He dug up dirt. Once I stabbed
The ground with my knife.
Nicked his ear.

He grew industrious, mowed the lawn
In neat squares, uprooted weeds–wild-
Flowers–built a plywood fort

Under a weathered oak whose branches
I climbed to watch, silent, dead-still.
Papa smiled and patted his burr cut

And called him a diligent boy.
I drew a circle around myself,
Let hair grow down my neck,

And worshiped round wet stones.
Navigating woods by smell of fog,
Watching street lights on the river,

Testing my breath on walks that winter,
I was sure the dead would return.
Shadow that ran across our lawn

And lost itself in the sunset:
I knew it was my mother.
“Just the light,” said my brother.

Drawing his cap gun, he aimed
Straight for the heart.
Mother Earth.

Rob Schultz taught American literature at Western Michigan University and Virginia Commonwealth University before drifting into radio and voice work.  Published first novel, Styll in Love (Van Neste Books) in 1998, which is still in circulation.  Other work has appeared in Prime Mincer, Rattapallax, Slant, Sou’wester, The MacGuffin and West Branch, among others.

again falls like fate, and I prepare to

rebuild. Scanning the wreckage, I search
for a catch to release the base row

committed to ripening in place.

The rotten logs must be wrestled loose,
carted to the deep woods to be forgotten—

I know from years past, they won’t go

without a fight with the living, clinging
to muddy March ground, as if to suggest

the recently dead dream of roots.

Noel Sloboda teaches at Penn State York and serves as dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Company. He is the author of the collection Shell Games (2008) as well as two chapbooks. Learn more here: http://www2.yk.psu.edu/sites/njs16/.

on a log
on top of a rain wet

woodpile,
black feathers glinting

white,
an allover misting

of december rain
on christmas lights—

this incarnation
as viewed from my office window—

a father-forsaken shadow
taking flight

among us, lonely moving.

Anthony Opal is currently a grad student at Northwestern University. His work is forthcoming in Boston Review, Harpur Palate, Notre Dame Review, New Madrid, and The Spoon River Poetry Review.

met this brash young rich kid with the
slicked spikes and soul patch,

mister ennuied-with-the-world
begat the devil-may-care millionaire,

and Paige typesetters melted
into West Egg moonshine.

He put down the three martinis
and clamped on a New England hard-hat,

then went out frothing foam,
having drowned a mass

of brave and witless men
in a sea of electrified fencing.

Meanwhile the kid woke up
one morning at age forty

and found he’d misplaced his wife
and his entire digestive system,

down the tubes like so
many lost countries.

The Teflon flakes off in the pan,
saturates the day with carcinogens.
Scrub it, rinse it, dump it down the drain.

Cultivate that blackened bottom taste.
How well the household chores agree
with a dark night, the spindling fix of a seam.

The sad thing about private lives
is they go unsung to the grave,
as funeral attendees steal toasted paninis

and banana bread. What will become
of the photographs that live on?
Shoebox. Nightstand. Blaze of glory.

Every letter you write from now on
will bear the stamp of this exercise.
Think of how it will be carried as wind

carries a sailboat, how you ought
to read it backward, word by word.

Please press the link below to hear our Fiction Editor, Levi Foster, read this poem

(Note that the recording is somewhat quiet, so you may have to raise the volume on your computer.)

yet you know nothing of capacitors, of relays
and dynamos, or how we use dinosaurs’ bones
to make our debauched suns glow.

but you know about flux and resistance:
the lean of a limb, the arc of a leap,
the force to pry an acorn from its cap.

I want to know what it’s like to walk
along the electric-white finger of god;
I want to suck the creosote from the pole

that sprung like a railroad tie at the edge
of the yard, an eiffel tower of light,
the hum that stifles all cries.

squirrel, I like how you close all the circuits,
tying the juice into irreconcilable knots of twine,
as easily as I can call god a liar,

as easily as I drink this glass of wine.

Every other surface
(dark black hair)
perfect. Perfect scent.

You drink steadily
Absolut Cape Cod

That monstrosity, what’s it called, she said.
The Pomapdour Center?
Yeah that’s it.
Great Rivers cardboard sculpture.

KJ your 6-foot
140 pound twink body
Nothing better in my life.
Only things equal.
The Nobel Prize in Literature
for lifetime achievement
could only equal your body
and sweet nature.
Sitting on the edge of my bed
your feet in white socks and black and white
tennis shoes
telling me about your boys, girls,
computer-animation free-lance.

*
[Take a good long pause here.
Take a half-hour walk or run

or swim—break—
then get back to this poem.
Seriously if you don’t do one
you’ll miss the experience.]

*
Every night I don’t look for you
but about five nights a week.
Looked through Zurich and Pattaya.

Everything disappears!

Not a hair on your chest
or flat stomach.