Quinn Rennerfeldt – Low Bones, Whittled One

 

Low Bones

–

We nurse our cold-clean

stomachs, famished and

fastened shut by each

rum breath, silenced by our

lead heaven, needles slipped

up arms in a harem of horses.

We sleep, clinging to the elbows

of spring, shackled to the warmth

of doors.  Safety is any number

greater than one; each night together

we are wealthy. Home

is just gravity adjusting

our low bones,

bagged and ready to go.

–

—

 

Whittled One

–

My hands linger on the ripeness

of my body where you ripple

and sift. Again I wonder if

you will be too skinny to thrive, a throw-

back baby they tell me can’t live. What if

the harvest of my meat and meal

can produce little more than jellied

bone and a whining, whittled-away

thing? I feel you move like a stretch

or slow dance and want to believe

you are all healthy and brawn, the things

Darwin would write of with raw, respectful

fascination, a body threaded thick

with living genes. My home diagnosis is

I am suffering from a heart

that doesn’t yet know how to love you,

little fleecy thing alive

in the shell of an organ like an eyelid,

thin mystery within my skin.

–

–

Quinn Rennerfeldt earned her degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder and currently lives in Denver with her daughter, husband, and ornery cat. She currently serves as a poetry co-editor for Blood Lotus. She was most recently published in Wazee Journal and has work forthcoming in Slipstream in 2014.

–

Joe Wahlman – Autumn Waves

Autumn Waves

 –

Lake Superior black rock shore,

an autumn chill in the wind—

pink cheeked, my son

stood with me

in the spray of the waves—

mighty lake waves—

rolling towards us,

exploding on the rocks—

roaring water—

rhythmic white walls of water

growing and falling

in the wind—

            My son roared right back at them,

                        arms overhead—

                        Eyes full of wonder,

                                                I watched him instead.

–

–

–

–

Joe Wahlman was raised in Michigan’s Upper Penninsula, where he now lives with his wife and son. He has taught English for fourteen years in both Colorado and Michigan.

Carol Lynn Grellas – Before the Pink House, The Waiting Room

Before the Pink House

–

I miss the days with two plates of eggs;
scrambled and warm, your face pressed

to mine like a picture captured through glass
beside the window’s ledge, the hedge

where bees would swarm around jasmine
potted jardinières that lined our home

on an ordinary street. Where we would walk
with shadows ignoring the coarseness

beneath our feet like barefoot nomads
yours, one step ahead of mine, so carefully

avoiding this unbearable existence of following.

–

–

The Waiting Room

 

It’s the morning of your appointment
and you pretend there’s nothing wrong.

You kiss the children, pour milk
over Wheaties, and don your special

dress for the waiting room where you’ll
await the verdict that might destroy

your life. You choose the dress
that hangs in back, tucked between

Summer and Fall, understated
and black to suit your practical mind;

easily tossed if you hear bad news
and it’s the one you wore to your mother’s

funeral; pockets still full of prayers.

 

–

–

–

–

’The Waiting Room’ is a part of the poetry collection ‘Hasting Notes in No Particular Order’ from Aldrich Press. The poem is previously published in Best Poem.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a six-time Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net nominee and the 2012 winner of the Red Ochre Press Chapbook contest. She has authored several collections of poetry including her latest collected works, Hasty Notes in No Particular Order. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of online and print magazines including: The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, War, Literature and the Arts; The Department of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Able Muse, Poets and Artists, and many more. According to family lore she is a direct descendent of Robert Louis Stevenson. www.clgrellaspoetry.com

 

 

–

 

A.J. Huffman – From Forest’s Path

From Forest’s Path

– 

the towering birch like a totem pole,

intricately carved to protect the budding offshoots

at its feet.  The struggle to take root, to look up

as I do, in awe of the elder, pray they will be able

to avoid boot, bird and belligerent weather

so someday they too can ignore me as I pass

below their branches, unnoticed

–

–

 

 

 

 

 

A.J. Huffman has published seven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest.  Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com

Carolyn D. Elias – Mother

 

Mother

–

You are a stone chained behind my teeth, biting my tongue

until it is slashed into ribbons.

