Fall 2021
Issue 12
poetry
GHOSTS OF HAMPTON COURT PALACE
The closed-circuit TV found
more fruit than flowers.
Gray mists above the floor
hidden rooms with spinning wheels
shadows in top hats. Ghost dogs.
Hands with glowing rings knocking on doors.
The video shows me standing in the entrance
one spectral hand on the knob
dumbstruck, ashen-faced.
So much has changed.
Why should I leave?
Where would I go?
Life is so difficult.
Someone’s always tip-tapping
across the floor stones
looking for her head.
SALAMANDERS OF THE SUN
i.
Lucky, aren’t we, tooling around reality?
A green, a blue reflective surface.
It has enlightenment, if you look deeply.
I am part of all this forgetting.
ii.
Happy you know me, fire.
Thank you for growing the Earth.
Who is the rabbit and who is the hawk?
Washed and reborn in the sun.
How strange what’s outside is inside.
iii.
Ibis and wood stork and egret and crane.
Mockingbird drinking water from a trough in the aloe leaf.
—Sam Cherubin
Dangles and Spangles
Hardly a crystalline dawn,
the rain is critiquing winter
in terms a child would enjoy.
You sometimes act posthumous,
cleaning the cat box or sifting
black oil seed for chickadees.
You web the available space
with senses I’ve never sprouted
but envy for their precision.
Today we’re supposed to stand
by the highway, bearing witness
with signs promoting peace but
enraging drivers who lust
for a nuclear apocalypse
to wholesale them to their god.
The rain seems sure of itself.
Its dangles and spangles brim.
Our local brook will erupt
into basements in the flood plain
where dogs will try to bark it back
between its leathery banks.
The voice of the rain reiterates
familiar phrases rather
than dredge original syntax
from thick old comforts of cloud.
Such hostile luxury forbids
our casual participation.
Even you with your angles
arranged to accommodate
must retract your tentacles.
Let’s toast some toast and pretend
this is the apotheosis
for which plain landscapes prepare.
—William Doreski
[AS FLUNG GLOVES]
We hurl prairie dresses, too small for even
the tiny sister, stained pink, reddish at the
cuffs, down the garbage chute (and little
Bessie says, I used to fear the devil), drifting
through the corrupt breath of a machine born
to burn indiscriminately: (then I realized
I had already swallowed him).
[THE DARK'S RAGBAG]
Crows perch nearer to my window, humming.
Once, I saw a sticker of a raven on a laptop,
ruffled feathers like a spatter of ash, a splatter
of black paint with yellow eyes. When they see
me drawn to the glass, they pause, slowly turn
away in the air. Hover in the gusts above
a neighbor’s house: now everything not nailed
down is covered with husks, rags blown from
the street, plastic planters whisked back and forth
by the wind. Here’s the emptiness – just before spring.
[THE SKY'S FAR DOME]
The pond is disappearing into the earth, you say, but
I saw how it returned last June, a dark swimming pool
filling in slow motion, deer swarming and entering
the soft edges. The sun rises like a hole in the sky –
to blind and push the weak. On TV, a white man’s face
looks captive, suffering. Blood pools from beneath
his hat and streaks downward. I wish you lived in this
century, I told you once. When a woman feels something
moving inside her, her eyes move skyward. In your absence
tonight, I cannot sleep.
Titles are lines from Sylvia Plath’s Blue Moles.
—Christine E. Hamm
DUSK
Alone, watching the empty sky,
an abandoned turquoise plain.
Who threw it open, poured a dye
on the earth, color of a whiskey stain?
The Georgia summer sketched in charcoal.
Scratch in the flinching bats. A train
in the distance mourns the sun’s buried coil.
Fireflies pulse. Here is their love.
A bird tramps the leaves. The soil
crawls with howling insects. Now above
the rising moon could be hollow. The sight
recalls, with a shock, what you had dreamed of:
An unknown ancestor, delirious, dying with the evening light,
held out a hand to you and said: Here. Take it. Here is the Night.
