Rich Ives, Featured Author

April 2016 | poetry

The Secret

oh my aging starlet in the butter

bread me with hyphens wide-

eyed and strained of

wonder without reason

when I need help I go to sleep

there is no school for this

aged persuasion

certainties: perishables

doubts: fertility

a string tied to my reasoning

like tiny aggressions pouring forth

from the military hole until

all those antennae twitch to one leg

climb it like a food source

I was busy criticizing a rock

a gardener with a little slug funk

dripping from his angry shoe

I’m between accomplishments but

the cast-off river has its own explanations

necessary things are not always beautiful

the privileged ocean’s temporarily illegible

there is nothing else to say about not saying

pessimism: the body’s half empty

optimism: the coffin’s half full

at the end of the journey a talking goat

he doesn’t have anything to say

I can’t sleep some nights it rains all day

a common man doesn’t want common things

something will happen of course

but I’m stopping now

only an opening whose words contain

mouths

it makes the first page read right into the last

I can’t remember what was said to make me feel this way

but knowing the secret exists makes it less secret

The Small Birds of Early Morning

Needing only a shovelful of air to float on,

tunnels of light open daily with a flutter and a dash.

Little feathered flutes of dream buttered with song,

I bring you fresh lessons of foam from the rocks.

All the way to the end of my feathers I go.

There can be but one infinity, and it’s incomplete.

You might wish to swallow a river.

You might want to taste a stone.

There are mines inside, there are ancient caves,

as if you could have just a delicate slice of lightning.

Incongruous as a sunbathing polka dot cat,

I have forgiven myself for being too available.

I stand in this ocean walking on the bottom.

Your accomplice surrounds me and enters me.

Why so many of you, and so shy, as if I might

spill the patient seeds or eat up all the destinations?

I think I’ll go now, or I’ll go thinking unreasonably, with only

my beak and my new empty bones, lighter than thought,

having begun something illogical and right and needing

to search for the nest with my partially digested cricket thoughts.

The Telegram Got Larger

every room in the sentence was a new color

I had trained these wolves

and I knew how to defeat a bear

I worshipped indecision

my daughter can pluck out all the eyes in a room

everything is hungry here

the meals are not spaced evenly

and the legs of a table can lead you on

we were some kind of violation so we had to quit ourselves

it’s like the door to the middle of a missing universe

it lives in the attic but once it’s opened

it cannot close

we were healing but we could have called it sex

she appeared to be one of those gummy

sentimental things fat and unreasonably relieved

encased in a pink snowsuit that made her look like she floated

he kicked the step again and hurt my foot again

learning disabilities

tiny birds between his teeth

something brittle and transferred

I could not partake of the nontransferable emotions

one gooey personal shipwreck

if only I knew what to do with lost ponds

near the dacha on the Red Sea with Petrov

now tell me

The Way You Say Anything Is My World Being Careless

A cloud tattoo stains the sky’s vast back golden

as the lines reach across to the needle of feinting horizon.

There must be a clever dance on the other side

where the streetwise universe desultorily pierces

every unacceptable angle of unimaginable planetary skin.

Sorry We’re Open articulates the door with drunk humor.

You’ll have to borrow some light for the bleedin’ blunt.

Who can you talk to about celebratory addictions?

If you don’t talk about the law, you’ll find it

creeping up on you with a needy ass-kickin’,

part of an airy custody battle gone weathery

and feline with feral intent, oh rat-girl motherhood.

Where can we rinse our scavenging delicates?

Are there no spiritual remains to pick at,

no more incomplete catastrophes of faith dribbled

like griddle oil on the soul of morning’s argument

humming alive with golden terriers of tenacious possibility?

Somebody needs to say something wrong here.

Ten thousand obstacles just give us more to talk about.

Come in, come in, I’ve got a squirrel in the pot.

I can see that you’re a person of great substance

dominating a much smaller sphere of inaction.

Rich Ives

Rich Ives lives on Camano Island in Puget Sound. He 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, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and has been nominated twice for the Best of the Web, three times for Best of the Net and six times for The Pushcart Prize. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a work for each day of the year, is available from Silenced Press, Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, is available form Newer York Press, and Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, is available from Bitter Oleander Press. He is also the winner of the What Books Press Fiction Competition, and his story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, is now available.

Apprehension

April 2016 | poetry

He doesn’t notice

the small flying thing

with the stinger

at the end of its thorax

fall into the opening

of his soda can.

So he picks it up

chugs the syrupy sweet

and the flying thing’s stinger

impales itself

in the wall of his esophagus.

He might as well

have licked an

electrical outlet;

replaced his blood

with acid.

The pain is an instantaneous God:

blinding, encompassing, absolute.

He will do anything to placate it.

There is not a single thought

in his brain other than

end this.

He pounds his throat,

nearly crushes his larynx.

He forces his fingers

over his tongue

down his gullet.

He can’t reach the tiny thorn

but he kicks in the gag reflex.

Every bit of lunch

and the flying thing

and the stinger

come back up.

In those few seconds

he’s decimated the patio furniture.

He’s slapped his significant other

who didn’t even have time to scream.

He’d counted himself

happy, even fortunate,

before.

Now he can’t

lay his head on a pillow

put a fork in his mouth

step through a door

without being afraid

of what might clamp down

like the unseen jagged teeth

of a bear trap.

Scott Urban

Scott’s poems have either recently appeared or are scheduled to appear in THE 2 RIVERS VIEW, ECLECTICA, and THE LOCUST MAGAZINE.  His most recent poetry collection is GOD’S WILL (Mad Rush Press).  His most recent anthology appearance is EVERY RIVER ON EARTH (Ohio University Press). He lives and writes in southeastern Ohio in a former Amish farmhouse that isn’t haunted — yet.