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Poetry
Hamilton Stone Review #36 Spring 2017
Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor

 

 

Chris Abbate

A Good Snowstorm

 

The way he says your mother

as if she had become a function,

a light switch he had flicked off,

a vase, but not the flowers in it,

the car battery that needs charging,

the exit he used to take to go home.

 

The way she asks about your father

as if he had belonged to her at one point,

as if she were tossing a pair of pants into the hamper,

potato peels down the garbage disposal,

as if he were the torn recliner in front of the television,

her asthma coming on again.

 

The way they refer to my divorce

as if it were something they had earned,

new cars and separate houses,

as if it were a carcass the vultures wouldn’t find,

or a good snowstorm, the town buried in an alien white,

one that makes you forget yesterday,

the sidewalks and the very ground you had walked on.

 

 

A New Room

 

By the day Reagan was shot that March

our eighth grade teacher had branded us

insubordinate

and had us stand against the wall

if we were caught talking.

My classical guitar teacher

had declared my playing

desultory.

The walls of his lesson room

were covered with black and white photos

of serious men holding instruments,

scrutinizing my fitful fingers against the strings.

 

On TV that night I watched with my parents

the video loop of gunshots and flurry.

Men the size of my father,

scrambling,

face down in their suits,

the fallen trees of their bodies.

 

In the days that followed I felt

a new room in my mind:

a space for teachers

to make sense of motives,

for the world’s insanity

to come and sit for a while.

It was a room filled with

adolescence and danger,

fists in every corner,

and a smell the way I imagine

rain trapped above a ceiling would smell,

or bullets after leaving the barrel –

their spent copper lives

scattered across a wet sidewalk.

 

 

January 28, 2012

          For Benjamin

 

Today your father and I loaded

your first twin mattress

into the back of his minivan,

hauled it upstairs to your room

and placed it in the bedframe

that once held his first mattress.

 

Your mother spread a new comforter

with toy planes while behind her

jets sliced paths in the blue sunlight

across the transom high in the foyer.

 

At the park your feet

dangled beneath the monkey bars –

twin birds propelling you into boyhood.

 

At the air museum with you on my shoulders,

wingspans wider than your eyes,

the Enola Gay hung, suspended

like a shiny bullet in a black and white memory

while a docent replied to questions adults asked –

the weight of bombs and exothermic reactions.

 

On the way home

I checked on you in your car seat,

a thumb in your mouth,

the other hand under your shirt,

your index finger pressed into your belly button

as if to relieve some pressure.

 

Someday I will explain life to you in terms of flying,

as a cycle of take-offs and landings,

of moving from one place to another.

I will say how we are the planes

and their intentions,

and how, after the rattle and hum of the day,

we shed our incidental cargo,

fold ourselves into bed

and dream of doves,

their silver, papery wings.

 

 

The Wolves of Them

 

He dropped out of college to marry her.

She sacrificed her thread of spontaneity.

 

He would give her a son and a daughter.

She would give him a home and a mortgage.

 

The wolf of him –

his den and chair.

The wolf of her –

her kitchen and stove.

 

One day he came home from work

and ate another chicken she baked.

He couldn’t recall a thing before dinner

and recoiled at the tomorrow

she held in the corners of her mouth.

 

He was still speaking in code.

She had begun speaking in clouds.

 

The night after she left him he lost a thumbnail.

He planned to reattach it

so he picked it off his pillow

and placed it on his nightstand.

The next morning he lost the whole thumb.

Eventually his fingers were gone,

which made sense since he couldn’t recall

the last time he had touched her.

Next were his privates,

which he would have liked to keep

for someone else perhaps.

Then his arms, his legs,

everything except his head.

 

Odds were they would divorce.

They had said this to each other in passing.

He heard himself saying this now

to his coworkers and neighbors

who inquired about his body.

 

They had married their best intentions;

not the rugged edges of their words

or the burr of their resentment,

but the wolves under the house,

the danger they thought they could tame.

 

 

Omniscient Sea

 

1900. The year you were born,

Grandma. You said you went

with the years, so I always

knew how old you were.

 

Visiting you in Florida. 1980.

My first plane ride. I was ten.

I gripped the armrest with

one hand and my glow-in-the-dark

Rosary in the other. My brother

was too excited about flying to pray.

Isn’t it ironic that I was closer to

Heaven, but scared to death of falling?

 

Summers. You came back north.

When I visited, you offered me

the cookies you baked. You said

you were tired of living. I didn’t

think someone holding a tray of

cookies could be so sad. You asked

if I was going to Mass and I told you

the truth. Don’t sin, honey, you said.

It will make God cry.

 

You had wanted me to become

a priest. Youngest grandson.

Last hope. At twenty-five, I moved

in with my girlfriend. She wasn’t

Catholic. God was Catholic.

You kept pictures of him

on your knitting table next to

the muffin foil with your pills.

 

1996. September. It rained at

your funeral. In October

my girlfriend and I married under

a stone gazebo on the beach.

It rained that day too. Now

this refrain of water. Raindrops

scattered across your casket.

God’s tears in an omniscient sea.

 

 

 

 

Michael Aird

Just When You Thought Moody’s Wouldn’t Notice

 

If a machine were invented

that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere,

turning it into food or construction materials,

while rebuilding topsoil, its inventor

would be a celebrity millionaire—

                                    and yet,

                                    I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of wired

 

It’s therefore not surprising

            that people are waking up to headlines

                        which economists have whispered forever:

                                                Bats are worth at least 3 billion a year;

                                                The absence of dung beetles would cost

                                                58 million per annum in lost nitrogen

 

As Dolf de Groot’s alluded to,

every year we lose the equivalent worth

of trillions of dollars of natural capital—

                                    making Nature Inc., hands down, the largest

                                    market failure ever recorded

 

There’s never a FREE lunch, but there have been

            lots of complimentary feasts—if that’s what you call

            clean water—and imagine Mother Nature

            sitting at a kiosk at the foot

            of the Catskill Mountains, or a bee

                        presenting you with an invoice

                        for pollination services

 

                                                In fact in China

                                                farmers have been forced to carry pots of

                                                pollen and paintbrushes around, and have

                                                their children climb to the highest blossoms

 

That’s what happens when Gaia’s greatest assets

                                    are economically invisible

 

TEEB’s global initiative

to securitize the biosphere

has thus been met with raucous applause

from policy makers and service users

alike

 

            Now we can finally suture

                        our improved ability to make

            economic valuations

                        with the existence of unpriced

                        environmental goods—and hopefully

                                                lessen anxiety in the long term

 

As I said previously, we need

such ecoinformatics to maximize

our portfolio effect—when you manage

                        one-seventh of the Dutch pension sector

                                                            deforestation can be

                                                            financially material

 

To understand the economic impacts

of ES on credit risk scenarios

                        the Natural Capital Declaration

                        has developed a range of analytic tools

                        to inform markets

 

                                    In general the idea

                                    is to scour attitudinal data

                                    for aggregate trends or class-specific

                                    preference heterogeneity

                                                            among stakeholders

 

Before concerned governments step in,

or expert knowledge (ECK) can design

an ecological infrastructure,

                        consumer choice behaviour will first

                                    determine the Willingness to Pay

                                    and explicitly portray interactions

                                    between supply and demand

 

Will there be some fuzzy outcomes related to

            a motivational pluralism

            around passive use values?

Sure: there are those that like birdwatching—

            but, for the most part, cost-benefit analysis

                        has proven optimal for targeting

                                    the distinct corpus in robust

                                    social-ecological networks

 

CBA can also help scale up

the policyscape

to manage temporal irregularities,

such as option valuing,

or spatial irregularities,

such as mitigation banks taking deposits

on adverse

biodiversity residuals

 

                        Mother Nature can be

                        a tricky negotiator,

                                    always looking for the double counting

                                    of both amenities and disamenities—

                        and so capital misallocation

                        is a constant threat

 

But we don’t want to be caught committing

            statistical murder, which is why

            this is not about a Green New Deal—

                        it’s about sitting down with Nature’s

                        best and brightest and talking shop:

                                    opportunity costs, adjustments

                                    on the margin, and who the hell anyway

                                    ever welcomed their celebrity status

 

 

 

The Child Thus Relied Upon the Objectification of the Higher or Lower Number of his Opponent’s Cerebral Folds in Order to Achieve his Success

 

As the saying goes,

you can’t manage what you can’t measure—

                        which is why flaccid assessment methods

                        have the majority perilously happy

                        limiting their risk responsibility

                        to ticking check boxes

 

While we can trace its root back to the word

riscus or dangers to avoid at sea,

            I don’t want my risk management practice

                        perpetually stuck between a rock

                                    and an annual heat map

 

                        Is it any wonder then that

                        leaders in the field are gravitating

                        toward a holistic view of risk?

                                    interaction matrices, bow-tie diagrams,

                                    systems that allow users to roll up

                                    and drill down for analysis and reporting

 

            Creating a comfortable risk culture

            where stakeholders participate

            in open heart discussions can help

            aggregate risks

 

                                                            Workplace spirituality can also

                                                            energize action, connect coworkers

                                                            to each other and the accumulating

                                                            zeitgeist

 

Otherwise propagation effects

throughout the project structure will likely

trouble the notion of risk ownership—

                        interfaces between actors within

                        risk clusters need to be highlighted

                                    and managed

 

            Who’s going to handle the components of

            supply chain risk—atomistic sources

            such as adverse selection, or else

            the more universal threats of goal conflict

            or a supplier’s moral hazard?

 

                        Who’s going to exercise

                        our constructive paranoia around FDI?

                        with high sunk costs and lowered mobility,

                        someone’s got to keep an eye, for instance,

                        on the risk of South Africa’s

                        soft resource nationalism, blustering

                        about an EU exit, or Russia

                        menacing its neighbours

 

                                    Who’s going to massage the most perilous risk

                                    facing organizations today—

                                    ie. labour unrest?

