Issue Ten-March 2013 (archive)
Elephant Bones by the Fish Hatchery
OK, not elephant bones—but huge driftwood sculptures
washed up by the river: silver-grey patina
weathered to the point of solitude. We see salmon fingerlings
and sign the guestbook like we're married
(instead of vacationing extracurricular lovers).
We propose some mad scientist lives in the log cabin
nearby—his very fragrant hybrid roses
are streaked like rainbow ice-cream cones and swiveled
with a purple so singular
we surmise the work of an evil geneticist, splicing the tips of beauty's
use cool mnemonic devices like a Voodoo king's alphabet.
Our minds, rusted by salt,
continue on a residual blurring of consciousness,
where the only way out is a brain-dizzying kiss, some act
to anchor us back to real fish, the dazzling now of flesh
Doodling Hawaiian flowers in the margins of my notebook,
Kierkegaard's goat, philosophy-woolly, walking up a wooden plank
(it is the middle of afternoon and the goat is woolly-white….angora?
and the moon is see-through on a sea of powder blue).
near a pumpkin patch and thinking of my tribal circle of friends—
mostly because they're Vegans (raw) & believe in UFO's.
Autumn and the high-voltage trees
are dizzy with sugar fixes.
Colored leaves can look like tropical flowers
Sweet aloha, my kitten, my moon-smitten apple. Now I am writing
a to-do list. I am sooooo ocd.
Fireflies blink and buzz above the wet hydrangea;
a duo of bats are dancing
in hot shadows, the wet grass beading our sandals
as we walk the park this summer midnight, Kalamazoo.
It is night; the blue of the hydrangeas
is lost on us. We guess at color from the fragrance
enveloping us like a Hope diamond.
Wishing the moment to distill into a vial
we can carry home, we recite words to enhance
the mnemonic value of experience—
damp, mellifluous, courage underfoot.
First love buoys the heart beyond explosion,
soft rush of chemicals and obsession
made more fresh by the sensuality of flowers,
their careless thunder booming
against our skin as we brush by in a hurried tone
of craving, flesh to flesh. Desire deep in the bones.
This tangle can never be undone. Already the bats
sleep, perhaps in the tall trees, upside-down.
Give me that gift Sakura, when there’s no solace in life. Lift me from my troubles . . . Rather, what I mean is to talk about the chorus of angels that I could always seem to hear right outside the door, or through the window whenever I was drawing. Often it was an actual party, or just people outside, laughing, mingling. Other times it was the huge celebration I imagined went on without me, a procession with elephants and roasting spits, sitars and costumed dancers repeating with their feet the thunder of drums. Maybe it was just too far-fetched to pit myself against the world, and I guess I would have been out there dancing with everyone else if it was ever that easy. I can remember being ten or eleven years old, trying too hard for dances with girls—something not right about it—and maybe that’s how I ended up drawing comics. Where is it that we get this idea that one’s life can ever really be wasted? Moreso than dancing, I can tell you about that great welling within me, not doing, just looking at pictures, of dances, celebrations in foreign streets, of people herding through shopping malls or calmly loitering as if that emptiness was the only mystery left. But Sakura, I told myself I had to keep going, I had to draw comics, for one, because of those dreams I’ve always had where I’m out on that crowded sidewalk and I’m finally able to stretch out with my eyes closed on the concrete, and because I think I know the end, that embrace, as they say, is like going into a deep, deep sleep.
She didn’t recognize her dad at first. She was waiting outside of school when he walked up to her and said, “Hi, Joanie.” Hearing her name made her look away from the redbud trees she’d been staring at, but when she could tell it wasn’t her boyfriend, she looked back at the trees. From where she stood, she could gaze up through the branches at the overpass; she decided the contrast between the flowers of the tree and the starkness of the ugly metal structure, its faded paint and utilitarian purpose, would make for a nice photograph. She would have to remember to bring her camera here before the trees lost their flowers.
“Joanie, it’s me” the man said, touching her shoulder.
She turned to face him again, this time ready to tell him to quit bothering her. He smiled and took off his sunglasses. Then she knew. She tried to say dad, but no sound came out. Still, he nodded.
“How’ve you been?” he said.
She nodded, barely hearing his question. She was studying him, noting each difference: He had grown a goatee, he wore his hair longer, he wore contacts instead of glasses, and the lenses changed his eye color slightly.
“You look different,” she said.
What she meant to say was that he looked younger, almost too young to be her dad. And it didn’t make sense, because she hadn’t seen him for two years.
“You do too. You look all grown up.”
In a perfect T.V. sitcom world this would’ve made her smile, maybe feel a little embarrassed, but something about the flatness of his voice made her feel exposed.
“What are you doing here?”
“You mean the restraining order? That expired already.”
He started to say how her mom and the court had cheated him from the beginning, all of which was true, but she cut him off.
“You haven’t called me in over a year,” she said. “Not even on my birthday.”
The memory of foolishly staying up late that night swelled up inside. She looked up through the trees and watched some kids walking up the overpass. Their voices seemed to embody all the lightness of spring. When she turned back to her dad, her boyfriend was there. She must’ve still looked upset, because Aaron immediately came to her side and asked what was going on.
“Is this guy bothering you, Joanie?”
She laughed for a minute before telling him that it was her dad. Then she watched Aaron’s reaction: part fear and part anger. Her mom had told Aaron all the stories the things her dad had done after the divorce and custody hearings. All of it was true, but her mom had also left out a lot.
“Just give me a minute, Aaron,” Joanie said.
Aaron nodded and told her he would go get his car and then swing around to pick her up. After Aaron was gone, her dad spoke again.
“It’s hard for me to believe you have a boyfriend now.”
She found it hard to believe, too. A couple years ago she had been an angry girl that wouldn’t let anyone talk to her except for her dad. And, as much as she hated to acknowledge the value of outward appearances, she was a lot prettier now.
“He seems nice,” her dad said. “Maybe we could all have dinner sometime.”
She crossed her arms and sighed.
He frowned and then touched his goatee.
“I came to see if you’d live with me, not all the time, but maybe every other weekend to start out.”
He went on to say he’d been getting his life back in order and the courts said partial custody might be an option.
“Why are you doing this now?” she said. “I needed you back then.”
Without meaning to, she looked down at her wrists. Although there weren’t any actual marks there, she always imagined everyone could see marks from where she used to hold a razor above her skin. Only in the past couple months had she been okay with wearing short sleeves.
“I tried to be there for you,” he said. “I just went about it in the wrong way.”
He took a step toward her, reached out like he was going to take her hand, and then stopped. His movements seemed awkwardly slow, almost to the point of being comical. Joanie wondered if maybe some of the kids on the overpass were watching them. She wanted to look back, but it would destroy the sense of voyeurism for anyone watching. Instead, she made herself look her dad in the eye. He was blinking rapidly and trying to work his facial muscles into a smile. She was about to hug him – she could almost feel the release of tension she’d get, the perfect sense of surrender – but then she saw Aaron’s car.
“That’s Aaron,” she said, pointing to the car. “Maybe we can talk some other time.”
He nodded. She wanted to hug him now but felt like the moment had passed. So she moved toward her boyfriend’s car and left her dad standing there exposed, it seemed, to the sudden and absolute changes of spring. As she got inside, she heard him say, “I’m still your dad, Joanie.”
Then Aaron pulled the car away from the curb. Immediately she rolled down the windows and turned the radio up loud, as if the combined noise could carry off the truth of her father’s words, their promise of change, their air of permanence.
Villanelle for a Sudden, Early Death
This truth can not be said, it must occur
Reality unrelenting had one more lesson to teach
When all you are becomes all you were
A simple phone call makes the weeks a blur
And halts my hurrying with a screech
This truth can not be said, it must occur
Did wise men wait with whiskey, frankincense and myrrh?
I keep confusing death and birth in speech
When all you are becomes all you were
Gone, you are no apparition, no hidden listener
You keep driving, drunk, farther beyond my reach
This truth can not be said, it must occur
Catholic mass, religion class, a saddle full of burrs
But the night broke open baby blue, promising a breach
When all you are becomes all you were
That night, a hence-unseen ocean began to stir
And gunshots drove you from the beach
This truth can not be said, it must occur
When all you are becomes all you were.
There are curlicue threads
They have a will of their own.
It’s not the will of the creator.
It’s their own hangie-downie impudence.
Muscles sag after a time.
The roughness, the texture of life,
whose eyes are always bright.
On Maximum Positive Deflection
You froze the lovely red blush on my cheek
after our first date; and disregarding what I said
as a chunk too big to absorb into your flesh,
you mounted the mass of it on your wall,
to come back to at a time when you learn
how to break down that beautiful discourse.
You say you remember our conversation vividly,
but you mean you labeled my arch words accessible.
I am as flattered as a pinned butterfly
contained in your collection of scarabs.
I beg your chest to sprout another man
whose thicker lines feel quick on my clitoris.
Your brown eyes catalogue each filament of me
in devotion, yet I jerk the back of his blond head
from your red back and your eyes split into blue
and bluer. The space between the two of you
connects me in new words that I rush into.
The thread of me catches between your eyes,
but what widening you see is more me
forgiving myself for conceiving you
inside of another man’s boundaries
Afterward, In the Bathroom
I compare you to the blue Sauropoda
nightlight on the index of elongation, vertebrae
to body height. The semi-dark of your bulk presses
against his shadow. A typical neck bone in this creature
measures about two loaves of bread long. Even the position
of your pinky—at a pressured angle in the second knuckle
to my neck—effaces temporal boundary: you amount
to one centimeter of blooded flesh.
Euclid defines a point as that which has no part,
and my hand is too far removed from the muscle
that controls your mouth. I cannot trace
termination of space between fibrous nerve endings.
You as proposition with kiss. How very heavy
you are, slumbering, somatic man.
Crawls from this alphabet
On the page of this newspaper
Carry the stitches of a shadow
I have seen this quiet before
On my mother's face On her lips
When I asked her medical questions
But it has floated upstairs like a thread
Into shirts my father will never wear again.
Kallima Hamilton is the author of Outside the Lava Fields (Aldrich Press, 2012). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Hawai'i Pacific Review and Shenandoah.
Uzodinma Okehi's favorite color is Aqua—no, Lapis. Or maybe Sky Blue. He still doesn’t own a cellphone . . .
John Abbott is a writer, musician, and English instructor who lives with his wife and daughter in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Potomac Review, Georgetown Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Arcadia, Atticus Review, upstreet, Midwestern Gothic, Bitter Oleander, and many others. His poetry chapbook "There Should Be Signs Here" is forthcoming from Wormwood Chapbooks. For more information about at his writing, please visit www.johnabbottauthor.com
Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education at The New School in New York City. Norman Mailer wrote that Dodds’ novel The Last Bad Job showed “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” Dodds’ novels What Smiled at Him and Another Broken Wizard have been widely acclaimed by critics and readers alike. His screenplay, Refreshment – A Tragedy, was named a semi-finalist in 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Two books of Dodds’ poetry—The Last Man on the Moon and The Blue Blueprint—are available from Medium Rare Publishing. Dodds’ writing has also appeared in a number of periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Folio, Explosion-Proof, Block Magazine, The Architect’s Newspaper, The Main Street Rag, The Reno News & Review and Lungfull! Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha.
Marilyn Windau is Wisconsin poet, a recently retired elementary school art teacher. I have had my work in several printed and online journals including Verse Wisconsin, Fox Cry Review, Stoneboat, Your Daily Poem, Brawler Lit, and upcoming in qarrtsiluni and the Goose River Anthology
Megan Wong received an MFA in creative writing at New Mexico State University in May 2012. She has work forthcoming in Puerto del Sol among other journals.
John McKernan-who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska-is not a retired comma herder after reaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives-mostly in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Ressurrection of the Dust. he has pubslihed poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field, and many other magazines.
