The 2River View

27.1 (Fall 2022)

new poems by
Sara Ries Dziekonski, Anon Baisch, Blair Benjamin
Daniel Bourne, Brian Builta, Andrew Cox
Nicelle Davis, Michael Hettich
Sharon Venezio, Patrica Whiting, Jane Zwart
The 2River View
27.1 (Fall 2022)

ISSN 1536-2086
The 2River View, 27.1 (Fall 2022)

Content

Sara Ries Dziekonski

New Year’s Eve

Anon Baisch
Moments in Symmetry
Sudden Were

Blair Benjamin
Life gone forth is wide open
Pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese
Daniel Bourne
Ambush Predator

Brian Builta
Dear Austin
Pine

Andrew Cox
The Drummer
The Fender

Nicelle Davis
The Dying: what does heaven look like to plants?

Michael Hettich
The Useful Man
The Wound

Sharon Venezio
The New Caregiver
The Ocean

Patricia Whiting
Help Line
Skeins

Jane Zwart
Because the human body is a tube
Manual
The 2River View, 27.1 (Fall 2022)
Sara Ries Dziekonski

New Year’s Eve

Midnight is a murderous
train. Soon it will steal
the last tracks of 2020,
so my husband borrows an ax
to chop our dead neighbor’s
discarded bookcase
into fuel for our fire.
We sit on camp chairs
around the fire pit
beside the backyard carriage house
that is just
black windows now.

We sip the wine a little slower,

as though it were the blood
of Christ, and the moon
melts on our tongues
like a communion wafer.
The flames sew lace
across our skin
and we pull up our blankets of smoke.
All December
our neighbor’s tree glowed godlike
in his window’s altar.
Anon Baisch

Moments in Symmetry

Ordinary hands are peeled

off cold faces :: moments
that have not begun
peel off :: the value

of thickness in the overcast

night :: there is a symmetry
to blindness when a body is
awake at the edge of a broken

bed :: the river

is not analogous
and so we are left
with the seam

of silences :: the humidity is

indifferent :: the rain is
not cached
for metaphor :: the gravitas

of a damp bench is
lost :: everyone is
consumed with wandering :: our
homeless bodies

fuck an old eclipse :: and

again the nothing
Anon Baisch

Sudden Were

—The cache of dead light :: Don Paterson

Mouth closed on the last

morning :: there were things
waiting :: but the nothingness
instead :: departure is

not as sudden as we
imagine it :: it is not
the eyes that darken into
blindness :: there was always

a moment when the hands

wanted a last
push :: we are abandoned
by the fabric

peeling off an old face :: it

is not that obvious :: there
is always a series
of doors closing

the between :: nothing

is locked but we do not
believe it :: the layers
of dead light pile

up in our old minds ::

the cache of loneliness
is unfillable :: but in some things
we will not give up
Blair Benjamin

‘Life gone forth is wide open’

—from the Mahāsaccaka Sutta

Life held back still opens,

but only when it hungers,
like the tiny polyp hydra,
coy gorger of shrimp,
that tears itself a new mouth each meal,
and re-seals the broken skin
when the mouth’s work is done.

I too have tried to pry a hole in my head

when I sensed a thought nearby,
and I know the urge
to disappear the doors.

We who hold back are also kin

to the tulip, tuned to temperature,
more bewitching
doctor of cautious openings
and closings—our brief season
of loveliness a thing to be guarded,
never wantonly spent.
Blair Benjamin

‘Pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese’

—from the Book of Job

I don’t pine for my fluid past.

I want to know I’ve entered
my designated time of ripening,
when I will at last achieve
my destined flavor, texture, and solid
personality. Age me in a cave,
deep underground, where pre-humans
learned to paint before they died,
where ancients went to inspire
their allegories.

Darkness,
dazzle my eyes, beguile me
with what I now call unrealities.
I won’t recoil from the long murk
of my lower-life’s world.
Chain my mind to illusion;
feed it comforting shadow-stories
cooked from the statues of cows—
beasts of skin, of tail, of blood,
transformed to objects of wood
and stone, then further transformed
to fire-thrown shapes on a wall—
amid fading memories of all I thought
I once knew, the unimaginable sun...
that warmed the mythical cows...
that curdled the milk of me.
Daniel Bourne

Ambush Predator

From the cemetery the brown pit bull lopes out

as if to bite our tires—or leap into our laps

ecstatic to be saved from its abandonment, but we

are already scooting down the road, the dog

shrinking smaller in the mirror—a panting, upturned stone.

