Issue 6: July 2022

Photo of Bristlecone Pine on Mount Blue Sky

_{Photo by Sandra S. McRae}

Poems by
Alice Dugan Goble, Ron McFarland, Oliver Scofield,
K. Blasco Solér, and Lisa Zimmerman

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Submit 3 to 5 unpublished poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com.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

Clear Creek – February

The middle is open, and ice bricks knock and swirl.
Channels run through slab ice in sunny spots,
frozen bubbles from turbulence stop time.

Snowflakes float toward ground,
then gone. Slant sun through skims of ice
makes gold-lit wavering lines on stones.

Light and water agree about beauty.

Walking west, ice sheets curl near banks,
cut back in on themselves. We sit,
creek level on sun-warmed granite.

Beneath the water, a singing.
The creek never asks who will love it.
Movement matters. Running toward.

Alice Dugan Goble is a Colorado poet with a few published poems, a love for poetry, a huge family, and a busy life-coaching business. The stunning natural beauty of Colorado is often her inspiration.

Ron McFarland

National Backyard Bird Count

Following the seven-thirty flurry of birds
nothing, not so much as a ragged sparrow.

We’re half listening to a classic music channel,
Beethoven’s fifth violin sonata, “Spring,”

even though it’s only two-thirds through February,
so we’re being teased and we know it.

The online weather report threatens
snow by way of reprimand for

another tour-de-force in self-delusion.
Local papers have ceased deliveries

leaving us vulnerable to the vagaries of
television and online news when it comes

to keeping up with various wars and assorted
calamities. We’re both of us almost eighty,

that time of life when for truly important news
one must rely on poetry or birds.

An Elation of Birds

He dreamed that morning of a black-and-white bird
that might’ve been a magpie but probably wasn’t.

It crept along a bare branch of the scarlet hawthorn
suspended over two feet of crusted snow catlike

toward the birdseed snowman who hung there
from his twine tether gently rocking in the wind,

attracting nuthatches, black-capped chickadees,
juncos, and the day before, a gold-splashed oriole.

He woke to a chorus of birds singing their hearts out
and a hungry squirrel poised to leap at the snowman

where he swayed beige-bodied under his black
top hat, silent and vulnerable, ready to serve.

Wind rang music from the chimes on the porch,
but no one seemed to be in a dancing mood, not

nuthatch, junco, chickadee, squirrel, nor snowman
coal-black-eyed, four-black-buttoned, black-mittened,
thin-red-mufflered, hanging from his taut twine noose.

Prey Animals

Oh, the neighbor’s cat’s a real killer,
slays newborn rabbits, occasionally a young
careless squirrel, pursues the quail
we think of as our quail although we
have no proof of ownership.
Her cat’s a tom named Tom
after her ex, “a cad” to hear her tell it.

He now lives out in the county
with two black labs his neighbors say
raise hell with their chickens.
He shoots pheasant over his dogs.
“Dogs should run free,” he insists.
“Chickens should be kept in coops.”
He never cared for cats.

We hiss away our neighbor’s cat
when we catch him sneaking over,
but he’s a stealthy predator,
proof of which we can document
readily in myriad feathers.
But we like our neighbor, a kind and
lovely woman opposed to human violence.

One day, or night more likely, her tom
will slip away, cross Mountainview
and foray into the wheatfields
on the edge of town in search of
dietary variety in the form of voles.
Coyotes lullaby us sometimes late at night.
They are not known to be vegetarians.

The Hummingbird and the Cranky Old Man

The hummingbird buzzed the old man’s ear
and whirred her way to the pollen-packed beebalm
blooming magenta early that year.

The old fellow muttered and quaffed his cold beer
as the bird whirred past with nary a qualm
buzzing once more his half deaf ear.

The feathery feeder posed without fear,
sipped blossom to blossom, utterly calm,
while the geezer guzzled his glass of warm beer

and consigned himself to uncertain cheer,
his life having dimmed to a sorrowful psalm.
He’d watered the beebalm early that year,

so this tiny green guest, unbidden, drew near
to establish her nest as a brief summer home
and offer this codger a buzz of good cheer.

Yes, the hummingbird buzzed the old man’s ear,
bold and insouciant, and flew up quite near
to tell the old fogy he had nothing to fear
if he watered his flowers and stuck to his beer.

Ron McFarland, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Idaho following 50+ years in academe, lives and writes in Moscow, Idaho. In 1984, he was named the state’s first Writer-in-Residence, a two-year position that involved ten readings and residencies all over the state.

Oliver Scofield

Mom’s Favorite Pastime

After Santee Frazier

Aspen march solemnly
            into our fields
                        and Douglas fir
                                                            push through yarrow and last year’s grass.
                                                She smiles when she asks

            do you want to see the trees?
What she means is
            do I want to spend a few hours
                        pulling weeds?
                                    Her floppy straw hat

                        elbow patched shirt
            ripped leather gloves
and faded bandana
            gather around her.
                        We walk into our field

                                    and pull weeds.
                        You would not believe what Luther
            did last week.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
            Neighborhood frustrations

                        also need pruning.
                                    And the 60 acres behind Miller’s
                        was bought, did you see
            the No Trespassing signs?
Bend, grab, twist, pull.

            Toad Flax gathers
                        in dirty piles.
                                    We find a new tree,
                        place a stake to mark
            this brave young soul.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
            Also the foxes have a new den
                        we haven’t seen any kits
                                    but the mom
                        took a chicken

            carcass from my compost.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
Harriers order
                        the meadowlark’s
                                    and tree swallow’s
                        silence. Ours too
            for a skyward  minute.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
            Oh my god! The thistle is soo
                        bad this year

                                    but I’ve pretty much cleared
                        between my driveway
            and the gully.
We squat amid tall grasses
            twisting out invasives, look east

                        worn barns, forest’s edge
                                    then the Tetons
                        stare back.
            It is a good day to talk
and pull weeds.

In Defense of Whatever Happens Next

After Laura Da

I.

Faint wagon tracks
lead away from Felt
along Bull Elk creek
across meadows
up a switchback.

Then, the Hollingshead homestead
buildings adrift
in waves of foothills
crumpling against
lodgepole shores.

Aspen nestle
edge two-track
cover themselves in spring.
The wagon rests
under hand-hewn planks
supplies yet unloaded.

Miles and Karl
silhouettes
on the threshold
looking like the barns
they have built
grey, stooped, worn.

II.

Going forward looking back
hay falls in lines, spiraling inward
to catch Miles on the iron seat, horses fore:
the prow breaking sea of timothy.

He keeps scythe swathes smooth
through dips and over the ridge.
Snap of reins, red tail’s shriek
            against that symphonic swish
of grass slipping sideways.

Down the valley
clouds, dark and heavy
            push east
            slight flashes
            will pass below
they stay dry-docked another day.

Karl sharpens axes in the forge
wooden handles clamped in a vice
file scrape matching his breath.

A broken window pane
            like a sunrise yet to come
            condenses light onto the silver gleam
            of fresh metal.

breath
            rasp
                        breath
                                    rasp
The file pushes forward
axehead ground slowly back.III.

In October’s first snow
I see them most clearly
ancestors through thick flakes
they move
                        with wind
            among cabins
and along the ridge.

I give their actions
calm urgency
as if they must achieve
autumn’s chores
before the tattered aspen
            vanish.

III.

In October’s first snow
I see them most clearly
ancestors through thick flakes
they move
                        with wind
            among cabins
and along the ridge.

I give their actions
calm urgency
as if they must achieve
autumn’s chores
before the tattered aspen
            vanish.

IV.

Each building burrows
in two feet of snow
whistling hollowly
wood stoves cold
and empty of ash.

Stakes poke through
            the drifts
haphazard seedlings
of Doug fir and lodgepole.

Come spring
we won’t till
and plant these fields
but watch the forest
slowly reclaim its own.

I ski to the forge
past an old Toyota
buried to its wheel wells
trundle open the door
coughing into the musty
scent of mouse droppings
            and sawdust
I pull a file from a drawer
clamp my axe in the vice
and breathe out

Oliver Scofield is an MFA student at Northern Arizona University studying poetry and environmental narrative. He grew up on an old homestead near the Idaho-Wyoming border. He currently works as a Wilderness ranger for the Forest Service during the summer and splits his time between Montana and Arizona.

K. Blasco Solér

Mutability of Water

Its mutability / its ability to be both airy and almost weightless and so very deep and burdensome on branches and rooftops / covering everything / both insulating and deadly / fragments of water that make immensity / the lightness of so many geometric feathers / fractals / fierce gentleness / soft / soft / soft / disappearing as gently and powerfully as it came melting to water / to sky / to fall to falls and streams down mountainsides and ravines and into roots and stems into bodies / all bodies / and blanketing again come winter / impossibly heavy / smothering / white and so filled with gray ash and grit / trapping and bringing down all the particulates and smog / keeping it all through the hard winter / creepily still when not blowing all around in gale-force winds /

K. Blasco Solér is a poet and science writer from Alaska. She is an MFA candidate and adjunct creative writing instructor at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.

Lisa Zimmerman

Answering the Question I Asked My Literature and Environment Students
on the Last Day of Class

Can a writer continue to celebrate what is beautiful on this planet,
even as it’s paved and poisoned and lost for all time?
—Kathleen Dean Moore

I will always argue for joy. I will argue for witnessing the tiny splendors of this fierce world, like the spider in the bathtub that startled me. Tiny splendor of spider and his right to be here. The rabbit chasing off the squirrel under the bird feeder. Little purple asters still alive after snow melted into leaf muck and the after-scatter of November wind. I will argue for the stately black-crowned night heron on the broken tree branch at dusk. I will argue for the full moon’s breath of light across the half-frozen lake where turtles and frogs hibernate in cold mud, their hearts slowed to an ancient rhythm of waiting. A rhythm I can almost feel as I swim toward sleep in the faint starlight that leans far and quiet against this side of the planet.

I say yes.

Why I Need Horses and What For

to see them move as smoke
across the singing earth
to stand between me and all weather

to nicker from the stable
under night’s black roof
to breathe against my anxious heart

to remind me how,
as a girl, I became a horse every day
cantering beyond the unfenced yard

far from the barn on fire
far from the bitter master

Lisa Zimmerman’s poems and short stories have appeared in many journals including Apple Valley Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, Cave Wall, Ghost Parachute, and Vox Populi. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Orison Anthology, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. Her poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here(winner of the Violet Reed Haas Award), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), The Hours I Keep and Sainted (both from Main Street Rag). She’s a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado and lives with her family in Fort Collins.

Issue 5: May 2022

_{Artwork by Sarah Sajbel}

POEMS BY
Beth Franklin, John Knoll, Brian Palmer,
Renée Ruderman, and Leath Tonino

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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.

Beth Franklin

Returning to San Francisco

Lines from “Accidentals” in
Old Man Laughing, by Robert W. King

When my sister asks me to go to San Francisco,
I hesitate. But go.  In an outdoor café,
settled at a French iron table, a demitasse of espresso

held in his left hand, a sharpened pencil in his right,
Bob begins the lines of a love poem. He contemplates two
Japanese poets, both named Takahashi. Shinkichi’s world:

a  Zen sparrow, a serene flower,  a peach’s emotion.
Mutsuo’s an autumn darkness, a father’s longing, the hunger of a child.
Bob writes, fire engines sirening around him.

Taxi cabs blare at slow-moving cars,
a crowd of people pass in front.
Amidst this chaos, he considers Mutsuo,

whose book he accidently brought along,
and the woman he loves:
…who sleeps back in our room, beautiful
even more because it’s afternoon…

Walking uphill with my sister, I think about that first book
that made Bob the writer he wanted to be. Five years revising,
a month-long stay at McGregor’s Cabin #6,  ten essays

about West Hope, his grandfather’s loss of a grocery business,
two defeated homesteading attempts, his mother’s sadness
at her mother’s sudden death, far away from the sister

she loved. But his poet self also wrote about the Big South
he saw as Chinese landscape, Dadd Gulch, a stock trail of yellowing aspen,
the abandoned town of Manhattan, a vision of ghost gold.

My sister and I walk through the green-tiled pagoda gate
into Chinatown. Red festival lanterns swing above us.
Her young grandson is still asleep in our hotel room.

Vendors sell packages of dried persimmon.  Firecrackers
explode, drums pound.  Ribs sizzling on outdoor grills.
People celebrate the end of Chinese New Year.

Shinkichi aside, Bob chose to write
about the woman he loved,
a woman composed primarily of sunlight.

I read both Takahashis, found next to each other
on the cabin bookshelf.  His margin notes, penciled lines,
dog-eared pages trace the clues of his mind.

I think about the man I loved,
thinking about the woman he loved,
asleep in our hotel room.

Incidentals

The worst thing you can imagine has already
Zipped up its coat and is heading back
Up the road to wherever it came from.

―Tracy K. Smith, from “No Fly Zone”

Waking up, asleep since 2 a.m.,
a small pain in my left shoulder reminds me
I am alive.

A cool breeze in my room,
the moon visible through a cracked window
of the old garage.

The dream is always the same:
I am walking alone up a road,
to wherever it came from.

Houses are visible,
curtains mask the lives inside.
Old women stand quietly with children

on the side of a dusty road.
A small brown sign materializes,
the words are blurred.

Two photos from our first year of marriage,
appear on a table next to a bed.
In one, I am smiling next to a blooming

pink bougainvillea in Sevilla.
In another, I am a reflection
in a restaurant window in Segovia,

famous for serving roasted leg of pork.
I walk around a large pond. The goslings
have grown large. The rabbitbrush

is in full bloom. A red-winged blackbird
sits carefully on purple penstemon.
I do not breathe. I do not feel joy.

At the edge of the water, a child fishes
with her father.

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.

John Knoll

Black and White

Can’t play a right note on my piano
Can’t play a wrong note
All the keys are drunk
And I’m in a window
Smoking a cigarette
Looking down into a wet street
Wondering if I should go out
And buy me a coffin
The Blue Moon’s open late tonight
And I’ve got a few dollars to blow
So it’s howling down 4^TH Street
Singing songs that make no sense
Staggering in the rain
Getting soaking wet
Happy as a stand-up bass
In a Miles Davis quartet

At the Center of the Universe

Up in the air
7,250 feet above the sea
in New Mexico’s
Rio Arriba County
with East L.A.vato
Richard Marquez
throwing signs
on the corner of
unnamed road and
unnamed road
A baby doe appears
Richard says
“Hello little one
you’re very beautiful
I wish I had something
to give you
but I just ate my
ice cream and
I don’t think I
should give you my
chile chips
they might make you
run all night”
The doe freezes
ears alert
like she understands
Silence passes
between them
Eternity temporarily
unravels its knots
The doe turns
to leave
“Wait a minute”
Richard whispers
“Don’t leave
I have something else
to tell you”
The doe stops
turns looks
listens
Richard’s voice
tender music now
like a grandfather
talking to his grandchild
“My name is Richard
little one
remember me in the
spirit world”
The doe twitches
her ears
disappears in
the woods
Richard’s words echo
Remember me
Remember me

The Wind Has Seven Colors

Four members of the Native American Church gather wood on Skull Mountain’s south slope. They chop wood with long handle axes. Tomas, an old Taos Indian, supervises the ritual cutting of oak and elm, making sure the wood is the correct length, so everything will be just
right for the peyote ceremony.

“The mountain should not hear machines on a day like this,” Tomas says.

The mountain’s silence broken by the sound of chainsaws about fifty yards down the mountain. Tomas could see a pickup with Texas plates and two men, cutting wood, partying with their girlfriends, drinking beer.

He walks down the mountain and asks them to move to another part of the forest. “Why don’t you guys go over there,” he says, pointing to the heavily forested eastern slope. “’I’d appreciate it if you guys would move over there because we are preparing for a special time and the mountain doesn’t like to hear machines on a day like this.”

“Go to hell, old man,” one of the women yells out.

He walks back down the mountain, picks up an axe, says, “Those people down there won’t listen. They don’t understand our ways.”

Tomas and his companions chop wood and gather wood for another hour. No chainsaw roar from below. A haunting silence. A presence. “The wind now has seven colors,” Tom says.

After loading the wood they get in the pickup and drive down the mountain towards Taos Pueblo. The drive past the white guys who are bent over their chainsaws. They pull the starter cords and curse, pull and curse but the chainsaws won’t start.

Tomas waves as they drive past. “You guys have a good day,” he says. Immediately the chainsaws start to run.

John Knoll has authored six poetry books, two plays-written with Joe Speer- a CD, featuring John Macker and an environmental jazz radio play, If You Rape My Mama I Will Kill You, with music by Zimbabwe En Kenya. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, including Beatitude and Exquisite Corpse. He performs his poetry with jazz and rock musicians, most notably The Jack Kerouac Band, Nuclear Trout and Ground Zero.

Brian Palmer

Yes, Then I’ll Go

Still. Then suddenly the herd is thundering
over plains as one whole formless cloud
that when it meets a yellow hill reticulates
to pounding hot crisscrossing trails of dust
rejoining with wild tumult at the top
where all is gone in one last smoky whorl
that spins, lifts, fades into a boundless blue.

A disappearance I’ll make someday, too.

I’ll go, go up from this dry August wash
back to the ocean sky and leave behind
this desiccating piece of earth that is
my body-shell.
But will I ever find
myself beyond that dissolution into—?

For now, I’ll take the distance of tomorrow,
the pain of waiting for a quenching rain,
and later leave this lonely, lovely field
whose antelope have fled so recently.

Yes, then I’ll go like them, away, away.

I Once Sat by a Sumac in the West

I once sat by a sumac in the west
insisting to exist in a remote
dry corner at the crux of four fenced fields.

It lived just past a scattered pole corral
behind an empty hay-roofed loafing shed,
its three-toothed autumn leaves had turned to red.

The memory of that ember-plant revives
in me a spirit that’s been sleeping, waking
now as daylight smolders into dusk.

Clear marble dawn will find me flying down
the windy streams of lonely backroads looking
for leaves unfurling green, refiring

the West, that masterwork enduring even
in the ramshackle middle of nowhere.

Brian Palmer was raised in the Midwest, lived for several years in the Pacific Northwest (which he still visits regularly), but has spent most of his life in various regions of Colorado, each one marvelously unique. He finds great satisfaction in writing poetry, and he’s the editor of THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays.

Renée Ruderman

Dreaming of the Dead

It’s not             that they don’t want to speak              the dead
They do                                         but they move mostly mutely
although sometimes I hear             the drone of their double bass
from the longest string            or the murmur of water over stone
They hide sometimes                             in a field of high grasses
or help me with a move                              lifting a heavy couch
Some dress in white caftans                                and drive badly
Some point at streets without signposts                 when I’m lost
It’s true                                        they seem surprised at nothing
And they rarely smile or hug
but some lie in my bed                       bequeathing me company.

Serenity

I want to sway in a hammock
for a while,
feather clouds
with my eyelashes.

I want to accompany
the crow chorus,
blowing notes to heaven
on my flute.

I want a pageant of air
in my throat,
the dazzle
of berries
on my tongue.

I want to read reclined
in the fashion of rabbis,
turning pages I have marked
up with dots, carets,
marginalia.

I want the release
to begin in my jaw:
unleash the hinges
unfasten the tendons
unravel this body
to the morning moon,
the interminable stars,
to embryonic galaxies;
let me fill with
a wave good-bye
to the harbor.

Renée Ruderman is a recently retired English professor from Metropolitan State University of
Denver who has two published books, another forthcoming, a few prizes, numerous
publications, and a black cat.

Leath Tonino

Dawn Walk

I would stop
the beat of blood,

the brush of breath.
the thousand pebbles

of thought crunching
softly beneath these boots,

would step from the trail
and stop my living,

this lifelong blinking,
to be here

dead a time
in listening.

To be here hearing
as the gray log

hears the soil
it becomes,

as the pond
beneath the geese

hears the floating feathers
once the geese have flown,

as the cloud
over the peak

hears the sky’s blue
pressing from the east.

To be here watching
with the ears of leaves

that last of me
ghost on away.

Leath Tonino is a freelance writer publishing prose and poetry in Orion, The Sun, Tricycle, High Country News, Outside, and elsewhere. He is the author of two essay collections about the outdoors, both with Trinity University Press: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long (2018) and The West Will Swallow You (2019).

Issue 4: April 2022

_{Artwork by Sarah Sajbel}

POEMS BY
Jonah Bornstein, Frank Coons, Sharon Corcoran,
Amy Wray Irish, Melody Jones, Marjorie Power,
and Andrew Schelling

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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.

Jonah Bornstein

Raven Flight at the Grand Canyon

I know the lust of hang-gliders to loop upward
in the grace of ravens, forming fissures in air
as if they, too, were custodians of space.
I watch them drift across the desert,
hands clenched to the reins
of taut wings, their bodies clamped to saddles;
I remember seeing
one of these creatures
dangling like a struck bird from electrical wires
above the coast highway—no formula of wellness
would return him, the bent grille
of his body haunting
me for years after. Now relaxed
in a warm motel room below the canyon,
its buffeting wind unlocked from my body
by a hot shower, I wonder whether the woman
who spoke truly did see a tagged condor,
the exposed pink guts
of its head a splotch of luminescence
against the ragged streaks of light
shifting on canyon walls, or a moose
in Oak Creek Canyon, the trolley
of her imagination unfolding at the rim,
smiling, glorious in her tellings, rose
madder dyeing the pale skin
under her eyes. It is enough, I wanted to say, to see
the particulars of where we are—
the clipped dust of deer tracks, to hear the thump of wings,
and watch a brace of ravens coil
up from the canyon’s lips, making visible
channels of air unfelt from our perch on the rim.
But I, too, have created canyon stars
out of a scattering of desert datura; and I question,
even, the hang glider forty years ago—wonder
if my parents diverted my gaze away from the snared man
to the cable of knotted cars, afraid
of death hovering above us, or whether I’d seen
at all, that my young mind opened a fissure
to move the uneasy flight
of man toward earth where I could see
its consequence, and know that daring
brings death close—that my story now
is to climb the pole, lasso the impervious hum
of wires that crowds our bodies
with a language we cannot understand.

Nightfall at Bell Rock

The red hills begin to glow
shrugging heat off their chameleon buttes.
It is their breath
faithful as the night blending into them.
Soon Bell Rock alone remains distinct, her full nipple
ready to drip its mineral milk down the smooth
slope of her breast to the gulch
where branches of a cypress skirt above
the ground like the woman in Guanajuato
who begged me
to buy a white carnation for my wife.

Fields of dwarf primroses
glow and shake in the dark, like a bed frame
of the newly married.
I look up at Venus dulling the checkerboard

of stars, and feel a chill

catch in my back, as if a cold blade

had found the spine.
I sit down in the dark; the insect’s
guttural grate vibrates in my body
as do the junipers’ silhouettes, their wild gestures
so quiet, finally, in postures of relief.

This Morning’s Dark Rain

This morning’s dark rain
buds on the tips of branches, sunlight
taking shape in these pendants
the way the flamelight from the candles
illuminated your hair and eyes
the night before you left
on a journey to the Mohave where the straggly
Larrea endures, its roots sprawling
outward for thousands of years to bind
the earth under the desert. You will sit before
this ancient bush until you learn
that patience is a feeling
that shifts with the winds the way
sands drift into forms
that cannot be predicted—such is the heartbeat
that pulses between bodies at rest
and in the fanned petals of ardor.

Pilot Light

I spend mornings shadowing
the pilot
light; it flickers against the heat
stone in the gas fireplace; the flame bows
and drifts one way,
then another,
from a wind of its own shaping.
Sometimes I turn up the thermostat.
The heating element blazes
open, clarifies the carnelian underside
of the curved stone—
it glows like rock arches
at sunset, or a campfire
as night falls.

I’m invited to sit and listen
among the broad-faced peoples
of the desert, to stories
of the morning, how
the world glistens
in a tree’s veins, and blushes
along the escarpment rims
where jackrabbits stand up to acknowledge
beginnings and ends.

When the wine is done,
we rouse. The black night
opens its hearth, a fleck of moon funneling us
up the slope to our tents, entrances
facing northeast where ridgelight
breaks from darkness
and reveals a fluted sky
we must all climb if we are to go
forward from absent
leaves into the harsh light of summer.

It is then, hidden things disclose
themselves, insects begin to hum,
and the black-spotted
lichen, that rings
the flats of rocks become a map
to the labyrinth we spend our lives
seeking entrance to.

We mumble goodnight.
I close the tent flap.
My friends have put away
their azure and turquoise jewelry,
settled into their beds as I will do,
our lives linked by more than story
or shared blankets, the stutter-steps
of our dreams arcing
into the course of the river,
tracing natural cairns
to a shore where there is no longer any need
to cry out to one another.

Desert Praise

White birch and aspen,
fir and willow and pine,
outcroppings that give the earth
shape, rock, your salmons
and grays, your yellow and blue
lichen and your red, the plant in your crotch,
the grassy plot on top
and the hidden reach of its roots.
Fish that give colors names,
the needles of pine from afar
that provide the tree its earth,
the mountain air and my breath,
spot to lie down on by the creek,
lonely yarrow flower
thinking it’s spring.
And you, too, desert and all dry things,
piñon and juniper, sagebrush
and bottle brush, lizard on the windowsill,
grasshopper with only one hind leg,
the sky that asks for nothing,
the stones in the road, the white-tails
plunging into brush,
the red birch along Secco Creek
and the late sun that glows at its tips,
the red grasses, the golden grasses,
the sycamore’s open arms
and the oaks, leaves that do not fall
and the buds at the nips,
the ants who have closed their gates
too early and wait in their hills like people before a fire,
the arroyo and the canyons, the powdered
desert and the hard, the basalt and the quartz,
I praise the dry rivers and the wet,
my father who is dead
and my mother who is not,
the lover who guides and the lover
who does not, the broad mesas
and being alone and loneliness which is its opposite.
I praise the wind that pricks the ears of things.

Jonah Bornstein has taught poetry and creative writing at several universities in New York City, Oregon, and now University of Denver. Jonah co-founded and directed the Ashland Writers Conference (1997-2002) and directed the International Writers Series at Southern Oregon University. His poetry collections include The Art of Waking and A Path Through Stone, as well as three chapbooks, “Mortar,”“Treatise on Emptiness,”and“We Are Built of Light.” Publications include poems in Prairie Schooner, Wallawa Journal, and The West Wind Review. He lives in Denver with his wife, the artist Rebecca Gabriel.

Frank Coons

Interspecies Encounter Question

It’s not a crime
to walk this path
through late winter
snow in this open space
on the edge of the city
though I’m blatantly
stealing time wandering
through the mind-fog
of last week’s muddle
when I should pay
tribute to the soft
carpet of white
underneath and that’s
when I see the three
coyotes
who no doubt
eyed me
who knows
how long ago
two on my left
and one on my right
keeping equidistant
and quiet
they’re nervous eyes
watching watching
and yes I know
they are unlikely to
mistake me as prey
yet some ancient part
of my amygdala
is navigating fight/
flight parameters
and perhaps
but who really knows
maybe their gray matter
is doing much the same
because we sentient beings
treasure survival
and are destined to calculate
and recalculate odds
so I walk and they
walk until a teen
on a fat-wheeled bike
rolls up yelling
do you see them
do you see them
and like that they’re
off on spindly legs
soundlessly disappear
one looking back just once
I wonder
will they catalogue
like me
this interchange under
interspecies interaction
and wonder
what the fuck
just happened

Tribulations of the Mockingbird

Does the mockingbird
ever forget
how his own song sounds?

Gifted with pliable voice,
he prattles on, mimicking
screech owl and hawk—
it pays to know an assassin’s catchphrase.

Chickadee and phoebe come easy—
staccato syllables repeated ad nauseum.
Same with crow and wood pee wee.

But some birds must drive him crazy.
Like the multisyllabic meadowlark
or solitaire and the rabble warblers

who blare various arias, canticles
and madrigals in the pale blue air of spring,
over and over in varying renditions—

like an ostinato or a Phillip Glass opus
and no wonder the bird sits sometimes
mute on a branch pretending to be deaf.

To the Universe, a Million Years is a Long Crazy Weekend

The dove-gray Morrison soil,
half clay, half gravel,
conceals the evidence
of long-dead behemoths.

A word not chosen lightly,
but the size of bleached bones
and teeth and the reconstructed
museum specimens speak truth
to what’s gone missing.

I walk on bedrock
that once held effluvia
on the edge of an inland sea,
where palms towered over
a tangle of vines and creatures
of enormous proportions
roamed the swamps.

What I see now
is stunted greasewood and sage
on a landscape of scarcity.
A quarrelsome crow
and a five-inch lizard,
(who could both be descendants
of the giants)
are the only animation.

The mind shutters at geologic time,
an oldness hard to fathom.
But I can’t help but wonder,
long after the Anthropocene is over,
what the next iteration
might look like.

Proteus in the Rocky Mountains

Hiking through rarified air on the cusp of tree line,
I saw a worn man on a roan mare, visage
of a previous century, all muslin and leather
and burden and asked him to where he traveled.

In a voice born of gravel and tobacco, he said,
to find that changeling Proteus in his lair,
just where the water gathers above the avens,
from a thousand runnels.

But so mobile, so malleable is the old king,
he’d determined that the searching was the thing,
and not the finding. By this, I gathered
he was just some fool gone wandering,

and probably more vagabond than philosopher.
Against my better self, I determined to follow
him at a distance up the rock-strewn path, in search
of such sea monsters and water gods as might

be found this high. Through the day, we climbed
until the tarns were small as mirrored moons
and the tundra, bog-like. I followed the horse-
shoe prints of a rider on a mission until I spied him

lighting kindlin for his fire. Pause, now reader
if you will, but there beside him, a beast I find
even now at a loss to describe, but it was a lion
head and serpent tail he had, that morphed

as he talked, in both color and form like some
chameleon—man, god, creature, who spoke
in a voice of rain, waterfall, vapor, streams too small
to bear a name, and the oceans they drained to.

Believe it if you will, or not and beware the wanderer
who seeks a myth. Some find what others won’t,
Poseidon’s son, I insist, was here where water
is birthed before it runs.

Frank H. Coons is a poet and veterinarian living in Colorado. He is the author of three books of poetry. His first book, Finding Cassiopeia, published in 2014, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. His second book, Counting in Dog Years was published in 2016. Both were published by Lithic Press. The third, A Flash of Yellow Wing, was published in 2021 from Orchard Street Press. His work has appeared in Caesura, Pinyon Review, Evening Street Press, Plainsongs, Pensive Journal, Santa Fe Literary Review, Pacific Review, and elsewhere. He was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2019.

Sharon Corcoran

Mountains and Clouds

Made for each other, in the way that
opposites attract, mountains in their solidity,
stolid and unmoving despite illusions of advance and retreat,
while clouds work their magic in movement and change,
draping the rocky shoulders with snowy capes,
diffusing dawn sun through their scrim,
sneaking like smoke from behind,
mimicking peaks’ profiles like a tease.
The sharpest peaks stir up lenticulars,
flattened like caps for protection,
or haloes for glorification, God’s palms
descended in blessing. At night
there’s more of the same, but for moon
and its magnification. And if there’s a window
facing the scene, and a pair of eyes
looking on, something like this arises—
words wondering
what to make of it all.

Sharon Corcoran lives in southern Colorado. She translated (from French) the writings of North African explorer Isabelle Eberhardt in the works In the Shadow of Islam and Prisoner of Dunes published by Peter Owen Ltd., London. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Canary, The Buddhist Poetry Review, One Art, Sisyphus, Literary North, and Bearings Onlineamong other journals. She is the author of two books of poetry, Inventory (2018, KDP) and The Two Worlds (2021, Middle Creek Publishing).

Amy Wray Irish

The Crime of the Poem

after Douglas Kearney

The poem stormed your defenses
in an angry mob of words.

The poem slipped into your dark
and rearranged the furniture.

Invited into your home, the poem played
with matches.

Invited to your table, the poem devoured
the decorative flowers.

The poem lurched against you in the subway
and picked your pockets.

The poem pressed against you for one steamy moment
leaving you aching and wanting.

Stretching out its languorous language,
the poem sold itself for anyone to undress.

Kidnapping a body of language
the poem strip-searched history.

Searching for hidden pockets of decay
to expose, to diagnose, the poem

Turned you—turned us all—into bystanders
of this dissection. The crime of the poem

Came when it made us chose
to be voyeurs complicit in the violation,

Or archivists delicately digging in the dark.

Hindsight

Hindsight takes time—
for tearing down, tearing apart,
getting a look at the hidden
inner workings. Like

The Henry Ford Museum. 1999.
A massive collection of Americana
that I took by mistake
for greatness. Its sheer volume

Awed me. Dizzied me into
submission. But in the unfiltered light
of hindsight I find a scattershot
attempt at history, a fractured

Narrative of national pride
thrown together and piled
in a hoarder’s tangled maze
of dead-end aisles. And

Any entry allowing exit steered
all captured souls
past a single Lincoln Continental,
that vehicle of JFK’s death.

Repainted, reupholstered, returned.
Driven by other presidents for years,
worn like a symbol of victory in battle.
Not bothering to cover up its violence.

It wasn’t even roped off, there
in the so-called museum—
a painted line parted the floor.
I could still see the bullet

Holes, could have reached out
and touched their impact. In 2020,
at last, I see that I was invited
to do so, to cross that literal

Line. To enter the exit wound.
In 2020, I still see too many believing
the mangled heap of history, reaching
into the breach to become

That jagged body. To get a taste.
When more should walk away

The Art Critic Clarifies Why Their Marriage/Show Closed

Because the wife flowered, fresh as a smooth-skinned Matisse
and the husband splintered, rending open dark as an Ernst.

Because the man exploded in a Pollock detonation of brain and blood,
while the woman arose in a liquid curve of sweet Chagall.

Because lady opened stamen and pistil, a pastel-petaled O’Keeffe;
the gentleman withered, grew spindle-legged, a charcoal-smudged Redon.

Because she was a cathedral, a river, a lily abloom at dawn.
And he was as shattered as a Guernica—broken, burning, burned.

The Fabric of the Feminine

after ‘Four Purple Velvet Bathrobes’ by Beverly Semmes

A queen’s plush garb. Stitched
in duplicate, for the royalty

Of domestic moments. Delicious
velvet, sweet and far too rich

Against the skin, the lips—
she never said Let them eat cake.

Her mouth was far too full
of her lust and fabric and mistakes.

ii.

Mother shoulders the robe with a shudder
as others depart for the day.
She stands frozen, framed in the door,
like the faded pictures she displays.

Like her infamous honeymoon
at the crime-scene-photo lake
where drowning and waving
grew indistinguishable.

iii.

The liquid cloth waterfalls, swirls,
gathers in a still, dark pool
thick with fishy sirens.

Indigo-skinned housewives,
hair plush as a 50’s settee,
recline, drink in hand.

The velvet alcohol they sip
tints their lips plum
like cold corpses under ice.

From the depths come their murky
murmuration. Their queenly
smiles and waves.

iv.

Unholy robes claim us, one by one.
But there’s still a single cloak
of uncertain ceremony
set aside for you.

Amy Wray Irish grew up near Chicago, received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and now resides in the foothills of Colorado. Her recent work can be found in local anthologies like Chiaroscuro (Northern Colorado Writers); national journals like Stone Gathering (Danielle Dufy Publishing); and online journals like Twenty Bellows (twentybellowslit.com). Irish’s third chapbook, Breathing Fire, won the 2020 Fledge Competition and was published by Middle Creek Press in 2021. To read more of her work, go to amywrayirish.com.

Melody Jones

My First Love

Turning my back on the crowded grit and crush
of humanity and hulking metal, still
the bluest of skies, the biggest of skies
            (you don’t have a monopoly on the biggest of skies, Montana)
Welcomed me most days when I paid attention, but
    the first order of business was to
Evade Death by City
            (even a Colorado city)
and go home,
Return home. I love you, Palisade.

The bluest of skies
The biggest of skies
Escorts me back, and exhausted
            tears drive me
Home
Peach orchards, and now vineyards not present in my youth greet me
            Look at your old home/new home/good-to-be-home
Welcome home
It’s been time.

Summertime

Oh, there are reasons to smoke
Ticks
    and 50s movie glamour in boxed black and white
    plus James Dean regaled in wrinkled brow
            and lip-dangled cigarette

But back to camping
Somewhere on the west side
    in the dry of my childhood days
            and indiscriminate brushing through Colorado foliage
were tiny branch passengers, waiting
just waiting
    for the tender smooth skin under straggled blonde hair, a hiding place, sheltered

But not secret enough from mom’s eagle eye
And dad’s adept use of his own
            lip-dangled cigarette
    to dissuade that tick – urgently – from
    permanent domicile behind my right ear

Good reasons.

Melody Jones resides in Grand Junction, Colorado, recently returned to the Western Slope after 30 years in Denver. She is published in Stories Gathered at the Kitchen Table. First Vice-President of the Denver Woman’s Press Club from 2019-2021, she now serves as President of the Western Colorado Writers’ Forum. Melody is currently working on a poetry collection. Visit her website at www.MelodyJonesAuthor.com.

Marjorie Power

While My Husband Explores Colorado Railroad History

A man at the counter asks for the book Dave read.
He goes on speaking, quietly, laughs a laugh
you’d hear past the edge of town.

