 
### Sixfold Poetry Winter 2014

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Sixfold and The Authors

www.sixfold.org

Sixfold is a completely writer-voted journal. The writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the prize-winning manuscripts and the short stories and poetry published in each issue. All participating writers' equally weighted votes act as the editor, instead of the usual editorial decision-making organization of one or a few judges, editors, or select editorial board.

Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October, each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.

Cover image: Anna Atkins (British, 1799 - 1871) and Anne Dixon (British, 1799 - 1877) _Adiantum Capillus Veneris._ , 1853, Cyanotype 25.4 x 20 cm (10 x 7 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

License Notes

Copyright 2015 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue are acknowledged. Thank you for your support.

Sixfold

Garrett Doherty, Publisher

sixfold@sixfold.org

www.sixfold.org

(203) 491-0242

### Sixfold Poetry Winter 2014

Debbra Palmer | Bake Sale & other poems

Ann V. DeVilbiss | Far Away | Like a Mirror & other poems

Michael Fleming | On the Bus & other poems

Harold Schumacher | Dying To Say It & other poems

Heather Erin Herbert | Georgia's Advent & other poems

Sharron Singleton | Sonnet for Small Rip-Rap & other poems

Bryce Emley | College Beer & other poems

Harry Bauld | On a Napkin & other poems

George Mathon | Do You See Me Waving? & other poems

Mariana Weisler | Soft Soap and Wishful Thinking & other poems

Michael Kramer | Nighthawks | Kaua'i & other poems

Jill Murphy | Migration & other poems

Cassandra Sanborn | Remnants & other poems

Kendall Grant | Winter Love Note & other poems

Donna French McArdle | White Blossoms at Night & other poems

Tom Freeman | On Foot | Joliet | Illinois & other poems

George Longenecker | Nest & other poems

Kimberly Sailor | The Bitter Daughter & other poems

Rebecca Irene | Woodpecker & other poems

Savannah Grant | And Not As Shame & other poems

Michael Hugh Lythgoe | Titian Left No Paper Trail & other poems

Martin Conte | We're Not There & other poems

A. Sgroi | Sore Soles & other poems

Miguel Coronado | Body-Poem & other poems

Franklin Zawacki | Experience Before Memory & other poems

Tracy Pitts | Stroke & other poems

Rachel A. Girty | Collapse & other poems

Ryan Flores | Language Without Lies & other poems

Margie Curcio | Gravity & other poems

Stephanie L. Harper | Painted Chickens & other poems

Nicholas Petrone | Running Out of Space & other poems

Danielle C. Robinson | A Taste of Family Business & other poems

Meghan Kemp-Gee | A Rhyme Scheme & other poems

Tania Brown | On Weeknights & other poems

James Ph. Kotsybar | Unmeasured & other poems

Matthew Scampoli | Paddle Ball & other poems

Jamie Ross | Not Exactly & other poems

Contributor Notes

Debbra Palmer

### Bake Sale

Don't eat the wrapper.

Nobody doesn't know this.

So when my mother ate the cupcake

paper and all, in one shoved-in bite and hissed

" _don't you say a word_ ,"

all the way home

from the Ockley Green Middle School bake sale

I thought about the paper in her stomach.

What if anyone saw her?

What would they say? Like my best friend's mother

who taught us how to count to ten in Cherokee

and caught my father's eye. I thought

it was because he liked her slacks

or because she worked part-time at Sears,

but my mother said it was because

she was petite and had a stick

up her ass. What would she say?

I carried my cupcake in both hands, its top

a coiled green snake with gold sprinkles.

To want anything so much, to devour it like that,

must be deadly.

### In The Week Before Her Death My Mother Hallucinates in Email:

I was thirsty. I walked to the yard shed

where the women were selling water. I had

no money. I was so glad

to see the only friend I had at church.

I held out my hands and she filled them

with sweet, cool water.

I was followed by a priest. She said

she could see my unhappiness.

I told her everything

right there in the yard

it poured like white words, gushed

from my mouth like a river of tumors.

The priest said, " _Come with me, my dear._ "

I said the only thing I know

in Japanese, the word for pocket,

"poketto"

and pulled from my own, a note

and unfolded it.

" _Just love them_ ," it read.

Two great white Pyrenees came to tell me

all of the beautiful things in dying.

When I asked them to walk me there,

they stood at my side and waited. This is why

I'm afraid to close my eyes.

### Breasts

The first time I kissed a woman's breasts

I understood

men

how they root and paw

how they knead and pull

to prove they're really here

how they suck a bruise

around the nipple

how they get completely lost

in between

how they smash and grab

apologize and hang on anyway

or, how they hold two birds so gently

they can only feel them

when they let go.

### Late Bloomer

" _Mama had a baby and its head popped off._ "

The severed head of the dandelion

drops from my guillotine thumb

the yellow burst of weed

held under my chin

" _Do you like butter?_ "

A little blonde girl whose parents are deaf

opens her mouth. " _Talk like your parents_ ," I insist,

shoving in a cud of grass.

She cries without sound—so hard

that the daisy chain crown

shakes from her head.

I just want her to speak with her hands.

### I Love Parasites

I love parasites for their barbs and hooks

for their many names & forms:

Tapeworm, Poinsettia, Blood Fluke,

Twin, Mother, Jehovah's Witness.

I love them for their shameless

savagery & nerve.

I love fetuses—also parasites

who live off the mother's body.

Then, as nature dictates,

the mother becomes the parasite,

depositing into her offspring

her tumors, hair & teeth.

I love my twin brother who stays

alive siphoning off my blood

& laughing about it from his lovely

teratoma mouth.

I love the Jehovah's Witness ladies

who feed off my politeness.

I love to invite them in.

We take turns holding my mother's upper denture

like a poison leaf. I love passing around

the bag that was my mother's prosthetic breast,

the silicone pellets hissing inside.

I love the cup of my mother's hair

the gray curls like smoke. Before we burned her body,

she asked me if I would wear her bones

around my neck.

I already wear them,

couldn't take them off

if I wanted to.

### Ann V. DeVilbiss

### Far Away, Like a Mirror

I've gone out walking

to see if I can meet myself

on sleeping streets

muffled with snow.

A rabbit is standing stock-still

in the center of the road,

as if refusing to move

will keep him safe.

I wonder if the rabbit is me

and how I can prove it.

At night the snow

holds the sky captive.

The rabbit sleeps curled up,

deep under the ground,

under the layers of trapped sky,

under the real sky,

which is orange like an echo,

which seems far away, like a mirror.

I go back home and try

to stay up all night.

I want to watch the snow let loose

the dawn, freeing the sky. I want to

see the light cast over the rabbit,

see it change him,

but I fall asleep again,

wake fur matted, confused.

I keep seeking new things

on all the same cold roads.

I need to know

which way to run.

I don't know

where to run to.

### Seasonal

We go west in the mornings, east

in the evenings. We know the sun

only by its heat and shadows;

we are home only when it's dark.

The world seems full

of monsters. The grass is

uneven, sharpened by frost.

A man spits on my porch,

tells me I can't park

in front of my house because

that's his spot, always has been.

The stains on his teeth are older than I am.

A few weeks later he is arrested for fraud,

having let his mother's body rot

in his house for months while he

collected her social security checks.

Once he is gone,

the house stays vacant

because of the smell, and I

park wherever I want.

Crows line the eaves

like undertakers, bray

like donkeys, begin

to outnumber us.

The world is too big

for safety, but here

in our house,

there is reason for joy.

Still, sorrow comes back,

pulled to me like

water to the moon.

### Down for the Count

When the thunder rumbles

I know he is looking for me

and I count

_one, two, three, four_

between the flash and roar.

The row of American flags

across the street looks

downtrodden and a little afraid.

I stick close to the eaves.

Before the storm the yard

was full of strange birds,

pelicans and hummingbirds

arriving in the wrong season.

He rolls his thunder tongue

through the clouds like

a snake in amber grasses.

_One, two, three,_ and I am

bathing in electric light.

A count of _one_ is too quick

to hide from, but somehow

the driving rain feels

clean, like a refuge.

His sky voice is big enough

to reach me anywhere.

### The Reckoning

His life is like a tango

between before and after.

Sometimes it fills his head

with oatmeal. Sometimes

his story is full of holes.

When he speaks of the loss,

he refuses to whisper, and

his loud voice pitches high,

like the keening of a sawmill:

flashing metal on dark wood.

His loss is like a small child

who has always been hiding

under the dinner table, and he

could hear her muffled giggles,

her earnest whispers, for years

before she came out in the open.

His loss is like a scar that has

to be told about because he

wears it under his sweater,

where no one can see.

His loss comes out to meet him,

to tell him she's always been waiting for him.

He takes her hand and they walk together.

### Harp

I will make a harp of you,

your hair curled around

its strings, the wood

of its flank flushed with

the color of your cheek

as you try to decide how

to say what comes next.

The harp will sing with

the sound of glass broken,

accidentally, woven into

a strain of careful laughter.

It will hum with uncertainty.

When you are away

I will know it is silent,

though I am deaf.

### Michael Fleming

### On the Bus

Life into legend, legend into life—

I once was you, Alex Supertramp—fresh

out of school, half nuts, no money, no wife,

no work, no matter. The sins of the flesh

were behind me, beneath me, beyond me.

Another self-inventing dharma bum

on the road to anywhere, off to see

the elephants, bound for glory. And from

such dry, dreary soil I'd sprung—I was you,

Alex—naked in my cast-off clothes, so

full of myself, so empty, just a few

well-tasted words were enough when the low

clouds to the west whispered, _Get on the bus_ ,

and I got on, and you got on—we wanted

more, magic, furthur, Alaska—I must

have crossed the river. But you? You were gone.

for Chris McCandless

### Paging Doctor Bebop

The good doctor, he knows all that book stuff—

the flatted fifth, Italian baroque—hell,

he wrote the book, and that would be enough

if books were enough, but he won't just sell

you on the art of listening, he'll give

you the real medicine, body and soul—

the silver horn, the music that you live

for, music that you die for, that the whole

world needs to hear, _now_ —the clickity klack

of time on the rails, the spike in the blood

and the colors of sound. Where have you gone,

Doctor Bebop? And when will you be back?

Life's so syncopated—starts and stops. Good

music, though—man, it just goes on and on

for Howie Brofsky

### Mr. McPhee's Class

Jouncing. Dolos. Craton. Words you serve like

oranges, unpeeling their sounds. We're not just

horsing around in canoes, or hitchhiking

newly made reefs, measuring the crust

after the quake—we're holding words to our

nostrils, inhaling, truly tasting them,

getting them down. Yes, we love this class. Our

urgently unhurried task: stratagem and

structure, a sense of where we are. You

model the hair shirts we'll wear, naturalized

citizens of this country we've come into,

promising too much, eager but unwise,

hardly writers yet and our hearts don't break

even when you tell us: keep squeezing, guys—

every good word takes as long as it takes.

for John McPhee

### Attending

He loses every case—it's hospice, he knows

that. Isn't medicine supposed to mean

saving people, healing them, saying no

to death? The right technique, the right machine,

the right dosage—isn't that what a doctor

should know? Coax fire from the spark of life—

is that what he should do? But no one walks

out of here. Nothing is fixed with a knife

in here. They're goners—we all are. So when

did _doctor_ stop meaning _teacher_ —is that

where we went wrong? Best to call him attending

physician—here to bear witness. What

else can the white coat mean, if not surrender—

tending what is broken, what is not.

for Derek Kerr

### The Audacity of the Jaguar

My world is not your world. Who was here first?

And who is the master? My amber eyes,

they're voiceless mirrors—imagine the worst

of me, call me coward, devil, beast. Why

should I burden myself with your fears? You

peer into these eyes and see nothing that

you know beyond your own reflection. Who

are you now? My wanderings are no matter

of yours—if you gaze into my coat

of a thousand eyes, I melt into smoke,

into spirit, into memory. Go

to bed now, lie beside your wife. That low

cough—just her soft snoring? Sleep. Dream your dreams

of all that you will do with fences, fire—

your farm, your _finca_ —oh, how it all seems

to be yours. And when you awaken, I

recede and I wait and I watch until

you send your shadow man. And I'll remain

here, hidden, choosing what I want to kill.

Closer—I can bite you through to the brain.

for Alan Rabinowitz

### Harold Schumacher

### Dying To Say It

The decision was made—

we went in and killed her—

a squad of father, sister, uncle, aunt,

doctor, nurse, chaplain, myself,

and the finger of God.

We went in and killed mom—

all of us, none of us, stole

the tubes from her dark veins,

slipped off the switches of life,

slid in the syringe of peace, but

We all heard—

the metronomic clicking stop,

saw the green mountains pass by,

shrinking on the screen like troops

marching down sloping holes.

We all heard—

the sighing respirator stop

and waited and watched

in the silence,

the deceiving silence.

She breathed alone—alone—

she breathed alone—

she breathed—

" . . . cannot compare to the suffering

of the present—with the glory to be,"

verses the chaplain glued appropriately

an anthology—

she—

We came before her throne

with rites of passage.

"Nita"—her brother whispered German in her ear.

"Nita"—her sister whispered, unclear.

The pendulum slowed like the sunset—

small waves of golden white

so faint, delicate, and slight,

seeped back into darkness,

the deep hole of creation

where something hovered

like breath and light.

He was wounded early and deep,

a boy's feelings fired to ashes,

who never trapped fireflies,

watched eagles and sunsets,

got crazy and laughed till he cried,

never made birds of clay,

never on a tender bet—

my father,

always in the next room,

who hid between sheets of anger,

dropped his first tears before her,

like blood and lead. He said

his words, falling like stars,

"Goodbye—

we had good lives together."

### Winter's Edges

When the edges of winter appear, and

the cardinals haven't sung since early August,

When the jays speak every second day, and

the trees lose weight, training for the test,

When the geese, calmed down, caw less, and

the freeways are quiet after midnight,

When will the next funeral be, and

whose will it be, and

Where will they be, the dead,

unburied until the spring thaw,

Their bodies lying in cinder block

waiting rooms?

You said you wanted to die

that first winter we were married.

You said so much, so many things,

now buried in ground too frozen to break.

The memories lie waiting in

the stone house of many rooms,

Not heard since some forgotten August

until now at winter's edges, but

No spring thaw will ever come.

When I hear the wind again, at night,

blowing from brick-lined streets

Trying to enter and sleep with me,

sounding like prairie photos of North Dakota

Where you and I were young,

so young, too young,

Speaking only every second day, at times,

and the veins stood out on our necks,

And the winds blew hard, and loud

as blizzard-lost cattle,

And the windows rattled, and the geese

had gone to more pleasant places,

I know the only weight we lost

was our minds.

### God Next Time

And will I ever see more of God except in the sunrise and the storm?

Ever see more than the beauty of the flowers and fields, or

a beautiful child in a grocery cart staring back at me,

ever see more than a quiet sea on an early morning beach,

or stunned still trees in the forest, or the swoosh of water on my boat's bow?

What is the face of God other than these, than the love of my wife,

the love of my friends, a happy dog, the yellow bird in my feeder,

the solitude of silence, the greens of Ireland's springs,

the shades, hues, and tints. Did the primitives experience more?

And would I recognize him if I saw him, or her—this God they talk about?

Would s/he be Jesus again, or a woman this time? Next time

God might choose a female to show the world for sure

that compassion is the way—softness, gentleness, composure, calm,

the receptiveness of the vagina, the yielding of spread thighs,

the Mary-ness of surrender, the warmth of the womb,

the mother's hovering spread wings.

And what if the second coming really were a woman coming down

out of the clouds, a glorious lovely woman of light?

And who would our heroes be then, the next time around

in the new creation, and who would we be

if we followed her?

### Alejandro

After the drunk tourists

are done drinking in Mexico,

going past my window at 5:00 AM

waking me when the darkness

is still holding fast,

I quit arguing with myself

about whether or not

I have to piss,

get up and do it, then

to the kitchen for a liquid replacement

and a look outside the window.

Red and blue flashing policia trucks

drive by slowly, and

in their eerie stabbing strobing lights

I see him—

I've seen him twice this week

in the dawn—

Alejandro—

the groundskeeper, sweeping

the parking lot

the sidewalks, even the street

with a broom, a pan

and a wheeled garbage can,

sweeping with fervent thrusting strokes,

like a forest-fire fighter

like a lumber jack splitting logs,

like a man beating down a concrete wall

with a sledge,

or a soldier pushing back

bacterial armies.

I wonder, standing by the window,

I ask questions,

I compare the contrasts in this world

between Alejandro and others

who hours later would drive

in gadgeted computerized vehicles

to their rare-wood desks,

soft swiveled chairs with high backs

and lumbar supports,

to platters of glazed donuts,

lattes, bonuses,

profits, pensions, soft palms,

and clean manicured fingernails.

I go back to bed—

thinking, I can't sleep.

I get up and look up

three Spanish words,

and memorize them. Exiting

to the outer freshly-washed

and scrubbed hallway,

his bicycle locked to the wall,

I see him in the courtyard,

sweeping the grounds again!

bean pods, twigs, and seeds,

flower petals, and leaves,

all of the falling

Mexican winter fecundity.

"Buenos dias, senor Alejandro."

"Buenos dias, senor."

"Como estas?"

"Bien, gracias, y tu?"

"Bien, muy bien."

Then with language skills

of a two year old,

I begin my memorized speech

as I wave my arm across the yard

like Crazy Horse defining

his lands and his people,

"Siempre"—(always)

"Todo"—(everything)

"Limpio"—(clean)

"Muchas gracias."

Alejandro proudly beams

so wide

that I see the gold in his teeth.

"Si," he says.

### War

I was in Melvin's garage

towards the end of his life

when he told me.

I don't know why

but I felt honored.

Melvin is one of those

no bullshit guys

who always tells it

the way he sees it.

He doesn't believe

in lots of words,

and certainly not

embellishments.

He is the world's best

and smartest mechanic,

better than any doctor,

not a body, or organ

or limb, or vein

he couldn't fix.

He gave me hell

if I waited too long

to service my truck.

"That's a carbureted engine,

not fuel injected,

gas can get into your oil

and pretty soon your cylinders

get etched, then you get problems.

Gotta change that oil more often,

'specially in winter.

Don't wait so damn long

next time."

I always paid Melvin with a check

made out to cash

at his request, and would say,

"Here's some tax-free income."

We both would smile,

knowing he was a "screw 'em" guy

when it came to income taxes,

and how the government used his dollars

to kill people.

One day when I paid,

this is what he said.

"I was in the war, you know,

in the Pacific theater."

"Yes. Weren't damn near all you guys

in town there?" I always threw in some

cuss words—guy talk, you know.

"Yup, me and Don enlisted together

and fought together, it was hell,

I tell ya. No fun. Seen it all.

Arms hanging on tree branches,

brains stuck on bark, eyeballs,

chunks of skull with hair,

hands, legs, feet, ears, cocks,

strewn all over the place.

Hell, even on my weapon,

and my hands,

and face,

in my mouth,

on my uniform,

in my helmet—

just wipe it off,

spit it out

and keep on shooting.

What the hell can you do?

It's either you,

or them

gonna die.

I did what I had to do,

ya got no choice.

Killing ain't easy,

you know."

"Don't tell me about war.

I've been there.

It isn't right, I tell ya, goddamnit,

no matter what those bastards say,

all a bunch of damn liars

if you ask me.

Someday they're gonna pay,

someday they'll get theirs."

It was the most

I ever heard him say,

and I couldn't get it

out of my head

Sunday morning

when I was in the pulpit

and Melvin was sitting

behind the pews

in his usher's chair,

looking out the window

while I was preaching

lofty concepts about love.

When he came up front,

the last to receive the host,

we looked at each other,

deep,

and I said,

"Melvin, this is the body

of Christ,

given for you."

A holy mystery was happening,

because killing

isn't easy,

you know.

Someday.

Someday.

Heather Erin Herbert

### Georgia's Advent

We laughed about it two years back

when I first saw cotton, white hot in the field.

Cicadas were sizzling in August heat

as my heart jumped up at blankets of snow.

