Poetry Winter 2013 fiction all issues
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Alysse Kathleen McCanna
Pentimento
& other poems
Peter Nash
Shooting Star
& other poems
Katherine Smith
House of Cards
& other poems
David Sloan
On the Rocks
& other poems
Alexandra Smyth
Exoskeleton Blues
& other poems
John Glowney
The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds
& other poems
Andrea Jurjević O’Rourke
It Was a Large Wardrobe...
& other poems
Lisa DeSiro
Babel Tree
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Reptiles
& other poems
Michael Berkowitz
As regards the tattoo on your wrist
& other poems
Michael Brokos
Landscape without Rest
& other poems
Michael H. Lythgoe
Orpheus In Asheville
& other poems
John Wentworth
morning people
& other poems
Christopher Jelley
Double Exposure
& other poems
Catherine Dierker
dinner party
& other poems
William Doreski
Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin
& other poems
Robert Barasch
Loons
& other poems
Rande Mack
bear
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Red Bird
& other poems
Anne Graue
Sky
& other poems
Mariah Blankenship
Tub Restoration
& other poems
Paul R. Davis
Landscape
& other poems
Philip Jackey
Garage drinking after 1989
& other poems
Karen Hoy
A Naturalist in New York
& other poems
Gary Sokolow
Underworld Goddess
& other poems
Michal Mechlovitz
The Early
& other poems
Henry Graziano
Last Apple
& other poems
Stephanie L. Harper
Unvoiced
& other poems
Roger Desy
anhinga
& other poems
R. G. Evans
Hangoverman
& other poems
Frederick L. Shiels
Driving Past the Oliver House
& other poems
Richard Sime
Berry Eater
& other poems
Jennifer Popoli
Generations in a wine dark sea
& other poems
Loons
My daughter photographs loons—
finds them in their nests, tracks them
as they swim across lakes, knows
when the hatchlings are due, waits
to record first swims.
She photographs babies on the backs
of their mothers and fathers, the same
who dive from under them
to emerge from the water with fry
to put into their mouths.
I have pictures of my daughter on my back
and of my granddaughters on her back
and of my great-grandchildren
on their parents’ backs
and being fed treats over shoulders.
“Up,” my children would say
and we understood and lifted them.
Lev Vygotsky proclaimed:
no thought without language first
and I think of the loons’ calls.
Are the words of instruction in those yodels,
setting the babies to think about leaping up?
Did I grab my mother’s breast without a thought?
Did Helen Keller's first thought come on that famous day,
or do we just not understand?
Pas De Deux
The fourteen-month-old boy stands,
one hand on the edge of the chair
before launching himself
toward his great-grandmother,
who grips the edge of the kitchen counter
before stepping out
toward the table between them,
one amazed at his new way of travel
the other perplexed by hers.
They continue to learn new steps of their minuet,
first performed shortly after he was born.
Early variations included slow dancing in rocking chairs,
arm and hand motions together on a piano bench,
these and others before the early warnings.
Now, both vertical, the choreography calls
for their hands to meet at the center of the room,
an awkward couple among complacently confident dancers.
The background music is both silent and polyphonic,
his a Sousa-like march with flute and cymbals,
hers a violin with slipped tuning,
strings frayed, notes elusive,
more and more unreachable.
One peers gleefully into the opening out,
the other squeezed by the relentless closing in.
Bedazzled
That ’possum never had a chance,
dazzled as she was by the beam of light,
brightest star of her night; she,
fading already in their thoughts
before the warm glow of the fire.
They sat and talked about her—
how her eyes gave back to them
part of the light they gave to her—how
each shot once, the three shots hitting her—
how she lay, limp fur, on the ground.
So Mary, seventeen, a game girl,
lay drunk on her father's lawn
while the three football stars talked
in the red glow of the Wurlitzer,
recalling her hungry eyes, her furry gift,
her falling into a loose heap
when they dropped her off at home.
Spring of 2001
Fifteen feet of snow and twenty below
got the downtown caucuses talking.
“Might not get a garden this year.”
“Tractor tires still frozen to the ground.”
“Old horse’ll have to eat snowballs this summer.”
At the red store, a man at the gas pump said
it was because of killing the rain forest.
Another one said you can’t blame nukes
for this one. A man at another pump said
“Oh yes you can it’s the final tab
for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Oblivious, the croakers strained their muscles
pushing the sluggish mud, breathing stilled,
letting their cold skin suck muddy bubbles
of air. All pushing at the same time,
they sent currents to the ceiling of the pond,
startling the ice. Like a locomotive in a roundhouse,
the engine of winter got turned around;
still, no one heard a sound. Suddenly,
only two weeks behind schedule,
the snow receding to the shadiest woods,
the songs erupted in the pond. This year,
along with their songs of longing,
the frogs were bragging, raucously,
“Wedidit, wedidit, wedidit.”
And three days later, the peepers joined,
“Yousee, yousee, yousee.”
Community
The turkeys, who have been coming in small groups
seem to have got together last night at a meeting
thirty of them coming into the field this morning.
Perhaps they were considering the weather
light frosts two nights and today ninety degrees,
and the dozen little ones.
Who hatched these youngsters in late August
they must have been asking, the answer
plain to all of them and even to me
who thought I could read embarrassment
in the eyes of the fidgety hen and the blushing
of an old Tom’s beard.
When they hear the geese going over soon
they might wonder about joining them
nudged by a vestigial memory that hangs
like a human coccyx or appendix
with impulse to action, fit only for dreaming
of perpetual summer.
Born in 1926, Robert Barasch grew up in Alabama, moved to New York in 1952, and to Vermont in 1970 with his wife and three children. He worked as a newspaper editor and reporter before getting a PhD in clinical psychology, retiring in 1996 and writing poetry and fiction since that time. His poems have been published in several journals and he recently published a novel, Parallel Play.