October 2016 | poetry
They rarely snapped apart,
those French Gothic cathedrals,
encrypting clotted earth
as they sailed toward endless sky.
Occasionally one collapsed,
like Beauvais, from trying too hard,
or, like Saint Maclou, cluttered
and confused its lines, losing
the impossible coupling of soil and sun.
But most, hunkered down, buttresses flying,
opened their core to rainbowing light
as they set about piercing heaven.
Chartres did it best. Resolute and
grounded as a twin-peaked mountain,
it told its tender stained-glass stories
well enough to make a peasant weep.
It flouted abstract symmetry, one spire
staunchly romanesque, the other
soaringly flamboyant. One said,
My presence here is God in stone,
the other, I am the earthly gone to God .
Its vaulted center held, however,
and still, and still, is holding.
Lynn Hoggard
Lynn Hoggard has published five books: three French translations, a biography, and a memoir. Her poetry has appeared in 13th Moon, The Alembic, Atlanta Review, The Broken Plate, Clackamas Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crack the Spine, The Delmarva Review, Descant, Forge, Edison Literary Review, FRiGG, The Healing Muse, The MacGuffin, New Ohio Review, Sanskrit, Soundings East, Summerset Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Tower Journal, Weber: The Contemporary West, Westview, WestWard Quarterly, Wild Violet, and Xavier Review, among others.
July 2016 | poetry
New Orleans broke my heart. So did Utah.
I’m the son of both and neither.
All these places break boys’ hearts.
Send them crying to their rooms on Sutter.
When I was young my dad collected frogs.
He dissected them. Kept them in glass jars.
Pressed quarters in my palm to love me.
The frogs stared at the world, unblinking.
I walked to town in roadwork season.
Smelled the bitumen and gripped the coins.
Love was the soft road leading from my father’s den.
I’m older now and I preserve things too.
Here’s the glass. Crystal’s my formaldehyde.
Tonight a man will come and kneel before me.
I’ll push his head back, trace his throat, and kiss him.
Then I’ll take the straightedge from my chest.
The scalpel stolen from the box below the frogs.
I will cut him open. Save him from New Orleans.
And Utah. The fog swirling outside the window.
by Graham Coppin
July 2016 | poetry
(a Tom Waits kind of drunk poem for
a poet friend who calls himself Moonface)
Sing Motherfucker! …Sing!
Like Moonface in the dark, in the cold,
‘cause that Jack’s off the track
he ain’t never coming back
…he had his long-johns on.
Nah, funerals ain’t funny,
but ya gotta laugh,
‘cause he ain’t had nothing from nobody
‘cept Sally once, or maybe Sue–
there’s two women with wishes
for more than the dishes
that just got old
cold Moonface
…with his long-johns on
Yeah, Sing Motherfucker! Sing!
–like the devil saying he’s sorry
after all these years
‘cause that Jack’s off the track
he ain’t never coming back
…he had his long-johns on.
by William Waters
William Waters is an associate professor, associate chair, and director of composition in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. Along with Sonja Foss, he is coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation. His research and teaching interests are in writing theory and practice, the history of the English language, linguistics, and modern grammar.
July 2016 | poetry
Fragile girl; the delicate grass-blade’s dewily soft sheen
trances me, sends me into a liquid dream or reverie;
Novitius symbolum of I, the belfry, and you-
Great bell for the angelus, siphoning to my growerly
Every furrow and bone of the sphere’s celestial
stars; Belle’s water; “indicator of the reborn sun:”
The radiant pavonids of your eyes; you pull my dreams
Right from my throat, bestowing to my crown the gift;
Traumas eclipsed by divine ascendening frequencies
Of autotelically-wide, shy- blue translucent eyes,
Eyes I recognize to be just as true and soft as those
Of Hazel: sheathed in her bright robes, inscribing me
In rainbow body and jewels, dispelling samsara. Great
Mahayana vehicle; sweet recalling dreams
by Matthew Scott Bartlett
July 2016 | poetry
It starts on the front porch
with a determined stare,
inspecting each of four French doors
through each of the twenty-four panes
it can reach, then over the fence
to the back porch, continuing
its ritual before settling
for a bedroom windowsill, hunched
against another numberless night,
nose pressed to window screen
as if to sniff the light, perhaps
recounting each pane, each door,
each windowsill before
hanging its head to doze, secure
in darkness, in silence,
that lonely scent of empty light
a curious, persistent dream.
