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Poetry
Hamilton Stone Review #34 Spring 2016
Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor

 

 

Mary Carroll-Hackett

Ghost Says Sometimes We're Dirty And Easy

 

with our see-through skins and our shiny teeth. Sometimes we look especially for girls with pretty names like Virginia or Heather or Claire, and follow them down the highway, streaks of light that they think are smears on a rainy window or the car in the blind spot that's not there when they turn. Sometimes, Ghost says, we burn, not from sin or brimstone, not from unfinished business like what you hear, but just to have someone with us, just to have something beautiful near.

 

Ghost Says I Could Be Anybody

 

You just don't know. Say I'm a boy named Jimmy Baird, a second son what put on the uniform, 16th Regiment, 1st Virginia, after my brother was kilt at Dranesville. Say I left my daddy's farm in Jetersville, after my daddy was kilt too, kilt early, at Mannassas, and I marched myself off at sixteen to join up against them Yankees. I walked away from Sayler's Creek. I walked and walked and reckon I'm still walking, they said to High Bridge, or Rice's Depot, but me, I just see this road what tears my feet again and again since I lost my boots, I just see the sun forever going down, in that west I walk to, and that woman, that woman, I all the time see that curly-headed woman, who sits on the stoop, and lifts a hand each day as me and my boys go by. Reckon one day I'll stop and speak, ask her don't she think it's true, how we sometimes can't see the cost when we feel we got something to prove?

 

This Time The Ghost Says I'm Your Father

 

and maybe it is, my daddy with his Irish eyes and husky laugh. But he doesn't sound like Brooklyn anymore and I can't help but giggle and do my sad Darth Vader. Ghost says I am your father. Ghost laughs too, says, very funny, and it's not like I myself didn't tell the same twelve jokes for years when I still wore that body. Then I know it is, in fact, my father, with his tics and twitches, and all the pain that lined his constant laughter, and I feel sweetly sad and sadly sweet, remembering this the gentlest man I ever knew. Daddy, is it really you? I ask. He calls me Way, that childhood name, and pats my hand, and suddenly I want corned beef and cabbage. I want sweet black coffee, and bagels with a schmear. I want my daddy back, reciting Yeats and singing those ditties from the forties. I flip the paper open, to the crossword puzzle, pick up my pencil to begin, and he chides, Oh no no no, you know better. Only a coward uses a pencil. Pick up your pen.

Ghost Says Look For Evidence

 

Of what, I ask? Of your grandmother, he says, of what you already know, look where the grass declares itself against the river, where the roots lay claim to whatever lays in their path, where the wind laughs against any army of intentions. Look under the stairs, in the fork drawer, between the curls of the cauliflower, in the wild carrot asserting itself in the ditch. Look in the dark, in the rippled asphalt of nighttime driving. Look where the deer are thriving. Peer closely into the face of the rocks tumbling water, into the cup of the rotted log, the needy swamp, the divided desert. Look into the gourd that creeps east to west. See and speak and memorize what is evident, what remains. Look in the next place you think of, in the bereft space between what and is, Look, look, look at everything that's left.

 

Bya Gtor

Take me too up the mountain, to the edge of the sky, to the mouth of the long night. Slake the thirst of those who carry me with the cold water the stones offer up. Make cups of my hands that I may feed them one last time. Empty me out in the honor of all who have walked the heated day, and of the vastness that made it. Then sit. Pray like the grasses, like the rocky ground with its relentless solemnity, like the hushing pass of the griffon vulture, like the velvet step of the Pallas cat. Sing that jackal's howling song, and from the distance, I will sing too, carrying along the wind between. Then leave me, bird-scattered and bleached, whitened til I'm britttle, til I'm dust in the sun. Leave me laughing in the reach, in the whispering riddle of who I will become.

 

 

 

 

Darrell Epp

Cover Letter

 

outsourced, offshored, downsized—they

replaced me with 30 cm of coaxial cable!

skills: various. extensive work history.

clerk. crying towel.  cloud watcher. pro

wimp. quisling witch cum witchfinder

general. double-double-double-agent.

hindenburg wing man. ben-hur extra.

cave man/cave painter, cartwright.

bone-rolling shaman, telecommuter.

fiance, until my rage got in the way.

liontamer, until the govt. shut down

the freak show and all the fun tiptoed

out the back door. i quit being a rodeo

clown when i looked in the mirror and

saw a soldier, deserted the army when

i saw armadas of neon parallelograms

invade the night sky, then it was mad

scientist in an alien invasion movie, no

a-list stars but a lot of familiar faces.

zagreb doubled for new york. the rest

was all green screen, the nerds with

their light pens. i’ve been called a team

player. i’ve been shot with an air gun.

hard to believe air could hurt so much

but important things are often invisible,

it takes training and grace to see them;

i think every good employee should

know this. autobiography is a sub-

genre of fiction. glass is a liquid.

light pours in, washes me clean.

when i was a gardener i couldn’t

tell the flowers from the weeds.

i still tried my best. references

are available upon request.

 

Living At The Movies

 

in the movie based on the novelization of the play

inspired by a true story a terminator fell in love

with a zombie. or was it a predator. i forget. it

was arty, autobiographical, with soft lenses.

the violence was abstracted, at oblique angles.

the soundtrack was grating, electronic. the

killer’s steps were steady, the femme fatale

told the lead to man up, emotions roiling

beneath the masks we mistook for faces.

who’s the real me? the cyborg asked. and

where’s my off switch, i’m so tired. the

tension slackened by the third reel, the

obligatory car chase. the popcorn was

slick with faux butter, your dentyne

was mint. all movies run together in

a cinemascope epic, a celluloid river

trailing behind us. all stories starts to

sound the same. boy meets girl. he’s

new in town. he has a dad. something’s

wrong. he was there, now here, this,

now that, stuck in the past, unfree,

stars don’t really shine, their glamour’s

a rental, let me die in black and white.

 

Ready Or Not

 

i didn’t like it when they changed spiderman’s

costume. and i didn’t like it when green lantern

left the justice league of america, some guys

you just can’t replace. hollywood should have

given orson welles a few more second chances,

what a waste. and toronto, searching for God

in toronto was like playing hide and seek with

the invisible man. hurry on sunrise, hurry on

sundown. on ash wednesday i almost woke

up in the wrong body,  how embarrassing. it

happened before, a neanderthal stranger

glared back at me from the puddles along

victoria st. n. incrementally they replaced

my friends with androids. i try reality tv:

lies taste better when they glitter. i try

reality: the wind slaps potato chip bags

against my ankles, greedy microflora

rezone my g.i. tract and still she doesn’t

come back! insects under the floorboards

bide their time. child star junkies bide their

time. whiptracks of beauty slashing through

the plasma screen glare, nameless colours,

the train wreck you can’t look away from.

 

 

 

Roy Frisvold

Where Do They Go?

 

Where do they go?

 

Surplus analysis.

Unofficial saints.

The Platonic sub-Forms

of recipes ten years old?

The youthful temperaments

of walrus,

of tech school football stars?

We sense something less than infinity

in the infinite daydream.

Have you, personally,

ever designed a guardrail?

What exactly “escapes me”?

Is it that fast?

Must we—dig that construction—must we posit

a whole theogony to tantalize?

Not that it’s not done

and is not quite not painful;

witness...

Stay out of the kitchen,

Bobby K. In fact,

all of you,

get out.

 

 

Cyclone Twombly One

 

1.

 

and the oars flamed     flower

 

and pomegranates were shared throughout the land

of dead     far as

 

the Eros Avenue exoskel-exit--

 

where ice was thawing

down the keystone

 

2.

 

Bowl flames with pollen

 

and the sun drips black

behind the eyes.

Below parallel skeins

 

dandelions: lit flares.

 

3.

 

Stone urchin     of sulfur

is the earth sun,

a rosette of flare

with its carmine-for-black corona,

rising—to feed?--

in the most gigantic sea,

and with an “equally” gigantic gesture,

sinking.

 

4.

 

Watching the Bucentaur

from a thistle-flower--

His Most Serene

Eric Dolphy.

 

5.

 

All those foam slaps

and surf-slaps into seabed

after her perfect blurred

lunettes there in the tower--

gasping

either way.

 

6.

 

parchment

crystals

 

7.

 

window

valentines

red sea slug

joined in battle

for all the graphite

 

8.

 

great bloody hydrangea

driving: down

is in

 

9.

 

exquisite

 

on their own

 

 

 

 

Abigail George

 

Written on the Body of Judson Jerome

In autumn
leaves will be wrapped
in water and rot.
I lay in between
the sheets. With
my head from
Whitman to Rilke.
Coming undone.
The driftwood is
whitening in the
sun. The open mouth
of the whale
that swallowed
Jonah is bargained
for like any
fugitive talent. Other people
move in the world
like solar.

When my sister
has her own children
I will be the
bone woman lost
in translation.
As wet as a leaf
in snow. 'Be sure
to send them all
my love' I will say
in a whirlwind
down the loophole
of the telephone.
At the back of my throat
it will mark
its position
safely. Follow a straight line.
Her children
will be gold.

Our relationship
goes in with the tide
and out again.
The sea shows
no mercy. The beach
wretched on this
cold winter day.
Salt and light
the skeleton  key.
'Please tell me
about your day.' I will say
enthusiastically.
Down the loophole
of the telephone.
She will begin to
tell me about the
fellowship of the
wild (the people that she works with).

It is a wait
and see game for
me. Wait to
see if she acknowledges
me. See if she
laughs or if I
can hear her smiling
at the other end.
I drink a flood
of tea. That is
my meat country.
The same with pain.
I give it some
time. Say 'this
too shall pass'.
There is a gulf
between us. Gulls
flying overhead
as far as the eye
can see. Collectively giving
a false sense
of security.


Johannesburg's Garden City Clinic

These streets are
paved with gold.
Yellow suns. I gaze into
fields. Wonder at
the lives of the people
who live here in this
neighborhood. There
is a flame inside each
of them. I pass
a woman standing alone
in the rain. She has
a bunch of flowers
in her hands. She
buys flowers I assume
for herself. Does no
one buy them for her?
Surrender the poet
said. I let go of you.
Do the flowers make her happy?
To all the ghosts
living or dead from
my past in the spirit
of writing this I let
go of all of you.
People. Humans. Life.
A blank space instead
of my name or face.
I write inspired.

Giving way to
that extraordinary
machine. Information.
This journey.
This great lesson
is not what divides
us, it is what makes
us who we are.
The wealth of winter is crisp.
I remember my sister
in the red trench coat
passing for an
independent woman
walking down the
stairs at the hospital
in Johannesburg.
Her nerves of steel.
My life was a journey
from beginning
to end through
the eyes of someone
who lives with
bipolar depression.
I live on the coast.
She still comes to me.
In rain or shine
I have to be
near the ocean.


On thinking of Wislawa Szymborska

Anguish and shock
rushes through me.
Here is a rush
of family in
my environment.
The soup is on
the table. Women
have to endure.
This is what I
have learned the
hard way. It is
autumn out and
the uninvited
guests of the day
have turned cold.
She belongs
to this time
this place just as
much as birdsong in
South Africa.
She forged a path
of fire for many who
came after her.
Years of silence.
The survival kit
of Eve's song,
of Wislawa's song

will follow me
for all my life.
Stealing beauty
will follow her.
This Masai dreamer too.
The substance
of ideas turn in
the air with its
clean frame.
This is its
season. I will
the poetry to live
in this wasteland.
No short measure
of grief there.
This is part of the lost country
where exiles
are to be found.
A concentration camp
found in ten
single pages.
I can smell rain
in this forest
of verse. There
is something pure
about the day.
Its soul adrift.

 

 

 

Allison Goldston

 

Me and The Girls

I try to call him

but the girls are by the door

asking me, What for,

you have us now?

The fan has stopped

but they're still, What for?

It's hot

and I'm lonely

and I say, That's why.

Fix it mom.

We cool down

and our cat purrs to life.

They hum into the fan

their own song.

We sit cross-legged

and pass around the scrambled eggs

and the big squeeze bottle of ketchup from our old house.

Is it okay, girls?

No, but we'll eat it.

