Ann Killough

Snowman

1

It was the inescapable quality of the manna that eventually got on our nerves.
Everywhere you looked, squishing underfoot like locusts, even out on a date you would
open your mouth and there it would be, quivering like a new tongue.  We asked Moses,
but he was never much help.  He was always too busy trying to get next to Jahweh.

2

In the springtime it took the form of bulbs.  Everywhere you looked, tulips, tulips, that
old thing about Beauty as some kind of orifice.  Dandelions, the earth's idea of a bad joke
on the subject of relatives, a child in the sandbox making cake out of stones.

3

I'm not even going to tell you about the mothers.  Pasting it into scrapbooks, rolling it out
into heart-shaped biscuits and cramming it down our throats while we were asleep,
waking us with their squeals as it began to dance on the countertops.  Stomping on it, in
their orthopedic shoes, making a helluva noise.

4

Theology is no help.  Theology is more interested in the exception, in the way
somebody's dachshund made a shrine out of it in the back yard, pasting it together with
dog spit and sheer hope.  And psychology, give me a break.  Here we are in the middle of
a raging field of the stuff and all psychology can do is squat down and have a you know what.

5

Me, I'm getting used to it.  I go out in the mornings and roll in it until I look like a
delicious snowman and then go to work and stand next to the Xerox machine and sing.
People walk back and forth, ignoring me, but my boss has just offered a huge reward for
my hide.  He knows how to appreciate a good thing, and he's hungry.

About the author: My work has appeared in Fence, Field, Mudfish, Poetry Ireland, Salamander, Sentence, and elsewhere.  My chapbook Sinners in the Hands received the 2003 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press, and my book Beloved Idea is forthcoming in January 2008 from Alice James Books.

José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

They come in droves like refugees, fleeing a colder sun. They brave our crooked, cratered roads, they offer dark, red coins. We welcome them, for their eyes are as blue as the sky, their skin as white as the sand. Listen: even the coral reefs sing them lullabies at night.

Their forbears bestowed upon us out-of-style hand-me-downs and broken cowboy dolls. We repay the debt with our hospitality. We bring them fresh pineapples and crabs, speaking only when spoken to. Though our feet will never feel the burn of their country’s snow, we will not be the first to say goodbye.

When it is time for them to leave, we pray that they will remember our seas long after the sand between their toes is washed away. We have nothing more to offer: everything else that was once beautiful is now in ruins.

About the Author: José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes was born and raised in the Philippines, and holds degrees from Ateneo de Manila and Columbia Universities. He was featured in the most recent New Writers issue of The Hudson Review, and his poems and translations have also appeared in Caracoa, Circumference, Michigan Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge, Philippine Studies, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and other Philippine and U.S. journals and anthologies.

Jamey Hecht

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

Remember the statue elephant not yet liberated from the marble?
Deep in chalk downs there stands an army of white sentinels
Undemarcated, unnamed, guarding nothing, still merely possible.
A giant dog made of borderless water is drifting in the ocean depths.
High in the Burgess Shale the uncarved taxi sleeps in oblivion,
Rife with teeming calcified ghosts of primordial snails. Its seats
Of solid mineral sit out the years, unconscious; windows
Totally opaque with crystallized guts of flatworms, trilobites
And undiscovered blastocysts whose heirs were never born.
I see the steering wheel that never turns, I see the four dead wheels.
Inside, a cell phone on the floor, a couple kissing, her scarf:
Forms all foreign to their matter, matter foreign to the moment,
Yet all of it subsisting in my stalled imagination where I wait
For this impossible ride to break from the unmanifest and move.

About the author: Jamey Hecht’s work in poetry, criticism, politics, and the history of ideas has appeared in periodicals including The Black Warrior Review, River City, The Sycamore Review, and The Massachusetts Review. His first book, Plato's Symposium: Eros and the Human Predicament, (Macmillan, 1999) is about ancient Greek philosophy; his second book is Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays: A Translation with Notes and Commentary (Wordsworth Editions, 2004).

Margaret Hepp

You Were Born to be Mine, See, Why Even Fight It

Last night, to rid my mind of You,
I slept with Death.
His fingers remind me of a coiled silver bracelet I’d had and lost,
delicate and cool, gently malleable, just fitting round my wrist.
He rouses me in the limbo between night and early morning,
breathing a soft legato I’d not heard before.
Pure exhalation: I part my lips to be filled with mortality,
to not be Yours.
Death comes over me in the pause before I rise.
In a cramped washroom: the unfamiliar reflection of a girl
gliding her open palm along her bare skin,
immersing her two hands in water from a corroded spigot.
I feel suddenly chilled. There, in the bed: a body,
sinewed, thin, grey, wrapped delicately in a sheet.
I dress myself and tiptoe quietly down the narrow stairway.
When I reach the bottom, I am naked again.
I knew, then, that I was in Your house,
grieving deeply for a feeling of nakedness I’d had and lost, long ago.

