BORN FULLY FORMED
I can tell you about coming
into being about birthing
out bodies from sun shit and earth
to rise again and emerge whole
from darkness from dung from
the lungs of dirt do not stand
witness against me sing my scarab sisters
into the skin of the dead I am born
of the underworld to show you light
lifting my burden across the burning
sky I am born buried
born again alive
in knowing my time
I’ll embalm your beautiful sun
give you darkness at dawn
I’ll tug at your eyelashes
with my antennae wake you
every day until you die
{ X }
SALLY J. JOHNSONreceived her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she served as Managing Editor for the award-winning literary journal Ecotone. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in the Collagist, Bodega, the Pinch, Weave, So to Speak, Everyday Genius and elsewhere. She is a poetry editor for Green Briar Review and works as a publicist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Find her online:@sallyjayjohnson.
YOUR HANDS WERE STOCKY AND ROUGH from hundreds of nights of drunken trips and drifted fights, medicated and on the nod. The chewed fingers heavy nicked from days of banging shoes, carving flaked and solid horn from the wobbly soles of timid horses. You had hard fists from shoving against the threatening lean of breathing flanks, banging clips against shuddering ribs, hooves elbowed and ungainly. I saw you clip a goat once. You made art.
And danger. But we all loved it. Out in the wild near Lock Haven, on careless nights, those cut hands gripped the steerage of your truck and pulled us three (four with Daisy) all sharp, fishtailing drunk and loose through gravelly firecuts beside potential falls and real peril, beside cliffs and sheer drops. It was a cold day.
I thought of you on the Ice, out past the dust and diesel, the back-action beeps of reversing machinery, past all the sound and smells and grit and thin humanity that make up that smoking cradle, that McMurdo Station. I remembered Daisy was so well-behaved in the extended cab.
I thought of you as the Royals stretched chalky and awesome. Fata morganas hashed impossible parapets into the distant coast. Didn’t we kick a dozen or so beer cans out the door and all over that gas station parking lot?
I thought of you in Antarctica as I moved a pallet of oil drums from the line in an outside storage area to the trembling gray shutters of the Vehicle Maintenance Facility. Shrill ice bits and volcanic ash snaked their way through the cracked door of my front-end loader. And I remembered all the locals at that gas station laughed.
Everything was okay. My own rough hand gripped the brodie knob on the steering wheel, the drums cargo-strapped tight against the forks. You showed me around that cool and rocky back road. There was snow between the trees. You pointed out where you’d crashed your truck.
I thought of your truck on all those careless back roads as I turned and rumbled at the bottom of the planet. I thought that I’d ask you down next season. And I thought that the world is not flat.
Why didn’t you come with me to the Ice, my friend? Why did you go the way you chose? Why did you choose what you did? Why that? We could have driven heavy equipment and welded things. We could have been drunk at Southern and stumbled ungainly over volcanic ash to the stolid sea ice. We could have toasted the melting ice pier or a passing gray skua. Raised oily glasses of golden whiskey to the fantasy of the Ross Dependency. Your hands would have been useful on the Ice.
And I thought of you this last Monday. I was in a phony house on West 10th Street in New York. It had rained earlier and I was soaked through and surrounded by the young and the phony and the untested and your voice came to me in my foolish writing. Faraway.
“Our time together was ours and mine was short. I had no time for the rest of the world.”
I thought of your empty hands, useless in the ground. I thought of the Ice again. Maybe I should have invited you. I thought of your wife. It gives me some comfort to know I took you with me. It may give her some now to know the same. Nearly winter here again.
In this hemisphere, at least.
I can’t wait for the snow.
And I’m okay, in case you’re worried.
{ X }
T. MAZZARAwas born in Virginia and studied at Trinity College Dublin.
ROBERTO RAVEN CIRCLES THE BATTLEFIELD, waits for the logs and squares to stop shaking and gurgling. Opposite of Quick Care, the beaks seek grossness, go to the quiet ones first. Little silver boxes squirm in the grass. Two argue in the sky If someone is dead, do you say “I love” or “I loved.” Birds are just addicts who come to any gathering for the free coffee. The buzzing molecules won’t stop mowing science down. New diagrams of buzzards break open encyclopedias. No one has any ears to hear the panting and murdered ecology. Put your energy into this field project management. Weed, mow, pluck, fertilize. Goats are good at bloodletting. Harvest the forearms and flies. You can tell how old something is by the smell. Roberto, the only feathered Italian in France at the time, is outnumbered by the xenophobic blackbirds. Christopher chipmunk’s only interest is nuts. Roberto is pissed and finds his voice again in the sky: message my wing beats in screams and piercing darkness through round orbital messages in a bottle. Christopher and Roberto are too scary to be illustrated properly. Real life never stops pulsing long enough for a proper water color. Roberto refuses to blind the corpses. A prisoner in another camp looks east, the morning bells ring. Armor a memory like the ocean.
And it’s over a thousand years later and we are back on the banks of the Seine, opening a bottle of wine with a corkscrew, loosening hiking boots. Telling each other about our small steps every fucking day.
{ X }
JENNIFER MacBAIN-STEPHENSis the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications), Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming, 2014), and Backyard Poems (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming, 2015). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared in public places in Iowa City. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Dressing Room Poetry Journal, The Blue Hour, The Golden Walkman, Split Rock Review, Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, The Poetry Storehouse, and Hobart. For a complete list of publications and other odds and ends, visit JenniferMacBainStephens.wordpress.com
YOU CAN’T TELL BY LOOKING IN OUR FACES. For some of us the tests are just routine.
For others, of course, a sentence of death.
Brave or stupid, cowardly or aware,
more or less imaginative or astute —
strange that we should all be called a patient.
Then the friendly helpful receptionist
who shuffles and cuts evolving decks of files.
