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Issue # 41 Fall 2019

Poetry

Poetry Edited by Roger Mitchell

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Bellamy
Who’s To Say?

Who’s to say

that last night

I didn’t hear

the white pine

whisper to me

through our

open bedroom

window when

I lay dry-eyed,

sleepless, fists

clenched? 

Who’s to say I

didn’t hear
the white pine

croon, Come

on, baby doll,
time to let
go, time to

think tall—

tall is a verb—go

ahead, risk

everything;

fall in love

with the

restless sky. 

Go ahead, run,

run, when you hear

the sun,

run, at first

light, to
the meadow,

& sway,

shake, shiver,

root-to-

tingling crown. 

If you stay loose,

baby doll,

you won’t break—

you will

withstand wind;

you will withstand

thunder, rain.

Persevere if—

let’s say

when—you’re

slashed

by lightning

 

 

 

 

Where Were You Born?

 

I was born from molten song—my mother was Pele, volcano

goddess.   She  spewed  and I fell  into Filene’s,   where  my

foster parents found me, 50% off, no refunds, no returns—I

was raised in the land  of ice and  snow where  I slipped and

fell down  hill after hill; no  one told me about crampons and

I was angry, but I cooled,  and now my trade is ice-cutter—

ostensibly,  I came from  Wisconsin but who says  I did  not

ride in on   the back  of the huge, g reen-and-brown  spotted

turtle   that  now   masquerades  as   Isle  Royale,   in   Lake

Superior—in truth,  I came from clouds and sadness, nothing

less  or  more,  sipping  milk  sprayed from  the  breasts   of

Cassiopeia—realism,  someone said, is a tale told by an idiot.

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Beyer
Contact proof

 

Diane Arbus
wrote with light
the tragedy
we all inhabit

 

one face
here for one
time only
then replaced

 

most of her subjects
peer out
into a world
beyond their means

 

small features
on the heads
of giants
identical twins

 

the subtle quirk
of a monkey
in a human
mother’s arms

 

a woman
who is a man
who is a woman
not entirely at ease

 

the camera-ignoring
defiance
of an idiot
paid to amuse

 

none of these
lacks insight
any more than
the artist herself

 

inexcusably
part of it
as all true
makers are

 

 

 

Sehnsucht

 

no one is a former dancer
           because one may dance
                      entirely still

 

in dream in memory
           sensing the dance
                      through each limb

 

the dance
           itself never
                      entirely still

 

passing and changing
           imperceptibly
                      down generations

 

first coarse village
           airs then
                      dexterous fingering

 

rows of small
           mirrored girls
                      on points

 

or the ruined
           toothless skull
                      nodding time

 

dance is also
           the rugged tumble
                      of the blood

 

to every branch
           and terminal
                      of being one self

 

 

 

Hamilton Gardens

 

three or four generations
of a large family

 

organising themselves for photographs
all speaking Hindi except

 

the two smallest boys
flyting one another in English

 

and somehow New Zealand
doesn’t feel so lonely any more

 

           *

 

a white-faced heron
flies out from the river bank
and back

 

a late autumn leaf falls
starting its slow float
on the current towards town

 

the heron lifts itself
into a tree
flapping its wings for balance

 

then seems to sit and watch
the quiet river
and its clouds

 

          *

 

rain renders everything
Impressionistic

 

more Sisley or Pissarro
than Monet

 

the grey-green rows
in the kitchen garden

 

distant silhouettes swallowed
by the recurring sun

 

            *

this is how the planet might look
treated with the reverence
of our ancestors

 

even weeds have their place
beside blackbirds and thrushes
scuttling through hedges

 

human design can only
so far subdue the earth’s
regardless generosity

 

human carelessness is of
course a different matter
now we’re closer to the end

 

 

 

 

 

Tegan Blackwood

Vocational Rehabilitation

 

Hello.  
I am here.
To tell you what I've done:
Shown you a pretty, pretty picture
done up in gel ink and grid lines
that I made in the night
while coffee dripped and dripped into my ventricles,
the night shrink-wrapping my pool of light
in the cubicle I cut for myself
from the ragged wholecloth of home
that never really feels like mine, because would I live like this?
I am behind a couch whose sections seat six, but only if there are six to sit,
which faces a bookshelf of things I've read too many times
and things I never will.  Look:
I painted the trees.  I hung the frame.  I wired the light.
Things I also did: not finish the mountains;
not vacuum, this for six months;
not unplug the vampire cord to the gaming system overnight.
Sat and made a block print list of futures
fun to pretend are mine, and played a game:
how long can I forget to fail?  Allow me
to spoil the story, in the interest of your time,
whose desiccated scrapings are worth more than days
I sit and pluck my parasites, play with them,
catch and release.  Six weeks.  
I could lose a finger for each and still play chopsticks,
But I'd probably forget.  And did you know
if you are practiced enough, you can do the following?
Get the hangover without the booze,
just from stewing in the sinkhole uterus of your petulant longing,
begging it to stay and keep you warm beyond
the absence of your ass on the captain's chair,
reupholstered, spinning and adjustable and going
nowhere.
And-- do cat's cradle with words, like this--
What's unviable is inviolable.
It shines forever in a place that defies death
by declining to define it.  Stand up.
The lurching hurtle of the earth, at obscene speeds
around the local star in the bog and mire of nothing
rockets yesterday's breakfast back in your mouth.
Stand up.  Your little light is melting its shade,
has fried moths, is heating your sweat, is creating
a darkness too big for the room you have.
Stand up.  Flop on up out of the golden sewer, and breathe.
You have made a list.  Oh!
You have made a plan, and only now you see
it was for someone else, because it seems
someone already, long ago, made all the plans for you:

All the pain, all the times your will
is blunt nails on the chalkboard of your character,
all the ways you could find
to disappoint yourself,
all the stations where you gawk at the cord and never pull,
all the dances you choreograph for your bony fingers
to go the last inch this time
and seize on anything.  All the teeth you'll lose to grinding,
all the years you'll lose to nothing,
to the grinding, clenching gears of the hungry horror of nothing,
wearing your brittle body, whittling your knotted mind
to dust. 
What if one day you can't stand up,
the chair is your legs, and all your twisted hands can do is list things forever,
grotesque sickening lists gone into infinity
of every word that ever made sense,
all coming to nonsense as the ink settles,
and you didn't even notice
that everyone you ever loved is dead?
What if one day you go empty-handed into the yawning den
of a stranger you know, with a placard and a role,
without any logic to hold yourself intact, and say aloud:
I am terrified, and I don't know how to show it.  
I'm a wasting disease with a sense of humor,
I'm a shellshocked herbivore twice shy in a tailored blazer,
a grubby wasteland boor waist deep in dictionaries,
I'm a bloody pulp dressed up as Potential, the very worst thing to be.
I never learned any of this, and I don't know how to tell you.  I never learned
anything that mattered much at all.  
My mind and body and Zeno's poltergeist conspire hatefully
to cook me into a mellifluous sludge of obsession and dread
poking the fire and wondering why it's hot
and when I scream and shout at them
and bang on the mirror, and threaten, and plead, and bargain, and bleed,
they won't give me even the crumbs of going
somewhere anyone could want.
I don't know what I want, and I don't know how to get it,
or why none of you will ever just make me well,
why you keep asking me how to fix me,
as if it's a secret I keep from myself for fun,
and truth be told I believe you have nothing to give and yet
for whatever reason, or none,
it is today and I am saying this to you,
it is today and there is something, still, that is me and
I am here.

 

Hello.

 

 

 

Buoyancy

 

I am not a very nice person
sometimes, I try to tell him,
but he keeps the ocean in a bucket
at the bottom of his bed.
To simulate weightlessness,
astronauts train in things like that,
in enormous pools full of machinery
which is absurd
but anyone who's watched the moon reflected on a lake--
the ripples across the water a languorous take
on the waves that are also uncountable grains of light--
can see the romance in it.  Only all the more because
in the southern sea, to rest and rust forever,
are the rare tin cans of realized dreams
that skipped from the air like flying fish,
flared and fell in circles across a shared sky and then
came back in pieces.

That's for everyone's safety.

 

There's a whole space station there, in bits,
which they used to call the world,
or peace, which are opposite things,
but the people aren't around anymore.
It's the same as a tide pool sharp with empty shells.
Everything is just like something else.

 

Sometimes I say too many facts.
I think, sometimes, I need
someone to hold me back, when the fires alight
with force to sever limb from limb
or like the lost, among these brilliant fragments I could fall forever
but never come home.
I wake up gasping,
grasping for a hand hold, dumb with fear
to be just a floater drowning in somebody's eye,
in a cold glass sea that winks and wakes
to see me gone.
I need to know what thing I'm just like
to what boneyard I belong
and I think, I might have been a little nicer
and said a little less

 

but he has this skill,
this quiet grace, and an extraordinary gift
to give someone:  He says
that things are beautiful,
and they are

 

 

Something You Should Know

 

I wrote someone a love poem once,
and then swore I never would.
I found it by accident, still folded along the same lines,
worn only on the corners,
among some faded receipts,
foil chewing gum wrappers, that kind of thing:
the detritus of turned out pockets;
also some birthday cards,
the ones from banks and dentists;
some collection agency demands,
destined for the shredder, probably,
unanswered and forgotten.
I don't even remember what I was looking for.

That's when I learned
that though there'd been crying,
and yelling, too, to hear at other times,
the soft crinkle of refolding,
of putting back something unreturnable
and the soft scrape of a drawer
closing softly
without words
was the sound of me shattering
and of us dying.