Does your throat swallow

broken glass when a shadow reminds you of me?

I inspect the lines of your body

and I spy no hidden bruise or red swollen lump,

only flexing fingers resisting to curl into meaty fists.

Against our wills we are blood bound;

our faces are blank, worn smooth from constant battle.

Raw tiny scars, shiny and faded,

maps of earlier skirmishes crisscross our souls.

Our hair is all torn out;

Having torn each other to bits we are not satiated

but laid bare, and afraid that the other will beat us

into submission.

Will we burn each other to ashes?

In the depths of our burning can we be reborn

as phoenixes?

–

–

–

–

Carolyn D. Elias is a writer, currently living in Morris, MN with her husband and two cats. She writes poetry and short stories. Carolyn also works as a freelance editor. This is her first publication with Sassafras Magazine.

 

Carol Tyx – Tomatoes on Windowsill, Garage

 

 

Tomatoes on Windowsill

–

Fullness to fullness

like beads on a string

not perfect roundness

not copies, each

its own being, a slightly

flattened curve,  a bulge

subtle differences in color

coral, brick, somewhere

on the orange to red scale

every day deepening

maybe like us

if we could hold still

long enough in the sheen

of morning light.

–

–

Garage

 

You look out the back window

at the garage sheathed

in snow, the roofline gleaming

against the indigo skyline.

 

The sag has returned—if it ever left—

the old wood bowing to the weight

of snow and  moonlight on this last night

of the year, all the jockeying up,

 

the reinforced beams, the additional

crosshatches of the previous summer

useless under the weight

 

of so much beauty.

–

–

 

–

 

Carol Tyx teaches writing and American literature at Mt. Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Her work has most recently been published in RHINO, Poetry East, Water-Stone Review, Iowa City’s Poetry in Public, and Rising to the Rim, published by Brick Road Poetry Press.  On any given day you might find her cooking with kale, contra dancing, or standing on her head.

 

Amanda Tumminaro – The Approach of Spring, The Trifle

 

The Approach of Spring

– 

The time when the cattails rise

high-reaching like an impossible prayer,

I am sitting on a far away bench

writing a poetic effort and facing

my daily dealings like scrambled eggs.

 

Nobody wants to mow their lawns at first,

they are issues cropped up in the brain,

confronting the homeowner like the past.

So a red robin flies over –

his viewpoint only squares of grass and lost peoples,

blond locks shining in the birth of rays, deceptively.

 

The neighbor, she likes to grow vegetables in the warm,

leaving my headaches and my heart on the front porch.

I must insert each in the proper cavity.

Sun widens over in a massive thaw.

All land obeys like a shackled chain gang.

–

–

 

The Trifle

 –

Pull back, pull back, I shall be

the child that sits

when the schoolteacher rings

the bell.

– 

Drowned forth, drowned forth

bobbing for apples, rumpled water,

I quit, muffled, struggled,

wet hair.

–

Isolation, the bitter fruit,

always ripe, juices sour, orange pulp,

somewhat thick,

it was always bothersome.

–

–

–

–

Amanda Tumminaro lives in Illinois with her family. She enjoys reading, writing and caffeinated drinks. She has been published in Black Book Press, Storm Cellar and Shemom and her work can also be found in a forthcoming issue of The Stray Branch.

 

 

Lynn Xu – Our Love is Pure, Two Poems

Our Love is Pure

–

I

–

Man

Makes love and love makes Rome.  In Rome apart

From you

This autumn is a dream.  I fell

Into the sea.  Through the French trees.  My heart

Became a suite in the Carlyle, compels you

To undress.

Foliage and cleavage sail like confetti onto our voyage.

 –

–

–

 

II

 –

Statues forgetting to crawl into death from the balconies

And battlefields.  Love

From the battlefields.  My blood went to breath

Like a younger poet, who made the dove

Crawl into a handkerchief.  In the face of the poet, it’s important to track

Which features are your own.

So age has brought lace from the sea onto your face.

Say past

These infrared trees, lay darkness sublime as stirred melodies.

