 
### Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 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.

License Notes

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Sixfold

Garrett Doherty, Publisher

sixfold@sixfold.org

www.sixfold.org

(203) 491-0242

### Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013

Alysse Kathleen McCanna | Pentimento & other poems

Peter Nash | Shooting Star & other poems

Katherine Smith | House of Cards & other poems

David Sloan | On the Rocks & other poems

Alexandra Smyth | Exoskeleton Blues & other poems

John Glowney | The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds & other poems

Andrea Jurjevic O'Rourke | It Was a Large Wardrobe, from My 4-foot Perspective & other poems

Lisa DeSiro | Babel Tree & other poems

Michael Fleming | Reptiles & other poems

Michael Berkowitz | As regards the tattoo on your wrist & other poems

Michael Brokos | Landscape without Rest & other poems

Michael H. Lythgoe | Orpheus In Asheville & other poems

John Wentworth | morning people & other poems

Christopher Jelley | Double Exposure & other poems

Catherine Dierker | dinner party & other poems

William Doreski | Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin & other poems

Robert Barasch | Loons & other poems

Rande Mack | bear & other poems

Susan Marie Powers | Red Bird & other poems

Anne Graue | Sky & other poems

Mariah Blankenship | Tub Restoration & other poems

Paul R. Davis | Landscape & other poems

Philip Jackey | Garage drinking after 1989 & other poems

Karen Hoy | A Naturalist in New York & other poems

Gary Sokolow | Underworld Goddess & other poems

Michal Mechlovitz | The Early & other poems

Henry Graziano | Last Apple & other poems

Stephanie L. Harper | Unvoiced & other poems

Roger Desy | anhinga

R. G. Evans | Hangoverman & other poems

Frederick L. Shiels | Driving Past the Oliver House & other poems

Richard Sime Berry | Eater & other poems

Jennifer Popoli | Generations in a wine dark sea & other poems

Contributor Notes

Alysse Kathleen McCanna

### Pentimento

is a tattoo on the back of my friend Martha's neck,

a term I learned in Art History as a teenager in love

with the student teacher whose name I scrawled in my notebook

next to Pentimento. _Edward._

Repentance is Wednesday evening youth group at the local

nondenominational Christian church where my knees pressed hard

against the wood back of the chair and I tried my damnedest to stop

thinking about that boy with the hair who played bass

in the church band. _William._

Pentimento is what they will look for when they look at my life

under infrared cameras: "there, where she changed her mind and moved

the heart a little to the left; there, where she changed her mind again

and entirely redrew the face."

Repentance is three days of snow in the middle of April

while I decide whether to make the same mistake again

or not or if it's a different mistake or maybe it's not even close

to a mistake but when will I know?

Pentimento is what happened to my body after the rape

and I couldn't stop twitching enough to sit in a chair

for dinner and my fork flipped pasta across the kitchen

and when it stuck to the wall we laughed and laughed

in spite of everything.

Repentance is necessary for the attainment of salvation

and salvation is God putting his hand on your shoulder

and saying, "it's okay, even I commit a little Pentimento

now and again

take a look at the world"

and when God takes his hand from your shoulder

and you hear your bones crack

that is Pentimento

and when you are dying and you see the backlit

undersides of leaves on the most beautiful tree

that is Repentance

and when you feel your heart tear and a part of it

is lost inside of you and a part of it is breathed into the world

then that is a Poem

that you memorize

and burn

### Relics

In this poem, your son is your daughter

and all the ghosts are dogs. The kitchen

is the baby's room, the baby's room

is the front porch. Coffee cups are kisses,

the flat tire is a pot of my grandmother's spaghetti,

the sandwich I left for you in the fridge

has someone else's name on it.

I cut the grass this morning with scissors

because I thought I saw it in a movie

as a child about mental patients or

it may have been soldiers in the field.

I found the tiny dolls Kelli and I

used to play with in the front yard

how many years ago? Now she has a baby

that looks just like her father and my body

keeps trying to have your baby but

the baby is actually a potted plant

on the windowsill that I keep forgetting

to water but water is really milk

that I keep forgetting to pick up

on my way home and the way home

is not on this map and maps are flies

that won't stop buzzing

around your sweaty head

the tomatoes you planted in our garden

are starting to outgrow their thin red skins

every time you place one in my mouth

it tastes like dirt and summer and this summer

I've been overwhelmed with coffee cups

and walking ghosts and smelling phantom

flat tires and loving your son too much,

and you not enough,

and did you find your sandwich?

Did you remember your name?

### Dream of the Apples

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth

—Federico García Lorca

We spoke of God for an hour in the morning,

evidence of breakfast still on the plates before us

(a few flecks of basil, crumbs of toast and bacon,

my coffee gone cold).

With sleep still clinging to my eyes, teeth,

my fingers still grasping at half-remembered dreams,

I think of God, with a great Old Testament beard,

an apple in each hand, his mouth, voice high

like a bird song, points of light blazing through

the apple seeds, cutting through darkness and flesh

and earth—

I think of Abraham the way Rembrandt painted him,

dark, sorrowful and sure eyes, thrust to the edge

by God's cold force and then held back, and wonder

if God requires of us such great anguish, such certainty

in our own triviality.

Once, I knew God (or, thought I knew God)

and He filled my shadow as rain fills a forgotten cup—

but some days, God does not rain.

God must wish to make poets of us all

to bestow us with such disease and grief—

to cause us to bubble up until our ache

spills onto others,

onto paper.

Once, I knew God, and we sat at the same table—

one day, He got up and Left.

### Roane Duana

Seir lived a fair mile from Orkney harbor

and walked there twice a week

along the stone fences.

With his shoes left ashore

he wandered into the water

and felt the cool sting of autumn nearing.

One morning

when the sun was behind cloud

he found among the stones

of the shore an empty seal skin.

He held it gently in both hands

and hurried home without his shoes.

Roane Duana followed him there from the sea

and approached him at the doorway.

She had no dress and he took her to town

to purchase a fitting cloth for his new wife.

Her pale blue eyes set in white

soft skin enchanted him

and he had her every night,

but when Seir awoke in the mornings

she was never beside him

but looking out the window

to the sea.

He had heard the stories and kept the skin

hidden under the floorboards,

beneath a rug and a great wooden chest.

Duana sat before the fire many nights

with her feet resting inches above

where the silky skin lay.

Returning from the harvest

Seir approached the door of his home

and felt the air empty, found

the floorboards torn up and the skin

gone. A cry reached his ears from the sea

and he found a baby left on the bed,

conceived after she swallowed a star

that had fallen into her mouth

while sleeping.

### Tell Me Again

In the bed of someone's pick-up

a dog howls

in the heat.

It is May, now,

the sun hotter

than normal.

The mechanic behind the counter

looks like he's rolled right out of bed

in a barn somewhere, yet his soft-spoken

words are plucked carefully as if from a vast

thesaurus—from behind browned teeth he says

the transmission flush is vital to the longevity

of your car's performance

I imagine him atop

a tractor in Wisconsin,

red-headed young ones

forking hay, sneaking eggs

from beneath snoozing chickens.

A slim wife in a flower-print dress

on the porch, the kind of girl who

makes pasta from scratch,

knows how to mix

his drink of choice,

scents laundry

with lavender.

He must think

I'm very concerned

about the procedure

as I stare at him

thinking about life

outside the shop

I lean in and say

tell me again

about the cost of the transmission flush

listen to his poetic explanation

smell his soft, cigarette breath

wonder how it would feel

to hold his hand stretched

out in a field under a Midwestern sun,

belly fat with pending children,

a reliable pick-up idling beside us

in the tall, tall grass.

Peter Nash

### Shooting Star

First, a twenty-year run of brilliance,

your yellow-green eyes glittering

beneath the raven wings of your eyebrows,

the lightning retorts of your valentine mouth,

the shimmy of garnet earrings

framing your linnet face—

we still remember the little girls on the stoops

bringing you their broken doll babies to kiss,

how we applauded you madly in _Oklahoma!_

as you sashayed off the Marshall High School stage

leading the cowboys up the aisle,

and the way you could pick up enough change

for a six pack of Heineken singing Bob Dylan

on the Sunset Pacific Mall with your paint spattered guitar

and a can of dollar bills. We'd never forget

the famous night you filled Café Prégo

with guys who'd fallen in love following you up the outside stairs

of the wooden house on Ocean Avenue,

your legs flickering in the sulfur light of the street lamps.

But somewhere in your thirties people stopped buying

your cardboard collages or the bouquets you scavenged

from the mason jars at Pioneer Cemetery,

your parents stopped paying the rent, the last boyfriend

slashed your painting of him sitting on the toilet,

no one would hire you to walk their dogs after Dotty the Dalmatian

got run over as you read the New York Times at McDonald's

and your cat Matisse died locked in your room

when you drove your VW Bug with daisy decals

onto the Talmadge Bridge. We still picture you

floating downstream, your face a petal of light,

though the moon was not bright enough to see the water

rippling through the folds of your dress,

or the algae-stained rocks below.

### What I Hear

I've been watching these trees half my life;

this hill of pines whose pitchy limbs

balance their rough trunks,

sprouting needles, dropping needles

the topmost tier a green undulating mat

roaring in the wind, changing light into matter.

Is it trees talking with the wind?

the small animals who shelter in the shadows?

the squirming rootlets in the basement of the hill?

I hear voices from a hive of mouths,

but not the words. I hear the brown towhees,

long-tailed, lurking in the underbrush,

scuffling in leaf-litter for seeds, the finches,

gold-bellied, sociable, jittering in the sun,

flung by the wind across a field of dandelions,

darting among the branches of shade trees,

living a life without naming the world.

I know that each of you is saying something

but I'll never get it right. Best to stand here looking

at that roaring, piney hill, hand covering my mouth,

the better to hear you with.

### Morning Chores

Night ends with a final snap,

clawed feet scrabble linoleum

dragging the Victor trap.

This morning I tote up the damage:

the crushed snouts, the oozing abdomens,

the tiny turds black as poppy seeds

speckling the floor. Now it's time

to pull on my crusted gloves, walk across the lawn

and flip the bodies over the fence. Turn on the sprinklers.

The truth is I don't know where to go from here.

As if I were in a maze of electron rings

whizzing around one small house-mouse

rapturously suckling a half dozen babies.

Orbiting her, the weed patch fills with corpses,

flies lay eggs in furry crevices, maggots

scour toothpick ribs. In the outermost ring

my spotted hands bait the trap with a Sun Maid raisin

imbedded in a dollop of crunchy peanut butter.

Beyond that, a space so vast

my mind clamps down, unable to enter,

but gives it a name: VICTOR.

### John Brown's Cows

Leaking milk from swollen udders

the cows have been separated from the calves

who wander dazed in the far pasture

crying for their mothers.

Strings of slobber hang from their mouths.

Bellowing their grief

the sound becomes background

like the rush of rain in the creeks,

while we dig the garden,

pitch hay to the horses, stack firewood.

And then a silence settles upon these meadows,

and just as you learn to live without your children,

the calves begin to suck water,

to graze by themselves.

### Rocky's Place

There is some kiss we want

with our whole lives,

the touch of spirit on the body.

—Rumi

Sometimes I think of his thousand Post-its

plastering the lamp shade, creeping

along the base boards, up the metal legs

of the card table and covering the window

overlooking a graveled parking lot.

In the corner, boxes of Zip-lock bags

filled with alfalfa pellets are stacked.

A bare bulb dangles by its wire

over two rabbits, Flopsy and Mopsy

inside a baby's playpen.

Each day begins seven inches above the sink

when he whispers the first Post-it:

Every seeker is a beggar

before moving on to the next

and the next in their ordained order

as if they were a trail of stone steps winding

seven times around sacred Mecca.

And when he arrives at _those who have reached_

_their arms into emptiness_ I imagine

him ascending the path to the doorknob of the closet

where the last Post-it reads: _This is the place_

_the soul is most afraid of,_ _on this height,_

_this ecstatic turret,_ and climbing

into the playpen he lies down with the rabbits

who nuzzle his face, their eyes half-closed,

their furry, smoky-white heads

moving back and forth

in mysterious jerks.

Katherine Smith

### House of Cards

January 1871

When I was in Richmond I met a man.

I touched pulp where a sword had pierced his eye,

dressed the bloody bruise of his crushed thigh

where hooves trampled his femur and pelvis. I caressed

his fragile parts to health until his hard mouth broke

into a smile. I dream now that he commands me

to escape my father and brothers, run back

to Richmond. But before he left the hospital

for the battlefield where he died he asked me

to marry him and I refused. I don't regret it.

I've learned too much belief in any man,

even a good one, can drive a woman mad.

The night when I dreamed he lay on me

and I screamed so loud I woke with Daddy

and the boys standing over my bed,

I told them it was nothing.

It's hard to be the only woman

in a house full of men. I wept last night,

and when I opened my eyes the stars

were beginning to fade in the dawn light.

