January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
My Internist Prescribes
Guess it depends on which of your three eyes that you look at it with.
All I see, floating around me, is detritus.
The detritus of denied intimacy.
The detritus of the glib.
Like beautiful Venezia, you float in your gondola
and ignore the surfing turds.
Peripherally, if you take the time to stuff cotton wool up your nose,
there is the renaissance,
gargoyles in repose.
Pretty girls chinning crumbling window sills.
Perry Como crooning.
A strand of DNA showing off, curtsying,
vaguely remembering my ancestors days of slavery in Mitzrayim.
A novella performed in my arteries.
My internist prescribes,
I obey.
The pills are orange and yellow and a gruesome sort of flecked turquoise.
I wash them down with lukewarm water
and the eye at the back of my head winks..
Religious
I pray in the morning.
I drink at night.
Somewhere in between there is the dog barking
the genuflecting of authority figures.
The urge for fried food.
A notion of racial purity.
Beethoven with his ear smushed into the piano lid.
The first names of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The ten plagues always carry I.D.
“Hi! My name is Locusts!”
The facsimile of God that all those meaty boys pray to in football season
Knows that repetition causes cancer..
And in the Garden of Eden it rains and rains.
You think you’re in Manchester.
I’m not a bit religious, except when it comes to taking my pills.
Dear Yahweh
Dear Yahweh, can’t wait to be a burden on my kids.
Long long time, they’ve cumbered me
So, soon they’ll deliver and carry
Bleach and clean and scrub-a-dub-dub.
And do it happily.
No Sun City for me. No old folks warehouse, please.
No special strangers tossing me
like some smelly old sack of shit.
Each must take turns putting me up
in a sunny parlor, so’s I don’t have to climb
to the top of the stairs. A nice
glimmering walk-in bath with handles installed
A minor cost….. Yours, of course.
The purpose of children is insurance
A girded codpiece against the testicle-kicks of mean daddy time
A guarantee. Insurance.
Yeah, that’s what kid s are all about!
Bring them up in your own image, knowing that they
Owe you and oughtn’t just farm you out
I’ve spent all the money on schooling and clothing.
Attended the ceremonies and soccer practices,
Cheered for you religiously at your games.
Knowing that, once you’re earning, you’ll be gone.
Only recreatable in photographic shrines,
Discount baby-sitting, birthday parties,
Christmas present competition and good Thanksgiving wine!
It’s been a blessing.
Really!
Now Lordy Lord Yahweh, dude.
I’m gonna be a burden on my children
Yes. And on my children’s children too.
—Ivor Irwin
IVOR IRWIN is a native of Manchester, England. He is the author of A Peacock or A Crow and has published writing in
Sonora Review,
The Sun,
Playboy,
Shankpainter,
The Long Story,
Actos de Inconsciencia,
The Review of Contemporary Fiction and various other journals, including
Burning Word. He writes a weekly column on Premier League soccer for
Global Football Today. He thinks that a kidnapper who quotes Malthus may auger well for future sociopaths!
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The Dialogue
I say, Some parts of me are like this—
and open his hand
Rain water funnels into the pink
Thin channels of water
branching out and then contracting
as if surface tension isn’t a thing at all
He says he doesn’t understand
how I made him this way
so porous
I did it to show you, I say
made us parallel and reflective
He says, I cannot accept this
He means to say my body
but the word has too much shape
doesn’t fit well between his teeth
He searches for answers
but he’s too distracted
by the bright flush of stars
dappling the mid-day sky
How odd today is, he says
dragging his fingertips against
the cotton of my overcoat
I tell him, No—
This isn’t what you are supposed to see
and make with the unbuttoning
Underneath is a stretch of land
white, winter land with a center of melt
He turns to walk away
I am not this too
Yes, I say, you are this too
The Dialogue II
She says, Some parts of me are like this—
She says this as she undresses
exposing herself to him in the dead of winter
in a dead field under a shocked sky
This is the scene of it
the time and place of her opening
She tries to show him through his hands
through mirroring
but even this miracle is too small
He fingers her overcoat
his last attempt at softness
but she is angry
No, she says, No—
and removes every stitch
un-sews herself at the middle
All that warm begins to spread
out from her center and all over
her white skin
And the boy leaves her there—
A girl standing naked in a field
holding her heart
—Zoe Etkin
Zoe Etkin is a Los Angeles based poet, student and educator. She is a recipient of the Beutner Award for Excellence in the Arts for her poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burning Word, Poetry South and Glyph.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
My grandmother, after her stroke
I.
Here, you are in that nightgown, a girl
again, wandering the downstairs hallway
escaping some dream. Later I will find you
in the dark kitchen trying to remember
how to read the digits on the microwave.
II.
In our house the bell was unexpected,
the cops even more so. A call about a gun,
my father’s rigid confusion, my mother’s balance
failing. I’m watching from the stairs thinking someone
must be dead. You’re there too, your hands aflame.
