Poetry

Two Poems by Jim Davis

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Physiognomy
def: the art of discovering
temperament & character
from outward appearance: smile

lines, baggy eyes, woman of my dreams
I don’t sleep so I can’t find her, copper
pennies worn  down by a tongue the color
of new ways of employing time-

honored processes, which is in its utmost
a secretion of Spanish news into sweet
dreams are made of peas pushed around
in an oil slick plate, where an egg white

clouds & rain argues like a stomach
of peas. Remember the days when we wanted
to know what we’d look like in the future?
Remember when I stood in the dirt, where

everyone walked? Everything looked like poem
dust. Those were the days of raw & rampant
sentiment. The whole thing owed to moments
of certainty. Sediment, apprentice of the world

mowing grass in rows: stripes catching light
in one direction, then another –
we should be so grateful.

12:12 < 11:11
.                       Who was king of that world we forgot
we owed money to, money too in the breathless
.  silence in which together we live. Great supposition
ensues. In certain of my minds, dreams, your eyes
.  aren’t green at all but some amalgamation, muted
reflection of fire and blood – those you avoided
.  then desired, avoided again. Who were you, cruel
lovetap, glinting in some nominal cast at the silver forge
.  to dangle from collar bone, earlobe? I’m sure you are
too unissued to pull Neil apart – Young not Diamond –
.  enigma of the disembodied songster, young one, not us,
young buck cutting through the forest goes and fucks

.  until his antlers grow and get stuck between two
sentences. Unwritten messages between predictions
.  are all you should crack up to be, where you’d best
invest your savings – liminal stock is the only guarantee,
.  lock jaw and barrel through dry walls, any other wall
will resist. The old grape cough syrup container has
.  clouded – in your dreams you pull harder, find me, wish
for proper signals to engorge – then the king appears –
.  pull again and you’ll sleep for good, he will tuck you in,
leave a glass of juice at the bedside, he will pardon
.  your debts, you think, although he’s already collected: sock
drawer, silver earring, unwrapped prophylactics, sack of teeth.

About the Author
Jim Davis is an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in Wisconsin Review, Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, Midwest Quarterly and Contemporary American Voices, among many others. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he reads for TriQuarterly and edits North Chicago Review.

The Guide Dream, San Francisco by Mark J. Mitchell

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The Guide Dream, San Francisco

El poeta como guía turístico dirá ustedes.
                                             —Nicanor Parra

In the tour guide dream you spiral down
to the left while the sky bleeds gray.
Cold tourists, damp as seals, bark questions
in a language that’s never been spoken
on this planet, beneath this sky.
In this dream they look, they never see.
They swim across tarmac, run over seas.
Visitors appear soft as eiderdown,
puffy, cold. Explain that flattened sky,
they ask. Silent, you brush away not yet gray
hair and laugh as if they haven’t spoken.
They believe it all. There’s nothing to question.
But they point, you look. You question
history. They ask, again, if they’ll get to see
that shrine, left destroyed when words weren’t spoken
at the right time. The statue fell down
a set of broken stairs, shattered into gray
dust on the sidewalk, matching that sky.
You stretch your fingers, draw on the sky
but they still don’t understand that questions
don’t mean the same things here. There’s a gray-
eyed girl in the back you’ve never seen
but you know. She refuses to sit down
when you bark an order. Unspoken
signals are shared like bicycle spokes. In
time that’s all that remains under this sky—
a wheel, a door, a red bus that’s fallen down
a hill too steep to climb. There’s no question—
the attempt should not have been made. They’ll see
that if the sky ever clears. It stays gray
as the girl’s eyes, but she’s gone. Gray
blankets are limp on the seats, and spoken
letters drop like pennies. There’s nothing to see
but they keep coming, keep dropping from the sky
keep landing, soft and damp as question
marks beside the name you didn’t write down.
You scan the flat sky. It’s still as gray
as glass. Questions linger. No one has spoken
since you turned down that hill towards the sea.

About the Poet
Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthology Good Poems, American Places. He is author of the chapbook Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press, 2010) and the novel Knight Prisoner (Vagabondage Press, 2014).  He has another novel, A Book of Lost Songs, forthcoming from Wild Child Publishing and a book, This Twilight World, forthcoming from Popcorn Press. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the filmmaker Joan Juster.

The Sunday Paper by Allan Kaplan

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The Sunday Paper

The drama reviewer on addressing the blank page
as the midnight deadline approaches
“Fake it, sweetheart.
One squeal
would embarrass us.”
 
