Christine Barkley

Reception

October isn’t autumn

anymore. Smoke signals

and summer passes

on its laze, its long wait for fire

-break. We receive the weather, or else

it acts on us. Trust whichever lets

rest less uneasy. Dried leaves left

unread in their cups with no

forecast for finales no hazarded

guess at the end. Time

for divining in ash and in ember,

unasked gifts giving again.

Grassland kicking up kindling.

The breeze unbreathable here.

The noises we were

hearing we still are, the growing

roar warning retreat

or relent. Pass it on.

The cry, the clang,

the alarm singing along

our thinning skins.

Hard to see through

the threat of it, past the terracotta

of the rooftops to the same

of the sky. Hard to catch wind

of a way out. Hard to hold

to hope or stay the hand bent

on breaking windows when

the fire has our backs. Pass

the last exit. Pass the matches.

What is coming for us

already is.

Woman Running Night

I sense the roads I don’t

want to know, the turns

that end dead, the dead.

The way I go, harm.

I don’t speak of the fear

for fear. For what follows

the rush, the flush, the height

of life or light shining teeth

-bright through black.

Then dark choking back

across streets, airless

squeeze of what I believe.

What I don’t know

I want. Bad weathers battering

the gutter, rifling from a long

shot, straight to the throat.

If I had a weapon it would be handled

gold, bladed opal, useless.

If I had any sense. If I did. There is no

defending this. Even at the trachea, 

the crossroad, the carotid. The crosswinds

confusing adrenaline for incentive. I speak

of it here for fear, for love

of it. The path branches, shoulders

what I couldn’t know, didn’t want.

What follows me careening at speed

I now sometimes hope will catch.

I have come to desire what I can’t

avoid. What is the use.

Where I go from this, what I know

better, how I wish. A bruise, an evidence.

I have come to quiet down. Wound

that I am opening

that I am, ask me.

No. Tell me

what is the harm.

Prussian Blue

For two decades I had lost

skirts and shoes to

jealousy, and so had you.

So we were. Savage

and covetous and joined

at our hips, by the shape

and shade of our eyes, or the cut

of our tongues. How we lied

of love. How we took each other

at the word. How many

of my missings

fell in fact to theft, 

the sorority of

gifts? To this day I swell

and break seasick

below memories or forgeries,

surfacing in your shirt stolen and

splashed with The Great Wave

off Kanagawa. Since we last

spoke I’ve learned the new

hue of that famous ocean

was called a revolution;

unexpected and enduring,

born by an accident

of blood. Concentrated just right,

that color could cure almost

any poisoning. Yet in spite

what was wrong with us

went fatal. A familiar,

enduring accident; a slip

of cyanide, a rip tide.

How I surface blue

-lipped searching for the last

wreckage floating, the antidote

to the fallout. Any thing

we might still share.

Fallows and Fault Lines (II)

When I think of gemstones

I smell the meat of metal in my pulse.

When I say I can’t speak straight I mean

that there is no bronze in the blood.

I collect minerals carved in the shapes

of eggs and I don’t know why -

the collecting or the carving, the nature of it all.

I mark the seasons now by the warnings

for floods or fire. I mark the dangers now by the

bodies laid out for collecting or carving,

the kindred copper of veins. I hope that they held

even half this fury. I hope that they held

at least more than this fear. When I say

an egg is an egg I mean that it is not

a newborn at all. When I say

I lay my body - when I say my body -

I mean that it is my body.

I held a hand over my nested ribs and cried out.

I held a hand over my belly and hoped.

This is the first time I have spoken of this;

this is the last time I will speak of this.

It was nothing more than pulling

a splinter of silica from the opal of an open

wound. What I held was only cold

earth and metal rust, unshed. What I carry

still is a flutter whenever I fail

to bleed - nightmares of snares, flattened

fields; a shard of mica catching the last

of the sunshine, or the first sight of fire.

When say I pray for fertility I mean

for anyone but me. I mean it.

I haven’t seen a fledgling since I was pregnant.

I haven’t hoped for anything so hard since then.

I didn’t tell anyone until I told everyone.

Now I hold and carry and say

only what I will bring to meaning.

When I say the way I word this biology

lays my whole life on a wide open vein

I mean that the softest pearl speaks

to an intrusion, but also a strength.

Skeleton Key

I left our other home before

the beginning.

We wallpapered over that life

in final artifice, in foreclosure.

I kept the key knowing

the locks would never be

the same. Now

that memory opens

nothing. Now in dreams

doors only closing.

Now I must stop calling

nightmares dreams.

Now they worry for what I will leave

behind, if I leave;

across the sea lives everyone

who does not know me.

At the end I sat peeling layers

from the stairway

for days, never found

the everlasting beneath.

