July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
An Old Man’s Day
Now is not the time for love. She’s only been gone a year. I wear black to mark her death. I visit her grave every week. I cannot bring a woman into this.
She brings me coffee at the café and offers me breakfast, though I never eat. I drink my coffee and read the paper, looking for my wife’s face in the pictures. It’s never there, but I have to look.
I walk through town now and watch the cars on the street. All it would take is a simple mis-step and I’d be done. I’d go to my wife at last and we would be happy.
It’s time to move on, my therapist says. You need to find someone new. But I’m not ready. My apartment is full of her photos. I can’t take them down. They keep me safe.
On the bus, a woman sits next to me. She asks where I’m going. Home, I say. She nods. Me too. We sit silently for awhile before she asks my name. Isaac, I say. She is Miranda.
The sun has fallen now. Streetlamps are hazy in the fog. I walk the last couple of blocks to my apartment and pour myself a glass of wine. I sit and stare at my wife’s face on the wall.
Miss you, I say. I want you back. The silence is heavy here. The apartment grows dim with the night air. I finish my wine and go to bed. At least in my dreams I’m never alone.
Ordinary
She is an ordinary woman. She works a job and comes home to her ordinary home and makes an ordinary meal. Her son is late from practice at the pool and she waits for him while washing dishes. He comes home and they talk about ordinary courtesy. They do not yell or fight, but they talk of ordinary things.
When we were in love, she did all of the ordinary things and I watched her working all of the ordinary hours of the day. At night, we went to bed and had ordinary sex, but it was an obligation. We were married. This was what married people did.
Now we are not a couple anymore. We do not talk or touch. We see each other at our son’s meets and games, but we stay away from each other as best we can. It’s awkward as a broken stool. We balance on the legs left to us and do the best we can. This is an ordinary divorce, only without the ordinary fights.
An ordinary night falls and she goes to her bed and lies there thinking ordinary thoughts. I miss her. It’s that simple, but she has no time for me. Our ordinary lives have gone separate ways and we have nothing left, but ordinary loneliness.
by William L. Alton
William L. Alton was born November 5, 1969 and started writing in the Eighties while incarcerated in a psychiatric prison. Since then his work has appeared in Main Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs among others. In 2010, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published one book titled Heroes of Silence. He earned his both BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon where he continues to live.
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
The storm brought the ocean into our home.
Even after the worst of the blowing was over, mother’s body couldn’t survive in the cold and the wet for long. I could only wrap her in a quilt, put her to bed, and wait.
The rainfall had become gentle, and the thunder sounded like a back cracking as I stood over her, knee-deep in seawater, watching her breath slow.
Tiny fish swam between my toes. I remained motionless, my skin puckering as I watched her breath slow, then slow, then stop.
When she died, there was a flicker of lightning, and her soul went into this mouse.
She stays dry by hiding in the ceiling and lives on the cracker crumbs I leave for her on a rafter.
I’ve started a shoebox apartment for her, for when the water goes down. I have a folded sock, which will eventually dry, for a bed, and a threadspool for a table.
Her body, I’ve kept just as she left it – in case she gets homesick.
The rain is now a mist. I sit in a saturated armchair and play solitaire on her quilt by candlelight, waiting for the water to go down, as teeny, tiny fish swim between my toes.
by M. N. Hanson
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Wine Tasting
Breathe,
but don’t inhale.
Taste and swish,
but don’t swallow.
The experience
lasts a moment,
then discarded
into a silver bucket.
So dignified,
so proper,
delicate ladies
with perfect hair
spitting blood
red mouthfuls.
Falling in Love Outside a Ryan Adams Concert
Into a swirl of smoke and music,
awkward chatter fades away.
Cigarette smoke mingles with,
Just put your arms around her already.
A woman laughs.
Pretense of scalped tickets
falls away, as we move closer,
pressed together in the rain.
by Laura Baker
July 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Cove
Where the
Black rock
Is soaked
In silver spray,
Moonlit
My guttural baritones
Are
Bowed strings of longing
Come in to my cove,
My black wings
Encircling
I cannot
Promise
A halo
But you and I, we
Could circle the fire
Let the howl
Of the wild
Rip the skin
From the waters
It will never
Tear the tears
From closed eyes
So please,
Burrow
And Settle
In the crook
The cradled bay
And I will set us in stone
If you will stay
Silence
There is no better sound;
the greatest opus
The caught breath
between thrusts
As her father calls
from beyond the walls
And a gulp slips away down a throat
The smoking gun
A peeling onion
and the tears of realisation
tearing out the truth talking noise clutter
It is guilt.
Pulled through in puppet strings
A thread long
A tight wire – line straight, an endless
unravelling of the mind inside
It is the music of tension,
the eternity of waiting
It is taking
the talking for a talking to
Away beyond the sidelines
Downstairs behind the kitchen door
and out through the garden, the garage,
the secret corner and the sly cigarette your father
will never show unto your mother
It is the monolith
in white block
One giant eraser ready
for the painting over
The one coat non drip glossing over a canvas
A cosmic napkin wiping the crumbing
of the messy eating of language
and the swirling amateur chaos of colour mixing
A palette trashed
A square punch to a whiteout
A collapse from a breakdown
And the blurring, the peaceful nothing
Of a hospital bed in morphine
With a sawn off shotgun
and a hearing all sewn up
A hearing
O, finally a hearing
without a judgement;
A hearing we don’t have to listen to.
by Greg Webster
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.