Come spring when the quince is red as passion,

I'm determined to set out on that train,

seeking nothing. I'll never marry. For now

the quince orchard lies buried under snow

and a crust of ice thickens on the river.

I'm done looking for portents in voices,

tea leaves, dreams. I believe in the cold, real

and sharp. When I walk this morning to the coop

the hens make the soft clucking sounds

that comfort me The rooster puts his beak

under his wing and goes back to sleep.

I steal from each hen a warm brown egg

and follow my footprints in the snow

back to the house. The weight of my family

settles on me like a shawl crocheted of iron.

I head to the kitchen to boil coffee.

Daddy and the boys will say it's too bitter.

When they come in from milking the cows,

drop the load of firewood for the stove

they labor to keep burning all winter,

I'll add cream to theirs and drink mine black.

### Bad

Spring 1870

Mother didn't like for me to climb the mountain,

warned me of black bears, ghosts. Now she's gone

I wouldn't mind meeting either just to know

I wasn't alone. Beneath my wool skirts my legs warm.

Quince perfumes the air, crimson, sharp as pepper.

The gnarled apple trees grow delicate curls,

white petals like my baby brother's fine blond hair.

The wind chases clouds over the mountains.

I can't imagine a world without me or the mountains.

Some folks might call it selfish, but what has come

to pass is so different from what I thought

I don't mind what folks call me. There is in me

a flame, a fire I used to be ashamed of,

that keeps my mind from wandering

at the creek where the path doglegs right

into valley ruins, a melancholy patchwork

quilted by women's hands and passed down

to daughters. On her death bed my mother's

barbed look snagged me as if she knew I'd turn

from memory like a man towards reason,

run away from what was certain as the home

that once held me fast, beloved as Priest mountain.

### Top

September 1870

My father helps to gather apples, little gnarled

things that'll last all winter baked into pie.

While summer lingers I stew them with rhubarb,

ladle into a white bowl, covered with cream,

the summer fruit that slides down the dark throats

of brothers raw with weeping. For six months

the frogs' croak from the river winds up

and stops, a toy that topples instead of spinning.

Daddy repeats _time to plant, time to harvest_

and his words fall short of meaning as if

something were chipped or missing at the bottom

of him that sets thought gyrating into the world.

The men and boys won't stop looking

as if they were waiting for a miracle

but all I can do is boil the clothes with lye,

wash the dusty floors, put food on the table.

I skip church on Sundays when other girls float

in taffeta to church on Norwood road.

Through crepe myrtle's blazing branches, I watch,

and bite a tongue of iron. When I feed the pigs

I slap the sow so hard with the rusty pail

that she no longer comes running for slops,

squints at me with knowing eyes. I don't have it

in me to believe a thing except the secret

of silver I saved nursing soldiers in Richmond.

Next spring I'll lay ten coins on the palm of the man

at the train depot with the tin roof that flashes

in the sun between the river and the church,

run away to nurse again in Richmond, instead

of a heart lay the rest on the kitchen table.

### Altar

Richmond 1880

I was just a girl, could never hope

to make the sun rise and set by milking cows

My body wouldn't chant the silent prayer

of broom-work and feather duster. There was

a hardness in me better suited to dressing wounds

or stopping the flow of gushing blood and pus

than to mopping floors. Years after I ran off

I knew myself flawed as if by making me God

had left a chink of doubt for men to slip

through to nothingness. Twice, though I knew

it meant wearing the men's rage till death

like shame at the flesh that cloaked me,

I almost went back and didn't. I went to work

in hospitals nursing the sick to whom I didn't belong.

I still wonder at night what happened to my kin,

but wear my concern lightly as a crust of thin ice

that melts in the April sun. Sometimes I think

with what I've understood I could have borne

to stay except I've learned that mother love

left behind that day the train pulled away

from dwindling mountains isn't enough

to keep anyone at home.

### Red Sea

It was just me and the bleak world

of scrub pine, red clay, rattling husks

of dead sumac. It was just me

and the massive earth and the stone house

no one had lived in for a long time. My life

a fact, without illumination. I followed

the yellow dog up the overgrown path

to where the bare Virginia mountain

crouched under the grey sky,

turned to walk the three miles home

down the same road I'd come.

The Blue Ridge turned red, then

a pale yellow without the usual

crescendo of dusk. I heard a laughter

like the bones of winter sun.

My daughter had been gone months,

her childhood like a sea

that had parted

and swallowed up half my life.

What was I doing alone

on this mountain? The grey sky

let go of snow as if releasing letters,

an alphabet of wordless understanding

that fluttered through the remaining light.

### Good-Bye

Good-bye third-floor room with maples leaves,

green seedpod that taps the window,

morning mist swirling over the James River.

beautiful light, thunder on the mountain.

Good-bye ash tree, sumac, wisteria.

Good-bye blackberry bramble.

Good-bye yellow dog, Maizie.

Good-bye peace.

Some say peace is carried within,

but can I fold up valleys

and take them with me?

Can I fold the James River,

the light, the blackberry bramble,

the yellow dog, and the maple tree

like silk dresses I slip into my suitcase?

Can I unpack a mountain?

David Sloan

### On the Rocks

It is a rare snapshot. For one thing

We are together; I am so small,

No more than four or five,

Perched on the ledge of a rock face

Below you, and I would be afraid

If it weren't for the single loop

Of rope you secured around my waist,

If it weren't for you, standing

A few feet diagonally above me,

Holding the rope that wraps

Around your back and spools

Out into your ready hands.

Even though you aren't looking

At me, even though your gaze

Stretches into the distance,

Like a man haunted by vistas

That would lure you away for half

A lifetime, even though I cannot foresee

The years ahead when I would still climb,

Roped up and hoping you would return

To hold the other end flapping

Free somewhere above me,

Even though standing there dwarfed

By the cliff face and by you,

I could not know that finally

The son would find a way

To reach the end of the abandoned

Rope and dangle it gingerly down

To the father who had fallen

So far away, and hoist him up,

At this particular moment,

Four or five and high up

On the sunlit rocks, linked

To no one else but you,

I know that I feel safer

Than I have ever felt since.

### Skidmarks

The accident itself was almost a relief,

the tumor that blooms benignly,

a blighted elm that finally falls beside—

not through—the roof. No gasoline-fed flames,

no glass-imbedded bodies stuffed head-down

into a crumpled car, no blood pooling on pavement.

One son escaped with a twisted back,

one with a lacerated cheek and a few days

of jittery dreams. My brother hobbled away

on an ankle that swelled like a snakebite

when he slammed down the imaginary brake

on the passenger side right before impact.

Just after midnight the call came that every parent

dreads and half expects. I outwardly grieved

for the car and the boys' shaking voices,

but privately, knowing we had once again cheated

the bringer of plagues and curses, I exulted

with the gratitude of the undeserving—uneasily—

as one who dreams himself awake lying

on a dark road, squealing tires an overture.

### Blanket Indictment

My parents gave me Indian names— _Thumb-in-mouth_

and _Blue-blanket-boy_ , but I couldn't stop, dragged it

everywhere, nuzzled silky edges against my cheek

so I could breathe in trapped scents

of my six-year-old world: Rocky's

wet fur, apple cake and cocoa,

eucalyptus, lavender.

My blanket got soggy

when I draped it over baby's face in the tub.

He turned a shade of blue and churned

water everywhere. It hid with me

under the bed when I heard

high heels clicking down

the hall for a spanking

I always deserved.

They would try to yank it away for the wash,

but I would wail and fist it as if it were

my own skin. They marveled

at my banshee strength,

bought another I left

untouched. At night

I swaddled myself to prevent sneak attacks.

Sometimes in the layered dark it would

shield me from graveyard sounds

of scraping shovels. I thought

they had given up.

I never heard the nightly shear of scissors,

one shred at a time, never suspected,

as it dwindled, first to the size

of a hand towel,

then a dollar, that early on I

would learn how,

imperceptibly,

everything is snipped away,

down to the nothing

I still clutch.

### What Matters

Does it matter that I never intended to stay,

never wanted to enter, touch, upset her?

But there's no rest from the doling out of pain.

The necklace she wore when we first met that day

invited a twisting. Her throat was a delicate bird.

No matter, because I never intended to stay.

My hands itched to hold her, not to betray

the whiteness, only to feel the flutter, the purr.

Can nothing arrest the doling out of pain?

She praised my hands, believed that I could play

the cello, read Rilke, caressed the words.

I mattered, and she intended for me to stay.

I patted her soft-sweatered back, tried to pray,

heard myself say _not too hard, too hard—_

but nothing could arrest the doling out of pain

For a moment under bruise-colored skies we lay

serenely. It passed—Oh, the voices I heard.

She's just matter now. I never intended to stay.

No arrest will ever end this doling out of pain.

### Fathers' Hands

Carving a bow for my son, who wants

a weapon to terrorize squirrels

and deliver the world, I snag the blade,

fumble the whittle stroke and slice my finger.

The cut oozes. My hand is sturdy,

scarred, nothing like my father's—

unmarked, maple-colored.

His hands stitched gashes without a flinch.

They mortared rock walls to hold a hillside up.

On the violin, his fingers flew like wingtips.

Once as a child I saw sparks spray

from that smoking bow. He tried to teach

my hands how to drive a nail straight,

which spans would bear a load

and which would snap, how to follow

the grain of things, how to hear notes first,

then pluck them as if out of a peach tree.

A single feather in his hair, my son stalks

the squirrel, holds the bow steady,

draws back the shaft, aims, lets fly.

Target and archer are unruffled by the miss.

He bounds over to the arrow, takes it

in his nimble fingers, so like his father's

father's, and nocks the end,

eager to aim, miss and aim again.

Alexandra Smyth

### Exoskeleton Blues

I.

It's that time of the month again—

the moon is bulging out of its socket.

My fillings shriek with pain and everything

is an insult: the skirt that no longer zips,

the door that says pull that won't open

when I push it, the coworker who insists

on ending my name with an 'i' like some kind

of porn star when my email signature clearly

shows I spell it with an 'ie.' I want to be

Alexandra, the patron saint of not giving

a fuck, but the creatures with shells are

suffering and I can't take this anymore.

II.

I am one with the invertebrates, hoping

for chitin and barnacles, armor of my own.

I walk with my belly to my enemies, the only

barrier between softness and the world is

a pair of Spanx one size too small, waistband

chewing a ring around my middle, telling

my lovers "look how small I made myself for

you," while the tell-tale stomach roll flaps

smugly in the breeze. We are all crustaceans

in the bedroom, and when I am in front of you

I feel too big for this skin, wishing I could molt.

III.

The moon, that big old slut, pulls at the tides

and in turn the tides pull on me. My body swells

and deflates, bellwether of blood to come.

I am always surprised at the elasticity of my skin,

the network of silver stretch marks across my hip

a map, literally, of how far I've come. It's the human

body's largest organ, and every seven years

years it regenerates into something new. A lobster

lives for seven years, and will shed its exoskeleton

twenty to twenty-five times. The things that I could do

if I was given fresh armor over two dozen times.

### How to Make Him Love You

First, you must wait:

desire will become dilute, inoffensive,

the last dregs of a drink on the rocks left

to sit and melt. This isn't weakness; this

is patience, an arithmetic of cat and mouse.

Don't become disappointed: this thrill is

evergreen. Soon, you will be held captive, knock-kneed

with wanting. With enough practice, your mouth will fill

with the taste of almonds and milk, your breath will honey

with the rhapsody of absence.

You are strong enough to survive on vapor,

yet you feel a fresh collision beginning

within. When you find him, lost and gasping

in the coatracks, draw him in with your nectar.

You are still soft and ripe, a peach.

### An Obligated Woman

I stagger around you in this empty room,

a breathy vortex of wanting, incapable of

naming this grief shifting inside me, smooth

and heavy like a stone inside a pocket.

The old bat is clanging in the belfry, unable

to see the humane through my own dark lens.

I would sink into your body if it could

provide me any consolation:

I would eat you alive at the crossroads if I thought

the taste would help me swallow this sorrow.

### Post-Post Modernism

I'm trying to call you but you won't pick up.

The 911 operator told me it wasn't an emergency,

wouldn't be for at least three more days. Then maybe,

I could try filing a Missing Persons report, but what's

the point when no one misses you except for me?

I threw out the hair dryer in protest. I filled the bathtub

with seltzer. Maybe I can lead you to carbonated water,

but believe me, I know I can't make you drink. I'll rise to

this challenge. I'll wait here 'til my eyelashes fall out, if

that's what it takes. Was my morning breath really that bad?

I'm sorry I didn't wear that fancy bra. The underwire stuck

into my ribs, and it made me feel like Jesus' slutty little sister.

You know I already have a martyr complex. Did you really

want to feed into that? I'll put it back on if it makes you happy,

you know, but I'll have to call you Judas if that's the case.

I eat spicy things just to feel now. I'm so lonely I put on

the kettle just to have someone to talk to. Even the cat thinks

I'm eccentric. Won't you just come back? The internet is a cold

and lonely place where everyone is wrong, always, and besides, can't you

hear the siren call of my knee socks? I am wearing them just for you.

