Hamilton Stone Review #31
Fall 2014
Poetry
Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor
Roy Bentley
White Cross
Most of nineteen seventy-three was Southeast Asian marijuana,
Thai sticks. Beer chased with an amphetamine called White Cross.
About the size and thickness of half a Bayer aspirin, the pills
were lightning striking in the same place over and over.
Forget the poetry of forcing your eyes open—I wanted
to find a way not to live falsely. Maybe every 19-year-old
wants that. But in those days you felt you could walk up
to a tie-dye-wearing stranger and French kiss him or her
because almost anything was possible then. The turntables
spun wild-horses-carry-you miracles, Jagger and Richards,
or Hendrix singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” flubbing the words.
Life was pretty good but you still saw yourself in a documentary
about Injustice. I knew airmen who died of intentional overdoses
with Walter Cronkite’s voice-over ringing in the barracks room.
Cronkite’s televangelism was as fierce as an angel or blackbird
whose wingbeats empty then fill then empty of last moments.
The Hillbilly Child Searches The Dayton Daily News
for Comic Strips Other Than L’il Abner
A child of Appalachian parents, I grew up and played
on the outskirts of a segregated Dayton. No black faces.
A family of Cubans. Maybe a few Greeks. Each morning
I rescued The Dayton Daily News from shrubbery, flying
over the Atlantic Ocean of new curbs and new sidewalks.
My itinerary was a one-item list, though I counted sections
in the driveway to and from my destination. Counted clouds.
Kids waited for the paper, so I waited. When my turn came,
I found the usual comics. Anything but L’il Abner Yokum.
Oh, how I hated the fogged glass of Dogpatch, Kentucky.
Al Capp. His unrecognizable, fictionalized Bluegrass State
peopled by Appassionata Von Climax and Pantless Perkins.
I read Peanuts. My father worked at Frigidaire; my mother,
at Standard Register then Inland Manufacturing. Together,
they bought a house, two new Cadillacs, a console stereo.
Tired of the jokes about moonshine, cornbread and beans,
he passed me the newspaper, telling me, “Skip that stuff
on missiles in Cuba or you’ll never get to sleep tonight.”
He’d run legal liquor into a dry east-Kentucky county.
I didn’t know that then, and he wouldn’t have told me.
Doug Bolling
Night Journey
What do you want from me, Dream
That you won’t let me be?
Federico Garcia Lorca
I have endured the edges and mirages of daily travel.
Have paced hour by hour in the worn shoes of
anomie.
But your voice, Lissa. I wait for your words
each and every one.
Haven’t we witnessed the light, the shadows
in a togetherness some call love.
Haven’t we trusted one another with
our temple of the future.
Shouldn’t we be able to touch the rose
without fear of thorn.
All this I ask but receive no answer.
At night in my dreams I undress you
but only from a great distance.
What is it that refuses our closeness.
What unspoken darkness lies in my
sleeping self.
Anamnesis 4
Death waiting to be born,
a slow turning through
heavy rivers of matter,
no words yet sounding
or even made,
darkness not yet shaped
to flesh,
incarnate birthings of
histories, of minds
contriving toward light,
inventing that, not
willing to believe
the oblivion beneath
brain’s flight,
such destiny of
shadows endlessly.
Rob Cook
The Katydids of New Jersey
By the slope of your breasts
we watch deer fall
gently across the factory marsh.
We listen to the backhoes
humming to the warehouse gypsies
who follow each other this far into
the parkway hallucination
when it’s all there is.
You follow the lights
lynched on the horizon—
shoulder-tall katydids carrying
lavender sewage back to our nest.
Where you dropped a stone, water inches north.
Where the Raritan loses its mouth, the chemical mantises return.
Lead me with your lips to the slag trucks, the dreaming
freighters, the trains sleeping their way close to here.
Listen to my hands until we can no longer feel.
Lick soot from the reeds until the snows come down.
Now it is safe. Teach me
the songs when they hide your legs—hurry,
soon the towers throughout your blood
will mute the importance of the Iranian interviewer
who deleted the wars
imagined from Perth Amboy.
Days are short—we’ve run out of compassion
for the sea oats, the river waste.
Put on your gloves and help me collect
the drifts and DuPont-lengths of hair.
Press your ear to the ground
so you can hear cars beating in the earth.
And soon as the satellites reveal
the frail minnow I shared with you,
hide the color of your eyes
while the leather kids from Sayreville,
flammable now on Birch Hill booze,
haunt our snail shack burnings of millet and kale.
Gods That are Noticed Only When They Stop Watching Us
A stack of books—a building with no windows,
and someone outside cooking his body
over the fires of obsolete
police blotters.
