All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Epithalamium

There were others; their bodies
were a preparation.
I have come to see it as that.

As a stream of cries.
So much pain in the world—the formless
grief of the body, whose language
is hunger—

And in the hall, the boxed roses:
what they mean

is chaos. Then begins
the terrible charity of marriage,
husband and wife
climbing the green hill in gold light
until there is no hill,
only a flat plain stopped by the sky.

Here is my hand, he said.
But that was long ago.
Here is my hand that will not harm you.

Descending Figure

1.The Wanderer

At twilight I went into the street.
The sun hung low in the iron sky,
ringed with cold plumage.
If I could write to you
about this emptiness—
Along the curb, groups of children
were playing in the dry leaves.
Long ago, at this hour, my mother stood
at the lawn’s edge, holding my little sister.
Everyone was gone; I was playing
in the dark street with my other sister,
whom death had made so lonely.
Night after night we watched the screened porch
filling with a gold, magnetic light.
Why was she never called?
Often I would let my own name glide past me
though I craved its protection.

2.The Sick Child

Rijksmuseum

A small child
is ill, has wakened.
It is winter, past midnight
in Antwerp. Above a wooden chest,
the stars shine.
And the child
relaxes in her mother’s arms.
The mother does not sleep;
she stares
fixedly into the bright museum.
By spring the child will die.
Then it is wrong, wrong
to hold her—
Let her be alone,
without memory, as the others wake
terrified, scraping the dark
paint from their faces.

3.For My Sister

Far away my sister is moving in her crib.
The dead ones are like that,
always the last to quiet.

Because, however long they lie in the earth,
they will not learn to speak
but remain uncertainly pressing against the wooden bars,
so small the leaves hold them down.

Now, if she had a voice,
the cries of hunger would be beginning.
I should go to her;
perhaps if I sang very softly,
her skin so white,
her head covered with black feathers. . . .

*

all from The First Four Books of Poems by Louise Glück. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.: New York, 1995.

JASON BREDLE

Falling from a Bridge

I woke after a night in the lightning chamber

feeling incredible. There was so much to do. It’s

crunch time, I thought, as I walked to the kitchen

for a bowl of cereal. I wanted to grow my

eyelashes really long. I was going to sew my hand

back on. I wanted to have an adventure. I

phoned Giancarlo and invited him over. He

walked into the kitchen with blueprints of Holy

Resurrection, proposing we set it on fire. I’d

prefer to fall from the perfect bridge, I said. We

made a list of all the bridges in the city. We chose

the bridge on Avenida cruz del sur for its design

and historical relevance. As we left, we found a

tiny duckling dead in a puddle of water on the

sidewalk in front of my house. It looked like a

painful death. It made the idea of falling from a

bridge seem stupid. What did we expect, anyway?

We were somewhere outside Bucharest in the

1970’s or 1980’s.

SARAH GAMBITO

Virginia

When I was born, the woman ahead

of me had a lovely Om and it was

an Apostle. White children sang around

me and I sang Edelweiss, Nothing but

the Blood and come cookie stick.

Quid multa ne multa multa

nox. In my church, I petted

my spine. I was furry

and luxuriant. Grass growing

nearer. I stood among my own conifers

and when no one was

looking I played every character

in the Nativity. I liked it

best when I was Mary freezing

at night. I kissed the top of

my dollbaby’s head and stayed

in my sheets while cars peeled in

fleur de lis around me. My church

was tall and level-headed.

My church memorized

scripture and made peachy

fingernails and emotional

outbursts in school.

ALICE JONES

Kara

Deranged pack ice, murderous
isotopes released in meltwater,
a black fluid force and its teeth,

ice-spined, ice-breakers
penetrating
the insanity of water,

eddies, spun mouths,
a poisoned drain,
birth sluice, primal sink.

KATHLEEN MARTIN ROWE

English Class

Hold me cheap
she says. How to explain
when words hide unborn
inside the fruit.