### Echoes

I fall into you like skinned knees:

sticky meat, red oozing to surface,

your mouth like cold air on a wound.

Blow on it. Anyone who's telling you

they don't like the twinge is lying to

you. We all want that tingle from pain,

then the heady release of analgesic,

how we edge close to oblivion with

pain's fading. If you're truly lucky,

old wounds don't heal right, and you

feel their echoes with the right amount

of pressure; barometric changing.

I press against you at different angles,

seeking out the sweet spot. It occurs

to me in the midst of this hungry

coupling that you are unaware that

this is what I am doing.

John Glowney

### The Bus Stop Outside Ajax Bail Bonds

It's not that they are on their way to anywhere,

although standing at a bus stop might at first

make you believe as they do that they are

more than ready to be somewhere else.

It's a late spring day in Seattle, a little rain

on the discolored facade of the courthouse,

and on this dampened, cracked sidewalk,

as if set aside for another time, they wait:

a slender black woman, her gold-painted fingernails

glorious coins, arguing with an afro-headed man,

who flashes the white blossom of a wandering eye;

a heavy silver-haired eastern European

grandmother, the spike of a cigarette jabbed

upwards from her mouth; a clump

of over-sized jackets and baggy pants

that are three swaggering young Latino boys

next to a tall stem of a young girl

shivering in a mini-skirt, pierced eyebrow

and lip, and an ex-hippie

turned public defender, his ponytail

fraying long gray hairs. In a moment or two

the sun will break through the low clouds

as if to examine all ordinary things, and everyone

will turn and squint, their faces lit

with expectation, as if they never intended

to be so plain, as if this was a chance

for them to shine beyond themselves,

and they can't hide their secret beauty

any more than a flowerpot

can hold back unfurling

its little bundle of petals.

### A Change In Circumstance

A small good deed, I thought, to haul away

the creepers and weeds my wife had, on a Saturday

spring afternoon until sunlight ran out,

cleared and plucked from the flower beds

into an unsightly pile. I scooped bunches

of dirt-besotted stalks and leaves into a bucket,

and heard from its depths then, as if just behind my ear,

the muted persistence of a bee's stalled flight.

My efforts had also disturbed long, fat

earthworms from, I imagined, a pleasant

slumber, or more likely, from their steady

oeuvre of eating the world around them.

They stretched like lazy, elongated accordions,

and tunneled in. But the bee, lured in by the yellow

glimmer of an uprooted dandelion, trapped lover

of unframed air and pollen's narcotic pull,

lover of light's many doors to elsewhere,

is now done in, denied exit. Caught off-guard

by his burial afloat, he buzzes angrily.

His little motor grinds against a root-clouded

medium, no glare of petals to steer passage out of

his clabbered milieu. His circumstance utterly transformed

at the hand of an unwitting giant,

his beautifully engineered form rendered

incompetent, his whirring gossamer wings

beat furiously into the tangled atmosphere,

row him against the fouled heavens,

carry him nowhere.

### From the Book of Common Office Prayers

Let's go where moths go for a smoke break,

or take a mental health day

with the accountants on pilgrimage

among the stub ends of pencils.

Let's schedule a vacation at the monastery

of unpaid invoices,

or take a long lunch sipping martinis

with penguins

singing medieval drinking songs.

Let's lie down

in the quiet room so we can hear

a golden pheasant

slipping through a white picket fence

into green thickets.

Let's use up our sick leave

among the last wisps of breezes,

or take some personal time

in pollen's sideways drift.

Let's take a sabbatical and travel a year

with the sawdust,

or find a cheap apartment in the neighborhood

of the moment

the birds startle into silence

and work

on our novel. Let's take a cruise

on the good ship

Two Week's Notice.

Dear god, let's quit.

### Learning A Trade

Taught the mercy of butchering

the lame cow,

schooled that what is not useful

is waste,

we wised up, staggered

out of bed,

began earlier,

rubbing the dark

from our eyes. We worked

sun down to chaff,

shavings, stalks

discarded, stub-ends, the peelings

fed to swine, day unbuckled

from dawn,

laid all the fields

open, let in

as much light as the fences

would take,

lugged frayed bundles

of leaves, scraped

the branches raw,

cut the dull plow

into the stony reservoir

of topsoil, stored enough

to starve in the spring.

We shouldered up

to the best cows,

milk flowing

and pulsing

into silver cans, slopped

the dregs, straddled

drought's dwindling

ruts, roads to next

to nothing, a bog

of stinking water,

black sky floating

to its end, flies

milling above. The nub

of not enough

our rough apprenticeship.

### Zenith

All this beauty, billboards of women

fifty feet tall, yards of golden

flesh-tone paint. _I am a prisoner of my lips_

_and eyes and hands and skin_ I said.

At the studio, they cut the lights,

gave me a shirt without buttons,

a robe without a belt.

I am lifted upon scaffolding, unfurled.

I am battered and shiny as tin.

Your ink stains my flesh.

My hair is not brushed for me.

How do I feel without clothes I ask.

Pandemonium of rush hour.

A thousand infidelities inch past.

The silk air.

All the eyes crawling over me are ants.

My open mouth, my white teeth.

The trucks on the road all night

from Detroit to Tallahassee

lathe my shape.

The moan of traffic.

The coyotes lie with me,

yellow-eyed, panting.

The moths that cover me at night,

stout, hairy bodies pulsing.

When they are finished with me,

they lower me like a corpse.

I suffer all those who come unto me.

Andrea Jurjevic O'Rourke

### It Was a Large Wardrobe, from My 4-foot Perspective

Deep enough to step into, touch lapels of his suits,

patch leather elbows of tweed jackets, ties lurking

through thin mod prints, hint of naphthalene and musk.

And Mom's feather-light blouses—slack polyester willows.

Rows of empty sleeves faced west, to the window

that framed the rugged Učka curving above the bay,

its hazel-green like the eyes of this fox boa that Dad,

in one of his moments of bravado, had stolen

for Mom, and that she, of course, never wore. Once,

those glassy eyes flashed, as if at the dirt-brown stack

of scuffed briefcases on the ground. Inside, sis and I found,

lay stained, yet still glossy, catalogs of the '70s decadence—

page after frayed page of nudes running through poses.

Our lashes threshed at each of those glam-wantons—

and that dog. We'd seen sunbathers scattered across cliffs,

naked and lazy like fat beige gulls, and that other time

when we peeked through the keyhole at Dede bending

over a steaming bath, his body creased with sickness.

Instead, this show of shipyard makeovers—the hollow O's

of pink-frosted lips, lids caked with silver eye-shadow, thick

semen, and in this up close, Salò-like shot—that puppy's

innocent erection, its mahogany fur almost like our pet setter.

### Romani Orchestra

Even the street kids running by a _kavana_ in this poorly-lit alley know your kind—

another dull Slavic star among clouds of smoke,

balanced on the edge of a rickety stool, leaning toward some new, pretty face,

the two of you cleansed in the reflection of shot glasses.

From their street, your mouth is a funk apparat of familiar lines: all brass, blather,

your tar-grained voice plying romance like a fiery Balkan accordion.

And for a few more dinars between the strings, the violin will keep lamenting,

trumpets coughing their belligerent longing,

your blind hand pawing up her warm knee until the lights come on, spill milk over

your magic squalor, the streets already in their cardboard sleep.

### Time Difference

Six hours apart is not too bad on an average day.

Like when you step into jeans, still stiff

from cleanliness, I slip into the coldness

of sheets. And in some other world

somehow more physical than typing notes

we almost meet in one naked moment,

though not many days are average just as you

are not an average man. Except, you remind me

of someone I knew years ago—at times

even loathed—he, too, was a picaresque consumed

with unrestrained sex and the nursing of plants:

like that ficus with bruised eyes you found

on a street curb and now tend to with UV lamps,

(the blooming cactus he filmed daybreak-to-dusk,

just as _Death in Venice_ observes a man observing a boy).

Like the sun is busy, dedicated to the fading of drapes,

and Albuquerque dust turns the sky into sheets of slate—

how long before the limestone cliffs of the Adriatic?

Like the ebb of a paper cut, the thrill of your messages,

thin and anemic as the hours between them.

Funny, had I loved him less I'd hardly remember him,

just that skin: ashen, after he died, his gaze fixed

at the flickering persimmon out the bathroom window,

leaf shadows on his face, and the fruit of his absent breath—

### More Ferarum

You make me feel graceful in savagery.

With every snarl, each small whine, I shiver like a junkie at the sight

of a burnt teaspoon,

like fever chills zing through bones, like the warmth of panic attacks.

You turn me on in uneasy ways, like a fresh widow's recurred penchant

for crotchless panties,

the sweet ache of fucking against the stone sink behind St. Josephs', chicory

scratching itself, the bells' rings like tongues

gossping. In fact, I think you're the little beast squatting under my ribs,

beating on the djembe—at each thump I tremble:

a smack like the sweet and bitter in Maraschino, a scorpion's pinch.

I feed you nest-tangles of my hair, the skin off the small of my back, toss

in a few fine words— _Spank my ass with that plank-hard cock_ —

so we will never get bogged down with some ordinary anxieties, love,

just like the sea will never stop fighting itself.

### Love Boat

_If I talk to it nicely, will it work?_ he asks

while scanning my card, feeling the strip

on its plastic back. I mumble back something

clumsy. He's cute, though, gives me long looks—

I can tell he hasn't practiced them often.

His arms, their long mossy smoothness

shows under the rolled-up plaid shirt, its tail

tucked loosely below the ribs of his corduroys.

I think, _He is far too young,_ and how I've fallen

for the bookish types too many times before,

how my history with such is enough to fill

the scrawny poetry shelf in the corner,

the one facing golden puff pastry recipes

and columns of self-help manuals.

I think how certain personal histories

should be pushed overboard some transatlantic ship,

made illegal, declined visa and residence and sent

to Cuba, or some other godforsaken place.

But Cuban music is sensuality and vice fused tight

(the stuff decisions are usually made of), and I imagine

Creole nights must have that strange sultry flavor, too.

I think about how mellow sounds can be cues

for something more disturbing—like jazz in movies

signals a brooding scene in a little room in the back,

someone sitting on a bistro chair under a bare bulb,

beaten like the orange pulp of six hundred cracked

mamoncillos. At the same time I fail to understand

the meaning of an unresponsive bookstore card,

and why, an hour later, as I stir granules of raw sugar

into my macchiato, I find that my new notebook

is blank, not ruled, and that paper—its white narcotic

emptiness—takes me back to the soft-spoken clerk.

Lisa DeSiro

### Babel Tree

You've heard of the tower. Well

I tell you, on my street

is an evergreen that speaks

as if in tongues, sounding

like a mob of children

crammed inside a classroom.

Who would think a tree could have

so much to say? St. Francis-

beneath-the-boughs,

presiding over his fellow

statues—cats and raccoons—

steadfast behind their fence,

provides a captive audience

for the prim trimmed evergreen

whenever it's infested

with that unseen sounding

like a multitude of tiny chimes

rung inside a church.

Truth is, this tree serves

as a container, a mouthpiece

for common sparrows

who "when interrupted by

suspicious noise"

shut up.

I tell you, they do. And who wouldn't

be surprised

if a tree fell

silent

the moment he or she

walked by?

### Felled

The hard-hatted cutter climbs with rope and chainsaw,

lopping off branches like hunks of hair

from the top down, until only a shorn torso remains.

Back on the ground, he circles the trunk,

incising. The engine whines.

Two other men stand at a distance holding cables

tied to the highest stump. A third holds up a camera.

When the saw pauses, they gather

together, leaning back,

pulling, arms taut. Takes all their strength

to make the elm tip, then topple. A colossal thud

shakes the whole house.

Spectators on my neighbor's porch applaud.

They don't see me at my window

trying not to cry because this one tree—

that seemed alive while dying, that stayed standing tall as a tower—

has, in less than an hour, been rendered

horizontal and now

lies helpless as a human body.

The black birds never minded

it was leafless every season.

But a petition circulated.

I signed.

### Bereft

That we won't go this year to Payne's to buy

Boston ferns (three for the backyard gazebo,

one for the front porch) and a few red geraniums

and a single green spike (for the terra cotta pot

by the driveway); that we won't open the shed,

pull out the muddied gloves and the wheelbarrow,

weed on our knees as if in prayer; that even though

we will never again share these rituals, spring will

return nonetheless and the earth will continue

undeterred, giving her garden the usual flowers:

daffodils, peonies, roses; that the black-eyed susans

went crazy during summer, as if nourished by her

ashes, my father tells me, months later, still

amazed; that she isn't here to see.

### Greetings from Paradise

Here, breeze-rustled palm trees make a sound almost like the sound

of brown oak leaves clinging to branches tousled by March

back home where winter lingers.

