April 2016 | poetry
I’ll look for you at that place between the dirty
flame of evening, it’s temple to oblivion,
and the milky solution of dawn
where extremes meet and get to know
each other all over. There are lips there
that fit together, silk sky touching
coarse waves. There’s a field there
where the grass is too full
of reflections of the world to talk about.
Ideas, words, phrases like “each other”—
some pattern of permanence
in all that rush and loss?
Your crescent blush made me think
of mealtime, candied kisses on the teeth,
the incessantly efflorescent pungent
bouquet. Is love to be understood
beyond the study of frivolity,
the study of hypocrisy
if there’s no such thing?
Is the raw material of divinity
all that’s left to work with?
It’s time to give up on my brain.
If you think this is a good way to improve
your heart or your mind, sleep on.
Stephen Massimilla
Massimilla’s book, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, was selected in the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize contest. He has received the Bordighera Poetry Prize, the Grolier Prize, a Van Rensselaer Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
April 2016 | poetry
The Secret
oh my aging starlet in the butter
bread me with hyphens wide-
eyed and strained of
wonder without reason
when I need help I go to sleep
there is no school for this
aged persuasion
certainties: perishables
doubts: fertility
a string tied to my reasoning
like tiny aggressions pouring forth
from the military hole until
all those antennae twitch to one leg
climb it like a food source
I was busy criticizing a rock
a gardener with a little slug funk
dripping from his angry shoe
I’m between accomplishments but
the cast-off river has its own explanations
necessary things are not always beautiful
the privileged ocean’s temporarily illegible
there is nothing else to say about not saying
pessimism: the body’s half empty
optimism: the coffin’s half full
at the end of the journey a talking goat
he doesn’t have anything to say
I can’t sleep some nights it rains all day
a common man doesn’t want common things
something will happen of course
but I’m stopping now
only an opening whose words contain
mouths
it makes the first page read right into the last
I can’t remember what was said to make me feel this way
but knowing the secret exists makes it less secret
The Small Birds of Early Morning
Needing only a shovelful of air to float on,
tunnels of light open daily with a flutter and a dash.
Little feathered flutes of dream buttered with song,
I bring you fresh lessons of foam from the rocks.
All the way to the end of my feathers I go.
There can be but one infinity, and it’s incomplete.
You might wish to swallow a river.
You might want to taste a stone.
There are mines inside, there are ancient caves,
as if you could have just a delicate slice of lightning.
Incongruous as a sunbathing polka dot cat,
I have forgiven myself for being too available.
I stand in this ocean walking on the bottom.
Your accomplice surrounds me and enters me.
Why so many of you, and so shy, as if I might
spill the patient seeds or eat up all the destinations?
I think I’ll go now, or I’ll go thinking unreasonably, with only
my beak and my new empty bones, lighter than thought,
having begun something illogical and right and needing
to search for the nest with my partially digested cricket thoughts.
The Telegram Got Larger
every room in the sentence was a new color
I had trained these wolves
and I knew how to defeat a bear
I worshipped indecision
my daughter can pluck out all the eyes in a room
everything is hungry here
the meals are not spaced evenly
and the legs of a table can lead you on
we were some kind of violation so we had to quit ourselves
it’s like the door to the middle of a missing universe
it lives in the attic but once it’s opened
it cannot close
we were healing but we could have called it sex
she appeared to be one of those gummy
sentimental things fat and unreasonably relieved
encased in a pink snowsuit that made her look like she floated
he kicked the step again and hurt my foot again
learning disabilities
tiny birds between his teeth
something brittle and transferred
I could not partake of the nontransferable emotions
one gooey personal shipwreck
if only I knew what to do with lost ponds
near the dacha on the Red Sea with Petrov
now tell me
The Way You Say Anything Is My World Being Careless
A cloud tattoo stains the sky’s vast back golden
as the lines reach across to the needle of feinting horizon.
There must be a clever dance on the other side
where the streetwise universe desultorily pierces
every unacceptable angle of unimaginable planetary skin.
Sorry We’re Open articulates the door with drunk humor.
You’ll have to borrow some light for the bleedin’ blunt.
Who can you talk to about celebratory addictions?
If you don’t talk about the law, you’ll find it
creeping up on you with a needy ass-kickin’,
part of an airy custody battle gone weathery
and feline with feral intent, oh rat-girl motherhood.
Where can we rinse our scavenging delicates?
Are there no spiritual remains to pick at,
no more incomplete catastrophes of faith dribbled
like griddle oil on the soul of morning’s argument
humming alive with golden terriers of tenacious possibility?
Somebody needs to say something wrong here.
