Fall 2016
issue 2
poetry
The Imaginary Conversation of Blue
What arrived could be subscribed to.--Robin Behn, “30 Windsor”
Shine. Shine outward
from your body. Make them
sing you in seven octaves.
This is not fantasy, it is
the Sunday morning worship
service, it is how “catholic”
in fact means universal, how
“orthodox” is more than just
a fifty-cent traditional.
There are different ways
to worship, most
of which do not involve
the act of awaking.
You do not have to rise
from bed, my savior,
you can stay right here.
The mourners
and the praise-singers
will come to you,
the procession, as always,
clothed in stained glass
and puppy fur. This
is immediate. This
is reactive. This
is stable yet unstable.
Quarks prove to us
there is no order in the universe, yet
our bodies stay coherent,
do not melt into one another
when I worship you. How is this?
I can wish to melt
into you. I can hope.
And each morning I can renew
my faith, perceive my skin
as ice.
—Robert Beveridge
Amphibian
Home migrates, a nest cobbled from banitsa, books, and piles
Of autumn leaves. Now it’s gone again—I don’t know where.
These nighttime miles tick a requiem for every hitchhiking ghost.
My passengers were me once; I can’t strand them in Nowhere.
Winter silvers strands of my hair, summer dyes my skin dark.
Leased by the seasons, I’m always moving somewhere.
The cage of my body hurtles along its looped track. Upside down,
My spirit says you have to choose. Why can’t I choose everywhere?
Part grass and part river, you are a swamp. Snakes and crocodiles live in you.
Sarah, you are both and neither; amphibians don’t belong anywhere.
—Sarah Abbott
Omnivore
Remember when I got pulled over twice in 38 hours?
Both times I was driving away from you,
the flashing lights grabbing at my neck.
They knew that if you had asked,
I would have stolen every stop sign in this volcano of a city
and thrown them all into the Schuylkill river
Because you hated four letter word
And the color red
Which remind you of the stain you left
On my new bed sheets.
That night wasn’t the first time
you’d felt like a wounded animal.
Except I wasn’t the lion you’d come to expect.
And when you opened your eyes, I wasn’t biting at your flesh.
I was licking at the tender place.
Already I could not tell
Whose hurt was whose.
See, I know the trauma of four walls and a wound with no origin:
My scars ache just remembering that Michigan winter,
when it hurt just to breathe.
When my chest expanding was itself
a violence.
Bringing you into my mouth
Tasting of honey-straws, patchouli, and still-warm gunmetal:
This was pure instinct.
How a kiss became our survival.
—Erica Concors
The Afterlife of Ideas
If we have names,
given by stars, neighbours,
passports, plastic cards
there isn’t so much more
to give, to take, but
silence, but company of strangers.
If we have homes,
crests of rose-harp
and half-sarcastic maple,
cliff and burren shorn of all
but colonial signpost to mark,
what need we ferryboats?
If we have titles,
embossments made in tusk towers
to choose between a kindly construction
of worthless parchment transformation,
squeegee wash dish platters pushed,
are not we emboldened by them?
If we have capitals,
red brick lake places in hearty cheer,
celebration of frontiers unconquered,
empires deceased, imagined, decayed,
are ever-fleeting these joys as
passing stations, professorial notions?
If we have moments,
tenderness by Turkish candlelight,
the switching magnetics of traffic
din symphony, couch-bound war cries
for struggles ever-far afield,
what use is there in lifetimes?
And if we have long evenings,
spent in tradition revival of
intellects, lovers beyond ourselves
let them last,
echo.
—Carter Vance
The Window
When we move to the high city, I cannot sleep for the tremor though my pillow. For years, the river feeds me color: boats of raincoats, herding lights of law, kayaks strung like beads. You did not tell me what they meant, the fire beams of propellers shone down the bridge. Tonight a new beam rests toward me, white rush without struggle remains through the tide. Across the river, the cement walls on four stories of a tall, dark building have been pushed out. All the light that fills the twenty floors below falls down to the water. And we think at night when it comes to us: this light is so like the moon. Here we will never see the lit circle slide off its base into shadow at the back of this building. In this window, a thousand rooms are the dust of stars or there are none at all. This is the moon’s light and the water is the sea, your breath that clouds the night all the warmth to me.
—Alison Angell
A TOWHEAD
JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON in the Pacific, imagined 1943 non-entry.
Every enemy demands complete attention; the body switches to automatic.
If radar does not blip, a sailor daydreams hope for home and wife as a wave
Obeys its law in nature, co-opting duty, frozen in reverie, even its boredom.
Buddies talk life and death at every rank, not planning a lesson as a teacher;
Not the way a contractor schedules utilities before sheetrock or carpentry;
But more in the manner of a pastor’s obligation to guide members of his flock.
Rumors of action, ever specifics deficient, discussed aforesaid, then action
Confirmed certain by the tracers, enemy movement that penetrates the ship’s
Zone of readiness, Lex with a nod to Concord, jargon crying on every deck.
