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SIXFO LD Poetry SUMMER 2019
www.sixfold.org Sixfold is a collaborative, democratic, 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. Each issue is free to read online, to download as PDF and as an e-book for iPhone, Android, Kindle, Nook, and others. Paperback book is available at production cost including shipping. Š The Authors. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted without the written permission of the author. Cover Art: Antoine Petitteville. Online at https://antoine-p-photographie.webnode.fr
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SIXFO LD Poetry SUMMER 2019 contents
Laura Apol Elephant Ears Easter Morning And On
7 8 9
Ta y l o r D i b b l e Lessons on sleeping with poets 10 Yellow. 12 Sixth Grade Biology 13 Handfuls 15 A Masterpiece in Progress 16 Binary Comfort 18
Julia Roth Lessons From My Menstrual Cup The Last Scraps of Cape Town Rick Deckard Fucks Rachael the Replicant
19 21 23
Jamie Ross Ceaseless Wind. The Drying Sheaves 25 Last Stop on the Chili Line 26 Passers-by 28 The Road Calls 30
N i c o l e Ya c k l e y Knoxville 32 Mea Culpa 34 Triage 36 The Minotaur Gets a Nose Ring 37 Undressing My Mother 38
George Longenecker I'm sentimental for the Paleolithic 41 Skull in the passenger seat 42 Nana remembers 43 Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee 44 Liquidation 45
Ta y l o r G a r d n e r molding (kinship with the eldritch) we are different parts of the same thing lost cause short observations by angels god is just a personification of things we're too scared to say
46 47 48 49 50
G r e g Tu l e j a Escaping 51 The Woman in 302 52 Spontaneous Human Combustion 53 Dear Oscar 54 No Thomas Hardy 55
Joanne Monte Nowhere on the Map The Source of Our Power War Casualties
56 58 59
Nathaniel Cairney Bumblebee Children 61 Each a Wildf lower 63 Gravel 64 Potato Harvest 65 The Last American in Belgium 66
Steven Dale Davison A Sleepless Sense of Found 68 Sowise 69 You Are Leaving 70 O My Heart 71 Wordsmouth Harbor Founder 72
Heather 'By rd' Rober ts Undoing 73 Paralyzed 74 Keloid 75 Elegy for Breath 76 How I Named Her 77
G r e e n h e a r t 78 A s h t o n Va u g h n Blackbird Looming 84 Through the Valley of Mount Chimaera 85 Halcyon 86 Hallelujah, Hallelujah, as God Looked Away 87 Song of Solomon 88
Linda Speckhals Death Wears a Speedo 90 Borderlands 92 Blue like the sky: A Pantoum 93 Around 3 94
Lucy Griffith Breathing Room 95 The Art of Goodbyes 97 Even though 98 Visitation 100
S t e v e n Va l e n t i n e Written 101 My Father Built These Things by Hand, I Say 102 Metal and Magic 103 A Son's Trust 105 When Tomorrow Comes 106
E m i l y Va r v e l B is for Boy and G is for Guy (1945) 107 An Analysis in Assonance 108 Vase 109 Obstruction 110 Juxtaposition 112
Jhazalyn Prince What the Body Wants and Does Not Want
Marte Stuart Watercolour 120 Generation Snowf lake 121 Lost 122 awaiting the biopsy 123
S. J. E n lo e Surgeon General's Warning Sopas de Caldinho (Kale Soup) The Resilience of Earthworms Displays of Nature II Canaries in the Basement
124 125 126 127 128
Meghan Dunsmuir Where Do I Begin 129 Ancestor 130 Dreamtime 131 Our Path 132 17 Years 133
C o n t r i b u t o r N o t e s 134
Laura Apol Elephant Ears She loved them— the two glass-blown elephants from my childhood turned into a collection I bought for her, brought to her: brass, carved teak, gold-gilt; one made of cloth, one of jade—each tiny, intact—trunk raised or curled, solid circles of feet, and ears flapping, like those green heart-shaped elephant ears in the garden, leaves—wide as my outstretched arms—that still flap, alive, in wind. Can she hear me now? She packed her collection, wrapped in newsprint, with such care. Fragile—Elephants on the box in her script. Our writing is so much alike, Mom, she used to say. I've hung her elephant print on my bedroom wall, where I'll see it: Mama and—protected by the Mama's solid front legs, stroked by her trunk—child. Over the years: she'd hold up her hand to mine, palm to palm, to see how her fingers were almost the same as—were longer than—mine, her elephant ring too large for me now, elephant earrings, necklace, there is nothing she will write again and those lovely fingers loaded that gun, pressed the trigger, the silence ear-splitting and what, after all, did she know about fragile—about handle with care?
Laur a Apol
Easter Morning When the wave rises, it is the water; and when it falls, it is the same water again . . . —Rabindranath Tagore
The cherry trees are in full bloom, the grass around strewn with petals that have fallen in the night. Is this the mystery of life? Of death? I try to believe in heaven—some days yes, some no. This morning, I do. When does water turn to wave, and wave to sea? My conversation with her is forever unfinished. Don't tell me someday it will be complete—by then I will have forgotten what I meant to say, and what, after all, will it matter?
Laur a Apol
And On For three hundred sixty-five days I have tried to make her make sense—ripped out every seam, pulled nails, dug up roots, sanded wood to raw. I have opened turned drained clawed, gone to sleep praying she would come to me, waked in disappointment or tears. I have looked for her in every eagle, heron, hummingbird; every cardinal, oriole, fox. Each startling blossom. Each bit of color I did not expect. My tongue trips over tenses: have/had, is/was, present-or-past the flip of a coin. Both and neither, my empty hand still my hand, scars and blue veins, long lifeline and her silver ring. I have spread the name I gave her—like seed, willed it forward, supple as wheat fields in wind, a knife that sharpens with use. Our stories, just mine now—each a shaky bridge, foot traffic only, how many crossings before it gives way? I know where I have stored the locks of her hair, what remains of her muscle and bone. They pull to me from the chest, pull at me in my chest, a wound she inflicted that afternoon one year ago —right now— a day filled with trillium, trout lilies, blood root. Last year's leaves rattle in the trees, the creek rushing over itself to the river, to the sea.
Laur a Apol
Taylor Dibble Lessons on sleeping with poets Don't. Don't make love to a poet. Do not caress her thighs with dandelion soft fingertips if you don't own a watering can. For the seeds you plant on her hip bones, through kisses, will lust for your honey-sweet watering. She will pluck flowers from the gardens that grow in your molars and plant them on her neck, leaving botanically influenced bite marks. Leave your gentle kisses at home in an envelope, high atop a counter, away from her muse-hungry hands. Don't make love to a poet because she will kiss every door frame you walk through. Peel fingerprints off the doorknob and place them where the ghosts of your touch last danced. As your tongues tango, she will write the chord progression of their song. But don't fuck a poet either. For she will hear a grand symphony in your growl at her to bend over. Don't fuck a poet because she will search for constellations in the freckles she can connect on your chest. She will moan your name into pillows made of angel wings and beg you to pull bible verses from her hair. Do not push her up against a brick wall and claw at her body hiding under her shirt unless you're ready to experience her throaty howl to the man in the moon. Refrain from dragging your snake-like tongue across her raised collar bones until you've tamed your own, inner Medusa. 10
Taylor Dibble
Do not fuck a poet because she will write about the threesome you two had with your personal, childhood trauma. She will become a scribe of nasty details like, how, shower sex is your favorite because you can't tell when you're crying. Don't fuck a poet because she'll ask you to choke her and while it may restrict her airflow, it will not keep her hand from paper. She'll trap your blissful curses in her ink and tattoo them across her journals. She will bury half your body under a daisy meadow and the other will be stored in the mausoleum next door to the local gentlemen's club.
Taylor Dibble
Yellow. It's hard to write some days, with the beehive behind my sternum violently rattling. my pen throws his ball-point head back, away from the paper. Writing poetry is a skill my anxiety has not yet mastered. It is hard to put words together when you're struggling to find oxygen. When you swallow the paper bag and your square breaths cut the inside of your cheeks. I've learned that shaky hands cause accidents and that attempting to calm down without release is like trying to cut yourself with wet cardboard. When I am anxious, I want to rip my chest apart. Let gold, gooey honey spill out. I want to tear off bee's wings and shove them into my eyes to use as contact lens. I want the relentless buzz to rattle my bones and wipe my brain of all but static electricity. I want to let it consume me. I have become far too familiar with the feeling of my lungs folding themselves up like lawn chairs. Of my heart yanking on its muzzle and slamming into the back of my chest. Of the way rumble strips feel to the unsuspecting blind and sewing needles filling my throat with dream catchers.
Taylor Dibble
Sixth Grade Biology The one thing I retained from sixth grade is about geese. My biology teacher explaining the V Pattern of flight they take is permanently ingrained into my brain. It's a survival skill she said, they can save their energy and take turns being the leader. That year we learned about camouflage and poison and which snakes were safe to pick up in your backyard. Geese seem to have instructions pattern tattooed to their wingtips, but it is all instinctual. For hundreds of years, geese have been born knowing how to stay safe. Growing up, you are not taught a foolproof method of avoiding rape. You're told your thumbs can puncture eyes and that your voice is the loudest siren, but you are not given an escape route or born with a V pattern to save you. In a moment of panic you don't remember your hands can fight back. You forget the banshee trapped in your throat and how to tie your shoelaces into anything but a noose. I don't remember his name but I still remember how his calloused hands felt as they brushed my cheek as he pushed my hair behind my ear. How it felt to have N's and O's clawing their way up a closing throat. How my limbs felt like wet laundry and how easily I became a rag doll. It's been nine months since spider legs tugged at my jeans and I still dream of my chest collapsing. My ribs disintegrating into an hourglass. I dream of the sweat dripping into my eye and a gritty, you're such a pretty girl spat out with the scent of cigarettes and fry grease. Desperation greets me when I jolt awake in a cold sweat. He guides my clumsy, half awake feet to a desk in the pitch black.
Taylor Dibble
He helps me block the stench with crushed opiates via a rolled up biology flash card. You don't think you'll become a statistic until 1 in 3 isn't just a set of numbers. You don't think you're the only one who sees victim branded across your forehead. You don't think a white ceiling will ever be interesting. But in that moment it was. And the only thing in my mind was flight patterns and the geese.
Taylor Dibble
Handfuls When I was younger, I used to collect fireflies. Tiny drops of sunlight drifting through the black blanket of night. Once they were in my cupped hands, I would slide them into clear mason jar kingdoms out on the back porch. I'd lay my head next to the jar and watch the bright yellow flickerbees blink kisses to me. I caught well over a million baby lightening bolts throughout my seemingly endless summers. Now, there are seams tearing in white dresses and every postage stamp I see is torn in two. I can't tell you when it happened, and I sure as hell can't tell you why, but sometimes vending machine lights flicker at the gas station by my house, and for a split second I swear I can see fireflies behind the glass. Maybe it's because I noticed one day my hands were leaving too many cracks to keep light in. Too many holes that cannot be filled. Someone mailed me a pair of hands last week. They were packaged in a cardboard box. No paper. No bow. I haven't stopped shaking since I peeled the tape off the crease. Not because of the present, but because I couldn't remember the last time I had held them. But more importantly, when was the last time that they had caught a firefly?
