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Issue # 43 Fall 2020

Poetry

Poetry Edited by Roger Mitchell

 

 

Tony Beyer

Hoist

for John Gibb

 

those wheels on poles

from which carrion hangs

human or otherwise

in plague paintings

by Brueghel and his school

 

there are always

plenty of the dead to fill

the lower third

of the picture plane

lime-white and skeletal

 

some shrouded and laid out

in narrow coffins

others like the packaging

of fast food crumpled

and tossed about

 

from the horizon

supposedly uninfected

figures hesitate

before entering the frame

and the unknown

 

vagabonds and paupers

among them will endure

by the nature of their condition

while the rest have more

uncertainty to face

 

viewed from the air

the shallow graves

in their thousands

mark the outskirts of cities

left to their own device

 

arguing the old and frail

would be gone anyway

leaders in denial

on screen and social feed

speak to empty air

 

red tentacles and gold                                                                                    

adhere fiercely

to the sized panel

a judgement that could yet

go either way

 

 

 

Hut book

 

Kamo no Chōmei and I

communicate with one another

over the obstacles of centuries

 

languages and cultures

his Hōjōki sets the tone

for elective solitude

 

to be read while the ground

shudders as if some local or

universal deity

 

has turned over in bed

away from human noise

that distracts the ear

 

from deeper listenings

the sky for example

or the distant mountains

 

rain syllables

quiet at first

then full-throated

 

unacknowledged prophets

whose testimony

can’t be written down

 

my role in the exchange

is to assure Chōmei

he is remembered

 

even here in my narrow

earthquaky country

where he might feel at home

 

 

 

Glass plate

 

polar explorers

before zips and Gore-Tex

layered in pullovers

corduroys balaclavas

 

stench of kerosene and oilskin

in the tent at night

the ponies’ stamp and shuffle

forlorn in the snow

 

they too are rendered

blackly two-dimensional

historically in their case

by silver emulsion

 

spectacular sacrifices

could be made for the sake

of one’s companions in privation

white on white in a swift dissolve

 

letters addressed to widows

attest to their sense of themselves

already with the ages

frozen out of time

 

 

 

 

 

 

R. T. Castleberry

Shock in the Wind

 

May morning wind blows straight through

apartment alleys, sleeper’s streets.

Mud from the weekend dries

in the grass, on the sidewalks.

Feeding hop of a cardinal distracts

a rushing mother and baby.

Wind pushing at me,

the empty, ruined road opens

through the swivel of a broken gate.

Uncut hair curls over my collar.

I’ve let my beard go.

I heard a joke Sunday

I promised myself to remember.

Comic lines desert me in the daytime.

Beneath high, spreading smoke,

faint sirens strike an alarm to the north.

I check for cell phone alerts,

news of curfew’s end.

Bushnell binoculars around my neck,

I see a blue jay startle into flight

from a heavy-limbed oak.

In a dialect of consequence,

a helicopter hovers, then dives.

Under light cover,

we’ll have blue sky heat today.

I’ll move inside soon.

Following routine refinements of isolation,

bored prod of uncorked bottles,

I’ll lock the windows down.

 

 

A Habit of Stone
             after Jendi Reiter’s The Name-Stone

 

Knife tracing the reach of a hand,

words sink into stone,

images stray like cascading stars.

My naming-stone is

a pictogram of trickster Loki,

scorpion, hawk, viper of the shape-shifter god.

I take solitude’s coin for a calling.

It drives the day, the senses of survival.

I worship but don’t pray;

pity but don’t forgive,

foregoing closure for omission.

Faulting a valley life, blinded capture

among white thorns and planting cycles,

I left for bright tower cities,

a train at my shoulder.

I have a friend, a twin

I expect to greet again one morning,

walking an island beach through

cinders of our boats, burning side by side.

“Where have you been?”

“Waiting for the last fire.”

 

 

 

 

 

Three Views of a Storm

 

Rain falls through a mulberry tree,

striking leaves like a boxer taking blows.

Loose patterns settle drought dust into mud,

set a steamy pall over the Commons.

Robin and starling skim from limb to eave.

Entwined scenes of riven sky, rust iron stairs

disorder a terrace window view.

 

First day, another month,

dread rises, distorts

like speech in a tunnel.

I’m dubious of concerns decided

by side effects warnings,

proof of purchase.

Both phones ring, registering

unanswered calls for

debts, donations,

pre-bereavement security.

Now that normal requires a mask,

I’ve come back around to

lies about autumn’s blooming.

 

Leaving Essential employment,

hybrid glide of a quiet car

slips a yellow light, past a flat tire truck.

Street flooding at the intersections,

high weed medians are a driver refuge.

Circling to hunt an overflowing ditch,

grackles swoop for fat frogs and snakes.

Noisy with acorn strike, loose siding,

empty warehouses sit as refuse, as fenced capture.

From highest ground, I trace water’s rise,

waiting like a witness to hear,

“The committee is ready for you.”

 

 

 

 

 

William Cordiero

Maple Sugaring

 

Two rails cut through the heart of town.

I trudge through boscage, rut, and leaf-

rot married to the failing land.

 

Trains whistle like the snowy hiss

of news left on all day. A stand of trees

seduced by paper’s yellow whispers.

 

My lucid toil takes sweetness from

these mazy volumes leaf by leaf. 

The detritivores each quibbling: more

 

dung flies’ ruckus, gribbles’ racket.

I tip the buckets full of sap.

I overturn each weeping pail.

 

At night the blood runs up the trees;

by noon it empties out. I hum

my song. The lumber tapped, I harvest

 

juice. Sucrose must be boiled down.

This sleepy town’s lysergic dreams

would creep through subsoil, mossy

 

caves, towers of conglomerate;

ride xylem up to canopy

as if a starry aftermath

 

still rippled through far space and time,

and tipsy sank and sedimented.

Across cold fields, a track of smoke

 

tilts and lingers off and windward.

This injured ground of North Ohio

yields something thickset sickly sweet.

 

Our bones map iron, earth and marrow.

Sinkholes’ props have turned confetti

over strata in which flowstones drip

 

as acid eats away the mineral.

Each year the root-hairs shrinking down, 

the trunk rings growing thinner yet

 

like orbits of some icy planet.   

I pour the sugar into troughs;

the troughs into a furnace room.

 

A soot-filled rain dismantles maples.

Our burning river’s dappled with

the slow collapse that is a train.

 

 

 

Plain Views

 

The train departs another hard-up station.

Small towns that sag like ziggurats in soil,

lank figures tending ragged furrows. Light

divorced through every twig. And wrinkled tracks

along the faces looking up, which hunker

to pick the fruits on offer. Marauding grackles;

sick bare-ribbed dogs. This syllogistic rattling 

down the line to a point of vanishing

beyond outlandishly infertile fields

parading lack, past blank ramshackle barns,

farmhouses, bell-towers soaring, orchard

stands and whitewashed tabernacles, such granaries

the frugal land affords. Back to cattle ponds

and irrigation ditches.  

                                   Your own sulked,

translucent visage overlays the pane.

Your only saving grace: to will yourself

away by looking to the floating pluralism

abstracted in orchestral palimpsests of clouds. 

A valence of distorted levitation,

that far-off smudge betokens your arrival,

an ever-narrowing parallel, this sweeping

vision—a life insisting that one travel

to it only to arrive at some farewell.

Hushed past drudgework, folding storefronts,

profane love-pleas scrawled on overpasses,

broken streetlamps, gutters smoldering with burn

barrels, a railyard rusting with assorted hulks,   

cracked stucco infrastructure moldered black

as if each passenger were spitting tar.

This sordid business of just getting by

has made the poor, aged citizens a nest

of festering shame and little secrets.

Your eyes are cratered by dismantled hills;

they record the grandeur and the glum of things

indifferently. Each person doing their level

best. And on and on.                    

                                           A milkweed prairie

in which a flock of snow geese swoop up,

loop back, and arrow, falling in together. Rushing

upward in their joint trajectory, one crush

of wings, they have elected to spend winter

elsewhere. You slug a little from your bottle.

Often you wonder why you look at all;

read your old dull endless book, The Decline

and Fall. —But why would anyone write history?

All evidence comes back to mock us, wild

and equivocal: stale air that’s mottled thick

with motes, bulk silage stacked in every silo,

pollen’s efflorescence filling up your window.

You squint and squint until the dark’s locked down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shannon Cuthbert

Contours

 

The art teacher favored you,

Snuck you charcoals and palette knives after class.

You never used them, too embarrassed or ill at ease

With their physicality, the mess of their labor.

The first model class with your sister

You ogled bodies, strange and cold.

Bobbi, who stretched the blue veins of her limbs

Into poses you fled from each Wednesday,

Feeling yourself in her tired eyes,

The pocks of flesh she had heaved

Through this life and a long line prior.

Probably she had graced many a stage,

Swathed herself in silk and compliments.

Too stuffy, this room,

These models slackly withholding the intimate,

Eyes of taxidermied stoats.

You never asked questions, spoke a word.

Understood art not as stillness but dance,

A series of lines and arcs,

Connecting us with our visual past.

The whirling wheel where you touched clay

And modeled its bulges into forms.

Where you stayed a moment staving off chaos,

You and your sister molded together,

Her hands on yours as a vase took shape.

Later you’d print the shapes of your lives 

In impermanent elements,

Their pigments derived from disintegration,

A world of mineral, ash, and bone.

 

 

 

Sisterhood

 

I’ve heard memories are inscribed 

In mostly light and dark,

That the strongest emotions

Pattern themselves like animal shapes on a child’s wall.

But do I remember my sister’s birth,

Or just the pink balloons 

Bouncing their heads together as I held them,

Almost dragging the 26 pounds of me

Up and away in the blister of March?

Or just the humming of hospital corridors, 

Curdling my toddler blood to ice?

I think it thawed only now,

Once these fluorescent lights 

Had flicked their way through me and out the other side, 

Belched out the blinking exit,

The very back where nurses wheel beds to the street

So we can watch the sky

And peel its skin back on nights like this,

Where we gather now to inhale smoke,

And ham subs half-warm in the plastic wrapper,

Where the world’s still dark enough 

To burn holes for stars.

 

 

 

Chimera

 

You bike to the graveyard,

The one by that flat concrete hospital

That emerges from a razed horizon

Much like a spaceship,

Smokestacks that blast unidentified particles

Into the boredom stretching beyond.

There are so many deer here

You can’t count them all.

Mostly they’re see-through.

Their ribs have always wavered for you

And you watch through their sides

Soft waves of grass 

Gurgling through the pipes of digestive systems.

The grass on these graves

Has waited out the better part of seven decades

And seven major storms,

Beheading trees along the way

Like snapping soft-capped mushrooms.

Dissolve and digest, chew and repeat.

You are tempted to dismount your bike

And fall to your knees

And enrich yourself with the taste

Of clotted earth and leaf and wind,

A rush that whispers and promises

To blow away breath and dark and even

The fallen foot of a leftover fawn,

Statuary on the grass,

Its eye that traces the tracks of smoke,

The hospital wings, each and every possible way to alight.

 

 

 

 

 

John Davis

White-out at Mission Ridge

 

on the slope my mind doubled over

and I did not know down from up

 

wherever I turned the wind was moving through me

ice pellets were moving through me

 

minute after minute the snow moving through me

the last of the sun moving through me

 

now the whip now the roar now the flush

now the breathing of the mountain

 

now the cold moving through me

like a lover

 

memories were moving through me

of mountaineers snowbound and lost

 

I could translate language but not the language

of left and right    down and up

 

I was standing on the ridge run

with vertigo and the wind

 

I felt the ghosts of trees moving through me

trees that were cleared so this baldheaded slope

 

could offer me carving, schussing, sliding

I turned but could not find my down and up

 

or the freedom and form of balance

within the numb within the wind                                          

 

within my inner animal I edged myself

toward the edge of what was moving through me

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Fillman

Promises

 

My father didn't talk

much to me as a kid.

So each sentence glimmered

 

as if it reflected

his eyes and not the mug

of beer lifted beneath

 

the yellow kitchen light

those nights on Union Street.

My son's hesitant Yes

 

I would like that brings me

back to words my father

never said but guided

 

into me with his hands,

the even syllables

of a saw pulled across

 

a two-by-four, the rasp

of a taping knife scraped

over spackle, the smack

 

of an old baseball trapped

in the web of his glove.

