Pacifica Literary Review

You drove the car up the brush pile
and left it with headlights on
and engine off. You rolled the metal
roof from the house and sold it
to dishonest contractors cheating
our neighbor who raises Pekinese.
You rerouted water from the well
to flood the street and ice over
and trigger a dozen collisions.
You invested your retirement fund
in ship-breakers on the furthest shore
of the Indian Ocean. You sold
your dog to a Chinese restaurant,
which enslaved him as a bus boy.
Finally you tipped the bed and spilled me
into a heap of dirty laundry
and tried to stuff me in the washer
where I’d go round and round forever.
I escaped and dashed outdoors and called
on the heavens for help. The weak
amber headlights pinned me against
a starless and ignoble sky.
The neighbor who raises Pekinese
phoned the police, who responded
with sighs of boredom. Their car
towed yours off the brush pile.
They arrested the contractors
and called Public Works to sand
the slippery road. They rescued
your dog from the restaurant where
he’d made a hundred dollars in tips.
They couldn’t recover your funds
from the ship breakers, but maybe
that was a sound investment. Lastly,
they arrested me for knowing you,
an act of justice so abject
the stars broke through cloud cover
and wept a trillion ions of joy.

William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent books of poetry are City of Palms and June Snow Dance, both 2012. He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Atlanta Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Worcester Review, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge.

Aurora. Cockrow. Day-peep.
Rifles whirligig down the line.
Each nozzle endows the next.

The centrifugal hands of the cadets
Harmonize. Like dressage.
To think of weaponry as dressage.

Motion associates involuntarily.
Also, light. To simply say:
Morning did warm things with light

And their guns, indistinguishing
The piaffe. Similar discipline.
A man scrapes barnacles

From the Newport Beach pier.
Early. So no one’s watching.
The line divides delicacy

And demean. To mean
This as a part of speech: the verb.
The long stretch of morning where

Man begs the piers to give
At risk of probing, buffaloed eyes.
At home, safe as the long-remembered

Delicacy they are. Before day, grace.
Clumsy owns the light. And how.
So long owns the land. And now.

William Camponovo studied poetry at The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington and has contributed poems to Iron Horse Literary Review, The Seattle Review, and Best New Poets 2011. He lives in and works for the city of Los Angeles.

Cypresses

For one day only
those who walk don’t have to think

that we were born here, not there,
which means there’s a chance

in a land without a meaning,
an answer in the frozen ground

like an unexpected comma.
A page is missing from the book

in the forest. Out of the question
each arrow strikes a bell which shuts a door—

thank you for seeing in the dark
what is wrongly called the distance;

what we ask for
when we cut our losses and proceed

as if we were protagonists, or lovers;
salmon headed upstream.

I remember the illusion of persons
acting younger than I am. We stand

convicted of the topical and transitory,
the sea deliberately gone.

Crates of Oranges

on the rulered page (of a Moghul garden)
the best word is water

but the first ocean was the best
between the horizon’s brackets

the main sentence waits

the world ahead was daylight
and no one dared get out

liars in the glass
argue that light will last

regardless of tenses and final clauses
the black bureau of history

is a maelstrom of loves and hates
and our shadows walk on stilts

at high altitudes
because my breath is gone

leaving stone blocks for goodbye
that painters find innocent

John Paul Calavitta studied poetry at George Mason, Naropa University, and the University of Washington. His work appears in Camas, The Monarch Review, and Mudlark, among others.

If I could I’d write
about the world’s
axis. As it is
I am left to contemplate
your left nipple.
As it is it is
only given to me to say
the words I
heard said before, the
secret codes of our night.

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published five novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010), Following Richard Brautigan (2010), and Gardner Remembers (2011), 2 full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2011), and 3 books of short stories. He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written “Coronet Blue.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. You can find Corey at his homepage here.

Attention clicks, blinks,
focusing—chambers clean
on each gun as it’s fully

loaded: marks at 50,
100 yards, 200 yards.
Slick shells scatter

like flies from a feast
of road kill. We are
shooting my dad’s 4-10,

30-ought-6—my best friend’s
.308 pistol he bought
six months after

losing his last gun:
an antique Luger
with a swastika

scratched out on its pearl-
smooth grip. (The sheriff
took it in a drug bust, then—

rumor has it.) He likes
this new gun, he tells me,
even more than the first.

It’s much lighter—
but uses the same
hollow points—takes

mere seconds to load,
even with a big clip—
is concealed easily,

and can be drawn
quickly if a situation
seems to require it.

“Pure speed,” he says,
“means everything. And
don’t you forget that.”

We are practicing shots
we know we’ll never take,
since we rarely lock

any doors here—just
gun cabinets, tool sheds,
sometimes cars that seem

worth protecting. But
who’d boost one of ours?
Mine’s a blue Chevy, busted up

something awful. And
my friend’s has a warrant
or two out on it—I think

maybe for speeding
or some other shit—so
no one will steal that.

-after Yusef Komunyakaa

J. Scott Brownlee is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, where he teaches poetry to second graders and undergraduates. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Ninth Letter, Boxcar Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Pebble Lake Review, Front Porch, South Dakota Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Involved with several literary journal start-ups, he was the managing editor and co-founder of both Hothouse and The Raleigh Review. A poet-of-place, Brownlee writes primarily about the people and landscape of rural Texas. His current book-length work, County Lines, was named a Semifinalist for the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In the market, the woman twirling swirls
her black umbrella—black jacket, dark skin spinning
this moment and it is not raining.

The harbor sky’s colored cement,
every other crayon in the box gone,

Fifty-odd years couldn’t root me (tapped
like a philodendron in some sun room, blue tiles
and always a bowl of oranges and almonds).

I tried the lozenges, ironed my blood
as neat as a pillowcase, on good days.

I gave away then to find now, fractured—
read the story again, all memories
a fabrication (I fumble for new words, references—

say eye and mean shading, chapter
for light’s angles calculated in years times distance).

Where are the footnotes, the abstract,
the catalogue’s glossy promises?
“Pastel.” “Tempera on cardboard.”

No bell, but a siren. No lighthouse,
but this life. If I approached,

it was fleeting, a turn—the faces changed,
perspective closer to the vanishing point.

Joannie Stangeland’s book Into the Rumored Spring was published last fall by Ravenna Press. She’s also the author of two chapbooks, and her poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, and other publications. Joannie serves as poetry editor for the online journal The Smoking Poet.