Here
a poetry journal
2018
Editor Daniel Donaghy, Professor of English
Here a poetry journal Department of English Eastern Connecticut State University 83 Windham Street 225 Webb Hall Willimantic, CT 06226 herepoetry@easternct.edu www.easternct.edu/herepoetryjournal/ phone: (860) 465-4570 fax: (860) 465-4580
Follow us on social media! Twitter: @here_poetry Instagram: @herepoetry Facebook: @herejournal
Student Readers Allison Brown and Hannah Hokanson
Cover Image "Innocence and Experience" by Daniel Donaghy
Publication of this issue of Here was funded by The Creative Writing Club at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Submissions for the next issue of Here are welcome October 1-November 20, 2019, through our Submittable link: https://herepoetryjournal.submittable.com/submit
Š2018 Eastern Connecticut State University
• Table of Contents
3
Bruce Weigl 5 Rennie McQuilkin 7 Natasha S. Garnett 9 John L. Stanizzi 10 Sean Thomas Dougherty 11 Cait Turner 18 José B. González 21 Jim Daniels 23 Brian Fanelli 24 John Bargowski 25 Aaron Caycedo-Kimura 26 Maria Mazziotti Gillan 28 Samantha McKosky 33 Clara Burghelea 34 Luisa Caycedo-Kimura 35 Paul Martin 37 Rebecca Rubin 40 Pegi Deitz Shea 42 Daniel P. Carey Jr. 43 Steve Myers 44 Steve Straight 46 Contributors Notes 47
2018
4
2
•
5
Bruce Weigl Sutra I am brother of the gutted cardinal the cats brought home and left like a bloody gift on the stoop for us to find in the morning and then rejoice. I am brother of the cats too who kill as guiltlessly as a god, and I am brother of the mud the god rises from and stands there like a tree we don’t know we should care for. I am brother of the trauma like a river through my brain, and never subsides; see? I am brother of the crow who speaks to me, but I am not free like the crow to choose the way the world appears, and I don’t know what I’m asking for here, except a hand to reach back through those years and bring me home because I am brother of three bad days and three bad nights when they blew us up. I am brother of the dizzying lift ship I saw smash itself down so hard into the wire that it burst into flames and then disappeared, and those who had come to get us out, souls I imagined who drifted up from the flames and smoke of the wreckage all the way to hell. Just when you think there are answers, another scream shudders down the dark hallway in the night. I am brother of the night that holds us forth like pure finders of our own mortal shrines. Nothing should be left to chance.
2018
6
2 Drawing I
I wanted to draw a picture of the landscape I often visit without my permission but whatever the pencil does is not right. The pencil in my hand is not right, so the trees look instead like gallows, and the birds like daggers flying, and the mountain I tried to sketch becomes a burden I must carry on my back like a ruck sack through the jungle. You know? All I fucking wanted to do was draw a picture of the landscape that included trees of several engaging varieties, not many birds, I admit, some mountains in the distance that called me, and some wild animals that would emerge in darkness from the brush into the mowed lawn of my mountain home, but everything I drew looked like death somehow, or like dying, and no matter how I held the pencil, or in which direction I dragged it, it all had the same flat countenance of death. I don’t think this means anything, though, because right at this moment I’m watching the pink and white azaleas blossom into such beauty that I feel like I will never die. And although it’s only a feeling, a glimpse of something and then gone, it’s all the honey hole of joy that I need at this moment. May I speak to you as if you were reading this now?
•
7
Rennie McQuilkin The Angling Like an angler choosing the perfect lure (feather-and-fabric mayfly or damselfly stitched during a long winter) the poet selects the right nib, fits it to a favorite pen, dips it in jet-blue ink the pen drinks in. Before it can make its mark, he inscribes with it the space above a blank page, the nib shadow-casting back and forth then settling on the page, its cursive forming ovals, lines, parabolas–– animal origins of a language as old as what the poet hopes may lurk below and rise like dream to the lure–– perhaps some first memory, every-colored, some rainbow-speckled, dappled nibble, and sudden strike of a thing the poet begins to play, letting out his line, letting out, reeling in, playing it for how long he has no idea, sometimes seeing it break the surface, permitting momentary glimpses of itself. He hopes what he nets, though quickly fading in the ordinary air, will be essential.
2018
8
2 Christmas Eve Afternoon at Braddock Bay for Eleanor and Will
And it was said that we should go to see this thing come to us from afar. So we set forth over fields simplified by snow and ice, bent low to negotiate an avenue of wild rose arched by the weight of winter, its red berries promising; passed a stand of cattails, umber seed-tubes broken into beige wool redolent as spice; and came to an endless lake, steel-blue under a lowering anthracite sky ornamented by salmon trim at its distant edge. Along the shore past bare willows glowing from within, a serration of waves broke, all but frozen. From the rock-ridden jut of a long spit hung teeth of ice––a place as austere as the cold cattle shed and tooth-gnawed slats of a small corn crib we’d hallow as a manger that night, nursery of God. Here, now, at the heart of wilderness was the mystery we’d come far to see, at first nothing: a white-topped, white-and-gray-striped boulder at the far end of the promontory. Then the white top of the boulder moved, swiveled like a lighthouse illuminating a circle of the world, searching into us: the oval, gold-eyed face of a Snowy Owl from the Arctic tundra, a creature so fiercely itself it was the proof I was looking for.