Each act translated back

 

to a promise of love,

the only way he knew

how to cure the silence.

 

 

 

Omen

 

The mountain as severe

as my grandfather's brow

in that small airless room

during his final hours,

I see a barn owl soar

out of the ridge's mouth,

its big head, terrible

eyes cursing all color,

as if it were hell-bent

on draining the season

 

of red maple, black gum—

every leaf a target.

It doesn't seem to know

the difference between

misery and mercy,

the living and the dead,

that my grandfather warned

Go easy on your kids

before he closed his eyes

and slipped away his hand.

 

My body suddenly

tight, bracing for a blow,

as if I am the prey,

a small, soft animal,

yet I'm surprised to feel 

a fluff of brown feathers

then a rush of wings that

beats on, flooding my ears

with what could only be 

the sound of a last breath.

 

 

The Vanity of It All

 

Two months into quarantine

and I'm still shaving my head,

scraping a razor across

the curve of my skull every

single night, the edge of each

blade sounding like my mother's

cheerful voice those mornings she

greeted me at the breakfast

table with pink lips, bluish

black mascara, two eyebrows

perfectly penciled on. Her

uniform for a long day

of chores in an empty house,

the sagging clotheslines, the hours

of stirring sauce on the stove,

all the dirty dishes stacked

in the sink, my father's shirts

piled for ironing, shower

and toilet always needing

to be scrubbed. In the bathroom

steam I'm staring at myself

in the mirror as I rub

a palm over scalp to feel

some small comfort. I lean in,

clicking my tongue if I spot

even one errant hair I

might have missed, those wisps I am

desperately hiding from

whom? My wife and kids? Maybe

a delivery man or

that nice neighbor who brings us

our groceries? All the while

my mind tries to smooth away

this human need of keeping

up appearances, this strange

compulsion to polish things,

with every swipe of the blade

memories of my mother’s

painted face reflecting bright

in the shine of a brass pot.

 

 

 

 

 

Howie Good

The Aftermath of the After-Party

 

Ocean fog swept in, and brought rattling windows

and bird cries and small black polka dots with it.

 

Headstones sprouted up, seemingly overnight.

Who are we anyway? If you ever go searching,

 

you’ll find electric chairs and gas chambers,

laser beams designed by the military to make

 

asylum seekers feel like their skin is shearing off

as soon as they get within sight of the border.

 

 

 

 

 

Nels Hanson

Musical Chairs

 

Hearing one million acres are scorched

I wonder if those trillion circling usual

stars and half a moon, Mars and Venus

 

shelter past the scalding fog. Three fires

in Obispo County the lightning kindled,

500 wilder infernos out of Dante raging

 

north, south of our “Middle Kingdom”

named after that distant Chinese realm

with enemies on every side. Is Hearst’s

 

famous castle threatened again, a rich

ghost trapped in a tower without a bell,

an actress whispering It’s just a dream,

 

ash falling steadily like a devil’s rain?

A week over 100° and winds fanning

murky light, the amber demon directs

 

“Book of Revelation” a century since

at The Dunes nearby Cecil B. DeMille

shot “Ten Commandments,” a plaster

 

Sphinx discovered under deeper sand

recalling Charlton Heston, a Red Sea

before Moses raises his long flintlock

 

to marshal NRA. Alert!!! Power may

halt, a rolling blackout and the bad air

gritty to inhale, specter of a “firenado”

 

wafting Dorothy beyond Oz, missions

my father flew over Japan. Still, things

aren’t bad as Christmas two years ago, 

 

cherry sun in a chocolate sky at noon,

ivory embers frosting hills and Santa’s

eight reindeer and sled. I’ve dreamed 

 

a black November, odd ballots woven

in dyed wreaths to match an armband

mourners used to wear, a red baseball

 

cap stitched with secret code in white

a letter short of MAGMA. California

to Woody Guthrie’s New York Island

 

observe those silent cities as you scan

cable channels you lease for the virus,

employment news, the new slain past

 

any mask or fire. This hour an expert

pleads Rome’s burning, mad emperor

fiddles to a flame. No, unable to beat

 

time he skips notes for the crescendo,

triangle and striker throwing showers

of sparks engulfing stolen mail a color

 

air was once, last blue missive flaring

while a hot election spreads. Monsters

return, go round and round yet at first

 

few understood the entertainments as 

we forgot what small children know:

A Musical Chairs concludes with one

 

chair left. That recliner is adjustable, 

holds easily such weight, pull a lever

it transforms to a padded throne hard

 

to find as true royalty is disappearing.

And notice, way stubby fingers tense

and grip in sleep, he surely thinks of

 

a strand of music, another chair from

Sing Sing on the sly he’d never ever

even consider installing by moonlight

 

in dark cabinet room to shock a Judas

by surprise like losers fired for laughs

on TV show, the rising star in sudden

 

eclipse left thirsty in a Sahara to die.

Soaring ratings pause in their ascent

to blink at golfing Nero fret and stare

 

seconds by the trap so near the green.

No soul will catch you palm the ball,

toss it rolling softly to a waiting cup

 

for platinum trophy worth Fort Knox

though far above our dome of smoke

across the sky’s hidden tortoise shell

 

constellations change to one animal

closing eyes that saw great dinosaurs

choke on dust the meteor kicked up

 

as caddy raises a scarlet flag to slide

the hole that greets the perfect stroke

and blacker clouds obscure a fairway.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Hettich

The Fireflies

 

Carpenter bees drill steadily into

the beam above my head, making perfect holes,

leaving neat piles of sawdust.

 

A butterfly lands on the sill beside my coffee cup.

 

In the shade, mosquitoes caught in spider webs

buzz and fall silent. It hasn’t rained for weeks.

 

Last night, we watched thousands of fireflies

rise into the sky, so many they looked

like desert constellations, except they were moving

like music. We were visiting friends,

drinking wine. A few of us were dancing.

 

Later, I woke alone in the dark,

got up and wandered through the quiet house

looking for you, who were sitting outside

in the garden, in your pale summer nightgown.

 

I watched you for a while, then went back to bed

where I lay glowing, like an insect full of light

 

or a miniscule glint in the teeming night sky

thousands of light years away.

 

 

 

The Legacy

All morning I’ve been collecting stones,

lugging them down from the woods to my garden

where I spread them out on the ground to admire

their shapes and glinting mica.

 

Then, as the afternoon sun warms us,

I fill a bucket with water and scrub them.

It takes until evening. When I grow tired,

 

I leave the stones drying, go inside,

pour some wine, and sit down to eat.

 

My wife and I watch TV and sit quietly

together; then we go to bed

and hug each other chastely through the night.

 

Tomorrow I’ll carry each stone back into

the woods and lay it gently on the earth

where I found it, so no one else will know.

 

 

 

The Skinny-Dip

 

After she wonders how psychic wounds

move, like genetics, from parent to child,

he muses on the way

a field of boulders

dances without moving, for millions of years--

 

and after they’ve silenced their breaths to listen

to a chirping in the undergrowth, they wonder how quickly

their senses might sharpen

if they bushwhacked off the trail

into the deep woods, to let themselves get lost--

 

which reminds them of people they’ve loved and lost

and prompts reminiscences

they both know by heart--

 

paths they might follow through the dark toward each other--

 

and when they come to a bend in the river

where a waterfall fills a dark pool, he undresses

and slips in, yelping; she laughs at his shivering

nakedness, then takes off her own clothes, to stand

 

leaning toward him, hands extended. Just in case.

 

 

 

The Lake

 

That summer I slept in a tent with a girl

who could turn herself into people she didn’t

know yet, people she was only just meeting

 

as she lay on the dock all afternoon

tanning to the color of antique furniture

 

while I floated in the distance, surrounded by bees

and hunger. One day she vanished

through the slats in the dock

or up into the sky,

 

I never knew for sure, though the dock was still wet

with the imprint of her body

when I floated in at dusk,

 

and the books she’d been reading waited in the sand.

No one else would miss her. Soon enough I’d lost her

 

to the odors of midnight and the frogs singing louder

than blood while I sat with my flashlight beside

the campfire reading the books she’d left me,

then throwing them into the fire.

 

In the morning I burned her clothes and scattered

their ashes across the lake while crows

gathered like a new kind of silence in the oaks

that leaned out over the tea-colored water

 

as though they’d been charmed by their own reflections

and were trying to meet themselves there.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Jones

Le Jeu de Paume

 

Why can I not remember such a remarkable Monday—

June 17 in sunny Paris in 1974 when I was twenty

and toured Le Jeu de Paume with the girl I loved

(who looked like the girl in Renoir’s “La Liseuse”).

 

I still have the daily diary I wrote that records our visit

and to this day in my study over my desk the cheap print

I bought of Van Gogh’s blue church hangs, a painting

I’ve looked at every morning for nearly half a century.

 

Le Jeu de Paume was perhaps the greatest museum ever—

crowded with paintings by Degas, Monet, Gauguin,

Morisot, Manet, Sisley, Pissarro, Redon, Cézanne—

but it closed in the eighties when the paintings were relocated

 

to the new Musée d'Orsay. It’s strange: I can recall every visit

to the d’Orsay, which masterpieces I pondered and studied

and who accompanied me and also the times I went alone.

But over the decades, the Jeu de Paume’s been lost to mind.

 

In Paris I’ve since walked past the building without a thought

and try though I will, I cannot retrieve yesteryear’s memory,

although I was there that day—it’s recorded in my own hand.

Perhaps I was overwhelmed by such great art and love—

 

all those paintings and my sweetheart in one small building!

Maybe it was too much for the young man I was then

to take in and keep, a moment almost too blissful to believe.

All that’s left of that long-ago day in Paris is a torn ticket stub

that bookmarks the worn museum catalog written in French.

 

 

Daughter

 

You like to tell the story of your childhood—

how I would close the door each afternoon

and light the white candle, trying to believe

 

the candle’s tiny flame was the only real thing

in this fleeting universe of illusions and dreams.

Remember how at midnight I’d stand out back

 

in the dew under the moon and sing very softly

a song about home and how home doesn’t exist?

It must have been hard for you, watching me

 

at my black typewriter, striking the keys like I was

trying to extinguish a fire or maybe something

worse that was burning inside me, if burning’s

 

the word, all ashes and waste. It’s true: I was never

satisfied, many balled up sheets of paper piled high

around my desk like snow that would have buried me

 

in great white drifts of time and meaninglessness

had you not been there to gather the sad drafts

and throw them by the armful in the fireplace.

 

 

 

Star Route One

 

I lived at the end of a dirt road—

a clapboard farmhouse with a big porch,

a ramshackle, make-do place

 

cobbled together over time under a tin roof.

A letter from home came once a month

addressed simply to Star Route One

 

and the only living things I spoke to

were the gentle cows and the horses.

I had everything I could need—

 

a ramshackle, make-do place,

a big porch, an orchard,

a mind sharp and ready to fight.

 

I drank well water, ate the food I grew.

I had everything I could need

and the patience to wait for poems

 

that came each day in every season.

I recorded the words in a blue notebook,

lines that seemed dictated by the wind,

 

and I had many blue notebooks

and a good supply of pens

so I could revise endlessly,

 

scratching out lines entire, writing anew,

then typing and retyping. My typewriter

harmonized with rain on the tin roof,

 

the words, recorded in blue notebooks,

finding their natural music, a minor key.

I remember gazing out the tall study windows,

 

the orchard in bloom, the pasture abuzz,

the mountains blue and low on the horizon

as I revised endlessly. Typing and retyping

 

I would look up from my typewriter

and gaze out the tall study windows

to see what was headed my way,

 

the mountains blue and low on the horizon,

the orchard barren, the pasture in snow.

The dirt road forever empty and still,

 

the only living things I spoke to

were the gentle cows and the horses.

I practiced patience, mind at the ready.

 

I drank well water, ate the food I grew.

Looking down the empty dirt road,

I revised endlessly, typing and retyping

 

because I knew something was coming,

something far better than poems—

something sweet, something good,

 

something that would last a lifetime.

 

 

 

 

 

Tricia Knoll

Autumn

 

The sky is glass and the grass

wears the color of deer.

 

The yellow jackets race

the crickets to outfeed on fall.

 

The flickers beat double time

on rotten alder

 

and the dog sheds summer

in rolling clumps of gray

 

relearning to hide her nose

under her tail in the cold.

 

A woman home from work

puzzles over two dead squirrels

 

and the smallest of their babies

clucks at the terrier whose patience

 

wears thin as the days dim.

