Issue #32.3 A Triple Issue: Sara Eddy, Brandon Shane, Bill Keen
A Poem by Sara Eddy
I Make Men Cry
It happens again. This one shows me photos of old friends, and surprised by the image of someone now dead, his eyes fill. Another man cries in a public park
over a lost love, another in a side room at a noisy party over the trauma of being awkward in college. I’m not sure how I provoke this.
It feels powerful, pheromones or vibes. Essential, a Cassandra-gift, that some lonely demi-goddess should have the power to make men feel things.
A strong large man sheds tears in a hotel bar about the children I will never bear for him. Once, in a busy cafe, tears
during a story about Neil Armstrong. More tears on a sidewalk about people who leave while their dogs are put down,
who don’t hold them in their strong arms and say goodbye. Who failed to hold these men in strong arms? Why don’t they hold themselves?
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Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
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A Poem by Brandon Shane
Creek Dogs
The creek dogs want me dead, stepping over cement lines, they know I have given gin to an alcoholic and kept her alive one shot at a time.
I’m too lost to care, bagboys regard me as compatriot among repeatedly scanned items, and them, something else becoming something better, while I am figurine in jostling glass.
I wander over tiles light as the ceilings and aisles, another item on the shelf, to eat or leave idle, to say I want it alone when it could really be anything else.
The alcoholic asks me for alcohol, just another shot. I just need to make it through: I tilt the bottle into a cup small enough for a single breath that professes my love.
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Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, One Art Poetry, Sontag Mag, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English. Find him on Twitter @ HalfTheLobster
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A Poem by Bill Keen
Once More?
I contemplate the bobber on the water. It is as still as a friend’s prayer at meeting. Connected to its moment by monofilament I sit as if I were asleep.
A gust of North wind roils the surface into ridges. In the furrow the bobber dances, dances, dropping its seed into the darkness perhaps to lure forth one more wish, one more harvest from the mystery before I lose the day’s last light.
As suddenly as the wind came upon me it dies. Placidity prevails, a perfect crust of ice on new fallen snow at dawn untouched by even an insect’s wing. My bobber is a still as a friend’s prayer.
Retrieve. . . retrieve . . . a small voice urges me, unfed need dueling with sense, to cast again, to cast again. But I am wearier than I thought and it is accident time, accident time. The uncast line is better, much better. There is something hungry in the water.
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“I am William Parker Keen (Bill Keen), Professor Emeritus of English from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, PA. During my graduate school days I spent two years at LSU (1959-1961)., learned to love gumbo, dark roast coffee, oyster po-boys, and zydeco music. I’m a dedicated reader of James Lee Burke’s novels. A couple of years back I visited the Bayou Teche.”
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