lit voices of indiana

Tia Clark "Insults for ugly girls"

She moved to Elmsford from Yonkers over the summer, and where she's from, the girls are prettier and the boys are realer and she went on dates with the realest ones every weekend, allegedly. It's nothing like Elmsford, she claims, this bullshit little village that doesn't even have enough kids in the school for a football team.

Scott Fenton "The Boys"

The boys did whatever they wanted. The boys got away with it. If they'd had any supervision at the country club pool, they would have been fired. Today, Akaash loaded his squirt gun to shoot at sunbathers. Wade pushed Donica into the deep end, pulled her under. Patrick, sitting above the glittering green pool, laughed over the Walkie-Talkie. "I hope she drowns," he said. "I call mouth-to-mouth."

Rebecca Lehemann "Good Friday"

the trilling robins dropped their spring-pale eggsinto their slap-dash nests? Their twiggy legs

performed brute magic—holding them above

the ploughed-up ruts of finally thawed mud.

Danni Quintos "First milk"

& the nurse rushes to catch them with a plastic spoon. God forbidthey soak your hospital gown or run down your rib cage. Once, you were

Brandon Young "World of desire"

That coming Christmas, I open my stocking to findan orange, an apple, a handful of walnuts—

I make a world of desire as I eat them all. I shove

my fingertip into the orange. Begin to peel away

Micahael Martone "The Moon over Wapakoneta"

When the moon is like it is now, hanging over Ohio, I come over to Wapakoneta from Indiana where I am from. I am legal in Ohio, and the near beer they can sell to minors is so near to the real thing it is the real thing. I told you I was drunk. The foam head of this beer glows white in the dull light like the white rubble of the moon bearing down from above.

Pablo pinero Stillman "Versus the Brown socks"

But my favorite show, the one I never missed, was Buenas Tardes con Omar. Remembering that show is like remembering a dream: hazy, confusing, and saturated with emotions. When it came on, five or six p.m., I'd move from the upstairs television downstairs to my mother's room

Allison Joseph "Junk Food"

I wanted no other crumbs on my lips, fingers,table. So when I roused myself,

dazed from the fall, the cold,

my head a heavy weight that bumped

all three steps on the way down,

I still craved a taste sweeter

than anything upstairs in the house,

Chuck Wagner " The fends at mounds state park"

"Listen," this shallow rivulet saysas it washes over stones, smoothing

everything that is rough or jagged

that would complain or cry out, "and I

will whisper a story in sibilance

and rounded vowels that will slow

the racing pulse and arrest the hurried

Nandi Comer, "Ode to the tongue"

What you call imitation is a clanging arrest, a sourmisuse of the throat. I trip over syllables. I feel

sweat trickle between my breasts, let these

faraway words lie like fuzz on my teeth. Tongue,

Shari Wagner, Creek-Song

It begins in a cow lane

with bees and white clover,

courses along corn, rushes

accelerando against rocks.

It rises to a teetering pitch

as I cross a shaky tree-bridge,

syncopates a riff

over the dissonance

of trash—derelict icebox

with a missing door,

mohair loveseat sinking

into thistle. It winds through green

adder’s mouth, faint as the bells

of Holsteins heading home.

Blue shadows lengthen,

but the undertow

of a harmony pulls me on

through raspy Joe-pye-weed

and staccato-barbed fence.

It hums in a culvert

beneath cars, then empties

into a river that flows oboe-deep

past Indian dance ground, waterwheel

and town, past the bleached

stones in the churchyard,

the darkening hill.

Shari Wagner: "First Flight

It quivered in the roll and turn

as Orville banked a curve,

spun from his hubs as he sped

downhill to the river.   

 

And a dream caught

in Will’s spokes, too, as he pedaled

to the rear, reading the cursive

of turkey buzzards, how they’d

 

coast with wings extended,

feather-tips twisted to balance on air.

Something tugged them both

away from their mother,

 

wasted balsa wood thin, delicate

as the kite frames

she helped them build. 

Their pockets were packed

 

with pennies and love notes,

the ballast of loss,

as they raced what snapped

at their heels—tomorrow’s move

 

to Ohio.  Under cirrus clouds,

dirt roads flew beneath them,

spokes twirled like a whirligig’s blades,

like a flyer’s spruce propellers,

 

like something so fantastic

it would lift them to the sky.

Adrian Matejka, “Illinois Abe Lincoln’s Hat;”

blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side,

jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn

& behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked

into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones

& the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost

stories whispered around the last sputtering match. & later,

top sheets pulled up over heads from fear of mirrors

at midnight or some backfired beater’s rusty pop pop pop

after the key twists at the edge of the week. No doubt:

Tuesday is the scariest day in Section 8, but Friday is right

after it in the suburbs. & after those trembling weekdays,

even more blacks with money disappearing & reappearing

as unexpectedly as poltergeists inside of TVs & haunted

trees with fast fingers in West Side yards. & still not

a wavelength of any kind for a black to put in the bank.

The inks in everybody’s hatted & contracting checkbooks

don’t change black. Some front-row architecture might.

Some guns, too, & their loud, colorful opportunities:

whatever version of black is inside a fist around a grip.

Not a color, really—more like the face a man makes in

the glinting face of a gun pointed at him every single day.

Adrian Matejka, Collectable Blacks

This is the g-dropping vernacular

I am stuck in. This is the polyphone

where my head is an agrarian gang

sign pointing like a percussion mallet

to a corn maze in one of the smaller

Indiana suburbs where there aren’t

supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try

to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean

it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it.

I’m grinning to this vernacular

like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic

marching band. Be cool & try to ride

the beat the same way me, Pryor,

& Ra did driving across the 30th Street

Bridge, laughing at these two dudes

with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into

the water & looking at the stars. Right

before Officer Friendly hit his lights.

Face the car, fingers locked behind

your heads. Right after the fireworks

started popping off. Do I need to call

the drug dog? Right after the rattling

windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears

as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before

the thrill of real planets & pretend planets

spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up

three West Side fingers, each ringed

by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer

of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club

down swinging at almost the exact same

time Pryor says, Cops put a hurting on your

ass, man. & fireworks light up in the same

colors as angry knuckles if you don’t

duck on the double. Especially on the West

Side—more carnivorous than almost any

other part of Earth Voyager saw when

it snapped a blue picture on its way out

of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.

Onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it represents.

Allusion

A reference to another work of literature, person, or event

Simile

A comparison using "like" or "as"

Alliteration

Repetition of initial consonant sounds

Apostrophe

address to an absent or imaginary person

Prose Poem

usually a short composition having the intentions of poetry but written in prose rather than verse

Epistrophe

Repetition of the same word or group of words at the ends of successive clauses. ex. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

Anaphora

repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines. ex. Some feel rain / Some feel the beetle startle