Gary Beck
Fading Force
This time so filled with remembrance
of beggar’s words that seem to prance
from my dishonest mouth’s story,
that struts a moment of glory,
laments its defeats in despair,
chants of maidens with streaming hair,
who slay their hopes and change their ways
the victims of my maddened days,
that pass as swift as spring’s delight,
that stir me in a blaze of white
flash-fire, extinguishing the coals,
mocking my unaccomplished goals.
Greg Billingham
Skinny Dipping
the trees are destined against us,
exhaling the kiss of their reflection
where clouds are one with water.
and for a moment we shattered their double life
of surface
its dreamy edges cut through
as you rise like a newborn earth
scattering ripples
your naked movements wake that
drowsy country, until everything is scurrying off
like the daylight-
lost to such a deepness
David Bradsher
Night Shift
At the dim juncture of the dawn,
my yawn-and-stretch completes
a canvassing of tousled sheets
to find my lover gone.
She showed up late, but didn't stay,
and left with no goodbye,
proving again that she and I
are strangers in the day;
yet, in the dark, we'll reunite
as two amnesiacs
who coalesce like candle wax
that moats a tongue of light.
Enabled
for Charles Delaine Bradsher, Sr.
1.
He's smaller now. He never was that tall,
too short for top-shelf pots, or basketball,
though at the Y—at lunchtime—there he was,
launching a shot amid the bigs, because
a man with limitations either spends
his life aground or, grasping hold, ascends.
2.
He's taller now. Two strokes (and age) combined
to wilt an arm and leg, but not his mind.
He fights the loss from an ischemic crash
to rise above the dust of settled ash,
helping the doubters see and understand
a man with Phoenix feathers in his hand.
Zachary Buscher
Exile on Mabel St.
Of your new street there is freshness.
Reeks lavender in spring. Doesn’t help
that your first love was a movie set, or when
you say, let’s make cinematic tonight and drive
to Culver City, what you long for is a picture
interference can’t retune.
Missing the emptiness of nest, you open
like a house that stays drafty each summer,
like a fridge used for storing fresh cases
they’ve captured as cut up police
and court logs. You highlight the name
in hot pink ink.
The fridge gives you character
crisis anew. Are you the villain? The hero
upped anti? Is magnetism even in you?
You think not, in line for change and results
of other people’s blood tests, a wait that takes you
into the next frame
which, not yet summer, is still the season
for games and gallow’s humor:
Death
by Sylvia Plath
Vs.
Death
by Isadora Duncan
Plath’s the hometown girl but you have to choose
scarf strangulation for the strangeness of the thing
Sedition passing between rooms
where molds of her pudenda mount the walls;
where folks start branding you traitor, questioning
your commitment to town’s dramatic nature.
Barring a mixture of feather and tar, you bounce
in wish accrual.
Your genie’s breath has brought you here.
You waste days checking lists.
Birthday Girl
Zebra overcooked.
Frosting plain impasto.
Bulimia stretches
the ladies’ room line dance
extended operating hours.
Such a skink, flicking her tongue
like that.
Remainders with stomach
raise their mop handles
to swat the piñata
the nightly nurse resembles.
She’s spilled party favors.
Pluck of lonesome tilde.
I think a thoughtful joke
of spiking insufflation
with nasalizing eyebrows.
Such a cloud, showering her cake
like this.
Her blessed Birthday wish
begs nothing but extinguish.
Her one good lung
no match for sentineled tapers.
from Mellow Wine
We’re out on the terrace
sucking down Belgians
Nicole with her mother
and Jules and I’m
ringed around the stump
of an amputated tree
out Onder de Linden
where cerecloth shade
casts goblets and rings
in light deemed medieval
making motion slow
as one takes a mistress
But which is the mistress
Someone new Someone blue
One’s got blue eyes
the other a blue soul
Both have soft hands
right and left almost touching
in a synchronized pinch
of legs left and right
My face flickers red
a match for the gangrene
that blushes like Xmas
numb from the waist down
A non-degree paraplegic
knows when to cut out
the angle of dead skin
the wrong side of scalene
the flimsy triangle built
to rest on prosthetics
Lisa Ciccarello
At night, the dark has a sound:
Light is a mirror & the back of the mirror is dark. It sounds like being under water. It's sound is the sound of a man standing by the water, quieting his baby with a blanket. The palm goes over the blanket. The water is hiding what it waits for. The water is silent. The baby is silent.
