Poetry Fall 2013 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Giving in to What If
after Steve Scafidi
If I only wrote about what I knew, as once
Plath wrote of moons, mannequins,
and the grievous words of yew and elm—
I would tell of the last call my brother made,
when he said he wouldn’t come for Christmas
and I tried to change his mind, and he insisted,
and I had the flu and didn’t, maybe, hear
the tone of his voice. Or I’d only write
of diapers, cakes baked, and failed tomatoes,
or of fees simple, encumbered and joint.
But I prefer to imagine life
in the animal kingdom, where,
as I understand it,
they get by without what ifs.
Here I can drift, a sea turtle
on ocean currents, weightless
from Thailand to the Golden Isles,
and not once consider
the half-ton of gravity
I bore across the sand
at nesting time, and will again,
when the moon draws me ashore.
As a crane I’m blessed with a mate
who chose me for life and is happy,
who doesn’t brood about the crane
one creek over, the one with plumper knobs
on her knees, knobs he’d like
the other males to envy
during annual migration.
I am a crow, immersed
in the collective mind of the murder,
and when the phone rings
someone, at least one of us,
has heard that tone of voice before,
remembers the up-shot, and tells me,
your brother needs help.
Go now.
Waiting for the Good Humor Man
Houston, 1962
Prone beneath mimosas,
the picture-book God
of rules and hellfire
deferred to the grace
of the natural world.
Pompons rained on me,
already dazed
by the scent of heat
rising off asphalt,
the smell visible
as a mirage
in a foreign legion film.
And though I don’t believe
my catechism, as I did then,
I’ve kept my eyes open to visions,
mild thunderbolts which saints
might call the voice of God:
After a storm, starfish
littered the beach at Sanibel,
hundreds of six-armed bodies
expelled from the deep.
And fifty years ago, I saw
lilies of the valley emerge,
pristine, from the charnel
of rotten leaves.
Prescription for the Use of
Scottish Footwear
When you hike, wear heavy socks and brogues,
so your eyes may rise above the narrow path,
ignore the common gait, trust one foot
to find its place before the other.
Toes safe, scan the landscape for love.
Stride through fields of waist-high grass,
fodder before it’s scythed to bale, and borrow
a few stalks to carry. The world’s in hand—
food for winter, seeds of next year’s crop.
Kick a pinecone straight down a gravel road,
on parade for crowds of spiderwort
and sumac cheering from the ditch. Notice
that suitors vie for your attention:
the eager moon, risen early into sheer sky
and the sun boasting in scarlet and plum.
Write your name on the bones
of the old smokehouse, to tie you
to the past, and keep a fragment
in the pocket of your winter coat, a gift
to find each year. At night, in the warmth
of your fireside, pick burrs from your socks
and burn them. Listen to your problems pop
and sizzle. Savor their resinous smell.
Watch them curl to cashmere smoke.
Birds of Suburbia: Blue-Gray Heron
Misplaced here by the interstate,
you soar above Baskin-Robbins,
sapling legs sailing behind,
neck folded into blades
of Da Vinci wings,
his dream of flight.
From here you wear no blue,
your silhouette all shade
glued flat to an ochre sky.
In this landscape of Starbucks,
your exotic form drags behind
a rusty tin can of foreboding.
Where are your moss-draped oaks?
I rejoice each spring and fall
when our house is a stop on your route,
like Sweat’s bar-b-q in Soperton
for Atlantans en route to Savannah.
I look out the west window
and there you are
a gawky Giacometti
knob-kneed and statue-still.
Perched on the brick ledge
or one leg submerged
you eye the buffet:
former denizens of our fishbowl
and offspring of bream
pulled from Nancy Creek
by children on summer break.
Then I see your slate spectrum flash.
You’re welcome here, eat up.
The goldfish translate sun too,
but are more prolific, their design
less esoteric, less like a secret
whispered in Genesis.
Losing My Drift
In line for coffee, waiting my turn,
a song transports me back.
Joni Mitchell just released Hejira, and I race
down the fine white lines of the free, free way.
I’m vaguely aware that what other patrons see
is a middle-aged woman, spaced out in Starbucks,
her hair in disarray, atypical of the neighborhood.
She seems to think it’s her duty to explain the draft
and women’s lib to young people who missed the Sixties,
these young people who seem to be running everything
(when did they take over?)
I don’t know this woman, but she’s always around.
Easily distracted, she has binges of attention,
interrupts everything she does to start
something else, keeps piles in every room,
monuments to projects she means to finish.
One pile on her desk is for vanishing wetlands,
one for stupid real estate projects
she will deplore in letters to editors
(Joni was right about that tree museum),
and one of unfiled items for her garden notebook,
data about plants that died years ago.
One pile is for an essay on hypocrisy.
The same politicians against stem cell research
say bombs away at the drop of a hat, unbothered by thousands
of dead civilians. Frankly, she just wants to slap
her friends who voted to keep them in office and say, WISE UP!
At this point it’s obvious the disgruntled boomer
has taken control of this poem that was supposed to be
about the grad student who stood atop Balsam Mountain
decades ago and thought society was progressing.
I was going to write about the self, or selves,
about how what seems lost, isn’t.
But the self that soars over the valley like a Red Tail
is also the slippery fish, still shining,
but scarred from flopping in the bottom
of an old canoe, which is the body, I guess,
and it’s drifting down stream, heading for the falls.
Patricia Percival
lives in Atlanta, where she is an active member of the writing community. When not making poems, she thinks about the big picture while micromanaging her garden (weeding). Her most recent publication is in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 5: Georgia. She is currently shopping a chapbook, Bargain with the Speed of Light, in which two of the poems in this issue of Sixfold will appear.