About the author: Margaret Hepp has recently moved to South Africa, where she works as an Editorial Assistant with A. Magazine. She is a graduate of Boston College, with a B.A. in English and Philosophy.

Nonnie Augustine

Snowman

As frozen climbers shiver,
dig a cave from the mountain, are beset
by helpless dreams of warmth, nourishment,
fight the sick demons of oxygen-thin air,
so do I freeze, hallucinate, battle chimera.

As the arctic fox pales in polar winter,
the penguin starves until his cue to feed,
a grizzled bear hibernates against the blizzard,
so do I lose color, substance, alacrity.

Your arms abrade, scratch like sticks
grown sharp and knotted.
Your chest freezes mine
 as if I sought solace from snow.

You kiss with lips of small gray stones
deep-set, blinded eyes, pitiless
black pockets of unfired coal.
Terrifying snowman, I will watch you burn.

About the author: Nonnie Augustine was a modern dancer with a degree from Juilliard, a special education teacher, and now writes full-time. Her poems and fiction have placed in contests and she has been published online and in print. She has written a novel and is seeking, in her haphazard fashion, a publisher.

Jane Satterfield

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

. . . the requiems & rusted tanks. We leave the windows shuttered, shoving off to summer
further south, geraniums’ blood blossoms explosive
in our wake, window boxes & hanging baskets left to the dim blessing of intermittent rain--
We leave the beaches for tourists mostly, the requiems
& rusted tanks & if the memory of Overlord’s aubade, well
let them have their post-arrival screw, their aperitif at dawn.
We leave the beaches for tourists mostly, the citronade
in sad cafes, the low land along the Channel, small fields &
high hedges, the meanders of the Seine . . . We leave
the tourists memory, geography, domains scraped flat
by wars. Let them learn how Michelins can’t account
for closings & car trouble, all kinds of discontent. We leave Alencon,
Rouen, Caen, Coutances, Bayeaux, our villages’ heraldic chain,
trois chats & tapestries, Calvados by the bottle, the resinous
tint of its tide. To the tourists, mostly, Camembert, moules, Boursin,
brioche, roulettes, bourdelots, tripes a la mode de Caen, andouillises and andouillettes. We
leave the beaches, the squad reunions & brass
bands, museum shop battle mock-ups, paper dolls in regimental gear—
--To the tourists, mostly, firing positions, machine gun nests, the first wave’s struggle to
shore. We leave film footage, rows of numbered &
Old-Gloried graves. To the tourists, the rifle jams & sunken Sherman
Amphibious tanks, the Sergeant—
they’re leaving us here to die like rats. We leave the rock-ridden beaches to the tourists
mostly, the cold & ebbing tide. To the tourists,
the ghost-cries sleep can’t shut out, history’s true torch song.

Note: The quotation in line 24/5 is attributed to Thomas A. Valence, Veteran of A Company, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division. Interview courtesy of Eisenhower Center for American Studies, New Orleans, LA.

About the author: Jane Satterfield, a 2007 NEA Fellow in Literature, is the author of two collections of poetry: Shepherdess with an Automatic and Assignation at Vanishing Point. Recent work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Marginalia, and Elixir.

Alison Apotheker

Snowman

Yesterday, in snow's rare visit to this city,
my son and I raised his first snowman.
As we rolled the white boulders of its body,
my pregnant belly nudged up against them like kin.
By evening, its body leaned to the left so impossibly,
I kept checking the window for its collapse.
In the morning, even more so, its body straining
groundward as if to grasp its carrot nose
that had fallen and lay now half-covered in slush.
My son, who hasn't yet been around the block
with gravity, suspects nothing. I remember
last summer when he skinned his shin on the sidewalk.
I watched his eyes register the body's betrayal.
Yet he seems not to notice the snowman's state,
the degree of recline, how little it would take
to return it to an idea of itself.
All over the neighborhood,
snowmen assume such inspired angles,
splayed skywards as if in appeal to their place of origin,
kneeling for their own beheadings,
canted in prayer, tipsy
with the song of their own slow-going.
The relief obvious in their frozen hulking masses
to rejoin the fluid grace of ground waters.
The truth is: before I became a mother,
I knew the body's longing to be lost.
An untrustworthy lover bound
to forsake us, I'd rather do the leaving
than be left.
But now, as we walk home in the dusk,
my two-year old riding my hip,
patting my cheeks with his mittened hands,
I never want to leave this earth.
Inside the baby tumbles and reels
already knowing where the body will take us,
that we have no choice but to follow its lead.

About the author: Alison Apotheker has poems published in or forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Mid-American Review, Crab Orchard Review and many other national literary magazines. She teaches at Portland Community College in Oregon.

