Category Archives: Poetry
REGENERATION by Brenda Taulbee
Brenda Taulbee
REGENERATION
I want to put my head down
…………………….and sleep like I used to know
…………………….………..how to sleep.
…………………….I want my brain to be less
like a rained out game
…………………….of hopscotch, the lines all running.
I never want to forget how the axolotl grows back its limbs.
…………………….…………………….…………………….And the starfish. And the lizard.
…………………….…………………….…………………….Snakes and their skin.
…………………….………..I want to write a poem about
…………………….a time I was brave and have you believe me.
I want my mother to call me without my mother knowing
…………………….…………………….…………..I want
…………………….…………………….…………..her to call me.
…………………….……………………I want to say I’m sorry and not sound condescending.
…………………….…………………….…………..Same for I love you.
…………………….…………………….……………………………………….Same for please stay.
I never want to do what the pot does
……..……..……..to the lobster. The scream
……..……..……..……..……..……..…….. ……..……..of all that red.
…………………….……………………I want you to read me without spoiling the ending.
…………………….……………………………………..……..I want an ending. One where we all live
…………………….…………………. ……………………and nobody is left to cradle the gasp
…………………….…….. ………….. ……………..of our bodies.
I want my body to be more like a galaxy and less
…………………….…………………. ……………..like a meat-packing plant. I mean,
……………………………. …………………………………………..…………. ……………..disorderly. I mean free.
Brenda Taulbee is a queer poet living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. Her work has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, and The San Diego Poetry Annual, among others. These days, she spends more time talking to cats than people, and that feels ok.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
SHOW TUNES by Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh
SHOW TUNES
My ex-
husband texting
quotations, marked:
“I know all about your
standards…” Because July:
………….Music Man.
last month was June’s
………….Carousel
bustin’ out
all over.
(If I… )
Next month:
………….State Fair
(Iowa, again, my home
state).
“…Irish imagination…” I know
he is drinking red
“…Iowa stubbornness…”
wine
“…library full of
books…” for his heart.
September, December
………….Fantasticks.
May, always
………….Camelot
Last line, un-
punctuated:
Don’t you ever
think about being
…?
almost like being: it’s always
Brigadoon Groundhog Day.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers, Julie Benesh is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, and her writing can be found in Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Tin House Magazine (print), Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Hobart, New World Writing, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and many other places. Read more at juliebenesh.com.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
I AM LOSING MY HANDS. by Kelley White
Kelley White
I AM LOSING MY HANDS.
The right hand middle finger middle joint swollen. I can almost see it. And hurt. Three times I try to open a bottle and hurt. Struggle. Will I need to ask for help? And who? There is the caretaker and I do so little. Last night the bulk the sheer bulk of him in bed. I move and it is a truck. A seismic dinosaur. The bedclothes shifting. Bedclothes. How many he saved. And all the tolls. He took tools he saved from his raggedly van. Sad. How sad. We did sleep in it and once I shivered shivered shivered big me. On skyline drive where there were deer and I saw them in the misty morning. And that boy hitchhiking with his dog. I don’t remember their names, the boy or the dog. Might have been Australian. He drew us both. Not what I think I look like. Yet my braids are gone now. So many shears. Years. It would not harm be me now to grow them back. How could it? This is this is a draft. Automatic s writing with a malfunctioning finger. Will it improve if I go faster? If I exercise it? Too cold to walk outside. Pain pain burning cold blueness. Poems and pines. Turning pines to omens. Poems to ounces. That’s good and if my fingers slside on the ssskeyboard well. This could all be interesting and now.
Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, and JAMA. Her most recent collection is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant and is currently Poet-in-Residence at Drexel University College of Medicine.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
TEENAGE ASTRONOMY by Karin Wraley Barbee
Karin Wraley Barbee
TEENAGE ASTRONOMY
Men watch her from her ceiling,
Cepheus and Hercules,
pressed there by a girl
on the top bunk.
Their luminous hands
connect the dots of her
now teenage body.
The screen glows like
the Northern Lights
beneath her bedspread.
Night to night, unmoved,
she appears.
We measure the parallax.
She is further from us now.
Month to month, she brightens
and fades. Even in morning
her skin is a white light
through torn shorts.
The sun has been reduced
to a clementine.
She gathers rainbows in her room,
presses them back into the prism.
We bag it all up, the old moons,
smiling, their violet songs.
She is a projection now,
an image on paper.
She is a spot in our closed eyes,
a red flare that seems fading
but rages bright enough,
shrinking into her radiance,
her core pure power.
She is nuclear.
A hard look.
A locked door.
A native of Ohio, Karin Wraley Barbee currently teaches composition and creative writing at Siena Heights University. She lives with her two children in Adrian, Michigan. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Swerve, Fjords Review, Columbia Review, The Diagram, Whiskey Island, Found Poetry Review, Glass, Sugar House Review, The Rupture, and others. More info about Karin’s work can be found at karinwraleybarbee.weebly.com.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
BEND AND TOUCH THE GRASS by Peter Grandbois
Peter Grandbois
BEND AND TOUCH THE GRASS
Though the house is quiet
another day nearly
………….snuffed out
Shadows slipping through
a bear’s skull,
………….half-buried
Deer prints breaking
the blossoming mud
………….at the water’s edge
The cricket’s chirp
limping through
………….the undecided night
You still understand
nothing
………….of silence
Time thickens
to an inky paste
………….deep in the hollow
of your hands
The moon a blind eye
opening
………….inside you
A leaf falls
becomes the wind
………….before it rests
becomes a stray
dog
a prophet sucking
the tit
………….of sky
The house lives
inside you
………….not you
inside the house
Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books. His work has appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW by Maddie Baxter
Maddie Baxter
THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW
My left leg is
an eroded coastline.
Squeeze my thigh to feel
the plateau of un-muscle.
Shaving my legs for the first time
at 13
was pressing a blade
to rubber.
If my pain was a keyboard
it’d be the lowest note,
uncaring, deep, monotone,
a whale’s cry
many leagues under
the eroded coastline.
The doctor touches my toes
with chilled prongs
A cold fish in
one of those pedicure shops
where the fish devours
the dead skin off your toes.
When I was born the fish gnawed away
at nerve endings in my left leg.
My leg is snapped telephone pole
no current pulses
through it and my brain
convinces me
I am covered
in tumors.
I am covered in
cafe au lait birthmarks
Stained in coffee
that indicates disease.
Now that I have been touched in fear
by a doctor
who does not even know my name,
I wait
for a bill in my mailbox
totaling $611.21
My mother’s texts
sound like co-star horoscopes.
Sometimes erosion is fixed
with sandbags
Around the crash pad
for waves
I dream about becoming a scarecrow
stuffed with cotton
Meaty, and upright
along the coastline.
Maddie Baxter (she/her) is a poet and copywriter living in Charlotte, North Carolina. She graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She’s a fan of poetic constraints, surrealism, and public bathrooms. You can read more of her work in recent issues of The News Station, Unbroken Journal, and Drunk Monkeys.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
MONOCULAR by Tingyu Liu
Tingyu Liu
MONOCULAR
Remembering, still: Sunday egg scrambles, green
…………..peppers and sharp cheddar adorning
…………..our fingers, coffee pot chuckling.
Tilt and: our slip of a room
…………..in Havana, stumbling on the party downstairs, sweet
…………..cake kiss, warm cola in colored cups.
Tilt: our orange kayak flush
…………..with the Atlantic, two Coronas propped
…………..between us, shared spots of cool.
Now: winter and
…………..walking into a corner bar
…………..in Little Italy, bare
…………..golden bulbs and stained counters and I turn 360,
lost in this palindrome,
…………..wanting not wanting.
A bird’s eye view:
…………..stranger, stranger, stranger.
But, had her beak hovered
…………..on you—I think
…………..even, I think that, I think even—
…………..we’d still be a winter
…………..each, a hemisphere apart.
Trees can’t be green everywhere.
…………..A bird changes direction
…………..…………..by beating her left and right wing at different speeds.
Tingyu Liu was born in Huaian, China, grew up in Miami, and currently works in Boston in biotech. She has been published in The Normal School, Four Way Review, Borderlands, Bodega, and elsewhere, as well as various scientific journals for her neuroscience research. She has degrees from Pomona College and MIT.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
SILVER FALLS by Melody Wilson
Melody Wilson
SILVER FALLS
We have driven east this bright afternoon,
the two of us, young parents on a break from
entropy. I am drowning in something I can’t
define and the day reels out like un-spliced frames
of someone else’s life. We park the car and skirt past
other people’s happiness, past picnic tables and barbecues.
You take my hand and we climb to the falls. The noise
of life filters up: laughter, singing. I am relieved
when the roar of water engulfs the din. I taste the
mist on my anesthetized skin, inhale the green power
of the fall, but do not jump. Something slippery creeps
up by spine, maybe vertigo, maybe hope.
