July 2020 | poetry
Blue suit, pressed
white shirt, red tie,
trimmed hair,
camouflaged lump
where the bullet
went in.
Mourners follow
the tearful track,
mother leaning
on father’s long arm,
siblings swamped
by the stark face
of death, young
men in dreads
as he would have been,
friends of the family,
one by one.
The church fills
with gray winter light,
dissolving faces
like spirits in air;
the color of grief is
the same everywhere.
There is no anger,
no vengeance in sight,
just acceptance,
defeat, despair.
Mary Hills Kuck
Having retired from teaching English and Communications, first in the US and for many years in Jamaica, Mary Kuck now lives with her family in Massachusetts. She has received a Pushcart Prize Nomination and her poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Hamden Chronicle, SIMUL: Lutheran Voices in Poetry, Caduceus, The Jamaica Observer Bookends, Fire Stick: A Collection of New & Established Caribbean Poets, the Aurorean, Tipton Poetry Journal, Slant and Main St. Rag (both forthcoming), and others.
July 2020 | poetry
Autumn 2020, Lake Weeroona, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
Three kilometres of asphalted track surround the lake.
In early hours, if you go clockwise, a morning sun will
warm your back. Go anti clockwise and you’ll squint
most of your way. About 80 people circle the lake today.
Only two need not squint. The slow mow down shufflers.
The not-so-slow press hard upon the slow. The quick
storm past anyone in front of them. They bunch close,
plague-friendly close. Tyranny of numbers forces the
two who walk clockwise off the track onto the verge.
Gasping, sweating, heaving, the mob shoves and elbows
for spurious advantage, eager to hunt a vanished dawn,
frantic not to be overtaken by a runner they cannot see
but have learned to fear from reputation, an athlete
who glides with the long, lazy stride of the gifted,
a player who reserves their best for the finish line.
The aberrant couple stroll into the unfolding day, yet
a while before the sun descends, perhaps there’ll be
other sunsets, more seasons for leaves to fall from these
oaks and elms and plane trees, many evenings to watch
the light drain from the day, until, none knows when,
comes a caress of the gentling blanket of enduring dark.
BN Oakman
BN Oakman, formerly an academic economist, started writing poetry in 2006. His poems have been published in The Age, The Australian, The Canberra Times, Meanjin, Quadrant, Island, Antipodes (USA), Going Down Swinging, Mascara, Cordite, Tincture Journal, Australian Poetry Journal, Eureka Street, Acumen (UK), Poetry Monash, Famous Reporter, Arena Magazine, The Warwick Review (UK), Shot Glass Journal (USA), Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 and elsewhere. He has published two full length collections, In Defence of Hawaiian Shirts (IP 2010) and Second thoughts (IP 2014) plus two chapbooks. In 2016 the distinguished Australian actor John Flaus recorded 25 of his poems for a CD titled ‘What did I know? He has been a recipient of a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Second Thoughts was awarded best IP poetry book of 2014. He was a Pushcart Prize (USA) nominee in 2015.
July 2020 | poetry
a man…died
Unnoticed in the bushes off the 101 Freeway.
By the time he was found,
a wood rat had dragged his skull
some thirty feet off
to use as a nest. – Dorothy Baressi, from “The Garbage Keepers”
I love this idea.
The mice’s fur, dry as straw,
bellies pink with milk. Their claws, curled
thin as the roots of an orchid, inside.
Think of it, your skull,
this thing you have carried from room to room,
library that housed all your angry love letters,
recipes for limeade, lists for what needed
to be done on the house. Now empty
as a temple made to honor a lunar eclipse.
The sockets of my eyes say nothing.-
still their gaze against the cold,
making their hollow, a window into trees.
O lordess of silence. I think of songs
whispered in branches. Sweetness in the leaves,
rustled by the feet of doves.
The long knives of green, coming through the earth.
The way they seem to be made of light.