Taylor Dibble
A Masterpiece in Progress When the question "How do you identify yourself?" is shot up into the class like a starting pistol, the class is off to the races. The scratching of pens and pencils father together like a pack. Did you know wolves howl at the moon to find each other? Did you know I cry at night because I can no longer even find myself? I am a deserted island full of faceless dolls, a museum with no artwork, I am self-baptized in a dirty bathtub, a link in a broken chain and thrown away pizza crust. There's a guitar that sits in the corner of my bedroom and I have no idea how to play it. I spend more time staring at the curves than I do learning how to strum. I wonder if you played me correctly if I would finally sound beautiful. I know I talk a lot, it's only because I don't want to forget what I sound like. According to my doctor, I am medically overweight. I try to tell him those extra pounds come from the grenade clipped to my tongue. I'm told poets have switchblade words, but lately my mouth has been so full of my own damn blood that I can barely speak. A poet once told me, they used to get "rapper hands" when they performed and that it was completely normal. But the only wrapping I do is at Christmas. Boxing up fake smiles for everyone. A season of giving but lately all everyone does is take. Did you ever think twice before you swallowed me whole? 16
Taylor Dibble
I have given away parts of myself I am still searching to get back. The small of my back was in the flash of a camera. My dignity and dependence had been camping out in the hum of a fluorescent light. Making love to the memories of when I saw myself as a good person has become habit. I am a nymphomaniac of defeat. A poet once told me, to not make myself the monster in my poems and although that's hard, I have started to believe him. Because my suicide date was set for May 1st, but now the first thing I think of when May is said aloud is another reason to live. Because May has a special place in my heart for giving me a reason to live. Two reasons to live. A million reasons to live. Enough reasons to live that god dammit Here I am. I am going to be me no matter what metaphor I mend to myself through poetry, so I better make it a good one.
Taylor Dibble
Binary Comfort Cinnamon can chase away ants if you sprinkle some along their trails, lavender deters scorpions and a honeybee will not fly in the rain. She must simply rest on a raised window ledge til the clear. Guided by sunlight, her navigation is halted in the peak of the downpour. The sky releases liquid sadists who stretch themselves wide to reach for her wings. Demobilizing bullets threaten to weigh her means of travel down. But I will keep her safe, tucked under my tongue. As she softly dances across the surface, I will rearrange my tastebuds to hexagons and regurgitate sweet words to make her feel at home. I'll force my tongue to work the night shift to leave one side of my mouth vacant, until the storm passes.
Taylor Dibble
Julia Roth Lessons From My Menstrual Cup There's an episode of Friends where Chandler unwittingly attends a one woman show that opens with the actress yelling why don't you like me? and then chapter one: my first period. Then the laugh track plays, because the boom of this woman's voice, her Eiffel Tower stance and relentless anatomy are all parts of the punch line. It's funny because no one wants to listen to a one woman show where I clumsily empty a swollen thimbleful of my DNA into the toilet & say a little prayer to the silicone tulip suspended inside me catching the physicality of my unmaking & how it shocked me the first time it unfolded into my fickle origami of flesh because I felt nothing & wanted to laugh there in the shower thinking isn't that just like my body the most disputed land of my body to whisper fuck you one day you'll realize all the things I can hide all the things I can carry but for now I am trapped within the discography of the sane singing the gospel of the douche down Walgreens's armory aisles of Vagisil & more discreet Summers Eve because I am a host for smells I can't control but am ultimately held accountable for & SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Julia Roth
times like these I can't help thinking about when I overheard a man say to his friend she must've been drinking beer because her pussy tasted sour & we meaning my sisterhood of ancestors have been here constantly emptying ourselves or preparing to empty ourselves trying to explain to you what it's like to watch what you are made of slither down the drain like oil & know you have lived another unrewindable month with so much & so little control over what's inside you
Julia Roth
The Last Scraps of Cape Town I went to a winery with the best bathroom in the world. Opposite the toilet, an entire wall of glass framed a hill quilted with autumn-honeyed grapevines. So quiet I held my breath while I peed. I needed a gate code and three skeleton keys to unlock my apartment. To sleep I needed two blankets, a fleece jacket, a hat. I bought electricity at the grocery store to feed my apartment's hungry circuits. I shut myself in an armoire once when I felt alone. I watched a bunch of poached eggs float around and around like jellyfish before being scooped onto a bed of hash browns and smoked salmon for a couple bucks a plate. The neighborhood bars looked like vigils with so many lit candles. When the power went out, conversations flickered and chins tilted up. Placing bets on the length of darkness. A friend leaned across the table to listen and her hair caught fire. I am embarrassed, now, to remember this when I forget so much else. I skipped work because there was no hot water to shower. I wasn't unclean, I was just afraid of the train and the cold and meaninglessness. I was afraid of the train held together with stickers screaming HEALER DEON: MONEY IN ACCOUNT, BRING BACK
Julia Roth
LOST LOVER, PENIS ENLARGEMENT and DR. GRACE SAFE ABORTION. There was one of those bright red tour buses where you could hear them talking over a loudspeaker from the sidewalk. You could buy tickets to ride it around a Real Live Township and gawk at the scrap metal houses and the people who live inside them. Not a secret or anything. I went to a market/an aquarium/a cafĂŠ. I climbed a mountain with a lake/a cave/a cloud right on top. It almost seemed like I could understand a place from above. Something about planting flags/ ownership/altitude deluding you. It was such that, for a moment, I thought I deserved understanding.
Julia Roth
Rick Deckard Fucks Rachael the Replicant It begins with Rachael trying to run Rick chasing slamming the door shut with a closed fist locked arm shoving Rachael back into the apartment clattering her against the film noir blinds In the script this is all reduced to [a little rough-housin'] Dick is kind enough to give Rachael instructions: say kiss me After all—she's a programmable thing And I'll never know the end of the sentence she begins with I can't rely on . . . because Dick cuts her off, demanding she say it, say kiss me with him coding her desire, she complies, says kiss me but he's unconvinced, needs her to say more, say I want you And maybe she thinks she does or maybe Dick is a convincing teleprompter or maybe she's programmed with an alternate definition of want, but either way she repeats I want you And he commands— again SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Julia Roth
And I know how she feels when she recites, from some distant index of sexuality, I want you. Put your hands on me, playing repeat after me instead of breaking the arm that's slamming the door shut.
Julia Roth
Jamie Ross Ceaseless Wind. The Drying Sheaves heave in their twine. A man can only tie so much, and then move on. How often have I found this road—two simple tracks curving into darkness. They don't explain their readiness, or their appearance. I don't forget who lined this face. Every step I take I learned from you. Every match I strike trembles with your light. The old stone barn sighs in its ruin. Carla's two gray burros flick their tails, doze against a wall. The ancient towering cacti around my mother's grave wave back and forth, with spiked familiar fingers. We all have nails embedded in our hands. Every village has a bus arriving from the distance, each window with its curtains, TV's that play movies hours after dawn. So long I've heard their rumble, deep along the river. Turn back, my love. Look again, at me. Let me comb your hair. —Ajuchitlán, Guerrero
Jamie Ross
Last Stop on the Chili Line —Rio Arriba, New Mexico
Now the tracks are gone at Taos Junction but the stones remain—hammered plinths and stelae that marked a freight train's passage, some still upright, others down to rubble, each one etched with miles and chiseled towns, a distant whistle moaning from Servilleta station, the iron clack and thunder of drive-rods and wheels, pine-fire steam and pistons wheezing up the steep from the Embudo drop. Henry Wilton in his vest and flannel shirt smiling at the door, Susie in the kitchen with her two-buck enchiladas. Brown-bottled beer stacked in a machine: Ice Cold Coke 5¢. How it got there is our story with its lines bent and fractured, pounded seven decades up from Silver City, through Socorro, Antonito, Huerfano and north, how wood became the coal, how the world becomes its own harder instrument— a two-man broadsaw gone pneumatic, a river's floating logs to a hopper freighting ore, smoke choking Pueblo and gas fires smelting steel. How the rails, cars and boilers were shipped into the furnace, poured into molds, the Rio Grande & Santa Fe now just names for history. Where a stop becomes a family or a lifeline or a place of deep transference—the vanished town of Stong with its rock-wall platform, houses and hotels 26
Jamie Ross
where Henry went to school, learned his figures and the tonnage, surveys for the highway, dorm rooms for workers and headstones for the failures the war would leave in fragments. Where a man like Henry Wilton would still hold on, as Susie ladles chile; while a group of boys in pickups, beards, hemp and desperation take their barstools with the others at the flask-lined mirror—women weaving horsehair, babies wrapped in burlap, torn men in leather, soot-covered pants— waiting with their whiskey, Schlitz or soda, waiting for the sawmills, or foundries, a hospital in Denver, a shack in La Petaca, waiting, as we all wait, for the next train north, or the next train south. Who was my father? When can we go home?
Jamie Ross
Passers-by —San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato
Many have flown or bussed to escape the thrall of blizzards, frigid months of erasable light. But the stooped man herding two burros past these café doors has never seen snow. His beasts are stacked with bulging sun-bleached muslin sacks, from the nearby cerros—hand-dug planting soil. They amble easy, slow, through robust mango, laurel and banana trees, new-blossom lemon, redolent gardenia. Every small front yard a universe of roses, lily, starburst gladiola and bird-of-paradise. The campesino carries a mesquite switch which he rarely uses. The burros know their route by heart: each corner and callejón, each entry that will open at the moment of arrival; the woman, man or child who'll emerge with the weekly five pesos, a saucer of galletas, mug of hot atole, two ripe apples—or, by fortune, a dish of figs. For burros, figs are special. Perhaps it's in their blood, an ancestral taste from their time near Bethlehem.
Jamie Ross
Always, they've carried gifts, human needs, and needed humans across the desert. Burros know winter all too well, and this way of service. Once it was Mary, about to birth Jesus. Today it's snow white sacks of dirt.
Jamie Ross
The Road Calls Again. As much as I deny her, as much as the red pickup squeals in its belts, rattles in its rust. I love you, says the truck. Always the two mesas blue in the distance, always this wracked highway, steep in its declension, whipping like a rattler down to the village. Always the café with its wood-fired Ashley, stacked split cedar, planked pine tables for Mona's enchiladas, her pinto beans and chile for the stream of tourists, long-haul freighters; a family from Chama with their 1950's hay-rig tow-roped to the trunk of a Ford LTD, Jake Mora's son Merle on his gas-route to Ratón; two kids from Questa, with a yellow bashed Camaro parked behind the dumpster, her smeared day-glo lipstick, his left, swollen eye. Always the dishes, scratched and steaming, served in celebration—by Ronnie, Mona's sister, hair swept back, who knows me like my sleep, every stock word, knows every idling semi, every awkward gesture of the teenagers' hands. They don't reach for their sodas, or napkins, but for one another as I once reached for her. And the engines simmer quiet for one blessed moment, while I sip my coffee, with a front moving in. Until the crack of thunder, a school bus rumbling by, the money and the tip. The one
Jamie Ross
she's knows by now, more or less— with a flip in her hair, the wave of her hand, and mine, on the shift; half-turn of the wheel. I love you, says the truck. Hey Ronnie, says the truck. Headed up a mountain in the oncoming rain. —Rio Arriba, NM
Jamie Ross
Nicole Yackley Knoxville To explore a city, you must leave the apartment. To leave the apartment, you must have gas in the car, you must know where the car keys are, you must leave the dog behind. To leave the dog behind without her crying, you must give her something to eat, you must move everything else that a dog could eat out of reach. At this point, you've thought about food too many times not to be hungry. To find something to eat, you must look in the fridge and close it again. You must open the fridge. If there's still nothing you want to eat, you must go to the grocery store, but not right now—today is reserved for discovery. You open the pizza app but have forgotten your password. You go to reset the password but what you type in won't work because it's the previous password. You order a pizza. The dog scratches at the door. She's bored, so you ignore her. To explore a city, you must know how to get there. You must open up Google and type in parking, find an address, fall down the wiki wormhole of when the parking meters were replaced, their fancy new interface touch sensitive. You must know if they require quarters, if you must pay on the weekend or after 5. To save the change, you decide to wait till after 5. The pizza hasn't arrived. It must be any minute now, so when the dog whines, scratches lines in the paint of the door with nails you meant to trim last Thursday, you ignore her. To explore the city, you must be in the right mood, convinced the buzz behind your eyes means excitement, not anxiety. When the knock comes and the dog wets the carpet with excitement or anxiety or because the pizza is twenty minutes late, when the person apologizes, you must say it's fine 32
Nicole Yackley
because you don't know how to be angry to someone's face. Before you eat the pizza, you must take the dog out. You must clean the carpet. It will be after 5 and the buzzing behind your eyes is no longer anxiety, but you don't know where the car keys are and there's always tomorrow.
Nicole Yackley
Mea Culpa 2016
An election ago we thought the world was ending. That its last legs might last a month, a month and a half, after the votes were cast, but the scales tipped in the right direction for once, and the year was redeemed as non-apocalyptic. This year cannot be redeemed. All the photos of suffering have been rereleased in color on the widescreen. Overexposure eats the heads off anyone who tries to lift them. Was Paris this year? Turkey? Nice? We're marking time in new disasters, each worse than the ones before because there were ones before and it happened anyway. Each somehow more and less real. I toured campus the second week of June, slept in an unfamiliar setting and woke to too-familiar news closer to home than I was: 50 lost— in the city where my brother taught— No, not lost, shot— in the state where my sister taught— 50 dropped whose brother's blood wasn't good enough to save them— 50 coopted into sad sounds by "saints" who made it anything but what it was. How is this much blood not enough to name it? (homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia—) Our Fault. I learned about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile only when I learned about Dallas. I didn't watch the video. I didn't want to witness a murder the way I would a movie of a murder. I didn't want to be reminded I was useless. I was selfish and didn't want to be reminded I was selfish. I told myself my tongue wasn't good enough to save them.
Nicole Yackley
We set the bar this year at non-apocalyptic and tripped long before we reached it. No matter how apologetic or apoplectic the politicians pretend to be about the ever-increasing number of horsemen (racism, sexism, ableism—as if our friends needed new ways for us to hurt them) horsemen who kicked sand in our faces, and made the ground uneven, yet we keep building stalls in which to house them. Mom called me crying three days after Dallas. She'd sung "Here Comes the Sun" as a friend walked down the aisle and her cousin died in a restaurant in Alabama. We had to put my dog down the same day we drove to the funeral and it felt fitting. Appropriate for this clusterfuck of a year. How many days, how many hours between shootings? How many have I ignored because I can't mourn them separately anymore? In my family I'm the heartless one, and here I am, still crying.
Nicole Yackley
Triage I excise my anger through scalpelwork— to get the quiet back, I'd carve down to bone. Remove the moment to remove the hurt. I lay you out, slice the belly first, slip my hand inside to find the growth— I excise my anger through scalpelwork. Before the tumult that shook our secret world, I trusted your heart as if it were my own removed. To halt the momentum of hurt I unearth the organ, scrape off the cells that burst from your raised voice. As all good doctors know, when speech is not enough, a scalpel will work. The eyes I cannot meet, I cleanse of dirt, rinse the residue of ire from your throat. As I relive the moment, the more it hurts. I'll stitch up the body and act, as I've rehearsed, as if there were no wrong. Change is always worse, so I've excised my anger through scalpelwork. Remove the moment, remove the hurt.
Nicole Yackley
The Minotaur Gets a Nose Ring The Minotaur gets a nose ring to be ironic. A septum piercing to be exact. He goes to the bar to be a little less himself and dances with anyone who doesn't mention it. To be gilded with a symbol that meant follower but doesn't mean follower anymore. To remind himself when he feels too bee fy that he is bull, is bovine—that he half rhymes with divine and is alive from divine inter ference. To embrace his wild side and by wild he means too be autiful for human skin to hold.
Nicole Yackley
Undressing My Mother after Robert Hass
I talk in storms, in myth to skirt the subject. What I have to say is said in whispers in closed rooms while my brother or sister stand guard at the door. The worst of it is she's going to read this The worst of it is she reads everything I write Her body is not novelty. I have seen the mirrors of my mother stacked endlessly upright as she undresses in the evening. I have followed the trajectory of my own shape as it parades past windows I imagine the Lommens have been shocked into ignoring. Look at my mother in the mirror, where she's harmless. Did this power of hers to meet your eye as she removes her bra, to hold a conversation stepping out of lace underwear, begin in hospital? Leave your hand too near, unattended, and she will press it to the hollow in her breast where the port was following the blood clot. What does she want me to believe? I have come to know it doesn't take a wholeness to survive. Pray for us sisters, now and at the hour of
Nicole Yackley
I was the one who found her. My dad adding more Italian seasoning to the burgers than he could get away with with her in the kitchen, leaving out the Worchestershire sauce altogether. The three of us in the living room, close enough to smell the sizzle, far enough not to have to help and my brother volunteered for me to check on her— Looking back, she was naked. She couldn't have been, looking back, just woken from a nap, a stop by the bathroom before dinner, but her presence in my mind feels naked, pale against the red against the tile, slumped on the floor, as pale as the tile— Dad told me to call 911; I handed him the phone. Pray for us sisters that now is not the hour of What is secret? What is s a c r e d? Who gave you the right to enter the bathroom, to soak your socks in my mother's blood and track it on the tile? Did I open this door to avoid my anger? This was after the surgery. After my parents' banquet without my parents, my brother making me laugh on the drive, absence drowning in denial. There is a letter hidden in my drawer where she says goodbye. There have been too many times my brother watched me cry. A year to the day, my mother drove us to the banquet and she was cruel and I cried. She made me hug her and in my mind she was anesthetized and under a knife and I wanted to hug a different her and I didn't want to hug her. The worst is she's going to read The worst of it everything I write SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Nicole Yackley
My mother is most vicious when she feels turned upon— don't look at her directly. In the mirror, she is breakable and therefore human. Follow the silver of her scars—she jokes they should put a zipper in, for next time. I am not afraid of her nakedness or the seam where they took the cancer out, gave her a metal heart. How is it continually surprising that my mother isn't nice? Sickly sweet, sure, southern belle, sure, birdwatcher, naturelover, yes, all these things and more, I have been blest with the best of parents. It is sacrilege to speak against her. What gives me the right to unzip her for you? To shove my mother to the center of the room and turn the AC on until the point is clearer. Does stranding her in the cold afford us clarity? I love my mother. After the cancer and the surgery, the chemo, radiation, the blood clot and the bypass. After the cruelty and the tears and the distance now to say this without a sibling at the door, standing guard. There have been too many times we almost said goodbye. This is a catalogue of when you made me cry. Stay for us sisters, now and forever.
Nicole Yackley
George Longenecker I'm sentimental for the Paleolithic since I'm kind of a retro guy who's never much liked the Neolithic, or those neoconservatives with their guns, bombs and money, telling me to get a job, when I'd rather be reading Whitman or Thoreau and sitting under a tree on a spring day in Lascaux, really—life was easy, plenty of leisure time and— as long as your flints were sharp— enough food to go around, we had time to paint, enjoy a cup of Bordeaux, eat roast trout and fresh strawberries— that Neolithic was too damned much work, growing grain 8-5 every day, when we could be picking Chanterelles and spearing goats in the woods— oh they make fun of us now— savages, cave men but we lived longer and stronger, we Paleolithic men and women, yes, back then women had some power, and those cave paintings were damned good— we had time to draw flowers, to watch stars, we counted seasons by the night sky, knew when solstice was coming, then we'd make love all night; our world was empty then, yet so full of everything we needed— wrap me in fur and take me back to the Paleolithic any day.
George Longenecker
Skull in the passenger seat of a '33 Dodge, its rusted metal worn smooth by 80 years of blowing sand and dust across the high Nevada desert. A rancher with a sense of humor and art— O'Keefe with a little Picasso and Warhol— has set this steer's skull in the seat atop a rusty steel shaft sticking up where the brain used to be. The steer stares east (at least as well as a steer can stare with only eye sockets and no brain) out across the village of Baker, and east to the Great Basin of Utah. Tourists on their way to a national park stop to take photos of this macabre desert traveler— a steer with no legs or hooves in a car with no wheels. Maybe we're fascinated because it's so stark— like the high desert, or maybe it's because we'll be there someday— our own bleached skeletons in silent cars rusting into desert, prickly pear cacti poking through where once there were wheels that could speed us anywhere, skull sockets where once were eyes that could see snow on mountains high above this desert.
George Longenecker
Nana remembers a frozen lake where she skated under clear winter sky with pink clouds, where chickadees called. She felt free on ice, and could glide forever into western light. Nana tells of winters when there was snow, summers when a girl could wade in ponds, where painted turtles basked on logs. It's one hundred ten at noon. The sea laps eaves of cottages like a huge seal— but seals are gone— sun, hot by dawn as it rises purple and orange over the Atlantic, chews away at seawalls and beach houses, then washes its way inland to the lakes. The future's begun, Nana said that first year the big storms came. She shows us her skates, tells us of frozen lakes, how she cut long lines, and perfect figure eights.
George Longenecker
Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee Rifles cracked, blood turned to ice on snow, west wind blew knife-cold out of Black Hills. Ghost Dancers' shirts embroidered with porcupine quills, frayed by bullets, still clothe their bones, colors long-since faded after a hundred twenty seven winters, a hundred ninety seven Lakota in a trench at Pine Ridge. Silent except for echoes of rifles, pleas of Hunkpapa and Miniconju, children's cold screams, Ghost Dancers' voices on the wind.
George Longenecker
Liquidation A shoe store at the mall, which hasn't been doing enough business, has a dozen signs plastered over its windows: Liquidation 50% Off—End of Season Clearance The manager unlocks a security gate, the store is open; customers file in. Piles of shoes: sneakers, sandals, baby shoes, oxfords, loafers, running shoes, hiking boots, high heels, moccasins, yoga shoes, work boots too many to shoes to count— everything cut. Liquidation: to do away with especially by killing; to convert (assets) into cash. Treblinka, Bosnia, Guatemala, Rwanda, a security gate is unlocked, they are ordered to enter single file for processing, half to one side, half to the other, eventually all will go. Sand Creek, Warsaw, Katlyn Forest, Kosovo— there's always a reason, why all must go efficiently, there's always a reason for liquidation, for clearance. Afterwards: piles of shoes. Large shoes, baby shoes, piled as though they might be worn again, but other shoes lie forgotten by the side of a dusty road somewhere, too many shoes to count, too many places to remember. SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
George Longenecker
Taylor Gardner molding (kinship with the eldritch)1 honeysuckle cherubim wings were shaped from the petals crushed in between god's hands. soft like pulp, they still bleed when they hear his voice. seraphim wings were torn into crow feathers were carved from thorns and the edges of leaves. they bent and cut and survived and god's hands still wear the scars. they hurt to look at. god didn't make the archangel's wings. they made themselves from the chaos left behind. they stole the dark, the before, and held the horror sharpened from the light. god smiles when he looks at them and the wings shiver back. there is nothing beautiful in misshapen petals. the book did not say beauty, god did not say bloom, he said creation and everything is ugly about that.