Here, it's already spring. Grass greening the ground. Full-blown

blossoming, purple roadside weeds, fuchsia, jacaranda,

jasmine scent all over the island.

Here, some flowers look like birds and some birds look like flowers.

Even the plainclothes crows strut their stuff with sunlit flare,

glossy as polished patent leather.

Here, a loon joins me for lunch on the bungalow patio. Seagulls

keep me company at the beach while I stroll by the water's

edge, my feet sinking in sand.

Here. Read this. Then send me a message if you're there, if

it's truly a garden, if they've given you petals for wings.

Tell me what it's like.

### Going to Visit the Dead

I know you're here somewhere, intact.

God has given you back

what you lost—

your breast, your ovaries,

your vision, your weight, your energy—

everything. Almost. Lost

is also what we seem to be:

me in the passenger seat,

my Bulgarian friend in the back seat,

her mother driving.

The landscape expands around us

wide and flat. We pass

an orchard adorned with _martenitsa_ :

red-and-white tassels worn during March

for good fortune, good health;

tied to trees on the first day of April

as a sign of winter ending,

spring beginning. I know

you're waiting. I'm afraid

we won't find the way. I can't speak

their language, yet I understand

when my friend says

Sunlight feathers in your hair

and her mother agrees— _yes, wings_ —

Michael Fleming

### Reptiles

Evolve? We'll evolve when we want to. We're

reptiles—we decide. No mother love, no

promises—that's the rule. Don't get too near,

don't think too hard, don't think, don't think we owe

you anything, cause we don't. Where were you

when we hatched? God, you should have seen our shells,

one perfect world piled on another, blue

shells, green—it's true: we made our way. To hell

with your nipples, your kindergartens, your

wedding bells, your rings—oh, we'll show you rings.

We'll show you claws—remember those? The more

you hurt, the more we—nothing. Go ahead, sing—

we don't do music, don't do memories—

why, when we'll outlast you? We don't do fair/

unfair. And we don't do thermostasis.

Go ahead, cry—we're reptiles, we don't care.

### Adventures

Be admonished: of making many books there is no end.

—Ecclesiastes 12:12

For making books, you need to have a certain

appetite, a certain longing, you

need to look, to be quietly alert,

not quite earthbound. It helps to have a few

ideas, to be sure, and to know the rules,

exceptions to the rules, movement of tides.

So many books! But then, so many fools

adrift without them, mapless. Darkness hides

from light, muddle fights with meaning,

illness sleeps with ignorance—it was

ever thus, and so little time between

reckonings, just love and books to shield us

from the rough, mindless elements as we

set out for adventures on sun-drenched seas.

for Fannie Safier

### The Importance of Vowels

Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. . . . In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word "raisin" understood implicitly . . . not unsullied maidens or houris.

—Ibn Warraq, The Guardian, January 11, 2002

The maître d' is sharply groomed, in tie

and tails, he greets you warmly, _Welcome, sir!_

_We've been expecting you!_ And as you eye

the virgins at the bar, selecting, certain

of your righteous consequence, a waiter

approaches with a bright, blinding smile,

and on his fingertips, elaborately

wrought, a silver tray with something piled

beneath a silken napkin. _Sir!_ he says,

plucking off the silk, _Before we begin,_

your seventy-two raisins! Let us praise

_Him!_ With that, he vanishes in a thin

blue wisp of smoke. The virgins are gone. You

invoke your god. A low voice answers, _Who?_

### Traffic Stop

It's just these glasses, officer, I swear—

they're progressives and I'm still getting used

to peering through this tube of startling clarity

amidst a blur of color—blues

like this undersea mountaintop, these reds

like bloody marys, these greens like Vermont,

like forests suddenly summer, like dead

presidents, like love—out here where we want

to be beautiful, here where it's just me,

you, and the universe, a voice to say

that all is well, everything's fine, you're free

to go now, ma'am—you can be on your way.

### Hot Cherry Pie

I always stopped there, the Madonna Inn—

that pink and copper shrine on the way down

the missionary coast, along the thin

thread of mother church's outpost towns—

_San Francisco_ , _San José_ , _Santa Clara_ —

rosary beads a day's walk from one

to the next, or now an hour by car

but still with sacramental purpose. None

of that franchise crap for me. I pulled off

the freeway, _San Luís Obispo_ , hungry

for hot cherry pie and hot black coffee,

body and blood for a soul wrung

out and wasted. Then that one time I spotted

those kids—a boy at the men's room door,

poised to push, his eyes fixed on a girl not

quite his age, maybe a bit older, or

a little further along in the game,

obviously the one in charge, standing there

at the women's, stock still until she aimed

her eyes at his and whispered: _Go. I dare_

_you._ With that they were lost for good behind

those doors—or for better or for worse, who

the hell knows? I paid up and continued my

mission to _Santa Bárbara_ —to you.

for Ellen R.

Michael Berkowitz

### As regards the tattoo on your wrist

It's not that I don't believe you. Rather,

call it some natural curiosity,

born of a childhood's nights

spent beneath the starry curve

of the sky, that makes me

want to discover

for myself

whether Orion really is

the only constellation

traced out on the curves

of your skin.

### Ad Cassandram

Let them come with their black

ships, princess. Let them come

and let them take back

what is theirs. You are not theirs.

I will love you and I will protect you.

Let them come with their black

horses. Let them harness them

to their chariots, let them rein

in their flaring nostrils

with bit and bridle.

Let them ring the dust

around our city

with the tracks of our dead.

It will take more than horses

to bring down our walls.

I will love you and I will protect you,

my beloved. My beloved,

beloved also of the deathless

gods. Most beloved by the most

deathless: master of the strings

of bow and lyre.

•

Cursing the aim of another's arrows, he cursed your own aim: that it might always be true, but never find its mark.

•

Let them cover the sky

with a dozen dozen arrows.

I will love you no less

among the shadows. But

do not put your trust in shadows

and in dreams only you can see.

There is no one else who will.

I will love you and I will protect you.

I will love you but I will not believe you.

### Begotten of the Spleen

And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone;

I will make him an help meet for him.

—Genesis 2:18

And so God reached past Adam's ribs,

and from his spleen was woman born.

And gone from Adam was the melancholy

that the Lord had seen in him,

but for Eve there was nothing

except that same sadness.

There is a way in which you look

off into the distance

that weighs against the lightness

of the heart behind my ribs

in your presence, that I can describe

only as the sinking of swallows,

who do not remember this

morning's sunrise, into evening.

### villanelegy

well

(i said

hell

he fell

on his head (she said

it's just as well

too soon to tell

(they said

what sent him off to hell

or heaven (hell

we said

he liked his drink too well

and so he fell

(they said

hell

there's nothing more to tell

so toast to heaven for the dead

and for the living, well,

hell

### Julie

When you think

about it, if you

think about it,

what did us

in wasn't your

anger or my

apathy, but that

_if_ in the second line.

Michael Brokos

### Landscape without Rest

I step aside as a boy pedals

fast downhill, our path blazed

by cedar chips, his father

ambling at the crest, and fret

against the grip of my own

vectors, the straight lines, strict

dimensions, days that race by

too easily for the neighbors,

too scrutinized for me; but don't

we make a fine match, strike

a spry exchange, don't we

light a fused flame, how they

keep the tires of their bicycles

inflated, and how no one ever

showed me how to ride, and

the way these widening lanes

make way for flashes of rubber,

flares of cottonwood leaves.

### Singing Stone

—After César Vallejo

My cigarette proves suitable

since I, too, am burning to a stub. How dizzying,

how carcinogenic to wield the world between

my own fingers, my own star going down in smoke

for a few moments

until the ember begins to flicker, and the world

takes its last drag,

stooping down to put me out in an empty furrow.

Lying in an open grave,

through the abiding veins of light I can see

my back story, my body

carried away in a trade wind racing across

blotted out mountains

made of stars

that Paris keeps turning towards itself,

stars that turn over thousands of times more

of their own accord

in the Andes, Trujillo, Santiago de Chuco,

caves collapsing

and my villagers' bones asleep in their red hats.

Downpour descends on me

as forecasted, my voice dry from trying to greet

the raw and forgotten

in music not precisely music, only the ashy

expectorations of panpipes and corequenques.

### Hunting Season

Out in the clearing, the cold

season's coming on, a walled fog

of lights and my bones

courting evasion, coerced

into stealing away

from a public suddenly

steadfast on staking me out.

I'm sticking close

inside the high embankment

of the river, but they will

find me, and take aim.

The facility with which

I shift through the seeming

boundlessness of the forest

appears to play in my favor

but in effect forms

the groundwork of the game, of my

bulls-eye. I sense their scopes

sighting in on me when I bend

down to drink from

the smallest streams.

The sky letting go of its

last warmth, limbs their leaves,

storm clouds leaning into

trees—the terrain

betrays me in the same

distention that my instincts,

being so sought after,

forget how to seek escape.

### Wingbeat

Not the procedure of inverted perch;

not the flitting at the feeder

brimming with sugar water

dyed bright red. Not the reverence

of echoes buried deep, lasering

stillness to a shrill point B

embedded in point A

by line alone, and only then

after the flight is over; not the discipline

to lift a mouth and eyes

from food, from coloring,

or the fundamental music

wingbeat speed produces.

What figures is the wanderlust

for flight, the worry

the one that flies inside inspires: how

to chase it out? The shooing

of the bat that matters

most; or all too fast, the blur

of the hummingbird whirring by.

### Stream Water, Stream Light

Stream water, stream light in the easy creek

that snaked and hissed at the bottom of the hill

all summer long, while houseflies at the crest

assembled to swing in signatures across

garbage bags ripped open by raccoons,

regalia of the driveway. We ignored

this festival of feastful decay whenever

we came indoors or left—the stores of moisture,

pools of light prismatic in our eyes

transfigured those peripheral scenes and stenches.

How we held on to an unswerving comfort,

reclining in our shared stretch of the bank,

groping among the termites in the wicker,

staying naked, since our clothes weren't clean.

Michael H. Lythgoe

### Orpheus In Asheville

Every Prelude is a beginning; preludes begin in the heart.

Carla is the diva of the opera at the Biltmore gala;

her moves are melodies; she is soprano of the samba,

Telemann, and Gluck's _Orfeo_ , a Brazilian with the Vanderbilts.

Her curves are smooth as polished wood. He plays her

on his hand-crafted lute . . . lingering on each swell & hollow.

His fingers work wonders on each fret; he feels the timbre

in each string of her. Each of his tunes is a prelude to love-

making; a prelude is a love song old—beginning anew.

And he knows, as he plays the theme song from _Black Orpheus_ ,

that he is creating a multilingual score; she leaves him a scent

of gardenias, on the arm of a tuxedo; in the lobby Orpheus plays solo.

He is the grandson of an old-world stone mason, an artisan

who built the Biltmore Estate to last. His musician's hands

trained to knead deep as in a spa's hot stones massage.

The guitarist loves her operatic interludes caressing his guitar.

Gliding away in a limo, she leaves him composing in the lobby.

In a midnight slide off Black Mountain Road

she is a skater in a love story ending in broken glass,

black ice; mezzo in shards; rime ice clasps her body,

clouding Craggy Cascades in icy droplets—a glistening freeze

on the windward face's mountain limbs at dawn. He lost her;

she left him on New Year's Eve for a mountain in fog; he searched

underground for her, charmed cave mouths into a chorus; the trees—

around the Highland Hospital where Zelda burned—learn arias.

Orpheus' fingers melt Looking Glass Falls every spring into lyricals.

A mythical musician, ever-improvising Preludes, plays instrumentals;

stones—cold Blue Ridge stones—break into Bel Canto.

### Schumann Composed For Cello

On the car radio, NPR plays a concerto.

Schumann, they say, was soothed by cello music.

So he composed slow paced compositions, to soothe

his troubled moods. No longer does a duo

make beautiful music together on violin & cello.

A woman screams at a man—waves her bow.

Their romantic instruments, left unplayed, soon break.

The duo flares, burns up, flames out before their libretto

ends in ashes, breaking the ancient Dao of Ying

& Yang; no smooth curves fit Dao harmony

into place. Artists cannot last if love is less

than their music. He leaves for the Beijing Symphony.

She stays to teach. They shared a bed before bows

crossed their strings like electric shocks. No concerto.

### Frida Kahlo On South Beach At The Bass Museum

I had no idea I was going to miss her so much.

—Diego Rivera

Frida wore white on SoBe for art deco,

a floor length native dress to hide her legs—

(Madonna wore a man's tuxedo)—

peasant beads, bare arms, scooped neckline.

A floor length native dress hides her legs

as she lies recovering from a miscarriage, in body cast.

Frida loved folklore, peasant beads, scooped necklines.

Next to her, Rivera—muralist—is an elephant.

Lying, recovering from a miscarriage, in body cast . . .

Picasso gave her golden amulet earrings in Paris.

Next to Frida—a dove—Rivera is an elephant muralist.

Frida's features in photographs line the gallery walls.

She wears Picasso's golden-hand earrings from Paris.

