July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Low in the ghostly zone behind the dam
beneath the bleached cliff and black water line
left by the river’s sudden abeyance
I wait as a wetter season arrives,
the thaw’s flow. The cracked floor absorbs
faster than the rain falls, shines the seams
but does not heal. High above tall houses sit
on the former shore. I am not alone.
The curious and researchers scavenge
the small structures, invasive and native,
that suffocated wildly, slowly, here
while power company customers
marveled at the mystery and the scale.
Park Rangers on two week assignments
with per diem field their theories, where the pressure
relieved, how a river could all at once retreat.
Other manmade lakes have disappeared, say
the experts calmly, say internet entries,
rare, yes, but explicable, and now locals
speak with authority on aquifers and sediment.
My functionary’s possessiveness
lured me here, like to a past regime’s auction.
Before it was submerged this rural land
had to be cleared— that was my office.
Evictions, expirations, foreclosures,
by legal means the place was carried off.
I remember the map grid colors shift
red to blue, like with any project,
the deadlines met in fretful succession.
Accomplishing the place, I used to walk
the dirt path behind the school’s woods
where the tired river was kept and tell it
how it would sweep away the school, the woods
the foul line’s white lye from the baseball field,
up a last run of the sledding hill, put
a hand on each of the pillaring hills.
An interrogator offering the world
to a captive with yet no plans to turn.
I had not thought that care was taken
to excavate the concrete foundations
and expected the grid of the old town
to lay itself out to my memory
but it is gone. Below the arisen lake
currents of sifting sands, like drifted snow,
plied under the remains of the houses.
I must stand still feet above the streets.
Expected, too, descendents of the civic clubs
who fought us to hold some sort of event,
bragging on our failure, lamenting the waste,
naming those founders I had to hear
so much about. But if anyone beside me
remembers the place, the red-fronted armory,
deploring voices, they are silent now
and perhaps as perplexed as I am, turned
trying to triangulate the past by hill shape.
But now real rain, tiny meniscus bursts
as puddle joins with puddle, making pool.
The path winding down from a parking lot
turns back to bottom mud fastest of all.
The Ranger post and its generator
will be left behind, a useless landmark
to those being told to walk quickly, now
in the suddenly stormed over sundown.
As I step over a hasty escarpment,
that ancient river, your silver push,
the tall houses, their brown lawns, are dim
but soon, electricity and flowers.
Whatever weakness briefly gave, it holds
now where at the foot of the dam a rising bank
highlights and enfolds the grades, and rolls
at me, like a man made a promise. Take it
now like a shallow bay returning, recover
the floor, the height of the cliff wall, hurry
above my head, by river and rain, come
like the tide. Make me run for my life.
by Keith Seher
Keith Seher works out of the Cleveland area, and has been writing since he was 13. I belongs to a number of poetry groups, including the Butchershop, and private workshop which has been meeting for more than 45 years.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Rehab Rosetta Stone
Re-
(prefix)
i call myself a name in the mirror
again
again
word on loan
radiant ray’s repo man
keeps bringing me back here
to the bathroom sink
washing my mouth out
to sing a diatonic drop
of golden sun
never reaching mi,
a name i call myself in the mirror
again
again
Build
(verb)
when we walked before day-break
men in the garden grew a skeleton
that looked like a hut,
brick-layer skin made
from adobe mud cast from ground’s dust
baked by builder-chefs, culinary sun.
we were enslaved to construct
pyramids over lunch
out of grains and fruit.
men cooking the hut
ate, too (as proof, i once watched
one eat a whole lemon bar)
went home after heat-waves
preheated afternoons.
we went to rooms like refrigerators.
i wondered why they went home
when they were done building
never considering
that i lacked the strength
to build a hut,
or eat a whole lemon bar.
Make
– after Edward Elric
(verb)
gods buy humans
at the grocery store:
one kilogram phosphorous
two kilograms lime
three grams silicon
five grams iron
four liters ammonia
eight grams fluorine
twenty kilograms carbon
trace amount bromine
thirty-five liters water
one quarter kilogram salt,
eighty grams sulfur
pinch of cobalt
roll into a ball.
make oceans boil.
cook for one hundred years,
bury in the soil
Rebuild/Remake
(transitive verb)
i have learned these verbs
still i only see bones
in the sentences
when these doctors speak
words like scriptures
they think themselves gods
when they whisper
I will remake you
you will rebuild you.
