Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013 Read online

Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013

  by Sixfold

  Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors

  www.sixfold.org

  Sixfold is a completely writer-voted journal. The writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the prize-winning manuscripts and the short stories and poetry published in each issue. All participating writers’ equally weighted votes act as the editor, instead of the usual editorial decision-making organization of one or a few judges, editors, or select editorial board.

  Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October, each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.

  License Notes

  Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue is acknowledged. Thank you for your support.

  Sixfold

  Garrett Doherty, Publisher

  [email protected]

  www.sixfold.org

  (203) 491-0242

  Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013

  Alysse Kathleen McCanna | Pentimento & other poems

  Peter Nash | Shooting Star & other poems

  Katherine Smith | House of Cards & other poems

  David Sloan | On the Rocks & other poems

  Alexandra Smyth | Exoskeleton Blues & other poems

  John Glowney | The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds & other poems

  Andrea Jurjevic O'Rourke | It Was a Large Wardrobe, from My 4-foot Perspective & other poems

  Lisa DeSiro | Babel Tree & other poems

  Michael Fleming | Reptiles & other poems

  Michael Berkowitz | As regards the tattoo on your wrist & other poems

  Michael Brokos | Landscape without Rest & other poems

  Michael H. Lythgoe | Orpheus In Asheville & other poems

  John Wentworth | morning people & other poems

  Christopher Jelley | Double Exposure & other poems

  Catherine Dierker | dinner party & other poems

  William Doreski | Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin & other poems

  Robert Barasch | Loons & other poems

  Rande Mack | bear & other poems

  Susan Marie Powers | Red Bird & other poems

  Anne Graue | Sky & other poems

  Mariah Blankenship | Tub Restoration & other poems

  Paul R. Davis | Landscape & other poems

  Philip Jackey | Garage drinking after 1989 & other poems

  Karen Hoy | A Naturalist in New York & other poems

  Gary Sokolow | Underworld Goddess & other poems

  Michal Mechlovitz | The Early & other poems

  Henry Graziano | Last Apple & other poems

  Stephanie L. Harper | Unvoiced & other poems

  Roger Desy | anhinga

  R. G. Evans | Hangoverman & other poems

  Frederick L. Shiels | Driving Past the Oliver House & other poems

  Richard Sime Berry | Eater & other poems

  Jennifer Popoli | Generations in a wine dark sea & other poems

  Contributor Notes

  Alysse Kathleen McCanna

  Pentimento

  is a tattoo on the back of my friend Martha’s neck,

  a term I learned in Art History as a teenager in love

  with the student teacher whose name I scrawled in my notebook

  next to Pentimento. Edward.

  Repentance is Wednesday evening youth group at the local

  nondenominational Christian church where my knees pressed hard

  against the wood back of the chair and I tried my damnedest to stop

  thinking about that boy with the hair who played bass

  in the church band. William.

  Pentimento is what they will look for when they look at my life

  under infrared cameras: “there, where she changed her mind and moved

  the heart a little to the left; there, where she changed her mind again

  and entirely redrew the face.”

  Repentance is three days of snow in the middle of April

  while I decide whether to make the same mistake again

  or not or if it’s a different mistake or maybe it’s not even close

  to a mistake but when will I know?

  Pentimento is what happened to my body after the rape

  and I couldn’t stop twitching enough to sit in a chair

  for dinner and my fork flipped pasta across the kitchen

  and when it stuck to the wall we laughed and laughed

  in spite of everything.

  Repentance is necessary for the attainment of salvation

  and salvation is God putting his hand on your shoulder

  and saying, “it’s okay, even I commit a little Pentimento

  now and again

  take a look at the world”

  and when God takes his hand from your shoulder

  and you hear your bones crack

  that is Pentimento

  and when you are dying and you see the backlit

  undersides of leaves on the most beautiful tree

  that is Repentance

  and when you feel your heart tear and a part of it

  is lost inside of you and a part of it is breathed into the world

  then that is a Poem

  that you memorize

  and burn

  Relics

  In this poem, your son is your daughter

  and all the ghosts are dogs. The kitchen

  is the baby’s room, the baby’s room

  is the front porch. Coffee cups are kisses,

  the flat tire is a pot of my grandmother’s spaghetti,

  the sandwich I left for you in the fridge

  has someone else’s name on it.

  I cut the grass this morning with scissors

  because I thought I saw it in a movie

  as a child about mental patients or

  it may have been soldiers in the field.

  I found the tiny dolls Kelli and I

  used to play with in the front yard

  how many years ago? Now she has a baby

  that looks just like her father and my body

  keeps trying to have your baby but

  the baby is actually a potted plant

  on the windowsill that I keep forgetting

  to water but water is really milk

  that I keep forgetting to pick up

  on my way home and the way home

  is not on this map and maps are flies

  that won’t stop buzzing

  around your sweaty head

  the tomatoes you planted in our garden

  are starting to outgrow their thin red skins

  every time you place one in my mouth

  it tastes like dirt and summer and this summer

  I’ve been overwhelmed with coffee cups

  and walking ghosts and smelling phantom

  flat tires and loving your son too much,

  and you not enough,

  and did you find your sandwich?

  Did you remember your name?

  Dream of the Apples

  For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

  to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth

  —Federico García Lorca

  We spoke of God for an hour in the morning,

  evidence of breakfast still on the plates before us

  (a few flecks of basil, crumbs of toast and bacon,

  my coffee gone cold).

  With sleep still clinging to my eyes, teeth,

  my fingers still grasping at half-remembered dreams,

  I think of God, with a great Old T
estament beard,

  an apple in each hand, his mouth, voice high

  like a bird song, points of light blazing through

  the apple seeds, cutting through darkness and flesh

  and earth—

  I think of Abraham the way Rembrandt painted him,

  dark, sorrowful and sure eyes, thrust to the edge

  by God’s cold force and then held back, and wonder

  if God requires of us such great anguish, such certainty

  in our own triviality.

  Once, I knew God (or, thought I knew God)

  and He filled my shadow as rain fills a forgotten cup—

  but some days, God does not rain.

  God must wish to make poets of us all

  to bestow us with such disease and grief—

  to cause us to bubble up until our ache

  spills onto others,

  onto paper.

  Once, I knew God, and we sat at the same table—

  one day, He got up and Left.

  Roane Duana

  Seir lived a fair mile from Orkney harbor

  and walked there twice a week

  along the stone fences.

  With his shoes left ashore

  he wandered into the water

  and felt the cool sting of autumn nearing.

  One morning

  when the sun was behind cloud

  he found among the stones

  of the shore an empty seal skin.

  He held it gently in both hands

  and hurried home without his shoes.

  Roane Duana followed him there from the sea

  and approached him at the doorway.

  She had no dress and he took her to town

  to purchase a fitting cloth for his new wife.

  Her pale blue eyes set in white

  soft skin enchanted him

  and he had her every night,

  but when Seir awoke in the mornings

  she was never beside him

  but looking out the window

  to the sea.

  He had heard the stories and kept the skin

  hidden under the floorboards,

  beneath a rug and a great wooden chest.

  Duana sat before the fire many nights

  with her feet resting inches above

  where the silky skin lay.

  Returning from the harvest

  Seir approached the door of his home

  and felt the air empty, found

  the floorboards torn up and the skin

  gone. A cry reached his ears from the sea

  and he found a baby left on the bed,

  conceived after she swallowed a star

  that had fallen into her mouth

  while sleeping.

  Tell Me Again

  In the bed of someone’s pick-up

  a dog howls

  in the heat.

  It is May, now,

  the sun hotter

  than normal.

  The mechanic behind the counter

  looks like he’s rolled right out of bed

  in a barn somewhere, yet his soft-spoken

  words are plucked carefully as if from a vast

  thesaurus—from behind browned teeth he says

  the transmission flush is vital to the longevity

  of your car’s performance

  I imagine him atop

  a tractor in Wisconsin,

  red-headed young ones

  forking hay, sneaking eggs

  from beneath snoozing chickens.

  A slim wife in a flower-print dress

  on the porch, the kind of girl who

  makes pasta from scratch,

  knows how to mix

  his drink of choice,

  scents laundry

  with lavender.

  He must think

  I’m very concerned

  about the procedure

  as I stare at him

  thinking about life

  outside the shop

  I lean in and say

  tell me again

  about the cost of the transmission flush

  listen to his poetic explanation

  smell his soft, cigarette breath

  wonder how it would feel

  to hold his hand stretched

  out in a field under a Midwestern sun,

  belly fat with pending children,

  a reliable pick-up idling beside us

  in the tall, tall grass.