Yes we part we open
Clay cup of the mouth, what
jar you've become
All the breath
echoing there spit-slip
the wetness of you when you talk: two fingers as far as you can
Filled, a slick grasp & carry
the jar is four fingers wide but not fist-fit around
Is this trying
No one will stop us but us & we
are somewhere else
parting each refusal, the tin of it
here in the jar they are
as cymbals & when they touch
I call it music
Chris Deal
the zed word
they were always
of interest, as a kid,
the gun shows.
i had fired a few,
but in honesty, they
frightened me, guns.
the potential that
was there in them, i hated it,
though i was being taught
to understand and to live
with them, to use them
if need be,
but never to fear them.
they were something
to do, the shows,
booth after booth
of pistols and rifles
and semi-autos, knives
and grenades and the
anarchist cookbook,
damn near every booth
was slinging copies.
that day i saw a guy
selling these small gold coins,
with three letters
right across, and a man
in a hood on horseback.
i stepped away,
not giving the man,
my elder, pepper beard
over beer gut and a
dirt covered chevy cap,
not giving him my money,
no, going over to where my
dad was, talking about his ford
with an old timer, and then
we went towards the exit,
to the next building of
the expo, and this fellow
he stopped us, a scarcrow in
black pressed pants, crisp
white shirt and a black tie,
he looked like a minister,
a lawyer, and he asked my dad,
sir, are you happy with the way
this country is going,
as a white christian man?
and my dad, he kept on walking,
but i saw, looking at that man,
thin blond hair, dead blue eyes,
and i never did go to another
one of those, the gun show,
i never pestered my pop
about taking me again.
there were nights where
i kept seeing those eyes,
blue like the horizon
on a clear day,
bright eyes but
dead to the world,
something unnatural,
evil in the way an
uncaring god would be.
those eyes, you see them
damn near everywhere,
always on faces you
don't quite expect,
church leaders, teachers,
kids you grew up with,
family, all with eyes that see
only what they want,
that give nothing to the world,
dead eyes for dead souls.
there's a word,
but we don't say that word,
what they are, we don't say it
for fear of a sort of infection
of the heart, you could say,
a sickness of the mind,
the word, we don't say
it, and we ignore
what they are.
of voices
say it's thanksgiving,
and you hear these voices
familial voices, ones
you've heard your entire life
and they're saying his name
in hushed, harsh tones like
liquid disappointment
and when they see you listening
they're cut off quickly
but the voices are still hanging
like smoke after a grease fire.
the things they're saying
these things they say he's done
you know they can't be true
it's a fiction, a lie
but then you think on it
and you've never been alone with him
because there's something
like a smell, a pheromone perhaps
and like an animal
the hair on your neck prickles
with survival instinct when you see him
and the years pass
and he's out of your life
you think on him
every once in a while
and perhaps what those voices
you heard, perhaps what they say
well, maybe it was true
but you can't ask
for confirmation
and you'll never know
what he did or
did not do.
Mike Donkin
Weavings
1)
So many children inhabit this house, the house the writer has rented for the summer months. He had thought it a good idea, the property being so remote. “Fully soundproof,” the ad had said.
A)
I reach a fork in the road. I go left instead of right to exercise my free will. This too, I concede, was predetermined.
2)
The house is covered in beetles. The children inside hear sounds which resemble the crumpling of dried leaves as they hold their stethoscopes to the glass walls. The writer scribbles prose amidst pandemonium.
B)
Lamps line cobblestone pathways, illumining the night travelers. Their long, fang-like shadows cut through the vibrating yellow of the buzzing lamps. Bursts of ghoulish laughter spike and take on the colors of the dreary nothing, a mix of yellows, browns, and blacks.
3)
Weeks have gone by. The writer does not know anymore whether it is day or night. The insects, whose abdomens are constantly blinking on and off with phosphorescent light, have subsumed the glass home. The writer does not sleep.
C)
Galactic old-timers slowly perusing a vast universe, nodding off with somnolent planets, babbling incessantly to remote, disinterested stars.