 –

–

–

III

 –

Mind evaporates briefly twisting in

Little disappearances

Of meat.  Fish

Meat everywhere mind is

Staring

Into your eyes.

Cloudless

Eyes.  Ebi

Shinjo starry

Skies.

Friends to whom I belong.  Friends who I will wrong.

–

–

–

(‘Our Love is Pure’ was first published in Octupus Magazine, issue 12.)

–

–

Two Poems

–

–

 

THERE WERE ETERNITIES DURING WHICH IT DID NOT EXIST.

–
Vivid.  Sun overhead.

You overdid it.   The ankle was showing.   Lavender takes on

touching directness.   The sensation

and the heavy shadow cast by the string unless carefully disguised

could give you away.   The gun is set aside to show the room

more evenly.   The man was a few hours

from vanishing completely, but I had read everything.   And a good deal of it

was true.   But certain things have a way of returning, for what was done

grows young and large.   Not without principle.   Whose perfection

is the very absence of nature.
–

–

–

 

–

 

THE THOUGHT DID NOT BRING YOU CLOSER.
–

Like the movie, which had a balcony in it, but wasn’t really

about love.   Where grass broadened

in broad sun there truth is marked by an X

clutched at the knee.   They projected a ladder onto the one

without anatomy, the sensual one, that though the figures reversed the continents began

resisting language and music were set down before you, meat, instinct, daylight

plunged toward the sky

were to touch each other.   Were to you

vast and transparent.   Tearing your shirt open, in the tall grass, continued

shouting across the bay.

–

—

 

’Two Poems’ were first published in Chax, issue 4.

These poems are appearing in Sassafras after a request from the editor.

–

–

–

Lynn Xu was born in Shanghai. Her poems have appeared in 6×6, 1913, Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Octopus, Poor Claudia, and others. A chapbook, June, was published by Corollary Press in 2006. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a William L. Magistretti Fellowship, she is currently the Jacob K. Javits Fellow at UC Berkeley, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. She holds an MFA from Brown University. With Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, and husband Joshua Edwards, she coedits Canarium Books. Between Stuttgart and Marfa, she divides her time. Her debut collection Debts and Lessons was published in 2013 by Omnidawn Publishing.

 

–

–

 

 

Joshua Poteat – Hitchhiking in the Dying South

Hitchhiking in the Dying South

–

–

I have seen the morning spread over the fields
& I have walked on, trying to forget
how it seemed as if daybreak was founded
on the most fragile web of breath,
& I had blown it.

Then I thought it might not exist at all,
nor had it ever. That it was only the idea of breath
& the egrets asleep in sour-grass were the idea
of flight, & if I was to breathe in,
it would all just disappear.

I have seen the spotted toads at dusk
come up from the ditches after a rainstorm
& into the asphalt’s steam & I have seen them
crushed by lumber trucks, then lifted away
into the pines by the gathering crows.

I have felt the night quiver with heron’s wing
over the swamps, over wild pigs in a blackberry patch,
their snouts bloody & alive in the moonlight,
& I have walked on, dirty, alone, kicking to the grasses
the swollen bodies of possum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, bobcat,
giving them no prayer, no peace-filled silence.

But that was long ago, when work was scarce
& meant thumbing my way to the tobacco plant
or the slaughterhouse, north up Highway 17
to Holly Ridge or down to Bulltail on 210,
either way I would be shoveling something until dusk,
something soft & warm & beyond me.
And I would be glad for it.

Walking with that forgotten gesture wavering
in the morning air, I felt that people
could come into the world in a place
they could not at first even name,
& move through it finally, like the dawn,
naming each thing until filled with a buoyancy,
a mist from the river’s empty rooms.

Thumb of autumn, thumb of locust, thumb of every kissed lip.

I have seen a cow die under the wheels
of a Cadillac going 60, & who’s to say
what the cow got from this?
Some would say a dignity, perhaps,
past the slaughterhouse
& the carcasses swimming the eaves.

