April 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The Journey
I wonder if The Age of the Journey has passed
in America now that The Port of Arlington
has become Earl Snell Memorial Park, and not
one hundred yards from rocky banks
where burly voyageurs and their Cayuse brides
upended canoes of fresh pelts, a toothless
Shell station attendant who’s a dead ringer
for Carmine Ragusa tops off my tank.
Travel means nothing in an era when every
destination is your living room. Will any
of us ever drink our urine on the run
from Modocs? Leave the train of Shutler wagons,
seventeen and barefoot, to strike out alone
through sagebrush with only a Winchester
and loaf of saleratus bread? The Tillamooks
had The Age of Myth, Age of Transformation,
and Age of True Happenings. We drift
in estuaries of interstate, squint into
unleaded sun. No matter how hard I dream,
every smokehouse ends up as the empty
building that was Happy Canyon Pizza. Every
yellow Union Pacific caboose chugs inches
and becomes a museum under the ecstatic
sneakers of my children. I think I could be wrong,
though, when a girl emerges from the unisex
rest room I am waiting to enter. Her hair
and snug pants are a tribute to the immortality
of Joan Jett. Her boyfriend has escaped
the history of hygiene to slouch against
the coffee dispenser. I am witness to the dawn
of an epoch of primal odysseys, as she ferries
through the exit, arms draped in plastic satchels
of peach cupcakes and jugs of green caffeine.
Only when she nears a rust-dappled Dodge Ram
with a shattered camper shell does he touch her.
He has explored the smooth geography
of her body a thousand times, but the hand
he brushes over the black scowl of a rose tattoo
on her shoulder blade is as gentle as the blush
of moonlight on virgin prairie, a gesture that says
one more day, and around the next bend
lies the ripe country where we’ll plow a blue gorge
wider than the Columbia through the wilderness
of our desire and claim, at last, The Territory of Love.
Junior Gymnastics Karma
On the overcast winter afternoon
you dub yourself Cynic of the Age
travel with my daughter and me
to the Crystal Cup at Salt Lake Community College
and watch her and three hundred
prepubescent pixies torch history’s tournament
of blood with their smiles. Do not doubt.
The sports complex of the cosmos
turns on the sacred torque of give and take.
Thus saith the sturdy woman in
Mighty Mites Cheer and Dance jacket
who distributes laser-green wristbands
at the entrance. She pronounces blessings
on you when you pay instead of sneak
in the back. Her life’s wages: a door-knob
nose, a figure like a sack of produce.
Her grin of broken teeth gleams
like a rain gutter shaggy with January ice.
This world is judgment. Final scores
sift sequins on snow. Long drives
end in long waits. Chump-change scholarships
chain gorgeous Lithuanian women
to the Saturday shift in the snack bar,
the lanky beauty of their volleyball
uniforms the only fair exchange
for three-dollar hot dogs and popcorn.
And you—head bowed on the stand,
awaiting the executioner’s medal, its surface
embossed with bazookas spouting
bouquets of flame, corpses backbending in
mass graves, helicopters applauding
for starving orphans. If you strap on the sexless
leotard of your soul and assemble
at the gate with the spangled ranks from
Top Flight, Idaho Elite, Tiny Titans,
and the team in shimmery peach who flew in
from Texas and swept the all-around—
if you don’t commit the unpardonable sin
of blinding yourself for spite, you might
arc through the lights and land forever
on the morning someone drove
all day to award you the ceremony of your birth.
Statistics from My Daughter’s Sixth Grade Choir Concert
When Miss Hale, one third through her reproductive years,
herds her class onto the risers for Greg Gilpin’s
“Do You Feel the Rhythm?” we clap. Not as
hermaphrodites announcing our presence in rural India,
but as proud parents of kids in black and aquamarine
Choir is Epic! T-shirts. My girl shifts from foot to foot,
and I count twenty students over to find a boy
with an extra rib. The Down’s Syndrome redhead
in blueberry sneakers—Miss Hale’s future son, the longer
she waits to have children—grins and releases nearly all
of the 1.5 pints of gas he produces daily. Between
Curry’s “Down to the River to Pray” and Albrecht’s
“Won’t Grow Up,” I’m transformed. I become
a Gallup lightning rod for fifty-seven percent
of people in Cleveland’s City Hall on National Prayer
Day and skyrocketing dwarfism rates. From the back,
a cough, at sixty miles per hour, punctures an
awkward pause as the pianist’s fingernails grow
faster than her toenails. Who are these youngsters?
I wonder: as they get down-and-dirty-go-go-dancer
for McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Will they be
allergic to deodorant and milk? Who will tell them
they have brains faster than computers, bones stronger
than steel? Which one of ten finger-popping cuties
will send a nude photo of herself to a crush then twine
a scarf in a treble clef around her neck the night
her mother screams an aria in a house filling up with
two pounds of shed skin per person? Bang. Bang.