 

I was the last fool to find out when some words escape you
they may not ever come back, and so
I swore he'd never know
because it was too much to bear that this one last piece of me
should sink silent into such an aimless sort of abyss.

 

In case you can't tell,
because you'll want to understand
like you always do
when you read this,
as you will, and likely more than once,
because I'll let you
when I'm ready,
as I will be,
to unfold a little more
and place still another of the softest parts of me
in the patient vessel of your open palms,
this is to let you know that

 

              this is a love poem.

 

 

 

 

R.T. Castleberry

I Tell You There Is a Fire

Early in the morning,
as the Devil picks up his stride
the sun starts its arc.
Saplings snap across security fencing,
dripping leaves over shards of safety glass.
I watch the strut of a blackbird walking,
August wind razing the feather grass.
Through an open window,
Son House checks the day like a grave.
Mindful of memorial distance,
I calculate sympathy, check its balance
against advice from my crooked heart.
Gemini orphan, wreckage
from family wasted and gone,
I scatter pennies in the street
for the afternoon unlucky.

I repeat a password four times
to start my life online,
the daily assignment of lessons imposed
by a drinker’s cough, a flashy ignorant illness.
The Guillotine Panels hang beside
a beret, a newsboys cap,
a poster of the riot at The Rite of Spring.
Shaping symmetry from shambles,
from memories of the idiot dead,
losers to blown chance, bad choices,
I reassess biography, from those
who select against intelligence,
to those brutally a fool.
Naming is key.

 

 

 

Talking To an Empty Room

I change my name when you stand before me,
my accent when you leave.
Cowboy defiance, hipster exception are
postures in desert-cracked doorways,
heat shaping pallid skin to steam.
My signature skips in the move to
shirt pocket Parker, briefcase Mont Blanc,
slices across a page, brittle in the bargaining.
Truth is a trickster, tailoring wit to advantage.
I lie to amuse, answers dependent on
whims of cruelty, inflection, displeasure.
Politics and faith are the loaded, lifted wallet,
cash in the busker’s hat.
Sounds of evening’s end carry down the street.
I watch you window shopping from the shadows,
grave and stumbling like the wounded.
I bet the count of steps until you turn,
death-white dress gleaming along patchwork stones.

 

 

 

Clarifying Salvation

Half the night is sulking before me.
Cars in freeway distance are haloed by
lightning and neon, trucker headlights.

A red dial diver’s watch consumes
  its measured trail.
Rolled shirt cuffs catch the stairway rail,
an onyx ring taps against a whiskey tumbler.
Seadrift relics mark the rooms, spinning
balances of water myth and wreckage.
I remember the prophet’s honor, wary in a cell,
a surplus of syringes, his treatise
  written in prison code.
I take in all losses--
a Nassau gambler’s stiletto cane,
a Rothko letter on forgotten technique,
a trickster journal discounted
  in the Beggar’s Bookshop.

They were brought to me
out of avarice, out of anguish.
I keep them safe—favor included in the fee.
Helicopters grounded by a strike,
I watch the feral prey upon the Garden.
More rumors fray the café conversations,
the rains of May arrive.

 

 

 

Tropics

Rain through the night
settles the day, the dust,
heat under a cane field drought.
Hungry on Friday, dry-throated,
I make the nights in
the racket of a broken-bladed fan,
aromas of pot and barbecue charcoal,
three hour blocks of nightmare monolog.

 

Morning sets me on a porch swing,
Topo Chico and a burning Salem at hand.
Early workmen idle against street-heavy traffic,
rat tail braids to their waist beneath hard hats.
Turned out from shelters,
those lost group and break apart,
harsh, hand-rolled smokes scorching the air.

 

I know that step, clumsy
with bourbon pints, daily ache,
walking weekday streets
in cheap sneakers, father-worn work boots.
Saharan dust cakes lips, lungs,
determines a day’s limits.
A dog pack trots the street-side grass.
Fast food bags flatten against security fencing,
freeway noise splits the block--overpass to red Stop.

 

One foot down, I rock on creaking chains,
trying to settle afternoon direction.
Disowning early calm, darkling clouds gather,
shade tree oaks creak in a rippling wind.
The feather of the moment has passed.
I gather myself, turn inside.

 

 

 

 

 

Joan Colby

That Summer in Oz

Brick porch. Oz books. Ice water.
That’s what I remember
Of a cross-the-street friendship
That lonely summer.
Inside, her mother, white-faced and silent
By the cold fireplace. Susan said
She was dead and all that time
I believed. Instead, the crazy place
Where women shrieked or were endlessly
Wordless. The housekeeper shuffled
In darkened rooms. Dorothy knew the flying
Monkeys were less to be feared than the witch
Who dissolved in water. So that was all it took.
Susan said no one can force you to do anything.
Sail away in the ruined house to meet
The heartless and the brainless. Here you’ll be queen
Of the misinterpreted. If you believe
Anything, believe this.
More sojourners than friends, we shared
No confidences. Susan preached. I heard.
Later, they said she fucked any boy that wanted her.
Ran away until her father, at a loss,
Sent her somewhere. Rumor of a child
Strangled like the bird who sang until she
Could no longer bear it. The black tomcat
With yellow eyes who sat
At her feet sheathing and unsheathing its claws.
She was brilliant, skipped two grades,
Expelled for cursing a nun, she kept
Sucking those ice cubes on hot summer afternoons
While we met a boy transformed
To the Princess of Oz.
Of course, she was older, of course, I listened,
Flattered to be chosen if only by proximity.
We walked that emerald road together
Like smugglers, each of us keeping
Our precious secrets. Drinking ice water
From tall glasses. If I yearned for something sweet
I’d never admit it. A black sedan came
To take away the mother who might as well be dead.
All you need is courage, the art of refusal.
Don’t ever let them make you,
Susan said.

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Daniels

Monkey Ball

 

After I try the bird’s way of knowing
and the cloud’s, I read silently—
Bay-Tree Maiden, Boots and the Troll,

 

Beauty and Pock Face. Then I walk
to my favorite tree. I’ve been told to be
quiet, make my walk a form

 

of meditation, back straight, breath
steady. Instead I talk to the Osage orange,
ask why I see so few birds now.

 

Is it because of wanting too much,
too much desiring? The tree and I
talk about wrinkles. Its fruit has deep

 

fissures, bumps, green skin. Why
do people call me horse apple,
it asks me. Why bodark, why

 

monkey ball? It says it misses
the extinct giant ground sloth
that used to lie down in its shade.

 

I tell it how lonely houses can be.
The sky grows well-deep, darker than
I’ve ever seen it, air moving like breath.



Did I Kiss You?
                        for David

 

The moon scatters glitter
onto the lawn. Our cat takes
the moon’s path, hunting.

 

I know night by its garbled
opera heard through walls,
dark wine, wakefulness.

 

And morning I know by its
slow gray light. You I know
by your name’s long vowel

 

and gentle consonants.
Did I kiss you? Yes
with the morning and

 

first cup of tea. And yes
in the slow sweep
of nightfall. Bones I broke

 

ache when the weather
changes. Forget-me-not
seedpods cling to

 

our clothes. Look.
All over our yard—
their blue flowers.

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Lucille DeBerry
His Declaration of Intent: I Try to Stay Away

from poetry (and pastry) but tonight I imbibed, took a taste,
listened to a local poet read and was hooked
like a bass in a catch-and-release pond of slicing-silver
or like a golden trout up in Hardy County mountains.

I try to avoid the temptation of complimentary vowels,
gerunds, consonants; captivating rhythms; and images
of cream-puffs stacked high on pink glass plates. Poems
could work their way beneath my skin like chiggers.

Poems may stay with you, accumulate, adhere tightly
in your mind as if adding layers of fat to your thin body.
You could acquire a craving; become addicted to poetry.
You could fall in love with smooth, flowing words.

 

 

 

 

 

William Doreski

Glacial Erratics in Belmont

 

Being rocks, they don’t remember.
Or remember very little.

 

The streets square up to houses,
to the playground, tennis courts,

 

and the large but effete cemetery.
The rocks squat self-conscious

 

on lawns as tough and polished
as the law allows. I kneel

 

before one and feel its cold
shoulders try to shrug me off.

 

The householders often catch
rock-worshippers like me

 

leaning into their property,
but almost never call the police.

 

Glacial erratics are common
in the Boston Basin, their weight

 

much of what holds us together.
I would like to stroke the surface

 

of these three fine examples,
but don’t want to actually trespass

 

without theology to back me.
The cool dusk pools in the street.

 

The cries of kids in the playground
recede like an ebbing surf.

 

I’ll take photos to prove that these rocks
thrive in this plain old suburb.

 

And then I’ll wander off with hands
roughened by imagining that

 

I’ve spent a lifetime worshipping
stone that hardly ever responds.

 

 

 

The Grace of the Garden Cemetery

 

In August we elongate
to conform to certain shadows
no particular object casts.
The streets resist interrogation.
The square two-family houses
brace themselves against shifts
in mood and density of cloud.

 

You walk one route to the bus stop
while I walk another. We meet
in a spangle and jangle of sighs,
wondering where our lives went.
The electric trolley buses hiss
and spark, eager to ingest us,
like being bellied in a whale.

 

A short ride to the famous
graveyard where we visit famous
and famously rococo graves.
Birds patter along their skyways
with tiny squeaks of pleasure
no human beyond adolescence
can utter without a blush.

 

We could lie on some heroic grave
and touch both head and foot stones.
But we refrain from blasphemies
against the self-created image
and unpack our picnic lunch
beside a pond so full of turtles
their shells clatter as they swim,

Our ham sandwiches blame us
for their fate, but we eat them
with conscience almost clear, the shape
and color of noon too bluff
and shallow to rebuke us
for hungers we’ve never curbed.

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Firer
A Misbelief of Painters

is a collective noun, not an accusation.
I love collective nouns: “a crash of rhinos,”
“a blast of hunters,” “a parliament of owls.”
Collective nouns were a speciality of medieval
Books of Courtesy, Juliana Barnes (A.K.A. Berners)
Prioress of the Priory of St. Mary of Sopwell,
which is near the town of St. Albans, loved them, too.
(Saint Alban is venerated as the first-recorded British
martyr. He is the British protomartyr! Beheaded!)
Prioress Barnes wrote The Book of St. Albans (1486),
which included 164 (!!!) collective nouns, including
“a tabernacle of bakers” and “a covert of coots.”
Books of Courtesy were manuals on “aspects
of noble living.” They guided and protected the young
from “embarrassing mistakes.” (Do you still believe in
embarrassment? In courtesy? In noble living?)
Early collective nouns frequently featured animals
(“A pack/cry/kennel of hounds”), birds (“A sord of
mallards”), and “intriguingly, an array of human
professions and types of person,” such as “a faith
of merchants,” or “an abominable sight of monks.”
In medieval society the role of a forester
“was respectable and well paid.” Chaucer
was a forester. (What are our contemporary
courtesy books? Self help books? Bumper stickers?
The New York Times? Marie Kondo?)
A forester’s duties included “protecting the forest’s
stock of game….[foresters] also stalked criminals
who hid in medieval forests’ thicknesses.” Thus:
“a stalk of foresters.” How do we learn what
occupations are respected and well paid?
What values and behaviors are acceptable?
Should we turn to the internet? God help us. What
are the collective nouns of the 21st century?
Dr. Jen Gunter offers “a rash of mansplainers.”
I offer “a screen of friends,” “a screw of politicians,”
“an app of compassion,” “a heard of poems,”
“a herd of poems.” I wait for your collective nouns.

 

 

 

On Kinnickinnic Avenue

 

I follow the oversize load truck hauling
an oversize boat named Intemperance. I
remember the names of other boats I’ve followed:
The Pequod, The Fin of God, Ghost. I love
to watch the crane that fall lifts the boats,
from the lake harbor as if they are alive,
maybe a marine species: walrus,
whale, manatee. I love to be
submerged in water: a bath, an ocean,
a Great Lake, love. Oh, here is my father,
alive again, he is lifting me from our summer
lake, Lake Lucerne, at Island View Resort,
in Crandon, Wisconsin.Time’s jiu jitsu.
Water’s intemperance. Once,
my five-year-old sister fell off the pier and
stayed under water. When my father realized
and finally pulled her out, she fought him
tooth and nail. She always regretted being
pulled from that lake, from our dead
Czechoslovakian grandmother
who held and kissed her underwater
before releasing her back to us.
My sister could never forget those watery kisses
and death’s dazzling multicolored lights.
Forty years later, in her suicide room,
on the white pillow next to her death,
my sister put a prayer
card from that loved grandmother’s
funeral. On Kinnickkinnic Ave. I’m
remembering that revolving cop-car-lit night,
remembering how the dead accompany us
on our errands of living, remembering
Lake Lucerne in Crandon, Wisconsin where
right now a small pebble-filled wave is
remembering, is lapping toward shore filled
with the bright, small rocks that entered our
white-wave- embossed childhood swim shoes
and stuck between our small-blue-wrinkled toes,
small rocks we filled our painted with sails, tin-
sand pails with, and which each evening
our parents shook back into the cold
green-blue, slight, white-capped waves
of that small, island-centered glacier lake.

 

 

 

The Rusk Epiphany

              “Like Proust be an old teahead of time.”
                                             Jack Kerouac

 

Under Galilean moons (Europa, Callisto,
Io & Ganymede), the salmon-copper-fish
weathervane on Sendik’s Market’s cupola
spins in lake winds. Under early night’s waxing
crescent moon, I question about. In the west,
Regulus. Out on the horizon clouds, rain,
thunder. Between day and night a horizon,
a sunset & three twilights: civil, nautical,
astronomical. Dusk, dusk, dusk. In
88 degree, 8 PM o’clocks, lovers
nest in lake’s break-water-wet rocks.
Solstice’s late slow sunsets gold treetops.
Proust thought it the artist’s task “to revive
long buried memories.” Regulus, one of
four Royal stars of ancient Persia, is the
brightest star in Leo the Lion. A huge
ship the size of a toothpick moves across
the horizon. Everything tastes like lake.

 

 

 

 

 

Philip Fried

 

The following are ethnographic reports from the planet Gliese [pronounced Glee zuh], which orbits a red dwarf star 20 light-years from Earth.

 

A Favorite Indoor Sport

 

Headline Climbing, a favorite indoor sport
and schooling for leaders, involves a handful of simple 
drills to perfect the nuances of footwork
when ascending a mock-up of routes and boulder problems
studded with foothold jibs, small divots, flows
of handholds in wave designs, and natural features
on the wall—all curiously tagged with headlines.

 

Encountering a "pocket" with screamer, No
Evidence to Support the Leader's Claims,
the climber is expressly instructed to cling
to the wall by sticking a pointed toe in the opening,
then pressing down forcibly with the forefoot and raising
the heel slightly to engage the calf.

 

To establish a foothold on an expanse of "flatwall"
blazoned, Resuming the Deportation of All
Who Are Other, the climber should smear his foot as if
on a slab, dropping the heel to maximize contact
and bending toes upward bringing the forefoot to bear.

 

When ascending to the "small edge" stigmatized, Sharing
Inflammatory Anti-Alien Videos,
the climber will focus on the narrowest section
of this scanty hold, ankle perpendicular.

 

For a "sloper" bannered, Denying Obstruction Specter,
the climber drops the heel and pushes on toes
to maximize contact and stay up high on the hold.

 

Finally, a well-schooled speck in the ceiling's heaven,
the climber will preen for a time in this easeful empyrean,

 

then descend, keen for an arduous real-world climb ...

 

 

 

A Graveyard of Past Futures

 

The Gliesian language, known as "Glie," allows
for a linking of tenses dizzying to an earthling
but justified by the Gliesian concept of GLEW,
an acronym based on words that refer to a fluid
fourth dimension and are now forgotten.

 

All stories commence with this phenomenological
mantra: "As a composite of many
present tenses, now past ..." [For the full text
of this formula, see the appendix, which also describes
the surprising appeal this mouthful has for children.]

 

A popular national theme park is named, A Graveyard
of Past Futures. Among its many features
are the severed sculpted hand with Liberty's torch
and a tapeloop of age-old clips from leaders' speeches,
promises for a better tomorrow, tomorrow ...

 

In photos on gravestones, re-enactors revive,
in costume, the daily doings of communes
and utopian farms, their sepia hopes well-framed,
and navigating the clutter-maze of packaging
in which the gadgets of Progress were purveyed

 

is a fun adventure in found and lost. While tucked
away in the crannies and nooks of mausoleums,
sleek models of tomorrow's metropolis
prove futurism is truly a form of nostalgia
in plaster, a pseudo-alabaster whisper.

 

 

 

A Singular Sect

 

Scattered in outlying settlements across
this planet-nation are the Emotikites,
a sect that strives for a wordless paradise
by communicating solely via emojis,
emoticons, and texting abbreviations.

 

In prayer, they pace a Circle of Negation
counterclockwise, chanting acronyms
like OON and ROV (Obliteration of Nouns
Revoking of Verbs) that have come unmoored from their words.

 

The E's exhibit a bipolar alternation
between celibacy and promiscuity.

In the former condition, they riffle imaginary
pages of their "Good Air-Book" to cite
parables extolling the holy and pure
and in the latter phase, the initial approach
to a possible partner is made via emophone,
a high-tech device that facilitates the exchange
of e-crotch photos and emoticon "poems."
(A rare apostate Emotikite, an elder,
has promised to reveal more about wordless
sexting, its misty origins. I'll probe him.)

Like Essenes of our own biblical times,
but with a Gliesian twist, E's fervently wish
to merge with He/She who can be iconized
but not named. And their faith leads them to shun
the weaker ones among them who caught between worlds
squat by the roadside begging for one or two words.

 

 

 

An Issue for Further Research

 

Is it a noble attribute or an addiction,
this passion of Gliesian men for folded flags?
Working in teams that strive for the strictest creases
ensuring that stars on a blue field can be seen
on a tight-folded cloth to be clutched between heart and hand.
As someone's deployed to an absence more profound
for every rigorous fold that hands enforce,
uncannily this addiction and this loss
are the source not only of mourning but also of pride
and the bugle's unfolding of Taps over cratered hillside.

 

 

 

An Age of Diplomacy

 

On the planet Gliese, the cratered landscape reveals
the ravages of frequent wars and yet
Gliesians take special pride in the high art
of diplomacy, refined to a Kabuki-like
perfection. On screens, they watch two other screens
facing each other, each with one right hand
grasping air in the pantomime of a firm
handshake of fellowship across the gap
of air.Then, the mirroring hands perform
intimate alpha gestures (in the absence
of actual bodies); for instance, the guiding-palm-
of-the-host or encouraging-knuckle-nudge-to-rib
of Gliesian bromance. An icon of this Age
of Diplomacy is the hologram of a grin
whose width is pieced together from many small smiles
eeked out from diplomats of the aggrieved parties
and which hovers like a mobile in the Great
Hall of the Spectacle of Winning the Peace.
Most striking, and reserved for a time of imminent
crisis that diplomats, abject and proud,
dread and crave at once is the apparition
of the bristling white moustache, devoid of a mouth,
that conjures visions of the aftermath
of nuclear war, victims vaporized
to shadow. Informants were vehement this horrific
threat was unlikely to be carried out
now the apparition is so well produced
and their elected elders schooled to resist
the admitted allurements of omnipotence.

