David Spicer

Not What We Expected

I’ll reveal this: when she and I felt
like gluttons and punished ourselves,
we ate and drank in The Purgatory Café,
a dive where pictures of dolphins
and unicorns floated on walls
and Cuban fishermen argued
about terrorized islanders. The place
pleased us with the faint smell
of fried sausage, and a blind woman
in a cotton dirndl decorated with daisies
played the oboe on a small stage, a pail for tips
next to her. Suddenly the door opened to voices
obscured by smoke and fog and revealed,
in a white robe, a bearded child
with a few followers. He carried a cross
carved from a wooden rocket and a dancer’s
pole. My skin tingled and we scoffed
for a moment before he spoke:
I’ve returned to the fires and jungles
of your world, I’m the rebel you’ve
waited for, so kneel and pray, run
with me, scrounge no longer,
the mathematics of this scorched
planet will arrive soon, but I am here.

Termination at the Crime Scene

We salvaged the wheelchair
and one shoe in a ditch at twilight
on the Okie-Texas line. Where was the vic?
An enigma. Somebody phoned me.
A woman who wept every other word.
I was the lead, Green the secondary.
Climbing out of the drooping earth,
we organized a search party,
found the corpse under the moonlit maple
next to an old horse with a bullet
in its head. The stiff had a gunshot wound
to the brain, swelled like a cocoon,
playing cards rolled up and stuck in his nose.
A hypo in his big toe. The stink astonished
Green with its wicked texture. Ah shit,
between you and I, it’s a heroin OD.
You’re not paid to think, moron, I admonished,
banishing him then and there. After his bad
grammar, for all I cared Green could’ve been
vines sprouting from a tea kettle
or a papoose with a pacifier in its mouth.

DAVID SPICER has had poems accepted by or published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yellow Mama, Bop Dead City, unbroken, The Curly Mind, Slim Volume, The Naugatuck River Review, Yellow Chair Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of one full-length collection, Everybody Has a Story, and four chapbooks. He is the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Mike Good

I Saw You There Dickinson (#1027)

I saw you there Dickinson
Roiling about the Gluten-Free
Organics – tapping on Canteloupan
Hues to waft the Possibility –

and so it seemed you did Stop for Death –
Filling your Cart with Grass-Fed Meat –
Squinting at Steel-Cut Oats, Manager’s Specials
Along the Tip of each End-Capped Aisle – Feet

dashing a Rest – a Breath – a Connexion
Holding Potato-Rough skin – a Loaf
of Bread in the glassy self-checkout line –
Your Narrow Face wrinkled Aloof –

Stretching for a Roof of WonderBread
and then Scampering – with the Wine –
Shrinking from Fear at the Attendant
Who asked you to Self-Identify –

and in your gray Purse –
you held – four Quatrains of Cash
and a Band of unpublished Poems
Writ on unpaid power Bills – Stashed –

and when it came Time
to type – the Item –into the Scanner
I wept there Emily –
as we Poets must Weep and Stammer

to one another –when our
Credit Cards run Out –
and upon the Touch Screen flashes
Regular or Organic – routed

by the Avocado lies we Impress
upon our Screens – offering our Shopper’s Cards –
Wondering at Once – how the Points
We Acquire – Amount in our Bags Beyond –

Success

It comes down to possession. I thought this watching Sidney Crosby score on a breakaway. It was a beautiful thing to see. When I say beautiful, I mean it looked routine: the way he bullied past a defender and snapped the puck backhand behind Anti Niemi. Crosby is famous for his rituals and repetitions. Some players do this weird thing where they lick their stick tape. Goalies are particularly sublime. Glenn Hall, Mr. Goalie, allegedly vomited before each game, crediting this emesis, or lack thereof, for each victory or loss. Patrick Roy would go out of his way to avoid skating on blue lines. Drills offer opportunities to master rudiments. What is it apart from the careful reconstitution of well-learned feats? To force oneself to vomit. To hope for the best.

MIKE GOOD is pursuing an M.F.A. at the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and serves as Assistant Editor for the Hollins Critic. He is from Pittsburgh, PA, where he helped to found the After Happy Hour Review and Hour After Happy Hour Writing Workshop. His poetry has appeared in Collision, The New Yinzer, Poetry Fix and is forthcoming in Nerve Cowboy.

Melina Papadopoulos

i. Serenade for Wolf Moths and Mournful Poets

We always return to the moon.
It waits howl-spangled, record-scratched
across all the best night ballads,
cathartic as a cat’s eye taking light
through a milky cataract.

We become nocturnal
when our words keep us awake.
We stir as though from cocoons,
poets named by scientists.
We pore over field guides,
identify ourselves.

Lettered Sphinx – abdomen
carved up, memorial in chicken-scratch.
Dizzied by the woodwork
of our own oaken wings.

We repeat our names
until they gain meaning,
a genus, a family.

ii.The Wingspan of an Atlas Moth in Translation

Nostalgic for church bells,
incense that with its stern aroma
startled me into reverence,

plant my candle in the sand —
In the moment, fear of fire quelled
as an answer to prayer.

For all the wrong reasons,
stained glass moves me.
I am easier to confront
as mosaic, assertive
in my rejection of sun|
as a hasty spill of light.

I chose two surfaces to study —
the cold static waters of a plastic globe
and the pilgrim-penned flight of the Atlas moth.
Wingspan tantalizing in a forgotten Greek alphabet,
bilateral deltas revealed before flight.

The first time I identified Greece on my globe,
I wondered at its mosaicked anatomy,
unlike the resolute fullness
I thought classified land into countries.

iii. A Revised Map for Monarchs

What compels a monarch butterfly into wanderlust:

Sun in its systematic sweep
over archipelagos of milkweed,
rain that hitches rides on worn thoraxes,
air quivering with the pliable heat
mirages are made of.

A knapsack of biological tools —
a dizzied compass
unfamiliar to direction but partial
to the steadfast plod of mornings,
evenings with worn soles,
a circadian clock with its sense of rhythm
invested in storm-beams.

A monarch without its antennae
has no sense of place,

spends migration as the poet
who can’t define a desert,
can’t name a valley,
can’t sleep somberly
in the collapsed shadow
of the chrysalis.

iv. The Morphos and Memory

I startle at their size,
all wing, bodies poised
like broken punctuation
in a dead language’s poetry.

They erupt from dreams,
not as insects but as pilgrims
whose wings bear thirsting bodies
of water among black expanses.

Awaken —

I remember my naptime quilt
pristine with a pink underbelly,
fabric boasting swallowtails, viceroys,
painted ladies, all flightless in their splendor,

how I wouldn’t sleep. How I would spend my life
preserving instead a swath of faded cloth
teeming with milkweed, wisps of dandelion run-off,
faint lilies suspended in pinkish mire,

how it took me five years to write this poem,
first in the form of an essay whose language
stagnated in its own motif, then in
the transition between silence

and having something to say.

How I will never call this a poem at all
but a migration of self,
circadian elegy, cathartic taxonomy.

MELINA PAPADOPOULOS is a student at Baldwin Wallace University. Her work has appeared in Jelly Bucket, Booth, apt, and Roanoke Review, among others.