April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I’ve miles to go but I have no pony.
My hair is braided into a donkey whip.
Flies buzz around your sweet tongue, honey.
I see you lying in a squeaky dry ditch.
Do you taste iron between your teeth?
Feel your lousy hair lice crawling creep?
You’re home now waiting for a stall with heat.
(She bought you baggy pants dangling to your feet)
You’re 62, slow as forgotten gumption
You say: “I don’t run much but I’d like to have that option.”
I don’t care about your Red Heels of Freedom.
You’re a fat wood louse. With a license to run.
(If I care about your cares will you care for me?
Say you could care less about carrying me?)
You say happy’s being where you want to be.
Sorry baby this song’s about me.
With a little application you could appliqué me.
Happenstance evidence, happenstance happy.
You can watch my life flash before your eyes.
With a dubbed in soundtrack, repeating your lies.
I could embroider tomorrow on my hands in red ink.
Carve “RIP Mr. Icky” over the bloody sink.
And with eighteen spider webs to bandage my hands
I’d stop up your mouth and silence your laugh.
It’s a heavy little bubble your hollow mind.
It’s a steady little rumble that holds my time.
Slumgullion curmudgeon your little stove sings.
The tractor’s in the shed. The chainsaw has wings.
by Kelley Jean White
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Shadow is substance. There is cold in shadow. The mean radiant temperature (MRT) in the cold of Vermont is assuaged by the cloudless sky. The dark side of the moon. Bluing shadows of noon, speak dawn song briefly, trampled down meadows… In the sky, two contrails, forming moisture in the air, blinding refracted rays, take the same direct path Westerly from the Azimuth downward into tendril branches. Quickly, they disperse, drifting, ice crystals, fading, two stringy vapor trails per plane. The sun is the same sun in the Yucatan 365 days ago, closing the eyes, conjuring a state of mind, serene, sand sticking to the soles of feet, green (manifold), blue (limned) and reflections on wavering aquamarine (temporal). Elemental: attraction, compulsion, the freedom of unscripted plans, what is there, unknowable at the time, is not there now. (Her life, her death). Color is light. Lie in the shade of a palm tree.
Lids, red, veinous, and in shadow. Without shadow light will burn. Without the unknown (dark), the knowable would not be symbolic (mother and child), symbiotic, enigmatic. (“Apollo has come and gone. But the fact that a dozen men have walked upon its surface does not make the moon one bit less puzzling to the scientists.”i) Earth’s knowable surface is a site of proud and wasteful surcease and macrobian fruitfulness. Earth: a blue ball sling-shot through an irrelevant arc, opposing, di-polarized from a dust bunny satellite, sustained in electromagnetic wave energy, a codified mystery naively trained and honed in on, until the end forever: gas, fire and collapse, without shadow.
i Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Yellow Sprouts”
by Robert M. Detman
Robert M. Detman has published fiction in The Antioch Review, Santa Monica Review, Evergreen Review, Wisconsin Review, elimae, Word Riot and elsewhere.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
The truth? I couldn’t wait to split. Picture
a birdcage strung up on baroque unwritten codes
— like living in a police state, I told the serpent
when we ducked out for a cigarette
one night near the end, just before it all
blew to smithereens, just before my lewdness
cracked the perfect and perfectly boring landscape
(a top-ten “Places to See Before You Die”)
mapped in majolica on the tiled floor of Anacapri:
a paradise of rivers and islands, flowers and fish,
and all His weird experiments (zebras, giraffes).
I was incidental there, a thorn in someone’s side.
In the far corner — you have to lean in close
— the exiled Crown of Creation and I, his rib-bone,
trying to cover ourselves with ferns and fronds.
Observe how my long hair hides my smile.
Wouldn’t smoking be divine after sex?
the serpent asked me once. What’s that? I said.
by Jo Ann Baldinger
Jo Ann Baldinger lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes poems, practices yoga, and tries to be patient. Her poems have appeared in Cirque, Verdad, Blue Mesa, Tsunami, and Onthebus.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Two strangers fuck you into existence.
Then they tell you they love you.
They tell you they love you and then some.
“Weedee doodee doodee deee.”
“Pee on the potty.”
“Learn your tables of arithmetic.”
“Clean up your room.”
“How much pain I suffered putting you into this world!”
“Don’t get that girl pregnant.”
“Do you think that car runs on thin air?”
“Don’t become like your father!”
“Don’t listen to your mother!”
“When will you get a decent job?”
“Are you working on my grandchildren yet?”
“Why don’t you show some respect?”
“Is that why I worked my ass off for you?”
“You have it so easy. When I was your age…”
Blah, blah, blah.
You watch them all this time.
They claim they know you.
You wonder who they are.
Then they die.
Then you do.
by Nolan Keating
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
‘cause you planned to study law. And I may
have written this already: Habeus
Corpus in some other journal or book.
Latin got me through med school—I’d just look
in Stedman’s Dictionary—ah, corpus,
corpse, a body, just like yours, only, say,
a little stiffer, with perhaps, a bit
of an associated odor. But
I don’t smell so good. You’re the one whose nose
knows the bell’s tolling. Mine couldn’t tell whose
a flower and whose a. . .All right, what
did make you leave? Was it the kitty lit-
ter in the basement? The moldy sponges
in the sink? Oh, your constitution, left.
by Kelley Jean White
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
One of the beasts
Of my existence
Has been cowardice
A disease
I consider it as such
Though it can be cured
But the procedure
Can be too much
For the man inflicted
And the necessary
Moves to make
To rise atop
Higher than you have ever stood
And the changes
Needed being made
The mirror can appear
As a shallow grave
But burying yourself into it
May be the only way
And face the face
That has continually ran astray
From the moments
Where you were needed most
By the people who have given you
Silos of love
And vast fields of trust
So I am finished
With this curse I have set
Upon myself
This will all be undone
And I will stand taller
Then any mountain to ascend
I am the answer
To bringing this way of life
To a fatal end
Face to face
I stare into my eyes
And strive for forgiveness
To myself
And all the lies
The reasons I have justified
To get fast on my feet
And run and hide
The man I see
Knows just what he has done
And will do whatever is possible
To keep all of that
In my rearview
Having faith that the road ahead
Drives a man who stands
And never lets this coward
Act in the same way again
by Justin Peterson