Her dark eyebrows, thick as fur, are wings in flight.

Frida's images in photographs line the gallery walls;

an unsmiling face reveals hints of hair above her lips.

Her eyebrows—like dark fur—are wings in flight.

The dove was crushed by Rivera's seduction of her sister.

Unsmiling face, Jewish blood, hair above her upper lip,

superstitious artist, loved by other artists taking her picture.

Rivera ripped her heart, seduced her sister.

At Casa Azul, she paints from a mirror, exposed in black & white.

Photographers fall in love taking her picture.

She paints nudes in jungles, poses with parrot & monkey.

In Casa Azul . . . gored by trolley handrail, exposed in black & white;

Frida unbuttons her white native dress to the waist,

she paints nudes in jungles, poses with parrot & monkey.

To reveal solitary, pale fleshy pearls—plain pink nipples.

She unbuttons her white peasant dress down to the waist,

clasping her hands under her bare breasts with pink areolas,

revealing pearl twins of pale flesh, plain pink nipples.

Bewitched by her Tejuana look, I feel her spell; another lover.

Clasping her hands under bare breasts with pink areolas:

_Frida, Nude Torso_ , 1938 photograph—alive—by Julien Levy.

Bewitched by her Tejuana look, I feel her spell, another lover.

The third eye in her surreal self-portrait, an exotic tattoo, hypnotic.

Alive in her art, _Frida, Nude Torso,_ 1938 photo by Julien Levey.

Kandinsky leaves his tears on her cheek as he kisses her.

The third eye in a surreal self-portrait, an exotic tattoo, hypnotic,

hooks me like Picasso's earrings, her mythic scarves, ex-votos.

Kandinsky leaves his tears on her cheek as he kisses her.

I leave Robert Deniro to drink in art deco at the Chesterfield,

Frida, mythical in her scars, Picasso's earrings, ex-votos,

pass Casa Casurina, where Gianni Versace was murdered.

I pass Robert Deniro drinking in art deco at the Chesterfield;

Al Pacino played a M _arielito—Scarface—_ at 13th & Ocean Drive;

I see Casa Casurina, blood stains gone, Versace murdered.

I taste Frida's skin even after the iced bitter lemon drink.

Al Pacino played a _Marielito_ in _Scarface_ at 13th & Ocean Drive.

Selma Hayak wore a white peasant dress at the Bass Museum.

Frida's taste lingered on my lips long after the bitter lemon drink.

Versace models slink & strut as I leave a lover, artists in art deco.

### Driving to Columbia

Last night I heard _Thank you_

for taking care of me.

I was reading _A Handfull of Dust_ ; last

night I heard the icemaker cough.

My dead father stares at me

from an empty store window.

I smell coffee, raspberry, rain,

and Old Spice this morning.

The pink rose in the garden fell

into petals before I left the house.

People gather on Route 302

for a horse show. A horse trainer

drove his horse trailer 21 hours

from New Mexico to run for roses.

Used cars wear their worth

on their foreheads. Confederate

soldiers, on their way to a war

in a pickup, stop

for a red light. Smooth Jazz plays

Bony James covering

Stevie Wonder—

a song I no longer remember.

I heard you say to me _thank you_

for taking care of me.

### Ars Poetica

Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones . . .

—Charles Wright

If you keep your ear to the ground,

you will hear oceans form shore lines.

Each line is a breath, a complete thought,

a lapse, a story, a Station of the Cross,

a meditation. Some words are as heavy

as a horse's hoof. Others are nimble

as a dancer with ankle bells. Some drum.

Always sing words out loud. Don't let them fall

flat. Pick up the vowels to roll like marbles.

Spit fragments out. Consonants cut a rock face.

Carve or break the stone of the line;

what is left is what you mold; what you speak.

Then you chisel it in. Then you put it down.

Keep your ear to the ground. Words are coming.

The ocean sends shore lines to ground.

Maybe the dead walked in your room

last night, looked in the mirror,

touched your body with the gloves off,

left an envelope on your desk.

Open it. Listen. Try to get the words right.

It takes a certain mind to read between the lines.

Silence is the space, the air, the pause worth hearing.

Feel absence in your bones; a heart beat is a tone.

Atone. Let yourself go in the undertow.

To hear clay utter undertones, go alone.

John Wentworth

### morning people

Like the twisting, turning path that at last breaks

into a clearing where you can sit among wildflowers,

and the cacophony of noise along the path at last disperses

into calls of birds and leaf rustlings that you can isolate and truly hear,

the hours of another day and sleepy night bring you at last

to another early morning and to the worship of the stillness of the moment.

How is it that the you you most truly are is so concealed?

When along the path so many stop to talk and listen?

When so many truly care to know who you are?

How is it that they never know?

This pencil, this crack in the window glass, this dead flower—

pick any image you like—

is not the same in the stillness of the morning as it is at night

and for anyone who fails to understand this, well, they can

try to understand you as hard as they will,

but they will never get it right.

### Watching My Love

Pick something to watch

And there is so much there to see

Almost no matter what you pick—

A mushroom on tree bark in the woods

A cat's-eye marble under bright light

A leaf floating in a fountain

The night sky

An envelope stained with a lipstick kiss

A fly-covered horse hind-end twitching in the sun—

If you pause at nearly any image for long enough

You discover something about the image

And about yourself.

"I see."

("Look closer.")

"Oh, yes, I see."

While my lover sleeps, I watch her face

As the streams of breath through her nostrils are in my veins

As the lashes over her eyes are rich, webbed thickets

As the shiny slope of her nose trembles in the scent of dust

As her matted hair curls delicately around the lobe of an ear . . .

And as her plump lips trace faintly just the notion of a smile

I understand that I love her best while she sleeps.

"I see."

("Look closer.")

"Oh, yes, I see."

But I am so sorry.

I am so, so, terribly sorry, my darling

That through teary eyes I watched my love again this morning,

And it was you that I saw

It was your breath in my veins

Your sweet whisper at my lips

But all in the past, or in my memories, or in my imaginings as you sleep.

For when I bent to move my lips onto your hand,

Your fingers had moved on your nightgown into a fist.

I watched so closely.

I watched so closely I could hear myself watching in the silence of the room.

And what did I understand? What did I believe I knew?

That this fist was your heart toward me, clenching tight, never to open again.

A tear slid down my cheek onto the foot of the bed.

I turned from watching bitterly, my eyes blank and empty,

So that I did not see the fist blossom like a flower, open into fingers

That might have held me yet again if I had looked closer, and longer.

### Saying Goodbye

Five times we have said goodbye,

and there will be more between us.

Have we built our love on our goodbyes?

I see you in bed, on the streets of Alexandria,

in airports, and in the brown grass of muddy fields in fall,

saying goodbye.

In dreams, I see us in the places we've been together,

and also in places we've never been,

and from everywhere, it is the same—

you are waving goodbye.

Learning from both slow, frozen tears shining in glass

and the torrential bursts of heartbreak,

we are becoming fluent in the language of goodbye.

Even now, from a car window, your fingers deftly spell our alphabet:

goodbye, goodbye.

Of course there is only one true goodbye.

And I wonder, will I recognize the day I never see you again?

Will I wake up with that heavy knowledge,

or will I never know, always hoping

for one more hello, yearning for the broken promise

of one more greeting?

If you'll let me, I will share a thousand more goodbyes with you

before our last one—

and that very last time I see you, ever,

I will say _hello,_

as we settle in together into our home

of my heart's memory,

where, even while you live the minutes of another daily life,

you will live forever with me in an eternal goodbye.

### 1929—for my father

"You're tracking footprints in the house," she said.

Was he dreaming? Wasn't he asleep on the screened porch,

The midsummer breeze touching his toes hanging over the couch,

The fat part of his arm a pillow under his head,

His eyes closed to the golden sun glinting in through the screen,

His belly full from a burger and four bottles of beer,

His day behind him a spent dollar on a lazy Sunday,

His night ahead a warm glow of lamp light on his bed,

His memories mixing with his ideas of how things were &

How they were meant to be?

"Have you even thought about it?" she said, somewhere nearby.

He breathed a breath, felt the breeze on his toes,

Aware of her somewhere near him, sweeping the floor,

Stirring dust, mixing tomorrows with yesterdays.

Half-asleep, he was dreaming, seeing his future

Laid out before him as sure as the radiant days already lived—

But now with his boy, his first child, his son.

_It'll be a boy, all right,_ he thought. _It'll be a boy._

The sun glinted through the screen onto the porch,

And the breeze was a whisper, a promise, a secret.

Christopher Jelley

### Double Exposure

Dad rattles into the family room,

groans down in his big yellow chair.

Trying to focus warped vision on the album,

he puzzles over the faces.

Our first time canoeing through Bull Sluice:

we broke a paddle, nearly wrapped the boat,

rammed the bank, snagged roots.

We both nursed an ice-cold Murphy's stout.

Dad, all smiles, pointing to his beer, me dripping dry

in a spring sun that set almost forty years ago.

A camera flash:

I'm an old man in a new photograph.

### Love and Waffle Fries

We rehearse _The Tempest_ ,

conjure fresh magic

from five hundred year old prose.

Reciting our lines into a mantra,

more than mere meter and verse,

an ancient incantation,

a transmutation of flesh—

we _are_ Miranda and Ferdinand.

Two sparks fanned into an inferno,

hormones racing at light speed,

devouring the last of childhood,

unstoppable.

You are the girl with a half-pulled

zipper on her bedroom ceiling.

One side of the painting a gold

stripe running from the edge of the wall

to the center of the room, a detailed

rendition. From here the mural

opens to reveal a wedge of jet-black

sky filled with glow-in-the-dark planets,

whirling galaxies, shooting stars.

As with most art, and with all girls,

I'm not sure what to think.

The mural poses several questions,

although for a teenage boy,

only one question matters—

is that zipper half open?

### Nick's

I.

A last game break cracks,

squeaking chalk pivots

on custom pool sticks.

Stripe and solid scatter,

race for soft edges, batter

each other's tangents,

bump cushion,

slow-roll

stop.

One player props against a stool,

re-lights a Marlboro.

Another coolly stalks the green slate field,

calling his next best shot.

In a corner, a couple seeks distance.

She sits erect listening, staring

at the floor. He sidles into her gaze, reaching

for her shoulder, she jerks away—two hearts

in a Gordian knot.

Co-eds help a birthday friend giggle home.

Their waitress fills a tray with empty bottles,

(one stuffed with a carefully peeled label),

wipes her once white rag across the tabletop,

pockets the ten—hard-won milk-money.

A Miller man sits at the bar sweet-talking

the dirty ash tray, picks at a half-dozen cold

hot wings. Across the thin room, a plain woman

locks his copper eyes—smiles him over

for a few quick shots. He holds open

her black leather coat—

they trickle toward the side door.

_Santana_ wails, in stereo:

. . . _tryin' to make a devil out of me._

II.

Under a fog comforter

_good mornings_ are exchanged

in half-tone light.

Fingers grope

a plastic coffee spoon,

double-sweeten instant.

Nothing is promised, nor expected.

I fasten an out-of-town tie,

snick the door locked.

Outside, two tentative song birds

call mates. A neon sign buzzes:

_vacancy_.

Catherine Dierker

### dinner party

a dishtowel tucked

in your back pocket

that i follow

as we walk

up the stairs

single file

a quiet entrance

shoes are removed

the humility of

standing in socks

before you

for the first time.

### movie night

low light in the doorway

thin and pallid,

sourceless

a glow that works well

with the evening,

the mood

on screen a film plays

out in crimson,

it bleeds

this place calls for

something fragrant,

breathing

a flower.

### cocktail hour

endless summer.

no socks and

pants rolled up

drink in hand

with one leg

crossed, casual.

he's a cool

match for

a kid like me

calm-faced and

quiet, sits

like a listener

the picture

makes me

want to sing

or at least

to swing down

and kiss his

bare ankle.

### window treatment

your fingers are deft

they fold clothes neatly

draw perfect flowers

cut fruit with precision

tonight, as you ready

the table, i sit waiting

watching the sun set

through a curtained window

like smiling through a veil.

### a bike ride / the christening

together we crossed over

to a place of quiet, of peace

where we will swim

in the lake of endless depths.

the moment of diving

the hardest moment

the curve of restraint

the fear of violence.

shattering light,

shattering glass

we crossed over

flying, crying—

with wind

with gravel

hitting our faces

stinging our eyes.

William Doreski

### Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin

Reading Dante has taught me

to hate the sinner, not the sin.

An hour before dawn the mirror

in the bathroom confirms that pride

defines and defiles me, the pores

of my parchment hide opened

to flattery I never receive.

I should replace myself with lust,

with the smirk of the lecher;

but you with your usual beauty

would find that expression comic

on me, a Halloween mask

two weeks early. Our barred owl

hoots his tedious medley,

each note thick as a woolen scarf.

Stars rattle loose in their sockets,

and one goes down with a shriek.

Or is that the neighbor's rooster?

