by Mercedes Lawry
The terrible winter you could not be reached.
Blue ice and no reflection in frost.
I grew weary and slept, pondering
the contingencies of forever.
I was shivering under four blankets.
Heat was money. I was less sure of anything
but the jays on the roof. Tears were only memory
and I could not abide music.
Downstairs, a drawer with all of your knives:
the pearl-handled, the fillets, one etched with a bear.
They’re still in the drawer, those knives,
still in the dark aside.
Bionote
Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, Poetry East, Salamander and Saint Ann’s Review, as well as two chapbooks. She’s also published fiction, humor and essays, and stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.
Country Highway
by David Chorlton
I’m tired, the woman shouts
into her cell phone, she’s my sister
for God’s sake and I’m tired
of goin’ to court and all you want
to fuckin’ do is . . . while she pumps
a few more miles into the tank
of her car that looks
as tired as she does, setting out
along the country western highway
where four datura flowers
are open on a strip
left as earth when the asphalt was laid down,
and a vulture floats
above the broom-yellowed hills
spreading east and west, as she follows
portable homes and a van
displaying the wish to
Secure Our Borders Now. She
isn’t stopping at any checkpoints,
just tunes the radio to the old songs
that match the high elevation landscape
where distractions are few
and the lyrics go like this:
Something he said
left me wanting him dead,
so I just had to cut him down.
Bionote
David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. He pursued his visual art and had several shows as well as writing and publishing his poetry in magazines and collections, the latest of which is The Devil’s Sonata from FutureCycle Press. Although he became ever more interested in the desert and its wildlife, the shadow side of Vienna emerges in his fiction and The Taste of Fog, which was published by Rain Mountain Press
Adirondack Chairs
for Jessica
by Domenic Scopa
“We drowned in Eden….there’s no hand to take me home now.”
-- Robert Lowell
Low tide odor
drifts up the knobby hill
from Portland harbor.
At the top,
they’re there,
two of them
Adirondack chairs in beds of pebbles,
and they rise like wooden thrones to overlook the pier,
their legs rotten & stubborn,
their seats faded.
I would have liked to bring you there
to sit with me again,
to watch the lobster boats
bronzed by sunset motor into port
with stuffed hulls,
and how the sun roughened fishermen
hose down their decks,
watching not to slip on grime.
Remember summer? Manic raindrops pattered mud,
while we recited Dante.
We almost drowned in paradise,
and foghorns blared their dirge.
Sometimes I touched your hand across the chairs
and our fingers clasped,
but there’s no hand to take me home, now-
except my own.
I would have liked you to remember
that I was, and am, unwell.
in memoriam Robert Lowell
Bionote
Domenic Scopa is a student at Suffolk University and will be graduating in April. He was recently accepted into the number one low residency MFA program in the country, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and will attend there in June to attain an MFA in Poetry and Translation. He has worked closely with a number of accomplished poets including National Book Award Winner David Ferry and Washington Book Prize recipient Fred Marchant. He is currently the assistant poetry editor of Venture Literary Magazine.
Friday Night
by Tim Suermondt
He’s drunk.
She’s drunk.
I’m not.
To them the world
is perfect.
To me the world
still spikes with trepidation.
He staggers, slowly.
She tries to tip toe
along the curb.
I watch them in case
they need help.
I do know what a perfect
world is capable of.
Bionote
Tim Suermondt has poems coming out in Plume Poetry Journal, december magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, The White Stag Journal. Mad Hat Lit and Red Fez. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
in the liquor business
by Allison Thorpe
My father worked hard
At running up a bar tab.
Always on the job.
See his corner bar stool,
The one without a window
Or sun-starved ivy.
He skipped lunch,
Put in the long hours,
Worked overtime.
Fierce at taking inventory—
Beer, scotch, bourbon—
He stored the liquid assets
Faithfully in his liver.
It was not an occupation
My mother would have chosen.
She worked two jobs to cover
The bills and his corporate
Raids on her purse.
My father resented
The limited partnership,
The family who took no joy
In his staggering success.
Bionote
A widely published author, Allison Thorpe lives and writes in a stone house in the backwoods of Kentucky where she dreams of becoming an international poker player
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