•
9
Natasha S. Garnett Owl Song Two owls hooting through the spruce dusk alight and perch in side-by-side bare tops of trees a wingspan between forty feet above the stream Up there like massive darkling cats, big-eared, yellow-eyed, eager, black paired silhouettes against the end of day Serious and imperious they render a duet to evening and the hunt A bark, not far, breaks in–– shaggy, earthbound, unharmonious Offended, the owls spread wings of silence, thrust off, sweep downwards, gone before the dipping limbs have stilled
2018
10 John L. Stanizzi
2
Entering the Sea in Hope of Solace Even those brief days we spent by the sea in the wooden cabin, its oven-heat a sweaty authoritarian gunge, couldn’t help––language up against the wall, a frightened perp arrested in the act. • Did we believe that by bringing the boat, as small as it was against their voices, down to the sea, we would forget his crimes? There was a time when the sea would heal us. or when we believed the sea would heal us. • They believed in the spittle, the insults, they believed the proven lies––no way they would quiet their greedy, insipid bays. And we waited by the sea for the storm which would be coming, the sea repeated. • Cities splinter. We hold our anger’s lease. Rally cries. Fat hatted, red hatted flat jabbering fabrications, and The sea, the sea, you cried, the sea would heal us all. And so we walked together toward the shore. • And we stepped through the moonlight in the swells, the salt a balm, the sand a healing salve. Is solace so simple––moonlight on sand, stones’ pull and push, angular panes of sea, we standing ankle-deep in the lament? • Even those brief days we spent by the sea, as small as that was against their voices, won’t quiet their greedy, insipid bays. The sea, you cried, the sea would heal us all, we standing ankle-deep in the lament.
•
11
Sean Thomas Dougherty Sonnet with a Sadness like Birds You don’t know how to approach strangers Anymore, much less anyone. Is there nothing but the distance of bus stations And laundromats? It might as well be miles To the dryer where she reads, or he knits A scarf for some boy he adores. For this is the heart: uselessly tore-lorn, Yes, love love love love love. We say it Like stamping one’s foot, in a puddle Out in the rain, towards no one Waiting for a face To show itself, when what you most want And most fear will leave you with a sadness Like birds, in the distance—
2018
12
2 The Way Light Falls
Between the two meter Maids, eating sandwiches Outside the House of Corrections. The shadows of clouds Grow out of the sky. Steam Rises from grates; Teenagers nod Under billboards. Pawnshopped trumpets. Iron locked gates, The little lights Of barges Pass under the steel bridge Where every summer Someone fishing Finds a body. Or the funeral Parlor, The mortician’s makeup That made us look As if we were in a musical Of The Walking Dead; As if we leapt Off a rooftop After we calculated Our last payment,
•
13
Trying to decipher What we witnessed Between the air’s panes Is like the Desire That webs us all Or the way that light Falls Isn’t failure.
2018
14
2 Postcard Near Atlantic City Circa 1991 (for Lynda Hull)
In this winter light Like a wake I smoked Beside a white girl As the bus departed As the strangers left The station One by one Once more I found myself Watching the rain Behind stained Windows (yellowed From smoke) Like a face In the distance Obscured A choir of them Called
Like childhood
Across the railroad tracks Littered with needles The miraculous Goats Stepping With their long icicle beards Like the three wise men
•
15
Heading toward the station
Of the cross
This girl carried the weight
Of what the rain cannot wash away
We watched the storm Drown the dark What was there to say If I had been left there Without spectators Before the pimps arrived The pimps who always arrive Towards the boardwalk (there in the ugliness at the edges) The rain let up I watched her walk Down the block With her tiny suitcase Towards the vanishing point Of another life I did not know More than her face And her jean jacket That spelled (Does it matter Does it ever matter) On the light Wind You could smell the sea roses Dying
2018
16
2 Those Notes We Compose
Across the bottle’s lip As if the dead are lurking. White lilacs on the table Under the picture of Christ. From a doorway, The grotesque & the damned; A menthol cigarette glowed. A summer of cypress, The silver dollar moon Above the back alleys Of broke, listening Through a fire escape; & a steel door opened: The third shift spilled From the warehouse dock. No one can tell you the cost For the sins we’ve sawed In half—for the toll At the intersection of parable, & piss—fallen off a stolen rig At a sharp turn long ago— Her face of the Black Madonna. Her bandaged wrist, Outside of the Polish Falcons;
•
17
The dogwood blossomed, The girl so high it hurt To hear her ask, how much? At the corner of 3rd & Parade. But all she wanted was to sell The plastic Dyngus Day beads She wore. She was matted hair, Perfume facing intravenous ghosts. She was thin as the drizzling rain. She snapped a necklace from her neck. The red beads scattered Across the AM asphalt Like some fast, rough music Even mercy could not stay.