An atheist looks at the biblical version of angels and feels a kinship
Taylor Gardner
we are different parts of the same thing a girl is told she was made in the image of god and she wonders which part, wonders how it is good to be part of scraps. god pulled out his herbivore teeth one molar at a time, left nothing left but ripped flesh and blood and us. he carved angels out of the bone, peeled them into flowers, and made them into the carnivore he couldn't bring himself to be. twisted demons from nerves and they are nothing but pain, eating the leftover bone shards in a surgical endeavor to try and not feel such agony anymore. god smiled, sunken mouth and gums and all, holes where we're supposed to be, and said "eat. think of me in the hunger and know that to be hollowed is to be hallowed, that there is beauty in the emptiness and that you are empty with ache."
Taylor Gardner
lost cause she felt too much and saw too much in a world that would not look back—in a god who would not answer. she was created without wings, only a force of fury; beautiful and beastly, a dragon inside of a snake, and she wondered if it was because he knew she was to fall. she feels too much and she cannot believe that there is something larger—how could anything exist in a greater magnitude to what she feels? she does not believe but she will blame.
Taylor Gardner
short observations by angels1 i. that ringing in my ears when the sky takes us sings like ecstasy cradled in their throats—i am bound by the vibrations in my bones—by the angels digging into my skin— by the altar i'm being pried open into. ii. absolution tastes like finishing silence, clementine and salt—it's pinned by the wings on god's bed—spilling hallelujahs to the sheets and feeling the light leave marks bruised onto its thighs. iii. god belongs to the devil in the way you moan his name— the way you carve desire into a halo—and how you then break it into horns—god and desire are hidden claws that drag down your back and into your hair—mouthing prayers and verses down to the skeleton beneath your flesh. iv. when god said kneel—lucifer was the first to say "kinky" and was the first to say "no"—all glowing hoard before a dragon—and then he was the first to take power while on his knees and make a crown out of bowing—make dragon wings out of gold. v. saints lick constellations onto your lips and novas in your mouths until you are bursting—they have no wings—just names they make you scream until they feel like they can fly vi. creation, creation, creation—
The atheist rewrites Genesis into an orgy
Taylor Gardner
god is just a personification of things we're too scared to say she learned how to pray through the mouthful of words caught in her throat by spitting onto the paper and turning the shards into lines that spoke to her better than any other god ever could. yes, she worships. yes, she aches. but isn't that just faith? that she's still coughing up slivers and loose thoughts, that she's not letting her blood drown her from the inside, is just faith in a day where she won't have to hurt to write. dandelion seeds and sun stretched rays will be all she needs to grow a confessional instead of being one. she believes—in herself.
Taylor Gardner
Greg Tuleja Escaping When we still had voices we used to sing in two parts, our favorite rounds and folk tunes, perhaps an aria, but then the slipping, the wavering began, and we knew that soon we would become nonessential, unknown and invisible, obliged to silence our own breathing, a distant, muffled groan, a gasp, a sudden slash of dissonance. When they drew their knives we felt the high breeze that spun itself down toward the hard foothills and whistled through a bend of chestnut trees where we could hide, so penitent and still, so insignificant in the thin air, huddled behind a shallow spray of leaves, a sanctuary where they would not dare to look, a place where we might start to grieve. But the slim tendrils parted, on a cloud of gray mist, and they did look, they did see their wayward daughters, resonant and proud, but damaged by a brilliant memory of blood screams and the bright, blazing chaos to which we must return, bearing the pain of renunciation, and a last loss of hope, two songbirds trembling in the rain.
Greg Tuleja
The Woman in 302 This morning the woman in 302 rolled the piano toward the window again and this time out it went, from three stories up, a didactic gesture, she later explained, rather than an aggressive one although she did admit to being surprised and perhaps disappointed that no one was hurt. She must have been more singularly determined this time, and able to command the resolve that is needed to do such a thing, but we always knew that she possessed enough leverage of spirit and control of her imagination to reach for grand, existential achievements, drawing on a cunning strength of personality, pushing through a tangle of ethical contradictions, and finally getting it to go, a great black blur against the yellow brick and indifferent silences of our building. Afterwards we were told that she had no regrets for so dramatically annihilating convention in order to grasp a dream, and watching her, in this her finest triumph we all realized that we were in the presence of greatness, even the poor, shaken, anonymous pedestrians on Madison Avenue, who might eventually be persuaded, she had often said, to take more responsibility for where they walk.
Greg Tuleja
Spontaneous Human Combustion Not many would, I think, believe it true that Auntie might explode while pulling weeds. Ridiculous! Impossible, they'd say, there must be other reasons, deeper clues, as fire trucks careen to intercede, too late for Auntie, who has burned away. But let's not close our minds, it could be true that high metabolism, added to a taste for ion-busting alcohol might cause a spark, a flame, a fireball! It's not as bad as swarms of killer bees, or being mauled by raving chimpanzees, dismemberment by packs of wild boars, that open window on the eighteenth floor, a trash compactor that we might be crushed in. I'd make the choice: spontaneous combustion.
Greg Tuleja
Dear Oscar The tomb in Pere Lachaise surrounded, a murmuring crowd of ardent admirers, cameras zooming, tiny stones clicking on stone to anchor scribbled messages to this imagined friend, the florid celebrity poet, stopped now, here in this shadowy corner far from home, the Dublin pubs and lecture halls, the London prisons. They seem young, these French groupies, non-readers, I suspect, unfamiliar with Lord Savile or Lady Windermere, as they aim their cell phones, and with blue chalk and black marker ignore the warning, Please Do Not Deface The Monument, affectionate tributes scrawled to dear Oscar, You will shine for us always, with Truth and Courage, Your Life imitated your Art, How I wish I had known you. Stepping back then, the full view of the strange sculpture, an odd creature without category, stretching forward, leaning out defiantly toward the world, a bizarre figurehead sailing into the wind, attended by these faithful pilgrims, his name obscured by intricate strands of lipstick kisses, pressed to the cold marble like a wreath of roses. Dear Oscar we love you.
Greg Tuleja
No Thomas Hardy Shocked by another birthday, I dreamed of books I will never read, nearly out of time for Margaret Atwood and Rupert Brooke, and all the abstruse Russians. How, through crimes of idleness that I dared to commit did I squander a rare and precious chance to discover the daring, lavish wit that seemed to glimmer in the dry distance, and how so fiercely did I remain blind to breathless, dying fires, year after year, to be finally defeated, resigned never to know Count Vronsky or King Lear? What might be heard through all this glorious burning? Just the low, plaintive sound of a page, turning.
Greg Tuleja
Joanne Monte Nowhere on the Map We're driving through the plains of an untold story, heading west into a country that is ours and not ours, into a rural sense of lost spirit. We pass cautionary signs authorizing: "USE OF DEADLY FORCE," where in the distance, a chain-link fence marks an underground silo not shown on the map. We continue to follow this road, looking ahead into the daylight glaring back at us and the landscape, our eyes excavating the bones of one lone farm. We see the barn stranded in the middle of nowhere in the arms of a broken-down fence; a one-time plow; contaminated well water; and the old homestead, stripped bare, and bending down in the dirt. Every now and then the sun's rays will strike like a match; each one a tiny bomb of flame bursting in the wind and chill of lost promise; a desire less visible, but scrolling on either side of us through the archives of faded color. We see the relics of a ruined renaissance, the machinations of the political that were never put on record, a ritual of too many mistakes concealed in the evolving sorrow of lost tribes. We are somewhere, and nowhere in the heart of sheer memorabilia lingering on the corner of Main; the church anointing the sick, the disabled, 56
Joanne Monte
the crumbling walls of the courthouse and jail; and on the other side, a school, no longer in use, but holding within its walls the day's lessons.
Joanne Monte
The Source of Our Power Living with the havoc of every generation: annihilation diffusing a blast of mushroom clouds, unwanted testing grounds, for years blitzed and salted with radiation, the newsprint of the world tossed on our front lawns, pages ripped out by the gut, smeared on our hands, our shirts, even our children as they race through the past flying airplanes and kites with the earliest perception of power stored in the genetic code. Prior scenes had divulged— as later scenes will—a race to sharpen the implements of destruction. In cool, white-washed laboratories, stainless steel counters hold secrets steaming in beakers, test tubes, crucibles— these being the solutions that defy the true source of our power.
Joanne Monte
War Casualties I When it was reported in the news that rebels had been killed in an ambush, and that cargo planes from the north had bombed that part of the country not protected by barbed wire or walls, two million people had already been lost in a fire ignited by oil and water. Many children had to crawl into a thorn forest. Others were left under the scalding sun of a war zone. A map of that country had revealed nothing of its past but borders. Cities had been founded and lost where even the thorn bushes lay siege. Below that wilderness, there exists another, of dark and pastel greens to be burned again and again until the day it surrenders itself to the desert.
II It's been proven—to be proven again that the clubs of outrage breaking windows, ribs, the laws of continuity, shall become the spades of history, digging the ground to place us there— and yes, we are still enslaved, chained, overworked: a deck we stand on, the rope we reel into the wind like a clothesline to hang out our memories SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Joanne Monte
of the white shirt our father wore, ripped open and slashed with his blood, the torn flesh in the overalls of childhood that our mother wept over, clung to; her blue dress whipped on the line with intensity, still stained with sweat, blood, semen; the dress in which she pleaded on her knees; hid our faces in, telling us to be still, do not look back, do not . . .
III Where it begins, it will end with the torched house, the slaughtered cattle; at the well, digesting the raw flesh of the children in its subterranean gut; at the river coughing up the mucus of toxic waste, the garb of ethnic cleansing scrubbed on its rocks. It will end at the cemetery in Dragodan; in the village of a chosen language, suffocating from smoke; in the fields that have orphaned and killed our children— it will end at the border of the imaginary line drawn between the state and the shadow-state. But what country is this and what will it take? Guns—(as in any country at war) It will take guns . . .
Joanne Monte
Nathaniel Cairney Bumblebee Children Black-and-yellow fuzz stirs sparkling swords of emerald grass. This one was trapped on her side, rolling like a wounded buffalo felled at the foot of a mole mountain. Something heavy weighs her down. Leaning over at the knees, I extend a bent white metal rod that once kept curtains from falling. She climbs aboard, then looks at me as if to say, "Well? Now what?" I lift my stick toward the fence, toward the close-cropped bushes, toward the neighbor's house, toward the horizon, toward forever, and murmur, "There you go, sweetheart." My youngest son, wooden saber in hand, cocks his head to one side. "You call it 'sweetheart'?" Truly, I did not mean to. The words emerged on their own, without thought. SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Nathaniel Cairney
This is what happens when one spends years of a life helping to lift smaller creatures from the ground. Spring's first bumblebees become your children.
Nathaniel Cairney
Each a Wildf lower See this bowl of wildflowers, each plucked by my son's small fingers, placed on the counter, chosen for a new existence in clean, cool water. See them bloom, thirsty, dying as soon they are born, aging, molding, decaying, a darkening mass shriveling, staining, returning to earth. Remember what each was and still is, an idea, a germ, a seed, one among trillions selected for love's service, a child carving one beautiful scar more On his mother's flowering heart.
Nathaniel Cairney
Gravel The moon brought light but not heat. Shivering men chained wagons to idling tractors, numb fingers shaking. Exhaust growls filled the darkness. With a clank and a rumble the whole mess of everything began to warm. Inside the cab, he dreamed of gravel. Just last week, he and his father turned a roadside pile into a driveway. Their calloused hands gripped shovels, their boots the ground, their voices the grit from last night's cigarettes. His father spoke of the sea, a strange naked moment of unrepressed longing. The old man had seen it once, decades ago. If you missed it that much, the boy asked, couldn't you have gone again? If only it were that easy, son, his father had replied. In the darkness, waiting for the diesel to thaw, he wondered: why wasn't it that easy?
