» Featured Poets

Review of: Bangalore, by Kerry James Evans

admin — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 18:59:34 +0000

Featured Poet: March 2013 Vol. 5 # 6

admin — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 01:05:43 +0000

Nick Ripatrazone

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of four books: Oblations (prose poems, Gold Wake Press), This Is Not About Birds (poems, Gold Wake Press), The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature (literary criticism, Cascade Books) and This Darksome Burn (novella, firthFORTH Books). His criticism appears regularly at Shenandoah, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Colorado Review and HTMLGIANT. His writing has received honors from Esquire, The Kenyon Review, and ESPN: The Magazine, and has been featured at Verse Daily.

This is how you remove a hook

from a trout: smooth your hand down

like petting the fish, and then squeeze

so the mouth opens, like a door.

Not that you would squeeze a door,

Rachel, I am talking about the action

in different ways, since I know

you do not always like these trips

(early morning, the rubber

of waders against thighs,

claustrophobia in the current)

and I want you to know

I appreciate your participation,

but, really, that trout will die

unless you learn to move

with a mixture of speed and care.

Catch is less important than release.

Sisters of Mercy

Beneath a 1986 Chicago Bears

sweatshirt, thermals, and bleached

Polo dress shirts, I found

a folded nun’s habit.

I lifted the habit and the fabric

settled down, brown and full.

The white coif was a bit wrinkled.

I searched the box for a rosary

but only found costume necklaces.

A woman stood behind a table,

bills stuffed into a fanny pack.

Could this be? Might she

have gone from convent to cul-de-sac,

traded morning prayers and early supper

for Pilates and PTA? I wanted

to ask, but someone tried to barter

the price of a butter plate. The owner

said absolutely not: all prices firm.

Nothing left to interpretation.

This Is Not About Birds

We followed molted feathers toward the corner of the barn

where a swallow’s coffee-colored, cup-shaped nest sat

in the rafters & small, sloped heads of nestlings rose & fell.

Outside they fluttered while scuttling along the shingles &

then swooped overhead; forked, cream-spotted tails shuttering

through wind. Yesterday a lone bird stooped over the wobbling

blades before rolling away, & we followed the swoop

until it rested on the roof & promised that one day it would be

on our table, center gutted, a prize for us to eat.

So we stuffed into the pickup, NRA stickers worn to beige, &

fired wayward shots to rouse the swallows from their nest &

we spun through the field, tires toughing it out but we shook

while keeping our rifles out the window. Waiting. None of us

had ever shot anything before (anything that moved/breathed/lived)

but it was as good a time as any.

Was there ever a time that was not as good as any other times?

Was this decided by a certain group of people?

Was there a list of times that were good, & times that were not?

Was this the result of a comparison or a singular observation?

This poem should (must) end with a death. So here it is:

I, or someone with me, as we have formed a collective, raised

a rifle, waited for the swallow to spread its wings, be full-formed.

Then breathed. Then shot, a single fire, & so accurate

that the swallow dropped, wings collapsing onto the hollow

belly. Such a thing to steal flight from something. Such a

shame.

An American Werewolf in London

Six hours of early Depeche Mode in Ms. Gabriel’s Saab

was worth it to see my brother play college football.

No one knew he was dating my geometry teacher.

My parents were de-flooding our basement

so I hitched a ride and listened to her claim

that Wade was more mature than most men,

let alone other college sophomores. She brought two cases

of water bottles and pointed at each Whole Foods

we passed. I explained the rules of football

and she told me that academics were more important.

I liked bottle rockets, Def Leppard, and two-point

conversions, and watched Wade barrel through

the line while people asked if I was his son.

Afterward the teacher wanted to go out, so Wade

told me to watch a horror movie and said to close

my eyes during the bad parts. The teacher

said she trusted me to do the right thing.

Santo Domingo

Four on the pickup bed, red

shirts flushed from wind, hands

in back pockets & we follow

them past the boys shooting

at the dark backboard, ball

not bouncing but slogging.

We park at the market where

cattle hang upside down, gutted

& draining into milk cartons.