Someone searching for adolescence—
the bands that vanished inside your stereo.
*
The open-mic poet trying
not to disturb what he’s written.
His audience keeps disappearing and returning,
maybe with one less eyelash,
another color between darkness and blackout.
*
Only one call this autumn—
the phone picking up echoes
of prairies-ago Canada geese.
The house you started from
a reminder of someone’s gossip.
The house itself
inexpensive, left behind
by starlings.
*
Spring snow:
all the heartbeats you’ve lost,
the slums omitted
from a Pennsylvania twilight map,
the death of an iris.
“The world is finished, but in some other
rainfall,” you said
from the newspaper’s hinges,
the beginning of drought season.
*
A man selling the next night,
five dollars, preparation
for yet another
grocery closing down.
The sky kept above them by the names they’ve chosen.
*
The word fuck and the blaring way
it does not forgive you.
People live there,
drinking and working and celebrating.
Long-distance trucks passing with their eyes boarded up.
Trees that sleep in the neighborhood
and trees too tired to hold any longer
the birds that help them breathe.
*
One town is called
Last Year’s Child Abuse Convictions, Population: Many.
Another, I Hate You, Population: All,
and the next, Eat Shit And Die, Population: Evan Blumb.
*
A human ravaged by his honest physique
having dinner with light left in the mirror:
face like a crop failure, a furrow of warlocks,
wind blowing the eyes somewhere,
the threat of rain inside the blurred reflection.
A haiku survivor counting shadow blossoms
from a house at the far end
of the moonlight.
The sky dragged away
by pheasants.
The space between stars, also, is gone.
Darren C. Demaree
A Damaged Thinker #47
Torn flame,
I am dancing
without
movement
& without
brethren
to do more
than lap heat,
as if something
bronzed could
have a tongue
or real moves
at all. I’m not
really needed,
but I feel
integral
to the hot tide
of the past.
A Damaged Thinker #48
Sight kettles
my time
as vibrancy.
Think again
about
no choices
I have made.
Sight has
stewed me
& the physics
of a cooked
world,
has done
very little
to take
this taste
out my tight-
lipped mouth.
William Ford
Iowa City, 1965
“So it goes.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
His table at the Memorial Union
crowded with war protestors
waiting for the T.V. cameras,
Kurt Vonnegut leans into
your ear and whispers with mock
intimacy, “Hell, read Kafka
and Bierce and try an imitation
or two, maybe a fantasy,
since you’re a Workshop genius.”
In the entry hallway reps from
a dozen defense contractors sit
in short haircuts, Brooks Brothers suits,
and red ties selling the upcoming
undergrads on the truth for them
in the slick-as-Disney pitch brochures.
He lights one cigarette by another
then says, “And get a little pissed
at something besides this fucking war,
even me if you can,” his face a moon,
his chin whiskered Mennonite,
his eyes so large they might pop out.
Nels Hanson
The Valley Sailors
Like ocean-going salmon one wet Valley March
before the War – early ’30s when my father was
10, before the Friant Dam stood at Millerton on
the San Joaquin, 20 years until the Army Corps
of Engineers built Pine Flat Dam above Piedra
and the Kings River still flooded every Spring –
Norville Petersen and Langdon Laplatt sailed
a handmade rowboat north from Kingsburg over
sloughs and tule ponds, through dense willows
and rushes, up irrigation ditches, new streams,
past Selma to Fresno and the San Joaquin River,
on to the Delta and Dad’s Point at Stockton and
into San Francisco Bay, out bridgeless Golden
Gate to the blue Pacific. I can imagine another
destination for two famers from the wide inland
Valley between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast
Range – on our dusty flatlands we always dream
of open water. Say this time the two don’t row
back from their hour on the rough ocean or hire
a wagon to carry their wooden boat to the station
or load it on a baggage car, ride south 200 miles
down sodden string of farming towns, Manteca,
Modesto, Turlock, Atwater, Merced, to Madera,
Fresno, home to Kingsburg to store it in the barn
as they watch the hard passage they discovered
pass the windows of the train. They keep rowing,
toward darker waves, farther, and farther, turning
to one another as they trade now at the heavy oars,
grinning, until they’re out of sight of land, green
California, sailing westward into the huge falling
sun, a night of stars toward an isle in imagination
no old explorer charted. Maybe they thought about
it before they returned to their small farms, their
wives and children and the vineyards they tended
50 torrid mortgaged Summers of never-changing
cloudless skies to make raisins each September
before Fall rains. Arid August nights on screened
porches after everyone had gone to bed did they
recall a different journey? Two rowers, headed
outward, surviving storms, drinking rainwater in
hats, scaly fish for food, by dead reckoning reach
a promised shore? Like Fletcher Christian’s crew
who burned ship and sextant they found a landfall,
their own unknown Pitcairn to live the second life
whispering a late-March afternoon. Weeks of rain
echoed on Norville’s white barn’s tin roof, urging
neighbors like Noahs to build their boat, voyage far
Pacific to land one clear sunrise on an azure coast.
