Wife

Wife looks into the sink and despairs. She tries not to stir up waves in the dirty dishwater, the gray suds and rainbow oil slicks mirroring the surface, how corn kernels and white beans clot up the drain. She feels cracked wide like a seed, driving her car barefoot and not expecting to get anywhere except all the places she's already been. This is the short version. Wife feels like a sofa cushion or an empty glass or any number of root vegetables. She can hear crickets chittering at dusk, recognize the stilted movements of a squirrel in a pile of leaves. When she closes her eyes, she can understand how a single scented candle will be the death of them all.

Wife lacks the bright-eyed optimism of Bride, Bride’s resplendent complexion, her economical scrutiny, her generous submission. One body, Bride says, believing it to be true, committed to the ideology of fairy tales. Bride and Groom moved into a cottage in a remote wood. The next day she put away her tulle and satin gown, the train that went on for days. She transformed her corona of ringlets into a single knot and settled into her days, thinking her joyous ending could be sustained, thinking the wild things in the trees didn’t have a mind to devour her.

Wife read a fairy tale once then ripped out the pages, boiled them in milk, tea leaves and sage, ground the pulp and pressed it to make her own paper. Wife is writing on the sheets as we speak, except the ink is bleeding into the fibers, except some of the words are illegible. Can you even make sense of them? Today Wife is a kite, two-dimensional and tethered, trailing behind a string, her hands stuffed in her pockets waiting for the right moment to float her words, for the wind to carry them off. She is waiting for someone to ask the obvious question. How are you? The answer is always what you expect. Just fine. Aren’t we all?

*

Lisette Alonso is a south Florida native who has held a variety of non-writing related jobs. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and is the author of the chapbooks Wednesday’s Child (Porkbelly Press) and The Album of Untaken Photos (The Lune). Her poetry has appeared with New Letters, The Tishman Review, The Nashville Review, Mothers Always Write, and Poetry Superhighway. You can find her collaborations as well on Cahoodaloodaling and Hobart.

Q&A

What are your five favorite words of all time?

Today my five favorite words are somnambulant, periwinkle, stupefy, astonishment, and crocodilian, but tomorrow they might be serendipity, capitulate, belligerent, cacophony, and emblazoned. After that, who can say?

Coffee or tea?

Definitely coffee, unless I’m sick to death of coffee. Then it’s tea, definitely tea.

You’ve been given a plane ticket that can take you anywhere in the world. Where do you go?

In junior high, we were asked to put together a presentation promoting a country we wanted to visit. I picked Australia because it seemed like such an impossible distance to travel. Maybe I was infatuated with the idea of befriending a kangaroo or seeing the Blue Mountains. These still sound like respectable ambitions for a woman who didn’t venture outside of her home state until she was in her 30s.

Deflection

Just another infiltration.

Private home invasion breaching Mary Orsini’s jalousie window.
Unprotected.
The straggling house off Route 60 shrugged

and urged and urged its final orchids on.
Skinside
unreels all inside out. Chilled

extravagance assaults the innocent sill. And still. Approach.
Avoidance.
How to full-frontal face the blunt drama. The fetal purple

bruises, the awkward gestures of puberty unannounced. Is it
fight
or flight. Or frantic

purpose. And a crushing will to fill the fallow
space.
And so oddly named. Flower?

Beyond just green encounters repurposed jam jar. Four ounces with
algae.
Alien root trigonometries, rutted

circumference and propped stick. Rims rusted metallic. The
undrinkable
stale water. Just one week elapsed and January’s complexion already so

compromised.


How she hated her heart and its traitorous four
chambers.
The driving ventricles, the muscular pitch. Bald

tread and failed brakes and
still
skidding. Her heart hated


almost as much as the perennial blooming.
Almost,
the prescient blooms. Hurrying.

Heartsick. Just the
same
willful stems. Unwelcome

by what could keep just as well hollowed. Even better just
empty.
Nostalgia for the not-color of sightline across yard after

yard, the barefooted vacancy, the
shattering
transparency of untempered window glass.

*

C.M. Clark’s poetry has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Paddock Review, Ovenbird, Metonym Literary Journal, The Lindenwood Review, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, the South Florida Poetry Journal, and Gulf Stream magazine. Her work has also been selected for Demeter Press’s anthology, Travellin’ Mama, and in the South Florida Poetry Journal Anthology. Clark was runner-up  for the Slate Roof Press Chapbook Contest and Elyse Wolf Prize, a finalist for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series, and semi-finalist for Molotov Cocktail Press’s Shadow Award. She also served as inaugural Poet in Residence at the Deering Estate Artists Village in Miami. Author of full-length works Charles Deering Forecasts the Weather & Other Poems (Solution Hole Press, 2012) and Dragonfly (Solution Hole Press, 2016), Clark’s most recent collection, The Five Snouts, was published by Finishing Line Press (2017). A new collection, Exoskeletal, will be forthcoming from Solution Hole Press in 2019.

NOTE

January is a tough month. The pressures of a new start and all that. Sometimes the very emptiness of a clear calendar, clear space, can be a short-lived relief. “Deflection” began with an orchid that bloomed early—just when the dormant stage—the empty window—was starting to offer its own kind of serenity. Can we ever deflect our fast-rushing thoughts from crowding that empty moment–that empty acre—a “home invasion” no alarm system can deter or prevent?

