Laudably Exquisite

The Ledge has been around for 22 years.  This latest issue contains 24 poems and 10 short stories.  The poems appear first, followed by the stories, rather than a smattering of both as is more common in literary magazines.  Although I prefer a smattering, and in spite of the six typos I came across, I like this magazine and would like to see it run for 22 years more.  The best of this issue is as good as anything I’ve recently read.

Prizes for poetry and fiction are awarded annually, and the second place poetry prize goes to Elizabeth Harrington for her powerful poem “Witness.”  “Exquisite and perverse” is how the speaker describes the poem’s situation, in which “My father is smoothing lotion on my sunburned shoulders. / I am letting him, / bare to the waist.”  Her sister enters the house and sees them, “And though I am innocent / of what I see in my sister’s eyes, / I am like a sleepwalker suddenly roused.” 

The first-person language is direct and free of portent.  What happens or doesn’t happen either happens or doesn’t happen.  We feel the sense of sleepwalking described by the speaker.  “If there is a sound to shame, / it’s the sound of pulling a blouse back on.”  That verb choice, “pulling,” explains everything.  An exquisite poem, not at all perverse.

Compared to the quiet power of “Witness,” Cynthia J. Hollenbeck’s poem “Seventeen” is a knock to the side of the head.  The speaker is babysitting her baby brother “while my parents were / out drinking and fucking around.”  Two high school football players stop by and engage in a threesome with the speaker until her parents come home, the boys make a hasty exit, and her father screams after them to no avail. 

I stood in the foyer, hair askew, cheeks flushed,

waited for him to come through the side door.

But he pushed through the front, and before

I knew it, punched me right in the face.

The violence and sexuality of the poem are in our faces.  We know how the speaker feels because she conveys it in her powerful, no-holds-barred language and descriptions.  This isn’t her first tryst, nor will it be her last.  We’re left with her father’s double-standard logic, which has likely contributed to the situation:  “Guys can screw whoever / they want.  Girls can’t.  That’s the way it is.”  This poem is hard to shake.

I like Meghan Adler’s “False Prenup” because it’s light and witty and references Annie Hall and Manhattan.  It’s about family and family lore and the way children are taught to believe anything if their Aunt Yetta tells them it’s so.  Unfortunately, three of the six typos I found in the issue are in this one poem, and that makes for a bumpy read.  I don’t blame Adler, of course.  The poem is a delightful featherweight, and it doesn’t hurt to know Woody Allen’s movies, either.

Philip Dacey, who co-edited the indispensable Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Form, offers a riveting poem titled “Whitman Doloroso.”  The poem’s epigraph, an excerpt from a letter, explains, “Yesterday I briefly misread “t-e-a-r-s” in a note referring to the condition of a Walt Whitman poster as rhyming with ‘beers’ rather than ‘bears.’”  

The poem itself posits a Whitman poster in the speaker’s office as developing a stain that grows and gradually becomes “a dramatic vertical from eye to beard.”  The speaker doesn’t jump to conclusions.  “I assumed rational / explanations.  Humidity.  A wall’s broken pipe.”  But then a tear (rhyming with “beer”) appears and confounds the speaker, who could be Dacey himself “(‘Poor Phil.  He’s delayed his retirement too long.’)”  “And then I saw it, a liquid bead up in / the corner of the paper eye.”  The letter fragment at the beginning of the poem imagines “a weeping Whitman poster, miraculous icon for a 21^st-century pagan religion!”