Emily Strauss

Piece of Him

A two-inch long, rectangular piece of surgical
Steel, lightweight, slightly concave, with a thin
Slot cut into the middle is all I have left.
It hangs on the door handle from a faded white

Cotton string intricately knotted through the slot
Then doubled over on a long loop, on the handle
Of the door, bangs against it each time I leave
A nuisance really, I generally ignore it except

When I want to recall old love, a genuine body part
From a broken arm screwed together, a piece
Of flesh, the rest long gone, nothing left but this.
He is melted to dust now, faded but for this relic

Taken when the bone healed, carefully saved
All this long time, now it is strung like a pendant
In a jewelry box, next to a baby tooth, lock of hair
Inventory of forgotten bodies and lost souls. 

Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry. Over 100 of her poems appear in dozens of online venues and in anthologies. The natural world is generally her framework; she often focuses on the tension between nature and humanity, using concrete images to illuminate the loss of meaning between them. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.

Sara Lefsyk

IT WILL TAKE ME TWENTY PACES to get to that tree. Meanwhile, William James is boxing somewhere in the corner.  I can see his pony from here.  I say: next climb onto that bridge and wait there William.  At night some things can reappear.

Like the time they told me to make a doll out of clock parts but instead I made a strobe light and sat on it for a while.  

The whole scene went something like this:  a man, seeing a transparent dog walk on air, walks off the edge of a hill and falls into his world alone.  He says:  “my hand is red and on fire.”  We are using someone else’s night voices.

At night a woman wears blue and forgets about weather.

In this next scene William is trying to convince me to build a clock out of doll parts.  When I say: I want to trick William into the very air, I mean: I need a benefactor the size of his ghost.  I water his birds but still he will not let go of cloth and lend me his gown. 



 

I DON‘T THINK I CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR THIS: the whole house was in pain but we went to the market anyway to spend our dimes.  At the old fish-breeder’s William recalls how: in his youth he had been haunted by trout in the Great Bering Sea.

But a man is a doll made out of tiny bird parts.  “There is a sort-of animal-shape hovering above,” he says.  William says “What!” then eats a very tiny salted cracker.  His whole second body expands inside his first.  “All is well inside the first and second bodies,” he explains. “The world held together with rope, various beams and rope.”

Still, a woman wakes up and feels a wilderness.  She says: “I feel the wilderness moving inside of me moving outside of me.” 

It’s dark.  

A man is listening to other people’s animal voices.  “Williams pony is red and on fire” he says.  Then places whelk in his ears and collapses to the floor of his inner visions. 

WHAT WE DID WITH THE OLD PINS WAS UNMISTAKABLE, nine animals remained but only one was still alive. 

We’re at the old Jungian Theatre touching walls.  I want to build a trout out of bird parts but William wears a girls ugly face and says his orange juice tastes like potatoes 

and can you make orange juice out of potatoes?

I tell William no I cannot make orange juice out of tomatoes.  I am wearing my Gettysburg hat.  It’s winter.  The snow forms a sort-of doorway into the ground.  

With any effort a man’s face is a bud of light.  

He’s floating and at sea.  In a deserted plaza his face is an academy of pure holes and plaster.  He says: “I don’t believe in a secret-real self.  But it’s far too dangerous.”

A woman wakes up thinking-violent.  

Her fingers move toward the dead eyes of a bird.  She says she feels the animal moving outside of her moving inside of her.  

A film plays on screen.  It’s a fast-motion action-documentary containing a close-up of the whole world and a still-frame of a very modern-day pony.



 

Sara Lefsyk's first chapbook the christ hairnet fish library is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.  Her work has appeared in such places as Bateau, The New Orleans Review, Dear Sir, Phoebe, and The Greensboro Review among others.

Issa Lewis

TREE CARVINGS

The tree absorbs the names, the hearts with initials in them, the fuck yous—

fifty years of words that had no other channel, that never became poems 

or got spoken to the people who needed to hear them.

The tree listens as its skin is sliced open, in passion or in boredom, 

with equal willingness and no complaint. It knows 

that next year J.T. will have broken up with A.M. 

and this carving won’t matter; will, in fact, mock the intensity of this moment 

and A.M. will cry when she walks by the tree next summer.  

