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Spring 2008

Poetry

VanBuren's picks:

Antonia Clark
Brad Johnson
Dale McLain
Roger Pfingston
Richard Rippon

John Anderson
Cristina Baptista
Cynthia Brackett-Vincent
Michael Brownstein
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Alison Eastley
Brent Fisk
David Fraser
Krikor der Hohannesian
Amy MacLennan
Lisa Markowitz
Damon McLaughlin
Micki Myers
Roger Pfingston
Heather Schimel
Rachel Stewart
Lafayette Wattles

Flash Fiction

On Debunking Modern Art

Alex Nodopaka

Pushcart Nominees

Editors

Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Patrick Carrington

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Charles Adés Fishman

Head on a Frozen Lake
Long Island, 2003 
 
Profoundly separate
from the rest of its body,
the head sat upright in ice. 
Without a neck or spine
to comfort it, the head
grew quiet: not yet a skull,
it still had eyes   that stared,
unblinking, at the winter morning.   
The head no longer knew
its race or gender   its ethnicity
or age   its name.  What little
it could see   left it passionless  
what it could hear, rushing the length
of the dimly glimmering lake,
registered as static   as aural blur.   
Fate had brought it to this unlikely
place   and no test   no eclectic
intelligence   could decipher its history. 
Whose head was this that adorned
the frozen lake   and had to be chain-sawed
from the ice?  Surely, it would put a scare  
in anonymous children.  Could the head think,
would it ask unanswerable questions?
If it had speech, would it teach or demur? 
Would its voice have the cold clarity
            of ringing bells?   

In the Wave
 
 
1.
The first space in the parking lot
is empty.  When I reach the sweep
of shoreline, I put down my things
and enter: the water is translucent,
temperate.  I swim in the soft curl
of a wave, swim steadily, letting the wave
hold me — it can have what I have —
such cold and patient embraces!  Time slows
to a swirl, and when I tire my feet touch
bottom — a slow ridge of sand that lifts
perfectly. 

2.
A well-built blonde, an iron-pumper,
floats upstream against the tidal wash
of the sun.  She wears a thong-bottomed
bikini and pulls the pins from her hair.
Her eyes are vacant or triumphant — I can't
tell which — and her hands hold the bra-top
she has mistaken for a lariat or a live
Tennessee rattler.  She exults in her dance,
her almost total nudity, and reaches for the sky,
bends over to adjust her ankles.  Her hair
blows in the wind, and I put my book away —
let the old laureate slumber! 

3.
Sea wind, blow through me.  You know I am
barely here, that the gull who shrieks
his warning over my head is more reliable.
With your salt breath, your trance-deepened
wisdom — you quiet me.  Scoured by you, I soften.
I breathe again the first smells of childhood:
the wide ocean of my mother's body, smoke
in my father's hair, and you, wind from the sea,
bearing fresh news of the planet.  Your hand on me
now opens my closed-off heart.

Charles Adés Fishman's books of poetry include Country of Memory (Uccelli Press), a finalist in the 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize competition, and Chopin's Piano (Time Being, 2006), recipient of the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. He received a NYFA fellowship in poetry in 1995, and his second booklength collection, The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989), an ALA/Choice Outstanding Book of the Year, was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. His anthology, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, will be out from Time Being Books in November.

"Body Language"

Jennifer Balkan

Previously published at Mannequin Envy:

After the Death-Camp Newsreels
  ~ For my daughter ~

Brushing the place now,
a half-hour later, I swear to you
this face you kissed still burns.