I drove my car off the backwoods road

to find my thrill melted in heatstroke air.

You thumped the table with your hand, Philly-boy,

when I told you what I thought I'd seen,

belched over your Coke can, winking and teasing:

How'd you get mixed up between snow and cotton?

Such a Northern-girl, you know you're in Georgia?

We need to get you out for a change.

In fall, I drive us out past the fields.

We sing together, you're tuneless but joyful.

It's four o'clock, florid, last sky-blues, gold.

We talk about hometowns, how down south is different,

share coffee and stories,

the pink sun in my mirrors.

My nails turn wood-smoke grey on the wheel,

I pull my sleeves down at the end of our songs.

You point at cotton through shadows of pecans,

then smile at me, saying: _It looks just like our snow._

Looks almost like Christmas.

It looks almost like home.

### That Old Spark

That first time, lightning hit the tallest pine tree,

the one I could see from school

and say, "That one is mine."

The charge ran from branch to roof to wire.

A long blue spark shot out at my feet,

leaving a dark scar on the hardwood.

My mother threw us in the car, and

begged us not to touch its metal sides.

We watched firemen come

to cut smoldering plaster from the walls.

The second time, we woke, the four of us,

and watched the night scud over with clouds

from the opening in our platform tent.

We rubbed our arms, asking each other,

"Are you cold? I have goose bumps."

As fine hairs stood on our cheeks

the world exploded over us, steaming,

flying, hot shards of wood,

the least of our problems, really,

as half the tree landed across our canvas.

The third time, days later, we ran for cover

down the side of a New York mountain.

Over tree roots, over rock bridges,

through curved dirt sluiceways,

shortly to be filled with water.

The last gasp dash across the open field.

We ran, one at a time. Young, fast, lithe,

my turn came, and the jolt gave me wings,

throwing me from the charred circle that

washed from the grass as I shook myself.

The fourth time, that same field, a week later.

They say that lightning doesn't strike

the same place twice. They're wrong.

The fifth time, watching flashing night from the kitchen,

my two eldest children eating dinner beside me.

I counted the space between lightning and thunder,

adrenaline and safety,

until there wasn't time between them to count.

The oven screamed that its circuits were cooked,

well done, while the house suddenly heaved

back to purring life, and light. My youngest slept on,

still sprawled across the oak floor

where Sesame Street had left her.

The sixth time I said it wasn't that bad,

and slipped my sandals into my fist

so I could run through the rain in bare feet.

As I stood outside the store I twisted my bags

closed, pulled my bra in place, took my glasses off,

and raised one foot,

as lightning shattered the sign above my head.

And I dove inside, the dark shop loud with voices,

apologizing to the clerk next to me. "My bad,"

I said, "that was probably my fault."

The seventh time happens on nights I sleep

without the covers, and in the nude.

I maintain it's the goose bumps on my back

that start my old dream reel flickering.

Hairs stand up, and my body knows

that my bright friend has come to visit.

I've died so many times in bed.

My husband thinks I'm always cold,

blankets to my chin, even in summer,

but it's because in my dreams, I want to live.

### Bittersweet

For years

I've said I could give my heart

to a man who gave me a box of crayons.

There's something precious

about ninety-six

clean blooms of color,

in bouquets of violet

and leaf green.

And for years I waited.

He gave a gold ring

that I paid for, a little,

which broke in our fifth year.

He gave cups of umber tea.

Gave me five children,

three of whom lived, beautiful,

with deep cornflower eyes

and carnation cheeks.

He gave a brick red house to hold me still,

and palettes of laundry

in a never-ending landscape

of sky blues and pinks.

But with all these things,

I wanted crayons, the waxy,

sour scent of a new fall,

a new page, a new start,

fresh and bright as the first day of school.

Burnt sienna and mahogany,

orange and scarlet,

a blaze of potential

rolling in my palm.

And this year,

my eldest daughter,

with a new woman-smile

gave me a brown paper bag

and said not to look, but

just smell it.

I inhaled,

and the colors poured back in me.

Sharron Singleton

### Sonnet for Small Rip-Rap

Here is a wooden clothespin that grips

a striped beach towel, rusty nail in the hinge

no one has seen since nineteen thirty six.

Yes, and safety pins, straight pins, bobby-pins

used to plaster curls to my head when I

was twelve, obscure and forgotten as old

bones of the lesser saints. They lie

in dusty drawers, the plain things that uphold

us—buckles, zippers, paperclips, all

the small earnest rip-rap that insist we

button and snap and allow us the small

pleasure of undoing. Praise especially

that which attaches, is unseen, spare—

the needle that mends and binds up the tear.

### Why I Don't Write Poems About My Father

Old, mottled,

algaed

and scarred

where hooks

have ripped,

the fish

has gone

deep, has sunk

through brown-gold

pillars of water,

as if through

a temple ruin,

down beyond

the reach of light,

to lie hidden

among weeds,

tattered fins

and fronds

tremulous

with the lake's

slow breathing—

the only sign

of its presence,

a shiver of circle,

unnoticed except

by the watchers,

the heron

and fisherman.

Well hooked

by his quarry,

the fisherman

wants both

to catch and not

catch, to scrape

away the armor

of scales,

to open, gut

the creature—

and still to glide

upon the wide

eye of the lake,

oars dipping, just

rippling the surface,

the shadow

of the boat

sliding across

the shadow

that is the fish.

### Seed

I lay down

life, crave

earth. Time's

bell clangs

death, chimes

birth, folds me

in its grip.

Harrowed

in the grave

I twist, split-

ting the shell,

I leap from

the furrow,

an old god,

green

and knowing.

### Hottest Summer on Record

there's no

resisting

the heat the air

sags with moisture

boundaries blur

between sea and sky

washed in bluegray

congruity

air becomes

ocean and we wade

into it lungs

open and close

like gills back

bones prickle

with forgotten

fins each cell

a pouch of liquid

edges dissolve

speech thought

becomes vapor

spangled with sweat

your body slips

into mine wet

boneless and salty

we stroke together

away from shore

### The Sleep After

While the pleasure of it

rips through me

like lightning on water,

while I think this is

what I could die for,

have died for—

it is the sleep after

in the arms

of the fugitive moon,

in the hands of that saint,

the rose, in the mouth

of the god

that I long for.

Bryce Emley

### College Beer

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

—Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"

It's my first time in a real dive: dimly lit, Willie lilt, cue-ball-scuffed floor, basket of condoms by the door. I ask what they've got and stop her when she gets to Schlitz.

Before I _clack_ the can open I conjure my father sneaking The Beer that made Milwaukee Famous into an Oral Roberts dorm,

swigging it mid-June Oklahoma storm from the driver seat

of his first Austin-Healey,

dwelling in that space of time he lived the stories he tells.

Bitter, tinny, it tastes like college beer.

Hemorrhage paralyzed him at 43. He's 64 now. He doesn't drink.

Every year is a stroke toward a closing surface,

a swimming out of the wreck,

the thing itself bluing into myth beneath.

The next round I take an AmberBock, and it tastes like it did in the Applebee's on University all those times.

### Two Pompeiis

In every living city the haunted ruin

—Robert Pinsky

i.

I'd like to think they didn't see it coming—

denarii left on counters like quarters on a dresser,

bodies bound in awful contortion,

arms clung around Fortuna medallions—

but the tremors in the earth a week before

that shook their bones in god-like warning

while they pressed and jarred wine

grown and named on what would bury them,

their doors inscribed with _Salve, lucru_

ruin that tragedy, build us a new city still

haunted by a decadence for us to marvel at

as tourists and let ash and time conceal.

ii.

I'd like to think we didn't see it coming—

our two bodies like bills wadded on a dresser,

too bound in painless contortion for us to grasp

that we had clung to what wouldn't save us—

but how could we not have felt the tremors

in our bones branching through marrow

as we pressed tongues and fingers,

buried ourselves beneath ourselves,

our end always inscribing itself

in our skin, ruined from our start

by the decadence of flesh, the baggage

we carried as tourists in each other's countries.

### Non-Small Cell

What should we gain by a definition . . .?

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

It could be large,

maybe medium, basically

whatever just isn't small.

One-fifth who have it last

another five years—

after that, some other statistic.

Nine times more common than small,

more women than men,

smokers and nonsmokers,

occasion for the one cigarette

lying dormant

in a drawer.

Clinical pamphlet,

Harvard doctor,

quick Google search—

some terms we can only define

by fissures branching our chests,

creating the loss by our knowing them.

Harry Bauld

### On a Napkin

Imagine the table-bards

of yore, filling the scraps

with blotty elegies and kennings

depending so much on the unfolding

wheelbarrow-thoughts beside

the chewed white chicken bones. I pine

for the lost scop world of prescription

pads, envelope backs, menus, telephone pole

fliers and stub pencils borrowed

from fat salesmen on trains,

the crushed index cards

with jam stains retrieved from deli trash.

But now I'm back in front

of a moony screen, touching my eyes

and fingers to what can never

also be used to clean

that dollop of cream cheese

off your beautiful, hungry lip.

### Swift River

Two brook trout flash in the current,

their iridescent shimmer a surrender

to the veiled hymn of gravity

and light. How small the self is.

Their bright wrinkling knows

they and the stream's contralto

were born to the same tune,

as if their flicker and gleam

fires not just a stippled kinship

but the synapse between, invisible

gate of their own depths. Trout linger

in the rill but don't know why or how long—

a while, with animal confidence, to turn orange

and find out why they stay. That is marriage.

The water has no words; I only imagine I hear

the pink and blue rings brookies wear

ping an ancient set of vows, history

of the recessional promise they whisper

to each other through the tips

of themselves: to face up

into the flood current that feeds

us minute particulars, the future's

freestones ringing beneath us like bells.

### Refusal

In the trivia contest blaring in the next room

at An Beal Bocht the question

seems to be _Which states touch_

_other states?_ and after a 5th black pint I'm in a state

that touches several other states I will never

be able to name and the first rock&roll song was—————————?

and a vicious dispute breaks out over the number

of overtimes possible in some type of game

as outside the traffic waltzes by

like a tipsy girl in the night

and the college students smoke and wish

they could get served by the biceppy bartender with the Cork accent

while a Mexican cook makes more Irish curry

and then runs out (thanks be to God) of _Irish pizza_

and you drink under the glare of a big painting of Behan

and Beckett and Joyce and Flann O'Brien

and Patrick Kavanaugh, who in the painting

looks like someone (perhaps one of the Beatles, maybe Ringo)

_playing_ Patrick Kavanaugh, and you are trying to remain

aware you are writing in a very small notebook

this five-pint poem and suddenly dreaming ( _One minute!_

warns the quizmaster) in your remaining minute

of that Irish girl with waterfall hair

when you were sixteen, the two of you

trembling together in your trembling station wagon

in her driveway outside the barn

where her quarter horses trembled in their withers

in the suburbs and every synapse you had

fired with the electricity of her skin

and now—right through the stout and dried curry dustings

sparking under your nose—you can smell

that girl's hair and you look in yet another unnamed state

toward the two sad white frosted cakes squatting like stones

on the shelf between the bar and kitchen

and you think, in spite of everything, no.

### Jaundice

Two hours old, my son fingers

his monk's cap like a conjurer

fanning four aces. Through the perfect feather

of a mouth, the quill of his cry

still echoes in the other cave

he came from that illuminated our margins

before the printing press was even

dreamt with its poisonous text,

its heavy leading. In a dawn light

flimsy as tissue I write

standing up with one finger

in his mouth while he pedals

and grabs for invisible boughs

under a flight of strong tubes burning

with their own full name— _Biliruben_ —

to void the blood of what is

golden and deadly, this new pen

leeching its own dark cargo.

George Mathon

### Do You See Me Waving?

Forty-two.

You announce it, as if it were the answer

for everything.

You're playing a game

with the fiddler crabs,

wiggling your toes, counting the seconds

until they reemerge.

It's dangerous,

I wouldn't come out for anything.

But they need to eat, you answer, sifting

the mud. And they mate every two weeks.

The males wave their big fiddler

claws

to attract females who follow them

into their holes.

Purblind love,

I say.

Only if you're invisible,

only if you're still as a killer

will they come out.

But it's impossible to tell the difference

between love and danger

of a silent predator.

They're quick enough,

you answer, to make up for that.

They have to risk it.

You call it trust.

An adolescent ibis works its long curved beak

into one of the holes without success.

I call this hope.

But the adult birds know

how pointless it is and don't even try.

It's what lovers do,

tunnel into safety,

hold on until the ibises stop digging.

Because love is

dangerous as a predator.

We keep counting but it waits us out.

### The Simplest Gifts

We love by accepting, I say:

the simplest gifts, the dumbest promises.

You nod in agreement

but remind me,

the male osprey knows

that if she doesn't approve,

his mate will discard the branch

he offers.

Sometimes the things I want

to give to you, the words I want to say,

scare me like that.

Above us a large nest

sits on a platform atop a power pole.

A male osprey flies out of it,

low

through the mangrove limbs beside us,

his wings

like knives in the leaves.

I offer you a shell I've picked

from the beach. Washed of its color,

its original shape nearly indiscernible,

you tumble it in your fingers.

In full flight

the osprey grasps and breaks a twig from a tree.

Crack!

Inured to her will, the sound emboldens him.

He turns back to his nest. Though small

the branch is accepted.

It's just an ordinary

shell. After a quick inspection

you toss it

into the water. But it's all I want from you,

something small and plain as that twig.

### The Cello

If love were easy

I would play

as beautifully with any bow, an equation

could be solved with any number.

It's why I hate

the soft hollow of her knee,

her arms' mathematical arcing

as they pull

these pellucid notes from my heart.

The way she bows me

until the sound

I can't help but make when she presses

her fingers just there, and there,

resonates.

A quantum vibrato that fills and rattles

the empty space between my molecules.

Love is desperate,

I protest, but relinquish it

on the pitch she commands

because I am made

for her straddled plucking and the horsetail

she flails incautiously across my taut ribs.

Each note she breaks open

—breaks

open my wooden heart and sublimes

into the electric air.

Not my will nor hers

but a reckless current when we touch.

The composition is timeless, she turns

the pages of the score with painted fingers.

It's not the way she plays the music

I love,

but the music we make

of our entanglement.

### The Bow

When she touches

the bow's rosewood

inlay, its ivory frog, when she lifts the length

of pernambuco wood,

it seems

a kind of ménage à trois. The shock

of horsetail is a fourth, like a stranger

met on a train. Later, an invitation

to dinner,

an unexpected tryst.

The cellist feels their joy.

She carries in her instrument,

selects a bow

and plays a note, a chord. She chooses another,

plays a note, a chord.

No prices are listed.

It makes no difference because price

is not the measure.

She picks a third, plays, sets it aside.

The Cuban Ipe wood shines, the carbon

composite balances, less than weightless

in her hand, but she knows it's not up to her.

The bow

will choose the instrument.

The morning progresses like a slow dance.

The bow maker makes tea for her

as if

they were merely chaperones

at a schoolgirl's cotillion. They sit,

talk of music,

wait for the music to begin.

### Under The Horse Chestnut Tree

I can't say if I unlaced my shoes

or he untied

the knots and unrolled the socks to bare my feet

but I felt more naked

than shoeless

from that deliberate uncovering.

Was it the summer wind

that lifted my dress

above my knees or his hands that peeled

the cotton cloth away, his lips that limned

the contours of my mouth and licked the beads

of sweat away, on a summer afternoon, sitting

in the front yard

under the horse chestnut tree?

The neighbors watched from their porches

as we kissed in the wind that lifted my dress

above my knees.

The fine hairs on my thighs

stood upright in the breeze,

his fingertips felt like cat's-eye marbles,

must have felt their stiffening

when they rolled

into the labyrinth hidden under there.

Was it the wind

that shook those quivering limbs

and bent my body so exquisitely?

Oh, I was breathless as those limbs

palpitating in the wind that blew my dress

above my knees.

There is no longing

like the longing of the wind.

I heard only wind

in the horse chestnut tree,

and chestnuts chafing on their branches.

The white panicles of erect spring flowers

now become these thorny nuts

in summer.

How they will fall to earth in autumn,

cracking open to open their chaste centers.

I will not resist him

nor how he will thumb them

slowly to throbbing luminescence, nor

how he will rub them

to polished perfection.

How can a fallen object be so flawless?

I wondered,

as the wind lifted my dress above

my knees. Horse chestnuts are bitter,

not for eating,

but rolling endlessly

by boys between their fingers

until they shine

like cat's-eye marbles

under the horse chestnut tree.

Mariana Weisler

### Soft Soap and Wishful Thinking

I've been poking at this old truth like it's a dead thing,

lifelessly lying there like blood-matted roadkill,

a deer struck and splayed and ebbing out onto the highway;

I've been prodding it, over and over, my pulse

flickering in anticipation of its resuscitation, of

the vivid moment when it will leap up, revived, prancing away

on spindly doe legs across the black asphalt,

up into the thickened navy sky where it will vault

across each of those twinkling memories, those silvery specks of

childhood blessings, until it finally will nestle itself back

among them, back into the place where I first spotted it years ago,

deceptively downy brown and soft, again soothing those throbbing stars with its velvet tongue.

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

—C. S. Lewis

### Dear Megalomania,

I finally reviewed the dissertation you wrote on me when I was 18,

and yes, I noted your citations of all the most influential thinkers

as well as your commensurate references to empirical and dogmatic texts,

in which you concluded, naturally, that I was either an Einsteinian genius

or a Marian reincarnation, that I was indubitably deemed divine

from the time of my birth, which, of course, was confirmed by my

first angelic sighting and aptly augmented by my infantile

ability to read auras and Freud alike.

But—I must admit—I found a flaw, just there in the 53rd footnote,

in which you indicated that you appeared "due to my debilitating fear of failure",

and thus were commissioned to carve out a future that would

suit my magnitude, throbbing idle and alone in my messy room;

and suddenly it was revealed to me, with clarion clarity,

that it wasn't I who feared life but you:

too erudite to ever accept error, too mighty to muck through mediocrity.

It was you, so small and mousy, dull and dim, cowering in the crevices of my mind,

and it was always your cowardice that ever convinced me to believe

I was anything but human.

### The Lament of Martha Kent

If you must go, then do so.

One foot on my porch and one on the moon

is too far a stretch, even for you.

I can't say how long I've known about the questions

splintering inside you; I guess when I saw you glance at me then

up at the sky, gray eyes pleading who—where—how—why—

and fantasizing feral flight, all while still grasping at the old

minutes that sank through the sunlight, needlessly

swiping them into your sleeve. . . .

Yes, son, I know you hate to leave when the scent of your childhood

is still a tease of sugar in the air, with all the furniture lidded

in fresh dust: thousands of cells of my shed love and trust;

and I also know that you've prayed I could tell you

where to go, that I could somehow teach you your language

abandoned centuries ago, until at last you thought,

"In space? There, would it be possible to trace the

scrawlings of my misplaced past?"

(Much like _my_ body, my heart, once fractured, recast.)

I can picture you now, on that day when you come back, with your

face set in chivalry, your hair knightley black, as

a man: draped and caped in cosmic hues,

and I will still be yours—to have and keep, or to lightly kiss on the cheek and leave.

My father told me once, "Questions are tried on, Martha, answers worn."

So now I tell you, my son—true Steel is forged, not born.

### Hope, Ms. Dickinson,

may be feathered, but it does not perch in the soul.

In these catacombs, aisled between stripes of skulls, death

crowning from the walls, it dug pitchfork feet into my shoulder:

a parrot, not bright, buoyant blue and radishy red but

brown like a mutt, like a mule in the mud, like

soggy cardboard and filthy kitchen floors.

On the loneliest days I'd stare into its black eyes like pearls

of briney caviar, and I'd wonder what's its purpose here,

sing-songing away, the sound withering in arid blackness;

I'd wonder which god gifted me this grimy wingéd rat

in place of a rope, or a flashlight, or crowbar, or any old thing that could

be used to pry open that trap door looming like locked Heaven above.

