Magazine
FALL INTO PLACE
by Sarah Law
You love the way my hair falls
over your bones, your prone body, how
I choose to cover you with words
so close to your own. From here
I can’t imagine why we ever worried,
even the span of my hand, small
compared with yours, fits to your plan. READ MORE
NO PLACE. LIKE HOME?
by A.J. Huffman
I met her in a bus station.
She was tired.
And hiding.
I tried to make small talk.
And succeeded.
Until I asked where she was going.
“Home,” she whispered. READ MORE
LONG DIVISION
by Kim Roberts
I was never good at math
but I understood
the heavy burden
when a number was left over:
you had to carry it,
the weight bending your frame
until your whole body formed
a less-than sign.
(“Long Division” was originally published in Prime Number and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Kim Roberts just published her third book of poems, Animal Magnetism, winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize (Pearl Editions, January 2011). She is editor of the online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly and the print anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC (Plan B Press, 2010).
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem exemplifies the efficient beauty of simplicity. Using few words in four brief stanzas, Ms. Roberts clearly conveys her message as effectively as she might have in a more verbose poem, perhaps more so. Tackling a concept as large as the heavy weight of burden one carries in life, this poem masterfully takes metaphor by the reigns, leaving the reader thinking of much more than math, “the weight bending your frame.”
Want to read more by and about Kim Roberts?
Kim Roberts Official Website
HEAT
by Adam Eaglin
It wasn’t a dream, more like a vision,
if vision meant steam rising from
a body, meant heat from the living—
I became the eye of a round-stomached cobbler.
I became a word in a fable. I became
the tongue in the mouth
of a girl. I became limbs like those of trees stripped of bark.
I became a shade of vacant white, like light
lifting from the skin of the sun.
Once I was attractive, once, you could smell it on me
like kerosene, that kind of thing, about to catch fire.
I never used the word beauty except when it was required,
ironically, but then I became the word, a creature transforming
in the moonlight.
Something strange happened then.
A man becomes frightened,
not at what he has done, but what he is about to do;
The wet of grass on skin,
the cold of the night
when you lay your body down.
Once I was attractive, once—
and then I became the night,
and then I became the air.
(“Heat” was originally published in Prick of the Spindle and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Adam Eaglin was raised in Summerfield, North Carolina, and has degrees from Duke University and Boston University. His poetry and reviews have appeared in Gulf Coast, Publishers Weekly, and the Harvard Review. A recipient of the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, he works in publishing in New York City.
Editor’s Note: Adam Eaglin is a master of metaphor. He effortlessly manipulates images to create an Alice in Wonderland-esque world for his readers to slip into as if a rabbit hole. With moments like “if vision meant steam rising from a body, meant heat from the living,” and “The wet of grass on skin, the cold of the night when you lay your body down,” we the readers are taken on a journey into a man’s inner thoughts and experience and into the relationship he inhabits and the transformations that ensue as a result thereof.
Want to read more by and about Adam Eaglin?
The Atlantic
Duke University Libraries
Vanity Fair
Words Without Borders
[The following translation was originally published in Per Contra.]
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(translation by Okla Elliott)
Who rides so late through windy night?
A father holding his child tight.
He has the youngster well in his arm,
He keeps him safe. He keeps him warm.
“My son, what twists your face with bother?”
“Don’t you see the Erlking, father?
The Erlking with crown and shroud?”
“My son, it’s but a sliver of cloud.”
Lovely, lovely child, come with me.
Such wondrous games you will see.
What bright flowers there are by the shore,
What royal clothes my mother has in store.
“Father, my father, are you listening
To what the Erlking is promising?”
“Child, calm yourself, be calm, please.
It’s just the wind rustling dried leaves.”
Sweet boy, don’t make such a fuss;
My daughters are waiting on us.