If you want to create, remember:
It is when words don’t
come
when they are summoned
that it is best to write
down words -
As it is when surroundings
are unrecognizable
that it is best to paint images/
An artist must
work hard
to dislodge the
commonplaces that
have been firmly rooted
by the voices,
the fluent flaccid voices,
like gasping balloons,
which beset
and confuse the artist,
/
The geometric person
who said that one does not understand
what they cannot explain
was wrong
-the geometric person who said
that one cannot see
what they don’t recognize
was lying
For they did not know the act of
forgetting(- pure art -
is only possible
if one can will forgetfulness
/ Accordingly
the pure artist
has unremembered
everything ;
pure writers have forgotten
how to speak;
pure painters have removed their
eyes
Literature
Bygones extremely save maddening
thwart rumple causes
astride syncopated trumpet coughs
I’m finished save along all
falling glass gorgeous ballads
of the mole’s regal cricket never ending but never exactly reality working out but
that’s not to say I’ve shortchanged
far from itself beloved of all but never
that I go for annual machination societies
encouraging cashmere
some systematize
the whole canon doubt without doubt
a larger possibility necessary
go on and strip one of pleurisy
spilling mercury
Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Black feathers, fibers
We burnt caramel and hemmed our jeans. You showed me how to pin the seam, straight on straight. The midnight running like railroad tracks. From the kitchen, the pot sang its sugar song. Because I could have cracked my teeth on you. The needle dives and surfaces. The knot is an anchor and a pearl. I am doing this to keep the night outside. Sometimes the night comes in through the window and asks for puerh tea. It asks for a longer seam. You thought you knew time, but something about fog makes you not understand. The night paws its concrete thoroughfares under mesquite blossoms. You have cursed me. If I don't keep stitching, the mountain will get closer and ask me to swallow it down. If I don't keep stitching, the river. Salamander crawls into my lap. Raven's song, why do you love him why do why do why do you. I love him because he has cursed me with threads. I love him because I am afraid of the needle's power. I did not before. Inside the kitchen, the night has seeped in through a crack in the stove. The night whistles in the teakettle. It isn't night. Salamanders were gods long ago. It is lonely in a place that begs to be sweetened.
Cosmetic lesson
Aristotle said the world is made of spheres. They slide back and forth and around and between without knowing prepositions. One sphere holds everything we know. The second sphere holds everything we don't know. Every night a mangrove tree sucks down another root and stretches higher. Every morning something catches on fire. The third sphere holds the other spheres but is still lonely because the fourth sphere holds love. When she cranes her neck up at the sky, at night, she shivers This may be because she is trying to find Scorpio. She is more afraid of falling up endlessly than falling from heights. The night is colder than it should be. She wonders if one of the spheres has a hole. A leak that hisses the light out like a deflated tire. The fifth sphere holds the sun. Spheres six and seven don't know what love is but can recite equations. The mangrove would shiver if it could. We sat under it when you said you were leaving. The cold came in then like a guest that wants to love you all night. The eighth sphere is rounder than the gold ring at the bottom of the drawer in the attic. Even a guest knows this, having never seen the dust's halo. The sun is quieter than you would imagine. I am the ninth sphere.
Chris Elder
Charles’ Muse
You wonder if you
are naked –
everybody must
see. Yes, reversed
mirror-visage shows
him again – heavy, dark
features, scarred they say
by adolescence, not
the subsequent life,
warm, far-seeing eyes –
he possesses you,
and you must submit
to the vision. You
leer through others
because it is not you alone
who are unclothed.
Silk entangles you,
but this thread is not
spun by a spider,
and not by a worm –
so you flee, but you only
get more of him on you,
in you. He slips into
your viscera , grabbing
your soul, and sucking
it out. Your pulse pitches
high in your ears, ring
ring ring – heartbeat
harmony of longing. Your
throat strains for him
but he sticks
on your tongue. He
knows you, and wrestling
him to paper is your
only chance. Now all see –
your Bukowski is showing.
Christina Farella
untitled
as I kneel I bend
–double
I steal
over your blades
of light
you, Dreamtiger
wading survivor
of poets, mirrored armor
paramour of
underwater skies
brushfire and
bloodletting;
we read all
the pages
in the house
with floors
like ginger waves
and accidental
notes played
John Floyd
halcyon
white ferries across nantucket sound,
and she and i looked out from starboard
and from bow at the teary blue waters
and the surf they washed onto kennedy beach.
through the overgrown iron of the gates to our beach.
along paths of broken seashells, wreathed in sawgrass;
and that night we slept on the sandy rocks,
beneath a shingled lighthouse, shining out.
submergence
oceanic firewalkers
barefoot on the sun
wish on satellites in orbit
where shooting stars burn out
beneath them, will a flooding earth
drown in the shadows of the whales?
rock bottom with a sandy floor;
we should have stayed in the shallows.
Amylia Grace
What Remains
Mid-November melts
Like the edges of spring
Calling back the wasted
Days we lost together.
Specks of dust caught
In the Santa Ana winds.
My foolish hands
Didn’t reach out
To skim the surface
Of your face, gently
Touching the still soft stubble
Tinted red from the late autumn sun.
I would like to touch you now
But we’ve been unrecognizably
Replaced. Cheeks and hands
Already spoken for
By this tidy, grown up
Version of us.
Outside in our turtlenecks
We tend to our fading
Garden of peppers and pumpkins.