 

 

 

 

 

David Galloway

Small Talk

 

I saw the woman damaged, standing in line, as
I waited for my children to retrieve a 500 count
package of napkins we forgot on the first pass.

 

Flashing lights a block away suggested an accident.
She wore fresh bandages on her arm, a livid scrape
on her forehead, bloody nicks everywhere else.

 

She reached the cashier, a young girl with a ponytail,
who dazzled a smile and asked, how are you today?
pushing good, well, great despite all the evidence.

 

And the woman battered played the game, saying
fine, thank you on that horrific day when all went bad,
took her snack bars and soda and winced out the door.

 

 

 

electro-magnetic pulse

before the internet came
i feared the pulse

 

because i knew
that any strategic launch

 

of nuclear missiles
must be preceded by

 

the electro-magnetic pulse
which destroys car ignitions

 

and sensitive defense systems
and though it can be shielded

 

against, it is simplicity to
to create a larger explosion

 

so when in 1984 my mother
slid into the bench seat of

 

the new maroon chevy caprice
with its big square tail lights

 

and turned the key, producing
nothing, not a spark, i didn’t

 

think the engine was dead, but
gripped by panic i was frozen

 

in the knowledge that this
was how the world ended.

 

 

 

 

 

Christien Gholson

 

Two sections from “The Place of Stones”

 

6.  The Reservoir

 

Star aureole through a sheet of cobweb
draped from the underside of a hemlock trunk,

 

broken and bent-double from last fall's hurricane.

I keep returning to a nearby reservoir, the brick

 

cabin on stilts in the northwest corner, the marble
plaque on the door: Kingston Water Supply. Res No 4.

 

Erected 1909. Is it fascination for the remains 
of what no longer exists? We decided to finally abandon

 

the stomach feed tube, give him only water. His body
went into convulsions, shaking and jerking so hard

 

his morphine-slack eyelids popped open. Fear? Or
was it surprise? Is this death? Is this how I’m going

 

to die? We sat on either side of the bed, our hands
on his. What else could we have done?

 

 

 

7.  A Dream of Deer

 

Seven deer form a procession, weave
through the stones each night, heading

 

into someone's dream. Last night: a dream
of deer with wings. Silent as owls, they

 

sailed over the forest, shadows across
blue snow, predators out hunting. I was

 

a shadow inside a shadow of stone, trying
to hide; guilty, terrified. And the stones

 

drew them close. Sudden crack: ice binding
the surface of the reservoir to itself. Leaves

 

left in the trees sound like ice scraping air
(what divides night from day). Arc-weld

 

blue flame of Venus to the west: ecstatic
star-spike through the body of the dream.

 

 

 

 

 

Nels Hanson

San Joaquin

 

Cold pump water set to run till morning
flowed down furrows in the new dark
after Venus and Mercury flared in a sky

 

still blue above the Coast Range once
visible at noon, east the Sierra Nevadas
shading purple, green wide flatland

 

brief rose – Ah, San Joaquin, valley
tender as your name, I loved you
always and you broke my heart, towns

 

enclosed by a first darkness, sleeping
sea of orchards, the primeval forest
an alchemy breathing oxygen, the long

 

day’s golden light and dust. Not meant
for this new world of yours, I don’t
understand what you became or we

 

made of you, no stars, gentle summer
nights under changing walnut leaves,
palms on an island in the after-light

 

after the burning hours. Two brothers
from Michoacán and I drank beer in
dirty clothes and from folding chairs

 

the visiting hired man and his wife
watched the soap opera from Mexico
through the window screen of the one-

 

room house, their faces flickering in
the white glow. What was it went
wrong, why can’t I love you anymore?

 

With your million lights and million
cars a sacredness slipped like rich soil
falling past fingertips, moonlit water

 

running all night under ripening plums.
Why do I love what I can’t find I look
for everywhere since you went away?

 

 

 

Telstar

 

America’s first communications
satellite, a ball almost a yard wide,
170 pounds, shot into space in July

 

’62 atop a Thor-Delta rocket from
Cape Canaveral. On its elliptical
course, circling Earth every two

 

and a half hours, Telstar received
signals only 20 minutes each orbit,
when it flew over the Atlantic. It

 

ran on solar panels and transmitted
TV shows, telephone calls, Morse
Code for telegraph. A day before,

 

the US launched a high altitude
atomic bomb, “Starfish Prime,”
energizing the Van Allen Belt,

 

radiation from the blast and other
tests, a Russian bomb in October,
burning out Telstar’s transistors.

 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis
we built a Telstar of papier-mâché
too heavy to lift. An instrumental

 

song called “Telstar” by the British
band The Tornados in December
made number one on the Billboard

Hot 100 Chart. The electric guitars
express a nostalgia for the future,
for stardust, the endless journey

 

whose end we’ll never see, as if
like a wise Neanderthal we found
the different footprint in wet sand.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Jones

Scotland, 1974

 

The morning of my twenty-first birthday,
I left Edinburgh and hitchhiked north
on the A9 in the rain. I caught a ride
with a lorry. The young, bearded driver
educated me on the virtues of whiskey
and I was mesmerized by the uncanny
way his musical voice kept perfect time
with the metronome of the wiper blades.
The road narrowed. The land became
wild, mountainous, desolate, beautiful.
The lorry dropped me in the Highlands
in a remote place I couldn’t find on the map.

 

I’d ventured north in search of clans—
McEachins, Morrisons, northern Watsons,
my mother’s people, the ancient family,
the tartan colors, the heraldic flags—
though I had no idea where to look
and no set plan to discover them. Perhaps
I just wanted to walk their mountains,
or lie a while in the ever-changing sun
by a windswept lake, or find myself blessed
with the good fortune to spy a rare sprig
of white heather to slip in my notebook.

 

After the lorry fled into the mountains,
I realized I didn’t know where to go next.
The drizzle turned into a downpour.
I pulled on my poncho, crossed a bridge,
and walked on ahead to the next curve,
mountains rising to the west, a small glen
to my right falling into dark pinewoods.
Hiking boots soaked, rain in my eyes,
I stopped and stood still in that deluge
and reckoned the difference between
where I was and where I was going—
a young man with no name and no home,
yet with sense enough to see my only road
was not on the map, and I’d push on alone.

 

 

 

I Would Sleep on the Roof

 

I would sleep on the roof
but the pitch is too steep.
I’d build a booth in a tree
and live there for a season,
eating meals and studying
scripture by candlelight,
but storms took my maples
and the spruce trees are dying.
So once again I set up a tent
and fill it with all the things
I need: books, wine, pens,
lantern, blankets, and pillow.
I sit through the evening
in a half lotus, my old legs
aching a little, but happy,
and listen to a lively wind
flowing from house to house.
In the blue tent my breathing
is smooth and easy, my sleep
restful and healing. Dreams
come, but never nightmares,
not like those I suffer in bed,
where I shake and cry out
for someone to help me,
someone who never comes.
In the tent, I close my eyes.
Before falling asleep, I think
about the moon and its light.
The moon spends the night
with me, and we journey
from east to west together.
An hour before the sun rises,
I emerge from my tent and stand
in the yard by my dark house
while the blue mists of dawn
wash the past and future clean.

 

 

 

Oil for My Lamp

 

Like everyone else in town,

I fell victim to the epidemic

of loneliness. But when I saw 

people setting their own homes

on fire, I loaded my old mule

and walked up the mountain.

With a hatchet I cut saplings

and built a dry and sturdy hut.

In the forest and sunny glades,

I gathered herbs and mushrooms,

dug chicory root from hard dirt

with the knife I always carry.

I tended a cooking fire of twigs,

boiled rainwater in an iron pot,

sat on a mat and wrote poems

on river rocks, like Han Shan.

Nights of the harvest moon,

I wandered hillside orchards,

stealing apples from the rich.

I’ve heard the rich are never

lonely—they have shadows

for companions, and slaves

who whisper tales of love

in exchange for a bowl of rice.

But I don’t believe in rumors

or idle stories. I only believe

in the wind and that it is good

to keep a store of oil for my lamp.

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Kelty

Killdeer

 

If she did one thing perfectly
It was how she lifted her wing
Pretending to be hurt, holding
It out as if broken and scuttling
Along the ground away from her
Nest.  I didn’t fall for it
But many others had.  They’d
Met her at parties, liked her
Easy way, though they didn’t
Know the effort it took her
To come off that way.
                                  She came
From a mile and a half down
A country road whose name  once was just
A number, and dirt.  Spent her
Days flying to the treeline for twigs
And digging the lice out of her hair.
How I fell in love with her I don’t know,
Perhaps it was her father’s limp
Or maybe it was because of the way
She did that one thing so perfectly
It caught me off guard.

 

 

 

Muse

 

You come to peer in my window,
press your nose against the glass,
or remain a foot away unblinking,
eerily.

 

I know that if I approached and
gazed out over the pane, you
would have no torso.  Just a floating essence,
yet heavier than metaphor.