So—I'll admit—I did it. I popped the head off that warbling

fowl and plucked each feather down to the down, and then I wove

them into one fine strand to lasso that door and yank it off;

and oh how that sunshine melted down on me like hot, smooth butter,

slathering my skin, thawing me to the bone! And I saw then, the

blood on my fingertips, the white meat of the creature on the ground;

Hope no longer the flight of freedom, a flittering flag of future

peace, but dead, like everything else here, bleeding into the dirt.

In conclusion: Hope, Ms. Dickinson—I've realized—

is a rope.

### My Most Existential Poem, Ever

Foreword: _First, there are some things you should know about me. I don't write this with quill and ink by the yellow glow of lamplight in a log cabin nestled somewhere in the deep woods of Vermont. I type this onto my phone with sloppy thumbs while my car chugs idly at a red light, misspelling every other word. For that matter, my spelling has always been atrocious, and I will certainly have to spell-check this before I submit it anywhere. Not that it will be accepted, because I almost never get things in on time. I'm not late—I'm unpunctual. On that note, I should admit that I can be rather lazy. Most of my writing days are actually spent on my cat-mangled couch, ingesting endless episodes of Law & Order SVU and mouthing Benson's one-liners as my itinerary disintegrates like crumbs at the bottom of the Utz Salt & Vinegar bag. (Which is funny only because I've been on this same diet for the last seven years, cheating at least two meals a day—I happen to love McDonald's and cream cheese.) So I always end up promising that tomorrow will be better, and I resign myself to stalking old friends on Facebook, watching Jenna Marbles on Youtube, and if I'm feeling particularly inspired, maybe a TED Talk or two. But more likely tomorrow will be exactly today, only varying in the variables, and I'll be splayed out on my couch, sucking on a spoon of peanut butter, late to turn on the People's Court, retyping this poem with one clumsy finger. And the day will end as it often does as I stroke my mangy cat in one hand and my stash of poems in the other, wondering what exactly it would take, how many more readings over how many more days, until one of us can finally make the other real. Anyway, I guess now you're forewarned._

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

If I called myself a poet,

Would it be true?

Michael Kramer

### Nighthawks, Kaua'i

Hamura's Saimin, Lihu'e

Edward Hopper likely never traveled here,

but it's 10:21 on Sunday; outside, yellowed light

streams across the empty asphalt to the dumpster

by the Salvation Army where pickers find the choice leavings.

They're in the shadows, and inside the night-blue restaurant,

three late diners sit at counters: two top left,

a man and woman; alone, a man sits near the door.

Behind, an older waitress leans looking off.

The man alone, khakis, a navy golf polo,

forks noodles with shrimp, broth dripping; he considers

returning to his empty room. The couple, heads together,

he murmuring, split a won-ton appetizer. Her sarong

barely covers her cream bikini. His board shorts, bar T-shirt,

seem grimy. He drains his Bud, wants to go.

She hasn't touched her Coke, isn't sure, looks away.

The waitress, a glance at the clock, remembers her son in bed.

### A Cycladic Harp Player, Marble, c. 2700—2300 B.C.

The Getty Villa, Malibu

Seated, harp at rest, you've waited

buried, excavated, glass encased,

four thousand years or more.

Someone revered you, your words,

your melodies, enough to invest the time,

the tools, the marble. And you were treasured

and are. Before our history your histories,

your literature caught image enough

that someone invested in this sculpture.

A god? are you some god for memory

or intent or value set for times,

ancestors past, or simply a good tune,

escape from labor's bold tyrant

of all our days? Anticipating

the view of you, not crowded to

the Cycladic art exhibit, a room,

I try to hear your music, your words.

But you don't play, your harp at rest,

completed? yet to begin? discerning

what to play, how the audience unfolds?

And that is what we do,

you and I, with God, with life,

with beauty on an inexpressible morning,

an audience who needs the image from our past

that grants this moment holy meaning,

tomorrow sacred as we plot our play.

### St. Francis Venerating the Crucifix (c. 1593)

by Domenikos Theotokopoulous (El Greco)

(to be read antiphonally)

Long-fingered and graceful his hands, veined so like the crucified Christ,

the gray-robed monk, his cloak heavy and patched,

adoring, gazes at the crucifix, topping a yellowing skull.

His Bible closed and marked, his grotto rock and dark,

the tonsured priest, gaunt, eyes sleepless with prayer,

enraptures presented mystery: grace through his savior's death.

A cloud-filled sky, bare light through grotto face,

cave light echoes browns, shadows, earth gray.

His adoration sparks, his devotion speaks,

his saintly pose presents, his concentration folds,

our interruption now? should we speak? keep silence?

should we kneel with him? Grace extends here:

We stand in a foreground of peace, the cave floor beneath our feet;

death conquers death; resurrection engenders miracle.

### The Minotaur Etchings from Picasso's Vollard Suite

The British Museum Exhibition, July 2, 2012

This morning, when I rose and saw you sleeping,

night passed warm, and, your side, your leg,

your thigh and hip, your arm covering your breasts,

your back exposed, I stopped and stared; I almost

climbed back in behind you. But

you were sleeping. So I chained my beast back

into his labyrinth. He'll come out, but not

until he's gentled, combed, mannered, calm.

### After Pierre Bonnard, "Table Set in a Garden," c. 1908

I should like a table in the sun,

one with a cane back chair.

Remove the bread and even the wine,

for I shall be sitting there,

my notebook open, a pen in my hand

at my table in the sun,

just writing a picture in the morning

as the shadows begin to run.

All the garden in bloom I would see there

would be colored bloom and grand

with a rose deep violet and phlox in blue,

each flower by breezes fanned.

I should sit at my table in the sun,

the one with the cane back chair.

I'd eat of the color and drink of the breeze,

and I would feel peaceful there.

Jill Murphy

### Migration

Cockroaches would crawl

from the space

between her teeth

while no one was looking.

Their glistening shells

would slip through her full-bloom

lips, one after another,

till her sallow skin was on the verge

of disappearing beneath

their insectuous migration.

In the next room, my father

stood on a balance beam. He

was a temple there, a house of cards.

He was a window covered

in moths vying for the glow

of my mother porch light. We couldn't

touch her, just follow

her through the house, sweeping

up those thorned legs and dried

wings as bees colonized her

lungs and cicadas groaned

in her stomach.

### Reaping

How do they communicate?

In circles.

How do they make love?

Separately. How does she touch

him? Sometimes she holds him

like the wheat scrapes

against the sky. Somewhere in Middle

America a field moves all at once,

though the blades are lonely. The sky asks

the grain to _not make a big deal_

_out of it_. The sky tells the grain _it's not just about_

_showing up_.

He did his panic-research on her

body, listened for the crickets in her gut

but rolled his eyes every time she complained

of pain. Says he is familiar

with the cicadas in her skull

like he knows the sound of blood

being drawn. Can he remember how brave

she was that afternoon, lying

on the cutting board?

The sky feels right

to the grain, but does it matter?

The blight will come anyway.

The wheat holds up the sky.

### Kitchens

I

Do we recycle

these feelings that stick

like oblong stains

on the countertop,

like little pieces

of butter smeared

on the cutting board, like

she clings to every kitchen

she's ever lived in? The drain

collects bits of egg shell

3 days rotten, while she dreams

of sticking her hand down

the garbage disposal, while

the cat paces nervously, trailing

tufts of loose fur

along the windowsill wanting

for the cat in the alley, just as the girl

wants for the kitchen

of her childhood.

II

Our shoes peel off

the floorboards in dried

juice and beer.

We hear the fruit flies' lovemaking

as they dive in and out

of the bottles on the counter

in the honey light.

III

The spaces I occupy get smaller

as I get older. I have

become less than bones.

He left in the night and took the olive

oil, the butter, left some ice packs in the freezer

and some blackened bok choy on the bottom

shelf. He left a silence

as insatiable as rust.

The negative space of hunger

filled the time we could have spent

loving each other.

For the next two weeks the only

thing that could be found in the ice

box was a fast-waning handle of honey

whiskey. I gained weight

and wisdom in the wrong

places.

Cassandra Sanborn

### Remnants

Remember July rains, me in the gold poncho

you uncovered,

pale hair stuck to the side of your face.

We ran.

Water dripped down your legs

and the man sweeping the street

dug gold leaves from the grate

covered in that fake rust.

They had dusted the street in soap,

pale imitation of snow.

The remnants rose up,

filled the streets with white foam

that lasted until we touched it—

until it remembered

it was always supposed to be temporary.

Lightning cut,

peeling back the night

as if anyone with a ladder

could step up,

hold the rough edge of a cloud,

step through the bright gap

up past the sky.

And I remembered

we never had finished

that conversation about hell,

when you asked

if burning was just an easy way to disappear

and I said I thought hell was like this:

loving something, perhaps,

the way I love you—

moss on the bottom of a planter in November,

last tomato on the vine.

### The World Was Supposed to Be

The world was supposed to be

bigger than this—

my mother's blue yarn around my neck,

light around my nose,

dark around my mouth,

too thick around the dark skin of veins.

Or maybe I should say

_my world_ was supposed to be

more than rusty yarn around my head,

covering my ears.

The world was supposed to give me white curtains

against a pale green windowsill.

Small fingerprints

smudged on insulated glass.

And light—

light through the window

not one shaft,

straight,

alone.

Enough light

to fill a room,

enough

to make white carpet warm.

The world was supposed

to give me days like this:

lying on the hood of Shawn's car,

his fingerprints

and the outline of my hair

in the layer of construction dust.

Tracing trees in the dirt

as if drawing a thing

could make it real,

as if the oil on my skin

could make all this last.

### My mother once told me God holds the world in His hands

I asked her if it got heavy.

She leaned over,

sweat a thin,

gleaming line on her back,

plucked a dandelion

from the overgrown patch in our front yard.

She gave it to me, said

it grows and dies right here

a whole life

and you

barely feel it.

It was soft against the skin of my palm.

I pulled a white seed from its head,

watched it float down,

disappear into the grass:

I asked her

what happens if He drops it?

She laughed

then threw my flower

in the compost heap

with its younger lives:

still yellow,

seeds not ready to separate.

When she went inside I saved them,

laid them in my orange wagon,

dragged it behind me,

right wheel squeaking.

I dropped them in my neighbors' yards,

two blooms each.

_I am a good god_ I said,

as they fell:

stems arching toward the ground.

The petals, heavier,

always touched the earth first.

My stars against a green sky.

My hands were stained

for days.

### Hands

Kate says,

write about your uncertainty.

Write about the wilderness

as if you are an Israelite in the desert,

as if you are hungry

and your food is monotonous.

I tell her I am writing about

the future of my life in the workforce.

A desk with two broken drawers,

the smear on my window where I killed a fruit fly,

my blue lamp.

But really, I will write about my hands—

the right one, especially.

How they betray me, wrists to fingernails,

when it is cold.

How my wrists ache,

how my ring fingers swell,

turn white, stiff.

How the bones in my right hand crackle

when I make a fist.

How the doctor says, _well, it_ _could_

be your mother's arthritis

or your father's bad joints.

Or circulation, or some kind of bone disease—

but before I panic

just wait

_and wear gloves_.

She says, _you're young._

(My body was supposed to be certain.)

Probably nothing.

I try not to think

about blood vessels constricting,

bones rubbing together,

all that cushion dissolved.

### Old Grief is the Rusty Padlock on My Parents' Toolshed

it won't close

but we wedge it around the handle

so everyone passing by will believe

we know something

about security.

Kendall Grant

### Winter Love Note

I tromped a snowshoe love note

in a mountain meadow.

The note, as imperfect as I am,

connected from no beginning to no end

and crossed a rabbit's trail.

It will melt and run by our house

in the river that connects us to these mountains.

The molecules will separate,

but you'll notice them bumping over the trout.

And in a waterfall,

you may hear what I made the snowshoes say.

### A Rare Congregational Member

I like an aspen grove below pine line

on the morning side of a small mountain

where wild clematis seeks the sun early

then folds purple blossom in solemn prayer.

Eyes of the forest, lost-limb quakey scars,

witness to God these wildflower sacraments—

and that I ate and drank and worshiped there.

### Unknown Priest

I followed a Western-wood peewee

to where peace and liveliness coincide:

A corner where periwinkle grows to hide

and my friend can eat in spring greenery.

His referee-whistle shrill stops me short:

"It's not secret, but sacred," he sounds.

With kind heart, he invites me along—

in reverence we escape the world's throng

and he ordains me.

### Who Called the Owl's Name

The gale must have pressed her into the electric lines;

She fell on the front grass.

Now, two feet deep looking for the sky,

the snowy owl lies next to our golden retriever.

It seemed without honor to put the carcass in communal trash

though the garbage truck was coming down the block

and we could soon forget.

Instead, we determined a sacred owl burial.

Now the yard seems wiser,

and so are we.

### Autumn Dance Championships

Of all the colored slices that danced from limb to earth

a weeping willow leaf won grand champion.

Springing from tree,

the narrow tumbler went prone

and rolled like an old-time mower blade

chopping the air

beatboxing the fastest spin Indian summer had ever judged,

gliding over warm and cool currents

until a mile of October sky had been clipped.

Donna French McArdle

### White Blossoms at Night

In dark, we forget ourselves.

Blow out our lantern light.

Light in you, stars in the night sky.

Night sky, night-blooming

Imagination. _Ipomoea alba_ spirals open.

Opening spiral: from lantern

Darkening, from bound revealing,

Then full white moon-flower.

Awakened to unfurling, a hawk moth

Swoops the expanse, its strength

Audible. A strongest sphinx rubs

Past anthers to the nectary,

And sips a sweetest nectar, most

Plentiful of all night-bloomings.

In dark, let's forget ourselves.

Blow out our lantern light.

### Gone

Somewhere between Mt. Morris and Canandaigua,

driving route 5 and 20, I tap the brakes because

up ahead something is not right.

A pickup has pulled over, its flashers on.

Then I see a doe in the middle of the road, fallen or pulled

onto the painted stripes of the turning lane.

She is so still, so plainly gone;

not even the air currents of cars speeding past

ruffle her reddish fur.

I want so much to stop the car and go to her

and stroke her neck.

But this is a rural highway, and I do what's safe:

I tap the brakes and drive slowly past.

### Where He Floats in Shallow Water

"You get your rest," I had said not even a week before.

He had shot morphine for his pain, and his head rolled back.

Now, where he lies in his polished casket, I pause

on the kneeler, this moment nearly as intimate,

a last chance to study the brow, the nose, the curve

of the ear. He did not bear this still face last week;

he is slathered with makeup and painted with lipstick.

I do not entirely recognize him.

As I stand to turn away, I see his big watch ticking

with enormous energy—solid proof time is relentless;

it drags me around like the thread-thin hand sweeps

past the seconds, drags me back to this scene, this room

when I had wanted to leave lightly, to deny how much of him

I did not know, to drift backward, to walk with him

down the street to the stone stairs, to watch him

slip off his sneakers and step into the black mud of low tide.

Two bleach bottles full of sand and rocks anchor

his small row boat. He walks carefully,

sinking to his ankles in the mud. He does not slow

when he reaches the incoming tide, so I know it is

a warm tide, heated by the late summer Gulf Stream

and its own drift over the flats to this cove.

The ocean is nearly to his knees when he arrives

at the tiny blue boat. He finds his bailer, a coffee can,

and sits, with careful balance, on the square stern.

There, where he floats in shallow water, he pours

a full can over his muddy feet and brushes the mud

off with his free hand. He racks the oars and rows to shore

to let me climb in, wobbling, and to drag my hands

in the water as he maneuvers us out of the cove

where a fine mist lifts off the water and we breathe in

the ocean air on that hot summer day.

### The Edge

First delicate arc of waxing moon and sky still sapphire overhead

but darkening just above the trees. Venus off to the left,

as if it had spilled from the lunar goblet. I know I will yearn

for this. I tell myself, remember: sapphire and moon.

I have reached the river bank where spilling past is half fresh water,

half sea. Kaleidoscope of fog, leaves and the soft, greenish feathers

from the bellies of goslings swirl the air. I grab at paper flying by,

but it is past reach. Words so carefully written: my instructions?

I squint, as if I were fighting astigmatism of the mind or of the spirit,

where not the spot, but the notion, is unreliable, dubious.

Will I be wading into bliss or into the Acheron, the river of woe?

Here is the boundary between myself and the rest of possibility.

Past the demark, what? At this edge so often, I'm prepared

when my half-hearted self refuses to step, so when the strain hits

I unwrap a sandwich, ponder the crunch of its cucumber, sting of its salt.

Remember this, I whisper to myself: cucumber and salt.

But already my world is shifting. The wind tugs at my resistance.

I pull off my shoes and reach one foot into the river current

and swirling fog. I must walk; I must arrive. If I need a way back, I must

remember: cucumber and moon; sapphire and salt.

### They Are Revealed by Their Shadows

I see but reflection of the morning light

gleaming from the low-tide mud, a gorgeous mud

mottled with rocks and kelp. Then a shadow moves

and the first bird is revealed. A second tiptoes

alongside, then a third; a flock of fellows moving

lightly over the uneven surface. Sanderlings.

Over to the left, another, and since now I am

focused, I see a fifth staring, like I have been staring,

at the ocean's edge where the waves carry rills of sunlight.

Tom Freeman

### On Foot, Joliet, Illinois

A girl heading the other way

stopped around 2 o'clock today,

rolled down her window, "Hey man, have a peach!"

It filled my fist. I recrossed the road pressing

my thumb into the fuzzy skin, just overripe.

My eyes moistened for a second.

Not yet hungry, I tucked away

the strange girl's gift.

A juicy ball of sun medicine,

my soft secret hope.

Hidden peach in the pocket

of this rough, frayed work coat I wear.

### At Sunset

Orange glow in the western sky,

rain has stopped,

dust plastered down along the dirt road

hedged with pungent wet sagebrush.

Passionate electrified guitar

wails from within adobe walls

of a small home at the base of a scrubby hill.

Out in the dusky road a lonely young man passing by

listens, smiles, says "thanks" under his breath.

### Breaktime

After pulling mean musk thistles all morning,

sweating torrents in a rain coat and welder's gloves,

I spread peanut butter with a skinning knife,

seated in the driver's seat of my rusty pickup

parked in the pasture up to the side mirror in shining grass.

The cows browse, sun glaring

on the black muscles of their backs,

and test the new fence line.

The young calf ducks right under.

Sun spots and shade play in the field

as clouds shift shapes and float east.

The insect trill heightens with each flash of heat.

I want to learn to see the wind in the grass as a girl I love

and she as the grass in the wind.

I think that'd be my heaven.

Keep the rest.

I lick both sides

of the knife edge clean.

Thirty more minutes

lost track of and it's

back to work.

### Moon Chat Transcript #10

I get up too late, sit in soft moss,

and wait for some rustle

in the leaves to wake me.

No wind. Not even a breeze.

Past girls I might have tried harder for,

friends I lost track of, come to mind.

I wonder what screens me often from

that straight shot look into

the real skin of things.

Down ravine, the creek glints, out of earshot.

The word is another body turned up in the Cuyahoga valley.

Two kayaking ranger's found her in the river north of Boston Mills.

She'd been missing ten days.

She's not the first.

Men tend to dump them just off the trail

where they think no one will look.

I imagine, in their guilt, those few acres

seem like the only place to hide,

a shred of second-growth woods boxed in with blacktop,

shards of dim light beaming through the canopy,

a murderer's one hope at forgiving himself.

Leaving my camp, I step carefully among the weeds.

and dead shades of brown leaves.

I'm not saying I forgive the killing of innocents. I don't.

But if there's any place that withholds judgment, it's here,

deep in trees, where no one watches.

Where you take a leak wherever you please.

Where men leave their old bald tires and

mushrooms or coneflower grow up through.

Where the only trace of who you are,

or who you've been

is the leaping of frogs,

and shimmer of the surface that accepts them.

### Yardwork

With each twig lifted from lush grass

I screw up my face to hold back tears.

I came here to scape land that I guess the man tends

so diligently in this narrow green floodplain

to escape the stark aridity

that might whisper him awake on the edge of town.

