Quintessential

Issue 1

Holly DayCharlie StewartHowie GoodLucas HowellWilliam Doreski

People always look at me oddly when I tell them I read po-etry for fun, and the looks only get stranger if I mention the poetry magazine that I’m starting. For most people poetry falls into two groups: the ponderous and awful stuff that they were made to dissect line by line and word by word in school, or the horribly depressing monstrosities that they, and everyone else, produced as a teenager. So really it is understandable that they’re shocked, but I think we need to put a stop to it. The joy in poetry isn’t in understanding every word, it is being surprised, in taking the language we use to write grocery lists and safety manuals and turning it into something wonderful.

This is the first of what I hope will be many issues of Quintes-sential, and though there is a disappointing lack of dinosaurs I think that’s been more than made up for by a selection of poems whose subjects range from Bigfoot to a love story tangled into dreams and woven into a life. There are twenty-five poems in this issue, twenty-five chosen from two-hundred and seventeen, submitted out of all the poems in the world; in the grand scheme of things it is quite a small number, but each of our authors has given us worlds. So please, dive into these poems; enjoy them. And when you’re done, go have a look at the world and tell us what you see.

An Introduction

* Maura MacDonald

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Holly Day 1

Charlie Stewart 9

Conceit * Definition of Love * In Retrospect * Song of a Thousand Violence * Itasca

Notes for the Underground * Dreams * Shadows * Beloved * Shoreham Nights

Contents

Howie Good 17

Lucas Howell 25

William Doreski 33

Epitaph for a Dead Bouquet * Refrigerate After Open-ing * Naming Names * Heartless 3 * Staring at the Sun

Gutting Trout * After Harvest * Harvest * Winter Solstice * Love & Oil

The Subject of my Life * Men the Color of Diamonds * The New Museum * Your Parting Remark * One Last Rubbery Egg

Quintessential

Holly Day shares the city of Minneapolis with a bar entic-ingly named Donny Dirk’s Zombie Den; we don’t know if she frequents the establishment, but any city that produces a poet like this and a bar like that is doing well in our book. She also writes a mean cover letter:

“I truly, truly hope you like the following poems. Truly, I do. It’s not like I’m going to jump off a bridge or anything if you don’t like my poetry, but it’s gonna definitely put a dent in my ego, and then I’ll be forced to go to some poetry reading or another, get drunk enough to get up on stage, and blurt these pieces out loud to a bunch of similarly-inebriated bar patrons who will clap and cheer no matter how lousy I am on stage. And then the next day, I’ll wake up with one heck of a headache, and spend a good part of the day wondering if people were clapping because the poems I read were good, or because the lousy stage lighting made it so you could see through my shirt. So anyway, if you don’t like these, I won’t be necessarily crushed, but I will end up being sorry.”

Holly Day

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Poems

Conceit

Definition of LovePage 2

Page 3In Retrospect

Page 4Song of aThousand Violence

Page 5Itasca

Page 6

2 Holly Day

ConceitIt should have changed my life. I watched himhunched over the ground, hours spentdribbling tiny grains of colored sand in intricate patternson the ground, drawing blue flowers that turned into red flowersthat turned into one giant flower covering the ground. It was so beautifulI would have given anything to roll the whole thing upand take it home with me.But the wind took it minutesafter it was done, smearing great swaths of color against itself untilit was nothing but a slightly grayer smudge against the blondness of the desert sand.The little man stood up, smiled at me, and walked slowly away.It should have changed my life. I should have taken it away with mehis lack of artistic conceit, his willingness to justlet his day disappear in the pursuit of beauty, but just the beauty of the moment.Be here now, and only now. Be here now here now here now here now.I fully intended to go home and erase everything I had ever writtenthat day, that week, that year, in my life, because filled as I waswith the artist’s apparent satisfaction at the act of creationand only in the act of creation, I figured that taking pleasure in just writingshould be enough for me, too. I satat my desk for hours, staring at page after page of hastily-scribbled poems,notes , stories, books almost started and those almost finishedand couldn’t do it. I failed. I wanted to. I want to be freeof these suitcases of loose paper, throw it all in the firedissolve the part of me that was saved in those notesbut I haven’t the strength to let go.

