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SOLSTICE

She is happy her father has come without excuse.
Against glowing moths and Milky Way, they collect
flashlight, matchbook, the box of fireworks.
And since he is happy, they sing and arrange
cardboard tubes, volcanoes named jade garden,
butterfly burst, stairs to heaven
in the middle of the gravel drive –- silver
and orange fountains repeat and fizzle.
The girl hops and gasps. She has both parents
to herself, for her mother has come away
from the house and dances in dark circles,
waving sparklers from each hand, looping
light, but who can follow wild cursive
she inscribes on sky, of love that flickers
and falls in this longest lit night,
letters that will not be sealed
and sent, but burnt beneath flesh
forever as happiness, in the girl’s long life.

- Barbara Rockman teaches poetry in private workshops and at Santa Fe Community College. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Calyx, Concho River Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Quiddity Journal. She is the winner of the New Mexico Discovery Award, The MacGuffin Poets Hunt Prize, the Southwest Writers Prize, and the Baskerville Publisher’s Prize. Rockman’s collection, Sting and Nest, is forthcoming from Sunstone Press.

the spider, its bite

It was as if we weren’t our kind any longer, that we might not nurse the words that tasted less and less like dust, gasoline, might forget the things that kept our feet calloused, left us fashioning mountains with our spines pushed upward, our necks curved as valleys, exposed, in contrast.

Waking in thirst is not knowing a father, knowing instead a woman’s desperation, knowing nicotine and too-tight denim, knowing mattress, knowing floor, knowing the withered pages of a bedside bible by pressing our tongues to the ink, shaping our mouths in practice, learning to speak as prophets, as kings. And even then, as we lay in bed thumbing the pages by candlelight, we were children who would not wake, would not know God.

As it stands now, drawer-tucked, yellowing, spine gnawed to powder by years past, this bible is no mystery; I know what it means. You were prom queen in ’99, wait tables, lost a daughter. Sitting alone on your smoke break, you know what it means.

I remember a crisped field this time last August, our spent bones spread in dusty drowse beneath the heat. You spoke about a deadly gossamer spun between these ridges; our kind does not pull against it, will not reach beyond it.

- Amanda Mitchell Dutton is an undergraduate at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She is in the process of completing an English degree and has not previously submitted to any literary journal. Her work consists primarily of poetry.

Re-reading Desire Lines

I begin reading the page
with its corner turned down,
a reminder: This is where we left off.

And then you are here again;
A cut along my finger, a rock
in my hand, a telephone ringing.

You spread the fingers of one hand,
dreaming of food, delicious asterisms
of wine and gravy, something boiling.

I often dream of you in the kitchen:
Glass of gin and simmering pot nearby,
your wooden spoon, offering a taste.

The Saintpaulia grow in clusters:
Slender, flowering peduncles
on the windowsill facing East.

Your body is a constellation;
a recognizable pattern of limbs
beneath blankets, unmoving.

- Adrienne Lewis is a poet, educator, and native of Saginaw. She puts her many talents to work for her local literary community. A full-time faculty member at Michigan’s Davenport University, her creative work has appeared in numerous online and print venues, including her two chapbooks: Coming Clean (Mayapple Press, 2003) and Compared to This (Finishing Line Press, 2005). She is the editor and publisher of the Symbolon poetry newsletter.

What the Camera Loved

The ear – its marvelous, warm shell.

How the ear slowly dissolves into the profile.
The profile’s remoteness.

Retreating from the face to the figure
– lingering on the hands –

from the figure to the dusky air.
Shouldering the quiet.

Into Great Silence: the wooden floor,
its trapezes of light angling into black.

The curving ear. The dark.

- Leonore Hildebrandt teaches writing at the University of Maine. A native of Germany, she now lives off the grid on the coast of Maine and is a member of the Flatbay Collective. She also serves as an editor for the Beloit Poetry Journal. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Cider Press Review, and Quercus Review, among many others. A letterpress chapbook of Hildebrandt’s poetry is to be released this summer by the University of Maine in Machias.