Archive
Still Life
by Dick Jones
Each morning they organise your bones
into the wheelchair, stack you leaning
out of kilter. Thus I find you, wall-eyed,
feather pulse and mouth ajar. This is
a stillness you are learning as silence
silts up your blood. I name you: ‘Mum’,
I call, quietly at first, as if this were
only sleep and you might resent the passage
interrupted. But your shade is walking
a broken road on the far side of dreams.
I keep my coat on, lean in the doorway,
breathing in the alkalines and salts
that are your presence in this world.
Beyond, through narrow windows, rain
drifts like smoke. The trees shift
their high shoulders, hefting their leaves
like heroes. I can see the lift and fall
of their evergreen breath, the slow,
dispassionate pulse. Such senseless beauty,
propping up the sky as if there were no
tides turning or falling stars, no ashes to dust,
no time at all. You speak — a half-word,
cracked in the middle. Syllables drift
like fumes. Somewhere in that steam
of meaning, the filaments of memory:
the horn’s tip of a lover’s moon,
a song’s dust, the eye’s tail catching,
not quite catching, doorway phantoms,
window ghosts. Grief crosses my mind:
its hydrogen release — from local pain
to lachrymae rerum, all in one ball
of fire. Easy, it would be to cauterise
this lassitude, here against the lintel,
watching not the rise and fall of your
fish-breath, your insect pulse, but
the immortal trees beyond. Too easy;
but death looked in and turned away,
indifferent, and now it’s down to me,
the blood-bearer, to wish away your life
for you. The house ticks and hums.
A voice calls out, thin and querulous;
another coughs. I turn down your light.
There, against the window, dusk outside,
you are becoming your shadow
cast against the shifting of the trees.
Dick Jones blogs at Patteran Pages and has placed poems in such magazines as Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles and Other Poetry.
Devour
by Arlene Ang
Teeth start out as milk.
What is the child if not an etch
on the kitchen wall? A vertical growth,
as in chocolates and Rice Krispies,
as in the higher the object is from the ground,
the more it acquires velocity during the fall.
The caries begins as sweetness,
a stray kitten mewling to be allowed in.
From enamel to root, the tooth
is consumed. Only later,
the awareness of destruction surfaces.
Pain illuminates the skull. Then amputation.
Afterwards every night begins
with denture fizz, the removal of self-
recognition before the mirror. How the lips
part as if from happiness, trapping
the loss deeper into the face.
Arlene Ang is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She lives in Spinea, Italy where she serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. More of her work may be viewed at leafscape.org.
Scales
by Ron Czerwien
My father keeps shifting
positions, searching for some relief.
From my spare room he calls out
nearly every hour. Each time
I cradle his boney frame
we move together, by increments,
from head to foot and back again
on a rented hospital bed.
I feel his vertebra in the palm of my hand.
The tips of my fingers recall
every delicate bone lifted
from the open bellies of Northern Pike,
Blue Gills, Small Mouth Bass.
Scales on my face and chest,
I scrape the cutting board
with my bloody knife. A pile of entrails
and fish heads. Skeletons
with clinging bits of flesh.
I wrap everything in the local paper
and throw it as hard as I can
in the direction of a gully
slit from end to end by darkness.
At night I wake to his sighs
as the small hands of raccoons
peel back the yellowed newsprint
his skin has become. They run
his bones between their teeth.
Ron Czerwien is the owner of Avol’s, a used and out-of-print bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. His poems have appeared online in Moria, Shampoo, nth position, and other journals. The questions most frequently asked by his customers can be found here.
Aliens Among the Brittle Stars
Our false fins agitate motes
in turquoise sunbeams, in salt
currents that sluice oils
from our skin into the waters
where mantas raise their velvet wings
near a chorus of nun-gray angelfish,
as the shadow of a nurse shark
passes before our masked eyes.
Rush-hush — waves moan above
our bodies, above the delicate life
of brittle starfish we watch crawl
over beds of coral bones.
A former qarrtsiluni co-editor (with Lucy Kempton), Katherine Durham Oldmixon (website) recently edited a special issue of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review dedicated to ekphrastic poetry. Her chapbook Water Signs, a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Award, was released in January 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Katherine lives healthily and happily in Austin, TX, with her husband, Arturo Lomas Garza.
Flight
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Robin Chapman studied the acquisition of speech acts by children for forty years, and now writes poetry. Abundance, winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Award, is her newest book.
Passing
My aunt grew up in Maine close to the tracks. Her bed shook gently. She fell asleep watching branches shadowed on the wall reach for the ceiling, bend, recede.
The summer she stayed with us in Palo Alto, a small earthquake hit and power flickered briefly, off then on. She said the train was running late.
I like to imagine her death came that way: a change in light she could take for something else.
Richard Jordan is a PhD mathematician who works as a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, Redivider, Two Review, and on the Verse Daily website.
