Issue 1 - Spring 2016
poetry
WHAT THE CREEK SAYS
You look to the clouds
To the blue blankness overhead
Cross yourselves, fall to your knees
Talk to sharp shards of stars
Brittle black emptiness.
No, look down at your toes in the silt:
God says “Good morning.”
His creatures waste no time looking up.
The rippling speech of the creek,
The rhythmic grinding of the foraging cows,
Heads all bowed to their green communion,
Are the liturgy and homily of this, the richest cathedral.
When everything else has changed, even the heavens,
I have not. I will stay water, no matter what comes.
There is a reason I am ritual,
Every kind of metaphor,
The only balm for every kind of sore.
—RITA QUILLEN
“WHAT DO YOU CARE ABOUT?”
—political leaflet
always words—not these
tattooed on a page but those
I couldn’t speak as I sat alone &
buried my face in gravel
on the playground
hoping no one noticed
hoping someone did
then in high school
winding the corridors
silent as if after a betrayal
my mouth was a glue trap
from which those hissing
monstrous spiders couldn’t flee
later too in bars & coffee shops
at home under yellow lights
not even to my wife
or those I swore I loved
I left my voice
in a bottle corked
I threw it far into the empty sea
“WHAT ARE THE ISSUES THAT MATTER TO YOU?”
—political leaflet
Grace sends pictures of her orchids
in their second bloom, not pink or violet
but the color of lips stained by cotton candy.
How long she fretted, flooding them,
fearing they’d die unnoticed on a windowsill.
I’m responding with a message
of praise & awe when my mother calls,
tells me her SUV overheated
forty miles from Fayetteville.
She doesn’t need a ride, she says.
The tow truck driver will take her
where she’s going. I sense a chasm
has opened underneath her feet.
I envision her falling as she speaks,
wait for her to rise again like orchids.
Two different images—I know
these are the things that matter:
what lives on, what crumbles,
what sings, & what’s then rent
upon the rocks. Why do we want
a world without such complications?
Every orchid is a phoenix flower,
meant to fade then blaze from ash.
Cars will fail & be rebuilt, as we will.
Each next step’s a mystery, &
sometimes, far from home, a busted hose.
—ACE BOGGESS
FOURTH OF JULY, NECAISE CROSSING BASEBALL FIELD, NECAISE CROSSING, MISSISSIPPI
It’s a solid hour before dark. Columns of blue balloons & speakers flank a flatbed stage. The pastor’s pulpit sits before a background of red cellophane stripes, white Christmas lights. Our children are running from third, to second, to first to home. The pines haven’t silhouetted into the horizon, the flag bearers haven’t mounted, the concession stand is open. The black stacks of woofers and tweeters pulse
with Brother Kevin’s thanks to Steep Hollow’s fire volunteers for keeping watch over the outfield, thanks to Miss Gay’s Gayla Productions for bunting, and he leads our pledge as heavy hooves cut into infield clay, stand ready to leave
the field. The Shiloh Baptist youth choir sings four hymns. I hear every word, without their voices. Cotton flags are sewn to their pockets. Is that the best looking choir you ever seen, Brother Kevin asks, as day fades. You know, the liberty bell can ring the story of our nation’s independence, but only the ringing of Gabriel’s trumpet will bring eternal freedom. When our Savior comes, we want you to be free. As the lights click and fade, children take seats along the chalklines,
the concession stands drop their plywood shutters. Lawn chairs turn toward right field, follow the progress of deacons running with flares.
—BRENT HOUSE
PROLOGUE
In the beginning, black. It's the old story—ink.
And then there was a growing out of it,
rip and bloom and a bird unwrapping her wings
one from another. There was a world to grow into.
In the beginning came animals not two-by-two,
but one. Discreet. From the one
came caring and anger and water and soil.
From the one came another.
Here he is, a black bear with wings to cover
the sun or the moon or the bed where you sleep.
SISTER STORY
When we were very small, we bounded
toward any sound that sounded.
Now we know:
quick atop the vole frantic in the sod root
away away the rattlesnake shake
avoid the tar-smell of the big road
follow Mama on the hunt until she sends
us out, out to wings to circle on
slow and low toward Oolie just landed in the big field.
The other thing we have to know
is how to find each other.
OOLIE’S STORY
The flying is best at night. The stars
or the absence of stars. The woolen blanket of August heat
or the sheet of sheer February freeze in my lungs.
I say night. But then I think of dawn, the red swell the earth
kicks up on the horizon. I think of early afternoon,
when I can swallow ten thousand gall gnats at a pass.
Early evening, when the chimney swifts column through the mist
settling over Liveszy Lake, rising over the land then falling,
arrowed ground-ward again. There is flight at noon, blinded,
flight just before noon, glazed. It is all my luck to be above it all.
I believe in your power, too, you little ones.
I believe in your hearts, the stretch of your hearts
out toward me, but I do not know how to reach in return
without slicing you bone deep. I do not know how
the two of us can ever meet without breaking.