We call for the dog and tie our shoelaces
While august flecks of gold and rust fall
Piece by piece from the trees.
I water the garden and see you proudly
Pocket the last orange and yellow pepper.
Everything we’ve planted has survived.
The sun droops downward in the sky.
I pause to watch half of it disppear.
What remains seems brighter.
I am happy until I notice
You've turned to go.
The moment has passed and I am
Holding a watering can
And not your face.
I call your name,
And tell you I need you.
You smirk. I have leaves in my hair.
We laugh and you tell me
I am beautiful. Before I can object,
You kiss my forehead,
And I believe you.
I smile as your fingers
Brush dead leaves from my hair.
We watch them fall on purpose,
Landing at my feet like paper airplanes
Made by the future daughter
We always meant to have.
-For Mark Davies
The Twisted Cactus
Lone on the desert floor
Tough, fibrous bravado, thorns and tiny
Glochids defend curiosities. Meanwhile
Begging me to ask the story of her creation.
I cannot tell just by looking
What events led to her endless writhing.
I long to reach
Past the thorns, beyond oblique
Barbs, and touch her from the inside
Out. I am drawn to the grotesque
Convolutions of self-preservation,
Nature’s silent prayer to herself.
Her prickly limbs intertwine.
Untouchable, or so it seems.
Yet here she is, shallow
Roots and all. Prone to separation,
She joins with herself
And thrives.
Fenton Grant
Breaking
Bars cloud your face.
Locked, cement setting
In the sun;
All the cartoon flowers I'd draw,
Wilting.
I don
Blue and yellow's baby,
And trumpet almost half
My heritage
With fermented beverages,
A blue eye, green's father,
Out, patrolling,
For interest.
The other blue
Eye
Knows
I'll find my way home
Alone
To plot and promise
Your escape.
John Grey
THE MONTH BEFORE I LEAVE HOME
I am getting ready to leave
so, the time I have left, I will spend staying.
See how bodily, I occupy a room,
how much heft I put
even to kisses on the cheek.
Whatever the world wants of me,
first the home will have in generous helpings.
Time remaining gathers weight,
can't be moved out of this house.
It's not your looks that hook
into me, not those sudden elevations
over knitting, around newspapers,
the sigh that greets sons like they
are kittens. I am quite capable
of snaring myself. Bookshelves
dangle like worms. The goldfish bowl
is a willing fly. For as long as it takes,
I'll be both fish and fisherman.
See me in the chair. My bones are
finding gravity a boon. Never has
this television so absorbed me.
The stairs are lovingly finite. The attic is
the perfect harness for my head. Such clinging
sleep... the bed shrinks the dimensions
of a life into a photo on a dresser,
banner on a wall. Watch how I deal with
what I'm letting go... I suck it into me,
drag it near and dear.
My restlessness has stilled me. My itch
is scratched by listening to bathwater run,
clothes spin through the rinse cycle.
My hunger first must get out from under
being fed. But it's sated far into the future.
And what do eyes at the window know?
Do they expect blood not to do its family duty?
Sure I'm greedy for the passing cars,
the overhead jets, the people I know already
in the city. But asphalt highways draw their
inspiration from the turnpikes of the heart.
And they're all one way.
John Griener
Maitre d’
From the farms
of the mid-West
we give you
the silence of the
butcher standing
in the slaughter
house smiling.
Come one,
come all.
Disregard your change,
for something such
as this you
should be willing
to put down
a few bucks.
On these bloodstained
floors you will learn
of the rise
and fall of
empires, not to mention
where tonight’s steak au poivre
originates.
Things such as these
should not be left
unseen,
and that is why
for a nominal
fee the universe’s
most wondrous
secrets will be revealed
to you. This will be an
experience not to be
forgotten,
and when the tour
is finished
please join us
for a nice piece of meat,
and superb glass of house red.
Message from Istanbul
Garbage truck,
Friday morning
pick-up.
I will go off
with the trash
pickers looking
for the remnants
of Byzantium
dumped into ash cans.
Ah, the lost
jewels of the heady
empress found
in the dust,
their beauty
has outshined
her. I can no longer
remember her
name, but this is
the way of history.
To say that she was
a beauty is an
assumption. I wish
to give her the
benefit of the
doubt, but
now that all of
her glories are
in my dirty hands
there is no
reason for me
to sing praises
to her lost memory.
Gabriella G Keanaaina
NEVER
I can remember
that never can be a gift.
Never can be a place
like those pictured
in a travel magazine.
My name and a date
printed on a ticket,
holding it in my hand.
Throwing toiletries and
pants in a suitcase,
departure was soon.
Shrieking, cracking springs,
seized with your arrival home.
Only moments now.
Maybe you will look
at something outside
and I will have a few moments more.
I hear you, soon
I will see your strut and your arms.
I will see you put things down
and that will tell me how it will be.
My seat would sit empty.
A happy gift
to the passenger next to me.
Later I would send
some whisper outline of myself
to a place where never
is a gift of rewritten memories.
Erik Knutsen
Clear
I have already been thinking about you thoroughly; about marble and of jade. It is becoming quickly the something I must say that it is the girl rushing through the woods and houses along the way who holds the heart for singing that ignites salacious remonstrances, or is it the other way. Her inborne dualist primacy, feral or severe, is reflected in me right here; so by virtue of wishing through another upon oneself but withal still intact - I want her to be made of porcelaine. In Pan's reedy whistle she wanders merrily, her green, green cloak a shoutback of his verdant melody. It is the shoulder that I wish to lay my hand upon. "So let me guide you," and thus I stood beguided. For I deniably stand for all that is good. While shaking off the grime, I was beckoning you in, though may I not enjoin you overzealously. But when you're through my door the knockings are louder ever more. You didn't walk this way only for yourself; I was there right with you in previous foreknowledge of the moutains and crystal lakes which praise my kind of day. Marf is a clean carpet and sweat sock footed feet. Chocolate. A Link fighting nobly to the console between our controllers' cord's end things. Candy. You and me and disney. Lollipops. The one thing I gave that I can never take away. I have abandoned everyone. I would come, I would come to visit you. My marf is your diamonds and cocaine. Is a relationship now contained in so few days, when all available recollections reflect a moribund instant of joy or two? She wants to be bone and flesh! Could the ikons love bone and flesh? When a wooded fir is trying to be an art print littered table, perhaps along the way. Hallowed be thy name; I wish but fear I'm failing to preserve thy sanctity. But that art print littered table may not have been what the fir had meant, it seems, it's strivings to achieve. So my mundanity breeds your insanity, I would still take those cut out pills with you another day. It wasn't even my affectations of nobility but my vectorised lucidity which prevented me. I wanted, oh, I wanted; please don't take away. Give me a second chance to rectifie today. Am I to keep myself from ever opening my abdomen to someone else, my entrails spilling out only onto the page where their blemishes are not shared to understanding. This next silence may even be too much for me. I forget who I'm to be writing about: a porcelain girl, or me. You seem to want to be Nastassya Filippovna, while I want to be Myshkin with a different wakeful ending. You said, "Link Absolves Zelda," which was a wonderfully beautiful and insightful thing.
Kirk Layton
the audition
they sit in darkness with pens held marking
comments in script deciding the future for me
while right hand fingers brush the nylon strings
the left forms dancing ballerina steps
mistakes reverb between the empty seats
forcing pens to the pads in instant action
eyes close to silence the darkness of fear
replaced by the color of a bach fugue
ten years practice condensed to minutes
for three academy student seats
her touch comforts me as i stroke her neck
feeling her body as i have daily
they judge in toronto, paris, new york
and here where i heard them play late last night
i can smell honey oil i rub her with
as our heartbeats turn to one yet again
they complete comments on musicality
i stand, i bow, i leave knowing the truth
we have been intimate for many years
and lovers we remain in private joy
Yonatan Maisel
Black is Not a Pastel Hue
Oratory in lavender,
self-speak in pastel-blue hues.
Brush-strokes deftly applied,
impregnate mine bellicose deliberations
in ephemeral tints of taciturn existence.
Aqua notes, flutter, fly,
mine ethereal thoughts whisper nigh.
Palette of subtlety, soft earth-tones,
evoke memories birthed yesteryear,
melodic chords woven, longings I enunciate to only ears mine.
Ordained, Summers digress to Fall,
Green-toned leaves mutate to russet, then brown.
Wither. And fall.
Winter’s chill, alas, takes hold;
Sanguinity born of love expires, displaced by immeasurable torment of heartbreak,
Jagged rocks I see through tears beneath. Of grays and charcoal-black,
I leap to closure, oh merciful cessation,
their neutral tones soon to be colored by mine incandescent reds.
Mine last worldly vision before all subsides,
is of blackness, nothing more.
Mine last fleeting earthly contemplation is...
black of death is not a pastel hue.
Carla Martin-Wood
Comet
A child who loved myths,
summer evenings I would search
amongst the stars to find
Andromeda between the clouds,
sweet arms lifted, though in chains,
or altruistic Chiron with his bow,
honoured there forever,
celestial and eternal monuments,
reminding us from whence we came
and what, with grace, we might attain.
