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Rose Mary Boehm, Monica Flegg, Robert Ford, Daniel E Haislet, Laura Hanna,
Cal LaFountain, Erin Leigh, Todd Mercer,
Brad Rose, Joyce Schmid, Larry D. Thacker,
Lindsey Thäden, Abigail Van Kirk,
Bonnie Rae Walker, Les Wicks, Linda S. York,
Mark Young
Dale Wisely, Editor-in-Chief
The Note
1. What's your favorite kind of science?
a. Climatology
b. Physics
c. Economics
d. Political Science
The correct answer is (d) Political Science.
2. What is the color of shame?
a. Scarlet
b. Black
c. Rainbow
d. Orange
The correct answer is (d) Orange.
3.
Air Force One leaves the United States of America traveling slower than the speed of reason, growing smaller and more dense as it flies. First it takes Manhattan, then it takes Berlin. It navigates by smell. If it accelerates at a rate equivalent to the annual average increase in sea level, when will it return to us?
a.The Last Thanksgiving
b.Closing time at a bar in Indianapolis.
c.When America is stripped naked and made to stand before our mothers and fathers and our mothers' and fathers' ghosts.
d.When we tell our children good night (and we mean it so much more that night) and we close the door quietly, walk out in the yard and watch the moon, all the roundness there is to see and all the rust.
My thanks to all the contributors to this issue of Right Hand Pointing who entrust their art to us. As always, my love and thanks to my friends and colleagues F. J. Bergmann, F. John Sharp, and Laura M Kaminski.
Dale
click on the hand to continue.
Todd Mercer
Waterbaby
Ingenue wasn’t born conventionally, says her story.
She stepped out of the surf onto terra firma,
never lost the feeling of the tides. She arrived
originally naïve, ready to be amazed. Ready.
A clear breath of air, a fresh face, a vector
for active curiosity among jaded idealists
of late-stage whatever society is these days.
It seems she hatched from breakers fully formed.
She made methods of remaining forever open
to simple beauty where she sees it, to meaty irony.
Ingenue through all her years somehow stays new,
whirls giddy when waves lap her ankles,
not that you or I could see those waves.
Todd Mercer
Interior. Tito's Hacienda—Evening
The revolver smokes, blood slurry spreads on a checkerboard floor. The shooter delivers his catchphrase, steps out of the scene. He leaves like nothing happened, retreats to his backlot trailer, decompresses. They’re filming out of sequence. Tomorrow the shooter and the bleeder will meet, become brothers. Yesterday—both funerals.
Todd Mercer
Flashing Neon Arrow
It isn’t always obvious. You don’t
come across Robert Johnson leaning
on a road sign, strumming devil-music
to show the nature of the bargain.
When deciding which fate to pursue,
it might help if Robert Frost
stood where paths diverge, pointing,
if there was a stripe on the right trail.
Daniel E Haislet
After The Lodger Had Passed
~After Billy Collins
I found a blunt, old, beaten sword
On the pathless side of a low stone wall
And used it to pound my river into an ocean
Then drank from my ocean down to its skin
I ground the skin into a silky blue powder
That I carried with me in a sack
Swinging from the point of my blunt old sword
To the mountains at the edge of the valley
Where I fanned the foothills with sheer blue hue
So it matched that evening's twilight seamlessly.
I collected the scene, folded in thirds,
and sent it into space in an envelope.
The ad said wait six to eight weeks
To receive my X-ray specs.
Rose Mary Boehm
Postcard from Peru
The wood sold to the Chinese, permission
given to build adobe houses in the ravines
between deforested peaks. Heavy rains
in the foothills of the Andes. Mudslides
disappear houses, people, infants, trucks.
Next year we’ll see the same. Wrecked faces
will beg again for help from the gullies
of ignorance. The authorities conspicuous
by their absence. Wish you were here.
Abigail Van Kirk
Untitled #4
Delicately undoing my sister’s ashen curls
in the same way I am picked apart by this world
in hopes of something more lovely.
Joyce Schmid
Dinner
Just eat.
Thunder heavy in the air
and lightning bolts about to strike
mother broiling hot and getting bigger
father melting in the corner, smaller, smaller
now the lightning smashes down but not at me yet
I’m just eating eating food food food
no hunger and no taste just food
and nothing else but food
nothing but the plate.
Just eat.
Brad Rose
A Merman Asks a Biblical Question
The waves’ teeth gnaw the shore.
Eyes closed, I count my scales.
At what point does a thing become itself
and not itself?
Starlight, always younger than its time,
I am my own origin.
For some, life is like swimming the Atlantic
without getting wet;
for others, the most pleasurable drowning.
Everything begins and ends with the sea.
Tell me, what was Adam and Eve’s surname?
Mark Young
the effect of lipstick on a city circle bus driver
Bikes slide through the streets dodging doors & inflexible pedestrians. Sometimes, at night, the inmates sit in a circle & talk about their homes or about the brilliant star cluster mowed down in its stroller by a drunk 72-year-old female driver who fled the scene. There is a semi-circle of scarlet on the sandwich.
Mark Young
Foregone Cage
Unlike other ducks,
the muscovy has a
single perfect cleavage
along which it splits
in intuitive partheno-
genesis. It is
a fixed cost, a
kind of music hall.
