Dry Apricot Ears: Poetry

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An Animal Alive │Dominique Salas

The first client this morning brought his female American Eskimo, ten years old and spayed, wrapped in a blanket, her snout peeking out as if she could still sniff earth up. But she wouldn’t anymore, having left him some time in the middle of the night. So I lay out the truths for him: I say, “I am sorry for your loss. Here is some tissue”; I say, "We will call you in a week to a week and a half when her ashes are here for you;” And I let him know, “I will stamp her paw in clay and paint it whatever color you like.” I go home to find my American Eskimo. When she weighed 10 times less than she does now, she had a girlfriend­­ a purple cow with a pink tennis ball abdomen, which she would hump like a teenage boy, constantly crossing a finish line. Now, she is on the couch, a balled blanket scooped underneath her, arthritic white arms holding together the softness. She loves it slowly and deliberately, as if she could still learn something she hadn’t in the past nine years of her life. Ears catching on to me watching before her eyes do, she rolls onto her back as I walk to her. I press the T of my forehead into her groomed and uttered belly and say a truth: you are still alive.

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Dominique Salas graduated from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, but is a true desert dweller, born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Currently, she enjoys working in an animal hospital, which serves to billow and deflate her heart daily.

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Inside these Windows │Chrissy Wright

haste creates small ( cuts) like gills in your skin, lines that would convene extra rays of tissue on a film.  film. ponytail on pillars greet the portrait of a snarling pop culture. grin again & again plastic grin-grimace. get in line... prod to be a part of my labyrinth while sour pipes & cinnamon assault the brain. +++ ++ + Chrissy Wright blogs.

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Now │ Logan Mayfield

The rain is splashing its change all over the street. Bill's Laundromat breathes the smell of humid clothes. The Korean market opens in red neon. In 1979 my eyes emigrated from the Middle East via bus. I see the color of rain in Arabic, but my tongue loses meaning in translation. I am a witness being interrogated by myself and I won't talk before my attorney arrives. Trash cans are shiny, new trees lining our curbs, they grow every year. A cat was stuck in one yesterday. My radio is a man from Atlanta. Its warmth is lonely and far away. These static people scratch in and out like channel 8. They once made me think of suicide every night. Umbrellas yellow the sidewalk. Licking the world's rough palm, the cat, eats his reflection. He is in stripes and I am wearing my going out skin. Tonight, I am more than an idea.

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Logan Mayfield was the recipient of a third place poetry prize in the 2009 Utah writing contest and his poems are forthcoming in several places. He spends most of his time between Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Portland, and Santa Monica.

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Ill in New Orleans │Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Back home, your cool hand pauses on my forehead— three, four, five, and the verdict: warm. The cure: breakfast for dinner, you shuffling skillets on the stove top. Lemon, honey, ginger, and the kettle chirping. Vanilla egg-y French toast with a dollop of almond butter. Smoked hash browns served with my favorite little fork while I’m faintly existing, spread-eagle’d on the couch. Without you here, I perch on the corner of some oyster-scented street, the damp air like a lid. And here is what I carry, nothing helpful—my purse stuffed with boxes of Kleenex stolen from the hotel, itchy hand sanitizer, impersonal antibiotics. Nothing like you.

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Nancy Lili Gonzalez is a writer from Chicago, but she hasn't been back to Chicago in almost seven years. The last time she went back was for a five-year-old's funeral.

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Church │Erika Jo Brown

Tonight I peed in the church for the first time. If you pee in a church and no one's there, do you still need to squat? Yes. I took a cookie, overly spiced midwesternly, what is this, ginger? Nutmeg? At least I have a life in which something to do with gratitude. White robes are lined up in the hall looking like angels. I am wearing a baggy men's jacket. Jesus Christ, how the sycamores shudder. And how I am thirsty. The night is laden with sycamores, lined up like angels. Thirsty sycamores.

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Erika Jo Brown is from New York, where she founded the Chinatown reading series Floetry at 169. She is editor of Stretching Panties magazine, an annual print collection of experimental poetry, architecture and drawing and is currently an MFA candidate in Iowa, where she's working on "Lyrical Load," a manuscript dealing with the midwest.