2018
18 Cait Turner
2 When Sweat Meets Sweat
Felix tapped his right eye, which was cloudy, before explaining that when he was four years old, his father, on a bender, had cut into its tissue w/ the buckle of his belt. It’s no good, it doesn’t work, Felix said. We were sweating out decades of chemicals; detox was a kind of death. An ancient A/C unit chugged & rumbled beneath our labored breath. Felix told the story about his father & his eye in a voice you might hear at the corner store saying sorry, we just ran outta rolls or huh, looks like I-95’s backed up. Outside, the city shimmered though waves of warmth we couldn’t feel. Beneath Felix’s broken eye was a creased & shadowed teardrop tattoo. Despite the air conditioning, I was sweating, too.
•
19
Afternoon at Front & Girard Three twentysomething White guys stand under the el smoking in the rain, waiting for their plug. When the skinny one wipes his eyes & hikes his belt cinched pants, the cash they’d pooled flurries to the ground. The other two yell & swear, lip-pinch their smokes, drop to their knees for the scattered bills. A Black guy, hair gray, late 40s, flips them the money from his motorized chair. The three don’t thank him. They take off down Front Street, already sweating, shouting We Good. We Good. We Good.
2018
20
2 Abando* Ghazal
FAMILY HOME FOR SALE says the sign out front what used to be the VFW, where years ago I’d watched a stranger die on the steps outside. The guy’d relapsed after 7 days clean. He split from the clinic, came back to the Ave to cop, then stumbled to the VFW to fix. The windows had been boarded, so he shot up outside. After the week in detox, his tolerance had dropped. His neck & back & legs became a giant C. Across the street, people crowded around the Quik Stop while workers called the EMTs outside. After sparking up a bowl, I’d drifted to the corner store for something sweet. I was too stoned to notice what had happened until sirens cut through the dark outside. I’d never seen an OD up close; I stuck to pot cuz I’d had friends on dope who’d died. The open airs stayed open no matter what happened outside. The lead EMT said that’s it. The VFW had long been closed & boarded up, but the steps were easy to find. The EMT covered up the dead guy’s face while the crowd began to thin outside. The Quik Stop is still standing, but most of the abandos been bought up cheap, fixed up, & sold to single families who don't like the idea, in this neighborhood, of their kids playing outside. *"Abando" is slang for abandoned houses, usually occupied by dopers, in the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia.
•
21
José B. González Another Master: Reading Dante’s Canto I Dante makes the footsteps difficult to find. But the trails in our city make it easy to be lost. Maybe the secret to Dante is to follow the rustling of the words. Or maybe the secret is to be so deep in that forest that only a poet can pull you through the leaves. Mr. B has told us to reread the pages. He doesn’t know that I won’t finish until after my mother has come home with dirty feet. I have been sifting the words, waiting for them to startle me out of my sidewalk sleepwalk. I should be outside. Running. For something. Or from someone. Or for something. Or for Someone. Even with dilated pupils, I have followed friends into dead-end streets and have read the truth behind street signs. But Dante speaks with a strange tongue. Mr. B tells us to search between the inferno’s lines. And I’m not sure if that means I should read Dante in the darkness or in the light. “Thou follow me,” Virgil says, “and I will be thy guide, \ And lead thee hence through the eternal place.” My family has been trying to escape false promises of forevers written by dictators who douse infernos with dead men’s ashes. But I will follow Dante anyway. Not so that he or Mr. B can continue to claim that I have almighty masters. Not so that I can search the grail of a promised eternity only to find monuments of someone else’s fraternity. Not so that I can sit in a desk and crack open symbols until they rub off on my hands. But so that I can walk with a stride of a hunter dragging the body of Dante’s Inferno behind me, so that I can show the head to the doubters, and so that they can finally understand what I mean when I say to them, yes, my family has seen worse. My family has left hell. 2018
22
2 Greed and Waste: Dante’s Circle Four
If I was Plutus, I’d move aside and join the men’s chants: Why do you hoard? Why do you waste? I’d let the men inside Dante’s circle waste their light and store their darkness inside their bodies until they’d explode and burn into bulbs that resemble my city’s lights waiting for the next spark, they’d have no choice but to listen to the timbre of wheezy breaths on city streets. I’d let sneakers hanging by shoelaces clap in the wind, and punish dealers for hoarding boys in cellars, for building monuments of wastelands, for giving birth to stillborns who were conceived with straws, and for whoring boys (who look too much like me) for a lick of a spoon. Greed. Mr. B thinks it’s beggars with a pen. He measures it with the wrong scales. And so does Dante. Greedy are the wasteful, like the guys who live in L5 whose bags of garbage spill over the day after pick-up. Greedy are the ones who have the stars but won’t share the stripes. The ones who charge for cockroach rentals while hoarding tenants. So much greed slugging around our sidewalks, but people never talk about the landlords who think they’re sinless land gods. If only Dante had walked around my block, he’d see how sins are spilling over into each other, he’d see how hope is stacked on top of hope, ready to go up in flames.
