https://bristleconemag.blogspot.com/bristleconeJuly2022.html
Photo by Sandra S. McRae
Poems by
Alice Dugan Goble, Ron McFarland, Oliver Scofield,K. Blasco Solér, and Lisa Zimmerman
© 2022 Bristlecone
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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.
Submissions are accepted year-round. Please adhere to all of the following guidelines:
- Submit 3 to 5 unpublished poems in a single Word attachment (no poems in the body of an email) to: bristleconemag@gmail.com. Submissions with more than 5 poems will not be considered.
- Poems posted on blogs and social media are considered published. Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you let us know right away if the work is accepted elsewhere.
- Use a header on at least the first page of your submission that includes your:
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- Flush left alignment except for drop-lines, internal spaces within lines, and any other special formatting your poem requires
- 100-word maximum bio at the end of the submission; same guideline for translator bio(s). Feel free to provide live links to your website.
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
Alice Dugan Goble
The middle is open, and ice bricks knock and swirl.
Channels run through slab ice in sunny spots,
frozen bubbles from turbulence stop time.
Snowflakes float toward ground,
then gone. Slant sun through skims of ice
makes gold-lit wavering lines on stones.
Light and water agree about beauty.
Walking west, ice sheets curl near banks,
cut back in on themselves. We sit,
creek level on sun-warmed granite.
Beneath the water, a singing.
The creek never asks who will love it.
Movement matters. Running toward.
Alice Dugan Goble is a Colorado poet with a few published poems, a love for poetry, a huge family, and a busy life-coaching business. The stunning natural beauty of Colorado is often her inspiration.
Following the seven-thirty flurry of birds
nothing, not so much as a ragged sparrow.
We’re half listening to a classic music channel,
Beethoven’s fifth violin sonata, “Spring,”
even though it’s only two-thirds through February,
so we’re being teased and we know it.
The online weather report threatens
snow by way of reprimand for
another tour-de-force in self-delusion.
Local papers have ceased deliveries
leaving us vulnerable to the vagaries of
television and online news when it comes
to keeping up with various wars and assorted
calamities. We’re both of us almost eighty,
that time of life when for truly important news
one must rely on poetry or birds.
He dreamed that morning of a black-and-white bird
that might’ve been a magpie but probably wasn’t.
It crept along a bare branch of the scarlet hawthorn
suspended over two feet of crusted snow catlike
toward the birdseed snowman who hung there
from his twine tether gently rocking in the wind,
attracting nuthatches, black-capped chickadees,
juncos, and the day before, a gold-splashed oriole.
He woke to a chorus of birds singing their hearts out
and a hungry squirrel poised to leap at the snowman
where he swayed beige-bodied under his black
top hat, silent and vulnerable, ready to serve.
Wind rang music from the chimes on the porch,
but no one seemed to be in a dancing mood, not
nuthatch, junco, chickadee, squirrel, nor snowman
coal-black-eyed, four-black-buttoned, black-mittened,
thin-red-mufflered, hanging from his taut twine noose.
Oh, the neighbor’s cat’s a real killer,
slays newborn rabbits, occasionally a young
careless squirrel, pursues the quail
we think of as our quail although we
have no proof of ownership.
Her cat’s a tom named Tom
after her ex, “a cad” to hear her tell it.
He now lives out in the county
with two black labs his neighbors say
raise hell with their chickens.
He shoots pheasant over his dogs.
“Dogs should run free,” he insists.
“Chickens should be kept in coops.”
He never cared for cats.
We hiss away our neighbor’s cat
when we catch him sneaking over,
but he’s a stealthy predator,
proof of which we can document
readily in myriad feathers.
But we like our neighbor, a kind and
lovely woman opposed to human violence.
One day, or night more likely, her tom
will slip away, cross Mountainview
and foray into the wheatfields
on the edge of town in search of
dietary variety in the form of voles.
Coyotes lullaby us sometimes late at night.
They are not known to be vegetarians.
The Hummingbird and the Cranky Old Man
The hummingbird buzzed the old man’s ear
and whirred her way to the pollen-packed beebalm
blooming magenta early that year.
The old fellow muttered and quaffed his cold beer
as the bird whirred past with nary a qualm
buzzing once more his half deaf ear.
The feathery feeder posed without fear,
sipped blossom to blossom, utterly calm,
while the geezer guzzled his glass of warm beer
and consigned himself to uncertain cheer,
his life having dimmed to a sorrowful psalm.
He’d watered the beebalm early that year,
so this tiny green guest, unbidden, drew near
to establish her nest as a brief summer home
and offer this codger a buzz of good cheer.
Yes, the hummingbird buzzed the old man’s ear,
bold and insouciant, and flew up quite near
to tell the old fogy he had nothing to fear
if he watered his flowers and stuck to his beer.
Ron McFarland, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Idaho following 50+ years in academe, lives and writes in Moscow, Idaho. In 1984, he was named the state’s first Writer-in-Residence, a two-year position that involved ten readings and residencies all over the state.
After Santee Frazier
Aspen march solemnly
into our fields
and Douglas fir
push through yarrow and last year’s grass.
She smiles when she asks
do you want to see the trees?
What she means is
do I want to spend a few hours
pulling weeds?
Her floppy straw hat
elbow patched shirt
ripped leather gloves
and faded bandana
gather around her.
We walk into our field
and pull weeds.
You would not believe what Luther
did last week.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
Neighborhood frustrations
also need pruning.
