Poetry Winter 2013 fiction all issues
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Alysse Kathleen McCanna
Pentimento
& other poems
Peter Nash
Shooting Star
& other poems
Katherine Smith
House of Cards
& other poems
David Sloan
On the Rocks
& other poems
Alexandra Smyth
Exoskeleton Blues
& other poems
John Glowney
The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds
& other poems
Andrea Jurjević O’Rourke
It Was a Large Wardrobe...
& other poems
Lisa DeSiro
Babel Tree
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Reptiles
& other poems
Michael Berkowitz
As regards the tattoo on your wrist
& other poems
Michael Brokos
Landscape without Rest
& other poems
Michael H. Lythgoe
Orpheus In Asheville
& other poems
John Wentworth
morning people
& other poems
Christopher Jelley
Double Exposure
& other poems
Catherine Dierker
dinner party
& other poems
William Doreski
Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin
& other poems
Robert Barasch
Loons
& other poems
Rande Mack
bear
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Red Bird
& other poems
Anne Graue
Sky
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Tub Restoration
& other poems
Paul R. Davis
Landscape
& other poems
Philip Jackey
Garage drinking after 1989
& other poems
Karen Hoy
A Naturalist in New York
& other poems
Gary Sokolow
Underworld Goddess
& other poems
Michal Mechlovitz
The Early
& other poems
Henry Graziano
Last Apple
& other poems
Stephanie L. Harper
Unvoiced
& other poems
Roger Desy
anhinga
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Hangoverman
& other poems
Frederick L. Shiels
Driving Past the Oliver House
& other poems
Richard Sime
Berry Eater
& other poems
Jennifer Popoli
Generations in a wine dark sea
& other poems
Tub Restoration
My father says I restored this 77-year-old tub
to feel like Cleopatra but I only wanted escape
from cybernetic ecology, wanted to feel
cast iron cool on my back in the winter
and I didn’t feel like a prince-ss or an Egyptian goddess
in this tub because I spent hours whittling it away.
I dumped it like my own crusted memories
on the cracked concrete driveway, mask allowing
me to breathe nothing from the past
that I am sanding away like corroding bones,
77 years of memories echoing from the drone
of a sander. It took four hours to strip the tub
clean of its memories, to peel the now elderly children’s
fingertips from the sides where they bathed
in democracy, capitalist rubber duck trying to stay afloat
while Roosevelt speaks on the radio and a Declaration
of War floats in the air pulled by little atomies
while Queen Mab is in a hazelnut flying
through men’s noses while they sleep.
Memories are dissipating and lost in the atmosphere
of a belt sander with each medium grade discard,
each rectangle tossed into the trash,
nationalism in a hefty bag, and surely the coming
and going of women (talking of Michelangelo or
Kennedy or King) was lost in the friction as well
and I can almost see one whispering Free at last
Thank God Almighty we are free at last and perhaps
the mothers memorized the ceiling above the tub
while their children slept, while their husbands slept
like dolls. When I finished sanding, I painted the raw canvas
(flushed of memories, history floating through the
atmosphere) with a porcelain white and now I soak
like a working class Cleopatra in a memory pond,
pruning away in the dull dust of humanity.
Utopia on a Park Bench
An old man wrinkled with time,
wrinkled with so many days at
Goodyear Tire, constructing tires
in an assembly line, tire population
in the thousands, communists
on a conveyer belt, arms forcefully
pointed upward. His park bench
is vast like a continent.
He, like Chagall’s wife, corner of a canvas,
consumes just a fraction of the wood
and metal conglomerate, and he
is feeding the birds, feeding the birds
as God, government of birds competing
for each seed like capitalism in a park
with leaping birds, working class birds,
open leaves in the open air of every
season of every year. Equal amounts
of seed pour onto the ground and he
knows there is no solution to equalize
their earnings, to balance the scale
with Marx perched in the middle as a raven.
He knows no socialist solution in his
steel-toed boots and windbreaker
with his beard growing downward
like the droppings of his tears to paper bag.
He knows no solution, only that he
is a giving tree in a dystopian world
and he tried to throw a pile here,
a pile there, one for you, one for you,
but the birds, the birds worked for their
profit, while the man, like God, fed them.
And Violets Are Blue
I am tired of submitting to journals,
society, men, God, tired of watching
my dog cower under my desk
after pissing on the floor.
I am his god after all, and he
is tired of submitting to me,
tired of drooping his ears
under tables and desks.
But we are all gods here ambushed
in the center of the infinite wooden
babushka doll,
clawing and crawling
and cussing and singing
all praises, all hail
the Great Babushka.
I submit now, roll on my back,
in a wooden container like
a babushka doll under a desk,
miming and suffocating and cowering
with simple movement like a puppet.
Society, I bring you clichés now.
I bring you red roses
and blue violets.
I cower under your table,
and like a dog,
I piss on your floor.
Pandora
Remember, remember, this is now,
and now, and now. Live it, feel it,
cling to it.
–Sylvia Plath
It is Mother’s Day Sunday, and I have
read the chapter of Luke before opening
the dusty box of yours, my deceased mother.
Your journal is sealed with the emblem
of an asylum. Your name written, chiseled
into the top like a vintage museum piece.
I open your words, gloveless,
a box of evils sprouting into the world,
red, red apples thrusting into the open
air like sins, hope left in the bottom
corner next to a ball of lent.
Lately, I have been reading the journals
of Plath like a bible thinking they were you,
reading the chapters and verses and now,
and now, and now, I am finally holding
your words which are distorted,
which are incomprehensible
through a bell jar of tears.
Remember, remember the chapped lips
of your smile, the features of your face,
the swampy feeling of my cheek after your kiss.
And to see your journal lying here next to Plath’s,
next to mine, juxtaposed, is colossal.
We have spoken to each other now,
clung to each other now, through written
telepathy, our journals mingling in comparable
time discussing life as two old feminists
in rocking chairs, like Plath and Sexton
chuckling, rocking, like Eve reaching
for a red, red apple.
Mariah Blankenship
received a Bachelors in English from Radford University and a Masters of Education. She currently teaches Creative Writing and English in Virginia where she lives with her tiny Yorkie and bearded boyfriend. She likes to read depressing feminist poetry and transcendental literature while watching trash reality television and war movies.