ISSUE #16
Debra Allbery
Found
1. In which the Opies’ Lore and Language of Schoolchildren provides context
What travels with us still, what knows no borders.
These schoolyard charms and chants, our voices falling
into born and borrowed patterns, tracing their lines.
On my son’s nightstand: a plaster cast of a wolf print,
abacus of stones and feathers circling his lamp,
ballast and flight, counting his lost addresses…
Neil Barrett
Go Back
Where are the hidden abysses in this house?
the sink drain?
the ducts behind the dryer?
the spots beneath the garbage bag
that I pretend aren’t there…
Jo Angela Edwins
A Woman, Married a Year, Is Struck by Lightning
while doing nothing special, walking to her
car
or checking her mail, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky,
but electricity wanted her, and now no one does.
She glows like starlight. Every muscle
crackles
at the slightest twitch. Her baffled husband,
who loves her deeply, is afraid now
of her power, or perhaps more afraid…
Karen Hildebrand
The Dig (Puberty)
Deep in my mother’s bureau
drawer, I find a jewelry box
brimming with colored beads
like the floaters that bob between
swim lanes at the pool
and rope my arms and throat
with turquoise lime popsicle
pink…
Mary Dean Lee
2040
I’ll likely be expired by then,
transformed, maybe
into a will-o’-the-wisp
floating in a marsh by the sea…
Kathy Nelson
Quantum Physics, a Love Poem
I am enamored of his warm hands,
his mechanics, his partial differentials.
A koala, or some other nocturnal animal,
he sleeps draped in the armpit of a tree.
His smooth shaved head, his high peaks,
his swollen snow-melt streams,…
Colette Parris
Leak
Not the kind that buckles ceilings, triggers frantic dead-of-night calls to unlicensed plumbers, makes you beg for highway robbery so long as the robber comes quickly and takes checks. Not the type discussed slyly in commercials starring well-groomed white women of indeterminate age wearing pastel Capris…
Rose Auslander
When the wind blows
& your fences fall & birds nest in your petunias & your daughter walks into your words
& you lose her there
when lightning burns a path in a random paragraph & your body refuses to walk that path
or take you much of anywhere…
Anne Marie Corrigan
Sham Boy
My hometown is cut in two
its knife a river
a sacred stream of flotsam
whose muscular scum-lipped eddies
slash and score and whittle their way
through marshy land
swirls like musical runes
spell out thuggish poetry
from North to South
from high street to low…
SK Grout
You are a thing to love wildly
We are drinking just baby-girl-wine
shrieking through the sharpness
your body impressing like a censer
before me, swelling almost too sweet
to touch. I enjoy trying. You are a thing
to love wildly…
Jen Karetnick
An Abecedarian of American Sentences as a Summary of Intrinsic Motivation
I. Anxiety
All day my heart is a snake, molting skin it is not ready to shed.
II. Backyard Sanctuary
Bees abandon the weeping bottlebrush tree, dive-bomb the pool at dusk….
Beth McDonough
Night vision
Eardley-lit, we pursued a full moon road,
scaled shining miles inland
from the slap of the slip
in the Sound by the garrisoned ferry.
We pedalled, chattered and laughed it
back to the garden’s tethered caravan…
Beth Oast Willams
Finding Myself Lost In A Forest Myth
My cape was stop-sign red
and yet that sliver of skin between cuff
and glove must have whispered come in.
Fabric blew open, weak as curtains
closed against a forest storm. I crawled
to the edge of Grandmother’s bed…
Shannon K. Winston
On Curing Anxiety
After Dean Young’s “New Restrictions”
It doesn’t matter how many therapists
you see or if you switch from espresso to decaf
to herbal tea, or if you drink chamomile
all day as you read about self-help books
and The Art of Being Zen as if you could wipe
your mind clean like the dry erase board…