Gun! Your wild eyes. Gun!
III.
One day you will remember only the glass, child,
not even the goldfinch tree.
IV.
Earlier, late Summer,
your glass back door already showing Fall.
Tell me about your girlfriend. You love
to watch me glower, all of eight.
You run a loose hand over my head and when
you call me so handsome what you mean
is that even now I look like him.
V. Frederick Clodius
The only photo I recall of us:
I’m holding Big Bird, and he is holding me
up against his chest, his hair long
gone to cancer.
I wonder how he smelled and sounded,
if when he found his brothers with his fists, his face
red with whiskey, there was any other way.
VI.
Tell the one about the city in winter, the blacksnow
closing-in, your father’s factory coat, your mother’s
disease, the dusty stairs in that house,
the gathering war, the hooded woman who could hold fire
bare you would become and never understand.
VII.
It is kinder under evergreen, isn’t it,
than in the white of hospital?
You knew this even when the tubes consumed you.
John oh John this place is guns.
It’s me, it’s Mike, it’s me
—FM Stringer
FM Stringer is a MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Maryland. He grew up in New Jersey and studied as an undergraduate with James Hoch at Ramapo College. He currently lives in Baltimore.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Big Dirty
A brown doe with tranquilizer darts stuck in her hide enters the red line to 95th, nestles vacant space between seats of Vietnam vets in Chicago-stained Cosby sweaters. A junkie teenager, ringworm scars like trilobite spirals fossilized into his scalp, steadies himself as the train quakes over demagnetized tracks and walks toward the deer. The two of them sleepy-eyed, unsure of movement, drunk and emaciated dancers on fetal calf legs.
The deer mistakes industry for a meadow; passengers’ backpacks and briefcases as moss-covered boulders; the ding-donging Doors Closing announcement for flittering birdsong; the hollow vibrations of the subway accelerating underneath the city as the cooing of a rushing brook.
The junkie muscles a dart from the doe’s thick skin. Licks a droplet of blood from the tip and eases it into his neck, collapses into the deer’s stomach. His head, frozen with poison, nuzzles into fur and rubbery tick nipples.
They sleep entangled, like fighters too tired to throw punches, both thankful for warmth and the thud of heartbeats against skin.
Cuba
I’ve been dreaming about Cuba.
Brown beanpole girls under coconut trees fan themselves with elephant ears. Skinny rib-caged boys pet cats and eat blankets, shatter bare feet against dirt clod soccer balls. Men named for warships clothespin cigars to lines that swing between adobe mud huts. Bats sleeping-bagged in sun-baked onionskin wings. At night they use fire to dry. When one catches, the city is a glowing festival of purple tobacco smoke and orange paper lanterns.
A Cuban woman sleeps naked in my bed and my fingers island hop back freckles.
Pronounce your last name again.
“Montes de Oca.”
My bed fills with sand, Garcinias bloom from my chest.
What is your hometown called?
“Ciudad San Ramon.”
I can see you there. And I am there too, smashing toilets to build barriers from the men who argue over corn and potatoes.
We Will All Make a Mixed Tape
Just for today let’s pretend that love is real.
And this word (when we close our eyes
and whisper it into our hands)
can cause us to will images of clouds in the sky.
Some of us will see tufts of white
in the shape of boys pushing girls on swings.
Others will imagine a slender woman
bending down to uproot a flower
in the high whips of cirrus
painted over the moon.
Keeping our eyes closed,
let’s all hum our favorite song.
Listen as the melodies
overlap with one another,
colliding in dissonance
and sounding like thunder rattling windows.
The sound causes the clouds in our minds
to morph into puffy grey record players
with hearts bubbling from their phonograph horns.
Now let’s open our eyes.
Let’s make a decision right now.
With all of us here,
syncopated by the heartbeats in our wrists,
let’s decide that love is not make-believe,
is not as indefinite as a dream
or as faint as a ghost zips by in a whisper.
When asked to prove this,
we will all make a mixed tape.
When we go home
and climb the stairs to our bedrooms,
pretending that our fathers are not asleep on couches
and hoping that our mothers will come back
from aunt’s and grandmother’s,
we will all make a mixed tape.
Pipe-Cleaner Girl
We all gathered around the tank because she was actually going to do it. This pipe-cleaner girl, a child really, with long stringy brown hair hanging over the indents of sad eyes, was standing on the rusty access-ledge over the shark exhibit. Aquarium patrons, overweight women with colorful visors and men in shorts with fanny packs turned away, cringed in prayer. The girl was wearing an ADOLESCENTS t-shirt and, already discounting her life, turning into newsprint, I knew someone would blame the music. A police officer with narrow eyes and a red mustache tried to talk her down. C’mon kid, he said. You don’t really want to do this, do you? She answered without words, taking two tiny steps closer to the water. The cop placed his hand over the megaphone and whispered to his short partner, I’ve got 50 bucks on the sharks. The menacing sharks whose fins had been breaching and slicing through the skinny girl’s shadow as it ebbed on the water’s surface. Then, without warning or explanation, she leaped forward like a broke-winged heron plummets. I closed my eyes, her afterimage branded into my eyelids. While waiting for the splash, time stopped at the aquarium. The choking sounds of the water filter sounded like planes passing. And for one brief second, instead of considering what drove her to jump, I think about what will become of me after my own death.