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Transfer │Lindsay Young

I’ll take a cold tray. A scalpel. A gloved hand. Split myself open, snip everything     loose, then reach in and lift out my organs:     liver, kidney, lungs, my still-beating heart and place them, slick and heavy, into a shining new body: broad shoulders, flat-breasted chest, muscle visible, bones dense, skin thick. Then, with an unfamiliar weight and warmth     between my new legs, I’d stand before you     and ask: so this is what it takes?

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Untitled (For Robert) │Cayley Heagerty

Originally published by Sorin Oak Review

I watch them draw out the plastic tubes that snake around your threadbare bones, like a sinking battleship raising its anchor. I can't think of what to say so I turn up the volume on the Sunday football game between God and the Devil and wait for you to slip out of your skin into that black inky nowhere. But you wait until we all have our back turned to waft up through the holes in the Styrofoam ceiling tiles, blanched sterile by the fluorescent flickering. They shuffle us out of the room, offering lukewarm cups of instant sympathy and suddenly I'm six years old again-- standing barefoot in the cold, wet grass of your garden on New Year's Eve, holding a sparkler, crying as it fizzles to a sleeping cinder.

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Cayley Heagerty shares a deep love for bad puns, swearing, and word-smithing. She enjoys parallel structures, referring to herself in the third person, and irony.

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I Would Walk With You │Sam Trevino

Hand-in- calloused-hand, with art history in our eyes. When I brush the hair from your temples I’m Jackson Pollock, dripping light down around the canvas of your shoulders. With each laugh you compose symphonies that will live inside me for months on end— the Chopin of your giggle on the subway platform, the Amadeus of your sighs echoing off of back ally walls. I’ll hear all of this as I stumble through Cambridge, stepping heavily, firewater on my breath. Do not offer me water, sweetheart – just light a match – I would have it burn like Texas sometimes burns. Let the fumes ignite my bones like old so they spark with each stride. Watch over me as I kick embers up against cold cobblestones. One crack between the bricks for every time I make amends. One scorched brick for each moment I forget to kiss you.

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Bath 5 (New Hampshire) │Jen Silverman

If it’s one drink, it will be two. Wisteria tangling around your wrists. Here is where you buried your

father. Here is where you buried your brother. Here is where they will bury you, when the

time comes. No wonder you drink yourself down toward the earth. Home is where the shovels lie.

Earth and earth and earth. Stones crowd your sleep. Granite and salt, sand giving birth to

the fortress where even your lovers sigh. Silent underfoot. You dream yourself toward them.

You are foxfire, you are phosphorescent. Your mouth like whiskey. Your eyes like whiskey.

You baptize yourself in sorrow, again and again. You baptize yourself with bourbon and brandy.

You swim downward, fast salmon, heedless, handsome, death is in you, it has captured your ear. You have your

father’s jaw, your brother’s chin. When you were born they bathed your small body with their fears.

Each scar they’d earned became manifest on your skin. Their love aches like a badly set bone. When the river takes

you, it will be no new baptism. Just that same, ancient sacrifice. Just that rush, that rushing, and then you are gone.

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Bath 3 (Iowa City) │Jen Silverman

That winter a fever came and didn’t depart till spring everything happened through a curtain

the bills the rent the love affairs with men I couldn’t keep separate in my mind I’d never liked blonds

but they were so bright they caught my eye like lucky coins I plucked them up and there you go next thing you don’t know

one from the other and blame it on the fever but the sensitive ones will leave your bed and go out into the cold, hearts bruised, and what can you do

I went back to bed that winter I ran baths late at night then didn’t undress sat at the edge of the tub and watched the water

quiver like a fugitive, I don’t remember that I ever saw my reflection in the spring the fever left

everything was clear-edged and merciless and I picked my lovers for their black hair and their black black eyes

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Jen Silverman is a New York–based poet and playwright who has, so far, mainly received attention for her work in the theater. She has been published by Ploughshares.

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Show me that wild onion heart. │Sam Trevino

Let me wash it clean under the tap – we will sing while dirt circles the drain like vultures over a patch of interstate, eating what they love most.  I would slice and dice the bulb of your core, sauté it in oil, devour it with hunger matched only by a cyclone bursting through barns – ravenous – crossing county lines with no regard for arbitrary borders. Throw yourself headfirst into the stink and mess of the romantic, eat the one you’re with.