Nathaniel Cairney
Potato Harvest Fallen potatoes litter the rond-point's southwest gutter, rootless, lost and jostled from towering wagons into mud and puddles, huddled and crushed like victims from some civil war unfolding inside dusty ash-filled tractor cabs. Gleaners slip into fields, ghosts in ragged sweaters, naked hands grasping pitchforks and sacks, hunting scraps next to highways. Brussels-bound black sedans roar past. They disappear into the crushing gray.
Nathaniel Cairney
The Last American in Belgium Crunchy maple leaves stir in the garden, turned over and over by something unseen. Beyond the fence, beyond the pasture, a solitary figure haunts a narrow broken road. Two headlights reveal a man, holding something in his right hand. He twirls it without thinking, as if he has done it a million times before, as if the thin dull object were an extension of his body. The car passes, obscuring the man for a moment. When the street is clear again, he is gone, swallowed by shadows that stretch toward the village where women huddle in dim tidy rooms and grip prayer beads as the harvest moon rises. It was only three generations ago, they remind us,
Nathaniel Cairney
that nothing on earth could stop what had no wish to be stopped. And so, we were invited. My creased-brow neighbor turns from the window. Wind flusters shutters and rattles glass panes. A single light illuminates his green chair. His steady hands offer a thick book with bone-white pages and a brown leather cover. Here lie the dead, he tells me, yours too. Each page a catalogue of ghosts, a waning light's gift, a generation's warning.
Nathaniel Cairney
Steven Dale Davison A Sleepless Sense of Found Fog gathers all night on the oak above us, in the meadow all around us. As the stars step back behind the mist, the curled brown wetted leaves stitter down through the branches of the tree. We lie close together in our bags, talking. We steep there, we sink deeper into the share as points of correspondence pile up in layers from our stories. My hungry tongue and lips turn demure, my wonder rises without peak until a sleepless sense of found enfolds me.
Steven Dale Davison
Sowise In cooldim of greygreen a beenman is grinseen, a newway to followfoot. The woodsing a feeltune. The moonroots of shoots an liveseed are wingloose and bringhymn to yourside in loomlight in mineseye. Tremblesure, our wesong is heartlong, rises in treebreezes and leaves, is strong and sowise, so . . .
Steven Dale Davison
You Are Leaving This monstrous looming, distant but oncoming, like the smoke of a burning village cloaking the landscape, promises a razing. Ash falls, thickening in the non-light in a courtyard deserted of footfalls. The fountain is dry. Night draws nigh. The scent of ends chokes out "Soon, too."
Steven Dale Davison
O My Heart You and I will be very good. We will let her get round the corner, wait two beats, maybe three—long enough to know for sure she's not coming back. (Then I don't care what she hears.) You will lunge, then, I know. And I will throw my arms around your neck and grapple your howling desperation until I've reattached the chain. But I won't let you go; no, I will murmur something soothing, some wordless, tuneless, hopeless—. I will cling to your quivering until I feel it's safe to merely rest there with my face buried to the tears in your familiar must. The long, long night we will sleeplessly entrust the darkness with our pain and wait to see: does the wrong depart with the sunrise, or cruelly taunt us from the limit of your run? But, O my heart, I promise: I will not desert you. I will not leave you all alone.
Steven Dale Davison
Wordsmouth Harbor Founder I rage into the phone. Heedless? No. I feel the windlash crack the lines, I bid the waves crash me 'gainst the pier. The wordstorm pounds with sounds my lips curl to form, I exult as I hurl the handset down into the consequences, at last past any caring that the relationship is sheering its moorings and plunging into forsaken haven danger. (Ill the fell tongue tastes after anger jettisons the heaviest cargo, while the unlashed chests careen across the lightless decks below.) As I turn from the phone stand, the ghost-ship heels toward the maelstrom, rudderless, sails shredded by the gale. As I walk down the hall, the empty hull tips over the grimace lips and shudders as it surrenders to the swirl. Wracked and groaning, cracked open past mending, way past hailing any rescue, I sink. I drink past drowning the deep oblivion overhead. I slowly settle on the bed. I listen in the darkness to the echo of all the reckless things I've said.
Steven Dale Davison
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts Undoing To burn it like cedar I request another dream I need a forest fire —James Blake
in the forge, i see mama pulling bada out of the flames. smoke folding into itself. bada's irises now an extinguishable forest, noncombustible. tears evaporate from my curling lips, head unrests from mama's chest. my body, once rubble, does not collapse. the limo driver masters rolling in reverse back to the only two-lotted gingerbread house in chatham. the sun sets in the east. it is not mourning. eyes remain shut. dwelling in the undecided but my bones know. that poem should've started with us walking backwards into a funeral home, west on sixty-seventh. the waiting area on the left, the main office—right. our mouths unauthorizing this contract, suppressing all calls for second opinions, reneging the invitation to this internment, or service, or whatever the fuck we were being offered. we insist on another option to say goodbye where my twenty-two-yearold self does not witness bada's body burning in chamber. never inhaling death at two thousand degrees fahrenheit. in this poem, i settle for the bits that got pummeled into dust. a phoenix existing inside blue blown glass around my neck. an eighty-seven-year-old ribbon, grounded, i never saw incinerated. this would be the only memory i'd wear.
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
Paralyzed When walking, we needed three things: the silver walker, the worn black wheelchair, and the will to be mobile. Only eight or nine but I was willing to catch her if she fell. I was strong enough to walk behind as she glided her weighted left leg across the mustard yellow floor. Her muscles wouldn't cooperate the way she wanted them to. Told the doctors to go to hell. She lifted her left foot off the floor and slowly traveled down her Hyde Park condo hallway. It sounds like an easy task but the stroke took this privilege. Left her droopy and immobile and reverted to infant. Seventy-three years old, learning how to walk again. They say doctors make the worst patients. We should add nurses to that list too.
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
Keloid I got my ears pierced for the first time at eighteen. Sat in a chair and allowed this stranger to bore holes in me, willingly. Replaced the gaps with diamonds. I was handed instructions for cleaning: take a cotton swab twice a day, dip it in alcohol, swirl it around the site. Twist often. Terrified of Bada's warnings, I cleaned it. Made sure the skin around the stud didn't hold it hostage. Form a forgotten memory. Become infected. Hold an extra boulder where beauty used to be. Our secrets, mostly keloids, are from her. I dodged the majority of the knives that carved my legs. Caught all of the words. I tell myself she didn't mean it. I still bled. I healed. Still left a narrative behind.
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
Elegy for Breath The only time a party erupted in my house a balloon was born. Bada's voice crackled. Her smile, slightly slanted to the left, teeth coated in Marlboro and Folgers. Her breath mostly ether. The clots stole the parts of her voice that reminded us of Walgreen after bath splash. But this day, a kaleidoscope of balloons were blown. Tied with fingers not quite old enough to stay up past ten. The colors glided across the room cloaking the brawl the walls carried. She swat at the balloons with her right hand, just like she did us after the stroke. She rumbled from laughter. This day, the roof of her mouth swallowed every fuck you from the ceiling. Her breath anesthetic. We giggled away gravity.
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
How I Named Her I have known babies' tongues to swallow English and giggle. The sounds adults' mouths have forgotten were prescribed. My teeth, barely breaking through gums dusted in formula, swung past options to baptize her. At two, my mouth too infant, crusted in apple sauce pressed its lips into drums. I was too rebel to carve Grandma into the roof with tongue. My native dialect, coated in plantains, exchanged Bibi for Bada. Kiswahili for a new code.
Heather 'Byrd' Roberts
Greenheart i can see you even when you are hiding even when your bulky sweater covers your ribs and your leggings cover the fine sleek scabs on your thighs and your sunglasses shield the broken vessels of blood that pool around your eyes holding a memorial for your heart like old friends gathered in a graveyard talk to me open your mouth like a chimney flue and let the smoke roll out i will not move my body away from your side until the raging fire turns to ash and when it does i will collect the ash on my fingers and put on you a new mark and whisper in your ear all the ways in which you are rising up until i see your soul is peeking out of your body like sunlight through the opening of springs gray clouds
when i die and no one looks at you the way i did and no one sits in the darkness and listens to your stories anymore and you lay still and feel and wonder who will mirror my existence who will remind me i am still alive who will beam love upon me as i sleep who will take my hand when the shadows melt one into another and all becomes black and fear when i die and you miss me and the candle dancing on the nightstand melts your emotions down to waxy tears and all you want to do is hear my voice whisper to you like sips of hot soup restoring you once again to health when i am gone and these hands that have held you well are scattered upon SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
wave and field and no longer are fused into five magic wands casting spells of comfort upon all you aching parts and you are sick with grief and pain finds a way into every nerve and pore and no drink can comfort the separation it is here you will find me for it is here in the sorrow i will wait
left to live on earth without you
close the door behind you keep the robbers aways the ones who steal my confidence and the ones who steal your attention lights off nothing on only our energy in this dark space all colors gone illusions melted down harsh lines blended together like you and me full moon and cloudless sky someone wants to be noticed it seems the crack in our curtains creates a beam of light softly falling across our body a silver band that molds around every curve keeping promises staying true
june full moon
maple is wearing her red satin nighty in broad daylight again swaying her shoulders and hips enjoying being enjoyed wind came and swept her up in just the right spot she giggled hiding nothing it seems she has forgotten her sprouting phase and her brittle exposure in winter i wonder if she even remembers herself before her red satin nighty captured craved attention
false confidence
like the shy stars i too come out slowly waiting for stillness and silence waiting for intimacy and wonder i am not interested in a love that drowns me out anymore i am tired of disappearing in all their glory i want a love that draws me out and bears witness to my subtle existence connecting my dots and celebrating the beautiful constellation that symbolizes all i am and all i am yet to be
sunny ex
Ashton Vaughn Blackbird Looming Who turns the hands of the clock, fastidious and careful, over and over again and again? Who animates the chipmunk that gently lifts himself out of the earth, and once, twice, snaps his head to the sky to peer at the sun he has forgotten? What is it that moves in the wren to urge her to sing— what is it that calls forth the blackbirds, year after year, to flood the skies in raven waves and leave the muddled face of Death burnished like a sigil in our thought? I know not why when the music begins my feet turn to dancing and my voice to song, but I do know there is something lively and wild and wonderful coursing through each life, each body, and that every time I give myself over to it I can once again feel the sun shining upon my face. When the raven waves arrive, and the song of the wren is diminished, I think I shall be waiting, not sitting—but dancing and singing, ready to greet them with whatever song the Earth may have of me.
Ashton Vaughn
Through the Valley of Mount Chimaera If the silence breaks, I hope your gold crumbles upon me like dust; Caught between the cusp, we tasted a brevity, not short and sweet, but as consuming as the flame which burns on testamented trust. And as I glimmer, a newfound thing, a burning blaze of aurum, enshrouded in a majesty like the decadence of boredom, I twist against the agony that looms like Hades' quarry; a flame to raze a man's fell hope, a prince's claim to whoredom. Toll the bells, Death's keeling knell shall palpitate the earth. March in robes of sanguine red through obsidian gates of Hell.
