Poetry

Colin Dodds

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NO PREDICTABLE MALFUNCTION

by Colin Dodds

The bar smelled like an ex-girlfriend’s breath.
And I was like Belgium in the 20th century—
just waiting for someone to violate my neutrality.

I had little room to maneuver;
the market of the heart
had been rebuilt for efficiency,

its work outsourced
and its meager glory distributed
to chromosomes, glands, and early sufferings.

The man next to me makes sense,
but only over long spans of time.
He spits a whole failed life onto my sleeve.

I cross the bridge alone at night,
howling and gesturing
like a failed sorcerer.

The moving parts
of my squalid heart lurch
according to no predictable malfunction.

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Colin DoddsColin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He’s the author of several novels, including Windfall and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” Dodds’ screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

William Greenway

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High Heaven

by William Greenway

                                                                     for Rosalee

                              He who loves give a hostage to fortune.
                                                                      —Nietzsche

Another stinking diaper to thank
God for, why we traveled all the way to Bethlehem,
Alabama, to get this,
slept in a crummy motel for a month waiting
for her to be born, mud-wrestled every bureaucrat
in the state, pressing inky fingers on every piece
of paper they sent to Montgomery, endured stares
and questions: “Is she colored?” the white maid asks—
a word I haven’t heard since my Georgia
cracker youth. Then another:
“But she’s a pretty little pickaninny.
And don’t ever cut her hair—
it’ll just make it kinky.”

We named her after Rosa Parks and Harper Lee.
The old man in the doctor’s office says,
“She gonna be a Coca-Cola redbone,”
a term we’re never heard.
“You better keep them boys away.”

Now, she’s crawling into every trouble there is,
and I remember why I’ve waited this long
for what I always feared:
loving something so much,
you could die from it, this joy
at the last, at sixty-six.

I always wondered what would “curdle the blood,”
but midway through the baby poem I swore
I’d never write, and halfway down
the hall, she’s trying to unplug the smoke
detector, and shrieking to high heaven, not
in pain, but simply because she’s found
her new voice, her own language,
and is already on her way, away.

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William Greenway author photoWilliam Greenway’s tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection, Ascending Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series. His newest book, The Accidental Garden, is forthcoming from Word Press, and Selected Poems is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press, both in 2014. Greenway’s critical work, The Poetry of Personality: The Poetic Diction of Dylan Thomas, is forthcoming from Rowan and Littlefield in 2014. His publication credits include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer’s Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Greenway was named Georgia Author of the Year. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University.

William Greenway

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IN HEAVEN IT IS ALWAYS AUTUMN

by William Greenway

              after John Donne

It all seemed to happen that same year
we lived in England, every hill golden
with the turning beeches, crimson apples
in the orchard by our cottage
muted pink by the mist rising
off the river reflecting
the upside down
palette of it all.

In Italy, the vineyards
wore the yellow, plaited hair
of harvest, every barn breathing out
the warm crush and gush of grapes
like the winey kisses of a long
luncheon tryst.

Time
had stopped.
The change
we couldn’t see coming
stalled for a while,
an Indian summer before the stroke.

Had it happened while we were hiking
the paths of fallen leaves, miles
from help, we’d have thought, though
not said, we hoped for any afterlife
to rival this heaven—color box
of plum, ochre, cinnamon, lemon—
and the blood-red beauty of the dead
gone on before us.

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William Greenway author photoWilliam Greenway’s tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection, Ascending Order. Both are from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series. His newest book, The Accidental Garden, is forthcoming from Word Press, and Selected Poems is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press, both in 2014. Greenway’s critical work, The Poetry of Personality: The Poetic Diction of Dylan Thomas, is forthcoming from Rowan and Littlefield in 2014. His publication credits include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer’s Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Greenway was named Georgia Author of the Year. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University.

Sebastian H. Paramo

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BEGINNER’S ENGLISH FOR REFUGEES

by Sebastian H. Paramo

I walk around the makeshift classroom
where the heat has us sweating for words.

The adults repeat phrases like a chorus,
Each word is said
as if it could change their lives.

They get out their notebooks & sharpened
pencils while the fan overhead twirls
a phrase or two that says, show me

the way. Multicolored hands capture
each letter in perfect script
like a child hunger.

They nibble at all the words.
Their eyes are on me—they don't stare,
they're intent at becoming American

like me. I string out a couple more words
& hammer phrases into their brains.
I want to give them that hammer,

holding a marker in my hand,
I want to test the refugees. I call on
a Nepalese woman to answer what is this?

But she doesn’t understand this—that word this.
Not yet. She turns to her neighbor from Iraq
saying No idea. Repeating her phrase. No Idea.

I turn myself around; writing the word again—they repeat.

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Sebastian H. ParamoSebastian H. Paramo’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The North American Review, The McNeese Review, Canary, Lunch Ticket, The Oklahoma Review, and others. He is an editor for the online journal, The Boiler, and was recently awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Dallas.

Katharine Johnsen

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BIRTHDAY

by Katharine Johnsen

                     Boca Raton, March 1995

Clasping my hand around my grandfather's, I pulled him from a 
doze
to rehearse; he was my Daddy Warbucks and I was turning seven,
obsessed with Annie. When he wanted to know how we should 
celebrate,

I said, a party with my friends. I hear her voice now, my grandmother
asking, What friends do you have down here? and my answer: Leah and 
Harry, Shirley and Jules, Arleen and Harold. So my grandparents' 
closest friends

came to my birthday party, couldn't eat the cake because of their 
diabetes, cholesterol, blood pressure. In a drawer is a photograph 
my grandmother took that night: Shirley leaning against the door, 
the others sitting, watching

as my grandfather and I dance and sing to a cassette tape
of the cast recording. I am only the floating hem of a navy
polka-dotted skirt as if it twirls out of the frame on its own.

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Katharine JohnsenKatharine Johnsen studies and teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is the recipient of the Bernice Kert Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and earned her BA from Emory University.