min words | max heart
Mark Dennis Anderson
Crossing the river into The Cheese Kingdom,
the wind tugs your steering, and I turn to face the crowd
of white caps applauding my half-a-lifetime achievement
award in the category of idolatrous indecisiveness.
I scratch the back of your head, baseline of my serenity.
If I were a theist, I’d say this is how God reveals himself,
refreshing my homepage of expectation. Coffee, the minor
American god of Mondays, delivers us from boredom.
Karen Windus
—Roswell, NM
In the tarpaulin of dream, you’re in and then out. Later, you’re waking late. The porcelain sky all shot up with grackles and it’s 11 am. The swamp cooler ticks in the window where the motel curtains stay pulled against the clatter cart of the maid. Outside, the land’s hide stretches hard under a washed out sky. You get the feeling the grass fires are just waiting. Somewhere, lightning hovers in an unknown thought, ready to strike. A few billboards up the road, after the huevos rancheros, you pull off at the UFO Museum. The road moves under the heat. An afternoon with aliens seems good at this point. You’ve just visited your uncle who lives nearby. He sleeps at night hunting dogs in his mind. Guns everywhere, one under his pillow and the bullets he makes himself. His land: a vacuum of prairie and antelope and two miles of barbed wire fence. You look at the hairless bodies in the glass cases and feel the eyes on you from the security guard. Maybe it’s the way you look. Or the bad check you wrote last night for the room. Still, there are these grasslands. They swell and wave and the dusky sky slices them right where they crest. When you leave, you see the maps of alien worlds and think of how someone plotted them. And then about your temporary home two hundred miles away and the one road that gets you back.
Karen Windus
A rustling way back there,
a slight sound.
Something
that moves around.
Trees. Shrug the wind
through, over the pale spill
of ice into a purloined
distance. Outside,
the crepuscular
cries of what remains.
Not starlings but maybe.
An incessant cackle.
Teeth. Against a darkness.
Milkweed casts out its seeds.
Snow drifts down. Wings
spiral around.
A glass slowly filling.
Fallen in stray shafts
over the fescue fields,
wintered light still
cleaves an afternoon.
The concīs 2016 Spring Season anthology is available for online reading and download. Featuring: Adrienne Christian, Bobbi Lurie, Charles Leggett, David Graham, David Spicer, Deborah Guzzi, Diana Smith Bolton, Dylan D. Debelis, Gary Wilkens, Ingrid Jendrjewski, Jaap Stijl, Jack Darrow, Jacqueline Winter Thomas, Jefferson Navicky, Jennifer Gravley, Joe Nicholas, Jonathan Travelstead, Judith Skillman, Kate Bernadette Benedict, Kierstin Bridger, Landon Godfrey, Lauren Page, Len Kuntz, Mark Young, Matthew Johnstone, Maya White-Lurie, Mercedes Lawry, Michelle Chen, Nyoka Eden, Peter Donahue, Peter Munro, Richard LeBlond, Roberta Feins, Steve Tomasko, Susan Kay Anderson, Tad Richards, Tatiana Ryckman, Tom Montag, Trace Ramsey, Wendy Carlisle, Zach Walchuk and cover art by Melanie Lewis.
Each of the 43 works this Season are powerful far beyond their compact proportions.
If the embedded issue below is (too) slow to load, use this direct link: https://concis.io/go/spring16-season.
Kierstin Bridger
You hang the candy cane on the lamp. Lick what melts. Now you’ve ruined the bulb, poisoned your room with burnt sugar smoke. You’ve blamed your brother for dumping all the easy-bake cake mix in cocoa heaps on the floor, for fingers squeezed between hinges on your wooden door, and for stolen cherry bombs under the bed. Three out of four fit a pattern. Years later you think of your dollhouse plates that went missing, don’t remember him smashing the Shaker dining table, or if the rugs were painted on the floor. You only recall having the house, the smell of splintered balsam and glue, that it was tornadoed somehow, blown-away.
Kate Bernadette Benedict
Disconsolate tyke, wriggly little urchin.
I let her pick her pinkening scabs.
When she pricked my cheek,
I tweezered out the keratin,
occasioning a bloody show.
Posparto already,
depleted, sorely lacking,
and here’s a laser
sighting me at the bodice.
Where have you gone,
my lumpen and impish scamp?
Mark me on my knees now,
forsaken and zeroed between empty shelves.
David Spicer
You play one last note on the quiet Wurlitzer,
yielding to the murmur of distant whales
near the beach, and I pray to Buddha
hummingbirds will revel in the sand.
The smell of cabbage drifts into the parlor.
I wipe the marble counter and shut
the oven door, flashing the calico and tuxedo
a honeyed smile. You and I flirt
during the drive to work, on our elevator ride.
Coil against each other like contented snakes.
While the clocks hide in the bottom
drawers, we prowl the office all day,
selling every stock in sight
after we kiss each other’s noses for luck.
Lauren Page
Post-Anatomy came
celebratory Sweet Water where
his bottom lip’s a snapshot
the shade of rhomboids on
an embalmed cat’s corpse that we
studied for weeks
& his voice
licked a blackberry bush that stung like
Doveak’s prophecy that Negro melodies
would be the basis for American music—
but he could never have foreseen
our jazz on gold sheets like Ellington
translated into something you could wrap
in fingers from his huge palms, those
stilled metronomes gone post-sex sedentary,
sat braided with mine on his sternum while
my bottom lip brushed his left nipple:
nerve center of my enterprise.
Tom Montag
January 2016, Highway 20, Mile Marker 39
Close enough to see
the mountains
have shaped the clouds.