The librarian, jolly in Crayola,
rubber-stamps his find. Out he clomps
to his high clearance vehicle.

A mother of two spills in with four
who pile like puppies on the librarian
who laughs a laugh you’d hear past the edge.

Three computers, three users plus a next-in-line.
And look – a card catalog! – revered elder,
rich silence, trunk of a thick tree.

Across the street stands a small stone house,
windows framed in age. Someone
has put on a new roof to help weather slide.

          In the yard
               aspens shimmer
          like hesitant belly dancers

                    lit by late afternoon
                         sun. Many of the leaves
                    already undone.

                              Each thin branch,
                                   delicate inscription
                              on a vast blaze of blue.

Marjorie Power’s newest full-length poetry collection is Sufficient Emptiness (Deerbrook Editions, 2021). A chapbook, Refuses to Suffocate, appeared from Blue Lyra Press in 2019. Southern Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Caesura, The Raven’s Perch and Commonweal have used her work recently. She and her husband lived in Denver (his home town) from 2015 to 2020 and have since moved to Rochester, New York, to live near their son and his family.

Andrew Schelling

Huge Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance

Keats & Shelley, & the lot of ’em
said many things, & said ’em well

but never stood to gaze
upon a stone
game-drive wall, splotched with black lichen
curling down a rock-strewn hogback pass
            towards talus.
Scant rain, much ice
            the Continent divides.

Thousand years ago
someone lined an oval pit with slabs of rock.
Here’s the shock-blue alpine
forget-me-not—
            tiny yellow pistils
and used the pits for what?
            roofed with thatch to hide the hunters?
or shamans sang the bighorn in?
in trance state sounds called forth—

At this elevation many ways one has to call forth sound—
chant the six great
                             odes of Keats
hunch in the pit
finger the living spearshaft.
Stiff wind from West, shreds the spoke-out words.
Tender is the night
                hedge-crickets
                                              sing

it all hides in the hyphen
skyline one long hazy pall of smoke.

On the wind
blows all that burning oak
              drawn in from California.                             [Chittendon Mountain, August 2021]

Andrew Schelling, poet, translator, essay writer, has published twenty-odd books. Among recent titles is the folkloric account of bohemian poets, linguists, and wilderness encounters, Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture. Recent poetry title is The Facts at Dog Tank Spring, and for translation, with Anne Waldman a new edition of Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha. He teaches at Naropa University.

Issue 3: March 2022

_{Artwork by Sarah Sajbel}

Poems by

Patricia Dubrava, Jeff Foster, Art Goodtimes, Daniel Klawitter,
Lary Kleeman, John D. Levy, David Mason, and Beth Paulson

Simplicity at BRISTLECONE

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as
two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail….

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Submit 3 to 5 poems in a single .doc or .docx attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com
Include a current bio of no more than 100 words.
If you’re submitting translations, please provide bios for both you and your translated poet(s).
Provide the following information:
- Name as you wish it to appear in the journal
- Mailing address
- Email address
- Phone number
- Website address (if you have one)

_____________________________________________________________________

PATRICIA DUBRAVA

Grandmother Visits the Doctor

“You’re a spry 75-year-old,” the doctor said. Grandmother did not reply, only turned to assess him carefully for the first time. He was older than her grandsons and younger than many of her former students. Young man, do you suggest to your 25-year-old patients that they are spry for their age? But she didn’t say that. She said nothing, asked the usual questions about the usual deteriorations of flesh and bone. And God help her, she was flattered in spite of herself; went home, told her husband, “The boy pretending to be a doctor says I’m spry,” and curtsied.

Grandmother Is Entertained

She knows those who catch her at it think “nosy old woman” when she pulls aside the curtain, but she can’t stop herself. For example, how lucky it was that she glanced out in time to see that young man in the house across the alley open the upstairs window and push a bike through it. It broke into several pieces when it bounced off the porch roof and onto the patio. She wouldn’t have wanted to miss that. Or the time a small woman strode down the street, mouth in a tight line, arms folded across her chest, while a muscle-bound man twice her size hurried after her like a toddler, whining: “Oh, baby, come on, don’t be like that.” And the next day she saw them holding hands. In public, her husband sometimes feels called upon to say, “Honey, don’t stare.” Just yesterday, in the coffee shop, she saw a stork-thin guy with a glowing bald head, his skin like dark chocolate, his trimmed beard black as ripe olives and decorated with a neat row of yellow and white plastic flowers. “Honey,” her husband cautioned. But she can’t help herself. People are so interesting. She could watch them all day.

Grandmother Waxes Nostalgic for Typewriters

The one she misses most is the pale green portable Smith-Corona—was it a Smith-Corona? Now she’s not sure, but it was the first prize of a poetry contest her first year of college. She’d written an elegy for JFK in one fell swoop of pain and that poem won. The judges mentioned its Greek tragedy resemblances, but Grandmother knew nothing about that. It was no “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,” but what the hell. The typewriter was metal, came in a gray and white vinyl carrying case and traveled with her to college and to California and finally to Colorado. She wrote poem after poem on that thing: Those were her white-hot poem writing days. It moldered in the basement after she got a state-of-the-art IBM Selectric. A fellow poet needed one so she loaned it, but the girl moved away, took it with her and the green typewriter was lost forever. She yearns for it now, that prize-winning-poem producing machine. Like much that has disappeared from her life, absence alone makes it seem dear.

On My Birthday, After the Pandemic

Feeling safe going out on a clear crisp day
of sun and unalloyed skies, even feeling somewhat safe
in the crowded Whistler to Cassatt exhibit,
buffered by our now voluntary masks—
three women strolled from painting to painting
without seeing them, talked endlessly about selling
their house in Arizona—the day a birthday gift
from my husband, the four hours out
nearly more than we could manage, yearning by then
to be home again, home again, jiggety jig.

And yet, I’m glad to have gone, remember Phil
standing long and closer than the guard liked
before one Whistler, explaining to me how the white
of the foreground figure drew the eye and from there
scattered white glints among the rocks thread your gaze
back out to the sea, to the white breaker
eternally shattering ashore.

_____________________________________________________________________

Patricia Dubrava has two books of poems and one of translations from Spanish. Her translations, essays and poems have appeared in numerous journals, most recently The Massachusetts Review (2020) and Cagibi (2021). Her blog “Holding the Light” contains over 300 flash essays and memoir. She teaches creative writing at University of Denver’s University College.

JEFF FOSTER

Sitting Shiva

Sitting shiva
should last months.

Starting could wait—
the crush of duty is a tide
that takes its time to leave us
stranded.

The tossing and washing and tumbling
scour the early days clean.
I got through it.

But later.
Now.

Sitting shiva
should last longer than now.

Tin Cans and String

It’s not that the poems to you
lack potential.
It’s that their intimate tone,
their whispers, hints and gestures
are just for you.

The world needn’t know
about boots and footstools,
our soles nearer than anything else.
Nor about souls
nor spirits
nor serendipities.

A poem to you is a secret
thing
our totem
our tin cans and string.
_____________________________________________________________________

Jeff Foster is a retired egg rancher. He moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2020.

ART GOODTIMES

Rainbow Gathering

For Dolores LaChapelle

Purple lupines tell us more than park rangers
when we camp amid their wolfish blooms,

tug their starry leaves until the dew
seeps into our skin & we come to realize

what a wet kiss can really mean.
“That ain’t dew,” pipes up McRedeye.

“That’s coyote piss.” And the laughter we
hippies ring from the bell of our mouths

announces not ecstasy’s vespers but the zen
koan of the Trickster’s leer. The fear

in the cop’s sneer. Despite the arguments
for & against Earth First!, Murray Bookchin

coast redwoods & the superiority of the
sensuous, we’ve learned how to drum, hum

& chant. How much morning Tai Chi teaches
us in the shadows of Shandoka’s slopes.

How quickly we can recover the lost harmonies
of the Wild. How deep Nature’s alive inside us,

hungry hawk chicks nested in the branching
of our neurons. Whole fields of timothy &

escaped orchard grass up against hot splashes
of Indian paintbrush. Golden mariposa petals,

wind-whipped groves of spindly doghair
tremuloides, false hellebore, sweet cicely

& the 40-year flowering of green gentian.
All the plant lore that any good Crone knows.

Hiking with her we stumble into beauty,
carry home stone. Bone antlers. Trilobites &

fat boletes to remind us on the way to & fro
what’s meant in taking the time to lose

ourselves in skies gone psilocybin. To grok
bristlecone pine impervious to alpine gusts.

To settle into the embrace of our more
than human family, and even if only

for a few days, to hear our own opened
hearts singing us back into the mystery.

_____________________________________________________________________

Art Goodtimes, poet, basketweaver, and Green Party social activist, served as San Miguel County Commissioner (1996–2016) and Western Slope Poet Laureate (2011–2013). Poetry editor emeritus for Earth First! Journal, Wild Earth and the Mountain Gazette, he is currently poetry editor for fungimag.com and sagegreenjournal.org. Retired from political life, Art serves as projects director for the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program, which includes monthly Bardic Trails zoom readings, the San Miguel County and Western Slope Poet Laureate projects, the statewide Karen Chamberlain Award and the national and state Fischer and Cantor poetry contests: www.tellurideinstitute.org/talking-gourds.

DANIEL KLAWITTER

If you like, I can be your anti-sonnet:
That unappealing vomit in the corner
Causing you to retch in less than 14 lines
With a rhyme scheme that chimes off pattern.
Let me be your garish lantern of illumination
And you can be the subject of my non-flirtation.
It’s better this way, to woo by not wooing.
My studied indifference is a way of pursuing
Your undivided and absolute attention.
It may be misguided; I make no apology.
This anti-sonnet is reverse psychology.

As You Like It (or Not)

_____________________________________________________________________

Daniel Klawitter, a Denver resident since 1999, is a member of the Colorado Poets Center, the lead singer/lyricist for the indie rock band Mining for Rain, and an Admissions Counselor at the Iliff School of Theology. He is the author of six poetry collections and the winner of two Purple Dragonfly Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature.

LARY KLEEMAN

Missive #3

To write the poem was to startle
into place a needed keeping.

What should he keep.
The broken chair, the memory

of bare ochre skin-in-summer,
everything that dries up.

To fetch water was to fulfill
a small contract, a ground level

protocol (meaning a useful movement).
Rosary bead, rosary bead

(an old formula revisited).
A mathematics of tracing and retracing

in breath with touch until
a territorial extension announces itself.

There and then he emerges asymptomatic
of all that diminishes him in his daily tasks.

There and then he puts down the pen.

_____________________________________________________________________

Lary Kleeman was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. Kleeman taught high school English. From 1992-94, Kleeman taught conversational English in the Peace Corps in Estonia. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana, Kleeman is a recipient of the Colorado Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship (2002). His three books are Negotiating a Lower Angle, geometries of indifference, and Lines Set to an Abandoned Stenographer’s Tape.

JOHN D. LEVY

God

I’m an atheist

today

and all
year, almost every

year, but when I’m

an agnostic
I have minutes of that

and once in a while, a while
separated by years, I find myself

writing a poem

about God. Yesterday, in

Tucson, I was thinking about Virginia Woolf and
reading portions of her diary when

a coyote walked by the window

closer than I remember seeing one
from this particular window. It

didn’t see me. It

was headed somewhere, going
north, not running but walking

fast, its mouth

open in what seemed an eager
smile, white teeth. And today

I think that if I did believe in God

God would be like that coyote

who
didn’t know I was nearby,

who was on the move

and
eager.

The Part of the Gravestone

that rests in the earth, the bottom of the gravestone, has no incised words. Its own shape is impressed into the earth, not an anonymous shape. No shape is anonymous.

International House of Shapes, that would not be an appropriate name for a cemetery. It would remind senior citizens, like myself, of The International House of Pancakes, which became IHOP after I grew up.

I sometimes find that when I am thinking of my late parents I write something with them in the background. They took me to the International House of Pancakes, on Bethany Home Road, in Phoenix, when I was in grade school. I remember the revolving tray (lazy Susan, which is not how I thought of it then), with its wealth of syrups.

The one time I visited my late mother’s parents in their cemetery in Phoenix (the same cemetery where both of my late parents now reside), it was just the two of us. It was a long drive. The cemetery was on the outskirts of Phoenix then. I followed my mother to her parents’ flat markers, which were level with the earth. She either said she wanted to be alone for a while with them or I could tell. I walked away, to the south, and stopped. It was the only time in my life so far (I’m almost 70 now) that when I looked up at the sky the blue seemed a solid overturned blue cup, with us underneath. That wasn’t frightening nor disorienting, it felt vast enough.