My daughters sing the nightly tunes
to cradle you beneath the moon. READ MORE
HOW LIKE A POTATO
by Keith Wilson
How potato of you,
noticing with your many eyes
the hunched and gloveless scraping of frost
from the windshield of my car. Omniscient
of you. Or perceived from your closet
window. Maybe the crack of your door.
And then to bring me a pair
of your own—worn, leather and for the garden.
How warm and hearty,
how rich and filled with starch.
Or Summer in your lawn chair.
My arms filled with groceries
or school books, how you tilt yourself
so your skin appears the most rough and brown,
bruised from the heavy handling
since before you were pulled from the unforgiving earth
by Jesus—who must, from the sounds of it,
live in the apartment
on the other side of you.
How you vegetate so,
arms like vines lifting to light
despite the dark knots
in your stomach, how you manage
to forget the heavy smell
of warm coffee soil,
down here where I live.
Below.
How like a potato,
to sit away from the birds, smiling,
all ready to fry.
(“How Like a Potato” was originally published in Poetry Bay and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Keith Wilson Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian poet and Cave Canem Fellow currently living in Kentucky. A graduate of Northern Kentucky University, Keith’s work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Mobius, Evergreen Review, The Driftwood Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, Kudzu, and in the anthology Spaces Between Us. Keith is an editor for the multilingual online journal Public-Republic and co-editor for the culture blog We Who Are About To Die.
Editor’s Note: How clever of Mr. Wilson to compare a person to a potato in such a skillful manner. To create layers of meaning – the potato-like characteristics of a person with their many eyes watching and their tendency to act as if they are “rich and filled with starch” – spread on top of deeper, more meaningful discussions that relate to religion and socioeconomic divides. In addition to his clever wordsmithing and ability to relay deeper meaning, Mr. Wilson’s poetry appealed to me first and foremost for his deft ability to manipulate language and create beautiful verse with moments like “how you tilt yourself / so your skin appears the most rough and brown, / bruised from the heavy handling / since before you were pulled from the unforgiving earth.” Given the layers of this poem, I suggest giving it a second and even a third read in order to fully extrapolate meaning as if pulling roots from the soil.
Want to read more by and about Keith Wilson?
Keith Wilson’s Official Blog
by Al Maginnes
Maybe the blindfold is not meant
as kindness for the condemned
like the choice of a final meal
or the last cigarette, a pleasure
meant to block awareness
of what’s coming. Instead it keeps
the living from seeing how
the eyes throttle with light
or glaze at the moment of impact
before the body empties into death.
In this age of performance, even an autopsy,
final audition of the body’s efficiency,
is theater. A TV doctor explains
how the flanges of the famous chest
are opened like curtains, the routines
of the reliable duo, systole and diastole,
the shuttle cocking of artery and vein,
the blood’s drifting clouds of toxins
all are measured and named,
no chance for curtain call
or final bow. In the film
I found on the internet and watched
because I started and could not stop,
the killers, not the condemned, wore masks.
He knelt before them as they read
their proclamations in a language
he was captive long enough to know
in fragments. His face a blank
of pure misery, glossed with sweat,
his hair twisted and on end,
some composure kept him still.
Perhaps he’d seen enough movies,
American enough to believe
in last-second rescues, the hero
who kicks in the door, guns blazing.
Maybe he believed this moment
a routine humiliation between
tea and afternoon prayers,
a ritual meant to be so frightening
that when water was thrown on him
or he was kicked, their laughter
let him breathe once more.
But the reading ended and one
of the masked men produced a long knife.
There was nothing swift nor spectacular
about what followed. Bodies wrestled
across the floor. Deep inside the scrum
started noise too high-pitched to be a scream,
noise I’d never heard a human make.
When the head was displayed,
it was no longer human, but something
molded from plastic and left too long
in the back seat of a car on a hot day.
If you watch this once, you will not
watch it again. In this world,
beauty and terror coax the same tears,
the voice of fear has no words,
the victim’s face, a trophy.
But morning still happens.