                                    by the time Fidelity Security Group

                                    gets called in, we’re willing to lay bets on

                                    some irreversible image distress

 

Can we fatigue of this?

            to live Semper Paratus certainly

            has its expenditures, which is why

            an integrated team will have developed

            a fatigue risk management system (FRMS)

 

            Of course, we ought to view risk as being

                        domain specific—while September

                        is National Preparedness Month,

                        nobody wants the nanny state

                        to force helmets, airbags and smoke alarms

                        into the home

 

                                    Think back to the earlier example

                                    about crossing the road, or think about

                                    the relationships you manage

                                    on a daily basis—each of us

                                    lives in a world that is not always safe,

                                    secure nor predictable

 

And yet, let’s be honest: the whole

totalitarianism of hazard prevention

isn’t doing our boys any favours—

                        no one wants to see a child injured,

                        but they need to fall off stuff occasionally,

                                                and so doing encounter their own budding

                                                risk assessment practice

 

That was true when I tried to short the market

during heavy volatility, and when

I got involved in MLM marketing

without realizing how lousy I was with sales—

                        more lessons I’ve learned:

                        creating a risk portfolio

                        can help you capitalize on your strengths,

                        and achieve best-cost outcomes

 

            It wasn’t until around the 16th C

            that the concept of risk gained a more

            positive sense as something presenting

            opportunity—

                                    not that we’re establishing

            the conditions under which certain groups

            can expose others to potential risks

            in order to secure benefits

            for yet other groups—

                                                but where Pascal’s concerned

                        it’s worth wagering on the right side

                        of the uncertainty set

 

Is this to introduce the aleatory

distribution of bads into

the pre-event configuration?

                                                            then so be it!

 

            That which resists risk management—

                        to quote from Zizek—

            might be the only continuity

            in getting us to think about how we

                        manage our risk

 

 

 

 

Bruce Alford

The House Mosquito

 

The Southern House Mosquito
enters through a broken

screen and caulking. One of them
killed my father.

 

Around the window in which an air
conditioner sits, it 

nags and whines in a strident voice,
wet and metallic

 

A thousand eggs float in oval rafts
inside the ditch—like

chemical elements or an armory of
weapons, one of

them killed my father.

 

West Nile Virus is endemic to
Louisiana. And so are 

dead birds, sick horses, sentinel
chicken flocks

and standing water, which holds
the deadly mosquito

that killed my father.

 

And I have seen the larvae
swimming in the waste at the 

abandoned city dump like little
murderers in the dark

Preparing to kill a father.

 

Curiously, mosquitoes prefer the
shade to quenching 

their thirst with blood. Let us look
at the mosquito 

which makes us weary. I wander
the rooms like him 

And raise, from this, the theme of
disease and killing.

 

Why does restlessness stalk me? I
want to sleep, but it 

will not allow it. It greedily
approaches. I wave it away

 

But, it comes back, more querulous
and excited.

 

I defeat it. But already, another
approaches

more savagely than the first, with
its gospel singing and 

its soul too full of lust

 

 

All our Seeing is not without Obscurity

 

The Great Egret, a young southern
lady. I love her

as myself. Her
plumage and her lean disastrous-looking 

legs

 

All ideal, although she often tends
the shallows here

in Louisiana, where she hunts small
fish and frogs 

searching, not without some effort,
through murky 

water.

 

 

 

 

Lisa Bellamy

Why I Will Not Sell the Undeveloped Parcel

I promised the skunks a place to freely stink.  I promised certain fur-bearing citizens, i.e.,
a possum consortium, easements in perpetuity through the weedy boulevards to the creek,

and I did commit to long-term housing for the skeptics, the chattering class of the underbrush (skittish field mice, recalcitrant porcupines, sharp-tongued pheasant hens).

 

I promised wild turkeys a private event space for their meetings in the bushes—they have crucial business to discuss, clucking and fussing, feathers flying up to the trees.

 

To the proud, newly- antlered deer, I promised a dojo to practice the four dignities: contentment, joy, wisdom and outrageousness.

 

I promised myself I would operate my own Camp Lollygag, for me to tramp, to trip on knotted weeds, to sink in slick to my ankles, to get lost, embargo goal setting—

 

what needs to rot, I tell my husband, can rot. I promised the moon a pack of enamored, serenading coyotes.

 

I promised the sun a slice of insouciant soil on which to shine.

 

 

Ezekiel

And I will send down the rains in their season – Ezekiel 34:26

 

I will send the rain of authority,

the Lord also said,

I will send rain to chase the devil back to hell—

the rain of snarling martens,

smeary goose-shit rain,

rain of mud and tar,

rumors-of-war rain,

rain to incite the devil’s disgust,

rain of defiant lovers,

naked tongue-rain,

sweating rain,

worst-nightmare rain—

I will send the rain of emotive, yearning peepers,

rain of warrior-babies

(tiny swords, shiny new breastplates of righteousness),

flummoxing rain,

the rain of spiritual warfare—

I will send rain in-it-for-the-long-haul,

rain biding its time,

sly, watchful crow rain,

strategic rain to bedevil the devil,

turn-off-the-TV rain,

rain beyond his paygrade,

deceptively soft,

pattering, sneaky rain,

Mata Hari rain—

I will send slain-in-the-spirit rain,

shaking, prophecy-

speaking Holy Ghost rain,

sincere, un-ironic rain, rain of shouting,

om-shanti-shanti-rain,

soothing rain to pacify ancillary sub-demons,

rain of purification,

everlasting white birch rain,

god help me,

help me, rain;

I will summon

blasting rain—scram,

I will say,

beat it, I will say, be gone.

 

 

Tick

 

An addict, famished,

who, from the under-

petal of a flower,

stretches trembling

front legs, waves

and invites, interrogates

the air without

discrimination—

faint, dizzy,

jonesing for blood—

desperate stance

that mimics the true

joy of seduction.

 

 

To Kindling

 

Without you, little sticks,

dry, little bones of the forest,

forgotten under leaves,

nothing happens. I need you,

search for you, as I wander,

my afternoon saunters—you are

the tinder, the story-starter;

lit, you are all crackling

mischief, all go-for-

broke—you soul-kiss

the kitchen match, find yourselves

reborn as trouble-making,

singing spirits—hear this,

unsung orphans: you are essential!

Lit, you’re unpredictable

prime movers; until you disrupt

the stove, until you flare up,

unilaterally destroy

the news, until you ignite

complacent, stacked golden oaks

and release the winter’s tale,

our barrel-chested iron man,

god of combustible things,

will sit, inert and cold—

until you invite, through

the flue, approval of the moon.

 

 

If a Black Bear Approaches

Speak in normal tones so you “sound human.” What you say doesn’t matter, just  speak.

Adirondack Explorer Fall/Winter Issue 2014

O gigantic, o slightly-slobbering, big-tongued Teddy sniffing the air: I hear sweet luscious bee hives cluster 20 miles yonder, east over Clement Mountain—why not, sir, point your nose to that honey?  Why not go, go, sir, to the honey, and why not ponder this subtle koan as you journey: why did the bear go over the mountain?  What did he hope to find?  What chatty, generous spirit whispered wanderlust into his ear?  Why not, Big Guy, pursue the “big story;” why not scratch your back against the sharp bark, against the hard questions?  O most-impressive Baloo, through your heart pumps the blood of ancient giants who once loved the children of men—see me, not as tasty flesh, not as your snack, but as your Beatrice, lamplighter for your quest; see me as the trembling finger pointing to your moon; why not aspire to roll, bellowing, in the thing-in-itself, the ding an sich, as if in clover?  Go, go now, O splendid, plus-size Paddington; go, turn your head to the sky; go forth—eastward ho, to the honey.

 

 

 

 

Tony Beyer

The Moth Farm

 

they are used in the manufacture

of sleep

                 

soft brown palpitations

of millions of wings in flight

 

and the subtle dust

that falls into eyelids

 

the agents from the city

in their sleek cars gather boxfuls

 

many lifetimes’ worth

of warm dreams

 

weighing little more

than a breath

 

 

 

Reading Chekhov During Rain

 

he always tells you

what the weather was like

and how it affected

the moods of his characters

 

black towers of cloud

over interminable Russia

or the horticulturist’s

bustling summer garden

 

and that time

in which all things exist

is the true enemy

bringing sorrow and change

 

a journey on foot

of twelve or so miles

may include all knowledge

all possibility

 

two men reeking of booze and dung

fitting a horse into its harness

at the side of the road

near dusk

 

a holy man

addressing a corpse

in words its associates

are meant to overhear

 

beginnings of a modernity

that has no minor characters

only those for whom the body is a sanctuary

and those for whom it is a defeat

 

nor does he hate anyone

however much they rant against

one another or their lives’

muddy channel

there will always be another morning

when the dogs stir in the yard

and pad softly or pause

to stretch and flap their ears

 

the boy fetching water

whistles and is silenced by a glance

from the women tending embers

left brooding under ash

 

and it is day

and there is tea and honey

or bread and salt

or just water and a share of the fire

 

and in place of a mantra

nothing is ever better

or worse than it is

so be appeased

 

 

 

Ace Boggess
My Ex Has Travelled North

to be with her father during his surgery

which sounds serious—something to do with his spine.

I learn this from another

who keeps in touch with the past

through Facebook, e-mail, spying drone,

who told me recently how my ex’s dog fell ill,

might die. I didn’t choose to hear,

now must fight my instant urge

to call & say inane words.

 

Is there an etiquette for well-wishes

toward the excommunicated?

Card, perhaps? Never flowers

smelling like apricot brandy.

 

Already, I’m anxious,

grinding my teeth as if on a stone,

from weighing what’s right against what’s expected.

 

Here’s Humility, tickling my shoulders with a leaf, &

there’s Regret, sucker-punching as it always does.

 

I didn’t know my ex bought a dog

(cat-person before she was my ex) &

often thought unkindly of her dad,

depressive drunk who

liked to wave his gun around while crying.

 

I’m better off remaining mute

as though I have no ex who owns a dog &

whose father, a man she loves & despises,

face’s the scalpel like some headsman’s ax. 

 

Life can be confusing & cringe-worthy.

How do so many live it for so long?

 

 

 

 

Carrie Bond
Dogwood Avenue 1986

 

Before my brother turned thirteen, 

my father died

 

in the most ordinary way — car

accident on a familiar road. Though

 

their eyes brimmed,

I had no well to over-

 

flow; my eyes 

swallowing the brown rug. 

