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
Landscape without Rest
I step aside as a boy pedals
fast downhill, our path blazed
by cedar chips, his father
ambling at the crest, and fret
against the grip of my own
vectors, the straight lines, strict
dimensions, days that race by
too easily for the neighbors,
too scrutinized for me; but don’t
we make a fine match, strike
a spry exchange, don’t we
light a fused flame, how they
keep the tires of their bicycles
inflated, and how no one ever
showed me how to ride, and
the way these widening lanes
make way for flashes of rubber,
flares of cottonwood leaves.
Singing Stone
—After César Vallejo
My cigarette proves suitable
since I, too, am burning to a stub. How dizzying,
how carcinogenic to wield the world between
my own fingers, my own star going down in smoke
for a few moments
until the ember begins to flicker, and the world
takes its last drag,
stooping down to put me out in an empty furrow.
Lying in an open grave,
through the abiding veins of light I can see
my back story, my body
carried away in a trade wind racing across
blotted out mountains
made of stars
that Paris keeps turning towards itself,
stars that turn over thousands of times more
of their own accord
in the Andes, Trujillo, Santiago de Chuco,
caves collapsing
and my villagers’ bones asleep in their red hats.
Downpour descends on me
as forecasted, my voice dry from trying to greet
the raw and forgotten
in music not precisely music, only the ashy
expectorations of panpipes and corequenques.
Hunting Season
Out in the clearing, the cold
season’s coming on, a walled fog
of lights and my bones
courting evasion, coerced
into stealing away
from a public suddenly
steadfast on staking me out.
I’m sticking close
inside the high embankment
of the river, but they will
find me, and take aim.
The facility with which
I shift through the seeming
boundlessness of the forest
appears to play in my favor
but in effect forms
the groundwork of the game, of my
bulls-eye. I sense their scopes
sighting in on me when I bend
down to drink from
the smallest streams.
The sky letting go of its
last warmth, limbs their leaves,
storm clouds leaning into
trees—the terrain
betrays me in the same
distention that my instincts,
being so sought after,
forget how to seek escape.
Wingbeat
Not the procedure of inverted perch;
not the flitting at the feeder
brimming with sugar water
dyed bright red. Not the reverence
of echoes buried deep, lasering
stillness to a shrill point B
embedded in point A
by line alone, and only then
after the flight is over; not the discipline
to lift a mouth and eyes
from food, from coloring,
or the fundamental music
wingbeat speed produces.
What figures is the wanderlust
for flight, the worry
the one that flies inside inspires: how
to chase it out? The shooing
of the bat that matters
most; or all too fast, the blur
of the hummingbird whirring by.
Stream Water, Stream Light
Stream water, stream light in the easy creek
that snaked and hissed at the bottom of the hill
all summer long, while houseflies at the crest
assembled to swing in signatures across
garbage bags ripped open by raccoons,
regalia of the driveway. We ignored
this festival of feastful decay whenever
we came indoors or left—the stores of moisture,
pools of light prismatic in our eyes
transfigured those peripheral scenes and stenches.
How we held on to an unswerving comfort,
reclining in our shared stretch of the bank,
groping among the termites in the wicker,
staying naked, since our clothes weren’t clean.
Michael Brokos
earned his MFA in 2012 from Boston University, where he received the Hurley Award. He has also received a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and his work appears in Hobart, Salamander, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore.