ISO Chicago Accent, Smoker’s Cough

Sometimes Chicago says goodbye with a tire iron, a gallon of gasoline,
and a promise, and I still want it to take me back. I like to dip my
fingertips in the pooled wax of lit candles and peel the paraffin off. I
like to have my hair pulled. I’ve never been hit by a man I wasn’t related
to. I only can walk like a lady in heels when I’m walking away. I feel
relieved when fire trucks stop in front of apartments that aren’t mine.
I like the smell of tobacco when I’m trying to sleep. I was born with
my grandmother’s bad lungs. I can’t chase anything down. Sometimes
I try when I drink too much. I wake up bloody-kneed and alone. In
college I won a prize for best kisser. I quit studying economics to write
poetry. I know how to calculate the Gini coeffcient of a hungry city
but can’t solve anything, not even dinner for one. On my last day in
Chicago, I gave a homeless man a twenty and felt a little better. I’d
like to give you a try, especially if you’ve quit at least one addiction
and still shake out of habit at night. I’d like to feel a little better about
my life. I curse worst in the morning. I’m not sure about love, but I’d
like somebody to make me coffee, maybe bacon and eggs. I’ll give you
everything but a key to my place. I’ll say your name until you wish
you were never given it. Stranger, I can bend into anything but a wife.

—

This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!

Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Glass Night Blessing

A boy, a half-decade too young, brings me roses
at work, like I’m a woman who owns a vase.
I fixed the snapped silver clasp of my favorite
necklace tonight, the one I snagged off,
too drunk for the precision of fingers.
When I was a child church ladies said
I had piano fingers, so I prayed for a piano
so hard I found music in every empty space.
I sang praise from my snug closet walls
and the branches of the cherry tree out back.
I never shut up. Mom would leave me
in the bath alone. She knew I wasn’t drowning.
I never shut up. It took me years to understand
I came from a lineage of tone-deaf housewives.
But I bent the forgiving metal of this clasp
between slender thumb and middle finger
with such precision it must’ve made
a shattering pitch. Thank god there wasn’t
any glass in the room. It’s comforting to say
that everything happens for a reason.
I never got my piano. Nobody I’ve loved
has ever given me a rose when I loved them.
I didn’t take the 63rd bus home from work
the night the boys threw bricks through
the windows near Cottage. When shards
must’ve had their two seconds of night glitter
before nicking a woman’s hand. When the bus
evacuated into the street. When the boys
shot a another boy who evacuated that breaking.
I am this blessed: I don’t know how to judge
if gun wounds in movies are realistic.

 

—

This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!

Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Mending/Poem for Seth Walsh

           I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
          it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
                 — Robert Hass

Every day people wake with spines in need of mending, nights spent
spooning absence. There’s no sense in cursing at the barista for the
chew of grounds in your latte. Sometimes it’s impossible to get a job
right, especially early mornings, especially when there’s a frontier
of people impatient to leave you. You’ve miscarried jobs before. A
belayer, you made sure the man put his harness on snug, told him if
his foot slipped off the fidgeting cable, you’d hold him flopping around
in the treetops. One foot in front of the other, the stuck pulley, you
should have noticed the slack was too much to save him, no point in
the care you put into the knots. He didn’t slip or sue you. Call this
grace if you can believe in grace today. The news didn’t say what kind
of knot the boy tied. His parents found him with his freckles still on.
It doesn’t matter what kind of tree as long as the boughs were strong
enough to bear him. Perhaps you could’ve moved to California and
told him a faggot is a bundle of twigs, but who’s to say he wasn’t ready
to set himself on fire? Or, you could’ve told him the kids meant he was
a fancy stitch that binds delicate fabrics, old lace to silk, but it’s hard to
feel fancy while bees swarm your eyes. But sometimes the dictionary
is useless, which is what you tell your dad when he says that in Merriam
Webster it says marriage is between a man and a woman. And you don’t
mention too much gin grinding your body against your roommate’s
or the small of a younger woman’s back in the morning but bring
home a law-school-boy from a good family to plan your future over
strawberry pie. The boy probably didn’t drink coffee yet. He might
have grown to make chewy lattes too slowly. Maybe he’d never learn
to sew, hem his pants with staples. What must be true is this: if a boy
hangs from a sturdy branch alone, if wind swings his limbs for hours,
it makes a sound here.

 

—

This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!

Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Don’t Call This Tenderness

There’s a shelter in your voice shaped
like a rustbelt factory, some gravel
I could kick into dust.

The air last night was thick remnants
of burnt coffee. We couldn’t get its syrup
off our salty skins.

We were parched and trying
to suckle anything left wet
out of each other. We’d forgotten
about coldness.

I don’t think you noticed the blisters
on my cracked heels
as you pinned them back
beneath your shoulders.

You weren’t the first body to open me
against the damp dread
of summer sheets.

There’s a man on a plane home from Jamaica
who’s claimed the territory of my hip bones
with his lips, named them his
favorite part of a woman.

I’m not the desert type. I need
to see water to believe it’s there.

Sometimes I get confused about the body,
go searching for its ends, ask the dark
skin of a barrel-chested stranger
if it’s ever been mine.

—

This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!

Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Enough Light to Harbor

         Where is that sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
         of the Midwest?
                      — James Wright

The vacancy of atheist prayers and too much wine
walk me out to Montrose Harbor.

Dad said that in AA you don’t have to accept God,
just that something is greater than yourself.

I press my palms together, tell the lake
I’ve always had trouble loving the whole

of a man, so I started with the dip in his shoulders
and ended with a strand of hair too dark to be mine.

I bought multivitamins today, which is the opposite
of killing myself. All my dreams are in French,

but I can’t understand the sounds. I say
endless, something about light pollution

and gunshots, two hampers of dirty laundry
and no quarters, a guitar I can’t play.

A man who looks too much like him, all beard
and bones and blue jeans, walks toward me,

then turns. I am the morning’s torn lace
and aches, which will have to be enough.

If I walked into the lake, I don’t think it’d leave.
The lake keeps licking the sand like I like,

which will have to be enough.

—

This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!

Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.