Poetry Fall 2013 fiction all issues
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Chris Joyner
Wrestlemania III
& other poems
Carey Russell
Visiting Hours
& other poems
Marc Pietrzykowski
Cabinet of Wonders
& other poems
Jonathan Travelstead
Prayer of the K-12
& other poems
Jennifer Lowers Warren
Our Daughter's Skin
& other poems
Jeff Burt
The Mapmaker's Legend
& other poems
Patricia Percival
Giving in to What If
& other poems
Toni Hanner
1960—Lanny
& other poems
Christopher Dulaney
Uncle
& other poems
Suzanne Burns
Window Shopping
& other poems
Katherine Smith
Mountain Lion
& other poems
Peter Kent
Surliness in the Green Mountains
& other poems
William Doreski
Gathering Sea Lavender
& other poems
Huso Liszt
Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin...
& other poems
Clifford Hill
How natural you are
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Dungeoness
& other poems
David Kann
Dead Reckoning
& other poems
Ricky Ray
The Music of As Is
& other poems
Tori Jane Quante
Creatio ex Materia
& other poems
G. L. Morrison
Baba Yaga
& other poems
Joe Freeman
In a Wood
& other poems
George Longenecker
Bear Lake
& other poems
Benjamin Dombroski
South of Paris
& other poems
Ryan Kerr
Pulp
& other poems
Josh Flaccavento
Glen Canyon Dam
& other poems
& other poems
Christine Stroud
Grandmother
& other poems
Abraham Moore
Inadvertent Landscape
& other poems
Chris Haug
Cow with Parasol
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Fiberglass Madonna
& other poems
Emily Hyland
The Hit
& other poems
Sam Pittman
Growth Memory
& other poems
Alex Linden
The Blues of In-Between
& other poems
Bobby Lynn Taylor
Lift
& other poems
D. Ellis Phelps
Five Poems
Alia Neaton
Cosmogony I
& other poems
Elisa Albo
Each Day More
& other poems
Noah B. Salamon
Sanctuary
& other poems
Fiberglass Madonna
Barbie was in her twenties I'd say
when we used to sew her clothes
on your Singer look-alike
back room of your maternal trailer
stitching time, saving none
I'd insist on bringing her
to the shower with us and she would
bathe in the Amazon River Basin created
from the drainage of your hair
and I would braid her hair
like your motorcycle hair sitting
there at your ankle
under the fall of your cleansed body
And her perfect plastic features
were a replica of you
reflecting in the basin
where a Narcissus flower once bloomed
and Adonis once bled into
the brushed nickel drain
Even your breasts were as plastic as hers
those same warrior breasts
but you fell down the drain of wisdom,
of vitality,
a break in the river current
And Barbie was fully clothed
when you tried to stitch yourself
together in an institute for the imperfect,
communicating with your Singer look-alike,
Sexton at her typewriter
You were in your twenties, I’d say,
when you drowned,
Anticlea at the river
And we are bathing eternally,
showering Madonna statue of
mother daughter Barbie
with your blood forever pouring over us
Barbie, that whore, lying naked in the drain
Lexapro Shortage
I am here to see a counselor today,
rotten psychology stinks to high hell
in my mind left on a shelf for 20 years
Bring me science
Bring me God
Anything but psychology
We came here together once,
you and I on the ironic love seat
I am staring at that brown seat now
It growls at me
I approach it like an enumerable caravan to my grave
and startled, I turn to the black, more appropriate colored chair,
holding the clipboard of my subconscious tight,
like a tiger you would say
And you are no longer here
They ask for an emergency contact now
and my God,
I have had an epiphany
I have no emergency contact now
Perhaps that is the worst of it
A permanent check mark next to divorced,
A blank next to emergency contact
They're all deceased, I say
(euphemism for rotting in graves
below Whitman’s democratic grass
Shut up
This is why you are here in the first place)
And my mother is damn sure in the painting
on the wall staring at me with an oil painted tear
mocking me for being like her
but there's no bullet in my head
no trickle of blood on my temple
just an empty loveseat
A Barren Grave, Walden Pond
I grow from the earth
as though houses were
formed on the eighth
day, emerging from
the dust like women
built from ribs.
Emerson, I join you
in the real houses
of this world,
the ones that
envelop the bottom
tier of gravity—
a pyramid of pressure,
our homes sprout
from the dirt under
our fingernails—
from atoms,
from bacteria,
from nothing.
The earth formed
deliberately from
the cabin and not
the other way
around, Thoreau.
I am a house,
empty,
barren of furniture
and my windows
are closed,
Venetian blinds
shut, smiling back
at me like Plath’s
tulips perched
on her windowsill,
they mock me.
Still I sit,
emerged from
the earth like
a cracked
politician.
I lie to ecology.
Mariah Blankenship
received a Bachelors in English from Radford University and a Masters of Education. She currently teaches Creative Writing and English in Virginia where she lives with her tiny Yorkie and bearded boyfriend. She likes to read depressing feminist literature while watching trash reality television.