Douglas Luman’s work has found forthcoming publication through other journal outlets as well, including (forthcoming) the Toad Suck Review, uCity Review and Epigraph Magazine.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Swallowing Sounds Like Boiling Water
I can feel a word
crawling up my esophagus
like tequila
in a red dress
or the kitchen table
that I swallowed when
my grandmother died.
I should have slipped into
the word when I married,
or when I learned to
measure coffee,
or when I first shrank
from small hands, small toes.
One day, it will become
more than a word.
It will be a song
a eulogy
a dissertation.
It will be or has been
my mother’s hands
made of flour
boiled in chicken bones,
and her smile
heavy with the weight
of the kitchen table
in her stomach.
One day,
I will be old enough
or brave enough
to speak the word,
or write it in a journal
that may be read
by my daughters.
I may finally cloak myself
in the word and allow it
to rush from my esophagus
where it is now stuck.
But for now, I let the word
“motherhood”
linger like a tickle
in my throat
or a flame
under the teakettle
of my childhood.
Farmland
On the commute home
the clouds form a table
atop four grain silos,
each grand, different.
It reminds me of you.
The top of the table is
covered with papers:
marriage certificates,
manuscripts,
dissertations.
Beneath the table
grows the pile of rejections:
unworn house slippers,
discarded candy wrappers,
an album of pictures that
doesn’t belong to us.
A box of ashes teeters
on the edge of the table.
If it falls, will our life
have happened at all?
I pass beyond sight of the table, and
I remember that it is only clouds.
I forget them as I continue home.
Elizabeth Jenike is currently a master’s student of creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she serves as the Fiction Editor for Oxford Magazine, the graduate literary publication. She received her undergraduate degree in creative writing from Northern Kentucky University in 2012. Her poetry appeared in the 2010-2011 edition of NKU Expressed, and her short story “The End” was published in the 2009-2010 edition of the same. Most recently, her flash fiction piece “How to Dye Window Treatments” was published by the undergraduate literary project ObsessionMag.
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I. first base
One could have all kind of kooky conversation
with the certain combinations of flowers.
Yesterday we talked with rue.
Periwinkle for pernicious wishes.
Daffodil for hello, put me in your pocket.
Arum lily for I’ll cling to your skirts.
Ivy for you’ll choke me for years after I’ve left.
Forget-me-not, did you never realise?
Goldenrod for sniggering into your scratchcards.
Next, high-speed flower arranging,
or, reading the clouds like tea-leaves
f’r’example, modest oblong clouds first
lining up the wholeway horizon-across
and the sky it goes the wholeway round
you’re at the Highline though, where
the vegetation was CHOSEN, yes, to
PAY HOMAGE oh glory BE, to the
wild plants which indeed had colonized
th’abandoned railway, the choochoo trickish
tracks, before it was repurposed, oh!
New York!
NEW YORK!
II. thither
(to the work, then)
Transcription: this is where the words are written down
without discussion.
Shibboleth: this is where the word is written down
without discussion.
Name: this is where the name is written down
without discussion.
NAME IT!: this is where the name is written down
after discussion.
“secrecy”: this is where the names are written down
without discussion.
Gentle reminder that none of this is any of your business:
this is where there is no discussion.
Excellence and hard work are possible at the same time probably:
this is where there is discussion.
Signature: this is where the name is written down.
The co-signatory was missing from the conference:
this is where the name is not written down
after discussion.
III. two too late
three being two
a list, beginning
my retarded son
I am envied
the shame fell
you disgraced me
terrible times together
drink it over
now we gather
the lost things
my son my
son oh Absalom
Absalom my son
the last time
we were together
you heard me
a broken record
turned against me
a record broken
which makes three
time times time
I am envied
two is three
the unknown code
you my family
the cruellest bones
the necessary marrow
denial with blindness
the heart’s sorrow
for the lost
for the last
for the blistered
for the burnt
for the starving
for the falling
for the hell
for the fun
for the glory
for the money
for the children
for my son
oh my son
the terrible lesson
the fearsome book
the awful page
the last look
IV. hither
Here.
Here is the manner, four-
wingèd spite full’f gurning.
Here.
The watchman fell at the o’clock
his regret was sounded loud.
Here is the dream. It
churns and circles and curses, it
spits mongrelly teeth, up-
airs them to the cloudless up.
They never sound as loud as when you
don’t speak words at them: they never
are heard more than they’re listened to.
Here.
V. twentyish
What does it mean, he says, Win — chest — er ?
From Belfast no I don’t believe it with your accent,
you aren’t German? Polish? How d’you come to be here?
I’m staying in The Clink , I am , but I’m, I am a free man.
Why did the cathedral bells ring? for
all Souls’ or all Saints’ ? what was the word ?
Solder, or, the linden tree ?
Yes, he says, I use the darkest charcoal for your eyes.
His art materials spiralled from The Marriage of Figaro,
for example, matching it all, as sort of romantic,
sort of unexpected & spontaneous, sort of unavoidable,
sort of making sure I lost that job, sort of.
Señorita , he says (fivefold flatterer),
Sarah of the good skin,
of the poetic and Biblical name , of the dark, sad eyes
and the gentle lips and the poet’s long thin hands.
From fond España, no, Odessa, he was, and divorced, a
cartoonist of politics who, he studied Holy Art at
(oh, Oh Holy Art!) Milan, Odessa, London, now, on a London bridge.
Writing a poem was the only faithful elephant of the deal.
Nevertheless I loved this person,
just like all the inappropriate
others.
VI. visionary(’s) proposal:
I am just the imaginative cockroach for you.
Our hair will grow still long after short-
term cryogenics. We’ll be refrigerated right?
These decisions must be made and stuck to regard-
less of loss of sealsong, wherever you keep the knowledge –
your guts’ll do.
Not really since your brothers still are dead there, in the
narrative background, historic, in the some-term freezing studio.
The stadium fills with cold undead, unsinging.
The library ’s where we keep tomorrow’s records : many
more dead than have lived a full and, &/ or
happy life.
Paper skeletons have been chewed
to pieces by once domesticated cats.
Don’t hang them on the
December trees!
New disturbances will last a century, we are ho-
bblede – hoy in-
to tomorrow spit
spat towards crunch gravel earth spatter crunch.
In an hundred years’ time we two’ll be living oh six days a head.
by Sarah McKee
Sarah McKee lives near a lake in Berlin. She inhales a large amount of comedy. She, too, has an irregularly tended blog: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/gormandgasp. Publications and projects include Metal Magazine (upcoming), Poems Underwater (upcoming), This Recording, The Moth, Blackbox Manifold, Veer, Varsity, Volta, The Harker. Kiez Oper (upcoming), These Carewon Cairns (sound installation, Scott Polar Research Institute), Bonesong (contemporary opera, Carmen Elektra).
July 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Full red
Library wine
Tongue coated in vinegar crackle
I decide to dabble into poetry
Just me
and Ahmad Jamal’s jazz piano trio
Playing the keys to my brain
Raindrop, waterfall
Oak barrel notes
Even though
All mine I crumple up and throw away
Chest resounding in vinyl fuzz
My heart brain unlocks
And plastic chair rocking
I douse my pen in cheap red ink
And begin again
Meandering scribbles
Sound sketches
Bass plodding deep and pensive
Dark and deliberate
I commiserate now with Mingus, Miles, Monk
Simone and Trane
Vain nostalgic searches
Cold moonlit silhouette verses
Jazz sounds like poetry
Holy blood, divine liquid lines
Half Full
Pen flowing
Ink glowing
A page appears
I haven’t seen before
Alive, shimmering Lionel vibes
I throw a black and white textbook
At the white and black floor
Flecks of winey residue
Flecks of truth
Get stuck in my teeth
And color my lips blue
And Suddenly
Half Empty
Heart heavy
Bladder filling
Tongue-tied delirious I get
Stuck
And seeping through this half-drunk numbness
Burgundy sadness
Poetry like jazz sounds
Wine like poetry feels
Congealed two-fifty
Self-fermented pity
Dark and red drowned
Wallowing prosetry
Lose pen and then
I’m alone again
Empty
Drained
Numb veins
Slow
Soothe
Succumb
To this sad jazz
Wine brine
Has
Had
Was
Glass
Empty
Emptier
Emptiest
by Zach Milkis
Zach Milkis is currently an undergraduate English and Political Science major at Santa Clara University originally from Friday Harbor, Washington. His poems and short stories have won various local prizes including recognition at the San Juan County Fair and publication in At Home Magazine. He served on the editorial board for The Santa Clara Review, and has volunteered teaching creative writing and poetry to students from San Jose, California to Cape Town, South Africa.