Once I saw a cherry tree
bloom. In a botanical garden
children tumbled downhill
on the lawn. It was
so imperfect.
Reshuffling her hands,

it’s the way people look at her
as if she’s stupid
because her language does not
treat them well.
Cherry trees grow

in Washington. A gift of friendship
from Japan, 1912, claims the classroom text.
The spring festival
attracts thousands.

Those trees!
Draped in pale letters.

How to understand
transaction, offering.
Hands covering face.

*

all from Denver Quarterly 46.2 (2012), Ed. Bin Ramke

To read some of Charmi’s work, please click to see her blog here!

To preview her newly published collection of poems, click here!

The Hearthside Readers and Writers Series is a fun, literary event that takes place on the third Sunday of every month, with a different featured reader each time. Hope to see you there!

JENNIFER BOYDEN

I’d Have Presented a Cup of Water or My Own Small Ax

She said she could read the dream
of anything, so they put her in a cage
overlooking, at first, the plum trees.

But they said this made it too easy,
that the fruit or the birds might be
where the visions were from.

So they put her underground,
and one woman dropped down
a handkerchief.

In the box, the woman
found the cloth’s dream of waterfall,
released it up.

Then they sent down
a boy who had never woken,
but his dream was in a language

so large its edges hurt. The lemon
dreamt of chaff blowing over the field.
The shoes of rising spoons of heat.

When the people had nothing left
to send, they went home
and ate, some with their hands, some

very little. In the box, the woman grew
thinner. In her paleness, she shone
like a sail of the moon’s own drift,

and so read t hat. Again and again,
as though it might release her.

MARY ANN SAMYN

Another Word for Small

The day, like a snake, had a bulge in the middle.

I cleaned and cleaned and was terrific at cleaning.

No, the day, like a dress, was pinned: tissue paper and chalk:
two kinds of rustle from childhood.

Briefly, I thought of calling.

The day, like grammar, was composed of exceptions:
after breakfast; noon; sleepy three o’clock; hope against hope; etc.

The day was not a snow day, and the sky was not a snow sky,
and the air, also not.

—Amid the winter muck, however, something bright
and inconsequential:

a toy, perhaps, or left out—months and months ago.

MEGAN SNYDER-CAMP

Bearings

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe
all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours
in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,
a reaction sending out runners across her chest,
a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back
into fashion, their son coming back
from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime
and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger
spread down the long hallway of their house
and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled
beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double
in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime
and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy,
the mother decides to see the son again, and so
our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth,
all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence
her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot
in this registered historic district (all of the houses
bear their stories on plaques, their first stories,
run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon,
cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue,
in this yard no marker stone and under this stone
their son’s everything, no double,
no double

LEILANI R. HALL

Oneironaut

For Joan (1948-2007)

I don’t eat the juniper berries.
Leave them for the crows

who must carry night across their backs,
the burden of breaking into day, the fury

of feathered evening stippled against the field.
I do not shame them for each small death, light

gone under wing. Here, I am an interloper,
having put my head on the pillow, let go

the hand of day, and walked into your night, lucid.

MARTHA SILANO

Love

I hate your kneecaps floating free
in their salty baths. I hate your knees,

both of them, and I hate your eyelashes,
especially the ones that fall out, the ones

you’re supposed to wish on; I wish you
bad wishes. I hate every hair

on your hairy face, hate you as much
as I hate being put on hold,

thank you for your patience
when I have none, when patience

is as far away as my first-grade teacher’s
if you have nothing nice to say . . .

Your mushroom risotto: hate it.
The salmon you’re defrosting: hate.

My vowels hate you.
My adverbs hate you. The backyard

hates you—the backyard with all its abandoned
dump trucks, with the giant hole our son dug

all summer while soaker hoses soaked. That hole
and all holes, including t he hole in the ozone,

which of course keeps getting better.
Spaghetti wrapping around a fork.

Mashed spinach and carrots caught
in the rungs of a high chair, stuck

to the floor like dried green paint: hate,
hate, hate. Each furry rabbit a little furry ball

of hate. Each blackberry a messy drupe of drippy hate.
At the China Palace the plates piled high with Mu Shu

Hate, the plates now a busboy’s burden of hate,
the only sound the dumpster’s clanging hate hate hate.