Outlaw’s Confession
Often in dreams I walk the main
road, wand on hip for his tattooed
heart. I turn Billy Tuttle to a toad
or flower in a vase, footless as any
tumbleweed. Other times I kill his
heart so well it died in the past so
his spurs spin toward Kansas like
clocks running backwards. That’s
when I dance and wear his black
hat for a fleece or dragon’s tooth.
I cut my own wrist to make a trail
of breadcrumbs. Nights with holes
in my back I gulp and fall through
wounds of stars until I catch in air,
shaking hanged men’s bones. Now
wind wakes my mother up or heavy
hoofs of horses. Her fingers charm
a gold locket open and I lie on her
breast like a robin. These lips didn’t
always wear dark bandannas, right
hand grip a Colt. Before he robbed
me of my love pennies lay under my
pillow and heart beat like a bull’s eye
as I slept in jail of a girl’s soft arms.
Tom Holmes
Spectral Analysis
The oldest color is turbulence.
It is in the vowels of Lorca’s songs,
the perimeters of spiral galaxies,
it is shaken from trees,
It is not white
like undelivered mail,
nor is it black like waiting
at a cold bus terminal in March
with a handful of pennies.
It is the color of what bore
red and yellow – spectra
from the first sound.
It is the color of if I don’t give
you these poems (or write them).
Revision
The old window glass sags
mold has found its way into my books
a girl enters
in her hand an orange
or a coil of copper wire
perhaps a doll’s blonde head
as I flip the page
I hear snow fall
and my hair crack
my eyes are heavy from thinking
about dreaming
filaments begin to hum
small metal objects spin to her hand
I squeeze my fountain pen
and scratch her out
Ted Jean
Desultory Sonnets
I
Gull Sutra
When the front edge of a big westerly
stumbles in across the Coast Range, gulls
in the Willamette Valley get off the ground,
jump from parapets, drop from power poles
into the turbulent current. Temporarily
refraining from fishwife prattle, to focus,
they tack and tumble, wings unlocked,
taking most of the morning, if necessary,
to drift as much as a dozen miles east. Then,
when the day settles into a steady cold rain,
they swagger and poop with equanimity
on unfamiliar lawns, and squabble
with new pied rivals over a spilled sandwich
every bit as delectable on the deliquescent
pavement of the Safeway parking lot
in Stayton, as it might have been in Salem.
II
pink stucco motel
she was legal
Chinese-American
farm girl hygiene
ink black hair
on gilt silk skin
he was hunted
Viet Nam draft meat
apprentice carpenter
athletic alcoholic
redneck poet
they met on the road
to the desolate Valley
he watched as she
shaved her armpits
in the swimming pool
of the pink stucco motel
III
Trajectory
Watching fireworks rise
above
Oaks Amusement Park,
I recline
with my love
on the lawn
at the upper margin
of the Cemetery of
The Grand Army of the Republic.
Our contentment is shot
through
with the slowly darkening
arcs of rockets
of regret.
IV
Doolan Creek
redwood root weep
red clay soil seep
blue soapstone striped
with white mica piping
bloody faceted garnet
ruddy chalcedony
black basalt
shot with schrapnel
of mineral gold
bobcat urine
skunk lube
red shouldered hawk shit
essence of redneck
stubborn steelhead
Doolan Creek
V
Alcoholic
At the dump to chuck
a prodigious load of shit
my son pulls
from the schmutz
the truncated stump
of a bloody rhododendron
ripped most in half
on the truck hitch chain
of a harried Mexican gardener
to make space for
zinnias.
Four years later, my prize
blocks the drive
with bloom
Michael Lauchlan
Late Stroll
Rare, quick bioluminescence
holds us here, now here--
pushpins in the air or just
fireflies expelling cold light
over dim fields where voles
and grackles scrape grass.
Finchlike, evenings flit past.
Older, we’re sure of less,
but see differently, peer
through a child to her mom.
Hearing a tale’s familiar shape,
we recognize the reworked lie
that spawned a war. Old
wounds ooze blood where
men wield guns and rhetoric.
Night spreads. We resume
our furtive rounds, scant our
not quite smothered hope.
Al Maginnes
The Day Patty Hearst Was Captured
The band that sang “Up against the wall” and proclaimed
“gotta revolution” renamed themselves and crooned
that if only you believed like they believed you wouldn’t know
the noise, the light-splotched film of Saigon falling,
the last helicopter lumbering up from the embassy roof,
rising in smoke-grained sky, the fingers of the final refugees
peeling from the skids, bodies dropping into the fate
of crowds. Every record collection on the street contained
a copy of Rumours, whether anyone remembered buying it
or not. Nixon slept in San Clemente. Everybody burned one
on the way to work or school and sang without listening
to the radio. Good weather once made revolution
and robbing banks more fun than school, no matter whether
you lived with the math teacher or not. That was last year,
when small armies still commandeered the front page.
Now everyone just wants to drop a ‘lude and dance.
All the bands are cutting their disco tracks, transgressions
more lucrative than holdups, unlikely to startle anyone
to tommy gun justice. The girl at Burger King gave me
too much change. I have not looked at a paper in weeks.
And underneath the collected noise of every house around me
spinning the same record, someone could put on a new shirt,
change a name and move, not free like the records released
five years ago screamed “free,” but unencumbered
by suspicions or second looks. But if everyone listens
to the same record, the same silence falls at the end.
I’m spending my windfall change on jukeboxes and pinball.
And this morning a mist came like breath-smoke
from the tall grass in empty lots and men climbed old stairs
to capture the answer to questions no one is asking.
Choosing Fire
A friend selling a gravesite, passed down through bloodlines and last names
like old furniture,
asked if I wanted to buy it. I was forty and had made no plans how to relieve
others of the burden
of this meat-thick carcass I’ve carried for every step of a life still not ready
to admit
it will end. The best choice would be to vanish like Lew Welch walking
into the mountains
with his rifle or Jim Sullivan whose guitar and Volkwagen were left baking
in the Santa Rosa desert
after he was abducted by a UFO or buried by the local mob. You decide.
But we are seldom
offered the best choice when it’s time for the last breath to shudder
across the vestibule
of dry lips. I walked once through a churchyard with a friend more connected
to the place he lived
than I will ever be to anywhere, and he showed me the antique chestnut
he hopes to be
buried under when the time comes. But I have given enough time to earth,
clearing plots, hacking
rocky ground into gardens, cutting ditches for pipes, for concrete and steel.
And I will spend
more sweat in whatever years remain. No need to be encased in a box
of red clay when
the majesty of Viking funerals, crowns of fire drifting across the endless
appetite of water
can be imagined so brilliantly. Because fire is the element I fear most,
what better to claim me
when my being has fled the fears born into flesh, leaving souls
to resurrect from ash.
Tom Montag
Escaping Death
Ah, the poem
saves us from death.
The poem
needs no end,
no beginning,
only breath.
Night shadows
threaten; the dark
bird calls.
We don't have
to answer, onlyhold tight
to the poem
and fly our own
way away.
Where Trains Once Ran
Where trains once ran
a levelness to the land,
yet even so
it is overgrown
and now the fields
encroach on history.
You may walk here
under wide blue sky
pondering what
is still remembered
and what is lost.
This is the lesson:
the earth takes back
what belongs to her
and it all
belongs to her.
Another Late Night
So now midnight,
yet I sit reading.
So now sleep calls,
and I push it off.
Something wants to
say something. I don't
know what. Something
pushes me and I push
back. Soon the clock
will chime another
hour. Soon I will
again be chasing
the emptiness.
A poem is a poem
is a poem is nothing.
Marge Piercy
A chunk at a time
It’s as if we walked through our lives
tearing off pieces of ourselves, the way
we lose and lose again, one of a botched
abortion back when women died of them
regularly as rain; one of a robbery
hiking in mountains of his homeland,
on vacation from his PhD; one of a late
head on as he drove home from his peon
teaching job; one of a heart attack during
Hurricane Bob; one lost at sea fishing;
one of stroke driving on Route Six; one
hung himself; and then cancer began,
the attack that consumes our friends
and loved ones stealing their flesh,
their organs, their time and finally
they too are gone. Each takes a piece
of ourselves into the grave with them.
We couldn’t endure all these losses
without the opiate of forgetting, but
it’s our own best memories we let go.
Look who’s coming to breakfast
A sleek handsome fellow, black
and white with a touch of red
at the skull, a downy scoots
up and down the trunk of the crab
apple outside the diningroom.
I’m used to seeing him [or her] --
the mates. Sometimes a hairy
barges in. This winter a flicker
makes an occasional appearance,
much appreciated till spring
when he’ll drum his mating
call on our flashing. All is in
order, chickadees, nuthatches,
titmice, juncos, cardinal pair,
blue jays, goldfinches, my winter
crew. Turkeys in single file bob
up the garden path. Crows
call me if they’re hungry. Two
leftover robbins hang tough.
A redtailed hawk eyes the feeders
from on high. But who’s this?
Nobody I’ve ever seen in forty
years of sunflower seeds. Lots
of red. I run for Petersen’s: newbie
here, red bellied woodpecker.
What brings him north to me?
Many residents have vanished,
clouds of fritillaries, evening gros-
beaks, while in summer an ibis
in the marsh. He’s welcome here
but not the news he carries
on his trim back: climate change
means stronger storms, hurricanes,
the ocean gnawing at the shore,
strange bugs, stranger diseases.
Kenneth Pobo
D.C. The Owl
Blind in her left eye,
she’ll never be released. Once a year
I peer into her room, see her perch.
Her caretakers say she’s trained
for school kids, is great in groups.
Her life seems pretty good,
though I’m not privy to her secrets.
My head, one of many, pops in
for twenty seconds.
It’s enough. I catch her eye.
She stares me down.
Stillness and Owls
Dindi has lost four cherished Aunts,
two uncles, both parents, two friends.
With Aunt Edna dying,
her mom’s one surviving sister,
in the waiting room she half reads
People magazine, remembers
Edvard Munch’s Death in the Sick-Room,
the taut faces, a single breath
could cave in the walls.
Edna had two rotten marriages,
an estranged son, years when she
kept the TV on thirteen hours a day.
She had the best laugh in the family,
as if several owls had gotten loose,
all hooting at once.
Stillness.
Strangers pace before elevators.
A doctor asks if they’d like to see her
before she goes. Dindi stays
while the others make one last visit.
A cold hand can’t contain Edna’s laugh.
She thinks she hears it, sobs,
starts laughing herself,
freeing the owls.
Stan Sanvel Rubin
Donation to a Complete Stranger
It was the only one I had,
far more suited to flattery
than rigor, dipped in the
juices everybody has,
in my case preferring
the via contempliva
to taking risky action.
Love makes cowards of us all,
and even if that’s false, remember,
Artistotle knew nothing
of marriage in the 21st Century.
Someone’s best excuse is always
someone else’s tragedy.
So take it tenderly, because
it really needs tenderness,
realize it’s a lot less
than what it once
promised to be, but still
it could work out for someone.
Maybe you.
Good luck.
David Salner
A Sea Like This
After the painting by George Bellows, The Big Dory, 1913
Like frightened turtles, these sturdy men
hunch their necks into their collars,
turn inward, so they might find
shelter inside themselves—or an excuse
for not pushing the heavy dory out
into the wind. Maybe some repair undone,
the rigging still a tangle of rope
and icy brine. But they find no excuse,
and what they fear, that line of purple clouds,
still faces them. They know how thunderheads
emerge from distant hints, darkening breakers,
sweeping them with sulks and shadows.
The sea will simmer and rise, exploding
from its bowl of shifting sand ... But now,
these ruddy men have jumped on board
and rowed into the inlet, and from the look
on each red face, each face of these nine men,
they're hating every second in this wind
shifting to gale. Yet they've pushed off
as if so ordered. But who would order it,
who among us, to send nine fishermen
into a sea like this, to fetch a dollar home,
a dollar for their catch? We see them disappear
into a haze beyond our calling, as they ride out
upon a timeless swell. And our last sight
tells us not of any terror they might feel
but of a boyish inkling they've been caught
in the act of realizing, a little late,
this is something they should not have done.
Shipwreck
1. Flightless Cormorant
Lead-colored feathers, sea-foam and rocks—
this plump bird waddles
between my hunger and the sun—
flightless,
but not defenseless, angry as some
demented hermit, flapping a sharp, arthritic wing
at me, the island's new arrival. Trying to learn
the predator-art, I'm far too slow and weak
for such a prickly catch—unless I see a sick one
skittering toward this nest of crested rocks.
2. Mollusk
I starve upon my lava perch. At dawn,
go down to fight the tumble of the surf
in search of mollusks. I scramble upon a reef
bristling with coral blades. Blood from my cuts
leaks into the silver wash, oozes in a sinuous
stream that pulses with the waves, my salt
mixes with the ocean's endless
rise and fall of salt, my heart
awash.
3. Dusk
Now I know the sting of the necessities,
but on my first dusk upon the island,
I saw a fine pen-craft of wings, tiny, exact,
beating across the sky—swifts, I thought,
careening toward the coming dark.