Yet, on that sleepy August afternoon,
when Kathy called me up the hill to play,
I still refused. Four to my nine years,
I thought myself too old for her,
and too grown-up for paper dolls.
So Kathy went her solitary way,
learned how swiftly fire can leap
from match to flesh,
how paper dolls can burn,
lingered without hope for days,
hers, the first coffin I would see,
she, who made death real to me,
and still I hear the sound
her mother made.
Tonight I hurried home to watch
as Comet Lulin streaks the sky, and yet
instead, through these late tears I saw
a four-year old run helpless
down a neverending hill,
an ever-living torch,
fire fanning out like wings against the night,
immortal in my darkness.
Darcy McMurtery
Yarn
Grandmother would tell stories of our
kin late into the evenings of our childhood. The void between her words filled with a spitting fire and the incessant click of knitting needles as
she spoke to wide eyed darkness.
The dust storms came and winds kicked up and wore away the field, grain by grain.
Her work dress, that brown calico from the picture, whipped her sunburned calves
as she watched her new crops destroyed, buried.
In spite of bare fields, the babies came,
instead of the rain everyone prayed for,
wet and salty, wailing with their own vinegar tears.
A week later their only tears were specks of sand
blown in from the fields streaking their new faces
With grime and blood.
Most of the babies lived, and some were doled
out to neighbors from a basket, like sourdough starts , except for the sick one
she drowned in the bathtub.
She would finish her knitting,
winding wool around gnarled, arthritic fingers
and carefully bind off a stitch, or mark off a place to begin
the next night. She snipped off the remainder of the yarn so no questions were asked and sent us off to bed to the sounds of the dying fire and soft murmurs.
Quincy, Washington
My father once spent a summer
pinning railroad spikes into a scorched earth
while the constant sun
struck its rhythm on his back
driving him to lay that track,
a path for escape or new beginnings,
dividing the desert into choices.
Days dawned and faded, pinned down at each hammer’s strike
until Friday nights delivered the far off
squeal of brakes down our curved hill
and we fought for his attention, clamored for
his greeting, a grunt or a nod through the open door
then he would tip his ice chest into the brown lawn,
a week’s worth of comfort into parched ground .
We lined up to touch the treasures he bestowed:
dried rattle from a dead snake, half ground to dust
a rusty railroad spike disappearing flake by flake
a penny flattened by a passing train
The real gift was his presence kept only
until the road beckoned, a mistress, now lonely,
a come hither to the long ribbon of black asphalt,
a journey without promise of return.
Ben Nardolilli
War Stars
It was a cappella access,
But did not produce believability.
Just banter with filming,
Every mother a material
And Christine’s skin a gallery.
The risk of ghosts and geodes,
Interesting mythological families,
Writing with her umbrella.
Times and houses were worth
That isolation and any poems the same.
Sweet New Style
In the shadows no one watches
Closely how we play, the rules
Are never kept, and in the dark
They cannot be read
In the shadows there is freedom
In being hidden, submerged
Under the void of light
Cast by feet on ancient shoulders.
They form a totem for us, covering
The chaos we weave, we speak
Without a care for syntax, the echo
Delights us and we laugh in the dark.
I do not care much for these games,
Little work is done, and I miss the sun
And the attention others used to pay to us,
We play, but only for ourselves.
One day the totem will collapse, when
We fail to tend to it, thinking
Games have always been played this way,
Without rules, without winners and losers,
When the feet up ahead lose their grip
And feet fall off shoulders, the shadow
Collapsing and shrinking, exposing
Homer’s head, barely above the ground
LeeAnn Patrick
Persephone Lost
Like the eternal mother
I have been robbed!
Not you my daughter
but your soft child-light
gone missing.
And as I search my myth
for answers, for direction
the earth grows old
and cracks
beneath the weight of my grief.
And how I misread the story!
Preparing frantically, obsessively
for the hand of Hades
I blinded myself to the power
of Aphrodite.
Disguised in promiscuous white
riding ashore on hormonal waves
rising...falling...rising
cresting, finally, above you
she stopped atop the impending crash
to contemplate the victory
then, as one, the wave and she
swept you deep into the mystery
drowning your innocence
in an ocean of perfume
and foamy white puffs of mousse.
Romy Shinn Piccollela
Seashells and Salt
Crush me into butter and salt.
Ducks fly overhead
as he runs his hands over my arms,
holds me like a husband
and smoothes my hair.
