Tried to remember where we packed the tinsel.
House smelling like pumpkin pie and safety.
Google said cinnamon was a sedative,
a homeopathic peace trigger,
a definitive cure for everyday stress.
We believed her.
Now, the scent is gone.
The broom, still impaled, is just
twigs and knots of wicker.
It looks like we’ve ripped
some dead stalk from such dry ground.
Splayed the desiccated roots.
Punished it for its exhaustion.
Going Public
I am so done with this private crying,
this dry-eyed staring into space,
this wait for tears to break the drought.
I’ve become sick of the mechanical swiping
at water rings long ago etched into all this furniture.
Same green rag—same clockwise arc.
Does not matter what the Sears portrait says.
A gone wife ain’t coming back into the frame,
a lost boy and a lost girl will not sit still—
here, anymore.
But these nights punching at the mattress,
aimlessly revisioning history,
will stop at sunrise.
Tomorrow, I’m going public with these ghosts.
Do all my crying at the mall.
I’ll walk the storefronts redfaced wet,
heave this pain out on a bench in front of Radio Shack.
At the food court, I’ll bury my hands in my face,
let the teriyaki congeal around the balls of rice.
When I am ready,
truly ready to let this all go,
I will clutch the handrail to the entrance gate
of the kiddie slide.
Holler out my demons.
Casket
When I was a little boy,
I assumed they nailed coffins shut,
because it would keep away the spiders, the worms.
Keep away the foul-fanged creatures,
feeders of the fat left on the bones.
They nailed it tight.
Only Jesus, the magical carpenter, could pull them out.
He’d remove them sometimes all at once;
sometimes only one nail at a time,
ever ready to change his mind.
Decide to leave you there.
I knew he came for my grandfather and my father,
removed those smooth iron pins,
so bent and caught deep in the wood.
He came to set them free from the ground,
the living dirt still hungry for marrow.
Today, as a grown man,
engine screaming down the highway,
the doors of the panel truck in front of me flew open.
There it was, coming 60 miles an hour at me,
a dark varnished casket, splitting open to the world.
The very moment I swerved,
I did not see its little pink pillow, or a cloudsatin lining.
I did not see the brass handles,
the ones my friends will grab when they carry me to my hole.
When it came at me,
gaping in all its hurtling whiteness,
the very moment I swerved,
I swear I saw teeth.
Mail
My wife receives the most interesting mail.
Last week,
despite my excitement at my “good driver” rebate check,
she was sent four books of poetry,
a postcard from Venice . . . the one in Italy for fuck’s sake.
She received three magazines in languages we don’t speak,
a pamphlet on growing marijuana . . . unrequested,
two gifts from old students of hers,
and a keychain of the London Eye.
Once,
on the day I got my new Discover card . . . the purple one,
she received a holy Catholic relic,
some saint’s microscopic fingernail scrape,
embedded in a Swarovski crystal rosary.
When we’re both dead,
whoever finds this box of junk mail,
the one I’ve been keeping balanced on the printer,
will know I was staid.
Serious.
A rectangle of nothing with a silly decorative stamp.
They’ll know I was one of life’s unnecessary calendars,
some charity’s mass-run reward for my sucker check.
They’ll know my overwhelming fear of making noise,
my paralyzing quiet.
But when they reach your bedside.
Oh, the glorious things they’ll find.
You, my dear, you’ll be the gypsy heart,
the insane tumult of the world in carnival spin.
They will know you’ve been a saint,
a reveler, a traveler, a slut.
They will know you were my voice.
Contributor Notes
Melissa Bond never was a skinny girl, always was a small girl, always had to jump. It started here, with brooding and a Jim Morrison crush, big as a movie. She writes a chapbook called Hush to talk about addiction, the slosh and snuff that nearly rubbed her out. She writes about Freud and drugs and the child that came, fast as a speedball—the one with an extra chromosome. She wins awards. She keeps writing.
Micah Chatterton lives in Riverside, California. Read more at micahchatterton.com
Charles C. Childers is a writer based out of Huntington, WV. Graduating from Marshall University with degree in English (emphasis in literary studies), he aspires to someday get a graduate degree in comparative literature. Interests include: Zen and Taoism, bouts of social drinking, hiking the hillsides of his home state, raising fancy rats, general hell-raising and environmental advocacy.
Erin Dorso is an educator and poet living in Walla Walla, Washington with her husband and two children. She has taught language arts in Florida, Japan, and Washington and now develops professional learning for other educators in her region. Her poetry is inspired by the natural world, at home and on the road.
Laurel Eshelman writes from Elizabeth, Illinois, population 700, and works a few blocks from home at the family business, Eshelman Pottery. Her chapbook, The Red Mercy, was a semi-finalist in the 2014 Palettes and Quills Chapbook Contest. Laurel’s poems and essays have appeared in her chapbook, The Scale of Things, in Love from Galena, The Phoenix Soul, Sweet & Saucy and The Prairie Wind.
Michael Fleming was born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, and has lived and learned and worked all around the world, from Thailand, England, and Swaziland to Berkeley, New York City, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He’s been a teacher, a grad student, a carpenter, and always a writer; for the past decade he has edited literary anthologies for W. W. Norton. Read more at www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws
Susan F. Glassmeyer is a on the Poetry Diet, grazing all day long. She has two chapbooks available: Body Matters (Pudding House Publications, 2010) and Cook’s Luck (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Susan is the founder of Little Pocket Poetry and “April Gifts” at www.LittlePocketPoetry.org. Ms. Glassmeyer is a somatic therapist and co-director of the Holistic Health Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Emily Graf currently resides in Austin, Texas, where she enjoys coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. She graduated from Kenyon College in 2015 with a degree in English & Poetry Writing. Her work has been previously published in Maudlin House, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere, online and in print.