One flew so close I felt its breath,
a hopeful breeze, a slip of silk,
brushing my cheek. I tried
to catch it but flinched
for I'd felt something
hairy and was not
ready, then,
to eat a bat.
4. Hunger
Hunger is buoyant, rising inside me,
relentless, burning like acid, needle-sharp.
I dream of succulent aloes, fruity kelp.
Wish for them, wish for a different island.
Here, all I can find are bitter mangrove.
They look delicious but are poison—
roots waving in the sea, tendrils
oscillating, rising with the tide
of hunger rising inside me.
5. Hunter
Obsidian vistas
are valueless. I must decipher clues
that change before my eyes, must understand
the traces littering the island
of myriad species. My target blurs,
specks roil, diminish in the crush of wind and sea.
I need a hunter's eye, a language of gnashing,
teeth whetted by hunger. My weapon—
moonlight splintering like glass.
6. Darkness
I’ve mapped each cliff and outcropping
and found few crevices where flesh can hide
but this afternoon I just discovered
in the shelter of a ledge, this nook,
a tiny darkness
full of tenderness
and fluttering with life.
You Jerry Saxon and Me
I dreamed of that feeling I had as a kid
of running again and I mean fast
flying or falling down a long steep hill
in Baltimore near an old brick school
with an asphalt roof and an air-raid siren
I was feeling the summer wind in my hair
seeing the blur of pavement fly past
hearing the slap of Converse on concrete
nearing the corner of Duval and Chelsea Terrace
it was you Jerry Saxon and me
running again and I mean fast.
Barry Seiler
SkitchSo now Skitch Henderson has passed.
This is what it takes for me to learn
His first name was Lyle, and Skitch
Is a slight alteration of sketch. Skitch.
It sounds like a noise you might make
While tickling someone you love.
You can’t help it. You Cry: Skitch, Skitch,
And you laugh too. I hate my name.
It has no laughing matter, no spirit. Barry.
Not short for Barrett or Baron. Really,
A translation of sorts from the Yiddish Berel.
Who knows who I might have been
Had my name been other? Skitch—
Such a showbiz name, snappy, right,
A hoofer in a movie who cares
Only about himself, his career,
But turns out decent hearted at the end
And saves the show and wins the girl.
No name for a poet who labors alone,
Dancing in the dark, believing
There’s no business like this one.
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Alley Apparition (Without Pierogis)
When I glimpsed strangers making out in the alley behind the dinermy body leaden with kashe varnishkes my veins stained by borscht
the cobblestones glittering in October mist
his hands flitting over her thighs her breasts pausing flitting again
as if they could find no rest then finally darting up to her hair
semi-kempt and her head upturned to stars twinkling in indifference
I thought achingly of Muffy and the hunger to be (the) other
to shed WASP-ness
to feed upper crusts to the swans decorous yet militant
on the mirrored lake not in Central Park
but somewhere in Westport or Greenwich …
or whichever genteel hamlet from which Muffy emanated
and I thought too of Mama and her pierogis renowned throughout the
neighborhood so fluffy were they as if they had never
been dipped in oil at all but in light itself golden
and of the quarrels terrible in their quiet and march towards oblivion
we—Papa and I—engaged in after dinner
on the likelihood ever so slim of earning an artistic living wage
and of the smokestacks curdling outside our rented row house
the stench of the steel foundries clotting our lungs
and the soot coating everything except the stoop that Mama polished daily
and her pierogis which somehow eluded it all ensuring that I would never
consume pierogis again and I haven’t these many years
even tonight and never even with Muffy
whom I met soon after my arrival in the big city the shiny apple
at a party dense with ambition and the theories of the day—
“poststructuralist” flitting through the boozy chatter—where neither of us
knew a soul and so we marveled at how we were here and meant to be
together even if Muffy was then a lesbian feminist separatist
and I—what was I? a nancy boy no a nancy waif from the industrial west
who was just so relieved to be away from the smokestacks
and my father’s disappointment vast and uncontained
that I wept with joy into her already too thin neck
confident that our disheveled joy would carry the day for
sure was she that the members of her collective would be amused by me
a bright golden plaything only they were not most definitely not
and Muffy was thus evicted by the hardening of ideology landing on my
doorstep and we said what fun and it was so for a while with late breakfast
of coffee and cigarettes and she tried to find her way into our parties the
wit ironic self-deprecating and the ogling of baseball players but was
not amused and turned away returning later less present more vacant
and I began to worry only Muffy assured me not to and from there
it happened so quickly she less and less and I nudging and frantic