Yet the tree allows the knife, and for awhile the words will shine palely

against the dark ridges of bark, a crusty sap-scab bleeding around the edges.

But time passes and the tree swallows them quietly

like skin swallows a wound, like a year swallows a minute.

Issa Lewis is a graduate of the New England College MFA in Poetry program and currently teaches at Davenport University.  Her poems have appeared in Pearl, Naugatuck River Review, November 3rd Club, and Switched-On Gutenberg, and her book reviews have appeared in Alehouse.  She lives in West Michigan.

Mel Kenne

Election Year 

The shit man

is coming. He

is sagging along,

leaving his stain.

A visionary,

he sees that

beyond shit

there is nothing,

absolutely

nothing to gain.

The shit man

is coming. He

is singing his

song of shit,

expecting all

of us to listen

and eagerly turn

our collective

attention

to it.



 

Mel Kenne is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent collection, Take, was published in 2012 by Muse-Pie Press. In 2010 Yapi Kredi Publishers in Istanbul published a bilingual collection of his poetry, Galata’dan/The View from Galata, in Turkish and English. His second book, South Wind, won the 1984 Austin Book Award. In 2010 he was one of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award winners. He lives in Istanbul, Turkey.

Hillary Katz

The Girl Considers What’s Next
 

On a rainy day in a fluorescent classroom, the girl sees his quick face in a child’s crayon drawing: the most of him she’ll ever get again. There are children with minds fresher than new love and that much self is frightening. The girl has not found something big enough to hold onto. Her own flesh is not enough. So the girl shares her pain with someone who doesn’t deserve it. In a Chinese restaurant that smells like warm fish, she sits alone and writes on a paper napkin the definition of to share: To leave scraps of yourself somewhere you’ve forgotten to love. To open yourself to the deepest spot of this life, wet and dark. To eat it, unafraid, and let the juices stain your clean teeth.

The Girl Pretends to Believe in Rebirth

The girl dreams of herself as a three-legged dog.  She hikes Bernal Hill in the October rain. Her paws are muddied and raw.  At the top the city unfolds under her like a ribbon uncurling. A grid of streets and houses and hills. The city is made of negative spaces. When the girl returns to herself, her bedroom is nothing but a streak of streetlamp light through the window and the noise of the sidewalk below. There is a woman who repeats that she wants to fuck God. She wants to fuck God because he isn’t doing anything else for her.  The girl has seen the woman before on the street. There is an emptiness in the woman’s face. Whenever the girl feels unfilled she goes to the ocean to let the salt soak into her.

She buries abandoned beer cans into herself. Sand-filled and crushed.  To make part of herself whole. The girl wonders if the moth that has been living on her bedroom ceiling knows about the smallness of this place.  To remember the smallness of this place the girl returns to herself as a three-legged dog. She sits on the sidewalk at dusk.  Her right front stump flops lifelessly. The empty woman passes by without a glance. As a three-legged dog she watches a family carving pumpkins on their front porch. They are surrounded by newspaper. Every finger is orange and slimy. The pumpkins are scalped. The pumpkins are gutted. The pumpkins are cut into something they are not.

The Girl Becomes Predictable

When it’s late enough the girl spills onto the street, opens herself like a dying tulip to anyone who might catch her.  The street is a river silver with fish, their scales each a tiny shimmering animal.  The girl is caught by so many animals’ sharp teeth.  Her skin is marked with red punctures.  She watches each one harden with dark blood.  At this hour the girl can’t identify other humans.  She holds hands with a wolf standing on two legs.  In the morning her skin is covered in rash.  The girl is allergic to dogs.  Her bedroom is bright with morning and swimming with trapped air.  The girl sweats.  Her eyes bulge.  She opens the window and smells begonias.  The girl turns pink as their blossoms.

In the End, There Are Stains That Never Rinse Clean

You fucked me for the last time and in the morning 

the sheets were marked with red fingerprints.  There 

are things you could never know:  that for you I forgot 

myself for the length of a star’s death.  That the flood 

born inside my lungs when we first touched drowned 

the down feathers from my body.  That your citrus 

breath would have been my ruin.  Because your mouth 

was a home for the lost. And I was lost and lost again.  