Then the corridors, buffed and vacuumed daily.
As many times as we sit and wait
for each procedure labeled as routine,
the first that isn’t can only mean
but one link in a chain that holds a swing
on a porch from which we watch the healthy pass.
{ X }
M.A. SCHAFFNER has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.
LIPS TO SAINT JOAN’S EARS, brown hoods cup water
in their tiny hands,
scavenging for bits of bone in the Seine.
A blacksmith remembers her: Fragile and lemur-like, raked over the coals
three times to
wring the witch out.
Psalm pages hang in the branches
Of the weeping willows,
heavy with the softness of girl’s skin.
Branches miss their little doll
with high cheek bones.
Like Cinderella’s birds
Who knew too much
clothing scraps are woven into
nests for remembrance near
the family farm in Dom Remy.
The proverbial sword struck
down the tiniest shape;
everyone wants to harm little girls.
Crowns not up to contemplating
the cosmos, acquiesce throughout eternity.
The healing is measured.
Firstonebreath.
Thenasecond.
Then a year has gone by.
Measured by guest book signatures.
Creeping in from forests,
forms conjoin to assemble
one gargantuan black robed priest.
The townspeople sweep,
chant, light candles,
cradle pieces of warmth,
this one I will protect, that one, lost.
{ X }
JENNIFER MacBAIN-STEPHENSis the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications), Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming, 2014), and Backyard Poems (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming, 2015). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared in public places in Iowa City. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Dressing Room Poetry Journal, The Blue Hour, The Golden Walkman, Split Rock Review, Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, The Poetry Storehouse, and Hobart. For a complete list of publications and other odds and ends, visitJenniferMacBainStephens.wordpress.com
“Half-Price Wednesday”, one of three pieces by Cassandra de Alba in our Winter 2015 issue, may be a very tiny poem but it gives us some awfully big shivers.
{ X }
THREE WEEKS AFTER YOUR GRANDMOTHER DIED
in these boots I bought them at Salvation Army
for the change in my back pocket. Wore them casual
with paint-stained jeans and dirty sweaters. Wondered
when my fingers started to tremble as I turned pages.
Developed a taste for good gin. Didn’t question
until the morning I woke up without feet.
“I detest all my sins because they offend thee, my God / who art all good and deserving of all my love,” says the Catholic prayer known as the “Act of Contrition.”
“The next age’s illusions will depend / on Gods we’ve yet to discover,” writes M.A. Schaffner in “Act of Contrition,” one of four poems he contributed to our Winter 2015 issue.
{ X }
IF GOD WERE HEARTILY SORRY WE’D UNDERSTAND,
but there are no sins, not even creation
ranks above reflexive pathology.
I’d clean the erasers for that schoolgirl
each long afternoon her mother spent at work
mixing poisons for her daughter’s future.
It wasn’t just wanting only one thing
but continuing to want, and to plan
a life along those lines of honesty.
The garden will go in just a little while,
the soil scraped back to the Pleistocene,
and stacked with pre-fab sections of Versailles.
The next age’s illusions will depend
on Gods we’ve yet to discover — on prayers
pleading for eternities just like this.
{ X }
M.A. SCHAFFNER has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.
AT THIS TEA PARTY OF BENCHES AND BIBLES, the lecturer is part drone, all queen bee.
All of the bigwigs wear wigs. They need more hair to think. Posturing as females, the powdered procure statements. The Statements sound like questions. The questions spit syllables like a furtive glance. Like a good Democrat, Joan attempts a reach across the aisle but she never learned furtive in the womb. A grandiose evening filmed for CNN or Soul Train, all the interesting bits are off camera when it’s all “take my pocket square,” and “Comb out that nest.” The robed ones might as well model maxi dresses. They in drag, She in garb. They sit and stare at each other through stained glass and vaulted ceilings. Go on, tell your tea party story how I came from underground and I will recap how they came from the sky. Our ears will foster care odd sounds of treason and devil. You do the ranting. I will do the pouring. And at the end of month’s end, whispers of pyres, of throwing a cat in for the ride, I will succumb. All because I would rather be right than apologize. All that’s missing are knuckle rings and a boom box.
{ X }
JENNIFER MacBAIN-STEPHENSis the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications),Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Backyard Poems (forthcoming, 2015). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared in public place in Iowa City. Recent work can bee seen / is forthcoming at Dressing Room Poetry Journal, The Blue Hour, The Golden Walkman,Split Rock Review, Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, The Poetry Storehouse, and Hobart. For a complete list of publications and other odds and ends, visit JenniferMacBainStephens.wordpress.com
“Multicolored Blood,” one of two poems by Juliet Cook in our Winter 2015 issue, was written during Ekphrasis at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio Poetry Association, led by Clarissa Jakobsons, and inspired by various abstract paintings and other art pieces.
{ X }
WHERE DO HER MISSING FINGERS LIVE?
Extracted from asylum tubes, re-shaped
into new modules with tiny insects
crawling out the mouth and growing,
glowing with dark shimmers.
These mouths are multicolored vessels,
some of them poisoned, some of them frozen,
some of them fresh but trapped.
Tiny red palpitations dangling
from the bottom of a stingray.
Bright red tissues dripping wet
confetti from abstract fetus, growing
into a horse throat cut.
It turns gelatinous and then skeletal.
A skull head with dark red painted
inside a purple casket sinking down
underwater and then swimming.
SALLY J. JOHNSON received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she served as Managing Editor for the award-winning literary journal Ecotone. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in the Collagist, Bodega, the Pinch, Weave, So to Speak, Everyday Genius and elsewhere. She is a poetry editor for Green Briar Review and works as a publicist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Find her online:@sallyjayjohnson.
FLAPPERHOUSE 