—Bryan Edward Helton
THE OWL THEORY
Leaving isn’t always loud,
your departure was as quiet
as the rose petals in my bible,
fluttering to the ground, their
translucent wings barely audible,
soft violins playing
to the quiet night.
—Layla Lenhardt
WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE
1. recipe: crab salad and dump cake
2. wherein I’m naked in a stark-barren field, surrounded by black, Novembered trees; standard-issue, late-90s bush modestly obscured by my mother’s folded hands, as if in prayer to the spirits that always inhabited her, for some reason, as the moon; her face exploded into my belly, hips, and right thigh; the remnants of her high cheekbones and lined lips hovering my navel, a hole to nowhere; my hands rolled into fists stuffed with ferns and tulip-tree petals; the havoc of the wind
3. Corsicana Daily Sun, Monday, April 8, 1968
4. the price of a bushel of apples, of peaches, of cherries, of pumpkins fed with milk in the years before I was born
5. in the wet heat of August, the pores of her skin sidle up to every exotic draught of Michigan wind allowed through the orchard branches; there are new kittens sunning in the drive and she watches as men hang slick tubes of bratwurst over clothesline; she wanders the orchard peering through the windows of the workers’ cabins, running her hands over the scattered tractors, cherry-pickers, marvels over the decadent evil of the reaper’s trailer; she asks someone where the foreman the boss or whoever hires people is and he leads her to my father weaving wire through a broken bushel basket
—Nicole Mason
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
My five-year-old grandson carries a Brontosaurus
backpack with his orange lunch, a bottle of water
and an extra pair of pull ups, just in case.
He hops on the bus and settles in his usual seat,
holding a toy, perhaps the green engine Percy
or maybe his bright blue monster truck.
When my son went to overnight camp, he hid
his GI Joe with a Kung Fu Grip under the shirts
and pants and sweaters in his suitcase.
He hoped I wasn’t looking, it was too babyish.
Later he told me he shared a cabin with Jeremy
who brought a stuffed cougar with only one ear.
I took three I Heart You bears to college
to put on my bed. Others brought Ginny dolls
pretending they were cute decorations,
matching their new ruffled bedspreads. But
we knew we all needed a seed of the familiar
in order to safely leave home.
When she was older than old, stooped back,
half mast mind, painful bunions on both big toes,
my grandmother announced she wanted photos
of her husband, her four children and all seven
grandkids buried with her, along with
her saucy crimson heels, just in case.
—Claire Scott
OFFICER, I’VE COMMITTED A CAPITAL OFFENSE
i.
every day i sell my brain
to a man who would pry
the bark from a dog
just to flip it
i can’t afford not too
ii.
/ last night
a crow cawed above my tree
pose / i thought for certain
it was a sign i would advance
further in my career path /
iii.
( every morning my youngest black cat
scratches at the window
longing to return
to the natural world / i keep her from
iv.
when i clocked in
/ i asked my boss
how much he would pay / for my head
/ he tossed a mouse at my feet
i brought it home /
for my cat to eat
—taylor d. waring
CROW SONG
You remember frost-glow mornings,
when Earth sparkled, diamond-encrusted.
Your mother would drive you to school
in a sleepy haze, the car a warm pod against
the cool wake-up air. You look through the car
window; the farmer down the street lined
his driveway with the corpses of black birds,
shot dead. The sunlight glancing across their feathers:
you could find gold at the end of their rainbow.
You cawed for them.
Twilight-dusted evenings found you lying in upturned
dirt on the bulldozed foundation where your dad planned
to build a new home. Your fists clenched around loose
seeds you scooped from your mother’s feeders—meals
meant for finches and cardinals; the “friendly” birds.
Cross-legged and statued, you sit, palms open and sweating,
offering. Trained to welcome a flutter, now you welcome a
murder. They come, bills selecting individual millets like tweezers.
