John Sweet
plane crashes off the california coast
is there a song for
this moment
when the first body floats
to the surface?
a prayer?
and what if the fingers and toes
and last terrified seconds
are those of a child?
can you look your god in the eye?
it is no small gift asking
these questions without answers
picture a man slightly drunk
and alone in a house
too big to be alone in
picture the house falling apart
but slowly
subtly
the windows warped
and the casings cracked
and none of the walls meeting
at right angles
a leak in the roof that he
keeps meaning to patch
a slowly spreading stain on
the bathroom ceiling
and two hundred miles away
his wife and son sleep
without dreams
and three thousand beyond that
the captain's voice is small
and filled with water
what he offers is a prayer
these bodies all around him
being carried slowly up
to the light
* first published in Human Cathedrals
Karyna McGlynn
The Bad Cut
A nurse’s quick and perfunctory hands
have just closed you up,
brown and roughshod thread pulled
into a perfect cross-stitch: picture
of a hundred possible dangers—
falling ladder, foot caught
in the black train rail, centipede,
serrated knife, thorn bush—
all my fear isolated in your right temple.
They’ve cut a round window
in the protective plastic shroud,
a place in which to work without
the distraction of the whole child,
a place which just happens
to reveal your sleeping eye
in the circumference of injury.
I stare so hard, you transform—
not daughter, but mountain,
covered in a hard reflective snowskin,
dark blood winding an inevitable lava
path where the winter melts down
and moves aside to reveal the earth—
bed of gauze, a lake to catch the run-off
of your old life in the seat of a mother’s
seasonal grief, a valley from which you rise.
Cut flesh growing a million tiny bridges
as surely as you will open that eye
to the sound of someone repeating your name.
Kelli Russell Agodon
After Hearing a Woman Say the Heart is the Same Size as an Apple
I. I begin to consider which one I keep in my chest.
A small pumping Fuji or Bailey Sweet.
I am part pie, part fritter, part turnover
in bed and listen to the thump thump thump of an Empire,
the whisper of Paula Red, the morning yawn of Sunrise.
II.
When I say I love you I taste cinnamon,
sugar, my coated center
beating again. Never bitter, I toss the green ones
to Adam, halve another to find a star.
O sweet apple of my -
unpeeling, pale white
skin appearing in your hands.
III.
My mother plucked the low ones
from trees planted the year I was born.
Every harvest, carrying ribs
of baskets to the orchard, we gathered each heart.
Hours later my hands were red, but I continued,
nothing more than a fist opening and closing.
-first appeared in The Alsop Review
Kristy Bowen
Admonition
Our wants are inherited.
History is a handful
of rocks tossed against
the window, the wing
beat of summer, fingers
cool against your temples.
This tea is so sweet
it hurts your teeth,
singed muslin, velocity,
the bones of a small bird.
Your sister knots
and re-knots your hair,
her fingers precise and distant,
dreams about the open window,
a thousand bees gone
sterile in the hive.
This is what you are allowed:
cantilevered politeness,
blackened fruits
in a ceramic bowl,
this rope pulled tight
in your body,
an anarchy of tongues.
Your mother warns
against reading past
daylight, walking the thinly
lit roads outside town,
lockjaw and feral dogs.
Still, under a sheet,
your fingers find the honey,
the drones gone mad--
The bones, they hold the shape.
De Anne Lyn Smith
When the Vegetarian Kisses the Carnivore
She feels like a cheat, sneaking
headphones into the opera,
whiskey into the synagogue.
Blood urges up to the swirls
of her ears and if some
bone pure part of her pretends
her tongue grilled against her lover’s
is not a gamy thrill, the pink
blush begs otherwise.
She closes her eyes, lets
the dim taste of steak knives
bleed into her mouth the way
beets color water.
Of course she can differentiate
between tendon and root,
which is not to say she hasn’t
heeled down on midnight
cockroaches or clapped mosquitoes
troubling the air above her lover’s spine.
When the vegetarian kisses the carnivore,
her mind’s caged statistics
go wild, pecking and scratching
at the wire, shedding feathers
under fluorescent lights.
Her thoughts are peppered with free-
range footprints of all shapes and sizes:
cloven, three-toed, five.
She learns convictions can bend
like cartilage. She’s learning love is,
if not unprincipled,
at least undisciplined,
a chef wiping spatulas on his sleeve,
licking his finger, dipping it back.
Theresa Boyar
The Recruitment of Doors
Mincing onions, you say nothing
is so criminal in a woman as pettiness.
Pettiness: your nails a scarlet blur
over the cutting board, that shedding
of concern for family, all that believing
one's self is so important,
all that believing that one
has a self.
There are hungry men beyond this
kitchen door, I don't need to be reminded.
They are bound to us by rings and blood.
You, now trussing poultry,
say a woman is like a door,
an entry, a way of guiding men
from one existence to another.
There are moments when your eyes drop focus
and I'm convinced you're reliving past events,
scenes where you were knocked down just a little,
nick by nick whittled away.
Survival must have compelled you
to accept your lot with lust, a growing
preoccupation with trying to enlist others
towards the glory of your way,
recruiting more doors for your men to walk through
tall as redwoods.
There is something divine in the way you stand,
straight as wood, and sometimes I can see you
as you must see yourself:
a giantess in the forest, admitting men
to walk beneath the towering whiteness
of your thighs. Knowing you could deny
passage if you wish, knowing you could crush them,
but holding back.
* First published in the Adirondack Review
