Archive
Aphids
by Laura Shovan
My daughter
says she will
join me
on the steps
with a book
while I
regard our
back garden.
She does not come.
In the heat
and stillness,
movement.
A praying mantis
in the lattice
and clematis vine,
body mottled
brown speckled,
head like
a heart or
arrow. It
hangs from a
wood slat,
shadowed.
Green intention.
I think it will
eat the aphids
gathered yellow
on the vine
but it wavers,
its mind
is not in keeping
with mine,
walks its slow
sticky walk
some other
direction.
I wait for
my daughter.
She has promised
to come out.
Editor of Little Patuxent Review, Laura Shovan (website) was a finalist for the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone won the 2009 Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches.
Among the Orchids
For a few weeks in 1970,
Bubba ruled our Tampa neighborhood.
No metaphor for gangs
or the Mob,
though they were there too,
Bubba was an 5-foot alligator.
Cats disappeared.
Children stayed in their houses.
And Señora Rodriguez swore Bubba
Ate her cotton Lyle drawers off the clothesline.
Her grandson, Hector, got Bubba tattooed on his left butt cheek,
but she pretended not to know that.
My herpetologist (husband) professed scorn,
encouraged Hector,
and teased his grandmother in excellent Spanish.
A friend grew orchids.
You might ask how passions for snakes
and orchids go together.
Sex.
Snakes being all phallic
And orchids…
Well they aren’t exactly modest, are they?
A sudden freeze sent us scurrying to move the orchids in
among the cobras, the Mohave diamond back,
a variety of spiders,
and the yellow-fronted Amazon parrot.
But Bubba waited in the cooling green house
starting to chill but still alert
and deadly.
Bonnie and I retreated to warmth and home brew.
The guys drank in the yard
wondering how to capture Bubba.
It went to 18 that night.
Sayers lost his orchids
But the next day Señora Rodriguez
hung up new drawers in the warm sun.
After a few years among the urban wildlife of Tampa, Florida, Cher Holt-Fortin retreated to the north. There she quilts and watches birds on the edge of farm country. No alligators, just the occasional coyote.
Witness
I step out to buy toilet paper and through the chorus of cars,
I think I hear the delicate, steady clip-clop of horse hooves.
The sound grows insistent, and through the leaves of the trees,
I sight the tips of white feathers—plumes of white feathers
like river reeds swaying in tandem with the breeze. One by one,
two white horse heads materialize, nostrils flaring with indignity
at their frou-frou headdresses, at being roped to this surrey
in, of all places, Brooklyn. An old black man taps
a steadying hand to his lopsided top hat—it, too, a monstrosity—
as he begrudgingly flicks the reins. White limousines follow.
Surely this is a movie set or an Irish funeral. Then I spot them
in the back of the cart: a couple, just married from the looks
of her dress, a bit dazed and—could it be? Yes. Embarrassed,
wondering just when this seemed like a good idea.
The woman—the new wife—sees me and waves, as if wanting
to make this the moment she’s dreamed, wanting the world to see
she is loved by someone who appears to be a nice-enough man.
He doesn’t wave, but he smiles, and tries to look less sheepish.
After all, it’s early November, late afternoon—
and there is yet some sun and someone to have seen them.
Lissa Kiernan’s poems, essays, and reviews can be found in numerous journals and anthologies, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Founder and director of The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative, a provider of online workshops, Lissa currently makes her home in Brooklyn, New York. Visit lissakiernan.com for more.
Opossum
Adjusting to suburban
interstices, he lived
successfully, scuttling
among shrubs, along curbs,
scouting out grubs, tubers,
and the lady of his dreams.
He sustained his dignity
in a society prejudiced
against his tail.
At night, an opaque
shadow, he was backlit
by stars and headlights.
He had been hustling
gutters and, satiated,
sauntered across asphalt
when they aimed for him,
reduced his ancient lineage
to road-kill, contemporary,
anonymous.
I stretched him out
on earth’s altar to suppurate
into glory, his fur transformed
to grass, his teeth to seeds,
his tail to root. Bless
his bones and guts.
