July 2018 | poetry
Stick-men crayoned on the closet walls
like astronauts abandoned
to the endless night of space,
ancient grease thick as suntan lotion
on the kitchen ceiling, a cloud of nail holes
floating the front-room wall,
slats of the fractured louver doors
scattered like bones on the bedroom floor.
It took a week to gather the detritus
of giving up, walking away.
So much left behind, hangers strewn in a jigsaw,
shirts and underwear piled in the corners.
the legless blue-foam seat
their child sat on all of every day
and died last month at seventeen.
She couldn’t move or speak,
only shift her eyes enough
that you believed someone lived in there.
They learned what her eye-flickers meant,
the gurgled cries, head wags.
Fed spoon-by-spoon so she wouldn’t choke,
I saw how they’d slide her in the blue seat
across the living-room, stationed by the television
so they could go on with their lives.
They’d check back in ten minutes,
read her eyes the way you try to do
when someone doesn’t answer.
You look as they stare out the window
at the pink streaks of morning,
see how still they are, wanting to believe
they’re loving the overwhelming
beauty of the sunrise until you notice
their eyes have stopped moving.
by Mark Burke
Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize.
July 2018 | poetry
Let the wolf metaphor stand. Must I heed what some editor says about cliché. They see them everywhere: tone deaf to the sounds of poems: their boxcar rhythm. Occasionally, they astound with a miraculously astute observation. For decades, I let them throw me into bouts of depression, for they were the only route. Was I cursed to be able to hear the world? Once for a week I was obsessed with the words of osteology: epiphysis, apophysis. I take words upstairs to empty halls where I let them echo. When Michael took sick, there was a polite buffer of silence between the world and me. I cared for him and felt guilty pursuing my passion for language play. When the morphine did little I knew what was coming. Each night I whispered to myself, God don’t let that happen tonight. I would read aloud to him at all hours of the night. Sometimes I would put my face up close to him and think, it’s still him. I couldn’t help but reminisce to myself about the stories he told of growing up, of his family living in an unfinished basement. My mind wandered madly. I doodled on my unlined journal’s pages: a cross within a circle with distinct dots around the circumference. It reminded me of Southwest petrographs, of our time exploring the spiritual sites of northern New Mexico. After he passed, I convinced myself there was nothing in creation that is a home. I took up sadness. It took a couple of years for language to speak to me again. One day huddled in a winter coat and scarf jotting down thoughts on a park bench I thought: at one time in this world it was alright to throw a kiss to a pretty stranger. This world speaks more than ever, and there has never been a time when there is so little rich language to hear.
—written from phrases and lines from the same page number of fourteen different books
by Marc Frazier
Marc Frazier has widely published poetry in journals including The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Good Men Project, f(r)iction, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Slant, Permafrost, Plainsongs, and Poet Lore. He has had memoir from his book WITHOUT published in Gravel, The Good Men Project, decomP, Autre, Cobalt Magazine, Evening Street Review, and Punctuate. Marc, an LGBTQ+ writer, is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, has been featured on Verse Daily, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a “best of the net.” His book The Way Here and his two chapbooks are available on Amazon as well as his second full-length collection titled Each Thing Touches (Glass Lyre Press). Willingly, his third poetry book, will be published by Adelaide Books in 2019. His website is www.marcfrazier.org
July 2018 | poetry
The chainsaw revs, wakes us to falling
limbs and pulping. Not the birch,
I pray, to what God of no
mercy, I know not. For it is the birch,
too close to the power lines, being
carved out. My son squeezes my
hand. People fear roots, I mumble—
which sounds creepy— maybe
the tree was sick, I add.
The comfort-lie, we both know— leaves
gusting down the picture-perfect block.
Joey told me entry-level jobs are being
replaced by artificial intelligence.
This shit is real, my son blurts.
(Joey: his best friend’s older brother.)
Typically, I would chastise this shit
is real. And lambast Joey.
Instead, I ruffle the top of his cherished
head. When did he start using hair
gel? My fifth-grader trying
to be tough, to take my eyes of what was
once my favorite tree, to comprehend
this irrational world. After drop-off,
I drag back home— only the trunk is left.
Goggled workers, in bright orange, feed
the silver branches to machines.
Someday, robots will do this. They will
also drive trucks cross country, scoop
ice-cream cones, walk our dogs.
The city trucks are a jolly green.
Emblazoned across their sides:
Yes, cultivation is good here.
by Rebecca Irene
Rebecca Irene is a graduate of Swarthmore College, and recently received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work is published, or forthcoming, in Eunoia Review, Sixfold, Amaryllis, Dime Show Review, and elsewhere. She received a 2018 fellowship from the Norton Island Artist Residency Program. A Poetry Reader for Hunger Mountain and The Maine Review, she lives in Portland, Maine, where she supports her word-addiction by waitressing.
July 2018 | poetry
Materials
The copper widow
offers a penny a thought
to fill her basket
with derivative fortune
cookie drivel of evil
~
The two-bit widow
dispenses small-time wisdom;
small-minded yokels
in small towns throughout the land
think me soothsayer gypsy
~
The très chic widow’s
custom-fitted tuxedo,
a George Sand number,
parfait with kitten-heel pumps,
and couture pop-art bow tie.
~
The watchful widow
on stake-out beyond the wake
of amplified loss
catches the constellation
Orion hunting me down
Zodiac Ripple
I was born on a full moon
a bad-ass moon
in Aries’s house
my sun sign in tight-ass Virgo’s
has a big bulgy ball of loosy-goosies
to contend with
some rules
apply
some rules don’t (as here)
fickle the application thereof
I know the rules
know which is which
a poker face doesn’t stand
a chance
you can’t
fake me out
the aggrieved
grammarian
prim-grim librarian
is off-duty tonight
my ram rises
for George Wolff
by Karla Linn Merrifield
Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 600+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel to Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. Forthcoming this fall is Psyche’s Scroll, a full-length poem, to be published by The Poetry Box Selects in June. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet Redux, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com. Google her name to learn more; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.
