TURTLE ISLAND QUARTERLY 10
Winter-Spring/2016
Chapter Two:
2 poems by Carter McKenzie, prose poem by Jeff Bernstein,
poem by Ashley Mares, poem by Gary Lark
2 poems by Carter McKenzie
Volatilization in Cedar Valley
Chemicals of war
drift over this green
nook of farms and schools,
2, 4-D, chloride, among
others, imprecise
blends in their vats
hovering overhead,
the grease and fumes
exacting profit
from a simple register
protected by law
in the name of marketable trees—
but no one can make the deer
value the fruit,
fallen
untouched,
what seeps in
to the gut of a dog
roused from his kennel
or a boy running to look
for TV adventure,
the bright stream passing
beneath dying branches, soaking
soil and root, ready for rising
in the indefinite
weather-shifts,
the bright stream
singing as never before,
carrying everything.
November
Pregnant and dark
black bear
in the cold
predawn
orchard
slow moving
through rain,
beneath the backs
of mountains
smelling
and eating
invisible pears
fallen
to the ground—
right instinct
filling itself
in time
shadow upon shadow
without an individual name,
hiding places—
she, these
in the distance
clear my mind
when I cannot
sleep.
Born in Colorado, Carter McKenzie earned her masters degree in English Literature from the University of Virginia. A founding member of the Northwest poetry collective Airlie Press, she is the author of the chapbook Naming Departure and a full-length book of poetry Out of Refusal. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including What the River Brings: Oregon River Poems, Canary, The Berkeley Poets Cooperative: A History of the Times, and the collection of poetry Of Course, I’m a Feminist! Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For over ten years, she has taught creative writing workshops for after-school programs, residencies, and summer literature camp sessions through Young Writers Association, Writers in Lane County Schools, and most recently Wordcrafters in Eugene. She currently offers poetry sessions for adults as well as children in Eugene and surrounding rural areas, and serves as co-coordinator of the Springfield Library Poetry Series, as well as on the boards of environmental and racial justice groups. She lives in the Cascade Foothills near Lost Creek.
Prose poem by Jeff Bernstein
The Temporary Bus Stop
Last winter seared an image into your brain: two neighborhood kids (who waited each day across from my driveway for the bus) peering out a tiny window their dads had dug in the tower of snow at the corner where two streets intersected, only their eyes visible, deep weather garb in the dark of a midwinter morning, snow falling for the I have lost track of how many times that record-breaking season.
Never in our thirty years did our little street host a school bus stop, unless you count those tired Bluebird buses that ferried kids to summer camp in a bygone era. Not yellow, not school. But all that changed when our neighborhood school was demolished and kids were shifted to a makeshift substitute across town during construction of a replacement. Seems some bus route planner at City Hall stuck a digital pin on the map and this is what happened.
I wondered what kind of bond those two kids would have by spring. After all, those ten subzero minutes in the morning were straight out of some disaster movie where the world has changed forever and they are the only ones left. Though the oldest students in their elementary school they looked so, so small with the walls of white looming over them. Back when my son was in fifth grade he had a girlfriend, I thought he was on the cusp of adulthood and had grown so big. What would he have looked like standing next to that wall at eleven?
My dogs ceased to bark at them on our slogs through the previous night’s storm, deciding the waiters were simply as much a permanent part of the landscape as the street sign for Wilde Road, by then barely visible, a green and white buoy bobbing above the white drifts.
A few weeks after the new school year began when you discovered that the pick-up place had been slated directly across from where you parked the car, your daughter was still living in Chicago. You told her on the last hour of the two day drive back east rolling through those ancient Pennsylvania mountains, leafy and luminous in the morning sunlight at the end of true summer, that there was a surprise waiting next morning out her window if she got up early enough. You didn’t want to set up false expectations, after all it was just a quiet destination for two students, a blue egg or two in the nest you thought was empty. Did you know that it is against the law to move Eastern songbird eggs from their nest?
A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). Recent poems appeared in Best Indie Lit New England, The Centrifugal Eye, The Midwest Quarterly, Muddy River Poetry Review, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon, Reckless Writing Poetry Anthology, Rockhurst Review, Silkworm and Third Wednesday. His second chapbook, Nowhere Near Morning, was published in 2013 by Liquid Light Press. His manuscript “Nightfall, Full of Light” was a Finalist in the 2015 Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award for a full-length collection of poetry.
poem by Ashley Mares
Don't Touch Hot Things
In darkness,
the blackbirds that rest
atop my clavicles.
lead me to corners of
the night I hope to forget by
the time the sunlight fills
the crevices of my bones
that were picked
clean by sharp beaks.
When the night flies away
upon their wings,
I wake up
to the air dripping
moisture into my bones
and spilling over into
the dirt. In sleep
the birds' song is soft as they
ask me to follow them
deep into the woods.
They whisper that
sometimes it's better to let a fire
die than put on more wood.
They say playing with
light is dangerous.
The smoke from the burnt
out flames fill
me just as well.
I flirt with their words
at dusk
and light a candle in the grass
to watch the wax
melt into a puddle –
the wick slowly bending down
like it's waiting to swirl its finger
in the hot wax just to test if
what other people said about it was true.
.
Ashley Mares has a bachelor's in English Writing from Azusa Pacific University. She is in the process of completing her J.D in Monterey, CA, where she lives with her Husband. Her poetry has appeared in a few local publications. She uses poetry to get through the stress of law school. Her poems have appeared in The Cedar Street Times, The Monterey Herald, and The West Wind. Ashley has received a Carl Cherry Center for the Arts award in 2011.
poem by Gary Lark
Young Buck
The young buck is back this year,
alone. The doe, his mother,
the one with a game hind leg,
is absent. I imagine the skin
pulling free of her ribcage
where she lay among the oak and thistle
across Meyer Road and him visiting her
less and less as summer turns.
His horns are forked this year
and he leaps the fence with ease
Gary Lark’s work includes: “Without a Map,” Wellstone Press, 2013, “Getting By,” winner of the Holland Prize from Logan House Press, 2009 and three chapbooks. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hubbub, Poet Lore, and The Sun. Three poems were featured on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His “In the House of Memory” is forthcoming for BatCat Press