GYROSCOPE REVIEW

Issue 15-2
Summer 2015

Copyright © 2015 Gyroscope Review

Constance Brewer & Kathleen Cassen Mickelson
gyroscopereview.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information
storage retrieval system, without permission from the editors.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this magazine, contact the editors
by email at [email protected].

Submissions:
Gyroscope Review accepts previously unpublished contemporary poetry submissions through
our online submissions system, gyroscopereview.submittable.com/submit. Please read our
guidelines before submitting.
For further information, visit our website: gyroscopereview.com.

All photos and design work by Constance Brewer and Kathleen Cassen Mickelson. 

FROM THE EDITORS

Welcome to the second edition of Gyroscope Review, and welcome to summer. What struck me
immediately when compiling the poems for this issue was how many of them were about place.
A sense of place has a powerful pull on the psyche. It can take us back in time, it can ground us
in the moment or give a glimpse of the future. Place poems can tell us about the land, its features,
the inhabitants either separately or in a lovely intertwining. I was taken with poems that not only
talked about a physical place, but also commented on the spirituality. Sometimes there is
immensity of scale. Some poems look at the world with a cosmic eye, others give us the minutia
of a microscopic view. Both visions grant us a glimpse into the intricacies of the poetic soul. I
invite you to read and enjoy this month’s issue in all its variety of scale - poems that sing from
the mountaintops and poems that fit comfortably -like a butterfly- in the palm of your hand.

- Constance Brewer

As I was formatting the bios for our contributors’ page for this issue, I noticed just how broad the
bodies of work are for our authors. This delights me since Gyroscope Review is so new. Here we
are at what is only our second issue and we’ve been lucky to include work from the former poet
laureate of the State of Wyoming (Patricia Frolander), the co-founder of New York Writers
Workshop (Tim Tomlinson), a firefighter who is a former Air Force National Guard member
(Jonathan Travelstead), an English Language Fellow with the US State Department in Russia
(John Michael Flynn), and a retired securities broker (Jane Roop). We have several MFA
graduates and candidates, college professors, and writers who launched their careers in the
school of life. We have Americans, Canadians, and British citizens. But the biggest thing about
this group of contributors is the fine attention to what they each offered as a submission, how
they got to us in some way. Summer is a time when I, for one, hate sitting on front of the
computer; that these pieces kept me in my seat is an indication of their appeal. May they keep
you in yours. Happy Summer.

- Kathleen Cassen Mickelson

Gyroscope Review !i
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Summer’s
by Marian Kaplun Shapiro page 1

Apache Plume on the Trail to Tent Rocks

New Mexico
by Pippa Little page 2

Burnt by a Sun God

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge page 3

Pipestone
by Oonah Joslin page 4

Remembering Utah
by S.D. Lishan page 6

Cold Harbor Light

by Kevin Casey page 9

The Goldfish
by Tim Tomlinson page 10

For Chris Lunn, Who Became a Paraplegic at the Age of Twenty,

In an Automobile Accident Near Setauket, October 1974
by Tim Tomlinson page 11

Night Row
by Daryl Muranaka page 12

Waxing Bitter
by Marie C Lecrivain page 13

Hallucinations, Seeking Trains

by John Michael Flynn page 14

Chainsaw Music
by Pippa Little page 15

my birth defect
by Wayne-Daniel Berard page 16

Gyroscope Review !ii

The World’s Ugliest Dog Has Died and We Don’t Know How to Feel About That
by Jeff Jeppesen page 17

Letter to the Con Who Shot a Cow

by Ace Boggess page 18

Your Uncle from Canarsie Explains the Rapture

by Will Nixon page 19

Epilogue
by Matt Morris page 20

How to Mend a Broken Heart

by JC Reilly page 21

The Intrusion
by Ken Poyner page 22

God Particle
by Jonathan G. Travelstead page 24

After Re-Reading Corso's Bomb Outside Of Santa Fe

by John Michael Flynn page 25

Fried Bread
by Patricia A. Frolander page 26

Brushing The Old Yellow Lab

by Pippa Little page 27

At Valley of the Gods, UT

by Bret Norwood page 28

Sacrifice
by Audrey T. Carroll page 29

Shallow
by Kathy Steinemann page 30

Foxy Night
by Jane Roop page 31

Gyroscope Review !iii

Why I'm Not a Parent
by Marie C. Lecrivain page 32

Robes Gather in the Alley, Languedoc

by Stephen Linsteadt page 33

To Reach for the Sky

by Kevin Casey page 34

Beyond
by S.D. Lishan page 35

At The Evening Table

by Pippa Little page 36

The Archaeology of Time

by Oonah Joslin page 37

Contributors page 38

Gyroscope Review i! v
POEMS

Gyroscope Review !v
Summer’s
by Marian Kaplun Shapiro

sweet
smell of star clang
of sun-
rise riddle of lilypads
a yesness of raspberry pie. Topaz

moon rising. Inch

by stellar inch we learn why
we need horizon: To weigh

the whatness of lake

the whoness of mountain

the whenness of
sky.

