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Yes, Poetry
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Yes, Poetry Vol. 3, Issue 9: September 2012
yespoetry.com twitter.com/yespoetry facebook.com/yespoetry editor@yespoetry.com Editor-in-Chief Joanna C. Valente Assistant Editor Stephanie Valente Cover Image: Keith Moul
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Contents 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 16 17 18 19 21 22
Joseph Mulholland Lara Candland Tina Barry Richard Fein A.J. Huffman Charlie Weber John McKernan Yevgeniy Levitskiy Belle Ling Farhan Kathawala Joseph Goosey Joe Gianotti Contributor's Notes Editor Biographies Submission Guidelines
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JOSEPH MULHOLLAND Taxidermy TV: Kinky Fish (Late Night Program) your amusement park ringlets sour in humid florescence the worktable cold but warm under my drying layer of mucus1 fleshing my iridescent scales shingle by shingle with a perforated kitchen knife you roar kinky with jelly, adhesives, alcohol applied & absorbed your bony scuff, I am a buried stalk of thawed ions your limbs are alive & stitched with arrows the way you butter & retrace cooing the never before dawn that is only once a junction from head to caudal fin a hinge of loose gill coverlets2 I don’t even feel my bones snap under shear & nipper I beg you to turn out the lights & you remove my eyes —manicured fingernail gauge3 a salt bath for my head feels like a jacket of lightning, iodine sucked from last night’s loopholes, I search down deep & nuzzle up against all the images of you I’ve kept secret from dizzying hook to net to blackout
Memories of Drowning 1
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“A little powdered alum dissolved in water does a good job of removing the remaining mucus.” Gerald J. Grantz, The Home Book of Taxidermy and Tanning (Pennsylvania: STACKPOLE BOOKS, 1969), 39. “The incisions should be made just deep enough to separate the skin.” (Grantz, 40) “Exert pressure on the cheek from the outside while scooping out meat thru the eye opening.” (Grantz, 42) Yes, Poetry
5 not the vertebrae we imagined. the second time we could have been anything —a crop circle, a tiny ice pick, the study of sound in water, a dissected planet the last third death is the first third death. we melted our Styrofoam dreams with a magnifying glass, inside the amphitheater the palladium ceiling financed our discoveries with fog you say I have a structure which rogues me along, I have a Venus flytrap made of phlox & crippled roots. every search team helicopter drowns in my gasoline reservoir you pulled an all-nighter face down on the plateau’s smooth belly, Gila monsters tripping over your silence I imagine your lips as ambulance siren red —from my one-way emergency runway a test tube baby blinded by the microscopes’ pearly orb how many deaths do we get? I’ve already had four. the last time I suffered cramps & ended up boiled down in midnight’s forgotten soup memories of drowning in your archipelago of patchy reptiles & sore monsoons —clouds that shed a briny film & left the sky addicted to impurity pucker up señorita, I have this love shield of paint fumes & pomegranate bark —the seeds? buried in a subdued feeling of vertigo, the closet reveals its highway reluctantly —a 1,000 mile tongue combing wafer fingers through your drug store hair I found no fleas ticks or lice —just the ash remains of my childhood tricycle. it was then I understood, not every circle rotates on a fixed axis
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LARA CANDLAND Untitled charted from my otter’s window: the glazier has come & gone, ceded his view to mine o juggler of glass strung across the face of my domestite— this sting— parted from our mothers— this shape of day day
day
these new world horses poised & strung like jewels & packed around a clasped chain. feigning homliness, shamming opals dowered in chrysolite & bending finally to their quenching pond.
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TINA BARRY Your Last Rooster You half hoped the cartoon cock-a-doodle-do, that startled you at daybreak, had come from the man in your bed who’d strutted about the bar, over-preened chest atop short bent legs. He’d promised another go round with you, the evening’s choice hen. Vowed to cook pancakes in the morning. But his muscles fluttered and off he flew leaving the stink of barnyard on the sheets. The cock crowed in the alleyway, again and then again. You parted the curtain. Peered through the glass. Hoping for him-russet beak, legs spinning. Anything but the reflection of your own sooty eyes, hair a bale of dry hay.
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RICHARD FEIN Skeleton Key Take off Clark Kent's glasses and assume Superman's X-ray eyes. Kryptonite is an optical illusion, so feel free to find a deeper vision. Beneath black, white, red, yellow, brown, and perhaps even a tinge of blue, the articulations of bones speak of grace in the harmonized movements of humerus with femur, of radius and ulna with tibia and fibula. See how the slender phalanges uncurl from the metacarpals when the hand reaches out to touch. Be awed at the towering strength of the spine which holds the skull far from the ground and closer to the cosmos. Scan the arcade of the ribs, those bellows of breath. Below is the pelvis which holds up the framework, like a wide supporting hand.. And like the comic book hero see beyond the clashing colors of skin all the way to the ore of silvery bones running within, which as much as ligaments and tendons binds us all to the common vein of the body politic.