 

 

Joseph Harms

 

Rachmaninov’s Lone Trumpet

 

Not love repined but magic never had

augmented palled estranged his days: the muse

extant demands alterity and praise.

When gone White Logic autogams the falc-

ate rheol, resolve of apophens; the ruth

usurping better served by irrealing;

the mornings trephinate; the stygi’n sun

a bagnio a rubicon a scutch

a hant a henbane, mortish circum-

incession (raining jackdaws, fallow field,

the earthend watertowers godding, moths’

wassail from pooled swags, a Midwest road,

a smalltown graveyard’s planes the first to bare);

the second reason for fey lines; verprevar:

People’d look at him and hug each other.

 

Indicia

 

The riven oubliette halfmooned that won’t

be left (abed in pickup tacky still,

Americanned) till dirt is paved and lamps

ensoul the dogday trees now intersticed

by vesp –cicadatocsin ague— wan

at apogee (unrecked the dealates

gainst corrugate) as muffled friends in cab

expound (we knew so few people back then)

and milieu inspissates with fireflies

and rivehung vines of dusty flowers soon

silhouettes fingerveil the berried crows

and possums –crows from pines and trees osteal

bove graves and fens— opens shocking as an

offing yawned: we head to town to fuck shit up.

 

Erythrism

 

Ex nihilo bookplated by a cloud

that fanged; the queried grain unswathed by storm

that shivered some, no more; the silo burned

mistook for moon; the bat eclipsing stars

as if purposed; the melic icicles

notated by hoofswags; the dripping moms,

phlebotom dads: a curse is, Bel, what I’m

essaying./  Blood inguinal before school:

we added ketchup, then your gymshorts in

November; hit that guy real good, delicti licked.

Atropous for a year at best from then;

our vatic lips cartooning love almost;

losung earned, sighs low, dumb, like manes alive:

we’d laugh and check the blood as it arrived.

 

 

Michael Hettich

 

Rain

 

I’m trying to remember how to make your favorite soup

when I have only candles and soap in this kitchen,

a few potted plants and pebbles and it’s raining

hard enough to feel we are living underwater

or at least behind a waterfall. Could I use my own skin?

Tears are warm and salty, but I don’t want to cry

just to make your soup; that seems faintly histrionic

or at least sentimental. The best soup’s made with bones,

of course, and I haven’t any, at least not outside

my body. Bones and bruises. And so I think

of many things I don’t feel anymore, and of you trudging

home now in this historic rain, maybe even humming

one of our favorite songs under your breath,

thinking of my fragrant soup as you take a wrong turn

in the deluge, almost tasting that soup now as you wade

the sidewalk-rapids on a street in some neighborhood

that looks a lot like ours, though it isn’t. I am boiling

clear water now, just to find you.

 

 

Singing Underwater

 

Somehow, he says, when I stepped into the river

I could feel myself dissolving, and the feeling was good

so I waded out into the middle and sat down

and savored the woods leaning in, and felt

my legs disappearing, my whole lower body

turning into water. The sound of the rushing

water was voices I remembered, friends

I’d forgotten for years, now talking warmly

about our adventures, which made me nostalgic

for whoever I’d forgotten I’d been.

And just as I was breathing deeply, preparing

to dunk my head under the water so it would

disappear too, I saw my wife

skipping down the path, singing softly, with a towel

wrapped around her body; I watched her step in

and wade out toward what was left of me, only

a rock now, to step across the river on.

And soon she was singing more loudly, in pleasure,

she was calling to our children, to all our friends and neighbors

to join her at the river. And though I couldn’t see

from underneath the water, I’m sure I heard my children

running down the path now—I was amazed,

to be honest, that I could recognize the pattern

of their footfall from where I was sitting. I felt them

step into the water, my children, and wade out

to join us, smooth pebbles in the current--and before

long, I swear, all of us were sitting

at a rough-hewn, waterlogged table with glasses

of stout, telling how our lives had felt

since they had been lost. And since I was a little

tipsy by now I started to sing

that old song my children had loved so much

when they were just babies, the wheels on the bus

go round and round, and then we were all of us

singing underwater, in harmony, which

is miracle enough in itself to say nothing

of the fact that that river is filled with pollywogs

and minnows and I swear to god they were singing too. 

 

The Broken Moon

 

Someone tells me the moon was exploded last night.

No one knows who did it; the consequences are only

just beginning to be measured. But when I look up,

it’s still there, hanging full in the sky

as always, doing its ancient work.

 

Another morning I woke early to see a hundred horses

moving through our neighborhood, grazing on our lawns.

Huge creatures, they smelled like trees and the loss

of the people I loved

until I had forgotten them.

 

By the time the sun had risen, those horses had vanished. 

I was their only witness, though the grass had been ripped-up

and clusters of horse shit lay burning in the grass.

 

Soon my wife woke and opened our windows—

the morning was cool—and asked me to tell her

the story of her childhood, where she had grown up,

who her parents had been, what nicknames they’d called her,

and how they’d hugged her those nights she’d awakened

outside herself in the moonless dark.

 

and needed to be called home, and needed to be comforted

until she was human again.

Deepening the Ground

 

We were dreaming that a mile could extend inside our bodies—

two miles between us—pretending we could walk

that distance, talking, holding hands, while blue jays

griped from the trees, and spiders wove shivering

webs in the breeze: this is love, we pretended;

 

and we dreamed a healing harmonics could sing

in the dust at the center of a blossom: an a cappella

chorus we could hear if we leaned close enough,

holding our breath, to feel the quivering

stamens, then inhaling that pollen—like a baby’s breath—

 

till our love seemed to swell beyond us, embracing

other forms of being than human: this feels

like life transformed into the ache

that moves the wind, transformed into the tide

that pulls the moon full, which was nothing like our real lives

 

or the love we actually felt, but precisely

what we couldn’t feel yet, like a glimpse of those insects

that live beneath stones,  who scuttle off into

the grass, or burrow down into the dirt

when their stone is moved. And what if we could feel

 

the eyes of the wild creatures watching us, alert

for messages we didn’t mean to send with our bodies,

didn’t realize we were sending, what if we could feel

those eyes burning through our habits of being,

and what if that very burning made us more

 

vivid to ourselves, less caught in this merely

human being, would we raise our eyes then

to return the gaze of that other and feel,

not less adrift here, but instead something more

like the love a river might feel for the ground

it deepens as it rushes, or the sky reflected there?