_____________________________________________________________________

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.

DAVID MASON

The Lion on My Roof

Precarious days, vulnerable like me,
those months in a cabin in Colorado,
the thin walls, the windows leaking heat.

One night a lion leapt on the roof—I felt
the frail studs shudder at its weight.
Next morning half a dead deer lay in the yard.

A man’s life is not a country’s life
but I was broken open, losing weight,
and like America I was unsound.

Some days I felt like that gutted deer,
a hungover face in the spotted bathroom mirror,
and when I hiked for relief in the dry hills

I was hardly surprised by the small arms fire
sputtering nearby. It was only practice,
but the sound of it, rapid and echoing, was all bile,

nightmare America shooting the light out,
so many weapons bent on killing time.
Give me the lion, I thought, hunting at night

from the height of a cabin roof, keeping herself
out of sight in the day, abiding the quiet.
Give me the wound I know I can endure.

Under the Mesa

The air was dry and crackled with crickets’ wings,
sunlight piercing as an ice pick, so the shade
gave deep relief, the air so motionless
that every footstep, every gesture of the hand
took on the hushed deliberation of a monk.

And I crouched in command
between a cactus and a blooming yucca clump
of one small gravel mound,
the gravel made of a billion brilliant bits
ground down from the mesa’s mineral flank.

A frenzy of red ants dazzled the mound
and with a stick I tried to marshal them.
I was the shadow in the shadow looming
over their active lives, my little hands
like hovercrafts intruding from above.

But the desert summer educates a god
though he may seem all-powerful to ants.
They have their own mind and a crowded will
intolerant of boys.
Their sharp bites teach a boy to dance and leave

a welted hide wet with incredulous tears.
So my grandmother found me full of wonder
that I should be attacked by those I tortured.
She split an aloe leaf and salved my sores,
and left my grandfather, home from work, the moral:

They’re God’s creatures, just like us.
The hand he lit his Pall Mall with was scarred
from shrapnel long ago at Amiens
when men in kilts swarmed over the gravel scarp
to bite the shadows who had bitten them.

That I should be attacked, that I should learn
like kilted men, like anyone alive
and capable of learning that the world
does not respect a meddling god, was only
natural after all. The world would take a turn,

blue shadows growing, growing into night,
a moonlit coolness under the silent mesa,
piñon and prickly pear and yucca spearings,
the red activity of ants gone under
as four-footed creatures of the night set out,

panting on patrol. A neighbor dog barked once,
retreated into domesticity.
The earth exhaled, the little house exhaled
as if it turned in sleep under the mesa,
the brittle air, the rocks so ready to fall.

Written in the Sky

Brother, one of us will die
before the other, who will feel
the absence like a missing bone.

The fog will rise up from the firs
until there are no firs, until
the earth itself is dry as bone,

a broken island no ships pass.
An awkward grief betrayed our bond,
the passing waters of a lake

we loved, great cedars
and the birds we feel along the bone
the way a paddler pauses in the dawn,

listening, brother,
to the heart of everything.

The Widow at 102

She remembered cedar stumps that twenty men
could stand on, remembered how her hair stood up
when she sensed a cougar stalking right behind her,
but she could not quite recognize this girl
who sat beside her now without a story.

How many horses nibbled from her hand,
how many buckets of coal did the furnace burn,
and where was the lumberjack, where the saw,
the old trail in the woods like a dent in dough?
From one pale cheek a root-like tumor grew.

Thousands of mountain sheep were crossing the tracks
when the train steamed down the pass. The trees so tall
a storm was just a whisper in their topknots.
The rain fell like tea from the alder leaves.
The tumor, pale and waxen, rooted from her face

into the cool subsoil of the peopled air,
and everyone she knew was gathered there
the way a waterfall will find a pool.
Becoming root, a pale and searching thing,
her mind had found the water of the world.

_____________________________________________________________________

Former poet laureate of Colorado, David Mason now lives in Tasmania, the island state of Australia. His new collection of poems, Pacific Light, will appear in August from Red Hen Press.

BETH PAULSON

Arborglyphs

Ice on the river’s edge shines like glass shards,
blue water flows around its own frozen places.

Ice forms on your eyelashes, too, cold fingers ache
but your heart quickens to bare trunks of aspen, blue sky.

A raven hops across frozen mud, hawk watches
from a ponderosa, deer have tracked thin snow,

red willows and currants flame along the ditch—
these winter moments hold both grief and joy.

Last night you dreamed a mountain lion was stalking prey,
heard a scramble in deadfall, at dawn found its footprints.

Thawing will come slow to the mountains, fields flood,
streams tumble where marsh marigolds burst white.

Once sheepherders lonely for loved ones carved names,
faces into the soft bark of the aspens.

You had to climb over icy rocks to find them,
felt with your ungloved hand the black, healed scars.

Passing Through

Morning and a rafter of wild turkeys
nibbles, struts in stalks of dried grass
under a small hill between us and a neighbor,

a dozen or more, plump, fan-feathered, on long necks
red and blue heads a-swivel,
black eyes searching, they scratch at seeds

among weeds in this rural valley side
of sandstone cliffs, curving line of river,
thick with scrub oak, tall pines to nest and roost.

Haven here in hunting season?
Ute tribe’s game path, their nets, snares
set for sweet meat, bold-flecked feathers?

DNA-remembered place of near-extinction,
where they were settler-shot for sport or hunger
until cleared forests grew back?

Slow, deliberate these meleagris gallopavos
progress ragged across our ecotone,
sharing wildness with us latecomers who also

track the seasons, each year dying a little more,
intent on our own passions,
thinking to ourselves we are going where we must.

No need to run fast or fly. We hear them
purr, click, gobble, passing though
yellow rabbitbrush, wooly daisies gone white.

Five Assays

Eighty years ago
a teak tree grew in China—
Mother’s fine carved box.

In spring globe willows
wear capes woven of jade silk—
perfect symmetry.

One ocotillo—
red paper cranes on green stalks—
sparks hope and healing.

Into the blue pond
water falls down noisily—
cat crouches nearby.

Glowing yellow suns
a handful of daffodils—
on my plain table.

_____________________________________________________________________

Beth Paulson lives in Ouray County, Colorado where she leads the Poetica Workshop and
co-directs Poetry at the Tavern. She taught English at California State University Los Angeles for 20 years. Her poems have been widely published in national journals and anthologies and have four times been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In May 2019, Beth was appointed the first Poet Laureate of Ouray County. Luminous (Kelsay Books, 2021) is her sixth published collection.

Issue 2: February 2022

_{Artwork by Sarah Sajbel}

Poems by
Jimi Bernath, Robert Cooperman, John Macker,
Ed McManis, Janet Smith Post, and Kathleen Willard
_{© 2022 Bristlecone}

What We Look For at BRISTLECONE

Regarding submissions, here are our current guidelines:

Submit 3 to 5 poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: editors@bristleconemag.com
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
.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
One poem per page with new pages created using an inserted Page Break (no strings of Returns to create a new page)
100-word maximum bio at the end of the submission; same guideline for translator bio(s).

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

Jimi Bernath

At the Municipal Farms

At the Municipal Farms I met my love,
hoeing weeds in a beanfield with a blue sky above.

Our eyes met as we both mopped our brows.
From a nearby pasture, the lowing of cows

made us smile, and those smiles were bright
in young tanned faces living in the light.

We leaned our hoes on an old beanpole,
a long drink of water was the very next goal,

so we smiled and drew from our Camelbacks
letting our arms and shoulders relax.

“I’m Ben,” I said into eyes of green,
hoping to narrow the distance between.

She told me, kind of shyly, her name was Rose
(as indeed it still is, heaven knows).

She came nearer, we made small talk
while glancing at the flight of a distant hawk

who turned eastward and headed our way,
as if he’d just thought of something to say.

He flew in circles right overhead
and as we looked up at him, a voice in me said,

“What sky and soil have joined this day…”
and then we had some more weeds to slay

before our shift in the field was over,
but that very night we began to discover

the common ground our hearts would sow
and cultivate, so our city-tribe could grow

with children and food fresh from the land,
in partnership with a divine loving hand.

We’ve retired now and are still well fed.
Our children and theirs work the land instead.

A cooperative world will long endure,
and I never really saw it, till the day I met her.

Morley, Colorado

black earth mission go on home
coal dark mother calls for thy return
give up this vigil for the loam
your broken walls let be unborn

I heard a bell clang down some years
your door and window full of hard blue sky
parishioners be bricks and wildflowers
and one black beetle that cannot fly

where once this hill echoed busy—
black rock dug, logs hewn, children fed
greed humility sensible crazy
linger still the unstillness of the dead

my feet the broken path now climb
following that long lost mission bell
while other feet around me beat the time
proceed to evening mass and all is well

my love and I have crossed the abyss
of rocks and briars and wires and railroad lines
to stand in a town as quiet as this
to say our prayers and make our signs

now leave crumbling walls to dark hill bosom
make for the traffic over on Raton
mission complete if not the wisdom
you’re more than memory and less than gone…

Sestina for June

For “June” and Willie

The grand finale of the big country music show
The crowd going wild as the stars got down
I stood among them on the wide bright stage
Talking to Alan Jackson so calm and slow
Asking if he’d seen June lately somewhere in the world
Then Willie stepped up to offer something old

The fans listened to the voice that seemed ages-old
No longer mindless leapers at an all-star show
But wakened to the sweet dream within the world
I heard Alan Jackson’s reply as the lights at last went down
And his face was not familiar but his eyes kind and slow
“June,” he said, “lives in another country, on a different stage.”

“Would you like to go there?” he asked as we left the stage.
“I don’t know,” I answered, feeling impatient and old.
“How long will we be gone? I can’t be moving slow.”
“About 30 years,” he said, “or you can stay and watch the show.”
I told him let’s go, and away we flew like a wisp of down
In a craft of some kind over the broad face of the world.

A massive city of hospitals seemed to cover a corner of the world.
“Is this it?” I asked, incredulous. “Is this June’s stage?”
“This is the insane asylum,” my guide replied, and my curious mind
sailed down
To a kind of mess hall, chaotic, poorly lit and old.
A patient tore plastic wrap from meat in a show
Of righteous indignation that the human race was so slow

To understand their folly, while a fat bald man ate slow
At the end of a table, a doctor in this world
But just as insane, I knew it must always show
And I cried out to leave and find the next stage
And June, so fresh in my memory from the days of old
And again we flew across the sea into a crimson sundown.

When we arrive I will breathe deep and lay myself down
Eating strange new fruit, savoring sweet and slow
Knowing that the feeling will never grow old
With June beside me and all around me in this world
June in my bed of wild flowers, on her fire and water stage
And like the man once sang in a country all-star show:

Slow down old world, and your travelling show
Slow down this dream of world stage
Slow down old world…

Jimi Bernath has been writing and reading and publishing poetry in the Denver area for decades. He is well known for his thoughtful, lyrical and provocative poetry publications: newshole, Frogpond, Heiwa, Peace Poetry Across the Paciﬁc, Brussels Sprout, point Judith, SOLILOQUY, Modern Haiku, SIGHT UNSEEN, Alura, The Small Pond Magazine of Literature, The Mercury Reader, STICK, Life Scribes.

Robert Cooperman

Bicycle Riding in Golden Gate Park: Late Summer, 1972

When Dwayne and I rented bikes,
I hadn’t the heart to tell him
I wasn’t very good or daring:
almost in need of training wheels
and a stiff drink, for the courage
to pedal the park’s steep bike paths.

Still, I didn’t embarrass myself,
and when we stopped to rest,
Dwayne pulled out a joint—
this being the twilight
of the Age of Aquarius—
and fired up, assuring me,

“This is some special shit!”
I took a hit. When Dwayne offered
a second hit, I shook my head,
hoping to retain my sense of balance,
and to keep my eyes from spinning
out of my head and at least a tenuous
grip on slipping-away reality.

When we mounted again, hard to tell
if the trees, or I, were marching,
like MacDuff’s army on Macbeth.

At our last downhill run,
two women flashed past, on bikes
or maybe galloping horses,
their hair flying like Valkyries,
crooking their arms for us to follow,
but they’d vanished like smoke.

Hitchhiking into San Francisco from Berkeley, Late Summer, 1972

Crashing with a friend, I’d thumb in from Berkeley.
Back then I assumed, with a quasi-hippie’s naivete,
that drivers’ smiles were far more genuine
than the ones painted on circus clowns’ faces.

Either I was right, or just lucky: never killed
and cut into a thousand pieces, just fulfilled
the hitchhiker’s social contract of offering
conversation, or listening to the driver’s monologue.

