.	Nov '03 [Home] 12 Showcasing Spring-Summer 2003 Contest Sample Poems Bohemian Pansy ("Think of Me") Glass, Zwischengoldglas Technique

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House Suspenders Joan Fiset Riddle Logic at Seventeen Diane Furtney The Curse Next We Should Try a Monkey Brad Ricca Beneath Abattoir Leanne Averbach ~ . ~ House Joan Fiset The white curtain drapes onto the varnished floor. Swollen wooden planks, a fan. It is uncluttered, and once inside fear carries itself like an ordinary guest paying a visit to a friend. Sound of footsteps, then a voice inquiring about the tea. The kitchen is painted a curious ocher, pale as filtered evening light, insects against the screens. What won't happen now is this: clutch of fissure, consequence. ~ . Suspenders Joan Fiset From the door, he's calling my name while I cut a bird from paper. Dark is here and moths. Porch stairs, still green, their paint bought on sale before my birth -- the moon has risen. He's calling as if I will answer. Not this house, these dishes, chipped on the waiting table. ~ . ~ Riddle Diane Furtney I am the oddity that is unange. I'm the silver that rhymes with orange. I am the obstinate, slow- metabolic plant that grows at the rate of sediments and influoresces extravagantly about once a decade. To the sphinx my question made for raised wings, squawks, and flight into a bedroom mirror, in the light of which was another face, another woman, whose rhyme of course we need not further search for. Her wavering look:  enraged, triste, and disengaged. That her silver and orange but subfuse longings could not be entirely masked by her marriage and her dire pretenses, I am the living evidence. Justice, then, I am a form of, since I am the shove of hidden desire into egregious shape: the moon's dark side that rotates into view; the glare of Is rather than the glare of Seems; a minor-key and irritating line of melody following a two-generational family lie that was cacaphony:  Who am I? ~ . Logic at Seventeen Diane Furtney Tulsa, early 1960's There is this world. Which, they say, is assembled tightly: women unite with men, A with Z. No A-B or M-X combinations can last, not in the congregations of love. But that was the history, if true, of the world up to now. I'm new and there might be, somewhere, a chorus of new people, everything more porous than what anyone admits or knows. Whole groups might be acting freshly on what they feel and anyone might approach anyone: meet somehow and talk and then go off into a laugh or a kiss or a life—because the world is hard but not just hard, not just concrete slabs on the heart. The world is also soft, it has to be to make sense. It's the ice-green of baby lichen on limestone stacked like log-wood by a pool‹ninebark and dogwood on the bank; a turtle noses up in the watercress and sunfish make C's and S's between the stems; in the beech woods there are dots of light on the deeps of fallen leaves. The world is huge. ~ . ~ The Curse Brad Ricca I will haunt you in the small, dark type of Victorian novels. And the eyes of large dogs. I am the hideous ghost of Divorces Future. I clang with the force of several old bicycles chained together, ghost ridden. I know this is a terrible thing to be what with all the aunts and uncles doing the electric slide. So I am sorry but I wish it nonetheless. For we cannot question our destiny. If so, we'd all be living in Indiana with high snow and corn and sharp appendicitis. And so my life wrecks like a truck. Dark choppers hover over it, desperate to see blood: maroon and grey, brushed on the pavement like paintings of Rome. ~ . Next We Should Try A Monkey (But That Would Be The Nuts) Brad Ricca The Soviets dispatched the canine Laika (which means "Barker") in Sputnik 2 in November 1957, one month after performing another technological feat that stunned the world, launching the first artificial satellite into orbit, Sputnik. Laika overheated, panicked and died within hours of launch in the second spacecraft to circle the planet, contrary to Soviet reports that the dog had lived for up to a week, said Dmitri Malashenkov of the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The 1,120-pound (508-kilogram) space crypt remained in orbit a total of 162 days, then burned up in the atmosphere on April 14, 1958. —Richard Stenger, CNN News The steel cylinder is pretty