Poetry

If Only

In the Air of Beauty

About the Artist

Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. He is an author of novels and poetry and his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review and more than 170 other publications.

The Virgin Mary Burns a Self-Portrait in Toast

I imagine the churches, their

pageants, their individual respective

marys, wearing blue

atop pale skin.  I pulled this strip

of barbed wire out of my bare heel

after a walk across the lawn.  I tap it

with my finger, and chip away

another crumb.  I think

of these midwestern marys, so

very new, like crisp corn.  Maybe a strand

of hair peeks out from a white head covering,

and it’s blonde, always blonde, or maybe

with a touch of strawberry,

like that willowy girl in Missouri who at sixteen is cast

as Mary for Christmas while her older sister, two inches shorter,

thirty-five pounds heavier, with auburn hair kept pixie cut,

picks with her fingernails at a wart on her right thumb.

I laugh, imagining them,

as I twist the wire,

burn my face darker

.                               into coarse bread.

About the Poet

Anna D. Ralls is an emerging writer from Columbia, MO. She is a graduate student at Oxford University, and her works are forthcoming or previously published in Contrary, Atticus, and Colorado Review. She currently lives in Bloomington, IN, and loves to spend her spare time singing opera with her husband.

Contest Between Harmony and Invention
The festival of lights is not about self knowing, or looking inward:
the flags strung up over the festival are a boat race more than
they are prayerflags, where by the docks we hear the harvestsong
from across the lake, and my throat is sore as if I sang it too.
And I tell you a sandpiper that I saw, reminded me of my own
lovemaking—his fleet-of-foot to the tide. Birdsteps, I can’t tell
if they’re cautious, following the tide where it swings, gone out
to where the dark waves are just a sound. Music of a garment
being torn, an orifice of the spirit closes with the stars overpowered
by the festival’s light. The sandpiper, called a curlew here,
becomes a shadow. Most dreams are gray like that, dreams I color-in
upon waking, but two of color, actually of dream color, came to me
last night and in the first, books piled high to the ceiling divided
us two. You lit a cigarette, said only desire could make us poor.
In the second, the wintercoats on the backs of chairs multiplied,
in every style, falling to the floor off the chairbacks like petals.

A Walk for Postage
Even I’m impressed at the jaunty tempo
mustered in my footfalls passed the assisted
living for folks in wheelchairs; always a few
puffing out front. I may be dizzy for love,
or dizzy for a provocateur. I see it
in the bobbing boughs. Of course I feel
it pout in my lungs. “Bazaar in a Jar”
is a church function apparently,
and the scalloped Art Deco makes one
wonder at the parishioners. Are they bashful?
Besmirched? — piling in the backseat
of a resurrection. Bleak overhead, the low
clouds in gradations of newsprint. Lonely
as a shepherdess, or however I might deign
to characterize a stranger, a woman in the park
dizzies herself — bowing and circling her tripod.
As though a mortal puncture has depressurized
my cabin, the shutterbug’s spaniel finishes
me in a mosaic gust of still-grain yellow leaves.
To have peace in giving away and receiving
is to become, oneself sacred. There was a limby
thistlebush the color of mica, its flowers demi-
secondeing up then low, floated away, lighter
than air at the touch of a yellow bird’s play
this morning, beholding flowers as though it
were me growing, them breathing. My eyes
dripped like fists.

About the Poet

Taylor Harrison Micks is a poet from Columbus, Ohio and an alumnus of Ohio State. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, studying for an MFA in Poetry at the University of Illinois, and has had poems published in Ninth Letter.

Gemma
Today, she broke hard bread with
hands of need; breaths caverned
sugar pills beneath diphthongs;
cloven teeth piped of slumbering
toxicity. Alone, she hurt in fierce
company of a Milwaukee winter;
its salient plane carried pale over
the svelte heights of her wooden
house on stilts, taking the shape
of goblin wings. Held and rasping,
she expelled a shock of mist from
red-scorching cheroot, sidling past
the running chatter of wine with-
out purchase, weaving where hem-
lock walls exploded in yellow lines
of her life blazed in domestic script.

