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
Bones
Spite, a sad kind, the way I am leaning—
a dark line—your brittle bones
passing in the world beside me—
it tells all—the Lord atop my shoulders—
how once inside you‘ll move with me
into the after for all to see,
once alive you‘ll never need
the twig and branch you give to me;
a cold love, inside the hills
to be bones and nothing more—
all you are is skin to me,
and bones and nothing more—
When a bluer sky is slid beneath
the crack at our bedroom door
I stretch and moan and move for you—
I am bones and nothing more.
Picture
At night, of late, I watch molding take
the edge away and men fingering their belts.
Flailing, they dig into their waistbands,
later, they will watch their babies
and pretend to sleep.
soap and hot water
have scarred my hands
but still I can be your beautiful
wife dressed in gray leggings
muscle and vein
have twisted my ankles
so picture me
something like a bee
inside a small room,
and frightened.
Close Reading
neighborhood morning what a bleak day across the
grid. holy roller quiet streets with distant thunder
and birds that talk amongst themselves. this is our
day of debt. strawberries for breakfast so sweet
may have mistaken them for small red clouds,
and the nights are so-dark reminders of being
buried alive. Come, revitalize
the summertime might coo, physically sick
as it were—nausea all across the bedsheets;
wondering if there is something
inside of me, and hiding it.
I feel dizzy and awkward at standing, all
my knees and feet in separate places
missing passports. the days are losing weight
and diameter; the artist walks in the room,
across the room, disappears outside the room
and the artist now has no palms or poems to tango.
Last week
was dense like a heavy cut of fish. we
closed early, live music in the background
and worms eating by the roots of plants.
Need Money? they ask, those deep deep
hands shucking oysters downtown.
prescription pain pill users wanted—that’s
what makes us all so happy, all kinds of separate
pieces local cheap and heavy. Landlord
and crusader moving state to state licking
tremors off many a-thigh in his day-to-day,
hands crept to the small of a back. Tastes like
prison meals, he says, like something got
on credit. there, there, hush now.
View from a Cold Window in North Carolina
It is so cold
that when cold boys look out
over the fields
and talk about bicycles
their voices are small
as hollow tin cans
and they forget
they have had no supper,
they forget the moon that
has left them,
that their father is gone,
and lumps of hills
like those found in bodies
can hide their red faces.
There is a fiddler with a spindle
beard sitting in the window,
there he sits on blistered wood,
with dirt for fingers—
he can see the stars
even when the farm is low
and green
and the asphalt road
snakes around
the tiny town
as if the whole blue world were made
Inside of it.
Looking Glass Rock
Six shades of blue,
a glimpse of sharp peaks
and I am so far behind,
so far behind that
I could still flush red
like a birthday cake
and you would fall
off Looking Glass
and I would be a gasping shape
like a burlap sap empty
for whoever will keep me.
Surely when your life passes
into so many things,
I will then be so alone
as I never have been,
and my voice will be
a cracked cup,
a chamber door,
and so I think
I will just slide right off,
I will just leap right off
and never look again
I am so afraid of the cliff
at Looking Glass.
Holly Cian
The poems here are among the first I’ve written since moving to North Carolina several months ago. As I worked on these poems, my focus was on detail, rhythm, and movement. Reading over these poems once more, I notice a sense of disconnect throughout—the speaker often seems to be separate from the happenings of the world, and the speaker’s voice moves at a more thoughtful pace, as if it exists in a dream.