April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Maria opens a blue-white box
of Phillips Instant Flood
which gathers at her toes.
She becomes a conduit
(the room is filled with Epsom Salt)
and slowly oxidizes.
Now tarnish-green
she receives a visitor.
He is a lecherous old fool
who plates her all in bronze
heating her to flesh-warm temperatures
to pass as “fine” in private.
I used to have anxiety
in public places, shrinking
into phone-booth hideouts
to open up my shirt.
by Paul Fauteux
Paul Fauteux received his MFA from George Mason University, where he was the 2011-2012 Completion Fellow. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Regime, Fat City Review and Sugar Mule, and for the advocacy of other fine poets on The Lit Pub. His first chapbook, “The Best Way to Drink Tea,” is out from Plan B Press. “How to Un-do Things,” a book-length manuscript, was recognized as a semi-finalist in the 11th Annual Slope Editions Book Prize.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Coffee House Get-Together With An Ex
We meet in a coffee house
after ten years apart.
In our conversation,
those ten years
and our two together
jostle for attention.
You’ve met someone.
You’ve settled down.
But you still love Hendrix.
And the beach remains
your Mother Earth.
Meanwhile, I’ve remarried.
No kids so no need to bore
you with their details.
We have our own home.
Your meager apartment gets a complex
so I stay away from how many rooms,
the size of our backyard.
We don’t touch upon
why it didn’t work.
We just extract moments
from when it was working,
pretend that was all of it.
And the intervening times
catch a break.
No imagining what it
would be like if we had shared them.
Despite the laughs,
an occasional tear,
those ten years remain intact.
You look older,
slightly wiser.
I’ve some gray
to give my heartbeat pause.
I’ve enjoyed this time together.
If I could turn back the clock,
it’d be the one on the wall.
Beyond The Wish List
The last year was murder.
Every night, another argument,
two heads going at it,
two hearts begging for mercy.
Weary, one of us would walk,
one drive, at a good pace
in opposite direction,
until sleep hauled us back
to be temporarily communal.
By day at least, we kept
ourselves at arm’s length.
I worked the factory
with radio at full blast,
one heavy metal
in deafening conflict with another.
You tended a second hand book store,
selling rough copies of
Dos Passos and Fitzgerald
between sipping lattes
from the coffee house next door.
Without the other around,
we could work on strengthening our cause.
I saved one photograph from the dumpster,
two of us on a beach,
me rubbing oil into your back.
Now my fingers are on the east coast,
your shoulder blades keep to the west.
But just the other day,
I saw someone who looked like you.
I thought that was your job.
And your yearly email,
I read at least three times.
I give you an 8 out of 10 for happiness.
My mark is roughly 7.
To be honest,
without lawyers and wedged apart
by flyover country,
we’re actually quite a couple.
Not that I wish us back together.
But there’s other wishes where that came from.
by John Grey
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
But tomorrow I’m going to take Durer to lunch again.
He won’t sit still. He’ll be interested in the supermarket
down the block and traffic, well traffic–it took about
an hour for him to try out all the adjustments on
the seat belt. He doesn’t like cars much, though.
The surfaces are too flat and shiny. He misses animals.
I take him to the Farmer’s Market, where the Amish
hang calendar pictures of fine horses and speak to him
in old Deutsch. He sketches a black woman at the counter.
He measures my palm against the length of my face.
He is agitated by fluorescent lighting. We stand outside
in the cold and count starlings. I give him a little rice
to throw. He decides to wait for spring before we go
out again. I understand. He’s pretty heavy to carry.
Too many pages and colorplates and indices. I didn’t
really mean to get him so wet.
by Kelley Jean White
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