What will I leave behind,

when I leave?

Across the sea will stay everyone

who could not open me.

I’ll stop calling.

I’ll keep the key.

---

Christine Barkley is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her poems and personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Manhattan Review, Grain, The Journal, Rust and Moth, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, The Indianapolis Review, and the Pinch, among others. She is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and The Maine Review.

toc

next

Kevin Sweeney

The Temperature In Aroostook County

Melancholy arrives with clouds and news the ocean

is 57 degrees at the Large Navigational Buoy this first

week of July, but joy follows when NPR notes the air

in Van Buren is 67 while Wells is only 59.  Van Buren

is sunny too, maybe a reward for being progressive;

unlike Caribou and Presque Isle, the enlightened

electorate of Van Buren emulated neighbors in

Madawaska and St. Francis, voting for Hillary, an

anomaly not only in The County but around our rural

state where Donald won Fort Kent by 11 votes and

Glenwood Plantation 2 to 0.  But light shines in Van

Buren where old Peaks Island friend Peter, back

from Vietnam, began his teaching career on the St.

John’s River, a school whose children spoke French

at recess.  Thank you, God and the usually random

skies of Maine for news of brightness and warmth 

on the eve of my 69th birthday in South Portland,

nearing the end of a life lived in improvisation

while others ably followed a crafted script, finishing

in paid-off houses with copious garages, extra

bedrooms, bountiful children close to home who

haven’t succumbed to amorphous bad luck. Hearing

the forecast on a day going the wrong way brings me

back onstage to a story constantly revised by teleological

playwrights. I’m driving my 17 year old car amid the

bearable lightness of being, certain the tank is full, 

weather promising.  For once, this poor player

neither struts nor frets.  Indeed, I know all my lines.

Uncle Vanya In Mad Town

I could’ve been better at discussing Chekhov’s play though

I told students about a production in Cambridge, actors

on stage twenty-five minutes before curtain, passed out

from another Russian drinking night like those on old

Peaks Island.  I might’ve said Chekhov was writing about

Maine, where long winter appropriates April and people

drink too much too early then wake to hard mornings.

The idea, one student said, is get out of Russia, but Vanya

was tethered, like Sonya, to the estate, could only long for

Yelena, the youthful beauty married to an old academic who

owned the place.  My class was too young to understand a

Russian mid-life crisis that made this short, chubby man try

to shoot the selfish elder. They thought Vanya should take

a yoga class because I failed to tell them about Route 11.

Not the road near New Hampshire where he’d stock up

on cheaper vodka nor the middle near Millinocket, close to

summer concerts at Darling’s Waterfront Pavilion in Bangor.

It’s south of Fort Kent, the stretch from Portage to Patten,

dubious cell service and tedious trees. It wouldn’t be easy

to live in Fort Kent, I should have said, though locals from

The County might disagree, pointing out contemplative

river views, poutine at the Swamp Buck Restaurant, a small

university campus where, if Vanya truly thought he could

have been Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky, he’d take classes.

No need for Bangor if he experienced ennui. Only 20 miles

to racy Madawaska and Parisian-like beauties in bars redolent

of joie de Vivre rather than the anguish of Russian souls.

I see him driving along the St. John’s River, listening to radio

songs in French, crossing the bridge to Edmundston, heading

to Quebec where women take off their clothes on nights of

single digit cold then back to Mad Town where the VFW’s

onion soup has drawn veterans from far away as Van Buren.

But it’s too late. Maybe next semester I’ll place Vanya in

Presque Isle, eating Chinese alone from the Food Court’s

only restaurant in Aroostook Centre Mall.  Maybe I’ll talk

more about Sonya and gloomy Dr. Astrov, but it’s windy,

10 degrees, and snow, says Channel 6, will be here soon.

---

Kevin Sweeney’s latest book is "Imminent Tribulations" from Moon Pie Press. He has taught at Southern Maine Community College since 1983 and is an assistant poetry editor at the Café Review for which he has done interviews with poets Carl Dennis, Kim Addonizio, Martin Esapda, Gerald Locklin, William Carpenter, and Margaret Randall.

toc

next

Max Cavitch

Canvas 1

Canvas 2

Canvas 4

Canvas 6

Canvas 7

---

Max Cavitch is a photographer, writer, and teacher living in Philadelphia. His photographs have appeared in publications including Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, F-Stop Magazine, The Journal of Wild Culture, phoebe, and Politics/Letters, and exhibited most recently at the Blank Wall Gallery (Athens), the Chania International Photo Festival (Crete), Art Room Gallery, and the Biennale di Senigallia, Senigallia (Italy). Since 2019, he has been a contributing photographer for the public-science project, iNaturalist.

toc

next