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Sam Trevino is a writer and poet, transplanted from Austin, Texas and currently living in Cambridge, MA and is one of the founding organizers of the Fresh Meat Poets Showcase and a current editorial intern at Dig Boston, an alternative weekly newspaper and he loves baby sloths more than most people and he still dreams of going up into space.

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Ministry Today │Steve Davenport

The weight of color's a body floating in the river, face down, arms spread like bloat, or a thought hanging like a question mark in a whiskey bottle at 3 AM. What's the value of time without end? What's a mind to do without a body to fail it? Blue's the sound of measured time. Gold's the color of another whiskey. The weight of color at the end of time is the gray waste of words. The end of color is the end of time.

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Steve Davenport is a poet.

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You Darkness │Eva Saulitis

October darkness (can't) take me in, tap at my window, lure me to your half-bitten frost-light (rose fringe) over new snow, over mountain snout, sleep, gentle, open your mouth, you my lord of leaf fall (of whitening), take this, (unforgiven) down the trail through meadows, down the eroded gully (my thoughts) and as I watch (softest parts flushing) most horizon, cold to the edge— ridgeline—glacial tongue, take my mind, darkness (that I cannot love) & I'll step into the alders, under the goshawk's killing tree (above me, looking through & past —flayed beneath—picked clean) be not so pretty, so pink, erasure who unfolds, holds this (madness) pressed in the swale, creek bed (jealous lover) take me cold and hard. Still this (something) comes (not) asking for my logical, into this (my private), demon lover you are below the horizon, blue as a black eye.

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Eva Saulitis is an essayist, poet, and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for 25 years. Her first book was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize and the ForeWord Book Award.

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Gone│Lindsay Young

It’s weird how easily you can lose a balloon to the sky.  It’s like dropping something fragile that slips right from your hands and shatters, except it just disappears as if you never had it at all. I don’t know which is worse.

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Lindsay Young is a graduate of St. Edward's University, where she befriended the most talented writers on campus. Together, they formed a weekly writing group called The Poemies.

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Of Flesh and Heaven │ Daniel Westover

I admit it beckons me, that storied place of harps and hymns and haloed seraphim. I confess I lift eyes skyward; that I raise my hands toward the stars, and that I dream of wings. But the comforts of familiar earth: a midnight binge; the sweet, soft grind of sex; dry-biting gin, and velvet haze of sloth pull me, are Sirens singing from the rocks. This is, of course, my station: stuck between chimp and cherub; lord of animals, yet heaven’s leper. Even as the sun inspires me to shin up these mortal walls, I cover my eyes, squint in its brilliance, crawl back to my penumbral comfort zone, where certainties of flesh quick-blunt the sense of wanting to discard my blood and bone. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying no to all the trumpets, thrones, and ivory towers. I’d love a long silk robe, a gilt halo, a white-washed mansion with a splash of flowers. But might I, sometimes, lie in bed for days and watch slow shadows inch across the walls? Or is that heaven, like the good book says, devoid of darkness, downtime, idle lulls? I can’t deny celestial towns tempt me— imagination paves their roads with gold as you’d expect: all burnished, blemish-free— but I wonder: when we’ve overcome this world, will perfect wings grow heavy on our backs? How long before, like Icarus, I glide toward the sun, so that the fastening wax will melt, and send me crashing back to shade?

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Daniel Westover is a poet.

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At the Beach │ Ellie Francis Douglass

I hold a clam as round as a clementine—

heavy (a world).

  I put it down and, through the thin tide of minnow fish,

watch it spin.

  Could the spirits of the dead fit in the sea?

Might he flourish in that hushed place?

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Untitled. │Cassandra Warren

Originally published by Miniature Bridges

It has been seventeen days. If my cat notices that you are gone, she does not show it, but she has taken to sleeping on your side of the bed. I had coffee with a stranger. It is too soon and he is too cynical, and unlike you, does not know how I shape my fingers to hold a pencil, what colors I will not wear, what things make my voice go soft. I notice. I'm sorry that we painted your bedroom together. That must be hard to look at. All I had to do was move around some furniture. I still love you. I see my mother in the shape of my face when I am drunk, when my makeup settles into the creases underneath my eyes, when I tire of being a good person, or whatever this is. Say I am able to cover my body in chrysanthemums. Say that I am able to forget you. It's not about beauty or fluidity. It is because of you that I knew home, once.