July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Swallowing Sounds Like Boiling Water
I can feel a word
crawling up my esophagus
like tequila
in a red dress
or the kitchen table
that I swallowed when
my grandmother died.
I should have slipped into
the word when I married,
or when I learned to
measure coffee,
or when I first shrank
from small hands, small toes.
One day, it will become
more than a word.
It will be a song
a eulogy
a dissertation.
It will be or has been
my mother’s hands
made of flour
boiled in chicken bones,
and her smile
heavy with the weight
of the kitchen table
in her stomach.
One day,
I will be old enough
or brave enough
to speak the word,
or write it in a journal
that may be read
by my daughters.
I may finally cloak myself
in the word and allow it
to rush from my esophagus
where it is now stuck.
But for now, I let the word
“motherhood”
linger like a tickle
in my throat
or a flame
under the teakettle
of my childhood.
Farmland
On the commute home
the clouds form a table
atop four grain silos,
each grand, different.
It reminds me of you.
The top of the table is
covered with papers:
marriage certificates,
manuscripts,
dissertations.
Beneath the table
grows the pile of rejections:
unworn house slippers,
discarded candy wrappers,
an album of pictures that
doesn’t belong to us.
A box of ashes teeters
on the edge of the table.
If it falls, will our life
have happened at all?
I pass beyond sight of the table, and
I remember that it is only clouds.
I forget them as I continue home.
Elizabeth Jenike is currently a master’s student of creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she serves as the Fiction Editor for Oxford Magazine, the graduate literary publication. She received her undergraduate degree in creative writing from Northern Kentucky University in 2012. Her poetry appeared in the 2010-2011 edition of NKU Expressed, and her short story “The End” was published in the 2009-2010 edition of the same. Most recently, her flash fiction piece “How to Dye Window Treatments” was published by the undergraduate literary project ObsessionMag.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I. first base
One could have all kind of kooky conversation
with the certain combinations of flowers.
Yesterday we talked with rue.
Periwinkle for pernicious wishes.
Daffodil for hello, put me in your pocket.
Arum lily for I’ll cling to your skirts.
Ivy for you’ll choke me for years after I’ve left.
Forget-me-not, did you never realise?
Goldenrod for sniggering into your scratchcards.
Next, high-speed flower arranging,
or, reading the clouds like tea-leaves
f’r’example, modest oblong clouds first
lining up the wholeway horizon-across
and the sky it goes the wholeway round
you’re at the Highline though, where
the vegetation was CHOSEN, yes, to
PAY HOMAGE oh glory BE, to the
wild plants which indeed had colonized
th’abandoned railway, the choochoo trickish
tracks, before it was repurposed, oh!
New York!
NEW YORK!
II. thither
(to the work, then)
Transcription: this is where the words are written down
without discussion.
Shibboleth: this is where the word is written down
without discussion.
Name: this is where the name is written down
without discussion.
NAME IT!: this is where the name is written down
after discussion.
“secrecy”: this is where the names are written down
without discussion.
Gentle reminder that none of this is any of your business:
this is where there is no discussion.
Excellence and hard work are possible at the same time probably:
this is where there is discussion.
Signature: this is where the name is written down.
The co-signatory was missing from the conference:
this is where the name is not written down
after discussion.
III. two too late
three being two
a list, beginning
my retarded son
I am envied
the shame fell
you disgraced me
terrible times together
drink it over
now we gather
the lost things
my son my
son oh Absalom
Absalom my son
the last time
we were together
you heard me
a broken record
turned against me
a record broken
which makes three
time times time
I am envied
two is three
the unknown code
you my family
the cruellest bones
the necessary marrow
denial with blindness
the heart’s sorrow
for the lost
for the last
for the blistered
for the burnt
for the starving
for the falling
for the hell
for the fun
for the glory
for the money
for the children
for my son
oh my son
the terrible lesson
the fearsome book
the awful page
the last look
IV. hither
Here.
Here is the manner, four-
wingèd spite full’f gurning.
Here.
The watchman fell at the o’clock
his regret was sounded loud.
Here is the dream. It
churns and circles and curses, it
spits mongrelly teeth, up-
airs them to the cloudless up.
They never sound as loud as when you
don’t speak words at them: they never
are heard more than they’re listened to.
Here.
V. twentyish
What does it mean, he says, Win — chest — er ?
From Belfast no I don’t believe it with your accent,
you aren’t German? Polish? How d’you come to be here?
I’m staying in The Clink , I am , but I’m, I am a free man.
Why did the cathedral bells ring? for
all Souls’ or all Saints’ ? what was the word ?
Solder, or, the linden tree ?
Yes, he says, I use the darkest charcoal for your eyes.
His art materials spiralled from The Marriage of Figaro,
for example, matching it all, as sort of romantic,
sort of unexpected & spontaneous, sort of unavoidable,
sort of making sure I lost that job, sort of.
