To Measure the Earth

The inchworm is green as the Sour Punch

candy my brother hands me. I have eaten

a world-record amount of Sour Punch Bites;

two hundred in 10 minutes.

My tongue, abraded. My mouth, bitter pucker.

Outside, the white monotony of snow

on the road and the fields beside the road. My brother

won’t turn on the radio; his voice takes me back

45 years. I grip the steering wheel

and the backs of my hands tighten when we hit ice.

When my brother opens the bag, the Sour Punch

Bites secrete artificial fruit. The scent

beats like a drumstick on a cymbal, a shivery

noise in my nostrils. We left the Five Points

Correctional Facility and it was spring,

fields green as inchworms and my nephew dead

not even a week. The bag of Sour Punch Bites

asks the corrections officer to use the restroom.

A geometer moth flaps its wings and an inchworm

lands in my hair. “Every time I pop out

you know I A.T.E,” I sing loud

along with GloRilla, my car windows up.

The strappy sandals of sorrow bite my heels.

I am full as an empty shopping cart. My brother

transforms into an inchworm in my passenger seat.

Ho to the Jo, they called me at my last job.

They called me the Hammer. When my nephew gets out

of Five Points Correctional Facility we will toast

with cans of Twisted Tea. With bioluminescent

cans of Twisted Tea. We are the survivors

and the perpetrators too. Dios Mio, my husband sighs,

mimicking a skit from Saturday Night Live. The bag

of Sour Punch Bites puts on a camo

jacket and goes back inside for stragglers. Cymbals

crash and one of them tumbles to the deck of the ship

after first striking a woman’s leg. The female

geometer moth is born without wings.

Hope Jordan’s work appears most recently in Cutleaf, Hole in the Head Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Stone Canoe. She grew up in Chittenango, NY, holds a dual BA from Syracuse & an MFA in Creative Writing from UMass Boston. She lives in NH, where she was the state’s first official poetry slam master. Her chapbook is The Day She Decided to Feed Crows.

Elevator Etiquette

Someone tagged some trees

in the park just like if they were

a highway overpass or a boxcar

in a train yard. I’ve got no songs

for these orphans. I’ve got no money

for gas.

The hostess sat me in the corner

by the bathrooms and I haven’t seen

my waiter in hours. Don’t ask why

there’s blood on that tree stump.

Just eat the chicken. Drink whatever

they bring.

It’s up to you, you know.

You’ve got to make the night fall

and the moon rise. You have to

keep the birds from flying north

in the wintertime. Sometimes

the seasons hesitate. I can’t do it.

I’ve got a fever. I’m losing weight.

My blood is clotting

in all the wrong places.

Doesn’t everyone know someone

who overslept and missed a flight

that crashed?

Patrick Meeds lives in Syracuse, NY and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center. He has been previously published in Stone Canoe literary journal, the New Ohio Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Atticus Review, Door is a Jar, Guernica, The Pinch, and Nine Mile Review among others. His first book, The Invisible Man’s Tailor, is available from Nine Mile Press.

Katabasis for Semele

You were once my earth—

blackberry jam, lilacs.

In late summer dusk

you called me for dinner.

I was your kitchen.

I became Mars, the planet of war,

at war with your Venus

and the men of Mars and Jupiter

who orbited you each night

downstairs, while Dad was away.

Years later, I returned, a wanderer

with only memories of home.

I don’t know how it happened—

my shell of anger broke.

Maybe because you again

made bacon and eggs,

burnt eggs,

but we danced at your bar,

Dante's Circle.

You were so small,

your head on my shoulder.

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

I was your baby.

You were my mom.

The whiskey bottles orbited.

The world spun around us.

Now you are Pluto—

as far as death,

the barrel of a gun in your mouth.

And sometimes you come at night,

a slowly falling star

with visions of the life you never had—

burnished by a beauty lost and buried,

but never quite extinguished.

George Burns's work has appeared in journals such as The 2 River View, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlanta Review, the anthology, The Writes of Spring by Tupelo Press, and Verse Daily. He won the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Prize and the Special Merit award from The Comstock Review. His first poetry collection, If a Fish, was published by Cathexis Northwest Press.