Ashton Vaughn
Halcyon Snakes slithering in the undergrowth, gloomy murk and despair and leaves blackened by rot; Weeds reaching clumsily through the turned earth —earthworms, those little tendrils of life, spindling along like fibers of the mortal system; Orchestral buzz of flies, stagnant water and algal bloom (which tells of death and life, death and life;) Upon the earth, like gravedirt turned, onerous ants trail back and forth— a machine stronger than any of man's; And among the swamp a heron stands, tall as a tower, and just as mighty, his cloudy down as soft and blue as wisdom: This is another way of life. Halcyon is a place in one's mind; here, the birds fly from the earth, and back to the earth they must go. here, the weeds die, and come back, and die and die again. They're coming back as strong and as lovely as ever.
Ashton Vaughn
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, as God Looked Away Washed up from the bay: I am driftwood. I am bound and I am impermanent, I am beautiful and I am careless. Salty water seeps from my head into the earth as I lie in the grass on the shore by the bay, as I lie in the fields that are faded. My hair is woven into the ground— I am the roots! and my fingertips are stems, sprouting and growing and searching for sunlight in this faded field on the shore by the bay, Where I believe I am surrounded by the company of friends until I notice that the skies are empty and the birds are quiet and I lean to my side to whisper to the resting wolf that "the world has gone silent" but the wolf has gone silent also and beside him are the birds who are absent from the sky and their throats don't hum and their wings don't flutter but their feathers still hold the luster of an old life's glory, and so I sit beside them and I sing the songs that they can no longer sing for me. Hallelujah. SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Ashton Vaughn
Song of Solomon I. Names inscribed on trees, scratched along fences and bridges— but we carved our names into the sky, cut out the stars and kept them like secrets in our pockets. II. The night I shed my clothes you watched me. You wouldn't even show your face, and later told me to get some sleep; pixels glared back at an empty stare. Y0u couldn't show your face, so you watched instead. III. The way the earth livens before the rain. Melodies hummed softly, held between the lips. Lavender. Bumblebee. Salt of the ocean. Wildflowers, freshly cut and pressed. IV. shatter,shatter, shatter, shatter, shatter, shatter, shatter, shatter, ,shatter, shatter . V. I love my body but only in the dark. VI. Did I ever carry you? Slung over my shoulder, the wind in our hair, running just for the hell of it? Did I ever carry you? VII. You see, love, we were never creatures of permanence. We douse our skin in ephemeral perfume, laced with rose or violet or whatever else was once new and beautiful, and we make short love, and then we wash ourselves of all of it and begin again.
Ashton Vaughn
VIII. But I still hold on. There is no desperate hope. There is no foolish naivete. There is only truth: that when my lungs collapsed and you were suffocating I pulled you out and I carefully pressed each of your blooms inside the walls of my notebook and now each pressed flower I wear like a seal upon my arm and my heart, stronger than death, the grave, it's jealousy diminishing the very flames of Hades. IX. I loved my body, but only in the dark. X. I left your body alone in my dark.
Ashton Vaughn
Linda Speckhals Death Wears a Speedo His bones chatter when his body trembles a laugh you're too bony for a red speedo she said as if he hadn't heard that one before Sometimes, he tells her, But sometimes even this Speedo can't protect me And he clutches his scythe because even though he's shed his black robe, he may still have a job to do, even on the beach on a hot summer day especially on the beach on a hot summer day Sometimes, he says, I just want to feel the sun warming my bones Are you the type, he asks, who never imagines what it would be like if you weren't scissored into shape by those who look up and assume the perfect sky has no clouds The type who never dreams of glitter wings and floating like a flower on the spring breeze afraid of being more bird than human
Linda Speckhals
though your blood would still vibrate in music and you would still love the sounds of thinking and the feeling of skin on skin To be so much more, like Death in a speedo, lying on the beach, unafraid of the stares, soaking in the sun and listening to the beat beat beat of the ocean as it pulses through the veins of the world
Linda Speckhals
Borderlands She traced a line in the summer sand, Asked a stranger to dare her To step over As if that would disappear it. His feet followed his gaze away and Silent across the sand Leaving her to watch the tide smooth the sand and remind her again and again and again That sometimes wishes don't materialize And sometimes the string of someone else's balloon binds Her wrists together And sometimes she knows that the only thing she can do Is to hide the ocean in her memory And return to the road. She drove towards home But when the exit came She went straight Past the sign that said Welcome to Pennsylvania And the words "if not now, When?" Echoed in the empty car. She accelerated And imagined the rush of gas was like the rush of her own blood or the rush of mere expectation that crossing this border would be crossing to a new life She closed her eyes Felt the rush of disappointment Just like when she kissed her best friend, Felt his scruff exfoliate her chin. Crossing that border too Left her disappointed Like a blue balloon Caught In the branches Of an old pine tree 92
Linda Speckhals
Blue like the sky: A Pantoum Blue like the sky As I feel the caress of clouds I long to swim in the air And feel the sun on my face As I feel the caress of clouds Until the rainstorm passes And I feel the sun on my face From your gentle smile Until the rainstorm passes And the curtain clouds part From your gentle smile And the sky shifts to night The curtain clouds part While I sleep under the stars And the sky shifts to night I let the waves wash over me While I sleep under the stars Blanketed by your warmth The waves wash over me I long to swim in the air Blanketed by your warmth The waves wash over me I long to swim in the air Blue like the sky
Linda Speckhals
Around 3 He deserts his children each day around 3 Leaving them in midswing on the tire That hangs from the ancient tree in the backyard Or while they sip tea with pinkies extended Like the adults they want to be Or while they play tug of war with the crayons They need to create their art Or while they are giggling or imagining or telling stories. He is a gliding centipede, Passing over the toys and debris of family life He drifts out of time And away from now And into that 3 o'clock moment. One day, maybe His children will look into his eyes As the hand of the clock ticks into its place, Hugging the 3 They will see that he's not there.
Linda Speckhals
Lucy Griffith Breathing Room Holiday Inn, Corpus Christi
One of those Spring Breaks too chilly for the ocean, I meet her in the hot tub, her swimsuit ruffled in blue-gray. I'm Sophie! I'm five! Her babysitter—doing her nails nearby. We play with bubbles in the water, I learn more about Mommy's boyfriend than I ought to know, retire to my deck chair with Conroy's Prince of Tides. "Somebody, HELP!" Babysitter shrieks, stricken, dangles Sophie by one foot, blue as her suit, limp as a bag of laundry. Red letters neon my mind. *CALL FOR HELP* I yell "Call 911" slide in to her side. *POSITION* "Lay her down, I've got her" *CHECK FOR PULSE* No need to check, her heart thunders under my hand. I tilt her head *AIRWAY* pinch her nose. Cover and blow—nothing. SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Lucy Griffith
Her jaw is clenched, I try the jaw-thrust, still clamped. I wedge my knuckle behind her teeth, twist, her mouth pops open. *BREATHING* Pinch, cover, blow. Two rescue breaths— cough, splutter, the welcome spill of warm water. Her eyes fluttering, glorious, before a mighty wail. Her mom appears beside me, reaching— I unfold Sophie into guilty arms. Wander, back to my book, craving a bourbon and branch. Later, the first responder chides "You could have lost a finger doing that!" I don't care. I put the sun back in Sophie's sky.
Lucy Griffith
The Art of Goodbyes Life, after all, does not take death for an answer. —Donald Culross Peattie
Plenty of practice—this art of goodbyes. Two babies, two breasts, a starter marriage to a wounded boy. Both parents, all the aunties and uncles, a sister so close. I know to sit behind the baby at the service. Babies are circles. And the officiant, I know the exact tone of voice when eulogy turns to commercial. I know to cry as much as I must. Afterwards, I know to look for the hawk circling the cowboy's grave, the hummer at my shoulder, and later—shooting stars. I know how much chardonnay to have on hand, how many candles to light, to put the Bach on long and slow. I know how to write build sing and story my way through, how to fasten my despair to the earth. I hold that grief is another way of loving. I know to follow those spiral steps, that heartache is a hologram. That the second year can bring you to your knees, and decades later ambush with a sneak attack— the heart has a long attention span. The great gears spin on.
Lucy Griffith
Even though for my daughter
my ashes are spread on the cliff by Sister's bench, mingling with her, and your childhood pup, perhaps a few choice bits of me hauled off by harvester ants, down their grassy highway, secured in a pebble cave. Even though I am gone, you will know me near— when a wren lands on your knee. When you start waking early to watch the world make a morning. When the asparagus thrust their tender heads into April's warmth. Even though I am not here, to hold you, to brush your hair, give it a trim, auburn curls on the front steps, I am murmuring— get your whole story out. Don't let anyone shush you. I am reminding, perfection is overrated, a nap is a balm.
Lucy Griffith
Hear my voice. Take a walk. Put flowers in a jar. Sit in the river, let it run through you. Eat cookies, watch the moon rise.
Lucy Griffith
Visitation My belly boiling with blood, I lie in the ER. A nurse with Maria sewn in blue script on her white coat, takes one look at me—drops her charts. She thinks my tears are fear— the long shine of needle in the doctor's hand. She doesn't know what I know, I will never have a child. She twines her arm in mine leaning close to hide the man in the baby-blue hat between my knees with his sword. Eyes of caramel never leave mine: I'm taking you on a picnic. Like a song, she narrates a trip to the beach, the feel of the sand, lap of the waves, sandwiches of ham and cheese. My ears fill with tears. I don't remember the feel of the needle, I remember the taste of ham and cheese.
Lucy Griffith
Steven Valentine Written Your Father has already written your story. Even the poet's. The difference remains that we continue to write it into existence.
Steven Valentine
My Father Built These Things by Hand, I Say it was a green house, a house we knew was green, not the hue or the paint of the panel, or the President heads floating into it, no, no, this was a green house, a green house so vile and toxic, it breathed a musty camouflage, a darkness that sat atop the stoop my father built, a stoop my father cemented like the times, like the time he gave me condoms before prom, like the time we discussed my girlfriend and how both she and his insomnia were make-believe but both a pretty butterfly in the green grass, both miracles on a sunny Sunday on a stormy stoop, my father built that stoop and his depression held the jackhammer, keeps buzzing to the melody of the stream line, the green on the glossy coated memory affixed to the sealant, bastardly it was, a house, a house that didn't feel like home.
Steven Valentine
Metal and Magic As a boy my father always brought me to the car wash. There was something about metal and magic and the idea that something could reappear polished; It was like a dream. It was a father and son moment when our slates were clean and we were happy. As I got older we stopped going to the car wash. My father didn't seem like he wanted to go anymore; His sadness overshadowed him like a blackened smoke. By now, I knew he wanted to but physically couldn't get up to go. Depression, festered its way into his torso; His polish would never reappear the same; He was a vase with a hairline mosaic. That day I learned that sadness muddles bodies into an unsettling being. That day I learned the gritty of a man's tongue when anxiety got the best of his throat And that day, I learned even family can serpent-tongue their opinion into a father's suicide note. You see they thought my father fit for electric shock treatment, thought him fit to lightning bolt his conscious to live under the hellfire They would tell him to get over it; To stop overreacting; Ask him why he can't just be happy again As if happiness wasn't a roadblock right in front of another roadblock Depression, doesn't come in seasons, but when it comes, it is always a Fall-out Depression, is the nosy neighbor, who forgot they could, just be a neighbor SIXFOLD POETRY SUMMER 2019
Steven Valentine
They always feel the need to ring the bell But my father—My father is not a one-way ticket to a hospital-wing; He is not admission to your nearest explosion He is not a warning label; He is just the vessel that God used to test the boundaries And he's had to live behind them–always Walking the tightrope above the lion's den and sometimes falling into it Shouldn't you--Be the one to feel shock after seeing a melancholy man so unscathed, But one who survived the pain? Isn't it ok for him to feel pain here? Isn't it ok for him to feel here? Now I've tried I've tried to make him happy Tried–to bring him to a car wash--maybe he'd reappear clean and polished And I've tried and tried and failed time and time again and despite it all he keeps living. He keeps moving forward--Here is a man who thinks he lives in a world that doesn't love him back-He's wrong and each time he keeps living He reminds me he is the bravest man I've ever met. A comic-book dream, nature-loving Demi-God, Each day I drive past a car wash I cling to his voice. I say—That waterfall of a man has always been polished. And he shines like it too.
