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The way each intersection

in a city where you’ve lived a while

becomes layered with personal archeology

The cafe that replaced a liquor store you avoided,

and the friend (or lover) you broke up with there,

and the way on the day of the big fire you passed

this corner as she said, "no, this isn’t much, just grass

in the hills." Somehow in this place, even disaster

passes into ordinary life: insurance, contractors. 

Unfold the map of all the places you have ever worked,

the colleagues you have run into, and the way

they complain about some of the same people

and some new ones you’ve never met, and you nod,

like, of course, I get exactly how it is to sit at that desk,

in that cubicle, and how it feels when that creep

stands in the entry, leaning against both walls at once.

This is the prequel to moving to Honolulu

or Prague, places full with narratives no one

could expect you to know, but peaceful at the moment.

You choose someone else’s landscape to drink

coffee in, while you observe the morning commute.

Before she went to college, Carol Dorf, had never been outside of the Philadelphia area, for more than 4 nights. Her house on Ninth Street has been torn down, and the one on Pleasant Drive was condemmed. Her poems have appeared in Fringe, The Midway, Poemeleon, New Verse News, Edgz, Runes, Feminist Studies, Heresies, Coracle, Poetica, Responsa, The NeoVictorian, Caprice and elsewhere. She’s taught in a variety of venues including Berkeley City College, a science museum, and as a California Poet in the Schools. She now teaches at a large, urban high school.

We sit at the kitchen table,

Conversation as random as the peaches

We choose from the bushel basket.

Order does not matter–

All will empty out in the end.

Our histories are grafted.

This summer alchemy

We learned in the bone of our childhood.

The fruit already garnered

from glossy leaves and blue sky,

aligned on weathered, paint-cracked sills

to wait the ripe of now–

Yesterday too soon, tomorrow too late.

We handle the soft flesh gently,

Stripping ruby skins to gold, honey-streaming,

summer-soft words, recounting piecemeal

what may this year be said.

Our hands busy, there is always somewhere to look

When bruises rise and the sweet juice at our wrists

is salted with tears. These intimacies

are as healed as ever they will be.

We do not offer one another condolences–

we are that honest.

Knives in strong, firm hands,

We bend to our work and the telling

which this December will gleam gold

and secret on the pantry shelf.

“A Serb farmer used a grinding machine to cut in half his farm tools and machines to comply with a court ruling that he must share all his property with his ex-wife.”    – Reuters report

I thought she would take half of what was ours
not half of what was mine.
Things she could never use.
So let me take my tools beyond the earth.

I am in the barn, cutting harrows
into halves and peeling hammers
at their hidden spines.

Cattle scales and plows split in useless pieces
lie in their last dirt.

No one can be satisfied. The world
comes in parts. I am only reducing it
closer to its hidden face.

What will I do with the cow?
What does anyone ever do with the
things that won’t be shared?

Valeria Tsygankova is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and creative writing. Her poems have appeared or are upcoming in Chantarelle’s Notebook and campus publications Penn Review and The F-Word. Valeria was born in Moscow and grew up in the Philadelphia area.

The world is filled with gods
They are like nothing else in the world
This is how you know they are gods

The gods did not make the world
The gods were made by the world
They are more helpless then they have ever been

I asked them if they were once
Like the gods of our storied past
But they did not answer

Their tongues were made of stone
And their teeth of wool
They neither sing nor speak

I found them one day searching
For change, but my pockets were empty
Everything now must remain as it was

Only the world changes
As stars withdraw to the beginning of time
As we found ourselves at the edge of the forest

Following the animals over the plains
Listening to their lies, their endless
Stories of gods who will not let them be
Jacob Russel lives in South Philly and teaches part time
at Saint Joseph ‘s University. His writing has been published in
the Beloit Poetry Journal, Salmagundi, Potomac Review, Bitter Oleander,
Pindeldyboz, the Laurel Review and other literary venues. jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com

You never hear the people
who jump.

Their steps echo on decks
above in consonants spit after
splash.

It isn’t a language you study
but frays of split
rope, splinters and simple carving
in cedar, where a blade
anchored
is pulled.

It’s silence, finally
when the ship tosses its ghosts:
drying watermarks, no
letters of intent.

The dead, you guess, were once
cast aside in lungsfull.

Maybe you trace tissue to the edge
to find forgotten tongue and speak
to complete the fragment.

Scott Hammer’s other poems have appeared in magazines such as Poet Lore, Lungfull!, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and Freefall. He teaches English at Bodine High School for International Affairs in Philadelphia .

The lot
was stones
and corners,
rafters shafts
of stars
and certainty.
Here
the cut-down
pines remember
circuitry
and sap:
warm boy,
just love can
drip like that,
thick
as plums
and straight
as parallel
powerlines.

Kathryn Pilles-Genaw graduated with her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. She currently shares an efficiency in Philadelphia with six cats and two bicycles.

I start to delete the e-mail from Vincent, not knowing
anybody by that name, when I realize the address
is my father’s. Last week he had surgery to remove
a squamous cell growth from his earlobe. As I read
his brief morning greeting, I again see his ear
swaddled like a miniature mummy, his hazel eyes
dulled with pain and fear. I type a quick reply,
better Van Goghthan Picasso, and sign it
your sunflower.

Delaware native Nina Bennett is the author of Forgotten Tears A Grandmother?s Journey Through Grief. In 2006, she was chosen by the poet laureate of Delaware to participate in a writers? retreat sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her articles and poetry have appeared in the anthology Mourning Sickness, The Broadkill Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Grief Digest, the News Journal, A.G.A.S.T., Different Kind of Parenting, M.I.S.S.ing Angels, and Living Well Journal.

Had they had different names,
or had this not been her first job
Stateside, or had the guy
just ordered instead of insisting
his knowledge of typical Hispanic
names, perhaps then, the Mexican-
American manager standing next to her
wouldn’t have doubled over
and his three friends at the table
wouldn’t have fallen on top of each other
in uproarious laughter while
the two of them stayed silent
– she not understanding,
he much chagrined.  But her name
was Ingrid.  Though fair with
sandy brown hair, she was not
six feet tall and her accent
exposed her Columbian origins.
Yes, dees ees my name.  Flirting,
he shook his head and continued
to resist, “No, it can’t be.”  Years later,
when Ingrid was at dinner
in Kansas for a conference
with a group of us, she related
the incident and still she was not
fully knowing why the ten of us
lit up the diner with guffaws and tears. 
Wat ees your name? she’d asked him, making
small talk as she’d learned while yet
in training, scoring points
with the manager beside her. 
With any other masculine name,
anyone could have easily gone with “Yes,
you look like a…”, or “the name fits you”. 
But because he’d answered,
Dick, and because she was new
to this country, the agreeable Ingrid
had replied gently, kindly,
Your face matches your name.

Teresa Méndez-Quigley, a Philly native, was selected Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Ellen Bryant Voigt in 2004. Her poems have appeared in four volumes of the Mad Poets Review, Drexel Online Journal, Philadelphia Poets, and many more.

He took my hand
that grey day
dark, muscled
trees emptied of birds.

As if I were watching
a grainy video
myself, led away.
The man was strong,
all twists, low voice.

It’s silent.
Shouldn’t have
taken the shortcut.
There’s nothing after
the path. See
maybe I was meant to.
Nothing after the
Or had to.

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann won the Short Memoir Competition at the 2007 First Person Arts Festival in Philadelphia. Her essay, “Why We Needed a Prenup With Our Contractor” was published as a “Modern Love” column in The New York Times. Her other essays have appeared in many other journals and magazine. She teaches in the graduate counseling psychology program at Rosemont College.

It’s a miracle we survive at all,
I say, as we walk the cases,
wincing at a colon as big as a stove pipe,
scowling at ribs deformed
by corsets, and spines collapsed
into little broken heaps, the horns
and warts and tumors
jutting out of waxen faces,
carbuncles and gouty toes,
a lady whose fat has turned her into soap.

But my brother, being a man, jokes on.
He sees a petrified penis and gasps,
I’ll never look at beef jerky the same way again,
as I giggle and cringe.

Until a whole wall of bloodless
babies in jars breaks over us like a wave,
all stages of fetal development,
followed by the terrible web of maladies;
so many damaged dolls,
each one a lesson in fragility.

He points to the anencephalic ones,
saying they look like trolls,
but then a lonely floater
in its little sea of tears
sends him into silence,
for we could be at the grave
of the little ghost he’s been
tethered to for seventeen years:
his first girl, all tangled in her cord,
born still and cold as snow.
I can’t bring myself
to tell him about the tiny
pearl of a zygote my heart tows.