On my table the many koans

 

of being rich or poor, humble

cotton and the apprenticeship

 

of thieves. Under a sky stained

the see-through of sea glass.

 

 

 

El Dia de los Muertos

         Now is made out of ghosts. – William Stafford

 

Mourners find my doorway.

The threshold leaks portents.

First frost          turned the basil black

                          struck the rosebud gray

                          greens gave over to seed

                          that sunken hour

 

The corn stalks hang head down.

The ash of my people is mountains away,

 in a marsh, on a cliff, or unmarked

 in graves of Civil War dead.

 

The mice plot to move in

to basement feasts of warm forgottens.

The wren ignores red yarn in the grass.

A black cat with four white paws

rubs against the garbage can.

   

 The oaks have not given up

 to weeks of their dreaming,

 dry yellow blown to the porch.

 My tongue readies to play snake for a snowflake

          memory of red-boot shuffle.

 

Pumpkins sag mildewed mouths

    beneath red felt sombreros, too melted for pride of pie.

Out come tea lights and garlands of gold,

         my mother’s bone china tea cups,

         one silver setting on the tatted tablecloth

         hanging down to an empty red velvet chair

         amontillado in the zipper-patterned glass decanter

         skull cookies on the hand-painted rose plate

 

My blood runs with flu virus. Gloves, wool socks

in a basket beside the door with mud boots,

and the ribbed stocking cap.

 

A whistle in the weather-stripping.

The ghosts hunch up, condors of smoke.

 

 

 

 

 

Naomi Bess Leimsider

Strangertwin

 

My double walker walks the world looking for me. Her Pale of Settlement face

is, of course, mine, but my mild blindness keeps me guessing. On and on

she goes and goes. I see her face, but I don't. Her long ago hand like family

on the back of my neck. She is here for our moment. One cannot

stay alone on the planet for too long.

When my doppelganger drops by for a midnight visit, I pay attention.

 

She smiles at me across the breadth of time, shifts into her organic state.

She is as lovely as I am just for me. I know her beginning, and also her end,

but I see only what she wants me to see. Not her rotten social six or

the ruined city of her body. Not surviving on little else but ersatz coffee

or last on the endless loop of a line for the gas.

She doesn't owe me anything, but she always finds me.

 

Our blood the only type on Earth; we are the same but different in and out

of her skin. Back in the Pale, we are lost and found. In the old country, I borrow

the muscle memory of her voice. I speak her loanword language, suddenly

fluent as the heavy jumble of words press my lips and tongue.

She lets me look around for comfort, others with our thoughts and faces,

but I forget what I cannot see.

 

In the morning, still sleepy with dreams of our demise, I realize

the length and depth of her journey. The back and forth of her bargaining.

The energy she spent for me. The pleas and prayers, the haggling up and down

for just a split second more, whatever needs to be done, however long it takes,

in order to keep it moving in the right direction to an accident of time and place

when another face will replace her. 

 

The world moves on and on. No one knows how she goes.

I've already had more life than she's had, more than most,

maybe more than I deserve.

 

 

 

Crazy For Two

 

What kind of gaze you give under brightest middle of the night diner lights

in the smallest moments. Start talking, and I'll gift you the truth of me

showing you mine. We are already drunk, but definitely order more

purple teeth wine. Also turkey clubs on toast and a long bottle of still water.

How we drink and feed ourselves so we are full.

 

What's going on here is we don't say it and don't say it because synchronicity

is that we both see the searing fresh trouble it will bring. The singleness of this one

night out of zillions, twelve hours shoved into one shift, which does nothing

but curve the world away from us. The bells chime, swinging crazily back and forth,

all the alarms go off, but what is set in motion is already in motion.

 

You dare me down; I'm known to take all bets and entertain all comers. Still,

I get up off the killing floor and mad dash to the exit while you sharpen

your slicing knives. The inevitable slaughter is more than I bargained for,

but I stop dead at the door. I am also unhinged; we are a pair of terminal cases.

Take a damp napkin and wipe the dark blood off my dirty face.

 

Our meal is here. There are no other choices, so pour the wine. Just this one night

in this booth under these lights so there will never be another. Drink the dry mouth

wine and ubiquitous diner water. Toast the two of us who sit here in this moment

eating sandwiches constructed layer by layer by layer. Then there will be a bill to pay

and other nights to live through.

 

Start talking; tell me everything. We'll go crazy on each other:

I am here for it, as they say. Stab my surface layer with the sharp gaze

of deep-set eyes on your fingertips, and then a little deeper.

 

 

 

Half-Life   

                                                                                               

When I explain to my daughter that she has eggs inside her; in fact,

a whole regulated cracker jack system, perfectly suspended in the pocket

of her star stuff, waiting for a shuffle to set off the static shock that is the hormone

cascade of the shape shift between small child and wild adult, she is floored,

of course, but she gathers her courage, deftly uses her newly gifted language,

and asks me, her biological mother, with great scientific precision:

not like the eggs we scramble in the pan? not like the eggs we use to bake a cake?

not like the cold eggs we use to turn one thing into another?

 

Part of my job is to share stories of the remarkable world. My daughter

is innocent to my radioactive griftress, graftress, con woman history. My spinner

of marvelous partial tales ways: I am unreliable on my best day. But I am supposed

to be her narrator, so I try to reduce my lies by half. I can give her this one honest moment:

no, not like those eggs. Your eggs are hot eggs; your eggs live in the quantum

world; your eggs might someday power up for the zinc spark; your eggs are pinpoints

of light blinking secret code into the curve of time.

 

My daughter already tells herself all the stories of the universe: how we hold

the future inside ourselves, the why and way of decay, that we lose the horizon

flying miles above the sea. She is still full of lightning, so she does not consider

how quickly we lose electricity. She only questions the frenzy, the alchemy:

how does the magic energy of our eggs spontaneously turn elements into us?

are we assigned an egg at the beginning of time? will there be another egg

like our egg again?

 

I run up against truth. The chaos of lines drawn and redrawn, the hum of mad

uncertainty, how it is all goes unstable. Mother substance decays into daughter substance;

daughter substance gives no quarter. I dance around explanations, definitions, the how

of how it is. I already miss the halcyon days of my old slippery ways when I could spin

several slick stories at once, soften the edges, make it sweet, easy to swallow, soothe

with half lies; tell her we are meant to be, things happen for a reason, there is full free will.

But I should practice my skills, hone newfound honesty: some eggs are better than others,

some eggs start good and go bad, some eggs are always rotten.

 

I swear I knew her face long before her egg bubbled up, pulsed, ripened. Back when she

was still independent of her physical state. This can only be true in the half-hidden reality

of absolute time before she became my daughter. There is no way to explain transition

and survival in a world where eggs exist, begin, break down; the deep truth that once life

has begun an organic body cannot slake its thirst for disintegration.

 

How can I tell her there are places on my earth that cannot be inhabited again

for millennia.

 

 

 

Virus Poem

 

in the twilight sleep between alive and not alive, the zombie

twitches to life. Suddenly, it is spiked mouthless muscular hunger,

all jacked up and vascular. Protein-famished, it devours the meatiest

strands then sheds, sheds, its swollen-sized slippery self, feverish

with shape-shift, with mutation. Watch it radicalized by the heady, reckless

call for colonization, the short, sharp cry of imperialism, the nationalist

desire for multiplication! Next is the massive march on its merry, merry

host, who, after a lull, presents with a lump, an alien ache, in the throat:

the things that happen to flesh and blood bodies.

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Mayo

Cheongsam

 

I imagine going to visit my ex in a garden

at the home where she spent her last years.

It would be autumn but in a southern clime,

where maples would have ceded their place

to live oaks with Spanish moss.

The grounds would still be green, belying the lateness

of the season as she sat there in a white, cast-iron chair,

her face westering toward the setting sun,

heliotropic as a flower.

 

I can even envision that she’d be wearing

that sky-blue, Chinese-silk dress I gave her

with the high collar and complicated floral design,

which fit her figure, as tight as a second skin,

its long slits along the sides sliding up each tanned thigh,

as her lithe body, still slim as a stem, then bent the blossom

of her smile toward my face

as I approached and leaned over to kiss her.

 

But I never dared to visit, to see how

her mind had slipped out the back door

of her drinking when I wasn’t looking.

 

I didn’t want to witness that goofy confusion

which might contort her mouth

or see her face blotching from an embarrassment

she wasn’t even sure why she felt

as her eyes searched to figure out who I was.

 

And I knew I’d be trying to decipher the meaning

of the cuneiform stains on the shapeless, bib-like gown

she’d be wearing instead of the embroidered blossoms

of her cheongsam and the raveled complexities I can see

they now represent of all we had never said to each other.   

 

 

 

 

The Archaeology of Remembrance

                                    For Margo

 

Out of the boredom of rainy-day Sundays,

once again, I descend the dank cellar stairs

to sort through those relics of my past and judge

the useless usefulness of sentimental things.

Today, I discover beneath a tepee of skis

a velvet sack in a plastic bag brittle with age.

At first, I don’t remember it. Then I recognize

inside the sack the wooden, cube-shaped urn,

which carried to this shore the ashes of my friend, 

who now rests among the roots of a pear tree

beside his brother’s house. I remember that we didn’t

talk for years, but not why, and after his memorial,

how his widow, who’d brought him home, couldn’t bear

to rid herself of its burden, thus entrusting its emptiness

to me. I also remember hesitating to take it, thinking

of the sacrilege of my options: driving it to the dump,

or just lobbing it into any dumpster I might pass by.

Now, as I further peel back the sack’s velvet lip, I see

the chipped remains of red wax used to seal the lid’s

screw holes and bestow upon the urn that status

from a higher authority customs agents revere.

 

I lift off the lid, where another, even thicker, white

plastic bag sits inside. Older than the first, its interior

remains powdered with the worldly residue of my friend.

Rummaging beneath the bag, I find the brass screws

which kept the box and my friend intact.

Then finally, I come upon this one, last object:

an off-white, plaster of Paris medallion.

As I hold it, I notice a number stamped on its face

and a date stamped on the back, the year my friend died.

I heft it once again in my hand, and in the quiet,

dimness of this musty, crypt-like place,

this portal to the mind’s wandering inclinations,

I imagine an artifact, a clay disk whose purpose

must have been as a passport to the afterlife,

a brittle document issued by some ancient

Sumerian bureaucrat or priest and valid

only upon the bearer’s expiration. And I

picture myself as this grateful archaeologist,

who has searched his whole life for such a find

and, at last, discovers his friend.

 

 

 

 

 

John Palen

Blue Piano

 

They drove separate cars.

The garage would open,

swallow a car and close again.

The yard man said they were married,

nice young couple, no kids,

busy with high-tech jobs. The mailman

said they were siblings,

brother and sister living together

while they finished degrees.

The roofer said they were siblings

damaged in a bad divorce,

neither parent wanted them around

in the new, blended families.

 

One day they were gone.

California, the movers said. . . .

 

The guys who delivered the blue grand

said nothing, left it in the center

of the empty picture window

in the empty living room

of the empty house,

the lid raised on the long stick

and eighty-eight lonely keys.

 

 

 

 

At the Supermarket After an Early Snow

 

Winter blew through like a rude guest,

didn’t stay, left old socks on the berm.

It will be back, in dirty moraines,

ice in dangerous ridges underfoot.

Already geese stage in stubble fields,

snowbirds pack for the Rapture

to be whisked away to Florida.

I’ll winter in place, as I’ve always done,

 

with the man from the group home

in damp parka and yellow safety vest

who’ll pilot nested carts across the parking lot

like lake freighters in a November gale,

the frail greeter on a tripod cane

who’ll welcome shoppers at daybreak

at a door always opening to the cold.

 

 

 

 

 

Bruce Parker

The Annunciation

            for Emmett Wheatfall

 

The tree into which

            the crow glided

                        was nearly as dark

 

as the crow, which

            seemed a black

                        ghost, but did

 

not frighten.  It fed

            on some insects on

                        a shaded branch

 

and flew off,

            silent all the while.

                        Then its call came

 

from the next tree

            to say that black ghosts

                        have found their voice.

 

 

 

Waiting In the Car While the Wife Buys Groceries

 

I see Death go by on a little bicycle,

riding on the sidewalk because

he is afraid of traffic.  He has come

all the way from downtown, last night’s

battleground.  A car had hit a protester

and now Death fears traffic,

his little bicycle is so frail, his black hood

frightens no one.  Downtown is

several miles away, but Death

is not tired, he only wants to avoid

getting hit by a car.