Gyroscope Review 1!
Apache Plume on the Trail to Tent Rocks

New Mexico
by Pippa Little

Everything is dry,

even shadows

pink-eye along rocks

a hundred centuries brown:

the plumes draw their long inky lashes

across us and we step through them, sleepers

dreaming spiders’ webs

One day before the sun falls


you will hear the first horse

singing

further along the ridge

where you saw him first

big as a god and unshining,

clay spirals in his mane, 

singing in the time before singing

and all your bones answering

Gyroscope Review 2!
Burnt by a Sun God
by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

There are many suns, but

fewer gods: Apollo
and his offspring,
in magnetic disturbances that bring out
the Northern Lights and the man
who told me how unimportant I was
at a friend’s wedding.
In those days, Apollo’s children spun off
his palms clockwise and counter,
as if arranged for birth from the disc
that bears seeds and feed
for us mortals with our mere appetites
and pitches to stand beside
the indomitable
just to be tinged
by their lies and fire.
I am a fish out of water, one of them said,
as much a fish as a bird forced down
from the sky as hills are consumed
and branches are deprived
of their layers and architecture.
At the intersection overwhelmed
with clinging bits of houses
and sidewalks in the storm water,
one led me on a slow reveal
in my rear view mirror
as if it was one of those mornings when I was naive
about suntans and the baby
on the Coppertone bottle.
Look at me, he seemed to be saying,
as he removed the helmet he wore on his motorcycle.
But I had moved on to another god
or perhaps just another demi-drama
and I was element, no longer apostle,
having been charred,
and made hollow.

Gyroscope Review 3!
Pipestone
by Oonah Joslin

Quarter mile distant

crumpled edge
rose quartzite quarry
sacred red
waters took them
down Winnewissa falls.

Red burn the prairies where

their blood seeped to the seam;
close beneath the quarry path
I see
by rock am seen.

The Great Spirit illuminates

bids me contemplate.

We share the rock face

to face never again to be
birdman and me
as we are now
unchanged.

Quartzite covered ancient bones became pipe stone,

Oracle of many suns and sons’ stories,
sages, springs, red clays, sumac fires.
iyansha K'api; that is to say,
‘the place where one digs the red rock’
to carve the calumet
make its stem of prairie wood
honour all that grows
leather and feather
honour all that lives
make smoke rise to the skies
honour the earth
with simple tools and sweat

Gyroscope Review 4!
let no weapon be brought upon it
let no blood be shed.
Take only what I teach you from this place
of peace and shadows’ change.

Shadows change.
Birdman gone. The world awaits.
Blood of nations, sacred seam within,
I go.

Even rocks crumble so.

Gyroscope Review 5!
Remembering Utah
by S.D. Lishan

The outsourced
stories
of your eyes:

Irradiating tears
they travel
with the weight

of winter
on their headstones
of years.

Fallow, they lie

sweet as love,
from Juab to

Grouse Creek,
their sour
stench candling

partitions
of regret,
their leaves still

succulent,
their flowers
yellow and green,

like the stonecrop

beside the creek
near Hiawatha,

beyond Mexican Hat,

Big Water,
Uveda,

and the Needle range.

It all comes
back if you wait

Gyroscope Review 6!
long enough,
like the gash of
snow left unmelted

perched on a pond’s edge

near Tabiont
and Maseser,

near the Green River

calling you
past nostalgia,

whispering stealth-
longings
beyond Goshuts,

even Hovenweep,
where the spruce,
shaggy with snow,

bite the wind back

shifting through them,
the cold stones

of winter,
turning, re-
turning us back

to the mountains,
and the water
running away, down

from the department

of ache, the agency
of salve and memory,

the bureau of re-

cognition glistening
like the graffiti

Gyroscope Review 7!
of your lipstick,
as you pause
at the mirror

in the apartment
on F Street, over-
looking the city,

and I,
I am there, too,
both of us,

glassy eyed,
like the fish
in the pale streams

of the Uinta
just above
the border

from Freedonia,
all the way here
to now.

Gyroscope Review 8!
Cold Harbor Light
by Kevin Casey



The lighthouse calls

the darkness to itself,
adds its single amber note
to the voice of breakers
sounding against the cliffs
that guard the harbor.

Sea wrack pulsing

through the fractured granite,
driven by some distant,
nameless storm -- your hair
splayed, flowing
across these pillows,
and the taste of
your sea salt skin.

And then the vagrant dawn,

hauling its net of fog,
braced by masts
and the beams of trawlers --
footfalls on the pebbled walk,
and the lighthouse tucks
itself among the pines,
silenced by the waking gulls,
and the lobster floats
emerging like songbirds
across this field of lavender glass.