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Across the street, a manis getting his cat ready for bed. Heis making a bed for his catout of freshly-raked leavesgreen, cut grassthe cat is lying on the groundby the pileunmoving, eyes open, watchingthe man gently arranginglawn clippings into a  pillow, birch leaves for a comforterthe man’s eyes look soft and mistyeven from heredown the streeta garbage truck turns a corner and lurchesinto view. The man brushes his eyes cleanunfurls a man-sized black garbage bag and stuffsleaves, grass, the dead catinto its mouth.He knots the bag carefullyleaves it at the curb.

Definition of Love

4 Holly Day

it’s funny how people don’ttalk about The Bomb anymorehow as children and teenagerswe spent so much time worriedabout how we’d survive afteronly to grow into adults too awarethere is no after.  it’s amazing how surreal watchingthe newsclips of bunkers being builtinside mountains in Utahfeel, how strange it seems to thinkof those survivalists digging human ant coloniesdeep underground, and how strange it isto hear myself say“Survive? I think I’d rather die!”

In Retrospect

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somehow spread over high-pitched keys, seekingfingers connecting to digital sparks, loveis a summon-song ringing out of audible range

lightning-straddled, he calls the roaches down.

black shadows stretch from ceiling to floor, seeking under the building where the small things grow, loving disciples sprout legs, pupate, molt, open wings and swarm—

he calls the roaches down. in this room of sick violins, seeking new gods, none of them true, love is a choir of mute voices, blind eyes and barbed legs

from carapace to grave, he calls the roaches down.

Song of a Thousand Violence

6 Holly Day

I never got to see Bigfoot, althoughwe walked along all those same pathsthe other hikers had, the onesthat came back with stories abouta giant hairy creature that walkedstooped near to the groundleaving bare footprints twice the size of a man’sthat filled quickly with waterthen disappeared.  I did see a small herd of deertwo fawns with speckled rumps strugglingto stay erect on baby legs, a lone egrettrying to pull something out of a faded beer cana raccoon so fat it struggled to get out of my way. But I never got to hearthe low growl or high-pitched screamsof the supposed missing link, justthe cacophony of loons, awake at midnighthooting so mournful they could have been wolvesbacklit by lightning and drowned out by thunder.

Itasca

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CharlieStewart

Charlie Stewart lives with his family in North Yorkshire, which makes him the only one of the poets in this issue to be on the same land mass as Quintessential, a high hon-our indeed. He used to sing and play guitar for a band called Laughing Gravy, but was eventually seduced by the wiles of poetry. In the three years since submitting his first poem he has been widely published across the lands (those lands being England, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and India), taken on the position of poetry editor for Sotto Voce Arts & Literary magazine in the U.S, and has just had a collection of poems accepted for publication by Koo Poetry Press. You can find even more about him on his website http://www.cpstewart-poet.co.uk/.

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Poems

Stewart Notes for the UndergroundPage 10

DreamsPage 11

ShadowsPage 12

BelovedPage 13

Shoreham NightsPage 14

10 Charlie Stewart

Remember welleach lovely thingfor darkness is coming. Take no pictures.Record no sound.Write nothing down. Remember. But first, take one small, inviolable, truth,and keep it, close, in a mouthful of bread -for darkness, even now, is approaching your door. And then remember love; remember hard.

Notes for the Underground

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I am fifty-three years old and have awakenedfrom many a beautiful dream. Have cursed the breaking daysand dressed myself, weeping. Know this, as I twistyour sleeping hair around my fist.

Dreams

12 Charlie Stewart

Some people have gone.

You meet them every day. Or, rather, you don’t. 

They call; you stop.You knew them once.But, whoever they were,they are no longer there. Some people have goneand they will not be back. The sun beats down upon the square. You withdraw, in circles, checking your shadow.

Shadows

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stillsomewherebehind the smokealong a laneacross a hillin some green woodbeyond the rainconcealed by leavesor these twelvemoss-growncolumns of Georgia font...you are always in my words.

Beloved

14 Charlie Stewart

Not too far backis a country lane,and there,beneath a Shoreham oak, ( his night’s work done - the moon gone down ) sleeps Samuel Palmer, artist,angel-droppings in his beard and hair.

Shoreham Nights

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Quintessential

Howie GoodHowie Good has a name made for a writer, and he has lived up to destiny admirably, producing nine poetry chapbooks, a full length book of poetry entitled Lovesick, twelve scholarly books, and miscellaneous other works. Somehow he also has the time to teach journalism at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He chroni-cles his writing life at www.apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com/. His poems are made up of small moments and dis-sent; they will leave you looking into your life and grab-bing for the moments on the periphery.

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Poems

Epitaph for a Dead BouquetPage 18

Refrigerate After OpeningPage 29

Naming NamesPage 20

Heartless 3Page 21

Staring at the SunPage 22

18 Howie Good

Here’s something I was interested to learn talking to another man in line: it’s possible to break your jaw merely by laughing. He smiled without showing his teeth, and I felt a familiar emptiness, as when voices float down at dusk from the barred windows of Juvenile Hall, or the shadow of the photographer falls crookedly across the child in a photo, or minutes turn into days, and days into nine leafless oaks.

Epitaph for a Dead Bouquet

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When I wake at last from a hundred-year nap, my wife is still on the phone attempting to reason with the Disputes Department, and our daughter, the beautiful, black-haired barista who lives in a distant city, is finishing up a double shift. Her back was turned to me throughout my dream, her sun-brown shoulders shaking as if she were crying. Was it the small table of ghosts that so upset her, or had she seen reflected in the metal surfaces water birds stupidly stumbling about on land? There’s nothing more honest than failure. The spruce tree may become a cello, but the heart – the heart chokes on its own blood.

Refrigerate After Opening

20 Howie Good

A double-yellow line means one thing when you’re driving on this side of the border, but another when you’re the passenger, your hands lying uselessly in your lap and the bored children in the back seat foolishly insisting on asking, as the road turns north and then disappears among the barbwire trees, why you named them for people who were dead.

Naming Names

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Her heart moves in with my heart. At dinner she stares down without appetite at the roses clotting on the plate. I ask how her day was. She shrugs – her heart doesn’t consider languishment and pain to be subjects for dinner conversation. But sometimes it wonders just what took place before it got here that night trembles under the table, waiting for scraps.

Heartless3

22 Howie Good

There’s something else I should be doing but the sun allows what state law prohibits a heart with manual transmission and I’ve always been partial to polite dissent my eighth-grade math teacher when she confiscated the laser light said You could blind someone Exactly I said

Staring at the Sun

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LucasHowell

Lucas Howell received his MFA from the University of Idaho in 2007 and has poems in The Atlantic, Poetry, Slate.com, and other publications. He is now a first year corps member with Teach For America, teaching 4th grade Language Arts at St. Helena Central Elementary in Greensburg, Louisiana, but has whole-heartedly taken his past experiences as an oil field worker into his words, turning oil and entrails into poetry. These poems don’t show us nature from a distance, they put us in it; working and changing the land.

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Poems

Gutting TroutPage 26

After HarvestPage 27

HarvestPage 28

Winter SolsticePage 29

Love & OilPage 30

26 Lucas Howell

This is as close as I get to prayer: left knee firm in the silted bank of the Wenatchee, ritual blade extended and locked, fingers working 

each organ like a rosary bead in the hand of a practiced Catholic.I begin in the pink circle of its sex, rocking the knife

in a slow jigging motion until my thumb’s flush with the gills.  This trout is small, barely ten inches from the caudal fin 

to the blunt of its nose. I slip two fingers in the cavity, follow the gossamer line to the simple clinch knot 

my father taught me when I could barely tie my shoes. The white crescent of my thumbnail clicks each vertebra 

as I work the kidney from its fibrous, black niche.This is a feeling I do not relish, this stripping of meat 

from the necessaries: furrowed coil of intestine, the still twitching heart.Soon wasps and ants will gather on the pile beside me 

each instinctually taking its piece and buzzing off to digest alone or march its weight in cool liver down a knotted corridor

to some birthing room where the matriarch, who once had nothing but her own wings to eat, will stuff herself, then sleep.

Gutting Trout

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This is August and there is no air,just the sweat that rings 

your eyes in dust.The fields are exhausted, 

and you drive by, slow as air,dreaming them green again. 

These drought years, heat sifts downlike locusts, and all the world is dust.

But soon enough you’ll take no air,so you drive slower yet--  

tires kissing the road to dust,nothing for miles but stone dry air.

After Harvest

28 Lucas Howell

We tuck the old tandem grain trucks loaded with wheat beneath the shed 

till morning. And the long light falls orange beneath the thunderhead-- 

harvest light, bending shadows across the stubble and seed of half-cut fields. 

Our work is far from done, but each day’s a season unto itself 

measured out against the sun--progress steady as a pulse, beating wheat 

from chaff, deep in the combine’s belly. Enough to feed this outpost town for years. 

And we are grateful, for grain is mortal as the flesh that takes it. 

Another day is done. Let the rainfall where it will.

Harvest: Storm Clouds to the West

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A certain quality of light-- sidelong rays glancing off crusted snow, a scrub pine thicket 

grown up around a sour spring--it’s ten below and silent as the moon.The early stars seem close enough to touch. 

You reach, and no one sees or calls you wrong. Your hand is grease-smudged, yet alight with a glistening scrim of ice.

Our universe is vast. And here,in Wyoming, the dark is coming quick.

Winter Solstice: Working the Ridge Above Gas Draw

30 Lucas Howell

The world goes still these summer afternoons,water scarce as shade, and the skya fiery bludgeon. No sounds

but the pumping unit’s steely purl: it nods ever down, then up, suckling oilfrom the fissured limestone.

And this untender dynamo murmurs sweetly in our nation’s ear.Not unlike my love, in the engine of her sleep:

a breath’s deep well to tap the midnight smells, sage and clover, driven by the steady machinery of her heart.

Love & Oil

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Quintessential

WilliamDoreski

William Doreski is immersed in poetry; in addition to several collections of poems, he has published three criti-cal studies, and is a Professor of English at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection is Waiting for the Angel published by Pygmy Forest Press. His poems are the longest in the issue, so we’ll let those do the speaking for him and keep this short.

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Poems

The Subject of my LifePage 34

Men the Color of DiamondsPage 35

The New MuseumPage 36

Your Parting RemarkPage 37

One Last Rubbery EggPage 38

34 William Doreski

We’re only twelve, but your mother,believing in early marriage,bundles us naked into bed,locks the door and cries, “Nature,nature!” We lie there shivering,our bodies awkward as shellfish,while stars explode at the windowand the entire universe fails. I wake still whispering to you,the creature of an old man’s dream.Yesterday’s snow gloats in yellowdawn light. Down the road a truck growls,scraping a neighbor’s driveway.I can’t remember who you are,whether your mother spoke your name,your dark hair a curtain behind whichyour eyes crouch like frightened kittens. I want to tell you that evenin my dream this didn’t happen,your mother didn’t try to mate us,the stars didn’t fall into streetsgreasy with liquor and sweatand burn there like crashed airplanes,the glow of your naked bodydidn’t shame the rest of my life. 

The Subject of My LifeI want to be sorry for failingto respond to your desperation,but shuddering under the bedclothesyou almost convinced me I knewand have known you all my life,and have one or two last decadesto heal the distance your motherimposed between us and our flesh.             

Yet I don’t think you existexcept as the subject of my life,and like the snow in the forestyou shape and reshape everythingwithout committing to anything,and with pastel grace extinguishthe roles of lover, confidant, and wife.

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Driving to work in the dark while snowcongeals a hundred miles southI feel the highway sufferlike a colostomy, headlightsdueling as we drivers resistthe urge to crash head-on forever.  Do you detect in the murk of sleep the stumble of traffic down glacialand leafless hills? I want to stickthe map of this drive like duct tapeto your office door so whenyou arrive you’ll find the starsoccluded by wisps of vaporand the reservoir already frozensmooth and clean as a bottlecap. You’ll recognize me plungingthrough time and space to greet youwith the usual awkward grimace;and by peeling the tape from the doorand crumpling it you’ll critique,justly, the grief that doesn’t apply.You’d invoke the lacquer of sunon ice, the shock of complete strangersconfronting your vivid orange hair.

Men the Color of Diamonds You’d rather stroll downtown and bravethe lunch hour crowd than conformto pre-dawn scenarios too rawto engage you. So alreadymy notion of the day has wrought meinto forms you can’t appreciate. Lying so flat you occupyonly two dimensions, you dreamof jungles breathing heavily,of red hens brooding in your hair,and of cocktails in suave resorts where men the color of diamonds prowlwith smiles bristling with sincerityyou know I’ll never achieve.

36 William Doreski

In the new museum, photostoo glossy for the naked eyecapture supermodels gloatingover bodies cast in alloysusually reserved for airframes.As I’m trying to pierce the glarethe flambeaux of your redheadignites. I feel the heat and turnand catch the air bag of your laughfull in the face. My eyes blacken,my broken nose sneezes up clots. You drag me to your curator’soffice and show me a mirrorand prove I’ve imagined the damage.But why do we clash so vividlywhenever we meet? Twenty yearssince we last inhaled the sameexultant breath, and still the fireof your hair sears my attentionand I have to look at the floorand hope the pattern in the carpetexplains you. This new museum,for which you raised millions of dollars,features art contrived to smotherthe morbid senses, art so rawthat in its glare no one mistakesherself for a human being. 

The New MuseumAs you explain this missionyour grimace masks a vicious glee.When I crack my psyche to laughyou fling me onto the sofaand apply such glib hydraulicsI instantly turn inside-out.Now I’m one of those art works,like you, and the sizzle of snakeheadscrowning your expression numbs meto more than pain, the office sealinglike King Tut’s tomb as natureand culture converge and congeal,glossing us like those photos,exposing us again and again.

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Trudging across the campusin the shimmer of Christmas lights,I mull your parting remarkabout going home to Swanzey,New Hampshire’s ultimate suburb, while I creep to Peterborough,a shabby, pretentious mill towninfested by blunt-cut blonde mothers.That wasn’t the way you put it,the S-curve of your posture framed in my doorway. Something aboutthe dark miles strained and aching,the hills crumpled like newsprint,frozen ponds creaking in sockets,the eyes of small animals blazing. No, you didn’t put it that way,either, your slim black skirtshiny as the famous dark mattercomposing the secret cosmos,your turtleneck sweater confident and secure. Maybe you saidthe days pass like kidney stonesand the nights break out in sores.Maybe you said the horizonsslash like epees, and the cries 

Your Parting Remarkof homeless kittens shame us both.Maybe you claimed the distancebetween us staggers, clutchinga semi-fatal wound. Maybeas you aimed your fishnet stockings at the softest of my organsyou said it’s sad we travelso doggedly apart our bodiesno longer respond to stimulithat in our better moments we share. 

The night-campus chatters on cell phonesand the Christmas décor glows likethe lights of oncoming disasters,and your voice tangles somewherein the ether, stripped of words.

38 William Doreski

The fresh green plastic fragranceof my new Packard convertibleoverpowers my friends and renderstheir sex lives inevitable. We’ve gathered to discuss the poemsthat have sustained us through middle age.Some have wept over Wordsworth,some have kept the boy-poet Keats close to their hearts, some have stunnedtheir intellects with Rimbaud, Heine,or Pasternak. I preferthat modernist chicken-elegy, the “one last rubbery egg”that has haunted me since high school. We sweep papers, books, and pencilsfrom the picnic table.  A chill muscles from the creased old hillsand my friends withdraw to the dinerwhere tough upholstered booths and coffeereward the average citizen. Since I’m no longer a citizenI sit outside in my Packardand listen to laughter percolateas my friends order omelets and fries. 

One Last Rubbery EggSnow weeps in the southwestern sky,devouring the stars as it sweepsmoisture from the sea. I should raisethe top and go indoors and laugh with my friends, but I can’t  findthe mechanism, can’t decidewhere I’ll go when deported,can’t decide if the elegy              

friends will someday prepare for meshould mention that last rubbery eggeveryone, regardless of gender,preference, or species, leaves behind.

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