—ABBY CHEW
THIS IS THE WAY
The morning the canyon opened,
its roaring water thundering and
its mist rising through rose light
carrying sweet white azalea into black,
the world could have been saying
It’s your time to go, and I would have,
except that too few of us have ever
stepped in a river powerful enough to pin
a body to the bottom, or emerged
at day’s end atop a rock cliff—
the river but a single lost thread below,
buzzards sweeping up and out
and over where you have just been:
this is the way it will be when you are
not looking, when you are pulled
backwards and up as if by a string.
Yes, the world is ending. It is ending
every day, and our feet are not even wet.
—BILL KING
THE LANCING
The body loses glamour on tabletop, arms
splayed like a leafless tree, sleeves
pushed aside to naked flesh. There is no chance
of the doctor and patient fucking. He has seen
too soon the way she shudders at pain, he can
imagine how she looks during joy
and it makes the needle almost like he pushes
the thought from his head, concentrates on puckering
redness, squeezing it purple. Small talk
is no use. When people die, he thinks, what can
we say? Nothing matters then; nothing except
the speed of blood and finding a way to cup the spill.
—DENISE K. JAMES
ELEGY WITH A MOUNTAIN DOCTOR RIDING HOME FROM A STILLBIRTH
The breach was as challenging to turn as a stubborn horse.
Almost as impossible as deciding not to weep on horseback
because tears freeze. As the Bible explains: a time for crying.
His horse is as black as the centers of a brand-new doll’s eyes,
a blue-black like the absence of moonlight on a grove of laurel.
He admired the actions of beasts before the dead child came,
for an animal body, any animal or human, is supple to a point.
This boy arrived as a knapsack of forceps fractures. Dead was
when he conceded, though defeat preceded the pronouncement.
If he was ever excited by the possibilities, he’s deflated now,
recalling arterial flow soaking a mattress in a flood of failure,
the man he had been reminded again what we’re at war with
and who is, and isn’t, winning. It is either late, or very early.
No language for how the glow from a fireplace stirs shadows.
He hears D.V. as he passes on his way out. Mounts the horse.
If what we do reveals us, he’s one taking rein to keep going.
As from some afterlife, snow thickets breathe gray. Silver.
He rides in a sleep-deprived hallucination in which it drops
into the saddle behind, an apparition talking with a voice
borrowed from the antechamber of a tomb. He rides on.
—ROY BENTLEY
IMBROGLIO
I.
Between winter’s shut window
and sheets of plastic insulation
the husks of summer flies
glint neon
their battering the screen
a memory.
A preternaturally large
crane fly straddles the screen
sealed in death.
As we sleep kerosene’s blue element
burns captive in our midst.
II.
When I came to you
in love
in love with love
there was no window
only
blind walls of adamant
oak aged to coffee brown.
I wanted smells
May’s perennial of perennials
the fat-headed peonies
July’s hot earth
autumn’s ferment of fallen apples.
My friend opened your wall.
The wood scorched his circular blade.
I have my window scents
and
I have sun in see-through woods.
I have sheets of August rain
when fury rakes
white across the sky.
III.
You tape us closed in autumn.
I am sealed one among our mingled things
my teacher pantsuits and skirts
your jeans and your coat
sheepskin embroidered with sweet mildew
your boot with its tongue askew
your nub of chewing gum on the windowsill.
You say the plastic will keep out the cold.
IV.
You say, The plastic will always.
You say, You will never.
Inside the low coal cramp of you
eating the wounded fruit of you
I know I
alone
see the best in you.
You say, One day I will tell you why.
You say I do nothing right.
V.
I am afraid of you. I want you.
I live in your walls. I am your captive heat.
Your wall has been cut.
You are not true.
—FAITH HOLSAERT
ENGLISH 101 SECTION J AT THE START OF MONSOON SEASON
There are men who have been rickshaw drivers
so long they walk like men in high weeds
their prayers flat rocks thrown into the sky,
men who have compressed their brains so long
with brick loads their pleas are particles
of skull, rising hushedly as dust specks.
In my English 101 class one raining afternoon
the students pondered chip off the old block.
Your father is the block, I said,
and if you resemble him,
you are the chip.
And who wields the ax said the one
who came the furtherest. Tonight,
by bus, he will return to a village
water has expunged five times,
not even a blip on MSN,
and where his father points his chin
at a river primarily half full one day,
and primarily full the day after.
He will tell them there are words between words
and an assembly of meaning in riven wood.
It is not important to the idiom, I say.
Decide now if you are a chip off the old block,
please, and answer in complete sentences,
I am/am not a chip off the old block because…
Outside our windows a transformer blew,
flashed like a stealth bomb
and all the copybooks
fell into half darkness.
In the silence,
devoid of the usual
neighborly translations,
I could hear the outlandish dreams
of their fathers inside them
humming politely,
humming famously.
—DORIE LARUE
MAY-DECEMBER
When she was twenty and he was forty
he equaled everything she wanted in a man.
