POEMS BY:
Frank H. Coons, Lew Forester, Amy Wray Irish,
Susan Marsh, Jerry Smaldone, Jared Smith, and Sarah Wolbach

^{© 2023 Bristlecone}

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Submit 3 to 5 unpublished poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com. Submissions with more than 5 poems will not be considered.
• Poems posted on blogs and social media are considered published. Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you let us know right away if the work is accepted elsewhere.
• Use a header on at least the first page of your submission that includes your:

• Name as you wish it to appear in the journal
• Mailing address
• Email address
• Phone number
• Website address (if you have one)
• Phone number

• Submission should be in .doc or .docx file format (no .rtf or .pdf)
• Times New Roman 12 pt. font—titles in bold and not all caps
• Flush left alignment except for drop-lines, internal spaces within lines, and any other special formatting your poem requires
• 100-word maximum bio at the end of the submission; same guideline for translator bio(s). Feel free to provide live links to your website.

After publication, all rights revert to the individual Bristlecone authors. We consider simultaneous submissions but please let us know immediately if something you’ve submitted to us has been accepted elsewhere.

The Editors: Joseph Hutchison, Jim Keller, Sandra S. McRae, and Murray Moulding

Frank H. Coons

Like Atheists

Where It Started

Walking across Spain
we spent many nights
in various rooms from
sub-pedestrian to palatial.

But it was after
a particularly hard day—
eighteen miles of hills
and vales, hungry and half lost,
we finally found our
pre-booked accommodations.

To our surprise, a convent,
where a stern holy mother led 
us to two very narrow beds
separated by Christ
on his cross, a New Testament
on the desk—

as if to excise any unsavory
temptations. Crisp white sheets
severely folded over anemic
mattresses, the entire atmosphere
the opposite of ostentatious.

And all night, the saints
kept their vigil, ready
to catalogue the most venial
of sins, prepared to intervene,
should the devil appear.

So we woke unrefreshed,
backs stiff, consciences
clean, though ready 

also to confess that if this
is what Jesus requires,
we’d rather sleep like atheists.

Every estuary
     is an amalgam
          of half-salted water—
               a brackish broth
that harbors the unfinished
     including you and I
          just now wading knee-deep
               eyeing an endless horizon
aware this might just be
     where it all started
          when those lonely elements:
                carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etcetera,
gathered under a willing sun
     to become a living something—
          holy admixture and eureka!
               And here we are the unfinished specimens

Frank H. Coons is a poet and veterinarian. He lives with his wife who, somehow, still puts up with him after almost 47 years. His two daughters and three grandchildren live close enough that he can bother them frequently. He is the author of three books of poetry, both published by Lithic Press. His first book, Finding Cassiopeia, published in2014, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. His second book, Counting in Dog Years was published in 2016. His work has appeared in Caesura, Evening Street Press, Plainsongs, Pensive Journal, Santa Fe Literary Review, Pacific Review, Pudding and elsewhere. He was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2019.

Dedication

This work is dedicated to my two daughters, Allison and Lindsay, and my three grandchildren, Madeline, Cameron, and Cole. They continue to be an endless source of inspiration.

Lew Forester

Augury of Ash

Marshall Creek Fire
Boulder County, 2021

Premonitory winds 
gust along the foothills,
dry grasses bent
like the penitent to their knees— 

a chaos of clanging windchimes,
tumbleweed trashcans 
rolling through streets, 
apparitions riding 
the playground swings.

Arid fields ignite, fanned into 
a blizzard of smoke & ember 
occulting suburbia, devouring
over a thousand dwellings—

homes once envied 
reduced to basements, 
concrete-lined graves 
of smoldering memory 
the displaced sift through,

as old prophecies  
about a warming world
begin to be absorbed
like wet snow falling
on ashes, too late.

Bird Paparazzi

Boots crunching ice, we walk through the fog
our words make  

while a hawk claws at a frigid blue sky.

We startle a whitetail deer, treading
the western edge of its habitat, 

then encounter a group of birdwatchers
wearing camouflage. They wrestle with tripods
and lenses big as dinner plates,

attempting to capture a migration of waxwings.

Fluent in their language, you chat with them
while I think of the ravens

I watched the day before, invading the perimeter
of my house, staring through windows, 
fouling the walkways.

Wheels Roll

across miles of Colorado highway
Craig to Elk Springs to Dinosaur
through sagebrush & juniper & rangeland 
the rolling freeze-thaw road paved 
over Ute Indian trails & dinosaur bones
over white man buried promises
no one ahead or behind for miles
& miles rolling free 
as the subconscious
the interstate an inner state
like the woman sitting alone 
in a café in Craig        
coffee in trembling hands     
hair like threshed wheat
hollow eyes verging on tears
should have offered her an ear
talked of flight & freedom 
in the broken lines 
& the lightness of leavings 
left behind
though leave your demons 
in the dust & your angels 
might stay back too
while the windshield carnage continues
the guts and wings of flights concluded
under clouds like gauze 
over landscapes sutured by barbed wire
with ghostly mirage    
blurred parallel lines
converging in the distance
while the Beatles’ Long & Winding Road
beams down from space through speakers 
& you ponder where next 
to go in this life 
besides down the highway
& into the vanishing 
point

Lew Forester is a social worker who lives in Arvada, Colorado, base for his frequent hikes in the Rocky Mountains. The author of Dialogues with Light (Orchard Street Press, 2019), Lew’s poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag, Blue Mountain Review, Sky Island Journal, Pinyon, Plainsongs, POEM, Slipstream, The MacGuffin and other journals, magazines and anthologies.

Amy Wray Irish

The Educational Exhibit

at the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, AZ

Sleek predator, poquito tigrillo, spotted hunter 
of the Sonora and primo del jaguar, 
why are you on display? A sign
at your enclosure says “Ocelot Entrance”
but not Endangered. Are you in need
of protection? Or just held captive in a space
that copycats habitat, plays pretend?  

Your signage claims you may live twenty years, 
preserved in the museum’s embrace. 
That’s 7,000 days and nights of vigilant eyes 
focused on release from your “natural” state.

Peering in at your penitentiary, it’s clear 
where declawed paws have paced those walls
with grace, rápidamente, again and again.
The earth laid bare from motion. Your sign
points the way for entry but never escape. And
feigns education, describing zoology but never
your zoo. Yet you are educational—look how much

I learn from your sanctuary, your cage.

The Ritual of Washed Hands

after Kora in Hell: “Improvisations II,”
by William Carlos Williams

If you are like me—a window-washer, 
poet, or other philosopher—with life’s filth 
fouling your glass every morning 

you would never return to the critical work 
of clearing the dirty accumulation of night,
without first cleansing yourself

of all that dug-up grave soil, keeping
even your cuticles spotless clean
with an altar cloth or scrap of haiku.

And when you hang your just-washed hands 
from the ceiling to dry, you cannot secretly
keep hold of broken glass or ripped cloth shreds. 

Really! How can you expect an untainted
trickle of light to find and follow you
through the gritty pane of this existence

like that—But come, let us pause 
together in reflected skyscraper light
along our precarious catwalk.  

One must be strengthened, prepared
for much before our hands
are tuned to these frequencies of purity.

You see, there is the oil slick
of the world forever spilling
between us, and we must become holy

as the translucent glass catching sun
before we can handle the stunned bird—
before our hands can meet.

When the Door Is Closed in My Face

The arid moonscapes of my empty walls
rise before me. Dented and pitted from the pierce
of pressed-deep tacks, ripped-out nails,
long-forgotten photos, discarded art—

But I find there a constellation of pockmarks.
I find a bouquet of flowering craters. 
I find a spiderweb of cracks connecting,
weaving a lacy curtain to hold back the beyond. 

And I find a tracery of wrinkles gracing
the snow-dusted face of my future.
I find a Himalayan range of white rising
in peak after peak of possibility. 

I find there a Rorschach of such intricate
artistry, revealing such beauty within
me, that I know any closed doors or enclosing 
walls can never hold me captive—never

call me abandoned or void—again.

Amy Wray Irish grew up near Chicago, received her MFA from Notre Dame, then fled the Midwest for Colorado sunshine. Irish was recently selected as the winner of the Poetry Mesa Chapbook Contest, judged by Judyth Hill. Her manuscript Down to the Bone will be published in 2023. Her 2020 chapbook Breathing Fire, winner of the Fledge Competition, is still available at middlecreekpublishing.com. Or read more of her work at amywrayirish.com.

Susan Marsh

My Wyoming

The dominant color is wind.
A sky smudged with dust,
Strands of barbed wire 
Humming the hues of light: 
Azure, denim, sand, 
Tawny buckskin tan, the soft
Gray shadow of a shadow.

Here is the day’s delicate beginning
Clouds mixing like ink on the horizon
As sun gilds the interior
Of a weathered windowless shed.

Come See

The frozen fist of winter has lost its grip
Snowmelt trickles through its open fingers. 
It stares into its hand, amazed. Aspens weave 
nets of mist across the mountainside.
Come see, they bid. Come see.

The sky spins mare’s-tails on a wild warm wind 
water pours headlong, glorious in its rush
silence is silenced by a cacophony of life.
The patch of earth beside this log is dry
dabs of color beckon. Come see.

A buttercup’s green hands embrace a yellow globe
hail-dense drifts of turkey-peas erupt 
from warming leaf mold. Elegant steer’s head 
conjured from bare earth, blooms under the pines 
gone before April softens into May.  

I want to call my friends in distant urban places, 
draw their attention from greening lawns, from 
quince and cherry blossoms. The mud has thawed, 
the buttercups are out this morning, I will say.  
No greater miracle than this: come see.

Susan Marsh lives in Jackson, Wyoming. Her non-fiction has been published in Orion, North American Review, Deep Wild Journal, Fourth Genre, and in many anthologies. Among her books are an award-winning novel, War Creek, and ten non-fiction books, including A Hunger for High Country and Saving Wyoming’s Hoback, winner of the Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental Humanities. Her poetry chapbook This Earth Has Been Too Generous was published in 2022. She writes the column “Back to Nature” for Mountain Journal.

Jerry Smaldone

Dick

Dick took a drag off his Marlboro and tried to exhale.
He was sitting on the porch, waiting for the sun to go down,
waiting to die.

He had stage 10 cancer and enough other stuff to kill a horse.
A big ol’ warhorse, more like a workhorse, pulling a wagon,
pulling a plow.

Now it was coming to an end, and he thought of all he’d done.
The farm in Ioway, a stint in the Navy, the precision of the
machine shops, winding bike rides in the mountains and
hunting with his boys.

He was alone now, Rosie gone two years.
He was proud of how he’d cared for her,
the love of his life, unable to breathe.

That first time he walked in the Ramblin’ Rose
and saw her behind the bar.
How she trusted him, wanted him 
in her hard-headed, independent way.

Yeah, he was alone, but the girls, his stepdaughters, 
came by to check on him and bring him dinner once in a while.
He had decided to do the right thing and let the family know.
Maybe somebody would want the guns he hadn’t used in years,
the bike he couldn’t ride, the truck. Somebody’d want the truck.

He thought how he would miss sitting here, watching the neighbors,
young ones pushing trikes and wagons full of impossibly cute kids,
old ones limping around small gardens of vibrant jewels,
some he hardly knew, who’d come by for a casual talk
as word had spread down the block.

He eyes teared up as they rose to the blurry trees and clouds 
and everchanging sky.
A perfect still life it was, life that is, with just the right amount of pain 
and joy to wake you up and raise you to a higher place. And then 
something lit up inside his head and he realized that was it.

We had to be lifted up to get to heaven, all of us,
we had to lose this wasted, worn flesh, to see who we really were.
We had to put on a body of shining light to enter the illuminated world.

Dick lit another smoke and took a swig of beer.
The air was clean today, sweet as your first breath.

When Jerry Smaldone is not advising top-tier thinkers on how to physically, spiritually and financially survive the coming global holocaust/ascension into the 5th dimension, he is getting beat up by numerous grandchildren. Numerous books are waiting impatiently to be published by anybody other than the author.

Jared Smith

Watching a Downy Woodpecker

I’m watching a downy woodpecker
silhouetted against storm clouds on
the highest branch of an ancient elm
tilting to the wind, sharpening beak
against fluid bark and pausing, then
picking what it finds into its mouth
jostling its feathers as the clouds 
themselves are jostled against cloud.
What does it hope to find so far above
the ground where beetles burrow freely?
Perhaps one or two tired stringy grubs
within a stalk too thin to hold them
yet hanging on, they too small and cold.

I must go on and like that tuft of feather
tend to the little things I cannot catch
or keep for any length of time.  The
messages of lovers, family, friends
that tie me to the world I love. I look
at my investments in the future, my
meager means of tying thoughts to
whatever it is that meets us at this time.
This is my job: making skin-tight marks
on paper as my sister falls dead across
the country, where she sifted tax returns
and handed out the government doles
to those who could no longer work,
one Administration to the next and next,
a long gray highway of U.S. dreamers.

It is too cold to walk the fields today,
the winds too turbulent and I too small
and dark, too feebly feathered to fly
holding only what I can.

Within the Shadows of Invisible

There are no deer in the side yard this morning,
stepping out from the tall winter grasses
on silent feet, nibbling the buds from groundcover,
looking toward our window, ears raised quizzically,
knowing we are here but not why or what we are,
sensing danger in the midst of our kindness,
fading back into the landscape from which they come.

This is a wide, deep forest where the trees grow close,
so squeezed together they shiver in winter’s wind
rather than standing tall and strong against it,
their trunks and branches rubbing against each other,
hands and eyes tangled against the clouds.

This is a forest filled with invisible animals
that take their meals from the sun and shadow
and go uncounted about their time among us.
This is the forest unkempt, unlogged, pressing
against the cities undrawn by architects, un-
lived in within the shadows of invisible.

Jared Smith lived in Colorado for many years until last summer and still retains ownership of two primitive log cabins in Roosevelt National Forest. His sixteenth volume of poetry, A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life, will be released by New York Quarterly Books in May of 2023. Jared has served on the editorial boards of New York Quarterly Magazine, Home Planet News, The Pedestal Magazine, and Turtle Island Quarterly, and has hundreds of publications in journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. His first grandson will be born in Colorado in April of 2023. Hurrah!!

Sarah Wolbach

Anniversary Hike in the Sangre de Cristos

Lost in the woods after missing the sign 
with a curving arrow advising us of the trail,
we wander for hours unthreaded 
from the needle of direction. 

I grip a sharp stone in my right hand,
binoculars in my left. I will break a skull 
if I have to, of a mountain lion, most likely, 
for we find paw prints in patches of November snow.

Sometimes you fathom how vulnerable you are
among the indifferent atoms of living things
and dead things. I set love aside for survival,
follow you cautiously into the forest’s maw.

The light dims, becomes shadow-light.
The particles of the intimate boundary 
between light and dark separate,
and in a split second the forest disappears,

becomes dark as a cavern after the candle
is snuffed out. Eyes useless, feet lost
underneath us. We hold cold hands, pull 
in different directions. The forest growls.

Killing Time in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

I choose a bad restaurant for no good reason.
The huevos rancheros are made with greasy
eggs and stale tortillas smothered 
with lukewarm red chile. 
The coffee is hot, brown water in a chipped 

cup. At the next table sits a family of three—

two teenage parents and a baby the parents 

pass back and forth across the table along 

with a cell phone and a salt shaker. 
The ease of it. 

While you lay dying in my arms, I murmured 

“love is everything” over and over. I wish 
I had said only “I love you”—less 

complicated. When did you say, “I am not 

happy”? It was an interminable day of bad 

choices. With each flavorless bite, I try

to forgive myself and love you more. 
I will be back tomorrow.

Wild

We used to say we’d hike 
    up Bear Canyon to Atalaya, 
        have a picnic.   

Now I hesitate 
   to step from flat
        to slant     to crumble

and you are gone.
   In my youth, 
      in my seven-league boots,

I leapt from boulder 
   to boulder
      over slits and chasms

over gaping mouths 
   of caves. I lit 
      fires with my boots. 

I walked over water 
    on needle-thin planks. I fell 
      but did not break.

But I dwindled
    with you, meandered 
        too long

in the flats. Then you stumbled,
      you broke, you fell 
             into shatter. Now 

you lie in the sand,
     old man, old glass 
         changing color.

My nerves shiver
   the fall, the slant 
        of shale. 

Why not avalanche,
    scrape flesh to the bone?
       Why not 

slip from a bridge
      and see where I land?
          I might skip 

across water, might sink 
      into sand. But if 
          I must drown, why not

drown happy? I plan to be wild:
   Up-fall into darkness, 
       become a bright stone.

After receiving her MFA and a postgraduate fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin, Sarah Wolbach moved to Mexico, where she led poetry workshops for expatriates and taught English to the employees of a mushroom factory. After leaving Mexico, she lived for several years in New York City. She is the author of two chapbooks, and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Artful Dodge, Borderlands, Cimarron Review, Comstock Review, Fixed and Free Anthology, Peregrine, Pilgrimage Magazine, Santa Fe Literary Review, Snakeskin, Wild Roof Journal, Yalobusha Review, and others. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

_{Photo by Sandra S. McRae}

Poems by
Beth Franklin, Erica Hoffmeister, Karla Johnson,
Marcia Jones, Donald Levering, Jessy Randall, and Tim Raphael

^{© 2023 Bristlecone}

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Bristlecone welcomes poems from writers of the Mountain West region. The editors are especially eager to read poems that reflect the region’s various cultures and landscapes, although we have no restrictions in mind regarding subject matter. Our main concerns are with the quality of the work and the cultivation of a regional community of poets and poetry lovers.

Submissions are accepted year-round. Please adhere to all of the following guidelines:

• Submit 3 to 5 unpublished poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com. Submissions with more than 5 poems will not be considered.
• Poems posted on blogs and social media are considered published. Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you let us know right away if the work is accepted elsewhere.
• Use a header on at least the first page of your submission that includes your:

• Name as you wish it to appear in the journal
• Mailing address
• Email address
• Phone number
• Website address (if you have one)
• Phone number

• Submission should be in .doc or .docx file format (no .rtf or .pdf)
• Times New Roman 12 pt. font—titles in bold and not all caps
• Flush left alignment except for drop-lines, internal spaces within lines, and any other special formatting your poem requires
• 100-word maximum bio at the end of the submission; same guideline for translator bio(s). Feel free to provide live links to your website.
  

After publication, all rights revert to the individual Bristlecone authors. We consider simultaneous submissions but please let us know immediately if something you’ve submitted to us has been accepted elsewhere.

The Editors: Joseph Hutchison, Jim Keller, Sandra S. McRae, and Murray Moulding

Beth Franklin

Ghazal in the Land of Love

In the land of love, my heart got broken,
seven times seven times seven every time.

Scarlet dinner-plate hibiscus, one day alive, 
droop, fall to the ground, at evening time. 

Stones placed over daughter bones, press mother 
and grandmother bones, marking ancestral time.

Worn out typewriter keys craft poem
after poem, beating wildly to love time. 

La Malinche, indigenous traitor from pre-colonial time, 
transforms to hero, Chicana icon, in post-colonial time.

A wheelchair, four walkers, a radiation mask upside down 
on a garage hook, prolong mourning time.

A framed photograph, the groom’s gray tweed suit, 
the bride’s white pleated dress, begin a lifetime.

Orange slices, delicately arranged on a blue plate,
first painted with watercolor, then eaten one at a time.

A thin mattress from the hospice bed, tossed
into a red dumpster; a breath taken. Last time.

“A Throw of the Dice”

This last time, 
I walk around the ponds a few blocks 
from our house, sold and empty.
Until today, a walk taken daily.

A bald eagle rests high on a cottonwood branch, 
in undergrowth, geese surround their goslings, protective.
A gray heron, hidden among cattails, stands rigid.
Red-winged blackbirds balance, trilling, on single stalks.

Did you know he smoked waiting for you?
What did you think would happen when you married an older man?
Why are you always with other widows?

The snow dustings on the iced-over ponds invent geometric patterns.
Rabbitbrush sleeps, not yet its late summer yellow.               
Fields of blue flax will flower to the left of the path.
Serviceberry, with withered fruit clusters, will bloom purple in June.

I carry my father’s prayer card,
the last line from the Irish blessing soothes: 
Until we meet again may God hold you
in the hollow of his hand.

You, drum major extraordinaire, 
melodious voice on the human stage of poetry
swing dancer, jiver, string bass jazz musician. 
And the quiet you, gazer of trees, rocks and rivers.
     
Bagpipes. Heard that first time in an Inverness bar. 
We stood with the raucous Scottish crowd singing    
their beloved Anthem, music played at your final 
Celebration of Life.

A photo taken by my oldest friend forty years ago—gifted to me
when she came to say a final goodbye—shows me reading
Mallarme’s “A Throw of the Dice.”  Blossoms are
everywhere on my walk.

Why do you write about cancer?
Why do you paint yellow coneflowers on the edge of the river 
at the cabin?

Sometimes a Beauty, Sometimes a Beast

“Ask the wild bees what the Druids knew.”
—Anonymous

When my mother died, they found 
an aerogram written to my Irish-American
grandmother. 20, in Madrid, writing

about discothèque dancing with Spanish
architecture students late into the night, 
learning a lot, nice people, thanks for the $10.

A clipping from the Indy Star, quotes me—
Purdue co-ed—questioning her American culture 
and values. Aerogram and newspaper clipping, 

saved evidence of a mother’s and grandmother’s 
pride for a young woman who left home 
for distant adventures.

My seven-year-old niece, a Halloween Disney Belle,
revels in her floor-length yellow satin dress, 
jeweled tiara, matching gloves, sparkling earrings. 

With her mother’s makeup in hand, she requests 
a heart crown painted on her forehead. Now tattooed,
the young princess waltzes through the living room. 

I paint a watercolor of a green apple with two leaves 
casting a shadow on the journal page. I feel 
the rounded apple in my body. My dancing niece 

grabs the gymnastic rings hanging from the kitchen 
ceiling, her backflip turning her princess dress 
inside out. Eating an apple, I watch her.

She tells me she loves apples, sliced thin as wafers.
With a somersault she gains momentum,  
pausing midair, legs straight up.

Beth Franklin, poet, painter, is the Executive Director of the Colorado Poets Center. In her role as Director, Franklin coordinates and sponsors in-person and virtual poetry readings; the Robert W. King Poetry Prize, a yearly contest for the high school students in the Greeley-Evans School District 6; and publishes The Colorado Poet newsletter. She is professor emerita at the University of Northern Colorado, where she prepared pre-service teachers in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education. A passionate believer in the importance of poetry, Franklin is dedicated to developing and supporting local and global poetry projects. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Erica Hoffmeister

Dandelion Heart

I want one-hundred legs
instead of these unreliable two.

A centipede in its stop-sudden mirage of fright 
landscaping dandelions for what they are: resilient 
medicinal, caught between concrete domesticity and 
rebellion entrenched in slow-moving ferality.

I want to be a horror show: my body
amazing in the most traditional definition.
Flowing in rhythmic patterns, tidal, near-
villainous, terrifying those in my path 
simply by moving in my strange, alien 
existence, earthly existence, scurrying 
and parting waves of humanity in my wake 
over pavement, through small gardens and
damp soil. 

I wonder where centipedes go after the march of terror 
commences. I wonder if their families hug with two legs, 
or all one hundred. If, like my mother, who needs 
all parts of her body to love, they 
smother their children with one-hundred 
little feet, or hands, or whatever limbs 
attach themselves to sectional parts of entity.

My two legs that carry this body: my inability 
to move my segments in sync—my self 
always twisting from its center, limbs flailing 
against harsh concrete, man-
made obstructions.

Horror show, dandelion heart. Ordinary.
Someone always mistaking me for a weed.best laid plans

This is not a poem about the sweet scent of orange blossoms
drifting through bright blue skies of childhood memory,
the soft-petaled magnolia leaves, my mother’s jasmine 

This is not about the ocean’s whisper, my salt-stuck curls
or the best breakfast burrito in town

This is not about my appendages ripped from their sockets 
and tossed into farther corners of once-possibility, my torso 
held hostage against Colorado’s snow drifts

my teenage-era locked door, my mother and I’s shared room, 
a year spent mostly sprawled across my best friend’s sofa, 
her legs translucent white

This is a poem about a hallway always occupied, the soothing hum 
of chaos, park birthday parties filled with cousin-limbs and sibling 
jokes: that time my brother drank too much on Halloween, my sisters’ twin giggles,
a knife always at her hip to heat and cauterize my open wounds

my nephew’s curly blonde hair, my mother’s wisdom, a double helix blue 
and citrus wax candle to light when this mountain range partition 
annexes our connected sky, a tiny flame 
held against my chest’s permafrost

It’s when I say that Las Vegas is my favorite city, remember glass shards 
sparkling in the street, hands splayed out of fast-driving windows
under a sky that cracks open on a regular Monday morning. 
I sprout citrus appendages on tilled soil, a beautiful comeback, an
unremarkable origin story

This is a poem about truth-dreams that ache my bones each night
at 4am, awaken and descend into a disorienting free dive, 
the conversation I never had with my husband 
hallucinating desert depths 

A cataclysmic variable—
binary star systems that merge and rotate into
a death spiral until they explode and die

they must exist together 
or not at all

Erica Hoffmeister is a rambling soul from Southern California who now lives in Denver, where she teaches college writing. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019) and Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019), but considers herself a cross-genre writer. Learn more at www.ericahoffmeister.com.

Karla Johnson

Gertrude’s Maid

Maid had sloughed out of her starched

white manners
white cleanin costume and 
white-world stance of
high alert watchin

Babys’ heads were pressed
dresses unmessed 
curlers set
so the mornin’s style could be 
blessed and ready to bear sweat
in worship tomorrow.

Maid’s now home with
sisters at the table tappin
whist cards slappin
raucous freedom boomin 
through lit cigs on lips, smoke curlin 
up, a cloud of relief from the day.

Sisters were knowin
how washerwomen
got recruited  
to be witnessin 
the Nordic antics
of the dirtied white rooms of 
gained wages.

Sisters at the table
demandin
of Maid
wait she said what
hold up she made you listen to what
naw what
sisters hopin
for a story from the famous woman’s lair.

Gurl, Maid said to the sisters, 
choosing a card and tossin
she was callin
it poetry
I’m tryna get home
paid time done and feet be achin
and she makin
me stand there and listenin
like she got somethin
and

Maid’s cig moved from lip to hand for the
spinnin of a 
Nordic-mocking recitation 
Exactly do they do
First exactly.
Exactly do they do.
First exactly.

Maid now hollerin
because sisters 
standin 
jumpin
bendin
slappin
on knees and backs
the funny too strong and
laughter too big to do it just sittin

And first exactly.
Exactly do they do.
And first exactly and exactly.
And do they do.
And shee-bee-bop dippity doo

Gurl, Maid said shoutin
over the shared laughin
Ella oughta slap that woman for stealin
good music
and calling it poetry
all she doin
is scat. actin smart but just bullshit spittin.