Or was it a punishment for nudging open
the gate-latch, the driver of the car
in shock, mouthing cow, cow,
& the crows in the pines answering
with the kind of sympathy my foreman used
when one of his line-workers
cut off another finger in the shredder.
Son, at least you still got your arm.

It’s difficult to get this straight,
but there was a beauty to the sparks
that spread out under the car, under the cow,
as they went from flesh to asphalt to flesh again:
fireflies in the hollow of the hills:
a blanket of white petals from the tree of moon.

A brief & miniature dawn began,
there on a summer night in the South
I had come to love as part of myself,
the sparks clinging in the grass for a moment,
unbearably bright, a confused moth nuzzling up
to the reflection of a flame shining in
the cow’s one open eye.

Now that I think of it, there was maybe even
a beauty in the cow’s fat, white body, a peace
I would never know, as it took in the car,
lay down with it: calf soft: morning breath.

This peace had a body, it was caught up in the night,
made from night, there on the shoulder of a road
so endless even the stars shrugged it off
& took the sparks as one of their own

–

–

–

–

’Hitchhiking in the Dying South’ was first published in Blackbird, 2003, Vol. 2. No 1.

The poem is appearing is Sassafras after a request from the editor.

Joshua Poteat has published two books of poems, Ornithologies (Anhinga Poetry Prize, 2006), and Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World (VQR/University of Georgia Press, 2009), as well as two chapbooks, Meditations (Poetry Society of America, 2004) and For the Animal (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2013). A chapbook, The Scenery of Farewell (and Hello Again), is forthcoming from Diode Editions, 2014.

Roger Bernard Smith – said, standstill

 

said

– 

leave it where it was

you’ll make it worse

by rubbing whatever compound

it is in your mind

the best way is to have these conversations

with your backs to one another

trembling from what you may hear next

steadfastly refusing to turn around

when there is silence

–

–

–

standstill

–

what I said was if I hear Sweet Georgia Brown one more time
I’m going to avoid Atlanta altogether and head on down
to Tallahassee without remembering how I got there

overshooting poorly marked turn-offs with their general stores
sand-blasted pickup trucks that the economic recovery
hasn’t replaced with a new government-made Silverados yet

how far would you go to let yourself be convinced
you hadn’t missed a road here and there in favor of simply
liking the landscape more than being right for a change

you’d have to suffer a breakup freakout to be torpedoing
your headlights through smoky unforgiving uncaring
dangerous air of nights this far from home

what if I said I’m not sorry but just scared and even that
will go away once there’s a familiar face facing me across
the table and when that’s gone I’ll begin being truly sorry

–

–

–

—

 

 

‘standstill’ was first published in Blood Orange Review, vol.6.1

Roger Bernard Smith is a 75 year old poet whose poems have appeared in a dozen journals.  His first chapbook is being published in February 2014 by Tiger’s Eye Press, Denver CO.  He teaches writing in the Mohawk Valley Institute For Learning in Retirement (MVILR) at SUNYIT, Utica, NY. He lives in the foothills of the  Adirondack  Mountains.

 

Kevin Murphy – Viewing, Shelf Life

 

Viewing

–

He didn’t look like he was

asleep as an open casket body should

head tilted toward his shoulder

skin bunched into

ruffles that hide his jaw line

like he couldn’t get comfortable

enough with all these people

as if he might reach up and

slam the lid down

–

–

Shelf Life

 –

We notice things: the steady speed of dust

Accumulating at our spines, your glances

Replete with tells, the couch frame’s ache, and

The room’s distempered hum. You shy from us,

For we know things: how to catch the conscience

Of a king, the universal truth of man,

Horror’s immense darkness and what it can

Undo in one. In you. You’re barely conscious,

Equidistant from us and the glow that holds

You like fine oak frames our window. Your curls

Etch into the plaid pillow, scribbled in-

To view for us like notes in the margin.

Your presence fades to changeless hours, while idle

Fluorescents also rise, late. Set early.

–

–

–

 

 

 

 

Kevin Murphy’s work has appeared in Heron Tree and Gravel Magazine. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho and currently resides in Asheville, NC with his person named Shannon.

