Poetry Summer 2020 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Vecteezy
Rodrigo Dela Peña
If a Wound is an Entrance for Light
& other poems
Shellie Harwood
Early Evening, Late September
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
The Deacon’s Lament
& other poems
J. H. Hall
Immersion
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
Two Aphids
& other poems
Sugar le Fae
Bagging
& other poems
Lauren Sartor
Shopping Cart Woman
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
Mushroom Hunting, Jackson County, Kansas
& other poems
Elisa Carlsen
Cormorant
& other poems
Daniel Gorman
The Boy Achilles
& other poems
Samara Hill
I Look for Her Mostly Everywhere
& other poems
Nicole Justine Reid
Returning to Sensual
& other poems
David Ginsberg
Butterfly Wings
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Café Sant Ambroeus
& other poems
George R. Kramer
Young Odysseus
& other poems
Amy Swain
In Praise of Trees
& other poems
Frederick Shiels
Bad October: 2016
& other poems
Matthew A. Hamilton
Summer of '89
& other poems
Chris Kleinfelter
Getting from There to Here
& other poems
Martin Conte
Ghazal for the Shipwrecked
& other poems
Natalie LaFrance-Slack
I Do Not Owe You My Beauty
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Dark Water
& other poems
Lauren Sartor
Shopping Cart Woman
She was brought in like a stray dog,
one past the use of breeding.
The young men shifted on the beds.
They had never been in this position before.
But she had. Minimally at first,
a way to make the occasional end meet.
Back when she was beautiful, back
when no one let her believe it.
Fending Off Loneliness
There’s always a cliché to cling to.
Hair of dog and keep scratching.
Tie one on and get loose.
Off the wagon and hit your head.
I put a record on the player;
the grooves deepen.
I crack one open.
The singing comes first—
that I understand.
The reading aloud
is reasonable enough.
But this talking to walls?
I don’t know when it happened,
but it’s happened.
Each night my feet paces the distance
from Binghamton to Syracuse.
The floor’s wood is testimony
of this delirium, of this trek, of my tongue
moving like a train full of philosophers.
I’ve answered questions put forth by phantoms,
reminisced at length about my childhood to the face in the window,
drank until I became incoherent.
I’ve sat on the rocking chair to make it nod,
strained my voice at the curtains to make them clap.
Each night is a compulsion for company,
an argument to be put to sleep.
Gravity
I stare out my bay window, a little drunk
(it is Tuesday but not too early)
at a young girl who tilts her head to the street.
Both her feet straddle the blue-grey stone
that borders my neighbor’s driveway.
She must be the granddaughter
of the old couple I saw planting
yellow flowers, side-by-side,
not speaking, burying roots deep enough
to stand the storms of spring.
This would mean the little girl
recently lost her youngest uncle,
but she does not look concerned.
With her chest puffed out,
she jumps with legs straight
like fresh cut branches
and sticks the landing, a slight give
in the knees. She does it again—again
with the same seriousness of an Olympian.
She faces the street
and seems to consider the weight
of her body on the elevated plane.
Satisfied, she hops off. Heels kick
the space between us.
She dances to the mailbox.
I keep very still so she doesn’t see me
staring like a fool with tears jumping
from my upper lip; a tall boy crinkling in my fingertips.
She comes back from the (unopened) mailbox
and leaps over a bed of black-eyed Susans
onto the lawn. She throws out
her arms and holds a triumph poise
for an imaginary audience.
In the stunned silence, the young girl stretches
her stomach back by the upward
and backward pull of her palms.
Her exposed belly button gathers
a droplet of sun.
Her body is a bridge.
A golden anchor of a leg
shoots from under her—
then falls.
She tries again, kicking
with more force and confidence,
(a touch of desperation).
In an instant, her body is upside-down,
wavering, as if calculating
the distance from sun to toe.
One of the Good Ones
Eileen and I drank from tiny bottles
while dressed in knee-length skirts
and low heels.
What really bothers me is that he was one of the good ones
Then she goes on about a cousin-in-law—Jimmy—
who had the same addiction. Jimmy: deadbeat,
father and son, a motel room,
maybe an extra woman or two.
Eileen sighs.
Bausch was looking for help . . . There were no
beds available.
Sitting in the passenger seat,
I sip at a 99 cent bottle
and imagine Bausch at the kitchen counter of a one-story house
on his cellphone, trying to make sense of himself
as a teacher and addict while two large dogs busy themselves
sniffing the floor. (I have no reason to believe
he owned two large dogs).
In the coffin, his body looked over-stuffed as if with straw
or like his organs were forgotten inside and engorged.
A fireman’s medallion was neatly clasped in his hands.
His mother, like the other mothers I’ve seen before,
was composed, even smiling as if in satisfaction
as a mother would in any event her child is party to—
if that party is innocent.
When he was little, he was so shy. I always had to push him forward
(the mother mimed her mothering) and tell him to smile.
The plastic teeth to another tiny bottle breaks the silence,
He was one of the good ones.
And that’s a shitty thing to say.
Drinking Cures
by erasure.
Suffering makes us whole;
there are parts about myself I had forgotten about,
the bridges are down,
towns move in.
The whirl of sediment in the yowling mouth
of the toddler,
her fingers clutching her father’s body,
the way she clutched his thumb
as an infant.
The young learn
by touching, the old learn
by being burnt.
I am not ashamed. I cried, that night,
sobbed, rocked myself on the toilet,
begged for the bottle.
Unable to dislodge
the fantastic death
and worse
the image of the girl’s diaper,
squared to capacity
the way my son’s gets
after a long nap.
But whatever urine was there
was washed out by the pull
of the Rio Grande,
forcing both parent and child
face down—dead—on its shores,
as if insulted: these people
are yours.