Melody Wilson writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Shore, and Timerline Review. Upcoming work will be in Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, and SWWIM. She has recently been awarded the 2021 Kay Snow Poetry Award and is Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
BIOLUMINESCENCE by Sara Mae
Sara Mae
BIOLUMINESCENCE
The pregnancy scare skulks through bay grasses.
It tips us over like cows & drains our peach liqueur.
Flashlights under the bleachers illuminating grope & teen
& tooth & wick, a stick rattling the jellyfish to yield shine.
I was 15, sneaking out to the 7-11 where I had perfected
straddling someone on a skateboard, coming home
a root system of bug bites. My first pregnancy test
all because a boy had fingered me. I think I knew
that I wasn’t pregnant, that I was just practicing,
reverent for the monsters we only face in daylight.
Years later, today & beast bright & the cashier asks
if I want a bag for that & I nod, afraid for others to see
what I carry. She says, I’ve got you, the lighthouse,
the moorless vessel, premonition in high waters, voice
for miles over a body of water like slumber party incantation.
& praise the mornings, revealing our glowing aloneness,
a single pink line balanced on the bones of the clawfoot tub.
Who was that creature I was just beginning to talk to?
Sara Mae is a white, queer poet and fashion witch raised between Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland. Her work can be found in Peach Mag, Pigeon Pages, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. In her free time, she is learning burlesque in the studio or in her bedroom, and writing songs for her project The Noisy. If they could go to dinner with any famous person, they wouldn’t care who it was as long as there was Old Bay on the food.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
SURVIVOR GUILT by Melody Wilson
Melody Wilson
SURVIVOR GUILT
My sister slept in the laundry room, the door fastened by a
cinch strap and a nail. She painted the cinderblock walls
purple. Some nights tires would slide into the gravel drive and
it was my job to cover. I feigned sleep, confusion, while our parents
banged on the impenetrable door. She taught me to hitchhike,
shoplifted my first bra, considered me a coward.
Freeze, she said, if the cops come. Cry when you’re cornered by a man.
She was the artist, the ringleader, my wildest thing,
my alternate universe, a phone call and some chemistry away.
Always trying to be something you’re not, she said, when I
told her I was clean. I should have chugged malt liquor
with her that November day. We could have smoked grass
as she put me in my place,
all afternoon.
Melody Wilson writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Recent work appears in Quartet, Briar Cliff Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Shore, and Timerline Review. Upcoming work will be in Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, and SWWIM. She has recently been awarded the 2021 Kay Snow Poetry Award and is Honorable Mention for the 2021 Oberon Poetry Award.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
FLOUNDER by Tom Laichas
Tom Laichas
FLOUNDER
i
The fingertips know things. Their ridged
whorls …. confess… the … whole.. body’s
whereabouts.
The fingernails know things too, and knew
them even before the teeth.
ii
The left hand arrives like a visitant, held one
arm’s length from the body. The left is a myth
of repudiated power.
The left hand’s five fingers sense a world
different from the right’s.
The left hand is grafted from another gender,
another species, from that one who knapped
the cleverest edges from flint.
The left hand’s arts are other.
iii
We are not born to symmetry. The mouth
turns up one way or another.
One eye is wayward. The other is clouded.
The heart bleeds left. The liver slumps right.
Joints ache one at a time, sometimes in pain
on the right, sometimes on the left.
We dodder into age and our toes skew.
They’re like a child’s milk teeth, growing
higglety-pigglety.
iv
The flounder’s two moonish eyes have come
to rest on its body’s left side. The flounder’s
right fin has atrophied.
The flounder is the omen of our toppling
bodies.
Catch the flounder. Cut it open. Read that
crooked gut.
Never forget: hold the votive knife in your
left hand’s fist.
Tom Laichas’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, Aji, La Piccioletta Barca, Evening Street Review, Stand, and elsewhere. He is the author of the collection Empire of Eden (High Window Press, 2019) and the chapbook Sixty-Three Photographs at the End of a War (3.1 Press, 2021).
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
flats by Danny Cooper
Danny Cooper
flats
hot sand and grainy glass
yours is packed like clay
me i grab some seashells
and scrape to the bone
doe deer’s ribs on hard cement
honey fur still clean and pristine
same wet pink thread of mine
in coiled cervine braid
rigid skull, a cratered moon
flakes like chocolate croissant
under silver steak knife
gray matter oozes out
grimy fingers prod the grooves
looking for the right shape
a celtic knot or bunny-eared loops
force the image clear
mold and wet blur
my grassy eyes can’t glare
i send your vision in the mail
watch me bend in the grid
bug bites on my legs
lunulas swelling their bed
overgrown green marrow
or a neck i think you’ll bite
grind me into ash
amaranth slivers of meat
sieve through the desert
skin in the wind
Danny Cooper is a recent graduate from the University of Pennsylvania where he majored in English and Earth Science. He’s originally from South Jersey and is now living in Brooklyn, New York. He spent the past summer working at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities developing climate storytelling workshops.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #35.
manic / depressive by Savannah Slone
Savannah Slone
manic / depressive
i only exist in spectrum extremes
floating amongst personality binaries
hard cut offs…….. prescription intimacy
learning to top
the in betweens dusting for my own
fingerprints in a house made up entirely
of stained glass ………………………of sunday
bath mat moldings …………….erotic velvet
desert mirrors
floor ………………………………………………..ceiling
violet skylight
blue flame rage
love concentrate
false memories
sky flood
my marionette hands
choreographing
hillscapes folding in on
themselves
constellations
underwater, ……spot lit
haunt
monochromatic weekdays
i am only wallpaper
self-gaslighting, a welcoming
home.
Savannah Slone is a queer, bipolar, and disabled writer. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Homology Lit and the author of An Exhalation of Dead Things (CLASH Books, 2021) alongside two chapbooks. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #34.
NITS by Marsha Blitzer
Marsha Blitzer
NITS
The native mums told me it was inevitable,
……………………………………………………..nobody’s fault.
………………..In the changing room
………………………..……………………………they swapped
………………..uniform jumpers and caps.
Soon I saw my sons scratching their skulls.
………………..Sesame seeds,
each louse
……………………………………………………..had claws attached to hair
………………..where it was warmest—
……………………………………………………..the nape of the neck
………………..or around the ears.
They laid nits,
………………..ten or so a day.
The brown pinheads hatched,
……………………………………………………..first into nymphs,
………………..then adults — left behind empty egg cases
……………………………………………………..glued on. Neat rows
clung with military precision
………………..to the shafts.
Mother swore by mayonnaise
……………………………………………………..to suffocate the tiny
………………..wingless insects, or vinegar
……………………………………………………..to dehydrate them.
Gasoline or kerosene, a less acceptable
………………..alternative, even for her.
I chose disinfecting shampoo,
……………………………………………………..used a fine-toothed
………………..comb to tease them out
……………………………………………………..at night – parsed one section
then the next, egg by egg,
………………..each strand of hair.
We talked about the day at school,
………………..missing Dad,
……………………………………………………at work in America.
Before bed, I soused them
……………………………………..in lavender oil,
their stuffed animals,
………………..too.
Marsha Blitzer has published poems in The American Journal of Poetry, The Banyan Review, and 166 Palms. An alumna of Sarah Lawrence, she completed the coursework for a PhD in Russian Literature and Linguistics from Georgetown and holds a JD and a MS in Education. She has practiced law in Moscow and London and now lives with her husband in Tucson, Arizona.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #34.
Shelter by Esther Ra
Esther Ra
SHELTER
Every evening before we climb into the car,
I tap the hood politely, and wait for the street cats
to leap out underneath—gray cloudbursts of mist-
matted fur, supple flash of muscle and sinew.
Even in the winter, slices of sunlight
butter the walls, caress the faceless
square windows. Last night I dreamed
about laughing with someone I missed,
the cold trickle of fear when I felt myself
stirring awake. In English class, my student
signs his letters to his mother with
—softly, your son— and I don’t attempt to
correct him. The cats are screaming
hoarsely in the night, so crazed with joy
in each other’s thin warmth, they long
for the whole world to know.
If only everything could be a little bit
softer. The snow falls soundless
in the golden light, blurring every edge
to a gently rubbed-out mistake.
Esther Ra is the author of book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018) and the founding editor of The Underwater Railroad, a literary reunification project. Her work has also been published in Boulevard, Rattle, The Rumpus, and Border Crossing, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize and the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. In writing, as in life, she is deeply interested in the quiet beauty of the ordinary. (www.estherhaelanra.com)
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #34.
SMALL CONSOLATION by Diana Rickard
Diana Rickard
SMALL CONSOLATION
you make an offering to posterity
ghastly aesthetic cauterizes the virile
there is a corniness to the late wave and you absorb
because of resemblance
because of what drifts
and sifts through the sieve
all of it
you fought and then you learned and then used humor to veil your motives
the prosaic shame of waiting, a penny dreadful of anticipation
in half-hearted syntax you question risk
a lilac apple flecked with gold
the edifying volume that is always put off, and the cuteness of everyone’s pets
nostalgic for an attention span, you are moved by a hesitant apology
the inbox contains an update. a question about snacks. a second confirmation
you recognize a silhouette on the toilet
familiar like that dull bonding when a celebrity dies
you love the bottle but hate the fragrance
merely balancing, on coiled spine
porous and commanding, generous and small
before you a darkening and amputated image
a woman falters then takes the stage
tipping on a generation, glad for the notebook
your robust materialism made from mutant fascination
a cultural deformity
decaying fort
a doll that always says no
Diana Rickard is a poet and true-crime scholar. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines. Her next book, on long-form documentaries, is forthcoming from NYU Press.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #34.
PAPER MACHE ON THE DRAIN by Soheon Rhee
Soheon Rhee
PAPER MACHE ON THE DRAIN
The day of Chuseok,
I remember that you wanted
to cut my dress and how
you made confetti of silk on
the basin with the remaining
the cloth of my hanbok jagged.
I had closed my eyes,
and when I woke, darkness
descended through the window
panes and eomma
was wearing an apron and
looked at me oddly.
I cannot hear her words
from the pounding rain
outside, I can see the shadows
hanging in between the skinned
branches of an oak tree.
Mother is now cleaning
the dishes and I hear your
footsteps receding before
you find me, you are holding
on the silk I had planned
to wear today, smiling
as if you had forgotten.
Soheon Rhee is a thirteen-year-old student who is currently attending International School of Manila. During her free time, she likes hanging out with her friends and reading books such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Her works have been accepted in Second Chance Lit, Stone Soup, and others.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #34.
AT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE by Kate Peterson
Kate Peterson
AT A CAFÉ IN VICTORIA, BC TWO GREY-HAIRED MEN TALK ABOUT LOVE
She’s in the garden all the time
and I’ve got my bridge,
and the next thing you know
you’re living different lives.
One asks the other, If she finds another guy
do you think you’d still be friends?
I wonder if this is generational
or national, men talking this way
out in public, over a cup of coffee.
My ex was absorbed in his book
and didn’t notice, which may also
be generational or national.
After a while he eyed me taking notes
and guessed I was writing about him.
He looked up to say he just realized
he is more American than he wants to be.
Wind lifted in my chest, waves of loneliness
and love I’ll never understand. The way it rises and falls.
The men started up a game of Mahjong
and my coffee was gone so I got restless,
which is obviously generational
and national. Finally, we moved to the water.
Kate Peterson’s chapbook Grist won the Floating Bridge Prize and was published by Floating Bridge Press in 2016. Her poetry, prose, and interviews have been published in Sugar House Review, Glassworks, The Sierra Nevada Review, Rattle, Willow Springs, Hawai`i Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Kate is the director of Get Lit! Programs, home of Spokane’s annual week-long literary festival.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #33.
LAST GESTURE by James Miller
James Miller
LAST GESTURE
We eat on the porch
when evening heat recedes.
Lamps hang from the oak.
The Conrad novel rests
between us—eighty-nine
pages left to speak aloud.
As you reach out for a drink,
we see a tiny frog, its soft green
curves still as summer, perched
on the lip of your glass. He leaps,
alights on the secret agent,
then the near-blankness
of our table, dry and smeared
with tree sap. Motionless,
aware. You offer a thumbnail
of water and he rests there,
half-submerged. We fall silent,
but miss the last gesture.
He is gone.
James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typehouse, Rabid Oak, North Dakota Quarterly, Yemassee, Phoebe, Mantis, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, Grey Sparrow Review, Blue River, 8 Poems, After Happy Hour, Two Hawks Quarterly, Concho River Review, Sweet Tree Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @AndrewM1621.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #33.
LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020 by Laura Tanenbaum
Laura Tanenbaum
LITTLE GRIEF SONG, JULY 2020
“But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rages of fog
where we stood, saying I”
—Adrienne Rich, “In those Years”
Today we took the kids to the cemetery, for escape.
No, it’s fine we explain to bewildered out-of-towners.
A place to go. Historical.
You ask, am I grieving:
OK, then, yes, I’m grieving.
The last day on the playground.
Someone sent me a picture and a joke.
Said we were all doomed; we touch our faces so much.
Remember that?
I thought then that I had never touched that person’s face,
not even by accident, and now I never would.
The kids find graves of two brothers
from Maryland who fought on opposite sides
of the last battle of the Civil War.
Reunited at a field hospital,
One said “peace,” the other “traitor.”
“The war between brothers” was propaganda,
but once in a while true. Like everything.
The kids have bandanas; call themselves bandits.
Years ago a teacher blindfolded us &
we touched each other’s faces. It was
acting or dance or maybe anthropology.
I don’t remember but I remember Michelle’s cheeks.
She thought the exercise distasteful.
“I’ve only touched the faces of people I’ve been with.”
I wasn’t with her but we drove to New Hampshire together.
Bad teachers are good at bringing people together.
She met my mother, likely brushed her cheek.
I don’t remember Michelle’s last name.
It’s not true, what they say about now:
People can still disappear from you. Happens
all the time, even before all this.
Did I remember her last name? That first morning?
Honestly I was shaky on her first.
You said that once, about someone now lost to you, and I loved you for it.
You say you don’t miss that now, her, then, any of it,
and neither do I.
Or so I say, sitting softly,
brushing no one’s cheek.
Each day I lose a hundred names.
Laura Tanenbaum is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Aji, Catamaran, Narrative, Entropy, and other publications. She has also published essays and book reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #33.
I AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS by Valerie Loveland
Valerie Loveland
I AM THAT GROUP OF PICTURES OF SPIDERWEBS MADE BY SPIDERS ON DIFFERENT DRUGS
Scientists call everything an experiment,
…………………….even when ……iit is actually a meme
even when …………………………..it is actually a spiderweb beauty contest
Scientists don’t realize
even when they talk about drugs,
………………………….…………………they are still nerds.
……Who hasn’t been…….. an accident,
an experiment, a copy of an experiment,
……………..another copy of an experiment?
Everyone always tells me I am…………………… so ………………….…..……right:
I am proof there is a part of us all that can be normal.
But I forgot to tell you spider moms die before the babies are born so
…………nobody teaches spiders how to make their webs. I forgot to tell you
a spider doesn’t bother to go back and fix their mistakes.
……………………………………A fact becomes a fun fact
when everyone attempts to tell it to everyone else
……………………………………but everyone already knows it.
…………One time, a person tried to tell this group of photos
……………………………………………………about this group of photos.
I usually display …………………………high contrast black background with white webs
but when I am angry I switch
…………………………………………………………………………to beige background with black webs.
My psychiatrist told me I need to find a new doctor
…………………………………………because he is not allowed to prescribe drugs
………………………………………………………………farther than the fence in his backyard.
Look at this one photo …………and it looks like I am doing better,
…………………………………………………………………………look at the other photos
and it looks like I am doing worse.…… I am doing both.
…………………………………………………………I am not pictures of spiders or drugs
………………………………………………………………but I am constantly asked about spiders and drugs.
I have never been asked if messed up webs still catch bugs.
Valerie Loveland is a poet and programmer living in Philadelphia. She enjoys audio poetry, video games, and fountain pens. Her most recent two books are Female Animal, and Mandilble, Maxilla (Dancing Girl Press). She recently finished [Unsolved Mysteries Theme Song], a manuscript of poems about the 1990’s TV show Unsolved Mysteries.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #33.
AMMONITES by Ann de Forest
Ann de Forest
AMMONITES
mountains once were ocean evidence coils beneath
our feet prehistoric curlicues not yet nautilus not yet
snail not yet calcified turban washed up on the beach
………………………void of any tender
……………………………….creature
barely old enough to remember tasmanian devil’s cyclone
wake cartoon cat’s stiff armed stumbles vertiginous eyes
hypnotize pulsing black & white watch dangles
………………………sways eyelids
………………………………fall
…………………………………………………………………..where does time begin?
crack the case find the spring sister crouched beneath
a crib a finger flick sends silver spiral shimmying up
spinning down mesmerized by tiny revolutions
mesmerized by bounce and drop
………………………by boing
…………………………..and hum
………………………………………………………………………danger up ahead
rattler on the trail vortex in the toilet bowl fingers
furled to pack a punch lobster thrashing in a pot fallen
leaf and flame-licked letter go in green come out red tail
………………………rolled up between
………………………………your legs
tentacles sweep across the map tempest whirls turns
one blind eye twists wind and water flattening palms pounding
the panhandle whitening the gulf your thumbs
………………………too cold to leave
……………………… any imprint
………………………………………………………………………curl up & die
old woman tends her labyrinth plants boxwood seedlings
ankle high a lifetime pulling weeds curves her spine
………………………downward
…………………………….eyes drop
fiddlehead unfurls to fern colors swirl across the page
to seal a book adorn a spine ossify as marble boxwood grows
high grows round the generation’s last survivor
walks her labyrinth sprigs fill to hedge path
………………………vanishes
…………………………….as maze
………………………………………………………………………so easy to lose your way
split the pod find the bean
split the bean find the finest curling
tendril waiting for instructions to unwind
our own little bean a blip on a screen
………………………nestling in
……………………………a hurricane
………………………………………………………………………look down
the rosy sidewalk slabs dotted
with fossils spinning right under
………………………our eyes
………….. ………….ammonites
………………………………………………………………………look up
obscured by light expanding
overhead nebulae no need
………………………for any
……………………………witness
Ann de Forest’s work often centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Coal Hill Review, Unbroken, Noctua Review, Cleaver Magazine, Found Poetry Review, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Timber Creek Review, Open City, and PIF, and in Hidden City Philadelphia, where she is a contributing writer. She is currently editing an anthology of essays about walking, Slow Going, to be published by New Door Books in 2021, a project inspired by having twice walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia, the city she’s called home for three decades.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #33.
