Poet's Ink Review

July 2009

If you are interested in submitting your work, check out our submission guidelines.

Her Porch in Waxia, Louisiana

My grandma lived in a small town down South. Her sharp tongue
was a tool that carved out the day’s orders for anyone unfortunate
enough to be within earshot. We hid beneath the risers,
and saw her knotted stockings pinch her thighs just above the knee.
They looked like beige flowers in the shade of her hem.

She always wore a dress; clean up to her neck. On hot summer days,
we’d watch her swelter like the asphalt on the road in front of her house.
She’d sit on the porch swing and sang hymns while fanning herself;
the lemonade’s ice melting in the glass. We’d hear her curse the heat,
and then ask God for forgiveness for cursing. We’d snicker beneath
the floor boards, and carefully covered our mouths with dirty little hands.

We pitched rotten apples at the neighbors’ drawers that swung from
the clothesline, and then hid under the porch as Grandma searched for us
with a supple, green branch. She prayed every Sunday that we’d find the Lord.
We never did.

In the evenings, she laid her stockings on a rod over the stationary tub;
the tops wrinkled and flaccid from being twisted. She’d sit barelegged:
watching the Milky Way spread into the expanse. She’d share stories of the slave trade,
and how the North Star led our people to freedom. We’d sit quietly, slapping mosquitoes
which lit on our sticky arms. She couldn’t see us yawn in the darkness.

I remember when we left: her sitting on the porch swing; knotted stockings
and all. She lived in a small town: of which I can’t recall the spelling.

Korliss Sewer

Korliss is a married mother of two. Beneath The Pages is her first collection of poetry, with another soon to be published. Selected poems have appeared in The Sheltered Poet, The Orange Room Review, Poets Haven, and BlazeVOX. She is an English Literature graduate from the University of Washington. Her website can be found at www.elusivedragonfly.com.

Summer Rolls Softly

Summer rolls softly in
and dawns a new day.
Strawberries and sweet corn grow
where just before lay straw and coarse stalks.
Was it so recently we worked in the field together
and tasted the succulent fruit that stained our fingers
and left red marks on our legs where we swatted gnats.

Dragonflies glide and I hear laughter tinkling
on the gentle breeze.
Is it the chiming of tiny bells of
fairies riding on their gossamer wings
Or is it the memory of summer days gone by?
How many summers since your calloused hand held mine;
how many winters passed?

The sweetness of the red fruit lingers on my tongue,
My unsteady hand brushes away a tear,
And I see a smile on my reflection in the old pond
on this first day that Summer rolls softly in.

Sandi Kivkovich

Sandi lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she works as a medical secretary and is active in the Arts community there.


Snapdragons Crackle

Snapdragons crackle
in the air for Maura
and her flowing gait,
a swagger neither Nora
nor Maureen would ever
let a suitor savor.
Maura knows
that in her wake
men with scythes
and burlap sacks,
men with eyes afire,
jaws agape,
creep like gators.
Nora and Maureen
can smell these men.
They will wait.

Donal Mahoney

Donal, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal and other publications.


Rain on the Fourth of July

Rain on the Fourth of July
means cookouts under canvas
and parades and fireworks canceled
despite high-school bands prepared
with Stars and Stripes forever
and cousins groping each other
in dusty upstairs bedrooms
instead of behind the barn.

I lean from my study window
and admire the spangles of rain
blistering the lukewarm light.
The neighbor’s children scream like
uprooted vegetables. To ease
their grief he lights a long string
of firecrackers. I brace myself
against the noise, but it rouses
a scene with Jeff Miller’s cannon,
which primed with a cherry bomb
could fire a tin can a hundred feet
in the air. Jeff died of stroke
in his twenties. His cannon, hewn
from a block of solid steel,
probably still lies rusting
in the basement where he hid it.

The rain means business. Trees
raft on the gusts and the lawn
ripples as if machine-gun fire
tickled across it. I press
my face to the misty picture
as if examining great art.
The distance fails. Simple hydraulics
snuff the discord of birdsong.
No more parades. The snoring
of gutters and drains seem personal,
but I admit that in my case
these simple aggressions of weather
spark barely the slightest pain.

William Doreski

Paper Boats

Fond of sailboats, you designed
a cardboard template that folds
into a quarter-inch-scale yawl

complete with captain and crew.
The hull’s an ingenious example
of origami at its best.

Do you mind if I copy it
to create a tiny schooner
aboard which you and I will sail

into a pearly bluish heat-haze?
That’s the way August should end;
but we haven’t visited the sea

all summer, the light too ragged,
the storms too frequent, the ghosts
of our favorite poets too restless,

and the books we’ve read so heavy
they’ve anchored us into place.
But browsing in the library

I discovered the cut-out book
containing your cardboard yawl
and so I copied the pattern

and enlarged it to accommodate
paper models of our egos.
If I can actually construct

a convincing if tiny schooner
will you consent to sail with me
to the edge of the square flat earth?

It’s really your idea, you know,
although designed for hobbyists
with nothing much on their minds;

and being literal as I am
I can’t help but adapt your toy
to my lurid personal ends.

William Doreski

William’s poems have appeared recently in Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and several electronic journals. He teaches writing and literature at Keene State College in New Hampshire.


Lavender Flowers

Bee and butterfly
on the blossoms,
they grow to Provençal height
from hot white stone.

Smell of summer herbs,
recall the cool wine in the garden.

Michael Lewis-Beck

Smell of Tar

Tar smell hits my nose,
yellow truck hits my eye.

They dumped the pitch,
flattened the hole.

The smell faded as I kept walking.

Fall,
autumn leaves scattered,
my mind in summer,
popping hot black bubbles on
the road to the candy store long ago.

Michael Lewis-Beck

Michael is a professor of political science and gardener in Iowa City. He began writing poetry in his “whiskey shack,” a timber retreat. He has published in Albatross, Lyrical Iowa, Daily Palette and with Bun Fight Press. His poems aim to “capture moments.” Recently, he completed a novel, Deadly Walks on the Riviera, forthcoming at Catstep Press.