Sixfold Poetry Winter 2014
by Sixfold
Copyright 2015 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.
Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October, each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.
Cover image: Anna Atkins (British, 1799 - 1871) and Anne Dixon (British, 1799 - 1877)
Adiantum Capillus Veneris., 1853, Cyanotype
25.4 x 20 cm (10 x 7 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
License Notes
Copyright 2015 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue are acknowledged. Thank you for your support.
Sixfold
Garrett Doherty, Publisher
sixfold@sixfold.org
www.sixfold.org
(203) 491-0242
Sixfold Poetry Winter 2014
Debbra Palmer | Bake Sale & other poems
Ann V. DeVilbiss | Far Away | Like a Mirror & other poems
Michael Fleming | On the Bus & other poems
Harold Schumacher | Dying To Say It & other poems
Heather Erin Herbert | Georgia’s Advent & other poems
Sharron Singleton | Sonnet for Small Rip-Rap & other poems
Bryce Emley | College Beer & other poems
Harry Bauld | On a Napkin & other poems
George Mathon | Do You See Me Waving? & other poems
Mariana Weisler | Soft Soap and Wishful Thinking & other poems
Michael Kramer | Nighthawks | Kaua’i & other poems
Jill Murphy | Migration & other poems
Cassandra Sanborn | Remnants & other poems
Kendall Grant | Winter Love Note & other poems
Donna French McArdle | White Blossoms at Night & other poems
Tom Freeman | On Foot | Joliet | Illinois & other poems
George Longenecker | Nest & other poems
Kimberly Sailor | The Bitter Daughter & other poems
Rebecca Irene | Woodpecker & other poems
Savannah Grant | And Not As Shame & other poems
Michael Hugh Lythgoe | Titian Left No Paper Trail & other poems
Martin Conte | We’re Not There & other poems
A. Sgroi | Sore Soles & other poems
Miguel Coronado | Body-Poem & other poems
Franklin Zawacki | Experience Before Memory & other poems
Tracy Pitts | Stroke & other poems
Rachel A. Girty | Collapse & other poems
Ryan Flores | Language Without Lies & other poems
Margie Curcio | Gravity & other poems
Stephanie L. Harper | Painted Chickens & other poems
Nicholas Petrone | Running Out of Space & other poems
Danielle C. Robinson | A Taste of Family Business & other poems
Meghan Kemp-Gee | A Rhyme Scheme & other poems
Tania Brown | On Weeknights & other poems
James Ph. Kotsybar | Unmeasured & other poems
Matthew Scampoli | Paddle Ball & other poems
Jamie Ross | Not Exactly & other poems
Contributor Notes
Debbra Palmer
Bake Sale
Don’t eat the wrapper.
Nobody doesn’t know this.
So when my mother ate the cupcake
paper and all, in one shoved-in bite and hissed
“don’t you say a word,”
all the way home
from the Ockley Green Middle School bake sale
I thought about the paper in her stomach.
What if anyone saw her?
What would they say? Like my best friend’s mother
who taught us how to count to ten in Cherokee
and caught my father’s eye. I thought
it was because he liked her slacks
or because she worked part-time at Sears,
but my mother said it was because
she was petite and had a stick
up her ass. What would she say?
I carried my cupcake in both hands, its top
a coiled green snake with gold sprinkles.
To want anything so much, to devour it like that,
must be deadly.
In The Week Before Her Death My Mother Hallucinates in Email:
I was thirsty. I walked to the yard shed
where the women were selling water. I had
no money. I was so glad
to see the only friend I had at church.
I held out my hands and she filled them
with sweet, cool water.
I was followed by a priest. She said
she could see my unhappiness.
I told her everything
right there in the yard
it poured like white words, gushed
from my mouth like a river of tumors.
The priest said, “Come with me, my dear.”
I said the only thing I know
in Japanese, the word for pocket,
“poketto”
and pulled from my own, a note
and unfolded it.
“Just love them,” it read.
Two great white Pyrenees came to tell me
all of the beautiful things in dying.