At the Hour of Your Death
a chaplain appeared and it was as if
my father, that constant joker,
had waylaid the elegant white-haired
minister we’d envisioned
and herded in a tiny Filipino nun
for our amusement and to lift your despair
over having just died in a hospital’s
generic white gown
with your hair uncombed.
The nun spoke an earnest language,
not quite English, not Roman Catholic,
but full of breathy spaces
where the Holy’s would have gone
if we hadn’t mandated Presbyterian.
We were mesmerized by her quick
index finger, eager to make a sign,
repeatedly reaching out, jerking back,
over your breathless sternum—
Mother Mary so unspoken
she was everywhere.
I could see my father’s fine
Irish hand in this, his knack
for making you and your mirror image
break into laughter
when humidity had panicked your hair
or your hemline had forgotten
to contradict the stock market,
how he would hold out his arm, and
filling the mirrors with emptiness,
sweep you off
into the deep and starry night.
Karen Stromberg favors flash fiction, the ten-minute play and short poetry. She does not accept the boundary between life and death.
Mt. Nebo, Arkansas, late August
by Brent Fisk
There will come a day when the cough won’t fade,
when the shadow on the lung won’t clear.
Now we’re coming home, clipping off the toll booths
one by one. Biopsy results are for Wednesdays, 9 a.m.
Until then you are purely my father buying breakfast
and time, growing drowsy behind the wheel.
Wake up old man and see how the heat blurs the road ahead.
We were lost soon as we crossed on the ferry.
You crave more coffee, another cigarette, ten more
good years of setting up our camper on a concrete pad,
stepping into flip flops on Mt. Nebo and shuffling off
through the acorns and hickories on the way to the public bath.
The hot showers steam the mirror so you don’t see
how ashen you’ve become. Steady on, wobble home
if you can. The daddy-longlegs are flat against the wall.
The mist is burning off over Dardenelle and we take
the switchbacks one by one. All those drop deads
I gave you years ago—I never thought you’d follow through.
Fish out one more pack of Camels, let the cellophane blacken
in the smoking fire. We have interstate to sleep through,
raccoons to rob us blind. So let’s steal one more week of daylight—
dream of winking owls deep in the spruce,
cardinals rising up the thermal mountain, my hand
on your cool shoulder shaking you awake.
Brent Fisk is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. He has work forthcoming in Minnetonka Review, Autumn Sky Poetry, and Rattle. He tells us that this and the other poem of his that we’ll be publishing in this issue are both over a year old, and kind of fell onto the paper they way they are. Poets get lucky like that from time to time.
In the Middle of the Night
by Pat Daneman
No one is there for anyone else. Even though that is what we expected.
All over the city millions of people guarding their worries
like angels. People who don’t deserve worries. People living in boxes.
People inexperienced with the politics of worry—should they go to the window
or into the kitchen? Is it time for a glass of wine?
The disappointing parent would make a list here—
Airplanes arriving or not arriving on time or not arriving at all.
Lumps that might be discovered, lightning bolts that might strike.
At this ridiculous hour the disappointing parent is asleep, alone, or with someone
disturbing. It is the waitress, the public relations doyenne, the ammunition salesman
we need to consult at this moment. Haggard in the light of computer screens,
blue faces, fingers searching for answers to sleep-
withering questions.
Slim and cool, the bare feet of the understudy across the creaking wood floor
of her jealous mother-in-law’s library. Locked in a bathroom the assistant professor
contemplates the shell-pink complexion of his most promising student. They conspire,
water spills. Everywhere, longing. The young talk show producer
whose illness is taking its time. Her lover’s prayers into the sky—
I’m afraid. You must try. Don’t let go. Glasses on nightstands,
magazines slithered away.
Too late to the party last night, nobody ate your cheap cheese. No one cared
that you won the Missouri Award or that your doctor found nothing worth keeping
an eye on. All over the city good hosts, ugly dancers,
bankers with sore necks are writing notes to themselves.
Petting cats. Whistling. Millions of people are lying
awake, tugging at quilts heavy with the must
of ancestral insomnia. As clocks chime, as bells toll,
they send flaming or laundered or half-eaten wishes
like paper boats into darkness. As trucks hurl their weight
down innocent highways. As the earth moves and the sky
is still. As morning approaches.
Pat Daneman has published poetry in The Pedestal Magazine, The Cortland Review, Blood Orange Review, Inkwell, RE:AL, Fresh Water and other small print and online magazines. In 2009, her poem “Thanksgiving,” in The Apple Valley Review, was selected for the Best of the Net Anthology. She has a masters degree in creative writing from Binghamton (NY) University.
The Ground Left Me
This morning I had a heart attack,
gurneyed pale and shirtless O2 mask
past my coworkers. I was crying
when I told you Something’s very wrong
and you squeezed both my numbing hands
before calling help. Inside MedFlight
the ground left me. Touching down Wausau
they thread the stent in 20 minutes
from groin to heart. You and my parents
hugging in my room. And I’m there too.
Brent Goodman (blog) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Brother Swimming Beneath Me (Black Lawrence Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Zone 3, Gulf Coast, Court Green, and elsewhere.
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