For weeks, before I bring the mower through the tallest grass,

I've been filling tarps with brittle fragments of Siberian elm,

sometimes brushing up against the little cabin

where he now tells me his son swallowed a gun

barrel one New Year's Eve.

The boy had been found a month before

crossing the Bitteroots into Idaho half frozen

with only a pocket knife and blanket to his name,

committed to asylum then released.

He would be my age now.

I grow quiet, leaning on a leaf rake.

I would've walked beside him on the highway shoulder,

long into cold Bitteroot night,

borrowing hope against the darkness,

against the snow lit slantwise in the rush of headlights

like showers of Gemini.

George Longenecker

### Nest

Wrap me in your wings,

hide me high in a white pine,

weave me a nest with your beak,

line it with downy feathers,

sew it with fine thread of nettle,

twine it with silk of milkweed,

cushion it with pussy willows,

braid it with milk of moonlight,

let me feel warm breath from your beak,

let me feel your heart beat against my breast.

### Rock Point, Ontario

Lake Erie's waves polish limestone fossils,

Devonian sea tides once lapped this shore,

where children ponder trilobites and wander

the bed of the salt sea from which they came.

Gulls sweep low over Rock Point Beach.

Lighted freighters float across the moon while

night beacons flicker on a distant shore—

the lake howls with gulls and freighters' horns.

At bedtime children in sleeping bags

curl up on the warm limestone bed,

cuddle up to the lullaby of lapping waves,

sleep all night in fossil seashells,

coiled in a bed of time.

### Arctic Refuge

All day the sun circles the horizon never

setting, orange at midnight, white at noon

as we float downriver to the Beaufort Sea—

at first rapid current slams our rafts

against stones, but soon we float calmly—

the distant Shublik peaks cast shadows

far across the tundra, a snowy owl circles

white as we drift north in twilight.

In the hills fireweed and paintbrush bloom,

the owl swoops and lands on the high tundra,

fossil coral and seashells lie everywhere,

the remnants of tropical oceans—

beneath arctic stone dinosaurs sleep

in crude petroleum—maybe enough to fuel

the world for another six months;

refined into jet fuel, pterosaurs would fly again,

leaving tails in the sky above the Arctic Refuge.

Next day we float north past a bluff where two

stone heads—Inuksuk cairns—keep watch

as they have for a thousand years over

the Inupiat and their river.

In the distance Arctic sea ice cracks like

thunder, on the horizon ice and sky

meet in a mirage; tundra swans trumpet

as we float north past dunes to

the sea. All night the orange sun sits low

while a snowy owl waits in silence.

Let the pterosaurs and allosaurs sleep

another fifty million years.

### Hurricane Irene

All day water pounded on the roof,

poured down in sheets while white pines

whipped in the hurricane. Houses shook

and windows rattled, air pressure dropped

as low as it had in fifty years, but barometers

could never measure this storm.

Tiny streams gorged themselves on the deluge,

became monsters who lifted huge boulders from beds

where they'd lain since the last glacier, the flood

heaved stones, uprooted trees and hurled the mass

downstream into houses, water gushed through

windows, shingles, boards and beams buckled,

cracked and splintered then rolled down into rivers

risen far over their banks—no longer minor tributaries.

All over Vermont from Waterbury to Bethel

from Rochester to Marlboro the water rolled,

streetlights flickered then went out. A crushed

car floated by, its interior lights still on, coffins fled

an eroded cemetery followed by a swimming corpse,

its stiff arms flailing. Two huskies howled and howled

as their dog pen filled but nobody could hear them

over roaring water and pounding stones.

For twelve hours it rained and rivers rose

even more quickly; people ran for high ground

before they could be washed away—no escape,

only pounding rain as railroads twisted like licorice

and roads turned to gorges. A covered bridge

splintered against boulders and the very water

which quenches and cleanses rolled its timbers

downstream with even more stones and trees.

The next day it was warm and clear—

at first light strangely silent, already at dawn

an odor of decay as water settled,

brown and still, blue jays called.

Finally, as clouds lifted, the mountains

could be seen, slopes still green, sirens wailed

while crows hovered, waiting, diesel engines roared,

but it would take months to fill and fix what Irene had done.

Slowly the flood receded and stones settled,

floodwater seeped out of houses and left oily muck

on every plate and chair; those who could returned

home, saw what the water had done and wept.

### Cardinal on a Cable

A cardinal sings from his perch on the cable,

happy for another Florida dawn;

his call is the same as cardinals everywhere—

but what if he were plucked from his wire

and instantly landed in New Hampshire

where it's zero minus fifteen today?

_What the fuck,_ he'd say, _now what?_

His cable perch carries news

of war in Syria and northern cold,

but he calls cardinals with his own news.

Why are some spared war and cold, others not?

Robert Frost knew . . . _that_ _for destruction ice_

_Is also great._ I too would perish tossed

nude into New Hampshire this morning—

at least the cardinal has feathers.

But we're here in Florida,

on our screened porch having coffee,

grapefruit and cereal, while you, red cardinal,

sing to us from the television cable.

Kimberly Sailor

### The Bitter Daughter

My father

never says Thank You.

A family fish fry for his 60th:

bronzing jukebox songs and a hotel stay and grandkids in swimsuits

fuzzy on the bottom, fizzy drinks in hand,

steam from the winter water

and made-to-order eggs on the other side of the night.

Result: one photographically documented half-smile.

Exhausted daughter who tried.

A hilltop gathering for his 65th:

noodle soups, crisp salads, pizza for fifteen,

and a custom cake with a wide-mouth bass.

Leaving work early, grandkids packed in the back,

harrowing January roads, cars in the ditch,

but not ours: we arrived, with candles too,

and that fancy party hat I wanted to burn

after he snapped the little string and said,

"Get this damned thing off me."

His face was red like a cardinal's back.

The grandkids made the hat their bugle.

Result: we're only gathering for the descendants now,

these milestones better left unrecognized.

My father

feeds his yard birds dutifully each morning.

Black oil sunflower seed for the showier singers,

yellow millet for the tiny fliers,

kernels for those who forget to

or would rather not

leave during winter anymore: too old, or too well-fed at home.

No thanks there, either;

but under his care, the birds stay.

In his kitchen,

a clock with birds instead of numbers

starts the bluebird song,

chirping mechanically as I make his morning coffee.

"Too weak," he decides, emptying it down the drain

before grabbing his bird seed bucket,

straightening his hat,

and sliding the glass doors open to leave again.

### She Won't Know

I carry the dead bat with a shovel.

My husband, working in Missouri,

my daughter, asleep, her old baby monitor just in range

as I move the bat from driveway to woods.

"Intact?" my husband asks.

"Yes. Probably still warm," I say. "Just fell from the sky."

The woods are slender but useful:

the neighbors drag over dead leaves on tarps,

abrasive and crunchy over the road's asphalt.

The city keeps a pump house behind the ash trees,

pleasantly humming as it cycles water on a schedule:

loud and quiet, loud and quiet. Hasn't broken yet.

I won't tell my daughter about the bat,

the same kind she visits at the zoo

next to the sugar gliders in their little huts.

That's part of motherhood: not telling.

Fancy church shoes clipping down the pavement with a dead bat,

or a run-over cat, or the worms she gathered and left too long in the sun:

should have been fishing bait, now just stringy compost.

The next morning, we are smiles and cereal,

wondering what to do with our day.

### Lineage

My mother died in her early 50s.

I am careful to say "died" and not "passed away"

because when you kill yourself, language matters.

The first time didn't work.

She asked if the hospital had a bookstore, or a library,

something to do, something to read, please,

while I watched Oprah between vital assessments.

The second time took.

I received her old earrings,

an odd photograph of myself that printed poorly

(don't know why she saved it; can't ask now),

and a snow globe that works if you shake it hard enough.

I like this last trinket, because she lived in the desert.

But all of this only reminds me

that I never received anything after my grandmother died.

So in love with her, I would have accepted

anything at all: a blanket from the linen closet,

a souvenir magnet from the fridge, a bent fork from the drawer.

But from her, I just have the last memories her daughter gave me.

### Josephine's Garden

We bought a delicate sign

for my daughter that spring.

_Josephine's Garden_ it says, a metal oval on a stick,

butterflies behind the letters.

In her garden

poppies bloom, low to the ground for a child's eye,

and irises too, taller than her ("taller than me!" she sings).

And while the tenderly collected rocks sleep,

twigs stuck in the ground fall down,

bits from her lunch decay for the birds,

and puddles from her watering can hands fill again,

I pose her for another photo, filed away by year.

After the flash

her eyes search for more cherry tomatoes—

her favorite, eaten off the vine, not even washed;

in the organic assault of Perfect Mom, I have made peace here.

In the corner

a farmer's market is underway: pumpkins double in size,

giant looping vines tickle their striped watermelon neighbors,

looking like summer footballs

getting ready for fall kick-off.

From age one to two, three to four, five to six,

I watched her in the weeded rows;

she's finally taller than those flowers we first planted.

Josephine snaps open too-small peas,

pulls up tiny carrots too early

and says: "Everything is still growing in my garden."

And I am water, sun, and heat,

thinking about my next child:

a small turnip growing within.

### Deep Sea Fishing

My line of pimples

is shaped like a Caribbean island chain.

The Bahamas maybe,

where we sail next to stingrays slapping our boat.

"Life is precious," I say.

"Sure is easy to die," he says.

The stingrays head north

and we thread our poles.

It's winter back home,

where the cardinals and bats play,

my snow globe re-dusts unshaken

and the perennial bulbs are hard underground.

Down here, my family is old enough for a boat ride now,

and this salty trip erodes many pains.

But in the ocean spray, I'm months away,

maybe days,

from someone realizing I'm a fraud.

Faker wife, infertile mom,

dramatic daughter

who can't even cast my line far enough in calm waters.

But I carry on with all of these,

because pretending, trying, is still doing.

We have two daughters:

one looks like me, one looks like him.

And if they look up to me

then I'm authentic

and forgiven

enough.

Rebecca Irene

### Woodpecker

Slit nostrils sense

what lies beneath.

This is what you live for—

sick wood giving way

beetle's squirm

on long sticky tongue

the swallowing.

You leave behind tunnels

paradise for squirrels

nests for smaller birds.

How many holes

can a tree endure?

You recall your beloved

White Pine.

Her curved trunk at road's bend

her thick sap weeping

every time you came a-calling.

### Crow Raven

If you don't know

the differences

between Crow and Raven

what good are you to me?

I find the secret of being

in nature's details.

To you, they are a waste of time.

Crow marries for love.

Raven for money.

Crow gives any dying creature

water from her beak.

Raven pecks fading eyes out.

And if you had ever lain in forests

against tree trunks

felt bark press hard towards

your back's thick skin

Crow would have watched

you with pity

Raven with menace.

Then as Raven shat on you in disgust

Crow would have offered you strength—

hair and bone

life and breath

fear and death

twig and stone—

of smaller creatures.

You would have recognized

that sweet saltiness in your mouth

my love.

For it is what you have been

feeding on for years.

### Sitting Duck

All the others

sensed danger.

The dogs weren't

even quiet

for God's sake

and little Billy

shot off

his gun for fun

miles away.

All the others

knew to fly.

You were

mid-paddle

when steel

tore open

preened down.

Your last

dying wonder:

why red rainbows smothered you

as others touched blue of sky.

### Humming Bird

I loved you when I was young

watched you sip sugar water

hover over my bright shirt.

There is no more sugar water now

or bright shirt

and I have aged terribly.

Poor trade for the genuine

is what I get.

Greta running nine miles

snorting nine lines

climaxing nine times

faster faster faster.

Greta starving

binging and barfing

chewing pills

thinner thinner thinner.

Greta drinking dancing

trying to sing.

No magic—

between monotony

and mayhem.

### Summer Robin

How they search for her when the trees sigh for outer green.

How they smile for her when the stalks strain for sunny sheen.

How they supplicate for her when rains signal for spring clean.

Wonder, adoration, delight, give way to

pulling _another_ worm—isn't she fat enough?

Singing the same _old_ song—hasn't she said enough?

Springtime is so obviously over, my dear.

Really. A summer robin should have the good taste

to _know_ when she ought to fly away.

Why, just last night I spotted one that caught my eye.

I almost lost my head until I saw her gray feathers

and wrinkles and wanting in the August sun.

Savannah Grant

### And Not As Shame

I want to wear your memory

as a red overcoat

the one you tried to throw away

but I keep it anyway

even though it's too big

(I shrunk it in the wash

but you hate it when

I do that)

### July's Herald

I wonder if the dog knew

you were drinking

weaving through piles

of mail and clothes

I remember the color

of that carpet at the top of the stairs

dirty tan lighter than I imagine

perhaps

the way I remember it is disorder

staring out a window

no line I can follow but

one jagged through the house

and in the doorway of your bedroom

I felt the tug away from you

a joint trying to dislocate

### Unmention II

the first time you tried to lock me inside

was maybe the fourth time you decided to hit me

but the first time my head hit the wall

I learned how to block you

because you always aimed for the head

a long time ago you put a hole in my dad's eardrum

he used to say it was from ear infections

### On The Brink II

at 1:38am I read that you buried the dog

in the back yard

that's what happens at the house

we bury dogs

I sent a pseudo-prayer from my bed tearless

said she was better off dead

but she had you to take care of her

while she lost her brain and her hips

to the floorboards and grey frigid March

she was nice to lie next to while I knew her

### On Returning in June

two years and the cat's still fat

the room's no longer mine

the wallpaper's gone and the desk

isn't under the windows

I remember every thing

I ever lost there

in that basement

I always find new blankets and shirts

I forgot to take with me

I'm sure there are moments

that haven't moved yet

the ghosted sound

of a wineglass set on a chest of drawers

a wasp's nest in a railing

a day's quiet

rupture

Michael Hugh Lythgoe

### Titian Left No Paper Trail

No sonnets, nor letters like Michelangelo.

Still we feel the oblique motion, the atmospheric

colors of his martyred St. Lawrence, his _Assumption_ ;

landscapes with river valleys and Alpine peaks,

ancient Roman myths, a sumptuous nude goddess.

Dawn is uncertain, pagan, shadowy.

Sudanese killers and thieves

are poachers in Kenya, for tusks of ivory.

A mammoth bull elephant pushes trees

down, forages with body guards to survive.

The vulnerable fade like ivory magnolia blooms.

Everything is fragile. Whole forests burn.

Antarctica is the most stable continent.

Titian's frescoes last. His late works show rough

loose brushwork: St. Jerome in a barren desert.

Art appears impotent to face down violence.

Marsyas played a double pipe but lost

his hide—flayed by a jealous Apollo,

King Midas watches. Ovid says so.

To study topography and meteorology,

is to feel baroque fault lines tremble at night.

Beside me in the dark my lover labors to breathe.

I listen to learn, labor to believe.

Titian expires during the plague. He paints allegories.

His self portrait does not look us in the eyes.

### Buddha In Brass

A sleeping Buddha occupies my mind,

and half-obscures its whole religion

by mere presence, contemplative and blind,

the intolerable comedy goes on.

—Peter Levi, Water, Rock & Sand

Buddha did not come to me on the Silk

Road but in Saigon. A Chinese merchant

sold him to me. The war was still young.

I was young. Buddha is well-traveled, a veteran.

His figure fattens in meditation, brass zen.

He knows Indo-China, wars, the French,

now the Americans. Buddhists set themselves on fire.

We bleed; Vietnamese bleed; we leave brass shells,

bomb holes, poison in rice paddy, napalm on jungle.

Buddha waits in temples, reclines in Thailand. He shows

his teeth, forged, formed in a desperate foundry, weighed

down with lead & iron, polished shiny—like brass

army insignia, buckles, .45 caliber bullet casings

recycled for art, joss sticks, a zen garden, a vet's

bookshelf. Tibetan monks light themselves ablaze

in China. If Buddha is happy, rub his ample belly

for good luck. I pray to God. Buddha

is no god. He was a rich prince

who gave up his soft life to roam and beg.

Burmese Buddhists visit violence on Muslims.

Buddha & I have a history. We each have

a war or two to wear like a hairshirt. We each

seek peace. We sit & stare in the study.

I feel like Buddha, contemplative & blind.

### White Dove In The Desert

Nine miles from Tucson, some Pilgrims

find the Church; it stands alone: White

Dove of Sonoran Desert. The rez

is a troubled home for the tribe living on the border,

on both sides. The Papago met Fr. Kino, who rode

in Jesuit robes, on a mission: prayer.

The missionary made a space for prayer,

in a dry place not far from Tucson, for pilgrims.

Franciscans followed the Jesuits, who rode

away leaving order in prickly pear paste, adobe white

walls old as suffering saguaro cacti. The border

is bone-dry; Rio Santa Cruz, on the rez,

runs dry. Illegals pass through the Papago Rez,

flee mayhem and madness to trade terror

for peaceful prayer in the White Dove. The border

is brutal, metal sculptures, homage for pilgrims:

the Nogales side in Mexico is hung with white

crosses, migrants killed crossing. Mormons once rode

by in a historic brigade. Franciscans rode,

with knots on cords, around robes, around Papago rez.

The cool White Dove, walled in white

wears a cord in the facade. Pray no predator. No terror.

No beheadings, Mules, Coyotes, cartels. Pilgrims

eat fry bread at taco stands near the border.

Feel the heat: afterburners above the border;

patrols with night scopes. Where blackrobes rode,

ICE finds torched holes in the fence. Pilgrims

pack prayers; smugglers pack weed, pass the rez;

illegals on the run are prey; the predator is terror.

Prey seeks prayers, under clouds dove-white.

The Pima Air Museum preserves war planes white-

hot, bone-dry; A-10 Thunderbolt pilots train. Border

in infrared sights—dehydrated souls journey in terror.

Migrants die with empty water bottles. A blackrobe rode

to bless St. Xavier del Bac, Arizona icon, on the rez.

The landscape is trashed with plastic. Pilgrims

revere a statue in glass sarcophagus, a blackrobe,

uncorrupted saint in his grave. White church on border

thirsty, contrails over rez; pilgrims pray, flee terror.

### Aleppo Looks Like Hell

Rubble & ruins: a bottomless well.

Well, reports of the here-after

are here—heaven appeared to a doctor;

he was in a coma. Aleppo is hell.

Hell is a war with cluster bombs.

Keep your eye on the balls, lethal.

Not toys. Mortars fall over borders. Ask us.

St. Paul had a fit on the road to Damascus.

A ten-year old girl was murdered in Colorado.

There was a killing in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Taliban just shot a school girl. Terror

on a school bus in the Swat Valley. Refugees

come & go talking of Aleppo. The wounded

girl is also in a coma. What does she see?

Drones have a Gorgon Stare.

It is presidential to order a kill, pick

the hit list. In Revelation, horses breathe fire.

Seven seals. Like helicopters in Abbottabad.

Getaway? Up a ladder? Angels are utility workers.

The ancients used ladders to climb closer

to heaven, up levels of adobes, Canyon De Chelly.

Mud roofs. Artists like to sit on roofs. So do snipers.

They paint the stars to stare in minds' eyes.

Or, sight a human heart in their cross-hairs,

or, roll barrel bombs down on Kurds & Christians.

A priest told us the special machine

outside of church could lift us to heaven.

It was a joke. We knew it was to lift

workers up to the rose window, to fix

the stained glass, part of the Bible's

parables to elevate all souls to heaven.

What of Evil in Aleppo? Does the Devil do

the killing? No. It is human gunmen. Who helps

the wounded? Who buries the dead? Who kills,

who cares, who executes, who shoots on a bus?

Is it us? Is Damascus full of men & women like us?

How do we get away from here? In wind and fire.

Pick & choose. Win or lose. Be bulletproof. Wear Kevlar.

Ascend in a hot air balloon fiesta, above Albuquerque.

### Sheba's Trees Bleed For The Magi

A scent of Sheba's fragrance lingers in the souk: incense.

The lines in the sand are drawn by caravans.

Arabia & Yemen share a jihadi desert waste.

Once the Queen of Sheba grew thirsty.