Miss Hale’s fairy baton drops them like shooting gallery
ducks into cancer, fallen arches, and waterborne waste.
Then my girl looks at me. And I know she will use
all 600,000 of her breaths to adopt black dogs. Already,
her taste buds outnumber mine. Her heartbeat sprints
ahead of the stony riverbeds five pints of blood paint
through my veins. Already, her glance rewrites the world’s
songbook of facts, the epic slogan on the T-shirt
that says we will lick our elbows. We will love longer
than chewing gum stays in the stomach. We will
sing when we have to let go of our 75 to 100 trillion cells.
Matthew James Babcock’s writing has appeared or will appear in Alehouse; Bateau; The Battered Suitcase; The Cape Rock; PANK; Pinyon; Poem; Quiddity; Rattle; The Rejected Quarterly; Slant; The South Dakota Review; The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review; Spillway; Spoon River Poetry Review; Terrain; and Wild Violet. He earned the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award in 2008 and first place in Press 53’s 2010 Open Awards (novella category, “He Wanted to Be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker”). Matthew has his PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is faculty at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg, where he teaches English. His book, Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis, is available from the University of Delaware Press.
April 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Scattering Garden
The bushes bear
no seed in winter.
Mourners stand
on planks
of a wooden arch.
They release ashes
onto rocks below,
a sea of blank faces.
Spider’s Stance
An alabaster stone,
smooth as the rock which bore it
and washed it by the stream –
among grainy bits of speckled white,
stood a spider.
It turned – paused – positioned,
its body, thick and copper,
reared like a wild mustang
in the western plains.
I swallowed my fear,
careful not to exhale,
breath held in suspension.
Waited – then it hustled down into a gully
and I skipped that stone across the stream.
Form
Who pushes the wind past cheeks stinging harsh
through a window slit on desks scattering
words lying in print: neither you nor I.
Emerson’s beauty?
Frost’s dark design?
I have stood against the wind, screamed its name
as it raged destruction on rooftops, dismantled birches
to its will and stole a lover’s locket
up into concealed blankets of smoke grey.
I have welcomed the wind, whispered its name
as it swirled droplets of warm salt air,
carefully lifted a child’s kite with ease
up, up into illuminated blue.
Ideology
is a lost stranger to freedom in form
pushing forth the wind.
Dickinson’s soul may rest easily.
by Katie Reed
April 2012 | back-issues, fiction
by Abigail Robertson
She talked of working in the factories, riveting metal to metal, the amount of manicures it took to right the calluses. She said it was like sewing together planes. She asked what the war was like. I wanted to say it was like sewing body to body, trying to hold the world together…I told her people saw worse than me. She frowned. I was not a war hero with medals pinned to my chest. I was a man with neatly parted hair who drank too much, coffee and the other stuff. I could not be riveted back together. This was not a callous that could be buffered away. She toyed with perfect pin curls and commented, with a pink pursed frown, about the rain. I remembered the rain, shiny on the fogged glass of my watch. The hands ticking, obscured by mud. Time was obscured by mud and tin can meals and the cold of the trench. Her nails were a familiar red. She fussed with a stray thread on my shirt, flashes of ruby against the forest green. The forest was darker, greener. Threads didn’t stand out in forests. She smiled rows of perfect white teeth. I remember sand and an ocean and foam that bubbled bodies, shoving them against the shore. A cemetery. She asked if St. Laurent would be warm this time of year.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
My Internist Prescribes
Guess it depends on which of your three eyes that you look at it with.
All I see, floating around me, is detritus.
The detritus of denied intimacy.
The detritus of the glib.
Like beautiful Venezia, you float in your gondola
and ignore the surfing turds.
Peripherally, if you take the time to stuff cotton wool up your nose,
there is the renaissance,
gargoyles in repose.
Pretty girls chinning crumbling window sills.
Perry Como crooning.
A strand of DNA showing off, curtsying,
vaguely remembering my ancestors days of slavery in Mitzrayim.
A novella performed in my arteries.
My internist prescribes,
I obey.
The pills are orange and yellow and a gruesome sort of flecked turquoise.
I wash them down with lukewarm water
and the eye at the back of my head winks..
Religious
I pray in the morning.
I drink at night.
Somewhere in between there is the dog barking
the genuflecting of authority figures.
The urge for fried food.
A notion of racial purity.
Beethoven with his ear smushed into the piano lid.
The first names of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The ten plagues always carry I.D.
“Hi! My name is Locusts!”
The facsimile of God that all those meaty boys pray to in football season
Knows that repetition causes cancer..
And in the Garden of Eden it rains and rains.
You think you’re in Manchester.
I’m not a bit religious, except when it comes to taking my pills.
