damselfly press

We Have Tried To Be From Here, But We Cannot
Listen to the Poem

Despite all the fantasy
Iowa was just an interstate
coated in ice. 16-wheelers
abandoned in fields, unearthly
sparkle of 24-hour
gas-stations on a moonless
December night.

The span is not just the iced-wheat
past the windbreak, it is not just
the grid-work roads dropped
by rulers across the flat,
not box houses behind the lone tree,
but how white
is the fuel of a cold
sky; and a little hopping
bird somehow left behind,
amid ripped magazines, near
an empty vodka bottle, lays
frozen in the drainpipe.

There will be more snow on Tuesday.
It will get colder by Sunday afternoon.
We will hold up our soup bowls. Identify tracks
in the snow: here bird. Here rabbit. This: dog.

The cold means we search. It means we are leaving.
It means we are growing old together. It is not even a dream.

We do not live upstairs, but we hear
the footsteps and the trains come
and go like wind. At first they rattle
you, but soon they are less
than noon bells, soon they are
just shadows doomed to return
in time, like us, to where
we are not from, again.

In our daughter’s bedroom water freezes
on the nightstand. Perhaps she will not
mind how we moved her from house
to house, she will find comfort in things
emptied, in the last sweep with an old
broom, final click of the latch, in the white
expanse beyond her brittle with possibility.

- Shana Youngdahl is the author of History, Advice and Other Half-Truths (forthcoming Stephen F. Austin State University Press 2012) and the chapbooks Donner: A Passing (Finishing Line 2008) and Of Nets (Gendun 2010). Her poetry has appeared widely in journals including Third Coast, Shenandoah and Margie.

December 30
Listen to the Poem

I’ve written you plotting and plodding,
sweet one. I say this is now.

You are key, lock, bed clothes
pulled off. I am a register

you sing in. How is it love’s
consequence has been so light?

I’ve written you sundry and careless,
a catapult of windchime.

I sometimes think of us as forgetful
and only remembering each other

like claustrophobes wanting the dense
space of football fields, the silver

scaled seats of empty stadium.
Or deep
in the night’s
sorrow, when you hear me

breathing, we are one
continent. You found a scrap of paper

with Cormac McCarthy #5
scrawled on it and wondered

what I meant, and you wanted to get it
so bad. You wanted Cormac McCarthy #5

to mean something prayerlike and rood,
something heard in a blood text

falling from the sky like a Leonid.
I’m telling you, and I’m telling you

it doesn’t mean anything and it
does, sewn in my hem, published

inconsequentially, as love sometimes is.

- Lindsay Illich’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Clare Literary Journal, Dos Passos Review, Hurricane Blues: How Katrina and Rita Ravaged a Nation, The Mom Egg, Rio Grande Review, Sojourn, Coachella Review, The Buddhist Poetry Review, and Texas Poetry Journal. Currently, Illich teaches writing at Curry College in Milton, MA.

As the Men Sleep
after Jeffrey Skinner’s “As the Women Sleep”
Listen to the Poem

It’s just coyotes and me
awake at this hour.
The faucet drips. A winter
so cold I’m losing sleep.

Vanilla vodka—cheap,
don’t even bother with a glass.
The bottle’s rigid lip,
the sick-sweet burn and swallow.

Up all night, I write a little.
I’ll tell them I wrote a lot.

I smoke too, as they sleep—
clove cigarette, its black length
between fingers, its sweet
smoke sucked up through the vent

over the stove. No one
mentions they smell it
each morning over
pancakes and sausages.

No one mentions
the summer, the nights
I spent love-blitzed,
smoking cloves by the lake
with my so-called mistake.

The boys sit by the fire
with their father.
I find my warmth in guilt,
in a memory.

These are the smells
that see me through
till spring: cedar Christmas
tree we chopped down

with a broken ax,
the pine tar soap
on his hardworking hands,
the man I married—

smell of my days.

Fistful of hair
I pull around
to my nose all day,
the smoke still strong—

smell of my nights.

The men breathe
like machines
in their rooms—
their engines run
on the fumes of my loneliness.

Space heaters buzz—
some kind of love,
something steady
in the quickening
light, in my deepest season.

- Heather Foster lives on a farm in Tennessee with her husband, kids, and Ozzy, the heavy metal rooster. She’s an MFA candidate in poetry at Murray State University. Her writing is featured or forthcoming in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Anderbo, South Dakota Review, Cutthroat, Superstition Review, and Country Dog Review.

Diptych

Listen to the Poem

Her face came together between August and October
like two photos that fit better together than they did apart.
That first trimester of her life
the bones, mirror images, two ivory cups,
curled toward each other and joined
in the center of the forehead, nose, cleft of the chin
seamlessly and whole.
Like a diptych skull
Like cupped hands hinging toward each other.

- A native of West Chester, PA, Anne Higgins teaches English at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, Maryland. She is a member of the Daughters of Charity. She has ninety poems published in magazines, as well as five books of poetry published.

Heartbreak

It is listed as
“Exploding Tree
Phenomenon,”

when maples
burst,

slow sap frozen
by winter.

The sound rings, a gunshot
trapped

inside the trunk.

- Theodosia Henney is a queer lady from a conservative state who likes to eat lemons raw. Her work is forthcoming in The Allegheny Review and The Vestal Review.

We Stay Most When We Stay Not at All

If Vesuvius were cloud-quake
this morning the sky is just one more
great catastrophe I want to save
like the little old lady who saves needles,
thinking pine-sharps can pin
the firmament in place–and you
too far to call to the balcony.

But wasn’t this our way,
you calling me to see the cerulean warbler,
I arriving late?

Pliny the Younger described the Pompeian sky
as a great umbrella pine
while across the bay his uncle
rowed out to meet the ashes.

It’s not enough to say
I want you here.

In the foreground,
wild cherry fall away
from blossom.

Somewhere in the middle distance
tree tops turn gold, the Midas dream.
Back inside my new room,
the shadow of branches
clot the blind.

Who wants to be the old woman
who won’t give up anything?
Her house smells of rot and mildew
and yet this morning I do not want to relinquish
one thready snarl floating from the mist.
Maybe I should have been a Hudson River painter.

Then I could place you,
a small figure in the distance,
with a top hat and a stick.

- Lois Marie Harrod won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State University) contest with her manuscript Cosmogony, and her 11^th book, Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching, was published by Black Buzzard in March, 2011.  She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.

So as not to write a love poem about heavy-beating hearts

I will instead ask you to imagine
pulling a white egg from your mouth
as the moon is drawn across the night
your teeth and tongue filled
with fear of crushing that thin china skin
quivering as the last of the egg brushes the lip
and the shell splits in a lightning crack
bursts open like broken glass
and inside that egg is an ocean
so you walk over those delicate shells
into that white new world and open
your mouth into the breaking waves
because you see it’s not about heavy-beating hearts
it’s not about the blushing dawn
it’s not about the earth shivering underfoot
it’s about peacefully and purposefully
drowning.

Metamorph

Listen to the Poem

It is time to become
a robot. Leave blood
and fat behind. Take
away the heft of livers
and lungs. Coil up
the tendons, the ropes
of hair. Let the meat
fall heavy to the floor.
Empty that shell of
all soft things, fur,
foam, milk. Do not
look at the sky, look
only at the box. Now
smile. Smile. Smile.
Steel rods, filaments
will thread the new
body like a needle.
White surfaces, wires,
blades, silver chips.
Cool and clean. Hard.
Simple. Like that fairy
tale from childhood:
the Ice Queen. No tales.
No ice. No childhood.
Smile. Smile. Smile.

- Abby Adams is a grant writer at a leading civil liberties organization in New York City with a penchant for bullet points. Her poetry has appeared in Breadcrumb Scabs and Philly Flash Online and will soon be appearing in Podium.

DOWN IN OUR HEARTS

At first we called it birds, awkward mating
in the crossbeams, my neighbor’s pigeons
trading their roof for ours. We imagined claws
and beaks in a clinch, each lost in the other’s
pearly breast, pleasured coo. Every night around
nine, their adoration so regular, we placed them
near the chimney, perhaps feathering a nest
with milkweed, or somewhere between soffit
and fascia, the crown of the house.

Though not greatly fond of pigeons,
we hated to end such romance, to realize
the water heater was simply giving out,
its labor magnified in the brass couplings.
We hated to think of this tired heart slowed
in midlife, striking less and less fire.