 

I turn my
back to you to chop onions,
or vacuum, though still feel your stare,
pulling yet without insistence,
like one planet drawing the other near.

 

We have come to know each other well. 
You with your oblong
head, your wild hair and overlarge
eyes bobbing in the dusky light.  I know

 

that when I lie down, turn on my side
and drift off, you will approach
and whisper in my ear all night long

 

until I begin to unfold like paper
and finally flatten out, ready
to be written on.

 

 

 

 

 

Claire Keyes

Sniffing His Hat

 

Item: three baseball caps tucked away
in the gritty back of the car. I hold one to my nose
and sniff it. Later I toss it in the washer.
So much for nostalgia, but perfect for kayaking.

 

Other hats, other vestiges:
his western, cowboy-dude hat, handsome
(gave that one to a friend), even a turkey-shaped hat,
a jokey gift from his daughter (to Goodwill).

 

Sporting his Russian hat, (Goodwill?) ear flaps
hanging during that February blizzard, he ferried logs
from the wood pile, split them, then tucked them
into the woodstove. Ah wood smoke!

 

But smelling for a bit of Jay in his hats, I doubt
I smell anything, no old sweat, no shiny grey strands
of hair. Still, I mine the past, the mundane, the once-was
flickering like silver in a vein.

 

 

 

 

 

Susanna Lang
Afternoon at Humboldt Park

 

August. The trees have grown fat with light.
You can still read the word HOME, all caps,
on the base of the statue, but the marble
has worn away so it is hard to recognize
the miner embracing his daughter after a long day
below ground. Someone gave him a Puerto Rican
flag to wave and home is now a distant island,         
the radios all playing their songs in Spanish.
Students from the art school fight the wind
for their drawing papers, try to make their pencils
gesture like trees. A small boy walks backward,
tossing morsels of bread, though he knows the way
to his house—past the statue with the flag, across
the street at the light, one block down, turn left.
But in this moment he is leading an army, if only
of pigeons, if only while he holds bread. Never mind
that they do not march in step, that they will not
win a single battle for him. Now while they are his,
the late afternoon pins a blazing medal on his T-shirt.

 

 

 

 

 

Charlene Langfur

The Sun is up Over the Mountains

 

The hills are green from the endless rain in the desert these days
but it feels like the resurgence of the heart is all over the place too.

 

I work long into the day and into the night and watch the stars at night
before I fall asleep. Out the window, the palm trees wave in the wind.

 

Early in the morning my dog is out leaping in the desert grass
and the wrens are hiding in the nooks on the old palm trees

 

as if we are all practicing and preparing to break free of it all
our spirits following after our dreams, on fire with the light

 

 

 

A Time of Wild Beauty

 

This is how it is for me, a gay woman
betrayed by a partner of ten years,
the house and the garden lost, gone in the blink
of an eye, and my income and job gone with it.
Years have gone by now and I still struggle
as if there is no clear way back or forward,
working odd jobs as if they are one whole job,
living alone, planning a day at a time,
trying to find the way back, the path back,
Each day in the morning, I say a prayer at first light
ringing the Korean meditation bell, its tone everywhere
in the air around me. An embrace of sound. And my 13-pound
honey colored dog kisses me on the cheek at the sound,
a ritual of exact and inexact timing, and this is when
I tie on my black leather shoes and head out
with her on the daily walk, we walk early after
the sunrise and I imagine we are walking to the ends
of the earth, a walk that always feels good because
we are in sync with the planetary spinning and each other,
walking past the palm trees in a soft and easy wind, past
the black crows talking to each other in the mesquite,
they are planning this and that and the smallest wrens flying
over the lavender buds, acrobats of their own kind,
and my dog is leaping in the desert grass, this is
how she does it, a lift and then a perfect arc, and always
I am forced to stop and smile, both of us in awe of the other
or so I think, the easy down exactly where we are, nowhere and
everywhere, the sun on our faces, the snow on top
of the canyon mountains surrounding us glistening in the light,
a wilderness of life we have learned by heart, astoundingly beautiful

 

 

 

 

Michael Lauchlan

Say Something

 

A small fire is starting near the door in the far corner of the hotel ballroom and I should probably say something about it to someone, anyone, but the room is loud, what with the half-time music and conversation. If I could remember who invited me here to eat and drink and watch a bowl game I’d try to find him--Roy--in the crowd. It was pretty outrageous that a guy--Ralph, no, Rudy--Rudy decided to rent out a room and put up a screen. I think that door leads to the kitchen. It’s a wonder the folks near the door don’t feel the heat, but, of course, the game is coming back on the big screen so everyone is turned away. Finally, I speak up--hey, there’s a bit of a fire going--or something like that. The last thing I want is to sound like a hysterical madman. I’m looking around for someone from the waitstaff who could definitely contact Rudy or a janitor or someone in authority but no one seems to be passing nearby with the shrimp, which is a shame in itself. So I call out a little louder and, wouldn’t you know it, right then a receiver takes a hit that knocks his helmet right off. For a minute, I think his head is rolling across the field. But of course they’d stop the game for that kind of thing, so I know I’m just imagining. A couple people flinch at the hit or growl approvingly. Then it strikes me that there are no waiters and waitresses because the damn door to the kitchen is on fire. I’m sure the kitchen has another exit so eventually one of them might come in with a tray. Of course, that could take a while. The drinks table still looks open but the bartender has split. So I’d raise my voice, but when I do that, like once when I stepped on a board with a nail sticking up, my voice goes all shrill. No one likes a shrill tone. A couple nearby is laughing so hard the champaign is spilling and splashing. I'd hate to startle them, especially the woman in her fine blouse. Hate to see her upset her flute onto that green silk. You think about the moment when the curtains catch, but you really have to be watching close to see it. They go up so fast, it’s just a flame colored ball rolling to the ceiling, and everyone is screaming and coughing and running now, and I should run as well. But I really can’t take my eyes off the flames.

 

 

Route

 

During dinner, a wild woman
rushed through my back door,
shrieking for her mother,

 

pursued by a man almost as lost
but also scary and large.

 

Who invites a cyclone
into the kitchen? Who wants the mad
rattling storms and trying the locks?

 

Not me. Milosz tells
of a 1940 suicide--how

a Russian Captain used his pistol

 

to resolve the mystery of human grief
and his place in it. Hard

 

to weigh his grams of pain against
bombs and tanks and death camps. 

 

We stare past the officer as though
we occupy a different volume

 

of the chronicle, as though ICE
isn’t cruising past the middle school

 

as though the rumbling I hear
is mere tinnitus. Cheery as hell,
we move the edge of things

 

across the lawn and down the block
and out of our minds, each of us
crafting a different escape.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Leight

The Return Trip Lasts Longer Than Anything Else

 

When I turn around
I’m facing the same way,
as if I’m changing places with myself.
I mean there are a lot of places that aren’t home—
when you’re looking for a place that isn’t home
it’s not hard to find one,
even if you’re not looking.
Not at home when you’re not somewhere else,
like a conveyance that moves along with everything else,
am I explaining this correctly? 
I’m not even sure if it’s time
or it isn’t time yet,
even after all this time—
it doesn’t help to look at your watch,
it doesn’t tell you how long anything takes.   
Momentum is often the unexplained absence of control,
as in a story that changes while you’re reading it,
I’ve seen it happen. 
Sometimes you move away from what
you think you’re moving toward,
the emotional distance is difficult to measure,
as when you’re listening to stations
on both ends of the dial,
not one or the other—
when you turn around
it’s not a form of restitution
that returns something that belongs to you,
as in a story that doesn’t know how far away the end is.
Practically everything is a distance.
You’re sort of no further along.
Thinking not when but if.
Continuing past the time limit
if there is one.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Many

City Windows

 

We drive, Gatsby-like to the
midnight city under the elevated
tracks of the N train, between its
massive 20th century pillars
with their mushroom rivets,
slats of moon and streetlight flashing
in epileptic flicker, over the
Queensboro Bridge. its lights hanging
like jeweled strands on the belly
of a zaftig burlesque queen.

 

We've heard you can pick up
girls, frustrated in love, disgorging
from the clubs, but the only two
we hail tell us to perform
some impossible act upon ourselves.
Would that we could.

 

With the windows
down, the night pours in
warm and inviting. the city is
abandoned and there's
exultation in commanding its
broad avenues, spanning huge distances
where by day we crawl among the throngs.

 

All the while, only half-seen
above the shuttered shops, whirring past
like the cells of some Truffaut movie:
these thousands of windows, whispering
their secrets as we ride in our jeans and T-shirts
in our father's timeworn Fords and Chevys,
their breath hot in our ears.

 

 

 

Moon Shoes

 

As we drove through wet streets
that last night together,
past the strip where the lighted
sign of a big box shoe store washed
the sky, you were suddenly crying
as you told me how your father--
angry all the time--once threw your
family's shoes out in the driveway
when he came home late
from his second job and
found them scattered in the entry.

 

Flip-flops, high heels, flats, oxfords,
boots, your brother's with the built-up
sole he had to wear since third grade--
you heard the clatter and looked out
and saw them splattered in the moonlit
driveway like those of bomb victims.

 

Later when we parked, the moon buoyed
up over the trees like a huge sad
bubble the color of a fluorescent bruise.
I thought about how it had waited
lonely up there all those billions of
years welcoming the first kiss
of an astronaut's boot.

 

 

 

 

 

Toti O’Brien

Dancers

 

Dancers hold their bodies like candles
altars decorated with clothes
old ladies have embroidered
perhaps by candlelight in the evening
or in the dead of noon
burned by exhaustion
curtain closed against the sunbeams.