 

 

The Frozen Harbor

 

One blue-tinted winter afternoon, when the harbor

we lived beside seemed to have frozen solid,

my brother and I ventured out onto that salt-ice,

which groaned and shifted as the tide rose

or fell below us and our mother called

from shore please come in. Of course we pretended

we were too far out to hear her, and as evening

settled around us, we started talking

in a language we made up as we spoke, a language

we grew more fluent in with every word.

Then we lay down together on our backs on the ice

and lay there in silence, looking up into the sky,

and listened as a stillness settled into the hollows

inside us—I still feel it sometimes, even

after all these years--and then we stood up

and reluctantly leaned toward shore, talking

softly now, pulling a star-filled

darkness behind our bodies.

 

 

 

Halvard Johnson

Without Saying

 

Effortless effort was wanted. The friendliest
of recriminations. Mayhem ensuing.

Appletrees falling far from their apples. Stars
bursting with light. Last speakers of Spanish now

endangered. Enormous events predicted for
some time in the future. Pockets of poverty picked

daily. Snowstorms spring up every spring.
Urgency notwithstanding. Telephonitis, it was said.

Pleniloquence. Bluefish special: between 4 & 5.

 

 

Hochzeit

 

In free fall, the gang at Deutsche Bank threw him a wedding

to end all weddings. One microcosm after another

dedicated itself to abstract thought, gave up

 

"voluntarily" (according to reliable reports) its benefits,

its annual bonuses, its blackjack winnings.

Mukarribs on horseback swept through, leaving

 

predominantly Jewish sections of Brooklyn in a state

of disarray: portraits of Warren Buffett dashed

to the floor, babies skewered like

 

lamb kebabs. Plausible theories spring up all along

the perimeter of our municipality, bursting

the dam of our estrangements.

 

 

From My Life

 

2.

 

My doctor and I have been playing a little game of telephone tag today. He's been trying to let me know that I'm going to be dying sooner than previously planned, this even after selling me an extended warranty only last year. I've managed to be out when he calls--you know, moving the car to get out of the way of street-cleaners and, of course, to avoid being ticketed and/or towed. When I get back to the apartment, there's another message from him on the machine, but it only says to call him, and that there's something "troubling" in my recent bloodwork. I put off calling him for a few days, and then, as always when I do call, he's either with a patient or not in the office or both. I leave my number with the re (de?) ceptionist and then leave the phone off the hook just in case he calls back before I have a chance to go out.

 

 

Dominant Craters

 

Along with the others, we approached their dominance

with a certain degree of skepticism. False annunciations

had taught us well, and when the harpsichord broke

down on the way to mass . . . well, we broke into howls

 

of despair. The dirty window overlooking the air shaft

allowed only a few minions of light to enter. Daylight

admitted rumors of thyroid and other endocrine

disorders--indolent diseases (or was it "insolent"?)

 

we were told. When news broke that the Second Coming

had been aborted by a back-alley abortionist, due

to the closing of Planned Parenthood clinics in all fifty

states, no hue and cry from the right. Expectations

 

of End Times rose to fever pitch, subsided when month

followed month, rose again. Unending war. Amen.

Richard Jones

Water Lilies, Green Reflections

 

I’m sitting before Monet’s “Nymphéas; Reflets vert.”

The tiniest brushstroke of viridian green pigment

textures the water like shot-silk.

A woman in a blue kimono

with a black obi knotted at her back

glides dreamlike through the Orangerie.

When she sits next to me on the bench

beneath the gauze-covered oval skylight,

I think of Ryokan’s poem—

   O that my monk’s robes

   were wide enough

   to gather up all the people

   in this floating world—

a poem I think Monet would have liked,

maybe even would have whispered under his breath

when he rose before blue-black dawn

and carried easel, canvas, and paint box

through the dark to his lily pond.

And now—

her embroidered silk sleeve alongside my old tweed coat—

drooping willow branches calm the purple water.

The green of the lilies deepens.

The shadows darken.

I’d like to ask Ryokan

what brought the woman here this moment

that together we might imagine the bright clouds and breezes

blowing through the garden at Giverny.

Then I remember another poem the monk wrote

with his brush on a paper kite:

heaven-up-great-wind.

 

 

“The Drunken Boat”

 

This morning on the Rue Ferou,

I found myself caught unawares

by Arthur Rimbaud’s poem

written on a wall that runs the length of the lane.

In the narrow cobblestone street

I translated the first lines into the air

then stepped aside

to let a bicycle rattle past.

The bicycle woke me to the fact

I was walking Montparnasse’s winding streets

a little bit like a drunken boat myself,

adrift on a sea of reveries.

To orient myself I looked around.

Ahead I could see the spires of Saint Sulpice

and over my shoulder the Luxembourg Gardens.

Once I had my bearings,

I walked the empty lane a few slow steps at a time,

gazing up at the poem,

deliberating.

 

When I was young

I carried Rimbaud’s poems

like a talisman in my coat pocket,

finding in him a visionary comrade

and in the drunken boat’s desire to be free

hope for my own future.

Rimbaud believed the joy of childhood

a lost paradise, and in his poetry

he searched in vain

for a path back to Eden.

“La vraie vie est absente,” he said.

At nineteen,

he gave up writing,

left France for the West Indies and Africa,

became a soldier, a deserter,

ran guns in Ethiopia, had his leg amputated

and died at forty, a penniless businessman.

His letters describe life without poetry or love:

desperate, wretched, preposterous, gloomy.

I thought it could have been me writing in French,

“Alas! That life should be so miserable!”

 

Toward the end of the lane,

on the other side of the wall above the poem,

cherry trees were coming into bloom,

pink and white branches reaching into the sky.

Perhaps because of the generous light

and the delicate blossoms

the poem’s final image moved me

as it never had before—

a sad child at twilight

squatting by a cold black puddle

and releasing a toy boat

“as fragile as a May butterfly.”

There at the wall

I had to finally acknowledge—

I must have repressed it when I was younger—

that Rimbaud the man was never free,

never happy or loved,

never content to be a little boat

bobbing about on a sundrenched, windswept sea.

I tried to feel the poem as I did when I was a teenager,

tried to catch the fire that meant so much

when life seemed overwhelming

and I was breaking.

I remembered the photograph

I’ve kept on my desk over the years—

the boy’s chaste white blouse, the angelic face.

I reached out and ran my hand over the letters,

a wistful reminder of youth’s bright hopes

and bottomless despair.

 

And now, sitting here

in my apartment

at midnight

writing in my diary

and sipping wine

by a tall window opened to song and laughter,

I find myself describing the Rue Ferou,

Rimbaud the seer,

and the contrast of his reality.

Then I remember the moment

the bicycle and rider rattled past

over the bumpy cobblestones,

the Frenchman in his tweed jacket

half-smiling,

his jaunty cap and sunglasses,

the books and bread in his basket bouncing.

“Maybe,” I write, “I could be

like him, the man on the bike,

more or less content at the end of the day,”

and then I imagine

the rider lying on a sofa

in a small apartment and reading by lamplight,

a Paris moon in the window,

a bicycle leaning

by the door in the shadowed courtyard.

 

 

Letter to a Friend

 

From my apartment on Rue St. Paul

it’s only a few minutes’ walk

through the labyrinthine old village

past the brocante shops and galleries

to the Bibliothèque Forney.

The guarded medieval gates once opened

for the archbishop’s horse and carriage;

now at the librarian’s desk

an identification card with my picture

swiped through an electronic sensor

opens the door to the courtyard,

where I always take a moment to look up

and admire the ancient walls

of golden stone and the bright red windows,

iron balconies, and black towers.

Stone steps built in the 1400s

climb up to the library devoted to the decorative arts—

the stacks rich with books

on painting, architecture, and design.

It is a good place to work.

The reading room has the feel of a monastery

yet at the long library tables

stylish young people tap away on laptops.

Right now I’m sitting by a window

with a book of Brassai photographs

and intently studying a portrait of Picasso in his studio,

the look in his eyes. I turn the page

and find old Paris graffiti—

names and faces

scratched and carved into walls.

Brassai called this “the language of walls,”

fugitive souls with knives

cutting into centuries-old stone.

I turn the page: a pair of initials

inside a heart.

Eternity

and the timelessness of desire.

I turn the page again

and find a carved skull, the empty eyes,

and think of the scholar’s skull,

the memento mori. Today

I climbed the spiral stone stairway

to pore over these images from the past

and lose myself in thought

and now—

sitting by the window,

happy in the window light—

I am as absorbed by the photographs

of skulls and lovers’ hearts

as if they were sacred scripture

illuminated in blue and gold

by the meticulous brushwork of monks of old

and I a young novitiate

tracing the text with my fingertips

and reading by candle light.

I share this with you

because you are my friend

and I know you know what I mean.

“The Gift”

 

Last night,

walking in the Latin Quarter

and dreamily following

the narrow cobblestone passageways

wherever they led

and losing myself in the crowds

carousing outside the brightly-lit bars

and hideaway restaurants,

I saw Man Ray in a gray suit

stepping through a doorway

and up narrow stairs. The lights

went on in a second-floor apartment

and through the sheer white curtains

I could see he was conversing

with Kiki, his model and muse.

Kiki looked fabulous

with her big eyes

and straight black bangs.

She was the kind of spirit who would enchant

Man Ray’s famous guests,

cook for them, woo them,

and at evening’s end,

sing for them.

I thought to ring the bell

and tell Kiki

that Man Ray’s photograph

of her naked back turned into a violin

is famous, that Les Violon d’Ingres

is now pictured on calendars

and even on the postcard

I dropped this morning

into the yellow mailbox.

I thought to tell Man Ray

that seeing his Indestructible

Object changed the way I looked

at everything, but then realized

words can’t really explain why

I embrace such a mad thing—

a metronome with a cutout of an eye

glued to the pendulum.

Suddenly the lights went out in the apartment.

I had the eerie feeling that Kiki and Man Ray

were looking down at me,

looking up at them.

That’s the way it is with art:

I find myself alone in the milling crowds

of the Latin Quarter at night,

looking up at dark windows,

looking for words to tell Kiki and Man Ray

that their art has always moved me.

Then, as if he could hear my thoughts,

Man Ray opened the window

and leaned out.

His pomaded hair shined in the streetlamp—

I could see the rakes of his comb.

A purple stain, perhaps of wine, bloomed on his lapel.

He asked me why I didn’t ring the bell and told me

Eric Satie was with him the day he created

his first ready-made—the flat iron with nails.

I told him I love the flat iron with nails.

He said it was a century ago

and he didn’t speak French

and Satie didn’t speak English,

but that Satie said it didn’t matter.

They had been drinking hot grog—

it was winter in Paris and cold—

and they were walking to Man Ray’s gallery show

and saw the iron in a shop window.

Man Ray bought the iron then and there

and with Satie searched for glue and nails.

Then Kiki too leaned out into the light,

her black bangs falling forward, her face pale, her eyes

glistening, her neck long and white against the dark room.

“He called it Le Cadeau”—her musical accent was charming!—

“which in English means, ‘The Gift.’”

“I know, I know,” I said, wanting to say more,

wanting to say I’ve known “The Gift” all my life,

that it has been instructive and enriching,

but with so many people around—

the boisterous crowds of students and tourists

jostling on the crooked streets—

I grew shy and self conscious

about calling up to the window,

not that anyone was listening to my effusions.

Kiki asked if I knew Man Ray grew up

among sewing machines and flat irons—

his father a tailor, his mother a seamstress?

I told her that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

I told her my grandfather was a blacksmith.

“He made wheels, gates, and tools. I think

he actually made flat irons, too,” I said.

“A god-like man who dared seize the fire,”

Man Ray said. “Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”

I explained that my grandfather died

before I was born. My mother

was with him when his heart stopped.

“Je suis désolé,” Kiki said. “Je suis désolé.”

In the upstairs open window

behind the white curtains

the two of them became

darkening shadows.

Kiki and Man Ray.

Muse and artist.

