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
Chewing Cud
A llama doesn’t care about bills or deadlines
it doesn’t care about making ends meet or making momma proud
all it wants is warm weather and grain at dusk
a green pasture to graze and a friend to eat it with.
I wish I could be more like a llama
eyes that see miles into souls
you brush its coat, whisper into those banana-shaped ears
and it answers your worries
with the sound of a hum,
a meditative pulse that takes you out of body
to ancient South American mountains
where, on icebox tips and in spanking wind
you observe humanity’s absence
there—detached from the familiar
you call it good.
it makes you pause: I think I’ll stay
and dwindle my life
just a while longer.
Learning to Stand
I passed within the barn walls,
unclamped the gate to enter the llama’s pen.
what was to be an ordinary
day of filling water buckets and hay bins,
turned to be the birth of a cria.
the mother stood wide-hipped,
the others crowding around
sniffing its rear as the head emerged.
the body dropped to the floor
wet and quivering
wrestling its eyelids to behold
its inaugural sight of dusty earth and straw.
the mother turned to inhale its fragile body
those quaking bones that
had been within her 11 months.
a single hum deemed it hers—
not minutes from the womb,
the cria stumbled to stand.
its lips small and shifting in its efforts,
shivering with hips as a dog after bathing
clenching its toes to the dirt
muscling upwards,
those legs, so lengthy and feeble.
at last,
its feet flat with the earth
cloven at the angle of a mountain
its neck in a U.
I see I’m not needed.
I pass to the gravel, and
take my steps to the house.
We Have a Llama Whose Name is “James and John Sons of Thunder”
My mom named him that because she’s into the Bible. In fact, all our animals are named after biblical characters: Peter, Paul, Luke, Abigail, Hannah, Zapporah—You name it, we got it. When you live on a farm and there are lots of animals, you tend to emanate that Genesis-given role in naming them. This is what a Christian household looks like. So we named that llama James and John Sons of Thunder—and one would think it’s fitting—the way it is but two names in one llama, a mirroring of the Trinity in a lesser form. A symbol for Christ’s “fully God, yet fully man” personhood. But my brothers and I always joked it referred to his testicles: those sons of Thunder. Those sons who would bulge in the summer heat, who would sag on crisp mornings. Those sons who drove him to straddle the fence-line in pursuit of the females. And who led to his castration. That day the vet cut them out, scalpelling the sack and loosening them from their hold, my brothers and I felt sadness in our hearts—a sense of death, like witnessing a funeral. Two little orbs emerged, cupped from the heat, white like a molded sphere of dried candle wax. I watched them disappear into the woods-line. (Did you know they bounce?) The llama’s head limp from anesthesia, tongue flaccid in the barn floor dust. Now he’s just called Thunder.
I Feel Like a Cowboy
when I saddle my llama
and you take my hand—
just the two of us
wandering ancient footpaths
where I choose to inhabit
straw huts and caves
that trickle out of mouths—
I salivate when I think
of chocolate and other drugs,
those sugar-comma dreams
and toothache stings
I feel like a cowboy
when I smoke marlboros in the sunset
and wear torn jeans that chafe
dreams under skin to surface
hopes that display
affection,
this belt loop that holds hearts tight
that you string up around your neck
and back against mine
I feel like a cowboy
gun in holster, yet not for
shooting
I just like the way it looks
hung and swaying against my thigh
as you stroke my chest
I feel like a cowboy
in a western film riding
into the sun with dust curling behind
I feel like a cow
boy, when you’re around.
An Account of a Llama’s Death
Zapporah died two days ago. She was such a good llama. The way she watched over the newborn crias as they matured to adulthood. The way she guarded the herd at night against coyotes. She was so kind even to the youngest of my siblings. My father tied her body to the bush-hog and dragged her to a pit beneath the big tree at the end of our property, the family gravesite where all our animals rested. There, he cut the engine and tussled her through the snow into the hole. My brothers and I looked into the earth at her stiffened bulk, already losing wool. She was ripe with age, and had outlived many younger than her. She was full-blooded Chilean after all—one of the last imports before the open trade stopped in ’88. We had long hoped against this day. We shoveled dirt to blanket her from the winter. Clouds rolled on the horizon to drag a cold front in.
Daniel Lassell
is the poetry winner of the 2013 William J. Maier Writing Award, and has been featured in several publications, which include literary journals such as Steam Ticket, Future Cycle, Penduline, riverrun magazine, Pure Francis, and Haiku Journal; and anthologies such as Panik: Candid Stories of Life Altering Experiences Surrounding Pregnancy, A Celebration of Young Poets, and Overplay/Underdone. In his youth, he raised llamas on a farm in Eminence, Kentucky. Today, he lives in Huntington, West Virginia.