How telltale the noise of love, pecking night
after night at the body’s window, small echo
through the pipes, charge that raises the hair
on our arms. We count one-Mississippi,
two-Mississippi, steady as the timepiece
thumping gable to foundation,
down in our hearts to stay.

- Linda Parsons Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and author of three poetry collections, including Bound. She has served as poetry editor of Now & Then and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award. Marion’s work has appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, and Connecticut Review and in numerous anthologies.  She lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.

Last Day Writing at Obras

Listen to the Poem

Nearly midnight, and rain
      does what it wants,
sometimes pelting

the peach leaves at my window,
      sometimes pausing to mist.
Nearby someone beats steady

on a wash tub or a drum.
      These days, I am mostly water,
boiled in a pot, collected from a well. 

At night, I sleep
      with a cistern in my arms.

- Janice Fuller has published three poetry collections, including Séance (Iris Press), and is the winner of the 2008 Oscar Arnold Young Award (awarded by the Poetry Council of North Carolina for the poetry book of the year).  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Magma, New Welsh Review, Cave Wall, and Asheville Poetry Review. Fuller is Writer-in-Residence at Catawba College.

So Much She’s Let Go

since the diagnosis – mammograms
and follow-ups – and if she waits
long enough, she might begin

again, one year already gone.
In her pocket a slip of paper
she took from church,

the Lenten meditation
You are Lucky   scrawled
in green ink. In the garden

she finds twine, a wooden
bird her son lost – how they tore
up the yard looking for it –

roots that reach longer
than the tines of her pitchfork
as she kneels, heaving

rat tails of dandelion. In the dirt
are fat worms, the severed
blade of a trowel missing since June

two years before, an anger
she opened after breakfast, the sting of it
still red, but scabbing over. Burrowing

into dirt, plunging her spade
into earth, splitting crowns, turning mounds
of soil still fertile beneath skeletal leaves,

under her hands, between
fingers, separating black clumps
from clay and tossing rocks,

she breathes,
shakes her head to release loam
from her hair, her shirt, removes

shoes, her clothes (down to jeans
and bra), removes the bra,
and digs in the dirt.

- Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden (2005). Nominated several times for the Pushcart, Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant and is currently assistant editor for Crab Creek Review.

Open

Listen to the Poem

On the clothesline, his shirts hang
open, outstretched.
I walk into their flimsy embrace.
The curtain is all shift and witness,
in the light of the window.
Emptiness
echoes. Footsteps inaudible
on the soft wall to wall.
There is nothing wrong
with want, only lack. Please
explain the in-between of open
and close, how to escape
the ache of a slammed door.
In the corner, a Kleenex
expands into an orchid,
but what I see is the open mouth
of the vase. 

- Amy Ash received her MFA from New Mexico State University where she served as Assistant Poetry Editor for Puerto del Sol.  Currently, she is working toward a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Kansas.  Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in various journals, including Lake Effect, Mid-American Review, Cimarron Review, Slipstream, and Harpur Palate.  Ash is a Pushcart nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize.

Little Bomb

The heart thawing in a bath of tap water
makes the bowl greasy. It is not really a heart,
just two chicken thighs frozen together
into the shape of a clenched fist.
In the kitchen it sits, pink as a carnation.
I imagine it is my heart, taking a break
from me, from its job inside the ribcage,
working around last night’s jumbo prawns
in sugar sauce, heart like the world’s
smallest submarine engineer, hefting gears
weighted with epicurean living.
It thuds and pours blood down
to the ghostly regions of my feet
and hands, coastal towns it will never see.
Bless the heart— it always finds a job
to do. Soon I’ll make a marinade,
and pry the chicken thighs apart, trying
not to think how together they look
like a hand grenade sitting in the tub,
little chicken parts, without a chicken brain
or a chicken heart.

Cate Whetzel received her M.F.A. from Indiana University. Her poems and short fiction have recently appeared in The Louisville Review, Chiron Review, Salamander, Phoebe, and New South. She lives in Michigan with her husband and teaches at a private high school.

