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
My Claim to Fame
My claim to fame— I had breakfast with him
and his second wife
now replaced by another
blond young thing.
Pancakes and coffee
fragrant as the songbird morning
of his words.
Once, He sat on my couch, the other poet
spoke
(between the Boursin-spread cracker mouthfuls and the sips of wine)
of how women’s poetry just wasn’t
strong enough
didn’t make “statements”. His own whining,
drumbeating body-painting
male-
bonding ceremonies in the woods
notwithstanding.
The Nobel prize-winner too
came to dinner once,
his childhood rape
sticky fly-feet stuck in memory, but
never grew wings on any of the women in his novels,
made their lives
real.
I need
today
to ward away
such memories, unseat
them, send them off in their fur-lined coats
into the snowy night. I need
to write
my own mornings,
the hot sweet coffee, crumbling rolls,
the frantic flying cockroaches and smashed dishes of
a Bronx back kitchen.
I want to watch our breath float again in the winter air
while we sing wild choruses, sailing to Bear Mountain,
standing room only at the opera, love affairs with tall hard men, flying
across the mountains of Afghanistan
to land in a village in the tribal wilds of India
surely
must count for something—
my words
my claim
to fame.
Sons
in memory of Loraine and for Heather
The eldest daughter
lay herself down along her now-dead mother
old arguments forgotten, put
aside, her sad self
at the fore, her life
a riddle, still.
While all around her brothers squabbled,
ordered, scoffed and simmered
all around,
gave orders to their sisters, to each other,
unable to offer solace
to their living mother or
now, any sister, or
themselves.
Kept muttering
about wills, and houses ,
paintings, books, and trinkets
while scolding
sisters, one as always, silent,
one still sobbing in her mother’s hair.
In my hospital room
my son, too full of pain, perhaps,
sat , never noticing the built-in window-bed for family,
(complaining later to me of how long
he had to wait for me to breathe,
to wake.)
He sat
in corridors, in anguish
in indelible childhood memory
when his mother screamed
and ranted, picked her way around from wall to leaning wall
while his father, interminable wordsmith
had no words
no arms to comfort or console,
no concern but for his
having to suffer more
by watching
his wife suffer.
Remembering perhaps
his doctor father always having time
to tend to others, his kind words
for others.
(He too complained
to a limp form of me in a different
hospital bed, arms strung with tubes
and piping, and fear.)
Perhaps fear
is what’s at the heart of it.
Sons can’t
fear, can’t
show lack of control,
or make sense
of the senseless.
Daughters
sit,
quietly
lie
quietly,
close by
face in her disheveled hair
to better hear
even a whispered word.
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
Don’t get too comfortable. You won’t be here forever. Don’t go and unpack all of your rickrack undies. This is just a way station. You are in a shabby limbo.
Soon the trials will get started. Every day they’ll question you. You will question yourself every day, every hour.
At first, as usual, the birds will whistle and sing in the early mornings; then they’ll start flying off, to the South, to the North. To those places you’ve not even seen in your dreams.
Once, perhaps in a dream, you will be that bird. Soaring, over green fields to a distant hill, you will own the meadows.
But, don’t get too comfortable. This is just a way station.
You won’t be here tomorrow.
Arlene Zide
has published in a variety of journals such as Meridians, Rattapallax, Evening Street Review, 13th Moon, Colorado Review, California Quarterly, and Rhino. Her translations of Hindi poets have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, The Bitter Oleander, and Salt Hill; and in the Everyman Series: Indian Love Poems, the Oxford Anthology of Indian Poets, and Language for a New Century.