July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
I Saw A Woman
The trees continue
recycling their timely poems
year after wind-blown year.
Soon the tenement glow
is shadowed with ice.
The bare limbs of timber
click and knock
in the windy woods
like two bucks
locked-up and tangling
over the deepest hunger.
This room is silent
and the wind is deaf.
Kids walk the ridges
carrying sticks
owners of imagination
on small wooded acres.
At the first scent of woodsmoke,
residents of alleyways,
speakers to animals,
converse between the lonely
and the gravel-bound.
Tonight the sunset
reminds me of someone.
I had never seen a face like that.
She possessed the room.
It had a special glow.
My stomach leaped to my chest.
Her red choker was a song
her hair a field. And that face.
I could barely stand to look,
I couldn’t bear not to.
Now the trees go blind
with shadow
and the pumpkins take on
the spirit of the sunset,
while I dream the dreams
of love and death.
The Poetry Room
There is a man
walking slowly
in a dark field.
He enters an empty room
closing the door behind him.
There are no windows.
He lies down on his back
detaches his face in the darkness
and places it on the floor.
The spot
where his face had been
begins to glow.
A blue luminous liquid
pours rapidly outward
filling the room.
He is completely submerged
in a translucent pool of blue
gradually darkening.
Muffled bubbling pleas
that sound like questions
catch his ears on fire.
The darkened room
thickens and burns
turning to sand.
The walls of the room
(now a sand filled vault)
become heavy iron grates.
A small boy
can be seen
kneeling on a beach.
He brushes sand away
from engraved lettering
on one of the grates.
He cannot read.
A constant breeze
turns his attention toward the ocean.
It is almost dark.
Where the water meets the sky
there is a strange glow.
February
one needn’t be
caught in the density
of canyon river eddies
to learn of impossible currents
of dark cold depths
a day passed in seclusion
winter’s stiff-armed oppression
unnamed and desolate
as an old abandoned warehouse
rotting in the rust-belt
soon the sun
sets in motion its oral tradition
translated and transmuted
by the poet and the priest
before the cold orange aura
tucks the trees away
under a blanket of night
whose certain temperament
moves toward everyone
everywhere at all times
Barry Yeoman
Barry Yeoman was educated at Bowling Green State Univ., The Univ. of Cincinnati, and The McGregor School of Antioch Univ., in creative writing, world classics, and the humanities. He is originally from Springfield, Ohio and lives currently in London, Ohio. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Red Booth Review, Futures Trading, Danse Macabre, Harbinger Asylum, Red Fez, The Wayfarer and Two Hawks Quarterly.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
“Among the graffiti one illuminated name: yours”
– Basho
Poised in beauty at the woozy edge
of this drunken swamp,
a mile deep into woods
like an enchanted pilgrim silently
climbing the ambrosial pathway
to heaven’s gate,
you startle me
with your earnest meditation,
oh sweet Buddhist orchid,
oh soft demented flora,
oh silent saint of contemplation,
oh sweet honey flower
of woodland mystery. I come upon you
growing here in this heap
of leaves and rotting humus
like a floral spit of liquid sculpture
rising elegantly
from the omphalos of dirt.
You remind me of my wife
as she ascended the stairway
of her youth
into the bridal registry
of her womanhood,
a stem of buds awakening her,
some painted white and purple,
a cough of feathers inside her,
a vase of flowers.
You remind me
of myself as I have risen
lonesome and flummoxed
in the drunkenness of my evenings,
worry and woe twisted
tight around my temples
as if I am still the bewildered groom
approaching my lover
with vanishing at my core,
something panicked and hopeful
inside my belly,
a graft of flying birds.