Later,

walking home at midnight

on the cobblestone quais along the Seine

and looking down into the black water

and the golden lights reflected there,

I regretted that I never knew my grandfather,

never got to talk with him at his anvil

or feel the heat of his forge

or see him smile to see his work.

Then I heard Kiki’s voice

speaking to me as clearly as if she

and Man Ray were walking beside me.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said,

“It doesn’t matter that you never talked.

The forge is a gift. Indestructible.

It lives on when you hammer words into being,

stories about your grandfather

and his little girl in the house practicing piano,

keeping time with the all-seeing metronome.”

The Left Bank

This morning I took a walk

through the Luxembourg Gardens

and saw old men

playing chess under the spring sycamores

and children

riding ponies on the paths—

like heaven, I thought.

Then at noon as church bells rang

I sat in Saint Sulpice

and considered the Delacroix painting

of Jacob

wrestling with the angel.

For the rest of the afternoon

I strolled aimlessly,

going where the wind blew,

dreaming about love and happiness.

I walked past the locked doors

of apartment buildings

once home to Hemingway

and Gertrude Stein,

Man Ray

and Henry Miller,

and the fact I was lost

and could remember none of the fabled addresses

deepened

and enriched the sense of mystery of each street corner

and alley, the feelings of loss

and thoughts of what might have been.

I wondered where De Chirico lived?

Maybe on the rue St. André des Arts?

I wondered if Modigliani lived

in that apartment up there,

the one with the geraniums in the widow box.

Some people say that painting is dead.

Some people say

there will never be another golden age.

All I know is

I could walk Paris for a thousand days

and never see all there is to see.

Maybe that’s why little things can be so moving,

little things in a shop window—

red roses in a blue vase,

a yellow-faced wooden clock,

a bent piece of brown wire like a twisted vine

holding glass grapes

the color of Prosecco and Merlot.

As I was walking I told myself,

“Let’s go to Deyrolle,

say hello to the tigers and butterflies

and chat a while with the gardener prince.”

Nearby — I was glad to remember! —

there’s an alley I love,

tiny and dark—

that makes me feel fully imagined

and written,

like a character in a Diderot novel.

But when I looked up,

I saw “La Bateu Ivre”

and realized I was on the Rue Ferou again—

the third time this week—

and that I’d walked St. Germain des Pres

in some sort of crazy circle

as I daydreamed.

That’s okay. You go no place by accident.

George Bellows said you can learn more

from painting one street scene—

if that’s what I’ve been doing in my head—

than from six months in an atelier.

I once saw a Man Ray painting of the Rue Ferou,

a lovely calm picture

so atypically quiet and subdued for the surrealist

that it seemed to me it could’ve been painted

by my Aunt Grace, back in Carolina.

Aunt Grace brought things to life with her brush.

Aunt Grace would have loved Paris,

drinking tea at the Café de Flore

and reasoning with the existentialists.

Grace is gone now.

The relatives back in Carolina

say she’s in heaven,

which Laura with a sly smile says just might be

as nice as Paris, who knows?

I’m hoping heaven is like my apartment

on the Right Bank in Saint Paul,

with the dirty dishes piled in the sink.

When evening fell over the rooftops

I found myself leaning against the fountain

of Saint Michael, thanking him

for slaying the dragon and vanquishing evil.

Then I walked home across the Seine

by way of Pont Marie,

thinking about my desk and lamp

as the French sun set

and a million lights came on

like a soft hand touching my cheek.

A part of me is still there on the bridge,

leaning on the stone railing

and waiting for some miraculous rendezvous.


Le Bateau-Lavoir

 

Le Bateau-Lavoir is gone, burned to the ground.

Nonetheless, I’ve come to 13 Rue Ravignan

to sit on the bench in the cobblestone park

and pay homage to the lost, ramshackle,

poorly-lit studios of Picasso and Braque,

Matisse, Apollinaire, and Kees van Dongen

—even though there’s nothing here to see,

no cold room to stand in

imagining Jean Cocteau at his desk

or Modigliani at his easel with his model.

I linger beneath the chestnut trees,

a little lost, a little disappointed

time has moved on though little has changed, ….

In my coat I’ve a half baguette from Miss Manon’s,

which seems the bread of heaven

as I stroll the lanes to the square atop Montmartre,

filled at noon with painters selling work,

sketching portraits and painting en plein air,

enjoying the day and the warm spring sun.

I nibble and observe portraitists at work,

the skill, virtuosity, and cleverness

apparent in every charcoal portrait.

If my daughter were here

I’d ask if she would sit for a portrait, too,

just for me. Earlier today,

down the hill from Le Bateau Lavoir,

I saw a man my age alone in his shop,

painting on a small wood panel

dead game birds and cut lilies,

a still life worthy of a Dutch master.

And this morning in the metro

I heard a sax player who played Sydney Bechet

like Sydney Bechet.

And when I changed trains at Concorde

I heard a violinist playing

“The Lark,”

the trills and squeaks

sending birdsong through the tunnels.

A year or two back,

I read a story about Joshua Bell,

the American violinist.

One morning in the D.C. metro,

with a violin made by Stradivari in 1713,

Bell played six classical masterpieces,

one after another,

beginning with Bach’s “Chaconne.”

The stale air in the pedestrian arcade

came alive—the dust motes sparkled—

and with the tiny instrument

the artist made a music Brahms called

“a whole world of the deepest thoughts

and most powerful feelings.”

But that day in the subway—

and here’s what’s hard to understand—

no one even stopped to listen.

 

 

 

 

Jenna Kelly

In The Business Of Whales

 

It’s a reverse process of public health—

the humpback, trailing prey like molar-

white blood, only with more blubber

and activation:

 

twinkling krill, flailing like ripped

esophagi, are drowning to swallow

dolphins. Either purge language

or master the syntax of oxygen.

 

I’ve an ocean of infectious smiles

and stem cell denizens. How waves

play the induction factors, altering

 

thoughts to suit seas like a tailor

and tame the three-piece suffocation.

 

I check shipwrecked baleen with fading

gasoline and infantile fins. I know

the taste of finalized bubbles,

but not the last bitterness of air.

 

 

Juggling

 

Little pumpkins crumple in your pocket.

 

Icepick fingers prick at alligator hides,

appraising their weight through orphan

incisors. Wait on their signal. Incubate.