 

Dancers hold their bodies like prayers
rising up like cigarette smoke
to gods sleeping, hushed by layers of clouds.
They hold their heads like crowns
of flowers floating on water
their smiles disembodied like dentures
made of milk and mother of pearl.

 

They wear exquisite mannerisms
sliding along their sleeves
to the tip of their fingers
coiled around their reptilian necks.
Their nails scratch the ether
like nibs piercing pinholes
through which strange scents are strewn.

 

Tang of lemony sweat
barbarous perfumes and a purple note
of adrenaline, aromatic oils of fatigue
bloody saltiness of swallowed fear.
They wear braces under their clothes
the color of skin.
Dancers wear braces tight.

 

 

 

Agony

And when pain and pleasure have reached
the point-d’orgue
perfect balance making them indissoluble
a hourglass diagonally inserted in her pubic bone
her vagina metamorphosed into a figure eight
the very shape of eternity.
With her eyes closed she can visualize their shade
seamlessly fluctuating from scarlet to violet
sometimes darkening then paling again
instantaneously, as if.

 

Pain and pleasure no more fighting for predominance
butting heads like stubborn rams
unified instead, melted irreversibly
sealed by a pact of perennial loyalty.
They have allied
in the secrecy of her membranes
kneeling on the velvety pew of her moist sex.
They have been married by some decadent prelate
their tie sworn by his beringed hand
on a sacred book.

 

Hugging tight now, and peacefully intimate
seasons seesawing
without intermitting temperance.
Chill of winter kissing summer dog days
as she craves the comfort of blankets
then a sudden cool breeze. Ice and fire.
Hurt clinging to pleasure so indelibly
they have melted into a pixelated landscape
intertwined in a monogram
stamped all over her cells.

 

Then she knows she has reached a plateau
place of no return, nameless landing.
Then she knows
the sires of this murderous gift
need no mentioning.
She locks the present moment
within a treasure chest to be enshrined
quietly worshipped.
She has brushed the round lips
of oblivion, of nothingness.

 

 

 

 

 

Claire Scott
The Sound of Life

 

I was still here once
the first strawberries of spring
bursting sour on my tongue
mushrooms swelling
under the bellies of trees
Lion’s Mane, Puffballs, Chanterelles
the orange flash of a Monarch
flitting through milkweed
I was still here once
the glitter of sea glass on the shore
the tang and brine
in the weave of waves
a gull’s coarse cry
the ache and awe of it all
I was still here once
until a curious lump
sent me straight to stage four
do not pass go
do not collect your fiftieth anniversary
or see your grandson graduate
death tiptoeing behind
with a dustpan and brush
swish swoosh
swish swoosh
the sound of life
erasing itself

 

 

 

 

 

Hilary Sideris

Reflections on Smooth Metal
              --after Temple Grandin

 

Cows walking
single file hate

 

climbing a stain-
less steel chute.

 

The sides jiggle.
They stand still

 

& behold what
humans don’t—

 

how strung lights
shake in the wet

 

breeze. Puddles
from leaking pipes

 

reflect, for cows,
the shapes of men

 

who often mean
to do no harm.

 

 

 

Screwworms
             --after Temple Grandin
   
We were not immune.
They laid their eggs in
our nostrils. Most maggots
eat dead flesh, these fed
on open wounds—scratched at

 

tick bite, barbed-wire puncture,
purple navel of a just-born calf.
My aunt dug them out of her
horses with her hands, filling
their wounds with a black goop

 

like roofing tar. We doubled
down & wiped them out,
irradiating males in the pupa
stage. Their mates laid myriad
eggs that did not hatch.

 

 

 

My Machine
             --after Temple Grandin

 

The loves of people
puzzle me. I can’t follow
the plot of Romeo

 

& Juliet, abide a human
hug. I panicked when vast
Grandin aunts, perfumed,

 

effusing, cornered me. I turn
my air compressor on—I thought
it up at Texaco, filling

 

my tires—soft walls, deep
pressure, but I choose steady
or pulsating. At sixteen,

 

I built my prototype. Inside,
I understood that cats don’t
like head pats. That night

 

I made Ginger purr, stroking
her back the way a mama
licks her kitten’s fur.

 

 

 

 

 

Annette Sisson

In Pursuit of Starlight

 

I.
The astronomer’s uncanny string
of numbers pinpoints the oldest star,
its yellowish-white light christened
cosmic latte. It originated thirteen
point eight billion years ago,
six thousand light-years away,
each light-year six trillion
miles. Earthbound, we study
curving mirrors to see what opacity
and desolation might yield, how
our grasping to fathom is universally derived,
interpolated by a factor of cosmic dust.

 

II.
A man trains chimpanzees to explode
into space, streak through dark energy,
break into orbit. The compliant apes manage
levers, indicate their waking, their ongoing
aliveness. They yield to the seduction of work,
their ball-peen focus a window in a dark
vessel, hypnotic as a trail of whirling hydrogen.

 

III.
Idaho’s dark skies pull us to
its barren black. The indifferent moon
burns low. A slow nightfall mists
our breath, crawls into our jackets,
seeps under the hoods. When the stars
blink into view, as if just awakened,
we fall into the sky, reckless of warmth
and ease. Stardust leaks into our pupils.
We are starlit, radiant from the inside out.

 

 

 

A Honeyed Sorrow

 

This return, as pressing
as autumn’s bow to winter,

 

as binding as the confederation
of wind and tree. The cord

 

for decades unraveled, I travel
to see again these lost

 

parents. And I wonder why
this pilgrimage, why

this abiding gratitude,
this need to part anew.

And the smell of autumn leaves,
overripe and brittle,

 

their decay a tender
savory—ligneous and piquant,

 

like dark chocolate,
its sweetness scarcely sweet.

This mud on my tongue
tastes not bitter,

 

but like the honeyed sorrow
of an aged and faultless earth.

 

 

 

The Color of Light

 

Water ripples. A translucent film
                     glistens, creases itself into bright
          silk folds trailing the surface.
This color is no color,
                     nor transparent—it magnetizes
          the eye, a girl coveting jewels.
It must be the color of light.
                     Distilled particles crystallize
          on Radnor Lake, early morning,
sundown. They crest the western
                     waters and the cloud shine over
          canyons. They glitter in the Tetons’ ice.
The gibbous moon, the crescent, gleam—
                     not white, not silver, but something too
          mystical to say. Like when we canoe
through schools of iridescent trout.
                     We revel in their didoes. One
          slices the water’s skin, surfaces,
sudden. Like when you sidle up
                     to my back as I write at my desk,
          your slow breath in my hair, fingers
on my neck, mouth over my ear. Your
                     nearness, graze, your astonishing fidelity,
          familiar as the melt of afternoon sun,
is as startling, as diaphanous, as the lucent
                     mist of a waterfall’s aura, as Radnor’s
          dazzling glister, as a trout, its exuberant
rainbow scales leaping into light.

 

 

 

 

 

Young Smith
My Neighbor in a Storm   

 

What is it, I wonder, that brings him out
to meet the burst of a midnight thunderhead?

 

To stand on the lawn in his pajamas and socks
while the wind rakes over the splashing mud?

 

Through the blinds, I watch his bald spot strobe
in the fits of light that bloom and yank

 

across the bellies of the clouds. Though he blinks
and squints, he never lifts a hand to shield his eyes,

 

and yet, in that face—I find no drunken smile,
no swollen look of pain or grieving that would

 

give his actions sense. As the water makes
his robe grow dark, his lips begins to move.

 

He’s singing now, I think—though I shut
the blinds to keep his voice outside.

 

 

 

Tell Him It’s Lorraine

 

She came in crying just before we closed,
stood around for a while, then mumbled:
“Railey. Horace Railey. Tell him it’s Lorraine.”

 

When we said we didn’t know the name,
she sighed and shut her eyes: her look was certain—
men like us were what was wrong with the world.

 

“Well,” she said, “when you meet him, give him these.”
And from her purse, she dropped them on the counter—
between the tire gauges and the spark plug tools—

 

a pair of  bronzed baby shoes tied together
with a strap of yellowed lace. 
          Later, once she was gone,

 

and we’d run out of ways not to talk about it, Tommy
locked the shoes in the safe underneath the register.
As far as I know, Horace never took them home.

 

 

Three Nights after Stopping the Zoloft

 

There is a mirror on her bedroom door.
In it, the window by her nightstand.

 

The moon among bare tree limbs.
The black roofs of neighbors’ houses,

 

and a face.

 

She tries to pray, but the words
are stones. They drop

 

from her lips, tumble
into the water of the night.

 

In the mirror, she touches
the bones of the cheeks,

 

the bridge of the nose,
the hair of the eyebrows—

 

yes, it is her face.

 

She holds its chin
in the palm of her hand.

 

She finds its eyes in the glass,
but can’t meet their stare.

 

She tries to pray—
the words are stones.