You remind me
of an altar of sylphs,
colorful spirits of the air
promising not security, not seduction,
nothing at all except for
being, expanding…
And erupting
from your saint stem,
three pink-and-white
orchid birds – I see them –
freeing themselves
in lopsided
emancipated flight,
as if enflaming themselves
up through the squalid air
in majesty, from the woven collar
of each sunburst axil,
each cradle of becoming,
as if the body, ours,
emaciated
like an orchid stem
with hunger, with vanishing,
could actually
bloom and exhale
winged beings,
three-bird orchids –
me you and us
from the aroused
unfolding of its
reaching,
right here at the edge of a swamp
in the woods,
just because.
Ken Meisel
Ken is a poet and psychotherapist and a 2013 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being Scrap Metal Mantra Poems: (Main Street Rag Press, 2013). He has been published in magazines such as Rattle, San Pedro River Review, Common Ground, Cream City Review and Boxcar Review.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Johnny Appleseed
A myth, a mistake,
raking sodden leaves into trodden ground
feeling dirt sift beneath his weight;
a nomad, a flake,
an illustration in a children’s book
planting the American dream, original sin;
a sexist, a snake,
sowing seeds into earthy wombs,
throwing them to absent winds
praying they catch, they root, they grow
bitter, sour, sweet;
a marvel, a fake,
a man
who tread across
the heart
of my own Ohio,
a man
who preached what he did not know.
A Madman’s Lullaby
There is a monster lives inside my head,
His eyes the yellow of the yowling dead;
I speak with him before I go to bed.
He sleeps, dark familiar, throughout the day,
Lonely, cold-fingered, molded from dread.
There is a monster lives inside my head.
He dreams where I should live instead,
Drawing the curtain from a summer’s ray.
I speak with him when I rise from bed.
He mocks the children for their children’s play
And bakes his misery in a poisoned bread.
There is a monster lives inside my head.
He speaks the words I would leave unsaid,
Wearing my skin weathered and frayed.
I speak with him before I go to bed.
He lures me in where no man dare tread,
Lighting the darkened path of an unlighted way.
There is a monster lives inside my head;
He speaks to me before he goes to bed.
Death, to Whom I Speak
For E. Springer
The phone rang yesterday afternoon
as I walked, dragging
my feet into the kitchen
because I could not find the cordless phone.
When I answered,
I heard — or imagined I heard —
You
answering from the other line, Your voice
whispering words with no syllables,
words in no tongue I could understand.
I tried to catch
a piece of Your voice
to bottle in a jar
like a sort of broken lullaby
to lull me to sleep on sleepless nights.
Before I could speak,
You — or the remains of You —
were gone
and I was left with a longing
and the dull tone
of static silence.
Pierce Brown
Pierce C. Brown is a poet, short story writer and translator. He currently lives and studies in Mainz, Germany.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The Wintry Wait to Work
A cold eight degrees at eight in the morning
as a mourning dove perches on the telephone wire,
Mona’s conversation with her new man
running under its talons. I see
a shattered flowerpot, glazed with ice,
lying in a lawn of discolored grass,
the long and twisty roots of its winter-dead
creeping along the ground.
At the corner bus stop the 58 doesn’t come,
the line that gets me to work,
to the flashy downtown high-rise,
to Louisville Gas and Electric.
Cars stop at the traffic light like in a video game,
stuffed with grey-haired obstetricians,
chubby day-care staff, and middle school math teachers.
I don’t breathe their smoke or feel their heat. I’m cold
to their George Strait and Stan Getz, can’t drink their coffee.
Above the avenue sits another dove,
a cooing stranger to the first, and the cars
scatter each time the light turns green,
whipping wind and pumping exhaust into my face.
Common advice says worry only about what you can control.
So I recall Kaufmann’s window ad on Market Street:
“$19.99 Solid Sweater Sale!”
Green, not grey, I think,
only because that’s what Mona would say.
