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
Berry Eater
He wears a belt around each leg crotch-high,
red hardhat, aviator glasses, chain saw on his hip
as he leaps from branch to branch, lightly
alighting from time to time to adjust his ropes,
when he’ll grab a handful of those berries.
Mulberries—we’ve spent too many summers
slogging through the purple paste that coats
the stone stairs and iron railings of our
Villa Charlotte Bronte, a confection
of buildings linked by walkways and arched
bridges along the Bronx bank of the Hudson.
The berries come from trees, large trees that
grow like weeds, raining sidewalks with fruit
from June until September, but even so
I’ve never tasted so much as one berry.
“Are they all that good?” my neighbor
hollers up to the man as his agitated
husband, who’d just as soon have the tree
cut down, pokes his head out then disappears.
The man pops another berry in his mouth
while he scans the tree for more ripe limbs
to hack off and send crashing to the ground.
Wiping juice from his mouth with the broad
back of his sun-stained hand, he yells down,
“They’re the sweetest when you’re on top, man,”
then pins another victim in his thighs, and saws.
Bitch
His ear is pressed to his Muse’s
breast, but she coughs up nothing—
a few yelps of love from a dog
(his dog, female, a bitch they’d say,
yet gentle), love based on scraps
from the table, a dry place
to sleep, someone to untangle
burrs from her coat, to sit still
as she tongues toes, nose, any limb
unclothed—all just dog data, no
heart. To his Muse he says “Leave,”
then glances down: The dog sits
at his feet, marmoreal, front legs
stiff, back legs askew, belly bare
and hot, just as he remembers.
A full hour he stares. Not one
muscle moves. No, he won’t write.
Opera Night
They’re all like that: Ruse, mystery
morals. I came to, pieces of it still
in mind, Così something or other,
but the rest—the front, the exterior,
the unflappable—they’re all here.
I’d say, Il faut renoncer chaque syllabe
if I spoke French. Why not Prussian?
Why not sub-American? Whatever,
evasion is essence. Nothing matters.
Everything’s inconsequential, but . . .
All in its place. Your underwear’s
in the laundry room. The ensembles
are breezy and serene. An affectation?
Mediterranean deceit? Turn rightside
out before dying. Lower the boom.
Dog Day
My bed a raft. She’s on it with me and her lamb,
black ears, dead squeaker. I’m resting my
fatigue. Damaged joints, inflammatory.
Used to be, I’d hang off to the floor, her lair
when she was underneath, anchor myself
with one hand, scratch her belly with the other.
Now I grab the lamb and launch it
across the room, out the door,
though she’ll return it. Such gentle jaws.
The bed’s head is elevated, two bricks
prone, a plank across, head
over heels: For my hiatal hernia, when too much
food is stuck inside. Today I’m full
of words, my friend’s words, her folk voice.
“Feelings, bind,” she writes. A wish,
a prayer, an invocation. Her words draw my thoughts
to the floor, the tilt of bed, the smell of stain
and wood down there, the cool, the cheerful shine.
It’s been hot. Close, we used to say,
my room a stale, unventilated
sigh. Even the living room, double-height,
banks of windows on the Hudson.
Down there I saw a dog, my neighbor’s
red and white Brittany, focused, focused
on his ball, panting, pacing, tongue lolling off his teeth
to the ground. She rose and limped to him,
lofted the ball again toward the river.
Mine’s female. (Ah, these females.)
Once she crawled into my lap when I was filled with
I don’t know what. Satan? She there
on my lap with this fury inside. We sat still,
the two of us, a kind of draining. Now her chin rests
on the lamb’s white chest. Only the squeaker’s
dead: The lamb’s alive. Five summers in her jaws,
the quiet chewing, peaceful
and delicate, a song.
A native of North Dakota, Richard Sime moved to New York City in 1966 to work on a doctorate degree but soon drifted into publishing. He returned to school later, earning an MFA in fiction writing in 1994. Eventually he turned his attention to poetry, and his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Barrow Street, Salamander, American Arts Quarterly, Provincetown Arts, and Passager. He lives in the Bronx, NY.