The Space A Body Takes

Maybe snow is falling
across the grey
of a small world.
Maybe you are tired—
have been shoveling
for hours, or splitting wood
and stacking it
against the close
white wall.
Your lower back aches
no matter which way
you lie, whimpers
like a small dog
kneading his intention
into the stiles of an old door—
he wants out, he wants in.
Your tongue is a sleeping cat,
a scarlet cushion—
your mouth,
and the bird in your chest
slows her flapping
between the locked twin cages,
her solo beating
like a tympani
in the knit, double cell.
She settles a moment,
for a moment, resigned—
the common and
singular nature,
her perch.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a builder and designer for a small, green-building company in Michigan and the mother of two boys. A frequent contributor to Foreword Reviews and the vice-chair of Michigan Writers, Steinorth’s poems have appeared in The Southeastern Review Online, Mobius:  The Journal for Social Change, The Dunes Review, The Bear River Review, and Re: Union. Her first collection, Forking the Swift, was awarded publication in 2010.

Lament

My mother called me a fence-climber,
said I was born seeking more. I was
six the first time I ran away,

would have stayed gone
if it weren’t for the dark.
Yes, it’s true. I wanted

something else. Not the maple
and slip-covered furniture,
the linoleum kitchen odored with fish

and Pinesol. It wasn’t that I was Peter,
refusing to grow up. My affliction
was more like Alice’s curiosity

or Goldie’s wanderlust.
Lately, I’ve been homesick,
missing the open-window

scent of grass wafting through
the summer nights of my childhood
when I wanted a world

that would spread itself before me
with richness, not paper-thin
and impermanent

as Mother’s Marcal napkins. At seven,
my favorite word was leave-taking.
Just yesterday, I read the word nostalgia

comes from nostos—homecoming
and altos—pain. A wound
that never closes.

Gail Braune Comorat is a founding member of Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild. She leads middle school children in Free Writes at the local library. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Delaware Beach Life, Delaware Poetry Review, Apple Valley Review, Delmarva Review, and The Broadkill Review.

Vigil

I used to watch for day
to sneak like a thief
into the night,
creeping across the fields,
a lantern swung
or a flashlight beamed
by a resolute farmer
approaching,
sinking and floating
on an endless
sea of becoming,
a hermit-crab scuttling
par-ci, par-là
willy-nilly about his toes,
reconnoitering
a temporary home.

All was expectancy.
Even the wind stood still,
awaiting a signal
to recommence
its nervous turning.
Then it was beginning,
imperceptibly shifting
like blond and blonder sands
on the eastern shore,
blankets lapped about
my legs, waiting for waves
and more and more,
when my parents
would leave me alone
with only a single window
to know the dawn.

A lyric poet, critic, and translator, E. Louise Beach also creates libretti.  Her song cycle, Ophelia’s Flowers, will be performed this spring at the Festival for Women in Music at the Eastman School of Music.  Her Requiem for Persecuted Youth will be given at Dickinson College on May 1, 2011.

Amethyst

I wear out evenings on the phone to my mother,
over-boiling potatoes to a sound track
of booze bottles rattling in time with the refrigerator.

By bedtime, I am no more than I was three
hours before. I am empty. Hollow,
like chaff caught in late season tractor wind.

The only memory I can conjure from the day is that
I’ve been cold. I wonder if the hours have forgotten
me the way a tire forgets a stone.

Can I be simultaneously hollow and stone?
I remember from a poem I read in high school
how a woman compared herself to a geode,

how the hammer’s crack revealed her concentric
amethyst crystals. You can’t know what’s inside
an ugly stone until you shatter it.

But I am afraid of the hammer.

- Christie Isler teaches ten year-olds to run the world and writes poetry and short fiction around the edges. Recent poetry and short fiction appear in The New Flesh, Infinite Windows, Poetry Quarterly, Every Day Poets, and Every Day Fiction. Christie lives outside of Seattle, WA.

Suspension

Whether I have learned to read
the variations in the long shadows
of your voice. Whether time can
be measured in tossings and turnings.
Whether I have touched your
hand or only thought to.

A stronger drift pulls.
I resist the impulse
of mathematics, pattern.

A line defines this known
distance, composed of ought
and not. The line is fresh
still. It does not sag, has not been
plucked by curious passersby.

Whether the road treats us kindly.
Whether our voices overlap. Whether
we kiss or only imagine we might.

- Heather Hughes is a poet, publishing professional, student, and teacher. Her work has recently appeared in Cream City Review, Eudaimonia Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Driftwood Review, among other publications. She would like to live in a lighthouse someday.

Blossoms in the Wind

I thought it would change him
as grief does,
the turning away from chatter,

instead
to watch out of the window
where a rainbow fragment lights the hill,

several geese string their way upriver
and how magnolia blossoms
are battered by wind.

Only recently Death crept to his neck,
licked a tender place, breathed softly
in the way that snow does.

Fear is the wolf.
Already he begins to forget,
he’s alright now, he says, alright.

We must choose for ourselves.
See how the magnolia candles its flowers,
withstands the wind.

- Rose Cook lives in the UK. Her poems are available in Everyday Festival, published by HappenStance, and Taking Flight, published by Oversteps Books.

a lake

I have been a lake for you,
and I worry that my waters
take too much:
your best fishing lure,
banded with a stripe of red paint,
a discarded shoe undone
by surface currents working
through laced knots,
even a white t-shirt that the
wind took after you placed it
beside you in the rowboat,
bronzing your back even browner,
but not as brown as the shirt,
now silt-soaked and drunk
in my mud.

but all you can talk about
is what you caught:
a great, shining bass with rainbow flesh
and little smooth sunfish batting their fins.
once, a tiny song-frog that leapt from
puddle to puddle pooled in the
bottom of the boat,
and a couple of honey-colored perch,
blinking knowingly with marble orbs.

- Irene Mathieu is a writer, photographer, medical student, painter, public health aficionado, and musician from Virginia. Her work focuses on themes of personal growth, change, and rebirth, travel experiences, relationships, and occasional forays into social justice fare. Previous publications include poetry and photography in 34th Parallel, Magnapoets, and The Meadowland Review.

Slow Cooker Stew

I rinse, peel, slice potatoes,
cut into an onion, wiping my burning eyes
with the back of my hand. I once believed
onions channeled sad thoughts,
whispering like oracles, your mother
will die one day, your father, you.
Easy to imagine wizardry from root vegetables
back when the kitchen was my parents’ domain.
Not that magic doesn’t happen now.
Tomorrow, already late for work,
I’ll pile these pieces into a ceramic crock,
add stew meat, a can of soup, then simply
flip a switch. Six o’clock, the aroma
of a simmering meal will meet me at the door
and I can feel, in that one moment at the threshold,
like somebody’s daughter again, or somebody’s wife.

- Ona Gritz’s poetry has been published widely. In 2007, she won the Inglis House poetry contest and the Late Blooms Poetry Postcard competition. In 2009, she placed second for Lilith Magazine’s Charlotte Newberger Competition. Her chapbook, Left Standing, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has received five Pushcart nominations.

Packing

I left the house,
boxes stacked, sealed and labeled.
You loaded them alone into some dark interior.

For a month we talked only of schedules, lists, divisions.
Mornings arrived sweet with the smell of wood pulp —
boxes flattened, stiff.

The Picasso’s print came off the wall, shelves were cleared,
the rooster napkin holder from Portugal wrapped,
other souvenirs tossed in the trash.

You kept the knife sharp so the cut could be made cleanly,
scoring and bending boxes for holding in. You muscled
through the silence. I, as usual, spilled enough words,

for both of us, but not to you.
Now, My feet no longer tiptoe across the floor
And room after room opens up.

-Diana Cole is a professional singer and teacher. She has translated many poems for concert programs, leading her to write her own poetry. Magazines that have published her poems include Off The Coast, Blueline, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Aurorean, The Christian Century, and The Chaffin Journal. Her poem, “Though I Walk,” set for double chorus by Thomas Stumpf, was selected by the Pharos Music Project and performed in New York City.

Searching for Sorrow

The little girl in the field,
stooping, bending nose to grass,
and “searching for sorrow” is what
I thought I heard someone say,
so I wondered, as I watched her peer
under the shrubs and brush aside
the daylilies, why would anyone
go searching for sorrow? It being
so good at finding us on its own,
abruptly plumping itself down
in our favorite easy chair, pouring
bitter dregs into our wine glasses
and settling in for a long stay. But
“searching for sorrel” was what
was really said, a particular kind of grass
with thick fanning leaves, and why
would anyone go searching for sorrel?
I wondered. It being so common
and green, so easily crushed and such
the shape of ordinary things, dirt
and sunshine and pigeons in the park,
and I almost turned away when the child
presented a handful of it to her mother,
fingers stained with the earnestness
of discovery.

