Poetry Winter 2013 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Winner of $1000 for 1st-place-voted Poems
Alysse Kathleen McCannaPentimento
is a tattoo on the back of my friend Martha’s neck,
a term I learned in Art History as a teenager in love
with the student teacher whose name I scrawled in my notebook
next to Pentimento. Edward.
Repentance is Wednesday evening youth group at the local
nondenominational Christian church where my knees pressed hard
against the wood back of the chair and I tried my damnedest to stop
thinking about that boy with the hair who played bass
in the church band. William.
Pentimento is what they will look for when they look at my life
under infrared cameras: “there, where she changed her mind and moved
the heart a little to the left; there, where she changed her mind again
and entirely redrew the face.”
Repentance is three days of snow in the middle of April
while I decide whether to make the same mistake again
or not or if it’s a different mistake or maybe it’s not even close
to a mistake but when will I know?
Pentimento is what happened to my body after the rape
and I couldn’t stop twitching enough to sit in a chair
for dinner and my fork flipped pasta across the kitchen
and when it stuck to the wall we laughed and laughed
in spite of everything.
Repentance is necessary for the attainment of salvation
and salvation is God putting his hand on your shoulder
and saying, “it’s okay, even I commit a little Pentimento
now and again
take a look at the world”
and when God takes his hand from your shoulder
and you hear your bones crack
that is Pentimento
and when you are dying and you see the backlit
undersides of leaves on the most beautiful tree
that is Repentance
and when you feel your heart tear and a part of it
is lost inside of you and a part of it is breathed into the world
then that is a Poem
that you memorize
and burn
Relics
In this poem, your son is your daughter
and all the ghosts are dogs. The kitchen
is the baby’s room, the baby’s room
is the front porch. Coffee cups are kisses,
the flat tire is a pot of my grandmother’s spaghetti,
the sandwich I left for you in the fridge
has someone else’s name on it.
I cut the grass this morning with scissors
because I thought I saw it in a movie
as a child about mental patients or
it may have been soldiers in the field.
I found the tiny dolls Kelli and I
used to play with in the front yard
how many years ago? Now she has a baby
that looks just like her father and my body
keeps trying to have your baby but
the baby is actually a potted plant
on the windowsill that I keep forgetting
to water but water is really milk
that I keep forgetting to pick up
on my way home and the way home
is not on this map and maps are flies
that won’t stop buzzing
around your sweaty head
the tomatoes you planted in our garden
are starting to outgrow their thin red skins
every time you place one in my mouth
it tastes like dirt and summer and this summer
I’ve been overwhelmed with coffee cups
and walking ghosts and smelling phantom
flat tires and loving your son too much,
and you not enough,
and did you find your sandwich?
Did you remember your name?
Dream of the Apples
For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth
—Federico García Lorca
We spoke of God for an hour in the morning,
evidence of breakfast still on the plates before us
(a few flecks of basil, crumbs of toast and bacon,
my coffee gone cold).
With sleep still clinging to my eyes, teeth,
my fingers still grasping at half-remembered dreams,
I think of God, with a great Old Testament beard,
an apple in each hand, his mouth, voice high
like a bird song, points of light blazing through
the apple seeds, cutting through darkness and flesh
and earth—
I think of Abraham the way Rembrandt painted him,
dark, sorrowful and sure eyes, thrust to the edge
by God’s cold force and then held back, and wonder
if God requires of us such great anguish, such certainty
in our own triviality.
Once, I knew God (or, thought I knew God)
and He filled my shadow as rain fills a forgotten cup—
but some days, God does not rain.
God must wish to make poets of us all
to bestow us with such disease and grief—
to cause us to bubble up until our ache
spills onto others,
onto paper.
Once, I knew God, and we sat at the same table—
one day, He got up and Left.
Roane Duana
Seir lived a fair mile from Orkney harbor
and walked there twice a week
along the stone fences.
With his shoes left ashore
he wandered into the water
and felt the cool sting of autumn nearing.
One morning
when the sun was behind cloud
he found among the stones
of the shore an empty seal skin.
He held it gently in both hands
and hurried home without his shoes.
Roane Duana followed him there from the sea
and approached him at the doorway.
She had no dress and he took her to town
to purchase a fitting cloth for his new wife.
Her pale blue eyes set in white
soft skin enchanted him
and he had her every night,
but when Seir awoke in the mornings
she was never beside him
but looking out the window
to the sea.
He had heard the stories and kept the skin
hidden under the floorboards,
beneath a rug and a great wooden chest.
Duana sat before the fire many nights
with her feet resting inches above
where the silky skin lay.
Returning from the harvest
Seir approached the door of his home
and felt the air empty, found
the floorboards torn up and the skin
gone. A cry reached his ears from the sea
and he found a baby left on the bed,
conceived after she swallowed a star
that had fallen into her mouth
while sleeping.
Tell Me Again
In the bed of someone’s pick-up
a dog howls
in the heat.
It is May, now,
the sun hotter
than normal.
The mechanic behind the counter
looks like he’s rolled right out of bed
in a barn somewhere, yet his soft-spoken
words are plucked carefully as if from a vast
thesaurus—from behind browned teeth he says
the transmission flush is vital to the longevity
of your car’s performance
I imagine him atop
a tractor in Wisconsin,
red-headed young ones
forking hay, sneaking eggs
from beneath snoozing chickens.
A slim wife in a flower-print dress
on the porch, the kind of girl who
makes pasta from scratch,
knows how to mix
his drink of choice,
scents laundry
with lavender.
He must think
I’m very concerned
about the procedure
as I stare at him
thinking about life
outside the shop
I lean in and say
tell me again
about the cost of the transmission flush
listen to his poetic explanation
smell his soft, cigarette breath
wonder how it would feel
to hold his hand stretched
out in a field under a Midwestern sun,
belly fat with pending children,
a reliable pick-up idling beside us
in the tall, tall grass.
Alysse Kathleen McCanna
grew up in Wisconsin and studied Art History at Smith College. After graduation she moved to sunny Colorado and resides between the mountains and the plains. Alysse works for Colorado State University in Pueblo and is an MFA candidate at Bennington College.