We drive on the edge of the Killbuck swamp, the notorious swamp,

abandoned refrigerators mixed with sphagnum moss,

tundra swans and raccoon hunts, the muskrats

always eying their holes in the bank. We wonder
if this dog is local, a canine psychopath,

broken off his chain and roaming

like a lion to recover his pride, crazed

because of the years anchored to a concrete slab

and now wanting to chomp some havoc

for the degradations done to him. Yet
not all pit bulls are monsters, and maybe this lop-eared galoot

is just another body dumped beside the garlic mustard,

victim of yet another summary judgement on this planet

delivered by a hard hand. There you go doggie. Go eat some

ducks or die.
But the language is not so harsh

when the land itself speaks. The hope still surging forth
from the ballooning throats of spring peepers

to coax out their own type of love

from all this muck. Who knows what will kill us
or let us alone, the eagle’s nest next to the herons
does not mean the rookery is doomed,
while who can stop the small fry from darting

inside the crevice of a hungry lunker’s mouth? Once I saw

a movie filmed in the forest tangle of Ecuador

some tiny hatchling open-mouthed in a nest,

its neck stretching up like a rubber band
towards the hovering bird it thought must be its mama.

A hungry baby who could not wait to be fed.

And then the larger bird gobbled it up. Who knows when

we will eat or be eaten. If the next guest I let inside my door

will be a hell-hound

or my last friend on earth. No wonder

that when the jaw opens

it is so easy to hear the groaning hinge of the world.

Brian Builta

Dear Austin,

Enough time has passed for you to be a toddler again, innocent in

life, a walking talking little drunk man, all learning and seeing and
doing laid out before you. At two years, two months the world is
possible, bright and electric. You play with Tupperware and the
dead wolf spider under the curtain, a bar of sunlight on the carpet.
You are calm, sharp and quiet with wit and grace. I want to be you,
spend every moment in the birdsong of your presence. Two years,
two months is a moment. The throb returns in a windstorm. Reality,
that musty math teacher, converts us. Something bloodthirsty
pulses around us. You wade into the accident area and disappear.
What we have feared, unfurls. Everything is loud, the deafening
clap of your absence, the ever-opening bloom of loss.
Brian Builta

Pine

—for Austin

Some days I wander lost in the woods

amid pine and pine plunder. Then, in
a clearing I see a boy in rowdy red
on his father’s shoulders, hands laced
like a strap under dad’s chin. Together

they are eight feet tall. At my desk

I am supposed to perform, but I
wonder what you are doing, which
tree you are blowing through, how
it is to be light. What would you

tell me if you could? Two rocks

descended from stone, we didn’t talk
much, more like the pulse of
wobbly wheels on pavement, the rattle
dash, open wind-whooshed windows.

Should I have said something important?

Hugged less awkward? All that running
you did and from what? Pain still stood
at the finish line, cheering on your
obliterated destiny with gathering dust.
Andrew Cox

The Drummer

Did not know how to play when she picked up the sticks but what
she played made her the only daughter. Hailstorms came with each
strike of the bass drum and when the hi hat made its presence
known she was ten and no longer in her father’s arms Then the
snare took over and it snowed and the animals came to her in her
fifteen year-old sleep. When the tom toms said hello the snow
melted and she was twenty years beyond learning to ride a bike.
Thunderstorms were delayed when the crash cymbal signaled it
was time for motherhood and the jack-in-the-box that will let out
its surprise. Both the splash and ride cymbals waited for the only
daughter to survive the hurricane in her chest. Then she struck them
as if to say dangerous weather will come but it does not matter I
will keep playing my drums.
Andrew Cox

Fender

My dad taps me on the shoulder and says son this is a world that
uses tear gas. Don’t be alarmed. I know I’m dead but need to
see you on occasion. Need to tell you how this is a world that
perpetuates conversion therapy as if the wind in the trees agrees.
Don’t shiver. I know on my last birthday I would have been 96.
I need you to understand a Fender guitar should play on the
soundtrack of my visits. And there will be a choir. Don’t shrink from
this world. I would have you kiss the word world on the cheek.
To know though many try to co-opt it they can’t. It is immense. It
sends such beauty that the birds cannot shut up about it. Now a
harp joins in and the jam is the air you breathe. Fear not son. I will
be back. In the meantime turn the world upside down and shake
the evil from its pockets.
Nicelle Davis

The Dying: What does heaven look like to plants?

The monarchs have been off course for years now. Migration shifts
were a mistake, like taking a left when you meant right. I continue
to amaze people at how long I can drive in a circle without noticing.