-Janet Barry, a New Hampshire musician and poet, has poems published or forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Ragged Sky Press, Off the Coast, Naugatuck River Review, Compass Rose, Tygerburning, and Canary. Janet holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and received a 2009 Pushcart Nomination.

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.

RAPUNZEL

She married the one back home instead
the son of a farmer
heir to a kingdom of tobacco and cotton
a man with broad shoulders and few words
and a farmhouse embedded like a stone in the flat endless fields.

She binds her hair now
safe from the grasp of tiller and plow
a heavy rope coiled at the base of her neck
weighted with memory
that she will not cut
and on hot hot nights
while her husband snores in his chair
she loosens the band and climbs the thick braid
anchors her fingers
in the stunned crumpled mass
and beside her in the stained tub
the cool water rises and rises
lifting above it a mass of scented bubbles
that will collapse beneath the weight of her hand.

- Agnieszka Stachura is a writer and part-time graduate student in the North Carolina piedmont, and her prose has appeared in Tiny Lights, Funny Times, Swink, and Ghoti Magazine, and is forthcoming in both Passages North and in an anthology of “Hint Fiction.”

Blood Moon

A sleepless night, the moon
placed like a filter before fires
that rise in the east. She knows
how blue light scatters
to whiten the paving stones.

When dust infiltrates
it’s like a secret not told
to one’s lover. Later
it becomes off-color, too large,
soaking the sky with trouble.

She tries to breathe.
Each tiny fire will grow
from draw to cliff,
whether by dry lightning
or a campfire left with the stamp
of someone’s footprint
long ago layered on cinder
like a palimpsest.

Each fire will persist
until the events that preceded it
become nothing more than a day’s
worth of chores. Some will leap
these lines the men
have worked for hours.

Perhaps this is just another dawn,
the nests just now sparking
with bird song, fluff and straw,
the patio littered
with bark stripped from twigs
to make a nursery.

Or maybe in the reddened moon
she misplaced some mawkish bit of grief
and now she’s flaying herself
like a priest who knows there is no penance
for words whispered
back into themselves—
for all that was nil, slivered,
addressed by dust to shine particulate, alone.

- Judith Skillman’s twelfth book “The Never” is forthcoming in May, 2010 from Dream Horse Press. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book “Storm” (Blue Begonia Press, 1998), Skillman’s work has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Seneca Review, among others.

Here’s a steady light, I said

and he was pleased, tucking that
into himself now he owned it.
So I didn’t say, how you are always
around, forcing photosynthesis.

I didn’t say, you see me here
by the side of the road, as if waiting
for your arrival, but normally
I’m a small animal, living far under

reams of dead leaves, where no news
can reach me. But this light. I fear
one day you’re going to tear off
with my shivery pelt.

I didn’t say that. No,
I merely trilled my dainty fingers
as he poled off into the dark
and inevitable street.

- Teresa Scollon lives and writes in Traverse City, Michigan. She taught as writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her work has appeared in several journals. Her chapbook, Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game, was published in 2009 by the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press.

Dear Lady,

You, on the couch, becoming a stranger,
do you know who I am?

You hold your newspaper
without reading words.

Your memories are locked in a cupboard
to which neither of us has the key.

When anyone comes to visit,
you smile. You say:

My house is so beautiful.
Everybody loves my house.
Dogs like it here.

If I were a dog, I would curl on the couch
and lean my chin on your thin ribs.

I would lick your bony mother-hand
to show you I am here.

- Penelope Scambly Schott’s most recent book is Six Lips (Mayapple, 2010). Her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Buttons

Sometimes it’s the ordinary things
that occur to you in the night
like turning the heat down or
the origin of the mysterious stain on your favorite white shirt,
a call you need to make tomorrow.

Sometimes something reaches out
from a long past place
like a lavender button
with a small rhinestone in the center,
a coat with a pale lavender plaid pattern.