Television Light
In the autumn forest I could
not find the screech-
owl that night, the rotating neck
in the moonlight, the fool’s
gold pupils hunting in
the crypt of darkness. But I
headed back at the usual
time, ready for a cup
of tea and the warmth
of blankets. My sister was
up, her leg hurting again, changing
channels on the tv. “Only movies
on are ones I’ve seen
before.” Our father came
down from bed, needing
an alka-seltzer. “Stop staying
up so late.” He turned and
left, squinting, in his white, holey
underwear, showing crack, and sister
asked why I had a lizard leg stuck
in the corner of my mouth. On
the screen two grouse pecked
in a thicket. I heard hands feeling
around in the dark hallway,
feeling for the switch.
The Girl on the Wall
The rural route winds
between clear brooks and wafts of manure
on this bridge connecting
livestock to distant modernity
where we delay for potholes, not tolls,
cattle, not red lights.
At the third stop a girl
sits barefoot on the stone wall,
idyllic breeze over healthy hair,
left hand in her aunt’s,
curious of the motorized giant
taking her mother in its belly.
Crystal blues peer into
the next world’s toy.
My memories reflect in the window,
the mysteries I boarded long ago:
Appalachian hollow turned to crowded metropolis,
suburban subdivisions to sub-Saharan Africa,
sickly pigs to stately pork, moonshine to Grand Marnier,
Budweiser commercials to Georgian supras.
Her venture will not take my route,
but neither can I return to hers.
If we stay put, do we shrivel?
If we go, do we lose our core?
I look closely at the girl,
see her through the glass.
She desires her turn
for a world of lights, of leaves.
Would I take all my photos down to start again?
The Withered
The heated fields bleed
in yellow brimstone,
framed by the perfuming farms
of our fatty nipples.
Crows, lost
and uncountable as they
waver in the sky
like the dark,
winged contours
of a dyed moustache
over a glib lip.
I have stumbled into
this golden age,
seeing its plastic
bifocals and chorus
as packs of dogs
howling through the dusk
of the heart,
bargains desired
for the fields forgotten.
Timothy B. Dodd
Timothy B. Dodd is from Mink Shoals, WV. His writing has appeared in Yemassee, The Owen Wister Review, Main Street Rag, The William & Mary Review, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas El Paso.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Coalmaster, stoker of purposeful flame,
worker of the bellows of hell, adept
of the infernal majesty.
Mama visited him in Washington.
He was lobbyist for a lathe turners union.
They ate lunch at Ollie’s. A waitress fawned all over him,
said he had paid doctor’s bills
for her son; rank
humanitarian, Exalted Cyclops, klavern keeper,
you couldn’t get the n-word out of his mouth
with a shotgun.
He stole heat from fire;
water boiled and became vapor at his command, a change
of state; he was a keeper of dark mists, magus
of the four winds.
His steam drove the turbines that create
reality; he was a wizard of the first order, someone
who realized you could disembowel a man
and it would not kill him right away.
Bryan Merck
Bryan Merck has published in America, Amethyst Arsenic, Burningword, Camel Saloon, Danse Macabre and others. He has fiction forthcoming in Moon City Review and poetry forthcoming in Triggerfish, Eunoia Review and others. He is a past winner of the Southern Literary Festival Poetry Prize and the Barkesdale-Maynard Fiction and Poetry Prizes. He lives in south Georgia with his wife Janice.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Arbor vitae, meaning tree of life:
rooted in the sagittal section
of sheep’s brain –
little cerebellum and
white-matter trunk,
white branches tucked within it.
The branches bare, as in winter.
Another, in the Kaballah – perfect
orbs suspended, tied
to the ceiling, to each other.
Tattooed in the characters of a language
whose characters were indecipherable.
Its intricacy mesmerized: no roots,
no reaching branches. The strings
between spheres held like taut sinews
with no need for beginning or end.
Yours a galaxy, stretch of strange planets
holding each other aloft.
Mine a single, irreversible cut.
Courtney Hartnett
Courtney Hartnett is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013 with a BA in Interdisciplinary Writing, and her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Appalachian Journal, storySouth, Blood Lotus, and Dew on the Kudzu. Courtney was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review’s 2014 Allison Joseph Poetry Award.
