Poetry

The Ephemeral Map
When he arrived in Alaska,
before it was known as Alaska,
before it was known to live
language and stories,
rivers and lakes, and towns,
he was lost with words.

A group of fishers grumbled.
He spread his arms. In the snow he drew
with the corner of his glasses
an X. He drew between them
a circle in the air and pointed
down with his palms.

He continued from the X
a line to where he began.
He punctuated with lakes
and mountains and a forest scene.
He drew a house at the end,
and placed his palm upon his chest.

He pointed forward. He drew
in the unconnected distance
a star. He pointed to the space
between. The fisherman laughed
and piled a snow ball in the between
and rolled it all the way home.

Lesson Plan: Teaching Terroir 1638 C. E.
The first time you’re lost,
scoop a handful of earth.
Rub a smudge across your gums
and tongue. Pocket the clump.

Do this at each occurrence.
When you’re home, redistribute
the dirt along your kitchen
table in regions like a king.

Where you were lost,
press your thumb and spittle
drool into the hole.
Here, you’ll grow your grapes.

And while you cannot mold time,
though it can age, or plot
experience, you can name
your garden, and water and twist the vines.

When you bottle vinegar and wine
and offer it out for trade,
customers will learn your land
by tasting where you found your way.

About the Poet
Tom Holmes is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose, and in July 2014, he also co-founded RomComPom: A Journal of Romantic Comedy Poetry. He is also author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013 and was released in 2014. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.

I Guide Stevie Wonder by the Hand
I wait patiently at the corner, watching lights
I say nothing, but walk. He walks.
His hand is slim in mine, cold and dry.
He doesn’t know it, but the color collects in the bed of his fingernails:
This is where he is blackest.
I guide him around a corner
The building with cinder glass obscures what’s inside
I imagine rich people there
I say, “rich white people, but we can’t see them working.”
I nudge him a little and he steps a little higher, avoiding
Legs laying out on the sidewalk, splayed
Brown bagged bottle between them.
Beside the bakery
We smell nuts and caramel cooking
I tell him that everything is beautiful:
Cakes tiered for weddings, cookies decked out for celebrations, candies small and brown.
“Rich white people dressed in furs and cashmere, flashing bills I can’t recognize.”
I walk him further and slow my step over ice
Around dog shit
.                 His nose wrinkles
We are near the park and I angle him—
We walk across the block long park.
The grass is crunchy with winter.
In the exact middle of the park,
Stevie stops me,
We stand still and my heart feels too violent.
He says, “Listen. Just shhh.”

Play Date: Tina Turner | Janis Joplin
I painted her toenails blue
Though the bottle said “azure”
We say this word “azure” aloud
Exaggerating the ‘Z’
And share sounds that make our lips
Pucker.
I blow air on her toes
She blows air across the waves.

About the Poet
DeMisty D. Bellinger teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many places, most recently in Driftless Review and Specter Magazine. Her short-short “Tiger Free Days,” first published in WhiskeyPaper, is on the Wigleaf’s Top 50 Short Fictions of 2014. DeMisty lives in Massachusetts with her husband and twin daughters.

A Cold Draft in Summer
In our full-moon drive,
headlights focus ahead
on the warm summer highway.
Suddenly the moonbeams
hang like icicles
as we come to the only house
where snow is falling,

where the lawn is white,
the roof is buried
nearly to the chimney top.
Nothing but shadows drift
across this freezing place.

The chimney breathes not
a smoke signal or spark
to show that someone
is tending fire.

We slow down but keep idling
homeward where our porch light
burns darkness away, where window
light melts our place into summer,
where we live always near the boiling point.

But here in the sudden winter, a single puff
rises from the snowcapped chimney
as if someone has given up the ghost.

You turn your head and shiver, turn off
the air conditioner, glance back
at the snow light drifting behind us, and sigh:
Who chooses to live and die in bitter cold?
Maybe they can’t take the heat.

I break out in cold sweat.
Even ice can burn, I say,
stepping on the gas.

A Sun too High to Light the Way
In a forgotten graveyard’s fog
thick as spiderwebs,
I hear the owl’s cold call
turn to caw, a cat’s purr
turn to dirge.

Nothing flies beneath
a mask of heavy darkness.
Nothing has enough shape
to have a name,
but to the touch, hard stones
stand like broken teeth.

Like the memory of the sun,
the path beneath me disappears.
The safety of tree limbs
creaks way above my head,
strains against the fog wall.

A crow could not see his shadow here.
A man could only feel himself falling here.

Feathers and limbs settle for this ground,
bury the stone that might have named me.
Imitating light, the silk shroud ties all
the lost together.

About the Poet
Robert S. King, a native Georgian, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press, 2014) and Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014). Robert’s work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of Net award. He is currently editor-in-chief of Kentucky Review, www.kentuckyreview.org.

The Drama Teen’s Captivity Narrative
She sits unnaturally still in the auditorium’s wood-slat chair, her back mast-straight, legs stowed like obedient spars. As the curtain rises on South Pacific she inhales, holds her breath for three full beats—the practiced pose of a daughter championing her mother’s cause. All daughters must learn to play such parts for small-town show.

