Issue #32.4 A Triple Issue: Jane Ann Fuller, Kate Efimochkina, Marco Visciolaccio,
A Poem by Jane Ann Fuller
Houses
“The body is a temple, a house with many windows opening.” Mary P. at the Thursday meeting.
After you killed yourself, and after my house burned to the ground, I built this house with a bathroom window, wide and low, so I could watch the yard and soak it all in. I've tried to make sense of the wren’s attempts to please his mixed up mate with nests in half-dried ferns or in a birdhouse gourd painted cobalt blue. It spun in the breeze like a piñata, moss spilling out, dried shell of a life, once a belly packed with seed.
She enters and leaves so many times. She can’t choose. Or if she does, I never see the evidence. It’s like the world
can’t give more than it takes. How things must work to survive. The woodpecker wraps a long, sticky tongue around its own bright skull to keep its brains from spilling out,
then hammers shagbark hickories all the way up the trunk. I watch until it works on me like a therapy which doesn’t last. Late fall in the yard, the cosmos gone to seed, red and orange zinnias turned to sepia and gloom. Winter, another kind of dead
resurrection, the season that comes with church basement meetings, steps to work, black coffee, store-bought pinwheel cookies, prayer with strangers who say things I want to believe.
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Jane Ann Fuller is a poet from southeastern Ohio whose book Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. A Best of the Net nominee, Fuller is a recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize. You can find her poems in Anacapa Review, Bear Review, BODY, Calyx, Ekphrastic Review, Hunger Mountain, Main Street Rag, Shenandoah, and many other literary journals. Her new manuscript Darkened Window was a semi-finalist for the Washington Prize and is still looking for a home. Find more work at janeannfullerpoetry.com.
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A Poem by Kate Efimochkina
Mother-of-pearl
Balconies, enveloped in mother-of-pearl. A vineyard and a cemetery across the river. Just one curve along the road. A wooden Jesus in the church. I looked at him until the priest quietly came out and stood behind me. He thought I was praying. But I was just watching, as I’d done a thousand times before. It was getting dark outside. It was early, very early spring with all its frenzy. The asphalt road, the trees ready to bud, the smell of dust heated by the day. Grinzing. I did not pay the fare. On my way back, I saw two people shaking a cigarette machine on a dark street.
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Kate Efimochkina is a writer and artist. You can see her work in Stone Circle Review, Lamp Lit, The Turning Leaf Journal, among others. She is the founder and editor of Odd Lobster.
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A Poem by Marco Visciolaccio
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Marco Visciolaccio is an author in Asheville, North Carolina. He edits Flash Fiction for French Broads Lit, a publication celebrating authors in Southern Appalachia. His work can be found in Johnny America, Frazzled Lit, and elsewhere. He yearns for the unsolicited email. Site: visciolaccio.com
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