#5.1 Three Poems by Emily Kingery
Survival
The husband asks what his wife will do if her lover is in an accident. What if
he is paralyzed and can no longer fill her with anything but remorse? What kind of
life would that be, what kind, what kind of wife is unmoved by the suffering of this
thought experiment? The kind who will click on the interior light of the car to see
your throat muscles, will lick the sweat pearled at your collarbone like elixir
as you uncap the water, puckered and half-drunk in the dark, and drink. The slide
in the park vanishes in the autumn fog when the words tumble down like girls
at play: I swear to God, you are water, you are the air I breathe to survive and you are
water and I will breathe and I will drown. They thrust out and their order repeats
in disorder. Your mouth at the mouth of the bottle, our phones in the glove box,
dead. The husband believes in the kind of survival that requires we saw through
our limbs, eat our own young or force hatchets through our lovers’ chests
to prove our need. He argues over bread and soup that tastes of sick days and
punishment, entertains his own vision of your body gone slack. Winter brings
hardship when it arrives, he says, and the frontier sunrise will not outlast
the burden of what a wife must carry. He asks what kind of wife sees only
the glow of pink in a snowdrift, sees frozen blades of grass and does not
think to cover the rosebushes? The kind who says, I swear to God, you are water and
I will drown when she is thirsty, the kind who hands you something cold to drink
and watches it empty into you, leaving nothing to spare for the miles ahead.
***
Intervention
I have been thinking about the tongue of Kitty Genovese licking marinara from a spoon,
the mouth of her lover after a double shift of naming the liquors lined up at the mirror and laughing at rough jokes of men.
Her tongue convincing when she names the ponies and her hand adjusts the odds, her tongue concealed behind her teeth in her mug shot, behind her teeth in her apartment when the hunting knife opens her lungs.
In the trunk of the murderer’s car, they found a stolen television
and a story ran about that, too, but nothing still
about her tongue. I picture it at her First Communion, accepting a practiced finger in her mouth, pressed like a lesson
while the congregants watched, awaiting the presence of God.
***
Stereopsis
for Daniel
The woman down the street where I live yells look at me when I’m talking to you, and I think of lovers’ eyes darting into corners, over phones, how each eye becomes a dog cowering, each eye takes light that the other eye doesn’t to deepen what is in its way. You’re not looking, she says, and she must believe love is a compound eye, an inhuman organ turned human by a look. Listen, I don’t know her except by her voice after dark, or know the man in her kitchen who may be holding a water glass with his back to the sink, but I know the sadness of look at me is one of a thousand sadnesses: the sky of childhood, a feather lost from a wing mid-flight or cut from Bukowski’s heart, an iris, kings’ velvet, the plastic of someone’s favorite toy released from under a tire. The blue of an old paradise in windows at a museum, windows so wide and so unlike your own sky you devote yourself to glass. The woman is crying, and I don’t know her, but I know you can give your eyes to what they will never comprehend. There is the glass you raise from the faucet when you don’t raise your eyes, and the glass that obliterates, that makes you wish the breakable world could be safe in your hands.
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Emily Kingery is an Associate Professor of English at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, where she teaches courses in literature, writing, and linguistics. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in multiple journals, and she has been both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She serves on the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit organization that supports writers in the Quad Cities community.
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#5.2 Two Poems by Chris Ashby
From The Invisible
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Chris Ashby is a poet and essayist, and is a member of the Spare Room Reading Collective in Portland, OR. Recent poems appear in Oxeye Reader, Dirt Child, and Datableed Zine. With Nate Orton and James Yeary, he has been collaborating on the My Day book project for over ten years. He is also the editor and bookmaker for Couch Press. He works in the woods for a living.
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#5.3 A Poem by Lisa Dominguez Abraham
Bugle and Hoof
When a drunk bicyclist flips off my man, the California utopia flickers.
I watch from the pick-up, tucking our flask into the glove box, unconcerned.
Let them shove mid-street, each sputtering he’s been to prison and is
willing to go back, motherfucker. Let the man in an Audi,
blocked by grappling men, step out and shake his cell phone,
yelling he’ll call the cops. Like me he is Other, insulated from the whine
of a crazed October wind, a tinnitus that flares nostrils and demands
fights as the first scent of snow slices down from the Sierras.