 

Let them wail and offer despair. 

I watched: the world, 

 

its indifferent spinning,

hugs and scalloped 

 

sympathy cards (drab flowers

black backdrop) may do no good.

 

Keep it coming.  She may

shut in her sadness

 

but it will seep through the threads

of our family forever. 

 

And I turned six with a banana-seat bike 

and prayers for the unforgiven, 

 

the unrepentant.  I sent the slinky

somersaulting down the stairs

 

tumbling myth, memory, unspoken

questions.  Let them go 

 

on drawing tears on the calendar,

a rude memorial

 

to grief. It would be years

before she could shrug

 

at the motorcycle passing, before

she’d tell his stories. Until then, 

 

he came in dreams 

wearing a baseball cap 

 

he never wore. 

It would be years before I thought 

 

of him outside the gash 

of his death, before I knew.

 

 

Rain

 

Fat-fingered children plunking piano keys in the dark

suddenly made meek.

 

A pleasant sound couples the cold shock down

your neck  wrist  cheek.

 

The blurred landscape, smudged tree-line, pastels thumbed hazy

by the mist.

 

Oversized droplets meander these weighted branches:

gravity’s tiny fists.

 

Leaves now made malleable, liable to droop  detach  splatter.

We dome our umbrellas, brief shelter from the sloppy clatter.

 

 

 

Michelle Brooks

Valentine’s Day or There Is No Rain in the Forecast

 

I gain transaction into my our heart

of darkness. I look at devastating blue

skies which reveal the open secret of my

insignificance. File side effects under either

a)bad shit that happens or b)compensatory

pleasures. You are my pain management clinic,

as if the best I can hope for is to manage. Gaudy

paper hearts line the windows of stores, making me

forget that a real heart looks like a fist. I would

trade it for these cheap imitations, so tacky,

so beautiful, so fragile that the slightest bit of rain,

sleet, or snow will ruin them. So unlike my own

heart, hidden, persistent, and never on my sleeve.

It beats despite what anyone does to it, I wonder

why it feels like paper that tears at the slightest touch.

 

 

The Lady or the Tiger? Capture Them Both

 

Nobody wants to hear this.

What luck! I don’t want to say it.

We stop at perfect days that shall

linger without form. There’s no

shaking this premonition that I’ve

been here before, the road travelled

by way too many. What can I say?

For my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer. 

 

 

I Am the Fist

 

There will be no tears.

You will forget how

to cry. You never cry

but you always look

like you’re about to be hit.

You cringe at the sound

of your own voice, the way

it betrays you. People mistake

your silence for strength.

Of course, you stopped believing

there was something to admire

a long time ago. You didn’t ask

for this. You don’t ask for anything

at all. By you, I mean me. But you

knew that all along, didn’t you? 

 

 

Obey the Night

 

Three doors down, there’s a crack house

guarded by pit bulls.  The poisons I prefer

are legal.  You can’t pick who you love.

The streets talk to me, but nobody knows

my name.  I read about the famous dead

while ignoring my own burial grounds.

It’s bad luck to build near a cemetery

so I carry mine with me.  My purse

empties to feed my wants.  Night

protects me from you but not myself.

 

 

No Reasonable Offer Refused

 

I survey the discount hearts, already

dented from the hands of customers

who didn’t choose them, the flowers

adorned with signs announcing For

Someone Special stand at attention,

the bouquets wilting like understudies

whose big break isn’t going to happen.

I want to tell them, Don’t give up. I see

how beautiful you are! I rummage

through the bins, pick up a box of candy

with Be Mine in wedding cake font scrawled

across the front and put it in my basket,

avoiding the conversation hearts, ones

that say things like, U R Great. There’s only

so much I can take and after all, I know better.

 

 

 

Richard Cecil

Great Books

 

My e-mail inbox fills with lame excuses:

Sorry, Prof, I can’t make class today;

grandpa died, I’ve got job interviews.

Paradise Lost drives half the class away

 

Students who read both of Homer’s epics

and Virgil’s dull Aeneid and discussed

primary vs. secondary classics

coated with two thousand years of dust;

 

students who cheered on Antigone’s

open opposition to a tyrant,

and students who preferred Penelope’s

sneaky tricks, like those they play on parents,

 

all united in their Milton boycott.

It might be Great, professor; Good it’s not.

 

 

 

How to Play The Game of Life

 

To win “The Game of Life” you must hoard money

love, and fame.  Fame costs you love, love

costs you money, money costs you love.

The easiest to pile up is the money.

So when you play, always go for money

at the expense of both fame and love.

The second easiest to get is love,

but getting love will cost you lots of money

You must suppress your greed to earn the love

of your lover/spouse by spending money

on jewelry and dinners out—money

that you could bank at the expense of love.

The hardest of the three to get is fame.

If it costs you all your love, you lose the game.

 

 

 

Bad Hood Rap

 

When quiet neighbors moved and got replaced

by kids last fall, I grit my teeth and braced

myself against the noise I knew was coming:

the thumping stereo, the practice drumming.

When I gazed out at autumn’s turning trees

I prayed, this year, send us an early freeze,

and kindly Nature granted me my wish.

October nights grew cold and north winds lashed

my patio, which overlooks their yard.

By mid-December, soggy ground froze hard,

and plastic lawn chairs wore a coat of snow.

The only noise next door came from the crows

who (I’m quoting Zimmer) cawed Fuck You

from bare branches of the trees.  Fuck you too!

I re-cawed, ensconced in my warm study.

 

Then came the early thaw.  The ground turned muddy,

and crocuses popped up in February.

Out came my neighbors, ready to make merry.

They hauled their folding beer pong table out,

their boom box speakers, and began to shout

at ten AM on Sunday.  Party all day!

they yelled, and I, who’d had nothing to say

began to scribble these lines without a pause

except to ponder “what noun rhymes with caws?”

and “should I quote the frat boy rapper’s lyrics

that drove the girls to giggling hysterics:

you muthafuckin bitches ain’t worth shit

or leave the crudeness out and stick with wit?”

Then, once I’d come to my decision,

I smoothed the rhythm out in my revision,

inverting rappers’ trochees into iambs,

end-stopping lines I’d awkwardly enjambed,

and by the time the kids had gone inside

to barf, pass out, choke on their vomit and die,

I’d finished this box I made to hold my rage:

rough ink black lines on a smooth white page.

 

 

 

 

Natalie Crick

Midwinter

 

Trees appear as brides,

Their snow dance wounding

The cosmos.

I am numb to you.

No one sees the snowdrops budding,

A bright field of knives.

If I turn away, they grow

In lines of white flame and,

As darkness falls,

A kingdom of black blossoms

Deep as a moaning mouth.

 

 

Remember Her

 

When she turns blue

Remember her as sky.

 

Grey, she is the sea

Leaden, gone,

 

Still half-asleep,

Dragging death by a string.

 

It already sounds distant as

The sharp gasp of ghost,

 

Punishing us, shy thing,

By turning into a light leaf

 

Or leaping from

The edge again

 

O so sweetly,

Blood effervescing and receding,

 

The promise of forever

At the end of every line.

 

 

My hands write, poised like a pianist,

And I wait.

 

 

Things of Grace

 

Blue night is

An absent shade now,

A broken memory of sky,

 

Shadows moss-damp and

Pearled with honey.

There are corpses floating in the trees;

 

Things of grace,

Swimming over us in flight,

Fluent beings on bone-white wing.

 

They call to me

 

When the sky goes dark,

When the clouds are a wish

But no rain pours,

 

When the moon rolls past and

My eyes catch fire.

They curl over pools

 

To drink,

Pale-eyed, beautiful,

Something half-remembered.

 

 

Birds At The Bay

 

In folds of white heat

Birds dive, colourless, soft-boned

Wither to water

Like Spring’s first buds

Skipping and falling,

Little souls lost.

In moonshine

The tide’s slow pull

Entices

Their star-shaped mouths,

Beloved waters: kissed.

 

 

 

 

Norita Dittberner-Jax

The Kiss

 

At the graduation, people ask about you

or don’t.

 

Later, you say when I leave the house I forget

to kiss you.

 

Are you becoming invisible

to me?

 

I would rather forget

my name.

 

After I am sad and pondering the meaning,

I think,

 

he misses

my kisses

 

reminding me of our losing each other

at the Dead Sea resort

 

you had an announcer summon me;

you were mad

 

and I was happy, knowing you would never

leave me behind.

 

 

 

The Dream of John

 

Gone, seven years. Last night in sleep

I conjured my brother

back from the dead.

 

He wore a robe and was

speaking out against war

as he did in his lifetime.

 

We embraced so naturally,

he in his fullness

before the wasting.

 

I woke buoyant, so glad,

for my vision, the capacity

to imagine what is gone.

 

My brother John came back

on his best day his body easy,

his mind clear.

 

How much more you, husband,

whom I have known from the blackest of hair

to the white head I saw yesterday

 

from a distance, you with the walker,

crossing the portico and I thought, who is

that man with the beautiful hair?

 

You will come back to me.

I will take the shards of memory

and forge you in the furnace

 

of my awful desire that you live.

 

 

 

 

William Doreski

White Things

 

Things you’ve spray-painted white

and hung from trees in the woods:

coffee pot, harmonica, comb,

 

toothbrush, adjustable wrench,

and my old Pentax camera.

Finding these objects adrift

 

like ghosts of themselves startles

and even frightens me a little.

The cold sun effloresces orange

 

like something from a greenhouse.

Small animals sulk and skulk

and challenge me to spot them

 

in the corners of my eyes.

The woods seem alive except

for the specters you’ve dangled

 

here and there. Do you believe

that the forest is too ugly

to appreciate itself without

 

this post-aesthetic display?

The camera saddens me. Often

through prism and lens I saw

 

your smile polish to a shine

that dazzled and confused the world.

