July 2016 | poetry
The Students Write Poems for Their Teacher
The students write poems
like they are painting
in the filtered dust of a late-night studio.
They fling glorious globs
of paint on a canvas
they imagine.
It is abstract.
It is realistic.
It is impressionistic.
They don’t need to find language;
the paint will do it for them.
Yellow will scream metaphors;
brown, onomatopoeia.
Thick black lines are symbols;
red, the gash of simile.
On parent’s night
I hang them up,
(their poem-things)
and their parents respond viscerally
In the gallery of words theirs say
“This is what I mean”
inferred by the yellow stroke that leaps
from thought to word,
invoked by the word
that lolls on the black line of comprehension.
Incised by the red connection
linking me to you.
Seem Bright
Between
Thigh-light ellipses
To and for America
Eat mac ’n’ cheese
Or grilled cheese on
Pleather
Young mother
Makes living
Seem bright
Okay here in USA
Clownish gyrations
Young girl with urges
Slinks toward
Mayhem with child
Tell her, stop, and
Check with
Lauren Bacall
Later, breast
Nipple
Hard and drifting
Through years of
Soft dancing
Snake beads under
Skin that hungers toward a mouth
Slink back, sling out
When feet slide into scripted shoes
They yell for free farm love
To Le-Ann, Who Had a Heart Attack
On New Year’s Eve
My student
Legally blind
Had a heart attack
But that was after her eviction
Now she’s in rehab
Submitting her Master’s Thesis
To me for
Our sixteenth iteration
To Le-Ann, who had a heart attack
On New Year’s Eve
Who has more fight in her
Than a drill to the earth
Whom I carry like a wounded sack
Of mashed-up innards
Who will finish
Or finish me
To Le-Ann, berating me
Commanding that I read
Reread, re-tread, explain
Why I can’t make the world right
Why she is blind
Why her daughter’s on the spectrum
Why her veteran status
Can’t save her from the streets
Why Schlossberg’s theory of transition
Means shit in real life.
Should I Care
If an ambulance just
Cruised up my neighbor’s driveway
With flashing red lights
And no noise?
Yes,
But still
My night goes on
Maybe my neighbor
Will die like my husband did
Right there in the home
Right there on the couch
Slumped over
In the midst of eating some pineapple
We are all stopped short yet
Think the tune will carry us
by Barbara Tramonte
Barbara is currently a professor at SUNY Empire State College, where she teaches in the school for graduate studies. She worked as a poet-in-the-schools in New York City for ten years, and formerly owned a children’s bookstore in Brooklyn Heights. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Alembic, The Binnacle, Black Buzzard Review, The Chaffin Journal, Confluence, Crack the Spine, Dos Passos Review, Drunk Monkeys, Edison Literary Review, Eleven Eleven, ellipsis…, Folly, Forge, FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry, The Griffin, Hiram Poetry Review, Home Planet News, Illya’s Honey, Juked, Kaleidoscope, Monarch Review, New Letters, The Old Red Kimono, Pearl, Phantasmagoria, The Pinch, riverSedge, Sanskrit, Serving House Journal, Slipstream, Spillway, The Tower Journal, Tulane Review, Westview, and other literary and academic journals.
July 2016 | poetry
it’s in the way Glenn Gould’s lips move
around the notes
sound reaching out into air, just
beyond him
he must catch it
draw it back into his body
tight and bent
in the attack of even the most piano
of pianos which bores down center
lost and falling and weighted
then flits out, released from the
dark, the moment just before the sound
that moment, there
before sound happens,
trapped within flakes of snow
on a cold still day, disturbed
the unceasing battle
between hands, which one gets the
moment before sound,
and which after,
which demands the sharp
which the fifth
which the fattest chord
which the sostenuto
we are vocal chords and
we are plucked chords
we are the vibrato of body at seeming rest
here we become most primal
closest to the earth and of necessity
without sight
by Sarah D’Stair
Sarah D’Stair’s interests include starring in punk music videos, catching up on old episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey, and avoiding the digital revolution. She is the author of Roulettetown (Kuboa 2011) and Petrov Petrovich Is in Love (Kuboa 2016), and is currently a graduate student writing a dissertation on a subject of sublime importance.
July 2016 | poetry
“‘but painters and poets
Always have had the right to dare anything.’
We know and claim that right, and grant it in turn.”
—Quintus Horatius Flaccus
A pale arm rises from the marsh,
point up, presents a sword to the dreamer.
The dreamer grasps the blade with both hands.
Blood spreads in the bog—stirs unquiet thoughts
among bodies sleeping there.
In springtime, a white flower falls from the cherry.
It’s caught in sap oozing from a cut.
That clot of sap is buried in the fossil ground—
Becomes a translucent stone that holds
a five-pointed star in amber.
Lost armies are buried in the orchard—they await
their resurrection. Recite their names five times—
as blind worms gnaw their marrow—
become the caterpillars marching on warm flesh—
become the dusty moths circling the light.
We bind our thoughts to hieroglyphs of word—
illusions that we create to trap
the attentions of our readers’ minds.
Letters on the chaliced skull (the ink is flame)
become the spellbird that I send to you.
The egret arches forward—bows itself into flight,
unfolds his wings above the reeds—
pale trespass on an evening shore.
His feathers are floating flower petals—
every wingbeat an eternity.
by Wulf Losee
Wulf Losee lives and works in the Bay Area. His poems and short stories have appeared in journals such as Crack the Spine, Forge, FRiGG, Full Moon, The New Guard, The North Coast Literary Review, Oak Square, OxMag, Pennsylvania English, Poetalk Magazine, Rio Grande Review, SLAB, and Westview. The two cats that allow Wulf to live with him are also his severest critics. Writing poetry detracts from play time, petting time, and from feeding them treats—and they regularly show their contempt for his muse by walking nimble-footed across his keyboard.
July 2016 | poetry
Hurricane Girl
The hurricane expert
talked of wind speeds,
probable damage, sweeping
his left hand over a map of the
East Coast. Behind him, in
another room, in silence,
a girl in a red shirt,
her dark hair a ponytail,
gazed raptly before her,
her profile so still I thought
she was perhaps a picture.
As I watched, she swiftly
lifted her chin, turned toward me
(and the camera), and gazed
behind her, a look of loss and
puzzlement on her face. After
a moment, she turned back
to the screen, or whatever it was
that held her attention earlier.
Did she sense my gaze? Or was it my
gaze and the gaze of a million others―
the hurricane no longer of interest
(Won’t bother us, so the heck with it)―
that made us all see her, wonder who
she was, what her task, and why the
look of misery and resignation?
Visitation
The cat curls, a C of pale fur
with blue batwing ears, in my lap.
I’m reading in bed, tomorrow
a workday if there’s no blizzard.
I’m reading Atwood, or Coetzee,
or Munro. Behind me in dusty dusk
a sound, skitter, shiver of something
small and secret. The cat’s head rises,
eyes pools of suspicion. What is it,
I ask him, but he stares past me.
Suddenly the air is full of Old Spice.
The only scent you would use,
and then only in summer. I turn
to look at the bottle, still on the
dresser. It is closed. You hadn’t
opened it for two years, as you drank
and harangued yourself to stall
the stalking, eerily benign
knowledge of death. A week ago
I watched the cat reach up
into one of your coats,
following your scent.
My heart ached for his longing,
for his inability to know,
but now I realize
that even knowing is no solace.
Except for Joplin’s rag,
Solace does not exist.
by Gay Baines
Gay Baines lives in East Aurora, New York, and is a member of the Roycroft Wordsmiths. She has a B.A. in English from Russell Sage College and has done graduate work at Syracuse University and SUNY – Buffalo. She won the National Writers Union Poetry Prize in 1991, Honorable Mention in the Ruth Cable Memorial Poetry Contest in 1996, and the 2008 Mary Roelofs Stott Award for poetry, as well as other prizes. Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in over 50 literary journals, including 13th Moon, Alabama Literary, Amarillo Bay, Anemone Sidecar, Atlanta Review, The Baltimore Review, Bayou, Caveat Lector, Cimarron Review, Cloudbank, Confluence, Confrontation, Controlled Burn, Crack the Spine, Crate Literary Magazine, Dislocate, Eclectica, Eclipse, Edison Literary Review, The Evansville Review, Forge, Grey Sparrow, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Jabberwock Review, Louisiana Literature, Nimrod International Journal, Oregon East, Phoebe, The Pinch, poemmemoirstory, Poet Lore, Queen’s Quarterly, Quiddity Literary Journal, RE:AL, Rosebud, Serving House Journal, Slipstream, South Carolina Review, Talking River, The Tampa Review, The Texas Review, Tiger’s Eye, Verdad, Westview, Whiskey Island, Willow Review, Wisconsin Review, and Zone 3.
July 2016 | poetry
My student sits in the armchair facing mine.
He seems to listen raptly as I babble on,
losing control of my syntax: my words
spool forth, but lose their interconnections,
as with rising dismay I realize
I have no idea what I’m talking about.
No, that’s not quite true: I have an idea,
a good one, but as I start to speak,
it goes out of alignment—it forks in two, and then
the forks fork, and I think of the two roads
diverging in a yellow wood, and the old trickster
who slyly let on that you couldn’t tell them apart,
meaning, I suppose, that we kid ourselves
if we think we know what we’re doing
when we choose one path over another,
which I realize I am actually saying aloud
to my student, who clearly hasn’t a clue
who the old trickster is, or why I am talking about him,
or what the hell point I am trying to make,
when all at once I remember sitting across
from my old mentor, long since dead,
who had mumbled with smug incomprehensibility
what I assumed, because of his advanced age,
were profound and timeless revelations
(though in fact he was twenty-five years younger
than I am today). Wouldn’t you think that by now
I had realized that I had hopelessly confused
the poor kid, and that I would have the sense
not to add my irrelevant memories
of that disagreeable pontificator?
Wrong. I’m off on a new tangent, complaining
of ancient trauma the old coot had inflicted on me,
the same I am surely inflicting at this very moment
on the polite young man who sits across from me,
respectful and demure, deftly concealing
any private thoughts he must be having
about the deteriorating mentation
of the well-meaning, logorrheic, pompous
old gentleman happily blathering away.
by Victor Altshul
My poetry book, Singing With Starlings, was published by Antrim House (2015), and several of my poems have been featured in the Hartford Courant. I frequently attend monthly chapter meetings of the Connecticut Poetry Society and meet with other poetry organizations throughout Connecticut. I am a graduate of Harvard University and Yale University. Throughout my life I’ve run twenty marathons, sung various baritone roles in numerous operas, and rowed in the Head of the Charles Regatta along with other prominent regattas. I currently work as a psychiatrist with a continuous private practice since 1967.
July 2016 | poetry
The white school house, covered with years of coal dust, looks so much smaller now. A rusty flag pole, white when it adorned, lies among the busted mine machines that cover the grounds once for play. The mine gone, the coal trucks only noisy ghosts in my mind, can I have lived here?
Its little flat spot up against the steep land of the hollow where it came to be, my place to learn and grow back then. Marbles at recess, oral book reports to a room with two grades, and the growling gray trucks, humped with coal, that passed all day.
Broken windows, like eyes that only light can see, sadly look my way. And a missing door with only night beyond seems to say, “Oh yes, I loved you then. I am not so bad. Look at you now.”
by Charles Hayes
Charles Hayes, a Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and others.
