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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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Rebecca Schumejda
fall-winter 09-10
Rice
Because everything else is ready
when I realize I forgot
to boil water for rice,
I top stale bread with hummus,
an adhesive for our garden vegetables.
I convince myself that the angry fork
you scrape against your plate
is a protest,
that the clamor of your contemplation
pulls us further apart.
When you ask:
how old is this bread, anyway?
You must be thinking of another woman
who successfully orchestrates meals
and looks better in a bikini.
Later, when you say
the whole damn world is going mad,
I know it’s a cryptic message
since the word rice
is scrambled in divorce
But it’s not about rice,
six-day-old bread
or about how I forgot
to close your car window,
allowing last night’s rain in.
It’s about something more complex
like the garden in our backyard,
we committed to
then neglected.
It’s about how the weeds and critters
creep in like doubt
and take what we always thought
was ours.
Outside by Moonlight
We watch the family of skunks
that inhabit our shed,
travel like secret missiles
through the opening
in the garden’s fence,
down the path
between sunflowers
and summer squash,
to the end where trapped
they turn clumsily
into one another.
Your fingers resting
on my forearm
travel south
toward my wrist
where your hand
squeezes through
into mine
and even though
my hand like the moon
is full of skepticism,
my fingers part clumsily
and turn back around
to interweave with yours.
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Rebecca Schumejda's Falling Forward was published by sunnyoutside press in February of 2009. In addition, sunnyoustide published her chapbook Dream Big, Work Harder in November of 2006 and her poem "Logic" on a postcard. Green Bean Press published her first chapbook The Tear Duct of The Storm in 2001. This November, her chapbook The Map of Our Garden will be released by verve bath press. Visit her website at www.rebeccaschumejda.com. |
Ice Water
What is the difference between want and need;
who selects the referees that make the calls?
The people in hell need ice water;
I’d settle for a chilled beer and decent conversation.
We always want what we don’t have
and when we have what we don’t want,
we whine until we drive everyone away.
We all have our defense mechanisms: worms
their ability to regenerate, skunks their pungent scent,
bright-winged butterflies their toxins, humans their lies.
Tonight, as a granddaughter of a practicing
Catholic and the daughter of an atheist,
I will have hedonistic sex with my husband for hours,
the man I moved in with years before we married.
I was a bastard child, a bastard wife, and am
destined to be a bastard mother. I wore white, anyway.
I would think that the people in Hell would prefer
vodka martinis, dirty with extra olives, shaken not stirred—
the way I like them. I guess we settle out of desperation,
out of predestined location and vocation;
when I was a child, my father gave me a shovel,
after I lied to him, and told me to dig a tunnel to hell
to preserve Satan’s energy. He didn’t believe,
but he scared the devil out of me—
yet another successful modern day exorcism.
Rebecca Schumejda
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