Poetry Summer 2013 fiction all issues
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Sharron Singleton
Five Poems
Sarah Giragosian
Five Poems
Jenna Kilic
Five Poems
Kristina McDonald
Five Poems
Toni Hanner
Five Poems
Annie Mascorro
Five Poems
Brittney Corrigan
Three Poems
S. E. Hudgens
Four Poems
Ali Doerscher
Four Poems
David Sloan
Three Poems
Olivia Cole
Five Poems
Lucy M. Logsdon
Four Poems
Marc Pietrzykowski
Four Poems
Donna Levine Gershon
Five Poems
Eva Heisler
The Olden Days
Stephanie Rose Adams
Five Poems
Jill Kelly
Five Encounters
Ben Bever
Five Poems
Michael Hugh Lythgoe
Five Poems
Arlene Zide
Three Poems
Harry Bauld
Five Poems
Lisa Zerkle
Four Poems
Peter Mishler
Five Poems
Tim Hawkins
Five Poems
Marqus Bobesich
Four Poems
Abigail Templeton-Greene
Five Poems
Eric Duenez
Five Poems
Anne Graue
Five Poems
Susan Laughter Meyers
Five Poems
Peter Kahn
Two Poems
D. Ellis Phelps
Five Poems
Linda Sonia Miller
The Kingdom
Nicklaus Wenzel
Skagit River
Holly Cian
Five Poems
Susan Morse
Five Poems
Daniel Lassell
Five Poems
Svetlana Lavochkina
Temperate Zones
Daniel Sinderson
Three Poems
Catherine Garland
Five Poems
Michael Fleming
Five Poems
Myopia and the Sick Child
Out the window’s unground lens clouds flee
my son’s fever across a breadth
of Bronx, where sough and whimper
drive heat on. This El Greco sky can’t be escaping
a whole borough that fast, such mad ploughing.
How can I be anyone’s father?
All I would need to halt the day
in its tracks, its element, its fit: a little vision.
These are my glasses at hand,
and here is the world to weather.
I should put them together
to catch this white scuttle and revelation,
the science of one last chance. But I don’t want
to recognize anything anymore,
rather pray (if this be prayer) without mark,
spot, puncture, like bristles of an astigmatic painter
caressing the flames of his own seraphim.
Square One
I would like to let everything
of love alone. Morning’s dog
keeps up its bark, and I can’t remember
when I lost track of you.
My physics stops at petal’s end
of a flower I can’t reach—I have no
need there—only not to choke
on every word: mass, force, attraction.
What keeps me going—somewhere
a nun touches herself to god.
The Greeks had no different word
for yellow and green, a spectrum to believe in
where nobody knows any longer
the burning sun from anyone else’s moon.
Matins
If I say love it will crack
my teeth and I am already bone
in need of graft. Mornings fall
from opened doors and small birds
persist like a torn corner of moon
restored in the last scrap of night, the page
I couldn’t read through
the razz of migraine,
an acre of dictation I shiver to take
from the car, the shower, the footstep
that starts the lists no one can finish.
In an orbit of larks I am sparrow pretender
in the chorus, a silent mouth moving,
makeshift hymn of shutting up and down.
Profit
Basquiat, 1982
In the tic tac toe of this space, what year will it be
When time arrows itself into your late rally?
One blue hole in the punctured ozone of downtown
Is all the sky you get in this economy.
Eenie meenie miney moe, catch a market by the toe,
Out goes you and your bloody trellis of halo.
Tomorrow avoids your blackboard, mad matrix
Of debt figured in the subway’s antipodes.
This scream through the drain of teeth
We’ve heard before in a major, northern key.
Chase it, get it, spend it, because you know
Something’s running you down, something’s coming;
Even if you don’t know what it is, you’ve seen
Its panicked fingers bony in their bright ecstasy
Erected into all the light left. You know
The position; now turn it to your own ends.
Queer Street
Boxer, Basquiat
what stories
he told with his hands
in the right he had romances
in the left soldier’s memories
—Zbigniew Herbert
Out of the zoo
of white fears are these
raised hands a no mas of surrender
or kong roar of victory
raging bull horns that have swallowed
the four-elbowed tenements of the Bronx
all torso and neckless
as a cartoon heavyweight
or black savior painted into a corner
stretched in the squared ring
against our sins
nails in the gloves
(the fix is in)
for hooks to lead us on
and crosses doubled and nailed—
are we flat on our backs
on the white canvas
blood pooling as the count
goes on above
arms and hairy fists pinned and fallen
or on our feet
in the trance of queer street
our permanent address
in these late rounds
where the legs are gone
and we’re out on our feet,
the heart alive and dead at once.
Harry Bauld
is from Medford, Massachusetts. He was included by Matthew Dickman in Best New Poets 2012 and his poems have appeared in Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, The Southeast Review, Verse Daily, Ruminate, The Baltimore Review, Whiskey Island, and Deliberately Thirsty (UK). He won the 2008 New Millenium Writings poetry prize. He has taught and coached baseball, basketball and boxing at high schools in Vermont and New York.