My father planted me an orchard of silver-dollar trees—they grew

my kindergarten height. I was harvesting these thin slices of light
when a herd, not a herd, but whatever a group of butterflies is called,

darkened around me—pulsating cloud, cocooning my body. When I

got the call my father was dying, I left the room full of kids I was
teaching, just left them like a ghost town. That is, the living seem

spectacle to me. I drove the 700 miles to my birth city and thought
I’ll just follow if he dies, just keep driving until I find the way we go
when the body stops. When monarchs found themselves lost on me,

I stood still as stone, not wanting to crush them—my arms slightly

levitated from my sides, moving with breath, until a thousand wings
began to slow with me. My father didn’t die, but is dying. I’ve gone

back to teaching, but teach differently. I tried to bring my son to

the monarch path so he might know being covered in migration,
but butterflies no longer recognize our planet, and move like chaos

towards some end. I googled the name for a family of butterflies—

a kaleidoscope—beauty reflecting itself into symmetry. When a plant
dies, they grow eyes that can see hearts moving wings—or wings
moving blood. Let’s say the line between left from right dissolves.
When my car was crushed from front and back by other cars, and I
was held at center, alive but trapped. I came out walking to and from

work, just as the butterflies were dying en masse in the streets of Los
Angeles. The gutters glistening with sheen—millions of monarchs
still. I collected their lost body in my purse and carried them home.
Michael Hettich

The Useful Man

Now I think of him walking the length of a train

that moves through a landscape he’s never seen before.
I watch as he leans to look out, or balances
between the cars to catch a glimpse
of that unfamiliar country. Then he turns and walks
back to his seat, past the forward-looking faces
of the strangers who pretend not to watch him.

And when the train sighs and pulls into a station,

after many days, he steps down, crying,
forgetting the suitcase full of his diaries,
records of the precious lives he lived where he’s come from,
that country whose name he’s already forgotten.

The sidewalk gleams like a river on a sunny

afternoon as he walks beyond the houses
to the fields where crows are ripping off the clothes
of the old men propped up on scaffolds, the old
straw-filled geezers who were hired to scare
the birds off and are clearly not doing their jobs.

Maybe he can go out and lift them from their racks

and maybe he can climb up there himself, to see
if his body might be any more effective than theirs.
After all, he came here to be useful.
Michael Hettich

The Wound

One morning she knew how to speak whatever languages

anyone else was speaking, wherever
she travelled, whomever--whatever--she spoke to.
Eventually these languages grew cramped inside her.
They rubbed and jostled each other. Their friction

started to burn off the secrets where she’d lived

until smoke filled the sky of her memories; fire
burned down the house of her earliest days.
In the front yard, her parents floated up and away
like ashes, to drift down in a distant country

with another language, where a girl like she had been

woke up to an ordinary day and knew
something was wrong. Still, she lay there a while
listening to her mother putter in the kitchen
and her dad whistle softly as he headed off to work.
Sharon Venezio

The New Caregiver

In the grips of delirium, my mother

speaks a new language:

the window isn’t ticking

but it’s getting darker at the edges

She thinks she’s in a hospital,

wants to be discharged.

the window is like a clock

but I still don’t know what time it is

The new caregiver sits on the couch

and fills out her timesheet. She just arrived,

wants the Wi-Fi password, calls hospice

and asks how many hours to mark down.

You measure time with darkness and light,

my mother instructs her.

How many hours are left?

192, but we don’t know that yet.
Sharon Venezio

The Ocean

When I was young, my mother could hear everything.

The exhalation of cigarette smoke.
My past-curfew tiptoeing. My secrets.

Now she hears her dead mother speaking

in the radiator. She stays up all night listening
to the air, adjusts the thermostat to the right voice.

When I call on the phone, her caregiver

becomes our interpreter, and I remember
the childhood game my brother and I would play,

holding the other under water

so we could guess the muffled words
pushing to the surface.

Listen, she says, don’t you hear them too?

I hold the phone tightly to my ear,
like a seashell, and listen for the rising tide.
Patricia Whiting

Help Line

There were overdoses every day.

Cakes and shrooms in pretzel tins.

Doppelgängers floating
through labyrinths.

Insects crawling on the sill

of the broken window.

Do you feel vermin crawling over you?

They’d meet at the gravel pit

just past the graveyard.

Sour scent of marigolds.

Flocks of dark birds

stabbing at maggoty confetti,

I have mixed emotions,

mixed emotions.

The bones of a life

no matter how you count the bodies.

There were overdoses every day.

Patricia Whiting

Skeins

The house is cold.

I’m wearing the fuzzy blue socks
my cousin gave me
two Christmases ago, when she still
remembered who I was—
a cobalt blue talisman that
makes me think of her
whenever I open my sock drawer.

In my father’s sock drawer

was a jumble of pennies, nickels, and dimes.
With quarters he could buy a pack of Kools,
supposed to be soothing on the throat;
and maybe they were, for the duration
of his short life.

