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
Richard Parisio
On a Photograph Taken in Newark, 1929
I imagine he was bored. His job, taking pictures
of auto wrecks for an insurance firm.
He paused a moment here, let vision
of the row of buildings blur in the nimbus
of his cigarette. When it cleared
the alley between tenements
blocked by a slumped fence caught his eye.
Someone wanting in or out had pushed or pulled
then tramped the wooden pickets down.
The fence bears plastered-on advertisements
for entertainments, modern products pitched
to the idle or the curious passerby.
No soul in sight, a thought flashed
in the black box of his head: before
I built a fence . . . He set up his tripod,
fixed the vanquished barrier in his view,
pickets splayed like whales’ ribs on a beach,
the soot-dark alley brooding like the sea.
He held his breath and flung the shutter open:
the flash he made was lightning with no rain.
Before his shrouded face the scene
came into sudden focus and the secret
coded in these appearances
fossilized upon a copper plate.
Brown Creeper
Below the plate glass ramparts,
on the simple sidewalk, no tree near,
lay a mouse-sized clump of feathers.
Out-of-context bird, what whispered word
for forest brought you here? What lust
for space enticed you past your borders
into this mirror of the sky. You crashed
into our reality, you paragon of drab,
you match for bark and shadows.
I lift you by your spiked tail feathers,
good for hitching up trunks,
admire your bill’s curve, perfect
for probing crevices for spiders—
what else could you expect here in this city
but sudden death? For an exile
like you, brown alien, mesmerized
by mere reflection, where is real?
What refuge from sun-dazzle,
tumult, glass, and steel?
I bear you through these Newark streets
till I can lay you in a concrete
urn with pansies. Forget the crude
jest of a citizen of this rough place
hollered as we passed: “Who’s got
two slices of bread for that?”
Best melt into the soil of this planter,
dream your way back to leaf-
filtered light. Your body, intact,
pressed into the day, has made a shell
to tilt up to my ear: I listen
past the city’s screaming haste to hear
your lilt, your forest song.
Mentor
Outside my morning window spills a wren’s
song, like a waterfall. No—effervescent—
like a spring that bubbles
from an unseen source.
Maybe I never really heard till Art King,
understated, most unwrenlike man,
pointed in the song’s direction, touched
a finger to his ear before he named the singer.
So many others, more accomplished:
orioles, tanagers, grosbeaks, and of course
the thrush—we first heard, then tried sighting
like augurers, scanning treetops for a sign.
Ready to retire Art King knew each bird
by its song, but hearing failed him in the upper
ranges: one of us young teachers, when we touched
an ear and pointed, might just get a shrug
from Art in answer. One such impossible note
he might or might not hear belonged to the tiny
Blackburnian warbler Art King called “the firethroat.”
The bird glimpsed was a match struck
in the leaves, a shock of orange flame
that blazes in the brain’s deep folds
four decades later. After those walks we each
went off to teach our classes—but enkindled,
as though we cupped a secret candle
against the wind all day. This morning
I salute the plain brown wren, though I can’t see him
answer with a tail flick from his thicket.
Triumphal
Master of nonchalance, the mockingbird
now stays through our northern winters
as if to say, we have entered the new
dispensation, the age of extremes,
when even this endless winter
bears the seeds of endless summer
like acorns under the snowdrifts.
The mockingbird goes for suet,
Leaves sunflower seeds to yankees, pine
siskins flashing sun-yellow from streaked wings.
The mockingbird’s hollow bones remember
the sultry south, where Spanish moss
beards the live oaks. He pours the honey
of his song into thick air, milk of moonlight.
Silent today, he bides his time,
can afford to, for the altered world
suits him fine: never mind those icy
blasts, it’s clear how things are going.
He’s been assigned to call out creatures
in endless mimicry, a roll call of the vanishing.,
The rests in his rollicking aria attest
to the mostly silent: tortoises, polar bears.
Growing up in the city’s outskirts I recall
his nonstop tour-de-force on summer nights.
Our bird-loving father feared the wrath
of neighbors kept awake might stop his mouth.
Fat chance. From his rooftop aerial pulpit
the revivalist preacher in his long gray coat
sang out and declared his own redemption:
here I am, here I am, singing, singing,
whose world, whose world, whose world
is it now?
The Honey Seeker
La Araña Caves, Spain
Sheathed in mesh mask, white suit, gloves, even high white
rubber boots, I kindled dry leaves and sumac berries to a smoldering
burn in the smoker. Working the bellows, I pumped gray
clouds of smoke around the hive before I dared to lift
a frame away. Mobbed by a posse of bees, I watched their city
with its capped wax cells filled up with slumbering larvae
rouse to repel the siege. I checked for dead or ailing
citizens, signs of mites, found none—left them in the peace
of their amber hoard, their throbbing, multitudinous life.
That day I took no honey, felt no sting, but was a gazer
only, witness to a bounty past my grasping, distilled
from the humming field, the crucible of flowers.
Six millennia have past since I went naked
to scale the limestone cliff to reach this womb.
On the cave wall, in red ochre, see my legs, my long arm
dangling, basket clutched in one hand while the other
plumbs the niche. I am stung and stung but hang on,
reaping, fool and thief and angel. I was chosen.
Richard Parisio
has worked as an interpretive naturalist for over forty years, in the Everglades, Pocono Mountains, at Assateague Island, and, since 1984, in the Catskills and Hudson valley. He is currently NYS Coordinator for River of Words, a national children’s poetry and art contest on the theme of watersheds. His poetry collection, The Owl Invites Your Silence, won the 2014 Slapering Hol Press Poetry Chapbook Contest.