Señorita , he says (fivefold flatterer),
Sarah of the good skin,
of the poetic and Biblical name , of the dark, sad eyes
and the gentle lips and the poet’s long thin hands.
From fond España, no, Odessa, he was, and divorced, a
cartoonist of politics who, he studied Holy Art at
(oh, Oh Holy Art!) Milan, Odessa, London, now, on a London bridge.
Writing a poem was the only faithful elephant of the deal.
Nevertheless I loved this person,
just like all the inappropriate
others.
VI. visionary(’s) proposal:
I am just the imaginative cockroach for you.
Our hair will grow still long after short-
term cryogenics. We’ll be refrigerated right?
These decisions must be made and stuck to regard-
less of loss of sealsong, wherever you keep the knowledge –
your guts’ll do.
Not really since your brothers still are dead there, in the
narrative background, historic, in the some-term freezing studio.
The stadium fills with cold undead, unsinging.
The library ’s where we keep tomorrow’s records : many
more dead than have lived a full and, &/ or
happy life.
Paper skeletons have been chewed
to pieces by once domesticated cats.
Don’t hang them on the
December trees!
New disturbances will last a century, we are ho-
bblede – hoy in-
to tomorrow spit
spat towards crunch gravel earth spatter crunch.
In an hundred years’ time we two’ll be living oh six days a head.
by Sarah McKee
Sarah McKee lives near a lake in Berlin. She inhales a large amount of comedy. She, too, has an irregularly tended blog: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/gormandgasp. Publications and projects include Metal Magazine (upcoming), Poems Underwater (upcoming), This Recording, The Moth, Blackbox Manifold, Veer, Varsity, Volta, The Harker. Kiez Oper (upcoming), These Carewon Cairns (sound installation, Scott Polar Research Institute), Bonesong (contemporary opera, Carmen Elektra).
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Full red
Library wine
Tongue coated in vinegar crackle
I decide to dabble into poetry
Just me
and Ahmad Jamal’s jazz piano trio
Playing the keys to my brain
Raindrop, waterfall
Oak barrel notes
Even though
All mine I crumple up and throw away
Chest resounding in vinyl fuzz
My heart brain unlocks
And plastic chair rocking
I douse my pen in cheap red ink
And begin again
Meandering scribbles
Sound sketches
Bass plodding deep and pensive
Dark and deliberate
I commiserate now with Mingus, Miles, Monk
Simone and Trane
Vain nostalgic searches
Cold moonlit silhouette verses
Jazz sounds like poetry
Holy blood, divine liquid lines
Half Full
Pen flowing
Ink glowing
A page appears
I haven’t seen before
Alive, shimmering Lionel vibes
I throw a black and white textbook
At the white and black floor
Flecks of winey residue
Flecks of truth
Get stuck in my teeth
And color my lips blue
And Suddenly
Half Empty
Heart heavy
Bladder filling
Tongue-tied delirious I get
Stuck
And seeping through this half-drunk numbness
Burgundy sadness
Poetry like jazz sounds
Wine like poetry feels
Congealed two-fifty
Self-fermented pity
Dark and red drowned
Wallowing prosetry
Lose pen and then
I’m alone again
Empty
Drained
Numb veins
Slow
Soothe
Succumb
To this sad jazz
Wine brine
Has
Had
Was
Glass
Empty
Emptier
Emptiest
by Zach Milkis
Zach Milkis is currently an undergraduate English and Political Science major at Santa Clara University originally from Friday Harbor, Washington. His poems and short stories have won various local prizes including recognition at the San Juan County Fair and publication in At Home Magazine. He served on the editorial board for The Santa Clara Review, and has volunteered teaching creative writing and poetry to students from San Jose, California to Cape Town, South Africa.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
309
Nature morte : l’atelier de l’artiste, 1891
If the knife should lay upon a white tablecloth,
Half turned towards a vase of painted china
In which posed flowers collide, and of which the
Curves show startled faces of daisies, all dulled
In a tangential evening light from the window ;
If the roofs and chimneys should bask in their
Obsolescence as in the last heat of the day,
Raising their perpendiculars to the raw heaven,
Unchanged by the fleet paths of birds that pass
Between the shaded window and their dull clay ;
If the fruit should sit in a glow from the rooftops,
Seeming to swim in uncertain forms, lovely and
Dark as a child’s wet hair, in a china fruitbowl
That funnels whitely from the table like a splash
Of spilt cream, pale-skinned, yellow and green ;
Who then shall say this nature is captured where
It lies, or that it is the artifact of crude cohesion?
We parse it out among its very fragrances! Our
Love is no drawn and vivisected thing. Deposons.
We will watch the fruit in their deathless light.
315
Rabbiner, 1914
His gaze is steady.
