Poetry Winter 2016 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Joel Filipe
Alexander McCoy
Questions to Ask a Mountain
& other poems
Alexandra Kamerling
Prairie
& other poems
Debbie Hall
She Walks Into Starbucks Carrying a 2 x 4
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Patience
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
Sheet and Exposed Feet
& other poems
Melissa Cantrell
Collision
& other poems
Martin Conte
Skin
& other poems
AJ Powell
The Road to Homer
& other poems
Paul W. Child
World Diverted
& other poems
Michael Eaton
Remembrances
& other poems
Lawrence Hayes
Walking the Earth
& other poems
Daniel Sinderson
Like a Bit of Harp and a Far Off Twinkle
& other poems
Sam Hersh
Las Trampas
& other poems
Margo Jodyne Dills
Babies and Young Lovers
& other poems
Nicole Anania
To the Dying Man's Daughter
& other poems
Lisa Zou
Under the Parlor
& other poems
Hazel Kight Witham
Hoofbeat Heartbeat
& other poems
Margaret Dawson
Daylily
& other poems
James Wolf
An Act of Kindness
& other poems
Jane A. Horvat
Psychedelic
& other poems
Bill Newby
Touring
& other poems
Jennifer Sclafani
Hindsight Twenty Twenty
& other poems
Martin Conte
Hair
Without the princess headdress,
jango jive do rag,
mother’s skull stretched bare—
spotty crust of hilltop,
tall grass are clumps of hair,
decaying under boulder.
Tufts clung where she left them
to stick from kerchief—
my Queen, my Hippolyta—
stray antennae, strands of memory.
She came downstairs uncovered once,
emerged earthworm, caught me
with eyes wide.
This mother not mine, this woman
unknown. Once,
when I was four, I learned to braid
her waist length cascade,
fibers of her being, feeling part—
Oh Queen, Oh Hippolyta—
of her tumorless universe.
After chemo, it grew in
gray and brittle, a brillo scrub.
She chopped it to military attention.
Now it drapes, chainmail of the knight,
clinking over shoulders, shining with frost.
My Queen, My Hippolyta:
you are dressed for battle.
Skin
Ichthyosis is a family of disorders characterized by dry or scaly and thickened skin.
— NIH
When Narcissus finally disturbed the water,
out leapt a salmon, shimmered fish
to baby, human, unwieldy and foreign,
landlocked lips chapped without gills.
My body was disaster, dying faster
day by day. I was no miracle
no flower petals here, just
suicidal sandpaper scales.
My grandfather, filleting fish,
fit me in the skin.
Ichthyosis, jutting long line in a short poem.
At school they ooh and aah
queues of them to touch the grit,
crinkling white clutch shunting
off a dying birch.
Show them the unaching scars
as if I received these
symboled marks
for their breath only!
says Coriolanus in English class.
We're their side-show, a need
to know how riddled we are, and so
to feel smooth themselves.
Will they recognize me
in tomorrow's skin suit
rioting roots beneath
the bed, polluted air
of me and my dead?
Have they consumed me yet?
I die faster
minute by minute.
Flesh
4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie . . .
as the needle's eye looks for mincemeat inside.
Who knew they could all fit?
Unfolding a thousand times
over, from plant to blue to needle's plow
across the blank hayfield of my leg.
They're coming up for me.
How do they see through
such a black lens?
The crow's sense
is underestimated
at the estimator's expense.
"What will you name her?"
the tattoo mystic says to me,
tickling my thigh like a baby's,
while the crow's belly
with its tender sheet
inches over my shy body
like ink on the underside of heaven.
She's made it over my chest,
nipples a smudge,
disappearing towards my inside
horizon, hairy skies.
My skin repeating itself,
black limb on black limb
making what white is left glow alien,
splintered web of moon
at the bottom of a stone well.
the punk poet tattoo lady
has a mother's unbreaking touch.
The crow's wing brushes
the nape of my neck.
I'm drowning in them.
Crows don't down,
their baby feathers
are never found.
Martin Conte
is a devoted citizen of Portland Maine, where he tinkers at writing, reading, walking, editing, and educating. His work has appeared previously in Sixfold, as well as in Words & Images, Glitterwolf, Aurorean, and others. The above poems are a part of an unpublished chapbook of “body” poems. Photo credit: Savannah Leaf.