Monica Raymond

SNOWMAN

To be made all
of one thing

my apple mouth
both fruit and eater

a mind of winter
in winter

and in spring
a mind of water

three-pronged branch
for gesture

could mean
vestige of sandpiper

dowsing hand tuned
beyond, beneath

but when wind
whips it from me

agency I
never owned

I've no
regret--

arm, baton
what I conducted

was anyway
its own

pigeon
cacophany

cumulus
oompah

of cloud
make more of me

of what I'm
made of

packed  
like down

on a breastbone
some wit

banked me
solid

I rest in it--
February

say
June, July

messiahs I won't
live to see

About the author: Monica Raymond is a poet and playwright based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has taught writing at Harvard, Northeastern, the Boston Museum School, and the City University of New York, published in Sojourner, Heresies, Iowa Review, and has poems forthcoming in the Colorado Review this spring. She was the 2005 Nadja Aisenberg Fellow in poetry at the Boston Writers Room.

Cass Dalglish

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

Where is Camilo Cienfuegos?
  
We slide into the cab on a rainy Havana afternoon looking for a santero in La Regla, for a
small white house near the cathedral where gods move into the bodies of saints,and our
cab driver says he remembers the temple on Cienfuegos Street, on Calle Camilo
Cienfuegos, the one named for the revolutionary, not Fidel or the Che,but the other one,
the one whose small plane disappeared suddenly, who was lost before his time…before
the revolution was won…before new rules were set…
  
So we circle ‘round the barrio, turn signals blinking right and left – tap blink,
tap blink, tap blink – but our driver has lost his memory and he asks at every turn, “Donde está
Camilo Cienfuegos? Donde está Camilo Cienfuegos?” A man tells us, “Turn right… a la
derecha… a la derecha…” And a woman says, “Go left… a la izquierda… a la
izquierda…”
  
Our taxi snakes through the rain and I wonder what happened to Camilo Cienfuegos,
where has he gone? To the left, around the blocks of short adobe houses, to the right, over
stone streets, to the left, behind the Church of the Regla, to the right along the edge of the
sea?
  
And where would he be now, that third man, would he move into the body of a saint?
Would he lead his people down this slippery street? Would he turn to the right or to the left?

About the author: Cass Dalglish is a former journalist whose first novel, Sweetgrass, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. Her second, Nin, was published by Spinsters Ink. Her poem, “Comfort,” was recently featured as part of the “What Light: This Week’s Poem” series on mnartists.org.

Miss Terri Ford

! Snowman  ________________________________

 
You in Hawaii who dream of the deep and the white, as we in Minnesota dream
of plush volcanic cinders on which to sit. You in Petaluma, fantasizing
that you arise to view the newfallen snow, that you must in all urgency help
the townspeople below. You in Tucumcari, you of Sedona, you
on the shores of Bali (hi!): you do not know snow nor the angels
nor men of it; you never saw how my maternal unit in Duluth in the bitter
months forced us out to play for at least half an hour, though you no doubt heard
my bleat and plea against cruel Mom, in my nonbendable snowpants,
dragging my mittens in drama in woe down the screen door. Iffy
I wasn’t. We dream too: not of you in your bikinis and Speedoes, but of
ourselves at least in shorts, perhaps coatless. We too
like a clean snow, but you face the yard in March dwindle, its wet sludge
of dirt and lint and the dying snowman, his mutable head half
slid off. You see what he’s made of: prut and crud, sticks and
dreck and slushed up flint. Yours to launder, the ruined hat. You walk
in its grit. I’ll be you. Bitch, don’t call.

About the Author: Miss Terri Ford is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Her second book, Hams beneath the Firmament, is due to appear from Four Way Books, like, pronto.  She lives in Minneapolis, where she laughs at the weather.

Elizabeth Ann Socolow

You Were Born to be Mine, See, Why Even Fight It

Stubborn this man’s love,
his humor, his woman’s challenge
to caromb a rock from the shore
onto a curved ledge of a dam.
Dinner she’d buy him if he did the impossible,
made the weight stick, flat enough
to edge on and stop moving.
The curve concrete, graceful,
no level place to catch the toss,
the match of surface and stone.
Dozens of rocks, hoots, laughter
breaking out again. She wanted
him to stop when we came by,
but he wouldn’t. We watched, left,
down the path minutes later
heard them thump the ground
behind us, jogging out of their way,
toward us, their love generous.
He said he’d done it, And we laughed
again and congratulated them,
and thanked them for coming after us
to tell us. Love like that can last
from the sheer lift
of challenge, rocks on a concrete
curve, the timing of it, the joy.   

About the author: Elizabeth Socolow, twice the winner of a New Jersey State Council for the Arts grant, is the author of two published volumes of poetry, Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton (Beacon 1988) and Between Silence and Praise (Ragged Sky Press 2006).