Water is more prized than gold, seek an oasis.

Caravans move phallic blades & bombs from Yemen

besieged by jihadis in uncivil wars between Yemeni

tribes, in Sheba's kingdom; she gifted incense

to King Solomon in his wise oasis.

Sheba ruled a kingdom of caravans.

Her scraggly trees in the desert thirst.

Thorny myrrh trees endure in desert waste,

The Magi follow stars they do not waste.

Today jihadis learn explosives in Yemen.

A reddish-brown antiseptic mummies those dead to thirst.

Herodotus wrote it is hard to harvest frankincense

from bushes guarded by tiny winged snakes; caravans

pass seeking to trade & rest at an oasis.

Predator drones prey on jihadis lurking in an oasis.

Thorny myrrh trees bleed when cut in desert waste.

Tribesmen trade ivory, African cargo, arms, in caravans.

Ramadan moon, with a Jambia dagger's curve, hangs over Yemen.

A dagger smith creates blades to bleed out incense

trees—"yellow tears"—near the Red Sea; thirsty

goats eat seedlings near empty wells, thirsty.

Black flags fly for a new caliphate, no Islamic oasis.

Sap hardens to rocks scrapped into baskets—incense

traders travel on dromedaries, burdens over waste;

myrrh rides in leather bags to a souk in Sana, Yemen,

trades like RPGs in Djibouti, or coffee in caravans.

Trucks & camels round the African Horn in caravans.

Muslims wash in mosques, kneel facing Mecca, thirst

for holy war, behead the infidel in Syria, Yemen,

Iraq. Sheba first, then Silk Road trader, a Prophet in an oasis—

all breathed in incense; the more cuts the sweeter the scent, waste

not sacred smoke for monks in holy places; rituals require incense.

If jambias with old rhino horn handles bleed out incense trees

near thirsty Gulf of Aden in dry Yemen,

who will caravan like the Magi, pilgrims in the waste?

Martin Conte

### We're Not There

For Janet and her daughters

An injured spirit lingered in our town

last night.

The air was thick—

He cast a cold pallor

over our ground.

The next morning,

we woke

to our first hard frost.

No one noticed the silver puddles of blood

that he left

except for our third graders,

who went splashing through them in rubber boots,

screaming.

He took with him

our town clerk

our pharmacist

and a young father.

We pretended the spirit was

heart failure,

stroke,

alcohol.

But we knew better.

Our bodies recognized

the taste

of this spirit's bitter breath;

our bones itched

as he scraped

at our cornerstones.

People gathered in the streets,

just to cry.

Air too thick to—

We're not there.

Instead, at school, miles away.

A friend from home messaged us:

_I feel like electricity is surging through the air._

My mother calls:

_The Island can't handle_

_another tragedy this year._

We're all gone, but the spirit

demanded intercessions anyway:

tears thick as—

We mourned that day like doom,

like 9/11 or JFK.

Did the town fathers meet

to ask of each other

what happened?

Did they sense the spirit

in the thick air—?

Did they put away

the gavel,

the bible,

and call on the old gods instead,

buried for centuries in granite tombs?

Did the spirit sit among them

listening to his trial?

Or did he pass beyond,

going first through your home,

leaving

that stained fray of linoleum,

that creak in the stair,

that whimper from your sleeping brother?

We still speak of it.

### Patriotism

They came to make a map

of my bedroom.

Two men, bearded, solemn,

with rolled up drafting paper

and thick black markers.

"You can stay seated on the bed"

one told me, carefully sidestepping

a pile of my laundry.

Both pulled out tape measures;

they measured everything:

the average width of my books,

the circumference of the bare lightbulb

jutting from the wall,

even the width between my feet,

toes kneading the blue carpet.

Then they set about drawing,

boxes and squiggles abstracting

the solids of my life,

turning the djembe I carried

from Uganda

into a circle,

the windows etched exes on the wall.

They used a labeling language

I could not discern.

I had to pee,

but one told me if I left,

they would have to start

all over again.

Finally, hours later,

they put the markers down,

rolled up their papers,

and shook my hand.

They said the drawings

would go to the Library of Congress

and be indexed with

the rest of my rooms.

They called me a patriot,

a citizen of the highest regard.

Then they left,

and their footprints

faded into the abstract square

of my carpet,

labeled 'F7' in the secret manual

all these men carry.

### Peacetime

I.

Four men appeared

from the war.

"Where should we meet?"

they asked.

"You will come to me

in a long, thin room,"

I responded,

thinking of the hallway

in the Rotary.

"Will our mothers be there?"

they asked.

"No, they died, each,

of heart failure,

when they heard the news."

II.

A man in Maine

has been beating a drum

continuously

for four years.

He says it is the heartbeat

of the Earth.

He has disciples who take turns

on the drum

in four hour shifts.

He is squandering

his inheritance.

I hear they may move

to a smaller house.

I wonder how they will drum

in the car;

if they go over a bump,

and the rhythm is interrupted,

will the Earth wink out of existence?

They must have

a contingency plan.

### The End of His days

And every ozone sundown burned a braver creation

—Christian Wiman

_Revelations_ settles

on the shoulders

of the blooming congregation.

Little eyes expecting

endings, wondering

at my cassock, at my

collar. Fear,

dear hearts,

in their little eyes.

For fear of what?

I let my brain

glide noiselessly

through the waterveins

of this bleeding Earth.

There is, hidden in smog,

destruction; fires

in homes of sand and stone

gut the lonely

mothers;

wives ask

another god

for his tongue

back. I rake

my fingers

through my brain,

explaining how a discarded

Book is alive,

blood-spilled and hand

prints all over the margins.

Man's thoughts smolder

of creation, embryos

swimming through rivers

of caution-tape into

a mother's waiting delta.

God turns bright red

and America's Lazarus, dead again,

(he was Kennedy,

he was Lincoln)

pretends

that his infinite

devotion to the notion

of one nation,

under God,

can raise him up.

My boat is drifting

through dusk.

My lambs are waiting

for slaughter,

for new life.

I ask

the third grader

what God wants

us to confess.

She, blest, imparts

intimately a

wisdom far beyond

her years.

I hear angels sing

praises: her God is near-

the end of His days.

A. Sgroi

### Sore Soles

Dark are the clouds above the dancer's head—

Wilting are the tulips in their backyard beds.

Biting is the breeze that whispers at her back—

Forgotten are the books that she pushed into a stack.

Ruined are her stockings, with a run at both the knees—

Aching is her back and the bottoms of her feet.

Narrow, long, and winding is the road she walks—

Alone is the girl inside the music box.

### Exsanguination

By the time I broke his heart

Mine had already begun to crumble.

Doubt came knocking,

Erosion spread.

There was now geological proof,

A history in the dust.

His heart suffered a swift, sharp slice

That bled quickly, and with fury.

Exsanguination of the soul.

Mine had fallen prey to a quiet disease.

A sickness, slow to show the symptoms.

It crept in, infecting every kiss and conversation.

Debilitation from deep within.

I lied to myself and to him.

I lied to my skin and to my hands.

I killed the animal that we were

And its blood dripped from my fingers.

Roadkill that we politely halved

And strapped to each other's backs,

Agreeing to share the stench.

We stretched and dried the skin,

Dumped the innards in the river to wash away.

The last task we did together.

Our heartbreak, in its collective sense

Will wash up on some other beach,

But the blood still stains my hands.

Three summers have come and gone,

And no amount of scrubbing

Can rinse my skin of the damage I've done.

I still smell it when I close my eyes.

By the time I broke his heart,

Mine was deeply flawed at its core.

Cracks ran through it from end to end.

There is no fixing a flaw like that.

### Reprisal

my sister took her name back

from inside his mouth where he was keeping it.

it perched on his tongue far too long.

a foolish place to keep a name,

a room whose door will not remain closed.

my sister took her name back

from under his bed where he kicked it,

left to collect dust until he wanted it again.

a foolish place to keep a name,

a space without walls to speak of.

my sister took her name back

when he left it on the train

and only realized the error

when turning out his pockets for the wash.

anonymity is a sweet, fresh breath.

he will know her not a moment longer.

### Autumn, buried

Brooklyn is still sleeping

Early morning in October.

Wide awake and weeping

We are solemn, shattered, sober.

What happened so few hours ago

Is etched into our skin.

Too late to tell the artist 'no',

Tattoo ink sinking in.

Brooklyn's still asleep

As we avoid each other's eyes.

Sunlight starts to creep

As we prepare to say goodbye.

Goodbye to the love and goodbye to the friend.

Goodbye to the fall and the never-again.

### Depths

You lead me to a place where the mud is deep

And no one can see us.

Leaves become sieves to the sun and its waning warmth.

For miles, we creep along

And pick up rocks, and feathers.

Remnants of the land we walk.

We traipse like this as the light winds away.

The fog within the forest depths is just that: deep.

The air drips with sound atop a bed of silence.

We say things we otherwise wouldn't,

We see things we otherwise couldn't.

There is nothing to be done,

No one calling our names.

The scent of pine saturates our noses

And rests behind our eyes.

Mine share their color with the bottomless dirt

And the grass that flecks the surface.

Yours are like the storm clouds we don't think will reach us—

—They do, and we are soaked.

Cotton clings, hanging on for dear life.

We reject its advances and peel off our layers,

Thinning suddenly under patches of moonlight.

I am cold and you are chilly. I am drained and you are weary.

We walk until we reach the lean-to,

A relic of our childhoods surviving well beyond its years.

A patch of dry wood awaits—

—We think it somewhat miraculous.

Just enough room for both of our bodies and both of our souls.

By morning, the damp is lifting.

It threatens to return and we do not doubt it.

I want to grab hold of these hours

And put them in a pocket.

The one within my chest,

Where everything I stow inside is doomed to rot forever.

The decay will take as long as my life.

Our clothes have almost dried,

Just as before, only now

They hold the scent of rain.

Everything is different, yet we are both the same.

Miguel Coronado

### Body-Poem

i.

my body is a poem

it sings, reverberating as a tuning fork

_reverb_ vibrates melodic

as a buzzing swarm

of lightning bugs;

as in a thunderstorm,

the bugs and frogs come out

to make the world

a damp and sticky place

for us.

ii.

my body is a poem

about my city in the rain, covered in fog

_covered_ just like a child

under a great mountain

of blankets, white as death;

I was always afraid of winter,

how it roared

& crept up,

covering

my shoulders

in its fog.

iii.

my body is a poem

that had trouble sleeping last night, & woke up

_startled_ by the rustling of bells

& the subtle click

of a door closing;

the way a funeral proceeds,

culminating in the closing

of the earth, the subtle

clink of a shovel

finishing.

### Adventures of a Lost Soul

When I was young,

I fashioned a small halo out of hollow stars,

Insect husks and the love of my grandfather

In the rustic shadows of farms

I explored in search of a reason,

Any reason at all to continue exploring

Once,

I led an inquisition in my

Grandfather's backyard

Against an insect insurgency

Swatting mosquitos in droves

& capturing buzzing bee drones

& chasing centipedes away

& banging on wooden nests

& watching the clover mites

bleed out in a frenzied splatter

of bright

red—

I ran away—

Afraid.

Today, I know

Clover mites are harmless little bloodbugs,

And I've long since quit the inquisition,

But I still explore for the same reasons:

The incentive to keep exploring;

& so I wear my halo like a badge

& set on out in search of home,

The place I lost, so long ago,

When I left those forsaken farms.

### The Kiosk

red light kisses a neon tavern;

a block away, a bum ambles into the night

his body silhouetted hungry red, a ghost.

he rolls a shopping cart,

filled beyond the brim

with plastic

(transparent

bones)

he'll cash them all in

for coins—he'll recycle his life

at a kiosk.

### The Sound of Distant Explosions

I am sound

emitting

as rocketfire—

distance

is drowned out

by a bonfire

in the night,

the hungry city

pulls the stars down

to earth with

skyscraping

razor-sharp

desperation

I eat sound

& sleep sound,

quietly fortifying

my body-fortress

to perfection; this vessel

for my mind and spirit.

### Tempus Fugit

i.

in time, you will see

the glowing shell of day shed

into the evening.

(two lovers stroll along an esplanade,

hand in hand in secret hand of another

secret lover, the moon, peeking out

from a curtain of grey clouds.)

ii.

in time, you will know

how doors unfold into death,

how curtains cartwheel

light into a room

but also darkness—and why

windows wane away.

(farther down along the river,

an old man falls in love

with the coy moon—

he gazes politely, not wanting

to strip apart her innocence.)

iii.

in time, you will be

gone as memory in a

holocaust of thought.

(a slow cloud obscures thought,

and the old man, weary of love,

bows his head ever so slightly

and closes his eyes to sleep—

and then the lovers closed their eyes

to kiss; and then the river closed its eyes

to flow; and then the clouds closed their eyes

and began to rain; and then the moon closed her eyes

and disappeared into the night.)

Franklin Zawacki

### Experience Before Memory

Step slowly, carefully,

until you feel the fog between the trees.

Hear the heartbeat of air.

Let the ground open beneath you

and grant you forever to walk the first step.

Freedom is brief: watch smoke disappear.

Even with the best of wines

the second sip drowns the first.

### Lacking An Easel

The compulsion to capture two children

geysering up and down on a seesaw—

balancing precariously on the air—overwhelms me.

If only I were an artist able to quick-sketch the silos

wobbling behind them

or draw the wheat field shrinking to stubble

beneath their feet.

Or paint the color of their squeals.

The boy reaches for a rooftop,

straddling the wood shed

with red and blue shouts.

The girl lifts bare legs—

shrieking purple cries

at the puddle drawing closer.

Two children divide the light—

each rising and falling with exultant yelps

that swoop like swallows into the hay loft.

But the exuberance of such a vision

can never be painted but only kissed.

And I'd rather savor it,

keeping my hands free to catch them

should one of them fall.

### Leaves Beyond Glass

For Peter Kaplan (1957-1977)

Father: open the windows before the trees go bare,

before the lawn is raked clean,

and one misstep buries me in mud.

Bring back the green leaves surrounding my boyhood.

Let me trot beside you,

two steps to your one.

My hand grips your finger,

as we trundle down streets,

pulling a wagon full of brothers.

I feel your chin when you bend down

to sort the bottle caps from the coins

I pull from my pockets.

Shining back from counter glass,

your eyes meet mine

above the pyramid of ice cream numbing my tongue.

Unable to look away, I'm lost in your reflection.

Confined by illness, I lay quarantined in your tattered robe,

gazing out while you frosted cartoons

to the outer side of my bedroom window.

You stood in the cold, arching your eye brows—miming laughter—

meant to carry me past all confinements.

Hearing you whistle around corners,

I came running.

I know you can't remove this sickness.

But lift me once more toward the ceiling

that appeared only an arm's length away

before I fall back—

entombed in the silence of this stale room.

### Spring

That well-spent hag was hardly awake

before—with a toss of her hair—

she changed beds.

Stealing the moon's protrusion,

she padded out her hips.

She filled out her flat bosom with green buds.

Crossing over the swollen creek, she trampled the lilies.

She squeezed blossoms over her body,

feigning a bath with perfume.

A breeze dried her clean.

Strapping on spiked heels,

she gave the turf its course.

Seed spilled everywhere.

But you've gotta hand it to her—

the old bitch.

Look at those meadows rise!

### Short Orders

It's 2 a.m.

I stumble into a diner.

Bubbly-mouthed coffee pots attempt

to steam open the tight-lipped night.

I find an empty booth.

I'm not talking.

A waitress appears, hovering like an angel.

She turns her face away,

allowing me to stare at the back of her legs.

I want to thank her.

I signal for her pencil. She hands it to me.

I trace our lives on a napkin.

"Look, buddy. You'll need more than astrological signs

to get _me_ into bed."

I open my jacket.

"Who do ya think you are? Pull down your shirt.

I've seen better tattoos on a dog's ass."

The food counter bell clangs.

"I'll be back when you're ready ta order."

I lick salt from the back of my hand.

"Hey! You givin' da girl trouble?"

I look up. The cook stands over me.

"Yeah. You. Don't act dumb. You can talk.

Now give her back her pencil. She's got work to do."

I hand it over, surrendering my tongue.

A drunken man and woman in rumpled wedding clothes

flop down in the next booth.

"Would you believe," the bride slurs, "I was going to be a _nun_?"

She looks around to see if anyone else is listening.

"Here's your eggs and Johnny cakes."

The cook bangs down my plate.

"Ya got syrup and whatever else ya need on da rack.

So no more lip outta youse."

The bride winks at me.

"Hey, sweetie," she whispers. "You'd better be careful.

Cupid might be lurkin' closer than you think.

Look: I've still got my garter on."

She bares her thigh and giggles.

"Whata ya say? Wanna try for it?"

The groom weaves as he wags a finger at me.

I shrug my shoulders and turn away.

It almost seems the coffee darkens

the more I add cream to it.

Tracy Pitts

### Stroke

the ants in the carpet have climbed

onto her head and onto the jars of strawberry preserves

green beans she'd snapped on the back porch

have spilt into the sink from water still filling the bowl

the oven burns doughnuts she was making from buttermilk biscuits

down to six rings of charred bread

the boys are with their granddad at Bull Lake taking

turns holding the golf ball he cut out from a snake's belly

the snake must have thought it had swallowed an egg

the smoke needs more time to fill the house

### Stray

I wrap live caterpillars

in corn husks

to feed them to the cows

and follow Pa

to the chicken coop

to watch his hands get pecked

while retrieving eggs

but hide in the truck

when he's outside

combing underneath the house

with a rake and towel

for a litter of strays

to drown

in the pasture

in the tub

where I was baptized

### Below

Underneath each hyacinth is a cat

She digs the graves on her own

The nursery will not charge her for the bulbs

Two were pronounced dead in the same week

Plant two and plant three

A fifth plant will show this spring

She doesn't like children much or her eldest sister

She remembers her Mother helping them bury

a squirrel that bit her when

she was only five, her sister nine

It was sick and not safe to pet

They all agreed to forgive the rodent

after returning from the emergency room

Together, the three of them sprinkled

the animal with rosemary, thyme, and lavender

then returned it to the earth

"That wasn't so bad," she says,

staring into her garden, eating a can

of pork and beans from a crystal flue

### Brother

hear.

those feet over the road

arched and bent the snap of thimble muscle

lifts you like a squall of ink

that

great old mouth clicks

wet with ancient hunger and parable

charged with rain and famine

don't caw at my share, brother

you were the last silhouette off the bough

for this downed meal

every bite we

shake with red tinsel between our beaks you

still keep one eye on me

dark, mannequin, inlaid like bad prayer

eat.

### The Tomatoes Are Good This Year

we sit like people sit

pray like people in prayer

even talk like people talk

there is new death here we

pass the turkey the dressing

the pie in the second week of october

tell stories swap photos like

factory canners when it's not

our turn we sharpen new exits

does anyone need anything while

i'm up notice the carpet is still green

after all these years wonder

if that mirror was always at

the end of the hallway the plate

of tomatoes reaches him the him

that will be dead by the real thanksgiving

the tomatoes he grew himself he

removes a slice the first slice removed

from the plate takes a bite a giant

little outburst slips right out he doesn't

cry long or share the future he catches

it quickly says sorry folks the tomatoes

are just that good

he passes the plate to his

left this time around we all

take one we agree

the tomatoes are good

Rachel A. Girty

### Collapse

Like a window left open

Winter after winter, like

A knock on the weathered door

And never a reply, I

Am a ghost town. I swallow

The plains around me,

I clear out warehouses, drive

Even the coyotes from town.

You're only riding by, just a little

Blue girl on a bike, but

Sickness spreads, and once its enters you,

You can never pull every tendril out.

Radioactive, gleaming with kinesis,

You begin your rapid decay,

Halving and halving, baking in the sun

Until you are nothing but

A wisp of a receipt from the

Drugstore, a dying echo on the concrete

Wall, My bottle cap, my seesaw,

My aluminum clink.

### Everything Gets Harder

Everything gets harder: the ground

Packed tight under days of snow, teeth and

Fingertips as winter beats on, scraping itself

Through the gaps in the window frame.