Gyroscope Review 9!
The Goldfish
by Tim Tomlinson

In a box pond alongside the lanai,

the goldfish make orange angles in green
water. The gardener feeds them each day
at the same hour. When his shadow covers
the pond, the goldfish kiss the surface.

He believes they recognize him. “If you

feed them at a different hour,” I ask, “would
they recognize you then?” The gardener
appears bemused. “At a different hour,”
he says, “I’m not the same person.”

Gyroscope Review 1! 0
For Chris Lunn, Who Became a Paraplegic at the Age of Twenty,
in an Automobile Accident Near Setauket, October 1974
by Tim Tomlinson

That night I was a thousand miles away,

crossing the Gulf Stream from Miami to Morgan’s Bluff.


The full moon laid a golden carpet over the lake-flat water.

And the stars!—too many to cram into our cramped galaxy.



Didn’t the horizon seem endless?

We radioed ships half the way to Cuba.



By dawn, the foredeck was silver with flying fish,

a few of them still struggling.

Gyroscope Review !11

Night Row
by Daryl Muranaka

Alone, in the dark,

the baby sleeping in the tent—at last!—
the canoe cuts through
the blackness. Gurgling
water beneath the skin
of the canoe. Our feet
absorb the vibrations.

The blade of the oar

whispers along, feeling,
always feeling for the rocks
that lurk below.
The moon’s full light
is swallowed
into the night.
The only sounds—
the little creatures calling
to us from shore.

Gyroscope Review 1! 2
Waxing Bitter
by Marie Lecrivain

free hugs - i don’t think so.

no smile, no arch of eyebrow,
and no open arms to accept you.

an act of kindness comes with a cost -

as all things do. the universe wasn't modeled
on the something for nothing rule
in the absence of flow,
diminished returns of sleep,
and pithy solipsisms that crowd out
the great truths we were raised to embrace.

this is the truth of life as we know it

until we burrow into the subversive current,
our backs bent and ears oriented
to the side-winding secrets
of how to stay one step ahead.

the universe will fuck with us

until we die, and the last bits
of meat and bone dissolve
into the earth - this is our last laugh,
and payment in full.

Gyroscope Review 1! 3
Hallucinations, Seeking Trains
by John Michael Flynn

1.

I’m told a century since passenger rail blew through here.

I walk a trestle bridge, rivet heads dulled, girders
still aqua-green in places but paint mostly peeling.
I can see to the north a shotgun shack and I swear it’s sinking
into the river below. In these parts they can’t give homes away.
Sign nailed to a tree reads Worms & Crabs 4 Sale.
So how many Powhatan natives bled to death in these currents?
How many guns are enough to kill off hallucinations?

2.

At the Victory Gospel Lighthouse Church

I sit on a wooden station bench once a church pew.
This is what they mean, I suppose, by recycling.
Hablamos Español on the sign out front.
I’m in Medina now on a Sunday, having left Yates
and when I leave for another town
I know I’ll try to memorize all the ones I’ve seen
and still wonder how they got their names.
These simple queries are one lasting joy of travel.

3.

Of many perches for itinerants on this planet

one favorite is an overcooked chair in a hotel lobby
with a faux fireplace and nicotine-yellowed wallpaper.
I’m baking here now in front of red train depots,
each roof shaped like a pagoda. Hundreds
of these tiny depots and I reckon someone died
here in this chair just a little waiting for trains.
The lobby door opens and I hear rap music drive by.
Streets, manhole covers, windows. Find me a home.

Gyroscope Review 1! 4
Chainsaw Music
by Pippa Little

And when you were small

we stepped on shadows-only
for three blocks,
our crazy hopscotch
in dusty afternoons
that smudged our hems,
made us smell of road -
I was big enough to reach you
plums snarled in a shark-tooth fence
to jam their maroon glut later
between each other’s lips –

we listened for chainsaw music

behind Lister’s wood yard,
ran away unscreaming
from his watchdog’s yawn
your shoes shone
and your mother loved you:

perhaps God won’t mind

if I pretend to be a church
when you lie down
in the imaginary of here,
the two of us so tired
and over the railway, always,
the unavoidable house,
all its windows open.

Gyroscope Review 1! 5
my birth defect
by Wayne-Daniel Berard

a lidless 

third eye.

that's right

all from day one

nothing but

everything

sight upon

sight depth

over depth

constant

intolerable

awareness.

Oh how I love

the shema

when we all

cover that spot.

yes yes

The Lord is

One but for

a dozen 

precious 

chanted 

syllables
I am not.

