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
Sweaty Man of Lincoln Park
Pray for Sweaty Man, that his gym membership has not
been revoked. A puddle—viscous and malodorous—left
in his wake. That he is not a salty blob of Jello jolting
and jogging down Clark St. Pray that you don’t sit
next to him on the 36 bus when windows are stuck or worse,
pray you don’t place your freshly-pressed pants on the seat
he’s just left, leaving you to wonder if you’ve pissed
yourself a week’s worth of water and Gatorade. Pray for air-
conditioning and cold showers. Pray for his wife,
that she doesn’t succumb some mid-August night
to drowning when love-
making turns up the thermometer.
That some hot-blooded mermaid doesn’t lure him
under for a salt water-dance. Pray for Sweaty Man,
that Poseidon himself doesn’t claim him for his own.
Independence
We got to Tremont Park early that first time.
Laid out a checkered blanket, waited and watched.
Lara and I stickied our small hands with red,
white and blue popsicles. As the sky blackened
and white-headed zits twinkled and winked,
there was a quick pop, like a pinned balloon.
Then came the clap that shook my stomach
like a hard hiccup. I loved the color tie-dying
the dark, but the sound, the way it smacked
the ground, made me cringe and cry and kick
over the bottle of dark red wine my parents
were drinking to toast our 199th birthday.
We were the first to leave, retreating to our white
Chevy station wagon. On the drive home, Dad
taught me a game—to clap in sync with each boom,
to ready me for the big 200 when I would be ten,
too old to run from what explodes in the dark.
Peter Kahn
is a founding member of the London poetry collective, Malika’s Kitchen. His poems have been published internationally and he is a prize-winner in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition (UK). A high-school teacher since 1994, Peter was the recipient of the Wallace Douglas Award for contribution to the Chicago youth writing community. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he has launched the Spoken Word Education Training Programme.