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Leslie Adams

 

Leslie is a first-year MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a 2008 graduate of Mississippi State University, where she earned her MA in English. While attending Mississippi State, she served as a poetry editor for The Jabberwock Review and was awarded both the Eugene Butler and the Albert Camus Creative Writing Scholarships. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume II: Mississippi, and New South.

 

 

 

Fracture

 

I’ve seen already how I could hate your thin mouth,

the ragged teeth of the story a glass shard, a memory scar—

 

I have not yet learned to let time bear weight like a healed bone.

And the narrative is never linear,

 

the convoluted edges of other and self, that radius of wanting—

how expendable we become, how superfluous to each other’s lives,

 

with our simple human dependence on signs and omens

balanced like birds legging single stalks of grass in the hayfield,

 

wreathing the supernatural like a ring around the moon,

something we can approach but never address,

 

something we wait for, not the light but a diffusion of the light—

how we look with indulgence on ourselves, our simple human wants and weaknesses,

 

your shoulders worn to the thin blades of a child’s

that I would cover as if they are shameful,

 

if I could wedge my hands to that omen of bone

without breaking them, if I knew I could have them back.

 

           

 ~originally appear in the Cimarron Review

 

 

 

 

Wanting the Earth

 

“You will want the earth, then more of the earth—

it will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive”

                                                          Louise Glück “The Sensual World”

 

So this is why imagination, like love, thrives on absence:

 

the light here won’t let us think;

we are ruined by accuracy.

 

the sea calls back its waves like a falconer,

each morning wakes into place on cue,

 

heat runs like the hot slap of sap down the ruined trunks of trees,

and the sky, unchanging as an eye, posing water,

drags horizon like the train of a wedding dress;

 

so studied, everything, so choreographed,

 

breaking down into other, compressing and reassembling,

sand clamoring back to shale and granite, formless and reforming—

 

so this is mortality, this is what the word means:

touch and the loss of touch, sight and the failure of sight,

 

the rain scattering pizzicato, the burden of the stilled string—

 

         

 

 

If the Child’s Face is a Small House

 

When we look again the sun will be gone,

although it will doubtlessly circle back to stand behind us,

discarding shadows at our feet. 

 

And the child who stands behind us, who makes us seem taller,

will also circle back to stand twelve years behind us,

and will call forward words that we are unable to hear at this distance,

 

waving frantically in greeting or warning,

and will not be lost in the coming dusk.,

and will not be silenced. 

 

But your face braces itself like the early lines of a house that will not shelter.

I have lived under your jaw for too long

not to recognize the grinding teeth like the sharpening edge of a knife.

 

I have seen your jaw set like a sun.

I have done this now for many nights, at your feet like a child.

 

Unlike me, the child is wise, and not easily fooled or caught.

 

I do not yet know if the child’s face is also a small house,

or whether I would be invited in.

 

Why should we question this?

 

The dead are aligned exactly as we left them,

and the unborn still whisk just over our heads like birds

for whom I half-cast the net and draw it back empty of even air.

 

Come here, little one.

I will not refuse you your questions,

and will not cast nets or accusations.

 

I dreamed each one of your teeth like unearthed seeds, but here, see,

they have been in my hands all the while.

 

 

 

 Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum

 

 

 

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr.

 

Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. is a graduate student at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, finishing his first year of studies in poetry.  He has presented papers and read original works at the Sigma Tau Delta National English Convention, been finalist in the North Carolina State Poetry Contest, and was awarded the Fredrick A. Hartmann Award in creative writing.  During his undergraduate studies at Elon University, in North Carolina, he was awarded several grants and fellowships for poetry and photography, which culminated in a Senior Thesis Project that won Best of Show.  His poetry has recently been accepted for publication in New Delta Review and Packingtown Review; his artwork has recently been accepted as cover work for Pennsylvania English, the literary journal out of Pennsylvania State University.

 

 

 

 

What Marie Curie Discovered After Her First Nobel Prize

                        1903, Journal Entry titled, Substance M’s Presence:

           

Two weeks after exhausting the prize money,

after mounting the new tub basin, sink taps

and flush toilet—one morning, using the washroom,

feeling the cold tile on my bare feet—I looked around

to admire the clean cast iron, and noticed

a grimy patch lingering between the porcelain bowl

and floor.  I pulled the cistern chain, washed my hands

before taking a lukewarm wet rag to the mold sprout,

and promptly forgot it.  Two weeks more, I found

three weedy mold blossoms in the mildew’s place.

It looked like a gray, seeding dandelion

the length of my little toe.  I harvested the buds

in an envelope, employed a baking soda paste to tidy

the surrounding area.  Yet, their fuzzy blooms recurred.

The following months I applied vinegar, lemon juice,

rubbing alcohol, borax and salt, but no reward.

How stubborn.  Then, abruptly, it was gone.

I studied each day for some trace of scum, for naught.

One evening, with this taken to Pierre, he surprised me

by news he sealed the gap around the toilet mount

with heavy wax.  It is queer to see my flowers absent—

I never did figure out what solvent would rid them.