•
23
Jim Daniels A Picture When I Was Happy Taken by My Suicide Friend I wear a red Stroh's Beer hat and a black T-shirt. I wore and continue to wear many black T-shirts. I feel like a kid in Detroit when I pull one down over my bed head in the morning. I sit on a flat field in central Michigan where all fields are flat despite our proximity to Mount Pleasant which was also not particularly pleasant. For me. Back then. Quick to let everyone know I was a kid from Detroit, even if it meant an ugly fist fight. I swaggered and swore on it. My hands are doing some odd rhythmic slapping clapping not slapping punching. We on our commune of ragged muddy blankets are listening to a band of three ancient black men singing acoustic blues on stage. I could clap. However awkward. However off the beat. 21 years old, I bust a juicy smile for her hidden behind the frame. Happy she's willing to have sex with me in a sagging orange tent or in the trees exit stage right or both in the next day and a half. The festival started by a co-op that will inevitably break down due to a lack of co-op over money and doing the dirty work. I will pass a joint with one of the old guys on stage later around a campfire as we split the difference in a discussion about God. She carried the camera with the confidence of a rock star. God never found a way into our discussions or lovemaking. She died cranking her suicide mix tape, a hose methodically attached from the exhaust and duct-taped into her car window. 2018. In 1978, I imagined myself a ladies man and a good dancer and that all I gotta do is flash that smile and all will be forgiven. No, not that smile. The one in the photo, unguarded and raw like our favorite music. I lost some hearing to it, but I can hear that boy's joy in the photo. Being Detroit was never a game for either of us, but in central Michigan it allowed us to stand straight as a street sign and stare people down. We had an understanding never to have an understanding. Thus, I woke up in another tent the next morning. Thus she punched me hard nevertheless. She was a woman of bumper stickers, causes, and a strong right hook. Taking the pills versus not taking the pills versus taking all the pills at once. Versus turning up the music louder. I had no camera and too much confidence in my own clapping. The nearby Pine River later got polluted by accident with toxic fertilizer and they had to shut it down. I'd fished in that river. Threw my cute puppy in and watched him learn to swim. Not learning to swim in toxic water on something more than instinct was one of my many early oblivious failures. What you can't see is a good lover/friend in a black T-shirt with a good camera making good use of it. She lived long enough to send it to me in an envelope with no return address. Look how happy you are, she wrote on the back. The photo traveled in books and shirt pockets. Just look, even now the colors have not faded. A photo isn't enough to keep anyone alive, I know now. But how do you shut down a river?
2018
24 Brian Fanelli
2
For My 86-Year-Old Neighbor, Who Still Shovels Snow drifts spill white on sidewalks. Plow trucks roar by, dirty the driveway you just cleaned. By the time you mutter curses, the truck has cut a corner, its yellow headlights lost. You then see your 86-year-old neighbor bent low, shovel in hand, her gray hair tucked beneath a knitted beanie. You don’t have to help, she says, but you do and imagine what it will be like to be her age one day, God willing, listening to wind gusts from inside the house, wanting to act as snow piles outside. How long would you wait for someone to dig you out, until you seized the shovel to do what you’ve always done for years, through decades of Pennsylvania winters? You stand next to her, shoulder to shoulder, chipping away at ice, afraid she could slip, break a hip again, but she laughs, My kids would kill me if they knew I’m out here. You admit defeat, refuse to tell her to leave it, to go inside to those empty rooms. Instead, you both commiserate over the length of this season, the first winter after her husband died. Once finished, she kicks her boots against cement stairs, waves goodbye with a gloved hand, shuts the door against winter’s waning weeks, but leaves the shovel on the porch.
•
25
John Bargowski Uncle We all knew Rusty's old man went crazy on some jungled atoll in the Pacific, knew the Army brass pinned him with ribbons and medals, then shipped him back home disguised as a husband and father to a job he could never lose threading spools of tungsten filament on the line at the light bulb factory on Bergen. Silently sharing a four-room flat on the south end of Ogden with Rusty's mother and a man Rusty called Uncle, who came after breakfast and left before supper. The two guys sometimes passing each other on the stairs after the 44 bus dropped Rusty's father off from his shift and he climbed the three flights to let the milk-glass paneled door slam shut behind him. Everyone in the neighborhood pretending he'd never been gone until those days around the 4th when we could glimpse his shadow framed in the thinly curtained window rocking side to side in the shuddered light from his RCA while Rusty's mother and Uncle sat together sipping longnecks on the stoop. The booms from the big stuff our older brothers rocketed into the Jersey night from an empty lot on the Palisades bursting into thousands of sizzling blue, white, and red stars that shimmered for a second or two then fizzled out after they'd rattled the panes of every tenement on the block.