Door hinges filter light,
turn fluorescent into speckled turquoise
cracked in the sun. The metal desk
is burnt sapphires
like his eyes that focus on me in the dark.
and push me onto a fist that he slips
between my legs and tells me
that I look good
enough to eat.
Turn me into sky, sea, tide.
I watch mallards float in the stream
and wonder
do they taste the same salt on their tongues?
Mid-Afternoon Bonfire
We build a fire. Dry seeds husk themselves in the heat as a doe walks between stalks; cloven hooves fight dust and the shells of centipedes and grasshoppers. Predecessors to locusts? Or did they come after?
I have written of deer before. They are common where I live. Tufted fur like caramel popcorn blows in the wind, copperheads coiled like strands of wet cotton. Smoke thickens above brush. I join him with two chairs, Cokes and a bag of chips. We sit and watch the flames. Snakes freeze into stone. Deer run, velvet leaping from spikes. Velvet does not leap, but I want it to.
I am imagining this.
After Examining Bone Fishhooks and Cherry Seeds
I order steak, medium-rare,
a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing
and a strawberry daiquiri with whipped cream.
I want him
to become meat soaked in balsamic,
chest open as ritual Aztec,
fat mashed to porcelain.
Ask me why
I am a heron’s beak to frogs.
I want to plaster him with mud,
decorate him with belled garland,
unearth him from dissolved sandstone
and catalog his ashes
with flint and mussel shells.
I want to hold his shoulders to my plate
and answer the question
in his eyes with blood,
ice, and strawberries.
Peter Res
Downpour
What was it about thunder?
Ever-clung to the concept of brick
stemmed a wild orchestration
amid your father’s feigned
cries and the deep rain
that would come to defy
your trust a half-eaten pomegranate, asleep in the fridge, bleeding
into a lost breath of air you forgot to seal. Glad for the possibilities
for nourishment, the smooth elixir of spring, you mourn the storms
before they pass, like the swift swell of barbecues and the slow death
of mosquitoes a pungent dance onto our shoulder, before you bothered
to notice, no one ever told you, melting on the porch, sounding-out
the vowels of softened states, you discovered
theory in your mother’s chrysanthemum, roots of imitation porcelain
and the true beauty of new jersey.
Bodies become gardens
we were named for
that when the rain returns
the blistered halves of trust
will have become sweet.
Green
Bathed in kale
the leafy shoulders vessel you
beseeched in your mother’s
old stainless, turning hue
as a tinted forest.
You drew first on restless
sheets of blaring paper
from your father’s printer
before the Market Economy
had meaning, and marker dyes
left their scent.
Like a window steeping
folds of earth indoors
after rain. When the eyes
of the clouds spewed from the pot
did you return?
Or forget, in the moment
I strained you-out
with the rest of the trees
grinning, disastrously, through the meal
like a young Pan in trance.
Felino Soriano
Painters’ Exhalations 6
—after Edvard Munch’s Jealousy
Tonight, what matters is
the distance steps cannot recuperate
in genuine effort. Voices by the thrown
handful, evaporated transgressions. Your
face gone of the flower I found scented
across my caressing palms. I’ve dissected
the tome of us, the written splendor
now buried beneath the wanted parting
of your name from its tattooed throne atop
my once panting tongue. He’s the anvil.
May your newness crumble from the steps
I’ve created in burgeoned elsewhere; fall
from your beauty, may he find another
as your body evaporates into a forgotten
garden, wilted. My face, hoping it visits
what frightens fear, resting ablaze across your
wandering eyes.
Painters’ Exhalations 7
—after Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
Study the dedication to stillness. Being
breathless conjures crowds, the curious.
Lie there, you the dead, the prior walking
among planted secrets (did they drift from
your tongue, phantoms of deceit?), they, the proliferation
of studious dispositions, watching and documenting
among intertwining minds. With pontificating wings,
the lesson of anatomy, physiological causation,
philosophy of incision meets with scientific
accuracy. Feet from the partial covered
skeleton, eyes with glare and purpose
persuade a silence to be paused, a voice’s
shadow lies down with the graduated
dead, lifted from the surface of intellect,
branding the alive with bare realization and
copacetic teachings, unaware.
Painters’ Exhalations 8
—after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Dance at Moulin Rouge
Garbed impression of fluidity, dance of man
engaging eyes’ reticent appearance. She,
centered vision of complete flight,
of escalated joy. He
meets her with concrete facial features,
taken by the exhaling sounds of music’s
layered expressions. The watching
engaged in silent conversations,
positioned to escape into this night’s
grand celebration. Outside, a city
of mentors guides the walking
tracing sidewalks’ several leavings. As
night crawls into its dedicated meaning, the dancing
fade into the walls draped in memory,
permanent etches of music’s skin
tacked against its rising breaths.
