Poetry Winter 2017 fiction all issues
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Cover Thought-Forms
Laura Apol
On My Fiftieth Birthday I Return
& other poems
Jihyun Yun
Aubade
& other poems
Jamie Ross
Red Jetta
& other poems
Sarah Blanchard
Carolina Clay
& other poems
lauren a. boisvert
Save a Seat for Me in the Void
& other poems
Faith Shearin
A Pirate at Midlife
& other poems
Helen Yeoman-Shaw
Calling Long Distance
& other poems
Sarah B. Sullivan
Iris
& other poems
Timothy Walsh
Metro Messenger
& other poems
Gabriel Spera
Scratch
& other poems
Zoë Harrison
Pattee Creek
& other poems
AJ Powell
Blanket
& other poems
Alexa Poteet
The Man Who Got off the Train Between Madrid and Valencia
& other poems
Marcie McGuire
Still Birth
& other poems
Kim Drew Wright
Elephants Standing
& other poems
Michael Jenkins
The Garden Next Door
& other poems
Nicky Nicholson-Klingerman
Costume
& other poems
Doni Faber
Man Moth
& other poems
M. Underwood
In Other Words
& other poems
Carson Pynes
Diet Coke
& other poems
Bucky Ignatius
Something Old, . . .
& other poems
Violet Mitchell
Deleting Emails the Week After Kevin Died
& other poems
Sam Collier
Nocturne in an Empty Sea
& other poems
Meryl Natchez
Equivocal Activist
& other poems
William Godbey
A Corn Field in Los Angeles
& other poems
Gabriel Spera
Scratch
They flock to me, the finches, when I go
outside to scatter seed like the grace
of angels on the stubbled lawn, erased
like most of yesterday by snow
and age, amazed, confused—as I’ve been, too—
to find, when they expect it least,
the black ice strewn with summer’s feast,
a miracle too perfect to be untrue.
They dash and peck, as though they, too, had found
what love provides is apt to melt away
and that same heart that fills our bowl today
tomorrow leaves us scratching frozen ground.
Freeway
Hemmed in by a six-lane traffic jam
on a weekend afternoon, I’m suddenly struck,
blindsided, by the thought, the realization,
that you are gone. Really, truly,
irrevocably gone. And, typical,
you didn’t have the courtesy
to mention you were leaving, but slipped away
like faith in miracles, leaving this decoy,
this imposter, in the shotgun seat,
looking for all the world like the one
I vowed to have and hold, absorbed
in work, jabbing at a thin screen, indifferent
to the stream of tail lights keeping us
from being where and when we planned to be.
And for once, I am not cursing
the traffic, which makes it easy to believe
the world’s stopped dead, moved to unmoving
by my loss. And almost I don’t feel
truly alone and irrevocably free,
the way a soul must feel wafting up
from the tangled wreck—though of course,
there is no wreck, just a bloodless
fender-bender, pulled to the shoulder,
the rubber-neckers at once relieved
and disappointed to find nothing
they haven’t seen a thousand times,
their sympathy tempered by the thought,
the realization, they could be home by now
if one or both had only checked their mirrors,
focused on their blind spots, understood
the person right in front of them
might slow, or swerve, or stop for no good reason.
Opportunity
It never rains here, the perfect spot
for an invasion, though of course,
there’s not a soul here to surrender,
no square or post to occupy. From where
I stare toward the horizon, nothing stirs
except the nebulas of dust, the motes
clinging to my panels like the pollen
on a drone. I’m left alone
to my devices, which I minister
with the gravity of a child with pail
and shovel shaping ziggurats
for the tide to sweep away. Though of course
there is no tide, no teeming sea.
Nor does the landscape even need one,
evidently, to gather rust, the stones
and crags, like random memory, steeped
in hues of rouge and blush. And like
a sapper through a minefield, preassessing
every inch, I tread deliberately,
obliquely, though in retrospect,
my course seems almost straight,
my state improbable and strangely
preordained. My days are long,
my hours numbered, my fate
to populate a vista so forbidding
even death, if ever he came,
no longer visits. And as the sunset
drains my tired cells, I recite
my litany of wonder, send
my missive, bit by bit, beyond the sky—
as though it mattered, as though
any power beyond my own
could ever reach me, right me, if I scarred
the soft lip of a crater, cascaded
down the talus like a turtle
on its back to rest helpless in shadow,
an instant fossil, fastidious wishbone
lodged within eternity’s dry throat.
Blood Moon
The shadow crept like doubt from a sinister
quarter of the moon, a malignant tincture
that would bathe it in mercurochrome and flare
the nearest stars, an event more curious and rare
than honest love. I splayed the tripod, set to capture
on film the partial phases of erasure.
And as I glanced starward from the aperture—
a swoop, a shape, a cloak of wings, twin craters
laked with eyes. Before I could even think to duck
it vanished beyond the roofline, leaving me
much where I’ve always been: humbled, dumbstruck,
between the dull pull of Earth and all heavenly
machinations, wondering just how many
miracles, how many missives from eternity,
I may have missed because I failed, in ignorance,
to lift my eyes and face the coming silence.
Roots
It’s hard not to view
a clogged toilet as a statement
on your life. But though I threw
both shoulders to the tank,
rocking to the plunger’s
squelch and suck, nothing sank
but my heart. It was evident
my issue went deeper,
like desire or discontent.
So I slogged out to the source,
uncapped the cleanout port and watched
ooze well up like hope divorced
from history and just as fast
slosh back. I force-fed a spasm
of metal coil down its shaft
and reeled it back, further irked
by the splash of failure. I kissed
its rubber to the lip and worked
my plunger till the pressure
grew too great, a fracking
disaster that sent a gusher
of thin black crude up and out
the backflow valve, swamping
the soil beside the house,
infecting the air. Kind fate
has graced me with sense enough
to know when I’ve been beat.
I phoned a pro, who passed
a naked blender through the pipe,
pureeing the roots that massed
like dendrites in a gangled
neural net. With one stroke, the knot
was solved, my life untangled.
The sun soon catalyzed
the malodorous muck,
made rich the earth that gave rise
to a carpetbomb of grass
that begged to get cut. And as I
bullied the mower past
there it was: a tomato shoot
where none had been sown, meaning
it had to have taken root
from seeds that plumbed the byzantine
maze of human gut, sclerotic
flume of sewer line
before lodging in the fetid
bog of excrement I’d
unwittingly created.
Was there a right way to react
to such aplomb?
Was I wrong to feel mocked
in my petty disgrace?
Or should I have known nature
would tell me to embrace
even the shit, to throw
my whole soul into it,
because who can know
what we’ll be when we’ve committed
to rise at last up out of it,
self-tried and self-acquitted,
what tender blooms we might
break into when we stand
clean and naked in the light.
Gabriel Spera
’s first book of poems, The Standing Wave, was a National Poetry Series selection and also received the Literary Book Award for Poetry from PEN USA-West. His second book, The Rigid Body, received the Richard Snyder prize. Other honors include an NEA Fellowship and a COLA grant from the City of Los Angeles.