 

 

 

 

 

J.R. Solonche
The Lady of the News

 

Every night I watch the lady of the news.
I do not like the news.
But I like her.
There is nothing to like about the news.
The news is all bad.
Every night the news is all bad.
But I like the lady of the news.
She does not have blonde hair.
She has black hair.
She does not have blue eyes.
She has black eyes.
She does not have fair skin.
She has dark skin.
She is not pretty the way that pretty is.
She is beautiful the way that beautiful is.
The news is neither pretty nor beautiful.
The news is ugly.
But I like to watch the lady of the news.
I like her voice.
Her voice is not pretty.
Her voice is beautiful.
Her voice delivers the ugly news beautifully.
If one must listen to bad news, this is the way to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Spring

I leave behind the fool I've become

 

because I no longer talk to the azeleas
nor to the flowering dogwoods

 

nor to the thrushes or bees or earthworms
I'm afraid the world inside me
has no fish in the lakes, no visible stars
only smoldering cedars
and partial dreams sinking into partial dreams

 

I'm afraid I'll never again see the stone
buildings of my ancestral home
and I'll dissolve like a sand sculpture in the rain

 

that is why I've unplugged myself
from my house and I now lean over, listening
to this green moth on a green leaf

 

that is why I leave behind the fool I've become

 

I’m under the last street light
before the walkway over the river bridge

 

the green moth floats into open space
becomes the moon
rising above the distant mountains

 

I can sense a new future self watching me

 

I know I will find him here on this path
where stone flows and folds away from the city
where rocks look like bones and internal organs
and the mossy trees look like breathing animals

 

 

 

drift line

 

I drag my heavy shadow as if I’m sleepwalking,
my head bent as I shuffle across the sand.
Or I crawl on my hands and knees.
Or I sit and stare knowing I came here
to simply stretch out on the beach, not this!

 

The beach's giant seastack looks
like a squatting frog with a periscopic eye.
Waves explode over its body as high tide approaches.
I worry about the potential sneaker wave,
but I don't lose my focus on the drift line.

 

I gather driftwood and petrified wood.
Chunks of metal. Bones. Shells.
Here’s a sacrum and there’s the disfigured pelvis
like wax forms warped from heat.
There's a lion-faced woman
and a boot or the hilt of a sword.

 

This knotted piece makes the head of a crow.
This flare of wood makes a pair of wings.

 

I'm here with a dozen beachcombers,
transfixed, illuminated,
akin to Tibetan monks with their woven bags
full of colored sand.

 

The hovering shorebirds might see us as part
of a multihued mandala
as we shuffle and crawl, undeterred.

 

And nothing would deter us. Nothing!
Even if a whale surged onto the beach and opened
its cavernous mouth. As long as there was
a continued line of treasures, we would enter.

 

And perhaps we have --
perhaps we're in such a darkness now, believing
we're still collecting what the ocean brought us.
I feel a shifting beneath my feet
as if the whale slides back into the surf.

 

There’s the crash of waves.
There it is again. And again.

 

 

 

 

 

D.E. Steward

Big Cabin Testament

 

Derek Walcott walked out for coffee from his Arkansas motel early on a winter Sunday morning confronted overtly by slavery’s heritage

On a ridge over Fayetteville,
higher than any steeple,
is a white-hot electric cross.

He waited by a wall until a police cruiser passed

 

“I was still nothing. A cipher”

 

His “Arkansas Testament” is of the 1970s domain of poets C. D. Wright and Frank Stanford

 

A peculiar conjunction

 

 “…I write this / in shorter days, darker years, more hatred, more racial rage”

 

Speculatively Walcott probably was visiting the university as a guest of the Razorback creative writing department or whatever the U of Arkansas called it

 

C. D. Wright did an MFA there and then stayed on

 

“This, after all, was the South, / whose plough was still the sword”

 

Lost Roads Publishers

 

Locale of Stanford’s June 1978 suicide on Jackson Drive over on Fayetteville’s eastside

 

On the Ozark Plateau close to Missouri and cheek by jowl with Oklahoma

 

Empty northwestern Arkansas

 

Fort Smith and Fayetteville, the Boston Mountains along bleached AR-16 via Swain and St. Paul, pop. 113, on the Dog Branch of the White River

 

A peculiar locale for poets in their potentcies

 

In all that Ozark hog-pen emptiness

 

Wright was born in Mountain Home a few counties east of Fayetteville on the Missouri line and Stanford arrived in Mountain Home in junior high

Ride rural roads in that part of Arkansas and see remarkably few pickups and cars

 

Vehicles, as they call them in the rural Ozarks, are minimally twenty thousand a pop, a new Ford 150 truck goes for thirty plus

 

People who do have jobs there make upwards of only eight-fifty an hour

 

Closed in, limited options, hard to pick up stakes to try it somewhere else

 

And on minimum wage impossible to boost yourself out of credit card debt

 

Minimum, minimal, minimize, minimax, minima 

 

Locked into where you are, what you are

 

What becomes ingrown, and what it is that cosmopolitans are critical of when rural is on the table, if it ever comes into play at all

 

As rarely as two noteworthy poets having come from the same town in the Ozarks

 

One who stayed there and died young, the other who stayed there for her first thirty years

 

“Everyone who could handle an oar / headed for hell in a boat” (Wright, “Blazes”)

 

As they lived with one another on Jackson Drive in Fayetteville reinforcing each other’s Ozark sensitivities

 

“The sun drove a man into the ground like a stake” (Wright, “Bent Tones”)

 

“listen are we really fucking / the people we love” (Stanford, “Liaison”)

 

As in all limited-scope situations turning into themselves

 

Not only in isolation or loneliness

 

But taken as a cast of the dice

 

The national vastness, the interior breadth of each state, like those Arkansas Ozark counties with double county seats

 

It’s a big place we live within

 

Its vastness abashes

 

Arkansas alone has seventy-five counties

 

There are hundred and fifty-nine in Georgia, two hundred fifty-four in Texas

 

New York has probably over a million single-occupancy, studio apartments

 

Shorter from Orange in Texas to the Atlantic, and from El Paso to the Pacific, than it is to go from Orange to El Paso

 

It is vast and the scale numbs and twists truths and realities 

 

Once in the middle of the middle on the way from Rolla to Tulsa, passed by the Pea Ridge National Battlefield at the Missouri line, stopped and read the signs

 

Then drove on west toward the Will Rogers Turnpike and camped in rangeland out from another Civil War battle site

 

It was Big Cabin on the old Texas Road in Craig County, Oklahoma

 

The second of the two Big Cabin battles was two Cherokee regiments under a Confederate general attacking a Union wagon train in 1864   

 

Those Cherokees after being forced westward out of the Southeast by Andrew Jackson and then a generation later coming in on the losing side again was like the vaunted Iroquois Confederacy putting its bets on the British in the Revolution

Neither the Six Nations nor the Cherokees came close to the success of the Pueblos when it came to parrying the ultimate winners

 

Even though in the end the Pueblo tribes lost out as badly as the Six Nations had

 

Those two most significant occupier-and-occupied ethnic wars

And then down the line Wounded Knee in December 1890 was alternative North America’s last gasp

 

That 1950s evening near Big Cabin an immense B-52 was on its landing glide headed right at us where we had laid out our sleeping bags in the deep dusk

 

It hung out off the horizon and maneuvered silently for tens of minutes in the extremely clear air while we were convincing each other that it was not an UFO

 

In country that is as open as that you just go on from there

 

You wonder how their horses found grazing 

 

“rolling his fist at the moon” (Frank Stanford, “Black Swan”)

Like Hanson’s Second Symphony sublime first movement’s emerging theme

 

As that open-country westerner Jackson Pollock didn’t have a seatbelt on when he drove into a tree on Long Island in August 1956

 

Empty America, the great American lack

 

That sets the character

 

“Americans… became what they are today – truculent, sullen and envious” (Gore Vidal)

 

Trumpismo

 

Full bore

 

“Did it ever occur to you, Sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?” (Stonewall Jackson)

 

We stand behind fences now to take selfies before strolling back to our cars

 

No matter whatever else is going on it was a spectacular 2016 Winter Solstice sunup at 40.36N x 74.67W

 

And last August’s Oregon–to-South Carolina solar eclipse’s band of totality was magnificently humbling

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Suermondt
Third Street and Middlesex

 

Sparrows in the tree
by the courthouse.

 

I wave and they scatter,
a blur in the air,
refugees in their own country.

 

I climb the concrete steps
and wave again, the summons
in my hand,

 

asking for justice.

 

 

 

Kowloon, Hong Kong

 

I wander through its park,
an oasis in the middle of
the frenetic pulse of the city.

 

I check out the swans and the array
of local and exotic birds.
I sit by the fountain stately poised

 

in front of the ancient shrines—
I’m no Buddhist, but like them
I feel real serenity and peace

 

on the march, despite the days
and years that almost made me
doubt it all in despair and anger.

 

My wife is coming from Austin Road,
bringing a bag of waffle delights—
we’ll eat them here before heading

 

to the harbor, the sea air in our nostrils
like love and freedom, happiness.

 

 

Van Gogh Wakes Up

 

and stares at the brown ceiling
    of his tiny room, a few splotches

 

of white stuck like sad stars.
    He decides to go back to sleep—

 

the fields, the crows, the sky
    and the lost souls at the café

 

will still be there later. The world
    will always wait for you if you let it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rodney Torreson

The Man Who Delivered Flowers Along Leonard Street

 

Dangerous, it was, to be so near to love
without it touching him, to be a mere
conduit between hearts.

 

Few could have survived their own hands
being buried in bouquets every day
unless he had his own love at home.

 

All over the West Side, you’d see him—
a big moon-head of a man in his 40s—
his wide hallmark hellos

 

faring as well as any cheer,
then smart in his little dance of backtalk
with employees at Mickey D’s.

