BRISTLECONE | 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

© 2022 Bristlecone

 

Click here to download this issue as a PDF

 

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

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.

Note that we’ve simplified our guidelines for submissions:

• Submit 3 to 5 poems in a single .doc or .docx attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: bristleconemag@gmail.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)

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

 

 

 

 

 

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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

As You Like It (or Not)

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.

_____________________________________________________________________ 

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.