Poetry Summer 2015 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Hannah Lansburgh
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
For Your Own Good
& other poems
Marianne S. Johnson
Tortious
& other poems
Kate Magill
Nest Study #1
& other poems
Karen Kraco
Studio
& other poems
Matt Daly
Beneath Your Bark
& other poems
Paulette Guerin
Emergence
& other poems
Hank Hudepohl
Crossed Words
& other poems
Alma Eppchez
At the Back of the Road Atlas
& other poems
Jim Burrows
At the Megachurch
& other poems
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Lioness
& other poems
Yana Lyandres
New York Transplant
& other poems
Heather Katzoff
Start
& other poems
Tom Yori
Cana
& other poems
Barth Landor
What Is Left
& other poems
Abigail F. Taylor
Never So Still
& other poems
George Longenecker
Polar Bears Drowning
& other poems
Ben Cromwell
Sometimes a Flock of Birds
& other poems
Robert Mammano
the way the ground shakes
& other poems
Janet Smith
Rocket Ship
& other poems
Gina Loring
Dementia
& other poems
J. Lee Strickland
Minoan Elegy
& other poems
Toni Hanner
Catching the Baby
& other poems
Tom Yori
Cana
When they tipped the jars
—which were actually those old amphorae
that cradled wines from Rome to Tarsus,
Hellespont to Heliopolis
—it wasn’t water any more.
It ran red as blood
and He fell silent
hearing the echo
of a word yet unspoken.
But the steward, an obsequious Greek
(graduate, All-But-Dissertation
—Pythagorean U., Corinth Campus)
won by his master casting lots
simpered at the rube.
Though, he said, it was quite a fine merlot,
the main course was fish.
Could you do something in a white?
And the guests, hearing a magician was
miraclizing out back,
almost stampeded to make requests:
They were a Zealot crowd.
So Mary, seeing Him clutch His stomach,
which threatened imminently that notorious, eruptive dyspepsia,
asked if He’d like to leave now.
For the strangest moment He cast on her His eyes so limpid
the world looked right through them
and He seemed to take measure again of the measuring human heart
its human limits, its bonds, its obligations,
its specificity, its universality
then as strangely as when He obeyed her to begin
He followed her direction again and parted.
However, the mysterious Q saw all.
He recounted it, raconteur he was,
to a scribbler, circa 60, in Thessaly,
who, à la Woodward / Bernstein, plied
Q—with wine, not coffee—
slurring his notes when Q left to refill.
The story, like the scribbler’s head, and vision,
came out blurry.
But he workshopped it at Ephesus
where the first item to go was that charged-glance thing
What is that anyway?
You can give an Evil Eye or a Look of Love
either of which, to your mother, is creepy.
Next they realized the steward’s expertise
in Sophocles and Aeschylus
detracted from focus on the wine,
which must have been—must have been
—The Best.
They eliminated also that distracting byplay about the color.
And if anyone noticed they didn’t care
that that steward, who’s supposed to run the master’s house
talked to his boss like someone
hired for the day
from Feasts R Us.
So anyway the point emerged:
Not what happened, but the Deeper Truth
the unschooled hungry heart always knew
but never knew it knew,
As fruit yearns to ripen.
Blood Drive
They keep calling you “hero” as though you were a kid
having to be verbally nudged off the high dive
or even the low dive.
The literature does that I mean:
The people with the stealthoscopes are too busy asking you
Have you ever had sex even once since 1977 with another man?
Have you ever paid to have sex either with money or drugs?
Has anyone ever paid you for . . . since 1977 . . . even once
. . . shared a needle to inject drugs?
. . . spent six months or more total in the UK?
(so what, you wonder, do they do in the UK when they need it?)
. . . looked for an undue amount of time at a map of Africa?
Before you finally start
you’ve recited your Social Security number
five times.
