Fall/Winter 2009-10
tom oristaglio
scott summers
cindy childress
tom rechtin
james b. nicola
debra rymer
doug draime
corey mesler
rebecca schumejda
chris crittenden
arlene ang
joey nicoletti
brad johnson
lorie allred
elizabeth kay
alexander russo
nissa lee
kenneth gurney
jessi lee gaylord
keith brighouse
ajay vishwanathan
ethel rohan
william "cully" bryant
julie steiner
Steiner Interview
by Alex Nodopaka
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Alex Nodopaka
Patrick Carrington
Mannequin Envy in memory of poet and artist Douglas Gamrath
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Doug Ramspeck
Summer 2009
Common Things
So imagine you found a seeping robin’s egg
on stone steps and made of it an omelet.
The sky was the color of a crocodile’s green eye.
In the distance a train was coming closer
and closer and then it wasn’t.
I kept saying Are you sure?
and you kept saying, About what?
It was the summer of all that whispering,
or maybe the summer after all that whispering,
when everything was wrapped in cellophane,
and you found an oblong pebble
clinging to your boot bottom as a talisman.
You kept telling me about a dream
you were having about being wrapped in a burlap sack
with an exotic shorthair that kept purring and purring
until you scratched out both its eyes,
which I took to be a symbol of
devotion.
All summer you offered
me the gift of common things: a smear of blood
on a white T-shirt, a yellow epaulet ant
from Australia, a noun made of turkey grease
and the stewed tail of a five-lined skink.
There was so much chlorine in the pool
our eyes were forever raw red,
but for all that I couldn’t believe you as the temptress.
No one thinks you were the one who climbed the tree,
who rolled the robin’s egg like Sisyphus from the nest.
You told me once that all I ever wanted
was the burlap sack. I told you once
that all you ever wanted was to seep.
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Doug Ramspeck's poetry collection, Black Tupelo Country, was selected for the 2007 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and is published by BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). His chapbook, Where We Come From, is published by March Street Press. Several hundred of his poems have been accepted by journals that include Prairie Schooner, Epoch, West Branch, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and Hayden’s Ferry. He was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2009. |
Fall 2008
Old Bait
It sickens me to think of it.
The circular life and the nation’s grief.
All of us writhing forever on the hook.
Though still I keep thinking of you,
until the rest is just old bait:
the fish hiding as shimmer
in the reeds, the beauty that cannot
tell itself from alluvium.
If most people spend their entire lives
watching the bobber float,
at least they get to sit in the rowboat.
Which is preferable to the parable
of the black night that adored the moon
so summoned the sun to better
see it. Good God I’ve grown weary
of this squawk-squawk. Have you ever
watched a swan tell a goose: Hey, get out
of my pond. The long white neck drawn
back like a bow. And now,
a year since I last saw you, the ghost-image
too easy to forget: it’s eye to eye,
the whiskey whipped across
the tongue, the blood hook
then all that flopping on the dock.
The body never was the enemy:
just listen to the News. Everywhere
disaster gives way to the commercial.
There’s some new dish soap
we are needing, some new fishing lure
we’ll never live without.
Judas Gets His Penis Pierced
In “Three Versions of Judas,”
Jorge Luis Borges suggests
that Judas suffered more than Jesus
so played a more significant role
in the Atonement. But I wonder
more these days about whether the kiss
between Judas and Jesus had homoerotic
implications. The piercing by the Romans
of the foreskin and insertion of a metal ring,
welded shut, was used to prevent erections
and procreation by the slaves, but in Borges
there is a long discussion of free will,
which I studied once in college
but which now reminds of a crow
high up in a canopy of trees, cawing out endlessly
though you can’t see him. I would like to think
that Judas wept, and Jesus wept, and the cock
cawed three times like a crow,
and everything that has happened since
is wet with tears.
Fall 2007
Narrativity
My brother shot himself in the foot.
No, he shot himself in the other foot.
We kept saying the names of things:
Tequila. Henry. New Moon.
We believed there was a story in there somewhere.
Maybe it was hiding in the purse
of the prostitute who was eating
chocolate chip pancakes
at the diner where the short order cook
was thinking about robbing himself again,
this time at gunpoint in the back alley
at the end of his shift. Or maybe
there was a tired gray river running through the center
of the city, and no one dared to look at it.
They could hear it—which was bad enough—
especially since the rest of us kept trying to drag
the drowned people out of the river,
kept trying to give them mouth-to-mouth,
but every one single of them would roll
around or cover their mouths
or refuse any help whatsoever.
Which was why the rest of us kept falling in love
with the first person we saw on the way home
out the southside bus; but still we dreamed
we were being interrogated every night
by The Unlaced Boot, which is why my brother
shot himself, right there, there, in the foot.
Middle Life
Her prickly ash is dying. Her toothache tree,
the leaves of which she plucks and grinds
to make her ointments, is bare this spring.
And because the body always whispers,
she gathers goat’s rue, hoary vervain,
and downy skullscap. She would search
the woods for discarded snake skins
if it would help. She would expel two-hundred eggs
like a cricket frog. In her vegetable garden
the small stream trickles past
then disappears like human wishes.
Her grackles rasp and watch
with yellow eyes. Once she cut her foot
on a sharp rock then bled into the water.
The water transformed itself to pink.
She dreams sometimes that blood is trickling
down the bark of the prickly ash, that blood
is pooling and strangling on her tongue.
Bio: "More than 200 of my poems have been published or are forthcoming by journals that include West Branch, Rattle, Confrontation Magazine, Connecticut Review, Rosebud, Nimrod, Hunger Mountain, RHINO, The Cream City Review, and Seneca Review. I direct the Writing Center and teach creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima. I live in Lima with my wife, Beth, and our seventeen-year-old daughter, Lee."
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Julie Steiner Limbs-Birds
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