This never means the same thing twice.
Tonight our children sleep in the backseat.

Their heads yield left and right through the country,
the moon a cantaloupe slice crowding

Cygnus from the sky. Under that pinoak I crept,
kissed a boy in porchlight pallor,

picked grass from between my toes.
By the juniper I snuck my first cigarette

lit from a burner on the stove. The day has been
put away, a groundhog tamps the mud

walls of his burrow, rabbits tucked safely in warrens –
it is too late, too late for a visit, for the slow

driveway sound, the pop of rocks under the tires.
I scan the drawn curtains for whatever it is

I am missing or might have missed. I imagine my mother
beyond the grey brick, busy with her worry.

My father asleep in the cold bedroom, the raspy hook
and pull of his snore. An empty dog dish in the garage.

My hand reaches across the front seat for my husband’s.
Fingers memorize knuckles as wind drawls

lonesome through the cracked window. I focus on the familiar
darkness ahead. I give a name to the newest ache.

Leigh Anne Hornfeldt lives in Kentucky with her husband and three young sons. This poem is included in her just-published chapbook East Main Aviary. Her poems have appeared in Foundling Review, Literary Mama, The Meadowland Review, among others. She is the recipient of the 2012 Kudzu Prize in Poetry.

I thought about leaving you.
But you didn’t.

Why did you treat me so badly?
I was testing your love,
but those days are over.

I was a cigarette under your heel.
You inhaled—admit it.

If I said “stop,” you heard “more.”
I thought you enjoyed a little rough play.
Besides, who had who in bondage?

We used to have fun.
I still love you. I’m just not
in love with you.

Look me in the eye when you say that.
I don’t trust mirrors anymore.

We’re more like roommates now.
I’d like to scale down, move into
something with clean lines.

I’m sick of you micro-managing me,
tired of 2 of these, 1 of those,
working my core.
It’s my way of saying sorry
I took you for granted.

Chocolates make a better apology.
You’ll thank me one day.

I wasn’t as beautiful
as you made me out to be.
Beauty is wasted
on the beautiful.

You don’t take me anywhere.
You don’t take me anywhere.

A body needs a body.
After all I’ve given you?
Sinewy, stubbled, bountiful,
smooth, man, woman.

You seem so distant
and happy without me.
You’re no help
with Sudoku.

I can almost remember
the time before you:
the swaddling sea,
my neck a small boat.
Those hands are dead now.

Who will take care of me
when you’re gone?
Proper arrangements
will be made, your care
entrusted to a stranger.

Where will you go?
I will be a passenger
on a highway that bends.
I’ll ride through cropped hills,
cows still as mushrooms.

Can you hear me now?
You’re all rhythm
and no melody.

Then sing with me.
Help me carry the tune.
Yes, I will be the words
in our little threnody.

Brandel France de Bravo won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House poetry prize for Provenance. She is editor of Mexican Poetry Today and co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles.  She has received Washington D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities artist fellowships and the Larry Neal Writers’ Prize in poetry.

I was walking back from a parade in my hometown
when I saw a house on fire, or it had been, was
smoking itself like a cheap cigar.   I went inside,
no one stopped me. I was very attached to this house.
I found small scraps, discs and ovals, of sheet metal
and began hoarding them in my cheeks, and they
didn’t cut me. I loaded my mouth with them, tried
to talk around them, such a shame and that
used to be red. Then, this is ridiculous, I thought,
and took them out, one at a time, even the slivers
buried in my gums. Then I ignored the ruined rooms
and became obsessed with the room of my mouth.
I dug around my teeth, into my teeth, the molar
in the back left—I pulled off its top, began scraping out
sculptor’s clay, decayed, stuck to my hands, suddenly
poured from my mouth, the endless toxic excavation.

Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Versus, Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter, and two chapbooks. Her poetry was nominated for two Pushcart prizes and has been included in Best of the Net 2011, North American Review, Fourth River, Mud Luscious, and UCity Review. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Blood Lotus.

The gods’ hammers strike your eardrums. The vibrations shiver you from sky to earth. Your roots spread, gather voices into your trunk, where blue and green meet to create the symphony of the planets and the song of the worms, the whole Whitman universe rotating to the pulse of your sap as it rises and falls.

Is it enough for me to crawl along the verticals of your dodecahedron like an ant in Wonderland? Is each point an epiphany or a decision? Is it enough to take the hands of other ants and sing the world into and out of existence with Coca-Cola and nepenthe?

Look. A boy with blond curls sits at a desk and watches a clock. His leg kicks the ticking rhythm against his chair. His fingers curl around that which creates the Word in thick letters on lined school paper. Every pencil is carved from your wood.

My cat plays with string theory. Time wrinkles. Sometimes it works itself into knots. The boy is a man now. He tunes his cello to your hum. You vibrate his notes up to the gods and out into the world. You write the lyrics in the sunrise.

Now the boy is a baby, pink against his mother’s nipple. Teleology is an illusion. The song neither starts nor stops, rises nor falls, but moves through the mother’s breast, through the tree that is you, through the power lines that draw us together, through the soil that spreads across the earth and greets every footstep.

Metatron, you write sorrow as well as joy. You write the cacophony of airplanes slamming into twin towers. You gather hunger and fear like a bouquet and hand it to the gods. But you are no hanging tree. You balance, unencumbered, between earth and sky. You hold stillness in your heart. The boy holds acorns in his hands.

I cling to the dodecahedron and trace the pattern that vibrates around me. I no longer try to find where you end and the perfect forms begin or where perfection melts into pain. Edges are an illusion.

The song is real.