Interviewing the plumber who found $10,000 in a paper bag
“Stan, what did you think when you found
that hand decomposing in all that moo-lah?”
“Finger itch is gone.”
  
Editorial: Flynn’s Kindness to Animals                                 
After dragging Flynn’s cumbrous projects
through the city council, our donkey
nibbled on the sweetest corn in Flynn’s bin.
 
Obituary: the Italian Tenor Guido Santorini 85
Those familiar jowls joggling,
his comic aria soared to the upper balcony.
His wife recalls, “Guido’s sly wink at God.”
 
From Professor Adamson’s column of historical trivia 
Spying his student weeping in the crazed mob,
Jean-Paul, a wry scholar from Province, quipped,
“The fresh root of headless will be my head.”

About the Poet
Allan Kaplan spends much daytime alone writing and revising, or watching endless late night movies with his wife. His books include Paper Airplane (Harper & Row) and Like One of Us (Untitled). His poems appeared in journals of various persuasions over the years; i.e.  Poetry, Apalachee Quarterly, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Washington Square Review, Barrow Street, Wind, Folio, Gulf Stream, Widener Review, Nimrod and Bad Penny Review.

Three Poems by Thomas Swiss

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In Hospital
Your mischief subtracted,
Your temper withdrawn,
You lifted, at last, your hand.
Wounded, you were cartoonish:
An alley cat waving a kerchief.

Warehouse District
In a light rain we stopped at Moose & Sadies
And drank tea and talked for hours.
I watched the riders go over the river
When you took a call from work.
In the kitchen, someone turned on Pandora.
Bowie’s “Heroes” played.
FedEx rolled up. A bus pulled in.

Pedal Pub
A centipede in traffic with a bar on its back
Motored by barelegged girls.

Exotic in Minneapolis,
But not so glamorous inching past Mike’s Plumbing.

Under the stadium and over to Hennepin,
An almost invertebrate biomass trailing a slop of lager.

About the Poet
Thomas Swiss is author of two books of poems, Measure and Rough Cut. He is the editor or co-editor of books on popular music, including Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (U Minnesota, 2009), as well as books on new media literature, including New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (MIT Press, 2006).

Three Poems by William Doreski

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Like Jonah
As you look up at me with eyes
the color of Christmas I fail
from neck down, each organ clenched.
My dead parents approve. Their faces
have gone adrift, but in the rain
the flux of rubber on asphalt
invokes a dozen holiday trips
with gifts rattling in brittle wrap
and the dog so excited we stop
to let her vomit by the roadside.

They approve of your crescent smile,
your cast-iron hairdo, your love
of books too intense for pleasure.
They’re glad my organs misfunction
in your presence, glad the sidewalks
cough up earthworms in the dusk,
glad that in the restaurant the waitress
mistakes us for the famous couple
that reserved the corner table.

The distance swims in the corners
of your bottle-brown gaze. I’m sick
with envy of your clever stance
that braces the earth against you
rather than you against the earth.
But seated with white wine smirking
in fragile stemware we devolve
into that public conversation
that always spoils the local effect.

Someday we’ll brush against each other
in a scorch of displaced neutrons,
but not tonight, not with dozens
of strangers wallowing around us,
my dead parents acting fond,
and the waitress distraught because
she mistook us for celebrities.

The rain slathers on the windows.
We peer through our wineglasses
at each other and take great comfort
in distortions that distance us
like Jonah self-contemplating
at the bottom of the world.

Haunted Men’s Room
In the haunted men’s room the feet
of the dead man remain visible
to anyone who peers under

the door of the toilet stall.
This keeps half of the office staff
in a state of constipation.

You think that’s funny. Physicians
all over America agree
that the hazard of haunted toilets

is a serious health issue
the government ought to address.
Sometimes the plumbing shudders

in gray tones so depressing
computers go blank, ballpoints wilt,
and vital documents blur with tears.

Sometimes the entire staff, men
and women alike, falls asleep
at their desks and dreams that stones

intone King James rhetoric
in memory of vital fluids
we shed without remorse. You laugh

because the dead man when whole
and not merely a pair of feet
was the husband you downloaded

from an online dating site.
Tiring of him, you outsourced
his sexual function so he lost

his third dimension and died. His ghost
hasn’t completely faded
because you keep a photo beside

the bed where you freely exercise.
I’m not afraid of those feet,
but prefer to cross the road

to the Dunkin’ Donuts men’s room
where truckers and lumberjacks
combing their hair and washing their paws

frighten off with large hairy laughter
any ghost that fogs the mirror
and threatens to wrinkle their gaze.

