Poetry Winter 2022 fiction all issues
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Cover
Li Zhang
Ana Reisens
Pam asked about Europe
& other poems
Krystle May Statler
To the Slow Burn
& other poems
Kristina Cecka
On Remodeling
& other poems
Belinda Roddie
Bless The Bones Of California
& other poems
Summer Rand
Alexander tells me how he'd like to be buried
& other poems
Alexander Perez
Toward the Rainbow
& other poems
Karo Ska
self-portrait of compassion…
& other poems
David Southward
The Pelican
& other poems
George Longenecker
Stamp Collection
& other poems
Mary Keating
Salty
& other poems
Talya Jankovits
Imagine A World Without Raging Hormones
& other poems
Laurie Holding
Sonnet to Mr. Frost
& other poems
David Ruekberg
A Short Essay on Love
& other poems
Elaine Greenwood
There’s a thick, quiet Angel
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Carry On Caretaker
& other poems
Jefferson Singer
Dave Righetti’s No-Hitter…
& other poems
Diane Ayer
A Fan
& other poems
Kaecey McCormick
Meditation Before Desert Monsoon
& other poems
Meg Whelan
Resubstantiation
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Possible
& other poems
Aaron Glover
On Transformation
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
[I'm crying in a sandwich shop reading Diane Seuss' sonnets]
& other poems
Holly Cian
Untitled
& other poems
Kimberly Russo
Selective Memories are the Only Gift of Dementia
& other poems
Steven Monte
Larkin
& other poems
Mervyn Seivwright
Fear Mountain
& other poems
David Southward
The First Tattoo
My whole life I’ve been afraid
to stain my body, insisting
no mark is meaningful enough
for ink’s permanence. Still here
I find myself: sitting backwards
in Aaron’s chair, as he engraves
palm fronds on my scapula. A gift
from my husband—to mark
the threshold of my fiftieth year:
palm trees and grackles, a Florida
upbringing merged with adults-only
Mexican getaways. With six hours
to kill, I’m nose-deep in a hardback
memoir (Springsteen’s) as massive
as Moby-Dick. Eyeballs distracted
by Aaron’s pin-ups of arabesque
biceps, I think of Queequeg,
the Pequod’s nude harpooner,
stunning Ishmael with his aboriginal
tattoo-treatise on the universe
no longer legible; how, in college,
I winced at the keloidal make-up
of Maori warriors—irritated with ash
to highlight youth’s passage
into pain, warfare, marriage, labor.
It taught me how history could live
under the skin—indelible yet invisible
until teased out with a stylus.
Like in last week’s episode of Nova
on the tattoo’s origin: fresh evidence
of ochre and charcoal pulverized
a hundred thousand years ago
by Homo sapiens rounding the Cape
of Good Hope. (From the same cave
came Earth’s first graffiti, a crayon-
red hashtag on a granite slab—
our meaty brain already impatient
to make something of itself.)
As Aaron’s needle probes the V-
shaped convergence of palm-trunks, I
almost faint; this vertebral crux
is my tattoo’s darkest part. I squint
to refocus on the open book, Springsteen
guiding followers into the crevasse
of his depression—no more the Boss
than Ahab was captain on the trail
of a lost leg; than I was, all those years
I didn’t write, fearing the itch
of the past like a wound too buried
to be scratchable. Not until
Aaron smears my scars with aloe gel
and hands me a mirror, do I see
all that’s behind me. Like the Boss says:
we’re born to run. No wonder we need
such painful, beautiful reminders
of what we can do to ourselves.
Object Lesson
Much as I failed
to grasp it at the time,
my threadbare silk
security blanket
must’ve posed a threat
(however veiled) to Dad
that snow-piled night
in the Midwest, when Cronkite
veered from an oil crisis
to a solar eclipse
while Mom laid the table.
Dad snatched
the fistful of rag
from my hand—
flashing that big-brotherly
half sneer, half smile
I knew meant trouble—
and opened the front door
to throw it
to the howling weather.
I wailed, ran
straight into the maelstrom
to save my blankie. And maybe
that was all
Dad needed to see: a spark
of opposition, his only son
demanding love—knowing
how hard it was
to come by that year,
how little there was
between him and me
and the ice.
