Autumn Newman | Cider Press Review

After more than a week of stuffing envelopes, the hard-copy “Best of Volume 16” Cider Press Review is on its way to contributors, subscribers, and former Book Award contest entrants.

The “Best of” issue features poems by Rebecca Baggett, Carol Berg, Jennifer Jackson Berry, Maggie Blake, Ace Boggess, John Bradley, Christine Butterworth-McDermott, Sharon Chmielarz, Lisa J. Cihlar, Joan Colby, Michael Collins, Gemma Cooper-Novack, Jimmie Cumbie, Carol V. Davis, Paul Dickey, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Carol Ellis, Sarah Estes, David Eye, Evelyn Clark Farbman, Shawn Fawson, Janice Greenwood, David Hathwell, Gary Hawkins, Sara Henning, Brian Patrick Heston, Louisa Howerow, Ann Hudson, Amie Keddy, Heather Lang, Susanna Lang, Mercedes Lawry, Bernadette McBride, Amy Meckler, Colleen Michaels, Nancy Carol Moody, Carolyn Moore, Mary Moore, Susannah Nevison, Amy Newday, Autumn Newman, Sharon Olson, Mary Elizabeth Parker, Lynn Pedersen, Kevin Phan, Katherine Rauk, Geri Rosenzweig, Michael G. Smith, Heather Sommer, Sarah Sousa, Joannie Stangeland, Kelly Terwilliger, Lisken Van Pelt Dus, Ryan Vine, Donna Vorreyer, Chelsea Wagenaar, Mark Wagenaar, Marq Wilson, Laura Madeline Wiseman, Anne Harding Woodworth, Matthew Zingg. Book reviews by Ken Hada and Gary Leising.

To order your own or extra copies, please visit the CPR Bookstore.

And Abraham took the wood for the offering and put it on Isaac, his son, and he took in his hand

the fire and the cleaver and the two of them went up together.

To adhere firmly and closely, or loyally and unwaveringly: to cleave.

To divide by, or as if by, a cutting blow, to split: to cleave.

Words we don’t understand built our story before it happened. Stories—

Slapped on in the stickiness of childhood—cleave

The personal and the mythological, inseparable like ink in skin. I ask them to explain

Your thumbprints in the hollow of my throat. Violence cleaves

Two people—before it breaks them apart—because stories have made violence natural.

Heavy and ridiculous—like the fuel for Isaac’s pyre placed on his own back—you cleave

Relentlessly to me, and I respond predictably. So when your knuckles break my teeth

You don’t need to say anything. As if on cue, my horns are stuck in the bushes, my

kicking hooves cloven.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 1.

Autumn Newman is an alumni of The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast creative writing MFA program and teaches English composition and creative writing at The College of San Mateo.

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CPR Best of Volume 16 Now Available

Cleave
by Autumn Newman

A Journal of Contemporary Poetry