2018
26 Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
2 Tillage
my father chuffs his shovel of his right boot full weight
into soil
with the sole
more dried mud than leather
both feet
gloved hands rock he levers a clod
on the shovel steps
the handle turns it
the smell of earth
balances
the blade pries
chops it
repeats to the right
takes him back
the family farm of rented acreage
packed clay
to San Gabriel before the War
before
Executive Order 9066
after tilling his first bed like a gnomon
marking time
on the pine bench
after a long swig his garden
he plants his shovel
upright
rests
under the pin oak
from a can of Coors
never looks beyond his fence
surveys
•
27
Measuring Distance Twelve inches off a yellow painted curb in Santa Rosa, just outside the open door of an Airport Express bus, my mother remains standing—her slight frame motionless—after telling me to sit in the first seat three feet away. This shuttle arrives at 6 a.m., leaves promptly at 6:15, transports people sixty miles south to SFO, where they fly to places like New York City to do things like go to grad school. Almost in the way as other passengers board, she avoids my eyes— her youngest—stares down the length of the asphalt until the door closes. The brakes hiss, the interior lights flick off, the coach departs on time. She waves at the tinted windows, tight lips a half-smile, tries not to think about the mostly once-a-year visits from now on. 2018
28 Maria Mazziotti Gillan
2 The Houses I Lived In
When we were still young, you and I, twenty-seven years old and our children, two and four, we lived in a big white house on Oak Street in Kansas City, Missouri, a couple of blocks from the university where we taught, that stone house with columns that stretched from the porch all the way to the roof, that house that I loved the moment I saw it, had bedrooms flooded with light, each with five big windows, and an old-fashioned kitchen, where I painted blue chickens all around the room above the chair rail, that house with its separate breakfast room and its built-in china closet, whose glass I stained bright blue and red, that house with its extra room that became my office and my TV room, that house with its back stairs. I loved that house because when I was a child, I lived in a cold-water flat with four small rooms, but I wanted that Father Knows Best house, the separate bedroom for me, the book-lined study and curving stairs. Every time I drove up to the Kansas City house I smiled, loving the rock solid look of it, those huge stone pillars, and the children in the big play room, and the bedroom they chose to share because, unlike my own dream come true, their rooms seemed too large to them, too overwhelming, and Jennifer, at two, with her golden curls, when she was afraid in the middle of the night, would crawl into the other bed to be next to her big brother and John would grumble and complain, but he always let her stay.
•
29
I loved that house, but I hated Kansas City. I was glad to watch it grow smaller in our rearview mirror when we moved back to New Jersey, to the house we bought without seeing it, across the street from my sister’s house, where I still live now, no longer young, alone, where all the rooms are mine, while you rest in peace. ◉ The Summer Porch When we were young, our children in grammar school, my sister and her family lived across the street from us. We bought our house while we were still in Kansas City. My sister and my parents had found it for us. On summer evenings we’d sit on my sister’s big front porch, talking late into the evening, while the children played in the street, or sat on the end of the porch playing games while we chatted. This was before my sister got sick, before the rheumatoid arthritis twisted her hands and feet into unrecognizable shapes. She was still beautiful then with her incredible skin, her huge brown eyes, her full mouth, her sexy body. So much energy came off her, it was like electric sparks. We’d sit and gossip. The air rustled with the movement of the huge oaks that lined the street. Strange how we don’t recognize those moments that will glow and sparkle in our memories like fireflies, don’t know how looking back, those moments are the treasure we carry to soothe us against all the losses that lie ahead.
2018
30
2 Like a Finger Loves a Scar
I keep tracing the round welt of the scar; oh, not a real scar like the one that seems to grow redder with time, the one that bisects my belly, just as ugly, though it is a metaphor for the way we have ruined the world, a metaphor for the ripped open mountains left by coal mines because we need, we need, we need, our own voices the only ones we hear, a metaphor for the noxious smell that rises off the Passaic River where my father used to swim in water when it was still clear, a metaphor for the melting ice caps, glaciers, for the way we go from heat waves to severe storms to drought and people keep insisting we haven’t caused climate change, a metaphor for everything we have done to ruin the pristine beauty of the world, too many houses built, too many trees cut down, too many cars driving too many miles. This is the scar we cannot erase. We cannot absolve ourselves. We are all guilty. Plastic bottles that will never disintegrate, millions of bottles and when the people of the future find them, what will they think of us? A world where a sick whale’s belly is bisected, filled with eighteen plastic bags. The scar of our greed, so huge, that soon it will obliterate all we have known and loved, in a world we should be preserved and not destroyed.
