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Two Poems by Kate Stolzfus

Gregory Luce
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Two Poems by Kate Stolzfus

The Night I Hear Sharon Olds Read

Some rooms look dead from the outside.
I eat late. I drink so much. Cold moon over

an old drugstore in an April that feels like February.
I am hungry for other bodies, other air,

and out of metaphors for trying to understand
my life. When I hear an unfamiliar voice

I’ve known for years, I want to unravel in gratitude
for the poet who owns its sound—

for her ode to waking alone, her braids pulsing
with butterfly clips, her tongue wrapped hot around

the words, her questions unfurled like buds
in bloom. She makes me feel the warmth I forgot,

reminds me what it is to cry out
with pleasure in a crowded room.

 

Don’t Take Advice From Strangers

With thanks to Natalie Shapiro’s “Sunshower”

Some people say you can’t feel color.

They say touch doesn’t have a sound.

They say breathing is not

the same thing as listening,

that you can’t pull love, beating,

out of you, can’t hold it hot and throbbing

in your palms, can’t hurl it across a room,

can’t make it stop singing.

Some people say you can hear

a whisper from yards away

but only if you stand on a rock

placed equidistant from another rock

outside of a building that arcs

like a moving train.

Some people say the words

will not hurt when they hit you.

Hold still: Here is a blue to cut your teeth on,

a heaviness on the tongue,

a buzzing at your lips, a noise like silence,

a space like a body,

a murmur like bees inside your ears.

Kate Stoltzfus is a writer and Midwest transplant living in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, DCist, Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Catholic Reporter, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and elsewhere.


Image by Lessentropy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78265504

Two Poems by Allyson Lima

Gregory Luce
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0
Two Poems by Allyson Lima

Never Times Never (Shakespeare in the Pacific Northwest)

The poet, gilled

aches—

Salmon

his singular

fling upstream

arches hard—

spawns another poem

another daughter.

Having evaded this time

the law of the grizzly’s

slavering jaws—

King Salmon he is called—

Cordelia in arms—

blood drives

the fish-scaled brain

never stops— never—

five times never.

Walkers

What’s left of days–
tipped over tin watering can
empty after a season of
tomatoes, peppers and a little basil

Red-clay pot of green-sticked chives
slim-ribbed onions half bent
against the coming cold.

Sap stills
Leaves spin off trees
once uplifted branches
bow to the listening ground.

He feels the blaze on his face
Grins into the wind leaves twirl and spin
proof of the whirling world.

His back bent hands gripped to the metal walker
Me with my stop-watch tracking the minutes
the old man’s intrepid steps shame my proud pace.

I slow my steps we greet each other in the eyes
smile together in the blaze—

Walkers in late day,
on the slow path of the neighborhood,
roots reaching deep—all linked
in the roaring dark.

Allyson Lima writes and translates poetry in Spanish and English. Raised in Northern California, her writing, intuitive and irreverent, emerges from the radical beauty and indifference of nature and (gendered) inconsistencies in Western art and mythology. Lima’s poems have appeared in the North Coast literary journal, Catamaran among others. She has translated the poetry of Mario Bencastro and is currently editing his prizewinning novel, La Mansión del olvido.


Image by Frédéric Bazille – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3709636

Three Poems by Patty Summerhays

Gregory Luce
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Three Poems by Patty Summerhays

Editor’s note: This week we present three poems by a poet who left us far too soon. Bourgeon thanks Naomi Thiers for sharing these.

Med Star

Head spinning cockpit, propellers
bouncing off stars. Could use a little
more light tonight. I would invoke God
for this, and if it happened—by what power?
The Siamese homes and barricaded streets, the flesh
in the breath of many night crawlers. Acrobat aristocrats
have seen the tit in the sky run dry of milk. The winds
off course, the batons policemen twirl lost in the hail that
plummets and takes everything down with it. The screeching halt
and skid marks. The salvation of flesh without soul.
Dead on arrival and revived–the flesh now,
the soul will catch up. Pump the flesh. Get a pressure.
Keep the head in alignment. Check the pupils. Step back
for an x-ray breather. Guard the gonads. Get your ass where
your ass belongs, bent over a kingdom. Now do this day in
and day out, hands at high tide. Do this in remembrance of me.

No Code

I hasten to inform him or her
it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. – Walt Whitman

No time to think.
Running to a patient’s room.
One foot in. One foot out.
Heart beat at 40, then 30.
The sense of God
coming, the climax
of death drifting
out of reach.
Two souls feed on each other
while I change the sheets.

Flight to Juarez

One road crosses another,
divides the thick green silt bottom
of fir trees and marsh
into a map worn at the folds.
In Tennessee,
every drop of the river
blends with water
as far away as Yellowstone.
I move in the direction of soil
worn from its banks.
How I will wish
for the order of things,
the square, plotted fields
one row after another,
rivers that feed the Mississippi
but keep enough
to flow on their own.
It is water
that teaches me
this route of survival:
to give away what I can live without.