When I asked them to walk me there,
they stood at my side and waited. This is why
I’m afraid to close my eyes.
Breasts
The first time I kissed a woman’s breasts
I understood
men
how they root and paw
how they knead and pull
to prove they’re really here
how they suck a bruise
around the nipple
how they get completely lost
in between
how they smash and grab
apologize and hang on anyway
or, how they hold two birds so gently
they can only feel them
when they let go.
Late Bloomer
“Mama had a baby and its head popped off.”
The severed head of the dandelion
drops from my guillotine thumb
the yellow burst of weed
held under my chin
“Do you like butter?”
A little blonde girl whose parents are deaf
opens her mouth. “Talk like your parents,” I insist,
shoving in a cud of grass.
She cries without sound—so hard
that the daisy chain crown
shakes from her head.
I just want her to speak with her hands.
I Love Parasites
I love parasites for their barbs and hooks
for their many names & forms:
Tapeworm, Poinsettia, Blood Fluke,
Twin, Mother, Jehovah’s Witness.
I love them for their shameless
savagery & nerve.
I love fetuses—also parasites
who live off the mother’s body.
Then, as nature dictates,
the mother becomes the parasite,
depositing into her offspring
her tumors, hair & teeth.
I love my twin brother who stays
alive siphoning off my blood
>
& laughing about it from his lovely
teratoma mouth.
I love the Jehovah’s Witness ladies
who feed off my politeness.
I love to invite them in.
We take turns holding my mother’s upper denture
like a poison leaf. I love passing around
the bag that was my mother’s prosthetic breast,
the silicone pellets hissing inside.
I love the cup of my mother’s hair
the gray curls like smoke. Before we burned her body,
she asked me if I would wear her bones
around my neck.
I already wear them,
couldn’t take them off
if I wanted to.
Ann V. DeVilbiss
Far Away, Like a Mirror
I’ve gone out walking
to see if I can meet myself
on sleeping streets
muffled with snow.
A rabbit is standing stock-still
in the center of the road,
as if refusing to move
will keep him safe.
I wonder if the rabbit is me
and how I can prove it.
At night the snow
holds the sky captive.
The rabbit sleeps curled up,
deep under the ground,
under the layers of trapped sky,
under the real sky,
which is orange like an echo,
which seems far away, like a mirror.
I go back home and try
to stay up all night.
I want to watch the snow let loose
the dawn, freeing the sky. I want to
see the light cast over the rabbit,
see it change him,
but I fall asleep again,
wake fur matted, confused.
I keep seeking new things
on all the same cold roads.
I need to know
which way to run.
I don’t know
where to run to.
Seasonal
We go west in the mornings, east
in the evenings. We know the sun
only by its heat and shadows;
we are home only when it’s dark.
The world seems full
of monsters. The grass is
uneven, sharpened by frost.
A man spits on my porch,
tells me I can’t park
in front of my house because
that’s his spot, always has been.
The stains on his teeth are older than I am.
A few weeks later he is arrested for fraud,
having let his mother’s body rot
in his house for months while he
collected her social security checks.
Once he is gone,
the house stays vacant
because of the smell, and I
park wherever I want.
Crows line the eaves
like undertakers, bray
like donkeys, begin
to outnumber us.
The world is too big
for safety, but here
in our house,
there is reason for joy.
Still, sorrow comes back,
pulled to me like
water to the moon.
Down for the Count
When the thunder rumbles
I know he is looking for me
and I count
one, two, three, four
between the flash and roar.
The row of American flags
across the street looks
downtrodden and a little afraid.
I stick close to the eaves.
Before the storm the yard
was full of strange birds,
pelicans and hummingbirds
arriving in the wrong season.
He rolls his thunder tongue
through the clouds like
a snake in amber grasses.
One, two, three, and I am
bathing in electric light.
A count of one is too quick
to hide from, but somehow
the driving rain feels
clean, like a refuge.
His sky voice is big enough
to reach me anywhere.
The Reckoning
His life is like a tango
between before and after.
Sometimes it fills his head
with oatmeal. Sometimes
his story is full of holes.
