Still, I said only
we’ll see, we’ll see
The Ark
The beasts are rollicking again:
The tigers have stolen a carcass
The alligators loll uncomfortably
on wide planks
and ache for mud.
To put it starkly:
The giraffes are cramped.
The best is just chaos
here in these floating days.
Two doves have returned–
one bearing branches–
But still they float.
“It’s stopped raining, you know!”
“We should never have come!”
“Why did you bring us?”
Meanwhile below,
In the death-gray hull,
The man with the cottony beard,
The unruly eyes, the shock of gauzy hair,
Sits solemnly in his threadbare robe
And thinks about a promise he made.
Where I Am From
Honeysuckle green leaves and
sun glinting through pine
Damp dirt and the smell of heat
rising off pavement like
the whisper of ocean through a shell
A memory of rain-slick streets
black mirrors of neon and steam
the faint electric pulse
Of wooden decks in the fading sun
black and white baseball and
the rising whine of crickets as evening comes
Of pale beer in parking lots
where crabgrass grew through cracked asphalt
One night, when I was just a boy,
we drove and drove
until silent through summer darkness
moths like stars whizzing by
back of the station wagon, roomy and warm
Nobody else around
I rolled down the window and breathed in
The distant smell of sea
Contributor Notes
Elisa Albo’s chapbook, Passage to America, is now available as an e-book. Born in Havana and raised in central Florida, her poems have appeared in Alimentum, Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, InterLitQ, Irrepressible Appetites, The Potomac Journal, Tigertail: A South Florida Annual. She recently completed To Sweeten the Flesh, a collection of food poems, and teaches English and ESL at Broward College. She lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
Mariah Blankenship received a Bachelors in English from Radford University and a Masters of Education. She currently teaches Creative Writing and English in Virginia where she lives with her tiny Yorkie and bearded boyfriend. She likes to read depressing feminist literature while watching trash reality television.
Suzanne Burns likes to write about kumquats. Poems from this Sixfold contest round will soon appear as part of a chapbook from Finishing Line Press called The Portland Poems. She is currently working on a short story collection called Love and Other Monsters, a follow-up to her debut short story, “Misfits and Other Heroes.” She has tattoos of lines from J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction on both forearms.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, and works in manufacturing. He has work in Rhino, Red River Review, New Verse News, Barnwood, Verse Wisconsin, and The Write Room.
Benjamin Dombroski is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2009 and Hunger Mountain.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His latest book is City of Palms (AA Press, 2012). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals. He won the 2010 Aesthetica poetry award.
Christopher Dulaney graduated with BA in English with a Creative Writing concentration from Georgia College & State University in May 2013. A multiracial writer, he writes prose and poetry and has studied under Allen Gee, Laura Newbern, Judson Mitcham, and Marty Lammon. He currently lives in Savannah, GA.
R. G. Evans’s poems, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as Rattle, The Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Weird Tales. His original music, including the song “The Crows of Paterson,” was featured in the 2012 documentary film All That Lies Between Us, about the life and work of poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Evans teaches high school and university English and Creative Writing in southern New Jersey.
Josh Flaccavento holds a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College and an MA in Literature from Clark University. He is from northeast Tennessee by way of southwest Virginia, but his poems in Sixfold are about the West, where he spent some time working on farms. He enjoys referring to himself in the third person, Norse mythology, and martial arts.
Joe Freeman, raised in western Pennsylvania, contracted there an abiding love of forests and fields. Graduating from Harvard, he attended the School of Peace Studies in Bradford, England (more hills and fields), and returned to the states—after a stint of community work in Northern Ireland—to undertake a career, of sorts, in government service. He presently resides in Arizona, a full-time homemaker. His only previously published poem, “What Job Might Have Said,” appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Midstream.
Toni Hanner’s poems appear in Yellow Medicine Review, Alehouse, Calyx, Gargoyle, and others. She is a member of Eugene’s Red Sofa Poets and Port Townsend’s Madrona Writers. She had two books published in 2012: The Ravelling Braid from Tebot Bach, and a chapbook of surrealist poems, Gertrude Poems and Other Objects from Traprock Books. Gertrude was selected by Mary Jo Bang as a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award.
Chris Haug teaches writing and literature somewhere in Middle America. His work has appeared in Scissors and Spackle and Punchnel’s. He holds degrees from Central College and the University of Northern Iowa and is currently enrolled in Pacific University’s MFA program.
Clifford Hill has recently retired from Columbia University where he held an endowed chair at Teachers College, the Arthur I. Gates Professor of Language and Education. He also directed the Program in African Languages at the Institute of African Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs where he taught the Hausa language. During his retirement he continues to conduct research on cultural variation in the ways in which language represents space and time.
Emily Hyland lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Presently, she is a yoga instructor, but before this career shift, she was a high school English teacher in some of the city’s most high-needs schools; a lot of her recent poetry is inspired by that experience. She has published poems in the Brooklyn Review, The Awakenings Review, and Stretching Panties and is working to publish her collection of poetry about the reality of teaching in NYC.
Chris Joyner is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Miami and calls Virginia home. In 2012 he won honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Sports Poetry and Prose Contest and in 2011 received the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in B O D Y, Penduline Press, Brusque, Fiddleblack, the Barely South Review, and elsewhere. While he is currently an adjunct professor of English by day and a server by night, in a parallel universe he ghostwrites for a well-respected rapper.