On the other hand, I was never offered a joint or pipe,
never had a legendary ride with the Grateful Dead,
nor did Grace Slick invite me into her Dali-painted
Porsche, or the usual fantasy: swirled to Paradise
by two wild women in gauzy dresses hiked up so far
above their thighs . . . nudge, nudge; wink, wink.

Dropped off in town, I’d walk, breathe the seaweed
heavy ocean air, catch a bus to Fisherman’s Wharf,
Golden Gate Park, or to the Haight, for an adventure
I’d tell about to friends and the future Ms. Cooperman,
whom I’d yet to meet, but if I could’ve seen
into the golden future, she was a mere two years away.

The Post-Apocalyptic Potluck Dinner Party: Berkeley, 1972

I was crashing with Rich, who told me
we were invited to a potluck at the home of
“Gandalf, our local wizard, and his old lady,
Galadriel, the Earth Mother of All Earth Mothers.”
Obvious Rich had a crush like an olive press.
“They’re so evolved, they hunt and grow all their food.”

“What prey animals do they hunt in Berkeley?”
I wondered, “Rats?” but shut my sarcastic yap,
thinking maybe this was my sign to return to New York.

“We’ll be playing a great game: ‘Who’ll Be in the Tribe
After an All-Out Atomic War?’ Meaning, what skills
can you bring, so you won’t die alone, in the Nuclear
Ice Age.” Naturally, Rich would make it. But me?

At the party, Galadriel proclaimed her fecundity,
to perpetuate the tribe, though I didn’t see any toddlers
racing around. Plus, she could coax vegetables and fruits
from the soil like Demeter. When I was summoned,
I stammered, “I’m a poet, I’ll spin tales around the campfire.”

“This is basic survival,” Gandalf cut me off.
“What can you do on a practical level?”

“Remember the Grasshopper and the Ants?”
I was about to snap, when Rich’s elbow stopped me.

“Poet?” Galadriel sneered. “We need workers
who can bring in game, build shelters, sew pelts
for clothing, find safe water. Poet?!” She might
as well have shouted, “Pervert! Murderer!”

Later, Rich enthused, “Cool, right!” And I knew
that, definitely, it was time to get back to New York.

Robert Cooperman‘s two latest collections are Reefer Madness (Kelsay Books) and Go Play Outside (Apprentice House). Forthcoming from FutureCycle Press is Bearing the Body of Hector Home, and from Kelsay Books, A Nightmare on Horseback.

John Macker

Vernacular Dwelling

At six o’clock in the morning
don’t reinvent the wheel.
I feel like one of those few rocks
left unpolished by the river but
the idea of new territories to reveal
stretches me into organic shape.
I’m more receptive to truces
or the next thing to embrace feverishly
and am nothing if not a vernacular dwelling
indistinguishable from the landform.
When a kid I was attracted to all the
summer storms assembled over wild places
like arid Shiprock while stars slathered
like snakeweed blossoms faded unflinchingly
into a smoke-crazed sky. My heart’s more easily
bruised by the burning out
                                            the melting away
the idea of a graveyard for confederate statuary
makes it soar and I still go to the desert to reconnoiter
my bravado. In January up in the wildlife refuge
the arctic fox received a respite and the Kongakut still
flows clear. Some of the fire behind my eyes has
cooled if imperceptibly zero percent contained.
My bones have been known to take on the
consistency of feathers. Nostalgia can be
punitive.      Merwin wrote:
                                             But we weren’t
born to survive, only live.     I used to think I was fearless
still admire the harder to get to
the without a trace, the never before
they’re where the river and I go to sing.

San Luis Valley

I’ve been to Antonito, Alamosa, San Luis
every spring Manassa gets mauled by the
elements, home of Mormons, Jack Dempsey
& Manassa turquoise. Skittish black dog
with cataracts crosses the road, she can find the
only café with her nose. In Antonito
coyotes & quail leave snowprints in the tiny
flattened cemetery where I was once fetishized
for being a stranger. The full moon remembers
it to whomever passes by.
Some of the Spanish surnames
barely survived the vandals
the road to it is hardened caliche, washboard
shameless in its disrepute. The American flag
downtown lost its skirmish with the wild for
hours wind. I gas up & savor a biscochito.
Some days the landscape is
an elder’s ragged book of dreams,
reminds me I’m something more
than just the accretion of seasons
something other than nondescript.
Some days my heart can barely
contain the expanse. I look up just in
time to see the synchronized swimming
manatee clouds over the San Juans,
truckers with their long haul winters slow down
hissing at the Lowe’s but rarely stop.
Spent too much time just passing through
intemperate Januarys were once my
bane & lust, driving through blizzards are for
those who think young. The sunrises out
here are seraphim arsonists
the quotidian ablaze with righteous fury.

Wyoming Morning Elegy

an old photo of my grandfather
two uncles and my father, southern Wyoming just
over the line. The black and white gods were playful
that day, the fedoras blocked just enough of the sun to
partially eclipse their faces. The range grasses were thick,
no diluting the rain’s mercies. No rustlers in the back-
ground, no Dog Soldiers, no heat dome, the rot of
addiction was not yet the river that coursed through us.
It took until some later summer for the hardened off
memories to cool. It was a day long before old age
but after all their wars, except for my grandfather whose
second son died in the Little Snake. But he smiles for
the camera just as the moment separates itself from
terrestrial time, as if gazing through something
as porous as a dream catcher, as if no one asked
How many people does our dead one weigh?
This photo is no hagiography, no book of soul
but maybe it depicts the breathing space before my
first breath. My grandmother a forgotten
headstone on a windy nearby hill. The prairie rolls
up to it, my mother who never knew her is the
summer passing over. We end up strangers after all.
The years are porous with the unforgiven
the past
an angel who only drowned in the same river once.

After Bob Kaufman

Poems are celestial hobos
catching rides
on abandoned boxcar clouds,
vows of silence with
parched lungs wait down below
for the liberated street language
of stars.
              The wildness of the improvisation
was everywhere
in choked cowl-like skies
in railroad track saloons
Mission District dives
tables full of Thunderbird and sodden
ash listening to Okie from Muscogee
smoking on the juke with all the
Homeric alcoholics spewing prosit!
between shots. Volumes of
heartbreak night sweats and
heaven in your jail / / bird voice.
                                                   The streets flowed
and still do in the dark with the
blues of your last words.
You protested, proselytized
poverty strung you out
I don’t know how many nightsticks
America cracked over your head
but you kept writing / / singing
a hundred nighttime lifetimes of
remembered dreams but
you allowed yourself only one
/ /  everyone.

John Macker has lived in Northern New Mexico for 25 years. His most recent books are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away (Selected Poems 1983-2018 (2019 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards finalist), El Rialto (a memoir), and Desert Threnody(essays and short fiction—a 2021 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards winner for fiction anthology). For several years, he was a contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review. His one-act play “Coyote Acid” was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in early 2022.

Ed McManis

The News

From across the country
we get the news: the oldest
son and his new bride
are expecting.

Joy. Long distance.
Like a favorite meal reheated.

Another reason to quit
red meat, save the heart;
another leaf on the
ol’ family tree.

All the “dad” mistakes
appear in dreams, a bad
slide show of nostalgia:
The Road Taken.

Most, harmless:
too many LEGOS, skimpy
college savings.
Harmless little lies
about love, God,

“You can be whatever
you want to be!”

And the one dream I
couldn’t shake. How the center
of a man is a desert,
how lost I felt, the illusion

of my wife as a refuge,
a garden, a river of relief
at the end of the prayer.

How I woke those mornings
trembling, mumbling,

Water, water for the baby…
there’s too much sand.

Throwing the Bones

These are the days of unintended consequences,
fireworks everywhere. Unanswered prayers
swirling like confetti. Who won?

Every morning I unsubscribe from another
email chain; every evening I create
another avatar.

Last week my doppelganger unfriended
me, and my children have abandoned
their surnames.

When you’re sitting with death
you belong to yourself.

Look, the horizon is on fire!
The city collapses like a sinkhole
into its shame.

Better get your toilet paper.

“Dig in,” they say. “Hang on, we’re all
in this together.” Reassurance is quick
from the other side of the wall.

“You can have the sleeves
from my vest!”

Look, your hands shake as you write
your name knowing that check
will never clear.

Your skin is changing hue, shedding
right before your eyes. You’ve forgotten
the last line of the spell.

Nietzsche’s Smart Phone

Today I might as well just be a virus,
Siri’s red-headed cousin.
Profs, hang-dog single-file past
the dark philosophy classrooms

ignore the coffee shop, congregate
behind the library
to smoke with the tribe.

The computer tech majors gather
in groups of
One.
The visiting adjunct Prof has created
an app that compresses lectures, flunks
you gently, and “stars” texts
with micro-aggressions.

My roommate is working
on an app that simulates
conversation and doesn’t pay rent.

In the afternoon there’s been
an English Prof sighting,
the one who published
The Book.

Some smarty-pants has created
a GPS app that tracks her
circuitous
route through
the campus.

You can log-on and get a point
if you mark her breach
with a hash-tag.

She’s a myth, a legend, pre iPad,
like a giant golden mermaid.
Even the Admissions Department
rushes to the window, snaps selfies.

The incoming freshmen detach from
their screens to calibrate the virtual
distance, thumb the coordinates,
stare into the abyss.
Let’s land her!
They frantically search for available outlets;
they hoist their virtual harpoons.

Old White Guys from My Neighborhood: For P.C.

He’s never grabbed a
pussy, not even his wife’s.

Picture the chaste bedroom,
silent, dark as the vestibule
of St. Theresa’s.

Sarah, in her Sears
nightgown, turns and reaches,
the coupling almost polite,
a quick-step before desire’s stoop.

Check. Check.

A whisper or two in the after,
tomorrow’s chores, assurance
about the front door—
“Yes, I hooked the chain.”

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.

Janet Smith Post

We Careful Women

The roads cross and divide here,
and just over there—unnoticed—is the house,
that now slants on all sides, but mostly backward,
like the past, that held the life of Seola,
who looked at us, when she came to town,
from behind dark eyes, that never spoke.

There, in that forgotten furrow, stands the plow,
where her husband’s hand once gripped,
the rusted curve of handle, and plowed the earth,
where Seola scattered hopeful seeds,
then bent, slender as a stem, over the rows
to harvest food to set before their hunger,
at the table, where we were careful not to sit.
Alone in her woman’s life, like that purple coneflower
there on the margin of the goldenrods.

Janet Smith Post has published one collection of poetry, Eyes of the Heart, Glimpses of the Holy, and co-authored three children’s books: Barnyard Boogie, Jungle Beat, and Where Two Rivers Meet: The Story of Black Hawk and Larkin Gatewood Carter. Her novel Cotton Rockreceived accolades from the Chicago Sun Times and was read on National Public Radio’s Chapter-A-Day in Madison, Wisconsin. She has also composed over 40 songs to support reading readiness for children, and her CD Alphabet Songs won a Parents’ Choice Award.

Kathleen Willard

Dear——

The seasons have changed and I long to walk through this one
with you like we did in summer breaking all the rules
the world imposes. Summer into fall,

I want to move through this new season.
You do not have to hold my hand or brush
my bare shoulders or lift my dress

and rub my thighs until I sigh like a cat
only amplify the invisible world.
Here in this row of cottonwoods,

this lake where osprey
calls fish, with just a glance,
you name every living creature

that crossed our path
flora and fauna
insects and amphibians,

and birds just by their song,
the entire gamut stunning
me with the earth’s abundance.

We watch the clouds
clash with the spine of the Rockies.
Our laughter eaten by the wind.

I know those days are over
and we will never crash
into each other like two comets,

strayed from their trajectory,
but I am trying to parse out
the moment I was no longer beautiful to you,

a declaration
made on a park bench above our arroyo.
Where just last week we walked

on a pier, a peninsula into the pond,
the reeds like flaring sabers,
like feathers in the wind,

engaged in mutual seduction.
When I was with you,
the world was never ordinary

and each step, a new discovery.
Here insects crawl out of the soil,
newly hatched, wings still wet

and you tell me their name
and particulars of their existence.
It is this that I want—

more walks in the park as you make a world visible,
acknowledging all around us
the universe is on fire.

Coyotes, in Orbit

You tell me I call in coyotes
each time I visit Santa Fe.
They travel up from the arroyo
hide in pinyon pines near the patio
and sing to me through the window
unnerving my dogs.
I have no wish to call coyotes in from the wild.
Their stammering voices welcome
the full moon riding edges of mountains.
I want to call you in, inside me,
instead you look away, head tilted
toward the Milky Way, an impossible accountancy.
I have become a tiny star, pulsating
lost in a nebula, in a galaxy
so far away it would take you light years
to hear my voice.