 

Note from Naomi Thiers: Patty Summerhays was a talented poet who died from colon cancer in 2009. She was active in the poetry scene at George Mason University (where she edited Phoebe) and in Northern VA, as well as raising 2 sons. Patty was an intensive care nurse at Washington Hospital Center and did health care work in Mexico and Guatemala; she was a fighter for homeless people in Central America. Patty was a close friend of mine for many years; I’ll never stop enjoying “Med Star” and her other poems.

Image by Antonio de Bellis – Œuvre appartenant au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon Photographe Mathilde Hospital, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63459853

Attestation by Helen Ward

Gregory Luce
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0
Attestation by Helen Ward

I do not remember where
The small town detective
Sat down with me
To take my statement

These are the kinds of memories
Our brains just can’t hold on to
Though, I do remember his eyes
His sidelong glances
The kind that
Every teenage girl is accustomed to
He doesn’t want to be here

But it’s not my fault
I didn’t call the police
This wasn’t my idea
I didn’t want any of this 

But…
I didn’t want that either
And my breath catches in my throat
Like a moth in a net
Fragile
And fucking terrified
As a wave of memory
Crashes over my body
Unwelcome
Like his hands
Like his hunger

He asks me
How old were you
And i know what he’s really asking
Fifteen

I’ve been told
Fifteen year olds cannot consent
Not with someone twice their age.
What does a fifteen year old
Have to offer a thirty year old?

Statutory rape
That word was sacrilege
To me for so long
He made sure of it
It rolled off his lips like a curse.
His particular flavor of blasphemy

Even now
Sitting here with this cop
Reaching that conclusion
Is like trying to see through a thick haze

It’s remarkable
What dexterous hands can do
With a young, malleable mind

Statutory rape
But this time
The times he’s asking about
The first time
It was not
There was nothing statutory about it

So i try to tell him
I try to describe what it feels like
To try to escape your own body
Like an animal in a cage
Try’s to gnaw off their own leg

How the body is unwilling
How it seizes up
Clenches like a vice
How when faced with something
Immovable
Impenetrable
He searches
Until he finds something
More yielding

Did you scream
He interrupts me
Did you fight?
Why did you go with him?
Don’t you love me?

Those last words are not his own
But another’s
I hear them all the same
And just like before
I don’t fight
I just cry
Tears sliding silently down my cheeks
Small, transient monuments
To this thing
My life has become

He did not write rape on his report
So i did not write it in my brain

It’s been twelve years
But i think
My pen is finally ready

Helen Ward is a waitress living in Fuquay-Varina, NC.  She lives with her husband and two children and enjoys reading and writing poems and short stories in her free time.


Image: “When the Smoke Clears” by Jill Malouf – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81851858

Three Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Gregory Luce
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1
Three Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Blonde Hair Hides as much as Killed Stories

No one comes over and you imagine yourself some squeaky clean museum
with the floors waxed nightly out of their less than womanly Italian moustaches,
blonde hair hides as much as killed stories in the “national interest,”
I am not a political conformist so much as an unusually flexible roadblock
drunk on beer and tiny bar top rings of sweating Nietzsche
that fall for a woman like plunging to certain death –
the sky is there so you can throw your last good shoulder out
thinking about the gods
slow dance aging hips back into forgotten tenderness
sharing a bathroom like an impeccable name with the seat down
the hyphen there so nothing is final
      (drinking with friends is all about surrendering arguments
      faster than friends)
snow globe shook, the epileptic swallows his tongue instead of his pride,
all the desks pushed out of the way like competing love interests,
rangy speed bump measles over the tiny human body;
a ventilator, scrub-panicked hallways in comfortable 12-hour sneakers,
the airspace closed and the marriage open –
crushed garlic and insurrection,
so many coy to each pond that some part of you
starts to think about population control
and how mountains never once try to climb people
who can’t stop mounting one another.

Kafka & Bedbugs

It’s funny how talking about bedbugs
makes me think about Kafka being late for work,
how his employer will be angry and dock his pay
and how a man who went to sleep a man and woke
up a bug has little recourse in the traditional union
labour laws sense and my wife says that bedbugs are
even in jury rooms now and harder to get rid of
than cockroaches and I tell her once you read Kafka
you can never get rid of him so that she wants to
know what Kafka has to do with anything which makes
me think we may be coming from different places
and that hers is Paris because she loves the wine
and pastries and old architecture that should
fall in on itself, but never does.

Bowling Green Buddy System

You could tell his wife was long gone
the way he walked into the store to make
his order and they expected him.

At the pizza place.
Every Friday night.
His dog ordered to sit in
the backseat, but sitting up front
to watch with excitement
once he was gone.

And how the man returned to the car
with his pizza.
Let the dog smell the box
and run in circles with excitement.

So that you just knew they shared
that pizza every Friday night.

In front of a television
that couldn’t stop lying,
but never mattered
anyways.

A Bowling Green buddy system.
After the nearby Corvette museum
fell in on itself and started selling tickets
to the sinkhole.

Both could be dead now.
The dog was old and the man was older.
They keep making pizzas as long as people
order them.

 

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, TheSongIs.., Cultural Weekly, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.


Image by Nils Dardel (1888-1943) – dardel.info, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41044350

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