Pride offends me enough to cut

my throat, but I can't afford

to waste an expensive razor blade

by indulging a little vengeance.

Besides, you'd have to clean up

after me, and I know you hate that.

The microwave oven beeps

that apologetic little beep

and the cat's breakfast is done.

The kettle boils water for coffee.

I should swallow my pride in doses

modest enough to fully digest,

but the famous portrait of Dante

with limber nose and oval mien

leers on a paperback cover

to confirm how clumsy I look

unshaven and fluffy with sleep.

I pour hot water over grounds

and realize this is punishment

enough, the daily unraveling

of ego in bite-sized chores, each

modest enough to kill me.

### Post-Neoclassical Poem

The blond forest undressing

leaf by leaf reminds me

how you've courted every man

who's leaned even slightly your way.

Two brooks converge. A boulder

overlooks the pool where nymphs

bathe on summer nights while humans

indulge in mortal dream lives.

I'd like to creep here in the dark

and watch moonlight catch a glimpse

of metallic bodies flashing.

I'd like to compare their grasp

of the classics with your own;

but with your mastery of legal

Latin you'd probably snuff me

under a heap of edicts and writs

to enjoin me from remembering

how frankly naked you could be.

Of course you don't want to contrast

your old-fashioned body with theirs.

Of course the brooks flushing down

from the twin monadnocks have chilled,

dispersing mythic creatures

until the next two seasons pass.

At the ruined stone dam, two deer

startle and flee. The folding chair

left to rust many years ago

still invites me, so I sit.

The light seems smaller, too shy

to support complexities no painter

since Constable can endorse.

Three miles above, a jetliner

sears the air. It's headed your way

with fuel enough to eat all three

thousand miles between us, leaving

only the faintest taste of ash.

### Moustaches of Slaughtered Heroes

Framed in expressive black oak,

your watercolors stick to the wall

like leeches. Frost hikes its skirts

at the pond's edge where geese chat

about flying to Kentucky.

Do I hear a drumroll enter

your small conversation? Do stones

at the bottom of the pond expect

to testify? Other events squeeze

from the tubes of paint arranged

by hue and cry. Brushes become

moustaches of slaughtered heroes.

In gusts of small talk you project

the naked retorts of the moons

of Saturn and Jupiter. Half mind,

half sun, you're anything but flesh

now that flesh has lost its fashion.

Your horizons sport crows and jays

to herd away the geese that spangle

your lawn with gray wet droppings.

Yet the bird wars occur mainly

in literature you're too proud to read.

I prop myself against a wall and wait

for the pond to freeze with tingling

and cries of pain. Your husband plans

to stay up all night and whisper

your fetishes to the stars. Why

should you care? Sparks roughed

from visiting boulders tender

light and heat enough to ease you

into those last gestures artists

require for their celestial fame.

Your water colors resist you

just enough to cling to three

or four dimensions, honoring

or more likely blaming you.

### Naked Under Our Clothes

Naked under our clothes, we enter

the famous public library

as if unaware that even

avid old scholars possess

bodies as secret as ours.

You head for the gardening books

while I descend a floor to scour

the art books for Gauguin prints

to rip out and smuggle home.

The canned air smells chemical.

The librarians nod and smile

and wish they could step outside

fresh as King Lear in the rain.

While you read about designing

gardens with water features

to foster turtles and frogs, I bless

the tropics for inciting Gauguin

to portray such burly colors.

Later we'll meet for lunch

at the oyster bar where lawyers

and their paralegals hunker

at small tables and plot their trysts.

Someone should paint their expressions,

which prove that they're too aware

of how naked they could be

if circumstances should allow.

I find a couple of honest prints

but lack the strength or moral

fiber to tear them from the books.

Maybe I'll copy them with flimsy

pencil sketches from my youth.

The lines shiver, stutter and fail,

but the effort relieves and renews me.

For a moment everyone's naked

and tropical in hue, even upstairs

where you flirt with photos of gardens

Adam and Eve would have scorned.

### A Hideous Verb

Self-condemned to adult camp

to punish my political self,

I weep with arts and crafts all day

and drink with friends all night.

The weather sighs like a bagpipe.

The horizons crumple and fold.

I miss you the way a bullfrog

misses his croak. I'd phone you,

but you'd hear the hangover creak

in my voice and disdain me.

I've sewn you a leather wallet

and crimped several blobs of jewelry.

I've even woven a wool rug

that isn't quite rectangular.

When with my fellow campers

I walk to the village at dusk

I suspect you're watching via

satellite TV. In local bars

we slurp cheap beer and play darts.

No fights, no politics, religion.

Only the slush of draft beer, kisses

with little force behind them,

promises to keep in touch.

Porous belief systems fail

in this crystalline atmosphere.

Dawn breaks the backs of couples

caught in narrow bunks. Such crimes

lack resonance. After breakfast

of groats, instructors apply

cobbler's tools—hammer, awl, needle—

to leather, plastic and wood.

We follow step by step. Always

with you I've followed step by step,

but at last I've learned that "craft"

not only makes a hideous verb

but encourages useless skills.

Robert Barasch

### Loons

My daughter photographs loons—

finds them in their nests, tracks them

as they swim across lakes, knows

when the hatchlings are due, waits

to record first swims.

She photographs babies on the backs

of their mothers and fathers, the same

who dive from under them

to emerge from the water with fry

to put into their mouths.

I have pictures of my daughter on my back

and of my granddaughters on her back

and of my great-grandchildren

on their parents' backs

and being fed treats over shoulders.

"Up," my children would say

and we understood and lifted them.

Lev Vygotsky proclaimed:

no thought without language first

and I think of the loons' calls.

Are the words of instruction in those yodels,

setting the babies to think about leaping up?

Did I grab my mother's breast without a thought?

Did Helen Keller's first thought come on that famous day,

or do we just not understand?

### Pas De Deux

The fourteen-month-old boy stands,

one hand on the edge of the chair

before launching himself

toward his great-grandmother,

who grips the edge of the kitchen counter

before stepping out

toward the table between them,

one amazed at his new way of travel

the other perplexed by hers.

They continue to learn new steps of their minuet,

first performed shortly after he was born.

Early variations included slow dancing in rocking chairs,

arm and hand motions together on a piano bench,

these and others before the early warnings.

Now, both vertical, the choreography calls

for their hands to meet at the center of the room,

an awkward couple among complacently confident dancers.

The background music is both silent and polyphonic,

his a Sousa-like march with flute and cymbals,

hers a violin with slipped tuning,

strings frayed, notes elusive,

more and more unreachable.

One peers gleefully into the opening out,

the other squeezed by the relentless closing in.

### Bedazzled

That 'possum never had a chance,

dazzled as she was by the beam of light,

brightest star of her night; she,

fading already in their thoughts

before the warm glow of the fire.

They sat and talked about her—

how her eyes gave back to them

part of the light they gave to her—how

each shot once, the three shots hitting her—

how she lay, limp fur, on the ground.

So Mary, seventeen, a game girl,

lay drunk on her father's lawn

while the three football stars talked

in the red glow of the Wurlitzer,

recalling her hungry eyes, her furry gift,

her falling into a loose heap

when they dropped her off at home.

### Spring of 2001

Fifteen feet of snow and twenty below

got the downtown caucuses talking.

"Might not get a garden this year."

"Tractor tires still frozen to the ground."

"Old horse'll have to eat snowballs this summer."

At the red store, a man at the gas pump said

it was because of killing the rain forest.

Another one said you can't blame nukes

for this one. A man at another pump said

"Oh yes you can it's the final tab

for Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Oblivious, the croakers strained their muscles

pushing the sluggish mud, breathing stilled,

letting their cold skin suck muddy bubbles

of air. All pushing at the same time,

they sent currents to the ceiling of the pond,

startling the ice. Like a locomotive in a roundhouse,

the engine of winter got turned around;

still, no one heard a sound. Suddenly,

only two weeks behind schedule,

the snow receding to the shadiest woods,

the songs erupted in the pond. This year,

along with their songs of longing,

the frogs were bragging, raucously,

"Wedidit, wedidit, wedidit."

And three days later, the peepers joined,

"Yousee, yousee, yousee."

### Community

The turkeys, who have been coming in small groups

seem to have got together last night at a meeting

thirty of them coming into the field this morning.

Perhaps they were considering the weather

light frosts two nights and today ninety degrees,

and the dozen little ones.

Who hatched these youngsters in late August

they must have been asking, the answer

plain to all of them and even to me

who thought I could read embarrassment

in the eyes of the fidgety hen and the blushing

of an old Tom's beard.

When they hear the geese going over soon

they might wonder about joining them

nudged by a vestigial memory that hangs

like a human coccyx or appendix

with impulse to action, fit only for dreaming

of perpetual summer.

Rande Mack

### bear

this man wears his shadow like a frumpy uniform

his temper is dubious but he can't put it down

he walks into a bar and silence buys the first round

it takes the toasts of strangers to divest his thirst

the stains on his shirt are the medals on his chest

the moon pulls his bravado around by its nose

he smells sweat slippery between breasts

he smells dew beading on wild strawberries

he fords rapids running through raging hearts

his passion insatiably pirouettes in the mirror

his spectacles are fly specked and tinted with fog

what he sees in front of him is not always there

his appetite leads him through a gluttonous waltz

he winks at the future as he dances with the past

the toes he steps on limp away from the brawl

his mother once tangoed time out the door

he keeps her estate in the heel of his shoe

clocks pick his pockets when he falls to the floor

### bat

this man clings to the underside of over

he signs his name to documents that won't rhyme

he paints his mailbox with mustard and guano

he plays the radio his mother kept in her kitchen

in the winter he fine tunes crackling frequencies

searching late night static for a taste of hum

his frost bit ears gather the cloudy music of tiny wings

he once danced in starlight with hungry zigzagging women

now his stomach growls as he swerves to avoid the downbeat

this man sprinkles mosquitoes on short ribs and omelets

he inoculates his memories with mother's milk and rabies

his great uncles sipped the blood of slumbering giants

on whetstones of dragonfly bones he sharpens his teeth

he squints as the moon blooms in fragrant dark corners

he sniffs gasping blossoms he finds quivering in shadows

his dreams are upsidedown and cratered with echoes

the mirrors in his heart are turned towards the wall

he fondles the what ifs of what must be abandoned

### marmot

this man is mangled by sawblades of sleep

he wakes up counting his fingers and toes

spotlights fracture the gnarled grain of his dreams

this man is puzzled by the jazz of his own charisma

hope is measured by the length of his shadow

his dreams are branches that won't fit in the stove

he keeps a portrait of the moon next to his pillow

minutia nibbles on the varnish of his pseudonym

his handshake is a cage in the middle of a smile

laughter is a mirror he shines in curious faces

the shine on his shoes belonged to his father

meaty ledgers were balanced and waiting

he lives in a maze with maps on the walls

he tips the doorman but whistles for the waiter

hunger is an ancient voice in destiny's choir

his harmonies are stumps on the forested edge

his heart is a blackbird in a frost stippled tree

his fate a tarnished spoon sprinkling his ashes

### magpie

this man takes out the trash in his tuxedo

he reeks of roadkill he powders his crotch

he sharpens his creases he slicks back his hair

he struts through the hush like he owns all the vowels

he jaywalks with a flair through rush hour traffic

he could get smeared without ruffling a feather

he is a matador sidestepping wheels in a jammed up dream

he is the only son of a sleepwalker and a pilot car driver

at the end of the road a sliver of moon stabbed his mama's heart

his heart is an old valley slowly choking with intersections

his lovers with their mysteries and mirrors are good for a laugh

his syllables are waves of glass shattering on shores of stone

he is the sergeant of arms in a cathedral of criminal minds

he likes soda in his scotch and his eggs just about to hatch

when shadows steal the day misfortune cues his favorite tune

all his cards are on the table . . . face down but on the table

he has no name for the silence slowing upping the ante

nor for the drumroll about to goosebump his soul

Susan Marie Powers

### Red Bird

Snow swells over fence posts,

drapes pine branches and softens

the edge of an ax

propped against a stump.

Once a plane crash survivor,

arms folded, quietly told me

how the engine died, the soft screams grew,

and cups flew amid staccato cries of "no."

Then the memory falls away

and a cardinal, red as blood,

beats wings against the snow,

lands on the stump.

I close my eyes but the rays

come through my closed lids.

Red wings sparkle in the sun.

I remember my old dog dying in my arms,

unable to walk, folded legs limp in my lap.

The needle glistened as the vet's eyes watered,

I held my dog, stroked the warm ear.

Snow softens all it touches.

Numbing, hiding, icing over

the way I loved a man long ago.

Now days go by without thoughts of him,

yet shadows chase me when I see another man

with his hands: clean and strong.

I have felt life tingle inside me,

and then it bled away.

I cried, unable to stop the loss

of someone who never was.

The cardinal launches into the air,

his red heat burns brightly.

The survivor found herself

holding hands with strangers.