Cards slappin
bids winnin
points addin
winners braggin
losers moanin
all still chucklin.

I thought, Maid said, wheezin
I thought, Baby, you need to get off 
that stuff. Sisters 
still laughin
denyin
cryin
yessin
and amenin

But I said, Maid said,
in perfect Nordic form,
I said it sounded important
and made my eyes wide
because ya’ll know I ain’t tryin
to be losin that one good job.

Sisters dealin
mmmhmm’n
noddin
with understandin

Another maid,
a sister at the table
of the washerwomen
spoke up, sighin
I sure hope Langston’s right.

The table be quietin,
settlin
calmin
respectin
the recitation 
of Prophet Hughes’ intention

“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

Adopted Guest

Friends, I watch your family from the inside out, absorbed.
Here, there are no sneers for children because they exist.
Instead the grownups chat together like a deep breath
No pressure.

Here, the mothers do not pinch your psyche like wet dough and twist
And the fathers do not sit angrily behind
Upright embalming slabs which chill you
Even in passing.

And your family does not indenture me for
Kitchen duty and holding their blame
And you ask me—don’t order me and you don’t get cruel
When I reach demands.

And dishes stay on tables not flung
And laughter is not biting in at my expense
And you go together not make me go in your stead
And I’m asking myself

WTF?

Karla Johnson is a perpetual graduate student, with master’s degrees from both Denver Seminary and the University of Denver. She is a third-generation native of Colorado and counts her grown two sons as her wildest blessings.

Marcia Jones

Car Wash Lullaby

Crystal rain tadpoles twist
upstream, then downstream,
against my windshield.

They curl, sensuous,
all the while watching me
unwind behind
my steering wheel.

Soft suds embrace
the last languid tadpoles
who didn’t escape
in the warning sprinkles.
Bubbles fizzle my car,
hush me in white.

Reclining inside,
I’m on Jupiter
deep in a marble crater
swathed in solitude
and eerie soap clouds,
a lull before the deluge.

Sudden rush, and elegant drops
drum a staccato of silence.
Silver monsoon meditation
washes worry away.

Could death be like this?
At last, more crystal tadpoles
glide forever downstream,
sparkling under crystal parachutes
in the rinse of letting go.

Moonlight Sonata

Wrapped in tangled bedsheets,
tossed and sleepless, she wanders
alone into the night woods.

The first floating notes in C# minor
summon her to still-warm shadows,
restless under the forest canopy.
An ancient square piano ascends
among soaring trees, its burnished body
formed in the forest, from the forest.

Its open lid reflects slender strands
of blue moonlight, its belly brims
with ferns and wild vines.

A flock of nightingales, mysterious
musicians of the dark, slow dances
on worn black and white keys

awakening long-silent notes in an aching
rhythm of tension and release, at once

desperate and joyful—a sonata of healing.

Marcia Jones’s poems won awards at national and state levels through the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (NFSPS). Her poems have appeared in two anthologies: A Flight of Poems (Colorado foothills poets) and All the Lives We’ve Ever Known (Lighthouse Writers). She published her first poetry collection, Only Time, in 2019. Her second collection, Blue Hour, will be out in 2023. She lives in Evergreen, Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains inspire her.

Donald Levering

Song of the Carpet Moths

(Man-Moth) regards it as disease he has inherited susceptibility to.
              —Elizabeth Bishop

Hearing voices from the wall,
Man-Moth fears he’s gone insane.
Then he reasons such high vibrations
could be the sonar-seek of bats outside

or emanations from a power line. 
He reaches up to tweak 
the buds of his antennae, and lo,
the signal strengthens, leading him 

to the hanging Navajo weaving. 
As he moves closer, the signals 
resolve to song. Ah ha,
it’s my little cousin carpet moths.

Give me darkness give me dust
and a niche in a slumbering rug
Give me flecks of dried sheep dung
and globules of lanolin

Give me cochineal dye
that turns the wool the same Ganado red
my tiny tongue and feet become
Give me labyrinth of pattern

to chew down to the weft
the dizziness of Whirling Logs 
dazzling Crystal and Spider Web
Two Grey Hills interlocking crosses

I love to inch along the pictures
of Yei giants and pollinating corn
munching on these cords of fodder 
enough for all my hungry young

The Weight of the Painting

To calculate a price quote for framing, the framer needs to know the weight of the painting.

How could the framer assign grams or ounces to the scintillating effect of the painting’s pastel aura of autumn shrubbery, the way it lifts the viewer off the ground?

See the small building in the background of the painting? How is the painting’s gravitas altered by the addition of this human dwelling? The ochre of adobe is dense with mud’s local lore. How shall he account for the levitation achieved by the roseate tones of sunset reflected in the building’s tiny windows?

Added to the assessment would be the burden of the history of the landscape painting, from the Tang Dynasty’s floaty silk scrolls of misty waterfalls to William Bradford’s scenes of spouting whales and ice-locked schooners, to Helen Frankenthaler’s flattened landscapes of pansies (what is the heft of her petals?). All these scenes behind the painting must be added to its total gravity.

This calculation would be incomplete without the sway of the critics’ weighing in on the painting. Their hot air plus the weight of public opinion may loft the painter to a moon-walk domain of celebrity, or consign her to the lead-footed realm of public indifference.

Nor can the framer ignore the background boulder that seems to lift off the ground. With its luminous lichens, it is as buoyant as if it were afloat in a salty sea.

Luckily, the price does not include the weight of the neural cloud of imagination about the painter as she worked. Like a cumulus cloud of water vapor, this mental image of the painting must weigh hundreds of thousands of tons but must be discounted from the framer’s fee.

In Pastel

After a diptych by Jane Shoenfeld

When you wake you check your fingers to see
if they’ve turned into ten long sticks
of colored chalk as you just dreamed.
Instead of the dream’s sidewalk, the paper

on one side of your easel starts to scintillate
with flecks from your pastel sticks,
colors nearly bright enough to sear
an optic nerve as you sketch a figure

that quickly grows into a woman
whose mane is a spectrum spray,
whose face an electric seraph’s,
whose voice reverberates like hive-thrum.

* * *

On the other panel, Grandfather
Sitka Spruce is lying down.
A trillium blooms from his chin.
Toadstools and lichen claim his face.

Carpenter ants haul his heartwood
to their potlatch. His needles
become banana-slug meal,
his voice, receding thunder.

His supine totem pole is hollowed
into a canoe that glides you back
sadly to your own casketed grandfather
among banks of overpowering mums.

Ghazal

After a watercolor by Susan List

Dusk on the lagoon like a burner’s gas light.
A hermit’s quietude flickers in the last light.

Twilight slides with earth’s rotation into night.
Old heartache turns me toward this “Last Light.”

Magenta spreads through the gloaming firmament.
Bats and moths and swallows stir in the last light.

Trappings come unmoored, habitual views disperse.
Glimpses of infinity scatter in last light.

Loose photon jubilee, cumulus hosannas.
Memory, time, and distance fuse in last light.

Donald’s eyes rise to the fontanelle of sky.
Love of spectrums of the dusk in List’s “Last Light.”

Donald Levering’s 16th poetry book, Breaking Down Familiar, will be released in May of 2022. A previous book, Coltrane’s God, was Runner-Up in the 2016 New England Book Festival contest in poetry. Before that, The Water Leveling with Us placed 2nd in the 2015 National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Creative Verse. He is a former NEA Fellow and won the 2018 Carve magazine contest, the 2017 Tor House Robinson Jeffers Prize, and the 2014 Literal Latté prize. His work has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac podcast.

Jessy Randall

Not Checking Messages

[stolen french fry form*]

Is
it
from not checking
messages that I
feel good?

[* The stolen french fry is a poetry form I invented based on the number of fries I stole from Price Strobridge and Ashley Crockett at the Poetry West Writers Retreat in Crestone, Colorado, May 2015. I made five thefts of fries, stealing first 1, then 1 again, then 3, then 3 again, then 2. The stolen french fry is therefore a five-line poem with word counts of 1, 1, 3, 3, 2. As far as I know, “Not Checking Messages” is the only poem ever written in stolen french fry form, but perhaps that could change.]

Jessy Randall’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Scientific American, and Women’s Review of Books. Her new collection, Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science is forthcoming from the University of London in 2022. She is the Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College, and her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.

Tim Raphael

The trouble begins

when I give bunchgrass a sway 
or suggest stones kneel at sunrise, 

as if they have something to say about this mesa, 
its vantage distinct from morning everywhere. 

Better I report unadorned the exact angle of the slope, 
how it frames the valley below,

allow the fields to be green, leave riotous out. 
A valley of green fields is enough. 

Except then the mesa rolls from shadow to sun, 
blinks itself awake and slips 

into its polka dot juniper dress 
in time to spot the owlets learning to fly “on owl-silent wings.” 

They’ve fledged but not far from the cliff face, 
loitering on a dead branch 

in sight of the ledge 
where they were born. 

Not yet horned or hardened, 
one stares back at me like a downy moon, 

its face ringed in a winter halo of white feathers, 
as if a July snow is on the way. 

Flecks of bone, like flakes, are scattered below the nest, 
the white mandible of a mouse or mole, bits of leg bone and spine, 

a tooth. I’ve interrupted something. 
Altered it—

two owlets motionless 
save the slow swivel of their famous heads. 

Harvester ants a few feet away begin their Sisyphean day, 
and I’m tempted to describe them as cheerful— 

a pep in their steps up their cartoon volcanoes. 
But why try to pin a mood on an ant? 

The soil softened by heavy dew. 
The soil itself more pebble than dirt. 

Is your eye drawn like mine to the dark crevices, 
a gash of dry streambed running down the slope, 

where I almost will a coyote onto the page?
Omitting the distant hum of State Road 75, 

I linger instead on the blue of the sky, 
leave out the sweat, my skin already wet, 

8 AM and the urge to say something, 
do something beyond witness.

No, I am not a reliable ally, 
I don’t tell it all,

deny you the scent of after-rain, 
ignore the stab of goathead. 

Today, it’s the absence of swallows and jays, 
no bunches of blue birds in the juniper. 

No birdsong calling Lightnin’ Hopkins—
Baby please don’t go    Baby please don’t go 

The blues scale I practice over & over. 
Each note in its place, but O, elusive swing,

somewhere out there, 
out beyond the metronome, 

where every coyote is a gift, 
and daybreak’s refrain is here 

& gone.

Blue Truck

We know each other first by our dogs—
walking our road, I see Tipsy
the cattle dog, dragging her dead leg 
like a grub hoe & I know Stan will appear 
in long slow strides, knit cap on cold mornings.

Scout runs ahead in sniffed greeting,
& when Stan pulls even, we trade a few words
about his garlic crop, about Kate & the kids 
& keep moving—he east, me west.                                        
Stan’s unwritten list of loss                            
is longer than mine & includes his wife 
Rosemary, whom I never met, 
yet he just hauled a Model A back from Nebraska, 
convinced he can find a transmission                         
& get it back on the road.

Kate had only been half joking 
about our own dead truck when she told the seller, 
We’ll take the house if you throw in the truck,
as if we had a choice,grass hiding                             
the airless tires of the Dodge, 
a ’49 flatbedwith perfect patina 
of autumn rust & blue, as if someone 
had sanded dead leaves & sky into fender 
& door, dignity in the rotted bed boards                    
& side rails that once held stacks 
of apple crates or firewood—the kind of truck 
you’d hop in or on if someone was headed to town, 
bouncing over the pitted road when 
there was still a bar & gas station, maybe                  
a kid taking a turn at the wheel. Now 
the bench seat is all springs but the chrome 
is like new, the Art Deco ram on the hood
ready to charge up valley to the snow on Jicarita Peak.                                             

The sign Kate painted & hung at our gate says
Blue Truck, not Blue Truck Farm—
we have less than a hundred whipple beans 
in the ground, assorted beds of zinnias 
& cosmos, three rows of wine grapes,            
a few apple, pear & plum trees, bush cherries, 
a lone apricot & only three hens after 
I forgot to latch the coop one night. 

Farm is a big word when nothing
is sold and what’s canned or put up 
doesn’t fill a pantry shelf, 
& farmer may require even more—                           
a few generations buried 
in Father Kuppers’ cemetery, callused hands 
like Stan’s that no longer crack in the cold, 
a knack for knowing whether clouds gathering
in furrowed rows will bring a soaking rain.

this town

this town has everything   it has it all this town   except curbs  
curbs & sidewalks but this town has everything else   no curbs like the ones 
in the last town with its paved streets & shaded sidewalks & town dogs 
on leashes  no leashes in this town   this town without a police force   no police 
no movie theater oh & no barber shop   no salons for people or dogs  
no tourist bureau with directions to the post office or the Battle 
of Embudo Pass or the tree where Harbert’s honeybees swarmed last year  
no big muddy river   that’s the other town  this town has hardly stream enough 
for beavers & kingfishers who meet on the banks because there’s no convention 
center either but this town has icy canyon roads sopapillas & a past like 
& unlike your town & the snow is starting to fly & knock down 
the last of the cottonwood leaves & this town looks back & ahead but mostly 
is busy today with Clarence’s funeral & keeping kindling dry as though this town 
is a protest without slogans that fit on banners   a treatise of half-baked 
tenets & no ultimatum   this sawdust-scented town   this town with everything

Tim Raphael lives in Northern New Mexico between the Rio Grande Gorge and Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his wife, Kate. They try to lure their three grown children home for hikes and farm chores as often as possible. Tim’s poems have been featured in I-70 Review, Deep Wild Journal, Sky Island Journal, The Fourth River (Tributaries), Windfall, Cirque, Canary, The Timberline Review, Gold Man Review and two Oregon anthologies. He is a graduate of Carleton College.

_{Photo by Sandra S. McRae}

Poems by
Kathleen Cain, Karen Douglass, Nathan Manley,
David Anthony Martin, and Ed McManis 

^{© 2022 Bristlecone}

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Bristlecone welcomes poems from writers of the Mountain West region. The editors are especially eager to read poems that reflect the region’s various cultures and landscapes, although we have no restrictions in mind regarding subject matter. Our main concerns are with the quality of the work and the cultivation of a regional community of poets and poetry lovers.

Submissions are accepted year-round. Please adhere to all of the following guidelines:

• Submit 3 to 5 unpublished poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com. Submissions with more than 5 poems will not be considered.
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• Use a header on at least the first page of your submission that includes your:

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• Phone number

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After publication, all rights revert to the individual Bristlecone authors. We consider simultaneous submissions but please let us know immediately if something you’ve submitted to us has been accepted elsewhere.

The Editors: Joseph Hutchison, Jim Keller, Sandra S. McRae, and Murray Moulding

Kathleen Cain

Natural Curve

for Kelly, 1960-2021

It’s important, to find a refuge in every day, so that when you hit the pillow 
at night, no matter how troubled you are, you can return there and rejoice a little 
in the person, place or thing (though “thing” isn’t really a good word for a poem). 

Today it was a natural spring, still present and unexpected, flowing through  
a subdivision not far from the hospice house where my sister lies. With warning 
signs, of course: Private Property. No Trespassing, blah, blah, blah—it’s only for 
us now, not you.  But just beneath the place where the sidewalk follows the fence 
line, a creek runs away, as they all do if they can. A tangle of trees crosses the water. 
The oldest one goes first, a cottonwood, bent like the St. Louis Arch or a bridge 
a mother might make of her body, to let her children cross. 

My sister needs a bridge like that on her final earth journey, though it’s one she 
has to cross alone, as we all do. She just asked what time it is. Ten to eight on Sunday
morning. October third. Canada geese have just made a fly-by, though if she’s heard
them, she doesn’t say. Which is unusual. The declining Moon sailed above the trees 
last night, a crystal sickle with gold and silver filigree—you know that way the Moon
does sometimes, in a cold sky. “It’s a gorgeous day,” she says. It’s hard to hear her now,
her always-clear voice reduced to a rasp of air. I put my ear to her lips, ask her, twice more, to tell me again what’s she said. “It’s. A. Gorgeous. Day.” Even as light dims around her, how well she kens the curve of weather, the arc of her life amidst its seasons.

Continuum

I always hate to see
May go—tulips, iris,
their fragrant parts
disassembling
into fragments of which
they’re made
dropping
folding back into the earth
again, into themselves,
forming next year’s seed
or pod, set to begin 
the hubbub of root and bulb 
beneath 
in their minor tremblings

and yet, the sky clearing
making way for sleepy June
soon the seduction of
mock-orange blossoms
and petal showers
of summer snow—raspberries
already beginning to form
their tart-celled red worlds

on it goes, this continuum
we call life and death
one wrapping and enfolding
the other . . . 
and look! golden alyssum’s
last blossom
and here’s 
the starred globe
of the purple
Persian 
allium—a gazing ball
if ever
there was one

Advice

“Ask the wild bees what the Druids knew.”
—Anonymous

Ten years ago, my uncle
the beekeeper
said that “for all intents and purposes
there are no more feral bees.”

Someone in my town posts a picture
of a glut of wild bees in a pine tree
and wonders what to do.

Advice rolls in, with or without
experience or understanding.
“Leave them Alone!”
shouts one. “Call someone to
collect them,” suggests another,
the human impulse to capture
so strong in us. “They’re migrating!”
a third offers, though bees do not
really migrate. For that, they’d need
a destination. And a return. This is

a swarm. They’re just moving house.
They’re gentle then, my uncle always
used to say, easily handled without
fear—all the fuss in honor of
the new queen, whom they will
follow and pledge their lives to.
Yes, leave them. They’ll find their
way, to a hollow log or tree, where 
you may or may not notice them as 
you walk by, to-ing and fro-ing through 
your own day. 

And Now This…

It’s hard to tell at first 
if the birdsong drifts in from
somewhere over Anderson Cooper’s 
right shoulder there in the dark,
from three to four a.m., Ukraine
time; or whether it’s the house finch
in the blue spruce tree outside
the picture window, from six
to seven p.m. Mountain Standard
time here in Colorado. Click off

the volume on the remote. Nothing.
Back on again, just as the finch
lets loose its end-of-day cascade
of notes. 
              Off.    On.  
It’s the bird in the dark
in Ukraine, lifting its song before
dawn. Lark? Or thrush? Sounds like

our 4:30 a.m. robins—so, a thrush
then. Whatever species, alive as
the spirit of land and people, its 
practiced trill of millennia unerring 
there in the dark, certain of the dawn
it can feel, feather and bone. In spite
of everything, singing up the light.

Kathleen Cain’s poetry has recently appeared in Abandoned Mine, The Comstock Review, and Pandora’s Amphora (Art Goodtimes’ blog). Work is forthcoming in the premier issue of Jasper’s Folly. She was a featured reader for the Ziggies Zoom reading in April 2022 and for the 100,000 Poets for Change Reading (Denver 2022). She is also the author of two nonfiction books: Luna, Myth and Mystery and The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion.  https://kathleencainwriter.com

Karen Douglass

Black-winged Moth

How near to a moth is god?
A universe of air away,
unless like St. Thomas’s
sponge in the sea I am
in god and god in me
and the moth brushing my hand
closes the gap from maker to made.

Or god is inside the moth
come to test me: can I believe
in a life like my own, veiled
when I thought to swat,
thus murder, a black-winged god?

Walking Companion

Escaping a sick world,
I carry silence with me,
hear only birds, sighs
of a passing bike on pavement,
the scuff of my shoes
if I forget to pick up my feet.

I choose one stone as a partner—
oval, black, smooth, palm-sized,
a talisman against the invisible.
I clutch the stone like a gift.

Shaped by long friction
against the elements, it asked
nothing but a resting place, yet
I have wrested it from its home.
We meet no one. The day lengthens.

Wild Sparrow

Wing tangled
in the mesh suet feeder
its furious struggle
to get free
twists the string tighter.

I fetch small scissors, clip
the thread and he’s away,
no thanks or regret.

This small rescue
glitters—
my fingers touching
that delicate wing.

Karen Douglass, BS, MA, MFA, a native New Englander, now lives in Colorado. She has been a psychiatric nurse, horsewoman, racetrack judge, mother (still is), college instructor, poet, and novelist. 

Nathan Manley

Mallard

Anas platyrhynchos*
For A.G.

By the watchmaker’s motive element
sprung to his afternoon preen, the drake tucks
as innards tick the green enameling
of that faultless, gem-bright head he carries,
bears up like a finery, prinking now
the fan-clasp fold of each ensapphired wing.

I’ve half-discerned his lost mechanic art,
the gear drive’s twinkling teeth and symmetries
of weight and counterpoise, whirr of gilt chains
wheeling—the animal an invention
of Enlightenment clockshops—when it breaks,
this spell that’s held me half an hour, dawdling

at the duckpond, where I conjure the dead—
yes, the never replicated genius
of Vaucanson, that 
       also of a friend,
who worshipped with a sheepdog’s heart, holding
that the soul takes no form out of nature
but the motion of its fleet machineries.

* The once illustrious, now largely forgotten inventor Jacques de Vaucanson exhibited three automata at a Parisian exhibition in 1738—most famously, a clockwork duck which reproduced mechanically the essential anatomical functions of a living animal, including digestion, for which it was best known. Composed of more than four hundred moving parts, the machine’s intricate design was never documented thoroughly enough to support a modern reconstruction. By the account of one witness, however, the duck appears to have survived at least into the nineteenth century—by then in a sadly degraded condition. His automata astonished Vaucanson’s contemporaries; Voltaire compared the mechanist’s accomplishment to that of Prometheus.

Short-Eared Owl

                                    Asio flammeus

“Lamplight lost on the membranous casement,
midnight lapping—soft, osmotic—cat-eyed
at the pane; sickle moon, slick as pooled cream,
cobwebs spun like a needlepoint doily
and catching the spill of it. Throw that latch,

“won’t you? Set a spell while the coyotes yuk,
yuk it up, gleeful, on gore-scrap tatters
and humble kills. Gullyside, sprightly, 
sylphs of the May wind finick wild lilac,
tumbling idle-wise, sweet as a porch dream.

“Set still. Prick up your ear, won’t you? Bard-beaked,
freckle-breasted, Brown Owl’s out whoop-whooping 
at the wood foot of the tamarack. Why,
the vermin bunch their pretty whiskers, spooked—
Dead Creek bending to its own erasure.

“Old Cricket’s picking at his mandolin,plumb-tuckered, for the like of us, again:
stickler for struck strings singing out for love
of nothing in particular. Let him.
Hear? The milk-lit lawn’s gone hushabye blue.”

Garter Snake

                                    Thamnophis sirtalis

You’ve traveled, cool and mathematical,
up the earth’s hibernal coil, scouring out
a patch of light to warm your sleeping blood. 

What meticulous articulation
settled scales in the stonework of your head?
In passing, you’re handsome as a statue,

capable almost of speech, if not guile
to slip the fatal lie by a black lash
of your tongue and unplenty the garden.

And yet, how speechlessly you scent the drift
of our mutual fear, of irises
billowing like tattered ships at the rim

of an alien continent, and flit,
slick as sin where you disappear, dipping
down the terrace with its potted blossoms

and into the yawn of a cracked timber.
To what empty, bestial dreams you’ve dropped
in your world below the world, admitting

no command but that of my enchantment.
One hand’s tensing at the throat of the earth,
where I cannot follow you to your peace.

False Parasol

                                    Chlorophyllum molybdites*

Stain of the ethereal cup no king 
since Æthelberht’s drawn a bitter draught of, 
toadstools fatten like figs in the forage,an elfin ring at the tanglewood’s brim.
Pared, pollarded to a diplomacy
of trees, the wild, fine-fruiting, is no more.
Light laps the orchard of a foreign Christ.

Up tumbleweed country, my heritage—
skulls of bison stacked in a parodyof cultic awe—the prairie plaits her locks
with empty ceremony, wind waking
on the neck, yucca-pod stiff.                                               Even here,
missionaries heard knocks in the dark, ache
of the old religion rankled, wraithlike 
in the grass: rattle-scrape of ós and ése. 

Sprung dewside of one virgin hill no plow
could scrape to cultivation—this of few,
half-fabled, to weather the oxen yoked
of the Homestead Acts—a fairy’s circling
savagely, calling up her green-gilled shrooms
from an Otherworld isle without a name.

Hers proved a poison, steeped in spleen enough 
by nineteen hundred, to open a door
in the backcountry and carry off the child.

* Known also as Green-Spored Lepiota and colloquially as Vomiter, False Parasol is one among a range of fungal species observed to sprout in so-called fairy rings. The organism’s mycelium, of which its mushrooms are the fruiting body, consists of a buried mass of filaments called hyphae; as hyphae decompose organic matter in the soil, aboveground grasses grow lush and vigorously, enriched with nutrients loosed by the fungi’s putrefactive work. This quasi-mutualism results in circles of dark green grass and occasionally, come rainfall, of pale mushroom caps. Fatal poisonings have historically occurred only in children and small animals.

Nathan Manley is a writer and erstwhile English teacher from Loveland, Colorado. He is the author of two chapbooks, Numina Loci (Mighty Rogue Press, 2018) and Ecology of the Afterlife (Split Rock Press, 2021). Recent poems and Latin translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Portland Review, Natural Bridge, The Classical Outlook and others. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. You can find his writing and instrumental music at nathanmmanley.com.

David Anthony Martin

Interpreting a Circle

Snowshoeing the quiet folds of the forest 
down into bobcat draw and up the other side
to the hem of the meadow opening before me
a near blinding expanse of crystalline white
today is a blank slate, surface unmarked but 
by wind and sublimation, this sheet of white
pulled taut & tucked into the far scrim of oaks
beneath the cold potential of emptiness rest
the moldering calcium-phosphate rich bones of deer
which now sleeping field mice gnaw
and the fibrous matrix of collagen is devoured
slowly by bacteria and fungi, as she molders 
in return to the base elements of the field
from where her nutrition was derived

For a short time, she was the field on four feet
experiencing herself, grazing the green tastes,
solar-powered chlorophyll-infused leaves
of wild grasses busy making sugars to trade
with the penetrating mycelium conveying deep
nutrients from the darkness to shallow roots,
she ground the green to chocolate-dark pellets

The bones: a reminder      memento mori 
“You, too, shall die.” It is a statement.
An admonition. More wisdom than warning. 
Nothing but these beautiful bones remain
the eye finally emptied doorways of perception
cleansed, the skull affixed with the eternal
unhinged grin, a silent, knowing laughter,
a cosmic chuckle of joy

The Wash

crumbling granite 
radiates

smoothened stones
haphazard path of red
rounded pebbles

the ghost of ancestral mountains 
long ago eroded

fragmented name
we’ll never know 

but still here
somehow
still

falling apart 
becoming a part
of everything else

Flow

One small point in the flow of my forage
this log-cum-bridge, wet-lapped
tight-grained waterworn heartwood
lacquered slick with unseen life
I know, this creek its width just so
beyond a single stride for me
with my eyes to the far bank, can I navigate
the maneuver, will it support me
just one swift, light boot step
all I ask, not my full weight
as I might ask of a stone
and no longer than a heartbeat 
a pivot point, a fulcrum for the swift
compasses of my legs, knowing
there’s a magic to momentum,
to already being in motion—

David Anthony Martin flies kites far too infrequently, forages wild mushrooms when in season, collects feathers when he finds them, writes daily and dreams nightly. He is the author of four collections of poems (Span, Deepening the Map, Bijoux, and The Ground Nest). He works in several capacities for the Nature & Wildlife Discovery Center in Beulah and Pueblo, Colorado, including Environmental Educator, Hike Guide, Park Maintenance, and Caretaker. He is the founding editor of Middle Creek Publishing.