 

 

 

In Dependence

 

We the people propel ourselves

out of ourselves

a new people,

 

birth begets rebirth

of the people we

believed ourselves to be.

 

 

 

 

 

Kenneth Pobo

Cooper's Hawk

 

Her talons could lift and carry us

to the outskirts of a cloud, perhaps farther,

where Dorothy should have stayed. 

Smaller birds fear, stay in trees.

The hawk misses little, agile, focused.

A sudden move, a leap down

to grab.  Sometimes she comes to visit

the top of our pole, fierce-eyed,

 

our yard her own.  We don’t exist. 

She’s surely unafraid of us

as we look at her from behind

the dining room window,

late autumn light on her wings,

the sky door fully open.

 

 

 

 

 

Will Reger

Flightless

 

The sparrows I saw

in an elementary parking lot

fifty and more years ago,

being only themselves,

fluttered and scuffled,

dusty in the asphalt grit

of 1966. The day

was cloudy, early or late,

a warm day, recess.

The birds, so fragile

and light, flocked,

jittery knots massing

for an attack,

for a conversion.

The boy tried out

their language. He said

the birds were teaching him,

as he chased them,

the only sparrow

not to take flight.

 

Crossing Ohio

 

Toward noon we begin again.

Not rested, but no longer aching to sleep.

You sit hunched away from me,

staring into the heavy woods we pass through.

The air is full of snow, streaking

out of the sky like metal chaff

from a fighter jet under attack.

We race down the empty state road,

saying nothing, the silence between us

is barely filled with Yo Yo Ma.

I can’t stop thinking of your shriek.

You tell me later you tried to wave it away

when you saw the hawk coming down.

But then the dull thud of flesh against metal,

the hard scratch of claw and bone on glass.

You remember its yellow eye looking

into you, without blame or anger,

as if it was giving itself to you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Repp

After Browsing the Red Bookstore

 

After browsing the Red Bookstore, the four of us—a family,

            I’ve always thought, no matter its brief span—

rode the Red Line to Charles Street & thence strolled

 

            into the North End for the linguine & clams

at, let’s say, Mangini’s. Warm that May, we got a table

            outside & began admiring our bounty—Voline’s

 

anti-Bolshevik history of the Revolution for me, the first

            volume of Das Kapital for Reebee, a monograph

on Diego Rivera for Jean & something about the Catholic left

 

            for Trish. Well, at least about Voline I’m just about

sure because he sits five feet north of here, still unread.

            Benefit concerts for Soweto remained necessary,

 

Our Bodies, Ourselves a revelation, apartments cheap,

            newsprint piled by the ton each morning on stoops

& minuscule porches, tofu new, feminism still second-wave,

 

            movements splintering by the hour, love redefined

by the minute. Here with my Italian brother & sisters

            in what may as well have been Naples, I felt free

 

of my sauerkraut & braunschweiger history—no, not free

            so much as not doomed to it. Tucking into our mounds

of shiny pasta, we joked about the gesticulating men milling

 

            under each streetlight, the mournful accordion tunes

out each window, the old women wobbling past arm-in-arm,

            swathed in black overcoats. Lifting her chin toward

 

the nearest slap-punch scrum, Jean said, “I hate the guido show,

            but The North End’s the only place I feel safe. 

Anybody fucked with me, I’d be little sister to every last

           

            paisan out here”—old news to the lapsed Catholics

on my left & right, but even the half-dozen Huguenot filaments

            in my DNA quivered sympathetically. Thumbing the last

 

bits of garlic onto his fork, Reebee ordered espresso all round.

            The streetlights took on an amber cast. The vowel-rich

jabber rose & fell. Though part of piecing together the rent,

 

            parceling the household labor, maintaining a posture

of conscious self-criticism & acceding to all the other

            contradictions we had no choice but to live out,

 

our pleasure nonetheless filled us—or me, at any rate,

            or what I can piece together of that “me.” The top flat

of a Teele Square three-decker cost $210 a month & the Red Sox

 

            were a juggernaut. One of us had a chance to teach

in a prison, another filled ice-cream cones, another painted

            when she wasn’t clerking for Manpower & the one

 

who’d first leave took the T to South Station, felt kinship

            with the bums & contemplated the vanished horrors

the workers endured in the gutted tannery where he typed,

 

filed & brooded all day. For centuries, the European peasantry

            toiled in place. Reebee’s espresso was my first, but cannoli

was old hat. We sat talking for hours. Take it from this paisan,

 

            this rag-picking, grub-hoe-wielding, memo-filing,

shelf-stocking, thatch-binding escapee from glassworks & draft:

            Blood & struggle are almost everything. Salud!

 

 

 

Another Snow Ode

 

I love how the wind drives

snow against what little skin

I don ’t muffle, sideways snow

in which those who live

in mid-Atlantic climes can’t

believe as yesterday’s three

phone calls once again

proved. I love falling

toward the glittery ridge

obscuring the mailbox,

thrusting the bulbous

bulldozers the high-tech

gloves make of my hands

into the powder that falls

aside & swirls along the dune

in the steady wind, the dented,

galvanized thing I alone

nailed to the 4 X 4 I alone

post-holed by the berm

brushed clean & flaring

in the low sun. Silence here

sweet as a ladle-full of spring

water in a canyon crusted

with salt in July, silence

that swaddles every sound

I make pulling a week’s worth

of letters, thick periodicals

& two padded envelopes

bearing return addresses

that may as well be inscribed

inside my left ventricle. I push

each leg in turn up the slope

to where the porch steps will

one day reappear. Black bile

humorously coaxes me

to the recliner to read

an atmospheric novel Irish

to its damp heart. May the snow

drift forty feet high. I can

afford to be that Romantic

because I paid the propane

man to top off the tank

last week. I live in the present

as I haven’t since the time

Ruth lost her keys & Jerry

rammed a foot-long screwdriver

into the ignition while we all

stood around feeling sorry

or bored. She drove an Opal,

a vehicle nearly pathetic

as the Pinto. Jerry failed.

Ruth sobbed. Everyone Ruth

had driven to Maine crammed

into Bill ’s car or mine for the trip

home. The first snow blew in

the next week, not even Halloween.

It never squalled there as it does

here, but I don ’t have a firebox

here as we did there. The Opal

got towed into the mountains

where Ruth bunked just across

the bridge over the Gale.

She wore three-inch heels

all year. What better time

than now to indulge

such reverie? A pile

of fresh mail teetering

by a pot of coffee perked

black as this, the day’s

quick dusk done, beef stew

bubbling in the cooker?

I promise I’ll write

Dan tonight to see

whether he remembers

the gearbox we pulled

from the Corvair that ran

for maybe a week. No bigger

than a loaf of rye it was.

 

 

 

 

 

Stan Sanvel Rubin

The Stars Are a Net

            E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle 

                        ––Dante, Inferno, XXXIV

 

Another night of hunger

where I almost killed a dog.

 

It raced into the road

as if to hurt itself.

 

It hurled itself

as if to swallow death.

 

Dogs don’t do that.

They save their friends.

 

Their loved ones depend on them.

I ride alone all night.

 

I have been drunk as a goose

walking on a log.

 

The stars that pound in my skull

are the stars that lure in the sky.

 

Skin flesh bone

a skeleton in a tent.

 

Now I remember it all

and as I remember I drive

 

into the night alone

reading the commentary of the trees

 

the stroboscopic stars

where nothing can be hurt.

 

The moon a wreath

for all of our dead.

 

 

 

Root

 

Believing everything has a time,

I walk among the fallen trees,

trying to map after the chaos of fire

the scarred metropolis a large tree is

when it falls that way, burnt roots

scraping the air like a tentacled thing

hauled from the sea. It lies here,

blackened, bare, reaching for sky,

a textured sculpture with hidden veins

from which mushrooms will sprout,

maybe a flower. The tree is what I am.

Root fires burning through my life.

 

 

 

 

 

Rikki Santer

Quarantine Spring 

 

Coldest nights on record

tucking in the impatiens

with tattered thermal blankets

& days with a bad taste that rattles

 

like cod loins freezer-burned.

Brylcreemed ideas from a dangerous

podium, viscid shipping & handling

my emotions to the front door

 

landing me in moods for reduction.

The granular seepage of time,

my mind too near to itself.

I am a tiny balloon chasing

 

its string, dandelions shake their 

heads, toss seeds to the squalls.

 

 

 

 

Hymn

 

            Thirsty for a

Pleistoncene morning,

            I’m a greying creature

trotting in & out of shadows. 

 

                        I rest deep

                                    in the dark belly

                        of my backyard ravine.

                                    Needy seeds float

 

            in the chilled mist,

my low howl stirs

            the sternum,

my ears swivel

 

                        for footsteps—

                                    wild crones who live

                        at the end of time, carry

                                    lupine bundles for healing,

 

            & not afraid to bite back.

Wolf birds pick

            at the bones

of my story,

 

                        death is our living,

                                    to love sky & creek

                        so much sometimes

                                    I cannot bear it.

 

            To track & run,

summon & repel

            prepare to find

my luminous pack

 

                        & fetch

                                    the feeder root

                        with sponges

                                    of my worn paws.

 

 

 

 

Carla Sarett

before the first frost

 

So many things I ignored as I devoured Steppenwolf,

as I marched against the War,

the name of that boy who always

wore bathrobes and pajamas,

with ordinary

shoes and socks.

 

Or laughing Michelle who wasn't laughing at all.

She overdosed two years after Emily

hung herself in Chicago, her first semester,

before the first frost.  I think I was

in Rome when I learned of the girls,

the Vatican, perhaps.

 

I didn't know them well, not enough to care

as much I cared about the War. 

And yet, and yet, and yet, when

I am traveling somewhere impossible,

it's not battles I think of but

that nameless boy's

pitiless stare.

 

 

 

 

 

Terry Savoie

"You Can’t Have Everything"

 

When Frank O’Hara wrote “midnight in Dostoevski,”

            he was having one hell of a time

with his pastrami sandwich while trying to play the cool

            cat seated next to LeRoi Jones who was chattering away

like a treed squirrel in that hole-in-the-wall deli not more than a few blocks

            down the street from MOMA.   Come to think about it, life

might've been a whole lot easier in those innocent bygone days,

            those legendary times we so fantasize about today

as some magnificent Time Before, a time long before LeRoi

            morphed into Amiri Baraka & tossed off that white-man’s moniker

which might well have satisfied his mamma & her lady friends,

            a time which was before the aforementioned Time

Before when O’Hara faced full on his fated collision course & head on

            on that summer evening when he said Yes, I do

to the high-speed, careening beach buggy boogying out on Fire Island. 

            Unlike Baraka, the buggy & bones created one shattering,

not a chattering, effect that rippled through the poetry world

            for the following half century & more. 

This Time Before now seems so much simpler, so cut & dry

            so to speak, although, as we continued to negotiate those

notoriously unpredictable twists & turns of the '60s, the '70s, & beyond into

            the final two decades of that horrendously dubious century,

innocence appeared as complicated & downright mystifying as this new decade

            continues to appear today.  And yet, somehow, we sincerely believed

our naiveté & goodwill was in tack back then, wholeheartedly taking everything

            in hook, line & sinker if the source only wore some religious, medical

or military garb & managed to step forward dressed in a crisply starched
                  uniform. But blighted, benighted, off-beat Frank?  His stride

always was a bit askew with his imagination walking off a step or two to one side. 

            In Time Before who, in God’s name, could trust that man Frank

with those aberrant sexual proclivities of his?  During Johnson's presidency          
                  suchlike were still & all our polite society’s unmentionables. 

Moreover, his kinship with Baraka?  Well, Baraka's very skin tone left 

            him hanging out in the cold.  Those two weren’t of America’s

uniform & starched legions although now we are able to a see how

            plain ol' dumb luck somehow visited Frank O’Hara,

&, in a moment of insight, he nailed it right about Time Before before he

            was so rudely interrupted & left  this world – Amiri/LeRoi included –

to flay & fend for itself as we continued unspooling life today

            while going about on our merry way into another blustery,

winter evening midway through the second decade of another century,

            casually unconcerned, intent only on greeting the upcoming

midnight with heart-lonely news from which no one knows

            how it is possible to ever escape.

 

 

 

 

 

Claudia Schatz

Bodies of Water

Our mornings are immobile, Sunday pure:

the sky is white and you are still, asleep,

while tangled clothes of night upon the floor

tell stories of a state we couldn’t keep.

As long as you are dozing in my bed,

the day cannot seep onwards in a rush,

the streams we’ve crossed and words we’ve left unsaid

are hung at bay, suspended in the hush.

We follow every river to the shore—

since running water seems to know the way

towards something deep and stable that endures—

yet never do we figure how to stay.

For now, your sleeping holds us steady still,

but once you wake, no hope or dreaming will.

 

 

 

 

Block Party

I don’t remember if I shaved my legs—

a thought that worried me five years ago,

but now I watch the parents drink their dregs,

ignore kids swiping beers, and let it grow.

I used to sidestep packs of older teens,

enamored of their smoky, secret shine

and still I smell the musk of furtive weed

from days before the heroin arrived.

Now I’m as old as they were when they ruled,

a queen of concrete feet and stomach lines,

but at this age there’s no one left to fool:

I’m sober, hairy, out past my bedtime.

The red cups, shouting, sparklers in the street

once promised conquest; now they hiss defeat.

 

 

 

 

 

Claire Scott

The Shape of Silence

 

We pass the silence back and forth

like a conversation

or a cellar of salt

only the clink of a fork on a chipped plate

a swallow from the glass of white wine

the scrape of a chair pushed back

only an occasional question

            is the rice too salty?

            any mail?

            did you water the roses?

is our love tired and old, sleeping most of the day

bored out of its metaphorical mind

should we sail to the Galapagos, spend a weekend

in Paris, hoping to reignite the gone-ago blaze

or is this the silence after years of sharing

children, chicken pox, summers on Cape Cod,

cancer, arthritis, shingles and grandchildren

winning soccer trophies, riding two wheelers

and falling asleep in our arms

the silence of lamplight

the flight of a swallow

the silence of apricots in a crystal bowl                    

and footsteps fading on a winter’s walk

 

 

 

 

 

Phillip Shabazz

Reminiscence

 

This is one way to see I was no longer

the child building a mud castle flowered in berry bush.

Once I ran downhill along a broken fence to my dog.

The beast stood waiting on the bridge,

calm, sunlight on an urban face. Summer morning,

casual shorts, playtime, and rainless skies sparkled.

Feet unscarred although I heard the paws

of a mouse rummaging in the trash. I did not fret

since the dig of doubt was not a bleak side.

The river licked its lip to cool the air.

Once the beast was a river that left me,

the son it never had, the never son.

Once the powder of milk stained my teeth.

I strummed the chords on an autoharp.

The plastic pick gave way to folk songs,  

a skinny voice, string music. This way

 

I let the bluebird out the window.

Once its wings caught wind, the beast

was pure feather and grace. Tracked butterflies.

Wildlife. Once my mountain was less a moon

of light drawn into the circle where I belonged.

I did not know I would seldom see them again.

And this was like the cigarette burning in a child’s bed.

Once my bed had fits of fire against the pillow.

The hottest sweat dripped off my fingers.

I, a bluebird pushed open the window,

let in more air, let the beast out.

 

 

 

Of the Water                                    

 

My mother means well as she holds me, wrapped

in a white blanket afloat in her arms between

the Baptist congregation and water in the church’s baptismal.

She wants to secure me a home in heaven.

Save me from the bloodless hole of fire.

 

I watch her usher me down the aisle to the pastor  

in a black robe with red crosses. He opens his mouth.

Words envelop in a prayer. He pours the water, drip by drip

from his hand, baptizing me in the name of the Father, the Son,

and the Holy Ghost—a baptism without mentioning the Great Mother.

 

I don’t hear her name called from the burning bush.

Her melody not even a whisper from the old songs

servants and saints sang under the Tree of Life.

No coins tithed in her name from Judea blossoms

or the raised bimahs in Jerusalem.

No homily on her rising from the grave among scorpions.

 

She’s not listed as grand matriarch in my rite, my circle.

Nor spoken for by the Gospels. Still she flows water beneath the skin.

Let the heart beat blood to breath.

Let the body live each day; die each night, to live again.

 

She flows without noise over cotton, unwashed clothes,

over potteries, stained glass angels in the windows of Zion Baptist.

Her rain cools the cows and goats, hypertension, and hormones.  

Perhaps her skin flows too beautiful to be seen on the surface,

too lovely for the Bible believing disciples sitting on the pews.

Her water releases their prayer to the common houses

surrounding the church arisen on Sunday.

It’s too hard to pen her to the Ohio River, or a fishing boat,

spear, hook, a frozen net from a winter night

on ice that does not move.

 

She plays no favorites, shuns boundaries,

does not limit her language to one landscape,

nor to the handwritten Aramaic, one scripture,

or one John the Baptist napping in his tent.

 

She flows over the dance and bed

Salome and Herod share. Not sex alone, but the fountainhead

sins of a body exiled from the house

to the stones thrown by men.

 

A sea in the baptismal, she’s too nimble, too wide

to be contained by narrow vows of clerics.   

 

Because she has no other way out, she lets herself flow

time immemorial into all hands,

all mouths open or closed.

 

I cry out to her, tears on the blanket in my mother’s arms.

The pastor’s Holy Trinity moment,

words that began in prayer seem to end

as the water flows over my head, free as light.

 

 

 

Snow against the Window

This morning a manmade dust hides its secrets in snow.

In silence the flakes collapse on my jacket. Breathe it I do,

the fallout on my lip. Icicles cause caution and from gutter

edges the daggers bond into winter’s glass. Airborne, crystal

fibers spike the evergreen my grandfather planted in the front yard

to give my grandmother shrubs to please her eyes.

 

I wonder. Is it possible to clean these corpses of dust?

I heard a biblical landslide would let loose its bowels.

Let the hawk crack grass. Let a spine break from an icehouse

on its back. And I’ve swallowed an entire bean and cornbread

existence navigating the blizzards howling behind my eye.

Matchless and stirring sun glow warms the windchill.

 

The drummers work their shifts. Take me in while

missionaries sail off to heaven. Give head in secret.

Ill and holy, they can get away with it. I speak of dust

clotting on the gray stoops and electric wires. Inhale voodoo

to disinfect my exposed arteries and bone marrow.

Maybe this is why I turn over in rags. Enemy law wheels

 

pig drunk as if porkchop is a culture on the house

a gravy greased skillet. Maybe that’s all there is.

No matter. I’ve nothing more to win or lose

in snow against the window. In the dust, I unearth

the heated hunger of breath. And hard to breathe

I wind down as a stem swaying on the evergreen.

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Sloan

Medusa in Her Garden

 

Deciding she would prefer Black Eyed Susans

growing out of her head rather than snakes,

or better yet uplifted clapping hands dancing

above an on-their-feet rock concert audience,

she lives alone in a mobile home off a dirt road

surrounded by dozens of dusty orange trees.

 

Upon release after six years in prison,

she was introduced by a second cousin

to a forlorn wealthy couple in Los Angeles

she now works for as a surrogate mother,

hoping it goes well and she can find her way

to helping out other infertile households. 

 

She testified before the jury about her role

pointing a pistol at a clerk in a bridal shop

while her boyfriend, whom she loved,

or thought she did, was busy in a back room

raping a customer—a turn of events, the rape

that is, she was in the dark about at the time. 

 

Standing among flowers, hand angled visor-like

against the early morning light, she knows

she is, feels she is, growing at the same time larger

and smaller. It’s weird. Given how tangled up

and confused they are, how can we ever truly know

which yellow head belongs on which green neck?

 

 

 

 

 

David Spicer

Switch

 

My grandmother was sweeter than a puppy

When her sons crossed her she brought out the switch

 

She’d whip her switch across her sons’ legs and backs

after whittling an elm branch into a foil

 

The whittled branch a supple whiplash foil

she’d swing it high and low against the boys’ arms

 

The boys armed themselves with a high-pitched Please Mom

On those nights my grandmother cooked cherry pies

 

and smiled with her unripe cherry-like eyes

My father and uncles grew into hard men

 

Hard elm-tree men with soft and pliant branches

they each kept a switch from their childhood of smiles

 

smiled just before they’d admire it recalling

my grandmother was sweeter than a puppy

 

 

After My Grandfather’s Death

 

my father and I sat in the backseat of my aunt’s Pontiac

for a thousand miles, and he kibitzed to her and my uncle.

You missed the damned turn, Rosie. We’ll be late, he said,

rubbing his bloodshot eyes. Uncle Roy said, Again, James?

Fuck off! Arriving, we separated from Rosie and Roy at the wake.

That night, recalling photos, I nudged my father to his other brother,

who’d been my grandfather’s favorite. My father studied him,

then smiled at the giant before they shook hands like old friends.

 

They talked as I wondered why they hadn’t seen the other for years.

We stood on the church’s left side, Rosie and Roy on the right.

I trudged to the coffin, gazed at my grandfather’s death-sleep skin,

and watched my father bending to kiss the body’s forehead and stop. 

I didn’t know then, after the silent journey back to Jersey, my father

would visit his brother but never speak of Rosie and Roy again.

 

 

 

In the Park

                        —for A. & M.

 

They’re celebrating release from lockdown.

He smiles, holds a wine glass of chocolate milk.

 

He wears sunglasses, hair darker than the milk.

Opens a picnic basket of ham and cheese.

 

The photographer yells, Say cheese, you ham!

They eat lunch, suck in the Australian breeze.

 

The outdoor lunch doesn’t suck, nor does life.

She tells him, You’re Van Gogh in your straw hat.

 

He takes off his hat, says, My brush is missing!

They toss the Frisbee, play the ukulele.

 

She sings I’m on Fire and he strums the Frisbee.

They laugh, hear a parrot in the trees squawking.

 

She laughs, sings, Don’t squawk, parrot, be happy!

They’re celebrating release from lockdown.

 

 

 

 

 

D. E. Steward

The Doric Mode

 

At ERW a tiny girl, her thumbs white adhesive taped, flicking madly on her device, notice her with her mother again later on the plane to Rome thumbs untaped

 

Alitalia’s green

 

Bound for Piazza Navona’s lofty scale

 

In from Fumicino on the autostrada along the well-leveed Tiber, autumn clarity looking over riverine marshes at the first church domes and highrises

 

Then on the dignified Via Cristoforo Colombo, a residential parkway that flanks “Area verde Rosa Raimondi Garibaldi”

 

Charmingly named for Giuseppe’s Ligurian mother

 

Thinking about Garibaldi, born two centuries ago, instantly telescopes the time sense of entering a city dating from ten times that many years past

 

Replete with character set by parks of pin parasol and lofty Mediterranean cypress

 

Young eastern red cedars, Juniperus virginiana, hold the fastigiate shape of Italy’s cypresses but mature to an impressive hefty stature

 

Juniperus virginiana is the first tree to return to derelict farmland and if not cut for lining chests and closets, can live on for nearly eight centuries, west nearly to the Oklahoma panhandle and the Nebraska notch to near the hundredth meridian

 

The rare big ones have the beauty of deep shade, peeling bark and tiny glaucous-gray cones, and three of their full life spans equal the vintage of imperial Rome

 

Zoom through what was imperial Rome toward the Pantheon’s absolute rationality of stone and bricks as real and as much of our time as the Airbus A330 we just came in on

 

The Pantheon in significant respects is the ultimate meaning of Rome

 

That great pagan temple faces its Piazza della Rotonda, crouched there as though waiting for more future to outwait 

 

Vaulting above its portico, a giant structure advanced beyond the Greek tradition of post and lintels, the Pantheon is a monumental and perfectly symmetrical, curved immensity

 

Its height and diameter are equal, just over forty-three meters

 

It is domed in unreinforced pozzolana concrete

 

Its massiveness staggers, its drum’s walls are six solid meters thick, its dome nearly eight meters thick at its base and over a meter thick at the top

 

At its highest the dome is open, a circular oculus, slightly reducing the dome’s weight and allowing its mass of poured concrete

 

On the floor below rain drains through a few thumb-size voids in the marble  

 

The oculus awes

 

It is nearly eight meters in diameter and unless viewed from the dead center of the temple’s marble floor, it always appears as a gracefully stretched ellipsoid perpetually open to the sky 

 

Recapitulating the perpetual diurnal cycle light to dark to light since the dome’s concrete fully set much over two thousand years ago

Much as if recording the permanence of each viewer’s circle of sky

 