Steven Valentine
A Son's Trust My father told me He warned me
He said:
Remember who you are.
Only for it to take four years of college and twice as many girls to totally forget the places I find sanctuary in
He told me:
Reach for the moon. Reach for the stars.
But I find myself searching for pussy and power in these bars--these poems are my walls incased in brimstone they seldom fall:
I don't trust things too often.
But as for my father, I trust him. I trust him often.
Steven Valentine
When Tomorrow Comes and the followers roam, they'll ask of our existence. Tell them we were born into a bottle of warmth and found out how cold-hearted this cruel world could be. Tell them we faced darkness at the split of a cliff but saw sun before dawn at the edge of a mountain peak. They'll ask of our existence. Tell them we've built the back of our homes with our spine to the sky and power in our palms. Tell them we lived in a city that collapsed in the sea and we mustered the strength to form the monuments we lead. They'll ask of our existence. Tell them we lived. Tell them we lived in a house that didn't always feel like home.
Steven Valentine
Emily Varvel B is for Boy and G is for Guy (1945) The girl grips the grill, Of her Grandpa's busted truck, Still tasting the grape juice, Along her burbling tongue. Granted, Grandpa's truck is larger than her. "Goodness, gracious," any bystander would gander, That truck could grab her and break 'er in half. But she's a natural, balanced there In her brand-new, baby-white boots, As if God himself had planted her little feet down, On that graveled ground, At Grandpa's. Little girl, Gorgeous girl, You don't get it yet. But you will in good time. That place you're in is not granted to you. Grandpa's truck is for the guys in town. Right now, it is only for make believe. You see, God didn't see fit to gift you that advantage. So, bathe in the greatness now, Of guiding that automobile, Of governing where it goes, Because in the war of guys and dolls, It'll be awhile before the guns are finally on your side— Once and for all.
Emily Varvel
An Analysis in Assonance She suffers in suffixes, Communicates in commas, Periodically exists, As a series of punctuations, And periods. Her euphoria rests in anaphora in parallelism in enjambment Poetry flows in her veins— Ink as thick as blood Her eyes act as a pen Shooting pins Her punches are puns Laced in the fine vintage Of Shakespeare and Frost Of Dickinson and Poe Allusions made all too clear In the illusion she presents to the world She prefers to perform through prefixes She gets as excited for an ellipse As the world for an eclipse . . .
Emily Varvel
Vase You knocked my flower vase off the counter. Now I have to wrap my shirt, Tightly around my skin, And pick up the splatter. But the glass still slips through, Scarring my bone-tired hands. The mirror image now Encasing my heart in glue. So, I pick up the glass, While you sit on your ass. But I know that's not fair, To make that assumption. Because I know a little secret, About how your flower vase functions. An invisible string, Like two cans between neighbors, Tied our vases together, 'Til you cut with your razors. So, your flowers fell forward, Crashing to the floor. But the furniture is too high, For me to see you anymore. But you cut and you clawed, Not me and my issues. We weren't responsible for your pause, For my abuse of these tissues. I patch my vase back together, To display my pretty flowers.
Emily Varvel
Obstruction "The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning."—DSM-5
The heaving, Scratching, Vomiting— The distress, Impairment, Obstruction— And yet, What about the seemingly insignificant things? "Did she just give me a funny look?" "I hope I locked my car door so no one breaks in . . . " "Does this dress make me look fat?" "They're staring at you." "Look, you made him leave." "You didn't get everything done? Typical." "How will I pay my bills if my car breaks down?" "You are a disappointment." The incessant inner-monologue of anxiety cuts deepest. Thoughts churn from head, To stomach, To mouth. Unloading your Breakfast and insecurities Into the toilet. Stomach and brain briefly empty. But a person must continue to eat. A brain must continue to think. Cyclical. 110
Emily Varvel
Anxiety is walking on eggshells, Begging yourself not to step on a crack, Firmly believing there's a connection between your mistakes, And your mother's broken back. Anxiety is replaying scenarios in your mind, Over and over. Each run through a dissent Into a different Circle of Hell Anxiety is running a marathon without moving an inch. Sleep for a year? Still tired. Can't fall asleep? Still wired. Anxiety blinds you to accomplishments, Binds you to it's establishments. Distress, Impairment, Obstruction— Yes. But truly, Anxiety majors in its minors. "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."—Shakespeare, Macbeth
Emily Varvel
Juxtaposition There are 3 cement rectangles Completely solid 3 feet thick They connect to form an open square The 4th wall Bars Smooth and silver 3 inches thick Across these 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 vertical bars Rests a horizontal latch 3 inches thick You are sitting in a cage You know You know life outside the cage It's liquid freedom and joy A concoction mixed with happiness But also unknown Potentially dangerous And yet you are locked in this cage Aren't you? The lock is inward-facing The world can't get you out It's an inside job And you are the only one with a key A gift Should you choose to use it You are comfortable in your cage More five-star than cell block But there is something sour Like the faintest of rotten scents in the finest perfumes That permeates these walls
Emily Varvel
The base is still there But you wait And wait 2 sides of yourself conflicting Juxtaposing each other You take 1 2 3 steps forward Pick up the key Jagged breath—one more step Shove the key in the lock Back away Look at the venomous luxury 1 2 3 steps back Returning to life in the cage Immersing yourself in the comfortable filth With the flicker of freedom fluttering In the back of your mind You look up See the bars Beyond— Freedom Joy Happiness 1 2 3 4 Turn the key Step back You hang a curtain across your bars Your 4th wall But you can hear it The joy, happiness, freedom 123 Rip the curtain back Drink in the sight Satiating your need
Emily Varvel
You nail 3-inch-thick wood to your bars Blocking out the sights and sounds Returning like a pig to its slop But again and again you return to that wall Long for it 1 Freedom 2 Joy 3 Happiness Carnivorous as wolf You shred the wood Quick as a fox You push the door You look back Because you are a juxtaposition You don't want to be a juxtaposition 123 Steps forward You live this uncomfortable life Filled with uncertainty and pain and strife But Filled with freedom and joy and happiness No rottenness to tinge the sweet You belong to the outside Always will
Emily Varvel
And yet 123 Steps back Door closed Lock latched Lose sight Beginning again And again And again Because you are a Juxtaposition
Emily Varvel
Jhazalyn Prince What the Body Wants and Does Not Want I. Parted lips at wide doorways parched and empty intimacies mounds of poppy and lilac leaves Black hands ; pale at palm and itching touch me at the tip please swallow my breath don't spit me out cacoon landing what are woman body parts disassemble eyes rolled in filth brown eyes ; sodden Big belly empty womb Priceless body
Jha z alyn Prince
II. her body unfolded tendons tight but spilling outward like a knotted shoelace dug into with the inner side of your strongest nail inside there was a battle but her body lay still Silent not singing like when held by dance and melody not vibrating like when limbs spread out as the first of morning sunlight leaks through the blinds His body curled into her filled her with sound that had no rhythm the cucaw of a wide-winged sharp-beaked eagle searching for a quick snack nothing that would make Him fatigued the deep whistled cry of a siren rushing to beat death those sounds were not meant to live in her make her glow red from the inside how would the world believe a quiet body filled with foreign sound?
Jha z alyn Prince
III. I don't sleep the same once your scent has lifted from my sheets and I can no longer breathe you in Being touched scares me at first The muscles in my back flex and my butt clenches Then I come undone like a song so well sung the room vibrates afterwards Run your fingertips in the warm crease behind my knee damp with sweat like your brow when you burrow your face into the crook of my neck Show me other ways that I can bend touch me and don't touch me and bring your lips so close that when you whisper your breath raises the hairs on my skin forget that we exist except to exist in this moment So taboo, just with you, won't you . . . come through. How does it feel to live inside of me a house that has been empty for years How will you decorate my wombs crash your angled hips into what is plush into what is warm and dewy and leave behind your sweet and fading smell maybe if I hadn't pressed my face into my pillow and hungrily inhaled the memory of you it could have lasted longer but instead your face is fleeting Sweet as it is
Jha z alyn Prince
IV. Barren belly bloated with air Here is the mother of your land Slain on it skin melted into her soil and tears seeped into her veins your eyes disdainful for the love she once had for the earth the songs she wept into her bosom the dancing feet she padded into her ground are now swept away and over and consuming her you took the child away screaming and Stripped the tenderness from her eyes the virtue from her thighs until she was child no more but beaten but bruised but bullied and subdued the dirt will not spring rose petals because it is saturated with blood too heavy with melancholy to pretend you were not the one who caused her ruin you with greedy hands and disdainful eyes God forbid you give back even a crumb of what you've wrought from the womb of this earth scatter like tumble weed in a desert as she be deserted and lonely and know not what company be like when it just stand there cause it always be picking and nipping and grabbing at her fruitfulness Oh she. is bound to grow tired of you and roll you off her striped back Patch up her wounds Take her chosen few The ones you watched suffer with those eyes that suddenly turned blind The ones humbled through suffering and blunt trauma The ones you dared not help less you be less comfortable with yourself
Don't you feel less comfortable with yourself?
Jha z alyn Prince
Marte Stuart Watercolour Reclined at home, bathed in water, you must have watched mesmerized, as your blood let out in ribboned rivulets, warm tendrils of you swirling until the dissolved dizziness was mixed monochrome and you were dead. Only last week you lay languid too, this time on your belly with sheet-entangled feet, staring into a morning coffee, oblivious to my slick salty trace mucking your thigh. You twirled a spoon in lazy dips, hypnotized by the surrender of cream to black, while a cigarette thread roiled and collapsed in the air behind your head. Wet on wet, with painter's ease, I captured you then— my brush, a tongue, traced the crushing line of your hip. Watery hues brimmed at the curved edge of a sketched boundary, until a crimson pool burst your delicate pecan form, as though your bleeding-out were inevitable.
Marte Stuart
Generation Snowf lake Each sculpture manifest by a wavering thermal flux, presumption at the crux, entitled and crystalline, crafted by a million well-meant imperfections. Take no offence, precious little snowflake, fragile beauty tumbling cherished from the sky, you are no match for this wet street.
Marte Stuart
Lost Just behind the house, close to home, is the forest where we got lost, certain our snowy prints would bring us back. The regular rise and fall of undulating land, this tree stand, another, different only for failed light. Before the rocky outcrop, we veered sharply left. I think that's where we went off. Minds disoriented by the pull-push of what I said, you said, the return ground shifted, you arguing, the sun's low angle, my boots dug-in, our familiar turn, missed.
Marte Stuart
awaiting the biopsy each moment the river drifts no part twice the same now and now again now what comes passes dragon boats blocked ducts stuck dams lumps water under a bridge runs elusive this not captured as it is as it is as it is
Marte Stuart
S. J. Enloe Surgeon General's Warning Commercials corrupting kiddies, cancelling kinder-care. Cancer, killing. Cultivate caution. Carcinogen candy cremates conscious corpses.