Allene Rasmussen Nichols is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her poetry has recently appeared in Ginger Piglet, New Plains Review and Conclave. “Metatron” is a response to Shannon Novak’s Acoustic Synergy art show. Images of the show can be found at http://www.shannonnovak.com/works/Pages/Acoustic_Synergy.html.

The one I seem to check into twice a month,
greeting the desk clerk who never reciprocates.
I walk up the rickety stairs, suitcase and life in hand
and enter my room that makes bare bones sound
voluptuous. I prop a pillow against the wall, sprawl
out on the small bed and stare out the open window,
the air smelling sweet as chocolate covered almonds
and I watch images of people I’ve known but can
no longer place go by, until my mother and father,
young as the day I was born, appear briefly before
moving on. I take a chunk of bread and a book from
the suitcase, nibbling and reading throughout the night,
content with this feast I’ve prepared, sweeping the crumbs
off the pages, careful not to damage the extraordinary words.

Tim Suermondt is the author of Trying to Help the Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and Just Beautiful (NYQ Books, 2010). He has published work in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine (UK), among others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Only one chocolate cake in all the land. Only this one Sunday. There was some startling
blue. White caps. Only at this window where the loch lives leaping in its song.

Minutes before, sheep turds. I have a blue plaid wool coat. Father in a suit. Mother in
navy or beige. Forty more years until they falter. Raw grown children of immigrants,
farmers knitting up their concoctions of home. (If a man can bend a spoon with his brain.)

We didn’t get older those weeks of marzipan and sugar-dipped fruit. The grapes spitting
in their dulled and yellow coats. Living in a hotel every night. With manners. The fish
with their difficult bones.

Without looking, I know that you are there. The slide tray clicks. The waiters in their red
coats hiding their fifteen-year old grins.

*                                  *                                  *

Far from the medicine cabinet of home. Such a hopeful box. There is no slide of this.
Iodine. Eye-cup. Mercurochrome. Any wound could be painted away.

Telling my rosary beads in the almond paste of clouds. That long ago. The fingerprints of
the waves. The whorls shuddering.

In the coke-fueled fogs of Europe, the chilly Glaswegian streets. Marzipan. What kind of
tasting is this—as if tongued through wax paper. In the shape of a fruit. In the shape of a
pig.

We have found March bread. Looked through its marchpane. We will break it together.
Mortal or vegetable. Hitting any of the taste-buds sideways.

*                      *                      *                      *

The air train shrieks. Suitcases roll. Long corridors of fast food and bad books. We all
think soon—the wheels should lift with our longing. (If a man can bend a spoon.)

Skating along, one hand on the rail of the accelerated walk. A dog on a leash. Two figures
on crutches. This cartoon doesn’t warn enough.

Metallic glandular flux. Can we scrape fear from our mouths. Maybe a rinse with the eye-
cup. The planes trailing their dotted lines.

Outside, it’s dark. Chocolate heavy on the tongue. Spit and his brother (ungathered) leap,
put through a sieve. This could be a slide slipped into the tray. Is this with or without the
moon, lickety-split, fisted, in the shape of the sun, stroll-jaunting away.

Susan Grimm is the author of the collection Lake Erie Blue and chapbooks Almost Home and Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue, with poems in Poetry East, West Branch and The Journal. She has received Copper Nickel Poetry and Hayden Carruth Poetry prizes and an Ohio Arts Council fellowship.

All-American heroes in flames, my right hand a god
controlling the world’s freedom while my left hand presses
the knob of the aerosol bomb – Aqua Net in all its hot purple
splendor – slips, and Duke and Snake Eyes nearly collateral
damage to Voltar’s char-bubbled plastic skin. No miracle
will get our mother to buy another Voltar. He’s dead, she said.
Resurrection is imagination to innocence. We built the base
out of a tin can, walls raised from crayons, broken pencils:
a child’s revival. Inside, the paratrooper closes my mother’s
door, slowly, and gives us a once-over. He tells us how monkeys
threw shit at them when they landed in the jungle. We landed
in this shithole of a trailer after the drunk lost his house. Men
imagined themselves our father for three weeks at a time.
Not once did they resurrect my father, blown away
one October. We were tracing the topography of the states
of emotion. My sister says he walked himself into a hole
dug by prairie dogs – that they were evil fuckers and he tripped
on their drugs, sold everything in the house. Mother coasted
the back alleys of Oklahoma City, toward Ohio, when she flipped
the van as I swam in her belly. My sister says I should’ve been
retarded or dead. The white knight awoke from his methadone
slip up while Mother was on a morphine drip – doctors gave nine lives
to her pulp of leg. Like all fairy tales, the knight was trolled by trolls,
witches – the most damned spirits pulled him down the six years
he wanted to be Father. Too many times, he offered himself
to them like a buoy that doesn’t know if it’s the sea’s savior
or just a fated object struggling to survive impossible waters.
The day before his thirty-third birthday, he vanished
like Jesus. Like a rain drop in the river. We translated days
into years. Years into men. In ’92, a tornado brushed
the field, painted the harvest into a wheaten-skied Oz.
We followed the road; only, home was not a place
we understood. Perhaps that’s why my sister hates Dorothy.
If this version’s truth, my father is the heartless Lion. If he baptized
himself in the river, how can I forgive? I was cradled
by these men because Mother wanted to apologize to somebody
for her guilt – they wanted in her bedroom, so she told them
the secret to heroism was her children. They slipped
each time – like action figures unaware who really held the strings.

Christopher Ankney has been published in journals such as Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, and Fourteen Hills. His work has been nominated five times for a Pushcart. He lives with his wife in Annapolis, Maryland, where he teaches English and Creative Writing at Anne Arundel Community College.