Tupelo Press Poetry Project

Claudia Carlson

Snowman

When I was
twenty and in love
with the son of a shrink,
whose parents
cared
about upholstery patterns and
hosting wine tastings in their upscale kitchen,
I rolled the new snow in their backyard
into a gigantic           snow Aphrodite:
her icy nipples     as big as loaves,
naked ass cleft and packed hard.
I was rolling her a snowman,
muscled thighs as high
as my waist, when they called me in.
Don't do any more. O stop. The neighbors...
My lover and his father went for a walk.  My snow
goddess was nine feet tall and topped their fence by three feet.
I looked at my ruined leather gloves, a gift from him as the
mother of the man I loved shook her head, just so. I knew
this wasn t going to last past spring, even before
he came back and looked at me with
his father's coal black eyes.

About the author: Claudia Carlson's first book of poetry, The Elephant House, is being published this spring by Marsh Hawk Press. She is co-editor of the anthology, The Poet's Grimm: Twentieth Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. She is a senior book designer at Oxford University Press and lives in NYC. See claudiagraphics.com.

Barbara Paparazzo

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

and bring our tiny stones
to the kitchen table.
Round ones – white, yellow, and brown,
like baby toes, and flat gray one
in the shape of lima beans.
I’m making flea-sized cairns,
homage to the rolling, seething,
and tumbling of
a long journey.

How small we all end up,
you on the red couch,
me on the white,
Sky and Telescope open on your chest,
The Illiad on mine –
do the gods still interfere
with our lives,
I wonder –
Jupiter in the south last night,
a gibbous moon overhead,
the long sepulchral grinding
not over yet. 

About the Author: Barbara Paparazzo is a writer from Conway, Massachusetts and has published poetry in the Atlanta Review, Cincinnati Review, Runes, Rattle and other journals.

Joshua Hostetter

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

Andy Warhol on the floor dripping canoe
      mud, & atop, ash is a forgery of travel.
There, bag of the messenger & the strenuous take
      back of myth. Captain Cook is mere skin product.
There is a story of high mountains & post-colonialism;
      all I want is 62nd & Park or a formal, evening lover.
Product of the strenuous ether lands; Karl Marx
      is in the thralling leather, theorizing mahogany.
Glass depth: the thicket between solitude and
      loneliness. Ezra, dear Ezra, just pay the fucking fare.
The current of Thoreau interacts with birdsong
      and no more qualm girds the girl’s pulsing heart.
She is the final contact, rallying those among Har Megiddo
      to abandon dust for flower. Truth no longer in bone.
Christianity tears seat with flint. Recompense
      dull flames within the coarse mulberry tree; bear
A kiss under some mistletoe. The canon lawyer has
      placed the King in the pocket; the Vatican is next to
Your face of Arabia dated to June expire. Heart goodness
      against Herod’s romance: timed shock and awe aster.
A father—seated forward—flecks his heart’s crust with
      love: awe, my child, toward the affluent forestation.

Joshua Hostetter is a student at The University of Chicago. He is majoring in English, Philosophy and Linguistics. He is originally from Pittsburgh, PA.

M.B. McLatchey

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

and the history of tourism --
a history of our shadow selves
like the open wings of angels
that they leave in the pearly sand;
beautiful, sweeping lines like cartilage
of the wings that trace their carefree
flapping; their spines a tentative print
between the wings; their mouths
an upturned string of shells
opening to a vast and mythical sky.
These are the things we leave behind.
Or a paddleball court etched out
in the ground where a ruddy turnstone
makes his nest-like scrapes, a place perhaps
for the female’s eggs; and seagulls dive for bits
of nacho chips and funnel cake.
And the sanderling’s soft song --
wick, wick - is the echo of a mother’s
plea, that day, to her children out too deep. 
These are the songs we hear in our sleep.
Or, the black-bellied plover’s plaintive call
as he circles the shore for a sandworm
or a crab -- for something, something to eat --
and absently darts toward a sand castle made
from plastic-cup molds and a child’s
plastic pail, pink or lime green or gold.
And a wave with a biblical thrust catches
the tourists off guard: a torrent of coconut oil
and ocean spray, a sandal, a drugstore romance,
then the bright, shallow meadows and plank.
These are the things we find and give away,
offerings of those who know they cannot stay.

About the Author: M. B. McLatchey's poems have been published in The American Poetry Journal, The National Poetry Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Poetry Review, The Anthology of New England Writers, and several other journals. Recent awards include the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry and the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award.

