Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013
by Sixfold
Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors
www.sixfold.org
Sixfold is a 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.
Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October, each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.
License Notes
Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue is acknowledged. Thank you for your support.
Sixfold
Garrett Doherty, Publisher
sixfold@sixfold.org
www.sixfold.org
(203) 491-0242
Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013
Chris Joyner | Wrestlemania III & other poems
Carey Russell | Visiting Hours & other poems
Marc Pietrzykowski | Cabinet of Wonders & other poems
Jonathan Travelstead | Prayer of the K-12 & other poems
Jennifer Lowers Warren | Our Daughter's Skin & other poems
Jeff Burt | The Mapmaker's Legend & other poems
Patricia Percival | Giving in to What If & other poems
Toni Hanner | 1960—Lanny & other poems
Christopher Dulaney | Uncle & other poems
Suzanne Burns | Window Shopping & other poems
Katherine Smith | Mountain Lion & other poems
Peter Kent | Surliness in the Green Mountains & other poems
William Doreski | Gathering Sea Lavender & other poems
Huso Liszt | Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin... & other poems
Clifford Hill | How natural you are & other poems
R. G. Evans | Dungeoness & other poems
David Kann | Dead Reckoning & other poems
Ricky Ray | The Music of As Is & other poems
Tori Jane Quante | Creatio ex Materia & other poems
G. L. Morrison | Baba Yaga & other poems
Joe Freeman | In a Wood & other poems
George Longenecker | Bear Lake & other poems
Benjamin Dombroski | South of Paris & other poems
Ryan Kerr | Pulp & other poems
Josh Flaccavento | Glen Canyon Dam & other poems
Christine Stroud | Grandmother & other poems
Abraham Moore | Inadvertent Landscape & other poems
Chris Haug | Cow with Parasol & other poems
Mariah Blankenship | Fiberglass Madonna & other poems
Emily Hyland | The Hit & other poems
Sam Pittman | Growth Memory & other poems
Alex Linden | The Blues of In-Between & other poems
Bobby Lynn Taylor | Lift & other poems
D. Ellis Phelps | Five Poems
Alia Neaton | Cosmogony I & other poems
Elisa Albo | Each Day More & other poems
Noah B. Salamon | Sanctuary & other poems
Contributor Notes
Chris Joyner
Wrestlemania III
So much depends upon
a scoop slam, an atomic
leg drop. Hulk Hogan’s shirt:
red wheelbarrow ripped open
as if by tornado or rust.
Jacked, his waxed skin
glazed with sweat, he is flexed
perfection. Bleached strands
worn like a bald-rimmed crown,
if ever he was apex, it is now:
all 7’5” 500 pounds of André the Giant
muscled impossibly overhead
like a mythological burden,
like Muybridge’s mid-gallop,
airborne horse. Though too young
to have witnessed, I somehow remember
gripping rabbit ears, counting to three
as Hogan peeled back the Giant’s leg.
I remember my father posing, partly
to me, partly to himself,
What makes a man? but never
the answer. I am trying
to pretend I don’t see the future
in his now slouching breasts,
or deeper inside slack flesh,
his heart hammering like a one-
armed carpenter worked too long
into the gloam. I am child again,
beside him under what relief
(I’d yet to fathom) a hot shower
bestows blue-collar bones.
grease from his hands
a game. Father, can I know
of love’s inglorious sacrifices?
Can I someday sing of its gristle?
Can I? Can I sing?
Hatred and Honey
Fledgling blunders, routine
tragedies, a dusk-bourbon sky
chasing us home. Suburbia—
what’s salvageable:
this viewfinder of warped images?
Or rather, memory as a hose
untangled with coordination
and patience? Copper-sweet
water the spigot rewards?
Now the sour must of an office
where my uncle hid monolithic
stacks of skin magazines, all airbrushed
areolas and bush. When it seemed enough
to simply palm my flesh
like an injured chick. Flash
to swimsuit snatched below
my bony knees, prick a sudden
offering to the golden
lifeguard with Fibonacci curls.
How the yelp I mustered
before bolting sounded
not my own. A summer anthem,
shame became inescapable,
became like gravity
teaching the moon
to orbit alone.
So I lifted weights in our oily garage,
tore muscle like sacrament bread.
The friend I hated most once snapped
my hockey stick in half for no reason
other than cruelty craves reaction.
So too he set fire to a pine
in the neighboring woods;
I entered briefly to see it blaze—
a blood-red exclamation.
That was how it went: rarely living
between hatred and honey, not rebellious
but ignorant of consequence
until we witnessed how indifferent
and vibrant the flames, how surely,
when stepped on, a rusted nail
settles the soft meat.
This tender recess left
once the nail is loosed.
Ode to Mosh
But for now, 17, we are
acned and beautiful, tornadic
in our angst. The venue’s strobe-
dark striates our flail
neon/black/neon/black.
Lost in an undulation of knuckles
and chains, bedraggled bangs
and B.O., we are tossed—
paper lanterns in a storm—
slip, are lifted, return
to riffs clipping the beer-thick air,
kick drums pummeling our love
�
� for the necessary rebellion
punk rock affords. After,
the lingering
sting in our ears we smuggle
home like anything good
that fades. But for now our bodies,
apertures through which
revolt and song, prism brilliantly—
solar flares through stained glass.
Ode to Asymmetry
Bless the smaller, left breast, untethered, swimming
under faded cotton you wear to bed,
mattress begun to cup like hands
held out for the drizzle of our sleep.
