|
Fall 2007
John Amen
Kathy Babcock
Kate Benedict
Jeff Calhoun
Howard Good
Kenneth Gurney
Sarah Jordan
Lynn Levin
Alex Grant
Tim Mayo
PJ Nights
Tim Peeler
Cati Porter
Doug Ramspeck
John Repp
Bill Roberts
RL Swihart
Spencer Troxell
Kelley White
Teresa White
Mike Estabrook
David Jordan
Kelly Mandryk-Layne
Willie Smith
Matthew Rounsville
Back by popular demand:See most pages of poetry for her photos,as well as her artist's page from the summer issue.
|
|
Doug Ramspeck
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."
|
|