Ed McManis

While You Sleep

They say the deer creep down at night
from the hills, dainty as ballerinas —
behead the petunias, gladioli. 
Cloven hoof-prints mark the congregation,

soft dirt snuffled, a snort rumbling
in the crease of your dreams to wake 
you at two a.m. You gaze into the moonlit 
garden, tri-horned silhouettes pawing 

through the newly planted flower beds, 
scattering rosary beads of scat. 
A grand plié, now stare away, 
now circle beneath your

peach tree, suck the green fruit to pits. 

A neighbor’s engine, early shift,
rumbles to life, just over 
the velvety lip of the ridge. 
Red eyes return your gaze, this family 

of rude tourists, their primal indifference
curling your toes as you turn to bow 
in your slippered feet, lips sticky-
sealed with peach juice.

Kiss

The attraction—chemical,
the junkie’s fix, gambler’s dice.
Salivating, you peel
the silver dress
—one was never enough—
work your tongue around
the swirled chocolate nipple
let the melting calm 
the sigh, scratch the itch,
then the luxurious
swallow.
You pinch for another and another
working the flimsy foil,
ripcord the paper-thin
hair ribbon—two, three, numbers swirl
—the addition of addiction—
and always a roving eye,
the bag of gold nuggets
the next counter down,
the slivered almond centers
that tempt restraint, make you
believe love is more than dinner
lust or dessert; it’s in your hands
and head as you gnash
your back teeth, melt the
heart within the heart.

The Poem I Didn’t Write…Twenty Years Later

Still offended at all levels, even in translation, hissed
when I proofed, was still politically incorrect, 
got cancelled and hash-tagged, 
spat graffiti on my computer screen,
had zero metaphors.
It woke me in the middle of the night, 
ate its own paws, eyeballed my young, immigrant 
neighbor, seduced my wife, lied to my son, 
promised me optimism and a jacket cover
as it licked itself, filled out the entry form, sent
a head shot from twelve years ago, signed 
my name, was overly nostalgic
for the ole SASE.
The poem I didn’t write won the contest, 
squandered the prize money on lesser poets, interns
with big eyes ahead of me in line,
transferred onto an electronic
greeting card that forgot
to recollect itself in tranquility
as it emitted the sour odor of all human
knowledge and thought, didn’t play
tennis or even have a net. 
The poem I didn’t write forgot 
to turn out the light, let out the cat, 
kiss my family goodnight.

Ed McManis is a Colorado lifer. (He remembers when I-25 was called “The Valley Highway.”) Ed is a writer, editor, and erstwhile Head of School. His work has appeared in more than 50 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Cathexis, Colorado North Review, etc. He, along with his wife, Linda, have published esteemed author Joanne Greenberg’s (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) latest novel, Jubilee Year. Little known trivia fact: he holds the outdoor free-throw record at Camp Santa Maria: 67 in a row.

_{Photo by Sandra S. McRae}

Poems by
Maria Berardi, Patricia Dubrava, Donald Levering,
John Levy, Sandra McGarry, C. J. Rakay, and Christine Weeber 

^{© 2022 Bristlecone}

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Bristlecone welcomes poems from writers of the Mountain West region. The editors are especially eager to read poems that reflect the region’s various cultures and landscapes, although we have no restrictions in mind regarding subject matter. Our main concerns are with the quality of the work and the cultivation of a regional community of poets and poetry lovers.

Submissions are accepted year-round. Please adhere to all of the following guidelines:

• Submit 3 to 5 unpublished poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com. Submissions with more than 5 poems will not be considered.
• Poems posted on blogs and social media are considered published. Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you let us know right away if the work is accepted elsewhere.
• Use a header on at least the first page of your submission that includes your:

• Name as you wish it to appear in the journal
• Mailing address
• Email address
• Phone number
• Website address (if you have one)
• Phone number

• Submission should be in .doc or .docx file format (no .rtf or .pdf)
• Times New Roman 12 pt. font—titles in bold and not all caps
• Flush left alignment except for drop-lines, internal spaces within lines, and any other special formatting your poem requires
• 100-word maximum bio at the end of the submission; same guideline for translator bio(s). Feel free to provide live links to your website.
  

After publication, all rights revert to the individual Bristlecone authors. We consider simultaneous submissions but please let us know immediately if something you’ve submitted to us has been accepted elsewhere.

The Editors: Joseph Hutchison, Jim Keller, Sandra S. McRae, and Murray Moulding

Maria Berardi

“Spirit is What Matter Does”

—Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

Ghost world, saint realm
won’t steer this rickety boat I helm.

It is in the verb of it.
The matter that is the same thing as energy

at a certain moment at a certain speed,
a moment that leaves time, ceases.

It is in the oxymoron, constant change,
the only sure thing we know,

right back to those first amino acids combining,
self-replicating, a first miracle.

And it is in the awareness of being aware
and the strangeness of this,

what bug in the programming is that,
what gift, what difficulty,

we animals that know and know that we know,
tortuous, abundance, 

benediction, a jest.
Our north star. A mess.

Our home,
we the guest.

A Sideways Wisdom

A sidelong glance.
“Eternity is in love 
with the productions of time,” 
said great Blake. Yes.

But eternity is right now 
and heaven is not a place.
And judgment is continuous 
and never entirely unkind.

Remember to remember.
Freedom-from
and freedom-to,
that is it.

What we search for 
is with us all the time.
What we look for, we cannot see,
as we cannot see the seeing.

And that which 
we beseech 
is not separate,
and is unanswerable.

Maria Berardi’s poems have appeared online, in print, in university literary journals, meditation magazines, newspapers, and art galleries. Her first book, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is working on her second, Pagan. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Her process is one of listening for transmissions and trying to catch them on paper before they dissipate: the glimpse, the complicated knowledge. She can be reached at maria-berardi.com.

Patricia Dubrava

Under the Peach Tree

I am savoring my second cup
in the sunny breakfast room
when the magpies create a cacophony.
Magpies are raucous by nature,
but this clamor is beyond the pale.

Suspecting they have again cornered
the neighbor’s cat, I go to the backyard,
find three birds fluttering from branch 
to branch, peering down, screeching,
but no cat. A full-grown magpie 
stiffens beneath the tree, abuzz with flies.

The mourners raise their raspy din a notch.
Peering into leaves quivering with noise, 
I say: “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Fetching a sack and shovel,
I carry the carcass to the alley
for dumpster burial in plastic, 
shut the lid,
listen to sudden silence, turn to see 
not a black and white bird in sight.

An Old Story

for Albert Siebe Keuning 1954 – 1986 

In this dream, which wakes me 
when he’s been dead thirty years, 
a trash can slumps by the sandy lane, 
nestled against junipers.
Sand, Floridian as our childhood,
and junipers hugging Colorado hills,
conflated by fancy. 

It is dark when I arrive, passing
scattered trash I should clean up.
Debris edges the narrow drive:
tin cans, orange peel, eggshells.
Guilt blots the ground beneath 
Rocky Mountain blue spruce, 
Floridian night blooming jasmine.

Mom’s asleep, so I enter in darkness 
through the oil-scented garage, hear my brother,  
grope through shadowed rooms 
toward his panicky cry, 
shuffle past crumpled paper, pity, 
crushed soda cans,
fold this little boy in my arms. 
“Didn’t Mom wake up?”
“No,” he whimpers, sobs subsiding to sniffs,
clinging to me as he does whenever I return.

Out the long, low windows
the white sand of the lane glimmers
through blackened hickory trees,
beyond them, the Front Range gleams blue.
In ghostly light, spilled garbage
litters the lawn, always the same garbage.

The Lessons of Picking Cherries

Backyard cherry trees lack professional care, 
grow as many of us do, like weeds, 
lucky to find nourishment.
Late frost kills besides: two years
have passed since the last crop
twinkled candy apple red in the sun.

As I pluck fruit the know-how returns to me, 
the efficacy that only surfaces when we’ve put
our hands to the work—the way carmine
deceives, the shadow side still pale yellow;
how to tell red from red, how to recognize
in the fingers the feel of ripeness.
At first my rate is slow: it takes practice 
to resurrect skill. By day three I pick swiftly,  
rarely let the ripest and best fall,
small perfections lost. 

In the kitchen I cull those pecked or bitten, 
leaves and stems, a tiny bug or two—this is nature after all.
Facing the pitting sends a ripple of despair through me.
They are many. I picked so many, unable to stop myself,
as often happens with words. Just this branch, 
this bunch more, denying the labor
I was piling up, the finishing that matters most.

With a cold glass beside me, a rhythm 
sets in as it sometimes does on the keyboard:
gentle squeeze at the stem hole pops the pit and done. 
Assembly line work, but all work has its repetitions. 
We learn to love some, hate others, make peace with most.