Gyroscope Review 1! 6
The World’s Ugliest Dog Has Died and We Don’t Know How to Feel About That
by Jeff Jeppesen

None of my music files are controversial anymore

and that pisses me off so much
prickly revolutionary edges worn classic rock smooth

Bred to be hideous
Existing only to elicit disgust or pity
its owner, Clara Something, scattered the little beast’s ashes in her backyard
she is the only one who sobbed for the thing

Tonight the crickets sing an argument which sounds like:

Is! Is! Is! Is!
and means:
Your mistake is that you think the world has a beginning
this leads you to believe it will one day end

In the end, stars will loosen

in their sockets
like the teeth of old men
clatter to earth
cool grey pebbles

I make my daughters listen to my records

tell them this Buddy Holly song is why
you girls can say those words that make you giggle
a three minute song as an agent of change

in the end
when the wind stops blowing
and no dogs are ugly anymore
when signs
and wonders are done

Crickets saw madly as

ever in the new dark
calling for lovers like it’s not the end
is is is is

Gyroscope Review 1! 7
Letter to the Con Who Shot a Cow
by Ace Boggess

because you didn’t think a .22 would kill

because you were drunk staggering home to Jesus through a muddy field

because your eyes swore I hated that fucking cow

even as they dazzled your ember-cheeks with tears

because there’s nothing left I could say that would make this
less a comedy where Falstaff waits in shadow just off-stage

because animal cruelty carries less time

than most of the battles we wage from behind our broken lines

I wanted to tell you all of us lose perspective in the moonlight

we opposites of Meursault waving his silly pistol on a sun-blind beach

I wanted to give you the silence of a priest’s laughter at confession

but my heart filled up suddenly with noise

because I envisioned the heifer’s outline chalked on grass

because you felt remorse for only this

Gyroscope Review 1! 8
Your Uncle from Canarsie Explains the Rapture
by Will Nixon

Not a week after the Superbowl not an icon was left standing.
Icarus hijacked the Japanese blimp to party in Cuba.
Dylan sipped sake after chewing on salt water taffy.
The queen kidnapped cheerleaders to entertain jaguars
for the patriotic showing of colors no flag could contain,
then filled her moat with burning champagne; in her pantry
we stuffed silverware into our sleeves. You could smell
the Jack of Hearts up to his schemes. Cash money like confetti.

Forget you ever had a venereal uncle in Brighton Beach,

a Communist who did his pornographic dreaming in Russian.
Buy a fistful of raffle tickets to treat your wife to the Cyclone.
At the top of the ride, fill your pockets with tiny free planets.
At least one is guaranteed to feel like Florida in February.
Never wear teeth carved from the bones of the last giants.
Never wear Speedos in public. Treat the queen to a mai tai.
The rapture may come, but bartenders will be here forever.

Gyroscope Review 1! 9
Epilogue
by Matt Morris

Next day,
putting out in your little
skiff with arrowy
swiftness on the blue, you sailed
’til you lost the sun among
other things, like, I
don’t know, credibility?
Anything that big,
I yelled from shore, is im-
possible to ditch. You cupped
your hands & shouted
back, but I didn’t catch your
rejoinder. When you
didn’t return, I shivered
in the weird dark. Where
were you? Stars riddled
the sky, which, not legally
required to answer,
kept mum. An ocean between
us, the bitter water,
waves.

Gyroscope Review 2! 0
How to Mend a Broken Heart
by JC Reilly

First, collect all the synonyms you can think of for broken: busted, fissured, ruptured, smashed,
crumbled, tattered, shredded, cracked. There are more. Find them. They may crouch under the
couch, mildew in a pair of stinky All-Stars, cram a jar of crunchy peanut butter, crawl along the
west wall in your garden where the night-blooming jasmine flourishes, sway in the branches of
the oak tree where a pair of squirrels chase each other, creep like ants at the foot of Flournoy
Hill, where the two of you lay in switchgrass and dandelions and watch the clouds shift into
rabbits or sailboats, swirl like the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, which reminds you of
Dairy Queen, of the time you licked white, cold sweetness off each other’s noses, that silly ice
cream duel, and the downpour that started right as you left, and how, even soaked as a runaway
river, you couldn’t stop laughing, swept away in laughter, the wet no more a nuisance than an
eyelash. Have you found them? Yes? Stuff them into the pocket of your jeans and throw them
into a wash. What comes out of the dryer: a clean pair of jeans and a ball of frayed paper whose
ink has disappeared with the Tide. Throw it out, or throw it to the cat to play with, but it’s
nothing. And your heart? Whole again, little melon in your chest, to keep or give as you will.

