Author: Post Road

A Habit from Tikrit + Fleeing Never-Pleasure Island

Gordon Kippola

A Habit from Tikrit

My war was softer than the infantry’s,
but patriotic terrorists fired rockets
at our FOB most days. Insurgent assholes
would have blown my limbs off happily,
or sent my now-ex-wife a jigsaw pile.
Within a month I think, fuck the dead
hadjis in all their meaningless numbers.

Two-thousand and four, in northern Iraq,
ten-dozen Big Red One soldiers are killed,
including a few prescient suicides.
I salute the dog-tags, boots and helmets
of new-slain kids, times six. Fifteen years—
I thought by now, for sure, I’d care again
when human beings die. Turns out I can’t.

Fleeing Never-Pleasure Island

No matter where I’m living at the time—Texas
New York, Iraq—when I walk beside the road,
the same boy screams at me from passing cars.

Who and what are you, boy? Why do you shout
from yellow Hyundais, rusting Dodge Chargers,
boxy Audi Foxes: all these identical stealthy cars

your faceless buddies drive? Do you shadow me
because I’m lost? Has a life of criminal intent
put you on my tail? Maybe you’re not my Javert,

a vengeful ghost, or Satan come to claim my soul.
Maybe you’re Peter Pan, reminding me to crow;
or Jiminy Cricket, helping me become

a real boy. Doppler effect shrieks hammer me
into flight or fight. My knees are too creaky
to run from teenagers in cars. I never learned

to fight, but I was large enough an animal
to give attackers pause. Age fragiles my bones,
robs my muscle mass: age has made me prey.

I wrap a paring knife inside a paper towel
and hide it in my pocket while I walk.

---

Following a career as a US Army musician, Gordon Kippola earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, and calls Bremerton, Washington home. He serves as a reader for The Los Angeles Review. His poetry has appeared in District Lit, The Road Not Taken, The Main Street Rag, Slant: A Journal of Poetry, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and other splendid publications. One of his poems was selected for the World Enough Writers Coffee Poems Anthology, one was a 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist.

Three Poems Translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

The First Aerial Bombardment

Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

The street. A woman zigzags the street. 
A pause. By the greengrocery
she hesitates.
Must she buy bread? there is not – is there enough? – not enough
bread?
Must she buy bread now, or –
tomorrow? –
she hesitates.
Stares at. Stares at her phone. Her phone. Rings.              
Mother. She speaks to mother: Mother!
without listening
she shouts.
Shouts
by the window of greengrocery; at the window of greengrocery
as if she is shouting at herself
in the window.
Slaps the phone.
Zigzags the street, shouting at
her invisible – i.e impossible –
Mother. 

Tears. Tears at the impossibility
of forgiving 
her mother. Forget 
the bread.
Forget. The bread and each living thing on this green earth. Forgo it. Leave it. Alone.

That morning
it begins. The first aerial bombardment.

The Correct Approach

Regina Derieva, translated from the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

The ancients spoke well:
briefly – but well.
Their thoughts had little wings –
like Hermes’s –
the ancients were not concerned
that someone might misunderstand –
everyone understood them.
But if one’s mind were weak,
he will quietly become intimate with
a Muse, one of the nine.
And the Muse,
inclining her head gracefully,
will teach him.
She will teach him to continue to stay
silent and silent and silent.
And if she permits him to speak
he will have to speak in hexameters.

[Night. Street. Lamp. Drugstore.]

Aleksandr Blok, translated from the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

Night. Street. Lamp. Drugstore. 
Dull and sleazy light. 
Live twenty-five years more — 
It will be as now. No way out. 

You die — and again you begin. 
All is repeated as before: 
Night. The canal’s icy ripples. 
Drugstore. Lamp. Street. 

---

Katie Farris is the author of BOYSGIRLS (Tupelo). She has translated and edited several books, including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets (Tupelo).

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf), Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo) and co- translator of Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Tsvetaeva (Alice James).

Our Friend Karl

Mark DeFoe

“Why should I call your name/when I know you’re to blame/for making me blue”
Wasted Days and Wasted Nights
– Freddy Fender

Truth was, his life was like our own, rich with
cliché and heart-numbing sorrow. He went
too far or often never far enough.

He could not workup enough self-torture
or good old guilt to shame himself,
for every time he’d feel that need for action,
he’d find it all a bit boring. He’d succumb
to this or that, either or neither, side-tracked
by some shiny bauble in the distance, some
whacko semi-scam, some weird science, some
celebrity morsel that would tease his palate.

He supposed his malady was chemical, but
could never dial that well-recommended shrink,
assuming the doc would echo his dad,
who always said, “Straighten up and fly right.”

He went on, delightful dinner guest, we agreed,
but in the end, unable to buy himself
a cemetery plot, unsure if he
had heard above the party’s roar, the last call.

We found him in his last apartment. dead in bed.
Beside him were piles of books, festooned
and feathered with clever book marks, telling
how far he had to read to reach the end.

---

Mark DeFoe is Professor Emeritus at West Virginia Wesleyan College . His work has appeared in chapbooks, anthologies, and journals, including Poetry, Paris Review, Sewanee Review, Denver Quarterly, Reed, South Carolina Review, Santa Fe Review, Smartish Pace, and many more.

The Pond + Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos

Sarah Audsley

The Pond

Because I knew better, but wanted to anyway,
because he hesitated ever so slightly when I asked,
because I felt my skin as naked and taut,
because I wanted to feel, because
he told me a secret about himself,
because I didn’t know what else to do
but jump—

            Did I say we held hands? When I dove,
I dove all the way through the sudden
snap of cold liquid filling the hole my body
made.

