July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The Friction of Leaves
I imagine my aunt cradled the wedge
of wood like an unborn infant,
her palms weighing the potential.
Her fingers, slivered by Braille,
skimmed the timber’s lineage
before rewriting it in a pile
of shavings spun into Fibonacci spirals:
a face born from a branch. Twenty years later,
the dust twisting from my truck’s tires
clouded his dead eye as I left. The wind
whistled through stiff lips, stirring his beard.
They say soft wood carves best,
but I recognized the grain
in his petrified face, the black walnut
growing in the x-ray slide of his skull,
the finality of our conversation
in the friction of leaves.
I walked to my father’s house in the country
at midnight from a bar on the periphery of town.
A distant dog’s bark echoed from the slate ceiling,
and a light, just out of reach, backed away matching my pace.
It shined like the flash from a silver dollar
in Sam’s trembling hand on Christmas morning when I was a kid.
I’m sure he missed the shake with his good eye:
the one not buried in gauze but too weak to see
without glasses dark enough to watch metal melt.
In the summer, he sat on the back porch with my father
and sipped steel cans of Stroh’s.
The maple tree in the yard massaged his face
with its shadows when it shifted its weight.
I can’t remember anything
he ever said, but when he closed his eye and laughed,
I heard dead leaves rattle in his throat
and saw a face stretched by the stress of calendar pages piled up.
I’m sure he heard a young man’s chuckle, the growl of tires in gravel,
the radiator’s dying breath. His vision, tunneled by the hole
in his best friend’s head, focused on a smooth face
reflected in the wrinkled satin of a creek outside Chattanooga,
where he ran from cops and swam in corn whiskey.
Fifty years later, his rickety legs stabbed knee-deep in the snow.
Two blocks from home,
he collapsed and swore he felt warm air blast
through his friend’s car window. He heard the engine rev,
but it was really a rotted station wagon
spraying snow from spinning tires, trying to gain traction.
The driver saw Sam and wondered
who would leave a mannequin in a shabby coat
half buried in a snow drift. On the road
to my father’s house, a wind chime murmured from a porch
somewhere in the dark. The distant light
felt like an unevenly worn mattress.
Echoes like Steel
Whitebarks shiver in a zephyr’s sigh. The Golden
Retriever’s teeth crunch peanuts from my palm,
muffling stillness on a jagged peak, surrounded
by snow that shrunk ten foot pines to shrubs
clawing their way through crusted powder.
Without snowshoes, drifts are snares. Below,
the cold sky reflects in Lake Tahoe,
a mirror one thousand feet deep, framed by senile mountains.
The sun wanes behind the western range. Beyond Mount Pluto,
I picture the pass near Truckee where the snow
seized ninety emigrants from Springfield, Illinois.
The cattle went first, even bones and hides;
then dogs, rats, shoes. One night as a kid,
sitting alone at the dinner table, I ate
tears and glared at peas piled on my plate.
Dad guarded the door, his arms like thick ropes
knotted across his chest. He said, you can eat anything
if you’re hungry enough.
A blackbird perched on an embalmed branch
eyes the burden of the past loaded in my pack.
When he speaks, his hollow voice echoes like steel.
by Trevor Nelson
Trevor Nelson studies English at Northern Illinois University and writes from Rockford, Illinois. His poetry and prose have appeared in 5×5, Awosting Alchemy, and Voices.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Husband
The better part of an acre of mortgaged lawn
demarcated by circular driveway, gravel paths,
boardwalk to pool deck, islands of
rhododendron, aspidistra, pear and cherry.
Four hours of mowing, on a good day.
Something he has insisted upon doing himself.
Not a bad workout in the magnificent heat.
But his mind, insufficiently engaged,
tends to wander off into the dogwood shadows
to witness flashbacks of infidelity, examine conjugal scars.
He lurches into the azaleas on the still wet slope.
As he pulls the mower from the hedge, he observes
that his throttle hand has snatched
a fistful of velvety blossoms, cool, pink and damp.
Yard Work
Having mowed the lawns from front to back,
Sam finds himself seated upon the low rock wall,
under the inconstant sun. Well, and so, what now?
Past silent, a hawk passes from left to right.
Sam considers that several people have died or left him.
He hadn’t hung on their every word.
Is sitting upon a rock wall after mowing the same as
soaring above a grove of fir trees to the river?
Is missing someone the same as loving her?
A dog howls, in a yard across the expressway.
Coyote answers, shyly, from cover beyond the tracks.
It is daytime, after all. Confusing.
Hawk returns from river whence.
About now, she’d be bringing Sammy a glass of wine.
by Ted Jean
Ted is a recently retired carpenter. In the past year, his work has appeared in Pear Noir, where it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as well as DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, elimae, Magma, Blue Earth Review, twenty or more other publications.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Tick chicken, snapped bones with the marrow sucked out. America with stained lips, grinning. Florida tries to pull herself off the mainland, drifting into the Atlantic. A constellation falls from its proper place and collapses in the mind of Jupiter, lightning crushes a skull. We beat each-other with blunt objects and then fall forward into prisons where penance is expected but never given. Prisons are revolving until each prisoner reeks of freedom, makes the jailbird’s skin crawl. My limb departs like a parent. My skin unhinges like breakdown. I am six and stealing pencils to build fires, lead poison bloom. I am crossing over the border where the lockers hum and the dogs explode. A scissor cuts a sound from the air, like a chunk of flesh, it is cooked in a skillet until the pitch is golden and crispy. On a plate the sound is not thunder. On a table the sound is crashing into the porcelain beneath it, cracking the heirloom, ruining the dinner, bleeding into the cloth an orange stain.
by Sam Eliot
What Hunger Causes previously published in the Writebloody Press anthology, Aim for the Head.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
I remember my childhood
late nights with my Father
talking for hours
more Him
than Me.
I miss those nights
spending time like
its your last two
dimes.
The urgency of the morals
told in a confession of
one Man’s life, intent
to create a Man of a
Son.
The details always blur
as if it mattered anyway
the story of a young Man
is always the
Wanderer.
The last we spoke
it was of your
Peace in Life
as we drank wine
at the tops of trees
lighting the stars
at Night.
I recall the strangest thing
as I was doing my wandering
just after the sun went down
I completely stopped, unaware
of the purpose for such a feeling;
an uneasy glow from my soul.
The Night turned to a
new dark I’d never seen
I imagine my subconscious
beaming like a dream;
my heart falling asleep.
a feeling so Pure
that it takes years
to feel anything
again.
My passion has suffered,
and my apologies are genuine
Father, what is a Man
once his wandering has
reached its end?
by Michael Golden
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
made the Snow in the
Mountain grow, and that
very graceful heart-shape vine
with heart-shaped leaves,
I believed called
Choke Weed
A delicate rose leaned
pink petals as in disbelief,
toward an unknown weed
with leaves the size of
dinner plates
by Carol Smallwood
Carol Smallwood co-edited (Molly Peacock, foreword) Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets (McFarland, 2012). Her poetry received a 2011 Pushcart nomination. Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing, with The Writer’s Chronicle editor as foreword writer is from (Key Publishing House, 2012)