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Lisa Dominguez Abraham’s collection Mata Hari Blows a Kiss won the 2016 Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, and her 2018 book Coyote Logic came out from Blue Oak Press. She has work forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and in the inaugural issue of the Piedmont College journal, COMP.
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#5.4 Two Poems by Megan Burns
Over/Tone
for Laura Mattingly
take this medicine
for the poison is in my body
take this poison
for the medicine is my body
take my hands
for the distance between us is well or not
take this moment
for time is moving about us
we don't know how to step outside
or under yet where the rot of this living can't touch
this veil of forget & i would not forget any of it
is what we open in grief: take this warning
for i have been thrown under the wheels of death
and it's all consuming and has no eyes for backwards glances
take this position beneath me and i would hold you down
to hours we spent walking in the sun and how we never said survive
without laughter and here we are: we are never going to stop moving forward
until we are done. and we are going to be done
but we dance in this season as if undoing
was in the sound all unsaid and unheard
how we small, how we helpless
what matters is the safety of you
and can i make safe
and can i make safe
and can i make it
i want to remember all of it
was my hand in the mud, to the root of it
at the crossroads where we bargain our souls and take plenty
i would believe in anything for you
do you understand to make you safe, i would believe
in anything and move the world itself into patterns of no harm so we could be gentle
we go gently into that love's light of us
***
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
-C. Palahniuk
Observations
for todd
imagine the landscape of recovery: how you become more than human, why are we asked to keep going
complex entanglement simply becomes no entanglement
can you survive an extraction of self, to say we come so far and it matters not, at all. kiss me or don't.
i tried to store minutes of bliss like i coveted can you get me so high i won't feel like myself ever again.
plurality means we come and go, we talk of art a canvas of shouldered wishes, make me desire any of it. i dare i double.
dip dawn into the river, i tell her there has never been a season i did not turn up calling, swallow grief in mouthfuls, my heart drowns, it shatters my heart does all the things but what it should how do you retrieve a body from collapse, how safe is it to follow me to the edge
how could even the universe remain entangled after billions of years
once upon a time i believed in love now it is all chaos. it is all a land older than civilized back in the cave of whispers where sound song birds against light and i am light as a feather, i am going to get free, i am going to sing a way home
do you believe anything is possible if i refuse to be human, what becomes of the mother board wired to a cause like hope you could bucket it down the well, dark moves in a poem written under the same sun, we blister
what if you are not reading the poem what if the poem is reading you, and the code of the world depends on how you translate the poem pulls up inside you what you need and you need the poem to give form, so put this stanza in my hand like a promise
if all we ever did was build a fire, if all we ever did was listen to music, if all we ever did was walk by the river, if all we ever did was eat and laugh and talk and drive by the water, that same water i've lived by all of my simple, meaningless life
do you think i have made something beautiful
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Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She is the co-director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com) and has been hosting the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans for the last six years. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Dream Pop, and Diagram. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has three books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013) and Commitment (2015) published by Lavender Ink. Her recent chapbooks include: her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press, 2016), Beneath the Drift (Red Mare, 2019) and FUCK LOVE: I’m sorry someone hurt you (Shirt Pocket Press, 2019). Her fourth collection, BASIC PROGRAMMING, was published by Lavender Ink in 2018. Her forthcoming collection is called PLURALITY.
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#5.5 Two Poems by John Dorsey
The Prettiest Girl in Barstow, California
for victor clevenger
stares out of an ihop window as middle aged truckers roll in and out of the parking lot of her heart
she smells like coconut oil & maple syrup daydreaming of world peace while eating a pecan waffle
anyone can make a wildflower sound beautiful the way wind brushes against her legs as night settles in next to the highway
but she takes the silence of a cactus blossom to bed with her every night
& the sky goes dim when she is behind closed doors
& where she goes is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
***
The Prettiest Girl in Sheboygan, Wisconsin
is grilling brats in the snow in a tattered rick springfield t-shirt as the school crossing guard falls & slips on some ice next to the local pharmacy
as she dreams of palm trees.
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John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017) and Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
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#5.6 A Poem by Mike James
Anyway, It Was In October, I Think
You can try to make it shorter, I overheard her say. I was already late for the bus. And the bus might be early. So there’s a distraction right on the corner.
Distractions are boredom’s everyday gifts. We rush out the door and realize: No keys. No pants. And, unlike last time, oops, it’s not a dream.