The owl in his palace of feathers.
Eyes yellow as sonnets.
But why focus on the owl, or grass, or trees?
Look at the forest and the broken spines of leaves,
the roots lifting from the ground
and the city beyond. All your life
you’ve been trying to find
something to land on. Let us return
to the skull, which has carried so much
of its own shadow, now lying in the forest,
the mice, nestled skin to skin, filling
your bones with their contentment.
Like earth’s final apology,
and her prayer.
Tresha Faye Haefner
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, The Cincinnati Review, Hunger Mountain, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle and TinderBox. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012 nomination for a Pushcart.
July 2020 | poetry
First, I need you to understand that our son
has two fathers — and no, I don’t mean me
and our Lord in Heaven. The only star hanging
in the sky after his birth, a red blinking beacon
of the radio tower on the roof of that bleak
Guatemalan hotel. The only woman there
not Mary, but Olga, his foster mom
who delivered him sleeping into my anxious arms.
No wise men or shepherds, no cattle rustling
beyond our beds. I’ve yet to see him
skip across the surface of a summer pond
or draw wine from the kitchen faucet. And
our house runs surprisingly short of bread.
You won’t find our son praying to one of us
behind the football bleachers, or atop
any stumps preaching to the other students.
So, for the love of Christ, can you please,
please update your form?
It’s two thousand and twenty in the year
of our lord — my name is not Joseph,
my ex, not anyone’s god. Our boy
is sixteen, our pronouns, He / Him / His.
And we’re fed the fuck up having to decide
which father to list as his mother.
AE Hines
AE Hines is a poet living in Portland, Oregon. He is a recent Pushcart nominee and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including: Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, The Briar Cliff Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, I-70 Review, the Crosswinds Poetry Journal, SLAB, and Pinyon. www.aehines.net
July 2020 | fiction
W Va. Hospital for the Insane
Name: Alona Perrine
Admitted: 6 June, 1866
Summer nights, Clay, the boy my husband hired, peeps through the window as I undress. One night, by the dark of the moon, in the gloom of the barn, aroused by the musky aroma of animals, I feel God-like and make a man out of Clay. His hands, raspy corn husks, shuck off my bodice, as I forage for his needle in the haystack.
My man, he never was a churchgoer, thank God. The Reverend Wilkins lays hands on me, saving me like a gold piece pilfered from the collection. In the choir loft I take up my cross, his belly, pudgy as bread dough. Oh, my Lord! he keeps repeating like grace over dinner.
One Saturday afternoon, at a private quilting bee in the store room of Maxwell’s Feed, the owner stitches me as I lay on sacks of seed, on his breath, the smell of penny licorice, his tongue, black as the snake’s. Afterwards, he beats me. Bloody, I run to the parsonage, demanding retribution or there will be hell to pay. Reverend Wilkins pleads, He’s a pillar. He has children. He tithes! When I threaten to confess before the congregation, he quotes scripture, He wounds, yet He binds. Then he washes his hands and testifies against me like a Pharisee. To prevent further “self-abuse,” he hog-ties me like a rodeo steer with leather straps from a broken mule harness. The following Sunday, a special collection raises enough to ship me off to some asylum.
*
On the women’s ward, a hen house without rooster, I undress for the doctor. To decipher my insanity, he prods my privy parts with his cock-and-bull, saying my clitoris rivals the size of a man’s penis, and how I would not leave until he was satisfied he’d done all he could to return me to normal.
donnarkevic
donnarkevic: Buckhannon, WV. MFA National University. Recent work is forthcoming in The Centifictionist, Blue Collar Review, and Ancient Paths. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Poetry Chapbooks include Laundry, published in 2005 by Main Street Rag. FutureCycle Press published, Admissions, a book of poems, in 2013. Many Sparrows, a book of poems was published in 2018 by The Poetry Box. Plays have received readings in Chicago, New York, Virginia, and West Virginia.