and some pretty rough trade arriving suddenly in the loft
and however sexy sometimes they I began to fear for her and for me
and then there was a trailing off of her and so we went searching for her
calling out Muffy! Muffy! not into forest primeval but along the piers
and in dens of this and that iniquity where we had last gotten word
imbuing with love her name (that wasn’t a nickname) that she so despised
but would not change sculpting those syllables outward into something
altogether dear only Muffy was not to be the trails led nowhere despite the
arrival of her parents bejeweled coiffed even in terror-on-the-verge-of-
grief and the police impassive none too pleased with us surveying the
male nudes and the manifestoes and petitions for this or that in Muffy’s
papers the unsavory sorts that only the epicenter can offer all converging
on nada and yet I never gave up on the parties even now when the closet
and its brand of humor are so unfashionable and even now when I can’t
bring myself to order pierogis I cannot forget Muffy her laugh laced with
blue her insistence that talk is not cheap her dream of a world
without brutality how once she kissed me on the lips below the El train
tracks before dawn so that when I landed here in this alley behind this
diner alongside the skittering of rats was that a raccoon and spying on this
couple my heart skipping a beat at the shape of her slouch the movement
of moon only it wasn’t of course it wasn’t there were only glares threatening
fury and borscht and kashe varnishkes rising spewing forth into the dumpster
and still no Muffy but only these stars twinkling against her absence
Don Thompson
Lessons
Choose a road ignored
by the county, one narrow lane
mottled with unrepaired potholes
that could crack an axle.
Be careful.
Ten miles or so into desolation,
pull off into the weeds and stop.
Listen... The wind
will settle down and listen with you.
So will scrub oaks, stones,
and ground squirrels with their paws
clamped over their mouths—
all of you together for once,
taking lessons in silence.
Buena Vista Slough, Late August
The parched wind has gone to ground,
taking refuge from the heat.
Rocks shimmer. Those shadows
under the trees also must be
too hot to touch—
like patches of half-melted asphalt.
The leaves look brittle, yellow-blotched,
overall a color you could call
used-to-be-green.
Not even the tule reeds in the slough
are convincingly green
this far into an endless summer.
They stand with their roots sunk
in the last pool, so stagnant
it seems to have a dry skin on it,
already peeling like sunburn.
Say Something
Swallows slicing the thin air to shreds
do no harm. It heals instantly.
Silence is our element
and though we hone words for hours,
for years, learning to
put a perfect edge on them,
silence, like air, heals as we speak,
equally invulnerable.
Survivor
This nondescript tree, tall enough
not to be mistaken for a shrub,
is spindly and clings
to the steep ditch bank
as if it faltered trying to climb
out of the muck and tule reeds
to level ground
where it could have dug in deep
and flourished. Nevertheless,
the tree holds on with shallow roots
and keeps growing—growing
at an untenable angle
in a place no one would choose.
Laryssa Wirstiuk
Play to Win
While you kiss me on my cheek, forehead, and ear,
I forget that we’re not supposed to be kissing
on the mouth. I can’t remember which one of us
had established this rule, but it definitely wasn’t me.
Since when do I follow rules? You have turned me
into an obedient, morally-sound citizen who never steals.
She might hope for an extra dollar, but she’d rather play
the lottery than swipe from someone not paying attention.
We’re testing our luck together in an empty parking lot,
where the world shrinks to contain us. We are hollow, plastic,
numbered spheres bouncing in a lottery-drawing machine.
I just barely kiss your atmosphere when you push me out.
Host Yolanda Vega is about to reveal the first ball up.
“Is one,” she says, holding me so the audience can see,
so the viewers can either sigh or celebrate depending
on their tickets. I could be the start of something great.
I am the chosen one: singular and, as a result, single,
or single and, as a result, singular. See also: unsure.
In that space we had nearly collided, but I’ve become
one more digit to check off someone else’s expectation.
September
Only one thing left to do
before fall: and that’s to eat
the ideal form of a peach.
Stone fruits at supermarkets
and in wooden buckets at farmstands
can’t compare to one I’d harvest.
But where? And who has time
to drive hundreds of miles
for possible disappointment?
Labor Day, and I have worked
to win you over, to pretend
I don’t feel it’s all over.
What was the last day of August
but a staging of my own death,
an annual rehearsal of measures?
I’m ready now, for your denials,
for the beginning of the end
of the shortest day when I’ll say:
“I wish I had left before
the sadness could swallow me.
Don’t you see? I’m not built for sinking
in mounds of plow-kicked snow,
waving my shovel in surrender.
