How can I stand
this tighter Breathing,
this Zero
at the bone?”
First Communion
The night before, Grandma made my pallet
on the couch with faded blue flowers.
Across the room, the iron-barrel stove loomed.
We learned not to touch it.
At midnight I woke. I’d never heard rain on a tin roof
and was sure what Revelation promised was true—
dark horses had come. In church we’d learned
about the wise and foolish virgins with their oil.
I had not confessed my sins. Everyone else slept—
or were they gone? Then the rain let up.
The dark turned dim. I chipped the polish
from my nails, ashamed they were not bare.
Milking
The women slipped her head
between the fork of a tree.
I braced a board against the bark,
a makeshift stock. Mrs. Henry kept the rope
taut around the legs while Grandma
milked the bleating nanny.
The swollen bag shrank.
The runty kid approached slowly,
still afraid of hooves.
Smoothing out her wrinkled dress,
Mrs. Henry said her grandbaby
would be visiting soon.
Then softly, “But she’s got
no fingers on one hand.
Umbilical cord, you know.”
Grandma frowned, then said, “Still, you’re lucky,”
placing her hand above her heart
just below the neck.
Morrilton, Arkansas
Train cars jump in and out
of old storefront windows.
A boy in Levi’s crosses the tracks
toward the monument company’s headstones.
A few already have a chiseled name.
I wait for him behind a heap of brick
and corrugated tin. On windy days,
the paper-mill stink drifts into town.
He claims the money beats baling hay,
then closes his mouth over mine.
Paulette Guerin
is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Florida. She lives in Arkansas and works as a freelance writer and editor. She is currently building a tiny house on seven acres and blogging about the experience at pauletteguerinbane.wordpress.com. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Subtropics, Cellpoems, SLANT, and Euphony (online). She also has a chapbook, Polishing Silver.