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
Jennifer Leigh Stevenson
Honey I’m Headed West
On the night I was born,
my daddy played a gig
at a bar called Cowtown.
So it’s right I’ve got me
a warlike mouth,
a honky-tonk heart.
I’m heaps of trouble, smoke
Benson and Hedges
like a lonesome locomotive,
drink bourbon from a truck
stop coffee cup. My soul’s
just some no-tell Motel
with most the neon shot out
of its shivery sign. Or a mirror
that’s lost some of its silver.
When we met I told you
I’m a dead end on a dirt road.
But you didn’t pay any mind.
This summer stands
as the wettest on record
but nothing’s getting green.
June bugs throw themselves
at the bare bulb on my porch,
trying to hump it to oblivion.
Cicadas preach white noise
from blue ash pulpits, but
none of us are wise enough
to hear their truth—
that the world will end
before the evangelists do.
I, too, call and holler
for you, a small town
Siren with an ivy crown.
Load up the truck with all
you can fit, I tell you—
it’s time to go. A sparrow
nested in the awning over
your front door, and some
cold-eyed crow’ll eat those eggs
one at a time. But hey, you
and me both know: wild
isn’t the same thing as free.
Undone
We open on an unmade man
sleeping artful in an unnamed bed.
A gentle ribbon of sunlight
sighs through the blinds
from his shoulder
to his hip
to the sheet
like some kind of ceremonial
sash and sword. He didn’t mean
to be here.
A fly buzzes frantic in the window
and the ceiling fan clanks.
We now part the steam
to visit her in the shower.
Over the pedestal sink hangs
a mirrored medicine cabinet
with a slot inside to toss old
razor blades. Her pale skin gleams
cream. She slicks her palms
over her hair, blinks, her wet
eyelashes dark and heavy.
She hums a lonely melody,
one that has fluttered
unfinished at the edges
of her for weeks. She picks
and picks at it and when
it comes to her
it just
opens in her hands.
Last night, his fingers brushing the barest
paisley on her neck, he kissed her jawline
with such cinematic longing that she climbed
onto him and said, Stop keeping yourself from me.
The Dangers of Prose, Love
I lick my finger,
flip the page,
“fray to fight
fray to unravel”
so I have some choices.
Either way it all comes apart.
Your work is shining, methodical,
blown glass turned from a molten
thing into tender tiny creatures
that fit in my palm.
I can almost see them breathe.
Not my poems, though.
I want to write
blunt force trauma
with a gauntleted fist,
smashing reckless,
jaw aching with anger,
wrecking everything.
But Baby, I never can conjure
you. Something phrases
should curve around light
and easy: your wicked
mouth, your cinnamon smell.
You rhymed and dined me
and dug in my dark
trying to find me a muse.
I got nothing like that in me.
So I take my forearm, sweep
it across all you ever said before
but it doesn’t matter. The sound
of 100,000 crystalline words
shattering
can’t cover up the echo
the thrill of your voice
Circe in Business
I wear all black, a high-necked frock,
and a straw hat to thwart the southern sun.
My plants, such lovelies, in rows
taller than I, bow now in summer
breeze. They forget how deadly
they are in their beauty, waxy
berries bright, leaves trembling.
I’ve made quite a name for myself.
Flowers in high violets, yellows and other
likely hues, (those colors are suspect
those colors are a bruise.) But no
matter. I wear leather gloves,
pinch those flowers and berries
at the base. Apply a little heat to help
the harm along. Women come to see
me when rage vignettes their vision,
walk along my wares, smooth their hands
over the glass bottles and decide just
how he should go. I don’t do gentle,
so you won’t find any soporifics.
Hemlock, certainly, if you’d like
to watch him gasp, or belladonna
to sink him into a delirium, dilate
his pupils as though he were tumbling
in love again, but by then could
you bear it? Wolfsbane hurts,
as I understand it, stirs up the belly,
sends saliva to froth in his mouth.
I don’t need magic anymore
so it’s lucky I don’t have it.
This, my dear, is true,
for every one of you
who seek me and weep:
Later in your Paris Green parlor
you’ll look in the mirror
and see a face tight with triumph,
wild eyes dark and bird-bright.
Mark me. Not more than a drop
to stop his heart. And don’t get
caught. Get even.
Quarry
Why do you want to talk now?
I’m barefoot, dusty and bleeding.
I replenish my stones.
I speculated so long in labored silence . . .
When I realized the weight of all these words unsaid,
when the chasm growled between us, filled with cruelty
and doubt I still couldn’t shout
and I couldn’t scream or say anything true or fraught.
I tossed a rock down into the yawn below
(where our pressure broke the yard),
watched that rock fall and gather pebbles
and momentum and felt bored. You rendered me
irreverent, chained to a shrug and a hum.
You once whispered kindness but
now you are a wooden placard
hanging haphazard over my front door:
“Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here”
burned into the grain.
This morning my back porch opens into this canyon.
It’s not powerlessness, or fear, but rather an
unbecoming. Eyes burning across the crisis
until they fade into embers of distance. ‘Til
calamity supersedes life and you and me
and we failed to be.
All this earth over our bones.
All that time.
We replenish our stones.
A born and bred Oklahoman, Jennifer Leigh Stevenson loves the backroads. She began writing poetry in ninth grade, studied music and theater at University of Central Oklahoma and wound up (somehow) in banking. For years she scribbled lines on napkins and wrote rhymes on the back of receipts, until she realized she wanted to be a writer more than anything. This marks Jennifer’s second time to be published in Sixfold.