It’s lovely to see who arrives in our dreams. Ron and Nancy dropped in. Ronnie was giving a speech. Nancy was eating a green apple, as she always does.
I never remember what I do in my dreams. Maybe I’m a clown others pretend not to see. Maybe I juggle while others talk or eat.
Juggling is not something I can do in waking life. If I toss something straight up, gravity invariably betrays me. A good toss postpones betrayal. Late arrivals, be damned.
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Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee and has published widely. His many poetry collections include: Red Dirt Souvenir Shop (Analog Submissions), Journeyman’s Suitcase (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), First-Hand Accounts from Made-Up Places (Stubborn Mule), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He served as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review and currently serves as an associate editor of Unbroken.
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Photograph by Michael Stock.
#5.7 A Poem by Doreen Stock
A Noise in the Garden
According to legend, King David tried to postpone the hour of his death by reading God’s law without stopping, knowing that the Angel of Death could not take his soul while he was studying. The Angel got tired of waiting and entered the garden behind the royal palace, where he made a loud noise. Hearing it, David left his studies and went down into the garden by way of some steps to see what it was. One of the steps gave way. The King fell down and was killed instantly…
–––A midrash
Each turn of the head is made into destiny
into the black bush carved silent on the glass
We move and move it is a slow breathless dance, it is dark
and braced with flame at every edge
the stone the fruit the tree globed and iridescent
our tongues are the bells our flesh sweats and screams
When the King turned to watch us
his hour flew from him in heavy bands and awful
wings..
*
At the open gate a dead thrush the children touching its neck
the dirt sifting over its body over the little hairs surrounding its eye
buried by my children until all I could see was the dot of pain that once was its vision
its song was covered its curled feet covered
and night came over the small space and rained down its stars
and sun came over the small space and filled it with the disappearance of meat and the disappearance of effort (such effort as a bird makes to gather its life)
and certain words of the children certain of the orange feathers sent themselves down to flame in all the nearby lilies.
*
What happens to people when they are dead?
you asked on the exact day of your birth at two in the afternoon. Four years old today and the light spilling down the redwood trunks outside our window me in the dining room chair where I then sat to face you in your question your eyes so clear and large black trees glowing in them
just this morning in the dream I pulled a blue knit cap over your bright hair like when you were only two
(and once before we were separated and I called and called you but you answered to a new name
I awoke then thinking of the King)
“Maybe they build houses under the ground,” you said.
Maybe.
I think they grow feathers there, too.”
Do you think so?
“Yes.”
Oh, Ben, the gates of all our days are red and gold. Once upon a time, a winter night, a fast furious brilliant pain inscribed a moment so fine I live toward and away from it always. You and I. Through every darkness. How we come to exist.
Remember.
We shatter the night. We are the green.
*
A silence that passes understand a darkness
then the springing sound of the feet of a bird pushing against the dead leaves
thin light moving down the brown bands of skin
tiny rank radiance of the earth
this before any song.
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Fairfax,California poet and memoir practitioner, Doreen Stock, recently launched Tango Man, a collection of love poems, Finishing Line Press, in August, 2020. Other works include: My Name is Y, an anti-nuclear memoir, February, 2019, Norfolk Press; Three Tales from the Archives of Love, Norfolk Press, 2018, a work of historical fiction; Talking with Marcelo, Mine Gallery Editions in 2017, a book-length interview of Argentine Journalist Marcelo Holot; In Place of Me, Poems edited and introduced by Jack Hirschman, Mine Gallery Editions, 2015; The Politics of Splendor, Alcatraz Editions, Santa Cruz, 1984, poems and translations. An interview and reading of Doreen’s poetry can be viewed online at Marin Poet’s Live! She is a founding member of The Marin Poetry Center. “A Noise in the Garden” is the title poem of a manuscript now seeking publication. For more information: doreenstock.com
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#5.8 A Poem by Marc Olmsted
dirt nap cocktail
(for Vincent)
you drank yourself under
dirt nap cocktails pushing up daisies with broken vein stems
mistrusting the world it took you anyway
L said your hands shook until 3 margaritas 4
to get more than than a word
- the man I never saw drink -
actual student of elder junkies
those Beat masters who cheated the odds
now you shook yourself 6 feet down
dead younger than their passing