Black and white in his beard, and
In the cloth
Of his tallit, threads of which trail
Across his lap. Black the kippah
At his crown,
Out of which wild hair blows,
Pale gossamer,
Manipulated by a shallow breeze.
His hands are bloodless as after
Illness, and in the right a tzitzit
Lies limply
Held between ring and little finger.
Its black and white wind endlessly,
A trail of stars
Across the darkness of his shawl.
Light plays across his brow, and in
The slight concave
Of the bridge of his fallen nose.
He seems to
Watch for a motion in the air.
325
Rimbaud : OPHÉLIE I
On calm, black water, where the stars sleep,
Pale Ophelia floats like a great lily,
Floats almost motionless, bound in her long veils.
From the far woods, calls sound.
For more than a thousand years, Ophelia
Passes, a white phantom, on the long, dark stream ;
For more than a thousand years, her sweet folly
Murmurs its romance to the evening breeze.
The wind kisses her breasts, giving out in corollae
Vast curtains that are shaped softly by the waters ;
Trembling willows weep over her shoulders, and
The reeds incline over her broad, dreaming brow.
Crumpled waterlilies sigh around her ;
Sometimes, in a sleepy inlet, she disturbs a nest,
From which a shivering of slight wings escapes :
An obscure music falls from the golden stars—
Owen Lucas is a British poet living in Norwalk, Connecticut. He grew up in rural Cambridgeshire, and began writing as a student at the University of London. His poems have been published in reviews and journals on both sides of the Atlantic, with work soon to feature in Eunoia Review, The Round, Vector Press, the James Dickey Review, 94 Creations, North Chicago Review, Forge and Clarion. His first chapbook is forthcoming in September, from Mountain Tales Press.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Good Food
Eating a bruised McIntosh apple lifts me out of Chinatown where no one is cheering on this hot Indian Summer. Feeling the soft spot through the skin under the thumb in time with a bite brings back dirty hands reaching for fruit, twisting the gift from the branch. I am on mother’s shoulders for no other child will do. One brother, too heavy, the other, too little. He may get hurt. If I take both hands from her face I will fall, but I need both hands—one to steady the tree limb and one to pull. The October sun in my eyes, I let go and reach. I grasp the branch and the fruit…Or do they—the branch, the fruit—move into my hands to steady me? I do not fall. I toss the apples, 29 cents a paper bag, to the ground and my brothers scurry to collect them. They are gold! Apples are food—good food, filling, cheap. No matter if it’s brown. Mother says, Cut it out! Or wormy. It’s protein! I don’t have to eat this apple. Now, my fridge is full of organic this and natural that. I did not pick it. I don’t have children I need to feed. I don’t need to cook. There’s 20 bucks on the coffee table and a Prosperity Dumplings three doors down. I eat around the bruise, chew down to the core, every piece of flesh possible before I hit seed. I don’t know when I’ll eat again. I’ve stockpiled leftovers from school lunches in the back of my bottom dresser drawer—half a peanut butter sandwich, half a salami sandwich, half an apple (now brown where bitten), in case, there is no dinner tonight. I can take care of myself.
My Senegalese Student Reading English to Me
A single boy dribbling a basketball in an empty wooden-floored gym. His entire body pivots like a door loose from its jamb. His arm hooks in a question mark as he takes a shot.
A breath
The furry bee buzzing round my head is lovely as it follows its own path, ducking, bobbing, dancing past my ear. It’s not just noise. There is no stinger. And away it goes.
A breath
Nearly dry sheets, pinned to the washline, flap and foxtrot in the wind. Hang.
Catch their breath.
And breathe.
Family Weekend at Rehab
In our therapy session
we are given pens that read
“House of Hope”
and surveys with questions like:
Does your spouse/family member
hide his/her drinking/drug use.
a. Always
b. Most of the time
c. Sometimes
d. Rarely
e. Never
The group leader leaves the room
and scribbles fill the air.
The woman next to me bubbles
and erases and bubbles and erases
when A and E are all the same thing.
During our break
I fill my Styrofoam coffee cup
with hot water and head for
the ladies room. No caffeine
in this joint. I smuggled a can
of instant Nescafe
in my sweatshirt.
I watch the mother of a
teenage girl in treatment
check her makeup
in the mirror. She smiles,
“Get ready for tears this weekend!”
and disappears out the door.
Back in the meeting room,
people are beginning to chat.
When I tell them I’m here
for my boyfriend,
not a husband,
a brother,
a father,
nor son,
I wonder
not for the first time
what I’m doing here.
The group leader
enters the room
and welcomes
us back.
I immediately tune her out,
stare out the window
at geese on the icy bay,
and realize
I’m the only one
who can escape.
Whitney Lee Nowak is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and New York City public school teacher who lives, writes, and works in Chinatown.