There are holes in us too—the chill

Reaches deep into your lungs and it's harder

To say exactly what you mean. You open

The refrigerator door, just to see the pop

Of light, the rows and rows of boxes

And bottles. You try to speak and

Your voice drops away. It's okay—

I'm trying to love you harder.

I mean the things I say now, I clean

The dishes you forget, I stop myself

From waking you when I'm afraid.

There are things we'll never say

To one another, things we hoard that wedge

Themselves between us when we sleep,

But you're warmer in the morning.

Things could be a whole lot harder.

### I'm Afraid of the Things You Keep

After that night you wouldn't

Touch peaches for a week.

You said something had happened

In the produce section, in your dream,

A floor full of grease and blunt objects.

In the morning you kept running

Your fingers along my jaw, to make sure

It was still there. I'm sorry about the peaches,

You said. It's gruesome, you said, blood

And cooking oil don't mix. I should have

Told you to stop, I should have said that

Dreams aren't real until you wake up

And you choose to remember. I'm afraid

Of the things you keep: the sound

The sedan made outside our window

The night of the thunderless rain

And the scream of whatever it smashed.

You couldn't find anything, even standing

In the driveway, soaking in your pajamas.

You carry every day the smell of the clinic

The day you told me you thought you would die

(There was nothing wrong with you at all)

And you've memorized the official list

Of ongoing worldwide conflicts. You keep

Imagining me gunned down or gagged up

But this is not a war. You and I

Are safe for now, are warm and loved

But you keep forgetting the days

Spent on windy beaches, the hours

Of firelight and spice-dark tea,

The kind old woman who gave you a nickel

When you came up short at the cider mill,

The minutes when you first fall asleep,

Dreaming nothing, listening, knowing

A word from me can wake you up.

Ryan Flores

### Language Without Lies

We resuscitated music,

we rescued it from the icy grip of the cosmos.

It was stillborn, from a cloud of dust in a silent vacuum.

We refined the ancient sequence

of building tension to create resolve.

We defined the colors, the math, the geometry of sound.

Now music is our only language without lies.

Now we're all playing different parts

of the same song, in which countless beats

of countless hearts provide the rhythm.

Now music is our ghost dance, our communion, a sanctuary

in which we're all kneeling to kiss the ground,

a temple in which we're all praying for a miracle.

Music is our echolocation—

a ping bouncing around in the dark,

singing, "I'm here, can you hear me?"

Music penetrates armor

and holds a light up to each and every face,

looking for something honest, something real.

Music makes order out of chaos, makes us feel like

we're not just spinning around a star,

that's spinning around a star, that's spinning around a star.

Music helps us trust our ignorance

as much as our instincts.

Music prepares us for love and loss thereof.

Music aligns us with empathy and gratitude

and defines the lives and times of the human experience.

Music is the human soul thinking out loud.

### The Future for the Present

We traded the warm Earth

beneath our feet

for designer shoes

on linoleum

fashioned to appear

as natural as stone.

We traded the old growth forest

for posters of athletes and pop stars,

for catalogs and celebrity magazines,

for tables and desks on which to write

checks with which to pay bills.

We traded the benevolent shade

for a well-placed arbor,

the dense undergrowth

for perfectly manicured lawns.

We traded a spring-fed stream

for a stagnant cow-pond,

naps on the riverbanks

for sleeping pills,

a seashell for a cellphone

a library for a TV guide,

a full moon dance

for a fitness center,

candlelight for a lump of coal,

a stable of thoroughbreds

for a barrel of oil,

a ceremony for a simulation.

We traded the winding trail

for the static grid,

a thunderstorm for acid rain,

fresh air for smokestacks

runways and boxcars.

We traded a conversation

for a keypad,

a sunset for a soap opera,

an orchard for a house plant.

We traded wild buffalo

for happy meals,

an ear of corn

for a laboratory,

a corner store

for a corporation.

We traded a hallelujah

and a hug,

for a website and a blog,

rituals for garage door openers,

a community for a computer,

skin for plastic,

landscapes for landfills,

handshakes for handguns,

stars for streetlights,

pyramids and kivas

for office buildings

and strip-malls,

a vision quest

for a universal

remote control.

We traded smooth curvatures

for right angles,

circles for squares,

spheres for boxes,

fenceless horizons

for corners and borders

dollars and flags.

### Guess Who?

(an exercise in lateral thinking)

to my mother I am _son_

to my father I am _hijo_

to racist hillbillies of the Midwest

I am _wetback_ , _spic_ , and _beaner_

to cholos at Armijo I am _gringo_

to officials at the State Department

I need proof of _citizenship_

to la gente de México I am _güero_

in the Southwest I am _coyote_

at the university I am _Latino_ ,

_Mexican-American_ and _Chicano_

to the Census Bureau I am _Hispanic_

or " _more than one heritage"_

to mis abuelos I am _mezclado_

to those who hear me speak Spanish

I must be _Argentino_ or _Español_

because of light skin and green eyes

because of maternal Bohemian ancestry

I muse as being _Czex-Mex, Czexican, or Czecano_

I could be the _United States_ of existence

I could be _America_

I could be your neighbor

your boss, your teacher, your student

I could mow your lawn,

cook your food

I could be you

### Maelstrom—

(or: The tiny, impending, commercial, homogenous, laughable ceremony)

I have known the inelegant madness of cubicles,

plastic cells in a sterile hive, maelstrom of time cards,

every tiny crisis surrounding copy machines and swivel chairs,

the impending dread that lurks in break rooms

and on sidewalks during the last drag of a smoke.

I have known commercial wallpaper,

packets of sweetener, the demands of staplers,

the homogenous ridicule of fluorescent lighting,

laughable music of printer, keyboard and mouse,

the ceremony of hands, the black and white oppression of clocks.

And each day I have witnessed expressions,

faces settled by routine, dripping histrionic courtesies,

controlled, tedious, hungry faces evaporating into landscapes,

disavowed through rush-hour traffic and prime-time TV,

mechanical, compartmentalized, alien faces

detached from their owners.

### Bad Poetry

(an experiment with cliché)

by weighing the hidden meanings of red

interlaced in clouds at dusk

and the fresh wound,

and by reading skin,

icicles, stones, thorns, and feathers

like love letters etched in braille

I have tried to align my senses

with the merciless concept of perfection

perhaps even to pursue the rose,

or the crimson moon,

or just discover an untainted expression,

because not even bad poetry writes itself

Margie Curcio

### Gravity

She is playing with her pink scarf.

A child's scarf.

Made of crocheted pink yarn.

Pink—the color of innocent love.

Pink—a child's color.

A purer version of red.

Neither lustful nor whorish.

She holds one end in each hand.

Small, pale hands with pink polish.

Pink polish half-peeled off of nails.

Nails tainted only by playground dirt.

She twirls, letting her pink scarf slip from one hand.

She twirls, her pink scarf flying freely with her,

following her lead, circling her, protecting her.

Twirling as I once did.

Twirling, as sometimes I still do.

Though I do not now, nor did I ever have a pink scarf.

For minutes that seem like hours I watch this girl.

This girl and her pink scarf, with its tattered edges.

She is almost like me when I was her age.

Thought it was I who was tattered and not my scarf.

She is still innocent.

### And . . .

In my closet

it is always night.

Even when the fluorescent light hums.

And I wonder how the light looks on the other side,

peeking out through the slightly spread fingers of the

walnut door.

I feel as though the whole world is sleeping,

except me.

It is a lonely feeling.

And the air is full of silence,

and the fingertap of laptop keys,

and the shuffling of pages,

and another _fucking_ paper cut,

and another sleepless night.

And I can't write another line,

because a swarm of bees is chasing away the butterflies.

Exhaustion has settled over me.

The frustrated tears come slowly,

dropping like weighty stones.

The door clicks open.

He is standing there.

I look up.

"It's so late," he says softly,

his hand outstretched.

"Won't you come to bed with me?"

And I am too tired to fight,

so I take his proffered hand.

His thumb wipes away a lingering tear

as he whispers

"I love your sad brown eyes.

Sometimes I think you are most beautiful when you cry."

He kisses me

and we are tongues of flame

dancing in the night.

And the sky, so far past midnight,

is sneaking in through the skylight.

And we are ligaments and moonbones.

We are muscles and we are starfire.

And we are energy and volcano dust and salted skin.

And we are falling.

And the tide is rising.

And morning is coming.

And our names are written in this calligraphy of wanting.

Our names are written in bird song across the quiet dawn.

Daybreak washes over us.

And together we are waiting for dreams to come.

I wish it could always be like this—

these moments when he knows me so perfectly—

but morning comes

and he forgets.

### Autumn Leaves

I can't write the avalanche,

not the way it really looks.

The rush of fear,

the charging onslaught of pristine snow,

a thousand horses pushing forward,

Sabinos and Camarillos,

Arabian whites.

I can't write the way it really feels,

the way you look right through me

directly into my soul,

somehow always knowing.

I can't write time more slowly,

can't stop the passing of people,

or the changing of seasons.

I can't stop the days bleeding into weeks, to months,

or the suddenness of so many years gone by.

I can't write the static friction of wanting, or

the pulsing electricity

in the space

between

where

two hands meet.

I can't write the silence of missing you,

or the haunting thickness of your absence.

It was never just you.

It was never supposed to be you,

but somehow it has always been only you.

With you I could see the sunlight in a whisper.

### Eleven / 13 / Eighty-Six

It was late Spring. Thisclose to summer. The summer of spitting watermelon seeds.

Chinese Fortune gum in orange wrappers and delfa rolls.

Plastic charm necklaces we bought from the ice cream trucks.

Blasting Madonna:

"I fell in love with San Pedro. Warm wind carried on the sea, he called to me"

from the silver Sony boom box on LaurieMarie's front stoop.

Begging our mothers for "just five more minutes" after the street lights came on.

It was the summer I first remember being aware of boys.

My eleven year-old self attracted to the lanky, barely discernible masculinity of their bodies.

The gorgeousness of the awkward angles that define their anatomy

as they carve the curve of an empty in-ground pool

or tailslide along the un-cut curb of a sidewalk vanishing into the melting asphalt.

I always thought it was a shame, how they scratched up the graphics on the undersides of their decks.

That summer was the first I ever remember falling in love.

I fell hard, like a star kicked out of heaven.

He was older.

A mysterious, dark-haired Italian boy with just-the-hint-of-a-mustache-thinking-of-growing

and an accent that made my knees embarrassingly unstable.

He said his family came from a border town on the Alps.

Maybe Trentino or Como, maybe Porto Venere.

I was skinny.

Weird.

A wholly uninteresting girl,

with bad hair and breast buds decidedly not blooming.

My small hands crept though his chain link fence to steal the plump June bearing strawberries,

growing on the border of Staten Island and Vernazza,

while his mother stood on their stoop yelling:

"Disgraziata sei!!! Potrete uccidere l'erba!"

at his Gemini brothers breakin' on the flattened cardboard boxes in their front yard.

The mischievous one, who looked like Balki Bartokomous, winked at me as he responded:

"L'erba è bene Mamma; non ti preoccupare,"

before dropping down to do the worm.

I drowned willingly in the sunset of his café au lait eyes.

I wrote love notes to him in broken Italian.

I played MASH, his name on every line, not caring if we ended up in the shack.

And I waited.

I waited through the teased-out, deadly flammability of Aquanet hair,

through banana clips, stirrup pants, crimping irons, and the Goonies.

I waited through Garbage Pail Kids and Super Mario Brothers, mullets and tails and Dance Lucky Stars.

Through lace fingerless gloves, Michael Jackson jackets, and mirrored aviators, I waited.

Finally at 13 he found me worthy. All Souls Day, 1986.

Unseasonably warm, though night came early that first November Saturday.

We stood in the remains of his parents' summer garden

surrounded by deep-rooted tomato plants and fig trees bagged for winter.

The air was alive with the aroma of basil and oregano and green peppers embedded in the dirt.

He stood behind me, his long arms wrapping me in the smell of Italy and fading suntan and too much Drakkar.

As we stared at the Beaver Moon, he spun me around and kissed me.

A perfect first kiss, drenched in moonlight and waning innocence,

electrified tingling and the exhilarating fear of being caught alone together.

And in that moment we were the coffee grinds and the egg shells and the orange peels impregnating the damp earth.

We were the rapid, hummingbird beating of our hearts.

We were the plum tomatoes and zucchinis and Italian parsley yet to come.

I lived a thousand lifetimes in the span of that first kiss.

A girl on the verge . . .

### Flame-Licked

You always told me you loved:

The figure 4 I slept in,

arm bent at the elbow, hand lost under head.

My face buried in the soft cotton pillowcase beneath a knotted mass of red hair.

The high arch of my left foot

caressing

the slow curve of my right knee.

But you loved so many things:

Night, crawling like spiders across the face of the Earth.

And the stars, wiping the night dust from their sparkling cider eyes.

And the cicadas, crying, caught in my hair.

I loved:

Your face, covering the street in hot ash.

And your breath, clouding my eyes like frost on morning windows.

And your fingers, tracing the peaks and valleys of my knuckles, the outlines of my small hands.

And everything, moving slowly like the February rain that

freezes

midair

as it falls.

You said my name in your slow, provincial way.

And I knew—

I'd never be the same.

I still don't know why I loved you.

Maybe it was the jasmine scenting the Milpitas air.

Or the hummingbirds diving into the bowels of honeysuckles,

trying to find some semblance of sweetness.

Maybe I was

looking for

a sunny place

between the clouds.

Together we plunged into the emerald abyss,

Feet first, eyes closed—

searching for Oz.

I poured out the contents of my heart like clumped sugar from the bowl.

You drew fingerprints on my sun-freckled skin.

My palms kissed spun sand.

We were the red balloon and the flaming heart.

You, always floating somewhere above me.

A satellite.

And I, always burning.

Flame-licked.

I was the skin you shed.

Your words melted like salted slugs in my mouth.

So cold, I couldn't even taste them

as I swallowed from the blue cup

you left on the counter by the sinking.

Stephanie L. Harper

### Painted Chickens

Twenty years ago

I received a birthday gift

from a close college buddy-slash-sometime lover

(What on earth were we thinking?).

Back then, our past was already in the past

and twenty-four was already not young.

He gave me a coffee mug

covered in chickens—

yes, painted chickens—

three plump specimens posed around the outside,

and one that looks like an index finger

with an eye, a comb, a beak and a wattle,

slapped onto the bottom.

How, I can't fathom,

but my friend knew that those chickens

with their orange-red, expressionistic bodies

would be a boat-floater for me—

the one time I had slept with him

had been an epic shipwreck,

with a silent drive to the airport in its wake;

on the way, we choked down pancakes,

and I stifled sobs in my coffee,

averting my eyes

from the helpless horror in his.

I then flew off into the wild, wide sky,

bewildered, drowning.

Somehow, for years to come,

his southern gentlemanly charms

still served to allure:

he kept his promise to write

and took pains to catalogue for me

the details of his worldly escapades

and various, accompanying sexual conquests,

always making sure to emphasize

the ways in which they were hot for him,

so as to prove those trysts' relative rightness.

Then, years later, for my birthday,

came, unexplainably gratifyingly,

the chicken cup.

Still burning hot

and feathered in their chili-pepper red,

royal purple and verdant green cloaks,

my static and impossibly happy

aphrodisiac chickens

blush like lovers on a Grecian urn;

clucking, urgent.

My southern gent,

now so long ago flown from this callous coop,

wooed another and had his own brood,

as, in due course, did I,

but the mug, no worse for wear, remains

a spectacular feature—

like a bright birthday piñata

(with its promise of sweet reward)—

of my sacred morning ritual.

These chickens,

still ecstatically surprised,

letting out unabashed, open-beaked caterwauls,

adorn my most aged and prized coffee mug;

a vessel, perfectly-sized,

it cups its contents so adoringly,

fiercely,

like an egg enveloping its cache of gold,

as I take privileged sips.

The big chicken on the left

might actually be a rooster

and that one on the bottom,

a middle finger.

### The Artifice of Death

In Memory of My Beloved Friend, JPM

Before you came to my dreams,

I had believed your self-hatred

precluded love.

Had you actually known in life

that you could still create bonds

from the beyond?

The brief words you left behind

in the blackness of a vacuum

were vengeful, frozen reminders

that everyone and everything

had failed you.

You took your sun from the world

and returned to the ancestral night,

where all artifacts of mortality,

like splintered clay idols,

are pieced together from the dawn of time

and placed carefully on exhibit.

The Curator catalogues young deaths like yours

among those who died cynical and regretful in old age.

Did you suppose you'd be exempt

from an eternity of the sorrow

you left for those you'd claimed to love?

Did you somehow know that I

would preserve your warmth

in the ornate museum of my dreams?

How did you know where to find me, waiting

for you in the shadows of dusk?

I waited in an endless gallery,

lost within marble halls, gilding and

minute faces carved into tiny,

polished soapstone figurines.

Among the lapis lazuli

likenesses of Osiris and Anubis, I waited,

grew tired, and rested my head

against a marble portico

of a room that led to forgotten souls

drifting in everlasting twilight.

Would my deliberate remembering

resurrect a vestige of you

from the static crypt?

You finally came to me

as the evening sun

filtering in through a skylight,

and gently brushed my cheek as I dozed.

That warm gesture was the same,

entirely benevolent force

which I had once known as _you_ in life.

It was you who had once rendered

out of the vague concept of me

a solid silhouette

that still cuts a dry island

into the murky ocean of living death

and stands against the firmament,

a testament.

Your kiss had gifted me

a quickening, a start, a far-off end,

a will, an enthusiasm to live,

a reassurance that every new

dawning is possible, because _I know_

you are the same, boundless heart

that once evinced such light.

Though I still believe when you left

you were resolved to your semblances

of self-loathing and violent whim,

I won't presume to condemn

the rent apart, toppled effigy

of who you once were to me

and who you became

lying in slabs;

blame doesn't mend brokenness—

In forgiveness, death becomes artifice.

In my dreams, these symbols of non-life

are subsumed by time

and life and death become interchangeable.

Aren't we all relics to be exhumed

and polished to flawlessness?

Though I conjure

these burnished, ghostly cyphers of your being _,_

they are no less solid, no less substantial,

than my own, chiseled breath;

you are surely no less precious to me

sequestered now

behind protective glass.

### I Am Alabaster

I am alabaster, polished, translucent—

and I am ashes, tamped in hollows,

crushed between the breath of the living and the souls of the dead.

No one will tell me if I will survive.

As the blush of dawn unfurls over dunes

and seagulls soar on ocean thermals,

I break apart and scatter in the wind,

losing the border where everything else ends

and I begin.

Lighter than air, a cloud of me rises up

to speak to the hawk perched on a streetlamp

and tells her I am fine, because I don't know how to talk

about not being fine—

besides, I am flying . . .

I want to be the best version of myself,

the beautiful one,

carved in lucent crystal and buffed to a shine,

so that my face will reflect your eyes,

which will be mine, crying,

because you have recognized the truth of me.

Specters of what was and what is

are ground into fine, dark cinders

amassing as shadows

beneath my alabaster feet,

while my crimson heart

yet thrums

with faith in what will be.

### If I Saw Aidan Turner Walking Down the Street . . .

If I saw Aidan Turner walking down the street,

I would not stop to contemplate the earth beneath . . .

I would not for a second consider that I

was already in junior high when he was born,

or that my own daughter is now the age I was

when that brand new star-to-be emerged from the womb,

replete with a tuft of black curls, which I can't help

but to surmise. My daughter views him in his full

adult glory—deep voice, dark eyes, just enough scruff

to pass as a vampire or Middle Earth heart-throb,

cloaked in black leather and adorable Irish

cadences wrapped about him like a lucky cloud.

My daughter is certain that she could reach him first—

fully trusting in her youthful abilities,

and in my usual habit to step aside

in favor of promoting her self-assurance.