Everybody aboard touched:

lovers, strangers, children.

Eyes closed, fingers entwined,

ending life as they had begun it:

absorbing the warmth of another.

The red bird darts looking

for what it wants.

I stand in the snow while somewhere

smoking fragments burn my feet,

feathers touch me, wings graze me.

I wait for the blade

to cut me;

I wait to fall

into space.

### Moored

Every moored boat tugs at its tether,

small waves disappear into larger ones.

The dock reaches out, but can't cross the sea.

I stand on the shore and squint at impossible distance.

When I was a girl of fifteen,

I tied our small sailboat to the dock.

The boat's bright yellow reflected in the water,

The rope was too short to secure

both ends, so I left it:

tethered at one end, loose at the other

The next morning, I arose to sun on my ceiling,

a pattern of light, bouncing off the water

beneath my bedroom window—squiggles and whorls

played off the painted surface

like soundless music.

Easy, the golden day ahead,

I walked outside where I found

the boat battered into splintered boards.

A nighttime storm had set it into motion

so it cracked itself in two.

Now I watch boats calm and controlled,

and wonder about a rhythm so violent

my very structure would come undone,

shaking apart everything put so carefully into place,

the wildness more powerful than the bond,

the waves overwhelming the vessel.

Can I go back in time to my fifteen-year-old self?

Secure the boat to resist the storm?

Defy waves struggling to undo knots?

Or do knots come undone

as time nimbly unties us from what we love?

Now, with decades behind me,

I send a benediction to that sleeping girl,

who cannot foresee what the night will bring.

### Happy Buddha

A stone Buddha in Provincetown

squats among singing lilies and gladioli.

Their summer voices blare orange pastels

in loud speaker fashion.

Buddha, how do you resist the urge

to swing your plump hips to this sunny blast of colors?

Surely, you must rise from that lotus position

and belly dance among the cone flowers:

your lovely round tummy smoothly

undulating in the afternoon sun.

The roses twining the fence

beg you for a kiss.

Maybe a tango would do as you pull their

vines hither and yon.

And before you foxtrot back to your spot,

take me in your arms for a sexy waltz.

Look deeply into my eyes,

and I will sigh as you

pirouette into place,

already missing your strong arms.

Anne Graue

### Sky

We were always looking up

in spring; those months so

hot and cold anything could happen;

funnels dropped, vanished,

vacuumed up between the clouds.

The Midwest sky turned

jaundiced and still.

Oklahoma knew it was coming:

the cliché of the freight train,

the stillness,

the mass of moving earth.

This time, the myth would shred

the houses to toothpicks

scatter photographs

and houses like paper shells.

In Kansas, tornado

drills were routine;

I thought we would outlive

whatever hit us; our heads

down, legs cramped, breath

hot above our folded laps.

Carrying my blanket

down under the stairs, my

father's shortwave crackling

weather reports,

I knew I would not survive

when the tornado hit

our house. Living would be

too difficult, as the living always is.

### Her Letter to Kurt Vonnegut, 1982

There's a place in Kansas City

called Montana Wildhack's;

I thought we might meet for a drink

and talk about Cat's Cradle or

Slaughterhouse Five. It would be

nice, nice, very nice.

My sister knows the place.

It isn't a gay bar, really, but

she might have kept that secret

(she is so used to keeping that

secret); she just likes the name,

I think, and said she'd take me.

I think you write like you know

all too well how humans behave—

the writing is spiritual,

tough, real. (Too much?)

My sister hasn't read a word

of it, and probably won't; it's

not her thing. She leaves reading

to me except for Anais Nin

or the author of 9 1/2 Weeks;

The books were in her room

and she was out.

Earthly conversation

would suffice, not be

the end of the world,

frosty and nuclear—

so it goes.

She told me she was in love

with a woman one night

in an old pickup we hot-wired.

At her friend's house with a pool

late at night, we drank beer

and swam above the Playboy

logo, down and back and down.

I am sure this type of thing

has happened, more or less; this

may be one of the good times

we concentrate on, ignoring

awful ones. I hope you will

consider meeting me

the next time you're in Kansas City.

### Cycles

Spring hot, yet

it feels like fall—

through weak bones

through clotted skin

thickened and congealed—

jaundiced spring and wild

ochre seep through

flaming bramble; bruised

plum of laden hyacinth,

the cadaver of a grey mouse,

the pinched ruby of a tree

growing, leaning toward pale

summer petals of a shrub flowering

in bells that hang low, look

as if they might reach

for furry mustard & black

pepper with wings—

translucent and spinning—

winter insinuating.

Mariah Blankenship

### Tub Restoration

My father says I restored this 77-year-old tub

to feel like Cleopatra but I only wanted escape

from cybernetic ecology, wanted to feel

cast iron cool on my back in the winter

and I didn't feel like a prince-ss or an Egyptian goddess

in this tub because I spent hours whittling it away.

I dumped it like my own crusted memories

on the cracked concrete driveway, mask allowing

me to breathe nothing from the past

that I am sanding away like corroding bones,

77 years of memories echoing from the drone

of a sander. It took four hours to strip the tub

clean of its memories, to peel the now elderly children's

fingertips from the sides where they bathed

in democracy, capitalist rubber duck trying to stay afloat

while Roosevelt speaks on the radio and a Declaration

of War floats in the air pulled by little atomies

while Queen Mab is in a hazelnut flying

through men's noses while they sleep.

Memories are dissipating and lost in the atmosphere

of a belt sander with each medium grade discard,

each rectangle tossed into the trash,

nationalism in a hefty bag, and surely the coming

and going of women (talking of Michelangelo or

Kennedy or King) was lost in the friction as well

and I can almost see one whispering _Free at last_

_Thank God_ _Almighty we are free at last_ and perhaps

the mothers memorized the ceiling above the tub

while their children slept, while their husbands slept

like dolls. When I finished sanding, I painted the raw canvas

(flushed of memories, history floating through the

atmosphere) with a porcelain white and now I soak

like a working class Cleopatra in a memory pond,

pruning away in the dull dust of humanity.

### Utopia on a Park Bench

An old man wrinkled with time,

wrinkled with so many days at

Goodyear Tire, constructing tires

in an assembly line, tire population

in the thousands, communists

on a conveyer belt, arms forcefully

pointed upward. His park bench

is vast like a continent.

He, like Chagall's wife, corner of a canvas,

consumes just a fraction of the wood

and metal conglomerate, and he

is feeding the birds, feeding the birds

as God, government of birds competing

for each seed like capitalism in a park

with leaping birds, working class birds,

open leaves in the open air of every

season of every year. Equal amounts

of seed pour onto the ground and he

knows there is no solution to equalize

their earnings, to balance the scale

with Marx perched in the middle as a raven.

He knows no socialist solution in his

steel-toed boots and windbreaker

with his beard growing downward

like the droppings of his tears to paper bag.

He knows no solution, only that he

is a giving tree in a dystopian world

and he tried to throw a pile here,

a pile there, one for you, one for you,

but the birds, the birds worked for their

profit, while the man, like God, fed them.

### And Violets Are Blue

I am tired of submitting to journals,

society, men, God, tired of watching

my dog cower under my desk

after pissing on the floor.

I am his god after all, and he

is tired of submitting to me,

tired of drooping his ears

under tables and desks.

But we are all gods here ambushed

in the center of the infinite wooden

babushka doll,

clawing and crawling

and cussing and singing

all praises, all hail

the Great Babushka.

I submit now, roll on my back,

in a wooden container like

a babushka doll under a desk,

miming and suffocating and cowering

with simple movement like a puppet.

Society, I bring you clichés now.

I bring you red roses

and blue violets.

I cower under your table,

and like a dog,

I piss on your floor.

### Pandora

Remember, remember, this is now,

and now, and now. Live it, feel it,

cling to it.

–Sylvia Plath

It is Mother's Day Sunday, and I have

read the chapter of Luke before opening

the dusty box of yours, my deceased mother.

Your journal is sealed with the emblem

of an asylum. Your name written, chiseled

into the top like a vintage museum piece.

I open your words, gloveless,

a box of evils sprouting into the world,

red, red apples thrusting into the open

air like sins, hope left in the bottom

corner next to a ball of lent.

Lately, I have been reading the journals

of Plath like a bible thinking they were you,

reading the chapters and verses and now,

and now, and now, I am finally holding

your words which are distorted,

which are incomprehensible

through a bell jar of tears.

Remember, remember the chapped lips

of your smile, the features of your face,

the swampy feeling of my cheek after your kiss.

And to see your journal lying here next to Plath's,

next to mine, juxtaposed, is colossal.

We have spoken to each other now,

clung to each other now, through written

telepathy, our journals mingling in comparable

time discussing life as two old feminists

in rocking chairs, like Plath and Sexton

chuckling, rocking, like Eve reaching

for a red, red apple.

Paul R. Davis

### Landscape

I like the way

lamplight makes the page

of the book

I'm reading gleam.

A wild vanilla with

crazed insects wobbling

into my mind.

I start to close

the book

and night appears,

sheep stranded high

on the outcropping.

Between the pages

is the everdark valley

of no language,

where words cross over

hurriedly to reach

the other side.

I put the book down,

the words don't fall out,

or over themselves.

They are locked in place,

like fresh eggs in their

cartons, asleep

and dreaming of speech.

### Second Vision

Too many eyes, too many things to see.

Twin cathedral steeples, nipples

erupting from the breasts of God.

Signs falsely proclaiming pizza is both

original and Italian.

Conversations boomerang off bent elbows,

mismatched words litter avenues.

Briefcases, laptop attache cases,

bag lunches, boxes of pizza for one:

FedEx will not deliver your life

or you from it.

Clouds invade your shoes,

your pockets full of gray money,

handfuls of anxiety fall out of your hat.

Afraid to go home, afraid of the continual fear,

drowning in the comfortable couch.

Going to sleep naked,

one sheet, one blanket,

2,738 dreams you won't remember.

Morning is a roving wolf,

eating the bones you forgot.

### Eating Molly's Pie

It was a sunny morning,

sky of flour and butter.

I went out to eat

some of Molly's pie,

came away fuller than the moon.

It was noon like turtles lounging.

I went out and had some more

of Molly's pie.

I left the desk,

overturned the timesheet,

went out like a thunderstorm.

I looked in corners where butts are thrown,

looked at signs like forgotten face cards,

looking for Molly's pie.

Close to midnight

down by the river,

Hungry Davy was there,

eating the last of Molly's pie.

I cried up, all the way through my hair,

wanting some of Molly's pie.

### Klismos

(4th Century Greek chair, perhaps the first of Western civilization)

Ladies, be seated.

Rest in elegance and wait for the news.

Your husbands are in the fields,

or fighting for Athens.

When Rome ascends,

when Saint Peter visits,

he will be crucified but leave a seat

for his crude descendants.

But this will be hidden, kept secret

from the tillers and the potters.

They will have curved backs,

broken backs, will lack support.

Castle residents will know the comfort,

the tribute from the fields, the gathering laws.

Conquistadores will bring saddles

and crucifixes to a world reclining.

They will join with missionaries

to bring enlightenment and germs.

All the world will be seated:

To work, to learn, to take rest.

What wondrous device will ennoble us?

How will nature uncivilized devolve?

We will lose our legs, take on those of wood,

carved with faces straining under the weight.

Our backs will weaken,

our eyes forget the wide vistas scouting danger,

our minds will turn more quietly.

We will be soothed.

The oceans are crossed while we stand

before the compass, afraid to sit and

not see the upright horizon.

These new lands have knowledge

of running and resting,

but we bring strange new instruments

lacking harmony with nature.

Forests are hacked down,

the wood is shaped into towns,

houses and their possessions,

legs and spindles hold us in place.

Intricacy and detail envelop our bodies,

stiffnecked we suffer the hardness

of where we sit.

The plains and rivers hold freedom

like butterfly wings hold the sun,

we seek the prairie grass to burn.

The western shore is gained

but there is no rest for our business,

still we are straight-backed.

Leisure is acquired with sweat

and now we can know comfort

of leather, of upholstery,

feathering our labors.

Finally, we sit: collapsed,

to think of new inventions,

made for human bodies.

New devices take craft

and they have arms, levers,

footrests and let us dream.

All in beautiful reveries,

we take our seats.

Philip Jackey

### Garage drinking after 1989

Her world will spiral like a merry-go-round in the belly of storms.

The matches and lighter fluid she'll buy at Walmart

will seem a lot less dangerous than they did before—

well as the cheap vodka that'll burn within her throat,

and after the fifth or sixth shot, it won't burn anymore.

Cobwebs will surround her; in all corners they'll spread like lies.

Spiders will fuck other spiders; their egg sacs swaying

with momentum like a Newton's cradle.

And with her back turned, few feet away,

an industrial fan will spin at its highest speed.