 

Simon Perchik – Four untitled poems

–

*

You fold this sweater the way a moth

builds halls from the darkness it needs

to go on living –safe inside this coffin

a family is gathering for dinner, cashmere

with oil, some garlic, a little salt, lit

and wings warmed by mealtime stories

about flying at night into small fires

grazing on the somewhere that became

the out-of-tune hum older than falling

– you lower this closet door and slowly

your eyes shut –with both hands

make a sign in the air as if death matters.

–

 

*

Breaking apart :this calendar

half as if memory, half

still exploding though the paint

reeks from weather vanes

and rain, last seen

mixed with snow

–without your glasses

you can’t make out if the wind

will dry in time

and a second coat already warms

the way you keep track

by lifting rugs, tables, chairs

–you need the pieces :lids

that will flare up

shake off their cracks

with each brush then back

till nothing ages

even with the window open.

–

*

You begin the way shorelines

risk their life this close

though after each funeral

 

you drown in the row by row

where each photograph is overturned

shaken loose from the family album

 

–her shoes seem pleased

to be shoes, not walk anymore

or store their darkness for later

 

–the family was always collecting

wanted you to sit, not pose barefoot

but there you are, even now

 

standing next to her, eye to eye

without saying a word, would leave

if you knew how to turn away

 

the blank page, solid black

not a beach, not a breath, nothing

that understands this emptiness.

–

*

These bricks reheated

remember circling up

sifting the smoke

for smoke not yet stars

still inside, terrified

by its darkness –chimneys

know to focus the sky closer

as the night that comes due

blackens this hillside

already in place

brought down from under

no longer red –-they aim

the way each shadow

leans against your heart

tries to warm itself

in grasses and your hands

made bigger, so slowly

nothing can save you.

–

–

–

–

 

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review,  The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013).  For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at  www.simonperchik.com.

Allison Hymas – Warning, Domestic

Warning

The chicken nuggets may burn your fingers. May cause ghost vanilla soft serve and hot fudge to scald and freeze your tongue. Possible side effects include sticky-slick crayon sketches on paper tablecloths and your mother, smiling, her hand on her soap-bubble belly. Inside, she says, is a new sister, a wrapped gift with a name tag but no encyclopedia entry. If effects continue, ride into the summer in a cloud of Old Spice and car exhaust.

–

–

Domestic

–

When my someday husband comes home

I won’t be waiting by the Cuisinart,

apron a garden of daisies,

cherry pie in my hands.

My pie would be raspberry,

or strawberry with pineapple chunks.

As it bakes, I will slide around the kitchen

in fuzzy socks and a lime-green apron with

his floured handprint on my hip,

singing “Barracuda”

until I bang my elbow on the corner of the oven.

 

–

–

– 

 

 

 

Allison Hymas is a recent graduate of Brigham Young University with a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in FLARE: The Flagler Review.

Carol Smallwood – Lunch at Wendy’s

 

Lunch at Wendy’s

 

In July, chemo ended:
Wendy’s napkins
folded the same–
but I’d been rearranged

 

 

 

 

 

Lunch at Wendy’s was first published in Vox Poetica, July 2012

Carol Smallwood’s over four dozen books include Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching on Poets & Writers Magazine list of Best Books for Writers. Carol has founded, supports humane societies.

Britt Melewski: In-patient, Better Than Not, Minor Leaguer

 

In-patient

 

You roll over into a darkness that eases

upon your shoulder.  Within

a manageable light, your two faces

 

discuss themselves: hammer or nail—

nurse or patient?  I watch you both

in your desperate slumber, separately,

 

continuously dreaming fields of pumpkin,

tolling gymnasiums of rock. When you twitch,

I scare—as if I had just wakened.

 

The crisp sheets slide the light, illuminating

the twin nightstands that move

so easily with nothing to put in them.

 

 

 

Better Than Not
– after Wolfgang Laib

The yellow spray of a decade
of pollen. The essence visits us
for only a moment, vanishes.
Put it in a jar or a tin or else.