But they know you now in this church hall,
people without pressure cuffs or red crossed coats or question or claim:
the cute white-haired Louise for instance who works the
reception table under the basketball net
(she reminds you of a first girl friend),
the bespectacled bustler at the recovery table
set up by the stage preempted with afterthoughts and unfinished by-play,
busted boxes herniating Christmas garlands in August heat.
They never seem to sport their own donation bandages.
Louise, looked at twice, may still not weigh the minimum 110 pounds.
And once upon a glance her eyes dodged to your shirt’s I Gave! stick-on
wanting to be wanted so.
Because there’s nothing like it,
what you’ve got aplenty.
It’s all-state biracial multinational
and every kind of natural.
You may feel that you are plodding on the treadmills of obscurity
especially Monday mornings
but you’re not the LED-up machine over there in the corner
glaring neon colors
coughing up product
at the in-chink of coin.
You are instead the real Real Thing,
a coursing vehicle of sin and crimson essence
beating the byways the arteries
putting your damaged heart into it
take and give
give and give and take
just as yours
drew in their hour from these tangled roots this turf of streams.
This is what your preemie daughter needed,
your mother, that time she had cancer,
your brother when he wrecked that bike,
your buddy when he took that bullet,
all from alien folk
who owed you
zip.
Stranger yourself, you don’t need what’s called closure,
the story that a story must complete
because they don’t just go on
the way they really do.
It doesn’t matter, what happens to today’s pint
what happened to the last one.
And it’s amazingly easy:
you just like back and let it flow
seems the least you could do:
Run in this easy-flowing roadwork,
this highway
this interstate system
this over-arching network of veins
a-pulse
a-pulse
a-pulse.
Since 1500
It’s hard to see the difference
in 25 mere generations,
though your wife’s brother Carl,
mouth full of turkey,
claims infallibility.
He loves to poke you in the ribs
or gouge your eye
with his faith moving mountains
of jobs to the world’s truly
exploitable.
After each election he’ll crow at you
How’s that hope thing working for you
that faith thing.
You want to retort
but really he’s a brother too throws back his head
laughs from his belly
sends huge packages at Christmas.
When he dies,
you will miss him,
and how he loved to tow your kids
behind his fun, godawful
powerboat.
But those blunt dull tools of God’s wrath in 1500
came rude and wet to life
like you;
and so did those victim misbelievers disemboweled:
Martyr and holy murderer
all lanced toward something
dimly seen
on a father’s spit, a mother’s blood.
Here’s the real confession:
I’m not so far beyond the burning rage,
the lune-y howls.
The suspicions Carl had for instance
that someone over there had a bigger,
better boat just handed to him
—the welfare—for nothing—
that’s not so far from the common cause I feel
for affordable care,
a holy spirit I long for
as I sing in the silent night,
or while I read the Times
Don Quixote
excuse me Walter Mitty
guzzling at the fountainhead.
I know the hunger and thirst
to purify this flag.
I’ve seen it all in the Before I read.
They’re telling me with everything money can buy
I’ve lost and my father’s grandfather’s great-grandfather’s
monumental struggles trashed
targets of cheap shots hollow points.
20-something punks smirk in crocodile shoes
boss PhD’s review their speeches
investigate prosecutors not investigating non-existent fraud
create new forms scientifically crafted bullshit
moving needles
finding legs
life sacred CREP-form.
I’ve lost but
I could sell out my ass.
They’d love that.
It’s not enough to win:
Everyone else has to lose
or else they just can’t feel good
about themselves.
Everyone else has to ignore mere math mere fact
and hail bend over for The Unseen Hand
that gropes and violates.
Everyone else has to kiss the oily lips and beaches
of this petrochemical Savior
Christ You’ve Never Known
You Can’t Recognize.
and now
I can feel my soles already flying like angels,
daily news slipped under my chin
the crowd mocking my union authorization cards
while the hoods whisper in my ear
one last time:
Abjure.
This is 
Tom Yori’s first published poetry. He has published short fiction in numerous literary journals such as New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Long Story, Sou’Wester, and others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was recognized in Passages North’s 2010 very short fiction contest.