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
He took his car and swerved
down
the side of the mountain,
up the side of the mountain, overlooking
the valley of trees, miles of green and farther away, the city.
He drove fast and we screamed joy. No music. Just the wind, high-pitched, shrieking, racing with us around bends, curves, inclines.
You flew.
Mustangs,
Thunderbirds,
Winged horses
Fell from the sky.
Long before crumpled metal and flames, they were fire, lava furies taunting the darkness with their light. Solar flares against the twilight universe.
She screamed when the blue-clothed messengers came. Inaudible sounds.
Molten feathers cannot achieve flight.
Porcelain seemed wrong to contain you
so I took handfuls and threw them into the pale blue from an incredible height
and watched grave dust line pristine clouds
until the invisible gathered it
and took you away.
Azure Arther
Originally from Flint, Michigan, Azure Arther learned early to deal with economic struggle by manipulating her experiences into fodder for her creative fire. Now a resident of Texas, and a grad student at the University of Texas, she placed second in the graduate level of the 2013-14 TACWT contest. She has been writing since she was five-years-old, and laughs at her first ten-line story, which was about three puppies.
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.
July 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Eurydice
What would he say if he could see me like this:
stinking of nicotine, sitting in the dark
across from the fucker with fat fingers
who’s never seen anything like me before.
Would he kiss me
Or tell me to brush my teeth?
Nowadays I can drink a carafe of wine and not feel a thing.
I got all the mean, deep feelings a girl could want.
Does that count for something in a lover?
What would he say if he could see me:
“Just because you went down south for a few days,
it doesn’t make you a bohemian.”
Would he bring lilacs?
Would we drown in the silence?
Would he find anything irresistible left inside of me?
Maybe I can still forget about him.
There’s always that distant possibility.
The Man I Loved
He drifted out with the tide.
He burned away on the end of a cigarette.
Or maybe he went out for a carton of milk
And never came back.
It was a harmless kind of disappearing.
Kate Douglas
Kate Douglas is a writer and performance artist living in New York. As a playwright, her work has been produced at Ars Nova and Joe’s Pub. She is a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters’ Lavina Kohl Award for Excellence in Literature and the NJ Governors Award in Arts Education for her short play Treading Water. Her poetry has been published in Contrary Magazine, among others.