*

all from The Cincinnati Review 5.1 (Summer 2008). Eds. Don Bogen and Brock Clarke.

Please take a pause, and read the article here.

Congratulations to Carrie for this achievement!

To read her featured poem, click here.

MARIE PONSOT

Alhambra in New York

From the kitchen corner comes

the low electric hum

of the five-petaled fan.

A stir of air reaches us

sweetly, as if it were fresh;

it governs our breath.

Our talk over dinner

could not be better even

were we caressed (if

we were as we were)

by a skim of air lifting to us

moonstruck off the long pool

at Alhambra years ago, there

where we are, as we know.

JENNIFER PERRINE

Outside Paradise, Everything is Other

Adam, this first day tossed
from the garden: even here

the song of dehiscence
comes scuttling up through fountains

of grass, all these anthers
bursting, clavigers loosing

their keys. Inside the weight
of freshly sinned flesh, pollen

spins its syrup, his breath
trickling from the honeycomb

of lung, fabiform nodes
in his neck germinative,

sprouting watery shoots
into blood, and oh, these bones

steeped in the lukewarm meat
of his skin say even this

is something to welcome:
even in this small wrestle

for each slow slug of air,
the body wants to be known.

NANCE VAN WINCKEL

Hit Return

Your flame—an eye
flown open—stopped me.
The thunderbolt not
so much. The mind changes
and ditto the curfew
make as if to stop me.
Good tries. Old ties.
A wail wells us (from
the has-been baby) and
aims to but fails to
take me aback. What
may be gleaned from
this? The very inquiry
stopped me: had I come
on foot? The injection only
slowed me. You pull
the needle out, and I
go on, darling, on.

KAREN HILDEBRAND

Wine-Tasting

Despite the joke that only a poet
would turn a bouquet of violets
into violence, I’m behind the wheel,
driving a country road late at night,
when the car dies, lights go out, radio slurs.
It’s like those alien spaceship encounters
where they suck up all the power
and then the moon explodes.
We watch through the windshield,
and I realize the moon is really the sun,
which, of course, scares the bejesus out of me.
Kim and I look at each other—never mind,
she’s been dead since 1999—and duck
into the back seat, our car gone off into the ditch.
I’m imagining chaos, roving bands, leather vested
scavengers, heads bandaged with filth and chains.
This after a perfectly sedate evening, full-bodied red,
Chris’s “soft and warm women,” cheeses, figs.

RAY AMOROSI

The First Born

When I dropped my hand in the river from the stern,
I wanted to be free of it.
It came back up cold, as lovely as the boy buried today.

It’s said God is a beast at high tide.
Wiry hair between your fingers,
a slack body as soft as a child’s thigh.

The familiar hand at breakfast is gone.
The mother swallows the absence like bread, the father
weeps in a bar of strangers.

When the moon is full in my snout when
the first born dies, the yellow
humpback wave rises at dawn

and rolls over and stars salt the river,
when the moon is too full, when the stars return.

*

all from The Journal 33.1 (Spring/Summer 2009), Eds. Kathy Fagan and Michelle Herman

BRUCE SNIDER

Lure

Muskrats enter the trap
for the apple, the lure

we’ve secured with a nail.
They can’t be saved,

nesting the banks, cloudy-
eyed, whiskered hunger

deep as our own. They
mate and breed. Where they die

in the cold: frogs, crayfish
gleam, cattail roots, scat

steaming. We lift them—
seven dollars a pelt—

into the boat, fur matted, legs
cage-snagged as if punishment

for feeding. Into water
they come rippling,

immeasurable. Where
it begins. Where it ends.

That feeling. So many names:
mud cat, mud beaver, heart-

stopped in the rushes, snared.

BRENDAN CONSTANTINE

Birthday Girl with Possum

No one wants to come
too near. It’s wild,
might climb out of her
arms, with its claws like
loops of gray icing. She
stares up at us, animals
poised to bellow. What
don’t we want.