Between Germany and Poland
The gap between Germany
and Poland is no wider
than the part in your hair. Rain sifts
fact from fiction. You linger
over coffee brewed to rival
jet fuel. You insist that Google
Maps no longer include
townships abandoned when cops
smashed down the doors to nab
anyone who voted Democrat.
You claim that the waiter who served
your bowl of mussels wore
spywear and looked sideways to catch
your profile cast in shadow.
I argue over my salad
that coefficients don’t apply
to factors based on the human.
You, with more serious math,
have cubed the effects of poverty
squared by terror. I can’t count
that high. Not enough fingers
and toes. Puddles in the street catch
glimpses of another world
and display them to pedestrians
splashing to the nearest bar.
We snuggle into our booth
and pretend the Second World War
doesn’t apply to us. The waiter
minces to our table and snatches
your credit card, presses it
to his heart. More black coffee
would cure us of the trembling
that always occurs at the border
between German and Poland—
the grumble of tanks displaced
by the angst of digestion,
the overcast of your gaze.

About the Poet
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

Two Poems by John Michael Flynn

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A Daughter’s Safety, A Father’s Patience
A weary magpie
he blankets her from afar.

Dusk thickens
remembered promises.
He wants to tell her
he’s lived, died, become –

Vespers of rain begin,
sweeten the air
as he keeps to his vigil
knowing they’ll go inside when she says so.

He’d forgotten such rains
don’t alarm the playful.

Splinter, Rail, Couch
Like Ichabod Crane’s pumpkin,
like Yogi Berra’s mitt in need of oil
skin cracks boils and petrifies
until textured into horrid extremes.

You like to think you accept this, but you hold on
to smoother treacle-like notions of your face
as a once elegant strand fit for an impressionistic
rendering complete with Sunday picnickers and parasols.

Fading while falling out of the exploding regions
in your corporeal terrain and its various war zones
you raid your heedless senates and caterwauling closets
full of faddish cream-potions, antiseptics and unguents.

You hear again each dawn in the wake of your insomnia
those chases, provocations and longings that have defiled you,
each one like a beloved aunt dead and buried
that you’ve got a picture of but have never met.

Some sing of surfaces as realms and this offends you
as over-simplified, dishonest, deceptive.
You ask what it is about surfaces and stark associations –
what you bring to them and how they stir fires within.

For you, there are no realms, no frosted glass fantasies.
You open your eyes or else you slam another door.
There is the muck, silk, steel and played-out edges of self-knowledge.
The dream-fever train never stops. You ride or else you get off.

About the Poet
John Michael Flynn, a resident of central Virginia,  is currently an English Language Fellow with the US State Department, teaching English in Khabarovsk, Russia. His most recent poetry collection, Keepers Meet Questing Eyes (2014) is available from Leaf Garden Press (www.leafgardenpress.com). Find him on the web at www.basilrosa.com.

Austin Seventies by Janet McCann

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Austin Seventies
and we are at the Sweet Pecan Cafe
sitting on outdoor tables leaning toward
the country singers up front and jumping around in the back
of the whole enterprise are rats! Waiter says
we can’t do anything about them so
we toss them our chips

now a poet reads about the
military-industrial complex which we hate
and will get rid of soon and we don’t ever see it all
coming, these little cafes all torn down
and the big dark buildings going
up and Starbucks instead of
this place we love

all we can see is happy rats
dancing and we throw them
our chips

About the Poet
Janet McCann is a crone poet who has been teaching creative writing at Texas A&M since 1969.  Journals publishing her work include Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’Wester, Christian Century, Christianity And Literature, New York Quarterly, Tendril, Poetry Australia, and Mccall’s, among many others.  She is a 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner and Professor of English. Her most recent collection is The Crone at the Casino from Lamar University Press, 2013.

Ode to a Bruise by Kathryn Hujda

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Ode to a Bruise
The olive edges mark the outer limits
of the blood galaxy rising on my thigh –
like nebulous gases,
combusting in untouchable space,
my skin is bejeweled with magenta planetesimals
orbiting in otherwordly indigos.

Oh small contusial universe,
the pressures at your conception
astound me.

About the Poet
Kathryn Hujda is a performing artist and keeper of cultural memory working in the Twin Cities. Her poems have appeared in Stone Path Review and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal.