S. J. Enloe
Sopas de Caldinho (Kale Soup) The only way I can make kale soup is with words, toss letters in a pot with some meat and stir, hoping something decent comes out. I try to remember the recipe, the words, but sometimes I lose them. I remember Vovó tossing live crabs in the boil. Into the pot they'd go, mixed together in a stew of lost days. After scattering and writhing, like memories trying to remember, we'd break their legs to toast another moment soon to be a forgotten thought. Vovó wasn't like the other Avós—her Portuguese was on the plate, in her offering a bolacha when I was fresh and a bolacha when I was good. It was in her dark hair and tan skin, inherited from Azorean ancestors, tending to island farms, gathering cabbage and onions, butchering the pigs for chouriço, mixing them into kale soup—a recipe made from memories, never written down, just told like old stories, their travels overseen by half shell Marys, carried here by planes and boats, shipping family and feasts, religion and tradition, memories fresh and forgotten. I cannot remember sometimes, so I keep stirring the soup, mixing words—hoping something decent comes out.
S. J. Enloe
The Resilience of Earthworms The dog never liked earthworms. He wasn't a vicious dog. He never bit, barked too loud, or ran out of sight. But in the spring, after the rain had pushed the worms through the dirt, he'd pull them up, bearing his teeth and whip them against the concrete wall that surrounded the yard. After the violent thwack, the worm would delicately, silently break in two. I'd watch as the two halves lay still, then—come alive. They writhed and wriggled away and back into the ground and the dog would lift his leg to the wall.
S. J. Enloe
Displays of Nature II We sit on the handmade wooden playset. I don't remember why we chose that place. The nameless woman reads us a story about water bugs and dragonflies. What do you think the story is about? Julia can't form full sentences yet. I answer, Water bugs turning into dragonflies? A dragonfly flutters by our heads. Yes, but what do they represent? I shrug. Death, the woman says, as if I should know this. She explains the allegory of the story, but I block her out, like everything else and warm myself in the noonday sun.
S. J. Enloe
Canaries in the Basement Sometimes I'd sneak downstairs and peer through the crack of the closet to watch the birds try to fly. To hear them sing. My sister got one for her birthday. And another. I never did.
S. J. Enloe
Meghan Dunsmuir Where Do I Begin tell me where do i begin was that normal? was that the right way t0 grow up into the spaces before i even knew what shapes would be emerging? you supported me with an infrastructure we called love but you would still encourage me to smile sorries every time i cried because really everything was fine because belly worms are really stagnant butterflies hiding within the spiralling infinite expanse of my mind glowing
Meghan Dunsmuir
Ancestor when i was born the pathway lined the sky with light splitting once again soon the centre of my circle shifted and the faces beyond my mirror were hauntingly familiar perhaps i am the ghost of your ancient home decade after decade not the other way around a cobweb history unborn and reborn anew expands in form into the sphere so much bigger than us
Meghan Dunsmuir
Dreamtime last night i went to bed praying i would wake up somewhere deeper than today i closed my eyes and i saw roots soggy with millennia of ancestral currents still the same level of damp the rainforest greeted me from my cotton coated vessel my head touching ground holy, undiscovered the creatures gathered 'round me and i asked, politely how the time is treating them in infinity they said the midnights are darker than oblivion and the summers brighter than newborn eyes but i mustn't stay too long so despite the hypnotic coloured mist beckoning i woke up in morning to start another present day
Meghan Dunsmuir
Our Path we've been walking down this path a lot these days mostly because we have realized it's the only place left to go i spent the majority of last night yelling about something someone did (very far away) to someone i do not know (will never know) you simply stared back down the now-empty path thinking about the last fir tree cut down a while ago since then we've just been walking and finding peace when i'm not yelling at all those stubborn ghosts here and nowhere
Meghan Dunsmuir
17 Years i lived within a tiny pale pink universe where I have cut my hair to fly beyond the walls that kept me near this everything space, this nothing space, a curvature of plaster swirling the same air over and over, my own foggy reflection was slowly appearing; cracks revealed we've been floating side by side together we would learn, hope, grieve til
the circle breaks
Meghan Dunsmuir
Contributor Notes L a u r a A p o l 's poetry appears in numerous anthologies and literary
journals, and she is recognized through a number of poetry prizes. She is the author of four full-length collections, most recently, Nothing but the Blood (Michigan State University Press, 2018; winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry). She is currently completing a manuscript, Lullaby, about her daughter, Hanna, who was lost to suicide in 2017.
Nat ha niel Ca ir ney
lives with his family in Belgium, where he writes, travels, cooks, does dishes, and marvels at the ease with which moles explode holes in the rich soil. Originally from the U.S. Midwest, his poems have been published in California Quarterly, Illya's Honey, and others. He holds an M.A. in English Literature from Kansas State University and is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
Steven Dale Dav ison
has published poems in a number of journals. He has written plays in both verse and prose, some of which have been produced. He has written both short and long fiction and has published a number of nonfiction essays and book chapters. Mr. Davison worked for twenty years as a journalist and professional writer in the private sector and was awarded a writing scholarship by Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana.
Ta y l o r D i b b l e
is currently a junior at Central Michigan University studying Psychology and Sociology. After her Undergrad she plans to move west and continue her education, while advocating and fighting for youth in the criminal justice system. Her work has been published in My Body, My Words, The Central Review and now here, in Sixfold. When she's not writing, you can find Taylor dancing around music festivals with her friends, from which she draws inspiration.
Meg ha n D u nsmu i r
is a white, queer identified woman of settler descent currently writing from her current location of Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people, known today as Halifax, Canada. Born in Tkaronto (Toronto), she crossed the country to attend the NSCAD University, where she is in her final year of study. Her interdisciplinary degree has had a focus on textiles, specifically weaving on the loom. Through both art and writing, Meghan aims to return herself and others to the creative spirit within us all, traversing otherwise divisive and limiting borders.
S . J. E n lo e
is a New England-based writer who received her B.A. in English from Westfield State University in 2016. She enjoys nature and the outdoors, hiking whenever weather and time permit, but is equally content with watching it through a window while daydreaming and conjuring up new writing ideas. When not enjoying nature, she can be found spending time with loved ones or cuddled up on the couch with her dogs.
Ta y l o r G a r d n e r ,
nineteen, is an amateur writer who enjoys tiptoeing, and sometimes outright annihilating, the line between poetry and prose. She endeavors at this from her small dorm room at SUNY Oneonta, located in Upstate New York, where she studies English and Creative Writing.
The poet
Greenhear t
is known for her emotional work of stringing together words and feelings for the world to enjoy. She lives in MN and has learned to use the seasons there as springboards for inspiration. Her IG handle is greenheart .
Lucy Grif f ith
is happiest on a tractor named Mabel (a muse of 55 horsepower) and lives on a ranch beside the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. Her first collection, We Make a Tiny Herd, was published by Main Street Rag as a finalist in their poetry book contest. She co-edited Echoes of the Cordillera: Attitudes and Latitudes Along the Great Divide. She won the Returning Contributor Award in Poetry for the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers'
G eorge L ongenecker
lives on the edge of the woods in Middlesex, Vermont. His poems have been published in Bryant Literary Review, Evening Street Review, America, The Main Street Rag, and The Mountain Troubadour. His book Star Route was published last year. Since 2018 he's been president of The Poetry Society of Vermont. He and looks for poems in nature and in the paradoxical ways humans interact with the environment and reflect nature in their art.
Joa n ne Monte
is a poet and novelist. Many of her poems have appeared in highly acclaimed literary journals such as Poet Lore, The Raintown Review, The White Pelican Review and Bayou. She is also the recipient of numerous awards, most notably the Bordighera Poetry Book Award for her collection of poems, The Blue Light of Dawn. Her novel, The Day to Eternity has been described as a gripping narrative set during the Korean War and has been included in Reader's Favorites. Much of her writing encompasses social, cultural and human rights issues. In 2005, the American
Biographical Institute selected her as one of five hundred notable American women for her literary and humanitarian contributions.
Jhazaly n Pr ince
was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY where she earned her high school diploma at Academy for Young Writers before moving on to Amherst, MA, to earn her Bachelor's degree at Hampshire College. There she studied Creative Writing as a source of healing for marginalized communities. She is a poet with special interest in interdisciplinary writing and exploring themes of maternal relationships, body image, race and inter-generational trauma to name a few.
Heat her 'By rd' Rober t s
is a Chicago-based poet, performer, teaching artist, and author of "Mahogany: A Love Letter To Black." Her work focuses on the intersectionality between form and freedom. She uses her experiences to shed light on issues of privilege, love, and familial relationships as she unlocks the opportunity for invisible voices to be heard. Byrd will appear in CAGIBI's journal in July. Her favorite words are balloon and bubble.
Ja m ie Ros s
writes, paints, hauls water and repairs his Toyota pickup on a mesa near Taos, NM. He also lives in Mexico. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Sixfold, Nimrod, the Northwest, Texas and Paris Reviews, also in Best New Poets 2007. His 2010 collection, Vinland, received the Intro Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.
Ju l ia Rot h
was raised in suburban Massachusetts, attended college at the University of Central Florida, and continued her zig-zag across the United States when she began the MFA program at Western Michigan University. Her most recent accomplishment is learning to ride a bicycle. She currently resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which truly exists.
L i n d a S p e c k h a l s , poetry is truly an act of rebellion. When she was young, her father told her she could be anything she wanted to be. Except a poet. She recently released a poetry collection, Pas de Deux, a collection of poems that tell a story of love and loss. It is available on Amazon.
Mar te Stuar t
gravitates toward poems with scientific and/or theological underbellies. Her current fav is A Backwards Journey by P. K. Page. Often lost, she believes "being led backwards through the eye of the mind" to be a helpful spacetime practice, or observing a river. Her best life work has been devoted to two perfect snowflakes, yet in free-fall.
G r e g Tu l e j a
was born in New Jersey and received degrees in biology and music from Rutgers University. He has worked as a professional musician, piano technician, and flute teacher. Greg lives in Southampton, Massachusetts with his wife, Frances, and is currently the Academic Dean at the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, where he has taught English and music, and for 35 years coached the girls' cross country team. His poems and short stories have appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including the Maryland Review, Lonely Planet Press, Romantics Quarterly, Thema, and The Society of Classical Poets.
S t e v e n Va l e n t i n e
is a spoken word poet hailing from New York City and recipient of the Lena Horne Performing Arts Award from the UAlbany's NAACP in 2013. He was later crowned the "Nitty Gritty" Slam Champion at Albany's Music Hall, placed fifth in Jazz in the Gardens' National Poetry Slam, and placed third at the Nuyorican Poet's Café in 2018. Steven then competed in the Individual World Poetry Slam and Rustbelt Poetry Festival later that year.
E m i l y Va r v e l
is an 8th grade Englsih Language Arts teacher in Katy, Texas. As a recent graduate from the University of Texas, her degree in English introduced her to a wide variety of poets and styles of poetry. This inspired her to start experimenting with poetry of her own. She enjoys providing ghostwriting and ghost editing services. You can either find her reading, writing, watching anything superhero-related, or playing with her little bean of a dog Buffy.
A s h t o n Va u g h n
is an upcoming freshman at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR, studying environmental studies and international affairs. When he's not writing music or poetry, he's often meandering through nature. Despite soon moving to Portland, Vaughn spent his entire childhood in Birmingham, AL. Much of his poetry was influenced by his experience growing up as an LGBT youth in the heavily religious,
conservative South.
N i c o l e Ya c k l e y
is a poet and artist from GA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Belletrist Magazine, Sunset Liminal Magazine, Z Poetry, Phoenix Literary Magazine, and performed as part of a chamber piece at the 2019 Nief-Norf Festival, among others. She has a BA in English from UGA and an MFA from UTK. More of her poetry can be found at whirlsofwords.tumblr.com.