Boiling Point 2020
Dear Mike, news of your death finds me
on one of those days in July
when the sliding door opens
to a porridge of steam, and all of Wisconsin
takes shade. Slogging through Facebook,
I’d been pondering how to respond
to paranoid memes, shared by cousins
I barely know—insinuations
that COVID is a deep-state hoax,
that Blacks are racist too, that Emperor Trump
will rescue the nation
from godless conspiracy—when Dad calls
to report that you, retired doctor and father
of six, close friend of 45 years,
have braced a gun to the roof of your mouth
and left this world in a wreath of smoke.
A survivor of stroke, dragging one leg at 83
through God knows what humiliations,
maybe you faltered in Florida’s sweltering heat,
or stopped noticing the horizon,
or couldn’t bear to be seen
as one more terminal patient—opting instead
for permanent anesthesia. I seize
my pen, wondering what to write
to your children, who once were like siblings
to me: that love may not be enough
to save us? that despair
thinks only of itself
and should therefore be pitied? that privilege
is no cure for extinction?
How different your leave-taking
from this morning’s more celebrated
casualty: Congressman John Lewis
who, departing amid his people’s cries
of defiance, must have felt he was riding a wave
of change—the only antidote
to life’s cancers. I imagine
your sons flying home
from Afghanistan, from Portland
(where the government’s bungled crackdown
is sure to incite protest)
while I’m out walking the dog
in the late afternoon. Maybe like you
we’ve all felt a little abandoned
by God this year. A lone officer
on a motorcycle, strapped in his gear,
passes me at the corner and wheels around
to the curb for a serious chat
with his headset. Watching him
beneath leaden clouds, I begin to hear
a chant working its way up the street: “WHAT
do we WANT?” Tomorrow I will lie still
in corpse pose, thinking I am but a witness
to these restless impositions of body and mind,
but today? With the dog pulling his leash,
with a hot breeze
whapping the American flag like a parachute
outside the nursing home—signs everywhere
urging “Wash your hands”—
and demonstrators shouting
through surgical masks, I can only think
Something must be done!
And with a feeling almost
of deliverance, Mike, I give in
with tears of welcome
to a gusting wind.
The People Who Served
From home or office they communed
via satellite, pawing at tiny keyboards
as they scrolled, scrolled
through templates of emoticons.
Seeking the perfect balance
of earnestness and insouciance,
they settled on the tone
of a precocious child.
Their days were spent cautiously
opening attachments, drafting proposals
for committee approval,
sending polite requests
to leave feedback—along with reminders
of forthcoming galas and improvements
to their policies. They downloaded
upgrades, and notified each other
of precious discounts
soon to expire from their reward plans.
Occasionally they complained
to a confidant: progress was tiring.
Their devices came with so many
conveniences, one constantly had to re-learn
how easy life had become.
The truly helpless, frustrated
by a glitch or malfunction, found solace
in the cheerful, scripted replies
of their call-center counterparts in Manila.
Naturally they were asked to fill out surveys,
letting their providers know
how satisfied they were, on a scale of 1 to 5.
Their wallets grew fat with enrollments
in loyalty programs, with advantage cards
and other emblems of belonging.
In an environment foaming
with options, even the most trivial
acts (buying toothpaste, ordering coffee)
became occasions
for self-searching. And the future,
when it crossed their minds at all,
seemed a vertiginous
and vaguely unsettling
expansion of opportunity.
So they stayed focused, ticking
items off schedules and lists, shuffling
documents in the nervous company
of a billion others: the lord-less
smiling vassals, dutifully
serving each other to death.
The Pelican
Let me fly serenely
above the silver bay,
no rival birds between me
and a deep, elusive prey.
Let there be no distractions
when, following the course
of myriad refractions,
I stalk their moving source.
Then let me wheel in silence
on my angelic span.
With concentrated violence,
let me fold my fan
and dive without detection
toward a silver meal—
piercing my reflection
to feed upon the real.
David Southward
grew up in Southwest Florida and currently teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020) and Apocrypha, a sonnet sequence based on the Gospels (Wipf & Stock 2018). David resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff, and their two beagles. Read more at davidsouthward.com.