Stoneboat

Circus, My Circus
Sandra Kleven

I come to this circus from another country
and the words you use sometimes elude me.
We have another word for fire and no words at all
for fiction or fall.

I view this spectacle like a little dog, head a-tilt,
a-tuned to lively ditties from an old calliope.
I have seen it all by now – a carnival of fat little kings with ladders,  
really not so different from the one I left behind.

Bareback riders flash the whip to urge the paper chase.
Ours at home split horse hairs and when they drink it rains.
Your freaks and your sideshow?   Not bad. 
Conjoined creatures, shape shifters.  Some human.

A be-whiskered ancient from a cave on the coast,
deformities in pickle jars, always a draw.
And your clowns?  The clowns? 
They are just like the ones I know. 

I come to this circus late with a full grown wire walker
in my belly; a double ganger, irksome twin pinned
to ambition and fame -- his eyes on the high wire
that spans the center ring. 

Your ringmaster smells like cutter’s brine.  The barker raves in rhyme.
Your Tiny Tim chews lemon rinds.  Our costumes droop like rags.
The climate makes us drowsy, and the pay is one late dime. 
But we’re joining up.  This circus is the only show in town.   

Countdown
Sam Bell 

Ten Possible First Lines to My Memoir:

1. I woke up alone; this was new. 

2. I miss my father. Well, I miss the image of my father when I was three, sitting on a giant turtle sculpture in the park, sun on our faces. 

3. He left me on the airplane's exit stairs after he threw his cigarette butt toward the engine. 

4. I was wading in the Erie Canal and a thunderstorm was coming on. 

5. The kitten was living underneath our canoe, so I took her in. 

6. At my thinnest, I was having a hard time breathing lying down. 

7. He left on a bright Friday morning; I watched him drive away, and I knew nothing would be the same again. 

8. In ballet, I soared across the floor and left my belongings, myself, underneath me. 

9. I didn't have a single shred of doubt in college; boy, was I stupid. 

10. I pushed Michael J. Fox once.  

Continue reading here.   
"Countdown" is an online exclusive -- this essay does not appear in the print edition.  

B.P. Drill Operator X
Peter Kahn 

Did he call his wife when he got ashore? 
Did she nod her head as tears spilled steady
and slow?  Did she choke back, “Were you drunk,”
“It’s not your fault,” or just cut the call off midstream?

Will he drink hot tar?  Blast hot lead through the top rim
of his open mouth?  Will he tie a rock to his waist, leap from
a bridge and bob for air like a Salem witch?  Can his spell be un-cast,
thrown back in the water to swim another day?  Will he leave a note, or will

ink be afraid to spill
from his pen?

"B.P. Drill Operator X" is an online exclusive -- this poem does not appear in the print edition.   

Sunflower
Karen Fischer 

Masters of Deception
Askold Skalsky

Perception is the deepest mystery,
sham’s sensuous anti-child,
a fruit-ripe baby-face atop
a colloped body sopped with
enigmatic figments and fleshly
circuitries of brain-washed
blood, confusion prearranged,
then organized like ladder-
climbing bishops on their
confetti checkerboards,
assaulting the ivory-towered
faculties with catapults of
light, dollops of consciousness
blazing the sensory battlements, 
the diddling eyeball on its
perspectival stalk and its
henchman patriot pulse
with pitchfork fingers and
pink razor palms, a primal
lie bred by a botched lobe,
an old bitch gone in the grooves
and graved like a grim tooth
in systemic whimmery,
stretching its anamorphic eye
into hollow bones across
reflective surfaces that ooze
their images, the bearded
optics of half-light, Vertumnus
with his peach-punk cheeks, 
momentarily arrayed like
a trussed up haystack with
a clavicle of winter squash.   

"Masters of Deception" is an online exclusive -- this poem does not appear in the print edition.    

The Current
Doug Swift

I began to wade into the waves.  They knocked me back toward shore.  I stopped, held my ground until the wave passed.  I took a few more steps into the ocean.

"Remember not to swim that way!" yelled Mrs. Bowen.

"Watch out for the current!" yelled my mother.

Earlier they had impressed upon me that people who got caught in the current died.  I scanned the seascape.  I scoured the roughened surface for any differentiation, anything that said Danger!  Current!  Stay Away!  I saw nothing.

"Last year," said Mrs. Bowen, a church lady who "knew things," and, no doubt, had been reading my mind, "two boys got caught in it.  Got caught and couldn't get out.  They were never found."

This whole vacation had been strange for me.  Usually we went to Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire.  The water was fresh, clean, and well-behaved.  But this year Mrs. Bowen had talked my mom into joining her at this cabin on the south shore of Long Island.  My father chose not to come.  I found the salty air sickly, and the bullying waves intimidating.  The "current" was terrifying, and I didn't go more than ten feet from the shore.  I stood there for a while, swam a little, then stood, and felt an awful stinging on one knee.  I cried out, and that's when I was told about jellyfish.