And that comb that daily traced

 

a path through your nest of hair,

the harmonica neither of us

could master. The white things

 

sway in the hard autumn wind,

beyond utility or regret,

too innocent to protest—                                                  

 

their slightly grainy texture

like Renaissance marble left

unfinished at the sculptor’s death

 

 

 

 

Abigail George

A Woman at Work

 

In my winter’s night

of dreams and visions,

you’re there. I find

myself in the interiors

of a museum. With love,

here are dahlias in my

hands. Do you accept it

or refuse it? When daylight falls

lonely I find I have a lost

ghost of a soul. All these

years I have lived a secret

life and inside the painted

blue you will find the hidden. The electric.

The mountain and the

field’s spark. There was

some sadness behind her

smile, her eyes. The speed

of darkness too. I know you.

I wanted to tell her. I’ve

been where you are. My

mother, my father’s wife.

When love speaks it brings

with it our dreams. Pure

 

and healthy as water. To us

it speaks about Paris. When

love speaks to me there’s a

story behind the poem. The

poetry experiment. It speaks

to me about the emptiness and grief

before it speaks to me about

a portrait of a child or the sun.

Older. Further. Beyond. The

discovery of it a thousand times

in a day. Bodies and limbs made

out of sunlight. This woman’s

work saves autumn. The ethereal

of the monster abundance

of that season’s change in

the air. The harshness. The

struggle-ish. The gratitude of

the narrator. Here comes the

remainder of the blemished sun craving

Noah’s ark and his animals.

More, more. The quiet sea says to

the coast. I want more of you.

 

 

 

 

Howie Good

‘Over Our Cities Grass Will Grow’

 

It was a Sunday, four days before Christmas. Choppers and drones were all over the sky. Tourists who had taken selfies at the Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe posted them to Facebook. A gnome-like man with a greasy comb-over said, “Everything is art, everything is rubbish.” You made up your own myth, and when you did, hoodlum types were observed entering expensive autos. But was that necessarily a problem? I myself became distraught at being left stranded on a dark road, especially as the I Ching advises, “Wait in the meadow.”

 

 

 

James Grabill

Where Exploding Oil Trains Escape Notice

 

It may have been we were drawn out of uncertain uptown midnight into evolving consequences that spill over from generations of energy. We can be watching our own post-historic blusters striking a moth of methane thaws before offspring of anyone’s up-bespoken afternoon rains in the kingdom of genetic songbirds.

 

Searching for rooms on major arteries of forgetting have been plunges and breeches, granges and sprawls, where we can see the many eyes sleeping with their B-1s and F-22s cottoning to mouthfuls of Teutonic admission gone athwart when it never had far to go.

 

And now we have up-and-down hoary yearning for split-middle lays of egg as imperial floodlight knifes over the bronze doors behind which opposite energies rhawl in uncrooned breezes craving the end of suffering from behind the collective back where mascara-ringed pours of outworn appetite have groveled before genetic branches in the place of proprietary experiments running cold and hot with sea-leavings afloat on the slumber-shot prime peeling away in leopard layers beneath the sky’s glistening million billions.

 

 

Grasshopper Clouds

 

When the mind decides to assume responsibility, rock-bottom hungers may clash.

 

Demands this desperate will try driving animal trucks unconsciously into one another’s headlights, intestinal muds redefining power from genetic undersea horns, filming the documentary from a raven’s perch through the eight coordinated eyes of jumping spiders, issuing manifestos on veils of tears.

 

While mindfulness establishes residence, grasshoppers with serious red veins can be swallowing pain, chewing on meadows, great inhaling swarms on skeletal wings voting yes or no, darkening the western sky before vanishing.

 

So the tips of billions of tongues lick the instant exhausted, as the next instant rolls undetectably in from behind, to where the next tips of tongues erupt, to taste what’s unferned.

 

From compass cores of becoming, vibratory forces push in fast forward, with mind parking its maneuvers in slow-motion root-hold pull of having a life.

 

In splashes of overflow light, autonomous breeding wheels. No matter exists but what’s already turned into historical antecedents.

 

Over time, zero plus zero approaches one, but who will be here to see it? Boot-black echoing in echoing lets stem-cell shadow fall flat and full through the unfilmed emergent communications of specialized cells.

 

 

 

Given a Life

 

Flagellum materialize where tiniest beings have been reaching for eons, conducting business, moving to stay alive.

 

The smallest breathing mobilizes over time into swoons blowering en mass. Evolving microorganisms prism the spectrum, while the documentary reveals infinitesimal choices in slow motion.

 

Once people have congregated, involuntary hunger runs the oil-hot carnival where normality pays admission.

 

River current continues in circulation of blood building complexity in the brain to field the complexity around us. Through distances and intimacies, the brain practices its arts that began long before birth.

 

Ancestors within us carry on their fondness for harpsicord and seasonal temperatures. In burning basement libraries, Freudian entanglements reinvent communion through the emergence of fundamental consciousness.

 

Where many have imprinted on what used to be, each moment of cosmic origin launches into what it will never again be.

 

The pin-drop dark blurs what it touches, then absorbs it into eclectic soup-pot horoscopes, the way it is, wanting to live, to continue within being, to be here where listening resonates with transcendence letting the world go.

 

 

Seated at the Table

 

Around the lion-clawed table of day and night sit the first humans and their legendary offspring. Given the number of sensibilities and ways they encoded the world, not many can agree about what’s to be eaten and how it must be served. Erstwhile, enclaves attempt to enslave escutcheony legions that qualify as the other to do the dirty work.

 

Ten thousand and more religions and cults undertake rituals, while a hundred thousand elevated orators, priests, kings, sales executives, jokers, and great mothers deliver life-changing addresses to the collective.

 

Drink, psychoactive fungal mash, joy and agony, curiosity and retrograde amnesia, on top of stone-serious harping and military-escorted sewing circles flaring up in choral renditions, sports enthusiasts roaring out lion prowess, adventurists snapping back the continuum, daughters with ox carts crossing the city limits—these and many continents more abound.

 

At the table are log-thumpers and transcendental Trappists, army experts in snare and stretched-skin comrade carriers, founding fathers of conga and great mothers of tabla Sanskrit, with stick-wielding unrestrained rhythmists, cymbalists, and triangle trainers bursting past colossal stone figures at the borders of longing. Who can tell where anything ends?

 

You can see kind presence and formidability, feuds and armored vests, lingering desire and visitations of suffering, with hunting and contemplating, everyone with a full face and refined head, including those who were ostracized flat, wearing scarlet bonnets or hair stubble shirts with those who’d never sit without standing, alongside those who couldn’t help but join or refuse. Whoever was born is there.

 

 

 

Decline

 

If something’s fishy in January, if fresh schools of perch and pickerel wash onto beaches where you swam as a kid, if big faces deny all knowledge of their acts straight into the camera eye of children, if fuming hourly caravans appear unable to stop revving up in downward polarizations of pretenders, forcing more extinction after mixing it up with transactions, if they pretend to reason, posing as appetites magnified by the Hubble in scenes of rollbacks brandishing public dollars and they’re in combat with questioners, if they’re laying into doctor reason with child-mind roundhouses from the side of infallible mystery and grandiose craving, then I’d agree you’ve got problems,

 

Whether you work, labor, catalytically convert, conceive, or diametrically compute, you’ve got problems, the educational kind disrupted by gangs of bad and good, whether unique individuals of stunning incapacity there tricked the election, anti-knowledge people have stood with contempt out of identity, or know-nothing forces of central intelligence parked gargantuan missiles in the plaza days before pacts were negotiated, if prayerful incursions have risen up to demand life sentences of forgiveness for the owners of blast furnaces who’re calling them flutes around the kids for the slow dance of biothermal digestion, you’ve got problems, if anti-knowledge forces are having their way around global scarcities, if in all arrogance greatness is so loaded with costume jewelry it requires pre-emptive mercenary forces just to keep moving.

 

Maybe the roar you can hear comes from steam shovels scooping perch and pickerel carcasses into the unknown, or the next decree coming down the pike stars founding fathers whose wartime rations were surely good enough for them. You might prepare for laws forced onto neighborhoods, and people of unreason calling large numbers the other, however much the climate careens into the deep end where no one has been and the halves in the culture are buying and selling heartbeat transaction, gunning black stretch limousines in commemorative displays, while the culture, in the face of journalists asking it to comment, declines.

 

 

 

 

Nels Hanson

Boat and Fish

 

To high Morro Rock, the Gibraltar

of the Pacific, an extinct volcano’s

limestone core standing in the small

bay, I went as a boy with my grandfather

and an older boy, grandchild of his friend,

to launch a simple boat, a piece of pine

with a paper sail. As the boy bent to the tide

pool and pushed his ship into the outgoing

current I saw the flicker of a four-inch

fish, yellow-silver, and pink. Gills to tail

it wore a flesh-colored sheath, thin skirt

with no scales, fluttering, a billowing

dress on a line. I knew the wounded perch

nearly bitten in half grew a new skin

more human than a fish’s, and the boat

sailed an ocean whose waters could kill

but would surely change us to something

stranger we’d have to become to live.

 

 

A Valley Childhood

From the high brick steps

I spit a loquat pit that sprouted

a tall tree, by the big lizard’s

house and the horned toad’s

 

burrow. Near white Shasta

daisies strawberries I ate

grew in the fenced yard

with a thick hedge. At night

                

quail thrummed in their

sleep, safe from the dark

owl gliding from the blue

gum grove like a forest I      

 

wandered in bad dreams.           

Stormy days rain flowed

onto the window sills my

mother sopped with towels.

 

Mornings my father played

the radio on a glass shelf

in the breakfast nook I slept

in for a while. I listened to

 

ice hockey scores from back

East, always the Toronto Maple

Leaves like gold walnut leaves

in the slanting October light,  

 

the bronze chrysanthemums’

dry blooms trying to bring

back summer before frost,

cold tule fog’s long century.

 

 

 

Michael Hettich

Skin

 

When we opened our family photo albums

after our parents had died, we were

confused: we didn’t recognize

anyone, not even ourselves. The houses

and vacation spots looked exactly as we

remembered, as did the pets and the cars

and the clothes the people in the pictures wore,

but the people themselves were strangers.

 

At the end of her life, my mother’s skin

was so thin she bruised when she spoke and even

when she was kissed, so we kissed the air

and blew it toward her the way they do

in old movies just as they’re leaving. 

 

I can’t remember who you are, Michael,

she told me, though I know you are my son.

We held hands and looked at each other. Her hand

quivered its bones like a starving broken bird.

When I told her I loved her, I couldn’t meet her eyes.

 

 

Sleeping Outside

 

            ...and I suddenly recall my childhood wish

            to live invisibly, to close my eyes and not be seen.

                              --Sherod Santos

 

1.

When our coconut tree drops its fruit, the thud

            startles us, whatever we’ve been doing, even

                        reading in the house with the windows closed,

even sleeping. So we go out to gather

            the fallen coconuts; we marvel at their weight--

                        and we make sure we don’t stand directly beneath

the tree since it still holds a least a dozen

            coconuts, too high to climb up and harvest--

 

                        and besides, to be honest, we really don’t know

how to crack them open, we haven’t the skill

            with a machete. We also have a mango

                        and a cluster of bananas whose finger-length fruits

are most often eaten by squirrels or mystery

            creatures before we even notice

                        they’re ripe. Sometimes, when it’s cool, we talk

of sleeping on the roof            so we can smell the green life

            growing around us while we dream, but we never do

                        though we keep the windows wide open when it’s cool

so the night noises will chatter inside us.

 

2.

Once, in what seems another life now,

            after sleeping outside on the porch of a cabin

                        in Maine, I found myself rowing across

the lake at dawn to a small beach that bordered

            an abandoned apple orchard. Spider webs glistened

                        in the trees and tall grass, while the insects caught there

buzzed intermittently. The morning was cool

 

            but I took off my clothes and waded into

                        the water, swam out a few strokes, stopped

and just hung there breathing; then I realized with a jolt

            that felt like happiness: no one in the world

                        knew where I was, so I might as well have actually

 

disappeared. Did that thought draw the deer

            that came as I floated there, that walked into the lake

                        as though I had called it

                                                                        and swam out toward me, 

panting loudly, moving quickly

            for such a huge body? I could only hang there

                        naked and alone—

                                                            and then it swam right

by me, as though I were actually invisible,

            close enough to touch. There were gnats in the corners

                        of its eyes. It swam off toward the other side

of the lake, where my family still slept. That’s when

 

            I noticed the herd of deer amidst

                        the apple trees, standing in the tall grass, alert

and watching. We watched each other. Of course

            they scattered as I swam in, so I climbed out and stood there

 

                        panting, naked and alone in the morning,

 

hungry for breakfast and yearning to live

            for good in my animal body,  realizing

                        from now on I’d always be a stranger in the world

of anything other than me--though of course

            I’d known that forever, so to speak.

                                                                        And back

                        at the cabin my family was still sleeping,

so I sat there and listened to the day and their breathing

            and wondered what they were dreaming. And then

 

                        I woke them one by one—the morning

was chattering with birds now and voices from the lake—

 

            and we went out with our coffee and sat in the sun

                        and laughed with each other and felt grateful for our lives

and kept all our secrets alive inside

            our bodies to roam in that wilderness silence

                        we’d never be able to enter ourselves--

                       

                        furry, and hungry, and real.

 

 

The Bears

 

            ...and then we saw a bear feasting on a carcass

on the far side of a field. I crouched to move closer

            while you scowled are you crazy? But after all, how often

do you get to see a bear up close, and such a big one

            rolling happily in the carcass of a moose, I imagined,

or a deer? 

                                    But then, as I turned to scowl back

at your scowling, the bear stood up, growling

            as a man and then a woman, grunting clumsily, naked

and homely, and told us to leave them the fuck

            alone. If I wanted to peep on lovers,

                        they said, go to the movies. But wait--

 

            wasn’t that my colleague, the woman they’d just hired

                                    to teach the Romantics, and wasn’t that the guy

                        from the Chemistry department? Well hey! Fancy meeting you

            here! No harm done. Pretty soon they were dressed

                        and bushwhacking with us, talking of Wordsworth

                                    and Blake, who would have taken his clothes off,

                        she said, and waded into the river

            to commune with the trout. He loved rainbows she whispered

as the chemistry professor started quietly sobbing--

            he’d felt great, he said,as a bear in those moments

                        we’d watched him, our fascination with his wildness

            had made him feel wild and powerful, which

he wasn’t.

                        So I draped an arm around his shoulder

            as we walked down the mountain; I admitted that I too

                        was a figment—on my best days--of my own wild

            imagination. Then I asked if they’d want to

come to our cabin that evening to hoot

            like owls and maybe practice flying, which we did

in a safe way, I assured them, by jumping up and down

            until we felt dizzy. And they both said they’d love to,

                        thank you, but they couldn’t, maybe next time: They’d started

            sensing prickles of coarse fur pushing

                        through their pores--a tingling they intended

            to savor: they wanted to stroke each other

                        while they grew wild. They were bears, after all,

            when they touched each other just right, when they let each other growl,

and they growled at us, laughing, as they walked off toward the trees...

 

 

 

Alicia Hoffman

Well Sweep

 

On Neiffer Road, a well. Near the back woods

that led to the creek no one went but me, a child

 

on my way to sweep the dried leaves from paths

that circled around the tall trees. What water

 

did my mother drink as she became with child

once again, this time unexpected? What water

 

we pour, pour from. Each time my grandfather

dunked into the pit he sledged and siphoned

 

pebble, rock, grain. On a big rock, I witnessed

his leathery skin. I would say each day it grew

 

more taut but you wouldn’t believe the tightness

grew by the hour, the minute. Well, sweep

 

the kitchen floor once more, my mother does,

to keep him under wraps, his own mapped

 

and bandaged time. What crumbs we discovered

under the arching cabinet tops, as if someone

 

were living a life of waste. Waste not, want not.

Want not, taste. Taste the time we drove early

 

through the mist to do nothing but drink

the dew coming off the air’s open cup, the fog

 

at that place. My God. If I could ever go back,

I would be a little girl again and unable to change

 

anything. I realize that now. I realize that, well,

I could sweep the whole memory of it away

 

and late nights as I lay down to dream near double

the age I once had been it lives like a sinkhole

 

in my aging body, my body a vessel to well

in and sweep and well in and sweep and well.

 

 

 

Clara B. Jones

Autodidact In A Wet Habitat

 

You needed more than one software system

Since major problems require global solutions

 

With image analysis tools. You turned your

Life over to algorithms and sold your shares

 

In the company before you decided to track

Rogue drones. Though irrigation controls

 

Ancón's drought, radar can't distinguish

Between birds and planes, but she said

 

What hurt the most so, when it was

Over, you married an heiress who had

 

Sensitive hearing and ran a blog—a

Source of fake news in a post-fact world.

 

It would shame you to send an app

To neighbors or friends while hotspots in the

 

River flood bogs on the mountain managed

By the tribal council. You wrote boredom

 

Poems in the absence of networks—

Programming foreign capital and

 

Fantasy games when she saw you in Volcán

Where you don't fit in since you make

 

Bad choices and hate the tropics, but there

Is no place in the New World you'd rather be.

 

 

 

 

Sandra Kolankiewicz

Sunday Morning

 

So there you were, saying we’d go to hell

because my brother kissed his boyfriend on

the lips.  You tried to cover your eyes.  We’d

just stepped from what we call church, not your cup

of tea, I suppose, your red shriek stopping

movement on the sidewalk, your daughter’s small

furry muff and matching hat made not from

a rabbit but most likely a cat kept

in a cage all its life, bred to be skinned.

 

 

 

Kristin LaFollette

Cardiac Notch

 

When I lie on my left side, I feel my heart beat

 

hard

 

against the inside of my ribcage,

 

one lung smaller than the other to make room

for the heart—

 

            Pounding,

 

as if there is too much of something in my system,

my blood thick with magnesium.

 

As a ribbon holds a page in a book, the feeling

of my core vibrating keeps me in my place—

 

It makes a sound

 

like a fist on a door,

 

my vision unreliable. People disappear when I close

and reopen my eyes—

 

I see you and then I don’t

 

and when I do again you have the cold white skin of your winter self,

 

like that photograph I have of you in the black-framed glasses,

the one with the train in the background where you have

 

blood in your

hair.

 

 

Scavenger

 

I am a child

I am incubating at 125°,

the heat growing and strengthening my limbs

 

Lungs,

hardly able to breathe in the humidity,

the sides and top of a tent bent inward with water

 

Our blankets wet with the condensation of hot plants

Paper bags scattered on the ground

outside the zippered door

 

Animal feet press into moist morning dirt like

smoke signals from the lake

There are mosquitoes and plastic bags

 

of blueberries and granola

Four people with aluminum foil over a hot fire

sweat

 

Heat turns to cold in the night

As my body grows in the warmth,

the animals scavenge for food

 

If I am born, the trees will take care of the rest

 

 

The Chemist

 

I pray to what I imagine is a face,

 

a kind of body like mine,

lips and skin that turn

blue without breath

 

My wings are soft, the orange-red color of foxtail

(and) I feel frail,

 

hollow as the sticks and glue that hold

the wings of birds together

 

As my home, I gather grass of many colors,

a          crunch like lightbulbs underfoot

 

Sometimes I want to know—

            Why is it so hard?

 

I ask—

            Why our anatomy? 

                        Why study things that fail?

 

I pray to what I imagine is a chemist

 

If I die, I think my chest, the frame

that holds it all in, will become an artifact,

 

like the remains of animals deep in water,

 

the dust of bird feet,

hollow bones—frail oxygen

 

 

 

 

Allie Long

Requiem Mass in D minor: I. Introitus (Club Remix)

 

I am pouring this drink, and I am preempting

the commemoration of my death. The light

hits me. I’m going toward it. I’m not sorry.

I throw an apology in the offering plate anyway.

I heard men like women who pretend to give

all they have. The one I have in mind won’t answer

his phone. I up the ante: I’ve got a bottle of perfume

to waste. Give me your feet. I’ll blow your mind.

Now’s not the time to be discreet. My mom

would want even my disembodied soul to marry.