Mark Young
every little breeze
Okay. Just when I've got everything done I had to do, & have decided to go downstairs & crank up the volume on the stereo gizmo as background to doing the things I want to do, the wind changes, & along comes Maurice Chevalier & we end up doing duets in a phony French accent & I am so embarrassed, not because there's anything strange about launching into song & dance routines, complete with canes, in a redneck town, but because my straw boater has seen better days & is definitely off-color.
Bonnie Rae Walker
Knackered Man
Gordon turned a right, allowing the wheel to slide through his hands. He liked that, the skim of steering wheel against palm. A yellow square of thrown-open barn doors signaled through the dark.
Swinging his truck and trailer into a three-point turn, he backed to the barn's mouth. Stepping out of the cab, Gordon took off his hat, throwing it onto the threadbare seat. It was manners, a sign of respect.
He entered and called out. It was the stall with the trail of straw running from closed doors, lots of feet in and out during the night. But he called out—people don’t like being startled—and a woman answered.
Gordon slid open the stall door. An old brown horse lay dead, its ribs and pelvis pushing out with age. Not meat then, too old, too far dead. Maybe hide and hooves. Maybe meat, if things were slow, but probably not.
The woman straightened—brown hair, brown pants—and reached out to shake his hand. She whispered a rush of words about the price for hauling the carcass, where it would go, what, how. A girl slept in the corner—blonde hair, brown pants covered in straw.
Don’t want to wake her, her mother smiled. Gordon nodded, pretending to know all about that.
The horse was loaded by the time the girl woke up. She slept through it being dragged into the aisle and she slept while the metal groaned and popped, but she woke before he could drive away. The money was in his wallet and he latched the trailer door.
Gordon turned to walk to his truck and stopped. The girl stood in the light of the yellow square, straw in her blonde hair. Gordon blushed as she cried, telling him to stop, to wait, while mother hugged her and told him to go, and thank you.
He hesitated, looking at the shadowed figure of the girl and her mother bent over her. Stepping forward, Gordon thought he would tell the girl something to stop her crying. Something nice. His face twisted into a smile. Something nice. He opened his mouth.
Mother stared at him like a cat. Blonde girl still pleaded. And Gordon went, his back curving like a question mark.
Never pretended to know all about that. He shook those thoughts from his head but the girl’s voice clung like straw, sticking to his eyes and face, forcing him to blink, stuffing his nose.
Never pretended to know anything about that. He got into the truck and watched the yellow square recede in his side mirror. Gordon turned a left, his hands gripping the wheel.
Les Wicks
Formal Dining
I have believed poetry to be superior cutlery, the
bitter knife, the swoon.
It sits unsold in the google store because
sharp things
forget their place, should not be mailed, their
disgrace. I have maimed with a
bloodstained, scoured writer’s block
but the damage was all to myself.
I’m always inviting them
& the guests sometimes don’t show.
Linda S. York
Tween
I crawled into her bed and carefully snaked my way under the tubes and wires that tethered Mama to this earth and wrapped my twelve-year-old arms around her, hung on to her life and prayed to have her take me with her when she died.
Laura Hanna
The Electrical Current of Dust
Before they fixed your hair
for the funeral, I touched
it the way birds would touch
their tongues together.
Your body was clothed
in stillness so unreal
I wanted to push you
off the table just to watch
you move again.
the scent of kumquats
and rosemary sanitized away,
I tried to imagine that you
had not reached
eternal separation
from me.
Cal LaFountain
Milli's Pardon
Milli Teague knew the burglar came each dark at 1:11 a.m., that from the frivolity of its patters, was adolescent, and that it had a penchant to leave things half-done. If they’d been her pantries to swipe, she too would forget to correct the labels’ facings. In the closets and basements of Milli Teague’s imagined bout of urban burglary, she also marred knobs with her grease, loosed tubs & tins from their usual nooks, and discarded sound as a layer of the world perceived by human sense.
The burglar’s appetite was expansive. Mornings after its visits, the kitchen bereft of content, Milli Teague began her day with a visit to the grocer’s. She’d buy up those items that the burglar, in its hasty reach, favored most—extra cottage cheese, extra potato bread. Extra many pickles.
Alongside fumbles & bungles, heedless inhales morphed to coughs enough to wake the cul-de-sac's tender geriatrics. The burglar, with its undeveloped faculties of stealth and dexterity, fed a forthright, undefined empathy in Milli Teague. She measured desperation, not malice, as the impetus that bound the burglar to its thefts.
One night the red/blue beams of laws enforced lit Milli Teague’s bedroom.
She fingered curtains leftward to expose a perpetrator cuffed in the Robinsons' side yard. Milli Teague observed the burglar’s meager resistance. That dainty nymph she’d let return dark after dark now displayed a writhe
attuned to her own.
Then, the food labels faced typically, boxes held their places. Knobs retained their sheen. Milli Teague catered not for the burglar’s, but her own relief, a buffer to her alone, that near burden hers always to heave & to hack, never burglarized at 1:11 a.m. or any other configuration of dark.
Robert Ford
Wee Lachlan at five
You can’t imagine the time he’ll be an old man,
and spend warm evenings folded into park benches,
cursing the aches that crept up unannounced, wiping
a brow whose furrows grew when no-one was looking.
His face will have become an onion, cheeks weathered,
and his nose broadened, all skirmished with veins.
The mustard hair will long have turned bone-white,
but his eyes will have stayed the same giveaway blue
as his superhero cape. With luck, the smile will still be
written through him, like his name threading a stick of rock.
on the best days
i sing you to sleep,
and you say
my art is beautiful.
iceberg
Erin Leigh