Elizabeth Schultz lives in Lawrence, Kansas, following retirement from the English Department of the University of Kansas. She remains committed to writing about the people and the places she loves in academic essays, nature essays, and poems. These include Herman Melville, her mother, and her friends, the Kansas wetlands and prairies, Michigan’s Higgins Lake, Japan, where she lived for six years, oceans everywhere. She has published several books, and her scholarly and creative work appears in numerous journals and reviews.
When Bears Fall From Trees
We walked up the street last night with my three children to eat dinner in a Chinese restaurant. The air was cool and the evening sun cast light on the streets that bounced back, yellow. Yellow is the color of the sunlight in southern California on a May evening, and I held Sophie’s arm as we walked. Henry pushed her wheelchair ahead, and Oliver skated along on a scooter, weaving on and off the sidewalk. I could write of presentiment, a halt or shudder, but that would mean something unusual would have to happen, and nothing unusual did happen. We walked up the street last night to eat dinner in a Chinese restaurant, and no bears fell out of trees. We ate hot and sour soup, steamed fish and garlic broccoli, vegetable egg rolls and orange chicken. Oliver spooned white rice three times onto his plate. We perused the paper placemats for the thousandth time, determining our Chinese year. “The Snake avoids the Boar,” Oliver said, “that’s me and Sophie!” “The Rabbit is the luckiest of signs!” said Henry, “that’s you, Mom! And I’m a Tiger, vibrant and energetic!” When the check arrived, we opened our fortune cookies and read them aloud, agreeing that they weren’t really fortunes but rather wise words. You are kind and filled with integrity, one said. The wise man eschews vice, another. We wished for real fortunes and decided to walk a bit more and buy a lottery ticket with the numbers on the fortune slips. Outside, Sophie looked up at the fading sun and began to have a seizure in her wheelchair, a big one, a very big one. Oliver scootered away, Henry asked what he could do, I wrapped a blanket around her, bears fell from trees, and we bought lottery tickets at the donut shop and then walked home.
Elizabeth Aquino (blog) is a writer living in Los Angeles with her family. Her work has been published in several literary anthologies and journals, The Los Angeles Times, Spirituality and Health magazine and online magazines. When she’s not driving her sons around to their interminable sports games and practices or advocating for her daughter and other children with disabilities, she uses vast swathes of free time to bake pastries and dream about coming back in another life as a surfer.
Natural Confrontations
1/ Firefly
Burst with courage
You are flying around, using
Your little light
Like a sharp scissor tip
To rip off the heavy curtain
Of all the darkness
Blown out of frenzy dreams
2/ Seagull
As if right from heaven
A snowy seagull charges down
Trying to pick up the entire ocean
With its bold beak
As the tsunami raises
All its fierce fists
In sweeping protection
Against earth’s agitation
In foamy darkness
3/ Crow
A baby raven
Popping up from nowhere
Tries to
Establish itself:
one dark truth
On the skeletal tree top
Yawing fiercely
Towards the sky, the wind, the buildings
The fields and the entire afternoon
All so fluffily white
In jade-toned snow
Changming Yuan, four-time Pushcart nominee and author Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Politics and Poetics: A Comparative Study of John Keats and Li He (2009), grew up in rural China, holds a PhD in English, and currently tutors in Vancouver; his poetry appears in nearly 570 literary publications across 22 countries, which include Asia Literary Review, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Kanto, SAND and Taj Mahal Review. Together with his teenager poet son Allen Qing Yuan, Changming edits and publishes Poetry Pacific.
Coyote Pack Sparks Fears
—LA Times, September 12, 2011
by M. L. Brown
day one
In Glendale, a pack of coyotes
has built a den in the shell
of a burned out house.
A fire-gutted house is better
than none—animals trotting in
and out at their pleasure. We once
let our horse walk into the kitchen;
and Rosie, the pig, whom we fed
with our lot of Welfare cornmeal
and milk. It was magic—
the state bestowed staples,
we turned them into chops and ham.
day two
A brief column
in today’s paper:
Glendale coyotes
to be caught, killed.