I tell you a story wasted on the wind,
one you will not hear.
Once walking the woods
and next to a river, granite
caressed the curves of my body.
I heard an exhalation, the breath
of a large animal so near
it seemed to whisper in my ear.

And this is what I want.
The coyotes silent, the full moon
diminishing into the dark sky,
and you next to me, breathing
in my ear.

Kathleen Willard’s two books are Cirque & Sky, a series of pastorals and anti-pastorals set in the Rocky Mountain West, and This Incendiary Season, documenting her travels to India on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. She writes and publishes Occasional Papers, an online literary news magazine available for free by sending her an email. Her awards include Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, National Endowment of the Humanities Grant, Colorado Creative Industries Career Development Grant, ACC Writer’s Studio Award, three Pushcart Prize nominations, scholarships to attend Vermont Studio Center twice, Breckenridge Creative Arts Artist-in-Residence Program, Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference twice.

Issue 1: January 2022

_{Artwork by Sarah Sajbel}

Poems by
Kierstin Bridger, Kathleen Cain, Kyle Laws,
Willem M. Roggeman, Jerry Smaldone, and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

WELCOME TO BRISTLECONE

We’re excited to announce the arrival of Bristlecone, the successor to Mad Blood, an emailed publication of work by poets who had appeared in the in-person reading series of the same name. The readings took place in Evergreen, Colorado, where they were hosted by Jim Keller and Murray Moulding. With the advent of COVID in 2020, the readings ceased but the poetry kept coming to the audience in the form of poems emailed monthly as a simple Word file.

Bristlecone seeks to expand the scope of that earlier publication by presenting the best work the editors can find from poets across America’s Mountain States region and beyond. We’ve chosen the name Bristlecone for several reasons. First, because this species of pine is a native of our region. Secondly, bristlecone pines have a number of qualities in common with poetry as an art form.

They are among the planet’s hardiest and most long-lived beings, the oldest known individual in North America having been dated to around 2800 BCE.

They prefer freshly open ground, flourishing in high altitudes and severe environments where few other trees can even grow. Is this not an image of poetry and poets? It is for the editors of Bristlecone

The aim of this journal is to publish poems that embody qualities that make the bristlecone pine so resilient, long-lived, and worthy of reverence. Ezra Pound advised the young W. S. Merwin to “read seeds not twigs.” Bristlecone seeds, of course, are carried in cones, which resemble poems in a number of ways. By showcasing ideas, insights, griefs and joys and even subtler emotions, this journal hopes to tap into the deep time that bristlecones inhabit, the toughness they exemplify, and the model of endurance they offer to poets and readers of poetry alike. Please note that whenever possible we will provide links readers can use to buy copies of books by Bristlecone poets. Please support their good work!

Finally, many thanks to Sarah Sajbel for creating the Bristlecone cover art.

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

Kierstin Bridger

White Cemetery Tour, Placerville, CO

Wooden tombstones
litter this plot of memory-scape.
Note the illegible births and platitudes
etched and carved under names of centuries past.
Bones underfoot leach calcium and character
while tongues of Iris albicans chant late March prayers
through unruly rhizomes which rise to trip
stumbling looky-loos and well-heeled guests.
The scent of juniper haunts unsettled specters
who seem to beckon children and chase dogs
over these weed-rich remains.

Welcome friends in this, our most dusky hour
among the skeletal scare of Bristlecone limb
and cactus-poked earth, see how white iris flags whip
in the western wind while their thin blooms float
like ghosts—petals ruffled
as dressing gowns tasteless
as communion wafers, they wend toward
our waterway, bow toward the fading sun.

This town was larger once
the railroad crossed the narrow canyon
between red cliff and river bend.
What’s left could go like that—
Say flash flood
Say avalanche
It’s a glossolalia of demise
as unknown as is next of kin
but listen, in the waters that swell nearby
you can hear a plea to rise again:
hung in the whiskey flush of current
a fading cry
a whisper under breath
a moving anthem,
a wink of surrender.

The Dream Where the Highschool Bully
Becomes Rodeo Royalty

She, a woman leaning outside the concrete wall
of a truck stop latrine,
the glare of sunlight white-washing her face.
She, a woman in a muscle shirt,
nibbling at torn cuticles
and the islands of candy apple polish
deserted on her fingertips.

You casually mention to her
that the children, back in the hotel room,
are making tin tiaras,
mostly from gum wrappers, you say
and she, ever squinting, eyeliner black and sharp
under already narrow, glacier blue eyes
says, I’ve always wanted to wear a crown.

So rather than ignore her, you decide
to coronate this stout blonde, this middle-aged siren.
You tell her to go into the restroom and get ready
that you’ll surprise the girls with the news.
You tell them their queen will give them
audience presently and that today
their monarch will be ceremoniously crowned.

Then your long-ago nemesis
rises atop a western steed, and emerges like a bride.
She parades down a long aisle, forward focused,
fists curled around a jewel-encrusted saddle horn.
She’s completely transformed herself.
She’s buttoned bedazzled jeans over her ample hips
and donned a gold-threaded plaid.

Her earrings dangle,
and her belt buckle shines as big and bright as Texas.
and you receive her, you take her in.
Therefore, when the girls, with great care
and solemnity, nestle the thin twists of silver paper
upon her frosted ringlets
she becomes radiant with yes.

Alchemic Reaction

I turn sideways and disappear into the stone.
—Anne Dettmer

We sit down near a window.
As she sinks
her paper sachet into its hot bath
the opened leaves
carry the scent of both grass and ocean.
I ask
what is it
if not tenderness
that allows us to pass through stone?

First is the turning, Anne says— and I’ve seen it—
shouldering into the passage of any dark alley
a shaft of sun finds her, encompasses
the whole of her, renders her luminous
where shadow once reined.
It’s a shift so remarkably subtle she becomes
unrecognizable and yet so fully herself.

I’m learning, I said, that heat can rise
set spark to our every cell,
I tell her my anger can flare unbeckoned
but where I once relied
on something like hand-to-hand
combat and raising ramparts,
I’ve found the quiet
warrior’s glide of stepping aside,
letting blows pass, feels as strong now
as the granite fists once did.

Outside the mountain looks
like a painting of itself
a Japanese scroll, inside the cafe
the invisible calligraphy
of our hands dissolve into air.
We mull over the simple miracle of
ice becoming water as we talk
and isn’t it mist that penetrates
the pores of rock?
She knows I live in a valley
formed by patient rain
I live in house companioned by a river.
Every year boulders cleave by its might
every year freeze sculpts the canyon.
chips away the defense.

We want it to be us
rising to meet the detestable
with the softest lick of grace
we want the way of an open hearth,
limp uniforms of battle
dripping from the last storm
steam rising from those sodden
fatigues
the way hearts melt
the same way
flame warms her green tea.

Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer who divides her time between Ridgway and Telluride. She is author of two books: Women Writing the West’s 2017 WILLA Award-winning Demimonde (Lithic Press) and All Ember (Urban Farmhouse Press). She is a winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio award, and a silver Charter Oak Best Historical Award. Bridger was short-listed for the Manchester Poetry Competition in the UK. She is editor of Ridgway Alley Poems and Co-Director of Open Bard Poetry Series. She earned her MFA at Pacific University.

Kathleen Cain

Crane Fields

It was my father’s job to scout the best fields for viewing. Lesser sandhills—for years I never knew if “lesser” meant the birds or the hills. Sometimes you have to let ambiguity stand. He knew all the fields—not just the obvious ones around Old Fort Kearny, or the bridge off Highway 10. Farm roads were his cartography; his own home place lay a few miles off to the south. He could work his way through a labyrinth of corners—my mother and I hard pressed to find the way back to town when he asked if we thought we could. We learned not to question when he said nothing as we eased past some farmyard dead end. There they’d be. Red heads startling our pulses. Druid wings raised to dance on first one, then the other leg. Fields alive with primal purr. 5,000 to an acre (more, actually, but you wouldn’t believe me)—years before busloads of tourists began to arrive at the Highway 10 bridge, subsuming bird purr with digital click and hum. We kept our pact of triple silence, windows down, even though it was March, with a blizzard brewing.

each spring a return
one hundred miles of river
forty million years

Phenology

When will the Sphinx moth appear?
Or the ring-necked doves return from Mexico?

What day in June
does the first Peace Rose bloom?

Where is the young blackbird hiding
as it begs to be fed?
Why does the hawk circle at noon?

All these I can answer
though after all this time
I know nothing

of your heart’s migration
or its seasons.

Easier to explain
the colors of the winds

how long since the sea was here

why we never see the dark side
of the Moon.

Scarstruck

Sometimes when I go to visit
this old cottonwood I call Scarstruck
when it’s time to go, I don’t want to leave.

All her children are gone.
She doesn’t know where, though
they’re probably no more than
two or three miles from home, at most.

In the early summer she speaks, always
jubilant about new life; always some
water-wisdom tricked out of the wind
turning her leaves. “Wait . . .” she
whispers. “Wait . . ..” She creaks
at the exact place where her trunk
left the soil. The old wound from

lightning gave her a voice. Each push
from the wind adds another word
to the story. Thirty years ago, and still
she doesn’t give up trying to surround
that wound. Not healing it, trees don’t
actually do that. But she contains it.
Holds it and keeps on living.

Kathleen Cain’s poetry recently appeared in Mad Blood (anthology), Mad Blood #6 Poetry & Art Calendar, and is forthcoming in the debut issue (online) of Abandoned Mine. Two of her poems were selected for the recent Forces of Nature ekphrasis show at the Windsor Art and Heritage Center, where “At the Window” received second prize in the poetry competition. Her nonfiction book, The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion was nominated for a Colorado Book Award and was selected as part of the Nebraska 150 Books Project. https://kathleencainwriter.com

Kyle Laws

Steel Dreams

In last week’s dreams, the back of the house became an industrial
warren of rooms. Trying to trace the cause, I remember telling a
friend that I’d worked on the dig in the basement of the Fariss
Hotel, scraped away layer by layer after the first corner of the fort
was found. On the second floor, where the lobby had been, was a
linoleum covered front desk, keys still in cubbyholes behind, and
narrow rooms with space for a single bed, railroaders’ rooms, those
staying longer occupying two suites in front overlooking the river
where it once ran downtown, odd angle of streets made by the
banks as they shifted depending on the flow after winter snows.

Spring run-off from mountains marked boundaries, as the first
year without a women’s poetry festival reminded us as we sat in
the Shamrock and wrote to $2.00 draws anyway. We are women
who rely on seminal markers of seasons, beginnings, the flow
of water out of mountains to fields where Pueblo chiles grow,
Bessemer Ditch through South Pueblo down Adams Ave. to the
industrial site which gives it its name, out onto the mesa, from
mountains through streets where Guggenheim had his first
smeltery. This is what populates rooms of dreams, steel remains
of an old Pueblo as we write to the end of day at the art museum
carved into what was the scrap yard bottom of Goat Hill.

Which Mind, Which Body

Years ago I wrote, document the change in body
from young to old with tripod and
remote control shutter.

I wanted to capture the form over years,
a form I was familiar with,
without asking a model.

The 35MM camera is deep in the closet,
myopia progressed to cataracts. By mid-thirties,
I had given up film.

I was thin, beautiful in an English way.
Then belly rounded as evening meals
became the center of life.

Five months after the Port-au-Prince earthquake,
I lost 15 pounds in as many days
to a Haitian parasite.

I’m back to when I wrote the directive.
I’ve recorded the changes year by year:
not in loosening of breast

and softening of hips, but in sharpening of mind,
letting go of expectations.
Still, I would like to be able to see

when I look in a mirror,
which is mind,
which is body.

Lucky Bones

Hook-like claw found only on the male
horseshoe crab worn by whalers when
they set off from shore for safe return.
In a booth in Lucky Bones Backwater Grille,
I record the moon rising over the watchtower
that stood alone on Beach Drive in the ‘62 storm
before the Grand Hotel was built around it,

how I walked into the sunset, to the pavilion
where seniors would sit to watch it go down
at the edge of town before the stretch
to the Point was a bird preserve, before

we knew that eggs laid by horseshoe crabs
were what brought thousands of seabirds
to our shore on the bay to rest and feed
exhausted from the fly north. We would

poke their hard brown shells with sticks
and watch them bleed green, not red like us,
so we felt justified in our probing as if they
were alien and we were defending from attack,

what in retrospect, looking back on the 50s
seems reasonable with Sputnik and the cold war.
Now the humble archaic creatures have risen again
to talisman that I raise a glass to: Lucky Bones.

Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, Colorado, where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Beginning at the Stone Corner (River Dog, 2022), The Sea Is Woman (Moonstone Press, 2021, winner of its 2020 award), Uncorseted (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2020), Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence co-authored with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind(Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for Best of the Net, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She is editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

Willem M. Roggeman

Translated by Philippe Ernewein

Lockdown

Some can’t take it anymore.
Some paint a mirror on the wall
with the face of a woman in it.
Some listen to a tape
with the voice of a woman
whose whispering can hardly be heard.
Some feed their imagination
with recollections of adventures
they never experienced.
Some see in the creases
of the blanket on the bed
the shape of a sleeping woman.
Some fall asleep
with one hand in the hand of the night.
Some whisper I love you
and listen to the stove’s answer.
Some can’t agree with themselves.
Some know the precise personal description
of a woman they never knew.
Some point to the place
where alcohol gave birth to beauty.
Some sit motionless in a room
and travel with dizzying speed
through the country that begins behind the mirror.
Some are afraid of the sunrise.
Some answer the questions
that no one ever asked them
due to lack of interest.
Some see in the wallpaper
how life passes by.
Some can’t even talk to themselves.
Some don’t realize that yesterday has never begun.
Some sink like stones into time.
Some feel their blood stop running.
No one is alone in his loneliness.

What Only Painters See

These are the first signs:
A startled moon between the trees.
Animals starting to stutter.
Flowers stirring from a nightmare.

Humans terrified of the future
scurry back into the trees.
The night admires the darkness.
All that ever happened drops out of time.

Silence steals its way upwards.
Old men degenerate into light.
He who keeps vigil pointlessly preserves
The melancholy trellis of his dreams.

Sleep leaves our eyes unseen.
Our fear cries out.
Spring tries on her new clothes.
The sun slithers behind the sea.

Evening enters every home
unrecognized by daylight.
Another day, another flash
Look — lightning, we say, and someone repeats it.

God’s Dream

If it’s true that we’re
all only characters
inhabiting God’s great
endless dream, then he’s also
dreaming all our dreams and has no
power to interfere in our existence
since he’s not conscious of it.
That he’s invented in his dream
Shakespeare as well as Eichmann
testifies to his fantastic imagination.
When the time comes for him
to wake from this nightmare, perhaps he’ll
create some divine Freud
who will analyze this dream
and explain it. Then will appear
what complexes God suffers from.
In the future then we shall
likely experience a calmer existence,
but if the therapy miscarries
we’re in for stranger
stories yet.

Willem M. Roggeman is a Belgian poet, novelist, and art critic. His poetry has been
widely translated, and he is a regular guest at international poetry festivals. He has also published two novels and several collections of articles on artists and highly regarded interviews with writers. In 1988, he was awarded the Order of Leopold II for his cultural work. His most recent book of poems is In Een Getekende Morgen (2019).

Philippe Ernewein is a native of Turnhout, Belgium. He is the Director of Education at the Denver Academy in Denver, Colorado, USA. Philippe’s published work can be found at
www.rememberit.org

Jerry Smaldone

Enter

another world
where ancestors usher you in, point out your seat,
whisper feelings to your soul that carry
you back into a womb of timelessness.

An overwhelming sense of family everywhere,
angels serving, guarding, humming a kind of prayer
so deep the sound burrows into your bones and
leaves you limp and barely breathing.

The golden light dims in the shadows
where saints are old friends, willing to listen to
all your complaints and requests, and this guy Jesus

is the forever mystery of why are we worthy of you
dying for us, what is the value of sacrifice,
who are we if we cannot love?

And the Mother of heaven, the healer of earth
Mater grazia, Mater misericordia, asks and gives
as she always has in the little shrine by the water

where we coil our troubled hearts
into the end that lets us begin.

Wedding Tarantell’

Ayyy, he growls, those days are over, shaking his hand
up and down, it couldn’t have been that good, right, dage?
nothing left but pictures of happy, hungry people

coming down the church steps, rice flying through the air
lace bundles of coombitz, obligatory shots of anisette,
sangweeches and home-made cookies

as the fast music starts up and kids pull the old ladies
squealing from their chairs and the old men brush us
away grunting lasciami, whyole and

the great circle straggles together, hand in hand,
arm in arm, as the lucky couple are forced into the middle
and around and round we go, faster

and faster, suddenly stopping and flying the opposite way
until we’re dizzy and laughing fire, until the groom pulls
his woman to him with his crimson scarf

and our outstretched arms cover the couple
in good wishes and the promise
of a lifetime of love.

Mother’s Day

Sunday morning early Dad sets your picture on the
desk next to him in bed as he turns on the Mass on tv.
I drive to the cemetery, nobody on the road

but churchgoers and classic cars headed to shows,
a bucket T with chrome manifold and V-8,
an unrestored ’47 Ford, dull primer black and beautiful

the change from ’47 to ’57 like shooting into outer space
drifting as I drive, spinzarodd, to yesterday at the bocce
tournament, where Georgie Mash remembered the aroma

of baking bread, fresh from the forn’, the outdoor ovens,
and the smell of cooking tomatoes, the canning, drying,
a fragrant cloud over the neighborhood

and mama, I’m not going to cry for you today, not much,
I’m going to smile and be happy and wonder why you
loved us so much, why the sight of us made you light up

even in your anger, only a mother knows. To feel that kind of
love I was once embarrassed by, from a person who I’d ignored
most of my life, whose body and mind were painfully failing

was humbling. It made me realize my own stupidity
and how long it took to grow out of selfish immaturity.
Right now, our little family, always full of drama

has never felt more screwed up. I stand before your
cold crypt, close my eyes and think of you.
Even with the dead, you have to be careful

who you ask for advice, and what advice you ask for.
“Enjoy!” she beams with that sardonic grin, “enjoy the turmoil.
Someday you’ll wish you had.”

The Good Times Are All Gone

You lay like a corpse
straight from head to toe
on your adjustable metal bed

naked, but for a sheet
grasped with crossed hands
just beneath your chin

Death stretches on the dirty
windowsill, amused by the battle
of birds versus squirrel, content to wait

until every friend you ever had
every cousin you ever drank with,
all your sisters and hardheaded brother

sainted mother and father you barely knew,
wrap you in their arms
and carry you away

My wife has baked the sweetest cake,
light as air and smooth going down,
full of butter, fresh with cream

but you cannot swallow, you will
not eat, look up into space
what is it that you see?

The future passes over you
this inevitability we are not allowed
to face until the very, very end

the final moments of this melodrama,
of troubled times, unleashed laughs,
hard responsibility and love you can’t lose

until you rise like a lion on invisible wings,
peek over the great abyss and go to meet
the dark night, full of glancing stars

light as air, fresh as a babe’s breath
your wife softly calling you forward
your angel leading you home

and you smile at your golden birth
and run toward it
like a fawn on newfound legs.

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, Gerardo gets beat up by numerous grandchildren. Numerous books are waiting impatiently to be published by anybody other than the author.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

New Mantra

To this day with its deepening whirlpools of grief,
I say okay. Okay to the way I am swirled
and pulled down. Okay to the thick muscled sorrow.
Okay to the throat with its clenching, its tightness.
Okay to the ambush of tears.
On this day when saying yes to the world
is too shiny, too perky, too yes, too bright,
on this day with its churning currents of pain,
on this day when there is no clear path forward
at least I do not say no.
Okay, I say, as I pull on my clothes. Okay,
I say, as I don’t make the call. Okay
is my life vest, my life raft, my passage.
I’m grateful it isn’t a verb. Okay.
Okay. Okay, I say, blessed by its unstriving truth.
Okay, I say as the whirlpool spits me out.
Okay as another pulls me down again.

The Naked Heart Goes into Town

The heart walks down the street
with its big brim hat, its sunglasses,
its four chambers stepping up
onto the curb. It hopes it doesn’t
run into anyone it knows.
It’s hard enough to keep pumping,
pumping, one hundred thousand times
a day. That’s all the heart can manage right now.
No conversation. No small talk.
No big talk. The heart has nothing to say—
a heart is made to feel,
and feel it does as it makes its way
to the post office, stops at the crosswalk,
feels it all.
Feels the cool breeze that buffets it.
Feels love for the scent of autumn,
love for the low-glancing light.
And it grieves for the loss
of what once it pumped for.
Grieves for the boy who still
lives in its walls. Grieves for
all who grieve, who weep.
Oh the heart, it feels so exposed
as it stands at the door of the coffee shop,
wonders if it can go in.
The other hearts in the coffee shop
wear so much skin.
The heart sniffs at the dark and bitter scent,
remembers what it was like
to go inside, sip a latte, talk about weather.
It pounds against itself,
walks on down the road.

What the Sky Knows

Before the feast,
I slip outside
into the rose glow
of evening and
talk to my loves
who no longer
walk this earth,
and I thank them
for being in my life
and I cry and cry.
How is it possible
at the same time
to hold so much grief
and so much gratitude?
And the sky holds me
and the rooftops, the
streets and the fields,
the factories and forests,
it holds it all, holds
what is most beautiful,
holds what is most foul.
It doesn’t try to change
anything. Like that,
it seems to say
as it turns a deeper
rose. Like that.

There Is Only the Field

On the day my father begins hospice,
I watch the pronghorn in the field,
marvel as their brown- and white-striped bodies
nearly disappear in the dead grass where
they graze. If only I could camouflage
my father so death can’t find him, so that pain
would never have discovered him.
Tomorrow, my mother and brother and I
will gather around him the way a herd
might gather, circling him as some antelope
circle their young. But death will come.
And we, unable to run fast enough,
unable to hide, will meet it together.
And if I could fight death, would I? Whatever horns
I have are more for ritual than danger.
When death arrives, I want to bring
my softest self. I won’t bargain,
but I’ll tell death it’s taking the best of us—
the one who worked hardest to survive.
When death arrives, I want to ask it, Please,
be gentle. He suffered so much already.
I want to tell death, You don’t get all of him.
I carry in me his goodness, his courage.
While I live, he will always be alive in this field.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS Newshour, O Magazine, Rattle, American Life in Poetry, and her daily poetry blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Poems byAlice Dugan Goble, Ron McFarland, Oliver Scofield,K. Blasco Solér, and Lisa Zimmerman

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Alice Dugan Goble

Ron McFarland

Oliver Scofield

K. Blasco Solér

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Jonah Bornstein

Raven Flight at the Grand Canyon

Nightfall at Bell Rock

This Morning’s Dark Rain

Pilot Light

Desert Praise

Frank Coons

Interspecies Encounter Question

Tribulations of the Mockingbird

To the Universe, a Million Years is a Long Crazy Weekend

Proteus in the Rocky Mountains

Sharon Corcoran

Mountains and Clouds

Amy Wray Irish

The Crime of the Poem

Hindsight

The Art Critic Clarifies Why Their Marriage/Show Closed

The Fabric of the Feminine

Melody Jones

My First Love

Summertime

Marjorie Power

While My Husband Explores Colorado Railroad History

Andrew Schelling

Huge Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance

Simplicity at BRISTLECONE

PATRICIA DUBRAVA

Grandmother Visits the Doctor

Grandmother Is Entertained

Grandmother Waxes Nostalgic for Typewriters

On My Birthday, After the Pandemic

JEFF FOSTER

Sitting Shiva

Tin Cans and String

ART GOODTIMES

Rainbow Gathering

DANIEL KLAWITTER

As You Like It (or Not)

LARY KLEEMAN

Missive #3

JOHN D. LEVY

God

The Part of the Gravestone

DAVID MASON

The Lion on My Roof

Under the Mesa

Written in the Sky

The Widow at 102

BETH PAULSON

Arborglyphs

Passing Through

Five Assays

What We Look For at BRISTLECONE

Jimi Bernath

At the Municipal Farms

Morley, Colorado

Sestina for June

Robert Cooperman

Bicycle Riding in Golden Gate Park: Late Summer, 1972

Hitchhiking into San Francisco from Berkeley, Late Summer, 1972

The Post-Apocalyptic Potluck Dinner Party: Berkeley, 1972

John Macker

Vernacular Dwelling

San Luis Valley

Wyoming Morning Elegy

After Bob Kaufman

Ed McManis

The News

Throwing the Bones

Nietzsche’s Smart Phone

Old White Guys from My Neighborhood: For P.C.

Janet Smith Post

Poems by
Alice Dugan Goble, Ron McFarland, Oliver Scofield,
K. Blasco Solér, and Lisa Zimmerman

The Dream Where the Highschool Bully
Becomes Rodeo Royalty