With tulips or roses lipping forward,
stemmed to a place of honor

under his chin, he’d trot a beeline

 

across the intersection to some gal
in the beauty shop, a pretty head
under one of those big

 

lampshade-size dryers—
where she’d lip-read his leafy
whispers while her heart thumped

 

a woozy loop that managed somehow
to miss him altogether. Only the petals
she pressed to her bosom

 

could lower her chin, caught as she was
in the afterglow, with the deliverer,
in his role, floating back

 

from the bouquet in the harmony of
avoidance, to leave her there,
steam teeming up from her blouse,

 

her turned-up nose waving high
for the scent, lifting the entire side street
up from the margins.

 

 

 

 

 

Reagan Upshaw

Mottes

motte: n. dialect:  a copse or small stand of trees on a prairie

 

 

They seem almost to float upon the land,
dark ships upon a brown and rolling ocean;
this one crests the low wave of a rise,
that one founders in a gulley’s trough.

 

Driving past, we notice them and wonder
why here, not there?  What stone, dropped by a glacier,
served as a reef to snag that one?  And here,
what cranny caught and held the floating seed?

 

Around them, furrowed earth gives evidence
that farmers clear and till.  Why were these spared?
Was this small patch too marshy, or did ploughshares
break upon a rock too big to move?

 

For whatever reason, they survived.
An inventory of their native fauna –
field mice, a nesting crow, the usual spiders
spinning their webs for flies – would disappoint.

 

Our need is for exotic denizens:
within this shade, in our imaginations,
mountain lions snarl as they survey us,
fugitives in leg irons wait for nightfall.

 

Such fancies have no risk of being disproved,
for we will never stop the car, have clothing
torn by the fence’s barbs, and stumble through
a muddy field to a prosaic find.

 

We leave the mottes inviolate as those groves
scattered across our brains, havens from which
strange beings break into our dreams, envoys
from the darkness we suspect is our true home.

 

 

Carnivore

 

The hills of Mendocino, that late summer,
lay stretched around us, tawny as the haunches
of a sleeping lion, you said, so much alike
that if you reached to touch them, you would find
their grass as soft as fur, being the same color.
It was the other way around, of course:
the grass was not the color of a lion;
a lion is the color of its grass.
You might have said the hills were like gazelles
and elands, or the shadows zebra-striped.
Protective coloration is the yin
to camouflage’s yang, grim predator
and frightened prey matched to each other’s hue,
or, rather, both matched to the dry savanna.

 

The landscape of my boyhood was as flat
as the dusty football field that it surrounded,
where junior-high-school warriors prepared
for Friday’s game, something much more than sport,
they told us: it would show what we were made of.
Under the coach’s unforgiving eye,
not-quite-men proving our half-baked manhood,
we sucked it up, we shook it off, we played
with pain and showed the world we weren’t pansies.
Afterwards, our locker-room bravado
echoed off the steamy shower tiles.
Our towel-popping horseplay was as close
as most of us would get to other boys.
How many of us already feared they might
be what we all purported to despise?
I don’t know to this day.  Whatever doubts
I had about my masculinity,
I had things easier that those boys did,
fortunate at least that I liked girls,
that my desire to touch their budding breasts
was quite unfeigned.

 

                                  A leopard cannot change
its spots, but I changed mine the following year,
trading my football jersey for a skin
more stippled in its hue, with intellect
and any sign of sensitivity
well-camouflaged by deprecating humor.
What was I so afraid of?  At the time,
I thought that I was prey, needing protection
from hungry jaws, but now a backward gaze,
if honest, falls upon a line of victims,
whose hearts I clawed, whose helpless cubs I killed,
a mewling whelp grown into a rogue male.

 

Still dreaming and yet half-awake, I lie
breathing the savory air of the savanna
and feel the sunshine warm upon my haunch.
My ear moves, not to catch a threatening sound,
but lazily to flick away a fly.
I recognize myself at last, I know
the taste upon my tongue is blood, not grass.

 

 

 

 

 

Erin Wilson

Thinking While Driving, Northern Ontario, November

             “The world is everything that is the case.”
                                                                 Ludwig Wittgenstein

Asphalt. Highway. Rock cut.
Late fall -- fringes of faltered loosestrife frozen to berm.

Rushing along the corridor strips the mental town of excess,
leaving the longing soul to ring purely—
Come nearer, I must have an affair with you,
cold embodiment of holy.

The sacred rugged rings its empty bell, leans forward,
equally longing to be glimpsed from behind its pall.

Pull back the mastodon of placental curtain.

The great icicles flowing to form
off the drift of Precambrian shield
are manifest enough to plunge and enter
the wiliest language-coated human heart.



From Teshigahara's Desert the Ocean Flows to Fill a Bucket

Water, it seems, longs to fill the container.
The melon assuredly finds solace in the rind.

The invisible energy of the tree
presses directly outward into its thousand wrinkled folds.

And the wind rushes madly forward
rubbing its face into the sweet palms of the outstretched leaves.

Your body -- I tremble at considering your body,
for how long did your soul rush forward to meet it?

And now you, the water,
how you rush forward into me.

But no container lasts forever, as they say and as we try to listen.
We weep in, we weep out, we are and are not, the great dance of transmutation.

I tremble considering your body.
I tremble considering your soul.

I coalesce within the rind of anguish.



Ingress

You would never
pelt a robin's egg
from its nest,
would you?
Kick your lover
out of bed
as your sinew shoots,
efflux, to fluctuate?
Just try to separate
red
from the
Gladiolus cardinalis.

When a poem
truly enters its home,
you don't fuck with it.



Mediation Beside an Unkempt Lot

 

Say and savour this:

Betula alleghaniensis,
Juglans nigra,
Populus balsamifera,
Populus tremuloides,
Acer saccharinum,
Quercus velutina,
and Prunus pensylvanica or—pin cherry,
all movement above a low lying bedding of bracken,
a list of plants and trees I experience—sway and caesura,
but don't know the names of except for the duration of this poem.

It is early Sunday morning and the breeze has not taken on any heat.

The leaves, with their various shapes and textures,
are passing with the wind, one way and then the other,
showing their topsides, then bottoms,
their two faces required to allow the being of their one body.

I am walking with wet hair but am warmed, and my hair is drying.
Tossed and tousled about my face, my vision isn't less,
but because of this sentient involvement has evolved to become more.
The name that I sometimes go by is not needed. Isn't.



Four White Calves Trot Out Onto the Field

 

Sometimes, when the pin cherry pushes its white clits
out through the holes between the air,
words are born.

Sometimes, when the milk moon moans and her breasts roll off into valleys,
one to the east, one to the west,
a metaphor begins.

And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes
four white calves trot out onto the field.

Can we imagine a world where only this happens?
And can we imagine that this is enough?

The four white calves are the first four white calves
always
and only.

 

 

 

 

 

Mike Wilson

Ancestor Worship

 

We didn’t take Christmas wreaths
to our parents’ graves this year;
the ground housing their remains
is unvisited, unadorned.

 

Graves we visit hourly are
regrets and remembered loss,
the not-gotten gain we husband at
the lip of the black hole till we fall in

 

and join forgotten lives in ground
mowed by strangers, marked by stone
more steadfast than family, visited daily
by birds, at night by the wind.

 

 

 

 

Howard Winn

April Fool

 

Snow is falling even though
it is April and Spring
for nature cannot be trusted
in this time of iceberg melting
as the seas rise and the
glaciers retreat even from
Antarctica and south Pacific
Islands disappear under seas
and Melanesians find no place
to live between fishing for
life and resting in the sunny
warmth of those rising southern
seas for if you believed in Mother
Nature she is not to be trusted
to act as maternal as myth told
you she should be but as hard-hearted
as the Wicked Witch of the West
in a fairy tale more real that fiction

 

 

 

Wheels 

 

turn under him and the minor motor
whirls him down the street on
the motor bike bought for his
older brother a few years past
but now it is his as that sibling
has moved on to larger vehicles
that impress the female classmates
at his school for these vehicles are
just the labels of growth and minor
aging into beginning adulthood as
necessary symbols of evolving
hormones that establish manhood
in the male culture where intelligence
is not the measure but often the
handicap for an ethos that prefers
illusion rather than genuineness

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Young

how / much can / a grizzly bear

 

          Oil prices slipped on
                      Friday, just in time for
the girls' drama & gymnastics
 classes. Now two of the
                                   three ratings agencies
         agree: the summer cruise

season coincides with
                            hurricane season. We
          celebrate the music of
                 The Grateful Dead with
           armed conflicts & suicide
                               attacks, advertise it on
 Guns America creating
                      both novel social inter-
                            actions between bats
    & humans & Billboard-
                             charting albums. Support
           for the Perseid meteor
               shower with the eBay
                                seller community  is
                  building to a peak. Eco-

systems need improvised
                                       explosions & aerial
                          bombardments. Ian is
     a male model. Ian is a
                       bicycle rider. August
            is an endurance race
                          for the trail warrior.

 

turpentine

 

That was about the time he gave up trying to mollify the Hollywood censors. The entire family was dispatched to Russian America, hidden in a miscellaneous cargo of amethysts, barley, & cashews. He laughed about it later, saying he was glad there had been no zebras aboard; otherwise the family's Cyrillic characters would have stood out like turpentine against such an Anglo alphabet.

 

 

 

since violence is learned

 

The library platform is indepen-
dent in all sections, apart from the
young adult ministry niche. That's
involved in environmental manage-
ment matters — such as: can a fully
veiled woman purchase a vehicle? —
in addition to training multilingual
staff to assist you with debugging

 

problems, & providing tour & ticket
assistance. Soldiers encourage the
youth to attend. The more aged &
less mobile are taken away to be dis-
posed of thoughtfully. Tolerance is no
longer available, is replaced by trauma.