It won't have the heart to tell her that in hell,

all they do is fuck. This bar smells wet, and everyone

is half-unbuttoned. God collected all his failed

attempts at chest hair and cleavage and locked

us in here. I swallow whatever’s in my hand

too quickly to taste it. My thinning blood sets

the plagues in motion. I'm the firstborn. Lamb’s blood

on the doorframe of the guy I’m going home with

isn’t going to do much. Better enjoy what little time

I have before I sober up. Anyway every bed

is an open casket. This guy doesn't even know

what I look like alive. I pull out all the stops:

double-coat of mascara and minimal pubes.

I want to be topless for the viewing. My piercings

are immortal. Look at me. I get my way and still

want to die. Everyone in the church is grinding to

as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

World without end. Amen. Amen. I’m propped up

next to this guy staying true to his promise to hold

a lighter to my blue lips. We hot box my coffin.

I’m so high everyone thinks they’ve prayed me

into heaven. Okay. God side-eyes to the camera.

God sips his tea. God pretends not to hear a thing.

 

 

 

Requiem Mass in D minor: II. Kyrie (Club Remix)

 

Lord, have some fucking mercy.

Christ, don’t make me repeat myself.

I can’t catch a break. My life is so easy.

That’s how church works, right?

 

I pray for a new car, a boyfriend,

and Africa. I can’t find Moldova

on a map, but we’re sending

money to children there. My mom

says blessed because she bought

leather boots. Once, I made

a Facebook status about white

privilege. It saved the world.

 

I go braless, and I say bitch.

That’s how feminism works.

I’m reclaiming this shit.

I wear lipgloss for me. I wish

I had bigger tits. For me.

I fucked the patriarchy

before it could fuck me.

 

I have quite a few opinions.

I’m not wearing any panties.

My asshole is very correct.

 

I hang out at the country club.

I talk about how racist

all the other members are.

 

All my friends are white.

We go to brunch for the mimosas.

We’re all on antidepressants.

We store our doses in mason jars.

We go shopping when we’re stressed,

which is a lot. We say I’m broke.

 

I loudly dislike children, and daydreamed

about marrying my one-night stand.

I like to keep things casual.

There’s no such thing as a slut

unless we're fucking the same guy.

 

I’m not religious, but I meditate.

I say things like zen and nirvana.

I do yoga. I know nothing

about Buddhism. I know everything

that’s wrong with Christianity.

 

I know some Spanish

and listen to all Shakira’s albums.

 

I read Jane Austen novels, and I relate

to the female protagonists. I thumb

through a few beauty magazines.

I’m not as pretty as the women

in them, but they all look like me.

I don’t think anything of it.

 

I’m sinning, and it’s convenient.

I’m sinning in ways no one thinks are sins.

I’m sinning, but don't call me out.

I’m so fragile. Just have mercy on me.

 

 

 

 

Kevin J.B. O’Connor

Nothing Secret

 

I no longer write in pen. 

My SAT scores were above average

but not perfect. I rooted

for George Bush (the first one)

in school. I’ve only voted in two elections

but I’m undefeated.

 

In soccer I was never undefeated.

I have excellent pen-

manship, but given the election

I’d choose to read. An average

day for me in school was one

I didn’t remember, rooting

 

for the football team, or rooting

to go home early. They were undefeated

one year—one

too many. I owned a Zebra pen.

It was average.

My friend was elected

 

president of seven clubs. The elections

were rigged. I rooted

for him because the law of averages

predicted his inevitable defeat.

He wanted to be a dictator, and gave pens

to his supporters. I had one,

 

it said: “Max Power for President”—one

of his names for himself in the elections.

They were cheap—the pens—

but worked. I would have rooted

for someone else to defeat

him but the other candidates were average.

 

The entire town was average,

really. The one

good thing was pizza. The undefeated

football team a year later elected

to lose—or so it seemed. I rooted

for their collapse, and melted the pens

 

at a boring, average party after the elections,

one my friend hosted, on charred roots.

In his undefeated glory, he looked like William Penn.

 

 

 

 

Al Ortolani

Five-Dollar Horn

 

During the time between wars,

my father took trumpet lessons

in a studio perched

above the Coca-Cola sign

in Times Square. He rode the train

from Huntington with his trumpet

secure in its fake alligator case.

                                                                   

Harry James was blasting the clubs

in Harlem. The Huntington boys

stood at the door, rocking on their heels.

Dad grew a pencil-thin moustache, wore

a blue jacket, a loosened tie. Every Friday

he soloed at the all-school assembly.

Once he sat in with the Long Island Symphony.

Even after Korea,

he blew smoky improvisations

 

alone in our basement.  At length,

he passed his five-dollar horn

to his son for grade school band,

but I was embarrassed by the ratty case, the dents,

the lack of shine on its antique bell.

Surrounded by sparkling Conns and Reveres,

I learned to clear the spit valve,                                                                 

bleated in the back row,

favored the mute.

 

 

 

Roger Pfingston

2016

 

Having woken from a night’s sleep,  

that common expectation,

I am calmed, even cheered in this

November darkness as I read a while

among the enduring voices of poets passed. 

 

An hour later it is my own time

and face in the mirror as I shave,

on one side of the sand-speckled basin

a ceramic mermaid--bare-breasted,

one arm elbowed out, hand behind her head--

a whimsical moment arranged by my wife

who still dreams.

                              Silence gives way

to the paper carrier’s stop and go,

headlights ghosting fog…in my mind’s eye

his arm extended…overhead, trees whispering

their wrinkled pages, writ and tossed…

the living room not yet troubled by human news.

 

 

 

Church of Field and Sky

 

A few days after the Fourth, scorched tubes

litter the road, their rockets spent across

thirty acres of six-foot stalks swollen with ears

sweetened by a good measure of sun

and rain. In previous years it was soybeans

 

hugging the ground, a ragged growth beset

by drought and insects, not as camera worthy

as this Sunday morning walk prolific with chicory,

corn, and Queen Anne’s lace. A developer’s

write-off, biding his time while the folks

                         

of Stoutes Creek Road hold their collective breath,

expecting yet another addition where the church

of field and sky prevails. And may it remain so,

the pleasure of this parcel’s delayed future,

its deepening green stippled with dew,

 

tassels rich with pollen under a blue dome

thickening to cumulus, cars and trucks

crunching out of driveways, neighbors nodding

or waving to the old guy down on his knees,

aiming his camera, whatever it is he sees.

 

 

 

Winter Roost      

 

Not the poetic murder nor the common flock.

More like a legion, a skirl of crows                

returning at dusk to roost silhouetted

 

in trees lit by the courthouse clock,

time conscious birds befouling the night,

a toss of feathers floating slo-mo into the mix.

 

8 a.m., the sidewalk a canvas of drip and splash.

Pollock, he mutters, cursing, tiptoeing

office bound while others take to the street,

           

preferring the risk of rush-hour traffic,

crows already up and out, gleaming

sun-oiled in the work of a twelve-hour day.

 

 

Daniel Pravda

Gig at Sidewalk in New York

 

how to spot a musician: drunk, he loses his legs

before he loses his sublime musical dexterity.

 

i say to him, there's an extra level of energy

in the city, a living with wolves.

 

6000 basted band stickers intimidate

the ammonia barrel in the bathroom of the bar.

 

shots of vodka.  pulls off blunts.  adrenaline

kicks red bull in the balls.

 

sultry, vulpine chick bends guitar, breathes fire,

persuades hearts to hang out and order more.

 

i say to her, i dreamt of you alone

in a market weighing clementine oranges.

 

feedback delayed by reverb and herb, evan williams

bourbon turbochased by tums and bayer,

 

the mirror a little grayer, songs rip

layers of smog, fried pain and carbon dioxide,

 

exercising liberties in the context of cops,

listening to the mortality of the city

 

bulldozed, buried and built again.

 

 

 

Zack Rogow

Labor Coach

 

Birth is an ugly thing.

The labor grinds like a stuck clock.

Pain immolates the person you love most

and you can’t do anything

except remind her to breathe

and she screams into your eyes

as if you caused it.

Masked faces gawk at intimate moments.

Instruments are smeared with numbers.

Poop snakes out, and the episiotomy gushes like red oil.

 

Birth is an ugly thing

until her tightest push

jellies the baby past the pelvis,

and that new creature appears

fresh as the day

that water first caught the sun’s flash.

 

Then you tuck that little joey under your chin—

its tiny fingers already grappling yours—

and hold that beating body,

suddenly you feel so strange—

as if you actually belong to this world.

 

 

 

People Keep Having Babies

 

There are already more humans on earth than seconds in a century

but enough children are born every day

to populate Miami or Belfast

The oceans fill up like forgotten bathtubs

and it won’t be long

before Siberian tigers live only inside rectangles

but those in love still make babies

There are cities you’ve never even heard of

with over a million people

and parents snug their newborns in soft folded cotton

Block after block

of apartment towers are smashed together

with no thought where all the glass and steel will end up

Goodnight mittens Goodnight moon

We treat this planet like teenage boys joyriding a stolen Chevy

and parents still lift their babies gently from their cribs and press

their cheeks to their cheeks

 

 

 

Terry Savoie

The New Warriors

 

arm themselves with prosthetics,

  their old limbs long gone, blasted,

       shattered or lopped off then stacked

  in blanched & bleached hillocks

to rest & roast in the noonday heat

  if not crushed in the beak of a carrion

       bird or witnessed by a romantic,

  latter-day Whitman.  Now, bionic

limbs live on, limbs with death

  grips, limbs ready to read

       neurons & nerve impulses,

  limbs able to scatter & scare

the living daylights out of kids in

  cancer wards, limbs designed for hyper-

       extension & nonstop lovemaking

  in mind, limbs for the touching

& the touching up that gets closer

  to the art of touching, limbs craving

       with artful plasticity the long-

  yearned-for revisit to the scene of a crime,

the just & righteous vengeance & yet

  another chance to pull the hair trigger

       that's been an itching phantom

  for years without any relief in sight,

without any belief in a final, testing

  ground of will power. Thus a new war

       is nothing more than a remembrance

  of all old wars ever waged as we end

up trading arms with those we once knew

  as our dearest, our best of enemies.

 

 

 

 

Barry Seiler

Vase

 

The vase across the room,

The one before the window,

Is checking you out,

Giving you the old once over.