GERI DORAN

Tabula Rosa

Enter into testimony: the name Beloved.
An inmost calm cannot abide in this.
As I am often told—
the long walk by the roaring sea
the long walk roaring by the sea
made not unknowing nor without cease

yet planed smooth along the corded vein—
though sand be not the sculpted grain, nor wood,
though walking be not grieving, nor the plane.

ANGIE ESTES

It is Virtually Without
Thickness and Has Almost

no weight. If rubbed between forefinger
and thumb, it will fade
into nothing. If dropped, it hardly seems
to flutter downwards. If it settles
on a hard surface ruffled or folded
it can be straightened out
with a puff of breath, unwrinkling
itself like a shimmering
shaken blanket. It can be
hammered thinner and
thinner without ever
crumbling away. It can
be eaten and seems
to vanish on the tongue,
but a good translation
should have some memory
of its original language: The statue lies
in a freshly excavated hole, dirt
and rocks tossed into
the bushes but robes
still clinging to her breasts
and thighs. The man standing
next to her, visible only
above the knee, has laid aside
his shovel: one hand rests on what’s left
of her arm while the other brushes
her stone hair once read The past tense
of sit is satin and as the world
rolls into dusk, everything is
quiet except for a robin
breaking small pieces of light
in its beak: the less light, the more
fragrant the lilac grows.

*

all from Ninth Letter 6.1 (Spring/Summer 2009), Ed. Jodee Stanley

JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL

Straight Line

No one in the county saw the wind, though
someone must have, maybe everybody did,

but it seems it was transparent, invisible,
&

no one can tell you the exact angle of the red pine
before it was broken, only after,

or can imitate the noise, the shaking loose
all those shingles made,

or can say for sure what that first moment
sounded like after the wind stopped

whether something or nothing or a soft note
in between.

EMMA BOLDEN

At First

The world whirs: vetiver and violins,
lilac and lion’s roar, lilies, dogwood and daisies

rip off their green shawls to show you
their white fringe of hair, asters

upholster the pathways purple, the fish kisses
the side of her bowl and even ice

cubes clink thanks for their glass. Love
new, and you knew the world new

defined, all a dictionary of him—stem
to be plucked by his fingers, lamp

that which lit his bristl’d chin—the whole
world, the whole world

of him, the whole world a hymn.

CHAD SWEENEY

The Mile

Western Oklahoma

My grandmother crowns the hill,
her headlights lathing the dark,
a farm route

through rye then cotton
then the red and gold of wheat,
the scrub oak crowding

a little nameless river
where fog holds to low places.
Who would have seen the tractor

aimed down the highway by a boy,
his first summer behind the wheel,
with no lights but the holy

somnolence of a cowboy radio?
The next car over the rise
is my father

blind into the fog.
There is so much to talk about
at this moment,

so many lines of cause and effect
trembling taut into that gully.
How does my father choose—

with his mother’s ribs broken
and his new wife moaning from the ditch—
to carry the limp body

of someone else’s child
a mile over night fields
toward the insinuation of a roof?

Everyone is bleeding and starlight
drizzles over the summer wheat.
The poem holds them there

long enough to trace the flight
of an owl
from a cedar’s black minaret

its wings underlit by brake-lights.
Which of you, dear reader,
is in the next Oldsmobile

to clatter over the bluff
shouting help into your CB radio?
Which of you opens the front door

weeping
to wrap your unconscious boy
in quilts? Do you kill

the man
who carries him?
In most endings I am never

born. In most,
you buy my family’s farm cheap
at auction. Who among you

is rushing the ambulance
past the county line at mile 67
when the tire blows? The story

moves through telephone wires
at the pitiless speed of rumor:
when my father reaches the house

with the boy expiring in his arms,
a white rectangle of light
and grief

sears his eyes forever.
In the cave of my mother’s
body

I listen to the first fire.

*

all from Passages North: 30th Anniversary Issue 30.1 (Winter/Spring 2009), Ed. Kate Myers Hanson

The review appears in multiple locations, such as The Midwest Book Review’s Small Press Bookwatch (under the category, “The Poetry Shelf”) and Amazon.com.

Thank you to The Midwest Book Review for this recognition of Carrie Oeding and 42 Miles Press!