See how her thumbs tap the playbill sheaf—in tandem—like oars slicing the tide, steering past faux beach scenes, past the enchanted evening’s bonfire bulbs. Soon she’ll duck into a private cove, weave fresh palm ribs into her stick map. It won’t be long now, her thatched plot to escape Potemkin Isle, the martial merriment, her mother’s command performances, nearly complete.

About the Poet
Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in B O D Y, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, The Screaming Sheep, So to Speak, Stoneboat, Terrain.org, and Verse Wisconsin. A few of her pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.

Thunder, Lightning
Thunder, lightning appear
on the sea and we slip to
Lesbos to be islanded and
enclosed.

Thunder, lightning. You roar
as I strike between your sandy
legs and we weep for the
banishment of emptiness
on the returning ship to
Athens streets.

Shall I lay my legs on
yours as we impregnate
the other eternally,
and birth from our lips
as we destroy our single
being, a crying child?

Thunder, lightning. I flash
behind your steps, unable
to describe on papyrus
the instance you slipped
into my menstrual flow
to heal small cuts and make my
heart beat longer for you
or your baths in the
sea that stirred me to compose
in the dark. Thunder

and lightning. I do not hate
men but how can I be tender
when every animal seeks out its
kind? Shall a bird love
shells or make nests for
hawks designed for doves?

Thunder, lightning are hammer
and necklace and we will never
return to any avenues but
their skies.

reprinted from Catch and Release and from The Rain, Party, and Disaster Society

About the Poet
Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of “The Chapbook “( Curbside Splendor, 2011) and “Love Poems “( Kelsay Books, 2014). His work was described by the Huffington Post as “not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them.”  He was a nominee for Poet Laureate of Florida.”Thunder, Lightning” is the closing poem of his WIP,  “The Ends Of The Earth.”

A Trial Separation on Trial
I’m still not clear on how it happened.
Or even where.
Sure, there’s people not happy about it
but their ranks have thinned over the years.
What’s that you say?
Sorry, I can’t hear.
My ear’s in mothballs.
And please don’t scream.
You’ll wake the baby.
Of course, there is no baby.
No mother either.
I’m so alone, I could die in my pajamas,
staring into the fog of death, mistaking it for sleep.
That’s me.
Always on the cusp of life and death.
A study in Hermeneutics and predestination.
Cross my o’s, dot my t’s,
before truth and method get here.
And suddenly a phone call from out of the blue
rings like smoke spirals rising from a cigarette
Wrong number? Forgiveness?
Forgiveness but still a wrong number?
Who can bear these oblivious distances,
people standing in their bright tropical garb
while I am huddled up in the chill off my own body?
It is she, says the voice.
It is she but without the urgency.
She sounds calm as if nothing every happened.
But everything’s happened.
If not, why am I in such
advanced stages of myself?

About the Poet
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Big Muddy and Spindrift with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Sanskrit and Louisiana Literature.   

The Girl On the Tasseled Filly

for Cecil J.

It’s a dirty-trick, the tick-tocks. You’re held captive,
caught in a kind of snow-globe musical sphere where
you whirl with a thousand flying flakes. The end awaits,
but you don’t know exactly when, or what’s promised.

You really feel sorry for next of kin, the sudden trickle
of jacketed friends, the curious, young and aging, who
peek at what’s left of your body. Some quote from
the bible, even recite psalms. Can there be a heavenly

or mythological rescue? Others with fond memories
just hold steady, commemorating you. Remembrances
are embroidered: how you saved a child in Betsy Head
pool, leaped to catch a ball hit by Hawk Aaron at Ebberts

Field. You loved pickle juice. Yes, DJ Clay Cole once
introduced your doowop group, the Novas, at Wingate
High. Onlooking choirs sang your praises as if feeding
you tubes of Gatorade. Precious Lord. But they shouldn’t

have worried, though you couldn’t say that. A nurse
whispered, “He’s done,” not seeing the burst of white
doves overhead as you pedaled full speed ahead on your
red-and-blue tricycle. Fading in the light, you whispered—

told me about old passions, not the expected story:
the kids, Disney, you with your wife in that hot, heart-
shaped tub. The director’s cut was Angie, who I didn’t
know, barely seventeen, a tease in her curvy peddle-

pushers, a budding Dear-Lord rosebud halter. She
galloped on a tasseled carousel filly, a jumper at
Coney Island. From your saddle, you kissed her in
mid-air, tasted lemon meringue pie. As you circled,

she giggled, said it: “You’re the best jockey ever.”
Walk-to-trot, trot-to-canter. She was your first, you
hers. But life is life. At the funeral, you said I’d see
this old lady sitting in the church’s padded last pew.

Nobody would see the violet flash her under her flare-
out skirt—not on the college quad, not there. She’d be
the last to leave, tears soaking her pony’s mane, brass
pole, the garden road where you’d soon meet again.

