Poetry Winter 2013 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Hangoverman
Every day an origin story—
an ordinary man swallows a potion
he knows is dire poison.
The change begins at once:
he writhes through blind bliss,
tears his clothes (and sometimes bleeds)
as the poison moves through his veins.
His strength grows great.
His strength remains the same.
His secret wears a mask.
Everyone knows who he is.
At last, eyes red, bottles emptied
by his superhuman thirst,
he enters his fortress of solitude,
wherever it may be tonight.
His bed. The floor beside his bed.
The sidewalk where he fell
on the way to find his home.
And all this just a prelude . . .
He awakes, having never really slept,
alter ego dead, home planet nearly destroyed,
the ability to suffer his only super trait, thinking
With great impotence comes great irresponsibility.
At least the Drunkmobile stayed in its dock tonight,
waiting where it’s waited since the beginning,
and in the beginning was the drink,
every day an origin story.
The Usual
In a faraway bar in a faraway town
the bartender thinks I’m someone
I’m not. She smiles, arches an eyebrow
and says The usual?
What would I get if I were this man
she thinks I am—a shot and a beer?
Somethng with more finesse?
I wonder how long his usual would last,
this man who looks and acts like me.
I remember my usual and the mileage it got me
though all the time I was riding on “E.”
My usual was darkness and long draughts alone,
hairpin roads and a hand too light upon the wheel.
I pray this stranger’s usual let him fit into his world
better than I fit into mine. The bartender’s waiting,
a wall of bottles holiday bright behind her. The usual?
she says again. I nod and walk out of the bar
into this stranger’s land where a lake as large as the sea
is drying up.
After April
She spent the whole first weekend in the dust,
rummaging through clutter. Animal,
she’d say to empty rooms or to the mirror
as she passed. Beer cans and cigarette scars,
scraps of food and flies. She couldn’t explain
the way some people lived. Memorial
cards and flowers came. Memorial
Day passed. The yard urned brown as dust
by Independence Day. She could explain
her sadness when she lost an animal,
her grief when surgeons left a puckered scar
in place of secret parts. And even mirrors
she found she could forgive—it wasn’t mirrors
that tore her life. St. Jude Memorial
Gardens. Machines that turned the sod to scar.
a few brief words, some prayers to ash and dust.
That was the place that made her animal
softness hard to bear. And who would explain
how tears can burn as well as freeze, explain
there’d be no toothpaste-spattered mirror,
no piss-stained floor, no reek of animal?
He won’t come back. Those words memorial
enough when she knew they weren’t true. Now dust
had settled everywhere. She felt it scar
the house the way asbestos fibers scar
the lungs. All dust. All ash. She could explain
his leavings until he left this dust
behind and disappeared out of the mirror
of her life, left rubbish as memorial
of what they had. She mutters Animal
today—not him, but every animal—
and stubs out cigarettes to leave a scar
on desks, buffets and chairs. Memorial
beer bottles and cans sit for days. Explain?
What explanation can satisfy the mirror?
What explanation cuts a path through dust?
She is an animal who can’t explain
new skin, new scars, or how the mirror
weeps in memorial, reflecting dust.
Alucard
In the black and white universe
of 1943, any bad actor could hide
himself just by spelling his name
backward. In this way the son
of Dracula became Count Alucard
and no one was any the wiser.
In brains cursed by the love of
wordplay, a verb like lives becomes
nouns like Elvis or evils.
One of the evils of the Universal plan:
that the undead’s sperm
could vampirize an egg.
The Son of the Man of 1000 Faces,
Lon Chaney, Jr., ill-suited in a tux—
and what kind of vampire
wears a moustache?—tell tale
droplets, a crimson confession.
Black and white logic: we see no blood.
We’ve seen plenty of blood in our day,
Stillbirth. Miscarriage.
Yet Dracula / Alucard . . .
What bride would ever provide
the ovum and the path
to let such palindromic birth proceed?
Late fetal DNA-land—
was it a bat I saw?
Dad,
don’t nod.
Devil never even lived.
Cigar? Toss it in a can. It’s so tragic.
Maybe that other undead son
was in on the joke when he said
The last shall be first and the first shall be last.
What kind of god—what kind of dog indeed—
grants the devil a son and drives stakes
through hearts like these?
On the Battlements
There’s a photo of a young girl and a man
on a fortress top in Old San Juan.
The meek clouds, the placid blue sky
seem like lies in the aftermath of storms—
las tormentas—that rocked them all the night before.
The sea is calm and picture-perfect,
the picture itself a perfect kind of lie.
You see a father and a daughter
on the battlements of the old Spanish fort.
The fort is photogenic, a tranquil postcard ruin
of conquistadores’ might. The father’s pose is casual,
grinning in the shadow of his cap.
The daugher’s face is pinched,
almost smiling in the sun.
What you don’t see is
the woman’s hands trembling on the camera,
the daughter fleeing after the shutter’s click,
screaming I’m scared, Daddy, I’m scared,
the father’s face contorting, shouting
Come back here right now.
You don’t see the blood stains
washed by centuries of storms,
dark clouds in the distance,
las tormentas yet to come.
R. G. Evans
’s poems, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as Rattle, The Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Weird Tales. His original music, including the song, “The Crows of Paterson,” was featured in the 2012 documentary film All That Lies Between Us. His first book of poetry, Overtipping the Ferryman, will be published in 2014 by Kelsay Books.