The coat was small,
the girl was small,
her father was alive and smiling
and her mother helped her
put her arms into the sleeves of the lavender coat.

The buttons were difficult to close,
the petal shapes pinched her fingers,
but she didn’t care
her father smiled and her mother said,
Perfect.

- Marietta Calvanico lives in Staten Island, NY. After working for more than two decades in advertising/marketing, she now works with her architect husband and is able to devote more time to writing and music.

Fool’s Gold

In the chaos of our parting, you scattered
scraps of my shredded letter. Bits
of words fell to the floor, noiseless

and soft, as a lover slips into bed
beside a sleeping partner:

sorry
never
meant
wish
forgive
please

As the front door slammed,
they fluttered then stilled, surrounding me;
irreparable fragments of something

so recently whole, still warm in memory.
I swaddle its image, perfect, and choose
to forget that you’ve left me

for the kind of woman who buys herself
flowers. Spread across our bed under
the blanket of night, I slide into a fitful dream:

women move across a dance
floor, sultry, seductive, sparkling,
bright bubbles in champagne flutes. Laughter

rises as music plays, shoes shuffle and skirts
swirl while I, not knowing the steps, follow
behind, bent low and barefoot, nails unpainted.

Flakes of burnt skin fall from my feet
like black petals as I quickly move to pick up
buttons dropped from shimmering gowns,

then hand them over, an offering:
a fistful of gold.

- Christine Orchanian Adler is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications and anthologies across the United States, as well as online at LiteraryMama, Cahoots, The Furnace Review, SavvyMiss and elsewhere. Her writing includes book reviews, poetry and articles on health and family. She lives in New York with her husband and two sons.

December Wind

Last night I dreamt I was bleeding,
two cold gushes down my thigh.

I woke up thinking, yes, winter is coming—
winter and my son.

But tonight it’s only wind
hissing something awful

and I see my grandmother
before she died, gray lips open,

the softest moan filling the room
then ending

and I can’t believe the wind is coming
from the earth I have taught you

to love, night after night gliding my hands
down your rocky body

the way Demeter would collapse
suddenly to her knees

and begin to feel
her daughter’s dark descent.

- Wendy Wisner’s first book of poems, Epicenter, was published by CW Books in 2004. Her poems have appeared in The Spoon River Review, Rhino, Natural Bridge, The Bellevue Literary Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Wendy previously taught writing and literature at Hunter College. She is now a La Leche League leader and is pursuing her Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) certification.

Some Memories

thrust themselves on us through cracks. We uproot them,
spray them dead. They loiter in junk drawers, snuggled
with old keys, hide in the charms of silver bracelets.
Sneaky ones slither on the resilient refrain
of a Beatles’ song, proclaim their tenacity in quilt patches.

Memories tailgate on the fragrances— leather and paint,
Camay soap, fresh basil. Against our will, they leap
into presence on an antique teapot, dusty with echoes,
skulk between autumn oaks and sweet gum,
intrude at the sight of old letters under worn lingerie.

We prefer to examine some on stainless steel tables
under cold fluorescent lights, scalpels poised.
We push them down, nail them into coffins,

muffle them with smoke and gauze and snow.
My brother says, “Remember—”
“No!” I say, “No.”

- Joan Mazza has worked as a microbiologist, psychotherapist, writing coach and seminar leader. Author of six books, including “Dreaming Your Real Self” (Penguin/Putnam 1998), her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Permafrost, Slipstream, Writer’s Digest, the minnesota review, and Playgirl. She now writes poetry in rural Virginia.

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts
– after Winslow Homer, 1870

This is how it happened.

The first one opened her eyes
At the sound of waves
Slapping against the sand.

The second one was startled into daylight
By the creaking of the pump.

The third was lazy,
And they had to rap twice on her window.

The dog zigzagged behind them.

They wet their hair.
They soaked their bathing costumes.
The hot sweat of the August night dissolved.

The single sailboat plying the harbor
Would never give them away.

- Elizabeth Lara has worked as a language teacher and editor. Her poems have appeared in The Rose & Thorn, Persimmon Tree, The Equinox and Reflections 2009. In 2008 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in New York City.