When he speaks of the loss,
he refuses to whisper, and
his loud voice pitches high,
like the keening of a sawmill:
flashing metal on dark wood.
His loss is like a small child
who has always been hiding
under the dinner table, and he
could hear her muffled giggles,
her earnest whispers, for years
before she came out in the open.
His loss is like a scar that has
to be told about because he
wears it under his sweater,
where no one can see.
His loss comes out to meet him,
to tell him she’s always been waiting for him.
He takes her hand and they walk together.
Harp
I will make a harp of you,
your hair curled around
its strings, the wood
of its flank flushed with
the color of your cheek
as you try to decide how
to say what comes next.
The harp will sing with
the sound of glass broken,
accidentally, woven into
a strain of careful laughter.
It will hum with uncertainty.
When you are away
I will know it is silent,
though I am deaf.
Michael Fleming
On the Bus
Life into legend, legend into life—
I once was you, Alex Supertramp—fresh
out of school, half nuts, no money, no wife,
no work, no matter. The sins of the flesh
were behind me, beneath me, beyond me.
Another self-inventing dharma bum
on the road to anywhere, off to see
the elephants, bound for glory. And from
such dry, dreary soil I’d sprung—I was you,
Alex—naked in my cast-off clothes, so
full of myself, so empty, just a few
well-tasted words were enough when the low
clouds to the west whispered, Get on the bus,
and I got on, and you got on—we wanted
more, magic, furthur, Alaska—I must
have crossed the river. But you? You were gone.
for Chris McCandless
Paging Doctor Bebop
The good doctor, he knows all that book stuff—
the flatted fifth, Italian baroque—hell,
he wrote the book, and that would be enough
if books were enough, but he won’t just sell
you on the art of listening, he’ll give
you the real medicine, body and soul—
the silver horn, the music that you live
for, music that you die for, that the whole
world needs to hear, now—the clickity klack
of time on the rails, the spike in the blood
and the colors of sound. Where have you gone,
Doctor Bebop? And when will you be back?
Life’s so syncopated—starts and stops. Good
music, though—man, it just goes on and on
for Howie Brofsky
Mr. McPhee’s Class
Jouncing. Dolos. Craton. Words you serve like
oranges, unpeeling their sounds. We’re not just
horsing around in ca
noes, or hitchhiking
newly made reefs, measuring the crust
after the quake—we’re holding words to our
nostrils, inhaling, truly tasting them,
getting them down. Yes, we love this class. Our
urgently unhurried task: stratagem and
structure, a sense of where we are. You
model the hair shirts we’ll wear, naturalized
citizens of this country we’ve come into,
promising too much, eager but unwise,
hardly writers yet and our hearts don’t break
even when you tell us: keep squeezing, guys—
every good word takes as long as it takes.
for John McPhee
Attending
He loses every case—it’s hospice, he knows
that. Isn’t medicine supposed to mean
saving people, healing them, saying no
to death? The right technique, the right machine,
the right dosage—isn’t that what a doctor
should know? Coax fire from the spark of life—
is that what he should do? But no one walks
out of here. Nothing is fixed with a knife
in here. They’re goners—we all are. So when
did doctor stop meaning teacher—is that
where we went wrong? Best to call him attending
physician—here to bear witness. What
else can the white coat mean, if not surrender—
tending what is broken, what is not.
for Derek Kerr
The Audacity of the Jaguar
My world is not your world. Who was here first?
And who is the master? My amber eyes,
they’re voiceless mirrors—imagine the worst
of me, call me coward, devil, beast. Why
should I burden myself with your fears? You
peer into these eyes and see nothing that
you know beyond your own reflection. Who
are you now? My wanderings are no matter
of yours—if you gaze into my coat
of a thousand eyes, I melt into smoke,
into spirit, into memory. Go
to bed now, lie beside your wife. That low
cough—just her soft snoring? Sleep. Dream your dreams
of all that you will do with fences, fire—
your farm, your finca—oh, how it all seems
to be yours. And when you awaken, I
recede and I wait and I watch until