Red-Lace Dress
The shadows won’t have
anything for her this evening.
But, the woman in red lace
dress turned fair beneath
the dissonant chords of pale
Paris, like bleached penne.
Fingers raised to rouge-edge
undertone, lips devoured
pochette motes at the Louvre,
inviolable as the grief she
tried to starve into a swallow
glass. Tracing wrist where
scars kissed ribbed and easy,
she burned cold suffocation
until the knuckles swept
concrete, magnificently bent,
where ash of a slim Gauloises
felled as bright as mercury
through the grate, terribly still.

Eve
You thought of Eve near the sea
and heard the first blue line
train sparked to a stop.
You saw her with a Chilean sky,
charquican writhed in the pot,
comforted the dark-creased
hands from reaching out,
reaching for the rosewood box
of her baby boy’s ash. Sand dug
in eyes, cherubic refrains
tarred with spaces of his wake;
stilted fingers rose like darkness
perching, in strands the color
of felled leaves, reflecting grey in
the gleam of goose fat. Torn
from early pages of solemnized
years, you dreamed of the sealed
room in that house, of Eve’s
plaited hair spilled white like
poplar in seeding, every unslept
night kissed her at the temple,
turned up now as artifacts
for keep, where elegy consented
to smooth black the scenery.

About the Poet
Lana Bella is a four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net, & Bettering American Poetry nominee. She is an author of three chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016). She has had poetry and fiction featured with over 450 journals, Acentos Review, Comstock Review, EVENT, Ilanot Review, Notre Dame Review, Rock & Sling, The Lampeter Review, The Stillwater Review, and Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3.

Convolitions 2
(Escapes and Attitudes)

Escape artists and
Copped attitudes

Wield forms of speech
That sound like they

Say or mean something
Worth repeating or

Unwittingly intuitive
Such as “Forgive me for

Speaking out of turn
But my bus just left

For downtown Milwaukee
And now I’m stranded

On its outskirts, no escaping.”
It’s true that I’ve since decided

To shut down feeling
In my unresponsive side

While what I think drifts
Up and away as the constant

Whiz and whir of traffic
Rushing by tears my hair,

Twists my neck, and numbs
My butt, which makes this

Fake injustice just another
Unknowable but inescapable

Attitude adjustment of
Battered body left behind.

About the Poet
Kit Wienert is a Chapel Hill poet whose latest book is Analogs of Eden. His out-of-print chapbooks include The Everywhere Province, The Love Unit, Incidental Musics and Fictions, Idylls and Admonitions, and Doctrines of the Moment. His poems and other writings have appeared in The Lampeter Muse, Credences, Tellus, The Pearl, Exquisite Corpse, Oyster Boy Review, and North Carolina Literary Review, as well as in the anthologies Sparks of Fire: William Blake in a New Age and Gathering Voices.

Forward Plain

Genesis

Begins as breath. Titter, sniffle.
The little voice. Unabridged, sans serif.

Eve

Dress it pretty, then. Skirt, bonnet.
Hushed as a comely girl.
Have her sit, play “Für Elise.”
A tidy scene, like a sentence
without vowels. Craft clarinets,
not whistles, my pet.
Music, not screaming.
Nothing is painful between the knobs,
crags of consonants.
How lovely, flutters and tumults
under an airtight veil.
The bride to be. Or,
what your bride might be.
Depending on tradition.

Gardening

Sinuous, the hours.
Differences of tree and fruit
cradle days: nervous
grenadiers without targets.
Panic greets a whoosh, another
voice, around a kindled wick.
Frenetic cull of beastly
sounds, common threads. Fuses,
not clothes. Braided
lengths of pity, like absolution.

Expulsion

The blank pages welcome
any big bang: howling, breathy
charges, or calmly packed dummies,
birthing quiet, loose anatomies.

Insulince
I hope you never come down,
from so high up on life’s stage.
The audience applauds any show
that pities sin’s lavish wages.

