Poetry Winter 2015 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
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
Winner of $1000 for 1st-place-voted Poems
J.H YunSundays for the Faithful II
They tear into the face of the gape mouthed mackerel,
dislodging the eyes and sharing them, unhinging the jaw so it hangs,
a flap of skin after a potato peeler mishap. I wonder about the assaulting
nature of winter. The way it comes and comes,
and seduction is a violence all its own. Did you drink from the fountain
you weren’t supposed to yet? Even the dumbest of birds are struck
with the same madness that send them all careening south
balding the horizon in winter when the first snow falls
when the bud first bursts or is first burst.
When I was young I couldn’t outrun my lisp or gap toothed whistle.
Outside the sky is curdling over, masking daddy’s view of us,
and the stragglers with their frostbitten wings are thrown down
as if they were born for that. Inside, the boys corral the quiet ones
into the closet, undress them, prick bloodied initials on their flush pink skin.
Tells them hush, Daddy’s too busy spying on the neighbors to hear you anyhow.
Yesenia (Castro Valley’s Jane Doe)
Nine years old, we nose the gully’s edge for flowers
to eat, pant legs rolled to tufts on our bug bitten calves.
Here, we fancy ourselves deer,
and like any good creature of prey, we cringe away from noise,
the mere suggestion of headlights groping the fog
at a distance we can’t quite see over the creek’s open mouth.
We feign fear, but only for fun. For whatever reason,
feeling hunted and liking it. When we come across a vine
of purple flowers, we linger.
Look, honeysuckles, I say, wrong though I don’t know it yet,
and we pull the stems off the violet’s head, lick the nectar
from the apex where the petals gather, suck until we are sated
and leave the gully as humans again. Now forget us.
Here comes the girl with the crown of chestnut hair
followed by a man, but he is not important.
She will lie with the violets for weeks before she’s found,
nestled in a canvas bag like a chrysalis with a throatful of rags,
lovely in the police composite sketch,
she won’t own a name for ten years. But the butterfly clip
in her hair confesses. Clinging to her despite river bed muck,
despite winter, despite cruel hands committing her body to earth,
its sweet, pink adornments insisting She was a child, she was a child,
while the bust made from a study of her bones smiles
soft through the static, right before we change the channel.
J.H Yun
is a Korean-American poet, currently completing her MFA at New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, AAWW The Margins, Prelude, and elsewhere.