I get up, make coffee, walk the dog, things
I can do with my eyes closed.
Not until I read the paper or listen
to the news does the world take shape.
Some refuse the blindfold,
but most are grateful for a darkness
granted by a cloth so ordinary
it might have dried last night’s dishes,
then wiped the empty table free
of crumbs and ashes.
Al Maginnes is the author of four full length collections of poetry and four chapbooks, most recently Ghost Alphabet, which won the 2007 White Pine poetry prize and two chapbooks, Between States (Main Street Rag Press) and Greatest Hits 1987-2010 (Pudding House), which were published in 2010. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Georgia Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cloudbank, Salamander, and Solo. He lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife and daughter and teaches at Wake Technical Community College. The above poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
WHEN I WAS NO LONGER MY LEATHER JACKET
by Lyn Lifshin
Something he’d picked up
and gently carried to the
closet. When I was no
longer something he half
wanted to wear, held so
delicately, smiled at like
when he came in later to
the reading, said he would
have brought the Margarita
but he didn’t know if I
liked it on the rocks, how I
felt about salt. Before I
was no longer my jacket,
darkly mysterious, soft but
with a musky smell, flexible
enough to do what he
wanted with. Before that I
was all animal, wild. I was prey
he was on a safari for, caught
in his crosshairs. He could
taste my hair thru e mail.
Once he tracked me as far as
San Antonio, couldn’t
find me. This time I was the
lure, the flash of a few verbs and
he canceled classes, took off
work. I was something he
couldn’t stroke like the leather.
He was used to things being
fatal, leaps and cracks. He was
a journalist, wanted no
emotion to get in the way
of the facts.
(“When I Was No Longer My Leather Jacket” was originally published in Poetry Bay and Lyn Lyfshin’s book Persephone printed by Red Hen Press and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A, and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction “Queen of the Small Presses.” She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as “a modern Emily Dickinson.” Her prizewinning book (Paterson Poetry Award) Before It’s Light was published Winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow Press.
Editor’s Note: It is an honor to share with you the work of Lyn Lifshin today. A renowned poet, Lifshin has earned her reputation as a true wordsmith. With moments like “how I felt about salt” and “flexible enough to do what he wanted with, ” today’s poem at once delves effortlessly into a vignette of a relationship and simultaneously tells the story behind the scenes.
Want to read more by and about Lyn Lifshin?
Lyn Lifshin’s official website
By Andrea Kneeland:
UNTITLED
When you put your arms around me and I close my eyes, everything except your body disappears. I press my face against your chest, my eyes all wet, and sometimes I pull away and see that I have left satisfying evidence of tears on your shirt. I will admire the evidence covertly. It looks like a Rorschach blot or a foodstain. When I close my eyes, you could be anyone. Sometimes I forget your name. I can even forget who you are while you are speaking to me, if I want to, if I keep my eyes shut, if I try hard enough. It’s not just you who disappears when I shut my eyes. The ones before you disappeared too. All of your arms, your t-shirts, your reluctant acts of comfort, all of you feel exactly the same and it doesn’t matter to me anymore who any of you are.
HOME MOVIES
the way flesh swarms like ants the stuttering thumps embedded
like morse in our bones forever a history of fingers glistening
like butter the way memory is sort of a stain
in the cloth
like grease or like blood forever there you are unbleached
how you let them touch you forever your breasts fleshed guppyfish
eyes straining toward opposite points in the air forever the arch
of your skin
and the slip of a fisted hand tanned like leather forever the wormy
brown nylon of twisted rug the way it holds the imprint
of swarmed bodies forever the muscle of thighs
the baby
soft skin of the wolves forever the circling throb of impatience
the impermanence of movement the impermanence of face
of the bodies of ten white socked men forever the clutch
like a balled baby
fist forever the way you pressed your self down into the love
ly brown floor forever how your face bleeds forever into the white
round white lights
forever how I wondered if anyone would ever love
you how I wondered how
you would make them
(“UNTITLED” was originally published in PANK Magazine, and “Home Movies” originally appeared in Tarpaulin Sky Press. Both poems are reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Andrea Kneeland is the author of The Birds & The Beasts (Cow Heavy 2011) and a web editor for Hobart. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including Annalemma, DIAGRAM, Barrelhouse, Caketrain, American Letters & Commentary, Wigleaf, The Collagist, 580 Split and elimae.