Planes, pilots and ammo in use or at ready: the carrier turns into the wind;
Sailors teeter on a rising slope; the fleet responds in unison; comes an order
Reckoning SNAFU; cockups in Navy letter and law; slicing away excess fat
In Man’s bureaucracy, irrelevant as leave at the burlesque house in Pearl.
Recent history: August 2, 1943, a male son, the first for sailor Ralph Moul
At sea and wife Margaret, home in St. Louis, was born, a towhead, Dennis.
Unspoken perhaps, unwritten: but he did think; he blurted “darling, darling”
Direct address to wind; or his military tone wavered a forlorn, universal “why?”
Or scuttlebutt hoisted the hope of covert repairs in the Bremerton channel; or,
Off-handedly he scribbled name and address of his best friend’s mom waiting
In Michigan. A sailor accepts ignorance of events, of daily problems for wife
And child in Missouri, of frets memory-filled for parents home in Wisconsin,
To an older sibling in another theater of war, to irrelevancies of his childhood.
He returns to her. Does she thrill darkly as the hulking ship ends its mission?
Can she find in him any hint of yawing seas? Can she deduce the sea’s depth
Competently marked only by the newly dead? Will she read a sailor’s catalog
Of a great armada pieced laboriously during fearful radar posting on the bridge?
What of a son’s future in rapt inquiry, listening for unspoken atrocities of war?
LOOSE LIPS
JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON 3/3-8/23/1944.
July 5, 1944: Made our last attack on Guam today. We haven’t any bombs left. Boogies (sic) to-night, about 5 of them.
The crew growls at hunger. The captain rations food, bullets, intelligence.
Ordnance spent on Guam shuffles defenders in hurried dances to Saipan.
Fuel vapor wafts the flight deck, burns the lungs, but engines will not fire,
Granting respite to the Marianas. Pilots wander aft, both furious for battle
And hoarse for quiet seas, cursing their broken planes, empty bomb bays;
Proud wasp or falcon formations seeking easy pickings on Saipan. A sailor
Aches to succor a warrior’s need; will give his life to right his carrier’s arc
Into void; to shoot the fix for bogies buzzing from that void; to bogies down
To obliteration, consumed, mindless of their suddenly improvised superiority,
Their caliber of advantage. Tonight, a sailor writes from his contraband heart,
His artless note offering “aid and comfort” that if known (never that he could)
Spur from bunkmates hateful derision, the stink preceding his kind to the brig.
No one aboard imagines, at home in the park, sycamores pods ripe and ready,
Adolescent girls sing a common verse: “loose lips sink our ships.” Giggles
Attract the boys on the mound or at the plate to turn; their chests (the boys)
Inflate to prance the awkward species mating dance, preening brilliant colors
THE FACT OF CIRCLING LIGHT
JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON 3/3-8/23/1944.
July 5, 1944: Closed to 10 miles and our night fighter was over Saipan, helping them out. They had an attack to-nite.
A rotating light beam, sailor, serves you: as eyes to “see” the swell of ocean in all directions,
Two hundred thousand acres at a time; as eyes to “see” a fighter over Saipan, ten miles with
No clutter; as eyes to “see” a periscope plash in night’s dark swash; as eyes to “see” echoes
Of Lexington’s wash swirling around Guam, yesterday’s echo of independence, yesterday’s
Ghost with proud history. In each day’s visions crawling eerily over combers, those heat Phantoms intensely seductive, your eyes “see” also too many wondrous alternatives to duty: Homecoming in dress whites, wife and child awed by your alertness, your contribution to Glorious victory over dark spirits dying for Japan, and the admiral’s salute acknowledging?
And what of coming generations amassing questions, some risking long stifled memory?
Your answers too often wide of the grisly mark, too grisly to confront, when the fact is your Return from war will birth more children and fantasies of forty dumb years of silent horror.
—Keith Moul
Lifelines
I wipe a silk from my shoulder. Who’s
coming? In the deep shade, a wobble,
a tilt from upright, and the speed
reveal someone wheeling a bicycle.
Then, a man.
One caterpillar descends
a silk thread of escape. White with black,
it must see the world from the zenith
of youth broken free,
slipping into the unknown.
There were struggles to leave,
the habits, the inevitable hungers,
eyes blind to cyclists, walkers, robins.
Today dew sparks a thousand thousand lights.
A compound, then a short future looms.
Now other caterpillars rappel from trees.
Some hitch rides, land
flattened to the pavement, or ripen wings.
Hickory tussock moth: the larvae sting.
The barbs he’ll wish he’d never touched.
—Kathleen S. Burgess
River Song
Four miles above
the valley of the Ohio,
from the sliding waters,
from silent currents,
from the barge wake
lapping the shore,
I lie in bed. I am ten,
caught somewhere between
sleeping and waking,
in the front bedroom
of the only house on the left.