perfect:  no holes, no corners and not the best for paws that go sliding up and down over Greece, Turkey, Pan-Asia. And no hard snacks but a thin liquid gel squeezed through a tube. This takes all the fun out of it. There is no need for a tail. In a craft that turns slowly like hissing meat you chase it anyways a hundred million times till the wires are a mess like the organs of baseballs. So the sharp array taped to the State gets a confused signal. Because it's all black and white: on tv, the newsreels, the faded photos of Life, and lest we forget, in the canine optic nerve that leads to the brain like a long, slow walk through the afternoon leaves. ~ . ~ Beneath Leanne Averbach The sky is crinolined and fluted; lacy feminine anger. Everywhere palms turn upward feeling. Marry me, one is inclined to say to anyone. In case this is it:  the end of summers. As though the old Abelard on the corner, shielding his newspaper like a love letter inside a big coat, were the last sentient being. A promise of showers and war warming on his ashen languor. It goes like this more often than I'd like. A mild grade condition of some sort. Brain is a weapon of mass deconstruction. The heart lingers beneath, doodling away the ache. ~ . Abattoir Leanne Averbach From somewhere over there the monotonous people-screams of pigs are cut with pops innocent as firecrackers. Nothing much from the cows, the stoics, who swallow their fear with soft oboe moans. I've been invited to the Kill Floor for a special task. 10,000 sealed packs of bologna forgotten and spoiled. A few are chosen, assigned to crouch around The Pit and empty the units of meat one-by-creamy-one; but after an hour, only two of us have not run off to empty ourselves. The stench, having nowhere to go, crawls into my mouth, while my eyes and ears get busy arguing ontology. Without their hair save a few sprigs missed by the flame gun animals have no race; beneath their browns reds and calicos, they are all plain as white men, severely deformed white men: best to eat them. The freshly deceased. Slung cheek to cheek they glide overhead on hooked tracks. Spilling onto the beetle heads of men. My meatmate and I work silently avoid the hazards of open mouths toss the rotten meat into the hole for dog food, fertilizer. Across the gorge a face beneath a hair net, the rubbery surface of her skin now thick with the oily atmosphere and that hardhat spilling red from above and down her neck like mine. The woman on the other side works out the day with me, until at last: the sudden, boorish beauty of the horn whistle. It urges us to the exit. The bang of the card clock triggers talk about the blueglow and beer to come as hardhats and smocks purple from brush strokes with flesh weave out through the less soiled incoming shift. (Runner-Up in Sub-TERRAIN Magazine's 2000 Last Poems contest) Joan Fiset lives in Seattle, Washington. Now the Day is Over, her book of memoir prose poems, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 1997 and won the King County Arts Commission's Publication Award. Her poems and prose have appeared in many literary journals including Ploughshares, Calyx, The Bitter Oleander, and Under the Sun. She is a psychotherapist in private practice and also works with Vietnam veterans and their families as a PTSD Counselor with the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs. Diane Furtney is a poet, mystery novelist, and translator (French, Japanese) whose work has appeared in a wide range of literary journals.  She is the author of two award-winning chapbooks and (under the pseudonym D.J.H. Jones) two comic mysteries, Murder at the MLA and Murder in the New Age.  More poems will appear soon in Rhino and in Stand (England).  Currently she works in the plant biology department at The Ohio State University. Brad Ricca's poems have appeared in 6ix, The Coe Review, Black Dirt, The Case Reserve Review, Albatross, The Kerf and Big City Lit [JulAug'03]. He lives in Cleveland. Leanne Averbach is a Canadian poet and short story writer who divides her time between Vancouver and New York City. She has read and performed her work with and without jazz musicians in Italy, New York City, and across Canada. Averbach has worked in a slaughterhouse, fish-packing trough, office cubicle, and been intimate with the inside of jail cells while a left-wing activist in the Seventies.