Poems by
Jimi
Bernath, Robert Cooperman, John Macker,
Ed McManis, Janet Smith Post, and Kathleen Willard
© 2022 Bristlecone
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Editors' Notes: What We Look For at BRISTLECONE
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.
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: bristleconemag@gmail.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).
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: 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 Rock received 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.
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