Gyroscope Review 2! 1
The Intrusion
by Ken Poyner

I am no intruder.
Drop your force shields,
Meet me at air lock two.
Our pressure suits can entwine
In the reflected light of the nearest
Moon, in the ship’s flashing status signs.
We can spin together without
Gravity as the starcraft in blue
And red scintillation tells us

Outer door open

Inner door locked

In a rhythm we cannot
In weightlessness match. Drop
Your shields. Set your engines
To autopilot. I am hooking
To the gantry of air lock two.
I have my external lights off
So my face plate can be your window,
A window,
Through which you might confirm
My pure, childlike intentions. I am
No threat. I am your release
From productive, endless tedium.
Grapple with me.
Twist: by moments the two of us mere space junk,
By moments the two of us ragged angels, masters
Of imaginative machinery more valuable
Than either of us could ever be.
Come.

Slip into the air lock.

Let our suits rub joint

To joint constructively:
The two of us unproductively tethered,
The senseless tiring bulk of sexless
Animals encasing an animal sex.

Gyroscope Review 2! 2
For you, for us, for me, guess
Which element emits more beauty: the stars
Or the status lights; the unruled
Emptiness, or the machinery
Of our environmental subsistence?

Put on your suit,

Come into the air lock,
Emerge onto the gantry.
I promise you: for this small time
You will not be missed, and
I will not be missed;
But we will for a while be a point of light
Licked furiously into the dark:
And then be, in one rotation,
The lonely shadow of ourselves.

Gyroscope Review 2! 3
God Particle
by Jonathan Travelstead

Oppenheimer tested fate and the first nuclear bomb at Trinity,

chancing this pale blue dot’s mushrooming into the black
for only a glimpse at the smaller cogs. Sure, in a few short hours

we’ll hitch a ride to Alpha Centauri on packets of light,

but just now in Geneva physicists sling particles like stock cars
in opposing directions around a track, then comb the smashup

for evidence of God lying, bleeding in the wreckage. Is found

in the form of new physics for which we've neither invented nor
tuned the proper instruments for recognizing. ‘Forty two’

spelled out in quarks. A matrix of corkscrews believed to be

the Rosetta Stone for translating gravity to magnetism. Glyphs
you believe into a pocket watch the moment you need one most.

Times we must trade the old, broken Pontiac in on a new one,

leave behind our notions of the combustion engine.
Every good experiment risks cloud flutter, blue earth

tattered into confetti. Watch now as they toss photons

and pray for snake eyes. Watch- blue sand bucket and trowel
in hand, and rush out when the tide recedes. Help me

to fossick teeth and shells from the sky's helices,

asters of light.

Gyroscope Review 2! 4
After Re-Reading Corso’s Bomb Outside Of Santa Fe
by John Michael Flynn

It begins making no sense, meaning all sense

during a whimsical examination of a yucca
plant in a motel courtyard.
I imagine atomic fears sounding off in 1959.
I hear inscribed across the desert’s edges
one more oily echo willing to sell as legacy
the dust we’ve fractured in our wake.

I walk into my careless room seeking epiphanies.

Air through an open window instructs my skin.
I listen to more desert winds and passing trucks.
Stunted by perplexing needs
I consider evidence, the slaughter required
for an empire to make its mark.

At Baneberry in 1970 the radioactive dust cloud

rose three kilometers high.
This was the exclamation mark of a new insight
siring wells, containment procedures,
underground shelters, stand-offs
in mercenary exchanges toward potential apocalypse.

I face my uncomfortable bed,

hear a child wailing, scorched somewhere –
always a war to think of
as I move to the comfort of bottled water,
drink, swallow, switch on my reading lamp,
the ark that is light no real consolation.

Gyroscope Review 2! 5
Fried Bread
by Patricia Frolander

Limp hand-me-down dresses hung on her depression-poor frame.

On weekends she wore coveralls, the bottoms rolled up to
accommodate her short legs. Her daddy walked away one day
when she was eight so Mama married his brother. A year later
Baby Sister became her charge.

While older siblings argued over who milked cows, separated milk,
churned butter, fed chickens and pigs and hoed the garden.
Mama’s kitchen was her domain. At age twelve she assumed command
of the wood stove, creating macaroni and tomatoes, venison stew,
pork hocks and beans, but fried bread became the family favorite.

Eighteen, tall and blonde, she married her sweetheart—buried him

twelve years and two children later. She cooked for a wealthy family,
tended bar, met a man, and left her kids with her maiden sister-in-law.
Bright lights, hard men and harder whiskey took their toll. At her funeral,
all agreed, none could compete with her fried bread.

Gyroscope Review 2! 6
Brushing The Old Yellow Lab
by Pippa Little

She is grainy cornfields I remember up beyond our house,

glowing on the hillsides I never reached
through late summer sunsets: long shadows in slow burn,
that longing to be somewhere else
where my life could begin. So much faster
than I expected, here I am, mothering a dog in our middle-age
who slips out of herself, supple as thistledown
every season, almost-white chaff lifting in tufts,
for whom love is this wordless touch, the weight
of my hands. I plough shadows in and smooth them out,
remembering light pollen-sticky on my skin,
waiting for that sensed world to come.
Not how I thought it would be
or enough, yet warm, rough, loose,
more than I needed.