They feast in your stillness until a passing truck disrupts,
sends them up like feathered fireworks into the day’s last
rays. You cawed for them.
The farmer’s garden was scavenged. Pecked tomatoes winked
at him, browning edges of torn flesh. He massacred
the murder, then took string and noosed it around the neck
of a not-quite-dead. You witness: the way the bird flapped,
weak-winged against him, rattled in its rough alto.
He let it hang for weeks, strung up in his maple tree,
a warning. You cawed for them.
Years later, after the farmer has passed, they followed you to college.
Staring out the library window, you see them gather:
black spots on a green lawn. They dazzle in the daylight, and your muscles
contract. You run, you must protect—disperse them before they are murdered,
by a farmer or each other. You burst into the yard and they erupt
charcoal to the sky. They caw for you.
—Sam Campbell
TELLING THE BEES
Someone has to do the thing,
to say the words aloud
to the hive in the eaves⸺
“The lady of the house has died.”
This house has become
an empty, withered flower
at the mercy of every storm
that threatens to darken the sky,
to break stems in its hard grasp.
As girls, we blew dandelion seeds
into the wind
and set our wishes free
under summer clouds.
Who can say
what is planted?
What is eaten,
or harvested,
or drowned in puddles?
Everything is a circle
of fire within
a circle of fire.
The dry earth holds our bones
inside of it like a mother
who keeps baby teeth
secreted away in her sewing drawer.
She has to remind herself
that we were small once,
and all of us could fit safely
inside the circle of her arms.
—Amber Decker
OBITUARY.
i hold my son’s hand
as we shelter in the museum
because summer is here
and i sympathize
with the mummies,
with their need for
unrelenting chill.
“that dinosaur has
three horns,” he says,
and he chews on his lip
then:
“but we don’t know
if he was purple or blue
or maybe rainbow?”
yes, maybe rainbow.
it is a wonder to me
that he can already
see
blackened bones
may sketch
the shape of a thing,
there are still
gaps and shadows
where the heart
must have been.
—Elisheva Fox
PINING FOR HOME
Draped over water’s edge at dusk, branches needle
Poquito Bayou. A lonesome stand of Florida pines
faces a deciduous tree line dotted with civilization.
A bridge span, cell tower, low-rise condos and homes
border the scene. A sunset’s sienna reflections ripple
as mellow waters fade to shadowed charcoal inshore.
In loblolly shade, two legs dangle from exposed root.
Feet dip into the brackish border of land and water,
like bait on thick fishing line, to snag a lost memory.
A splash of feet speak: we knew a time before
the plunder. We never walked today’s agglomeration
of boat-docked, fenced-in, hefty waterfront homes.
The body remembers how we traced sandy trails
to secret fishing holes and caught unearthly creatures.
It remembers how we held a bat in knee-deep water,
hit a tennis ball into blue and bolted like barracuda
to imaginary bases. It remembers racing to the island,
lazing on the dock—before Opal washed them away.
The body remembers how dolphins evaded our chase
with out-of-reach breaches and leaps. It remembers
watching walls of wet weather wash in. It remembers
the weight of rain. The body remembers handfuls
of goopy, soft, scooped-up and tossed baby jellyfish
and the fierce sting of grown ones nettled into flesh.
The body remembers what left; how we moved away:
people, pines, an indigenous playground. In darkness,
legs lift from a root and feet shuffle in salted sand.
In the lonesome, in still waters, in the dusk of life—
memories reside. A soul ponders how pine roots run
so deep in sand, revels in the briny weight of rain.
Isn’t that the way from birth? We feel our way home.
—Lisa Kamolnick
FAR FROM THE TREE
Orange clouds: not sunset,
but Manila burning in the distance.
You and your mother fled to Taal
through coconut groves that night.