Q&A

What are your five favorite words of all time?

Tang, swaddled, abseil, sundown, epithelial.

Coffee or tea?

Tea: Tazo “Zen.”

You’ve been given a plane ticket that can take you anywhere in the world. Where do you go?

Lake Tahoe/Squaw Valley.

The Ruling Class Sacrifices at Chichén Itzá

For the “caravan” bridge refugees forced to throw their children
into the Suchiate River, 10/20/2018

That anniversary year we went there on a tour

to stroll the plaza with its pyramids

leaving the air-conditioned bus for the jungle

which smelled like something melon gone sour—

and came suddenly upon what the jungle hid:

the ball field where the winner died. The Sacred Well,

the Cenote, our guide explained, hidden from view,

was past those trees, as he shooed away some kid

about to beg—the little girl was beautiful—

our guide commented she was the type thrown into

that pool.

*

Stephen Gibson’s Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror won the 2017 Miller Williams Prize, selected by Billy Collins, University of Arkansas Press. Earlier collections include The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Idaho Book Prize, Lost Horse Press), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/Intuit House Book Prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen). His poems have appeared in such journals as Able Muse, American Arts Quarterly, The American Journal of Poetry, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Court Green, The Evansville Review, EPOCH, Field, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, J Journal, Measure, New England Review, Notre Dame Review, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, Raleigh Review, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Southwest Review, Upstreet, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

NOTE

What prompted me to write this poem has been the vilification and inhumane treatment of asylum-seeking families—that so-called "invasion" on our southern border.

Q&A

What are your five favorite words of all time?

“We are pleased to accept. . .”

Coffee or tea?

Coffee.

You’ve been given a plane ticket that can take you anywhere in the world. Where do you go?

China.

After Heavy Rain

You can no longer see the kicked-over leaves where the deer ascended this hillside. The river mud has flattened out, and the gutters have lost their voice. True, there is no obvious route away from where you stand. But the hermit thrush masters its song merely by hatching, and the landslide always ends at the bottom of your ravine.

*

Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017) and Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and New World Writing, and his story collection is Saturday Night at Magellan’s (Fomite Press, 2013). He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, as well as the 2016 NANO Fiction Prize. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.

Q&A

What are your five favorite words of all time?

Coast, star, moon, hive, woods.

Coffee or tea?

Coffee.

You’ve been given a plane ticket that can take you anywhere in the world. Where do you go?

The pine barrens of southern New Jersey.

The Fainting Man in the Painting

After viewing The Crucifixion of St. Julia by Hieronymus Bosch

Perhaps he just couldn’t take seeing a woman
becoming a saint
crucified on a cross,
her bloody hands and retching eyes
reaching up toward a heaven
he no longer believed existed. Or maybe
it was the sudden clap of thunder
bursting inside his head
that made him dizzy. Or the ringing
inside his ears sounding like a thousand wings,
bats spiraling out of the mouth
of a deep and forgotten cave.
He grew cold and numb,
saw the aching auras
of zigzagging silver lights, a whirling
galaxy of shimmering stars—
and so he fainted,
dropping into the waiting arms of two men
he thought were his best and only friends.

*

Lois Roma-Deeley’s fourth poetry collection The Short List of Certainties won the Jacopone da Todi Book Prize. Her previous collections are: Rules of Hunger, northSight and High Notes- a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist.. Her work is featured in—or forthcoming from—numerous anthologies and journals including, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power & Invisibility, Italian Americana, Quiddity, Zone 3, Spillway, Juked (on line). Roma-Deeley has been the recipient of many awards and honors for her poetry including an Arizona Commission on the Arts grant, New Millennium Writing (finalist) SCCC Lawrence Epstein Visiting Writer Award (finalist), four Ragdale Foundation Residency Fellowships and many others. Roma-Deeley was named U.S. Professor of the Year, Community College, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE, 2012-2013. She is the first national winner of this award that Arizona has ever had in any category. Currently, Roma-Deeley is the Associate Editor of the international international poetry journal Presence. www.loisroma-deeley.com

NOTE

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working on many ekphrastic projects with painters, photographers and even a composer. The experience always leaves me with a feeling of joy. I see these collaborations as more of a conversation between art forms rather than inspiration. Significantly, I learned the approach to ekphrasis projects often centers upon these two dynamics: focus on structure or form; and/or a focus on theme or content. So when perusing the internet one day I ran across the triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch titled The Crucifixion of St. Julia and I felt that conversation between poetry and visual art ignite. The painting depicts St. Julia being crucified on a cross while several neighbors, including a fainting man, are gathered at her feet. I couldn’t help but feel that Bosch and I, if he were living now instead of the 1400’s, would be having a lively discussion regarding the power of women and society’s resistance to that power. My poem, in form and content, is a result of my imaginary conversation with Bosch’s work.

Q&A

What are your five favorite words of all time?

Mellifluous, stone, perhaps, rising, into

Coffee or tea?

Expresso!

You’ve been given a plane ticket that can take you anywhere in the world. Where do you go?

Rome (where my father’s people came from).