We step over the heads of bulls

& flies tickle our calves. Velocidad

maxima: men in sandals & ripped

jeans hold hands, leaning against

the pocked walls, Styrofoam cups

pitted in the holes. Carlos

walks us past them & shakes

one’s hand, skin lingering on skin,

& I kick aside bottles of Presidente

while the brothers of his lover sit

behind a sign with a white woman.

Where is he, Carlos asks, hand

on the rock (Esteban is an officer

& sets brush control fires

on the roadside–in the only photo

Carlos has ever shown of him, he

is pissing in the fire). The brothers

raise their shoulders & say,

in words I only half-understand,

what’s gone today is gone forever.

Featured Poet: February 2013 Vol. 5 # 3

admin — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:49:30 +0000

Luke Johnson

A native of Ithaca, New York, Luke Johnson is the author of the poetry collection After the Ark (NYQ Books, 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Poetry Editor at storySouth (www.storysouth.com) and a graduate of the writing program at Hollins University. He lives in Seattle, Washington. (personal website)

Above Oxbow Dam

Rupert, Idaho

Even the gas stations are beautiful
in Rupert, but not for the obvious reasons.

Not the Snake River feeding
reservoirs that feed automatic waterers

sputtering arcs over potato crops
yards from the diesel pumps,

not ranges clawing the horizon
like distant kingdoms of thought.

Not the woman with her grandson:
him crouched next to a truck-sized puddle

swatting gravel at brown water,
her tugging him back by his overall-bib

when he edges too close. A man
in a patchwork leather coat

tapping ashes on the bars of his Harley.
We’re not here together, mostly.

It’s a tale the land is telling: we are
momentary, always on the verge drawn

both ways. It’s the fisherman,
one week earlier, sucked back from his raft

into a diversion dam. The water there
stays deep and dark. It is feeling only.

It is the place running over itself.

*Appeared in New England Review

Shooting Below the School Building

Holy is the muzzle-flash, the blood-speck

on my thumb’s knuckle where my hand met

the gun’s recoil above hoof and paw prints

tracing snow, thickening only to disappear.

Earth held ice around us. No halo here

but trigger-guard, no prayer but aim.

The iced creek—where our students escaped

to grope or smoke, hiding joints

in a stone-sunk ammo-can—gurgled
its small life. We left their stash and kept

shooting bottles. The art-teacher (his guns) told me
Our kids plain don’t care: when in Pennsylvania

five young girls died, a grown-man killing

in a one-room school, one of our students joked,

some laughed. You can’t teach against that
sort of senselessness, he said, bracing.

One of the girls, speaking only German,

did escape, not understanding

the shooter’s words, but running
to a nearby farm while others offered to die

so their classmates might live, knowing
the meaning of salvation. I didn’t

hit much, but kept reloading, stripping gloves

and fixing rounds to chambers, tossing

my spent shells into the creek. No balm
but repetition: fire and re-load, like writing

words on a blackboard until they’ve lost
meaning, not glancing backwards, but trusting

the hand to spell each sentence the same.

*Appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review

Summer Service

Do not pity him. Do not treat him like furniture.

Robin, the autistic boy from the congregation

who liked to watch our ceiling fans go.

Talk. He’s a boy. He seemed less

fixed on revolution, searching instead
behind the blade, the space for an instant

obscured then revealed over and over, knowing

he’d seen the blank ceiling-patch before,

but believing it could change, or just liking
its blankness, the communion between boys

and what seems like magic. I would find him
Sundays after sacraments: neck craned back

feeling the blades change speeds, and as the wicker
sank in the blade’s middle, Robin soon

came less, as if the fans were a miracle
disproved, a once great prizefighter

swinging at ghosts. He will leave
and we will move. The fans gutted or left

as decoration, a relic of hot days after prayer

when the fans spun impossible, and boys loosened

ties as if all they needed to believe was air.

*Appeared in New England Review

Wedding Night that Wasn’t, with Thunder

Surely, in this other life

we would have let the filament sour.

Rain: the forest-rustle turns drone: a sound

that goes with emptiness, deep and hollow.
Inside my tent is damp.
A spider restrings its web
beneath the rain-fly. I’ll watch it work
again, knowing its venom
and quiet, knowing it continues
despite me. In the morning
I’ll clear her spun web.