I hope you never come down
from what a pretty face I have,
and how I’ll just be handed
all the things you never had.

I hope you never come down,
again, long enough to feel
that piled-up need to butcher meat
until it looks the way you feel.

I hope you never come down,
so I’ll always feed you sugar,
ant-infested—plus a laugh—
for your diabetic coma.

About the Poet
David Tuvell has written poems appearing, or forthcoming, in Coe Review, Easy Street, Minetta Review, Mud Season Review, New Orleans Review, Steel Toe Review, and other publications. His Bachelor of Arts in English comes from Kennesaw State University, and he also studied substantially at the University of Florida. Outside of poetry, David’s path has been quite various, and he has made his way through things like information science, information technology, and labor.

Field of Statice
In July the bright ones come
from the ground.
Stars on rented stalks
cover strings of silver
strewn by elven-folk
who live for but a day.

Tell me any color—
sea lavender,
limonium, marsh-rosemary—
I tell you l believe
in any memory
come from water.

A sky full of foam,
a fire burning
down the hatchery,
that’s the madness of July.
Give me the herb,
the everlasting calyx.

Dry me a bouquet
and quiet the wind.
Let night put out
even the boldest blues,
the most outrageous purples
and dissolute creams.

The Jacarandas
I left them
on boulevards,
veiled figures wresting
purples from the earth,
the breeze stirring
a kind of trouble.

I left them
as I left my youth—
a memory vivid only
in dream. I left
with my fingers
crossed behind
my back, the countryside
dry and golden
or simply brown,
ready to catch fire
with the first strike
of lightning, the cigarette
thrown from an open window.

I left my inks
there as well,
and the pens. If you don’t
believe me there are stories
of other women
equally bereft.

About the Poet

Judith Skillman’s recent book is Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions, 2017. Came Home to Winter is forthcoming from Deerbrook Editions later this year. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, FIELD, Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, and in anthologies including Nasty Women Poets, Lost Horse Press. She has been a writer in residence at the Centrum Foundation, and is the recipient of a 2017 Washington Trust GAP grant. Visit www.judithskillman.com, jkpaintings.com, https://www.facebook.com/judith.skillman

Laika the Space Dog

Alone, she entered an abyss
bejeweled with blue giant suns,
white dwarfs, black holes, quasars
and nebulae like clouds of gnats
in the deep, the clockwork spin
of galactic arms across all dreams
as Laika, the Soviet space dog
was launched into heaven
for the Motherland and reached
the tonnage of night without food
or water and died, memories stirring
of chasing fireflies through sweet grass,
her hot breath lost beyond worlds,
Earth’s scent wisped to her brain
until her last thoughts began:

Look, there’s a darkness
and the blue globe is dimming.
I wish I could take the Earth in my mouth
and run with it across the stars
where my grave is laid in a bed of stars.

Here without hares or foxes
life is bigger and blacker
than I thought it could be, my paws
like wings floating in this gray car
where I’ll die lonelier than snakes
and drown in night’s deep river,
crossing the boundaries of touch
without stone or soil to walk on.

People sent me to the forever
where no flowers open smells,
only glittering specks blossom
and sleeping I dream of dogs
running over glaciers, chewing antelope,
chasing shaggy brown beasts, their tusks
like sharpened moons—I carry
my kind’s history to the end of ends.

Howling towards shadows’ outer layers
my ghost is fleeing to the world.

Dying I will come back, Yes, I’ll taste
tender air and amber sunlight
back from immensity. I’ll climb
the rainbow’s stairs earthward
back to green shoots and streets
cobbled with hardness, back from the timeless
seabed of space to the churning ground. Back.

