July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Good Food
Eating a bruised McIntosh apple lifts me out of Chinatown where no one is cheering on this hot Indian Summer. Feeling the soft spot through the skin under the thumb in time with a bite brings back dirty hands reaching for fruit, twisting the gift from the branch. I am on mother’s shoulders for no other child will do. One brother, too heavy, the other, too little. He may get hurt. If I take both hands from her face I will fall, but I need both hands—one to steady the tree limb and one to pull. The October sun in my eyes, I let go and reach. I grasp the branch and the fruit…Or do they—the branch, the fruit—move into my hands to steady me? I do not fall. I toss the apples, 29 cents a paper bag, to the ground and my brothers scurry to collect them. They are gold! Apples are food—good food, filling, cheap. No matter if it’s brown. Mother says, Cut it out! Or wormy. It’s protein! I don’t have to eat this apple. Now, my fridge is full of organic this and natural that. I did not pick it. I don’t have children I need to feed. I don’t need to cook. There’s 20 bucks on the coffee table and a Prosperity Dumplings three doors down. I eat around the bruise, chew down to the core, every piece of flesh possible before I hit seed. I don’t know when I’ll eat again. I’ve stockpiled leftovers from school lunches in the back of my bottom dresser drawer—half a peanut butter sandwich, half a salami sandwich, half an apple (now brown where bitten), in case, there is no dinner tonight. I can take care of myself.
My Senegalese Student Reading English to Me
A single boy dribbling a basketball in an empty wooden-floored gym. His entire body pivots like a door loose from its jamb. His arm hooks in a question mark as he takes a shot.
A breath
The furry bee buzzing round my head is lovely as it follows its own path, ducking, bobbing, dancing past my ear. It’s not just noise. There is no stinger. And away it goes.
A breath
Nearly dry sheets, pinned to the washline, flap and foxtrot in the wind. Hang.
Catch their breath.
And breathe.
Family Weekend at Rehab
In our therapy session
we are given pens that read
“House of Hope”
and surveys with questions like:
Does your spouse/family member
hide his/her drinking/drug use.
a. Always
b. Most of the time
c. Sometimes
d. Rarely
e. Never
The group leader leaves the room
and scribbles fill the air.
The woman next to me bubbles
and erases and bubbles and erases
when A and E are all the same thing.
During our break
I fill my Styrofoam coffee cup
with hot water and head for
the ladies room. No caffeine
in this joint. I smuggled a can
of instant Nescafe
in my sweatshirt.
I watch the mother of a
teenage girl in treatment
check her makeup
in the mirror. She smiles,
“Get ready for tears this weekend!”
and disappears out the door.
Back in the meeting room,
people are beginning to chat.
When I tell them I’m here
for my boyfriend,
not a husband,
a brother,
a father,
nor son,
I wonder
not for the first time
what I’m doing here.
The group leader
enters the room
and welcomes
us back.
I immediately tune her out,
stare out the window
at geese on the icy bay,
and realize
I’m the only one
who can escape.
Whitney Lee Nowak is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and New York City public school teacher who lives, writes, and works in Chinatown.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
1.
A man in Houston tossing his laundry to the street from a third floor window, shouting, “If we
want to go back to Nature, for God’s sake, we can’t go in these.”
His underwear raining onto a small spruce tree, then, for days, hanging there limp, like fruit,
or words.
2.
The unbreakable babble of a river at rest.
Then, during heavy rain, how the same river will awake, screaming.
“Even if you can’t understand it,” Michael’s father told him, standing on the bank of the Red,
“you should still listen for a while. Just shut up and listen.”
by Travis Vick
A recent graduate, Travis Vick has spent the past years studying poetry beneath B.H. Fairchild and Bruce Bond.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Ancient Lullabies
1
Dew-wet grass glistens under pink morning sun,
and a bee, that liberated prophetess of old,
now silently hovers in the air above, conceiving
of all the truths that are yet to be told.
2
The full-grown, ripened tranquility lingers
where honeysuckle spills over and blankets
one section of rusty wire fence, half-fallen
to the ground; the grass softly sighs.
3
The time of longer days has bared its noon,
pure, naked whiteness languorously awaiting a silver
moon that sits high on a coral horizon: Don’t
try to sketch an outline, but let it paint itself.
4
Empty lots; July’s saccharine kudzu chokes all
that’s in its path as afternoon thunderstorms
spur the vines on to wilder and yet more
uncontrollable growth; autumn will halt the onslaught.
5
Choruses of ancient lullabies wait in shadows
here, where childhood secrets and open sky
declaim in verse, unsung yet clear, the stories
learned by Devorah when summer’s grass blades bent low.
Before The Wind
soliloquy uprising power of words
they slam, one into the other
tossing echoes virginal sound deflowered
heather-ish whole but sparse
bluing purpling graying
spilling over everything carrying character
and then burning spinning flames yarns
folk tales too they tell secrets floating in empty space
Beginning Midway Through
A cardinal hovers in the garden’s lacy air.
The desk, laden with paper, typewriter and books,
shivers under the machine’s mild drone.
A young father’s image flashes in the dormer; he clutches
his briefcase and his baby as
the postman rides by in his jeep. Wake up!
You’re lying on the beach when you open your
eyes, the antique sunset giving a patina to your blisters,
the pus encrusted like pearls on your cherry-wood
skin. I, too, have slept the afternoon
into obscurity, arising confused at first.
Where were you, if not with me?
I hold out my hand, in a silent Come here
plea. We’re still in love—but this happened
long ago. Over and over in my mind, I review
what I can recall in a desperate effort to reconnect
to that easiness we seemed to find so readily before;
maybe I’m crazy, though—maybe this is all in my head.
Looking out the window, there’s a blur
of red. The cherry-wood desk nestles
in one corner of our home. And, on
the projector screen, you pose with Michael James
in 1958. Even when you’re here, you’re not always with me anymore,
but, at night, I still fall asleep dreaming that our life together is as it was.
Eye Of The Storm
When whispering palms sway in a sustained, even tempo,
and eucalyptus branches crack in a rush of air,
when Red Howlers moan and wail with monkey madness,
and neighborhood dogs bark and bay in eerie ferocity,
when all of the world outside is tinged with gray—
even blood-scarlet sorrel bushes and green vines, grass, trees—
and radiates a pearl-pink afterglow,
then I know a storm approaches—
with torrential tropical gusts and slapping sheets of water,
descending and swirling from a once-cloudless blue sky.
Soldier-Child
Kudzu
jungle in my backyard—and I
am soldier,
a reverse-
victim of the battle I know
at home.
Margaret Adams Birth has previously been published in such journals as Riverrun, Ship of Fools, The New Voices (Trinidad and Tobago), Aldebaran, Atlantic Pacific Press, The Poetry Peddler, Purple Patch (England), White Wall Review (Canada), Green’s Magazine (Canada), Shawnee Silhouette, Mobius, Black River Review, Potpourri, and The Wild Goose Poetry Review; her past work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
