Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013
by Sixfold
Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors
www.sixfold.org
Sixfold is a completely writer-voted journal. The writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the prize-winning manuscripts and the short stories and poetry published in each issue. All participating writers’ equally weighted votes act as the editor, instead of the usual editorial decision-making organization of one or a few judges, editors, or select editorial board.
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License Notes
Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue is acknowledged. Thank you for your support.
Sixfold
Garrett Doherty, Publisher
sixfold@sixfold.org
www.sixfold.org
(203) 491-0242
Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013
Alysse Kathleen McCanna | Pentimento & other poems
Peter Nash | Shooting Star & other poems
Katherine Smith | House of Cards & other poems
David Sloan | On the Rocks & other poems
Alexandra Smyth | Exoskeleton Blues & other poems
John Glowney | The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds & other poems
Andrea Jurjevic O'Rourke | It Was a Large Wardrobe, from My 4-foot Perspective & other poems
Lisa DeSiro | Babel Tree & other poems
Michael Fleming | Reptiles & other poems
Michael Berkowitz | As regards the tattoo on your wrist & other poems
Michael Brokos | Landscape without Rest & other poems
Michael H. Lythgoe | Orpheus In Asheville & other poems
John Wentworth | morning people & other poems
Christopher Jelley | Double Exposure & other poems
Catherine Dierker | dinner party & other poems
William Doreski | Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin & other poems
Robert Barasch | Loons & other poems
Rande Mack | bear & other poems
Susan Marie Powers | Red Bird & other poems
Anne Graue | Sky & other poems
Mariah Blankenship | Tub Restoration & other poems
Paul R. Davis | Landscape & other poems
Philip Jackey | Garage drinking after 1989 & other poems
Karen Hoy | A Naturalist in New York & other poems
Gary Sokolow | Underworld Goddess & other poems
Michal Mechlovitz | The Early & other poems
Henry Graziano | Last Apple & other poems
Stephanie L. Harper | Unvoiced & other poems
Roger Desy | anhinga
R. G. Evans | Hangoverman & other poems
Frederick L. Shiels | Driving Past the Oliver House & other poems
Richard Sime Berry | Eater & other poems
Jennifer Popoli | Generations in a wine dark sea & other poems
Contributor Notes
Alysse Kathleen McCanna
Pentimento
is a tattoo on the back of my friend Martha’s neck,
a term I learned in Art History as a teenager in love
with the student teacher whose name I scrawled in my notebook
next to Pentimento. Edward.
Repentance is Wednesday evening youth group at the local
nondenominational Christian church where my knees pressed hard
against the wood back of the chair and I tried my damnedest to stop
thinking about that boy with the hair who played bass
in the church band. William.
Pentimento is what they will look for when they look at my life
under infrared cameras: “there, where she changed her mind and moved
the heart a little to the left; there, where she changed her mind again
and entirely redrew the face.”
Repentance is three days of snow in the middle of April
while I decide whether to make the same mistake again
or not or if it’s a different mistake or maybe it’s not even close
to a mistake but when will I know?
Pentimento is what happened to my body after the rape
and I couldn’t stop twitching enough to sit in a chair
for dinner and my fork flipped pasta across the kitchen
and when it stuck to the wall we laughed and laughed
in spite of everything.
Repentance is necessary for the attainment of salvation
and salvation is God putting his hand on your shoulder
and saying, “it’s okay, even I commit a little Pentimento
now and again
take a look at the world”
and when God takes his hand from your shoulder
and you hear your bones crack
that is Pentimento
and when you are dying and you see the backlit
undersides of leaves on the most beautiful tree
that is Repentance
and when you feel your heart tear and a part of it
is lost inside of you and a part of it is breathed into the world
then that is a Poem
that you memorize
and burn
Relics
In this poem, your son is your daughter
and all the ghosts are dogs. The kitchen
is the baby’s room, the baby’s room
is the front porch. Coffee cups are kisses,
the flat tire is a pot of my grandmother’s spaghetti,
the sandwich I left for you in the fridge
has someone else’s name on it.
I cut the grass this morning with scissors
because I thought I saw it in a movie
as a child about mental patients or
it may have been soldiers in the field.