Watching the world
from a fourth floor balcony.
How it seems so slow in the silence
and distance. The illusion

of a year gone by. People
can’t count to ten in the realm
of the spirit. At my best
I can stack an oblong block

on top of another and have it
fit jointly past an eye blink,
only pray I can hold onto One
in E minor for more than a second.

 

 

Minor Leaguer

 

He started receiving messages
from the car dealerships
on what not to wear and who
not to talk to too much
at the supermarket. The sun
melted the drapes. He didn’t
gain weight but felt that he did
or should. Everything is too close
to the river. He forgot
their names, their phone numbers,
never got an address. Email,
what’s the use? Everything
he ate tasted like paint, digging
dirt. The silos were empty
except for stacks upon stacks
of discarded baby rattles. The field
filled either with water or light.
He stopped writing letters,
or never began to. His bones
were still very much bones.
The field no longer called to him.
Of course, the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

Better Than Not was first published by Spork Press

Minor Leaguer was first published in Philadelphia Review of Books, June 2013

Britt Melewski grew up in New Jersey and Puerto Rico. His poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, The Philadelphia Review of Books, Sporkpress, the DMQ Review, and elsewhere. Melewski received his MFA at Rutgers-Newark in 2012. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

Issue 6

SASSAFRAS LITERARY MAGAZINE ISSUE 6  - Nov 25th, 2013 

CONTENT

ARTWORK

Emily Strauss (photos) - Covering Fog,
Hills and Barn, River Morning

POETRY

Jon Bennett - AHM#2
Michael Boccardo - What No One Told Me About Autumn,
Fable For Boys Who Chase Tornadoes

Beth Boylan - The List
Micah Chatterton: Self - Hypnosis
Nancy Correro - Pursuit of the other side,
New Life in the 21st Century

Megan Kaminski - Dear Sister
Mercedes Lawry - Trends, The Observer
Jeremy Nathan Marks - The Conversation,
The Moon

Dawn Schout - Scablands,At The Royal Palace
Emily Strauss - After a While Dumbness Strikes, Night Music


FICTION

Michael Brasier - Like Nothing Ever Happened
Ron Morita - Flight
Sherri H Levine - Footbridge
Ashleigh Rajala - Coal Dust



NONFICTION

Riona Judge McCormack - Theme in A Minor
Kelly Seiz - Pluck

(Sassafras issue 6 as a PDF)

Michael Boccardo – What No One Told Me About Autumn, Fable For Boys Who Chase Tornadoes

What No One Told Me About Autumn

_

__Why it boils over without apology. Why
lawns lining every home erupt

__in the night, fevered by some unnamable sorrow.
Why the sky hides so often, a blister

__I’ve fingered since childhood.
When it uses words like mercy

__and regret, I lose myself in the backyard
the way a match loses its grip on the dark.

__Here, between two pines, I might hear
what was once the gossip of sheets

__my mother snapped against a line,
father’s shirts pinned shoulder

__to shoulder, collars flared, buttons with nothing
to clutch. I think of the crickets who will later spark

__the air with their duplicitous refrain,
how I will follow them, barefoot,

__moss dusting my heels. And for what?
Tell me that if I look back now,

__I won’t see how each grief solders us
to the next: a house clapped shut,

__gagged, leaning into its hollowed bones.
Leaves, battered by wind, seized

__between the tines of an abandoned rake.
Their ceaseless falling. How they wait

__and wait to become tinder, then smoke,
then ash. How I cannot change it.

__

Fable For Boys Who Chase Tornadoes

_

Even from birth, it is said that sky bonds
_______with a certain kind of child. For instance, this one:
___his eyes like cellar doors sprung, each iris

a spiraling dervish. Bundled, his hair is the shade
of hysteria beneath a blanket’s scalloped hem — erratic, always escaping.
Think ash. Think vellum, or wool

raveling its dense skeins down his collar, curls
_______that will drag shoulders broadened
___by the eve of his thirteenth birthday.

Alone, he’ll cross lands flat as patchwork, drifting
_______east, the sun a spill of whiskey scorching his shadow
___against the earth. Over the years he will begin

to forget his mother, father, the debris
_______of their smiles as they waved goodbye,
___both arms buckled around the others’ waist.