Ebb Tide

I tell myself that it’s for you

I gather up these stones, for you
this stripe of quartz, this green

like old glass bottles, but the truth is
we all walk the beach head down,

reaching for that salmon mottled
rock that’s not quite like the others,

even when the sign says not to—

that woman with the cell phone,
ankle deep in the receding tide,

who turns a stone around
and around in her other hand

as she says, “I was so sorry
to hear,” she won’t take that stone

back on the ferry as a gift; it will sit
in her pocket till she finds it in the dryer

next week, and puts it on the window
ledge or on her desk. It will always

smell like a disembodied voice, and sparkle
like that release, the water going out, and out.

- Susanna Lang’s collection, Even Now (2008), was published by The Backwaters Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as New Letters, Green Mountains Review, Jubilat, and Inkwell, where she won the 2009 competition. She also won an Illinois Arts Council award for a poem published in The Spoon River Poetry Review.

The Geese

Still, the sun contributes its honey
and a large raindrop magnifies the thin branch,
here, where I am, and where my mother,
many miles away in her kitchen,
is quietly aware of each

as they pass, over flat land and long grasses,
the lone, strong, open-branched tree,
and the rain that gathers somehow,
to flow over large boulders,
highlighted like hair by sunlight.

In the scheme of things, I too, belong.
All I need do is try, heed the geese,
their squawk and wildness.
If it is meant to be, she thinks,
they will return again.

- Roberta Visser leads creative writing and poetry workshops for students and adults and has been a contributing writer for the daily Keene Sentinel. Most recently her poems have been published in Women in Judaism, The Worcester Review, Entelechy International: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, and Late Blooms Poetry Postcard Contest.

Mirroring

I am giving up beauty.
Not the silver thickets and the sandpipers
Not the grass beneath the lake,
not the way your hair eddies
when you rinse it in the bath–
but the lighted rooms when
tall and cool
I am effortlessly suspended in the
wordless hush of sight and gifted desire,
drifting quiet like a trout at the water’s edge,
pulled by a gentle current.

I will learn eyes that look outwards.
Since I no longer pull and sing like the current,

when a river butterfly
touches silent surfaces with delicate feet,
I will bend to meet it myself.
When an egret stands in the
marsh shallows with folded wings,
I will call it lovely.
This is beautiful, this is not, this
is an endless garden of reeds,
this is the forest after a rain.

- Kristin Roedell is a wife, mother, and retired attorney living in Lakewood Washington. Her work often concerns the daily lives of women, as well as mental health issues. She has been published in the online magazines Breath and Shadow, Metromania, and Switched on Gutenberg. Other works will appear in Flutter, Chantarelle’s Notebook, and Open Minds Quarterly. Her chapbook Seeing in the Dark will be published this fall by Tomato Can Press.

Witness

I do not laugh at bubble letters on the bathroom stall.
The pretty cursive, the delicate loop in the y.

Even when the words spell, help me. I hate my life.
I am willing to witness your toilet paper autobiography.

Who am I to judge, after all? I have spent hours considering
how many other people’s photographs I have wandered into.

That couple from Minnesota in Times Square at Christmas.
The bottom left hand corner.

There I am, wearing my blue coat.
Trying to turn away from the camera, blurry.

- Sarah Kay is a NYC based poet whose work has taken her uptown, downtown, and out of town. She is the Founder and Director of Project V.O.I.C.E., which promotes creative self-expression among high school and college students through writing and Spoken Word workshops. For more information please see www.project-voice.net

Market

She buys those eggs with little scenes in them,
a frosting tree and icing child within glittering
walls. She places the village on the end table,
the forest scene atop the television and tiptoes
across the carpet so the deer by the brook won’t
startle. She dusts the ovals in all tenderness
every weekend, shaking her head, remembering
how her life was once that small, the curls on her
head, miniature, her heart a veritable smudge of
gumdrop, neck held in abeyance by the dazzle
of the domed white sky—until the day of the
hammer and shout and sugar shards, cathedral
piping falling across the lintel of an opening door.

- Jenn Blair is a Park Hall Fellow at the University of Georgia. She has published in Copper Nickel, The Tusculum Review, Miranda, Fairfield Review, and Hamilton Stone Review among others. Her chapbook “All Things are Ordered” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives with her husband Dave and daughter Katie in Winterville, GA.