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FIELD #85

(Fall 2011)
 
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Contents
Muriel Rukeyser: A Symposium

Linda Gregerson
Out of Childhood
A. Van Jordan
The Establishing Shot of Gauley Bridge and Matewan
Mary Leader
A Show of Trust from "Mearl Blankenship"
Anne Marie Macari
Feeding and Fed
Gerald Stern
Roach
Kate Daniels
"O for God's Sake": Muriel Rukeyser's Practical Idealism

*****

Betsy Sholl

Rumplestiltskin

Laura Kasischke
St. John Sits on a Rock to Recover from the Bitterness of the Book
Present Perfect
The Angels Given Trumpets
Alexandra Teague
The Barbed Wire Bible
Survivor's Guilt
Greg Wrenn
Sanctuary
Georg Trakl
translated by Stephen Tapscott
Evening Song
De Profundis
December (first version)
Elisabeth Murawski
The Burden
Karin Gottshall
Religuary (II)
Reliquary (IV)
Chana Bloch
Cleopatra's Nose
The Little Ice Age
Sarah Barber
Milkweed
Why I Am Crying into My Gin-and-Tonic
Jeffrey McDaniel
Queen of the Shortcuts
Venus Khoury-Ghata
translated by Marilyn Hacker
"Darkness erased her pillow"
"They loved us in the grooves of the floorboards"
"When night became talkative"
Leslie Harrison

[December]

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
Length
In Mid-Autumn
Kelly Luce
North Rim Love Song
Elton Glaser
Where the Mississippi Begins
Bottoming Out
Pierre Peuchmaurd
translated by E. C. Belli
and Sasha Fletcher
September Alone
Sarah Maclay
44
Sandra McPherson
Annotations on Poet B.
Philip Metres
Interlude: Vodka Proverbs
Catacombs of the Eye
Catherine Pierce
Fire Blight
The Universe Is a Madam
Without Ceremony
Christopher Howell
Second Message
Cynthia Cruz
Sister Midnight
Todesarten
Gro Dahle
translated by Rebecca Wadlinger
from A Hundred Thousand Hours
Michael Chitwood
The Song
Gretchen Primack
Doris Out of Love
Nicholas Gulig
Swimming (Afterlife)
Rachel Contreni Flynn
Desk on Fire
The Quickening
Thorpe Moeckel
Crowded Barnyard, Pretty Spring Day, One Little Goat
Brendan Constantine
  A Thousand Chandeliers O.B.O.
The Favor of Your Company
Rainer Brambach
translated by Stuart Friebert
  Poetry
March in Basel
Ralph Burns
  Junior High Football, Wingback
Angela Ball   Status
Billet Doux
Anna Journey   Confessions of a Firestarter
 
SURVIVOR'S GUILT

Daisies border the lawn
like poor embroidery. You do not want them
to be beautiful. Thick-hearted,

on their wayward stems. No one can explain
why you deserve this. Not the doctor. Not
the clock. Not God

in his stained-glass field. The flood recedes.
The fire swerves around your house, your bed, your
face. Hard roses on the breakfast china.

Everyone at their time, they tell you.
The nurse crying in the nursery. The crib
carried down, the buckling

floor. You watch light through the ivy--
day making its same mistakes; spring rain
straying into summer. You breathe as the last

coughs rake blood from his lungs. No one
can change this. The bodies are buried;
music seeps from shutters--hurricane plywood;

cracked glass; the station where the train will leave
in a wake of dumb bright songs. No one can take back
what you prayed. You wanted to live.

You wanted to be safe.

--Alexandra Teague

Copyright © 2011 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 

WHY I AM CRYING INTO MY GIN-AND-TONIC

Not the burst blossoms of the pear,
not the chartreuse stems it shed,
their fine eyelashed cups peaked
and emptied of petals, but finding
a few at midnight in my hair.
It is past time for going inside:
the people in this novel are so sad--
as if it weren't enough they are
young and lovely, as if the rain
had been more than routinely
violent, as if grief could not be cut
with golden, as if it might be a pity
to be a man at forty on a porch,
crickets legging it to the heart's
old etcetera, honeysuckle so wetly
sweet with rain that fireflies
rising from it, absinthe-winged,
totter onto the mineral air
and even the stars are getting lit.

--Sarah Barber

Copyright © 2011 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.



CATACOMBS OF THE EYE

On the ocean floor, find it. In the corner
store near the frozen dumplings, press it

into service. Soak the local: anarchy of milk
on a May Day tablecloth, the curtainless

shower swamp, the hand-twisted shirts
dripping from every curtain rod, an empty

rental flat. Outside, imbroglio of iron
flowers on canal fences above time

-sledged sidewalks. The rising canals
spill past stiletto-flexed calves

of street walkers, their moving picture
-esques. Sitting at attention, the veteran

of amputations, his glacial blue gaze,
his military cap in his lap like a sponge for change.

The glue-sniffing urchins slouched
on the crumbled window ledge

of the Currency Exchange, their faces
all edges. Their gray frames ashiver,

memorized, seized birds. The water
rises. Glut of the mouth, the unslaked eyes.

--Philip Metres

Copyright © 2011 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 


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