Crane back now and stare up into that eight-meter void a hundred and forty feet above, into an ellipse created by the angle of sun and stance under the dome

 

Connecting so with every other human who has stood under the Pantheon’s dome to do the same

 

The same amazement again and again for well over two thousand years 

 

To have imagined the grandness of the dome and its oculus, what they must have been like, those who did, and then to have actually built it     

 

No ancient building as amazing as the Pantheon

 

Its “inexhaustible newness”  (Robert Hughes)

 

Across a few Roman blocks west, the Bernini-magnified Piazza Navona

 

In the warming sun before Sant’Agnese, Bernini’s grand Four Rivers Fountain, topped with a sixteen-meter Egyptian obelisk from Domitian’s reign (AD51 to 96)

 

The big oblong piazza is dominated by it, found by the Pope of the era on the Circus Maxentius out on the Via Appia near where Rome’s botanical garden is today 

 

The Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi’s four rivers being the Nile for Africa, the Plate for the Americas, the Ganges for India and the Danube, Europe

 

Within Sant’Agnese, its concave oval façade bell towers flanking those of Francisco Borromini, Bernini’s rival, an evening’s dignified Vivaldi string recital in a chapel aside

 

Walk out to the city-muted stars in the intermission, thinking queerly of a Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate maintaining that climate change is caused by the accumulation of human body heat

 

Muddled that this sort of thing has to do with Piazza Navona

 

Back inside to more Vivaldi thinking of glancing up for satellites after the first Sputnik

 

The excitement of seeing one and realizing what it was, its tumbling reflection of the sunlight coming from far down over the horizon

 

Before satellites in the evening sky became commonplace

 

Watched them while standing on the catwalk of my old US Forest Service fire tower on Josephine Peak at over six thousand feet in the Transverse Ranges

 

Once simultaneously seeing an evening satellite and a rocket engine test on a pad on Vandenberg Air Base on the coast beyond Santa Barbara about ninety miles out, a nice juxtaposition of space tech

 

Mountain air

 

One other evening on the Piazza Navona in a café on the south end of the square with the basin of the Fontana del Moro nearly filling the view out through an open massive Renaissance door, the king-of-the-fountain figure of the Moor

 

Again one of Bernini’s

 

The Baroque façades walling the southeast side of Piazza Navona lofted in the dusk like Monet’s bluish rose tint in his Reims Cathedral series

 

A thoroughly Roman place, to be sitting there talking with friendly servers and breathing a sense of wellbeing beyond the usual self-satisfaction at being well set and indubitably within Europe was just right   

 

Thinking Vivaldi, thinking Monet, thinking Bernini, Boromini, not the NFL, the last World Series, or Bronzini on a menu

 

Or Trumpismo

 

As at the table behind a rangy fiftyish Anglophone sat down projecting the intrusive nosiness of a lonely expat, polluting the Roman quality of all things universally being accepted and enjoyed

 

He wouldn’t shut up

 

Finding no bonding, as the Monet glow disappeared, he knocked back his Peroni and went off scowling

 

“This is Rome / remorse would be anomalous….”  (Jane Kenyon, “After Traveling”)

 

A city three thousand years old with its own terms

 

As in many cities now, most Romans were not born there but are Romans, and he was not

 

No words spoken, no words necessary to understand that in Rome it is not enough to be there, the city not a displendishment of itself as Paris and Manhattan often seem

 

And as in the 1990s Sistine Chapel ceiling restoration, when the brash realities of Michelangelo’s cinquecento colors, his colori cangianti, iridescence, Joseph’s strong yellow, Mary’s flashy blue folds, were reinforced

 

The generally academic critics of the renewal of that supreme Renaissance vision balked at the restored hues’ higher tones

 

At the great frescos’ own terms

 

Which are the same as one of Michelangelo’s great transference architectural definitions of Rome’s identity, the Piazza del Campidoglio on the summit of the Capitoline Hill

 

That by his design was turned around from its pagan orientation, opening direction to the Forum, to face Christian Rome’s Vatican City and St. Peter’s, off to the northwest  

 

He placed his great bronze equestrian of Marcus Aurelius, now a replica onsite, in the piazza’s center

 

Approached from below, the level of the Piazza Venezia, up the Cordonata, that in the same soaring manner as the Spanish Steps grandly defines its site from below

 

Off the Cordonata onto the sublime oval of the piazza confronting three great palazzos and a stunning view of the Forum from the Tarpeian Rock, the cliff from which ancient Rome’s traitorous condemned were thrown

 

Further, Michelangelo redesigned the façades of two of the palaces that house Roman antiquities and classical statuary, making one of the great museums of Italy contingent to one of its most stately open public spaces

 

Set high above the Forum itself

 

Rome’s past refuses to cloy, but the Roman modern tires, rather the city as city tires, big clotted city

 

The Forum of course insinuates haunting and desolate strength of former greatness, perhaps even more than Beijing’s dusty Forbidden City, the towered walls of Great Zimbabwe, or the scale of vast, sere Teotihuacán

 

A serene verticality of the columns and capitals remaining, rising off Forum Romanum’s chaos of tumbled cut stone, grass and pavement, buried rubble, is a surreal classical pasture of the past

 

The Forum as the stereotypical image of the romantic classical, the ennui of lost time

 

Its quietude antipodal to Naples

 

“…we will recall with pride the golden era of human insight, this glorious interlude, a few thousand years long, between our uncomprehending past and our incomprehensible future”  (Steven Strogatz)  

 

This time Naples was like a kinetic heralding of our future

 

Taxi run from the station down the length of the Corso to the ferry port, a shiny feel of a pneumatic tube express and virtually with the sucking whoosh

 

Always familiar, friendly Naples, for the Capri ferry

 

Two Capri days, crowded and boutique-ridden island where since Emperors Augustus, and most notoriously Tiberius, people there often have had no connection to the place or with each other

 

Red-footed falcon 

 

Maxim Gorky lived there, 1906 to 1913 theorizing revolution, Lenin visited him there for a week in 1908 and again in 1910

 

Close to Capri once before, sailing west from the Amalfi Coast leaving Positano at sunset as the westerlies were evening calming, at the wheel steering wide of the Belvedere di Tragara, Capri’s southeastern point reared up sharply against the moonlight

 

Bound for northern Sardinia’s Porto Cervo that night and out in the Tyrrhenian Sea felt the last of summer end, in the way that weather change frequently is emphatic at sea, it was late October, and before dawn needed three layers on deck or in the cockpit

 

This time off Capri on the Salerno afternoon ferry with boisterous German tour busers aboard who, as their beer cached lightened, became increasingly so

 

Their obtrusive swaggering around the open upper deck even began to hint a few glares

 

A gloriously clear sundown astern going from port to port along the Amalfi Coast, Sorrento to Salerno  

 

The lonely expat’s bloviating back in the Piazza Nova evening in Rome was fluff  compared to the German bunch who for some reason, perhaps a 1940s memories war recall, even rasped into drinking songs

 

Hostility levels much easier to parse than amiability and there was no doubt about what was going on

 

But not instantly as when once decades ago walking after dark on the narrow drive from the mensa of the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, close headlights aimed at me accelerated hard sending me to a heaving dive into the hedge aside

  

Close, deliberate and dangerous

 

The car was anonymous but the young men not, not irrefutably enough to confront them, they weren’t scientists but two locals on the staff

 

In the American South sometimes you can smell a sinister edge like that

 

Given the coyote glance of great grand progeny of bitter-enders

 

Even stronger sometimes from Germans, and fresher, how terrifying infantry combat with them must have been, their violent competence, their savvy, facing down their vulpine eyes  

 

Docking in Salerno is magnificent, everything a Mediterranean city for the first time could be

 

All port, and ancient, Etruscan, Roman, Lombard, Norman, vividly Italian now

 

Walking off the ferry, direction the Duomo’s Norman shed into the darkening medieval alleys off via Mercanti past the eighth century Archo Arechi in the chilly dusk

 

Like a North African Kasbah

 

The worn stone sills and steep narrowness in the almost dark, past a couple of small glistening white tablecloth restaurants and one tiny negozios after another just closing, each more like a mahal in Tunis than a usual Italian bottega

 

In the twelfth century Salerno with its medical school was to medicine as Paris was to science and Bologna to law 

 

Mercanti opening to the nineteenth-century Corso and a café where the friendliness of a flashy server and those at tables nearby politely sought explicit recounting of waypoints after the Alitalia flight days before

 

Then laying out detailed directions to the hotel farther on closer to the station

 

The empathy of so many Italians, enhanced that evening there by the earnest interest people in the Mezzogiorno and Sicily have about America

 

Generations of grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins and friends gone there, and been and often still are on Staten Island or in Philly or California or “near Chicago”

 

And then the Allied September 1943 Salerno Landings at Paestum nearby

 

Paestum, a most particular Mediterranean site, was Magna Graecia’s Poseidonia

 

A basilica and two Doric temples, sixth and fifth century BC, well-preserved, on grounds replete with many of the details of a cultured port city that even before the Romans went into decline and then civic abandonment – its malarial coastal marsh setting  

 

That spectacular place skirted on the train from Salerno to Messina in the morning    

 

Past the Salerno Beachhead that was the first invasion of fascist occupied Europe

 

Sixty-two hundred and sixteen US casualties

 

Around a dozen years of war echo before my pfc stripe and blue infantry brass on the empire’s Pacific front never to be shot at except in friendly fire

 

Last time here Campania’s spring wildflowers were in glorious profusion tossing in the sea breeze between Paestum’s majestic thick-pillared Doric structures and around the fallen stone, right up to the stereobates and off throughout the unpaved swards of the walled city’s ruins

 

Color and excitement brought that sunny day into the adjoining museum to tint memory of the hues of the Tomba Tuffatore (The Diver) 480 BC with an ethereal blue

 

One of the few Greek wall paintings left anywhere, a profound passage to death, an image of ecstatic confidence in a graceful heads-up plunge into eternity

 

In the side panels, vividly gay emphatic, others like the diver go ahead with life in a salute the noble manner of the diver’s inverse apotheosis

 

But for Goya’s best, there probably is no stronger evocation in painting of the human condition than the Tomba Tuffatore

 

A 2018 morning Salerno-Messina rapido blasted past glorious Paestum this time 

 

On down through the Campania’s littoral

                         

Market garden manner of its viniculture fruit-grove coast that so far has nourished a cascade of civilizations 

 

Attenuated Italy  

                                                                                                   

Sapri, Paola, through Reggio Calabria heading for the passage to Sicily’s Messina

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eleanor Swanson

Drafting My Desire

 

Love is my cartographer—

I draw lines from your hand

to your right shoulder,

from your left shoulder

to your right hand where

I trace the lines of your palm

noting shallow rivers,

tributaries, and perpendicular

routes to your destiny.

 

I follow the path

of your sternum, imagine

the shape of your heart,

drafting my desire, hoping

to formulate the meaning

of desire as a terrain

even more dangerous,

even more mysterious

than love.

 

 

 

Bombed-out Cities

                       Wars now, ten to watch:  Syria/ISIS
                       Ukraine S. Sudan Nigeria Congo Afghanistan

 

Cartographies of Bombed Out Cities in Syria

I walk upon an earth that has no map.

Aleppo

I walk through the streets of Aleppo,

one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.

It has been all but obliterated by barrel bombs,

bullets, chemical attacks and air strikes in the war.

No street signs remain, so I walk, following a tank,

among the photographers who refuse to leave.  

 

Where do boys keep their toy soldiers,

plastic replicas of flesh and blood infantry?

Guns and tanks spilled onto a living room

rug that swirls with blood-colored flowers.

 

 

 

Geography: An Illusion

                              “The Geographer,” Johannes Vermeer

           

I am Vermeer’s creation

in an imagined room filled with

maps, charts, a globe, and books

rendered on canvas.

At first Vermeer had me looking

down rather than looking out

a window, where in a final

version of the painting I

squint in the sunlight seeming

to think intently, ready

to experience a revelation.

 

The dividers I hold

were originally vertical,

not horizontal.

 

The cartographic objects

in his painting suggest

his familiarity with

the profession that obsessed

the Netherlands in  the 17th

Century.

 

Half obscured, the sea chart

on a wall behind me depicts

all of the sea coasts

of Europe.

 

Who am I?  What did

I know of perspective?

Reputedly, I Anthonie

van Leeuwhoek posed not

once, but twice for Vermeer.