the Flash's seizure
vibrating speedy comic book
through the tomb
of gothic Poe's despairing worms
of macho Hemingway's shotgun
of mystic Kerouac's ruptured speech
vomiting into the bloody toilet
of paint-spattered Pollock's carcrash
& the OD's of a hundred thousand cherubim
all broken idiot children
blind fish in the cave of the Wheel
grinding all the worlds
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Marc Olmsted has appeared in City Lights Journal, New Directions in Prose & Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and a variety of small presses. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including What Use Am I a Hungry Ghost?, which has an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Olmsted's 25 year relationship with Ginsberg is chronicled in his Beatdom Books memoir Don't Hesitate: Knowing Allen Ginsberg 1972-1997 - Letters and Recollections, available on Amazon. For more of his work, http://www.marcolmsted.com/
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#5.9 A Poem by Clay Cantrell
Remorse
Down the interstate we feel each other loose limbs flash along the cars and jailed in this reverse column and important time tires have mapped out the death of a community have swept into the septic nostalgia new jails new roads a doghouse bereft of food a house bereft of live people who might chug pout or primrose roads with rubber shoes and think of popular felons drunken tulips drift by a firebird’s back window lemon zest hits the tongue amid a toxic baptism o lovely present wash out the exile we’ve already stunted the prey yonder later among the cypress o lonely woman the interstate stings us with its loud chorus and I am too limp to speak without your touch it glimmers like a double-sun against dirty memories I understand how other people cast their bodies to river to float from high bluffs when you sleep with your new husband under this new and gray sky I hope you recover your capacity for air transduce the road hum to violin fractures and fly along the new exit ramps
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Clay Cantrell holds an MFA from the University of Memphis. He is the author of the Landfill Poems (Red Dirt Press) and Spooling the Luminous Junk (BOAAT Press). He lives in Memphis and edits environmental reports.
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#5.10 Two Poems by Jeffrey Hermann
Someone Who Believes in You
You can fail algebra and English in the same year and still make something of yourself. For instance I’ve noticed that hot water poured into a cup sounds different than cold water. Softer, more inviting And it’s always someone’s job to sweep the floor after everyone’s left the banquet hall. That brides claim the unexpectedly beautiful days for themselves feels like a sprig of selfish hope we can all learn from, even though the galaxy is awash, completely backed up with unclaimed days. Days you’re awoken by sirens or weeping on the phone, days that have rained actual sludge from the sky. If you’re ever arrested, promise you’ll take a moment to admire how the clouds have parted the quality the light has taken on, liquid and cool, a quality that transmutes even the jet-black paint of the squad car Call that a fresh start. I once told a girl she had eyes like a cow’s eyes. I was 16, high school. My grades were poor I meant they were beautiful. Long lashed, dark and deep
***
In Love for Real
There are laws against issuing fake weather reports that come with a jail sentence. Just a light one And you can’t trade wheat commodities on Good Friday. There’s a fine. They change the rules in baseball whenever they like Batters once had the privilege of calling for the pitch they wanted, high or low. The pitcher would acquiesce Now catchers speak with their hands, saying slider, my darling; cuuuurrrrve ball We assume it’s limited to what pitch to throw but who knows what they might confide out there Sometimes he’ll even come to the mound whisper behind his glove. Tell me it’s all knuckleballs and changeups. Tell me you wouldn’t love to know
Are there guidelines about how many corduroy shirts one man should own? I count 16, but not all at once, of course. Lifetime total
God it’s really pouring out today Buckets. They said there’d be sun and we had planned a picnic But now we watch from the window our minds wandering while the street acquiesces becomes a little stream Pine needles, a paper cup, little stones gather at the end of the road It’s nothing anyone should do time for, this deluge It’s only the lawn full of rain, only sandwiches uneaten in a basket, white wine warming on the counter The dog is closing his eyes, tired of the bone Which is when I lean in and touch your thigh and you know I would fry an egg for you at 2 am if you asked Or even if you didn’t, just looked at me a certain way Or apricot jam. Certainly we can agree on apricot jam with a spoon, straight from the jar
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Jeffrey Hermann's work has appeared in Hobart, Palette Poetry, Pank Magazine, Juked, The Shore, and other publications. He received a Pushcart nomination in 2018 from Juked Magazine.
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