 

 

 

 

 

Dogcatcher’s Science Lesson

 

Dogcatcher starts at signposts, looking

for stapled flyers about lost border collies

and schnauzers answering to Fritz,

but he doesn’t like the lost mongrels

nearly as much as the ones with no past

or collar or housetraining.  At the pound,

he has nests of kennels heaped

like logs on a woodpile.  He moseys along

the pen rows sipping ginger brandy

from a bean can, scribbles numbers

and days and dates in a drugstore notebook,

trying to plot the shelf life of caged dogs. 

Dogcatcher has figured that a natural

“runner” mutt—cooped up—doesn’t last

more than a year, but note taking is still ongoing.

 

Erin Quick

Erin Quick grew up in Columbia, MO and now lives in South St. Louis. She holds a B.A. in English-Creative Writing and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from Webster University, where she also served as Poetry Editor for The Green Fuse. The last few years have found her peddling poetry from the stacks at Left Bank Books while managing the bookstore. Most recently, she is taking some time to welcome a new friend into her growing family. She is committed to social justice and building community through literature. As the volunteer librarian at The Soulard School, she exposes elementary school children to the wonders of poetry before they ever have a chance to be turned off to it.

 

 

 

When Hanging Up the Mobile: A Found Poem

 

~for David

 

When hanging up your mobile

there are certain measures

which should be observed:

 

1)

Hang the mobile

so that it has a quiet, uniform background.

Light

walls in a corner

are often to be preferred.

 

2)

Preferably

close to a lamp in such a way

that its shadow will be cast on the wall

or ceiling,

this giving the mobile yet another

dimension. A candle

is the most concentrated source of light,

and will give

distinct, well-defined shadows.

 

3)

Try to hang the mobile

where you can watch it while listening

to music. You will see

the mobile move

to the rhythm of the music.

 

 

 

Moore’s Paradox: Love

 

A baby died in the design of a city,

a baby was never born.

 

Here is the shape a family takes,

here is a star,

 

here is a hand, and she was never born.

A baby died in the design

 

before we could tell her about skyscrapers or trees,

before she could taste cherries or wine

 

or feel sunshine or the hum of pain

upon leaving it all,

 

before we could tell her

the word for love is death.

 

Hannah K. New

Hannah K. New is currently a grad student at Southern Illinois University studying poetry.  She has participated in several readings and won several awards over the last several years.  She has published two chapbooks: Voices From the Second Floor (self-published with several poets 2005) and Fighting Nature (published by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies 2006).  The National Federation of State Poetry societies awarded her the Florence Kahn Memorial Award in 2006 and she traveled to San Antonio to present her poetry at its annual conference.  Hannah has presented papers and poetry at the National Undergraduate Literary Conference in 2005 and 2006.  She has also published several non-fiction articles in various magazines.

 

 

Proving My Uncle Wrong

 

“Watering horses can’t be a poem,”

you said one night when I defended

the idea that everything is poetry.

I leave the house, snow filling my boots

and soaking my socks.  I pour the cool water,

a fluid arc, into the buckets. Two mares

move their necks like swans, straightening

and then curving. I imagine they are playing

a game of Catch Me if You Can standing still.

A colt follows me and rests his nose against my back.

We both take comfort from the warmth of togetherness.

I get caught up in the rhythm of pulling the hose

and rolling it into perfect O’s to hang on the hook:

pull and hook, pull and hook.

The natural flow of routine runs through me

and satisfies me as neatly as water filling the red, plastic buckets.

And you—you tried to argue with me

that watering horses can’t be a poem.

 

 

Ice Storms in June

 

He labeled the horse’s breath, Sweet hay of the Earth.

He labeled my eyes, doubled curse—see-saw.

The horse was blind in one eye, saw with his muzzle.

 

To my mouth, he burned with coals.

I will scar your forehead with my breath.

I will singe your hand with touch.

 

To baptize you with blood would be cliché,

so I will use the sweat of horses,

and the melted ice of winter storms in June.

 

 

 

Ode to Cell Phones and Testicles

           

My husband says I must introduce the piece of

metallic shit as my third generation, excellent reception,

brick of a phone.  It was his mother’s, and he passes

it to me as lovingly as my Grandmother gave me her

silver spoon.  I hold it, until I feel the heartbeat,

the electric skip that I am sure is giving me brain cancer

as surely as the plastic basketball hoops on an assembly line

in Ogden, Utah gave my husband his gift of a testicle.

This testicle does NOT receive reception. At least

not anymore.  And for some reason neither does his

remaining one.  I dial, but no one answers. And what

is with testicles nowadays? We will all be sterile in a few years.

The rivers are full of birth control pills, estrogen slipping into

seminiferous tubes, taking up residence in the warm male ovaries of heat.

And climate change now, too. Warming the testes until it is too hot

for tadpoles or for sperm.  I would throw my cell phone into the river,

but I am afraid of what my husband will gift me with next.