Editors’ Note: Brushing the Old Yellow Lab was previously published in The Stockholm Review, Issue 1-
2014-08-22. We are pleased to republish it here.

Gyroscope Review 2! 7
At Valley of the Gods, Utah
by Bret Norwood

Red dirt, high mesas,

the moon above the wash's floor:
Whoever doesn't believe in spirits
has never spent much time outdoors.

Gyroscope Review 2! 8
Sacrifice
by Audrey T. Carroll

Picture the stars sent through electric whispers in the air to He-Who-Navigates-By-Cygnus and
pray that she does not see the forbidden power, pray that she does not feel the crackle of life
loosening like arrow to rotted trees. Struggle free of your bonds only for her to remain chained,
blade against flesh, searing of a far-off chant. Know before action, see those final moments play
in the mind's eye, motions slow before the monsoon, reassurance of her life against yours. Snap
fingers, quake the Earth, and then nothingness as you empty, essence spilling into night's air,
taken into clouds of frozen breaths, remembered on her lips.

Gyroscope Review 2! 9
Shallow
by Kathy Steinemann

First, a facial. Then, a pedicure. I’ll be Sleeping Beauty: creamy complexion, hair fanned around
my face like a halo of innocence. Or one of those women in the old masterpieces: reclining on
my chaise, my flowing garment positioned in a perfect pattern of flattering folds. I don’t care
what Stewart says. He called me shallow, a coward. But he doesn’t understand. It’s not fair. He’s
trying to make me feel guilty. But there’s no guilt. The hell with him. Tonight, I’ll slip into my
new lingerie and the long turquoise dress with the lace trim on the bodice and sleeves. A bottle of
the finest wine will caress my tongue and numb my body. Twenty-nine scented candles, one for
every year of my life, will flicker and create dancing patterns of light and shadow on the walls.
Then I’ll listen to classical music while I run my fingers through my hair: my long, silky hair
with the soft curls. My destiny is clear. This will only happen once. Once. Maybe I am shallow
because I want to be beautiful. But it’s my life. I refuse to go bald. I refuse to feel pain. I’ll
swallow the entire bottle of sedatives, then lie back on the sofa for my final sleep. And I will not
smudge my mascara with tears.

Gyroscope Review 3! 0
Foxy Night
by Jane Roop

On a stubborn starless night

in my headlights crossing the road
a fox with shy funnel face,
a strand of wire body
bushy tail caboose
rudder and warmth.
Dot. Dash. Flash.

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Why I’m Not a Parent
by Marie Lecrivain

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings - William Blake

This was the fundamental problem

between Icarus and Daedalus, and although
the former tried his best to walk the line,
he knew enlightenment was not a heritage.

Can you imagine the words, I told you so,

dying on Daedalus' lips as he watched Icarus
plummet like a comet into the sea,
broken wings askew and breath
sucked away by the west wind? Do you see
the clever life jacket Daedalus designed
- specifically for this occasion -
left behind in a corner of his workshop
because time and tide wait for no man?
Can you sense the momentary pride
that swelled in his breast as he
watched Icarus ascend to heights
no one dared to go,
his heart caught in his throat,
and eyes wide open in wonder?



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Robes Gather in the Alley, Languedoc
by Stephen Linsteadt

Black clergy robes

hanging on an outdoor clothesline
dance staccato to the wind

as though hearing flamenco for the first time

or perhaps they are finally free
of their starch.

From my upstairs room

I hear them laugh at each other’s altar jokes
and confessional stories

as they snack on bread crumbs

from their pockets
and drink from wine-soaked sleeves.

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To Reach for the Sky
by Kevin Casey

Bikes resting in the dust, pivoting

on their pedals, but the baseballs are tucked

in their gloves today, bats are left

to list against garage walls, waiting.

Someone has brought a bow to the field,

and the new game has no rules, and it has

no name. And the arrow, shot steeple-straight,

draws their small souls up to plumb

the endless blue; subsumed by the sky,

hidden in the perfect bliss of recklessness,

its point still aimed toward heaven,

above the sound of children laughing.

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beyond
by S.D. Lishan

beyond the moss and leaf rattle

beyond the grit of finch

and the screech of hawk

beyond the scumble of last year’s deer bones

beyond the totems

of dying ash and wild cherry

beyond the bindweed

and the glowing violets

beyond the mute prayers

directed beyond the bone-colored sky

a taste of water glint

a sleepless sigh over smooth stones

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At The Evening Table
by Pippa Little

For Jean and Jack Dagnall

on their Diamond Anniversary
April 11th 2015

Come, this is your place, and yours.

