Poetry Winter 2015 fiction all issues
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Cover Peter Rawlings
J. H Yun
Yesenia
& other poems
Colby Hansen
Killing Jar #37
& other poems
Melissa Bond
Freud's Asparagus
& other poems
Jane Schulman
When Krupa Played Those Drums
& other poems
Susan F. Glassmeyer
First Moon of a Blue Moon Month
& other poems
Melissa Tyndall
Haptics
& other poems
Micah Chatterton
Medicine
& other poems
Emily Graf
Toolbox
& other poems
Kate Magill
LV Winter, 2015
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Meeting Mrs. Ping
& other poems
Richard Parisio
Brown Creeper
& other poems
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
Circe in Business
& other poems
Laurel Eshelman
Tuckpointing
& other poems
Barry W. North
Molotov Cocktail of the Deep South
& other poems
Charles C. Childers
Privilege
& other poems
Ricky Ray
A Way to Work
& other poems
Cassandra Sanborn
Revelation
& other poems
Linda Sonia Miller
Full Circle
& other poems
J. Lee Strickland
Anna's Plague
& other poems
Erin Dorso
In the Kitchen
& other poems
Holly Lyn Walrath
Behind the Glass
& other poems
Jeff Lewis
Charles Ives, A Connecticut Yankee
& other poems
Karen Kraco
Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill
& other poems
Rafael Miguel Montes
Casket
& other poems
Erin Dorso
March in Manarola
Water presses and slips
green silk over stone,
a mother’s hand over hair,
tangling loose strings of foam, floating
away,
the broken
cat’s cradle, the rope
and the rock and the sea,
the sea,
the sky and the rock and the
red boats lined up,
waiting
On the Drive Back to Andersonville
Snowdrifts rush across Lakeview Drive.
Naked tree trunks pull white coats on their backs
heaving polar fur bit by bit
until they rear up, ancient monsters
showing their dark bellies.
Branches, bald and bone,
each limb capped with pearl talon.
Translucent snakes shine off the ends, slicing
wind as we scream by them at 65.
I shiver against the window on the way back out
to the stout, less dignified part of the city
just after New Year’s midnight.
From across the console, my husband sighs:
Isn’t the snow lovely?
In the Kitchen
Chopping cabbage
the way I taught myself
from eating nabe so many times at the izakaya
around the corner.
No technique—
just hacking at squares of leaf
the best I know how.
We’re Italian
and I’ve watched my mother cut the peppers
wide and firm for cacciatore
lean strings in the salad.
Daikon is probably the same
and I julien an in-between, indecisively sized amount
of about a handful too many
and toss the extra white strips
in my clean, white bin.
My neat kitchen hides the cook
I keep shamed in the cupboard.
I poke and prod at the ordered implements,
order my boyfriend around,
act the woman of the house
while crumbs build up in the dark corners
a real woman would know about
and the nabe leaks bright kimuchi
into cracks in the straw floor.
Fig Keeper
In the evening, I watch the fig garden
below my window.
The air stills.
I wait, listless,
for stretched leather skins to split open
and expose what’s been ripening
inside.
Grow a person,
I imagine,
who will speak my tongue,
sweet and pitted and
present.
Erin Dorso
is an educator and poet living in Walla Walla, Washington with her husband and two children. She has taught language arts in Florida, Japan, and Washington and now develops professional learning for other educators in her region. Her poetry is inspired by the natural world, at home and on the road.