BEING WHOLE AFTER A DIAGNOSIS by Anthony Aguero
Anthony Aguero
BEING WHOLE AFTER A DIAGNOSIS
I. Diagnosis
Someone likens your body to soured-meat,
Flies swarming the thighs, a hint of cinnamon
Brushes just underneath your nose.
ELISA, has confirmed the inevitable.
O you enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.
II. Treatment Plan
Someone says take this ad infinitum. One by one,
Opal, green pills sitting at the bottom of a valley.
Nothing violet or green ever growing.
Stribild was approved by the US FDA in August 2012
For human bodies.
A cocktail of Vitekta, Tybost, Viread, and Emtriva.
III. Non-Adherence
Someone mentioned they smelled a thing dying
In the apartment you lived in. You checked each
And every corner – he put a flashlight
in your throat. Says It’s you. You prepare
an ofrenda with only cinnamon sticks.
Immunocompromised. Death in the white-
Blood of my body.
IV. Reminder
Death likes to tap at the sole of your foot.
It smells of cinnamon just to confuse you.
You smell meat running its course.
V. Adherence
One by one, opal, green pills sprawling at the
Bottom of a translucent lake. Little by little,
The color rushing back into your body.
Antiretroviral treatment –
The ceasefire of replication.
VI. Being Whole After a Diagnosis
You drowned so many times just to get here.
A hint of cinnamon brushes just under your nose.
O the scent of living too.
Anthony Aguero is a queer writer in Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared, or will appear, in The Bangalore Review, 2River View, The Acentos Review, The Temz Review, Rhino Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, 14 Poems, Redivider Journal, Maudlin House, and others.
Cover Photo by Sharon Co Images on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.
THE SECOND STEP by Meggie Royer
Meggie Royer
THE SECOND STEP
That night, the door so waterlogged with rain
it stuck for hours, hinges flush with the frame,
a mouth against spine.
In the woods that year, several syringes
we could never place, some long-ago nectar
unraveling like thread.
It was body memory, the feeling
of pushing the plunger,
neurons pulsing into every bell tone.
We filled them with marigolds instead,
gold punched into sharpness;
that night, they clattered against the door
like hail. Knowing we couldn’t let them in
was easier than knowing we could.
Meggie Royer is a Midwestern writer, domestic violence advocate, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Persephone’s Daughters, a literary and arts journal for abuse survivors. She has won numerous awards for her work and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She thinks there is nothing better in this world than a finished poem.
Cover Photo by Christian Allard on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.
AS TRANSPARENT AS IT GETS by Heikki Huotari
Heikki Huotari
AS TRANSPARENT AS IT GETS
Just because you’re parasailing doesn’t mean this call’s not coming from inside your house. As mirror neurons turn, I’m casting demons and fly fishing with them. In each multi-facet is a hidden hook. It’s possible that Satan is deceiving me. With Gertrude Stein I beg to differ then along with Gertrude Stein I beg to differ. What is not yet yellow is a yellow cat. What will they think of next? A palace for each personage and vice versa. Veni, vici, vidi, says restroom graffiti and, The joke is in your hand why are you looking here? Nor filler nor refrain, this content will not stop but is it pheasant under glass?
In a past century, Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest fire lookout tower. He’s a retired math professor and has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Pleiades, the American Journal of Poetry, and in three collections. A fourth collection is in press.
Cover Photo by KiVEN Zhao on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.
DISSECTION by Amy Beth Sisson
Amy Beth Sisson
DISSECTION
After school
my teacher helped
me pull the pink
downy breast feathers
to clear the skin
and make an incision
She put the scalpel
into my hand
smaller than the body
pinned to the black wax tray
I cut to reveal
porous bones, tiny intestines,
spongy lungs.
This would never
happen now
A teacher today
would lose
her job
Though plenty of robins
are still found dead on sidewalks
Night before last
I didn’t hear
the screech owl
whose cry had
kept me awake
all week
When I awoke
you came to mind out in
the smoke-choked west
Where birds
are falling from the skies
of the migratory flyways
I texted but you still haven’t replied
But today
in the early hours
I again lay listening
for the descending whine
and long trill
Amy Beth Sisson is sheltering in a small town outside of Philly. Her day job is in software development. She tells programmers what business people want and tells business people why they can’t quite have it. She completed UPenn’s online Modern Poetry course, ModPo, this summer. Her fiction has appeared in Enchanted Conversation and Sweet Tree Review. Her non-fiction for children has appeared in Highlight’s High Five and Fun for Kidz magazines.
Photo by Agto Nugroho on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.
HAVANA, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 2020 by Peter Wear
Peter Wear
HAVANA, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 2020
White clouds, so many white clouds
pause above August’s green cornfields–
an armada of triremes, sails cast in marble,
cross empty skies armies dreamed
held destinies that might outlive them,
mortal sons clad in fathers’ bronze,
the taste of blood and glory drying in their mouths,
all to die for a face whose singular beauty
was fictitious. But the clouds pass.
I never cared much for histories of war.
Honor and bravery I cajoled, things best
left to veteran halls and empty cinemas,
dive bars nursing the pings of automatic gunfire
locked behind a whisky cabinet. Two miles east
bone-white barns crease under bronze rot, husks
abandoned by molting cicadas whose cries
fill the air hissing lost prayers: please
don’t leave me alone, not here.
The Cubs are playing on the radio tonight.
Announcers remember their green years,
the injuries, the trivia, take casual shots
at each other amid the banter. Oh,
what I would give up to see those uniforms
one more time. The signal bleeds out, Christian
radio, then white noise, and I am left
with the scent of diesel and soybeans. I take the exit
pointing to the place where truckers sleep.
Peter Wear grew up in Minnesota and majored in English at Kenyon College. He currently resides in Chicago, where he works in marketing. His favorite job was sifting through donations at a thrift store, where he collected many useless things.
Cover Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.
WHERE I WAIT FOR YOU By travis tate
travis tate
WHERE I WAIT FOR YOU
The river before anything else, the glazed sun emerging
gently from evening. You, brightly looking towards what
I hope is me or, some future tense self where I’m dangling
slightly less from crisp edges. I’m all in-tuned, harmonic.
Your beaded breath on my neck in the morning, not like
beautiful but your stale mouth close to my ear. Quick
horizon made from our bodies lying close & the damned
buildings spiked up from the concrete. I see us in our
dizzy haze, walking close, shaking our bodies in each
others’ directions, seeing my parents, eating food from
a plate we share on the veranda, our bungalow. I want a
river to run through me, make a beard of your bramble,
something to put my hairs through in the wet evening.
Are you constant in your shaking? The riverbed is small,
something growing away from each of us, riverlets or,
more accurately, estuaries, gliding simply towards the sea.
travis tate is a queer, black playwright, poet and performer from Austin, Texas. Their poetry has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Underblong, Mr. Ma’am, apt, and Cosmonaut Avenue among other journals. Maiden, their debut poetry collection, is out on V.A. Press. They earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. You can find more about them at travisltate.com.
Cover photo by Nick Kulyakhtin on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.
SPEAKING OF SUNFLOWERS by Evan Anders
Evan Anders
SPEAKING OF SUNFLOWERS
the world is bare bones
an orphan after rage
relinquishes her arrow.
magnolias ago,
sunflowers stormed my mouth
every night an attempt to take ownership of the sun
every tide stumbling into decimation
a collied exists as a reminder
we were born a flicker of elegance.
autumn evolved with our refusal
to compromise, a sea turned to snow,
the sea’s last poem
another battle with the sheets
every destroyer has a price to pay
for petals strewn
upon the floor.
who am i to question this state of decay?
stripped bare the world is stone
soured on the promise of gold
speaking of sunflowers
each petal a faceless instinct
a glimpse at where the dust gathers
i’ve glorified my share of silk.
where once i was a storm
i am afraid
where once i cherished chaos,
chaos became my craft.
where do i go to scream?
no longer whispers in a vase
i swear to god
silence is a virtue.
we chew love for sugar
not sustainability
lost in a lullaby, i repeat myself
how shall i go to war with this flesh?
if i am empty, what are you?
to become the tide,
one must break.