  Peter Nash

  Shooting Star

  First, a twenty-year run of brilliance,

  your yellow-green eyes glittering

  beneath the raven wings of your eyebrows,

  the lightning retorts of your valentine mouth,

  the shimmy of garnet earrings

  framing your linnet face—

  we still remember the little girls on the stoops

  bringing you their broken doll babies to kiss,

  how we applauded you madly in Oklahoma!

  as you sashayed off the Marshall High School stage

  leading the cowboys up the aisle,

  and the way you could pick up enough change

  for a six pack of Heineken singing Bob Dylan

  on the Sunset Pacific Mall with your paint spattered guitar

  and a can of dollar bills. We’d never forget

  the famous night you filled Café Prégo

  with guys who’d fallen in love following you up the outside stairs

  of the wooden house on Ocean Avenue,

  your legs flickering in the sulfur light of the street lamps.

  But somewhere in your thirties people stopped buying

  your cardboard collages or the bouquets you scavenged

  from the mason jars at Pioneer Cemetery,

  your parents stopped paying the rent, the last boyfriend

  slashed your painting of him sitting on the toilet,

  no one would hire you to walk their dogs after Dotty the Dalmatian

  got run over as you read the New York Times at McDonald’s

  and your cat Matisse died locked in your room

  when you drove your VW Bug with daisy decals

  onto the Talmadge Bridge. We still picture you

  floating downstream, your face a petal of light,

  though the moon was not bright enough to see the water

  rippling through the folds of your dress,

  or the algae-stained rocks below.

  What I Hear

  I’ve been watching these trees half my life;

     this hill of pines whose pitchy limbs

        balance their rough trunks,

  sprouting needles, dropping needles

     the topmost tier a green undulating mat

        roaring in the wind, changing light into matter.

  Is it trees talking with the wind?

     the small animals who shelter in the shadows?

        the squirming rootlets in the basement of the hill?

  I hear voices from a hive of mouths,

     but not the words. I hear the brown towhees,

        long-tailed, lurking in the underbrush,

  scuffling in leaf-litter for seeds, the finches,

     gold-bellied, sociable, jittering in the sun,

        flung by the wind across a field of dandelions,

  darting among the branches of shade trees,

     living a life without naming the world.

        I know that each of you is saying something

 

  but I’ll never get it right. Best to stand here looking

     at that roaring, piney hill, hand covering my mouth,

        the better to hear you with.

  Morning Chores

  Night ends with a final snap,

  clawed feet scrabble linoleum

  dragging the Victor trap.

  This morning I tote up the damage:<
br />
  the crushed snouts, the oozing abdomens,

  the tiny turds black as poppy seeds

  speckling the floor. Now it’s time

  to pull on my crusted gloves, walk across the lawn

  and flip the bodies over the fence. Turn on the sprinklers.

  The truth is I don’t know where to go from here.

  As if I were in a maze of electron rings

  whizzing around one small house-mouse

  rapturously suckling a half dozen babies.

  Orbiting her, the weed patch fills with corpses,

  flies lay eggs in furry crevices, maggots

  scour toothpick ribs. In the outermost ring

  my spotted hands bait the trap with a Sun Maid raisin

  imbedded in a dollop of crunchy peanut butter.

  Beyond that, a space so vast

  my mind clamps down, unable to enter,

  but gives it a name: VICTOR.

  John Brown’s Cows

  Leaking milk from swollen udders

  the cows have been separated from the calves

  who wander dazed in the far pasture

  crying for their mothers.

  Strings of slobber hang from their mouths.

  Bellowing their grief

  the sound becomes background

  like the rush of rain in the creeks,

  while we dig the garden,

  pitch hay to the horses, stack firewood.

  And then a silence settles upon these meadows,

  and just as you learn to live without your children,

  the calves begin to suck water,

  to graze by themselves.

  Rocky’s Place

  There is some kiss we want

  with our whole lives,

  the touch of spirit on the body.

  —Rumi

  Sometimes I think of his thousand Post-its

  plastering the lamp shade, creeping

  along the base boards, up the metal legs

  of the card table and covering the window

  overlooking a graveled parking lot.

  In the corner, boxes of Zip-lock bags

  filled with alfalfa pellets are stacked.

  A bare bulb dangles by its wire

  over two rabbits, Flopsy and Mopsy

  inside a baby’s playpen.

  Each day begins seven inches above the sink

  when he whispers the first Post-it:

  Every seeker is a beggar

  before moving on to the next

  and the next in their ordained order

  as if they were a trail of stone steps winding

  seven times around sacred Mecca.

  And when he arrives at those who have reached

  their arms into emptiness I imagine

  him ascending the path to the doorknob of the closet