Rich Ives

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

Damp

Those little dream brothers were made of chicken feathers,

and I had to blow their dream parts forcefully from my nose.

I was lobbing bottles of vitamin water at their cute little feet.

You’ll need help to rise now and

some dreams won’t take you back,

as if there were something determined in their breath.

We were after love that night, but wet and mysterious was close enough.

You carried several husbands in your peekaboo pants, and

This just pisses me off, I admitted loudly,

but you were also the ocean with everyone

coming down to you to watch you breathe,

and you will not have to pretend you know this.

Deep in the night when the night’s closer, someone thinks

you might understand I always wanted to help you,

and I always wanted to be you helping me,

and suddenly it’s dusk with candelabras of birdsong

lighting my ears, and it’s best to tell them everything because

you’ll feel better, and the wandering brothers won’t listen anyway.

Confessions of a Delinquent Narrative

Of course, the surprise ending knows I will arrive,

but the beginning doesn’t know where I’ve gone,

thinks I might start again. And I might, but not

to set up house and drink endless tea.

Sometimes I do feel as if I know where I’m going

though I cannot take you there through

the door I’m still building, and I can’t stay

here any longer without erasing myself.

Sometimes I open what’s not even there.

It could be a deeply questionable freedom I live in,

beneath the could of it. I’m suffering from

a surprisingly difficult stroll, and the color

of little bird panic in the wings of my heart

won’t bleed a seductive smile made of merely

smoke and daisies. Let not the unbound be fenceless,

shedding their dark beneath the breath of progress.

Tonight I want yogurt blossoms and imbeciles in

the dark trees as happy as tongue depressors. I’ve already

lost a couple of porches and reasoned with absentee clouds.

I’ve an unreasonable love of falling leaves and wet hair.

I’ve decided the Italians must once have thought

“modern dress” meant “attached to sullen hillsides,”

and I’ve decided I’m a territory unexplored by innocence,

unexpected beauty, toast, or a fresh glass of water.

Still, I might be less literal than I thought. I might be

raining beachballs containing ideas for new machines.

I might be plucking eyelids from the blind parents of

dirt-bikes and chastising the unplanned fun that bled us.

I might be joined to the confused by the undecided and,

if it’s not a part of the plot, each pound for an ounce

of thought, I might contain a warm milking stool with

ambitions to speech, and I might walk away from myself

out onto the road of participation and complicity

in a rage of taking back, of feet, of direction,

as if I might have been the goal and not

merely the forgotten territory of progress.

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.

Bad Timing

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

A line outside the liberty bell,

bars you can still smoke in,

cyclists covered in tattoos; my five-foot-one sister playing

dress-up in her brand-new, oversized Albert Einstein Hospital coat.

Everyone gone, to the shore.

(Fourth of July weekend.)

Gray, cobblestone streets nearly empty, melting before dusk.

It’s my last day here. A crowd gathering for the presidential motorcade

Jolts me out of sleep.

Kids laughing on the sidewalk below, the day disappearing.

Love’s at the door, with lightly freckled cheeks and a guitar case on the floor.

Muscular arms bursting out of a gray v-neck, a smile like the best meal of your life.

No place I’d rather be than in a room where he is singing.

Orange lights pouring in from the street, a breeze, a voice–what a voice.

Promises I’ve made –No More Musicians! – want to fall into the sky.

Quitting would mean I learn from my mistakes.

Reason never wins; look at the divorce rates. But,

Spring has come and gone and

Timing is everything. Maybe I should have owned a clock all these years.

Usually, I can read them like paperbacks, but those eyes—museums should keep them

Vaulted in a glass case.

Where they can be studied,

X-rayed.

Years will go by and I’ll still remember them, under the awning, rain falling around us.

Zippers staying zipped, a long embrace that felt like home—a home I can’t afford yet.

—Zhanna Vaynberg

ZHANNA VAYNBERG was born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine and moved to the Midwest in 1991. She graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing in 2008, and will be receiving a master’s degree in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University in March 2012. She recently won an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s August 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers for a piece of flash fiction entitled “Things You Should Never Tell Your Mother,” and her first published story, “Do Not Leave Chicago,” will be coming out in Euphony Journal’s winter issue in January 2012.

Pieces Of Minute-Hands

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

time runs

fluid stop-motion

over carpet –

around in music syncopation,

notes hanging from the ceiling

like mobiles

and your hands keep reaching

for the moon, but clouds swarm

and silver is only a flimsy figment

in the dark

—Sarah Lucille Marchant