You have filled the jug with light, with blue hours.
The cloth runs white as river-spate
where you’ve tidied the half-read books away.

Here you can see for miles and years –

clouds scud high over dimming cedars,
rain’s falling on gardens and spires. Plates shift,
memories’ tesserae, exposed, transfix.

April, you light the lamps later and later,

dusk rustles, dances in taffeta.
Come, the bread is warm, the moon is full,
sons long grown hang up jackets in the hall.

I would bring bride-blossom, swallows’ wings,

salt-grain diamond, holy labyrinths.
But this circle, this feast, is yours. Twofold
you’ve filled the sixty years you chose.

Come, there is love enough, spilling over

for slow endearments, for memories’ soft blur
just as the first drop of light, shared
from wick to wick, multiplies like stars, like prayer.

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The Archaeology of Time
by Oonah Joslin

I’d stepped outside


the day that time stood still.

A bee in the garden was
suspended mid-flight over
a forget-me-not its blue face
open to the deep sky.



I saw the moment freeze

the breeze break

the shudder of all things cease.



Time beneath our feet

above our heads

moves in us 

through us.



No shadow moved across the day

and no leaf stirred.

The blackbird’s beak 

swallowed its sound

and all around I saw 

the bones of time

evidence its archaeology.



Time resides in mystery

tesseracts, fractals,

twists like a Möbius strip

where red ants crawl

in lemniscate. 



Sound’s silenced 

light stretched 

the smell of death and taste 

of long deleted stars.

Gyroscope Review 3! 7
CONTRIBUTORS

Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press,
2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003). He is an ex-
con, ex-husband, ex-reporter, and completely exhausted by all the things he isn't anymore. His
writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Atlanta Review, RATTLE, River
Styx, Southern Humanities Review and many other journals. He currently resides in Charleston,
West Virginia.

Queens, NYC, native Audrey T. Carroll is an MFA candidate with the Arkansas Writer's
Program and graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. Her work
has been published or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Hermeneutic Chaos, Foliate Oak,
The A3 Review, and others. She can be found at http://audreytcarrollwrites.weebly.com and
@AudreyTCarroll on Twitter.

Bret Norwood lives in Sheridan, Wyoming. His stories and poetry have been published in the
Open Window Review, Owen Wister Review, Soundzine, and other journals, and his poetry was
recognized in the 2013 WyoPoets National and Members-Only contests. He is a staff blogger for
the Sheridan Programmers Guild. Follow his work at bretnorwood.com.

Daryl Muranaka was raised in California and Hawaii. He received his MFA from Eastern
Washington University and spent three years in Fukui, Japan, in the JET Program. He currently
lives in the Boston area with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he enjoys aikido and
taijiquan and exploring his children’s dual heritages.

Jane Roop is a retired securities broker. She lives in Kennewick, WA, home of the Kennewick
Man, at the confluence of three rivers, the Columbia, the Snake and the Yakima.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of an experimental memoir, An Unsuitable Princess: A

True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir (Jaded Ibis Press, 2014), and four volumes of poetry. "Burnt
by the Sun God" is from a series of poems on the Greek myth of Daphne.

JC Reilly is the author of La Petite Mort and 25% co-author of a book of occasional poetry, On
Occasion: Four Poets, One Year. She has been published most recently in The Citron Review,
Compose Journal, Glassworks Magazine, Kentucky Review, and Dirty Chai. She lives in Atlanta.

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Jeff Jeppesen lives and writes in Warner Robins Georgia. His work can be found in Every Day
Poets, Strange Horizons, The Linnet's Wings and Every Day Fiction. For several years, he was an
associate editor at Every Day Poets.

John Michael Flynn is currently an English Language Fellow with the US State Department in
Khabarovsk, Russia. His most recent poetry collection, Keepers Meet Questing Eyes (2014) is
available from Leaf Garden Press (www.leafgardenpress.com). Find him on the web at
www.basilrosa.com.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and
currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. Having finished his MFA
at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will
one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review, on
Poetrydaily.com, and has work forthcoming in The Crab Orchard Review, among others. His
first collection, How We Bury Our Dead (Cobalt/Thumbnail Press) was released in March, 2015.

Kathy Steinemann has loved writing for as long as she can remember. As a child, she scribbled
poems and stories. During the progression of her love affair with words, she won multiple
public-speaking and writing awards. Her career has taken varying directions, including positions
as editor of a small-town paper, computer-network administrator, and webmaster. She’s a self-
published author who tries to write something every day. You can read more of Kathy's work at
KathySteinemann.com.

Ken Poyner often serves as unlikely eye-candy at his wife’s powerlifting meets. His latest
collection of brief fictions, Constant Animals, can be located through links on his website,
www.kpoyner.com, and at www.amazon.com. He has had recent work out in Analog, Asimov’s,
Poet Lore, Sein Und Werden, and several other places, both in print and on the web.