            Did I tell you there was no moon? Traces
of bone-colored frost at the pond’s edges.
The invisible sheen of ice my head pierced
—mind reaching back. Gasping,
I dreamed this before, heaving, I swear
            I was here before
                        —body in
shock of water, body cold—water
rushing out, blood re-routing back
to the heart’s small caverns
like fluttering wings of moths trapped
between the screen & windowpane on a farm
where I would wander in the fields, hide
among long winding rows of corn…

            Whose hand was it tugging
my body out?
            No farm, no field to roam
just frozen feet, shock of hot shower;
the steam on skin rushes through.
            The runnels of
blood down our bodies, shards
of ice melting. The stitches,
the proof: I’m not
safe. I am solvent.

Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos

after Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

1
Math is mostly equations: one plus one, two plus two, plus…
also formulas, so many designed variables—
to keep someone alive, calculate, add & subtract the costs.

2
What if hands pull down stars, guide them inside the round belly?
What if this is how a spirit dives, twists into a body?
What is built up from bones? Fingernails. Skin. Flesh animated.

3
Grandmother’s fingers tightened around my bundled form,
(a thing) spitting, begging, for warmth from her hunched over
indecisive back—she knew the math would not compute.

4
This is where I’ll learn how to cast the rod to find the fish,
or skim the water to chase Jesus bugs, walking on the surface
by some trick of tension, & balanced perfection. Keep count.

5
What does this form do that others don’t? I’ll force the issue
of Korean poetic form, composing these sijo. In this way,
I’ll be closer to my genetics, my bloodlines—strands fraying.

6
This is where I’ll learn how to skip stones across how many
lakes? Making circles, again, hearing the sound of stone on water.
Oars cut cleanly through its flat surface—stars, so many stars.

7
In the heat she’ll fan my round face, place a bottle to my lips
flick flies off my head, & try to conjure up my dead mother’s
face, show me a smile I’ll never remember, nor this thick night.

8
Always those hands keep plucking stars from the heavens, make
constellations inside bodies, make more mothers. I see that form
& origins are stories—I’m all those mathematical distances.

---

Sarah Audsley, an adoptee born in South Korea and raised in rural Vermont, has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre. Her manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. She lives in Johnson, Vermont where she works for Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.

Deepfake Ashbery

Benjamin Aleshire

“Let’s go for a stroll to the river!” ejaculated Diane.
And though you’ve already beheld the river on
so very many placid occasions your voice-box
makes that sound again, that Waterloo “Yes, yes let’s”
tootling in your throat. After all you admire
Diane for her chandelier, so many crystal wishes
lucid in the lubricious half-light, but you bolt
to the bathroom mirror and tell it, “You
puppy-mewler! The river. Naufraugeur!”
That last word chicken-bones in your throat
but you don’t know why and it doesn’t matter.
Nothing particularly matters here, at’all. Besides,
the chandelier proceeds with tinkle-tinkle-tinkling
the syllables of your name on the other side
of your fortress door. When you compose yourself
in subjunctive, return to the flock, no one notices
they were gone. The poem is long since finished
but its sub-rosa applause keeps going on, and on.

---

Benjamin Aleshire‘s work has appeared in The Times UK, Iowa Review, Boston Review, London Magazine, and on television in the US, China, and Spain. An excerpt from his novel-in-progress Poet for Hire was featured at Lit Hub and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. In 2020, Ben received a James Merrill fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and was a finalist for the Alice James Award. He serves as a contributing editor for Green Mountains Review. Find him at www.poetforhire.org, and on twitter: @droletariat.

Sabbath + I will not be embalmed and placed behind an iron gate

Kaitlyn Airy

Sabbath

O

            stark staring

        lark

            winter-rank

of thirst

            ravish then

            this rare acre

            this dark

brave 

            seed.

Under this belfry

            my hymn:

the

 swollen

            hips 

of sordid

flowers.

Darkest darling

            lantern-faced

among 

husks       admonish me

your fever.

I will not be embalmed and placed behind an iron gate

I worry about stepping on unmarked graves / the world is full of them / shallow ones covered in soft grass / lurid and lush / for no grave is marked forever / and when showers come

and shroud our prairie / I watch the throat of the earth swallow rain / and upon growing a marriage of root and tree / upon tangling with the dirt / I do not care if I breathe a lungful of soot / for this

is our inheritance / I pull this silk dress over my brow / and think of ash / I touch my cheek and think of clay on the wheel / as I cover my mind with sleep / an arc of stars crowns the sky / burns steadily through the dark air / your eyes

are gold coins which ferry my body across the river / a river which moves like the green pour of sugar and absinthe / or a pair of hands carrying a lover / through the worn curtain of time / and so we watch days

tumble into the barrel / drink the cold ferment of an autumn below / throw tough leather scraps for dogs / and at night / we hug the cold road home drunk / ablaze in rushlight / and if I should kiss sunbaked mud one day / promise

that you’ll bury me undercliff / in a field of heather / a slant of light / that you should scavenge my extinction / my body no longer a home / that you should place that jeweled seed / in the mouth of a girl / who fled a chasm of hounds to warm / your tarnished dark / who sieved the dull husks

of a ruinous year / and held the shape of a seed / of a man / of a history

no other mortal may recall

---

Kaitlyn Airy is a Korean American poet and fiction writer. She was the 2020 winner of the Phyllis L. Ennes Contest and will be a featured poet at the next Skagit River Poetry Festival. Her recent work appears in EcoTheo and Crab Creek Review. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia.