
Having been so compositional for both Poetry 1 and Poetry 2, moving into Free Verse usually terrifies the students. But the compositional tools and principles they carry, with their focus on prosody, prepared them to be intentional in Free Verse as well. Being in control, knowing what the options are, and knowing why something works or doesn’t is invaluable. Intuition is nice, but it shouldn’t be the only route.
I asked each of the eleven students in this semester’s Poetry 2 class to submit their favorite poem of the semester for publication in Fusion. I was eager to see what they’d choose, since the quality of all their writing was quite high. Most students chose one of their Free Verse poems for this issue. I have to say I’m really pleased at the results.
I’d like to express my deep gratitude to FUSION Magazine for providing an outlet for these remarkable writers.
Enjoy.
Pat Pattison
Professor
Berklee College of Music
Ava Dinsmore
I will my hands to be my legacy.
The cream on my knuckles to stop them
Cracking in the cold.
The backs I rubbed in spirals,
The necklaces I clasped,
Little girls store these moments: the hands of their mothers and her friends,
When I’m gone, I wish to live on in these, the memories of the
smallest of Women.
As a girl, the hair I gathered and held
out of the way,
As a granny, the hair I tidied without permission.
The dress backs I zipped,
The little shoes I laced,
The shoulders I nudged awake,
The foreheads I tested for warmth,
My touch that doesn’t excite, but soothes,
My hips that don’t beguile, but hold.
When I leave, I hope the leeches can’t reach me as
Little ladybugs crawl all over my corpse.
Joely Cromack-Kluko
On Tuesdays and Fridays, I wake up to construction.
The bustle of the city is a light hum
Against the thunder of- what I can only imagine to be
A Gigantic Bulldozer attempting to make-out with another Gigantic Bulldozer
It’s a pity, really-
Wasting the morning tearing into
Seldom-stepped-on
Back-alley concrete just to
Smooth it over.
In another forty years, they’ll redo it
Again.
Every day I wake up I have to convince myself that I’m not a bad person- or worse-
A burden.
If there were another shoe to fall it would have
Fallen by now,
Smack onto my head (with my luck).
I’ve grown tired
of defending myself in my head to people who are not around to ask me to
Anyway
face. And on Mondays and Wednesdays and Thursdays (and the weekend)
That is enough to return me to consciousness peacefully,
seemingly. But on Tuesdays and Fridays, I’m
Grateful that the roar of construction
Overrides the true shocking quiet:
That I am a person
That exists.
Blake Teagardin
As I’m stripping off the day’s armor,
Awaiting the warmth of the steady shower,
I lift my shirt from my body, and an unexpected wave
Crashes over me, the familiar scent of
Someone else’s heartbeat, and I’m struck with the thought:
My skin is no longer mine.
I don’t remember agreeing to share it,
Nor did I really mean
To give away my time that washed down the drain,
Or the bed in my mind he takes up all the space in,
Or my silly, adamant hopes that latched onto him so fiercely,
As I stood back, begging them not to,
With not
If only I had anything desirable
Left.
But I am only love — SO MUCH LOVE,
And there’s nowhere to put it,
No one to give it to,
And I know that even It is not mine to keep,
And it’s a growling, shaking beast
Now without even a cage to call its own,
Just gnashing claws and teeth
From the empty corners of me;
It’s a broken damn burst free, pouring
Down my body, leaving rivers and
Tattooed trails and cavernous canyons
For him to claim; if he wishes.
But he doesn’t,
And he’s not here.
And so I’m standing
Naked and
Alone
In my bathroom,
With a chill on his skin,
Chasing down a smell
That’s already slipped
Away.
And the water’s falling,
Genevieve Sull
I line up the entrails of a
worn toy once stuck in motion,
and remove her filmy lens.
She’s all bits and beads and sequins and
flecks of dread and dust.
A magpie menagerie of glass and loss
I examine, then toss back
Into
I beg her for a pattern,
shaking, with a vengeance,
the stark and stripped-down shards.
Willing sum greatness to appear.
Myself the dreaded voyeur
I press a thirsty eye,
Hold the scattered scraps up
against a marigold light.
Geometric greens of seafoam
Crimson curtains fall and rise.
All morphing, growing, serving
all in place and time
And there, the pinprick center,
a little girl in purple.
orchestrating all of it
just wanting to be seen
Makenna Bear
A rearview mirror rosary
jingles
As I press my knee into your seat,
kissing the roof to wake the angels,
The religious ritual when running
red lights
Squinting at the sun
And the dust devils that
lick the side of the highway
Blurring the lines between
divine intuition and delusion
I find God in roadside crosses
We frequent truck stop diners with
sawdust pancakes and sandwich bread
And you order cheap steaks at
counters crowded with penny-pinching cheapskates
And ass-pinching skirt chasers
With-with wives and-and daughters
And suddenly I want to grab the keys
and leave you here…
But you’ve done nothing
wrong.
A maker of my own evil
And now my life is sober and sorry…
Don’t touch me!
Your hands are cold from the outside
I drive
And you drive
and I sort the shapeless day
Trying to find
something to say
but the Words don’t fit right in
my mouth
There’s too much…
like a smile with too many teeth
Content for a cruel age but
still a steady stinging
scent in my nose persists.
I’m a dog following the double yellow lines back home
Natalie Dodge
Faintly, mourning creeps, slips in. Carefully it
chokes, contorts her reason, and loiters ever-
more beside her. Grief is no friend. Its fanged grin
Draining her clean, ‘til
There’re no tears left; just an ink-free pen, smokeless
fire, a silent scream, but she flails like she’s cut
cloaked, afloat inside the Dead Sea. In Time, her
pain will live sparser.
Kira Weaver
Dear God,
Today, an Old Black Man gave up his seat on the train for me. He said
“I know that weighs a lot.” Blue inked were his palms, he was jotting down words— God,
Please let the next sentence he gets to write be a
Good Sentence.
One he is proud of writing,
One he would not have written if he had stayed
Sitting with the train car moving down, and the more people,
More people come on the train and the Old Man with palms of thought,
Moving farther,
And farther,
Back.
removed from my sight, I don’t know where–
He left some stop before mine,
God, do you think if I got up and searched through all the cars on the train moving down,
Putting empty palms on the more people as I pass-by,
I could find the man with the blue inked hands.
And, God if I am too late –
Thank him again.
Daphne Eleftheriadou
My childhood Best Friend and I
Don’t speak anymore.
Growing pains that mama couldn’t Kiss away,
Left salt in every wound and yellowed every tooth,
Stretched out our pale skin across concrete-counter-tops,
Pulling out the pretty parts
Always bound to break.
We were twelve when we met
When we tied our bones to build shelters
Safer than our homes,
Hid under blankets that could
Slow down time, that could
A frank reminder that one day the breaths would stop.
“…Could we be buried hand-in-hand?”
“What’s in the middle of
Scatted in the sea?
I know you love the mountains though…”
“Well maybe, somewhere in-between?”
Stephen Pilat
Arson fantasies, bred contempt,
and growing moldy cynicism:
These little “gifts” are mixed
into my brain slurry, with limestone and dust
and passion and apathy and all the things
that take hold and bind to the earth
without my permission –
spinning in a drum,
knocking around
and pulverizing,
becoming whole
once again at the other side.
Sloppy scraps congeal and coagulate –
taking shape in molds made
by educators and clinicians
and those thinking they “knew best”
I was raised a lot like pavement:
Utilitarian in nature,
Malleable in principium
until hardened by exposure.
Rigid exterior until cracked
by a flower,
or construction,
or gentle weathering of city life
under shoes of unworthy benefactors.
(The chances of these trembling hands being given
the grace of God to paint her face
on temporal canvas in perfection seemed
slim to none.)
But what do I know about construction?
Building has never been my strong suit.
More time is spent fortifying
the walls around me than
building a strong enough
foundation needed
to survive.
Fess up, Blockhead…
you messed it up again.
Zach Feinstein
I still think about the sparkle in her eye.
A twinkle of light that dances so free,
how her hair was the perfect frame to showcase her face
and when you put your fingers through it,
it felt like a gentle stream grazing through the spaces in between them.
A silhouette of an hour glass that reminds me that my clock is ticking.
Grains of sand fill the beaches of her home town, waiting for her to return to them.
In the summer, I admire her with the windows down in my car.
In the fall, how she becomes part of the foliage. In the winter how she glows like the sun when it’s snowing and
in the spring when her smile pales the beauty of the newly bloomed flowers.
I would launch a thousand ships for her,
yet will she do the same for me?

Pat Pattison
I’ve driven by this fence a hundred times:
Aged wood, tan-brown, pocked and pitted by wind
And winter storms. The posts are notched, designed
To hold the thin rails, carved by stable grooms
To fit tight, hold fast – whatever weather comes,
Keep the horses in, safely tucked behind
The sturdy structure. Every rail was pinned
And poled, secure. But now, once solid beams
Sag, tumbled into disarray, the brace
Missing, gaps a string of Mustangs could pass,
Like thoughts, galloping to the far horizon,
Never to return.
The gradual relinquishing of reason.
Image by km2bp on Mapillary, “Hands Mural in Lagunillas” CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons