Photo by spencer77 Spencer Wright via flickr
It’s the season of planting, and “Need Somebody to Love,” by our Spring 2012 featured poet, Ronda Broatch, begins under the skin:
I’ve picked each fruit under strawberry leaves
planted my Queen of the Night
and now this sliver of bark won’t budgefor love, nor money, nor squeeze
of tweezers, like the stinger leftafter the death of the bee….
“There” in Trinidad, Kathryn Martins tells us, “You know the smell of jasmine when you smell it. It is feeble to call it fragrant. It is feeble to call it sweet….”
And in Lia Skalkos’s “Encyclopedia Floridiana,” Frank finds a Jesus Lizard:
Frank holds it with one hand, its tail protruding pornographically from between his fingers. I wonder if its heart is pounding. If it is, the lizard shows no sign of it. All those years of evolution and it is holding still in a hand that could crush it. I wonder: how does the lizard know when to stay still and when to run? How does it negotiate the balance between coming and going? Between stasis and instinct?
“Come see this,” Frank says, still clutching it….
Spring through poetry, fiction, and commentary by these writers and others, including new poems by Jaime Garcia and Kevin McLellan, new stories by Matthew Dexter and our-man-in-Cork Edward Mc Whinney, and reviews of books by Michel Houellebecq, Greil Marcus, Pamela Uschuk, Jeremy Grimshaw and Michael Downs.
If you’d like your work to appear in our next issue, the deadline for summer is June 1. Contrary accepts submissions only through this form.