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A.J. HUFFMAN Light Denied “She shuts her eyes to mirrors and any shiny surface.” —Martha Rhodes
She will not see what she cannot feel. That’s why her eyes are always dark. They have yet to be used. On anything but you. And you’re not real. So they are confused into silence. Just passing along enough shadows to convince her. She is still alive.
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CHARLIE WEBER Sunday Afternoon I lied there in the Wal-Mart parking lot, the abandoned Wal-Mart next to church, making angels on the asphalt. Peering into the blue, I wondered how far I would fall if gravity failed. I heard the train coming ahead of schedule, loaded with trees scalped clean for the flooring mill. When the train passed, I saw the man who yelled in church earlier, standing there, looking down at the tracks, and wondered if he thought about gravity.
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JOHN MCKERNAN Marilyn Dream
Number Two
I am Marilyn Monroe I step out of a white Cadillac Walk across the playground At recess in Omaha To where the sixth grade boys Are kneeling cursing Scrunched over a circle in the dust Shooting marbles I pick up the skinniest one in my arms The one with the brown hair & brown eyes Some Irish name and begin kissing him Soft then hard on the lips and the neck He opens his eyes and says Put me down I want to meet Sheila Waters Not you I want to kiss her Not you Like you did just then Touch her hair Ask for her silver rosary Then give it to me
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YEVGENIY LEVITSKIY Ode to Costco My heart goes out to your pre-packaged goods & bad cholesterol, you draw me in with promises of executive memberships, free-refills on soda, and cheap over-the-counter medication. Your free samples of microwavable food, tastes as good as anything with more spoons of salt than sugar ever could. Your high and bumpy white ceiling is probably filled with asbestos, but I still love you anyway. I hope you never catch me stuffing an eleventh orange in a ten-count bag
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13 of Florida’s finest and juiciest. At the crowded aisle with my card out, you swipe and ask me if I want an upgrade, but I say no. The money I save by being a gold star member & loyal lover will go to spending and stealing more behind your back.
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BELLE LING Carp-Ikisukuri (after Henri Cole’s Sardines) Flipping the eye of a scab to see and holding up the twitch; backing and fronting the cut with curls and blossoms; splashing the slices with mercifullyslipped salt to keep them moving on bones; then setting a little scenic boat to hand them over, like dedicated tissues of a virgin to prove her innocence. I think: I must not doubt her virginity. I must not feel owing anything to her. But then, eyeing her, eating meticulously like timid nerves twining with skin faithful to the sting and cut, I also think: Yes, Poetry
15 If I were her mother, I’d prefer that was me.
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FARHAN KATHAWALA In Tallinn The sun clings to epileptic water In the cherry blossom world miasma mingles with neon runoff Birch sap rolls heavy down young throats People ignore fellow lonely neighbors heads bowed in reverence
somewhere.
at a few spots. in ancient capitals.
to the concrete
which swallows heat and toe prints And I stare blankly top a hill tapping on a black screen filling eyes sideways with jewels making my world apart from the silent exodus into silver skies
on all places.
of sunbeams here.
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JOSEPH GOOSEY LIVING UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT CONSUMPTION WAS NEVER A DISEASE BUT SIMPLY AN EASTER HAM My fourth skeleton is simply fed up with the amount of video games played by my liver. My uterus is over the complete lack of shelter. My hands are becoming deserts. Do you know of the swan who ate the man? He (the man) convulsed until all of firehouse 42 showed up at the scene but it was too late and he’d turned into a new swan. Swans, you know, are werewolves too. Can we feel all the fabric in China? Can we remember the reverberation of being six? Does the Nobel prize include a cash prize or at least a block of fine cheese? Once a vegan I spat on those who didn’t own accordions. Once fun I attempted the opening of doors not meant for simple opening. Carried a cat corpse down the boulevard. Naturally I got pulled over on foot and the cop said what are you doing and I said a burial is taking place please do not interfere with my beliefs. If ever a cop questions you about anything at all, simply invoke some god and walk off.
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JOE GIANOTTI Clothesline Your love for me works like a clothesline from a John Sloan painting, the kind that New Yorkers shared in the tenements, the simultaneous push and pull, push and pull of drying laundry.
