Poetry Summer 2023 fiction all issues
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Cover
Joel Filipe
Kristina Cecka
Rabble
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Uncivil War of Love
& other poems
LuAnn Keener-Mikenas
Skunks at Twilight
& other poems
Alyssa Sego
Passage
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
Forest of One
& other poems
Brent M. Foster
Ode to Darwin
& other poems
Jack Giaour
trans man is feeling blue
& other poems
Alan Gann
how strange
& other poems
Richard Baldo
The Privilege
& other poems
Michael Fleming
In
& other poems
Holly York
As it turned out, there was no bomb on board
& other poems
Celeste Briefs
Late Poppies
& other poems
Kayla E.L. Ybarra
Goose Song
& other poems
S.E. Ingraham
Leaving to Arrive
& other poems
Rachel Robb
Molting Scarlet Tanager
& other poems
Bruce Marsland
Sauna by a Finnish lake at Midsummer
& other poems
Ellen Romano
Seven Sisters
& other poems
Greg Hart
False Coordinates
& other poems
Greg Tuleja
Shanksville
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Southern Charm
& other poems
LuAnn Keener-Mikenas
Feldspar
In my hand it changes
from dull slate to living thing.
Sap of some ancestral conifer
wrote this turpentine gold
some mammal’s uterine steel this blue.
The dark seam in the middle
reminds me of a picture my son drew
a squirrel he saw the neighbor kill.
It was crossing a border from rain
into sunlight. How smoothly that making
healed him, icon on our coffee table turned
altar, stuffed animals and Ninjas attendant
a cross of lashed popsicle sticks. Flawlessly present
he flowed on into play. For days
I was spellbound.
Yet I couldn’t stay, ten years later
in my father’s hospital room. Storm of stillness
his knurled breathing. I sat turning pages
of Tatwas—ancient Hindu symbols, feeding them
through my hand on his arm. Twice slowly
through the book, then I placed it
on the floor beneath his heart.
When I left the room was filled
with shapes of penciled light.
The nurse called just after four a.m.
I retrieved the book she had sealed in a ziplock
and the labored script of the heart monitor tape.
Now I fidget with the lights in this stone.
That tiny orange shape
a campfire
there, the ice-green angles
of a glacier. The rest
submerged lucent blues
miners in the cave
forging, foraging along the vein.
Caverna Sagrada
Everything she knows tells her
she has to let it go, the hollow place
where the baby lived, where the
maturing boy struggles, miles away
with words like liar and other thorns.
This boy made out of light
how did it happen?
who chose to stay with the dark raveling
of his father’s pain—father
who recognized in him the gold
thread in a nightmare. While she
had been an unbearable glare
that showed too clearly the whole loom
Looming. Life looms
like a wave in slow motion
getting bigger and bigger and you know
what it is going to do to you
without love.
So the boy
knew himself to be the flecks of sun
that rode that wall of water, the only light
his father could see. How could she turn
her back on that?
In the cave of sorrows she sits
with the emptiness, rocking it
like a cradle. Rocking the poem
trying to get her back adjusted
in the lap of the arm chair. Looking
at a photograph: the baby
glistening in his bath. She had framed it
with a special mat that hid his father
who held him in the tub: Even
in the rage of divorce, she would not
cut them apart.
Now, she goes to bed curled with an ache
lacuna in the midst
of a blessed life. Lets herself sag
into it like limp cloth. When she wakes
the thread is taut. She can stitch the poem
over the absence. She thinks of women
in the old world whose sons went to war
at twelve, daughters married into another
province, disappeared
in a wilderness of that takes by force
one way or another. Spinning
in the wee hours, there is never enough thread
to tell these stories, no satisfying way to end
such a poem. You can drown
forever. That poem just stops.
But there is a boy
made out of passion and June sun, given
the gift of choice, not required to make
any trades.
An excellent swimmer, his features
a perfect blend of both parents
he is not afraid of the dark.
Green Damselfly
Breaking loose from her mating flight
She settled to the naked log in the fugue
of Rocky Run, where I lay crucifixed
hands and feet in the eddies.
She faced me, perfectly still
but for the occasional curtsy of wings.
I moved slowly with my camera.
Sun played on the log bright as a dance floor.
It is I who should bow, I told her. She ducked,
clasped harder as the breeze shook her. Yes
it’s just like that for me too, I said. Long
moments
then
she fluttered, settled
nearer, walked
toward me
black eyes distinct
in her emerald head, all of her body, even
the edges of the black velvet wings a radiant
emerald: You cannot
die, no matter what
pierces you.
Soon,
she let the air lift her. I don’t know how long
there were two
in their lilting turns
then the sound-filled absence.
Oak Chair
The birds this morning, as if they could sing
about anything. So we unloaded
your mom’s oak china cabinet, carried
from three states away, as she is
finished with it. It was heavy, and I was heavy
but I wiped it perfectly clean, anointed it
with orange oil and bees’ wax. And the wood sang.
This I thought is eternal life. It made me turn
to her older sister’s single dining chair
I had asked for, orphan long dispersed
from its fellows. Thin and tall, flowing
like a dancer, its shapely contoured seat made
of a burl—that knot where the wood
has had to struggle, grain all spun
like a storm, fans of blonde curled
among black strands. When I finished
it simply shone. This it said
is what you are trying to do.
And yes, it is worth it.
Skunks at Twilight
One night when you were a baby,
the four-room house on the sheep farm
a whole family of skunks
crossed at the bottom of the yard.
I watched from up on the porch
white stripes undulating a soundless tide,
mother and five half-grown kits
flowing through the early dark.
I called to your father, you were asleep.
This was thirty years ago, we didn’t know
it wouldn’t last. Everything
stark with suffering, you a tiny geyser
our bolt of enlightenment. And this
exotic little family stealing along
like the sweetest secret.
I still can’t read the sign.
Kundalini, strong attraction
and repulsion, self-respect
says the medicine book. I can say this:
They knew where they were going.
Their flawless rhythm rolls in my mind. It’s out there
even when we don’t see it, moving like a wave,
arriving. We are born
to this bold errand, sorting out the darkness
weaving in the light while others sleep
amid the breathless watchers
LuAnn Keener-Mikenas
has two collections of poems. Homeland won the 2013 Library of Virginia Award; Color Documentary (Calyx Books 1994) won a 1990 Virginia Prize. Poems have been anthologized in A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry and Worlds in Our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers, among others. She has been a fellow at MacDowell and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A therapist in private practice, she lives with her husband in Virginia. www.luannkeener-mikenas.org