From the bottom of a ravine
you heard the people screaming
flushed from sugar cane fields
on fire, shot as they ran out.
How did you get through that night?
How can I be brave like you
when just entering a room
full of people frightens me?
They might as well be coconut palms
looming in the dark.
Nada you’ll say to me, your shorthand
for You’ve got this. Easy for you to say.
You played ball with your father’s ghost
when you were only three.
—Cristinia Legarda
IN THE FIRST ROW OF THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL
A week after his departure, she sits on the aisle,
so everyone who eulogizes can reach her hand
after descending the marble steps, nod in sync
with her pillboxed head, as the choir sings
“The Battle Hymn’s” second verse.
No matter how many times she bows her chin,
turns to cheek a well-wisher’s lips, tears up
during a reading from Corinthians, that hat—
black, inlayed, its gentle leaves beginning to vine
down her neck—does not budge, so stubborn
the securing pins are to her scalp, her stoicism.
She doesn’t even recall dressing for today, who
suggested the hat, its asymmetry and distraction.
Still, how fitting it would be, she thinks, if he could
unfasten it now, a Chantilly Frisbee he could pilot
toward the tabernacle, spontaneous, charming,
so soon, from the pews all would rise in a long-armed
wave like at the baseball game, his laughs escaping
from the mahogany casket and bouncing along
the grand chamber.
Hours from now, when relatives have turned on
the college game and encouraged her to eat
a room-service sandwich, she will excuse herself
to draw a bath, disrobe, the week a black mound
in the room’s corner, and she will try to break free,
fingering the hat pins, her head—shaking back,
left, up, again—trying, too, all while she lowers
into the filling water, wishing her fingers
teeth—
his teeth that bit open the Mae West jacket
after his Skyhawk was shot down, his arms
and leg too fractured to assist, those teeth
preserving his life and rising him to the water’s
surface,
those teeth that could rip the hat in one motion,
smile at her relief, mouth her name one last
time, those teeth
her pruning fingers float out of the water for, past
the void on her head, and into his air.
—Amy Lerman
ARS POETICA: AS ARCHAEOLOGIST
I scout for the wreckage:
Bone embedded in soil,
pot shard shaped once by
human hands, now smooth calcium
nestled deep inside earth’s
muddy pocket. My hands submit
to their memorized posture:
The constant cupping,
wrists ladling sand
like life-saving soup,
dumping this bounty
into a sieved bowl
that betrays inconspicuous
grains, revealing, eventually,
some lithic totem,
some evidence I existed before
my first breath, before reaching
for my first wound. I long
for the brown specks
that camouflaged my primordial
skin before I learned skin lured
predators, before I adapted
to this world’s fear. A steady
sun beats down on my digging,
but my limbs refuse rest.
Excavation is its own kind
of gift: The ordering, classifying,
naming what history forgets.
—L. Renée
PANDEMIC LITANY FOR LATE SPRING
Another morning slips through the window like a need,
like a need for dogs, for nicotine, like a need for caffeine
and Dolly Parton songs. I want the birds to riot all the time.
The need for the screech of bluejays, the chirps of titmice.
The blur of blood red when cardinals fight for their seats
on my fence. Outside the window the neighbor’s roses droop
with aphids, the rabbits grind the garden lettuce and starlings
steal the tomatoes. The groundhog tunnels the backyard
into a maze game. The hawk surveys and shrieks
from the sycamore. This need we have to tame it all,
to own it: backyards, gardens, our neighbors. This need
to sing Dolly’s pretty tunes until we are cuffed mid-verse
by the fist fight of her lyrics: betrayal, sorrow,
astonishment: a woman walks out on her husband
and kids. This pig-headedness of the mockingbirds
who bully the bluebirds out of the puddles, chase
the crow with something gold pinched in his beak.
This need to break the glass, flee the malady, the malaise.
Watching from the window I long to live with the murder
of crows who patrol the skies. I pray for murmuration.