April 2017 | poetry
Since you left,
this apartment got smaller.
Like you packed away
the space you existed in,
and carried it off with you.
A whole world by your side,
in a purse.
What you left
are echoes of questions
drifting in a fog,
hoping you’ll return to rescue them.
Just like me.
I don’t feel like a mother bird,
after her baby has flown.
I feel like the nest.
Abandoned, up on a branch,
watching birds flying by,
knowing that none of them are coming here.
None of them are mine, any more.
Dazzler
Dazzler is a British-American poet living in Arizona and Washington State. Having survived corporate and Academic lives, he now spends his days dedicated to poetry, family, and black labs.
April 2017 | poetry
After Margot Canaday’s The Straight State
1
At Ellis Island
they found the immigrant’s body
indeterminate.
Protuberant breasts;
also a small, atrophied penis,
testicle undescended.
“Now,” the interrogators asked, “back home,
“did you sleep in the room with your brothers
or the room with your sisters?”
I always slept alone.
2
The interrogators stamped the folder:
UNDESIRABLE.
They sent for the father,
who made the crossing.
Meanwhile, this determination was
reached: “He is male.”
They shaved the head,
gave the immigrant
ratty trousers, cinched with string.
The father arrived
and did not recognize
her, stranded before him
awaiting either official
entry or deportation.
“If you took him home,”
they asked the old man,
“how would you treat him?”
As I always have.
3
They
undid the string
and let the ratty trousers fall.
They showed the man the small,
atrophied penis, the undescended
testicle. And asked him to explain.
(Their mouths glowed like incinerators.)
It is true,
she becomes a man for a day or two
each month, when the moon is full.
They asked, “How could you tell?”
At those times, there is always deep sorrow in her eyes.
Justin Vicari
April 2017 | poetry
Dissolving through the throngs on LoDo streets.
Beer soaked smiles and purple clothed melee.
Bars brimming full with possibility.
First Rockies home game only minutes away.
The golden bubbly flowing from the taps.
Anticipation in the on deck circle.
Optimism cheering from the stands.
At the plate the hopes of all the people.
And on the mound our cynicism fades.
The windup for the season has begun.
Is our fate to be despair or victory?
We’re tied for first but yet to score a run.
Each day is opening day- we start anew.
Our destiny depends on what we do.
Mike Coste
April 2017 | poetry
A Parable
A big wave was coming. My car rose, then filled with water. O God, this can’t be happening! I looked up, my car could fly! It rocked up over the trees, skimmed the tops. Through the clear bottom I spotted my childhood home. I lowered my car and it hovered over the pool in the yard. Then I jumped through the roof into an empty room. At the back was a closet with a hidden door. I opened it. Someone was walking down the hall & hugged me. A thin man I loved. He showed me the closet he was building, the dome ceiling I hadn’t noticed before. The wallpaper didn’t fit, and between the seams the bare walls breathed.
A Sign
My father came to sit on the blue wicker stool in the upstairs bathroom of my childhood home. Talking in his familiar voice as if he’d been alive the whole time in another place. I finally asked him the question I most wanted to before he died. He said I feel it whenever you pray for me, he who never understood what it meant to pray. He said it feels like deep silk. I didn’t understand but I did. I asked him to give me a sign that he heard me when he returned to wherever he had to go. He repeated it feels like deep silk, my home.
Barbara Siegel Carlson
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of the poetry collection Fire Road and co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead Selected Poetry of Srecko Kosovel. She lives in Carver, MA.
April 2017 | poetry
My eyes fold on the
past – a frozen wasteland
warming
These may be
false hopes, but they
heal the wounds we
savor
Insecure stains of the distant
slowly crawling closer
I hear their drums
pounding on a heartbeat further
A forged bellow creeps
somewhere between stomach and
mouth,
loosely fitting its skin to
match the crowd.
Joe Albanese
Joe Albanese is a writer of poetry and prose. Recently he had a piece published in the Fall 2016 edition of Sheepshead Review. In 2017 he has work to be published in Calliope and Adelaide Literary Magazine.
April 2017 | poetry
Bottomless Lake
they all said it was “bottomless,”
that lake past all the farms,
a couple hours’ drive;
they said boats went down
and never left a trace, vanished
as if swallowed whole by time,
no simple sand and rock there to receive them,
no sound, no scrape, no muffled thump
like everything that falls
(and everything does fall);
they all believed it like Yeti in the snow,
saucers in the desert,
things that kept the world exotic
while life took every mystery away,
a box filled and emptied every day,
a depth they knew so well
where water came and went
between the pull of moon and sun,
subtracting to some finite sum,
and they’d fall themselves
into the true abyss
for which there is no wonder
but the unexamined buoyancy of faith
Literacy
what we will and will not understand,
the language of the world
waits in space between the leaves,
rattles in the chatter of the wind,
whispers hope at nightfall,
despair within the questions of its bending trees
in seasons that it does not know,
days in the dyslexia of me
and we,
twisted from the discourse of the sun
John Kristofco
John P. (Jack) Kristofco’s poetry and short stories have appeared in about two hundred publications, including Burningwood. He has published three collections of poetry and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.