Peter Schwartz
the conservationist
I've shed layers of worldly
curtains until I barely was-
I've crawled from post to
post for mouthfuls of any-
thing to grasp the price
of my conservation.
Linda Ann Strang
Gwen John’s Vision
Having stared for too long at the impressionists, she leaves the art museum of her bedroom with impressions of her own: Rodin’s handkerchief in her hand, compressed.
Two gossiping women wobble inside a crochet of shadow. A boy like a blur on two blight stars, waves goodbye. Paris is a cradle of water lilies – choking, and reflected on a world of deep water. Monet paints and floats yellow stars of saffron from one retina to another, from one retinue to another. From one pedigreed filly filigree to another, trees and riders threaten to resolve into Seurat’s petite pulse points together. Naiad of the midnight bruise, she rubs her compound eyes but the boy on the bicycle still wears teasels of light everywhere for combing her spirit through.
Identity Dissolution on Closing Night
I was raised in a paper lantern.
The flame flickered in
and out of my navel.
If I used you would you think I meant me?
If I used you
would you think I meant everyone?
Is your leg as long
as the leg of a spotlight?
But when you shot a bolt
through my golden wing
everyone lifted the lock
from my face.
You applauded from the gods
when I flew through the air.
Everyone’s lip
has a shape like a curtsey.
Everyone corpses
when it comes to the punch line.
When the curtains drop
you will lose half your soul.
The firebird is broadcast in reverse
through my bodice: the trail of fire
at once double breasted; the trail of fire
double breasted no more.
Everyone’s heart has a flint and a spark
Everyone splinters and the theatre is dark.
Becoming Scottish
I didn’t know that the skeletons in my
closest wore tartan. They began with
Mac. My mother saying slyly, They think they
come from Scotland though they’ve been here
for years and years, had little effect. I was a princess
under the table; my concern was a handful
of broad beans in a dented soup ladle.
Being her own Tower of Babel in the kitchen,
Mother was chiefly of French and of Dutch
descent, with, perhaps, a spicy Malaysian
smack. She held a handful of cloves
and bloodlines that were none too easy to track.
By the time I strode out pouting from under the table
Mel Gibson had taken on a brotherly cast.
Robert Burns was read: I needed beating out,
and the heather in my heart was heard to cough.
Then the lassie in me came out of the cupboard;
at the culture auction she was ready to bark.
But official languages create quite a clamor
so there she was defeated under the hammer.
Now, ultimately, consider my birthright bright
a mess of curry, crowdie and custard.
I crucify the Bear on the Southern Cross,
change my heart to pomander and sniff at my loss.
James Wilk
Bereft
Rocky mouses his muzzle through the crack
of the front door, his leash taut, bound
for the street. Our breaths’ vapor, testament
that he and I still live, dissipates into fog
as we shuffle suburban streets,
past the unheeded four-way stops,
past the driving-range, abandoned.
A golf ball sulks in the gutter, an orphan
or widower, or perhaps a scapegoat driven
and banished from the others who nestle
warm in the club-house, in a bucket
like raspberries or amber cherries.
They too will be driven into the gutter
and washed by the melting snow into the sewer.
We reach University Boulevard. Asphalt crumbles.
Painted lines, faded and covered by gravel,
only suggestions, not stone-tablets from Sinai.
A flattened raccoon-carcass sprawls,
slack, bones crushed to gravel by tires,
more a half-unrolled strip of sod fallen
from a truck than something no longer breathing.
Rocky pulls me onto the bike path, down
past the gnarled cottonwoods, stripped bare
for winter, flanking the lifeless creek bed,
branches bent upward and outward like fingers,
wavering like the upraised and tremulous arms
of a dozen emaciated Jews, rounded up at daybreak
in those flickering newsreels they showed in school.
I stumble past the empty soccer fields,
browned and strewn with muddy snow,
then past the squat, non-cathedral
of the post office onto my street again.
Ungaraged cars, shrouded with frost,
hunch pale at the curb, metallic corpses.
Fine gravel, snow’s jetsam, crunches
under foot and paw toward home.
Why one prospective employer, upon divining
our horoscope, refused to hire us
Conceived together of a nation’s grief—
Compacted in blood, says Solomon,
of man’s seed, and the pleasure of sleep—
coming into life as President Kennedy left his,
we were to be children of sorrow,
the stars aligned malignantly at our births:
Apollo fleeing the lion, Artemis parting the fish,
each longing for eclipse, to be womb-tight once more.
That’s why, he said, we’d be unreliable workers.