And the 60 acres behind Miller’s
was bought, did you see
the No Trespassing signs?
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
Toad Flax gathers
in dirty piles.
We find a new tree,
place a stake to mark
this brave young soul.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
Also the foxes have a new den
we haven’t seen any kits
but the mom
took a chicken
carcass from my compost.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
Harriers order
the meadowlark’s
and tree swallow’s
silence. Ours too
for a skyward minute.
Bend, grab, twist, pull.
Oh my god! The thistle is soo
bad this year
but I’ve pretty much cleared
between my driveway
and the gully.
We squat amid tall grasses
twisting out invasives, look east
worn barns, forest’s edge
then the Tetons
stare back.
It is a good day to talk
and pull weeds.
In Defense of Whatever Happens Next
After Laura Da
I.
Faint wagon tracks
lead away from Felt
along Bull Elk creek
across meadows
up a switchback.
Then, the Hollingshead homestead
buildings adrift
in waves of foothills
crumpling against
lodgepole shores.
Aspen nestle
edge two-track
cover themselves in spring.
The wagon rests
under hand-hewn planks
supplies yet unloaded.
Miles and Karl
silhouettes
on the threshold
looking like the barns
they have built
grey, stooped, worn.
II.
Going forward looking back
hay falls in lines, spiraling inward
to catch Miles on the iron seat, horses fore:
the prow breaking sea of timothy.
He keeps scythe swathes smooth
through dips and over the ridge.
Snap of reins, red tail’s shriek
against that symphonic swish
of grass slipping sideways.
Down the valley
clouds, dark and heavy
push east
slight flashes
will pass below
they stay dry-docked another day.
Karl sharpens axes in the forge
wooden handles clamped in a vice
file scrape matching his breath.
A broken window pane
like a sunrise yet to come
condenses light onto the silver gleam
of fresh metal.
breath
rasp
breath
rasp
The file pushes forward
axehead ground slowly back.III.
In October’s first snow
I see them most clearly
ancestors through thick flakes
they move
with wind
among cabins
and along the ridge.
I give their actions
calm urgency
as if they must achieve
autumn’s chores
before the tattered aspen
vanish.
III.
In October’s first snow
I see them most clearly
ancestors through thick flakes
they move
with wind
among cabins
and along the ridge.
I give their actions
calm urgency
as if they must achieve
autumn’s chores
before the tattered aspen
vanish.
IV.
Each building burrows
in two feet of snow
whistling hollowly
wood stoves cold
and empty of ash.
Stakes poke through
the drifts
haphazard seedlings
of Doug fir and lodgepole.
Come spring
we won’t till
and plant these fields
but watch the forest
slowly reclaim its own.
I ski to the forge
past an old Toyota
buried to its wheel wells
trundle open the door
coughing into the musty
scent of mouse droppings
and sawdust
I pull a file from a drawer
clamp my axe in the vice
and breathe out
Oliver Scofield is an MFA student at Northern Arizona University studying poetry and environmental narrative. He grew up on an old homestead near the Idaho-Wyoming border. He currently works as a Wilderness ranger for the Forest Service during the summer and splits his time between Montana and Arizona.
Its mutability / its ability to be both airy and almost weightless and so very deep and burdensome on branches and rooftops / covering everything / both insulating and deadly / fragments of water that make immensity / the lightness of so many geometric feathers / fractals / fierce gentleness / soft / soft / soft / disappearing as gently and powerfully as it came melting to water / to sky / to fall to falls and streams down mountainsides and ravines and into roots and stems into bodies / all bodies / and blanketing again come winter / impossibly heavy / smothering / white and so filled with gray ash and grit / trapping and bringing down all the particulates and smog / keeping it all through the hard winter / creepily still when not blowing all around in gale-force winds /
K. Blasco Solér is a poet and science writer from Alaska. She is an MFA candidate and adjunct creative writing instructor at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.
Answering the Question I Asked My Literature and Environment Students
on the Last Day of Class
Can a writer continue to celebrate what is beautiful on this planet,even as it’s paved and poisoned and lost for all time?
—Kathleen Dean Moore
I will always argue for joy. I will argue for witnessing the tiny splendors of this fierce world, like the spider in the bathtub that startled me. Tiny splendor of spider and his right to be here. The rabbit chasing off the squirrel under the bird feeder. Little purple asters still alive after snow melted into leaf muck and the after-scatter of November wind. I will argue for the stately black-crowned night heron on the broken tree branch at dusk. I will argue for the full moon’s breath of light across the half-frozen lake where turtles and frogs hibernate in cold mud,
their hearts slowed to an ancient rhythm of waiting. A rhythm I can almost feel as I swim toward sleep in the faint starlight that leans far and quiet against this side of the planet.
I say yes.
Why I Need Horses and What For
to see them move as smoke
across the singing earth
to stand between me and all weather
to nicker from the stable
under night’s black roof
to breathe against my anxious heart
to remind me how,
as a girl, I became a horse every day
cantering beyond the unfenced yard
far from the barn on fire
far from the bitter master
Lisa Zimmerman’s poems and short stories have appeared in many journals including Apple Valley Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, Cave Wall, Ghost Parachute, and Vox Populi. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Orison Anthology, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. Her poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here(winner of the Violet Reed Haas Award), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), The Hours I Keep and Sainted (both from Main Street Rag). She’s a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado and lives with her family in Fort Collins.