Colby Hansen lives and works in Denver. He studied English at Portland’s Reed College and, later, elementary education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He now teaches third grade. Most of his projects, including the novel-in-verse he’s currently soliciting for publication, are for kids. Although he’s been writing for the last fifteen years, this is his first time in print.
Karen Kraco lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches high-school ch
emistry. Over the years she has alternated teaching gigs with stints as an editor and freelance writer. Her profiles, feature articles, and poems have appeared in local and regional publications, and she was co-editor and publisher of the poetry journal ArtWord Quarterly.
Jeff Lewis has a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, painting, from the University of WI, Superior. I have had poems published in The Wisconsin Academy Review, San Jose Studies, Magical Blend, Kansas Quarterly, and other magazines. I am a five-time winner of the Lake Superior Writers Award for poetry. I am married, have two children and live in Northwestern Wisconsin.
Kate Magill is a Vermont native and a devoted backcountry wanderer. This is her second appearance in Sixfold. Her first volume of poetry, Roadworthy Creature, Roadworthy Craft, was published in 2011 by Fomite Press.
Linda Sonia Miller I have been a teacher of kindergarten and college students, teachers and incarcerated youth in Vermont, New York and Connecticut. My work has appeared in a variety of journals, and my chapbook Something Worth Diving For was published in 2012. I am inspired to write by the woods and mountains among which I live, the increasingly incomprehensible political landscape, and the revelations that come from a life spent among children.
Rafael Miguel Montes, born in Santiago de Cuba, is a Cultural Studies professor at St. Thomas University and a Cuban-American writer living and working in Miami. His literary work reflects his dual upbringing in the Cuban-American community of Hialeah, Florida, and the academic communities of a number of institutions of higher learning. Twice nominated for a Pushcart award in poetry, his writing has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, The New York Quarterly, Tattoo Highway, Conclave: A Journal of Character, Magnapoets, Criminal Class, Prole (UK), and a number of other academic and literary journals. His poem “Menu” won the 2011 UK Poetry Kit Award for best poem in an independent literary journal.
Barry W. North is a seventy-one-year-old retired refrigeration mechanic. He was born and raised in New Orleans and presently lives with his wife, Diane, in Hahnville, Louisiana. Since his retirement in 2007, he has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, won the A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, and was recently named a finalist in the 2014 Lascaux Poetry Awards. He has had three chapbooks published. For more information please visit his website, www.barrynorth.org
Richard Parisio has worked as an interpretive naturalist for over forty years, in the Everglades, Pocono Mountains, at Assateague Island, and, since 1984, in the Catskills and Hudson valley. He is currently NYS Coordinator for River of Words, a national children’s poetry and art contest on the theme of watersheds. His poetry collection, The Owl Invites Your Silence, won the 2014 Slapering Hol Press Poetry Chapbook Contest.
Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. In 2013, he received the Ron McFarland poetry prize, and second-prize in the Whisper River poetry contest. In 2015, he won a Cormac McCarthy write-alike contest. He has performed alongside such luminaries as Saul Williams. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, three cats and a dog, where they dream of farm life in an undiscovered village.
Cassandra Sanborn studied creative writing at Purdue University and now lives in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is her second publication in Sixfold.
Jane Schulman is a poet and short story writer. She also works as a speech pathologist in a Brooklyn public school with young children with autism and significant cognitive delays. Jane has been a featured poet in local venues and taught senior citizens to write their lives in poetry, fiction, and memoir.
A born and bred Oklahoman, Jennifer Leigh Stevenson loves the backroads. She began writing poetry in ninth grade, studied music and theater at University of Central Oklahoma and wound up (somehow) in banking. For years she scribbled lines on napkins and wrote rhymes on the back of receipts, until she realized she wanted to be a writer more than anything. This marks Jennifer’s second time to be published in Sixfold.
J. Lee Strickland is a freelance writer living in upstate New York. In addition to fiction, he has written on the subjects of rural living, modern homesteading and voluntary simplicity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sixfold, Atticus Review, Icarus Down Review, Latchkey Tales, Garlic Press, Countryside, Small Farm Journal, and others. He is a member of the Mohawk Valley Writers’ Group and The Hudson Valley Writers Guild.
Melissa Tyndall is a writer, bibliophile, caffeine addict, professor, and Supernatural fangirl. She holds a Bachelor of Science in English, a Master of Arts in Corporate Communication, and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Her poems and award-winning articles have appeared in Number One, Prism international, Red Mud Review, Words + Images, and various newspapers. Her work is forthcoming in an essay collection examining The CW television series Supernatural. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Holly Lyn Walrath attended the University of Texas at Austin for her BA in English and the University of Denver for her MLA in Creative Writing. She is a freelance editor and the Associate Director of Writespace, a nonprofit literary center in Houston, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Vestal Review, Literary Orphans, and Pulp Literature, among others. Find her at hlwalrath.com or @hollylynwalrath
J.H Yun is a Korean-American poet, currently completing her MFA at New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, AAWW The Margins, Prelude, and elsewhere.
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