Stan Galloway

PARADOX The hand that draws the bowstring has faith that the deer will die. The longbow bends, the arrow points, the deer stands frozen in the curious pose of prey before its doom. But Zeno suggests that once the arrow flies, it covers half the distance to the deer’s heart first, then half the distance left and half again and again and half again so the deer will live and the arrow will never find its one true home. A woman’s faith is different than a man’s. She believes his strength is bowstring straight, his heart like longbow yew, flexible but taut. A man believes that he is not a beast– until the string snaps, the tortured bow splinters and his fist is arcing through the air toward the faithful face of the woman who believes. The hunter doesn’t love the prey. He’s filed the razor edge of the arrowhead [...]

Driving under drying skies, north, passing fields the summer has been too wet to turn brown, i wait for God to appear, for poems to rise like mists, for some sort of ever that doesn’t sting. croon to me like a wild road, sunlight spider-webbing across a cracked windshield across strange arms across a morning we can all afford to spend and live and live. ________________________________________________________ Joanna Suzanne Lee earned her MD from the Medical College of Virginia in 2007 and a further MS in Applied Science from the College of William and Mary in 2010. Her ppoetry has been published in a number of online and print journals, including Caduceus, Contemporary American Voices, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her second full­-length book of poetry, the river and the dead, is forthcoming in 2015 from unboundCONTENT. She is currently serving her third year on the James River [...]

Vital Desert Lesson Number One Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried. – Henry David Thoreau Living on beans and bread in an abandoned cabin no larger than a tool shed, I’d be happy, I once said. If I could just remain immobile, silent. No place to go, I’d read Dante’s Inferno and ponder the nature of mass movements, the building of Babel’s tower, the steam locomotive. Dawn and dusk I’d thank sun and moon that I’d escaped the grinding bustle, that nothing disturbed my dreams. Oh, I know it all seems too idyllic, but one vital lesson this desert’s teaching: let nothing rush me—not the heat I try to keep out of, not the man behind me in the traffic jam fidgeting with the folds of his gutra* while he beeps and speeds past me one nano second after the light [...]

Some Men Men who’ve kissed with passion the full lips of women they didn’t love, men who’ve grown too reticent for the confessional, who’ve cleaned public restrooms, wiped menstrual blood from their walls, who’ve written— then scrubbed off—vile graffiti from the rusting doors of shithouse stalls. Men who’ve grown enormous with disregard, rolls of it bellying over their wide belts. Men who’ve been barbers of the dead and were happy for the work, men who’ve become what they’ve microwaved, who overvalue the quality of their erections and fawn over them like the town’s new Wal-Mart. Men who look awful in suits, who’ve been there and back yet grew impatient, men who go to wakes to keep up appearances, who’ve made a deal with God but can’t remember the terms, men who are old pros when it comes to hospitals and cracking jokes at the nurses’ expense, men who’ll be at [...]