That night, after my mother rubbed cream on my red-stinging knee, I asked, "What is a current?"

"I'll tell you, Rick," said Mrs. Bowen, in her bright, assured voice.  "Come here."

I went over to the table, where she had taken out a pencil and paper.

"It's like this."  She said something about a "channel" and "flow" and drew a kind of  spirally thing, like an auger-shaped sea shell.

"See?" she said.

I really didn't.  Why would we be so afraid of a seashell?  I nodded anyway, then went back over to the sitting area with the others.  After a while, I asked again, "Does anybody know what a current is?"  I thought Mrs. Bowen was in the kitchen, but she was still at the table, writing quietly in her pad.

"I just told you," she said.  My mother kept staring at her book, and my brother kept reading his football magazine, so I didn't ask again.

The next day I set up my army men on the beach.  I molded the sand into a battlefield―machine gun nests, sniper caves, plains behind the hill crests for cavalry to assemble.  Scallop shells stood for boulders, which scouts hugged tightly.  Engineers carved roads through virgin terrain.  Tanks rumbled upon the new roads, which were strafed by
bazookas.  The surf was firm this morning―the rise and fall of nearby battles.  I aimed my machine gunners: p-b-p-b-p-b-p-b-p-b-p-b-p-b.  Tanks tried to roll up the flank: b-rrrr-mmm.  P-B-B.

Just as the offensive forces fell into position for the final push, a frothing wave broke over the battlefield.  It knocked everyone from their positions, tumbled machines, collapsed caves.

"Uh, oh," said Mrs. Bowen.  She and my mom were seated in beach chairs a little behind me.  They stood up.

The next wave was devastating.  Masses of men were swept away.  I rose upon my knees and let out a shriek of horror.

"Uuugh,"  my mother said.  "Come on Ricky."

"But...... "  I grabbed a tank and searched for more as a third wave hit me solid in the hip. My mother grabbed my arm with one hand, and her chair with the other.  Mrs. Bowen was already retreating with books, lotion and her chair.  When we got to higher ground I stood and watched the unstoppable approach of the water as my mother said, "It's high tide."  I tried to grasp the loss.  Two armies.  Gone.  A battleground, leveled.  The women were saying something about the moon, but that was as crazy as a sea shell killing boys.  I fell to my knees.

Mrs. Bowen said, "The good lord giveth, and the good lord taketh away."  She said more words, comforting words, but I didn't hear them.  Then she unfolded her chair and sat back down.  My mother did the same.

"We're going into town tomorrow, Rickie," my mother said.  "We'll look for more army men then."

I stared at the surging waves as they came closer, and closer, and then halted their surge at the top of the beech slope.  And yet wave after frothy wave still crashed in as if it were hungry for something.  And I knelt there, clutching my tank.

Beneath Breath
Kyane Howland
 
Breathe over your hands
and imagine

the page to be a 
bank of snow

holding
footstep,

echos of
crow caw,

and empty road.
Become the child 

standing and 
squinting at sky.

Approach
with hope,

offer a sweatertorn hello,
and follow

to where bears
wake in caves

there
you will be devoured by love

your entrails
steaming the next sentence. 

"Beneath Breath" is an online exclusive -- this poem does not appear in the print edition.  

Inside One of Two Ropes In A Sailor’s Knot
Leanne Chabalko

Are you thinking of the way we touch
in eight distinct places? Crossing over
and under and over again, my throat seizing
when tightened. We hold hands. We hold frightened
sails. We hold on until the men shout and pull.

We hold each other out of duty, not love.

Belayed. Encumbered. Secure.

Once I thundered face first
into cold-born rain, latched to a dirty cable
on the Santa Maria gunwale.
Do you remember my writhing,
Captain Columbus? Did you see my careful pose
on the cover of Lescallier’s nautical history book?
Though my great-grandparents sat as one,
cross-legged and proud, on the breast plate
of Hereward the Exile, these days

bored sailors slide me lonely

through belt loops and across sweetheart’s necklines
more times than I care to count.

I dream sometimes
of my coiled cousins raveling, unraveling,
raveling in stubborn molecular twists.
I dream of the scientist ordering me
to try again and I tense every thread,
laughing boundlessly, as I replicate, divide,
replicate again, flooding each cell with my beautiful
helixes. Then I awake, stuck flat on my back.
I pray for an un-hitching, a de-snag,
an anti-splice. Am I destined to lie here entwined
with you only? Both of us unable to breathe,
waiting for the marlinspike’s final pointed swing.