— Ryan Mattern
Ryan Mattern is a 23 year old creative writing student at California State University, San Bernardino. His work has appeared in Criminal Class Review, The Toucan, This Paper City, Halfnelson, and The Secret Handshake. Although he calls Chicago home, he currently lives in Southern California with his dog, Wrigley.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Phantom Limb
It still twinges
on cold nights,
and itches from imagined
insect bites.
Sometimes, I expect
to look and see it
still attached
to me.
I still pull blankets
over it at night,
and see its outline
beneath the cotton sheets.
I still feel
the blood coursing
through non-
existent capillaries.
I scratch
to find out
where it really is.
My nails find nothing
to scrabble at.
I am still counting
the hours
of separation:
How long
since amputa-
tion? It left
while I was asleep.
I am left
with echoes
of its departure.
It has preceded me
to the grave.
I am dying
by install-
ments.
Desert
(for Kristoffer Ian Villalino — the morning after, March 9, 1997)
it is too much for us, the fantasies,
the mirages founded on empty air,
the groping and walking in circles,
finding nothing solid in outstretched hands.
the purple tongue protruding through cracked lips
rasps the soft skin and rasps the soft skin off.
then boneless, the skeleton of lips
protests the passage through uncertain sands,
and reaches ends too tired to feel relief.
it is too much for us, the long dry coughs,
bringing nothing up but the salt of phlegms —
hands tearing at the throat to reach within —
we choke on hands that try to give us drink.
—Alexander N. Tan Jr., M.D.
Alexander N. Tan Jr.,M.D. graduated from the University of the City of Manila (Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila) with a Doctor of Medicine Degree. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy degree from Our Lady of Fatima University. He was a fellow at the 36th Dumaguete National Summer Writers’ Workshop (1997). His short stories and poems have been published in several literary journals throughout the Philippines and the United States. He is a member of MENSA Philippines. A practicing physician and physical therapist, he writes and lives in Mandaluyong City, Philippines.
January 2012 | back-issues, poetry
What Are You Doing, Sheryl?
Moms unload their kids
for Kiddee Day on the midway.
Cheap rides to kill an afternoon
so hot us ride jockeys get away with stripping
down to muscle shirts. Nobody
shirtless on the job, that’s the rule.
We watch the moms watching us
behind their sunglasses. Bringing Johnny
back and back in line, making longer
conversation at us the longer
we let Johnny ride. Till it comes time
to run him back home, him screaming
he’d had way too much and wants more.
Near dusk just the moms and their best
girlfriends come strolling out of nowhere
all made up fresh. Nothing else that late
but stall till closing, set the ladies sidesaddle
on the merry-go-round, bum their smokes,
and let ‘em circle us all they need for free.
On the beach after we shut down,
we sit around a stick-fire,
passing 20s of malt liquor, inventing
who we are one lie at a time.
Laughing too loud and louder
the more we get twisted.
What are you doing, Sheryl? says
a tall man who’d walked up behind.
We all stand and puff our chests
like we’d defend her. Hubby
backs off weak-kneed on his own,
and Sheryl does right, walking away
and letting him chase her.
Another rule: If outside trouble finds you
don’t bring it home. There’s Sheryls
out there everywhere, some willing
to drive and try us again next town.
We don’t want no bad mess.
Though it’s fun sometimes to get cozy
and push up real close by.
The Pie Lady
Her pie wagon steamed early mornings
—far end of the midway—
with smells of home-baked sweets.
She chose me, of all the ride-jockeys
who schemed for a slice of her,
to drive her every few day for sacks of flour
and apples she could have managed
easily on her own. And we’d ride laughing,
two carnies shoved up in tight spaces
who never minded sitting close by.
I was just a kid, mostly, back then.
Saved up wages and bought new jeans,
light blue, almost white. Ruined them
first day with a smear of axel grease
across my thigh. Upon which the Pie Lady
gladly set to scrubbing me with a wet rag
and her own brand of miracle problem solver.
She worked and worked unstaining me.
Take ‘em off, she said and I did,
while the ovens bubbled with pie.
—Lowell Jaeger
As founding editor of Many Voices Press, Lowell Jaeger compiled Poems Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poets, and New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from 11 Western states. His third collection of poems, Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep (Arctos Press) was published in 2009 and was a finalist for the Paterson Award. His fourth collection, WE, (Main Street Rag Press) was published in 2010. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.
