April 2016 | poetry
Algoma Guardian
She’s bound for Toledo riding
low with grain, slipping through
fine blue capillary that splits
the difference between Belle Isle and Windsor
Canada keeping a low profile
to the south forever
confounding us.
N A I D R A U G A M O G L A
emerge one by one from behind
a clump of trees in the middle
distance, tidy Canadian houses
gobbled like so many pills
hull bleeding rust
I stand witness
to silent progress
her steady down bound passage.
Durable Medical Equipment
Standard kit; four wheels and a hand
brake, tubular construction in sober
parsons black with a lick
of chrome fittings, she’s low
to the ground and tight
on the turns with a basket
up front, padded kneeler in back,
our Mardis Gras float, I’ll ease her in
behind the Krewe of Mona Lisa and Moon Pie
while you slosh hurricane and wave
to the joyous, drunken throngs.
Dave Hardin
Dave Hardin is a Michigan poet, fiction writer and artist. His poems have appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Prague Review, The Drunken Boat, Hermes Poetry Journal, The Dunes Review, Epigraph Magazine, Loose Change, ARDOR, Carolina Quarterly, The Madison Review, the 2014 Bear River Review and others.
April 2016 | nonfiction
It has been millennia since I last ate you. How did I dare, today, breaking the spell?
Your stem neatly detached by a twist of my fingers, your thick flesh with its sparkly aftertaste exploding on tongue, your pit so very small that for lack of practice I’m scared of swallowing it… I have missed a fruit in my mouth, especially a fruit like you.
Almost for a lifetime I’ve shied away, fearing a secret threat you concealed under gracious smoothness, under naïve alegria. Innocent, are you?
You came in brown bags, paper satchels. You came timely, on season, and we waited for you: late May, early June. After the roses bloomed for the Virgin Mary, you wrapped up the sensuality of spring in a bloody sap, precursor of luscious summer, of apricot, peach and plum prodigality.
You appeared: velvety, dense – a queen dressed up for a court dance, but your size made you childish. Cheerful ballerina: hand in hand with rosy-cheeked playmates twirling in brazen tutus. Caroling, playing hide and seek in a maze of dark leaves.
Ladder pushed against the trunk, basket hanging across a branch, neck bent backward I gazed up, my eyes lost in a crimson orgy. Happiness was too large for my shrinking heart: cherries, I’ve left you behind, just where I left myself.
I don’t know who kept going after the split. Who lived in my name.
But it wasn’t me.
Toti O’Brien
Toti O’Brien’s work has appeared in Synesthesia, Wilderness House, The Harpoon Review and Litro NY, among other journals and anthologies.
April 2016 | poetry
I’ll look for you at that place between the dirty
flame of evening, it’s temple to oblivion,
and the milky solution of dawn
where extremes meet and get to know
each other all over. There are lips there
that fit together, silk sky touching
coarse waves. There’s a field there
where the grass is too full
of reflections of the world to talk about.
Ideas, words, phrases like “each other”—
some pattern of permanence
in all that rush and loss?
Your crescent blush made me think
of mealtime, candied kisses on the teeth,
the incessantly efflorescent pungent
bouquet. Is love to be understood
beyond the study of frivolity,
the study of hypocrisy
if there’s no such thing?
Is the raw material of divinity
all that’s left to work with?
It’s time to give up on my brain.
If you think this is a good way to improve
your heart or your mind, sleep on.
Stephen Massimilla
Massimilla’s book, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, was selected in the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize contest. He has received the Bordighera Poetry Prize, the Grolier Prize, a Van Rensselaer Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