When you left you gave me all the pennies you found 

under your bed collected in a mason jar.  For weeks 

after I dreamt of fields littered with copper, greening 

in a steady rain. 

In the End, the Birds Told Harsh Truths 

The morning we woke snarled impossibly together 

for the final whispered time, we unclasped our sticky 

hands and in the center of my palm was a pearl, oval 

and murky as the white of an injured eye.  You held it 

on your cupped tongue and when I tried to take it into 

my mouth you swallowed it whole and said it was an 

accident.  In the bright kitchen you cracked two eggs 

into a hot pan.  One yolk spilled from its shell marbled 

with blood.  You said, some things are meant to only

live partial lives, and tipped it into the trashcan. When 

I walked outside, empty-stomached, the birds stopped 

singing all at once.  Silent in their nests of stolen moss.




Hillary Katz’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, burntdistrict, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and other journals.  Originally from Vermont, she is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire.  She reads for Weave Magazine and teaches poetry and translation in middle schools.  She lives in San Francisco. 

 

 

Howie Good

GREAT THINKERS

I take the winding blacktop road that the arrow indicates I should. Cows stare dully from behind barbed wire. It reminds me of a Nazi-era law for the prevention of offspring with hereditary diseases. I suddenly realize that tomorrow I might be found miles from here wandering the countryside wearing only one shoe.

*

Trees cluster around me. The air glows with the pungency of their fresh-from-the-grave smell. I unzip to take a piss, a wrinkled old woman peering over my shoulder. 

*

I’m given a brush and a can of white paint and told to number the trees. A bird whistles derisively from somewhere in hiding. I decide right then to stop searching for the moral of the story and let words come to me instead, like windfall sticks and branches. It’s cold for spring. While great thinkers are thinking great thoughts, the ground shakes at shorter and shorter intervals. And such wind! Like the mistaken zeal of Socrates’ executioners. 

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing) and the forthcoming poetry chapbooks The Complete Absence of Twilight (Mad Hat Press), Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and An Armed Man Lurks in Ambush (unbound CONTENT).

Matthew Dexter

All Her Piggy’s

We stand on the ledge where we’ve threatened to jump a thousand times. The traces 

of freshly-painted asphalt against our naked toes are labyrinthine. I can see her neck when 

the wind carries her hair into the evening. 

The streetlamps and vehicles and buildings blend into one. She is so close. One step 

and she will fly. We have spoken of flying--it never happens. 

There is a witness watching through his telescope from one of the high-rises. He is a 

few floors above us. He will get his money’s worth tonight. All the lights are glowing in the 

man’s apartment. You can see the kitchen and bedroom and living room strewn with 

furniture. He is sitting there in his underpants, waiting for us to die. 

Of course, only we know that the time has come. Soon the entire street will be 

awake and our parents will be aware and our boyfriend’s bodies will sob over our naked 

texted photos.

She steps closer to the edge. Her little piggy is curled across the precipice. The nail 

hangs there waiting, watching. 

I inch closer, the bubbles writhing against my heels and toes and the balls of my feet 

as if I’ve never felt them. She reaches out her anemic arms. A perfume bottle shatters. She 

is a swimmer about to start a race. The glass cuts my big piggy and the moonlit blood is the 

color of her nail polish, sparkling. She takes another step so that all her piggies are exposed. 

I observe my gushing wound. I wait for her to dive and approach the edge. She 

disappears without a whisper. The man jumps from his telescope and runs around his 

apartment, from room to room, a rat illuminated in a maze. 



 

Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Like the nomadic Pericú natives before him, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine.

Holly Day

Comfort Food

apocalyptic dreams comfort us

show an end to credit card debt, to war, 

the confusion with our day-to-day ordinary lives

too wearily responsible to suicide

we ask God to end it for us.

the gleam in a Bible salesman’s eye

offers a glimpse of a Heaven waiting

just past the mushroom clouds 

blooming on the horizon.