But I was an expert in microscopy,

not peeping idly out a window,

as if the landscape I saw was actual.

My landscape of animalcules—

tiny animals—seen under

my lens—is my life’s geography.

No illusionary place, but prima

materia, where all I see has come

to be real.  Has come to be wondrous.

 

 

 

 

 

Taunja Thomson

From an Aerie (Ornithophile)

 

The barred owls are nesting in my hair.

Their talons sift through each tress

finding the softest places

on my white scalp

to lay their bright

eggs.

 

The snow-browed diederik croons in my ear

dee-dee-der-ik     dee-dee-der-ik.

His emerald-copper feathers

flap & fan my face

as he dances

for a mate.

 

The painted bat bustles about my neck

to & fro    zagging up & zigging

down    bouncing from beetle

to stridulating cricket

sketching twilight

at my nape

 

Hummingbirds like watercolor

motes sip from my lips   

trace my eyebrows

with thread beaks

quiver at my tongue   

break into arias—

 

psalms ring like tintinnabulum

from a sun-drenched

aerie.

 

            ~inspired by the art of OYa NoYa

 

 

 

Dream during a Pandemic

 

A million butterflies—crimson

tangerine     canary     malachite

cobalt     electric grape—

rumble ground & shimmer air

with their arrival

after this long sleep

alighting on creeping phlox

& blazing stars     black-eyed

Susans & sea holly

sunflower & sedum

to embrace petal & sepal

to sip the nectar

of companionship

in person & touching

to hear the hum

of voices raised

climbing & circling

escalating in a crescendo

that splits doors    shivers

windows    blasts walls

into irised shards

that lie    broken bits

of ocean holding the seeds

of an amaranthine reef—

its corals rugged resting places

for the spindle-legs

& veined wings

of all fragile flashing

things that breathe

as one.

 

 

 

O Capricious (after Kandinsky’s “Capricious”)

 

O capricious whale

of a world

with lemonade flags flying

on the bow

& angular dancers

at half-mast

spinning rigidly

in different directions,

 

In your belly secrets

splash near the engines

that blacken all—your insides

& the silky ocean

surrounding you. Your occasional

cough is downplayed

by your crew. 

 

On your deck temples writhe

in wind as sun casts

a sheen of neon colors

over their facades

covering stains & pockmarks

& doors adorned

with broken glass

at their edges.

 

Seagulls like raised eyebrows

soar over you

dodging the fragments

you spew overhead—words

like spend     eat     take     yours

mine—their edges pierce

the sun cleaving it

into smaller

& smaller

pieces.

 

Your tail ends in a cryptic

moon propelling you

through jigsaw shards

of leaf    clay    cloud    fur

flesh—as horizon swims

then sinks

around you.

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Tremblay

The Luminous Race Track

 

My brothers, my sister and I we love

our old man’s stories where he’s chasing the dream.

Some evenings, he says, with his voice smoky,

Lady Luck’s face shines like the sun

through the red gold maples of Narragansett Park.

 

A workingman can believe a glint of sunset

flickers with prophecy that all the grime of the road

will be washed from his soul. The Racing Form

tells us each horse’s record, but that’s just

cranking sausages. Know what I mean?

Try as we might to figure the angles,

we beg for a raise from our hard-hearted bosses.

Still and all, lifting our chins for a random kiss

or a slapped face from the lady in the sky

is the only real gambling.

 

A delicate and precise hush enters his voice

when he tells us the inside dope lies just beneath

the saddle. The trick is to divide furlongs

so the winning horse will prick up its ears.

Wet your pencil with your tongue and circle the name.

 

Feeling what’s in the hearts of horses ain’t magic.

Stroll through the paddock before each race.

You can feel them. It’s in how they swish their tails.

                                                                                   

Horses can be scared, horses can trash-talk just like us,

horses can be tired, bored even.

Some nights we hit the Daily Double.

What a kick, playing with the race-track’s money.

We must take care, though, not to get cocky.

That opens us up to race-track touts

who slip between bales of timothy and snag us

by the lapels. They say: Get wise, the fix is in.

 

Our old man’s eyes spin off sparks.

He speeds to the ticket counter.

Having a luminous race-track inside him

burns a hole in his pocket, a flame too great to bear.

His heart leaves his brain slipping in mud

when his horse’s heart gives out on the home stretch.

 

Midnight comes in a confetti of ripped up tickets,

a ride home on blue highways smoking Pall Malls

until his Buick fills with radio smoke saying

“Get ‘em next time, Chief.”

 

We are left with a parable of swamp gas

on the outside of his windshield as he rolls,

broke but smiling, a thing of light, in a fog so thick

it’s a miracle he ever makes it home

 

We are left with a parable of swamp gas

on the outside of his windshield as he rolls,

broke but smiling, a thing of light, in a fog so thick

it’s a miracle he ever makes it home

 

 

What Is Kept From the Children

 

What is kept from the children

becomes the monster under their beds,

the one with the mummy wrappings

on top of his bloody head,

the one we gather around, not daring to touch

when the clock on the wall says it’s the hour

people die in their sleep.

 

The monster just sits there lighting a cigarette.

He’s at the kitchen table filling the room

with smoke that changes it to a dark lonely road

outside of Bridgeport where he’s stopped

by three men waving red lanterns.

He’s ripped out of his truck at gunpoint.

Bolt-cutters break the seal at the back of his semi.

Tons of Chesterfields with tax stamps is the cargo.

He’s hi-jacked and blackjacked and left for dead.

The cops find him unconscious face-up in a ditch.

 

Now through the darkness he’s flown to our kitchen

in a white skull cap like a Santa at Christmas.

We sit on his lap and we breathe in his smoke

and we know that this is our one and only Dad,

the man who tells stories that all end the same way.

He wrestles the beast back into its cage

and then we can shout glee at a narrow escape.

The river of wanting turns the wheel of doing.                                                         

We are twigs that are bent

by stories he tells us, little shocks that

make our eyes burn out.

The thread of what happened is lost,

it’s a leaf fallen in the river and swept out of sight

until ignorance passes for innocence,

and the children are haunted by fanged icicles

beneath the Quinebaug’s bare birch branches.

 

What’s hidden from the children

will someday rise up and bite them from behind,

and they’ll stand at the gates of nowhere

shaking their heads, not knowing what hit them.

 

 

 

Heartwood

 

I stand in my blue corduroy jacket

as my mother knocks on the front door

which rhymes with bonjour.

All I knew is what I heard on the radio,

strange names—Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Saipan.

My mother kisses the top of my head

to make my brains radiant then walks away

to the optical plant where she makes

funny goggles for the Air Corps.

 

The woman my mother left me with

marches me through parlor, kitchen, out the door,

sits me on her back-porch steps. I wait

until the glass glitter in the gravel driveway

turns to stars. For hours, hours.

A picket fence with red hollyhocks,

the silver garage where chickens squabble.

 

I stare at a set of snow tires piled

off-kilter. They spiral into a shadow that grows

fangs, swallows me down a pitch-black throat

where acids burn my eyes.

Was that rain-barrel mosquitos buzzing

or a squadron of B-17s returning to Westover?

I turn my arms to wings, lift off, carrying

a load of loneliness for my mother’s voice.

Late afternoon, sunlight ripples through elm leaves.                                                 

Grass, stones, animals, wood, metal mixtures of air,

earth, water, and fire, the sun to cook them

into everything we sell our souls for.

Only some are alive. Pigeons, clouds.

Angels don’t count, they exist but they’re not alive,

not like the sad brown song of my uncle’s

work-boots as they dry on his porch.

I hear Wilhelmina say, Bienvenue. Maybe it’s Ma!

 

We walk up the hill, hand-in-hand.

At the top the land opens to a wood-lot.

A man in overalls like a train engineer’s hat

cuts logs with an electric saw. Its spinning blade

zings. As we pass his stacked cords, I stop, turn:

Please don’t leave me at Wilhelmina’s house anymore.

“I have to work. Your father …” She stops.

Buzz saw through heartwood.

Something is wrong with my eyes.

Flocks of clouds fly away. Don’t cry, Ma, I beg

as she retakes my hand.

 

We step over one silver railroad track,

then another, up the dirt path to our three-decker.

Tomorrow is Saturday. I’ll tie tomato vines

with strips of ripped old sheets.

But for now from my bedroom I hear

something’s wrong in the kitchen.

A gasp like someone running to catch a bus.

 

 

Gerry & the Sacrament of Music

                                                                             

He meandered up Main Street,

drifting on the aroma of hot buttered popcorn

wafting from the Five & Dime. He liked

the crowd. He wasn’t shy in a crowd.

But then a ribbon of spritely sound

drew him up to Le Cercle Canadien Hall

where a drum and bugle corps rehearsed a march.

The band leader heard him hum

“Stars and Stripes Forever” in the stairwell,

handed him a bugle. Gerry put it to his lips.

The guys in the band stood listening 

and out came one clear note.

It was like he hit a home run in his first at bat.

 

The way Saul became Paul on the road to Tarsus

Gerry was changed. He had a mission

to find the right tone for every note,

to run the scales like a lark, to share the brass communion,

to spiral with his friends on the staircase of Dixie

with “The South Rampart Street Parade.”

 

When I looked at the sheet music

all I could read was, “Composed by Bob Crosby.”

The black dots might as well have been crows on a fence.

I heard him play O happy day over and over

until sunshine broke out of him through his horn

and the Earth became for him

the only planet of music in the Milky Way.

 

I envied his new life.

The music he read and played

was played better when he found

the feelings in the notes.

 

He looked at me over the bell of his horn.

I have notes, he said. You have words.

When you feel the urge to write

just ask yourself. Does this thing have a heart

that moves the blood? Does it have a brain

that grasps the diamond-shape of the mind?

Does it have legs to complete the journey it’s on?

Does it have hands to weave sound into a form?

Does it have a spine that holds it together?

He found in his shapely horn an instrument

to open a threshold to the world within,

an “Ode to Joy” just waiting to be born.

 

 

 

 

Equipage

 

When I see a woman in an airport

rolling her suitcase I think of my mother.

Hers is a small green and yellow plaid

made of compressed paper from the Depression

when that's all anyone could afford

The rocking-chair is her jet,

a ride to whatever land suggests itself

from colors of yarn she crochets into afghans.

On this day it’s the light tan of yucca bells

tinted with calendar pink of an Arizona canyon. 

 

The October sky is full of thunder and snow.

A freak of nature lights a fire under her.

It begins as a quiver in her jaw.

She hoists herself up.

Her crocheting falls from her lap.

She picks a plateful of sticky buns off the table,

scrapes them in the trash basket under the sink.

 

A dozen steps to her bedroom.

She returns with turtle-shell brush,

comb and mirror, underwear, two flowered

dresses, that small green plaid suitcase

my sister and I have never seen.

She slaps the luggage on the table

muttering something like trop c’est trop c’est trop c’est trop… 

 

Nancy and I know it’s French,

but the feeling in the words is clear—

Enough’s enough’s enough …

 

The hub our family wheels around is packing.

We take a lump of helplessness in our kid’s coffee.

My sister and I hunch our shoulders

in the same question mark.

Nancy wants to know what will become of us.

Mother says, You’ll live with your memè.

But she’s a witch! Nancy howls.

 

The noise wakes our Dad.

His bare feet slap the kitchen linoleum 

and when he sees what she’s equipped to do

he surrenders point by point.

It’s impossible for a truck driver

gone every other day to care for three kids.

She’s an artiste. She crochets afghans that give her

her own money. No more factory work,

no more paying his gambling debts,

no more sleeping in her bed.

 

She’s found what she can’t live without,

a heart like a wheel to steer her life by.

When I see plaid luggage like hers pass by,

I feel an impulse to stand and smile. 

 

 

 

 

Carol Tyx

On Unlocking the Bathrom Door

 

this feeling of lightness

as if you’ve become a bowl

spacious and open, like

 

cleaning out a closet

the hangers no longer jumbled

what’s no longer useful given away

 

the satisfaction of releasing a resentment

you’ve been hanging on to, the pressure

building up suddenly gone

 

like dumping the compost

in the yard, the bucket

rinsed and ready

 

or sliding a library book down the chute

the story having worked its way through you

the surprise of empty hands

 

and now a slight hunger, knowing

there’s room for more, ready

to start all over again

 

 

 

Bacon

 

What is it about bacon

that she, a long-term vegetarian

(mostly), cannot not devour?