Mary Molinary

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

mostly we rummage through
their leavings
mostly we call them
snowbirds
we etch other
names for them in the sea-
glass and sands of other
languages on other
shores
(seems some days we were
born to be theirs,
see, why even fight it)
mostly the sun rises and sets like coral
reef fires
and the tides
shift in and out like mass
migrations of ancient travelers
then can we be
found combing the strand, mostly

About Author: Mary Molinary is near completion of her manuscript, The Supine & Other Burials, the third and final book manuscript of her trilogy, Humanesque. Poems from the first two manuscripts have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, spork, River City, Pindeldyboz, and Poetry International. Some have re-appeared on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily and are forthcoming in the next Poetry Daily Anthology.

Margo Berdeshevsky

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

[BEACHFRONT—Aceh—Sumatra—the epicenter—2005]

*

It's too hot not to swim. But in their dissolved cry?
or is it only the insects? or it begins again because
the world only ends in one place, & not in another.

When it begins again, one guitar in the shadows whose
darling died in December water. A cat, blind in one eye. 
An inchworm, bursting.

A funeral tea with green sweet-cakes where only women
in jilbabs come, knees to the left. A man we could not save 
with the laying on of hands.

High blood pressure, leg sores, the heartbeats like
hummingbirds,    the deep-voiced equator reciting 
Allahhhhhhhh, Allahhhhhhh,    her twelve toes, curling.

A fever & a yellow cur, hunting. Crazy-woman who is 
not crazy anymore, praying &     praying,     & praying.

*

The reel of bulldozers moving shore-washed & its bloated
broken :  garbage & ghost & ghastly in loops, repeating.
In verses of the truth    down     in a monsoon dawn.

When it begins again, an old heat, white, imploding.
There were rebels, but not in the open green. Was horror under
a head-scarved sky.     Laughter, under the roofs before they

ruined,     breakfasting.     Horror is not made by any
hands that can be seen, here. Nor by silver monkeys, staring.

There are children who were hung in trees in a mother's
sarong, to be safe. Motherless, safe & staring. Old
women, softened with cotton yearning. A wise-man of 
a village with so few to be wise for, any longer.

Pickaxes, ready for their ditches. Who knows these feet?
God. Incantation, for the stagnant, the breeding. The waters & who
stands beside them. Sediment. Mercy, not really in sight.

For tomorrow, the heat & a free moon. Golden. Exaggerating.
For tomorrow, the tired, left, for the strong. A star, one star, falling. 
All that loves, loving.     Even then.

About the Author: Margo Berdeshevsky lives in Paris. Her new book, But A Passage In Wilderness, will be published by The Sheep Meadow Press in November, 2007. Four Pushcart nominations, The Poetry Society of America's Robert H.Winner Award, Chelsea Poetry Award, Kalliope's Sue Saniel Elkind Award, places in the Ann Stanford & the Pablo Neruda awards, Border's Books/ Honolulu Magazine Grand Prize for Fiction. Her works are published in The Southern Review, New Letters, Runes, Poetry International, Nimrod, Chelsea, WSQ, ACM, Traffic East, Kalliope, Many Mountains Moving, & more. Her Tsunami Notebook– photos and incantatory poems – was made following a journey to Sumatra in Spring 2005, to work in a survivors' clinic in Aceh. A collection of short stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, waits at your gate.

Jeni Rinner

SNOWMAN

leave the cab
leave the beaches
we were born
to
fight

we leave the fight
mine for the why of the were
                 exposition

leave the contents
mostly mine

the tourists were born
the tourists were of a
the tourists leave

we were mostly for it
   even snowmen
see contents, mostly

the tourists were you: see?

fight for it
mine for it
even beaches
even you

About the author: I'm a graduate student at the University of Denver finishing a Masters in Digital Media Studies, with a thesis on collaborative poetry methods using networked media. I enjoy long walks on the beach, which is unfortunate in my currently landlocked position. Sometime this year, I will own a dog and a ridiculously overpriced ticket to a bluegrass festival.

Jennifer Richter

You Were Born to be Mine, See, Why Even Fight It

I’m good at making hearts. Seven years ago inside me I made yours. Bedtime tonight, you pull me close and whisper; you ask me how to spell “admirer.” You don’t ask why I wipe my eyes or why your father’s out again or why each night we think our voices rising down the hall don’t keep you up. A boy your age once hid this in my desk: “Now I’m positive I love you.” The first time you wrote “love,” you handed it to me. But this new word, in your careful printing, I know I’ll never see. Once I held you in my lap and showed you how to cut a heart. You tried and tried. Yours looked like a little mouth, surprised. You held mine in your hands. Yes, I said, You can have it.

About the author: Jennifer Richter is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.  Her poems have appeared in many national publications, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry, published by CALYX Books.