Somehow, in winter,
and only in winter,
the sounds of the river
travel clear as ice
on the clean cold wind,
through the hollows,
their barren tangled trees,
up over the ridge of Table Rock,
enwrapping the haunted steeple
of Lawrencefield Chapel,
down again into the hollow
and finally climbing the south slope,
settling behind my closed eyes,
where I can see its waves roll
over the land, traverse the full
four miles from the valley
caught somewhere between
sleeping and waking—
the song of the river
in midwinter.
—William Scott Hanna
Mappa Mundi
Legs
like bone trees
or trunk roads to nowhere.
Each knee a knot,
a congested junction.
Hips:
major topography—rippling midlands, hills
and clefts; foothills to rising torso ridges.
Arms elegant
extensions of dirt tracks.
Blood trafficking
in ever-smaller
arteries. My heart
a henge, encircled.
This blue-marked map of skin.
Ompompanoosuc Gold
After watching your sister nearly drown
in a hotel pool, you were afraid
to go under. But summer called, its heat
and its rituals, and you would be driven
to the place where the river bent.
The Pompy washed sunlight ripple by ripple.
If you made it to the float, you were
old enough to be a cool kid, though ten years
later you knew the cool kids never swam—only
drank beer, smoked pot in stolen bongs
round the back of somewhere else.
Kingfishers darted a blue that nylon palely mimicked.
Killdeer flew overhead. You wrote letters
at midnight to made-up people. You tell me
it was freedom without threat: even the river
never dreamt of drowning. You tell me,
and your face lights with the laughter of water,
with the memories of a richer sun.
—Jennifer A. McGowan
Monks
The mushrooms lead nowhere
But into themselves,
Black stairways that end
In beautiful crevices,
Between damp rocks
And delicate hands.
When you hold them
Their whole drooping story
Fills the air.
You can almost taste them
Musting through your lungs.
It’s the language of deep existence,
Of being rooted to something so big
You don’t believe in edges.
It’s why they are the holy men
Of the forest,
Always humble,
Hooded in prayer.
—Seth Jani
Illegitimate
for the old man
I pocketed a couple of your letters
from one of your women.
I suppose I should feel guilty
since just this past winter,
the frozen ground took you into her raw mouth,
a muddy cavern of siltstone and loam.
It’s a wonder she didn’t get pregnant sooner,
every night up dirt roads, stirring in hollows
courted by the deafening rasp of crickets,
you name it – you had taken her there.
She thinks it was a good time while it lasted,
and you must have thought so too.
It sure is a funny thing,
how even 72 miles away a cashier catches
me at the checkout, her phone flashing
an auburn haired boy,
You sure you don’t have family in Alabama, honey?
Even stranger is how your letters could have been mine.
I never told you but I brought a girl home once,
drove her out to the old tobacco field, mantled under the kindling
of rustling wings, where you shot blindly
at a boy for waking the rows of faded burley
leaves, ocher skirts buttering to touch
their neighbor’s sleeve.
It’s spring now,
there are things I’ll always wonder,
but how they managed to till your grave
in that skin splintering cold,
I’ll never know.
—Joy Bowman
Hierro
The girl from Zacatecas
Wears sequins like starlight
Slow dancing with the undertaker
—A man of some stature--
In his mirrored platform shoes.
Most of the younger men in this club
With their American pistols
Want to dance to narco-corridos—
Prancing like circus horses
Drunk on mezcal and beer.
But she doesn’t hear the music anymore.
Or the lurid whispers of these grubby norteños,
Just the lonesome whistle of La Bestia--
In the distance. An iron coffin
Barreling north to the river of drowned loves.
—Tom Darin Liskey
On Being Sober Five Years
This morning the world is covered in dust—
thin curtain of yellowish resin settling on everything.
I see it falling to the earth in the shadows
of the hundred-year-old oak across the street,
I see it everywhere as I pedal my bike to work,
dust hanging in between houses and spilling
onto front yards. It looks as if someone applied
one of those filters, the kind that makes photographs
look vintage or a little more worn. How concerned
should we all be with false spring? Birds arriving
ready to eat and breed, only the plants are long gone.
Do we not dance anyway, giddy, in spite of ourselves?
I wonder if knowing better matters in the end,
but this isn’t the end—here’s a cardinal,
here’s a man sanding the hood of a rusted out convertible
in front of his storage space. Here’s the copper yard
where three dogs used to be chained outside
in a circular fence with one dog shack for shelter.
How I hated their bitter chorus of barking, but today
is silent and I tell myself they aren’t dead, only rescued.
Who doesn’t feel regret or shame about the past?
Here’s spring, here’s my birthday, here’s to another year
and another in which I wake up and see more
of myself than I sometimes care to. I lock
my bike to a metal handrail and blink back focus—
and when I say the dust disappears, which is exactly
like recognizing forgiveness—I know I am here.