Kevin Casey has contributed poems to recent editions of Green Hills Literary Lantern, Kentucky
Review, Rust + Moth, decomP, and other publications. His new chapbook, The wind considers
everything—, was recently published by Flutter Press, and another from Red Dashboard is due
out later this year. He is a graduate of UMass, Amherst and the University of Connecticut.

Gyroscope Review 3! 9
Marian Kaplun Shapiro is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton,
1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007),
and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish (Finishing Line, 2007), and The End Of The World,
Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). A Quaker and a psychologist, her poetry
often embeds the topics of peace and violence by addressing one within the context of the other.
A resident of Lexington, she was five times named Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She
was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Marie Lecrivain is the editor of poeticdiversity: the litzine of los angeles, a photographer, and
writer-in-residence at her apartment. She's the author of The Virtual Tablet of Irma Tre (© 2014
Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House). Her avocations include alchemy, collecting Brontë novels,
and crafting purty things to sell on Etsy.

Matt Morris has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, such as ABZ Review, DMQ
Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, New York Quarterly, Runes and Utter. He’s
received five Pushcart nominations as well as a recent Best of the Net nomination. His first book,
Nearing Narcoma, won the 2003 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Since then, Pudding House has
published his chapbooks, Here’s How and Greatest Hits. He currently lives on what remains of a
farm in West Virginia with his pet wombat Sonny.

Oonah Joslin is 100 MicroHorrors old and she sometimes feels it, but that is only because her
storytelling brain never shuts down. In addition to her work at MicroHorror, you can read
Oonah's poetry and flash at Postcard Poems and Prose. She is also the poetry editor of The
Linnet's Wings. Visit Oonah on her blog, Parallel Oonahverse at https://oovj.wordpress.com.

Patricia Frolander actively ranches in the Wyoming Black Hills, although at this stage of her
life, she prefers her writing desk. Frolander, a Wrangler and Willa Cather Award recipient, has
been widely published for eighteen years and was appointed Wyoming Poet Laureate by
Governor Matt Mead in 2011-13.

Pippa Little is Scots but lives in North East England. She is a poet, tutor, editor and reviewer.
Overwintering came out in 2012 from OxfordPoets/Carcanet and was shortlisted for The Seamus
Heaney Centre Award. She is working on her next collection and also a chapbook. This year she
takes up a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Newcastle University.

Gyroscope Review 4! 0
S.D. Lishan is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University. His book of
poetry, Body Tapestries (Dream Horse Press), was awarded the Orphic Prize in Poetry and was
published in 2006. His poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Arts & Letters,
Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Another Chicago Magazine, The American Poetry Journal,
Bellingham Review, XConnect, Barrow Street, Your Impossible Voice, Creative Nonfiction, and
other fine magazines. He lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife, Lynda, and their dog,
Kracker Jack.

Stephen Linsteadt is a painter, poet, and writer. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry
collection, The Beauty of Curved Space (Glass Lyre Press), and the non-fiction book, Scalar
Heart Connection, which is concerned with humanity’s connection, or lack thereof, with Nature,
the Earth, and the global community. His poetry has appeared in Silver Birch Press, Synesthesia
Literary Journal, Pirene’s Fountain, San Diego Poetry Annual, Saint Julian Press, Poetry Box,
Spirit First, and others. He has published articles about heart-centered consciousness in Whole
Life Times, Awaken, Truth Theory, Elephant Journal, and others.

Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text,
The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. His chapbook, Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse
(Finishing Line Press) will appear in October 2015. His poems, stories, and essays have been
published in China (United Verses and Anthill), the Philippines (Esquire, Tomas, Silliman
Journal, and in the Anvil Press anthology Fast Food Fiction), and the U.S. in numerous venues,
including Blue Lyra Review, Caribbean Vistas, Soundings Review, Theory in Action, and in the
anthology Long Island Noir (Akashic Books).

Wayne-Daniel Berard teaches English and Humanities at Nichols College in Dudley, MA. An
adoptee and former Franciscan seminarian, his birth-search led him to find and embrace his
Jewishness. Wayne-Daniel is a Peace Chaplain, an interfaith clergy person, and a member of
B’nai Or of Boston. He has published widely in both poetry and prose, and is the co-founding
editor of Soul-Lit, an online journal of spiritual poetry. He lives in Mansfield, MA, with his wife,
The Lovely Christine.

Will Nixon is the author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.
He sometimes collaborates with his friend and fellow author Mike Jurkovic. Will lives in
Kingston, NY.

Gyroscope Review 4! 1
 Thank you for reading this issue of Gyroscope Review.

The reading period for our October issue begins July 1, 2015.

Please see our guidelines at http://www.gyroscopereview.com/home/guidelines/

We hope you share us with your friends.

Gyroscope Review 4! 2