 

This one happens to be a bud vase,

A vessel,

Holding a single rose

With a slender neck and a curious face.

 

The rose is whispering to the vase.

It sounds like the sea

Sliding along an old wooden wharf

On a Mediterranean island.

 

Or the west side of Manhattan on a moonless night.

Plate

 

No matter how hard we try

We can still see the shepherd and shepherdess in the meadow,

And the sheep with their ironic half smiles,

Terrifying in their contentment.

 

Earlier a sudden shower.

They took shelter in a shed.

We know,

We watched through the window.

 

But none of this appears on the plate.

 

Which is blue and of a set.

Brush

 

The handle is something like wood.

But not quite. Something more elusive.

 

You take it in hand.

You look at yourself in the mirror.

This is the you

Who looks at himself in the mirror.

 

Who decided how a brush must be used?

For sure, it wasn’t you.

 

You aim the brush at the shower curtain

And fire.

 

Bang. Bang.

Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.

 

You got me you cry out,

And stretch your arms dramatically,

And fall to your knees

In the dusty street.

Loaf

 

What does the loaf want?

 

Lifted,  squeezed,

It signals to its neighbor,

And its neighbor nods.

 

It sighs acceptance.

Of what, we can only surmise.

 

We feel uneasy carrying it home,

Its head peering over

The top of the shopping bag.

 

 

 

 

D.E. Steward

Lagoon Camp

 

Dogs as dogs have been

 

Lycaon pictus

 

Lycaons in unison behave like canine bands, those random insouciant packs of farm or kraal dogs or strays

 

Wild dog, hunting dog, painted hunting dog, Cape hunting dog, lycaon, licaon, once all over Africa south of the Sahara 

 

Bizarre pelage of red, black, brown, white, yellow, big rounded ears, blotchy marbled coats, white tufted tails, black powerful muzzles, the adults over fifty pounds, long legged with four-toed feet

 

Prey located by sight, approached stealthily then chased for ten minutes or much longer at speeds of over fifty kph

 

Frequently disemboweling their prey while running

 

Bolting their kill, regurgitating to pups, deferring to old or injured members of the pack  

 

But no aggression toward the others, amicable and helpful within the pack except when rival females occasionally fight for breeding rights

 

And wild dogs will attack hyenas trying to intrude on kills

 

“Some creatures pass by and don’t return” (John Kinsella)

 

An overwhelming sense of well-being driving slowly through the bush in Botswana snaking along on a sandy track in an open safari car with savvy people under fair-weather cumulus in clean air flushing in on high from South America across the whole South Atlantic and the dry Kalahari

 

Frequently the monumental profiles of an elephant herd feeding near the horizon, zebras in the middle distance, perhaps a jackal or a bat-eared fox or small antelopes in close, and raptors soaring in wide turns below the drifting cumuli

 

The most distant raptor low toward the horizon Spencer says is a martial eagle and the other two both African hawk eagles

 

Spencer reads profiles and probabilities as soundly as any university-educated natural scientists, knows everything about what we see, and seemingly he misses nothing

 

He is from Francistown far to the east on the Zimbabwe border, has been guiding for two decades without going stale

 

The old naturalist’s adage about observing the exceptional about every forty minutes is halved or quartered with Spencer

 

As days on safari accumulate, the wonders turn up more and more and sometimes are nearly matter-of-fact, but that would not be the case without guides like Spencer

 

Out at daybreak from Lagoon Camp and in the days before from Little Kwara, move slowly and soon sight either giraffes, elephants, impalas or reedbucks, and what at first was amazing becomes normal and predictable

 

Perhaps something vivid and unique that evokes gasps once or twice an hour, coming up on what’s left of a kill, a boomslang in the branches over a waterhole attempting to raid a southern masked weaver colony’s nests, a mother of any of dozens of species with her young, another huge eagle on perch, and the elephants, always the elephants

The lions, the cheetahs, crocodiles, sinister boomslangs, lofty giraffes, zebra herds, wonderfully delicate antelopes

 

And the constant presence of birds 

 

The galvanic fascination with the fast-changing habitat across savanna high ground to swamp, to woodland, and then and always back through the bushveld again

 

A monoculture in sheltered mopane woodlands, mysteriously parklike with strangely quiet and narrower birdlife than in the forest plentitude of species in the Amazon’s várzea or the northeastern North American Piedmont and Appalachians

 

Mopane’s serene bareness in from the constant edginess of the bush, and it is the hardest wood in southern Africa, pit braces, railroad ties

 

Out of the shade back in the acacia savanna a pair of batteleurs on perch just twenty meters off, yet another kind of eagle, chestnut, gray, black plumage mildly evoking the calico-cat patchy pelage of the wild dogs

Generally traveling on sand, hardpan or swampy tracks except when Spenser drives the car into thickets or high grass to follow game or investigate what is or may be going on

 

Just in case, each safari car has, secured below the guide’s seat which is the driver’s seat, a high-caliber rifle   

 

In tall grass on the way back into Lagoon Camp we slowly come up on mating leopards

 

Spenser had noticed jackals moving in, meaning probably the remains of a kill, meaning maybe lions or a leopard

 

In close the leopards broke from almost beside us and flashed into a thicket beside a kopje, they moved explosively

 

And coming back to Lagoon next evening in the dark just after sundown we saw a single leopard, Bate on his tracker’s perch off the left front fender spotlighting, as is done in New Hampshire for moose

 

Its eerie green eye shine, its jaguarlike rosette marked flanks, the deep black spots on its limbs vivid like pools of the night into which it eventually vanished as we followed it into heavy brush

 

With a lot of travel in the African bush twice before years ago had never glimpsed a leopard and both times here I could have reached down out of the car to almost touch one

 

Cheetahs are easier to run across, and more passive in human presence

 

A couple of times we watched two cheetah brothers who hunt and live together near Lagoon out in the open as they lounged on a hummock like two big dogs on the lawn

 

After minutes of staring at them and their own strange, high-fashionesque small-headed looking-into-the-far-distance gaze they would stalk off stiff-leggedly as if in disdain, one behind the other, brothers as brothers are

 

A half dozen elephants of various ages and sizes feeding through camp walking where they wanted to right across Lagoon Camp one afternoon in siesta, crunching away the way circus elephants do eating hay, and seemingly oblivious to us in our tents

 

Namibia’s Caprivi Strip thirty meters away across the limpid, green Kwando River 

 

And the hippos, anywhere with enough water for them to hide themselves submerged, in the big vleis, in the rivers, in the arms of the delta itself, to come out only at night to roam for substantial distances foraging in the dark 

 

Hippos in the hippo pool by Lake Nakuru in Kenya years ago at the exact late afternoon beginning of the seasonal rains

 

The red-pink inside their rounded huge coal-scuttle jaws even showed through the sheeting rain, their gappy plug teeth, and the bellowing, bellowing, bellowing, beseeching the elements in pure joy for more rain when a dozen or more of them began bellowing in unison as the deluge began

 

So many things African are impossible to know anywhere else

 

The snouted cobra in my work room on the mountain in Swaziland, in through the ground level broken window, that I moved out the same way with a long-handled shovel at wrapped-in-a-blanket arm’s length

 

The quizzical faces of the samango monkeys coming in at dawn out of the kloof up Sheba’s Breasts behind that Swaziland house to raid the feral pawpaw grove

 

The longer-than-a-meter, did not see it well, monitor lizard that took me down with a swing of its heavy tail, clipping me behind the knees while standing obliviously taking a leak in the grass off the Great North Road in Zambia

 

The snakes, the crocodiles, the multitude of geckos, the exotic insects and their marvelous sounds, the birds

 

Hammerkops landing dramatically on the bottom of the Swaziland house’s empty swimming pool to stab and gulp down clawed fogs (Xenopus) there for the water trickle on the blue-painted bottom

 

Pangolins rattling across the yard of the house in Tanzania at night as bushbabies (spectacled galagos) trundled across on a wire above, balancing like gray squirrels do on telephone and electric wires

 

That piercing strangeness of bushbabies grunt-yapping and yapping screeching in the Tanzanian silent Indian Ocean night  

 

Magical, bizarre and magnificent

 

Now Botswana’s radiant birds

 

Brown snake eagles with their yellow eyes, creamy white legs that on perch stood out like elegant little pillars

 

Wahlberg’s eagles, the most common of the half dozen eagle species

 

The redbilled and the yellowbilled oxpeckers riding the big grazing animals frequently high up feeding on the shoulders and necks working toward their ears, and on down their legs and flanks if at rest

 

The profusion of birds background for the safari drama of hooves, tossing manes, bursting speed, blood, dust and large-scale carnivore pursuit

 

The diminutive passerines and even the doves, drongos and small raptors dwarfed in the brilliant and dramatic light and weather

 

Birds are the only live element that is unchanged and the only expansively wild creatures that we notice other than squirrels and rabbits, deer, in most of our metropolitan world

 

Birds in full variety in the African bush are omnipresent as a kind of minor key

 

Everywhere there the ambience of the birds

 

Almost that there is too much else in the African savanna with the huge animals and the others that trail them

 

Like the white rhino cow and calf trotting off over a ridge off the Zambezi on the Zambian side near Livingston on the way out of the Okavango

 

The mother with two oxpeckers bouncing along on her neck, the calf with the charmingly dopey and compliant look rhino calves have

 

Too much else, like the animal smell from the dust itself when the first big drops splatter at the start of a hard afternoon shower

 

Off to the west from where most of the heavy lightning storms come to the wide Okavango is the Kalahari, the great western desert of Africa’s south where the San have thrived for more than a hundred thousand years

 

All over southern Africa the San’s click-languages, the first people of all

 

And their serene diffidence is a quality of that part of Africa’s special case

 

San squint-eyed physiognomy is as ubiquitous there as blondness is in Scandinavia, small stature in South Asia, as obesity in the wealthy world 

 

The San with their camp dogs, dogs as dogs, that have always been

 

 

 

 

Lynn Strongin

Jeez’ Corner

 

Catafulques? Undecorated, it was the south, it came out the back kitchen door

The child hung back.

Jam Jars for winter stood on a sill

The sorcery of sunlight in a poor kitchen:

Everything about it poor, the cupboards, the splintered chairs

One cannot count on sympathy.