Dear Yahweh
Dear Yahweh, can’t wait to be a burden on my kids.
Long long time, they’ve cumbered me
So, soon they’ll deliver and carry
Bleach and clean and scrub-a-dub-dub.
And do it happily.
No Sun City for me. No old folks warehouse, please.
No special strangers tossing me
like some smelly old sack of shit.
Each must take turns putting me up
in a sunny parlor, so’s I don’t have to climb
to the top of the stairs. A nice
glimmering walk-in bath with handles installed
A minor cost….. Yours, of course.
The purpose of children is insurance
A girded codpiece against the testicle-kicks of mean daddy time
A guarantee. Insurance.
Yeah, that’s what kid s are all about!
Bring them up in your own image, knowing that they
Owe you and oughtn’t just farm you out
I’ve spent all the money on schooling and clothing.
Attended the ceremonies and soccer practices,
Cheered for you religiously at your games.
Knowing that, once you’re earning, you’ll be gone.
Only recreatable in photographic shrines,
Discount baby-sitting, birthday parties,
Christmas present competition and good Thanksgiving wine!
It’s been a blessing.
Really!
Now Lordy Lord Yahweh, dude.
I’m gonna be a burden on my children
Yes. And on my children’s children too.
—Ivor Irwin
IVOR IRWIN is a native of Manchester, England. He is the author of A Peacock or A Crow and has published writing in
Sonora Review,
The Sun,
Playboy,
Shankpainter,
The Long Story,
Actos de Inconsciencia,
The Review of Contemporary Fiction and various other journals, including
Burning Word. He writes a weekly column on Premier League soccer for
Global Football Today. He thinks that a kidnapper who quotes Malthus may auger well for future sociopaths!
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The Dialogue
I say, Some parts of me are like this—
and open his hand
Rain water funnels into the pink
Thin channels of water
branching out and then contracting
as if surface tension isn’t a thing at all
He says he doesn’t understand
how I made him this way
so porous
I did it to show you, I say
made us parallel and reflective
He says, I cannot accept this
He means to say my body
but the word has too much shape
doesn’t fit well between his teeth
He searches for answers
but he’s too distracted
by the bright flush of stars
dappling the mid-day sky
How odd today is, he says
dragging his fingertips against
the cotton of my overcoat
I tell him, No—
This isn’t what you are supposed to see
and make with the unbuttoning
Underneath is a stretch of land
white, winter land with a center of melt
He turns to walk away
I am not this too
Yes, I say, you are this too
The Dialogue II
She says, Some parts of me are like this—
She says this as she undresses
exposing herself to him in the dead of winter
in a dead field under a shocked sky
This is the scene of it
the time and place of her opening
She tries to show him through his hands
through mirroring
but even this miracle is too small
He fingers her overcoat
his last attempt at softness
but she is angry
No, she says, No—
and removes every stitch
un-sews herself at the middle
All that warm begins to spread
out from her center and all over
her white skin
And the boy leaves her there—
A girl standing naked in a field
holding her heart
—Zoe Etkin
Zoe Etkin is a Los Angeles based poet, student and educator. She is a recipient of the Beutner Award for Excellence in the Arts for her poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burning Word, Poetry South and Glyph.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
My grandmother, after her stroke
I.
Here, you are in that nightgown, a girl
again, wandering the downstairs hallway
escaping some dream. Later I will find you
in the dark kitchen trying to remember
how to read the digits on the microwave.
II.
In our house the bell was unexpected,
the cops even more so. A call about a gun,
my father’s rigid confusion, my mother’s balance
failing. I’m watching from the stairs thinking someone
must be dead. You’re there too, your hands aflame.
Gun! Your wild eyes. Gun!
III.
One day you will remember only the glass, child,
not even the goldfinch tree.
IV.
Earlier, late Summer,
your glass back door already showing Fall.
Tell me about your girlfriend. You love
to watch me glower, all of eight.
You run a loose hand over my head and when
you call me so handsome what you mean
is that even now I look like him.
V. Frederick Clodius
The only photo I recall of us:
I’m holding Big Bird, and he is holding me
up against his chest, his hair long
gone to cancer.
I wonder how he smelled and sounded,
if when he found his brothers with his fists, his face
red with whiskey, there was any other way.
VI.
Tell the one about the city in winter, the blacksnow
closing-in, your father’s factory coat, your mother’s
disease, the dusty stairs in that house,
the gathering war, the hooded woman who could hold fire
bare you would become and never understand.
VII.
It is kinder under evergreen, isn’t it,
than in the white of hospital?
You knew this even when the tubes consumed you.
John oh John this place is guns.
It’s me, it’s Mike, it’s me
—FM Stringer
FM Stringer is a MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Maryland. He grew up in New Jersey and studied as an undergraduate with James Hoch at Ramapo College. He currently lives in Baltimore.