David Kann escaped academic administration and returned to poetry and just-teaching. In the process he discovered that writing poetry makes him feel more like himself than most activities. In pursuit of himself and better poetry he recently completed an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been published in Stoneboat and The Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.
Peter Kent lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He has published work in Cimarron Review and the online journal ForPoetry.
Ryan Kerr is a teacher, writer, and musician living in central Illinois. He is currently pursuing his EdD in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His poems have appeared in Poetry Motel and Matter.
Alex Linden
hails from Tempe, Arizona. She holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and is currently a PhD student at Texas Tech University. Other poems have appeared in Blue Earth Review, Blood Lotus, Juked, and Burner magazine. She has poems forthcoming in Bayou Magazine.
Huso Liszt’s poems have also appeared in Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, River City, The Indiana Review, The American Anthropologist, and the Journal for Anthropology & Humanities. He has written extensively about the Peoples of the Agreste in Brasil. Also a theatre artist, he is a seventeen-year resident of Ketchikan, Alaska, where he is currently working on a novel for children.
George Longenecker teaches history, poetry, and technical writing in the Department of English, Humanities and Social Sciences at Vermont Technical College. His recent poems have appeared in Memoir, Atlanta Review, and Santa Fe Review. He lives in Middlesex, Vermont, with his wife and poetry muse, Cynthia Martin. When he’s not writing and teaching, he hikes and skis in the Green Mountains.
Abraham Moore is a poet originally from central Indiana. He currently lives and works in San Diego.
Award-winning poet G. L. Morrison writes, teaches, and nests in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has migrated into Sinister Wisdom, Evergreen Chronicles, Girlburn, The Advocate, Manzanita Quarterly, Alternet, Sexis, and into anthologies including Best of Best Women’s Erotica (Cleis Press), Mom: Candid Memoirs (Alyson Books), and How Can You Say We’re Not Related (Scurfpea Publishing). Her poetry collection Chiaroscuro Kisses (Headmistress Press) will be released later this year.
Alia Neaton is a writer and editor who received an MA in writing and publishing from DePaul University in 2013 and is thrilled to have her poems debut in Sixfold. She is currently working on her first full-length manuscript, an exploration of modern society’s dynamic relationship with food. She lives in Chicago with her husband; they are expecting their first child in February. www.alianeaton.com
Patricia Percival lives in Atlanta, where she is an active member of the writing community. When not making poems, she thinks about the big picture while micromanaging her garden (weeding). Her most recent publication is in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 5: Georgia. She is currently shopping a chapbook, Bargain with the Speed of Light, in which two of the poems in this issue of Sixfold will appear.
D. Ellis Phelps, painter & poet-novelist, is the author of Making Room for George (Balboa Press, 2013). To engage more of her work visit www.dellisphelps.com or find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DEllisPhelpsArtist
Marc Pietrzykowski lives in Lockport, NY, with his wife Ashley, and enjoys being alive more than should be legal. He has published five books of poetry and one novel, as well as numerous individual poems, stories, and essays in a variety of places. He also writes music, sings, and plays a few instruments. More details on all these pursuits can be found on his web page, www.marcpski.com
Sam Pittman lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where he writes poetry and teaches composition, writing, and ESL. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Sperry Fund. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA from the University of California-Berkeley. Sam’s poems have also appeared in ditch,.
Tori Jane Quante recently graduated from Georgia College & State University with a BA in English, Biology minor, and a headache. While attending Georgia College, she was the poetry editor and editor-in-chief of The Peacock’s Feet, an undergraduate-run literary journal. In addition to writing, she enjoys yoga, baking, and fretting over global warming.
Ricky Ray was educated at Columbia University. In 2013, he was the winner of Fugue’s annual poetry contest, and the second-prize winner of the Whisper River poetry contest. Recent work of his can be found in Esque Mag, Ink Sweat & Tears, and the “literary mixtape” Chorus, edited by Saul Williams. He lives in New York with his wife and three cats, where they dream of farm life in an undiscovered village.
Carey Russell graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with degrees in English Literature and Mathematics. She moved to New York after graduation to work in Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. She now works as a writer and researcher at Columbia’s Office of Alumni and Development and is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia. Her work has most recently appeared in American Athenaeum, the Cumberland River Review, and Vex Literary Journal.
Noah B. Salamon spent most of his childhood in Maryland. He majored in philosophy at Swarthmore College and is pursuing an MA in English at Loyola Marymount University. He currently teaches English in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three sons.
Katherine Smith’s poems and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, among them Unsplendid, Measure, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Ploughshares, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage. Her first book, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), appeared in 2003. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.
Christine Stroud is originally from eastern North Carolina, but currently lives in Pittsburgh with her partner and three cats. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and works as an Assistant Editor for Autumn House Press.
Bobby Taylor is an MFA candidate in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied poetics at Naropa University. An award-winning and Grammy-nominated songwriter, he has had songs recorded by Don Williams, Montgomery/Gentry, Billy Ray Cyrus, and many other Nashville recording artists. As an actor he has performed on many stages throughout the country including The Lamb’s Theater in NYC, the Ryman Auditorium, the Grand Ole Opry, and his hometown theater: The Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville, Tennessee.
Jonathan Travelstead received his MFA at Southern Illinois University. He served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. When not on duty, he backpacks twice each year in Central America and Europe, and works on an old dirt bike he hopes will get him to Peru in December.
Jennifer Lowers Warren has published poetry in Rhino, Nerve Cowboy, and Literary Mama. She lives near a military base somewhere in the world for the next ten years.
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