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Contributor's Notes Tina Barry’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Exposure, an anthology of microfiction from Cinnamon Press (2010); Elimae; Fractured West; THIS Magazine; Pear Noir! and other online and print publications. She’s an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. Lara Candland’s first book, Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree came out in 2010 from BlazeVox. Her work has appeared in many journals, most recently Unsaid, American Poetry Journal, and Phoebe. She recently received a Special Mention in the Larry Levis Poetry Prize, 2012. She is also a co-founder and librettist for Seattle Experimental Opera, an award winning playwright and screenwriter, and a member of Lalage, duo featuring live electronic voice manipulations, whose first CD, Lalage: Live on Sonarchy, was released last year. Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as Cordite, Reed, Southern Review, Roanoke Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic, Canadian Dimension, Black Swan Review, Exquisite Corpse, Foliate Oak, Morpo Review, Ken*Again Oregon East, Southern Humanities Review, Morpo, Skyline, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain Aroostook Review, Compass Rose, Whiskey Island Review, Oregon East, Bad Penny Review and many, many others. Joseph Goosey dropped/failed out of an MFA Program and is stuck in Jacksonville, Florida and would like to leave again. Words of his have shown up in a variety of places if you care to look for them. To make money he reads court records. A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has previously published four collections of poetry: The Difference Between Shadows and Stars, Carrying Yesterday, Cognitive Distortion, and . . . And Other Such Nonsense. She has also published her work in national and international literary journals such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Writer's Gazette, and The Penwood Review. Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work athttp://www.facebook.com/profile.php? id=100000191382454 and https://twitter.com/#!/poetess222. Farhan Kathawala is an Indian student currently living in Memphis, TN. He has work published or forthcoming in Short, Fast, and Deadly, Red River Review, and Thunderclap! among other online journals. He plays bass guitar with a friendly banjopicker and drunkard washboard-strummer in his free time and eats clovers in the park when no one is looking.
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20 Yevgeniy Levitskiy has received a B.A. in English-Education from Brooklyn College, and is currently pursuing a M.A. His writing has been published in Hot Summer Nights (Inner Child Press), The Smoking Poet, Green Briar Review, Downer Magazine, and elsewhere. His forthcoming publications include The Books They Gave Me (Free Press/Simon & Schuster),Everyday Other Things, Paradise Review, and other publications. He is currently at work on a middle-grade novel. Belle, Ling Hoi Ching is a university graduate from the University of Hong Kong, and has completed her master of arts in Creative Writing in the University of Sydney in 2008. She has a special interest in writing poetry and short stories. Her favourite novelist is Haruki Murakami, and her beloved poems are those which can capture insightful images with indepth philosophical meanings. John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska – is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines. Joseph Mulholland’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Subliminal Interiors, Anomalous Press and Rabbit Catastrophe Review. He currently lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he studies at the University of Puerto Rico in the Hispanic Literature Master’s Program. Charlie Weber lives in Scottsdale, AZ. He writes as a hobby, as part of a local poetry roundtable. He has nothing published to date.
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Editor Biographies Joanna C. Valente was born in Manhattan, New York. She attends Sarah Lawrence College as a MFA candidate in poetry writing. In 2011, Joanna was the recipient of the Friends of Humanities/American Society of Poet’s Prize. She is also the founder and editor of the magazine, Yes, Poetry. Joanna is a graduate of SUNY Purchase College, where she received a BA in creative writing and a BA in literature. Her work has appeared in La Fovea, The Medulla Review, The Houston Literary Review, Owen Wister Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Uphook Press, among others. In her spare time, she is a mermaid. More can be found at her website: http://joannavalente.com Stephanie Valente lives in New York. One day, she would like to be a silent film star. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from dotdotdash, Nano Fiction, LIES/ISLE, and Uphook Press. She can be found at: http://kitschy.tumblr.com
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Submission Guidelines -Please send all submissions to editor@yespoetry.com. -We consider previously unpublished work, although simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Copyrights revert back to writer upon publication. -Submissions are on a rolling basis, so we ask you not to submit more than once per month. -Don't forget to include a third-person author biography with your work. We also encourage you to link us to your website or blog. Poetry: Submit up to seven poems. In the subject line of the email, please write “Your Name_Poetry Submission.” Either copy and paste your work into the body of the email, or attach as a .doc file. We welcome all types of poetry. Photography: Only submit original work; it can be a stand-alone piece or part of an entire collection. Submit up to five photos with an artist's statement. Email us with the subject line “Your Name_Photography Submission.” Music: Please send mp3 or mp4 files only. In the subject line of the email, write “Your Name_Music Submission.” Other: If you are submitting a review or interview, please send in a .doc file. It must not exceed 2,000 words. Email us with the subject line “Your Name_Other Submission.” If you would like to be involved or have any other questions, please direct all emails to editor@yespoetry.com.
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