•
31
Broken Bones Speak In 1974, I fell down the steps to the garage and broke fourteen bones in my ankle, an operation needed to put it back together, metal screws inserted, screws that were never removed, screws which served as my own weather report. For years, I managed not to break any more bones but the month after you died, the month before our 47th anniversary, I broke my shoulder and my nose. A couple of years later, I broke the other shoulder, my nose again, and I came close to breaking my eye socket. Last year, I broke my nose once more. But my eyeglasses have protected me from looking like a prizefighter, my nose has been broken so many times. I know now that broken bones speak, even years after they’ve healed. The language of broken bones is clear and precise like a sophisticated torturer who knows just the right way to inflict the maximum amount of pain. No matter how much I wrinkle my nose with effort, I cannot make it any easier to put on a jacket or walk across the room, my bones screaming their one note again and again, a scratched record forced to repeat the same sound.
2018
32
2 Home is the Place
Susan Sontag writes "Home is the place where there is someone who does not wish you any pain."
I was so fortunate to grow up in a home where my mother kept us safe and close so that even today, all these years later, I can feel the smooth skin of her arms wrapped around me, the way she would break off a piece of homemade bread fresh from the oven and spread it with butter from the stone crock the milkman brought to the back door along with our milk. I tried to raise my own children in the same way, wanting them to know they could always count on me, that I would endure all the world’s pain if I could keep them from suffering. Of course, I couldn't. No one could, not even my mother, who would have wrapped us in cotton wool forever if she thought that would protect us. But we cannot keep our children from loss and betrayal, no matter how much we wish we could. Home is where they come when the world is cruel to them, when they feel broken and destroyed and we take them into our arms and hold them while they cry.
•
33
Samantha McKosky A Shared Gift That night before Christmas, lying on Grandma’s brown carpet upstairs, I stuffed the dogs’ coarse fur into my shoes to keep warm. My mom told me I was smart, smart enough to get an education. Fingers shaking from late-night coffee, she pointed to her uniform, sleeves beginning to show their stains, hung out to dry the smell that begged to escape. Heavy circles chained her eyes. I was so sick of eating nothing but Grandma’s pancakes and fried dough, of my sister waiting for a call from Dad, the third year in a row. Later that night, Mom called us into our room that had white walls and Grandma’s photo with Elvis, a room small enough to feel stuck in and hear only silence. Mom closed the door holding a bag behind her back. She pulled out a Nerf basketball hoop, the price sticker still on the backboard: $5.99. We never expected a gift. My sister and I cradled the net and squeezed the bright orange ball until wrinkles formed like a happiness when it’s Christmas all over again.
2018
34 Clara Burghelea
2 First Time: Orange
(Râmnicu Vâlcea, Romania, 1985)
Mother comes back in the morning, after a night of queuing. Her treasures lay on the kitchen table: four oranges, two rolls of soft toilet paper, a half-melted bar of Chinese chocolate. I touch the fruit and put my nose to it and remember her reading the story of the Christmas orange. I am not sure whether to eat it or save it until New Year’s Eve. The smell tickles the roof of my mouth. Mother smiles and starts peeling. Her agile long fingers, soaked with juice, run across the white flesh of the fruit. Tongue-tied with adoration, I impatiently touch her elbow. The grainy rind coils on her lap like a baby snake skin. Nana stares over her thick rims while her hands keep up the purring sound of knitting socks. She knows strawberries, plums and grapes but the bare pulp of the orange has a different geography of smell. As the orange blooms into fleshy petals on the plate, all three of us gaze at its layered pulp, and, eyes half closed, taste the twinned heart of the fruit. When the new, tangy aftertaste is gone, we smile. Outside the window, happy laundry dances across a green line. In my hand, chocolate melts like love.
•
35
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura Water Iris Yesterday a root beer twin pop melted on her tongue On her shoulder a damselfly Light chestnut wings like the skin and the eyes of the boy who bought her the popsicle Last night a Saturday like always a father yelling at a mother and the mother quiet as a flower What will the neighbors think All is silent in the morning A botany book a sketch pad a #2 pencil Ericaceous shrubs root in airless bogs the coolness of a maple floor the corner of a room Ombrotrophic plants receive only rain the flow of the fingers the breeze of the breath Bedroom walls can’t hold hate Only the mind flutters always the mind 2018
36
2 Skin
The girl fixes her arms to the railing, chin on her knuckles, stares at the folds on the elephant’s face. Thick serpent-like trunk that brushes the ground, eyes that stare inward. The girl talks to it with her gaze, plans an escape. March. Tree limbs extend taupe and bare, like the sky and the buildings that cut it. Concrete covers all. A rock pigeon pecks at a burger, coos at the girl, then shakes a limp piece of lettuce with its beak. At twelve, the girl frowns at cramps, new curves on her frame. A pimple on her butterscotch brow. Bras constrain her, as do businessmen in crowded trains. She’s grateful for air, her down coat, the stillness before wind tings her ears, her legs. Alone in her room, the girl creates plays, dresses dolls, tests her sister’s liner–– long exotic lines form her eyes.