Bless the 37 crumpled drafts of “Virtuvian Man”
Da Vinci, flustered, arced into his waste bin.
Drafts with one testicle slightly drooped,
one longer leg, six fingers, wonky eye.
in a country not quite our antipode. The unpredictable
course blood runs from a needle-nicked finger.
The unpredictable course by which cancer conquers,
finally, the dictator’s lymph and marrow.
Bless the fractal crack of lightning,
its flighty refusal to lick the same ground.
The drunk man struck while scrawling
sloppily, with earnest into the oaks’ flank
he hearts her—a declaration
to whichever sidereal big shot
rules over us but does not appear
to reward our psalms.
Which is not the way I feel for you now,
Honey-Bum, as you saunter braless, against
exhaustion, toward the commitment
of another dawn. Not asymmetrical, exactly, our love
but chiral, Icarian in its fluctuations. Not golden
our mean but a perfectly flawed stone
in a ring too small. This, the only way
I’d have it: waltzing off-beat,
mismatched,
mooching booze
at oblivion’s dance party.
Carey Russell
Visiting Hours
Let’s build a tent of sweaters
and huddle like bullfrogs.
Come snuggle so close to me
you can hear my hair
chaff against your skull.
The sky is a dying violet
veined in silent oaks.
I leave you my voice
in nurses’ footsteps climbing
up the white linoleum.
That and clean socks.
Almostleaves haze about these
late March branches. They candle
to green in the last reaches
of the sunset before winking out.
Is that what you thought
your death would look like?
I am still coming home
to your hanging shirts.
Domestic
Through muscled roots, past black spring
soil, I buried your old dog.
Her old dog, you would say, watching him
search the house for her, hopeful,
her clothes still in the closet, hair still
in the brush. You still slept then
in linens embroidered in tight stitches,
her initials rising like scars. Now pale
ovals and rectangles hang where her
pictures had, shadows of those
boxed photographs you still avoid.
This is the season of her
dying. And deep into hard earth that scours
the shovel, I buried the dog.
Egret
At the end of summer the egret stands
where the green reeds blacken
into deep. White and alone, velvet
he greets
cranberry vines
crumpling his gown then smoothing it.
His yellow metal eye,
layered by millions of years, the unbroken
clouds of a storm, and all
the weight that keeps You
from me and holds us to the earth.
Egret tell me you’ve met a god
so reckless that he will love
us all equally.
After Hours
Clever sticks scratch the liver
spotted lake, the first green
unraveling. She is left.
Clouds cross her gaze
and a few unassembled stars.
How cold it is in this house.
These inescapable thoughts,
all that can and cannot be
healed, how and how long.
It is all still now, her vision
washed out. A history carved
in her feet and emptied space.
All night long the room shifts
to fit the absence. An act
of god could shake her,
a tremor in the earth
of her body and the stretch of
water so black it burns.
Into the Valley
I returned home for this, an Appalachian
valley where once-green hills hold
the breath of the dead between them and lift
from each morning a fresh bandage
of mist. I watched the lowering, her coffin
rocking into the ground, a cradle
swaddled in gravel and dirt. Early fog sank in
so dense I could tear it like bread.
The gaze of the mourners followed me,
their eyes black scattering birds.
A fine ice dusted, silently silvered
my hair into my mother’s.
Cupping my hands, I gathered cold globes
of breath, watched them whisper away.
Do the dead hold their mouths in their hands
like this to know what is left of them?
When I left, I took the valley with me,
the train slicing the fields, leaving
its stiff suture. She is survived by me.
Marc Pietrzykowski
Cabinet of Wonders
Hefting Mrs. O out of bed required
a winch and a cradle of straps
and a hard ear: she cried, at least
more often than wailing, wordless,
the occasional bark. No wonder,
both hips were shattered, her spine
nearly a question mark.
So, her soft sobs were welcome
Tuesday morning, before bath,
and her sudden shrieks ignored,
at first, until we saw her fist
jabbing toward the floor: a small,
pink, heart-shaped box had fallen
and lay beside the bedpan.
Jamilla opened it, and up sprung
a tiny ballerina, en pointe,
pirouetting to Für Elise,
gears plinking slowly, slowly,
the song Mrs. O’s sister practiced
forever, in the front parlor,
the sun colored vase of lilies
atop the piano, hair in a shaggy bun.
We all listened as it slowed
to a crawl, one note, one more,
then hung, unresolved, on the C.
Mrs. O didn’t have to cry, Jamilla
turned the key before breathing,
let it play, let it wind down again,
then turned the key once more
to watch the ballerina twirl.
I Am Glad I Have Seen Racehorses, Women, Mountains
I am glad I have seen racehorses, women, mountains,
glad I have sung, stretched my back, peeled skin from my sun-burnt arms;
I am grateful to have had a good enemy,
and to have fought, knowing there is no end to fighting.
There are few things to believe, and many things to know,
and they are all mixed up in a rusty can,
but when you are thirsty, even the rust
tastes of life. I am glad I have seen pumpkins, contortionists,
a mound of snow the size of a house; glad to have stunk a while
in the hole left by love, to have smiled
when an enemy was injured without reason,
to have realized there was a day the battle would end, for me.
There are tunnels and crevices beneath our feet, and weeds
springing up from between them, and beneath that, yes,
it is hot, but it is not a heat that concerns us, nothing human there,
though we may, given time, be ground down again into that molten sea.
When This Plane Goes Down, I Want To Be Sitting Beside You