Poem for Bobby Fischer: 1943-2008

Nothing soothes pain like human touch—Fischer’s reported last words

The universe scrolled on, stars like spurs
in heaven and northbound geese swept
over Reykjavik where he played
C4 for the first move of game six
and where he died bearded and schizoid
as King Lear, an anti-Semite loved
by his Jewish mother. At fourteen
he was the American chess champion,
a high school dropout, and afraid
the government read his thoughts
through tooth fillings. Yet

he stood like a kraken risen
above white whales drumming in the deep,
a god rounding islands with his will
while galaxies burn and wheel
their dreaming work on his grave raging
Icelandic poppies from the earth,
the sun’s wellspring soaking glaciers,
his rooks, knights, kings and bishops dance

in memory, before we, like all
who lived, wither heroically
vulnerable in our last nights
while our tears rust into frost
and the ocean rolls over its deep bed of stones.

About the Poet

Eric Fisher Stone lives in Fort Worth, Texas where heI graduated from Texas Christian University and work at a PetSmart. He is an incoming graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and Environment. His poetry has appeared most recently in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, Eunoia Review, New Mexico Review, Uppagus, Yellow Chair Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and Third Wednesday.

Our Dear Creatures

The morning before the first faith, light is moving pharmacologically;
you choose not to consider the furniture;
the earth gives fever to our enclosure/forgets to breathe— uneasily
the chest that expels the sparkless ruin abandons itself to visible:
we’ve found the aftertaste of condemnation pinioned
around the dripping framework of delicate and venial knives;
of our thoughts replaying a Nehru blazer in velvet paisley blue,
fitted— neck loosely collared like guilty fondness in the backyard—
you discover chicken-wire, the first thoughts of incarceration,
footprints of giants permanently cast. We grope for veins of pleasure,
blindly exchanged like last night’s eventual riches,
protected by small nests slithering across botanical sand rifts
hoping to make sex and crazy babies together but it seems we both doubt
the motility of such sounds/waiting to be plucked like strange florets;
our dear creatures retreat/to later skulk back; don’t mention the position
of earth— foreign lands may sometimes obscure your guerilla vision
removing surest eyes/ I’m a smiling hostage to my own checkered plan,
an event dismissed by the greater requirements of background love;
outside the oppression of lubricant the world runs more loudly,
unwilling to do anything more than arouse without coming any closer:
in a stillness; we struggle to subconsciously/reveal translucent fruit
and optical crown, wearing the ribald face of shredded decency,
the curl and forward bend of your intimate body harshly maintained
by rejecting the wanderings of rogue surface waves running deeply.

Velvet Wolves

Inside you are two loves—

composed of velvet wolves
and predictable visibility
sinking beyond all inclination.

In the bleak museum
hundreds of feet within you

we spend hours leaning
beneath the rockabilly shirts
and mistaken claims

the pictures you refuse to return.

This sounds like a harpsichord—
whatever it is that’s going on between us

silk and gabardine fit perfectly
the duality
of our confused history

until a polar swarm
cuts across our branch-swept path.

Love is jealous of every other creature

real or imagined,
that dares to share its name.

About the Poet
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

Tending by Succulents

Aloe, sedum, fox tail agave,
painted echeveria
and their baby-plump cheeks,
their water-storing tissues,
a hillside tutorial on thriving
sunbeam-leashed or less.
Hardihood, longevity, reaction, analysis,
I see them coat the fat like rind,
the veins a secret trailing
my lifeline and pinned thorn-point
inward. Drying out to the brink,
pushing blooms through
near loss, I will only think the name.

On a hike I never venture—
rattlers under rock—
spiny glimmer, green satin, pearly
tips, sleek skin, warm center, swollen
flesh strike love pierce my chest
like primal life and make of me
a desert.

The Overlook

Rail-side, people bend
like angle rulers to ogle
the lower-stream fish rush
and its fleet of fins
and its snippets of shimmer
baiting the river to rise
halfway and offer more,

or they scan the landscape
as if it were Atlantis
dug up and displayed
so that some eyes fill and others
fall somber. One fan twitpics it
“not a fiction, but true”
#IHeartNature.

Skyward, flocks of chatter
dive through blue
as a larger bird swallows
its distant kin,

wings, beaks, feet pushing

off canyon like fog

on a panorama settling up.

About the Poet