The rain comes in torrents.

The street is a river where everyone
I have ever known comes swimming by.
I see them as if through the murky glass
of a laundromat washer, turning, shifting,
waving sometimes as they come into view.
Jane Zwart

Because the human body is a tube,

food that sleds the esophagus

needs only laughter to hop a curb
and fleck our breath with cud

halting the whole machine.

A man says as much on the radio.
I do not doubt that he is right

about the body’s narrows, where

the straws and bellows touch.
But it cannot all be as inelegant

as he says. Outside swap meets

women fish for their car keys,
dithering between Saturns,

embracing plaster busts–heads

a little larger than life, chins
grapnelled over their shoulders–

three-fifths of a slow dance

without even trying. The body
is a tube, sure, the housing

for a posy of leaky pipes,

but, still jaunty, the infirm knot
scarves around their throats.

Old men, no less slick or glad

than before, still comb their hair
as soon as they step out of the wind.
Jane Zwart

Manual

—for Adrian Dallas Frandle

In this diagram, a camel faces a goose, a hare a wolf, a rabbit

a goat: each creature a shadow cast by human hands.

Adrian is right about the last pair. Between them there’s an air
of conspiracy. The rabbit rears up, forepaws paddling

like a begging collie’s. The goat has curled his beard. How far
they are from simple camel and goose, each the offspring

of a single hand. One puppeteer puts forefinger and thumb

together, holding an invisible coin. Spare digits bunched

to make a muzzle, he smudges a dromedary on the wall.

And look: even a lacy cuff is no impediment to a waterfowl

stretching her bowling pin body. A wolf is another matter.

He costs double the manipulation: two vulcan high signs

joined in the quaint clasp of prayer. The hare, too, is a secret

handshake, top and bottom bound by a pinky promise.

For the child, there is no instructional graphic, but once I sat

for a silhouette, my profile the bluff of my parents’ hands.
The 2River View, 27.1 (Fall 2022)

Authors

Sara Ries Dziekonski is the author of Come In, We’re Open; Snow

Angels on the Living Room Floor; and  Marrying Maracuyá. “Fish
Fry Daughter” was selected by Ted Kooser for his American Life in
Poetry column. She is an editor and teacher for Keep St. Pete Lit.

Anon Baisch is a data analyst working in the semiconductor

industry. Anon’s poems have been published most recently in
Defunct and New Note Poetry.

Blair Benjamin is the Founder and Director of the Studios at MASS

MoCA, a residency for artists and writers at the Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art. His writing has appeared in Atticus
Review, Bluestem Magazine, North American Review, Pithead
Chapel, Sugar House Review, and The Threepenny Review.

Daniel Bourne’s books include The Household Gods, Where No

One Spoke the Language, and the forthcoming Talking Back
to the Exterminator, which won the 2022 Terry L. Cox Poetry
Award from Regal House Publishing. A collection of his Polish
translations of Bronisław Maj, The Extinction of the Holy City, will
appear in 2023 from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press.
Brian Builta works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth.
He has recently published poems in Jabberwock Review, Juke
Joint Magazine, and South Florida Poetry Journal, with poems
forthcoming in New Ohio Review and TriQuarterly.

Andrew Cox is the author of The Equation That Explains

Everything (BlazeVOX [Books] 2010); two chapbooks here at
2River: Fortune Cookies (2009) and This False Compare (2020);
and the hypertext chapbook Company X (Word Virtual, 2000). He
edits UCity Review.

Nicelle Davis is the author of Circe (Lowbrow Press), Becoming

Judas (Red Hen Press), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press), and
The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press). Her poetry film collaborations
with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world.

Michael Hettich is the author of a The Mica Mine, which won the
Lena Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society
and was published in 2021. A “new and selected” volume is
forthcoming in 2023 from Press 53.

Sharon Venezio is the author of The Silence of Doorways (Moon

Tide Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in numerous
journals and anthologies, including the Bellevue Literary Review,
Grew Sparrow, New York Quarterly, and Spillway. She is currently
working on a poetry manuscript about dementia.

Patricia Whiting is a West Palm Beach painter-poet. Publications

include a chapbook and two collections of poetry. Her poems
have appeared in Slipstream, South Florida Poetry Journal, where
she is now on staff, Thimble Literary Magazine, and others.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs

the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared
in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny
Review, and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.
The 2River View, 27.1 (Fall 2022)

About 2River

Since 1996, 2River has been a site of poetry and art, quarterly
publishing The 2River View and occasionally publishing individual
authors in the 2River Chapbook Series. 2River is also the home of
Muddy Bank, the 2River blog.

Richard Long
2River
www.2River.org
muddybank.org
be1ong@2River.org

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 2RV
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