Lynn Veach Sadler

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly:  Life in Cirques

The French colonized with
mutineers exiled in malarial St. Paul.
They cultivated coffee, spices.
The French responded with plantations.
When cyclones destroyed coffee and spices,
lost a hot spring never found again,
the French answered with sugar plantations,
sent slaves to work upon them.
Madagascar slaves were thrust into
volcanic land, place of cyclones.
They ran away to cirques, old volcanic cones;
slipped back to the coast for tools and women.
The colonials hired slave hunters
to return them, lop off hands as warning.
The slaves not caught
organized in tribes with chiefs.
Some of their issue have never yet
ventured from Mafate.
In the highest point of the highest cirque,
an escaped slave took refuge,
made a life reporting on pursuers.
From a twelve-year-old Creole slave—
sweet-sweet-sweet vanilla.
Réunion’s myriad orchid varieties
went barren until young Edmund
pollinated Mexican orchids by hand.
When slavery was abolished,
Chinese and Indians
came to work in French Réunion.
Today, Tamils fight back.
In their temples, in brightly-colored
clothes, Tamils fire-walk on steaming coals,
then find respite in foot baths of milk.
Tamils pierce the skin of their backs with
arrow-sized pins; use heads of
goats and chickens in ceremonies,
prepare for their insurgency.
Today, the poor whites
have been moved to cirques
to clean up the coast for tourists.

About the Author: Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and creative writing.  Editor, poet, fiction/creative nonfiction writer, and playwright, she has a full-length poetry collection forthcoming from RockWay Press.

Julie Marie Wade

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

Brody did not want to believe in the great white any more than the Mayor did. This is the part the history-makers always seem to miss, whenever someone is watching from a crow’s nest for land or calling out from a pulpit over the furrowed sand: EVERYBODY, OUT OF THE WATER! We want to justify these actions as insight, something we don’t have because we are too ordinary, too trusting, like children still singing Que Sera Sera in glee club and eating white-bread sandwiches with all the crusts cut off. 

But Brody had seen the girl, what was left of her, and in the raw terror of that mangled scene, he understood the Cartesian split better than any philosopher. Renouncing it, he might have murmured something, retching into his handkerchief on the lonely drive home to the beach house, where his wife and kids were waiting. (In these stories, they are always waiting, as if they never move between frames or step off the stage into someplace unscripted...) Brody might have murmured how the girl did not have a body, how some of her parts were not merely missing. In fact, Chrissie Watkins was a body, the same way his wife was, and his sons, and also himself, which is the hardest moment—the Everyman moment—when the hero understands that flesh is truer than fiction and profits, more trustworthy than any ephemeral soul. And faced with that prospect, what would anyone do? We’d pay the bounty hunter; we’d face our fears of the water. Blood-thirsty, like the enemy, we’d seek our flailing revenge.

About the Author: Julie Marie Wade was born in Seattle in 1979.  She completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the Univerity of Pittsburgh.  She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, the Literal Latte Nonfiction Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.  Currently, she resides in Pittsburgh and teaches Women's Studies at Carlow University.

Michael Meyerhofer

SNOWMAN

Not a snowman—a snow sculpture.
That’s how friends described it afterwards.
The Buddha in repose, smiling,
hands folded between his bare knees.
It was two years before Armageddon,
according to televangelists. I was trying
as the millennium wound down
to reevaluate my beliefs and get laid.
The anonymous sculptor gave the Buddha
a snow-dais, holding him aloft
in the middle of that blank frisbee field
across from Mayflower, our dorm.
I thought I was in love that weekend.
Southern Iowa, dead of February
where some of the drifts reached my belt.
The river stopped, a petrified ribbon.
The redhead I wrote poems for
had a three-way with my roommates.
That night, I tried to distract myself,
reading Bashó over Jack Daniels.
Even his fingernails were perfect.
Bulge of the femur when his knees bent.
Closed eyelids, smooth as silk,
concealing the pupil of some mystery
it would be years before I understood.
All my poems rhymed back then.
The redhead I was in love with,
whose breasts jostled when she walked,
said once she wanted to read them.
When no one would answer
the door, I eventually found himself
outside, my gloved fist erasing his smile.

About the author: Michael Meyerhofer’s book, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He is the author of two chapbooks—Cardboard Urn and The Right Madness of Beggars. His work has appeared in Arts & Letters, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Fugue, National Poetry Review and others.