•
37
Paul Martin The Pass Walking the trail, I see the rotting ties stacked along the route the Black Diamond once traveled, connecting our dusty little town to the world as it did that day the three of us were settling into our seats when the conductor appeared in his dark uniform. My father held up to him the laminated pass he earned by his work with spike hammer, shovel, and crowbar on the railroad section gang. My brother and I stared up at the conductor’s face as he studied the pass, then nodded, moving on, the three of us easing back, unwrapping sandwiches my mother had packed, the train picking up speed, the trees and the river flashing past on our way to St. Patrick’s, Radio City Music Hall, Yankee Stadium, my father’s wide smile leading us out of one country into another.
2018
38
2 The Song Sparrow
The song sparrow perched at the edge of the fountain dips its beak and tilts back its head, drinking twice more before it flies into the maple’s shade. Three tiny beaks of water, scarcely enough to be measured. To live like that, needing so little, singing a pure song.
•
39
Trexler Orchards
Surprised by the big flatbed heaving out of the orchard, churning up dust, I recall the summer I woke in the dark to catch the spine-jarring ride to Trexler’s, one of twenty or thirty white kids among the Mexican migrants thinning endless rows of peaches under the climbing sun, falling asleep at the supper table, praying each night I’d wake to rain, the brief taste of hard work my father insisted would do me good before I gladly returned to school, forgetting the unseen ones who followed the harvest, shouldering their wooden ladders, their hands like ravenous birds stripping the trees of pears and apples, bending low over rows of cabbages and potatoes that stretched to the horizon and, reaching the end, turned into the field again.
2018
40 Rebecca Rubin
2 My Grandmother Tells Me Stories
of her first boyfriend, Don Jackson, who left footprints in the flower beds outside her bedroom window. She whispers as if her father is listening from the grave. I used to watch her put her teeth in, squishing pink glue on raw gums. I cut my corn off the cob and sat with her while she ate. Tonight, she’s had two glasses of wine. She wavers to the car like she’s never drunk before. She giggles like a schoolgirl, hearty and whole-toothed, and fixes her pink bow.
•
41
To Kill A Jew is easy, he said. As he doused a bundle of wood in gasoline, flames rose, a smile creased his freckled face. He stared at me through a camera lens, the good Catholic boy who delivered the chalice by my side one Monday morning Mass. You belong in an oven. He smiled again. I bet your grandparents burned. I’d heard it all before. This time it was different, though. He was serious. I wondered how a person could carry so much hate, the same type that brings a gun into a synagogue.
2018
42 Pegi Deitz Shea
2 The Worst Thing about the War
(As recalled by George A. Deitz)
shooting someone dead was not the worst thing I did in the war there’s no time to think when the enemy is ten feet away shooting you just act one time my squad was lost starving we came upon an old stooped man shuffling along with a walking stick lightly tapping the rump of his boney water buffalo
we offered to buy it to trade for it meant only meat to us crying he mimed this is all I have left in the world we took it anyway pressing his palm with money which slipped through his fingers like ash we cooked that beast we ate that beast and it churns inside me still
•
43
Daniel P. Carey Jr. Patching the Hole I scoop compound to fill the hole your fist made in our living room wall that day you said you were leaving. Gripping the putty knife, I run again to your box in the basement and grip the gun you didn’t know I found. Remember how I stood halfway up the stairs, barrel cold against my twelve-year-old temple and said Just stop, you love each other? Remember how everything stopped that night? The gun was gone by morning, but the hole’s still here, five years after you left, and tonight in front of it I’m swooping and smoothing like a painter, like a son you could have loved.
2018
44 Steve Myers
2 Pool
Her 1944 high school yearbook: Pauline like an abstract expressionist sum of fragments & marginalia— suggestion’s cipher, no center, no THERE. In shadow, Paul A. Wilson, the pater familias, Foundering Father. (Resentment a duty...liberty not safe without it). Popular; even the most reticent scribbler considers her “a real swell girl.” The Class Historian makes reference to “a bad case of spring fever.” Her best friend, the one who’ll marry the hero/martyr of Iwo Jima, consoles her: “Honest you deserve more than you’ve gotten but someday soon you’re going to receive something that will be happiness for you forever.” What she wants most is her own swimming pool. In her painstaking cursive she’s recorded the diaspora the war’s brought on: the boys, “Navy” or “Army Air Corps,” girls either “married” or “nursing training.” Exactness to the last detail: “mother of a little boy—boyfriend in New Berlin, working.” A hint of her father, his chronic bile, in the gloss she offers alongside her senior picture: “Hopeless.” Still, the posed shots capture an upjut chin, show her proud of the body the gym team’s given her, and of her basketball team, the girls’ interschool champions three years running, where she was a “linchpin,” a playmaker when girls’ rules only allowed you to push the ball to midcourt, but not cross over; you dished off to your shooters, backpedaled to the baseline. Each time the other girls came at you, you held your ground.