I have not been tough enough on her in some ways—

for instance, I have not gone for a hard tackle,

stripping her of a ball at foot in one quick breath,

nor have I generally used my advantage

of momentum in everyday foot-races:

usually, I would feign a fall to foster

her sense of imperviousness to ill fortune;

in most cases, I would give her a head-start, but

if I saw Aidan Turner walking down the street,

I would at once utterly forget her youthful

sighs, her earnest blushing, her sweet, redolent gaze

transfixed in goofy stupefaction, innocent

through and through—the beauty of watching her feel

herself becoming a woman (through watching him

make love to cameras in a perfect balance

of feigned humility and stunning sex-appeal)

would extinguish in less than a blink of an eye.

The frightful scene that would ensue would estrange us,

my daughter and me, for a lifetime and a day—

such would be the nature of the abject horror

my actions would exact upon her fragile mien:

she would learn for certain that determination

does, in fact, pay handsomely . . . As for the handsome

Aidan Turner, hypothetically spotted

strutting blithely down the street by the likes of me—

the assault would surely mark a milestone for him.

Nicholas Petrone

### Running Out of Space

Within the jurisdiction of the Atlantic's salty breezes

the smooth meandering road

vanishes

gobbled up

consumed by expensive running shoes

dissolving into glare.

I can see to the subatomic level

I am intimately acquainted with the quasars

Erupting from each tiny aperture

of the blacktop galaxy.

Following the yellow line

I could run this walk this bike this

on my hands and knees crawl this from sea to sea

Oh infinite road

I utter

Shout

Proclaim clichés in your honor.

Or what if this shady curve

painted with gently dancing silhouettes

of scrubby crooked pines

is the whole road

the entire multiverse

or whatever they are calling it now?

I'd be okay with that

and can't help wondering

whether we are naive

to expect another road around the bend

some infinite intersecting labyrinth

of highways . . .

It is more likely

that I am merely riding this piece of asphalt

like a treadmill in empty space

or at least it feels that way

as I stop for water.

### Worlds Apart

A whole world is laid waste in the morning for a child to find. Evidence

of the murky underwater galaxy is everywhere so unspectacular

as if every terrestrial plant and animal were vomited onto the surface of the moon

each day and curly-headed little aliens run to see

the funny bones of Aunt Clara and the tall grasses pureed by the long trip

through outer space

and ask what that smell is daddy.

The jogger who took our picture has never been to the bottom

and neither have I. We know nothing—we just came to Wellfleet for the oysters.

Those stupid clams have never seen the Grateful Dead.

The mollusks missed my daughter's first words.

That jogger has never seen me naked

nor the mollusk.

### untitled poem about rain

Rain is perfect

no matter how it d

r

o

p

s

where it

splatters.

rain drops

belong to no one.

We all daydream from similar quiet corners—

gray, always gray, solitary

but not unhappy.

When it rains I can breathe

When thunderstorms roll we hold our breath.

Sometimes a storm looks like night

feels like drifting opiate slumber.

The drops fall

They do not look for distraction

direction or definition

Rain sounds like rain. There is no metaphor.

Sometimes they die in puddles

are reborn

as ripples.

Sometimes they are lost in the ocean

Sometimes they zigzag race

or dance

on the window of cars when you are young

and the ride doesn't seem so long.

Danielle C. Robinson

### A Taste of Family Business

After grace, the head of the family squared her lap.

Using her semi-wrinkled, mahogany hand,

she selected the silver from the left of her plate.

She scooped and sliced the first servings on China.

Then she softly smiled while politely passing the collards

to her first daughter who is sweeter

than her plate of yams and southern tea.

Her only son is the chicken out of the group that

stirs up home-made laughter to choke up every soul in their seat.

Patiently waiting, the new generation

sat like macaroni and cheese until their turn.

Over the savors of spices,

the variety of cuisines dished out silence

followed by a series of traditional "Mmm mmm good!"

First chance, the first cousin sang a hymn;

The second cousin proposed on bended knee;

and the third cousin sat pretty in pink—

announcing the development of a new edition.

By this time, joy was dancing in circles—

limiting water the opportunity to feud with blood.

Then the head of the family spoke

of the past to connect with the future.

The strength of her voice sprinkled wisdom

and tough love with blended whole truths.

Then her sister displayed her buffet of sweetness.

And they were all gravy and well served.

### Notes of the Day

This time.

Eyes didn't go probing for water.

This time.

Stems hid and petals too.

But, it found roots.

Not by the bay,

but gradually sprouting at window.

PITTER, patter.

splash, SCATTER.

Creating musical notes as it fall side by side.

Pinging from the sky to pong the Earth.

Obstructing objects with showers

to satisfy yesterday's thirst.

PITTER, patter.

splash, SCATTER.

Feeling of the cool and calm pelting me—

as it alarm others with rage in avenues.

Gifting some peace cupped by tea.

Enticing laborers the fancy of sleep.

PITTER, patter.

splash, SCATTER

Next time,

Eyes will hear the sun.

### Birthstone

I am from a city of pain,

where few fathers neglect their daughters.

Broken sons are often slaughtered.

I am from the "All American City."

A home, somewhat quite bold and witty that

centers a market house that stocked and sold slaves,

and the 82nd Airborne—salute to the "Home of the Brave"!

A history of indigenous cultures steered

and speared by the rear of Cape Fear.

Best interest in spring?

Honeysuckles and dogwoods—

plant fresh scent of precious moments of my childhood.

I am little gardenia in queue—

raised on Gardenia Avenue.

Streets over, eyes squint and zoom

before I enter my pink and white bedroom,

Drugs sold and women occasionally auction their souls.

"Don't leave without permission and be careful", Momma always told.

I am a pinched carat straight out of coal,

in between hidden smiles and tortured souls,

that barely diffuse "Thank You"—

in the mist of the city's troubles and midnight blues.

I am from a legacy of struggle—

where doubt politely invite life to crumble,

generations of corruption and abuse,

spirits high off booze and drug residue,

slight education and lack of motivation,

extreme colorism and degradation,

family values shredded by grudges

and overdue monetary value.

Here, the birthplace of my genome,

Polished-upand shine for the city I call home.

### Every Night Forever

Over burning candles,

sweet wine kissed our lips

as a chilly breeze circled us.

The sky owns no moon tonight

as our hands practice constellations resembling l-o-v-e.

Behind the taste of laughter,

warmth tickles our hearts.

As our eyes think of a dance,

we extend hands to confirm yes to:

Care for me to be the skyline with you?

Care for us to be those portraits in motion?

Care for me to be that jazz breathing in your ear?

Care for us to glow together for the rest of our lives?

### May She Rise

To Dr. Maya Angelou

Above in the sky,

glistening over the lives of millions,

may she rise.

Hoisted proudly in the wind,

flaring and flapping freely

in the honor of all people.

may she rise.

Uncaged, fearless, and melodic

with peace and hope under her wings,

may she rise.

Uprooted from oppression,

stemmed with elegance,

and of blooming beauty,

may she rise.

Fleeing cocoon,

dancing freely,

parading in majestic colors,

may she rise.

Like a soulful mezzo-soprano over an African drum,

joy to the world,

the words of a prayer,

a heart inhaling love,

and a spirit flown into heaven,

may she rise!

Meghan Kemp-Gee

### A Rhyme Scheme

Your broken heart knows it's about time,

a beat away from a healthy sense of play,

that you learned to ask for your own advice.

Please take a moment to fill out the form.

Now, all of the legalities aside,

listen close enough to realize

this is the kind of lie you could take pride in,

when truth writes itself from the outside in,

when you weave the wool pulled over your eyes

into sheep's clothing and when, sheep-eyed,

you parade in wool rags rather wolfly worn,

or rather, rags washed in the same river twice.

Even broken hearts are right twice a day.

Listen close enough, and anything can rhyme.

### Pantoum

The world unfolds itself at night.

It's getting late, but I don't mind.

This is a game I like to play.

I play these games to stay awake.

It's getting late, but I don't mind

explaining all the rules to you.

I play these games to stay awake,

and make the rules up as I go.

Explaining all the rules—to you,

that's a game, too. You say I cheat

and make the rules up as I go.

I say we'll do away with rules.

That's a game too, you say. I cheat

at almost everything these days,

I say. We'll do away with rules.

You let them in, they'll eat away

at almost everything. These days

we keep them all at bay. At night

you let them in. They'll eat away

what we don't know we love. And yet

we keep them all at bay at night.

We fight but sometimes we forget

what we don't know we love. And yet

I still like it. I like the way

we fight, but sometimes we forget

this is a game. I like to play.

I still like it. I like the way

the world unfolds itself at night.

### Saxa atque solitudines voci respondent

Still, all we wanted was some inspiration,

and so we tuned our ears to the unknown.

We heard the one about the heart of stone,

and so we all set out to fashion one.

At heart, the change remains just what it seems.

You reinvent the secrets that you keep,

you recognize disguises, you enclose

the call inside the answer. Don't suppose

that just because we always looked asleep,

the answers came to us as if in dreams.

We found that we were sprouting mossy wings.

We slumbered darkly, rocked by noises,

until we woke up to the sound of voices

lisping the truest sense of holy things.

### Bestiae saepe immanes cantu flectuntur atque consistent

We found the things our stillness recommends,

some holy ground, a stash of songs, some new

sets of teeth that charm as sure as they cut,

new loves that wink and promise to be true

and whisper _oh it doesn't matter what_

_you do I'll love you anyway_ , new friends,

false selves that trim the fat from fight or flight,

false faces, the ability to lie,

a new proclivity to meet the eye

of what we want to eat, a muscle curled

and crouched and looking backwards at the night,

a wicked shift that we still strain to feel,

new arsenals that could unmake the world:

the things we need to make the world real.

### Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar

Certain moods are required as a sign of subordination.

These methods make darling a distinction

between purpose and result,

pending the exalting _so_ or _so much_.

Fostering confusion between causal and concessive

easily slips into matters of time,

time when, or maybe with.

Maybe—what is relative usually isn't indicative.

Sometimes the truest way of things

is best expressed by a past contrary to fact—

the curse of chaos barely shuffled off

by the blessing of what didn't happen to happen.

Likewise,

we less superstitious assent to utopian literature—

a future more vivid,

tricks of timetravel, tomorrows and tropes.

Doomed little things—

a beautiful excuse for the use of _lest_ ,

for the charm of this mad king's dream,

a language full of invisible subjects.

Or like Macbeth we find

things no sooner uttered

than delivered,

then—

nothing is but what is not, or

nothing is but what is said.

Just try it.

Just try to just say _nothing_.

These are the words of bestial dispositions,

a screwing of sound,

a court masquing for our panting,

the libertine's love of letters, of reported speech.

Begin the staged exorcism of the volitional,

let the gilded butterflies laugh back,

let the speech all be an act—

this is how to do things with words.

Meanwhile, somewhere in ancient Rome,

it trembles for its antecedent.

Little does it know what the world becomes—

dreams after dreams, endless dependent clauses.

Fortunately, the partitive genitive

keeps the show going,

a part of the whole

with the whole of a thing—

synecdoche, a wet dream

of the truly infinitive,

which by definition

cannot be modified.

Here— _hic_ , _in haec re_ , _in hoc_ —

this is where the story might end.

The old stories don't get along

with the new grammar.

Once upon a time,

when one thing led to another,

you wouldn't write about your death

in perfect tense.

Nowadays, the thing you take in becomes

everything.

Everything comes home with us

to be played and replayed.

Like taking home a Christmas tree

and waking up deep in the forest,

like the end beginning,

like a dead man poised to make a poem,

this is the conceit of the complementary infinitive.

The Christmas Tree takes us from to be to praise—

brought down at last,

it couldn't be any other way.

Tania Brown

### On Weeknights

On weeknights, she

painstakingly applies lipstick, a

paint-the-numbers exercise where she

does her best to

stay in the lines and

not stain her teeth with

tell-tale red; she

steadies her hand as

the mascara wand,

a fairy godmother in a tube,

plumps and

makes appear

what wasn't there before.

She squeezes her feet into heels and

wobbles like a bell

chiming the appropriate hour in

her knee length skirt.

"Let's go for a walk,"

she tells the dog, who

plays his part well by

always being ready at the door.

She strolls down the street,

summoning her best impersonation of

someone put together,

not falling apart

at the seams.

On weekends, she

stays home in his old clothes, her

knees peeking through

holes worn by time, and

watches movies,

lips whispering lines that

remind her of him, as

the dog waits for

another weeknight.

### Slice of Life

Frozen:

a slice of life extracted,

permafrost edging in,

tainting the feigned perfection

of a memory

carefully preserved in microscopic detail

to show what he wanted

and not what was.

### Burn Me Clean

I poke at the bloody hole,

ragged edges stinging,

feel around the space where you were—

the way you filled me up and

still left me wanting,

the way you ripped me open so

I could never be whole again.

It's funny now—

in that soul-crushing way which is

never actually funny but

we say "funny" because

who really wants to think about

the pain we're obscuring—

funny how

you were a security blanket, a

safe haven for my worried heart,

for my mind that never stopped

firing on all cylinders,

until it did, and

now it just fires on one:

you.

Funny how you were,

then in one decisive moment,

you decided you weren't, and

who was I to say that

you'd gotten it wrong?

That you'd always be,

even when you were no longer.

You were

your favorite shirt,

the one I'll never return,

because dammit,

it looks good on me, and

every time I wear it

I catch that sweet scent and

my head is filled with you,

buttoned up in the softest flannel as

you lift another box

higher than I can reach,

always willing to do those little things that

made my life easier,

until you weren't.

I'm not sure how so much of you

fit in that hole,

how I packed away

even the tiniest pieces—

your smirk, the crinkle of your eye,

your general nonchalance,

your affinity towards devil's advocacy—but

unpacking it has been even harder.

I light the match,

my flicker of hope,

press it to the flesh,

cauterize and sear,

burn myself clean so

I can move forward without you.

### Melody

The way we danced—

leaves on a breeze,

a whirlwind of autumn,

taken by the song

only we could hear—

failed to wake the dead,

and they remained

beneath our feet,

tucked safely

in their graves.

### I Am

I am my mother when,

exhausted at the end of the night,

I scrub with all my might to

scrape the dredges of the evening meal from

the bottom of the flame-licked pot,

unable to sleep while

it sits in the sink.

I am my father when,

wishing to be alone with a

book and a candle at a dinner party,

I manage to spin tales of

past exploits

that paint a different picture than

the one in my mind.

I am myself when,

eyes closed,

sitting on the couch, I

contemplate the things I

like and dislike about

the person I've become and

weigh them against the

notion of the person I'd

like to be and

the person I once was,

wondering why the tally

never seems to come out quite right.

James Ph. Kotsybar

### Unmeasured

The lone, quantum bit,

unlike Frost, chooses both paths,

interferes with self.

### Yowl

I

I've seen the minds of my generation bested by their handheld mobile devices,

texting for a dopamine rush, tuning out the reality around them.

I've watched them, withdrawn from present company, looking for bars of microwave coverage, friending strangers, downloading angry birds,

internet junkies, living in the ether, looking for that server connection to fame gauged by the number of hits they receive,

who sit in restaurants with downturned faces aglow, oblivious to their dinner companions, to check who has Twittered® them in the last few minutes,

who drive distractedly, causing fatalities in order to update their Twaddle® followers with TMI about their state of mind on the road,

who walk into traffic, updating their relationship status or performing Binglehoo® searches for celebrity gossip or obituaries,

who envision themselves as divas, broadcasting narcissistic images of every party or event they've attended in the camera phone eye, imagining others care,

who live without discretion in the digital age, unknowingly or uncaringly giving up control over their destinies to follow the latest manufactured meme,

who look with disdain on anyone behind the curve of the latest cell phone product designed to track them through time, space and potentially subversive ideas,

who are GPSed at all times, allowing local merchants to target them for advertising or law enforcement to trace their movements,

who are trained to demand ever higher speed connection, because they're afraid to be, "so seven seconds ago,"

who fire up the Wiki at both ends, eliminating the need for scholarly research or retention of thought,

who self-publish their diaries and essays as open blogs, pretending that makes them journalistic writers,

who trust all their personal information to cloud networks about which they have only the foggiest notions,

who ask YSIC about who watches them watch countless MPEGs of people's posted antics that pile up a profile of their tagged interests,

who believe convenience and expediency are more important than their right to privacy, conceived as an abstract concept of the elderly,

who are betrayed by the telecommunications industry they think serves them but ignores Constitutional rights to due process and even freedom of speech,

who post supercilious comments publicly, assuming they have the protection of anonymity because they hide behind a hash tag or screen name,

who, hands free, carry on conversations with the air, like schizophrenic lunatics, speaking to virtual colleagues, even incommodiously in the commode,

who require medications for ADHD and bi-polar disorders, never making the connection to their constant multi-tasking, dividing their attention,

who "can haz" perpetual amusement lolling at LOL sites, impersonally spamming inboxes worldwide with their latest animal pic find,

who post videos to social sites of the last vestiges of actual experience witnessed, and often disrupted, to make their disassociated lives downloadable,

who refuse to turn off their ringtones, assuming all potential calls more important than any movie, play or concert they might attend,

who think they're the source of the Arab Spring and 99% strong because sometimes they can pull off a successful flash mob,

who are misled into believing they have influence and choice because there's an app for that.

II

What routers have backed up the profitless souls naively sold to the machinery of control?

Telco! Dotcom! Dotnet! Dotorg! Dotgov! Dotmil! Dotedu! Dottv! Dotbiz! Dotint! Everyday your bandwidth fills with the addresses you occupy.

Telco, you are the new god of information, replacing books, magazines, newspapers and even postal letters.

Telco, the world is trapped in the web you crawl seeking content management and infrastructure ownership.

Telco, computer simulated, you leave no paper trail in cyberspace, so how can we know what really persists and what may have been censored?

Telco, whose phones are smartest for you and whose service is about limiting access to information, you are the true user.

Telco, your hidden stealth-bots relay the private data in our terminals that you cram with cookies.

Telco, whose attempts at regulation have been at least partially thwarted, your lies about protection of intellectual property have been anticipated.

Telco, whose plans to terrace farm the fertile fields will one day restrict totally free access, may you choke on the Creative Commons.

Telco, who wants to navigate our searches for us, leading us into realms most profitably marketable for you, may your electronic banks surge without protection.

III

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IYSWIM IGWS: There's always a price to pay (TANSTAAFL). HAK XOXO IOH!

### Cue!

In the middle of my act,

I'm pulled by my hair through the curtains,

wrenched out of character,

forced to see the sandbags and pulleys

behind the scrims and flats

and recognize

the stage for what it is.

Made to observe the gearbox of

_Deus ex machina_ ,

to understand its well-oiled magic

from behind the scenes,

I see the joke I 'd been too in on

to get—involving too many,

too involved in playing this scene.

I only know my audience

as extensions of myself,

and that's been just a role.

Motes in the spotlight

look for motivation,

and settle,

irresolutely flickering, unresolved to Earth,

and the globe's no different for it—

becoming no more ponderous,

due to the energy lost in production.

I'm not laughing

as I retake the dusty boards,

stand my mark again

and, running dull fingers

through mussed hair, find

. . . not one line in my mind.

### Open Mic

One thinks poetry is a couch to make the world play therapist,

or at least take note and listen.

One thinks poetry is a prayer book, calling the faithful to litany

or the faithless to become congregation.

One thinks poetry's a vase to preserve cuttings from the garden

or store stony trinkets collected from private shores.

One thinks poetry is a rifle to shoot the head with images of war

or blast away the combat's trauma.

One thinks poetry's a bullfrog shut in a shoebox, ready to croak

or jump out inappropriately during show and tell.

One thinks poetry is formaldehyde to display pale, shriveled organs

or the internal parasites that feed upon them.

One thinks poetry is confetti, empty color tossed haphazardly,

or blinding shards thrown like glitter into the eyes.

One wonders if poetry deserves polite applause for its presentation

or if the art has been lost at the hands of these practitioners.

### Go Ogle

Sometimes we miss things

that are just over our heads.

Let's learn to look up.

Matthew Scampoli

### Paddle Ball

Ponytails

Pink ball on a rubber string

The tip of her tongue a writhing, uprooted earthworm

An incessant gentle thud

I feel her concentration

"25 Dad!"