Rebecca Dunham

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

Am taking stock, am prepared to
vitrine every item on this list of things
you’ve lost (an infant’s crenulated
smile, all pink gum, & the four sun-
yellow bedrooms you’ve lain in & left
for a next one that’s no brighter).
Many vinyl seats have you settled upon,
drivers thridding city streets
you never tried to learn. Insatiable
crevices billfold-thin & as desirous.
Many must I slide my fingers down now,
feeling them up only to lift out
loose change, hard gray cuds, a lipstick
or two. There lies the instant you
first let yourself question, first asked
if this was love. Find it. I can
I must flay & number it, must record
its precise anatomy, its traitor’s form.

About the author: Rebecca Dunham's first book of poetry, The Miniature Room, won the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize and was published by Truman State University Press. She teaches at the University of Northern Iowa.

Jeremy Voigt

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

The philosopher likes to think he lives on the beach made 
mostly of glass, tucked behind the island’s waste management 
facility, where locals only come on New Years, or Memorial 
Day, or some such holidays allowing for a work-free Monday,  
and mostly the beach thrives as novelty—its worn shards  
compact and shiny waste which tourists love to search in old- 
American-greed style, squatting near or in the water, cupping  
edge-of-palm to edge-of-palm sifting away—the sun drops 
into its green flash—the economics of beauty ragged, cutting. 

About the Author: Jeremy Voigt has a MFA from Bennington College. He edits the online journal Arbutus. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, RHINO, and Arabesques Review, Tiger Tail.

Sage Cohen

You were Born To Be Mine, See, Why Even Fight It

object and subject lost relativity.
 
The canvas framed your return
in an embarrassment of green.
More art than truth, our windows
groomed exposure. The bed
through which our bodies rushed:
portal of blood. Impermanence of skin,
our separation wove the wound together.
Unconsciousness could be mistaken,
in its ferocity of completion, for peace.
Our thirst for visibility was the night’s inhalation.
Often I stood, looking out
for what might save me.
In the letters we wrote I strove
for a moment of authority
as you rearranged
my papers into a pattern
you could tolerate.
You blamed me for my loneliness.
Exhilarated with the danger
of inauthenticity, appetite
precise as a knife, we divided
with each departure
the possibility of the seed.
It happens like this.
The years settle below the bridge.
The words slowly learn to trust
the turbulence from which they rise.
Undisguised, you shuffle in –
radiant, surprised.

About the author:Sage Cohen’s poetry has been published in journals, including Poetry Flash, Oregon Literary Review, Blueoregon.com and San Francisco Reader. In 2006, she won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest.

Thom Ward

Snowman

All winter globs of snow lived in his belly and ate light from the sun that dared
penetrate his snowskin. Yet, on days when the heat was not enough, he would
choose fences, trowels, pop cans, carburetors, and occasionally, weather vanes.
His powers grew. Soon, even the strongest mailboxes broke from their hinges,
cruised over snow and entered his white stomach. Of course, he was never
completely sated. The sharp edge of metal is addictive. Snowman kept busy.
One morning, after forcing down six pitchforks and a basketball rim, he exploded.
The children looked up from their oatmeal, paused, and then returned to spooning
the warm, heavy drifts.

About the author: Thom Ward is Editor at BOA Editions, Ltd. The author of four poetry collections, his new book of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, is forthcoming in early May from CustomWords. He believes that by then, all of the snow currently burying his Upstate, New York will be gone. Maybe. Perhaps. Then again...

Metta Sama

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

Your letter reveals nothing, courier-shaped words
typed in your adopted language, more articles
than ripe nouns, prepositions plenty. You are home
now, back with your wife and children, a life
no longer on hold. You say it’s expensive to write,
each letter a second, each word costs you a dime,
a sentence a minute; you reveal nothing. I wonder
what language you speak when you shake hands
with the clerk, innocent-eyed and smiling. Perhaps
he’ll ask after your wife. You’ll respond dutifully,
bountifully, words costing nothing & more. Will you
pay to print the eleven words I lustily typed for you,
arial, rounded, fleshy and desperate; will you push
those words into the folds of your pocket, push them
deeper than ink, thread, the wound of a gum wrapper?
Will you stuff your hands far into your pockets’ guts,
fondle my words, and recite a mantra to the expectant clerk:
my wife is well. Love is well. All is well. Inshallah.

About the author: Metta Sáma (previously Lydia Melvin) is author of South of Here. She has poems and reviews in Crab Orchard Review, Paterson Literary Review, Verse, Sojourn, and Torch among others. A horrible titler, she finds this project poem-saving.