*Appeared in Quarterly West

Featured Poet: April 2012 Vol. 4 # 6

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:41:34 +0000

Lowell Jaeger:

As founding editor of Many Voices Press, Lowell Jaeger compiled Poems Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poets, and New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from 11 Western states. His third collection of poems, Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep (Arctos Press) was published in 2009 and was a finalist for the Paterson Award. His fourth collection, WE, (Main Street Rag Press) was published in 2010. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.

Grandma’s Last Christmas

Grandma still lit candles on her Christmas tree

instead of stringing lights, and Dad said we’d better

help her take the damn thing down before

the old homestead burned to the ground.

Easter Sunday after church, we drove over

and found Grandma in a chair pulled close

to the soaps flickering on her new TV.

He done it, she said. I seen him.

She pointed at the black and white screen,

her house coat buttoned askew,

her thick ankles crushing her fuzzy slippers sideways.

That’s him, she said. He’s the one.

We raked buckets of dried needles, scraped lumps

of candle wax off the floor. Dad unscrewed the trunk

from its stand and heaved what was left

out the backdoor, trailing more needles and wax

and all us kids sweeping up behind him.

It’s just a show, Dad shouted from across the room.

It’s pretend. Grandma pulled her specks

lower on her nose and smoldered.

I know what I seen with my own eyes,

she said. We each had to hug Grandma

before we could go though she never hugged back.

The room felt empty where the tree had stood.

Dad bought a round of ice cream cones

at the drive-in on our way home, and we savored

in silence, letting the cold melt on our tongues. Dad stared

ahead, shuddered and mumbled. We didn’t dare ask what.

Things Got Worse

Things got worse before they got better

after the mill shut for good

a week before Thanksgiving. Dad

was up early with no place to go.

He’d sit with his coffee and stare

straight ahead like a blind man.

We’d come home from school and find him

still there. Then it snowed and snowed;

the roads drifted closed, trees snapped

curbside and lay broken like wounded soldiers.

Dad shouldered his shovel door-to-door

asking for work clearing drives and walks.

A nearly grown neighbor boy did the same.

We’d report to Dad whenever we spotted the boy

slinging snow near streets Dad claimed

as his own. He don’t need it bad as I do,

Dad said. He’d pull on his boots and march

off to see what’s what and set the boy right.

A week before Christmas Dad took a job

delivering bottle gas, and he let us ride along

to see the Christmas trim on big houses

across town. Or we’d slip and slide

county backroads delivering to farms.

A big man in coveralls loaned us an ax

and we cut a Christmas tree from his woodlot.

Not much of a tree. Dad lashed it

to the grille of the truck and pieces flew off

as we sped along, our snow boots caked

with manure, our noses pinched

against outhouse smells in the heat of the cab.

At least we got food on the table, Dad said

whenever Mom looked like she felt sorry.

Or he’d say, There’s hungry people in this world

who get on with a lot less. Which meant

we should eat what Mom dished and not complain.

Strangers

A classmate came knocking

one hot summer afternoon.

He’d hiked clear across town

in a trench coat and sandals

and nothing more. These were days

of Jimmy and Janis, make love

not war. We did crazy things.

Mom let him in; I wasn’t home.

Mom worried strangers might be Jesus

in disguise, testing her. I guess

Jesus did crazy things too.

He said Mom had served him

milk and cookies. We laughed

and made fun of her. Neither of us

meant it; we were young and hopped-up

on mock and ridicule.

Mom said they’d had a nice visit.

He’d talked about dropping out, Mom said,

and she hoped he wouldn’t do that.

He’s a bright boy, Mom said.

His big brown eyes just melted her

heart, she said. And his smile,

so gentle and full of forgiveness.

LSD

We tied twisted plastic wrappers

to the rafters. Lit them one by one,

awed by the dripping flames hissing

and sizzling in the dirt. Dozen guys,

half as many chicks, huddled

in a picnic shelter, Iron Butterfly

drumming a war dance on the eight-track.

The molten globs of plastic shrieked

when they let go and whistled

like bombs. Last year of high school,

first frost on the meadow, full moon.

