April 2012 | back-issues, poetry
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The fifth of November, I remember dark nights
Of frost, bitter cold, biting winds, clad in
Winter’s warm woolens with fur-booted feet.
Into pitch blackness, a wide gulp of my heaven,
The aroma so sweetly inhaled as we stride
With the moon as our constant companion.
Rockets and wheels spinning and whizzing, while
Heaped pyramid fires rise higher, great pyres
Of wood and Guys we all made, with faces
And arms and legs, so real, sat atop the tip
Stuffed with straw and old papers, last week’s news
Up in flames, and we stare as we bite
Into our blood-red toffee apples clutched tightly
In mitten-less hands, and with quivering fingers
We sip on steamy, hot, oxtail soup. Excellent!
Smoke-filled Bonfire Night with its snapping
And crackling and “Oohs” and “Aahs” that expel mists,
Floating mists, of icy cold air into night’s lighted sky.
Night’s Truth
Staring into pure night’s nothingness
I am the only attendant in this static world
Even as a weighty arm bears down clumsily
Claiming its place across my stiffened torso
In the stillness the restless wind rattles and stirs
Accompanying the hollow, soundless space
With its sporadic howls and whistles
Unnerving the shaken, flimsy window screens
And drumming rhythms on fragile panes
Into a tempo of mesmerizing melody
Immersing me in a yawning, restful slumber
While enticing the hidden, hushed, neglected
Thoughts once entombed in the brazen light
Let loose to conviction under hypnotizing darkness
And clandestine revelations are finally at liberty
To throw off the white veil of day’s deceiving hours
Sincerity surfaces exposed to torment and candor
Fabrications find no welcome in night’s shadowy murk
The wail of the wind laments sadness and sorrows
Laid bare in the dark shroud is my solemn truth.
Top Deck, Friday Nights
Seizing the cold, metal pole flanked by folding doors
That snap back fast and beckon us as he brakes
We leap up the single steep step in our high-heeled stilettos
Out of breath, giggly, and silly and showy
Dropping our loud, clanking silver in the waiting slot
And snatching tickets as they churn out the noisy, red box.
The good-looking driver throws a wink and a grin
Unlike the few straitlaced, po-faced passengers below
Teetotalers, night-shifters, glaring in unanimous annoyance
So we make a swift, mad dash up the winding, narrow staircase
Holding fast as the double-decker picks up speed
And finally falling hard on the seat in an ungainly heap.
Laughing and panting, resembling a tossed pile of laundry
Bearing floundering legs, we sit barely upright
Becoming part of the upstairs crowd, rowdy and wild
As they chant and they cheer and they hoot and they holler
And in silence at the back some exhale sailing smoky circles
Which we deeply and delightfully and dizzily inhale.
Like clockwork, the same swarm piles on Friday’s last bus
Done with dancing and drinking until dark’s early hours
So young and adrift in this English inner-city
Where up top we belong at the unruly after-party
Among drunkards and cursing and fighting and spewing
Rebellious and clueless, we make our way home.
by Carla Ingram
April 2012 | back-issues, poetry
I. The Garage
Knelt beneath the staircase
my skin hummed against the threat
of discovery, the shock of her
blonde hair, the string of his guitar,
the damp silhouette beneath my thin
cotton dress. Clouds of laughter
and smoke swung between us, a circuit
of pungent electricity rocked
with soft delirium. She kissed
my lips with curling halos
of marijuana and strawberry, blew
dandelion-seed wishes for a boy.
II. The Carnival
The arc of the Ferris Wheel winked
above crowns of swaying pine,
causing us to drift off track.
It was an asylum from the empty road ahead of us,
a catalyst for the drug, so we shoved
crumpled dollars into fat hands
of grey-haired ticket vendors, stumbled
arm-in-arm across straw-thatched grounds,
red-eyed, howling, lost in ourselves,
rapturous, discomposed–limitless.
III. The Launch
We crawled inside the bench seat,
a metal bar strapped across our laps,
pinned to sweat-stained vinyl and faith in numbers.
The engine lurched and the machine gyrated
satellite shuttles into streams of brilliant
red and canary shrieks. Our bodies were fused
together in pools of marrow and spun-sugar.
My brother and sister, we were reborn
in mongrel gravity, the vicinity of three,
rendered invincible
by bastard youth.
by Rachel Lake
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