Evan Anders brews coffee for mass consumption in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in Philadelphia Stories, California Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and Chicago Quarterly Review. He is a retired stay-at-home dad who thinks Bob Dylan was best in the eighties.
Cover Photo by Kilian Peschel on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #31.
MY LOVER STARTS SEEING by Chi Siegel
Chi Siegel
my lover starts seeing
after a.b. yehoshua’s “facing the forests”
my lover starts seeing
our house as a forest. my lover begins counting by the tree
its singing throbs with more than words, whisperings
of warm & summer & night. sacredness
bringing a lump in his throat.
this green, this sea does not rustle,
it’s small, like tombstones,
something constant with its leaves.
my lover would welcome conflagration.
my lover would leap into its arms.
………………………this is to say:
………………………it hasn’t always
………………………been this silent here.
the crimson glory of sunlight, the distant oil spill
sea behind that of the trees,
sap leaking like spit from his ridged & cracking
………………………tongue.
………………………now kindled,
………………………now his eyes glow.
………………………how assertively the forest
………………………leaves its mark.
now fire burns, like a prayer,
a mad moon hangs red in the sky,
just because he wanted to know how it is to blaze.
Chi Siegel is currently based in Oxford, U.K., though she was born and raised in San Jose, CA. She is the co-founder and Art Director of Sine Theta Magazine, a creative arts magazine by and for the Sino diaspora.
Cover photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #31.
THE PRICE OF HANDS by Brian Ellis
Brian Ellis
THE PRICE OF HANDS
You can try the gloves,
but the gloves will work
two hours tops. The grape juice
has crept inside of them.
Your hands are being braised now.
Your fingernails have become
the consistency of cake frosting.
The tips of your fingers are translucent.
By hour five you forget
the vibrating of the hopper.
The trembling of the grapes
streaming past you
in their furious march towards
the de-stemmer. You can’t
feel your spine anymore,
it has been shaken out of the back
of your shirt.
You’re still trying to pick up
each bunch, inspect it for detritus,
for Noble Rot. The ashen wad of wet death
that in small amounts, lends itself
to the exquisite. Mostly,
you find bugs. Earwigs are fine,
they don’t alter the flavor much.
But Ladybugs make wine bitter.
After hour six
the bright transition-metal stink
of mold is gone. You find a bird’s nest,
several Mantises. Paula tells you
last year she found a thumb.
This is the difference between
box wine and the bottle,
your hands.
The flavor of good wine is the price of hands.
The difference between
the bottom shelf and the timeless
flavor of wealth
is that one is drinking bugs and bird’s nests
and the other is drinking
the blood of hands.
Brian Ellis was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, and began performing his own poetry at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Often Go Awry from University of Hell Press. He lives in Portland, Ore.
Cover Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #31.
THE ESPERANZA PROJECT: A Collaboration of Sound and Words by Richard Casimir & Herman Beavers
Music by Richard Casimir, “Antumbra” (poem) by Herman Beavers
THE ESPERANZA PROJECT
In classical music, a fermata is a pause of unspecified length printed above a note or rest. It is represented by an eyebrow above a dot, nicknamed a “birdseye” or “cyclops eye.” How long that pause should last is left to the discretion of the performer or the conductor.
And yet, by comparison, this Great Silence seems trivial: a global pandemic is killing millions. The rest struggle against police brutality, racial injustice, the rise of fascism, the precarious state of democracy.
In late June, as our American cities broke open in protests over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I received a WhatsApp message from my longtime friend, Richard Casimir, a Haitian-born violinist and composer now living in Pamplona, Spain. He’d written a string orchestra piece on the improbable (it seemed to me, in this dark time) theme of hope. Now he was enlisting performers from all over the world to record their individual parts while quarantined at home.
It would be a diverse group of musicians, including conservatory professors, international soloists, orchestral players, high school teachers—and Richard’s 14-year-old daughter, Emma, a promising young violinist. My own daughter, Caeli, who grew up to be a musician, appears on both violin and viola. The tracks would be mixed together by Richard’s nephew, Michael, a violist in the St. Louis Symphony.
Richard wanted to know: Would I help him find a poet to compose words to accompany the music? My first thought was that a poem on hope would be a nearly impossible challenge in this bleak time. I turned to one of the strongest poets I know, my colleague Herman Beavers, a scholar and artist whose poetry often evokes and centers music. Herman’s gorgeous and moving response to “Esperanza” is “Antumbra,” a two-part poem named for the part of a solar eclipse in which the ring of fire from the hidden celestial body is visible on the edges. The poem, which begins in despair, brings us forward to a moment when we can sense clarity around the edges of ruin:
……………………………Caught
in the morning’s first blush,
nomads on a river whose whispers
turns the sad machine of hurt
to wings, the Blessing’s pale fire blooming
“Esperanza” is a lush and seamless integration of sound that swells with purpose, and with hope, that we will one day again be together. The collaboration with “Antumbra” nudges us closer to that moment.
—Karen Rile, September 2020
ANTUMBRA
by Herman Beavers
1
Everywhere the search
for colors to drape
across the heart, a state
of mind barely legible
against the shout of hyperbolic
clothes, the mantle of undignified
thespian privilege, a Van Gogh painting
fake & perfectly intact. This panic-
stricken tale of woe for those who
live poised on the lipstick
side of things, coveting a gift for
reinvention perhaps or the tactical
use of a day’s ration of rice. Enough
with the cars minus license plates
children banging metal pots
clustered around dead pay phones.
Struck dumb in the square-jawed
light, the sweat of blood red air,
the chameleon plies his craft,
muse for a contretemps’ pallid blue yes—
its precise, ironic surface sprawling
across scrublands of agate type, dramas
of family succession akin to
the serpent’s unconscious hatred of mettle.
2
Anywhere a heart hammers
where the curve’s beguiling tumble
of words makes the straight line
testament to unspeakable sadness,
we are one ache, humans holding
the moment so still, the day could
fly to pieces. If we could turn
fast enough, we might catch a
glimpse of an angel’s wingtip, the hem
of a celestial robe. Trudging behind
beauty, the velvet fist of violence
flattens into romance, leaves us caught
in the squirm of a good plot. Could
the cool flesh of a peach, cumulus
clouds rocking the sky above us,
the slow wheel of a mind
humming in the tightest
corners of the universe,
invite us to taste honey, taste
salt? What if a good year
is any that God sends, even
if the blackbird flies low to
the ground, his song lost
in shadow? So what if the
sound the rain makes, ticking
on the roof, against windows
mimics the clock face knocked
clean of numbers, houses
pelted by a panoply
of numerals tumbling all about us?
Might we relinquish looks shot through
with worry, with hubris? Caught
in the morning’s first blush,
nomads on a river whose whispers
turns the sad machine of hurt
to wings, the Blessing’s pale fire blooming,
Oh, to be loved like this.
To be loved, like this.
Summer, 2020
For Richard Casimir and Michael Casimir
A native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Richard Casimir (composer) graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, with a Masters and Professional Studies degree in Violin. He worked as a violin instructor at the Preparatory Division for Gifted Young Musicians at Temple University, and as a string teacher in Philadelphia public schools, before moving to Spain in 2006. He currently resides in Pamplona with his wife and two children and teaches violin and chamber music at a private high school, Sagrado Corazon. Richard began composing to address the technical needs of his students and ensemble groups, while encouraging the communal and citizenship aspect of their music education. To that end, he has organized several benefit concerts for charitable causes, involving his students both from Philadelphia and Pamplona. His latest composition, “Esperanza,” is an example of such a community awareness effort. He dedicates it to the victims of discrimination and intolerance, appealing to people of all cultures to recognize their shared humanity and to treat one another with compassion and dignity. Here Richard Casimir is pictured conducting the Sagrado Corazon Youth Orchestra for a benefit concert in the Parliament of Navarra, located in the city of Pamplona. That concert, entitled Music Against Inequality, was organized by Oxfam Intermon to raise public awareness in combating poverty around the world.
Herman Beavers’ most recent poems have appeared in The Langston Hughes Colloquy, MELUS, Versadelphia, Cleaver Magazine, The American Arts Quarterly, and Supplement, Vol. 2. His poems are anthologized in the volumes Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty-First Century (University Press of New England), Remembering Gwen (Moonstone Press), Who Will Speak for America (Temple UP) and in the forthcoming volume, Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag Press). His chapbook, Obsidian Blues, was published in 2017 by Agape Editions as part of its Morning House Chapbook Series. His latest books are Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and The Vernell Poems (Moonstone Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Even in Such Light (Anaphora Literary Press, 2020). He serves on the Advisory Boards of The Furious Flower Poetry Center, Modern Fiction Studies, The Black Scholar, The Langston Hughes Review, and African American Review.
Esperanza String Orchestra:
Violin
Emma Casimir
Magliore Casimir
Ellen dePasquale
Albert Douglas
Josephina Guzmán
Catalina Iribarren
Victoria Joseph
Nicholas Kitchen
Yuki MacQueen
Rudy Perrault
Viola
Sam Bergman
Michael Casimir*
Isabel Castro
Karina Schmidtz*
Caeli Smith*
Cello
Janet Anthony
Amaya De la Cal
John Eckstein
Yeesun Kim
Francesca McNeeley
Nicole Peña Comas
Bass
Txuma Del Río
Joseph Petit
Isaac Salas Luna
______
*Viola & Violin
Audio editor: Michael Casimir
Video Editor: Kim Kelter Neu
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #31.
FIELD NOTES FOR THE MAGICIAN: SLEIGHT OF HAND by Rosemary Kitchen
Rosemary Kitchen
FIELD NOTES FOR THE MAGICIAN: SLEIGHT OF HAND
I.
Mother teaches me
to read the ages of bald women hooked to IV stands
in cracked knuckles, the prominence of veins in fingers and wrists.
We whisper, like the palmists
of the Memorial Oncology Ward
II.
Mother’s gurney vanishes
between swinging doors,
and Father practices the trick
of folding down ring
and middle fingers,
of straightening pinky, extending
thumb, cupping the symbol
for love in a trembling hand.
The Magician might call this
the Palm Proper—letting
two fingers press into root
of thumb to form a bridge
at the hollow of the hand
where anything small enough
can hide
III.
After the diagnosis, we listen
to the tick of a wristwatch
covering its face with both hands.
On a sundial, the titanic body
of our nearest star
can be transfigured
into a hand made of shadows.
IV.
In a difficult manipulation,
the Magician’s hands
exchange a silver coin for
copper—small maneuvers of
fingers masked by larger
hand movements.
The surgeon’s hands exchange sharpie for
scalpel, marking all the
places
where it hurts, and
turning them over, like
the Magician asking Was
this your coin? and the
coin always reappearing
wherever it vanishes.
Rosemary Kitchen is a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee PhD program in English. She currently lives with her husband and stepdaughters in Knoxville, TN where she is pursuing an MS in Mental Health Counseling, as well as polishing her first manuscript, Field Notes for the Magician. Her poems have been published in journals such as Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, and Tinderbox.
Cover photo by ZSun Fu on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #31.
EIDOLON by Nicole Greaves
Nicole Greave
EIDOLON
She said there are some things
you will always be, like Italian,
some skills interchangeable: folding underwear
and trussing a chicken, some days
for darkness. I remind her
of her dead daughter. Her true character!
Everything is a lie and everything a truth. We
always know it. Like how we are
loved and unwanted. As a girl I drank
water out of shoes. It made sense, all of it.
Nicole Greaves teaches at The Crefeld School in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an M.Ed. in special education. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary reviews and was awarded prizes by The Academy of American Poets and the Leeway Foundation of Philadelphia. She is a recent 2020 finalist for the Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest and was a 2015 finalist for the Coniston Prize of Radar Poetry, who also nominated her for The Best of the Net. She is a former poet laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and resides minutes outside of Philadelphia with her family
Cover photo from Pixabay
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #31.
TWO POEMS by Jaewon Chang
Jaewon Chang
TWO POEMS
Blindness
It began with a stove,
burnt mahogany dissipates in, wishing
the ember hinted the future: mother
running out of her favorite house,
home to the ancestors’ cedar trees. She had one last look
at her bedroom door, the one grandfather
painted pink, now dark red. I could only recall
the sound of its opening. I was raised
respecting scars that linger, knowing
they would not recover, the wail
of an old man coiling flames, the burning forests
sprouted in my eyes, planks of cedar etched
on my back. Every story
holds bliss, this story
was my mother alive. Every story
holds sadness, perhaps this story
was my grandfather’s. I was raised
knowing, able to see past my blank eyes.
◊
Pandesal
The charred grain edges, infused with
butter fillings, slices of white cheese
wedged in whole wheat, a hint of salt
sifting through openings, a treat Nanay
bought during my birthday. One piece
was considered a feast, enough
to satiate a mind. It was a hero, trailing
a path to provinces, as if arriving
at dark alleyways was happiness.
Nothing is perfect, Nanay says.
Contortions made the taste last long,
for years almost, as if it would erase
our memories of the burning cities.
The tongue would caress a portion,
like a mother covering the ears
of her child during gunshots. I wish
history was like a lily, without hesitation,
rising and floating away.
Jaewon Chang is a high school junior living in the Philippines. His works have been recognized by the Scholastics Art and Writing awards on a national level. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in District Lit, Austin International Poetry Festival Youth Anthology, National Poetry Writing Month Anthology (2020), Ilanot Review, Passengers Journal, and elsewhere. During his free time, Jaewon enjoys traveling the city on foot.
Cover Photo by Kei Scampa from Pexels
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SOULS FALLING INTO HELL LIKE SNOWFLAKES by Roy Bentley
Roy Bentley
SOULS FALLING INTO HELL LIKE SNOWFLAKES
“I saw souls falling into hell like snowflakes.”
—St. Teresa of Avila
Am I the only one in the Cleveland Art Museum today
looking for mercy? I’m looking at an artwork about Hell
or the end of the world, recalling my then-small son saying,
of the Challenger disaster, I’d have gotten out. In the painting,
there are boats and the boats are filling, the sea aswarm and
starkly bullying like the first dopplered image of a hurricane.
Angels with an artist’s idea of wings are manning the tillers,
captaining across a broth of larvae-white bodies, the deltas
and islands and archipelagos of extended arms and hands.
If the broken world in the painting does anything it repels,
a summation you’d prefer to skip altogether, thank you.
But if you’re lucky, you’re one of the rescued who
are now far beyond the graveyard of linear time.
When I was a kid, John Glenn went into space,
sardined into a Mercury capsule, Friendship 7,
and my hillbilly family cheered the tv-launch.
Appalachians think they know about an afterlife
and God—so when my silver-haired grandmother
read aloud from a King James Bible, finger tracing
the lines on the red-lettered pages, the birds of Ohio
a night-chorus outside the window, I could see where
this was going: to a hell of the Imagination. So I told her
to rest her eyes for a while. To settle back on her star quilt—
I’d read. I made up a Jesus. One without a beard and such
fragile looking skin. A man-god who looked like he could
appreciate rocket launchings, the quiet heroism inherent
in the dropping of bodies splashed down without shame
in a storybook Pacific, the wake of an aircraft carrier
roiling blue water under a big, glaring white sky—
my God looked like the astronaut John Glenn,
but I made sure he said the word verily a lot.
Enough to make him at least believable.
Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published eight books, including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, which is bringing out a new & selected. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in Cleaver, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah, among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award and will appear next year.
Cover Photo by Andrew Neel from Pexels
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THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM by Mirande Bissell
Mirande Bissell
THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM
hands the swaddled child over. A dream is no place
for a baby. She has seen revelers pour the baby
from a carafe—he’s white wine, fruity like the summer
he is born into, and they drink the baby in the purple
dusk of a dream-cafe. She’s always too late to stop them.
She’s seen the baby become a city she might one day
reach, but the map shifts, its topographical lines
crowning, and her finger never lands on the same town
twice. Once, the baby grows up and becomes a murderer,
though not on purpose. She knows his heart is good.
He comes to her despairing, the knife slick and still
in his hand. His mother has splinters under her nails.
She has clawed the empty kitchen cabinets searching
for the baby. She’s flung open all the closets, ferreted
through the hamper, calling his name in ashen circles,
her light late and industrial, but his crib stays empty.
The numbers flicker silver on the afternoon clock
when the woman from the dream just hands her the baby,
adjusting the blanket on his head so his mother
will recognize him, saying, Keep him. Let him always
be a baby, and the woman pauses and scoops up
a stray piglet, pink and winky-eyed, and tucks him
under her shoulder before she turns to go.
Mirande Bissell lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, where she loves to hike in the Patapsco River valley with her beagle. Her poem “The Mammoth Steppe” was the winner of the 2019 Stone River Poetry Review contest. She is a recent grad of the MFA program at Bennington College.
Cover Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #30.
WALKING THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD by Stella Hayes
Stella Hayes
WALKING THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD
out my window colored heads bound in swiftness. in their decision to bring about movement
& motion. the snow is taking a break from falling, as it did just days before. the village is
painted in primordial gray, with roofs in color too happy even for a rainbow. eavesdropping
on a father being mourned at the mouth of the coroner’s bed. the aroma of death. a father
& daughter lost to loss’s gravity. a walk through the underworld would have to wait. his body
wasn’t friendly overnight. forgetting that it was capable of carriage, despite the force of gravity;
forgetting it was self-possessed, despite being broken down. anyone it keeps bumping into
when awake; it made what sounded like a voice of pleasure. but as closely as I allowed myself
to hear the bedtime fury, he was letting out what sounded like a body’s pain; wrestling to bring
itself respite. at least overnight. at least it should have been given a break. like in a fist fight
for survival. the mercury line inside the thermometer rising & rising. in cold flurries, the snow’s
motion resting, motionless. he inside the fury. I am with him, right hand on his forehead; as he is,
inside a breath, cataloging heat & cold. in hope of cooling. in hope of slipping free from the heat.