Spread onto cookie sheets and into the freezer, 
they are as bright as a pinup’s lipstick. 
Rolling the hard candy marbles into freezer bags,
I reserve four cups for the pie I’ll make next winter
to rekindle the joy of labor done long ago,
its taste a burst of the best of summer.

How I Knew It Was Picking Time

In immaculate black and white tuxedos
with iridescent blue lapels, 
a magpie mafia flaps from branch
to railing to birdbath 
with as little poise as toddlers, 
scolding each other:
this water dish is mine, mine! 

Darting and stock-still, darting and still 
on the moist lawn moments ago,
the silent pair of robins has been bullied away. 

Atop the light-gilded fence,
one magpie perches in profile, revealing
between the precise scissors of its black beak
the sunlit jewel of a cherry.

Patricia Dubrava has two books of poems and one of stories translated from Spanish. She teaches creative writing and translation at the University of Denver and practices short creative nonfiction on her blog “Holding the Light” at patriciadubrava.com. Her longer essays have been published in Hippocampus, Talking Writing and other journals. Her translations of Mexican short fiction have appeared in over 25 journals, including The Massachusetts Review.

Donald Levering

Settlement

How thoroughly we’ve ruined 
the value of our home
to stake our dueling claims,
knocking out its pillars
and walls with wrecking balls.

What a team we’ve become,
having cut the estate to stumps, 
scorched the earth between us, 
auctioned keepsakes, 
split the children. 

At long last our lawyers 
have ceased hostilities, 
each having large pieces
of the opposing party’s liver
to gnaw by their bonfire of pleadings.

Henceforth the knives kept sharp for ambush
can whittle ornaments and dolls.
Instead of targeted arguments,
we can poke holes in our respective plots
to plant beans and corn and squash.

Finally you are free
to scrap your flame thrower
and unpack your cello.
I can almost hear you stroking it
the way you used to do.

We’ve witnessed the removal
of my armored suit, signed away
your interest in my old mandolin.
It needs to be re-strung before I can
pick a song of romance once again.

The Papal Broom

Havana, 1998

John Paul II has brought his broom
to sweep the atheists of Cuba
into the Holy See.
It’s the same broom he used to brush
Pope Urban the 10^th’s tomb
clean of the rumors of lechery.

Socialism, he intones to a thicket
of microphones, is the methadone
of the masses. And in his masses
he prays for world peace, for shoeless
Cubans that they be fruitful,
and for the dictator’s deliverance.

Close-ups show his TV rouge and how 
he winces from the gout that keeps him 
seated to consecrate the Bunny float.
He scrunches his nose, whispers to an aide
who translates, The Easter Egg smells vaguely 
female, and is best hollowed out and painted.

He wants to sweep the island free
of hypocrisy, and for starters
enumerates the times he desired
women priests. Beside him the infirm
despot confesses he’d ordered saltpeter 
sprinkled in his soldiers’ cigars.

The Holy Father’s homily, sweet as sugar
cane, forgives imprisoned dissidents.
He lifts his broom to sanctify
voodoo charms and rumbas, he blesses
sightings of the Queen of Heaven
in murals saluting the Revolution.

As the Yankee anchorman confuses
John Paul’s catacomb connections,
the Pontiff dons his stiff miter to beatify
the first Cuban Catholic midwife.
From the balcony he waves at the masses,
leaning on the papal broom.

Donald Levering’s 16th poetry book, Breaking Down Familiar, will be released in May of 2022. A previous book, Coltrane’s God, was Runner-Up in the 2016 New England Book Festival contest in poetry. Before that, The Water Leveling with Us placed 2nd in the 2015 National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Creative Verse. I am a former NEA Fellow and won the 2018 Carve magazine contest, the 2017 Tor House Robinson Jeffers Prize, and the 2014 Literal Latté prize. My work has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac podcast.

John Levy

Grasshopper

When I see you in your armor, grasshopper, with your oblong
eye

protruding from your shell of a face, your shield
existence, 

all the barbs on your legs, your delicate
antennae,

I could be you I know
and even more the you I don’t.

Mule Deer

Named after a mule because these deer’s
ears

are bigger than those of
white-tailed deer, say,

but not all
that much, I think, maybe

incorrectly. I think maybe incorrectly most
of my time, mulish

yet walking on two legs
so as not to be rebarbative

in company, even when alone. But I don’t think
I got even “mulish”

right, because when I “used” it
up there, in the eighth line, I thought it meant something

different than obstinate. Unfairly, I
thought it was derisive in a different

but bigger way, the way I often feel
I fucked up in some manner I know full well

I’m exaggerating yet I ruminate upon, which
reminds me that the five mule deer I surprised in our

backyard on the outskirts of Tucson three evenings ago
were nibbling on tall sharp-spined cactus. Quite

incredible
they didn’t hurt their lips.

John Levy lives in Tucson. His most recent book is Silence Like Another Name (otata’s bookshelf, 2019), which is available online as a PDF at https://otatablog.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/john-levy-silence-like-another-name-ebook-1.pdf.

Sandra McGarry

I Watch Them Disappear

In the pond five ducks swim.
They write on the water with webbed-feet pens
circles-in-circles = watermarks.

I want to be a translator of those geometries.

There is paper with watermarks and
cursive lines of love opened on the desk.
How once in Paris or was it Colorado?

You wrote how color changes
when the rain tints the buildings— 
How it deepens everything.

And how missing magnifies an intensity of desire. 
Or that old woman at The Brown Palace who
steadied the hand of the old man.

Fire was there—you wrote, the sureness of it,
after she’d settled the napkin at his chin.
Is there not room for kindness everywhere?

How this question follows me for years.
Is it true with age there 
comes a deeper understanding of that fire? 

It is time and light that takes the words
to lighten—the circles, too. 
The ducks are gone.

I read the letters now remembering:

A sure hand.
A fine pen.
An ink thought indelible.

When I can hold no more,
I fold the words
along the well-worn creases.

Outside the window—rain
drop by heavy drop writes
its own story.

Moving

It is late evening the purple plums are eaten.
The concord grapes are in the bag in the car’s trunk,      
stored alongside two suitcases full     of dreams. 
And an uncountable number of grains of sand
to remember   packed into a Mason jar—
that long hot summer that startled 
the corn in every field passed.
We were moving west with fire in the heart.
We watched the dawns breaking.
And took in the dying fields— 
Unimaginable.  The colors of sorrows.

Sandra McGarry grew up in the east near the ocean. She taught elementary school for 28 years. She moved to Colorado in 2009 to be near her children. She enjoys hiking and biking. She’s published in Pilgrimage, Paterson Review, Encore, and DoveTales.

C. J. Rakay

Everywhere and Now

You always told me that you could feel them, those that had died, 
the ones you so loved, so young, so many for you. That you felt them 
as though they were sitting with you at the kitchen table
over a cup of green tea or a bowl of berries, 
each one chatting away, you gladly listening. 

They’re gone. 
Strange, you said, how you knew that but somehow 
didn’t believe it—couldn’t believe it. How could you, you said, 
when you see them in the soft light of every new moon,
in the bright eyes and sweet breath of our children,
even in that shiver you felt in your limbs for what you thought was no good reason. 

They’re not gone, you said. 
They’re here. They’re everywhere. 
And I thought it was so nice—so very sweet—that you believed that. 
But I never did. Until now, until today, when that lone stream 
of morning sun blazed through our bedroom window, and there you were.

C. J. Rakay is a two- time First Place prize winner and two-time runner-up of the Poetry Society of Colorado contests. She was a finalist for the most recent Daisie E. Robinson award.

Christine Weeber

A Home, A Trap

I am inside the full moon 
     as it skins, skins rainbow trout
  she looks up- 
    stream,
       plies the pool

Caddisflies hatch, 
               emerge 
        from pupal shucks
     their own slow dawn 
clouds as runoff heats 

   We are inside that rupture 
  pupal skins floating
     water pulls us
       down-
   stream
         we 
             wing 
   against shuck 
          edges 

Our emergence 
       bleeds 
    an ephemeral 
  sun- 
      wash 
    we carry 
with us
    wings ablaze
       scooping air,
    darting—
early home now death trap

Ravens

Which six are mine?
  I can’t tell

from the conspiracy
    shooting across the sky

I try to spot them, eye the eyes—
   but like falling stars rising 
they split the atmosphere

   all wing and tail and beak

a body of one
  a body of a hundred

circling, creasing, torpedoing.

The turn a wave crashing sunset’s brow.

    They curl along the western ridgeline,
   frozen trees muscular and blank.
The body coalesces, disappears.  

   I am left in the wake, as is the fading light.

 My circle of oily, glinting feathers
     anchored in sand shifts, shifts.

Christine Weeber is the author of two poetry chapbooks, In the Understory of Her Being (in English and Spanish) and Sastrugi. Her poetry and prose have appeared in the Wild Roof Journal, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, the Kyoto Journal,Solo: On Her Own Adventure, and other publications. Christine is the poetry editor at SAPIENS, an online magazine that illuminates the world of anthropology for a general audience. Keep up with Christine at https://www.christineweeber.com.