White

she walked into the bedroom and saw

what was left of her little girl

the child that smiled and cried so easily

grown into a dead woman

bound and gagged on a bed.

she never said a thing

when she saw the nipple rings

making round indentations through

her t-shirts, the tongue ring at 18

she had hoped it was a phase,

she never said a thing

as the girl wasted away, strung out at 22

she kept getting better. They talked all the time

but not about that.

and now, here is a mother

pulling leather bondage gear off her dead daughter

removing the bits of metal from her breasts

from her lips

pulling a flannel nightgown over soft, still-warm hair

covering the body

before calling the police.



 

Shoes

if it hadn’t been for the new shopping mall

they never would have found the bodies.

six skeletons, strung with dried skin

tied to trees in the heart of the forest.

after the bodies were identified

as coming from good, upscale families

that still lived in town, naming 

some of the new roads leading to the shopping mall

after the dead girls

seemed like a good idea.

after further consideration, though

they decided to just give the girls

a really nice funeral.

 

Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, and Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch.

Susana H. Case

Instructions for Adjusting to Jet Lag

Disorientation is temporary; no need to be irritable about your irritability...it’s as if your wig’s full of bugs, yet you don’t wear a wig...and underneath that non-wig or those earwigs you must know that plane-sitting is shit work...I mean shift work...you’d prefer to shirk but if you can’t, it’s better to be organized...fight it, take a lot of melatonin...more hellish nightmares will make waking hours seem normal...but think seriously: is that what you really want?...and since it takes a day to adjust to each time zone crossed, if you’re considering a brief trip of long distance, you might as well stay home... that way your brain won’t be in Spain while your suitcase is in Kathmandu...or is it that you left your heart in San Fran while your chest is in Pécs?...if you do decide to fly, my love, it’s okay to ask about lost luggage, but please...do not scare those you love by asking, where am I?

Susana H. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology. She is the author of: Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions), Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press) and 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press, forthcoming in 2014). Please visit her online at: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shcase/.

Cynthia Blank

Mother

You have two daughters

running in separate directions.

One comes home crying and laughing, 

stacking up her lies

with borrowed money,

and the other falls in love with a bluebird,

migrating to warmer climates

to be alone with him.

You lay in bed 

surrounded by dust, 

pink floral wallpaper, 
and two yellow-eyed cats who are afraid

of each other,

and think you have failed.

Later, you remember you had a sister, 

that no one spoke of, 

who died

in your mother's womb.

And you decide your daughters 

have become re-creations 

of her, 

and failure is something, 

inherited.

Cynthia Blank is a poet and student who is graduating from New York University with a degree in Dramatic Literature and Creative Writing. She plans to continue to Master's studies to receive an MFA degree in poetry.

Introduction

The Summer Issue of Scapegoat Review is filled with captivating and unique work. Summer, a time of long days and short nights, a time of lush flowers, trees heavy bearing fruit, gardens full of growth; frenzied in their collage of colors, flavors, and textures. Many thanks to the writers who fill this issue.

 

Erika

 

Here is one of my favorite poems about summer—

 

Summer Song

William Carlos Williams

Wanderer moon

smiling a

faintly ironical smile

at this

brilliant, dew-moistened

summer morning,—

a detached

sleepily indifferent

smile, a

wanderer's smile,—

if I should

buy a shirt

your color and

put on a necktie

sky-blue

where would they carry me?

Scapegoat Review Summer 2013

Introduction by Erika Lutzner...
Cynthia Blank • Mother Mel Kenne • Election Year Holly Day • Comfort Food • White • Shoes Howie Good • Great Thinkers Emily Strauss • Piece of Him		Hillary Katz • The Girl Considers What's Next • The Girl Pretends to Believe in Rebirth • The Girl Becomes Predictable • In the End, There Are Stains That Never Rinse Clean Susana H. Case • Instructions for Adjusting to Jet Lag Issa Lewis • Tree Carvings Sara Lefsyk • It Will Take Me Twenty Paces • I Don't Think I Can Take Credit For This • WHAT WE DID WITH THE OLD PINS WAS UNMISTAKABLE
Matthew Dexter • All Her Piggy's