I can’t feel under all these layers.”
Then on the way home I remember
that orchard, where at least (if no peach)
I could disappear among branches.
My dog and I take our chances,
and she thinks the fallen are toys,
pushing them with her snout.
I walk from tree to tree, testing
peach after peach with my grip:
too hard, too hard, too hard.
It’s too hard. Too hard to be
alone the day after you’ve ceased
playing the role of your favorite self.
Then one gives. It’s low-hanging
fruit, so different from you.
I snap it off the branch and bite.
The juices run down my salted wrists.
I haven’t showered in days, won’t shower
for days. Stay, summer, stay.
So much has gone wrong
to allow me to think
of the one thing I had wanted all along.
I Miss You, I Miss You, I Miss You
I.
Seeking an answer, I consulted the introductory chapter
of Howard Sherman’s How to Make ESP Work for You,
a title that seems straightforward enough to be true.
In the 1930s, two researchers shared a common factor:
their minds were unusually receptive to outside chatter.
So while one traveled to the Arctic, they would pursue
an experiment to see how many thoughts could push through
the atmosphere and arrive in Manhattan, safely captured.
Three days a week, they had a scheduled meeting,
when the man at the North Pole would log his thoughts,
and the man in the city would record his impressions.
After five-and-a-half months, they had no trouble believing
ESP is real. Seventy percent of the ideas had moved across
oceans and land. Even so, the skeptics had questions.
II.
After finding the evidence, I used it to support
my beliefs about the universe: that we all share a lifeforce
invisible to the naked eye and misreported
by the textbooks in my high school physics course.
I could make ESP work for me if only I could court
the open-mindedness that it requires as its source.
How would I invite the thoughts of others - remorse,
sadness, joy, even grief - and keep only those of import?
I paid close attention to the thoughts that drifted
like clouds in my mind, in turns revealing the sun
and then casting shadows on cluttered city streets.
I started to think that perhaps I, too, was gifted,
when a text message or call from just about anyone
was preceded by his or her image. Frequency increased.
III.
Equipped with my new power, I wanted to speak to you
because we weren’t speaking, not in the unenlightened way.
I was already imagining conversations about souffles,
like what if I had baked one for you but neglected it for toolong? Would you have appreciated the effort? I’d run through
ways I’d respond if you ever decide to apologize, say
I’m more important than communicative disarray.
I think these thoughts while I drive. I have more than a few.
Still, my goal is to make ESP work for me, to direct
my intentions in a way that you can receive them.
I am hurling soapy water from a five-gallon bucket
onto the dirty sidewalk of my mind. It’s a project
to clear the cement-colored dirt, to openthe pathway between us. I almost say “fuck it.”
IV.
But when I heard the news, something that would change
my life, you’re the only person I wanted to tell,
despite the fact that I was still angry yet under your spell.
Only you would understand a revelation so strange.
Only you would sympathize with my desire to rearrange
my plans. But months had passed since our last farewell.
Where in the world could you be? Maybe you’re in hell.
In the Florida Keys? Home on the range?
I created your home. I imagined you beside a polar bearon an Arctic tundra, wearing oversized, insulated gloves.
You were waiting for my message, even though you weren’t.
It was summer, so I put on a bikini and sat on my deck chair.
I waved my hands like at smoke, something burning in the stove.
I repeated: I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. A current.
V.
And then it struck me - what if my message is stolen
by someone more receptive than you? Does my worry
mean it’s already been intercepted by someone unworthy?
Now everyone thinks I miss them; all is broken.
You’re the only one - why am I so afraid to call you, the chosen?
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you - what a sob story.
Who doesn’t miss someone at some point in the journey?
I remind myself that, despite frustration, I must remain open.
Maybe the existence of this poem will perpetuate
my desire to again be near you, at least within earshot,
so we don’t have to concentrate, so we can unwind.
Sherman and his colleague were able to demonstrate
the possibilities, and I still believe. You know I have a soft spot
for any reprieve from language, shackles of the confined.
Care Package
If care could be sent via postal service,
it would be a brown, cardboard box
filled with a plush rabbit from the zoo gift shop
and a song compilation meant to motivate me
to overcome my petty, first-world problems.
If care could be transmitted through radio waves,
it would sound like a game of “telephone,” arriving
at 3 AM, vibrating from a cell phone until I accept
the sound of being punched by the realization
that long-distance romance cannot be sustained.
If care could be recycled into something new,
it would be the extra space to open my arms
in a bed without a rabbit donated to Goodwill
and the ring of condensation left behind
from a cold beer resting on a compact-disc coaster.
T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Issue # 31 Fall 2014
