July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Low in the ghostly zone behind the dam
beneath the bleached cliff and black water line
left by the river’s sudden abeyance
I wait as a wetter season arrives,
the thaw’s flow. The cracked floor absorbs
faster than the rain falls, shines the seams
but does not heal. High above tall houses sit
on the former shore. I am not alone.
The curious and researchers scavenge
the small structures, invasive and native,
that suffocated wildly, slowly, here
while power company customers
marveled at the mystery and the scale.
Park Rangers on two week assignments
with per diem field their theories, where the pressure
relieved, how a river could all at once retreat.
Other manmade lakes have disappeared, say
the experts calmly, say internet entries,
rare, yes, but explicable, and now locals
speak with authority on aquifers and sediment.
My functionary’s possessiveness
lured me here, like to a past regime’s auction.
Before it was submerged this rural land
had to be cleared— that was my office.
Evictions, expirations, foreclosures,
by legal means the place was carried off.
I remember the map grid colors shift
red to blue, like with any project,
the deadlines met in fretful succession.
Accomplishing the place, I used to walk
the dirt path behind the school’s woods
where the tired river was kept and tell it
how it would sweep away the school, the woods
the foul line’s white lye from the baseball field,
up a last run of the sledding hill, put
a hand on each of the pillaring hills.
An interrogator offering the world
to a captive with yet no plans to turn.
I had not thought that care was taken
to excavate the concrete foundations
and expected the grid of the old town
to lay itself out to my memory
but it is gone. Below the arisen lake
currents of sifting sands, like drifted snow,
plied under the remains of the houses.
I must stand still feet above the streets.
Expected, too, descendents of the civic clubs
who fought us to hold some sort of event,
bragging on our failure, lamenting the waste,
naming those founders I had to hear
so much about. But if anyone beside me
remembers the place, the red-fronted armory,
deploring voices, they are silent now
and perhaps as perplexed as I am, turned
trying to triangulate the past by hill shape.
But now real rain, tiny meniscus bursts
as puddle joins with puddle, making pool.
The path winding down from a parking lot
turns back to bottom mud fastest of all.
The Ranger post and its generator
will be left behind, a useless landmark
to those being told to walk quickly, now
in the suddenly stormed over sundown.
As I step over a hasty escarpment,
that ancient river, your silver push,
the tall houses, their brown lawns, are dim
but soon, electricity and flowers.
Whatever weakness briefly gave, it holds
now where at the foot of the dam a rising bank
highlights and enfolds the grades, and rolls
at me, like a man made a promise. Take it
now like a shallow bay returning, recover
the floor, the height of the cliff wall, hurry
above my head, by river and rain, come
like the tide. Make me run for my life.
by Keith Seher
Keith Seher works out of the Cleveland area, and has been writing since he was 13. I belongs to a number of poetry groups, including the Butchershop, and private workshop which has been meeting for more than 45 years.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Rehab Rosetta Stone
Re-
(prefix)
i call myself a name in the mirror
again
again
word on loan
radiant ray’s repo man
keeps bringing me back here
to the bathroom sink
washing my mouth out
to sing a diatonic drop
of golden sun
never reaching mi,
a name i call myself in the mirror
again
again
Build
(verb)
when we walked before day-break
men in the garden grew a skeleton
that looked like a hut,
brick-layer skin made
from adobe mud cast from ground’s dust
baked by builder-chefs, culinary sun.
we were enslaved to construct
pyramids over lunch
out of grains and fruit.
men cooking the hut
ate, too (as proof, i once watched
one eat a whole lemon bar)
went home after heat-waves
preheated afternoons.
we went to rooms like refrigerators.
i wondered why they went home
when they were done building
never considering
that i lacked the strength
to build a hut,
or eat a whole lemon bar.
Make
– after Edward Elric
(verb)
gods buy humans
at the grocery store:
one kilogram phosphorous
two kilograms lime
three grams silicon
five grams iron
four liters ammonia
eight grams fluorine
twenty kilograms carbon
trace amount bromine
thirty-five liters water
one quarter kilogram salt,
eighty grams sulfur
pinch of cobalt
roll into a ball.
make oceans boil.
cook for one hundred years,
bury in the soil
Rebuild/Remake
(transitive verb)
i have learned these verbs
still i only see bones
in the sentences
when these doctors speak
words like scriptures
they think themselves gods
when they whisper
I will remake you
you will rebuild you.
Douglas Luman’s work has found forthcoming publication through other journal outlets as well, including (forthcoming) the Toad Suck Review, uCity Review and Epigraph Magazine.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Swallowing Sounds Like Boiling Water
I can feel a word
crawling up my esophagus
like tequila
in a red dress
or the kitchen table
that I swallowed when
my grandmother died.
I should have slipped into
the word when I married,
or when I learned to
measure coffee,
or when I first shrank
from small hands, small toes.
One day, it will become
more than a word.
It will be a song
a eulogy
a dissertation.
It will be or has been
my mother’s hands
made of flour
boiled in chicken bones,
and her smile
heavy with the weight
of the kitchen table
in her stomach.
One day,
I will be old enough
or brave enough
to speak the word,
or write it in a journal
that may be read
by my daughters.
I may finally cloak myself
in the word and allow it
to rush from my esophagus
where it is now stuck.
But for now, I let the word
“motherhood”
linger like a tickle
in my throat
or a flame
under the teakettle
of my childhood.
Farmland
On the commute home
the clouds form a table
atop four grain silos,
each grand, different.
It reminds me of you.
The top of the table is
covered with papers:
marriage certificates,
manuscripts,
dissertations.
Beneath the table
grows the pile of rejections:
unworn house slippers,
discarded candy wrappers,
an album of pictures that
doesn’t belong to us.
A box of ashes teeters
on the edge of the table.
If it falls, will our life
have happened at all?
I pass beyond sight of the table, and
I remember that it is only clouds.
I forget them as I continue home.
Elizabeth Jenike is currently a master’s student of creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she serves as the Fiction Editor for Oxford Magazine, the graduate literary publication. She received her undergraduate degree in creative writing from Northern Kentucky University in 2012. Her poetry appeared in the 2010-2011 edition of NKU Expressed, and her short story “The End” was published in the 2009-2010 edition of the same. Most recently, her flash fiction piece “How to Dye Window Treatments” was published by the undergraduate literary project ObsessionMag.
