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
After you leave for work, I contemplate the shovel
Clearly visible through the kitchen
window, a shovel leans
against the fence. The yard
of our city apartment is nearly
nine square feet and everything
I’ve tried to grow has died
so you joked that I was Queen Midas,
that I could kill anything with a touch,
which didn’t make much sense
but I laughed because it was better
than not laughing but I stopped
touching the garden although
I didn’t stop touching you.
It’s a brand new shovel
and the dirt looks undisturbed
and as I let the coffee burn
I wonder what it is
you’re planning to bury.
The Lost Girls
It’s hard to run with a shield in one hand,
but we get used to the extra weight.
The point isn’t to hide.
We wear our motherlessness
on our chests, like Athena,
born in full armor, raised
by a father. We don’t
use the word abandoned.
People know our story so well, they forget
they know our story.
We like the feel of dirt
and rocks and we sleep
under trees and never talk
about our feelings.
The point isn’t to feel, either.
Which is why, when we find
the well-worn teddy bear
stashed under branches,
a note saying Love, Mom
tied to its paw,
we burn it.
Which is why
I didn’t tell them
it was mine.
When the Dog Bites
It’s one of those things that happen to other people
and besides, I’d always wanted a puppy
so I stopped to say hello and was distracted
by the gathering saliva, the darkness
of its lips, the sudden
wrongness of it all
so when its jaw clamped down
at first, there was only silence
and a warm empty feeling.
I wanted to disappear.
I started singing an old children’s song
but I couldn’t remember the words
so I closed my eyes and pictured my mother
in the kitchen the day she said
girls in white dresses
should never be caught
lying on their backs
stirring the stars at night
with their tongue.
She had a knife in her hand at the time
though I couldn’t quite remember why
and when I opened my eyes I could see
the blood seeping through the grass.
I don’t know at what point he let go
and later, when the doctor asked me
what happened, I told him it was just
an accident. It was nobody’s fault
but my own.
A daughter should know the answer
In Australia, they cover corpses
with leaves. Slow erasure of organs,
of skin. In Andorra, it is the law
to ask every body you find
lying face down, Are you dead?
Are you dead? Are you dead?
•
A girl walks into the desert. She can smell
the morning’s carrion and she understands
this is how time passes. Fingers lengthen
but have less to hold. Overhead, vultures circle
and she needs them to land. She needs to ask
if they’ve seen her mother.
•
It takes over two thousand days to mummify
the self, like they used to do in Japan.
She wonders if her mother’s hidden somewhere,
only a thousand days from death.
•
A person isn’t missing
if she disappears
on purpose.
•
A girl walks into a museum
full of skeletons. She needs to know
why skulls always look like
they’re smiling.
•
A woman hides in the bathroom
of a funeral home, washing off
her mother-face. She shakes hands
with a cadaver, says, If anyone asks,
I wasn’t here.
My foot is stuck in the mirror again
and I can’t stop staring at the two five-fingered bruises on my neck, pulsating like some ghost is trying to open a door in my throat. Behind me, a mask on the wall is hiding another mask, almost forgotten but in the reflection I can make out both sets of lips whispering, You have to let go. But I notice my foot is getting sleepy so I spin it a story about a house the shape of a head and inside the house, a wolf, inside the wolf, a man I once loved before I learned every mouth holds a secret and every hand makes a fist and somewhere in this story someone or something died savagely at the tooth of another. My father hated his own face and my father’s father used to smash everything around him before he disappeared mysteriously one night, not unlike my mother although not before she stood me in front of a mirror with my first make-up kit and said, You’re the one who looks at your reflection. You’re not the one who looks back.
Kristina McDonald
received her MFA from Eastern Washington University, where she was the poetry editor of Willow Springs. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, New Guard Review, Switchback, and Sugar House Review. She has worked for the literary non-profits Writers in the Schools and Get Lit! Programs, and she currently works at Rice University.