My neighbor’s dog yaps
all day, it’s a purebred,
small and white—
bite-sized.
day three
Glendale decides not
to kill the coyotes.
The public has spoken:
We must coexist.
The fire-gutted house
will be torn down instead.
My neighbors, where I lived
as a child, must have wished
our kneeling house brought down,
barnyard bulldozed, animals sold.
Women from wildlife welfare
hand out brochures in Glendale:
secure trash cans, clear brush,
fallen fruit; people are the problem.
The town imagines when the den
is gone, the coyotes will move on.
M. L. Brown’s poems have appeared most recently in Calyx, Blackbird, Gertrude, and Shadow and Light: a Literary Anthology on Memory. Her manuscript Disassembling the Body was a finalist in the 2010 Gertrude Press chapbook contest. When not working on poetry, she devotes time to raising funds for Planned Parenthood. She has an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles.
A Night in New York
Liquor began to unfrock the men.
Their manicured nails grew sharp
and their lips reddened with
expectation. Breeding belied their urge
to unbeak the ladies masquerading
as virgins, and their faces furred
with hunger when the clouds cleared
and silver urns brimmed with a choice
Ethiopian blend: sacred elephants, acrid air,
baobabs rifled with heat and roasted,
milled and burnished to satisfy
the cravings they’d kept in the stems
of their brains, nubbles brewed in the dark
Pangaea, just before Earth cracked
into continents, was quartered and drawn
into drawing room luxuries: cups cradling coffee
creamed to sweet manfur brown.
They filled their eyes with the décolletage
of the now unhosieried women nibbling
at tiers of pastries with disinterest.
Their cravings got the better of them
that chicory-dark night, carving pockets
in their chests to make room for the mew
and caw of their seemingly flakey prey.
Christina Cook is the author of Lake Effect (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her most recent work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Cimarron Review, and online at Conte and Cerise Press. She is a contributing editor for Cerise Press and an assistant editor of Inertia Magazine, and works as the senior writer for the president of Dartmouth College.
The Cockroaches
This community carries itself on the hard backs of its citizens’
scented sweet chemical juiciness, soft interiors,
specific paths followed nocturnally, searching—
food and water, moistness of drainpipes and mildewed
crawlspaces and crumbling lath and drywall gone damp
with condensation, accumulated dust, oil, grease, the goo
primordial: life’s messy elixir, delicious. Who could pass up
such opportunity? Someone had to grab that fetid niche,
multiply the night, fill the humid dark with liveliness and,
on six swift legs, just run with it.
Although Ann E. Michael (website, blog) hasn’t lived in a city for years, she has dwelt in apartments in New York, Philadelphia, and Grand Rapids, Michigan in the past. Her most recent book of poetry is Water-Rites.
Coot in Kentucky
Standing alone in our gravel driveway, you look lost
in your tuxedo, water-bird flown to the wrong address
for an upscale cocktail party; either that or you’ve shown up
two hours late, so you start walking back and forth
as if most of the guests are behind the clapboard house,
as if a group of drakes smoking cigars will be standing
in a circle on the other side of the dented red truck.
In tasteful gray and black, you look out of place,
too sleek for the number eight gravel mixed with sand
on which you stumble in your over-sized, three-toed shoes.
Or, is the party on the Gulf of Mexico, and you’re not late,
just taking a break en route from your summer place up north?
Whatever, you grace our inland home—sparrows, robins,
chickadees, titmice, and us—with a sea-going elegance
we envy as the final oak leaves blow down, and we’re left
with what seems, at least in your presence, our annual upland
ordinariness. When, at last, you run across the parking lot
as you would a pond, flailing your wings, we want to come.
J. Stephen Rhodes is a Presbyterian minister and theological educator. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Windhover, and Tar River Poetry, among others. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (Wind Publications). Among the mammals he has recently seen at or about his feeders (supposedly for birds) are squirrels, chipmunks, a rabbit, a shrew, deer, and two quite rotund raccoons.
qarrtsiluni 