•
45
4 a.m., rain falling steady so it drips from the eaves as it did that June morning they moved us from the farmhouse into town. I am there again, ear pressed to a beer glass, its rim warily pressed against their bedroom door like Lucy did, eavesdropping on Ricky. Farmers’ faint bootsteps on the gravel lane, arriving for morning milking. Skritter under the floorboard. Jittery night cleaves to horizon. “The light of reverie,” writes Simic, “is a dim light.” Imagine 4 gray walls stacked boxes bare floor 2 undraped windows ashtray desk rug mattress, them. A shadow-realm. I strained to listen: O the heart that has truly lov’d never forgets warbled my father’s violin, laid aside in its clasped black case. My God! where am I to go? whispered the woman standing at the train station (my mother had fallen asleep, reading). The answer: a flutter in the throat of the chimney, a sift of soot, then silence. A floorboard rasped. The cast iron cat doorjamb antiquely mewed. The little Buddha, our refugee from Occupied Japan, loosed a blue streak of Nothing from the duffle bag. Our land, home, all we knew. Did the voices foresee uneasy dreaming? Did they understand?
2018
46 Steve Straight
2 Tuning
Soft mannered, polite, he removes his shoes at the door and pads in his stocking feet between the Hazleton grand and the Baldwin upright, striking the A above middle C on each piano. Both are slightly flat in the dry air of winter, and he begins with the Hazleton, thumping the A440 fork on his knee and then stroking the key whose tone he will reconcile. It is slow work, sounding the A steadily as he turns his hammer in minute increments until the tone is true, then aligning the intervals among all the keys in equal temperament, working his way up the keyboard for the next hour. I am most content to listen one room removed so that his healing work is clear but softened, and unlike my musician wife who makes excuses to leave the house for this, I feel myself each time fall into trance, as if I were being tuned. It is a languid pleasure, hearing the relationship between discordant beings resolved two notes at a time until order is restored, all tension removed, and in time the whole house is in tune, if not the world outside.
• Contributors
47
John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, which won the Bordighera Prize and was published in an English/Italian edition in 2012. Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born English poet who earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University. Her collection The Flavor of the Other is scheduled for publication in 2019 by Dos Madres Press. Daniel P. Carey Jr. grew up in Bozrah, CT. He studied English and Poetry at Eastern Connecticut State University and is a former small business owner. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a poet and visual artist. Born in Santa Rosa, CA, he now lives on the East Coast, where he earned a Master of Music at The Juilliard School in New York City. He is the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee). Born in Colombia, Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a writer, translator, and educator. She was the 2014 John K. Walsh Residency Fellow at the Anderson Center at Tower View and the 2014 Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellow at Ragdale. Jim Daniels's poetry books include Rowing Inland and Street Calligraphy, 2017, and The Middle Ages, 2018. In 2017, he also edited Challenges to the Dream: The Best of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards. His next collection of short fiction, The Perp Walk, will be published by Michigan State University Press in 2019. He is the Thomas S. Baker University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon. Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 16 books, including Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (NYQ Books, 2019) and The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018). He lives in Erie, PA. Brian Fanelli's latest book is Waiting for the Dead to Speak. He is an assistant professor of English at Lackawanna College. Natasha S. Garnett is a graduate from Dartmouth College with a BA in English whose work has appeared in River Walk Journal, Oak Bend Review, and Toasted Cheese Literary Journal. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award recipient for All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions) and author of twenty-three books, founded the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ, is editor of the Paterson Literary Review and is Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY. Recent publications include What 2018
48 2 Blooms in Winter and a poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow. José B. González is the author of Toys Made of Rock and When Love Was Reels. He currently teaches at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Paul Martin is the author of River Scar (forthcoming from Grayson Books), Closing Distances, and three award-winning chapbooks. His poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and Writer's Almanac. Samantha McKosky, from Deep River, CT, is a 2015 graduate from Valley Regional High School. Currently a student at Eastern Connecticut State University, she enjoys running for Eastern's Cross Country and Track and Field program, mountain biking, and swimming. Rennie McQuilkin served as Connecticut's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2018. The author of thirteen poetry collections, he has received an NEA fellowship and the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the publisher of Antrim House Books. Steve Myers, the author of the poetry collections Last Look at Joburg, Memory's Dog, and Work Site, is an English Professor at DeSales University. Rebecca Rubin is a first-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Emerson College. She hopes to one day be a professor. Pegi Deitz Shea, award-winning author of more than 450 works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for readers of all ages, teaches Creative Writing at UCONN. John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide–Ebb Tide, and Four Bits: Fifty 50-Word Pieces. Steve Straight, professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College, is the author of Some Assembly Required, The Almanac, and The Water Carrier. Cait Turner lives in Philadelphia, where she was born. Bruce Weigl has written sixteen poetry collections, including On the Shores of Welcome Home (Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry and forthcoming in Fall 2019 from BOA Editions, Ltd.) and The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern University Press; Pulitzer Prize Finalist), and a celebrated memoir, The Circle of Hanh (Grove Atlantic).