 

Your palms are now iceboxes.

You are mercurial. Digits tinker

 

with your hatching organ. Picking

at their seams, as though desperate

to lobotomize them into sentience.

Innervated into a prophecy.

 

                                            Surgery.

Doctors in sugary pairs. Dissolution.

Your skin clinks, geometric in teeth.

Their hands are bloodier than yours.

 

 

Shedding Jove Like Flannel

 

Is it the misguided demi-god

that tries to crochet Jupiter

 

to empty riverbeds: planting old

hangnails in the gravel mattress,

blossoming more reptilian than

 

cross-stitched storms? Vanity

 

is a scalar quantity. Lightning

emanates from basilisk irises.

Caution tape knits tornadoes.

 

…trying to water that which

never even flowed. To form

a pulse from genius. Paradise

 

from miscarried hurricanes.

 

 

 

 

Sandra Kolankiewicz

Colonized

 

How much has happened while I’ve waited for

my refrigerator to clean itself? 

When migrants came though on their bus, the wrong

side of the church chased them down the street with

signs.  A man locked two women in a room

for thirteen years. Across an ocean and

a desert, by now the city has been

taken, another twelve boys with their throats

slit in the courtyard of their school.  Still, the

top shelf is sticky from the popsicle

that mistakenly melted there. Who can

pay attention all the time, so many

borders gone, drawn by compass, level,

sextant, and transit, the four companions

that mapped out the globe, locking enemies

into the same villages, dividing

families with walls, modernizing the

borders for commerce but disobeying

natural laws.  Who spilled the milk and did

not wipe it up, merely closed the door to

darkness and the cold, turning their back to

sit on the couch and eat a sandwich while

Bagdad was burning, and another news

story about a missing boy crossed the

bottom of the screen like a tickertape currency

designed purely to maximize profits? 

My husband said, I am trying to talk

about love while we were deciding if

we should go bowling.  Our daughter asked for

our help, then turned us away, all of our

conveniences rebelling, unable

to function, for we haven’t maintained them. 

 

If Punishment Worked

 

If punishment worked, the jails would be empty,

            the street corner bare as I walk by.  Instead,

the museum yawns while remembering how

            once song began the day at the grammar school

behind it.  Luck like faith has fled because no

            one knows the difference between them, our mistake

believing prayers should be answered, so we make

            narrow ones to fill our shallow lives.  Have him

love me, bring me money, help me make the grade—

            rising to the top of our hollow talk

like an unfiltered swirl of petty pleas

            slowly turning in the vacuum that becomes

our lives, the vortex we create by staying

            in or climbing out when we have to relieve

ourselves.  I’m being polite but obvious;

            bitter but kind; broken and different but

with a stem that is green in the midst of a

            graveyard.  I avoid some mistakes while making

others, recoil from the word ‘consequence,’ which

            gives some the right to judge and do nothing, while

providing the rest with a  reason to grieve.

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Porven

Thinking about Sex and Death, Deeply

 

Not all danger is deceptive. It can be manifested honestly,

like a bloody finger from the hesitant julienning of sweet onions

or gulps of saltwater taken by a snorkeler with a cramped ankle.

 

An anglerfish recognizes such vulnerability—welcomes prey

with bioluminescence and a crescent-mouthed grin

which parts to reveal glinting fangs like shards of glass.

 

A skydiver experienced a seizure at 9,000 feet and survived.

My friend mutes the news report and says life has risks,

that it was the consequence of bold actions they took to truly live.

                                                                                                

She wants to shatter the portrait others have sculpted of her

as baby sister and church darling, sings of how her true self

fades away, smothered by small town expectations.

 

But she comes back to our apartment crying that she’s a whore

after being kissed by a guy who asked for a dance,

bought her a Yuengling that night clubbing in Tallahassee.

 

What else could she be, if not a virgin who only meets dateable men

in class or at the library who want committed, chaste relationships

and to discuss the Dave Matthews Band over coffee and pumpkin scones?

 

How long will she yearn for love that exists as she dreams of it?

How far will she take self-deprecation under the weight of a purity ring

when St. Lucy gouged out her eyes and gave them to Diocletian on a golden plate?

 

Will she ever focus breathlessly on a man caressing her breasts,

lifting the hem of her dress in the shadows of the front porch?

Could she ignore formaldehyde while cutting open the womb of a dogfish shark?

 

There is a raw sincerity in the curled bodies of the embryos,

clear and motionless beneath the passing of white lab coats,

a collective pile of possibilities never fulfilled.

 

 

 

 

Charles Rafferty

Genie

 

He thought the sudden polishing of the shirt sleeve would be his redemption. After all, it had been centuries since he'd even heard a footfall on the drip-slick stone of the cave. But there he was, tethered to his lamp like a stubborn flame, refusing the million dollars, the bigger dick, the three more wishes. Caught between the cramped brass and human monumental pettiness, the genie couldn't bear to fully enter a world in which desire could reach no higher than a cookie jar.

 

 

 

 

Emily Ransdell

Grief

 

 Love needs a body to do its work.

                                          — Barbara Hill

Grief needs a body too,

needs hands like shovels and the bent

back of dirt, the grunt and groan

of its necessary load.  Grief needs two

good legs to stand on and the sense to know

when to sit down.  It needs rolled-up shirtsleeves,

a thermos of sweet tea, a shady spot in the grass

for its chair.  Grief needs a bushel basket

for the snap beans it will leave

on your doorstep some evening, 

a mason jar for the snapdragons sprung up

in the side yard where no one goes. 

All day, grief does its job

like a dutiful mule.  At night it needs

the radio left on in the kitchen.

Grief needs a body too.

 

What I Kept

A coin purse made of shells.

A mixing bowl, a first-edition

Joy of Cooking too mildewed to use.

The bassinet.   An incomplete set of silver,

three books by L.M. Montgomery,

which inspired my name. Two family rings,

a flower I made from a paper plate

at five.  An old address book with names

and zip codes of the dead.  The sound

of her voice singing Dixie Melody,

the waxy smell of her lipstick

and the cigarettes she smoked in the car. 

How her hair in sunlight looked like bourbon

swirled in a glass. Her pretty watch,

but not the pearls my father gave her. 