Her father, a geologist descended from Rabbis,
had seen fissured gaps that would crack into ravines –
rocks don’t fracture all at once, the process
is immeasurable to the human eye,
he explained in echoed German.
But she was Spring, flirty in organza, full
of promises. With sunlight and naiveté
gathered into her wedding dress,
she breezed brightly into his prime.
When the baby came they gave her a name
that means noble, for surely they were king and queen.
Thought about setting up a bottled lightning stand,
but couldn’t settle on a price for pricelessness.
They jumped back and forth across the crevice
of themselves for thirty years; eventually,
he was more like a father than a husband.
She got sick of old records and old ideas,
stumbled around disagreements scattered
through the house like used furniture.
First, stress fractures in varying directions –
small cracks accumulate with time.
Then shearing, textured shapes,
Scherkluft, like compression in the gut ¾
irreversible strain wherein the element breaks.
This is what she’s thinking about in the hospital room
at the bottom of their canyon. Winter is lonely,
quieter than she remembers, more bare, fewer
places for shelter. Spring too had settled down,
stood on the edge of summer and traded
like a native – white daisies and sun for
harvest leaves flaring red, then fading brown.
—MICHELLE LYLE
SHADOWBOXING THE SHAMAN
The raven appears, conjured
out of coal and spirited to the snowfield.
She’s almost invisible, the sun behind her,
and she extends a wing, asks
if you’re still paying attention,
mentions the squirrels knocking snow
out of the spruce, and can you see
those willow buds swelling?
This must be a dream, the white so deep
it’s almost black, and the riverside air so warm.
Her other wing waves, a half-flap,
behavior that makes sense but accomplishes
nothing. How did you get here? she asks,
eyes like a chip of tiger beetle carapace,
Where did you come from, to be standing
hip-deep in an edgeless, opal field?
She prods you on what feels like your shoulder,
so you turn, turn, and keep going around
for a while: trees, then not, then mountains
cut by a river, and she asks, Where are you going?
just as you come back around, again,
coal clucking at you and the wheel of your feet
—JAMES ENGELHAR
MOONSHINE
We broke the bread.
It was all we knew how to do.
Waking up from another war, my grandfather
went straight to salvaging.
Through yolk and bone, through my grandmother’s spirits
in all their swollen bottles.
He strung her teeth up like windchimes,
all her tea bags across the cellar door.
Outside the bullets lunged and still he would not stop
from gathering everything she had loved.
We kneaded and sang, each pulse of the dough
like memories to us.
If anyone had asked, his sorrow was baked
into each and every grain.
—MEGGIE ROYER
SOMETIMES WISHING
A mind will wander
hither and yon
when hands set to
some reg’lar task –
here I am snipping
a peck of runner beans,
popping tails and tops
whilst the big pot comes
to a raring boil
and the greased spider
is smoking for corncake.
Woodsmoke and hot iron
I follow right on back
to Big Elk Branch
and Miz Gaston teaching me
to put food by:
catsups and pickles and millionaire relish,
sweating at the Home Comfort
as we scalded peaches
in August and slipped them
from outta their bright skins,
stirring apple butter in the kettle
over a fire in the yard.
I learnt it was a labor
but aftertimes a joy to see the jars
filled red and yellow
in that dirt-floor cellar,
a treasure-room
where women held the key.
Sometimes as we roll
past hayfields or tobacco,
field-hands under they hats
in the sun, or cotton busting white
from the knife-edge bolls
and I recollect
the burn on my stooped back,
the itch of hay dust, the fiery sting
of the saddleback worm
whilst working the green corn,
but too the cold water a-trickling
over moss at the springhouse,
and birds as would flame up
in the trees, and the mister’s orchard
sweet both spring and fall.
I had my pallet then
and not much more –
nothing I mought call mine,
even my ownself,
not like now when I have
my own place
with my bits and pieces,
books, a pot of chamomile
to take for my sleepless.
Still, I do pine at times
for the old place,
knowing that outside
the back door a mist be
‘mongst the arms of the hills
and the first wrenbird calling clear.
—VALERIE NIEMAN
A GOOD DAY
Walls and doors and corridors.
And windows.
You’d forgotten the windows, their brilliant eyes open on the good days.
And this is a good day.
The morphine in sync with your pain.
The doctor smiling and unhurried.
The sexy nurse not afraid to flirt.
There are other days, and the usual downers within the good:
the fist-glare of fluorescence, the cold-tabled x-ray, the lonely MRI coffin,
the glum face of your cousin come from Idaho to see . . . what?
If you’re dead yet?
A good joke, that, good enough
to let you smile, to laugh, to surprise the living
with your cheerful dying.
It ain’t over till it’s over . . .
A late reliever in the late innings, you keep taking
the signs
as long as they keep coming.
Walls and doors and windows.
Signs.
A pitch.
A chance.
You wink.
She winks back.
Call it a good day.