Faces flashed bright in the flames,

then black. Faces flashed

bright in the flames, then black.

Across the world an orange robe

doused in gasoline set itself ablaze

on a busy intersection, broad daylight.

One of us made noise like gun-fire.

Don’t do that, one of the girls said.

Something moved in the shadows,

something in the dark crept closer.

Napalm them jungle niggers, someone said.

We laughed and dared the dangerous

big world out there

to dare us back.

Action

Action speaks louder than words, Lenny

reminded us. We’d just walked home to the dorm

from a rally on the commons,

spitting bullets at Nixon and his war.

We huddled and passed a pipe. Lit candles and aimed

a black-light at Hendrix ghosting on the wall.

Don’t you just want to trash something?

Right-on, Ted said and raised a clenched fist:

Smash the state! Right-on, Man. The rest of us

agreed. It’s revolution, Man. Love Generation rules.

We passed the pipe again and chased it

with a bottle of Boone’s Farm. Larry

went teary-eyed. Think of it, he said,

it’s up to us. We’re like what’s-his-name Jefferson,

Abe Lincoln, Man. We’re . . . like

making history, Man. Let’s do it, Lenny

shouted and jumped up on his chair. Do it, Man!

“Something’s happening here”—we sang along

with the stereo. We’re like a movement, Man. We’re like . . .

a tidal wave, Ted said. We’re like . . . .

Someone had sent ‘round a few crumbs of hashish

smoldering on a tinfoil wrapper. We’re like . . .

but he coughed and coughed and couldn’t force

another word. You’re like wasted, Man, Larry said.

It’s cosmic, Man, Lenny said. Don’t you see?

It’s all atoms. Everything. All made up of atoms.

All we need is . . . like . . . unlocking that atom, Man.

Ted snored. Larry rolled himself up in a rug,

knocking an empty, spinning. The needle on the LP blipped

on the last groove over and over. Ticking like a bomb.

No, ticking like a countdown. No, ticking like a clock.

Featured Poet: March 2012 Vol. 4 # 5

admin — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:44:49 +0000

Kevin Boyle

Kevin Boyle grew up in Philadelphia and now lives in Burlington, North Carolina. His book of poems, A HOME FOR WAYWARD GIRLS, won the New Issues Poetry Prize in 2004, and his chapbook, THE LULLABY OF HISTORY, won the Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award in 2002. His poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Virginia Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry East, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Colorado Review and Antioch Review.

Approaching Sixty

The plaza in sun-stroke, the men tied to palms

Whose branches they lop, he walks through

The dream to her steps and finds her still

In mourning, saying, come back in a year’s time,

My love, then invites him in, touching

His face to find out who he is, a recurring touch

For thirty years, and then gone, not the memory

Exactly, just the dream. A blessing not to wake

Without her, the black lace, the red in her hair

In her lips as well, the welcoming smile saying

Tengo las cosas muy claras, because everything

Makes sense to her now. And a blessing

Not to be turned away and find himself lost

In the two-block red light district where dwarves

And the deformed make small talk with

The sex buskers, the women raising their skirts

To show him their black mantillas they lift

To show him their hair, black and pomaded.

The two scenes arm in arm for years until

Finally he realizes he hasn’t dreamt of her,

Of all of them in years. Even in his dreams

He’s forgetting, leaving the exotic traces behind.

In the Deep Heart’s Core

Timmy was too kind to say no, despite the flooding

That winter, as always, the shite the road threw up

Even before it gave up on being a road, the students

Waking from their sleep to yawn and bitch about

The poor conditions of the mud lane, the brambles

And gorse scratching up and into the sides of

Timmy’s coach, even at the windows to frighten

The bejesus out of one slow, deeply hungover waker

As I took the mic to announce we were about to alight

For a view and snap of Yeats’s Inishfree, perhaps even

A class photo, with Inishfree in the distance, our heads

Surrounded by Lough Gill, our feet planted in muck

We’d bring back to Timmy’s coach, if Timmy

Would be so kind. We saw the island, “kind of puny,”

One student said, and another, “It’s a little fucking nothing,”