Those she wears still.

My Apologies

 

I am not a morning person. 

I don’t read the news before eight

or even the daily Garrison Keillor

poem.  I look at botched celebrity facelifts

and the ten worst hairstyles for women

my age. I abhor the domestic

racket of breakfast, my husband's

relentlessly chipper ways.  He actually

hums while cooking, possibly even

while eating, which he’s doing now.

He stands with his plate at the counter,

looking out at the viburnum he’s pruned

for years.  It’s muscular, and blooms

like a large and tender boy coaxed out

of shadow and onto the stage.

 

I should have said thanks for the omelet

and the coffee.  I should have admired

the viburnum and the cluster of hyacinths

that lean toward it like the sun. I should have

noticed its outstretched limbs like a man

with his hands full of blossoms,

waiting all morning

just to give them away.

I Go Shoe Shopping

 

Not another black pair.

Not the low heels and roomy round toes I favor for every day. 

 

I want red ones, like in magazines. 

 

I want them brought out in boxes and displayed at my feet

like a feast about to be served. 

 

I want a young man with hands like white doves to offer them

pair by pair for my approval —

 

silk, then suede, sling-back, then the elegant open-toed. 

 

I want them all—

the strappy stiletto, the pump, the wedge. 

 

With my heel at rest in the soft white nest of his palm,

 

I want all the reds he sets in front of me —
scarlet, crimson, bittersweet, rose

 

 

 

 

Barry Seiler

Unchained Simile

 

Like those old movies where the passage of time

Is illustrated by the pages of a calendar

Tearing off and blowing forward off the screen,

And we see the days, the seasons, the over

And over of leaves falling and trees releafing,

And back of that the bodies marching off to war,

Marching back again, selling apples on street corners,

Snoring in Salvation Armies, their hands in their shoes.

And as the pages slow and stop, the camera finds him,

The young man we loved and knew, stooped now,

A glamorous dash of gray at the temples,

Standing before the warden. And the warden says

Keep your nose clean, son  And a look

Makes its way across his pale face,

Not quite a smirk, not quite a grin,

Something damaged and familiar we saw once

On a street as we hurried to the subway

To get out of the weather,

Newspapers skittering by,

Men clinging to their hats for dear life.

 

 

Glove

 

To be skin to the skin.

To be veil between thing and thing.

 

To be thrown down in anger or insult.

Or perfumed for seduction.

 

To be emptied finger by finger until all that remains is an idea of you

In a hat on a table by the door.

 

 

 

 

Chumki Sharma

Fallen

 

Aches seem older

than my shoulder blades.

 

There my wings once fluttered.

Back then I was one with

air and light.

 

And when did they wither?

Was it the time I rushed to the pane

to see the sky darkened?

When I first learnt the strength of gravity?

My bondage to it through

loss and time?

 

My wings dried up, became

unseen even to the Gods

who had given them to me.

And I, never an angel,

nevertheless became

a fallen one.

 

Shooting stars in my backyard

I become a tree and host fireflies.

 

 

Like A Dragonfly

 

On Sale one Morris chair,

where you sat the day you came

with the ring.

I still haven’t

found a buyer for my dream –

invincible as the

yellow acacia we planted,

stubborn like the hovering

Dragonfly over the rose bush.

 

How do I let it go?

All the packing boxes

and the tape can't  secure

that which never came true.

 

Blue patch between the neem leaves,

all it holds, all it never will.

 

 

The Middle Path

 

My warm jackets hang forgotten

in my closet as the thin shirt

on me fights a losing battle.

Winter morning in the old city.

Familiar. Yet a stranger still.

I light a cigarette, craving

warmth, relishing the chill.

Should I laugh? I contemplate

as the chill stings my eyes to tears.

 

He asks me once again, "Do you

love me?" I am true to too many

summer nights and winter mornings.

 

Outside my window

A Neem tree between graves of neighbours

who were strangers to each other.

 

 

A Window For Her Songs

 

Army of sarees, chests of jewels,

crates of books, riot of colours,

but no music player for her.

To own a song you love is to

lose its charm.

 

She made sure it was never

within reach for her to play and

tire of it. The bitter sweet

pain of chancing on it on the

radio, strain of it drifting

from a stranger's window..

 

Mist in her coffee cup,

Lift doors close

on a stranger's smile.

 

 

What Remains

 

In middle age, ghost in me rebels,

rages against the slow dimming of

the light in my eyes. Tiny circle

of turquoise flashing on my ear,

lustre of white gold rings of a love

long gone. Studs pierce my body-

my nose, navel, pale lids of my eyes?

Will these beat time? Will it be the

white of my ribs that once caged a

wild heart? Or the twin circles of my

pelvic bones,once showing off my

feminity with feline grace?

 

In an old jewel case

A baby tooth without a name

 

 

Bed of Truth

 

On a true blue bed

between clouded mountains

I grow a new brain.

This one will be sparkling,

fine, afloat in the sea of truth.

 

I sleep flanked by two trusted

dogs guarding my bed

midst brushed cotton green

and purple flannel.

 

I grow a new heart

and beat to the

rhythm of truth.

 

Who awakens in

the blue bed perched mornings

on a hill in the clouds?

A waker fashioned from true lies?

 

 

Pool of Wounds

 

This evening, we sit by the pool,

share matches and light alcohol

from a blue bottle of our

wounds. Your purple swimsuit mended

with my bikini strings, tied

again and again. We dive

into the pool, into the blue 

surf dirtied by yesterday’s rain.

Coral the color of an old

scar tears a smile into my arm;

fish, sharp paparazzi, gather

to lick.

 

 

 

 

Richard Spilman

The Owl of Minerva

 

An owl near the top of the maple,

dark lump in a web of branches

like the tumor cradled in veins

 

the doctors found a week ago

when you came in complaining

of a burning in your belly.

 

You and your cousin had a .22

to shoot cans and starlings.

The owl should have been easy,

 

a clear target straight up,

the two of you taking turns,

but it neither flinched nor fell.

 

If anything, the shadow grew:

a cowl round the noon sun,

a hush in the heartbeat of day,

 

brooding on calamity as it

waited for the shroud of dusk

to spread its ancient wings.