by Richard T. Rauch
Richard T. Rauch was born and raised in the New Orleans area, and currently lives along Bayou Lacombe in southeast Louisiana. Rick’s day job is constructing rocket propulsion test facilities at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to test the Space Shuttle replacement “Space Launch System” designed to get human explorers back to the moon and on to Mars. (Keep your fingers crossed…) Poetry credits include: Big Muddy, Confrontation, Crack the Spine, decomP, Euphony, Grey Sparrow, The Oxford American, Pembroke Magazine, Quiddity, Wild Violet, and the anthologies Love Notes (Vagabondage Press) and Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press). Flash fiction credits include Infective Ink and Aspen Idea (Aspen Writers’ Foundation/Esquire Short, Short Fiction Contest finalist).
July 2016 | poetry
N 42°25’32.5″ W 103°43’58.5″
“…when they would talk among themselves he (Red Cloud) would call out to them to keep still as he wanted to hear what his wife or father or mother were saying to him.”
— Letter from Kate Cook to her sister Clara, 1908
A year before he died, Chief Red Cloud had gone blind
yet he could see, told friends he was now “so nearly dead”
he could once again see his dead wife, beckoning.
Your dying father, too, spoke with long-dead parents,
and in vivid dreams retraced younger maps,
hiking again that thin trail to the Little Huron where
he emerged from dark woods to find an Anishnaabe
encampment at the river’s mouth, as in ancient days.
He sat with the men all night, and listened.
No one knew it would be the last Encampment.
*
On the Great Plains, the Lakota build wooden scaffolds
for their dead, or placed them high in tree branches
where the coyotes could not fight over them.
What a blessing, when the sacred Eagle descends!
Sometimes the bones are found perfectly intact, the skeleton
composed. It is easy, then, to imagine some flash flood beginning
upstream, a wall of mud and water that will find mammals of the Eocene
unprepared as day-hikers in some sunny slot-canyon
outfitted with handheld GPS and two hundred dollar boots
about to be swept away by a gully-buster fifty miles west.
Isn’t that what happened to the Sioux? Wasn’t it
just a trickle at first, wasn’t the sun still shining
when the geologists and bone hunting expeditions arrived?
Didn’t a wall of “consumption” and “smallpox” and “Manifest Destiny”
roll in from the East, where they’d turned to see the Dawn?
The journals of early explorers describe a biblical plain
of milk and honey free for the taking, as soon as bison
were exterminated and sod which held the whole fabric in place
furrowed, and turned to dust —
*
In Westerns, there’d be an Indian Guide right about here,
a human segue saying “Since Then, Many Moons Have Passed.”
We’ve learned to lecture passionately, and write in verse.
We take classes in healing and empathetic listening,
regret the cavalry, and the dust bowl, for which we now atone
by washing plastic bags a dozen times, writing Senators
denouncing pipelines, composting vegetable scraps, managing herds with PhDs
because there are no wolves or nomads to control the bison numbers.
*
There’ve always been plagues of locusts, but don’t they eat everything
and move on?
The wind howls and booms and kicks like a mustang against our square walls.
In the Badlands, you’ll come upon a single fossil bone resting
like a lost war-club on the surface of a Chadron mud-mound
itself no larger than a sacred drum — all that remains of a great mountain of mud!
*
What force in this world makes things dwindle?
Your father, startled from a vivid daydream, looked wildly around the room
and said, “where did he go, that fellow who was just here?”
When tourists drive the Loop Road through the Badlands
with their air-conditioner running, sun-roofs open, windows down,
their music reverberates for miles, all different drumbeats
echoing against the stone.
It makes it hard to hear what the dead are trying to say.
*
Wrapped in his scarlet blanket of wind, Red Cloud keeps saying “hush.”
He asks that we please go back where we came from
or at least learn to be still.
by Kathleen M. Heideman
Kathleen M. Heideman is a writer, artist and environmental activist working in Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula. She’s completed a dozen artist residencies with watersheds, scientific research stations, private foundations, the National Park Service, and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. A curious woman.
