Poetry Winter 2015 fiction all issues
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Cover Peter Rawlings
J. H Yun
Yesenia
& other poems
Colby Hansen
Killing Jar #37
& other poems
Melissa Bond
Freud's Asparagus
& other poems
Jane Schulman
When Krupa Played Those Drums
& other poems
Susan F. Glassmeyer
First Moon of a Blue Moon Month
& other poems
Melissa Tyndall
Haptics
& other poems
Micah Chatterton
Medicine
& other poems
Emily Graf
Toolbox
& other poems
Kate Magill
LV Winter, 2015
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Meeting Mrs. Ping
& other poems
Richard Parisio
Brown Creeper
& other poems
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
Circe in Business
& other poems
Laurel Eshelman
Tuckpointing
& other poems
Barry W. North
Molotov Cocktail of the Deep South
& other poems
Charles C. Childers
Privilege
& other poems
Ricky Ray
A Way to Work
& other poems
Cassandra Sanborn
Revelation
& other poems
Linda Sonia Miller
Full Circle
& other poems
J. Lee Strickland
Anna's Plague
& other poems
Erin Dorso
In the Kitchen
& other poems
Holly Lyn Walrath
Behind the Glass
& other poems
Jeff Lewis
Charles Ives, A Connecticut Yankee
& other poems
Karen Kraco
Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill
& other poems
Rafael Miguel Montes
Casket
& other poems
Emily Graf
Toolbox
I’ve had broken teeth dreams
and woke tasting my gums for blood.
A girl said she needed my incisors for art,
pliers shining in her hand.
She was beautiful in the way of people who know
they look good while concentrating.
Fingers stained burnt sienna
and black, she drugged me with whiffs of turpentine.
Surrender slipped gauzy under my tongue.
Of such dreams, Freud says, anxiety about sexual experience.
Jung says, renewal. Not violence,
but yes,
disorder.
In the dark afterwards, my teeth
were whole. I looked at the blue sliver
of floodlight along the curtain
and knew my life.
Photograph of Two Girls Outside Crazy Horse, South Dakota (2007)
I remember saying, bury me,
South Dakota Badlands,
crumbling crowns of black stone and basalt
in the empty ocean of the Midwest.
Under my hand a grasshopper scythed
its butcher paper wings.
We pointed our camera at a motorcycle gang, behind them
a heaving forever of sunflowers,
a harmonica,
the yellow sound of mosquitos.
Or maybe you pointed the camera, and I
held up the unfinished nose of the Indian head.
Bury me, or cut me open.
I was too young to love a landscape so greenless,
too young to think my bookishness was anything but
a free pass to hop from coast to coast
and skip the breadbasket in between.
Years later, bowing
against Chicago’s lusty sleet,
I think of you with an imaginary scalpel in your hand,
back of your dad’s RV, working on what you believed to be
an improvement of my body,
stunning revision,
while the sun thundered against the plastic curtain
of our small window.
2AM Instagram of Lunar Eclipse
Green sunslant across the dresser should be,
is not quite, an antidote for this hangover. Urgent, the phone
opens its single rectangular eyelid. A few sentences
from you, and I’m drunk again. In the night you scrolled through
the pixelated good times and lit on
my white blouse, my rose moon. How well these images
unscrew your silence. Etched in blue,
you ask for more sweet, you ask if I remember
that we have decided to forget certain unerasable errors.
Taking your words outside, a breeze lifts rosemary to my lips, I breathe it
toward you loose
in my two hands, and because I am so glad
to have your attention (this sparkler
burning down to its metal stem)
what is there to say next?
Concession: my love’s a shaky bubble drooping
from a plastic wand, all swollen gleam and neon rainbows,
resigned to death in the frail grass.
Striking Matches
I.
You are dealing cards on a picnic table, the wood
bruise-hued, seams crusted chalky-white.
Someone jokes “cocaine” because we’re high, I say
“it’s probably bird shit.” We’re playing cards
and I’m talking to make sure you hear me. In the game,
you and I are partners. I forget the rules.
Not Hearts. It’s not Hearts but we might be losing—
the rain ceased hours ago but the light that burnishes
your hands is still wet.
II.
You are in your apartment learning Spanish from Cuarón films.
Your shirt smells cold,
of struck matches and want. You’re using something sharp to tune gears that turn
your hands black. In your hands I am
a melting icicle. I’m not going anywhere but I might be
shrinking.
III.
You have an impulse to gather
all the cards to you while they’re still dry, still make that busy click when shuffled,
but also
to drink the whiskey that’s been passed to you. It tastes
like marigolds might.
Hot crowns, dry flares.
I wonder if I’ve spoken in the last hour. I wonder if instead I’ve been dancing
in the bloom of light tossed from a window,
revolving to rhythm you shuffle— red-
heart black-heart—song of opposites.
IV.
You are leaning against the wall of the Rijksmuseum and it is leaning back on you
while you watch the black crowns of trees
swell with birds, then deflate. Icy feet, I just broke a toenail,
black linoleum
jeweled with blood. You just lit a cigarette and the rush has you
in a headlock.
V.
In my sleep I open my mouth and a spider drops in.
I swallow. Transparent threads
suspend me from the ceiling and I kick my legs like a Rockette,
kick my legs like a doe leaping from a freeway,
kick the blankets free.
You hold still on your side of the bed,
your body curled around a vacancy.
VI.
Once I carried my memories lightly
as you carry another person in water
where what looks like work
is actually
floating.
Emily Graf
currently resides in Austin, Texas, where she enjoys coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. She graduated from Kenyon College in 2015 with a degree in English & Poetry Writing. Her work has been previously published in Maudlin House, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere, online and in print.