Later, we lie silently on a mattress of thick grass

And watch the sunset

12 now, I hear the sounds of her growing older with each breath

"Dad, why doesn't it just bounce off the horizon

(See how the flat rocks ricochet from the water's surface)?"

Indeed, (I think to myself), it only sinks deep below

Like wounded pride into a dark abyss

While the evil chill settles into and around us

"But it rises in a symphony of brilliance," I say

"Again and again,

Like a paddle ball on a rubber string"

"Love you Dad"

Relieved, I ease back into my darkness

And nonchalantly coalesce with my worries

Beneath a decaying canopy of hope

### At the Shore

The aroma of sea and aged wine vapors lulled me to a sandy retreat,

And as I squinted up through the sunspots and glare

I saw your scarlet lips

And your freckles, all randomly spilled upon an ivory canvas.

I watched the seaweed twirl on the kite string

Like a forlorn seedling helicoptering its way to fertile ground.

Erratic movements, like a discarded beach ball in the wind,

attended me.

When The Maestro tapped his baton on the lifeguard's tall wooden chair,

The last wave crescendoed in perfect 4/4 time,

A darting breeze snapped the umbrella fabric,

The seagulls chanted an urgent chorus, and

Suddenly, I lost my senses.

But just as I accepted my newfound weightlessness . . .

"Come" you said, your generous bosom pointing the way.

Rising from the cool dark shade, I witnessed cotton candy clouds framing your silhouette.

The sun teased the ocean's edge as I absorbed your warmth.

While you sashayed, I heard the gentle crunch of sand

Beneath your French pedicure.

Our fingers cut through the licking wind.

I bristled at the chill of my sweaty palms and sunburned skin

And breathed your jasmine perfume.

Your cherub tattoo weeping saltwater,

We walked to Nowhere and arrived to a waxing moon,

The stars winking at our togetherness.

"I can't imagine it," you said,

As you sat, criss-cross applesauce, on the teak boardwalk.

But what you really meant was

That you couldn't comprehend it

Which is quite an important distinction

Because after all, as children we lived by imagination.

Burrow, hermit crab!

Spying through your translucent flowing linen, I glimpsed your belly

Distended from the fruit we planted there.

And when we returned, we studied each other,

Weathered and bleached

Like driftwood vomited upon the shore,

And smiled.

### Halftime

We smelled the sweet decay of autumn

As the sun hung low and distant

Like an indifferent youth leaning on a street lamp with a cigarette hanging from his lips.

"Yes, you can," said I,

And gently lifted her sharp chin with a curled index finger.

Her large eyes were two fried eggs on a skillet—steady and unblinking.

"Think of the seed," said I.

"It's infinitesimal,

Merely a speck

Buoyed by breeze.

Soon it's punished by beams of sunshine,

Drenched by torrents of rain,

Relegated to lie hopeless in the muck.

In time, it's a resplendent and majestic tree

Standing stoical against winter's biting wind."

In one swift errand, and

With a knowing glance

I watched her peel away

And felt a familiar swell in my core

As the ball left her foot

And distorted the symmetry of the rectangular soccer net.

### Libretto of a Three Act Opera

Seated in my private box

I reach for my glasses

As the curtain parts

And I hear the familiar choral swell

(I know this libretto by heart)

Act I

Intermingled shadows of distinct forms

Melting in an awkward dance

Act II

A filthy, biting, angry, swirling cyclone of vomited words in a deafening crescendo

SPLCH! *tink, tink*

Shards of porcelain scattered like grain on the cold kitchen tile

Act III

Bereft of all senses

In my private hillside castle

With my moat and my stone walls

I poke sticks at the sentries

### The Impropriety of Soul

As you spoke,

My soul abandoned all decorum,

Gliding gleefully through your hair,

Lying about lazily on each perfumed tuft.

It swam desperately in the deep pools of your eyes,

and danced across the perfect symmetry of your face.

Then, encircling your tender neck,

It ran to the valley of your chest

And hiked the gentle peaks of your breasts.

It inched its way across your pale abdomen,

Twisted its way to the small of your back

Where it caressed your Venus dimples,

Skied expertly down your buttocks,

And surfed the smooth islands of your thighs.

It paused to read the tattoo encircling your ankle

Before sliding along the arches of your feet.

It returned to me

More wanton than before it left

Eager to explore this foreign, beautiful terrain

Again and again.

Jamie Ross

### Not Exactly

—Taller Servicio Automotivo Rafael Teniente

You have seen the mechanic. No,

you haven't. You have seen his son, Rafi,

who knew nothing. Then you saw your pickup:

out by the fence, between a taxi and police car,

hood open, jacked high on its side. Just

to replace a loose timing chain? No,

not exactly. The engine's in pieces—spark

plugs and wiring heaped on the cab, covers

on a fender, oil pan on the ground; bolts,

screws, nuts piled all over the place. Something

else has happened. Something other than

the timing chain has loosened, warped, torqued,

rattled away. Perhaps it was the valves. Where

are the valves? Or were they? What exactly

do they do, or did? Perhaps it was nothing.

Perhaps Teniente needed simply to look. To see

if anything else had occurred—to those valves,

and the guides, and the rods and camshaft,

and the tiny bearings that bob up and down

over and under the springs. When Aaron Chigbrow

disassembles an engine (he showed me once)

there are hundreds of these things, sometimes

chipped or corroded, yet often—when you wipe

off the oil, as smooth as the day they were born.

But a bad cylinder can drive you mad, trying

to even out scratches and gouges, with air-driven

dremels, sapphire bits, micrometers, steel wool

rubbed by hand; to get back the compression,

the purr of the rockers, like a fine-tuned Maserati

the first time it takes off. How my Toyota's motor

used to sound, two weeks ago. When I knew,

at least, where it was.

### Foreigners

—Café Organica, S. Miguel de Allende

I was gazing at the blackboard

with the specials today, it was only

ten a.m., too early for lunch, though

the large butch woman with

stark facial hair and Sacramento State

was knocking down a salad, a giant

enchilada, plus a bowl of beans

her girlfriend hadn't touched, they

were talking intently about a she

from Portland, I wasn't that focused,

besides their thing was private, and

Lara at the register

had let her long hair down

and was speaking with Santos, Santos

was wearing a bright pink polo

with a little alligator

that wiggled as she laughed

and someone had put sunflowers

in the umber vases, like Vincent Van Gogh,

with a bouquet on each table of tiny

bright carnations, each petal striped

with different colors, just like

the ones inside a cast glass sphere

on Nanna's cocktail table, that sat

by her lighter and her silver cigarettes

when Dad took our family

back to New York, all night from Denver

on the vistadome Zephyr

to pick up the brand new Volkswagen bus.

No one in Kansas on Route Thirty-six

had ever seen a Microbus before

and ran to the fences, stared

from the tractors, dropped their hay bales

simply to gape,

and here was I, in the back

with the seats reversed, my kid sisters

Betsy, Deedee, two-year-old Ali

and we all were playing

the license plate game, waiting

for a drive-in like Lula's Dairy Dream

or the next rhymed, eight-sign

Burma Shave riddle, chocolate

milkshakes always were the best

on this trip, burgers in wax paper

dripping mustard as we drove

and everyone, including Dad

and Mummy, had a dark brown

moustache, a thick German accent

and no one wiped theirs off

until the next Texaco.

### Float

Do you remember how you felt

yesterday, when the giant hot-air balloon

swooshed down in front of your hotel window

behind the equally giant palm tree?

How it hissed, belched flame—suddenly

got bigger, encompassing the whole tree.

And then, without prediction, how it

rose, receded and shrank, little by little

until it was a satellite tracked by the sun,

finally a gum wrapper, blowing away.

Do you remember how you felt

this morning at Rafael Teniente's lot,

finding your truck jacked-up by the fence,

its gas tank on the ground, a cylindrical part

dangling from a line. Was that

a fuel pump, the thing that pumps the gas?

Was that a float, that tells your gauge

how much? And when his daughter Eva,

ripe to marry, waiting her chance

showed you, yes, the float, in her hands

with its tiny mechanism, the contacts

that were bad, how lovely the apparatus

looked, the twelve brass ingots like notches

of a zipper, so beautifully calibrated

as she moved the sensor up and down.

Do you remember the elephant

on the cover of your child's writing book?

How light in the photo, how round;

yet how massive, heavy, as it trumpets,

bellows, crushes trees and cars,

affirms the earth with no need to fly.

How the float was just a canister

that bobbed and fell on the tides of its fuel.

How day rose with the balloon, then

broke live. How the tank in the dirt

was a kind of death. How an elephant,

without trying, each year circles the sun.

How Eva's hands, soaked black

with motor oil, opened, trembling,

shot up to grasp the rope

dropping from the sky.

### We Are Rain and the Rain

does not discount us. It doesn't put its garbage

in a black plastic bag dogs will rip apart.

It doesn't buy toothpaste at Espino's, just

to see María, six months pregnant. The rain

has been pregnant for many months, many times

and all of them are beautiful. My sister Deeds'

first child was such, everywhere this baby

broadcast over highways, cities fraught with fire,

in the Chico kennel every stray and starveling

gifted Haley as a Chevron gifts hoses to its pumps;

Deedee fueling passing engines, Haley's

smile, her wisps of hair and dancing gurgle tiny

hands at every moment of a party Haley at my

sister's open breast, the rain, how soft, expansive

for us all the rain adores the cucumber the sand

fleas at Los Cocos the waitress' panty hose the

baby rain named Haley tapping at my window

roses sudden asters blooming all across the balcony,

the rain does not remove us from our slippers

or the metal eyelets of a silver vinyl tarp

lashed across a taco cart dripping into midnight

just outside San Marcos Market two men wet

in canvas trousers pitched sombreros woven

for this flavor while my sister glows

in every taxi Haley's promised garden, every

petal spritzing the handmade wrought-iron rail, rain

does not contain itself or still sunlight after passing

women with the juicer in the hotel kitchen

laughing, sizzling bacon and their boiling beans

forever this aroma, we are rain the coffee

perks, burbles, my rain will not forget you

once your rain moves on.

Contributor Notes

 Harry Bauld graduated from Medford High School in Massachusetts and studied art history and played shortstop at Columbia University. Selected by Matthew Dickman for inclusion in Best New Poets 2012 (University of Virginia Press), he has taught and coached at high schools in Vermont and New York.

 Tania Brown is a poet who enjoys focusing on the depth and shallowness of the human landscape. She's worked as a social worker, retail manager, and freelance editor, all while soaking in the rich, urban experiences of Philadelphia. Tania aspires to be a renaissance woman and hopes that ingesting enough books will get her there. In her free time, she enjoys snapping slices of life and nature in pictures, knitting, and watching Doctor Who.

 Martin Conte is a student of English literature at the University of Southern Maine. He has published in the Words and Images Journal, and has won numerous poetry and playwriting awards. His current project involves the struggles that ensue when his narrator appears in his home, and refuses to leave. He currently lives on the coast of Maine, the most beautiful place to live, where he intends to stay.

 Miguel Coronado is an aspiring poet currently studying at New York University. He was born in the Dominican Republic, but has spent most of his life raised in New York City. He plans on pursuing a lifelong career in Journalism and Creative Writing after he graduates from college.

 A poet since age 11, Margie Curcio was born and raised in Staten Island, New York. She lived in Santa Cruz, California, for five years before settling in New Jersey, where she makes her home. Margie's previously publications include "Press of Tangled Bodies" (Porter Gulch Review 2003), "Tattoo Poem" (Porter Gulch Review 2013), "Javits" and "Flame-Licked" (Porter Gulch Review 2014). Margie is working on her second poetry collection, which she hopes to publish next year.

 Ann V. DeVilbiss holds a BA from Indiana University, where she studied English and completed the honors program in poetry. She does editing and production work for a small press in Louisville, Kentucky, where she lives with her husband and their cat.

 Bryce Emley is a freelance writer and MFA student at NC State. His poetry can be found in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, Your Impossible Voice, etc. He's on staff for Raleigh Review and BULL: Men's Fiction and blogs about advertising at advertventures.wordpress.com.

 Michael Fleming was born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, and has lived and learned and worked all around the world, from Thailand and England and Swaziland to Berkeley, New York City, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He's been a teacher, a grad student, a carpenter, and always a writer; for the past decade he has edited literary anthologies for W. W. Norton. (You can see some of Fleming's own writing at: www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws.)

 Ryan Flores is a writer, musician, producer, and designer from the California Bay Area. He lives in Colorado and has a degree in Spanish literature from the University of Colorado. Flores is the founder of the independent record label Heart Shaped Records and is in several bands, including Moonhoney, Ondas, Leopard and the Vine, and Love Water. He is currently working on a novel and his favorite fruit is the mango.

 Tom Freeman, the oldest of six children, comes from a little, twenty acre, not-for-profit farm in the Cuyahoga Valley of northeast Ohio. He has lived there for most of his twenty-three years but has also spent a considerable amount of time traveling, working, and mountaineering across the western United States where he feels most welcome. He enjoys hiking with his fourteen-month-old husky-wolf dog, Denali. He recently graduated from Kent State University.

 Rachel A. Girty is a student at Northwestern University studying vocal performance and creative writing. She has performed with The Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Northwestern University Opera Theatre, and The Castleton Festival. She works on the poetry staff of Helicon. Her poetry has appeared in Prompt magazine, and she was recently awarded the Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

 Kendall Grant As a freshman in college, I realized that Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" captured more detail than I had discovered in life. His lines started my pilgrimage into nature and poetry. Professionally, I teach at a religiously affiliated university where the spiritual and academic collide sparking principle-based insight and action. The desired result is a life of disciplined service to God, country, and world.

 Savannah Grant is a recent graduate of Smith College, where she won prizes for fiction and poetry. She is always looking to write new poems and improve her work and hopes to someday make graphic novels. She lives with her dad and a small (very lucky) black cat.

 Stephanie L. Harper earned a BA in English and German from Grinnell College, and an MA in German literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives with her husband and two children in the Portland, OR, Metro area. Her work as a Writer and Home Schooling Parent has far-reaching extensions into social activism endeavors to promote a safe, just and vibrant world of possibility for future generations. http://www.slharperpoetry.wordpress.com/

 A native of Rochester, New York, Heather Erin Herbert lives in Atlanta with her children and husband, where they spend the summer trying to avoid bursting into flame. Currently working on her MA English at Valdosta State University, Heather works in a college writing center and likes to spend her few free seconds per semester reading, knitting, and consuming improbable amounts of coffee. She has no idea where she found time to write these poems.

 Rebecca Irene has finally accepted poetry as her tumultuous lover and taskmaster. Her poems speak to the simultaneous beauty and horror of this world, how every life is the same, every life is different and the ways our lives differ are not always fair or fathomable. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College.

 Meghan Kemp-Gee is a screenwriter, playwright, and award-winning poet. She lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.

 James Ph. Kotsybar's poetry has been selected by NASA for launch into Martian orbit—the first literature to another world. His poetry appears in the mission log of the Hubble Telescope, and has won honors from the Society of Classical Poets, Odes To The Olympians, Ohio's Ingenuity Center, and Balticon. Performances include The Los Angeles Performing Arts Center, Llhasa Club, Beyond Baroque Gallery, KCSB 91.9 FM, KDB 93.7 FM, and three cable television channels.

 For thirty-nine years, Michael Kramer has day-lighted as an English teacher. He has advised the award-winning high school literary magazine, King Author, and has had work nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kramer has been married to Rebecca longer than he's been teaching; together they have raised four remarkable children. He has work forthcoming in Pough Quarterly. Check out his collection of short stories in verse Hopeless Cases (Moon Tide Press, 2011) on Amazon.

 George Longenecker teaches writing and history at Vermont Technical College. Some of his recent poems and book reviews can be found in Atlanta Review, Penumbra Memoir and Rain Taxi. He lives on the edge of the forest in Middlesex, VT.

 Michael Hugh Lythgoe was one of three finalists selected for the 2012 poetry fellowship by the SC Academy of Authors. Mike retired as an Air Force officer and earned an MFA from Bennington College. He teaches for the Academy for Lifelong Learning at USC in Aiken where he lives with his wife of 50 years, Louise. His chapbook, Brass, won the Kinloch Rivers contest in 2006.

 George Mathon was born in Vermont and still lives at Joe's Pond, though now he winters in Florida. He's explored many of the natural wonders and native ruins in the United States. These places provide inspiration, time and location for many of his poems. He's published three books of poetry: Entering The Forest, Chickadees, and Killers.

 Donna French McArdle's poems have appeared in the anthology Lost Orchard: Prose and Poetry from the Kirkland College Community, and in Wilderness House Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, and other journals. With a grant from the Massachusetts and Boxford Cultural Councils, she documented local farms and farm stands in Essex County Harvest 2003. She earned an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and works as the writing coach for a public school.

 Jill Murphy is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

 Debbra Palmer's poems have appeared in BLOOM Magazine, Calyx Journal, Pectriloquy (CHEST Journal for the American College of chest physicians) and The Portland Review. She recently returned to her birth state of Idaho after spending most of her life in Portland, Oregon where she studied writing at Portland State University. Now home at last, she lives and works in Boise with her wife and their little dog, Tennessee.

 Nicholas Petrone's poems can be found in many places, including The View From Here, Willows Wept Review, The Ranfurly Review, Poetry Superhighway, 3 Elements Review, Weird Cookies, Straight Forward Poetry, The Tower Journal, Vimfire Magazine and in many other damn fine publications. You can also read his poems at http://winkingattheapocalypse.blogspot.com/. He teaches American history in Syracuse, NY.

 Tracy Pitts is a writer / filmmaker living in Portland, OR.

 Danielle C. Robinson, a North Carolina native, is the author of A Slice of Purple Pie and the forthcoming poetry book Words I Should Have Said Before. She is a graduate from North Carolina Central University. She loves to dedicate her time to scientific research, writing, painting, African dancing, traveling, community service, and listening to music.

 Jamie Ross writes and paints on a mesa west of Taos, NM, spends much time in Mexico. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, as well as the anthology Best New Poets 2007. His 2010 collection, Vinland, received the Intro Poetry Prize from Four Way Books.

 Kimberly Sailor graduated from the USC Creative Writing program in Los Angeles and also holds a Master's in Library and Information Studies from UW-Madison. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Recorded A Cappella Review Board (rarb.org), authoring over two hundred published music reviews. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Bookends Review, and her novel The Clarinet Whale is available on Amazon.

 Cassandra Sanborn earned her BA in Creative Writing from Purdue University. Though most of the writing she does now is for her job—she is the Grants Coordinator at a nonprofit in Indianapolis, Indiana—she continues to write poetry and fiction in her spare time.

 Matthew Scampoli writes in Pelham, NY.

 Harold Schumacher Originally a pastor, his career transitioned to stockbroker (he served "God and mammon"), realtor, townhome complex caretaker, high school and college instructor, newspaper columnist, pastor again, and retirement. Currently, a novel and poetry book are in progress. He lives on Rainy Lake near International Falls, Minnesota, and is a 20-plus-year veteran of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

 A. Sgroi is a native New Yorker, a twin sister, a trapeze artist, an avid fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, an occasional poet, and a Sixfold newcomer.

 Sharron Singleton My poems have appeared in Agni, Rattle, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, among others. In 2009 I won the James River Writers Contest and was named the Poet of 2010 by the journal Passager. I also won 1st place prizes in 2010 and 2012 in the Poetry Society of Virginia annual contest, 1st place in the MacGuffin Poet Hunt contest in 2012 and 1st place in the Sixfold Contest in 2013. My chapbook, A Thin Thread of Water was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press.

 Mariana Weisler is a professional actress and singer, performing both locally in her hometown of New York City and nationally. She graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College and Macaulay Honors College where she studied Opera, but now works in the more intimate venue of Musical Theatre. Mariana's foremost passion, however, lies in creative writing, with her first notable publication being in Sixfold. She is currently working on a collection of poetry and a novel.

 Franklin Zawacki writes in San Francisco, CA.