And then turned to arrange ourselves for Timmy

Who was still working the coach back and forth

To escape the trap that was the carpark, finally

Emerging in a lather, and though I thought to hand him

My camera for the group shot, all twenty-eight students

Handed him their cameras with quick directions,

And so with a few cameras on the ground, and the rest

Like bangles up and down his sweaty arms, he took

What felt like a thousand wedding photos, all of us

In fine mettle, the students and I smiling immeasurably,

As if at peace, the water birds flying away from us

Out of the rushes, the little bits of trash we dropped

Floating in the wind that put color in our cheeks, forced

The lake water to lap near our feet and take the one

Styrofoam cup someone had accidentally let slip

Out toward the mysteries of heather island.

I sometimes drag the photo out of my iPhoto folder

And realize I can’t remember a single student’s name

Because it was over a dozen years ago and Timmy,

I learned, is long dead, and though I seem to forget

Almost everything, I do remember his prescient words

As we left the lake. Never again, I’ll never again

Take you eejits down that fucking Yeats lane.

University Dreams

When I tell my daughter I only spent one Friday night

on campus when I was in college, she seems so saddened

by my loss I love her even more. At sixteen, she hates

school and is eager to go to college where she imagines

every Friday night will be filled with ecstasy, not the drug,

just the feeling, and Saturday night as well, perhaps Sunday.

She doesn’t mention Monday through Thursday much.

When I tell her I lived at home and took the bus and el

that left me off six blocks from my first class on Astronomy

taught by a man whose accent was from another galaxy,

she asks about Friday nights, Saturday, and I tell her everything

about the supermarket, how there were cash registers

to punch and no scanners, and they hadn’t invented the blood absorber

so all the meats bled as if freshly slaughtered, and how

once, during the five years, the Retail Clerks International

went out on strike, which meant I could be on campus

on a Friday night, even Saturday morning, before I had to return

to picket. And did you make up for lost time, she asked?

It was so long ago I can’t remember everything, except

that feeling of being alone and walking alone along fraternity row,

all the parties in full bloom, each house surrounded by a moat

of people, smoking and drinking, and then meeting, somehow,

a girl from Astronomy coming back from the library, Jewish,

both parents doctors, from Westchester. I told her my mother

was from the Bronx and, somehow, she invited me in

for a drink, and then—such a dark horse—to stay the night.

At that time I believed in half-hearted class war, and so felt

oppositional, and I was terrified of her, her openness,

her license, her black hair. And by Tuesday we had won

concessions, the strike was over, and I was back standing up

in my apron, blood here and there, kind of comforted

by the inhibitions, the tamping down, knowing that soon

would come the ecstasy, and I wasn’t far from wrong.

Why Sleepless

My mother told me not to fall asleep without

saying a decade of the rosary, and her mother

told her not to sleep with flowers in the room,

and a Russian caregiver told my parents to sleep with

the window open an inch or so in winter, and my brother

told me to sleep on my side of the bed or else

the wrath of Cain would come down upon me,

and my dog sleeps in a locked crate, and my mother-in-law

mentions the heat, how she can not sleep with

too much or too little heat since her husband died,

and my wife, when she sleeps, talks in her sleep

about the men who are pursuing her with knives

or with flowers, she’s never sure which, or she’s lost

her leather purse and men she has slept with

find it, dump everything in the grass, and fling

the purse deep within the long woods she can’t even see

for all the brush fires held against her eyes.

Seems to Teach

It is only during the eclipse that the moon takes

A lover, finding some other floating stone to hold

Close to her, some with dimples, some with the pox,

And as the world below her watches the magician’s cape

Cloud her over, the moon is at her antics, making love

Without arms or legs, all brain becoming quickly

All womb or all heart, she tells them. They’re at it

For an hour or so, having to part only as the sun begins

To light up their edges, the moon waxing poetic

About her moodiness and need again for privacy, solitude.

The rock begins its drift and the moon remains inviolate,

The virgin goddess beloved by all the lonely on the faces

Of the earth. She knows she is watched, and in the way

Parents teach children how to die, when the time comes,

She seems to teach the single, the solitary how to endure

With panache, with subtle shifts, the bright white loneliness.