He is left only to guess at the siblings
_______who may fill his place—a sister, all elbows
___and scraped knees locked around the siren

of a rusted gate, or twins, brothers
_______dirt-streaked and thundering through thickets
___of wisteria. In ritual, he still exists. Charms

strung at their throat, wrist.
_______For protection: clover bunched above windows,
___the splintered lip of a vacant door. Nights,

one small voice reaches for the others,
_______a leaf wavering across the room, Will the sky ever return
___him home? Can he find us on the map of his hand?

They fear the days blotted by clouds,
_______but know without a photograph this is all
___they have of him. Swab of cheek, shadow thick.

Lips a rippled cumulus splitting the horizon.
_______They hold hands, knuckles steepled, and recite hymns
___that tug at their throats like birds wrenching worms

free from an arid and unyielding
_______world. A world that trades prayers for magic,
___logic for spells.They have yet to know

that nothing is holier than the body, the atlas
_______of its undoing: skin, breath, bone. All of it dust
___blown into the pocket of a God they cannot touch.

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(* What No One.. and Fable For.. was first published at the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund among the winning submissions of 2012. The pieces are included in Sassafras via a request from the editor.)

Edit:  “What No One Told Me About Autumn” is also slated to appear in Best New Poets 2013 (winter).

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Michael Boccardo’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Kestrel, Border Crossing, Weave, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Nimrod, as well as other journals.  He is a multiple recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and a three-time Pushcart nominee.  Also, he serves as editorial assistant for Cave Wall.  He resides in High Point, NC, with his partner and three tuxedo cats.

Megan Kaminski – Dear Sister

Dear Sister

 

 

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This shouldn’t be so difficult — your side
of the ocean no colder than mine and
coasts are often rocky and lined with stinking
fish and seaweed. I read your letter again
last night when the colder air rolled over hills.
Each line a new complaint about collapsing cupboards
and sulky cats. The neighbor is painting his house; white
boards sopped of gray and each morning

a different man on a ladder smiling down to sidewalk.
The trees are still today and everything is quieter.
Voices do not carry through closed windows and only
rumbles from old cars remind me that I am not alone

here in the brick house far from the road. The tea
warms me a bit too much and the tray for letters
on the desk still empty, waiting for you to get out
of bed and compose a reply.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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(*Dear Sister was first published in Two Serious Ladies, and is included in Sassafras via a request from the editor.)

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Megan Kaminski is the author of one book of poetry, Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012), and six chapbooks of poetry, most recently This Place (Dusie, 2013) and Gemology (LRL Textile Series, 2012). She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas and curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence. You can visit her at: http://www.megankaminski.com

 

Jon Bennett – AHM#2

AHM #2

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If I’m going

to be a prisoner

and I am

let me build

my prison

on the ivory plain

of your stomach

in view

of the forest

of your long

brown

hair.

Jon Bennett is a musician and Pushcart Award nominated writer living in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His first novel, “The Unfat,” a speculative sci-fi story about autism, is due to be published through Chupa Cabra House in March of 2014. You can see more of his poetry by visiting him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jon.bennett.967.

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Beth Boylan – The List

THE LIST

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“Oh, I’d love to see The Great Gatsby,” my mother sighs,
“Well, we’ll just have to put it on the list,” replies my father,

as if taking your wife to the movies has any business
being squeezed onto a decades-old list of To-Do’s–

paint house, trim trees, book a cruise—I need air

so excuse myself and make my way past

the dusty sealed windows, curtains, silk flowers,

and the computer humming upstairs, where he plays office.
Another storm is struggling to show, blowing at the spruce
that has fattened since I sat in the sun here
reading The Sheltering Sky all those summers ago—

its branches grasp toward the roof and gutters

as raindrops sputter onto the patio,

which has begun to fade and rust at the edges—

“It’s only in theaters ‘til Monday,” I shudder aloud to no one
before going back in.

 

Beth Boylan, a poet originally from New York, now lives in the Asbury Park area of New Jersey. She received her M.A. in literature from Hunter College and teaches English and writing at a local high school and college.

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