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
Everything You Google
Everything you Google comes back to haunt
you when you least expect it, like when you’re
trolling an atheism website and little pictures
of wedding bands mystically appear on the left
hand of the page because earlier you had Googled
funky wedding bands not because you are about
to be married but because you have been married
for almost fifteen godly years, in awe
that anything this tenuous-seeming wakes up
every morning in the same place, still willing
to commit to dinner that night, if not at six sharp
then as soon as is humanly, ethically possible what
with the meetings and the errands and the man-
dated receptions of wine and women in the work-
place and you see that you don’t like any of them
better than what you have, with the ribs
of gold that you found in a nothing jewelry store
in Clearwater because you were not sophisticated
enough to look into bespoke bands hammered out
like prenups, more things you never thought about,
like God while he was still living in the house
you grew up in, before divorce split the synagogue
into his and hers, before the void led you not to
temptation exactly but to this man who comes
custom as if an engine beyond belief remembered
what you had been searching for.
Kaddish
For Helen
Gray feathers in the rearview mirror
flutter finally to rest along the shoulders.
Your hair—thin and silver like birdsong,
long into your decades of denying
yourself nourishment—gone.
Delicate creature I cannot swerve to avoid,
you are free now of hollow bones and highways.
No more pecking at seeds and berries.
Yit’gadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.
I alone count gulls for the minyan.
The 7-Up Man
He comes every Thursday
to restock her shelves.
He goes straight for the 2-liters
like he owns the place.
He works quickly:
Highway 9 brings truckers,
beachgoers, locals, all thirsty.
He looked at her once
as she walked out of the walk-in
freezer wearing the dried sweat
of every clerk since 1920
who had donned the community parka
to uncrate the ice cream
and said, “Nice negligee.”
No summer shift manager
has ever needed delivery more,
walking home to her mother’s house,
his Coca-Cola eyes in her sight,
Jazz Age perspiration hanging
like a Billie Holiday song
on her shining, tired skin.
Twilight
Bat at my head,
I don’t care if the tangling in the hair thing
is a myth,
I believe it,
I believe it
with my skin,
with the back of my neck,
with my soul,
that your sonar
is on the fritz,
that the frizz of my hair
has crossed
from annoying
to perilous
and that once we are
enmeshed, frantic,
your needle teeth
will inject me
with whatever the cave
has bred
as I fly blind
across the field
from this day,
when my mother
has died,
to the next,
when we take up
the heavy shovel
and heave clods
of earth
onto the box
we have put her in.
Mother Earth, South Carolina
August, and the house shifts, a pediment drops to the pavement,
and we bring the baby home from the hospital
to rock in the craterlet the earth has carved for her.
A different August, 1886, landslide on the Ashley River.
Walls failed and fell, fissures birthed new meanings of the earth.
We tell ourselves we are rocks, but all that means
is we respond to stress by breaking apart.
I split like rock to bring you, my earthenware,
Earth-wary, to a place of rending and liquefaction:
One thing melts into a mother.
Charleston felt aftershocks for thirty-five years.
Any mother could have told them to expect that.
Donna Levine Gershon’s
poetry has appeared in storySouth, qarrtsiluni, Literary Mama, and Kakalak: Anthology of Carolina Poets, among other publications. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she works as a freelance editor.