July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
A Borrowed View
In a borrowed room
the hitchhikers
share a diminished view
of the city at dawn:
the sunrise fractured
by clouds
and the Waffle House sign
and of course the interstate.
With blurry eyes
they can’t fully see
or remember which direction
they came from
or where they want to go.
Almost before
this experience is over
it has been added
to the other experiences
so similar in all
the important ways
that they run together,
which wouldn’t be so bad
if this moment of confusion
weren’t the only thing
they could safely rely on.
The Red Cedar
Every year someone drowns
in this river
which is named
for the cedar leaves
coloring its water.
It is always
a college student,
a dreamer or
outcast or sometimes
just someone
coming home from
the bar too late
with too much
on their mind.
No one is ever
sure of what drew
them toward the water’s
edge. Perhaps the way
ducks huddle against
the bank or tree roots
hang over the water
like a step,
like an invitation
to some unknown world
where movement is
a given and progress
and destruction
are often the same.
by John Abbott
John Abbott is a writer, musician, and English instructor who lives with his wife and daughter in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Potomac Review, Georgetown Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Arcadia, Atticus Review, upstreet, Underground Voices, Fast Forward: A Collection of Flash Fiction, and many others. His first chapbook “There Should Be Signs Here” is forthcoming from Wormwood Chapbooks. For more information about his writing, please visit www.johnabbottauthor.com
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Strange Trials
If you must drown or burn, please burn.
At some point, you must choose a scent
(ascent, descent) and go with it.
I’ve never seen why we shouldn’t put our bodies through
strange trials for no reason other than that freedom
is knowing perfectly and exactly all the walls of your cell.
Everything survives flames. Imagine
touching the nonexistent
top of the sky, your body in ashes on the wind’s wings.
Revelation, like all sensations
is for one person, time and place only.
If it is true, as Moses knew,
that the desert is God’s country,
the void speaks volumes.
The Visitation
In the event of a visitation—
some presumably all-knowing being
coming down to chat—my protocol
is to first ask, Is there a God?
So when God Himself appeared to me, I asked this
and He replied, in His unmistakable voice, No.
The sky turned green and chairs
collapsed under people all across the city.
All I could do to demonstrate my faith was walk
out on a frozen lake, tiny cracks following
my every step. Laws are governed
by miracles, and these can never be broken.
This was in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
late November. What an unbelievable name.
People had thrown rocks onto the ice
some heavy ones even broke partly through.
When I stepped back onto the dock, my hero’s
welcome consisted of a black sun-abandoned line
of trees standing behind a field of yellow
grass poking curiously out of the snow.
by Dustin Junkert
Dustin started writing in order to impress girls. Most girls aren’t all that impressed by writing, he has found. But here’s hoping. Dustin lives in Portland, OR. He recently had an essay published in the New York Times, and poems in The Journal, South Carolina Review, the Minnesota review, Weber, Georgetown Review, GW Review and New Delta Review.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
If you murder, if you need help, if you get sick, my parents say but what not insane? why not gay, why not lesbian- why not college drop out, religious drop out- out of morals out of luck—sorry, blessings — what we do, what we choose, merits love, merits obligation- but what you are is Christian, is nice, is ambitious and going to school and write a book, write a novel- Lord forbid you be complacent. Lord forbid they should know- out of chastity, out of virginity, out of love- out half a closet why not him? why not her? In his car, in her bed, in his bed- in his mouth in her bra, Blood rush, tongue rush, hip thrust, lip sucking, hair damp, body heat, in heat, treated like meat. why awkward? why not just say cock and curve and clit and clip your teeth against his throat, head thrown back. back arched again-eyes closed again, tipsy again? curious again, happy again—
Passion. and harlot and scarlet letter, and floozy and slut and whore mongering temptress and in love again– and casual again. with consent again. Love won’t cover this again- Don’t have sex they say, don’t even think gay is okay they say, the Bible they say and listen they say. and yes sir and ma’am I say
my mind in the car, in his car in her car, the shoeprint on the ceiling of my car. They’ll love their kids no matter what, they say– they don’t know what what is, I say.
by Amanda Ramirez
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Thousands of leaves scatter toward us,
New Year’s confetti.
Icicles—test tubes,
bruised apples—a baby’s beating heart.
A needle pokes in and out in and out
sewing your name.
This is the season in between seasons.
Our paddles cut through water,
reminds me of my mother’s porridge
thick, lumpy, never the same consistency.
Your fishing line jerks, the fish escapes.
Your spinner stuck to a tree branch.
We had banged on the rack of bones that
was the canoe’s chest.
Mice ran out,
tiny blind bodies clinging to their mother’s
nipples, naked in the presence of the Red-Tailed
Hawk.
This is the funnel of nature.
I’m swept up between The Valley,
her hips straddling me
the explosions of artillery
from the Gap sound.
I feel the contractions
before she gives birth.