Editor’s Note: Don’t let it be said that I don’t know how to ring the new year in with a bang! I must admit today’s poems are some of my favorites that I’ve had the pleasure to publish on this series. If you’re an avid reader it should be clear to you why these poems are right up my alley. Working strongly within the theme of relationships with an overtly sexual drive, these poems are a one-two-punch to the gut of America’s Puritanical backdrop. With moments and killer end lines like “And this will be proof that I know who you are and I mean it when I say that I love you,” “All of your arms, your t-shirts, your reluctant acts of comfort, all of you feel exactly the same and it doesn’t matter to me anymore who any of you are,” and “forever how I wondered if anyone would ever love / you how I wondered how / you would make them,” Andrea Kneeland is a poet after my own heart, and the perfect start to a new year of poetry!
Want to read more by and about Andrea Kneeland?
Hobart Literary Journal
PANK Magazine
Tarpaulin Sky Press
for EMW
Sestina, tonight’s the night I push you off the overpass.
I’m done with your six kinds of hell. Your demanding sky,
your French complications, your clouds in my happy wagon,
your forty-two words for rain, your pearl-handled gun,
this concrete and asphalt that leap-frogs the low ground
locals call the Bottom, dirt cursed with industry and blood.
I’m done with your sixes and sevens, the pressure of blood
at the thirty-nine sutures pinning us to this long overpass
you keep calling me to, far above the patchy ground
that only we who grew up here could think deserves a sky,
any sky, even this one with its petro stink. I too have a gun,
this twelve-gauge I’m pulling loaded from my buckshot wagon.
May your pieces make a smart pattern. May the dead wagon
carry a vacuum and glue. If there are forty-two words for hell,
I expect thirty-nine of them to be you. You need a real gun,
Sestina, my dirt under your nails, the rough of this overpass
for texture, the heft of a gunite hose shooting two-up at the sky
to make a holy road for rich pilgrims heading for better ground,
which means rolling or manicured or ode-worthy, any ground
but this petro dirt you call me back to with talk of the wagon
that will save you. I’d do the Crazy Wing through a bad sky
if I thought I had anything new for you and your stale blood,
your long form, the way your returns wrap this overpass,
Sestina, in the same old sixes and sevens. Better someone gun
you down than endure one more round of blanks from the gun
you pull from your obvious garter. Better the hard ground
meet you falling than I waste my love from this overpass
on your history, the stretch marks you earned on the art wagon.
Bottom needs steel, slaughterhouses, freight trains bringing blood
and thump of flesh on flesh to make its rough song, one part sky
to five parts slag and spill, glorious smokestacks praising the sky,
canals, and river, a round of voices joining as I lift my shotgun
and new ashes settle all over this Bottom I love like blood.
Time for us to go, Sestina, double-pumped to sky and ground,
me to open fields, where I’ll whistle past the dead wagon,
and you to your forty-two words for life after overpass.
We promise to curse the sky. We deliver our ends to the ground.
We’re loaded on the meat wagon. We love the noise of the gun.
Here is the blood we love. Here is where we leave the overpass.
Steve Davenport is the author of Uncontainable Noise (2006), which won Pavement Saw Press’s Transcontinental Poetry Prize. His “Murder on Gasoline Lake,” listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007, is available as a New American Press chapbook. Recent publications include a lyrical essay in Northwest Review, poetry and fiction in The Southern Review, and a scholarly essay about Richard Hugo’s poetry in All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
As It Ought To Be 