About the Poet
Isaac Black, an MFA graduate of Vermont College, has work published or forthcoming in journals like the Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, Fjords, Poetry Quarterly, Boston Literary, Bop Dead City (interview), San Pedro River Review and Spillway. Founder of a major 501(c) college help organization, he’s been awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Literary Award for fiction and Broadside Press Award for poetry. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he’s also been a recipient of poetry fellowships from the New York State Creative Artists Service Program (CAPS) and New York Foundation of the Arts. Isaac’s the author of the African American Student’s College Guide (John Wiley & Sons).

Collapsible Animal
How we saw the female whale circling figure eights
in the river that snaked its way through a bursting
verdant land near the coast of Oregon. How we took

too many photographs, were disappointed none came out
the way we had hoped. How they in no way framed
the largess of the belly, not to mention the expanse

of the fanning tail. How we later read in Klamath papers
the whale did not swim more than a day longer till
it beached and baked in the scorched sun of a long August

far from the salt it wanted. How in stillness it is impossible
to glimpse the rush of movement the spraying water
brings to the surface any collapsible animal must feel

surging like blood through the veins on the days we bear
witness to a beauty so surprisingly out of place we can only
shrug and lift the darkness from our skin to splay and pierce

the frigidity of this foreign air. How some days we are a prayer
answered. How we are peopled here as the folding of hands,
standing even now on the metal grid of a bridge in a country

so far from our own.  How even here there is an invisible
something swimming through the blood, with us even
on that hidden beach in Big Sur, the one where the stones

thrust their monuments of geology straight from the briny surf
and I searched all afternoon for a starfish I never found and
the surfer out on the waves was so remarkably young.

With us even as we piled the pink skin of the pickled radish
onto steaming tortas pollo off the truck on La Brea.
All the strange offerings.  Intestine.  Heart.  Tongue.

How later we weathered a storm as the Pacific came out
of the clouds so instantaneously the lightening blew
the darkness from our sight like a camera flash before

the rains came and upturned bathtubs upon our bodies.
How we used to sing a child’s game – closed palms,
intertwined fingers.  Here is the steeple.  Here all the people.

How there was no meaning in the verse – just a joy circling
a dizzy planet of youth.  How the whale circled and spun
in the dizzy figure eight of its own losing. How I wonder

if pleasure in the new air of the freshwater can be found
even as it slows and exhausts every recourse for finding
the way back to breathe.  How we never know the meaning

of the rose even as we ring ourselves around it.  Ashes
to ashes.  Dust to dust. How when the sky is burning a boy
can hang a lapel of posey onto his blouse before swimming

into an ocean of his own drowning.  How we know the ending
to every story.  How we become giddy with the telling of it – just
listen to our voices rise and lift and quicken our very own falling.

About the Poet
Alicia Hoffman is originally from Pennsylvania,  but now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of “Like Stardust in the Peat Moss”(Aldrich Press, 2013), her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Tar River Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Camroc Press Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Dancers
I think of you as a sock-footed girl dancing by
yourself across your hardwood bedroom
floor, imagining who you would love, your glum
father both annoyed and pleased by the
shaking of the light over his reading chair,
even then the smooth flute of your calf was
becoming a profound form of punishment
to me, your hair my hand out the window,
your voice opera, Carmen at Masada, Don
Giovani in the Warsaw salt mine cathedral,
holy sounds, sacred notes. It is a shame
that I sold myself as perhaps something close
to that ghost dancer—as you now know you
will need to shoulder me from the base of the
toilet to the bed as that is part of the deal with
me, part of the dance I know, the wobble waltz,
where I place my palm over your naval until our
child kicks and joins our out-of-sync Bolero.

This News Cycle
This new cycle came with Mawin,
the four-year-old Syrian boy wandering
the desert with only a picture of his mother
and a plastic bag of dry rice, trembling and
sucking on the hard grains, swallowing
one at a time—
then came the Mexican shark hunter blown
off course, lost at sea for eighteen months,
found drifting near a South Pacific atoll
where he told of a dead partner and a diet
of sea birds, fish, and hand-scooped turtle
meat, and how a grown man could now
rest a finger between the valley of his ribs—
U.N. Human Rights Tribunal releases
studies on violations in North Korea
with stories of imprisoned women giving
birth, and how the magic of other women
coming to help with steel bowls to bathe
the newborns was twisted by guards who
made the new mothers place their screaming
infants stomach down in the bowl and let
them drown—
In the seas off of Great Britain an abandoned
cruise ship with cannibal crazed rats is said to
be pushing its way to shore, and a frenzy builds
and the ship gets lots of play until it slips off radar—
when the Sochi Olympics start and news of
Russian officials poisoning stray dogs to thin
them out carries—
until the areal skiers untether from
the earth and spin through the fog and snow
and it is a gift to see people launched, stacked
image upon image, story upon story, until
night upon night spin past, and we can add
ourselves to the endless ways of how we disappear.

About the Poet
Devin Murphy’s recent work appears in The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah as well many other literary journals and anthologies. He holds an MFA from Colorado State University, a Creative Writing PhD from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University.