One of us wants to lie low

One to go to Starwars, mind you, at the university.

Dragging their cart of coals, fatigue, along the pony lumbers

The woman remembers

She buried her dead birds all in shoeboxes by the barn:

Little wren, and here was English robyn.

There on the to her sing was her first canary. They all came to grief, singing.

Swinging my body up by standing on tiptoes and pulling myself over a branch circled           by muscular hands. Back down on earth

What is phosphorous

Is earth, the curb of one half so

Raising his childbody on one elbow

Giving in to hunger

He would cry

But not in the manner of David’s beautiful figures on the season

Rather

The dubious condition

Of childhood in need.

While meantime round the corner come Jeeze songs, hymns up the ladder & down.           Soprano at top alto the lowest the child rung can reach.

 

 

 

In Our Carrels 

 

Scribes, bent over, spine-aching scholars

Poems of air are slowly rising:             in blowing diagonal snow inscribing us lie the           ancient text, we so bookstores, rammed with many colors, a kaleidoscope of           people we know & do not know turning page; one dog barks:

Night turns it all into an engraving.

In the dress shop, where we buy a black one, One black turtleneck dress, we always           buy black,

& in the jewelers. Morganite takes your eye

Pears take mine & spill them round

A heavy snow fills valleys

And in the indelible dark comes train inches away from the house that bird.

All are mute.

Despite all the colorful and beige inscriptions none will speak a word, an integer of           thought

No bird will since

Beside the house that is a hull

Now

Gutted 

Save for the carcass of the dog no longer barking

 

 

 

Five Cities Lurking Beneath Winter Waves

 

All teal

All out of Brueghel

Or London’s Thames the historic winter it froze over

After a big loss, you’re drawn to things intuitively;

For her it was goshaws. Some considered them a feathered bullet.

Sky is the color of tea-stained paper.

Goshawks are born with blue eyes

Later clear

And finally the color of chimney smoke.

So lurking beneath the love                        the wonder

Will this city come up like bubbles from a diver?

Like the Great Slave Lake            Ukraine:

Branches of snow, how would they hold their lace under water

Lapping, curling, waving

Waves peaking to the height of a house?

Then they fall back down.

I turn the key I the lock to one door of a small circular city in Ukraine

A thousand years ago

Snow is blowing like white film, smoke, dust

Off roofs.

I wait my turn, lyrics, balanced collected in my hand, my little grey cells

As sweets at the bottom of the jam

On the kitchen shelf. The final breakaway from finitude occurs only after the Second           world war.

          (Tomas transtromer” “Now , as I tell you/ of the Emperor”)

All The Neural Pathways Block, Unpacked

Cleared by the snow, ivory palaces

One can marry the moon

But the snow has a will of her own.

You can feel on top of it all

Even though you’re at the bottom:

Think of all wartime minerals: plus fuels: coal

Copper, tin, steel

Ride astride a creature of the mind

I walked the space of my hymn-shaped room sparrows, small sparks 

Along the rim of a black rail outside the room

My protectors.

The rail I rode toward the Lord had been broken

Open to leave a clean space & shining.

 

And when the room

Should no more be

When, Lord, I come to die

All will be trim staked;

Soul to sever from body.

 

 

I Set My Voice Box Out In The Snow

 

To silver

Not long like a row of concert goes to Schubert’s trout quintet.

Circling it hard orbs of cold

Containing echoes of all I had even spoke

The pipe held in vise.

Landscape circled it too

Thrilling water so chill

It contained a series of sorrows, tears.

Sky was Quaker brown.

Ozone sharpened. A freeze was coming

But now in between

Trusting my instrument I let it ice over

Like the heart in the body locked in

But still the silver sides mirror

All the grievances of a long lifetime blown up like a bird against glass.

 

 

 

 

Tim Suermondt

Hopeful in Utrecht Tonight

 

                               after Mia Avramut

                                               

In this elbow of the world

everything seems to be as it should.

 

The stubborn daylight that still faintly clings

to the many rooftops attests to this clearly,

 

and the men and women of the city seem

to have satisfaction woven into their stylish clothes.

 

I look through the windows of a passing trolley

and can see my friends at work and play in America.

 

I’m tempted to cross the canal to the park,

pick up a fallen branch and scratch on the sky

 

‘I’ll be returning soon’ and not worry whether they’re

ready or not to welcome me back.

 

 

 

The Patriots

 

In the darkest part of the bar we gather

to plot to save the world.

If only our leaders listened and had

the conviction to implement our ideas,

brilliance born among an array of beers.

Hanging on the wall right above us

is the dim lit framed black and white photo

of JFK who appears more sad than pensive,

his spirit probably realizing his mistakes,

the Bay of Pigs on his lips no matter the times

he dreams of dancing in Camelot.

When one of us finally succumbs to the hours

of drinking we decide to call it a night.

En masse we tumble outside, our steps trudging

along on a sidewalk made silver by a big, bright

moon and a sentinel of streetlights.

“I love America,” one of us says—“Yes, yes, yes,

sleep on it, sleep on it,” says another as we make

our way holding on for dear life, strengthened

by the wisdom of how much the Republic needs us.

 

 

 

Ben Swimm

I Said That We Should Stay

 

Even after some animal instinct sent our dog running madly
into the woods on our first night there, leaving only slushy prints

 

for us to follow through the swamp, I said that we should stay.
He came back later, and I considered this the more important sign.

 

After dinner, Lewis came upstairs to tell us what he meant
when he said Church: a ragtag group of East Village urbanites

 

that came on weekends to the farm to lash together shelters under trees
and arrange the rocks in spiritually conducive patterns

 

before smoking themselves senseless with whatever
the latest shaman prescribed, which was all to say, I think,

 

he considered themselves to be a generally harmless group of individuals.
For the most part he was right, the closest we ever came to harm being

 

the time a burly tattooed vegan activist showed up at our house
when we were out and stood waiting by his Jeep for our return

 

having driven three plus hours to convince us not to eat
the pig we raised ourselves on local grain which had become

 

somehow the latest project of the local PETA chapter.
After weeks of paranoia there were no brawls, no abductions,

 

nothing we could point to and say, “this was the moment
at which our lives became unlivable.” Instead that came from me,

 

when I told you that you could leave without me and the mason
jar of our relationship cracked neatly at the base

 

and spilled out all that we had stored, which by then had turned
to mostly botulism, anyway. We filled our days with enough

 

tomatoes and garden weeds and cover crop to pretend
that we were moving forward but at night we feared the angry wasps

 

that crawled all summer through our walls to sting us in the dark.
Lewis and his followers often spoke of portals. They sat in circles

 

pounding drums and wailing in the room above us while we tried
to sleep. I think they knew how the wasps got in. I think they knew           

           

how to point to something and say it did not exist, like the moon,
or the news, or maybe a whole year. When I finally fell asleep each night

 

I dreamed of dog tracks in the snow and woke up wondering
if you had followed them. If they would circle in the swamp forever.

 

Elegy with Children’s Books and Bad Jokes

 

When more than one person rises to speak

at my Grandpa’s funeral about how

he liked to read the book “Go, Dogs, Go!”

to us grandkids, and how often he would

quote it – “I do not like your hat!” – I know

what they mean is that he was a curmudgeon.

 

And though we all believed he was capable

of love, he really did not like our hats. Still,

he made us wooden toys when we were young.

Trains with creamy curves and linking cars, tight

wooden axle wheels, piggy banks

with moving parts and oak blocks in the old style:

 

Heavy, solid, massive enough to build

a fortress from. These last few years he’d

ask about my outdoor exploits and my

my marital status, always making sure

that I was catching fish and cooking them

for Mimi in the cast iron Dutch oven

 

he gave me one spring, complete with a

camp cook’s manual. This was his idea of love:

Boy Scout studies book. Boy Scout gets badge.

Boy Scout catches fish. Boy Scout woos woman.

Which is why my dad makes the joke at the

reception. The one about him never

 

having seen my Grandpa kiss his wife.

The one where saying “I do not like your hat,

I do not like your hat, I do not like

your hat,” means “I’m very glad to see you,”

and the one where he’d check Mimi’s hand

for a ring, with a wink, every time we’d visit.

 

 

 

 

Pepper Trail

Brief Remarks by the Deceased

 

I was not always so quiet,

As you may perhaps recall.

I used to be a fidgety man,

quick-tongued and sharp,

likely to appear anywhere,

the nearly carefree companion,

almost at ease in the raucous crowd.

 

But for years now, a stillness has been growing in me.

A legacy from my father, that silent man, bequeathed with a look,

Aided by the loss of youth, the losses of middle age.

More and more of my words were spoken in my head alone,

Or written in halting, broken lines like these.

So my silence, you see, like death itself,

Is simply a logical conclusion.

 

I will take no questions, for I have no answers.

If there is a new world beyond my eyelids,

I have yet to see it.

I believe that I will use my stillness, as I used to do,

To melt slowly into the landscape

And, once forgotten, to see if revelations,

Like birds, approach me through the trees.

 

 

 

 

Lisa Zimmerman

What I Might Write to My Mother

 

Nineteen years is how

a lie gets disguised as over it.

Where did you go? After all

this cold river melt downstream
I miss you most when one daughter
flicks her wrist just so and her sister borrows

your pretty legs to kick beneath

her short black skirt.

I just got middle-aged—

tiny, intricate webs,

my smile’s sad afterimage.

 

And suddenly—the way you left—spring

starts up like that Sunday morning in April—

all ache and blossom, church bells,

your inconsolable daughters.

And what then, Mom, what?

 

 

In Contrast to Common Sense

 

Dazzled awake by 5 o’clock sunlight,

clear spirals of water clean him aware

in the shower. The mirror warps

and magnifies his daydream shaving.

 

Coffee steams in a paper cup

as he drives to the job, one arm out

the window, hot black cloud of smoke

rattling the muffler, words about patriotism

peeling off the bumper.

 

His life feels like the residue of bad economics

but it doesn’t slow him down at the yellow light.

There’s a girl in the Cadillac showroom office

whose sweet crooked smile yanks him from the margins

every single time he punches in.