Summer 2016 Season

Work from the Summer 2016 Season of concīs.

Summer 2016 Season anthology!

The Summer 2016 Season anthology is out, featuring: Alexis Rhone Fancher, Alisa Golden, Barbara March, Becca Borawski Jenkins, Brad Rose, Caitlin Scarano, Carol Ciavonne, Carol Dorf, Catherine Moore, Deborah Guzzi, E. Kristin Anderson, Emily Withnall, Gail Goepfert, Howie Good, Ingrid Jendrjewski, James Reidel, Jeff Streeby, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, Jennifer Martelli, Jessie Janeshek, Karen Windus, Kathleen Nalley, Kathryn Kopple, Kelsey Dean, Laurie Kolp, Leonard Gontarek, Mark Dennis Anderson, Mark Young, Martin Willitts, Jr., Mary Cresswell, Matt Dennison, Meg Eden, Michael Cooper, Michele Leavitt, Nate Maxson, Shinjini Bhattacharjee, Tanja Bartel, Tom Montag, Zackary Medlin, Christopher Miles and cover art by Brant Schalk!

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J. Vernel Equinox

Mark Young

Returning to the Moon is the key to humanity’s long-term future in space. It is a vertical project, akin to climbing a ladder. Each step has its own name, its own symbol. The symbols are not visual representations of the naming words. Nor are the names descriptive of the activity of the step. There are no milestones, only spaces between the steps. Memory retains them thus, & can produce them to the mind whenever it has occasion to consider them. The first step is called “A control toolbox automatically loading for no reason.” The sea is its avatar.

Suspicious looking Tupperware

Mark Young

Chooses her words care-
fully. Scientific before

descending to the biblical.
Thus hermetic instead

of hermeneutic. Ho-
mophonic prefered to

homophobic. The revo-
lutions of evolution

in place of revelations,
divine or otherwise.

Castor Mound

Jeff Streeby

St. Hubert’s Day
and through frost smoke rising from the creek
a waxing moon

Sunset. Light leaching from a freezing sky. A clear night falling. East, the cold glitter of evening stars, but west beyond the lake, twilight burning out in colors of honey, wood violets and blue vervain.

Right about now that 80 lb. super blanket I spotted last week will be working the castor set just upstream from the den. The chin stick will make him drop a front foot squarely between the jaws of a #4. Tomorrow morning, as sure as I’m standing here, he’ll be at the bottom of the drowning rod. If he’s as big as I think he is, he’ll go at least 70 inches. As long as he isn’t all scarred up, he’ll maybe rate “Select”.

Venus. The Milky Way. The order of things.

The Beaver Moon
At perigee,
biggest and brightest of a lifetime

Skull Percent Off

Jessie Janeshek

How to rationalize, face-down, eye makeup and packing
 raw meat and eiderdown   slideback, the traintrack.

This was the dogeared philosophy   pushing contaminate
 inside where falseness began.

This was the witch wind   the finger-kinged zodiac dip.
 Many slid down the slide
 of the abandoned pavilion
 slipped off her negligee that way.

 Prince Gallitzin pedaled the organ
 let his hair out the diamond-shaped window.

 

You had the talent  bluesy, unlucky
the runs in your stocking
economic decline.

Papers soaked up pubic ink
closet calculations
the heavy girl gaze.

 

Let the clouds serve
 what sawdust does best  wide-eyed and pray.

Bend your head dead  above mutant truths
 a four-legged nativity.

Go ahead and indulge  in popping glass violets
 self-deprecation

as cutting your teeth
won’t fix what’s left of decay.

Posing

Emily Withnall

Mount Cavalry Cemetery was just off Hot Springs Boulevard and it was our go-to spot in eighth grade. We felt cool there, in the dark, wearing our ripped up jeans and flannel shirts. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t died two years prior he might have been proud of our middle-of-nowhere New Mexico grunge crew. I’d dyed my hair eggplant that year and my favorite jeans had patches all over them. My favorite patch was sewn on the back pocket: bright red voluptuous lips with the words “kiss my patch” scrawled across them in white letters. It was as far as I could go. My friend Lynette’s hair was dyed an inky black and she wore it draped around her pale face. Excluding the forest green and black checked flannel tied around her waist every day, her clothes were all black. Her eyes were lined with thick black eyeliner, her eyelashes were heavy with mascara and she wore black lipstick, too. David and Patrick, the tall and hollow-cheeked twins, had “slayer” scratched into their skateboards. Lynette and Angelica took it a step further, carving “slayer” into their wrists and the insides of their soft biceps with dull pocket knives during algebra class. “It makes the pain go away,” they’d explain, referring to a mysterious emotional trauma that I was not privileged to understand.

American Sentences, New Zealand Lens

Mary Cresswell

Sheep surround the airplane door—howdoyoulikeus?
 howdoyoulikeus?
The urban myth: Ladies a plate, they said, and she
 actually brought one.
I spent three hours in Los Angeles. I know all about
 your country.
Howlonghaveyoubeenherehowdoyoulikeithowlonghave
 youbeenhow?
We make our own rules. That’s why we need so much
 Number 8 fencing wire.
Clean, green and a good place to raise children. Don’t
 say what you really think.
What do you mean “insular”? If you don’t like us, you
 can always leave.
Now that you’re old and we’ve sucked you dry, when
 are you going to go back home?
No more Miss Liberty, no more Golden Gate—
 only the Southern Cross.

Torn Light

Leonard Gontarek

If the world smells like rain in the morning
and it does not rain.
Nothing latches on to almost everything.

In the morning, the birds settle like soft taps
of erasers on blackboards.
The chalk breaks and skreaks.

Alcoholic

Kathleen Nalley

It was 1975. There was a jail cell and a death sentence, a liver barely functioning. There was a coffee filter and a metal tub of shoe polish. There was nothing but time and silence. Her father’s father played chemist, separating the alcohol molecules from the rest of the chemical goo. There was extraction, taste, and, finally, release. He descended from the Goths. They spoiled the land with their presence, their grease, their ilk. They were an underground fracture, a mineral seepage, kudzu and weeds, invasive. Their offspring, poison. Their semen, toxin in the water.

Osage orange

Martin Willitts, Jr.

Maclura pomifera, a tree species native to the southern Mississippi valley

one Osage bow was worth
a horse & blanket in trade

it has convoluted grapefruit-sized fruit
on the female trees

formidable thorns on young shoots
yellow-colored bark

its lush foliage
was sheared effectively into impenetrable hedges

the invention of barbed wire
soon made Osage orange hedges less desirable

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