Poetry Summer 2016 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Carly Larsson
Sarah Sansolo
Bedtime Stories
& other poems
Miranda Cowley Heller
Things the Tide Has Discarded
& other poems
Alexa Poteet
Escobar's Hacienda Napoles
& other poems
Cynthia Robinson Young
Triple Dare
& other poems
Nicole Lachat
Of Infidelities
& other poems
Amy Nawrocki
Bad Girls
& other poems
Lawrence Hayes
Winter Climb
& other poems
AJ Powell
God the Baker
& other poems
Gisle Skeie
Rearranging
& other poems
Bruce Taylor
Always Expect a Train
& other poems
Ricky Ray
They Used to Be Things
& other poems
S. E. Ingraham
Storm Angels
& other poems
Laura Gamache
Outing
& other poems
Keighan Speer
It Rained Today
& other poems
Emma Atkinson
Grocery Stores Make Me Feel Mentally Ill
& other poems
Erin Lehrmann
Block
& other poems
D. H. Turtel
Margaret, Again
& other poems
Chris Haug
Bovine Paranoia
& other poems
Kimberly M. Russo
Definitive Definition
& other poems
Holly Walrath
A Tourist of Sorts
& other poems
Angel C. Dye
Beauty in Her Marrow
& other poems
Nicole Lachat
Your Throat Is Gripped with Love’s Pain
No avenue wet with salt
No white sails anchored between blues
Nothing but the line to evoke them
It is ten o’clock in the morning
I am uptown and nowhere near myself
Outside flakes drape the pavement
The city lives through another white burial
You smoked Dunhill blues
One leg over the sheets
And my legs wrapped around your torso
Learned the many ways to pray
With the body
Down Broadway the afternoon ploughs
Someone shouts about Jesus
From a milk carton hill
We live under the burden of scarves
Someone steps onto the platform
Emerges from the underground
A moment we do not photograph
A warming dark
A thing becoming clearer
The grip of sunlight over a naked body
I have returned up the six flights
The voices in the hallway vanish
You are not next to me
I’m in another country
Your bougainvillea will darken without witness
The sheets are cold
On the roof the neighbors are smoking
Of Infidelities
there were only a handful.
A natural decline, or be it progress,
we’ve learned more than two ways of splitting
a deck. As if every morning were not another death
they rose to the charade again, to the rehearsed
kindnesses. She, resuming the position
of footstool and porter. He, a roof,
a silk blouse. And because he couldn’t bring himself
to make a clean cut, he hacked away
at the bird on Thanksgiving, until, claiming
he could no longer muster cruelty,
let the creature squirm until it’d all bled out.
Nicole Lachat
is a Canadian poet of Peruvian and Swiss descent. Beyond borders, she is a Bunburyist at heart, and a recent MFA graduate of New York University.