 

Of course, it’s got to be quality—

uncured, local if possible, perhaps

knowing the pig personally—to be worth

 

jumping off the plants-only wagon,

but my god, the smell alone—

dark, dripping, a fairy-tale forest—

 

could be enough.  Yet it’s not.

You need at least four slabs

even if you told yourself two

 

is the limit.  Crisp and chewy

lean and fat—you want it all,

the aftertaste lingering, the loamy

 

earth of that ancient forest, wild boars

snuffling, licking the last gleam

of fat from your fingers, not wanting

 

to wash your hands, wanting only to linger

in that dark, shadowy understory,

gifted from one belly to another.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Weaver

Night Writing at the Braille Factory

 

and cosmetics warehouse, where all the raised dots and cells are kept

segregated in perfectly chilled vats of cucumber vodka, and the night

 

watchman’s blind dog accompanies him on his waking walking

watchful hourly rounds, while albino mice sample Canadian Banknotes

 

from the Journey (2001) and Frontier (2011) series, enjoying the full-bodied

inks, the tactile denominational bumps, and their chewy polymers.

 

Uninterested in the new Israel Shekel, India’s rupee, the Swiss Franc,

Russia’s Ruble, and Mexico’s MXN polymer banknotes, all tactile

 

currencies, the mice are not blind to taste, but make their preference

known in small piles of well-chewed but not digestible recurrencies.

 

 

 

Dance of the Wooden Leg

 

Spin and stomp. Stomp and spin.

Plant the good, shoed foot

and tap tap tap. Never look down.

Always smile back at the mirrored

ceiling or your lucky partner.

Lift the lighter leg. Send a message

in Morse code ratta tat tat

to the awestruck crowd. Allow

no autographs or carvings

to your stump. Cha Cha your way

across the parting parquet floor.

Take no prisoners when you spin

like a wooden top. The world

is yours alone. Spin and stomp.

Stomp and spin. Plant your good

foot hard and tap tap tap. Ratta tat.

Never look back. Never back down.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Wyatt

Notes Toward an Unheard Music

 

It Must Be

 

I

To wake in the hours before light, to stir and tic,

to sing into the coming of the light such songs

as will welcome it, and then to chorus voices

 

under and over it in full throat, crest

and feather, this is the necessary ritual.

To hear only a single song, however

 

jubilant, while others fill another space,

only the world hearing it all, the great

tangle, trombones and cymbals, flute and fever,

 

this is morning and the garden of it.

Green vines depend from trees that cannot see.

The wood thrush makes music too fine to hear,

 

but heart hears with little difficulty.

Heart fills with all the fine space of morning.

One tune hears another and shapes to it,

 

and the image fills with itself, sun sprung up,

some of the singing taken wing, rounding

the wood – even silence has become loud

 

and lost, a mere idea we cannot grasp.

It rises and comes around, this clamor,

and we fill with it, struck with understanding.

 

II

Though she does not play the blue guitar,

the woman at her window hears the jay,

his banjar not fine, not fit, yet silvery.

 

Spring sheds blossoms and blossoms in rain.

Bees debate and tumble while blossoms fall,

rain in rain – and summer sounds the green,

 

the green banjar – at her window listens,

the night grown blue, tuned blue – silvery dreams

tangle in some music crickets churn.

 

Too warm, remembering, the pillow hot,

the blue guitar faint as the moon behind

torn webs of clouds - another circle’s song,

 

a whippoorwill asks after spiders, lost

in their dark caves under the floating web,

consumed in waiting – the world underfoot

 

already dry, inharmonious crunch

and bray, in dream become the morning jay,

and morning then, and at her window she does

 

not play, she hears. It is enough that night

has worn the webs to silver, and in their caves,

the spiders, husk to husk, begin their song.

 

III

Face in the mountainside melted from stone,

these runnels stitching it a lasting portrait,

gray and silver green and moss-red green.

 

Here is the ruler of the wood, the piney

pines, the silent air, the red-tailed screech

as silence falls beneath his heavy gaze.

 

Close vines bind ground to ground and burrow there

where ferns’ fond fiddleheads become his hair.

The forest does not please him – nor this path

 

that rises by his waiting unforgiving

stare – he has no crown, but we swallows

still mark his brow – he has no ear for us.

 

No scepter but this broken pine bleached white

as porcelain – the sky is white, the air,

the air is white – no larks fly over it,

 

gibber about lost lands, lost words, the drip

that forms this giant face, its faint colors.

We passed here, then, fairies and minions of

 

the mountain’s old muttering core, we pass

his glare, bring these pine cones and broken ferns –

we swallows, orphaned children of the air.

 

IV

Memory takes this happy child to wed,

and she will have him this time, not before –

He sees a time and calls it Banjarland.

 

In midsummer with the whip whippoorwill

where the wood’s dark has turned to light, so dark,

then light, so cushioned, so full of music.

 

And will’s whip, the marriage song would never

end, midsummer in timeless Banjarland.

Its words were whip, in song, its words were will,

 

and poor the mating of the two in song.

They broke a glass beneath the sacred tree.

They broke a goblet, stepped upon a cup,

 

even a chalice, the dark red wine seeping

into the night, so dark, so full of music,

words without words, without a child’s meaning.

 

Who was she whom he holds in memory,

whom he loved and married there in music?

And she loved memory and lived a while

 

among his dreams, and now again she sings,

little brown bird her mouth the night ajar,

over and over singing near and far.

 

V

We dined on the freshest mouse.  The wine was red.

The wood mysterious.  Count Kaiserling

called for his music: Dear Goldberg, play me

 

one of my variations.  Something soft

and somewhat lively in character for

the insomniac.  Count Kaiserling sings,

 

sings who, sings who, his gayety grown stern.

His daughters who and who – their daughters, too.

Clocks and cuckoos rust under rain.  Something

 

soft, soft yet lively as the freshest mouse.

And the wine will red, will red as soft as dark.

The night will dark, will darken in itself.

 

The forest gathers voices made of words,

of who and who with silence in between.

A lively screech for the insomniac.

 

Count Kaiserling, his keyboards two, may choose

to dream, may hum a tune of lunacy,

of choirs of keyboards bent upon the key

 

mysterious, the key of muddled sleep,

of sisters silent in the air, the key,

as wine is soft and red, the key of G.

 

VI

And so deep in the night upon this sleep

the Count reclined and music cradled him.

His sleep became a point so fine midnight

 

disappeared into it – all things, in fact,

became a dream unheard, unseen – perhaps

chiaroscuro prevailed, or gold illumined.

 

Perhaps his mind, still in the key of G,

flew silently into the mysterious

forest, and there so many sisters joined

 

him, whos piled up like so many pine cones,

an avalanche of whos beneath strung stars,

beneath the dream that bore him, ascending

 

only, having taken every repeat,

when the cadence gave up its cadencing

to silence, and silence gave up to more.

 

He wakes and sudden is the point of entry.

Somewhere a sound – his eye is blind, his ear

a bath of listening.  A question of,

 

a choice between – where does that tune reside?

Somewhere in the Aria he wonders?

Deep in the night its harmonies return.

 

VII

Then he does not sleep and morning comes slow.

The harmonies of order must remain.

The fox leaves feathers in his wake – the snake

 

must swallow whole.  Music fills the temple,

its corridors, in absolutes – its forms

are likenesses of men, he would believe.

 

Owl at the window does not fill the room.

One season bends and slurs into another.

The aria descends in steps from west

 

to east, from possible to weathered past.

Possible stands weary, impossible

to comprehend, an abandoned building.

 

Windows and doors removed by time do not

confound the owl, her harsh regard, her glare,

her will that night will come and will be real.

 

He does not wish for night to come, shadow

of the dreaming day – I heard last night

some fine music I cannot remember.

 

Some angel rose or fell – a great turmoil,

A piling up, a gathering of language,

luminous, and yet there was no sound.

 

VIII

Now that angel, perhaps a cloud of moss,

regarding some world, let us say this one,

swallows above, night hawks below, one dumb

 

robin listening for worms angelically,

that angel, then, might swoop and shriek, his rusty

cry warning small hearts to cast no shadows

 

in his wake.  Am I who must imagine

him, his wide wings, the silence that he boils,

am I less angel here in my cold cloud?

 

Is his commotion more than mine? Regard

these lines.  Swoop over them.  They fall slowly

into the sky.  Listen.  They urge upwards.

 

The robin’s eye is bright.  His happiness

is hour to his day.  Another angel

must come his way.  Another and another.

 

There is a time for time, a day for days.

The Count will dream, so well asleep, I am.

And then I am, and angel, in the earth

 

or air, I am, of silence, and from time

to time, I am, behind the light, behind

the sound, behind the word, I am, I am.

 

IX

Wren singing from the bottom of the sea

of memory fierce notes that catch and pull –

Birdsong, the noise an angel makes falling

 

down the stairs – anything an angel does,

this bird can ridicule – an angel flies

around a candle flame, around the moon –

 

Hear then, these robin roundelays, caprices

trying out loose knots and looser still –

Practice makes the wren perfect his rescue

 

call – they do not practice each other’s words.

Each exercise depends on nothing but

itself – the perfect is perfectable.

 

Going around the aria, music

 must gather, tail to nose, itself and spin

again, a breath seeming never to end –

 

Always another song learned from the world,

and some take pleasure in the moment called

from memory, but each song sung is changed

 

by the singing, even our listening.

A thousand songs revise, distort, depend

and fall like leaves forgotten in the air.

 

X

Fat boy, my singing summer, seasonal

and historical, like any other –

Brown thrasher, winter wren, wood and hermit,

 

nuclear bomb over Nagasaki.

The world hears beneath this tree, contemplates

your histories, provoked and unprovoked:

 

bachman’s sparrow, red-eyed vereo,

the flow of memory, as if rising

from the bottom of the sea, past days, nights,

 

and past the hour before dawn, the first song

and the last moment before it, the last

silence, we strive to remember, phantom

 

before these names: eastern wood-pewee,

western wind, eastern bluebird, winter

wren – once the singing, the moment before,

 

springs past morning, springs past all history,

another lesson looms, not rational,

irrational, the cloud of it, over

 

the mysterious green, determined song.

There are no words, there are no words for that

which rises until we no longer hear.

 

*

Player, you have come to the tune, somewhere

between the trees and the shadow under

creek stones.  It is the music you will find

 

that has been made in weeds and tumbled wind.

From syrinx and silence the poet spins

these cadences.  The notes you find will play

 

and never end, if play you play and endings

bend to the first measure, and then begin

again in weeds and birds and shallow stones.

 

Player, how do you play reading the book

of silence, reading creature in the stream,

corpuscles tumbling into light, river

 

of all things, audience of gravel bars,

of sun and wary weeds, of perching claws,

of worm and minnow, aria of night,

 

dark mother of every sung syllable –

this music, player, play, and play again,

until, beyond itself, the sound is sound

 

plunging to be heard one first time, rising

to be forgotten, never heard, player,

begin, the score does not perform itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Young

The Sasquatch walks among us

 

Apart from the very white

guy who walks by wearing a

black T-shirt with a simple

"Muhammad Ali" printed on it,

half the world wears baseball

tees even if they come from the

half of the world that either

doesn't play the game or know

what it's about. That's why I

feel safe getting around in a

bannered shirt that lauds the

virtues of Nietzsche & his

Nihilist Muskrats. The op-

probium inherent in it rarely

registers. One half thinks that

NM is a term that comes from

curling. The other half congrat-

ulate themselves on knowing

things outside their area of ex-

pertise, that they recognize this

famous gridiron team that hails

from — is it? — the Appalachians.

 

 

 

I Can’t Wait To Reconnect With Lilo Again

 

Some of you might remember me.

I was a trope once used in popular

culture, The Dark Lord rising to

gather his armies in the context

of a global mobility shift. Footage

was shot for the newscasts when

my dual citizenship situation first

arose. Add to that body- & dashcam

captures released by the police, plus

a university's private surveillance

videos. "The well is a mirror," said

a woman at the center of the fray.

"The marital relationship is not the

primary emotional bond. Rather it's

a beachfront property with uninter-

rupted views." "It's our culture," says

another, "a disturbed emancipation

with an average of 250 résumés sub-

mitted for every condo. Those false

children are cases in point." Views-

keyboard_arrow_down. The chances

of trees trapped in a prism of refracted

light surviving are almost zero. You

are so lucky being back in Belek again.

 

 

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