Matthew James Babcock Poems

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.

Katie Reed Poems

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

Ivor Irwin

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 

Zoe Etkin

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.

Fragments on Catherine Clodius

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.

Ryan Mattern

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.