The earth’s blood pools
beneath my feet.
by Sarah Grodzinski
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The Friction of Leaves
I imagine my aunt cradled the wedge
of wood like an unborn infant,
her palms weighing the potential.
Her fingers, slivered by Braille,
skimmed the timber’s lineage
before rewriting it in a pile
of shavings spun into Fibonacci spirals:
a face born from a branch. Twenty years later,
the dust twisting from my truck’s tires
clouded his dead eye as I left. The wind
whistled through stiff lips, stirring his beard.
They say soft wood carves best,
but I recognized the grain
in his petrified face, the black walnut
growing in the x-ray slide of his skull,
the finality of our conversation
in the friction of leaves.
I walked to my father’s house in the country
at midnight from a bar on the periphery of town.
A distant dog’s bark echoed from the slate ceiling,
and a light, just out of reach, backed away matching my pace.
It shined like the flash from a silver dollar
in Sam’s trembling hand on Christmas morning when I was a kid.
I’m sure he missed the shake with his good eye:
the one not buried in gauze but too weak to see
without glasses dark enough to watch metal melt.
In the summer, he sat on the back porch with my father
and sipped steel cans of Stroh’s.
The maple tree in the yard massaged his face
with its shadows when it shifted its weight.
I can’t remember anything
he ever said, but when he closed his eye and laughed,
I heard dead leaves rattle in his throat
and saw a face stretched by the stress of calendar pages piled up.
I’m sure he heard a young man’s chuckle, the growl of tires in gravel,
the radiator’s dying breath. His vision, tunneled by the hole
in his best friend’s head, focused on a smooth face
reflected in the wrinkled satin of a creek outside Chattanooga,
where he ran from cops and swam in corn whiskey.
Fifty years later, his rickety legs stabbed knee-deep in the snow.
Two blocks from home,
he collapsed and swore he felt warm air blast
through his friend’s car window. He heard the engine rev,
but it was really a rotted station wagon
spraying snow from spinning tires, trying to gain traction.
The driver saw Sam and wondered
who would leave a mannequin in a shabby coat
half buried in a snow drift. On the road
to my father’s house, a wind chime murmured from a porch
somewhere in the dark. The distant light
felt like an unevenly worn mattress.
Echoes like Steel
Whitebarks shiver in a zephyr’s sigh. The Golden
Retriever’s teeth crunch peanuts from my palm,
muffling stillness on a jagged peak, surrounded
by snow that shrunk ten foot pines to shrubs
clawing their way through crusted powder.
Without snowshoes, drifts are snares. Below,
the cold sky reflects in Lake Tahoe,
a mirror one thousand feet deep, framed by senile mountains.
The sun wanes behind the western range. Beyond Mount Pluto,
I picture the pass near Truckee where the snow
seized ninety emigrants from Springfield, Illinois.
The cattle went first, even bones and hides;
then dogs, rats, shoes. One night as a kid,
sitting alone at the dinner table, I ate
tears and glared at peas piled on my plate.
Dad guarded the door, his arms like thick ropes
knotted across his chest. He said, you can eat anything
if you’re hungry enough.
A blackbird perched on an embalmed branch
eyes the burden of the past loaded in my pack.
When he speaks, his hollow voice echoes like steel.
by Trevor Nelson
Trevor Nelson studies English at Northern Illinois University and writes from Rockford, Illinois. His poetry and prose have appeared in 5×5, Awosting Alchemy, and Voices.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Husband
The better part of an acre of mortgaged lawn
demarcated by circular driveway, gravel paths,
boardwalk to pool deck, islands of
rhododendron, aspidistra, pear and cherry.
Four hours of mowing, on a good day.
Something he has insisted upon doing himself.
Not a bad workout in the magnificent heat.
But his mind, insufficiently engaged,
tends to wander off into the dogwood shadows
to witness flashbacks of infidelity, examine conjugal scars.
He lurches into the azaleas on the still wet slope.
As he pulls the mower from the hedge, he observes
that his throttle hand has snatched
a fistful of velvety blossoms, cool, pink and damp.
Yard Work
Having mowed the lawns from front to back,
Sam finds himself seated upon the low rock wall,
under the inconstant sun. Well, and so, what now?
Past silent, a hawk passes from left to right.
Sam considers that several people have died or left him.
He hadn’t hung on their every word.
Is sitting upon a rock wall after mowing the same as
soaring above a grove of fir trees to the river?
Is missing someone the same as loving her?
A dog howls, in a yard across the expressway.
Coyote answers, shyly, from cover beyond the tracks.
It is daytime, after all. Confusing.
Hawk returns from river whence.
About now, she’d be bringing Sammy a glass of wine.
by Ted Jean
Ted is a recently retired carpenter. In the past year, his work has appeared in Pear Noir, where it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as well as DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, elimae, Magma, Blue Earth Review, twenty or more other publications.