Two Poems by Frederick Pollack

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Pentecost
The verb unite, from some lost manifesto,
has drawn them here. But there’s no sign
they will, or can: glaring, or attitudinizing
within themselves and carefully deadpan.
Some, at the lights, decide,
almost together, there’s light enough
from the windows, which are too high
to show anything but normal spiteful sky.
Others attempt to find a working plug
for the coffeemaker; then,
failing, observe the grey
tiles and chairs with their ambience of AA,
and each other. There’s no unity
where no one leads, and I
(thinks each of them) can’t. Won’t.
I have responsibilities. I keep
things going, to one bad end or another;
my role is not to choose but to regret.

So they sit and desultorily discuss
position papers, of which no two copies,
however, seem identically worded.
Someone has slipped up, or devolved
responsibility to the point there is none.
At the end of the long table joined
from smaller tables, someone’s mind
wanders. He’s a believer,
but worries whether after
so many years he can still shovel
energy and hope through a hole in the sky.
Could decide that ethics emerge by themselves,
or let them go … A woman mourns
(though no new furrow breaks her face)
how no one will now look at her;
urges herself to find
more interest in events like this,
a way through dry ideas to drier peace.

And one who has just sung a long,
detailed, heartfelt, humane and obsolete
aria finds his attention
drifting through the question period,
which also drifts. He recalls, perhaps, a sled.
Or the sled from a classic film.
In either case an object he once rode.
Remembers love, ideals, long-past
or never quite forthcoming afternoons.
Outside, a sullen rain begins.
Consensus builds towards lights.
The wall, however colorless, behind
each face creates a figure-ground
anomaly. Loose contacts, cut
and tangled wires yearn
for outright ruin or repair;
the sensitive are sensitive to this
and wonder which will be decided here.

The Maid
Sonia lives in a plaster mudpie
raisined with German, partisan, Serbian,
and NATO shrapnel and
stained where pipes break.
She works downhill and up another hill
in a glass lozenge
overlooking a much-visited
bay, cathedral, fortress, red
tiled roofs, and their photographers in shorts.

Guests from the EU, IMF,
OECD and the mostly German
bankers leave towels
in heaps, unspeakable sheets,
and broken glass but tip
like earlier Americans. Their advances
have a certain shamefaced charm,
verging (again like Americans) on
the confessional. Except when French.

More recent delegates (from Svoboda,
Jobbik, Golden Dawn et al)
to neofascist head-to-heads
with drug and arms mafiosi tip
not at all; are at least as messy
(unless sheer nihilism makes them neat),
and nasty. Sonia has wound up
pregnant once, in the hospital
twice, but needs the job.

In her scant leisure, she reads.
It is not man who commands the times
but the times that command man wrote
the oldest Romanian chronicler,
as quoted by Cioran, a favorite. Her one
prayer, entirely secular, is
that those who despise
others enough to kill them should
themselves be killed, except for her.

About the Poet
Frederick Pollack is author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press, and author of a collection of poems, A Poverty Of Words, forthcoming from Prolific Press. He is also adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University and has many poems in print and online journals. Poetics: neither navelgazing mainstream nor academic pseudo-avant-garde.

Two Poems by John Grey

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Second Hand Book Store
If e-books had a conscience,
it would look like this:
musty rows of stuffed shelves,
light through webbed window
straining to make out an author’s name,
aged editions of the classics,
signed copies behind a glass case,
obscure dead poets, their gravesites
squeezed between film history
and “The Decameron” in Italian,
coffee table art books cover to cover
with rank travel guides to a younger earth,
shadows crawling up horror tomes,
moth buzzing about an early history of flight,
estate sale bargains stacked on the floor,
and, up front, the crusty old owner
behind a dilapidated desk
with, on one side, an adding machine
and, on the other,
a prehistoric copy of “Books In Print.”
But e-books have no conscience.
And either I wrote down the wrong address
or that store’s no longer here.

Immigration Officer
I showed him my passport.
He looked at it intently,
as if peering through
a magnifying glass,
looking for clues
to a robbery, a murder.

The passport picture did me no favors.
The contortions of my face,
all stress, all disappointments,
were as obvious
as a lounge lizard’s lines.

Yes, the stamps from many lands
told the story of my travels.
But I would always be this man
in that snapshot.
My hair would be unkempt,
my cheeks prone to fleshiness.

I’d be weak-eyed,
tremble-mouthed,
and on the verge
of losing it.

Eventually, he let me through.
But not until

he had no doubt

what his country was getting into.

About the Poet
John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in Paterson Literary Review, Southern California Review and Natural Bridge with work upcoming in New Plains Review, Leading Edge and Louisiana Literature.