I am crossing a field with banks of too much snow. the grieving child watching with her eyes,
as she has seen too much too. you won’t recognize me. I see a twin likeness in the shadows,
under a thin light. we will be shadowless; skipping through somewhere where we can’t
or won’t want to be from
Stella Hayes is the author of the poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). Stella Hayes grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Hunger, The Indianapolis Review, Small Orange, and Spillway, among others.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #30.
TWO POEMS by Juheon Rhee
Juheon Rhee
TWO POEMS
SIX STAGES OF GRIEF
I. you are going to a Danish pastry down on Jung-gu road to sell your soul to the devil itself no one’s seen you will clutch your handbag once filled with perfumes and lotions full of cards of queens kings you do not recognize how upset you would be when the royalties can not accept your only gift as it withered and is wearing the helm of Hades that you wish existed
II. it is everywhere the steel-colored smoke you are afraid feel it yet you can sense the heat from its strong arms grasping you it weaves you through the silken thread of your mother’s hanbok lying in the cold basement floor you are a puppet body controlled by the gods above performing a dance arms flowing timelessly a nightgown hollowing into a ghostly figure as the wind’s talon digs its life out you do not know until your hand meets the ghost dissipating from your touch
III. you are suspended in the bowl you call time one minute you are moving next you are plunging endlessly on the rotting wood below your pupils will dilate remain unblinking a clear sky on your scicera you are not crying you are not for your tears are gone and your mouth is burning in the air conditioned room
IV. when you first hear the news you will laugh for its absurdity but then frown upon saying it is not a matter you should joke about while praising the rather authentic cries you will hear the heavy silence a weight tied to your neck dragging you down as voices are not spoken as you will not hear the “how did you know” and the “that was pretty good, right?” only the unspoken words dead on the phone
V. your eyes will be bloodshot but hands pale you can not breathe as your mouth lets out a coarse melody without notes or a beat an alarm to the graves — to the tombstones down below your vision is distorted and your hands are shaking are they
VI. you are stuck in bed because the blankets have imprisoned you embodied you they have made you a mansion without a door to leave thirty-six hours in bed and you have not yet slept for the dreams will reflect the pain in the eyes framed in your sunken mask as though one scooped ice cream off your cheeks for there will be no one to wake you up the next morning only a shadow of the urn on your desk
◊
(untitled)
did you know that when you are bitten by a snake a drop of that yellow tinted liquid can clot your blood before you speak let you fall onto the floor eyes wide open Staring at the blood leaking from the bite you’ll be helpless alright your group of empty-headed friends will do you no good so you will need this cure
Remedy for a non-venomous snake bite
1. Pick the greenest of all herbs straight from your garden: yerba buena, echinacea angustifolia, tanacetum parthenium, echinacea and feverfew
2. One although flower discarded leaves shaped like petals with a layer of translucent over the clover-colored film
3. Mash them up until it is now a dark green, much like when eyeshadow your only friend scribbled on her eyelid before running off to the girl she fell in love with
4. Slice the limb of the aloe plant growing next to the woven welcome! mat now hidden under the coffee colored dirt
5. Remove the slimy substance inside
6. And crush it until it is merely a slightly transparent liquid, color of her tears running through the thick layer of foundation when her mother told her of her disgrace
7. Mix the two substances until you hands are sore, like her legs when her parents dragged her up the mountain so she could confess her sins to the metal statue
You will end up with a green paste
You will not use it
For with or without the paste
You will be left with a scar you will hide
Juheon (Julie) Rhee is a 14-year-old student and is currently attending International School Manila. During her free time, she enjoys reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries and hanging out with her friends. Juheon Rhee’s work has been published or is forthcoming in K’in Literary Journal, Indolent Books, Heritage Review, 580 Split, deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, and has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
Image credit: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
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BLESSING ONE: BLESS ME by Sherine Elise Gilmour
Sherine Elise Gilmour
BLESSING ONE: BLESS ME
I have a mother who once said car, lake,
who said, I couldn’t stand holding
your sticky hands any longer,
who said, I found a lake deep enough.
I am blessing myself on the phone
with the life insurance company.
I am blessing myself listening
to Muzak. I am blessing myself
because I have a mother who
bought a life insurance policy on my
wee head, because I have a mother
who made herself beneficiary.
She told me the ways she thought
I could die: top of stairs, quick fling
of small body. The road, how easy
to leave me behind.
And I am blessing myself speaking
to the customer service representative,
blessing myself at the notary public,
faxing over documents. And I am blessing
myself at the post office, licking
the stamp. Bless me. Bless my white matter,
my skull not cracked. My neck never broke,
my lung sacs full of air. I am blessing myself
because she has not. I am blessing
myself because who else will? I am blessing
myself because, most nights, I still want to be held
by a mother, and that never goes away.
Sherine Elise Gilmour graduated with an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Glass: A Journal of Poetry, So To Speak, SWWIM, Third Coast, Tinderbox, and other publications.
Image credit: Henry & Co. on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #29.
AUTUMN’S RECKONING by John Middlebrook
John Middlebrook
AUTUMN’S RECKONING
The fiery fist above slowly loses its hold
………….and the musky lungs of autumn grow dry.
At last, fall staggers and drops upon the rattling grass
………….breaking the arched back of summer.
Charms tumble from its pockets like loose change
………….and glisten on yellowing fields of dew.
Now there’s lead in the leaves, and the birds
………….reconcile their wings with hostile winds.
As nights grow longer, between the sheets
………….the nearing cold grips and turns us inward.
And there—inside the gray bones of morning—
………….we tally things most dear.
John Middlebrook lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he manages a consulting firm focused on non-profit organizations. John has been writing since he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he served on the staff of Chicago Review. His poetry has appeared in publications including the Tidal Basin Review, Cleaver Magazine, and the Wilderness House Literary Review. John’s home on the web is here.
Image credit: Cecile Hournau on Unsplash
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SORRY TO BE LATE by Marc Harshman
Marc Harshman
SORRY TO BE LATE
He knew how it would be—should have.
Forgetting the keys on the table,
………….doors locked, window’s open, returning
……………………..on a loop of memories
……………………..to finding and un-find
……………………..the forgotten un-begotten.
There was something to be done.
Pilgrimage or errands . . .
Doors and windows.
Roads and stars.
Here in the foyer is the overflow, the detritus
………….from the wedding, birthday, wake.
He wouldn’t know what to say
………….even if he knew these people.
He turns on the lights.
Tries the back yard.
The key fits the road like a feather.
Something. There is to do.
A bird has fallen smoothly
…………out of the inconsequential sky,
…………begins thrashing in the underbrush.
Another threshold.
There he was . . .
……………always unexpected and the rush
……………to apologize, to do something.
And then
………….he let each of us
………………………shake his hand.
Marc Harshman’s Woman in Red Anorak, won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and was published in 2018 by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater, co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. He is also co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.
Image credit: Mason Hassoun on Unsplash
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AUTO CORRECTED by Jackie Craven
Jackie Craven
AUTO CORRECTED
Today has dawned a nude beginning. The male truck idles
at the curfew and the bruisepaper waits on the porch. Already
children climb the pill to their elementary scheme. Today
has dreamed a new pretending. I rub my sighs and put coffins
on to brew. If only I were yogurt! Gazing out my chicken window,
I watch a flock of wretches necking in the trees. Somewhere
a lawnmower begins to whore. Today has donned a blue
bikini. Goblins scream and squeals scamper across the dawn.
If it weren’t for the chills, I’d quit my throb. Sometimes
I wonder if I’ll have enough ink to carry on. So many sweats!
I cheat my toast and rush to worry, drinking 65, 70, 82. Today
has spawned another sinning. Lions flash in my mirror
and everywhere I turn, white helmets. Raised pistils.
Scowling faces of two dozen—peonies?
Jackie Craven is the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016). Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Agni, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, River Styx, and Salamander. She’s worked for many years as a journalist covering architecture, design, and cultural travel for various publications.
Image credit: Agê Barros on Unsplash
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STARRY NIGHT CREDIT CARD by J Pascutazz
J Pascutazz
STARRY NIGHT CREDIT CARD
Shouldn’t it let me buy everything
and pay with negative interest?
All those swirling golden stars
teeming, unbalanced in the sky
Since I was Vincent in a past life
I told the collector on the phone
A measured man. Had he dealt
with my unlikely work before?
