January 2013 | back-issues, poetry
You swing the scythe in washed out flaxen fields
You may hear the blade against the dried out stalk
It is a sweet sound if the cutting edge is thin
You will listen for that faultless cut, it is a veiled thing
It will hide in the murmur of starlings and six-row barley
You will swing and scare the murderous crows
In repetitions you swing with the turning of your hips
They are never the same, form of swing or ting of blade
The light will fail and you will walk home under cast out corncrakes
By turf lit doorway you will sit and spit then drag the whetstone
You will smother the wicks and set loose the hungry tomcat,
Evicted field-mice are suing for recompense.
by Alan Donnelly
January 2013 | back-issues, poetry
The Dungeon, Midwest Books, Stoughton, Wisconsin
Confine me closer, little room of shelves,
And hold me in your mouth whose teeth are spines.
Your concave paper and your convex cloth
Collapse upon me. Drug me with the smell
Of mummied wood. The book I want is all
Ways hidden well: accept my captured hand
Into your close forgotten crevices
To touch the flesh the angle leaves unseen.
by Sara Bickley
January 2013 | back-issues, poetry
It was a sweltering summer day and
dripping with sweat I
popped over to Taylor Street,
ordered a lemon ice.
Waiting in line, my
phone buzzed it’s usual “hi,”
opening it
while taking an icy sip,
that’s how I
learned
that you’d died.
The sharp taste.
The sour taste.
The aftertaste
of lemon ice.
by Stefanie Lyons
Stefanie Lyons received her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a Chicago advertising copywriter by day, working on her great American novel by night. These poems come from a series of digital loneliness and anti-advertising pieces she’s currently working on. Oh, the irony.