Roy Jacobstein

Exposition of the Contents of a Cab

           Dad gave me three gold pieces of advice:
            never eat at a place called Mom’s; never play
            poker with a guy called Guy; and never lie
   down with a body hauling more junk than you.
   So why this vexing with her auburn needs
   and needles, unpinnable wings of jade?
   One day we’re schussing the black diamonds,
            edging our slicked blades into the powdery
            slope; the next, we’re stifling in a rusted taxi,
            halted for a trunk search at the border
   of no return. Drogas, says Jorge the driver,
   dos equis etched into his eyebrow’s left notch.
   They lookin’ for drogas. But the guards just glance
            at her tangled mane, me sweating beside her:
            nothing here to confiscate, nothing to declare. .

About the author: Roy Jacobstein’s most recent book of poetry, A Form of Optimism (UPNE, 2006) won the Samuel French Morse Prize, selected by Lucia Perillo. His earlier book, Ripe (U Wisc 2002) won the Felix Pollak Prize, selected by Edward Hirsch. His work will be appearing this year in The Gettysburg Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and is included in LITERATURE: Reading Fiction, Poetry and Drama (Mc-Graw-Hill, 2006).

Katherine Soniat

SNOW MAN

Sleet. Sled with a broken runner.
Who’s out to leash the wolves at night?
Cloud-thin the moon scopes a patch of the earth.
Pale flesh
in the ivory incisors:
      Wolf trots off with a hand in its mouth.
The air’s molecular tonight. Vials of mandrake foam on the apothecary shelf.
      Torches on the outskirts of a village.
      Shouts split the atmosphere like atoms.
Where’s that old elixir—essence of dove and olive?
      Wrist torn off; this wolf’s run off by no one.
The sky’s a striated red and booming (hearts used to be like that)
      Our moon just another celestial rock above the slaughter.
Stray hand’s such a playful toy to toss, lifeline exposed in the snow.
      Morsel map of the cold world.

About the author: Katherine Soniat's The Fire Setters is available through Web Del Sol On-line Chapbook Series. Poems are forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Southern Review, Poetry East, and Tiferet.

Doug Ramspeck

We Leave the Beaches for the Tourists, Mostly

We want to leave them our broken lives, too,
and the shape of the wind when it makes you squint
then flutters all the sails. Once, like Scheherazade,
we offered them a story rolled in a knapsack
to protect it from the rain, and another time
we donated whitecaps and their rabid foaming.
Then there was that secret we have kept from them
for all these years, mostly because we want it
for ourselves, which is the way of things
when you are sitting in your boxer shorts at noon,
when your life is a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich
growing moldy on a paper plate. Only once 
did they offer us anything, and then it was the word
wishbone, which we accepted like the short end
when you tug and tug and finally it breaks,
like another lost wave against the shore—
which they can have as well. They can have it all.
We are making one last sandwich, packing
our names in our knapsack, and getting out.

About the Author: Doug Ramspeck's poems have been accepted for publication by more than 150 journals that include West Branch, Rattle, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, and Seneca Review.

Matthew Frank

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

You say, art undresses life, shows us its nipples
and suckling pigs, exhumed from palm fronds
and leprosy. You say, it’s Easter Island
framed and hung with one gold nail in a beamless
wall. How does it stay up? How can the old man
with one leg not topple when the weather lights
his windbreaker on fire? He claps both hands
over his chest and mutters something about
the hierarchy of clouds. You misinterpret this
as thunder or ash, as the girdle that shapes
the trunk of the plum tree. Pluck one before
the blood shoots to its branches, before its eyes
fill with fluid and spill their quince. Be the giraffe.
I know it’s in you. Your mother had it. You bite
one side. I’ll bite the other. Meet you at the pit.
If the bomb rings while we’re eating, let the machine
get it. At our windowsill, the potted basil attacks
the potted thyme. The winner goes home with the pig.
It will tell us why we were born...
How dare we deny those whose function is to flavor?
Love reduced to oilpaints. Sex reduced to sculpture.
Remember what Giuseppe said? How Rubens created
his own fetish? He died with a stocking in his mouth.
If you unhook my belt, I’ll kiss you. You should
know this: My tongue has gone the way of the wind-
breaker, plum-skin. If you be the giraffe, I’ll be
the lioness, open my mouth as an asphodel. Go ahead.
Read me another chapter. Sing me to sleep. And this time,
be specific.

About the author: I have work in The New Republic, Field, Tampa Review, Epoch, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Creative Nonfiction, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Rosebud, 6x6, Bat City Review, Gastronomica, Best Food Writing 2006 and others.