Sixfold Poetry Winter 2014

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

  [email protected]

  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