POETRY:

• Jake Adam York
  • Secession (”There’s never just one.”)
  • Secession (”I made a map of the county…”)

There’s never just one. The captive turns surgeon, hangs skin on the barbs of the understory, sepias into dogwood leaves. Runaways rub garlic on their feet. Hounds bay outside the restaurant. But there’s no waiting either. A soldier clothes a corpse. Grass drowns the battlefield. Silhouettes confederate night. Beneath the bed, boots slough their crusts of mud to fill the chinks between the hardwood planks, so we can never sleep in just one place again. And this is how it begins, as a postman’s fingernails on the screen door’s screen, itchy for a signature, an indication, the story on the outside to match the one within. The message says my throat is one hot Atlanta, bring back the party line. Then I can whisper through the caterwauls what I’ve been meaning to say all along. Says I am a mockingbird, a catbird, a hungry pigeon. I am the wingless crow who laughs at himself when the pines lean over the shack in your dreams.

I made a map of the county and shoebox houses on every road, oilcan museum and smaller box houses on the smaller map within. Cicada for the trolley kudzu’d in some hair. A Hotwheels on a cracker at the sardine-tin garage. I made a coffin for a sock I folded like a dunce. Dug a quarry and a blue-hole in the ridge, stolen backhoe in the deeps. Fake tree from a forest, guitar from a gourd, and from the constitution umpteen more. Tiny music in a hole-punch chad. I made my collapse, my fold, my own little elsewhere. Boat from bottlecap, flotilla from remote controls. A bandage from my pocket lint, cottonfields from quilts. And a zoo and an ark from a wayward bird. I wrote the county’s history on the heads of matches and at last I made a suitcase out of clay and packed my clay and took the census as I made my way out of town.

for W.C.

Jake Adam York is the author of A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois University Press 2008) and Murder Ballads (Elixir 2005). He and his students in the undergraduate Creative Writing program at the University of Colorado Denver publish Copper Nickel. He made his own website: www.jakeadamyork.com.

POETRY:

• David Graham
  • Against Close Reading
  • Paradise or Its Outskirts

          —Questions for Discussion

What does the sky mean?
Is the grass correct?

How many splashes in that pond?

And while we’re at it,
what is the point of Tuesday,
of the numeral six, of north?

Might the marsh water have an answer,
an opinion, some silence as of judgment?

Can you kindly explain
the mailbox flecked with rust,
new brakes, dog fur, the taste of salt?

And how about this gray turkey
strutting across a gray field
as if he owns it?

Wouldn’t you agree?

          People also say this is Paradise.
          What sort of Paradise doesn’t have puddles?
                    —Josh English

Paradise comes with muddy pawprints, static,
insomnia, tired brooms, bus fumes hovering
over the still frozen town. Unruly lilies shoot up
through late snow on the cemetery hillside.

A ripe fan blows grease into the alley
out back of the lone Mexican restaurant in town,
where the hostess on break hunches against the cold,
cupping her cigarette with lovely hands.

She’s skinny with generalized denial, and anyone
could love that, don’t you think? She rents
in Paradise or its outskirts, I’m sure of that.
Just watch her eye the three sixtyish secretaries

at their regular Wednesday lunch, all puffy hands
and throaty laughter. Dye jobs just past
their sell-by dates. She could love such weary mothers
easily, but chooses the sky instead, cloud puffs

echoing her exhalations. That’s a zero-G Eden
up there, free of lime slices jamming bottlenecks,
the damnation of sticky linoleum, lint in a purse
puffed up like a secretary’s hair. She likes to think

of nothing, long moments weightless as the check
floating down cloudlike over a table. She’s smoke
obscuring the sky’s cracked mirror. Maybe the snap
of a lock bolt at closing time, and the moment after.

That sort of Paradise. Fritos still in their gleaming bag
at the very top of the brimming dumpster.

David Graham has published a bunch of books that no one has seen, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume Press). With Kate Sontag he edited the essay anthology After Confession (Graywolf). He just entered his third decade of teaching at Ripon College, a wonderful liberal arts school no one’s heard of.