July 2018 | poetry
I love our pup, she whose DNA chooses to chew
the coffee table’s legs, any book, shoe or the pair
of reading glasses I left where anyone my age
would set them in case of fire, storm, the need
to finally pay a bill, much less an inappropriate
drop-in by someone you would never add to
your daughter’s wedding invitation list. However
it’s 7am and I must feed her. There’s a schedule,
a set of behaviors prescribed in validated tomes
by those who decided never to major in philosophy,
dance history, or literature. They opened their minds
to trial and error, determining a schedule is for sure
the only way to raise a confident and willing companion
who will at some unfathomable day give up dragging
anything dangling—bed spread, sweater, scarf, shower curtain—
who will come when called, sit, lie down, heel, fetch, love
me even when there is no treat. But it’s 7am and I
staggered to bed after meeting a deadline at 3am.
The schedule proclaims “Feed the pup at the same time
every day.” If she sleeps just a measly hour longer, do I
risk her turning into the neighborhood’s teeth baring
dingo who digs up Mrs. Phelps’s petunias, snarls
at the priest on his daily walk, steals the dump truck
from the sandbox down the street, snaps at the kid
selling magazines for a trip to Haiti? Will I be
the one whose best friend must be muzzled for
sleeping into just one more hour of just another day?
Do I take a rabid risk? Oh hell, God bless the kibble.
by Jack Ridl
Jack Ridl’s collection Broken Symmetry was named the year’s best collection by The Society of Midland Authors. His Practicing to Walk Like a Heron received the Gold Medal for Poetry from ForeWord Review/ALA, and his Against Elegies was chosen by Billy Collins for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize. He was named Michigan’s Professor of the Year by the Case/Carnegie Foundation. More than 90 of his students are now publishing their work, several of whom have won first book awards.
July 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Taking
I’m leaving you tonight,
but before I leave I’m taking your chess,
your ping-pong, your Poems of Others,
your quiet geometry, your sloppy watercolors.
I always thought your nudes were ingenuous
and your self-portraits perfidious.
I’m taking your fatal pouty mouth,
the oil in your scalp, the virile volatile day
when we went to see your mother’s face.
I’m taking every square centimeter of cloistered soap
and skin bacteria from your sink.
And your affection for sentimentality
and for marshmallows.
The yacht is already sold,
and the money is kept safe with the mafia.
I’m taking your teeth, one by one,
all of them, and some more.
You’ll never ever be as chic
as you were when you lived with me.
I’ll wear your torso on my sleeve
and your allergic reactions on my knees,
already pale and sick for a lifetime’s sentence
of Saturday’s nights without the company of crickets
and your asthmatic burly posture. I don’t know
how you went so far with that attitude.
I ‘m taking and taking a little more—
your unresolved conflicts
of sex and ego with the mirror,
the thrill you get from stains on a white shirt,
the pancreatic cancer you never experienced,
the bitter-sweet days
where you had me but desired her.
I’m taking the vision of love in your progressive astigmatism
and your accelerated breath every time you saw a beautiful girl,
a relic more than a memory, stark as a roasted pig,
still pink, on the Thanksgiving dining table.
I’m taking all that defines you as a person
because I cannot think of any other way
to be remembered.
Give Me Joy, Not Liberty
No one feels well here. Not the turkeys during Christmas,
not the mouse in the pet shop doing acrobatics with its tongue,
not the maiden, not the nun, not the bricklayer,
not the beautiful but toxic Russian for-hire assassin
who sat down to drink in a club by the beach in 1998
and hasn’t gotten up since.
The orthodontist is sad. The dog walker is sad.
The sommelier racing downstairs for a Sancerre is sad.
The traffic cop with the fat neck and the loaded gun
ready to shoot anybody is also sad.
The communist novelist looking for inspiration
in a café decorated with posters of Che
cannot believe how sad the world is after he wrote one word
on a scrap of newspaper soaked in champagne.
Ocean Drive Drag Queen Nina Blackrose is sad,
so is the trophy wife cloistered in a yacht.
The young are as sad as the elderly.
The bald and the handsome are equally affected by suffering.
The beginning actress who didn’t get the role in the audition
is sad and needs sleeping pills to make it through the night.
There are no sleeping pills in America anymore—
Marilyn Monroe took them all.
The Italian whisky-seller
sadly stays in the scene all year round,
littering cigarette butts and glasses half full of Jack Daniel’s,
shoulder to shoulder
with sad thick gold- toothed naked trapeze girls,
dropping bills as if he owned
that trashy juke joint on 11th street.
Sadness is more serious than acne. Just ask Benitez,
or the technician from the cable company.
I had an abortion on a morning as yellow as margarine.
My doctor, who was obviously depressed,
recommended that I avoid heavy lifting
and cardiovascular activity for a week.
I sit by myself on a bench in the playground
to look at the children playing.
They all have features that foretell potential for grief—
the rigidity of a jaw, the crude rhythm of a hip,
the deranged leg in the air—
as if they had inherited tragedy from their parents,
who were once naïve 7-year-olds
chasing restlessly after a ball,
but grew up to become sad sommeliers,
sad dentists,
sad strippers.
by Grethel Ramos
Grethel Ramos Fiad is a Cuban-American journalist, writer, poet and photographer currently living in Miami. Her poetry rejects the cheap comforts of dogmatic conventionality and welcomes the disclosure of the dissonances in human nature.
