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Poetry Summer 2018    fiction    all issues

Poetry Cover Summer 2018

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Cover Michael Lønfeldt

Carol Lischau
Son
& other poems

Noreen Ellis
Jesus Measured
& other poems

Amanda Moore
Learning to Surf
& other poems

Adin Zeviel Leavitt
Harvest
& other poems

Jim Pascual Agustin
Stay a Minute, the Light is Beautiful
& other poems

Timothy Walsh
The Wellfleet Oyster
& other poems

Anna Hernandez-French
Watermelon Love
& other poems

J. L. Grothe
Six Pregnancies
& other poems

Sue Fagalde Lick
Beauty Confesses
& other poems

Abby Johnson
Finding Yourself on Google Maps
& other poems

Marisa Silva-Dunbar
Frisson
& other poems

Merre Larkin
Sensing June
& other poems

Savannah Grant
Saint
& other poems

Andrew Kuhn
Plains Weather
& other poems

Catherine Wald
Against Aubade
& other poems

Joe Couillard
Like New Houses Settling
& other poems

Faleeha Hassan
In Nights of War
& other poems

Olivia Dorsey Peacock
Thelma: ii
& other poems

Sarah Louise
Tremors
& other poems

Kimberly Russo
Inherent Injustice
& other poems

Frannie Deckas
Child for Sale
& other poems

Jacqueline Schaalje
Mouthings
& other poems

Nancy Rakoczy
Her Face
& other poems

Ashton Vaughn
Contrition
& other poems


Andrew Kuhn

The Bacchae, June, Alberta

On a cold dawn run by the black lake’s shore

snow still heaped in the lee of firs

low mist seethes like a bad idea


glides across the face

of the waters

seeping wisps

over broken road


and you hear the reckless rider gallop up behind

what the hell

but turning to let them pass

you’re wrong


it’s a mother elk

recently calved

primed to stove in with one quick kick


the head of a wolf that might swing in close

to her black-eyed tottering all-in-all


and she’s cut you off by the low thorn brush

wheeled and with a wedge of hoof

split hard air like a billet of wood

in front of your forehead


and you try in what little Elk you know

to tell her you come here not as a wolf

although in the fall you stalked her father


but her tongue deserts you


so plunge aside

and break the mirror

the lake has made

for the sky

from a glacier


and learn to your bones what it costs

to cross

a local god



In the Glass House

“The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform
from which it springs,
forming the main motif of the house,
was not derived from Mies,
but rather from a burned-out wooden village I saw once
where nothing was left
but the foundations and chimneys of brick.”
—Phillip Johnson


On the springtime coverlet of a little Eden just after sunset

the box of glass floats


and the master builder, alone,

bored with empire, bored with excess, bored

with getting away with it,


imagines himself a prince, back-lit, disrobing,

teasing his subjects


who crouch in the bush like refugees.

This land is my land.


##


Somewhere out in the dark the family tree blossoms

laddered with shrewd poltroons

who pitched Mannahattas off the Palisades.


Old money new money

money accruing it

never stopped . . .


In the massive, shuttered childhood homes

the Daughters of the American Revolution

passed for parvenus.


Now the prince sheds veils that shimmer of abalone,

tarpon scales skimming in moonlit pools.


This land is my land


##


Not all of the pure products of America go crazy . . .


Some live forever

and grow rich, grow richer, praised to the skies.


Before his pampered chin grew whiskers

aluminum made him a jazz-age Croesus,


the protean century’s chosen element

shiny ubiquitous light fantastical

spinnable as silk, spun worldwide into


safety razors, throwaway cans

fighter jets, shining skyscrapers.


Rich as Proteus the god

he grew, immune to limits


the Depression for instance

and ordinary life


transcending pedestrian rights

or wrongs, free to float


an ecstatic excursion descending on Poland

in the blitzkrieg’s vanguard


burning villages

thrilling the night


This land too

This land is my land


##


Then home to celebrate the ruination of the Jews—

print panting tributes to Mein Kampf,


throw bricks of cash at Huey Long and Father Coughlin

avatars of radio hate scouring American prairies and hollows


and trick out muscled Nazi squads in custom fitted uniforms

swooning to witness their strutting marches

erect through the squares of Homeland hometowns.


The money flowed and bore him up.


He stockpiled weapons and flirted with learning

to shoot


##


When it became more widely noticed that these enthusiasms

stank of treason


the money served and the talent too

to float him up and out of harm’s way


the postwar Proteus morphing into—

no architect, merely—but more

and more the transcendent hero of material culture


the One to decree to each new generation

what is to be

the next Big Thing.


##


As the impudent mandarin

forgives himself everything


the new Canaan in need of mandarins

forgets the unforgiveable—


celebrating the brilliant Glass House,

his see-through palace


great wink at the world

the joke nobody wants to get . . .


This land is my land


##


But entranced this soft summer night


all alone in his gorgeous deceptions

the great man


is suddenly spooked:

naked and still, in view of the trees.


Now gather shifting mobs

of shadow.


And he hears behind the mosquito whine,

tree-frog racket, suburban cough

of a car turning over


the click and whisper

of baffles and dampers:

history, not entirely hushed.


##


He slides open a panel in the façade,

flees the crouched and listening world.


Before him squats the cylinder of brick

like a factory smokestack sheared by a tank round.


Light startles a brilliant frame

through which he slips


and disappears.


On the chimney’s far side

a hearth is blazing.


To the ghosts on the lawn it looks as if

at last he too


has walked into

an oven



Plains Weather

When you wake up

if you wake up


will you see the ceiling has flown far away


or maybe just into the muck pond

down the road where cattle cool their shanks

and switch away the flies, except


the pond’s been sucked up to the sky

as well?


The threads that came from Hong Kong or the new place

they now make the shirts that celebrate

your everlasting Oklahoma City Thunder—


will they come apart in shreds as fine

as sphagnum moss


and flutter on the updraft high enough

to find their ways back home?


Oh gosh I hope so.


Had about enough of you,

and this heat.

Andrew Kuhn is a psychologist in New York City and the Hudson Valley. His poems have appeared in Common Ground, Conclave, The Mailer Review, Vending Machine Press, So Be It, The Ghazal Page and other venues. His collection of interviews with 21 eminent poets, How A Poem Can Happen, came out in 2017.

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