I found the tiny dolls Kelli and I
used to play with in the front yard
how many years ago? Now she has a baby
that looks just like her father and my body
keeps trying to have your baby but
the baby is actually a potted plant
on the windowsill that I keep forgetting
to water but water is really milk
that I keep forgetting to pick up
on my way home and the way home
is not on this map and maps are flies
that won’t stop buzzing
around your sweaty head
the tomatoes you planted in our garden
are starting to outgrow their thin red skins
every time you place one in my mouth
it tastes like dirt and summer and this summer
I’ve been overwhelmed with coffee cups
and walking ghosts and smelling phantom
flat tires and loving your son too much,
and you not enough,
and did you find your sandwich?
Did you remember your name?
Dream of the Apples
For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth
—Federico García Lorca
We spoke of God for an hour in the morning,
evidence of breakfast still on the plates before us
(a few flecks of basil, crumbs of toast and bacon,
my coffee gone cold).
With sleep still clinging to my eyes, teeth,
my fingers still grasping at half-remembered dreams,
I think of God, with a great Old T
estament beard,
an apple in each hand, his mouth, voice high
like a bird song, points of light blazing through
the apple seeds, cutting through darkness and flesh
and earth—
I think of Abraham the way Rembrandt painted him,
dark, sorrowful and sure eyes, thrust to the edge
by God’s cold force and then held back, and wonder
if God requires of us such great anguish, such certainty
in our own triviality.
Once, I knew God (or, thought I knew God)
and He filled my shadow as rain fills a forgotten cup—
but some days, God does not rain.
God must wish to make poets of us all
to bestow us with such disease and grief—
to cause us to bubble up until our ache
spills onto others,
onto paper.
Once, I knew God, and we sat at the same table—
one day, He got up and Left.
Roane Duana
Seir lived a fair mile from Orkney harbor
and walked there twice a week
along the stone fences.
With his shoes left ashore
he wandered into the water
and felt the cool sting of autumn nearing.
One morning
when the sun was behind cloud
he found among the stones
of the shore an empty seal skin.
He held it gently in both hands
and hurried home without his shoes.
Roane Duana followed him there from the sea
and approached him at the doorway.
She had no dress and he took her to town
to purchase a fitting cloth for his new wife.
Her pale blue eyes set in white
soft skin enchanted him
and he had her every night,
but when Seir awoke in the mornings
she was never beside him
but looking out the window
to the sea.
He had heard the stories and kept the skin
hidden under the floorboards,
beneath a rug and a great wooden chest.
Duana sat before the fire many nights
with her feet resting inches above
where the silky skin lay.
Returning from the harvest
Seir approached the door of his home
and felt the air empty, found
the floorboards torn up and the skin
gone. A cry reached his ears from the sea
and he found a baby left on the bed,
conceived after she swallowed a star
that had fallen into her mouth
while sleeping.
Tell Me Again
In the bed of someone’s pick-up
a dog howls
in the heat.
It is May, now,
the sun hotter
than normal.
The mechanic behind the counter
looks like he’s rolled right out of bed
in a barn somewhere, yet his soft-spoken
words are plucked carefully as if from a vast
thesaurus—from behind browned teeth he says
the transmission flush is vital to the longevity
of your car’s performance
I imagine him atop
a tractor in Wisconsin,
red-headed young ones
forking hay, sneaking eggs
from beneath snoozing chickens.
A slim wife in a flower-print dress
on the porch, the kind of girl who
makes pasta from scratch,
knows how to mix
his drink of choice,
scents laundry
with lavender.
He must think
I’m very concerned
about the procedure
as I stare at him
thinking about life
outside the shop
I lean in and say
tell me again
about the cost of the transmission flush
listen to his poetic explanation
smell his soft, cigarette breath
wonder how it would feel
to hold his hand stretched
out in a field under a Midwestern sun,
belly fat with pending children,
a reliable pick-up idling beside us
in the tall, tall grass.