Ten thousand obstacles just give us more to talk about.
Come in, come in, I’ve got a squirrel in the pot.
I can see that you’re a person of great substance
dominating a much smaller sphere of inaction.
Rich Ives
Rich Ives lives on Camano Island in Puget Sound. He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and has been nominated twice for the Best of the Web, three times for Best of the Net and six times for The Pushcart Prize. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a work for each day of the year, is available from Silenced Press, Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, is available form Newer York Press, and Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, is available from Bitter Oleander Press. He is also the winner of the What Books Press Fiction Competition, and his story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, is now available.
April 2016 | poetry
He doesn’t notice
the small flying thing
with the stinger
at the end of its thorax
fall into the opening
of his soda can.
So he picks it up
chugs the syrupy sweet
and the flying thing’s stinger
impales itself
in the wall of his esophagus.
He might as well
have licked an
electrical outlet;
replaced his blood
with acid.
The pain is an instantaneous God:
blinding, encompassing, absolute.
He will do anything to placate it.
There is not a single thought
in his brain other than
end this.
He pounds his throat,
nearly crushes his larynx.
He forces his fingers
over his tongue
down his gullet.
He can’t reach the tiny thorn
but he kicks in the gag reflex.
Every bit of lunch
and the flying thing
and the stinger
come back up.
In those few seconds
he’s decimated the patio furniture.
He’s slapped his significant other
who didn’t even have time to scream.
He’d counted himself
happy, even fortunate,
before.
Now he can’t
lay his head on a pillow
put a fork in his mouth
step through a door
without being afraid
of what might clamp down
like the unseen jagged teeth
of a bear trap.
Scott Urban
Scott’s poems have either recently appeared or are scheduled to appear in THE 2 RIVERS VIEW, ECLECTICA, and THE LOCUST MAGAZINE. His most recent poetry collection is GOD’S WILL (Mad Rush Press). His most recent anthology appearance is EVERY RIVER ON EARTH (Ohio University Press). He lives and writes in southeastern Ohio in a former Amish farmhouse that isn’t haunted — yet.
April 2016 | poetry
Barbie Underwear
Most say girls stop playing
with Barbie when their
friends do. I didn’t
because I was the older sister
and our attic, renovated
in creams and whites,
had become a
plastic heaven.
I stopped when my
sister held a Tommy doll
to Barbie’s bare breast
in front of mom and attested
to knowing that this was
how babies were fed-
that I had told her.
I stopped when I feared
she would discover the way
I put Barbie on top of Ken in
bed and I tore apart
the Velcro pads sewed onto the back
of her shirt to keep
her decent.
Now, I realize the sound
of Velcro departing Velcro is that of
a pad being pulled off
panties. It’s something I should have
been able to pick up on then, because
I still wore belly-button high
Barbie underwear when I
stopped playing with Barbie.
Hotel Bed
We fell asleep in a room that was 65 degrees
at the highest – mid July,
around 11:15 pm.
I was wrapped in your zip-up, maybe
your sweat pants.
I was buried underneath hotel sheets
and a stupidly thick comforter.
I had puked up pink vomit
and called it a night.
The next morning of our vacation
you told your parents that we
were alright.
We drove to a dive:
The Athen’s Diner (on the placemat
it goes by another name).
It was only us and a few tables packed
with old men drinking coffee.
We moved onto the city to: decorate our clothes
with museum badges, eat matching meals
of Cape Cod chips and grilled cheeses,
before inevitably arguing with the GPS
on where our next destination was –
back at the hotel, so that we could hang
the sign from the doorknob
and try sleeping again.
Shop Rite Cart
I overheard you talk
of Cheerios and wanted
to know if your mother
slipped you into a school dress
and combed your hair
before breakfast in a kitchen
that had not yet had an avocado
colored phone from the 70’s.
The dinner you place
in a Shop Rite cart,
I can only assume most of it
is Italian.
Parents now long passed
siblings married and responsible
for the ones pointing at the shelves
as the cart wheels click along.
You showed me a photo of you
at a coworker’s retirement lunch in
which my only recollection is
the black sports coat. I’d been
with you the morning of. Waiting
for the others, you pulled your
hair back with a comb
like James Dean.
I wonder now if there was a wine
glass in that picture that was
yours. Tipsy, I’d imagine
you flushed and shy
gently wrapping your fingers
around my elbow, humming
the theme song to Mister Ed,
the only song I knew of that you
committed to memory.
Carrie Tolve
Carrie Tolve is from northern New Jersey. She spends most of her time divided between work, binge watching Parks and Recreation, and reading. She has been published in Mock Orange Magazine and has work in the upcoming issue of The Meadow.