I did the masterpieces everyone loves
now worth billions in museums
then shot myself dead in the heart
before I made a single cent
So I had unlimited credit—I
reasoned—with the starry dynamo
The nauseating spinning started
when Mr. Money didn’t buy it
He sympathized. I was unmoored
lost in a cosmos of pure color
I’d eat cadmium yellow orange
wash it down with turpentine
I threatened, before hanging up
I walked to the local park
scissoring the starry sky
into a million irrevocable
pieces, and in the dark
dug a hole and buried it
along with the bill
in the ultramarine
shadow of the Cypress
and went about my art
J Pascutazz is a non-binary writer with Asperger’s syndrome, a graduate of Bennington College, and was raised in rural Ohio. J is a resident of Brooklyn. J’s work has been published by Right Hand Pointing, Dime Show Review, Miracle Monocle, and others, and is forthcoming in The Fabulist Words & Art.
Image credit Gregory Hayes on Unsplash
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IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE by Alice Hall
Alice Hall
IN SOME ALIEN PRAIRIE
the birds don’t circle the ways they do here…….collected in one
large cloud……a blanket of ‘of’ …….there’s no following
in backwards time…no picking back up or undoing…..the glass
hardens almost immediate…the soft bubble at the tip smoothed
to hard nub….the sound of liquid in yr straw….….a suck bitten
between handful of teeth…. it thinks of things which need
splitting…..division….via money…….via labor….…. via you’re
too stupid…………look….how pretty….….i’ve become..in yr
absence……..look how you’re faking just look….you’ve peed
yrself all over N –– J ––– Transit,….you’ve lost….yr flip flops in
old bridge & now we’re getting kicked off the train b/c, well,
b/c i’ve sworn off swearing sworn off being a woman yelling
instead i’ll be a reliquary….….so how about……..you give me yr
xbox?……yes, it was me….yr bungled up boyfriend….…come to
sew all the patches on yr clothes
…………………………………………………& come to split the field in two
Alice Hall is poet living and working in Buffalo, NY, where she is pursuing a PhD in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Previously, she taught poetry and writing in Portland, Oregon. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Prelude, Dream Pop, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook One Million Nude Women (Industrial Lunch.)
Image credit: Michael Jin on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #28.
TWO POEMS by Jeremy Radin
Jeremy Radin
TWO POEMS
Ode to the Nectarine
O secretive sunrise of an armadillo,
won’t you please uncurl for me? Of all
the fruits I know you alone must live.
Fiery armadillo dredged through blood
& yolk, I have been watching you for hours,
waiting for you to emerge from yourself
& shuffle across the kitchen counter, sniffing
at the knives. I set out a plum for you, bowl
of dead spiders. I haven’t the faintest as to
what you like to eat. The encyclopedias
keep your secrets well, but I am persistent,
little Jupiter. I will witness the unwitnessed.
Your unfolded golden splendor. Treasurous
armadillo, shall I place you in a bedroom
with another of your kind—scattered petals,
incense burning, Al Green playing low? Shall
I leave you to it & peek through the keyhole?
No. My eyes would never survive it; the sacred
savagery of your love—a pair of burning gods
divulging to the dark the unspeakable
violence of sugar.
Marriages
The Fries
At the burger joint your friend thinks it is funny
to snatch, while you are not looking, the fries
one by one off your plate, & stuff them, grinning
into his mouth. Even after you’ve explained to him
that it’s as if he’s reaching over & eating your beloved’s
hands, how she is all you have: a wife of piping gold
to stave off an encroaching dark. Though you gesture,
half-joking, with your edgeless knife. Though you growl
like a goblin Pagliacci he whips his hand, again & again,
eight, nine, ten times—until you hunch, ogre-ish, over
the fries as though communion were possible only here,
upon this bed of chipped linoleum. But what does he
care, munching the beloved—until something begins
moving within him, & he grimaces & leaps & rushes to
the bathroom, where, bending over the toilet bowl he
stares at what he’s vomited out: nailed, knuckled, & pale:
a mass of wriggling fingers…
The Sprite
The server brings
the Sprite & before
she is halfway turned
from your table
you’ve finished
the Sprite & request
another & within
seconds it too
is gone so she brings
another, then two,
then pitcher & you
do, you drink it straight
from the pitcher
like a mug
of coffee, jug of wine,
a vessel in which
white mums
have been melted,
& yes, of course,
you marry the Sprite,
you walk the aisle,
speak the vows,
lift the veil,
smash the glass,
& lick your love
off the floor…
The Oreos
So simple to be both lovers at ………….the same time one
munching a sleeve of Oreos…………. as the other begs him to stop
one shoving Oreos into his mouth…………. the other floating up
into space one gasping through crumbs…………. the other bellowing
but one’s head is a sugar swamp…………. so the other isn’t heard
while hauled through sleeves of stars…………. entreating the first
to take a break breathe…………………….. but one does not rest
one advances like an ocean……. …… pulling catastrophe
into insatiable tide………………… ….. as the other goes
finally silent ………….…………………………………swallowed up
in the hungry hush ………….………….…………. the plump dark
………….………….………….………….………….………….………….picking its teeth
Jeremy Radin is a poet and actor. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, The Journal, Muzzle, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He is the author of Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody, 2012) and Dear Sal (Not A Cult, 2017). Jeremy Radin lives in Los Angeles where he once sat next to Carly Rae Jepsen in a restaurant.
Image credit: Heidi Kaden on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #28.
FIELD WORK by Nathan Lipps
Nathan Lipps
FIELD WORK
He wakes back bent into a kind of platform
for what is meant to be goodness.
Heat of the sun in the soil near his face.
Imagine wind noticing itself.
That kind of silence
each morning. Across the field a body
of another, watching.
What Hegel said about two souls.
Each holding a seed
in their loose fists. Terrified
to let go, knowing the need
to sow. To join that patch-work quilt
landscape to something.
Receiving the fly-over-fuck-you
gift of nothing, despite the effort.
Back to bed, the soil cooling.
Again, again.
Terrified of claiming.
Of being claimed.
Nathan Lipps lives in the Midwest where he teaches English courses. His work has been published in the Best New Poets, BOAAT, Colorado Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere.
Image credit: Samuel Myles on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #28.
AMOR FATI by Tina Barr
Tina Barr
AMOR FATI
Chits came in stapled packets, five yellow slips
to a page, that ripped like postage stamps, perforated.
Three’d buy a creamsicle, or a barbershop twirl
of white vanilla shot with chocolate.
……………………………………………………..Inside the girl’s
locker room, open to sky: tuna, peanut butter.
Slatted boards laid their shadows beneath us.
Cross-legged, towel our card table, so nothing fell
through.
…………….Sun pooled; we painted our noses
with white, thick Noxema.
………………………………………..Go Fish, bubbles drifted
up from the nose of a cartoon orange fish;
or Old Maid, we’d scream, getting her, bun, spectacles
like death, in childhood’s parlor.
…………………………………………………..Legs lengthening,
tops beginning to bulge enough for training bras.
My Daddy said, You’re a man trap.
Mary’s older brother, a redhead, swam close
towards the dock; the end of the boardwalk floated.
Horseshoe crabs compassed under it, tails moving
needles. Their blood blue from copper, scientists
drained it; it clots in response to toxins.
……………………………………………………………..Across
the harbor Watson was writing The Double Helix.
We were spun in the vortex of two-piece cotton suits
like Gidget. Angus was older by a decade. Only once
did he lift me onto the low rung of ladder, sea brown,
warm; clear jellyfish the size of figs swirled.
………………………………………..……………………………Once
a month lifeguards whistled us out; sharks’ fins
streamed past a red nun.
………………………………………..Mary once invited me over;
I didn’t understand Catholic meant too many children.
Her mother had something called a “nervous breakdown.”
The phrase clotted in my head; forty years later, crouched
on our dining room floor, crying I couldn’t stop.
………………………………………..………………………………….Dreams
my father turned his head towards me in bed.
In photographs, lab technicians in masks, shower caps,
fold back each carapace, stick in steel needles, crabs
strapped above glass jars into which drips sky color.
◊◊
Tina Barr’s books include Green Target, winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poems published in NC in 2018, Kaleidoscope (Iris Press) and The Gathering Eye (Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize) and three chapbooks, all winners of chapbook contests. Her Fellowships include the National Endowment for the Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and MacDowell Colony. She teaches in the Great Smokies CW Program at UNCA.
Image credit: Mat Reding on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #27.
WESTERN SPADEFOOT by Michael Rerick
Michael Rerick
WESTERN SPADEFOOT
she scans a glossy creak
lowland like wood floors
creased with alluvial fans
playas and alkali flats
before sandy gravely
shortgrass in a quiet pool
where roasted peanuts,
a sneezing fit, or snores
stroke a pocket comb
in a chorus of saws
floating in a San
Francisco rain and river
where power sounds
◊◊
Michael Rerick lives, teaches, and washes dishes in Portland, OR. Work recently appears or is forthcoming at Clade Song, COAST|noCOAST, Counter Narratives, Graviton, Mannequin Haus, Porridge, and The Wire’s Dream. He is also the author of In Ways Impossible to Fold, morefrom, The Kingdom of Blizzards, The Switch Yards, and X-Ray.
Image credit: Laurence on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #27.