Peter Nash
Shooting Star
First, a twenty-year run of brilliance,
your yellow-green eyes glittering
beneath the raven wings of your eyebrows,
the lightning retorts of your valentine mouth,
the shimmy of garnet earrings
framing your linnet face—
we still remember the little girls on the stoops
bringing you their broken doll babies to kiss,
how we applauded you madly in Oklahoma!
as you sashayed off the Marshall High School stage
leading the cowboys up the aisle,
and the way you could pick up enough change
for a six pack of Heineken singing Bob Dylan
on the Sunset Pacific Mall with your paint spattered guitar
and a can of dollar bills. We’d never forget
the famous night you filled Café Prégo
with guys who’d fallen in love following you up the outside stairs
of the wooden house on Ocean Avenue,
your legs flickering in the sulfur light of the street lamps.
But somewhere in your thirties people stopped buying
your cardboard collages or the bouquets you scavenged
from the mason jars at Pioneer Cemetery,
your parents stopped paying the rent, the last boyfriend
slashed your painting of him sitting on the toilet,
no one would hire you to walk their dogs after Dotty the Dalmatian
got run over as you read the New York Times at McDonald’s
and your cat Matisse died locked in your room
when you drove your VW Bug with daisy decals
onto the Talmadge Bridge. We still picture you
floating downstream, your face a petal of light,
though the moon was not bright enough to see the water
rippling through the folds of your dress,
or the algae-stained rocks below.
What I Hear
I’ve been watching these trees half my life;
this hill of pines whose pitchy limbs
balance their rough trunks,
sprouting needles, dropping needles
the topmost tier a green undulating mat
roaring in the wind, changing light into matter.
Is it trees talking with the wind?
the small animals who shelter in the shadows?
the squirming rootlets in the basement of the hill?
I hear voices from a hive of mouths,
but not the words. I hear the brown towhees,
long-tailed, lurking in the underbrush,
scuffling in leaf-litter for seeds, the finches,
gold-bellied, sociable, jittering in the sun,
flung by the wind across a field of dandelions,
darting among the branches of shade trees,
living a life without naming the world.
I know that each of you is saying something
but I’ll never get it right. Best to stand here looking
at that roaring, piney hill, hand covering my mouth,
the better to hear you with.
Morning Chores
Night ends with a final snap,
clawed feet scrabble linoleum
dragging the Victor trap.
This morning I tote up the damage:<
br />
the crushed snouts, the oozing abdomens,
the tiny turds black as poppy seeds
speckling the floor. Now it’s time
to pull on my crusted gloves, walk across the lawn
and flip the bodies over the fence. Turn on the sprinklers.
The truth is I don’t know where to go from here.
As if I were in a maze of electron rings
whizzing around one small house-mouse
rapturously suckling a half dozen babies.
Orbiting her, the weed patch fills with corpses,
flies lay eggs in furry crevices, maggots
scour toothpick ribs. In the outermost ring
my spotted hands bait the trap with a Sun Maid raisin
imbedded in a dollop of crunchy peanut butter.
Beyond that, a space so vast
my mind clamps down, unable to enter,
but gives it a name: VICTOR.
John Brown’s Cows
Leaking milk from swollen udders
the cows have been separated from the calves
who wander dazed in the far pasture
crying for their mothers.
Strings of slobber hang from their mouths.
Bellowing their grief
the sound becomes background
like the rush of rain in the creeks,
while we dig the garden,
pitch hay to the horses, stack firewood.
And then a silence settles upon these meadows,
and just as you learn to live without your children,
the calves begin to suck water,
to graze by themselves.
Rocky’s Place
There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of spirit on the body.
—Rumi
Sometimes I think of his thousand Post-its
plastering the lamp shade, creeping
along the base boards, up the metal legs
of the card table and covering the window
overlooking a graveled parking lot.
In the corner, boxes of Zip-lock bags
filled with alfalfa pellets are stacked.
A bare bulb dangles by its wire
over two rabbits, Flopsy and Mopsy
inside a baby’s playpen.
Each day begins seven inches above the sink
when he whispers the first Post-it:
Every seeker is a beggar
before moving on to the next
and the next in their ordained order
as if they were a trail of stone steps winding
seven times around sacred Mecca.
And when he arrives at those who have reached
their arms into emptiness I imagine
him ascending the path to the doorknob of the closet