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
Underworld Goddess
Our eyes made contact through a slow drizzle
I bore through her soul, leaned face to face
Weeks later, other disturbances, broken bird wing,
The final descending.
Over past park benches the drunks gather, laugh
With breath of whiskey,
One lost in the gutter, the Captain they all call him
Ass in air, face down.
It was ten years ago they found me three days endlessly
Riding the trains,
Mother lighting her candles believing in small places,
Her dreams of the crisp uniforms,
Men under a hot morning sun,
Mailmen,
All of us, mailmen, delivering sliver thin notices
Final foreclosures like razors,
Petite bottles of French lavender water
For the lonely,
The dirty fingers waiting upon bare-breasted women
To burst through brown paper magazines.
It was in a book we first discovered the goddess every
Autumn stolen to the underworld,
We were children, the family beatings made him
Crazier than me,
We dug through piles of dirt, the shards of glass
In his broken backyard,
Down and down, we dug through earth toward
Our goddess,
Uncovering worms, scared and writhing on late
October afternoons,
Pliant worms below, and above us the stone face
Of a soon to be fading sun.
late evening fumes
at 4 am, it was treasure hunt, channel 9
3 jack in the boxes, 3 crazy contestants,
one winner, who got to pick the prize
one box to choose out of fifty, sixty
boxes of various shapes, sizes, colors, and bows
and that was the show, the remaining time
left to the torture of contestants, the chosen box’s
contents slowly revealed, and for the record
I don’t remember how I came upon the magic
of the nail polish,
bottles snuck from piles of dirty clothes and
missing homework of my sister’s room
smashed into paper bags
saturation
covered with plastic bag
maximum inhalation
every night through high school
and I was always the straight kid
never drank
never smoked
glue sniffer
most antisocial form of user known, they say
notch above pedophiles
and those nights lit with the glow of the tubes
inside the old black & white tvs as I watched
the odd couple, mary tyler moore, the saint,
sleep not so much coming as the haze descending
to awaken 4 am the jack straight out the box.
Any Monday Morning
Often it is how it all begins
the coldest day of the year
a man on 9th avenue walking
in nothing but a sweater,
arm around a basketball,
smoke from a cigarette,
and how by nightfall
the newest associate of a law firm
will admire herself in a bar mirror,
enjoy the buzz of happiness
co-workers buying the next round,
and how by morning the soldiers in full gear,
rifles poised, will have hit the beach,
crash like waves, like kindergartners pushing
and shoving their way from schoolyard
into school, insects climbing screens,
and how it may be 1987,
the man in the tightfitting uniform testifies
for the twenty-third day in a row how
incapable we are of comprehending
the deals made, the true costs of our comforts,
so the arms are sold, our bastard propped up
for one more rigged election.
the whitecaps violent,
the insects hit windshields,
beyond distant hills corporations have grown
enormous, force trees out of the landscape,
windblown seeds with nowhere to land,
the soldiers inch toward targets,
the children move beyond rainbows,
push against something dark and unknowable,
and this the way any Monday morning goes,
the man on Ninth Avenue with the basketball
fleeing his girlfriend’s apartment
with whatever he could find,
the cold seeping through his sweater,
and smokeless by his side the last cigarette.
Elegy
Unknown hard
bop jazz
soprano
sax
runs
feel
to loose
to be
Coltrane
on the
radio
a
long day’s
desk job’s
end
not any life
a life more
fragile
than
ever
my heart
and time
past, time
wasted
and time
spinning
and
at the
center
a man
in
the
ground
is
truth
no
other
way
but
shovels
of tears
and
in the
moment
a
bird
moved
by
the
pretty
day
to
sing
to the
shovel’s
rhythm
to the
dirt’s
falling
the pine coffin
innocence
was ours
was
everything
yet
only words
like stones
as
a
man
in
the
ground
whom
you
love
is
truth
Gary Sokolow
has an aging MFA (Brooklyn College) and has been published in Blood Lotus Journal, Up the Staircase, and Chantarelle’s Notebook.