She hates the heat; it sweats out the alcohol,

and nothing smells worse than the depths of disease

protruding through stale fragrance that will embed,

into vintage tank tops with Mickey Mouse on the front,

over a pink bra and blue denim shorts bathed

in Giorgio perfume—wrinkled and creased, and

crammed in a cardboard box on top another cardboard box:

the furthest decade she's able to reach without a step stool—

the last one she'll ever trust, to rational thinking.

Only stigmas will remain—of oil and antifreeze,

Fieros and Firenzas, Madonna in the tape deck—

the beaming of the headlights unfolding

the shadows that ascend to the ceiling.

Hanging hacksaws will warp into sharp fangs.

Lawn rakes into claws.

And the storm will come. Her gutters will surely give,

to pouring rain under black clouds, blacker than their predecessors,

bringing bad fortune through meandering felines.

Soaking black Maine Coons take shelter with lemon-marble eyes

gouged from years of sidewalk disputes, and yet to purr thereafter.

Instead they will stay still, struggle to see,

their eyes slowly dimming like a wicker candle.

And she will feel pity—for whom or what, she won't know,

just enough to understand belligerence will not kill the pain.

A lit match to methanol works best.

### Swimming at night in suburbia

The pool shines mercury beneath the moonlight,

where young girls jump off of diving boards into the deep,

somewhat ashamed as only their bikini tops break the surface,

spilling polka-dots, some amber, others amaranth.

And the boys can't see, only touch, because chlorine

burns their eyes the same way liquor does their virgin throats,

sinking ten feet to the bottom, haggling air through a kiss—

sealed, the radio drowns by a thousand pin drops,

and the girls allow to be touched with pruny fingers.

Subterranean lights beam bright,

outlining shapes, the shadows: a frog

who gave his life in the skimmer, a thousand

ripples projected on a white painted fence, and silhouettes,

all different sizes as they watch their former selves,

slide off eachother, poor attempts at a carnal act,

squeezing the air out of inflatable rafts,

on such a night where fireflies dress their best,

and luminesce the pungent air.

### Granny and Papa's house

And for sure this house is haunted;

it moans at night like papa did,

when he wasn't papa anymore,

rather a sad story of children and their children

and pestilent cancer cells, his sunken cheeks pale,

and white as the ghosts who live here.

If you listen close, you still hear his son,

been dead since '72—

plastered to a tree, killed instantly,

thrown out the window like a sack of shit,

the same way most repudiated

his mendacious words of advice.

And you can still smell the menthols,

almost if she hadn't lost to the stroke

ten years prior, my granny,

who smoked before you could die from smoking,

turning the walls to dirt, stained dull yellow

like the nicotine on papa's teeth.

And granny's the kind of gal papa read poems about,

and papa didn't read poems, he was more

a hands on kind of man,

who preferred using fists when he's pissed off, scared,

and even in love because granny swears

that one of the holes papa punched through the closet door

was in the perfect shape of a heart.

And you could see right thru,

skeletons stacked on skeletons.

Karen Hoy

### A Naturalist in New York

I cannot see the buildings

of Manhattan in the dark,

though at a far journey's end

as we cross

(yes it is,

confirms the driver)

the Brooklyn Bridge

towers of window lights are rising

in the buildings' negative space.

It's the way each

illuminated giant facet turns,

revealing more as we approach.

Transitions of galaxies,

oblong astronomical bodies

in a moving geometric display;

metropolitan northern lights,

and I am in awe.

I've seen things as stunning before:

the terrace of salt-white

pools at Pamukkale;

the cap of Kilimanjaro

afloat on African clouds;

stalactite ballrooms in

Carlsbad Caverns;

a neon-red sunset

on the Serengeti.

I feel my own turning,

my marrow re-engaging

in ways I didn't know

my insides could fit.

I'm not a city person

is no longer available

as I adapt and rearrange;

a discontinuation

of a former stock phrase.

### Nan's Photographs

That one, that's my favourite,

of my mother in a tutu,

age sixteen, on points,

with her raven hair straight

from a white hairband

and her hands arched above her.

of all your photographs

of even that one of me

with my brothers

when I wouldn't keep still

at the photographers,

and Darryl is smiling

and Kevin has been instructed

to keep me on the seat

I'm already half off,

as if at any minute

eighteen month old me

will slither to the bottom

of the round frame

and drop, gurgling

onto your hall carpet.

more than the scattered ones

in little straight frames

around your bookshelves

and the dresser;

a collection of cousins

in the dull plumage

of successive school seasons.

_This_ photo,

my mother; your daughter;

the family's only dancer.

Look at her—

our loose-tendoned

connecting icon

in her own space,

owning the frame.

I love this photo,

how it shows excellence

pursued, found,

redelivered on demand

for the camera's exposure;

her talent in black and white,

_en pointe_ in a silvered

chemical capture.

### For Peter in Memory of Jo

Meteorites land mostly

in the sea

or in forests

far from our eyes.

Sandcastles are always

washed away

by the tide—

they don't survive.

But in between

these statistics

are things we risk

by being alive.

By survival

we're defined by

losing people,

precious people,

lost to us,

the ones behind.

Somewhere on earth

a meteorite.

Ankles are lapped

by sand

sent swirling

into flower-shaped fractals:

a million tiny rocks

in the tide.

### Mrs Bing and Mrs Bailey

and the list read

Bing Bing Bailey Bailey

Bing Bing Bailey.

Visiting you, we waited

with the suitcase, by

the noticeboard on the lobby wall,

while Mum brought in

the rest of our stuff,

letting the double doors close off

to the hot ice-cream-dripped tarmac

of an English just-a-half-season

or the rest of the year's

straight-off-the-sea wind.

and the list read

Bing Bing Bailey Bailey

Bing Bing Bailey.

It always amused my sister and I—

seven days of warden shift

in a rhythmic, onomatopoeic

can't-help-itself-but-be-a song.

Bing Bing Bailey Bailey

Bing Bong Bailey.

We hurried along the hall

and sang it to you, giggling,

at the entrance to Flat 4,

where you were

officially sheltered

from live-alone danger,

but independent

with your own front door

and wardens, on duty,

at your every red-cord-pulled call.

Bing Bing Bailey Bailey . . .

don't finish it . . .

leave the song hanging

in our grandchildhoods

among the sandcastles.

Gary Sokolow

### Underworld Goddess

Our eyes made contact through a slow drizzle

I bore through her soul, leaned face to face

Weeks later, other disturbances, broken bird wing,

The final descending.

Over past park benches the drunks gather, laugh

With breath of whiskey,

One lost in the gutter, the Captain they all call him

Ass in air, face down.

It was ten years ago they found me three days endlessly

Riding the trains,

Mother lighting her candles believing in small places,

Her dreams of the crisp uniforms,

Men under a hot morning sun,

Mailmen,

All of us, mailmen, delivering sliver thin notices

Final foreclosures like razors,

Petite bottles of French lavender water

For the lonely,

The dirty fingers waiting upon bare-breasted women

To burst through brown paper magazines.

It was in a book we first discovered the goddess every

Autumn stolen to the underworld,

We were children, the family beatings made him

Crazier than me,

We dug through piles of dirt, the shards of glass

In his broken backyard,

Down and down, we dug through earth toward

Our goddess,

Uncovering worms, scared and writhing on late

October afternoons,

Pliant worms below, and above us the stone face

Of a soon to be fading sun.

### late evening fumes

at 4 am, it was _treasure hunt_ , channel 9

3 jack in the boxes, 3 crazy contestants,

one winner, who got to pick the prize

one box to choose out of fifty, sixty

boxes of various shapes, sizes, colors, and bows

and that was the show, the remaining time

left to the torture of contestants, the chosen box's

contents slowly revealed, and for the record

I don't remember how I came upon the magic

of the nail polish,

bottles snuck from piles of dirty clothes and

missing homework of my sister's room

smashed into paper bags

saturation

covered with plastic bag

maximum inhalation

every night through high school

and I was always the straight kid

never drank

never smoked

glue sniffer

most antisocial form of user known, they say

notch above pedophiles

and those nights lit with the glow of the tubes

inside the old black & white tvs as I watched

the odd couple, mary tyler moore, the saint,

sleep not so much coming as the haze descending

to awaken 4 am the jack straight out the box.

### Any Monday Morning

Often it is how it all begins

the coldest day of the year

a man on 9th avenue walking

in nothing but a sweater,

arm around a basketball,

smoke from a cigarette,

and how by nightfall

the newest associate of a law firm

will admire herself in a bar mirror,

enjoy the buzz of happiness

co-workers buying the next round,

and how by morning the soldiers in full gear,

rifles poised, will have hit the beach,

crash like waves, like kindergartners pushing

and shoving their way from schoolyard

into school, insects climbing screens,

and how it may be 1987,

the man in the tightfitting uniform testifies

for the twenty-third day in a row how

incapable we are of comprehending

the deals made, the true costs of our comforts,

so the arms are sold, our bastard propped up

for one more rigged election.

the whitecaps violent,

the insects hit windshields,

beyond distant hills corporations have grown

enormous, force trees out of the landscape,

windblown seeds with nowhere to land,

the soldiers inch toward targets,

the children move beyond rainbows,

push against something dark and unknowable,

and this the way any Monday morning goes,

the man on Ninth Avenue with the basketball

fleeing his girlfriend's apartment

with whatever he could find,

the cold seeping through his sweater,

and smokeless by his side the last cigarette.

### Elegy

Unknown hard

bop jazz

soprano

sax

runs

feel

to loose

to be

Coltrane

on the

radio

a

long day's

desk job's

end

not any life

a life more

fragile

than

ever

my heart

and time

past, time

wasted

and time

spinning

and

at the

center

a man

in

the

ground

is

truth

no

other

way

but

shovels

of tears

and

in the

moment

a

bird

moved

by

the

pretty

day

to

sing

to the

shovel's

rhythm

to the

dirt's

falling

the pine coffin

innocence

was ours

was

everything

yet

only words

like stones

as

a

man

in

the

ground

whom

you

love

is

truth

Michal Mechlovitz

### The Early

Wind, sharp, dis-

tilled, washrag gray, hissing

at the shutters, a big

body with a small

voice, its over-

tones smashing the early buds, their cracked

faces, their violent,

lolling needles for

tongues puncture

December. False

intimacy, the chill

pushes their wide mouths open

and brittle. There was

a night when the heat

was broken and the windows

stuck- we couldn't

close them, and you

brought me cold blossoms

that we kept in the bedroom, cold

blossoms that we kept in the bedroom.

### Lumen

She wore a whisper

of a dress

an old pattern, but

transparent

like a cerebral daydream

of modesty

and when I opened

the shutter

of the bedroom in which

she danced

the exposure

of her legs

was the ambient light, and

my camera

the buffer

between us

as she held

spilling threads

in her thumbnails

the details

were phantoms

of ugliness between the non

living frames until

the hem

of her skirts

became wet

with acid

and in lavender

pixels she fell

away

"You are

really beautiful . . .

Do you think

you're really beautiful?"

### Horrible Aubade

With cupped hands

you search behind my collarbone,

dipping a crackling song under

the ladder of ribcage.

I come three times this way.

Undraped, I shuffle

off my pigment. The cut

shine that swabs my smile

with disinfectant,

I have no augmentation now

for laughter, no

aloe to chew

on for it's healing

properties, and we fold

into a night slice.

We use specialized shadows of our voices.

There is a hum about this skin

lit room deeper than my radio wires

are used to picking up.

Daemons of melodies singe the walls

at the crooked corners,

floor to ceiling.

It is the alcohol

swab, the antiseptic, time

capsule of pain, that we dig up

in stale backyards

I wake before you,

count my pigments, shuffle

them again

and fold the clothes from off the floor.

### Mi querido, I will sing you to sleep each night

Hidden behind your negative space,

what do you find in her glowing hand?

A tone of white not from this century and

a foreign crease in the paper of his skyscape

What do you find in her glowing hand

that cradled all her misplaced children?

A foreign crease in the paper of his skyscape

folded over by wind, and a bottle of tequila

And what was the cradle for those misplaced children?

Those tiresome winged ones that cried and knew no comfort?

The folds in the wind and tequila sighed lullabies

that invoked nightmares worse than not sleeping at all

And those tired monsters never did learn comfort

but knew the geometry of a perfect sized grave

and how to measure the weight of a nightmare too heavy

before any of those winged ones learned to sing

The geometry of a perfect sized grave is

a tone of white not from this century and

before those droopy eyed winged ones learned to sing

they were hidden behind your negative space

### Quick to Dark

The thinnest

line is the blood

line and I taste

it on your tongue.

Darkness is in the repetition

of paint

strokes, in seagulls

scraping

the top

of Brooklyn, with their crying, empty

gullets, I could

blacken your eyes with

my hair, I could

lap up

the ocean really

quickly. I'm

sorry I keep swiping at your eyes. The tapping noise

was nothing, just

a child

on the beach beating two bones

together. I'd dispute it

if you wanted, see, I love you and I'm desperate

to know

where your lines break.

Henry Graziano

### Last Apple

Dawn lures her each morning

where she stands barefoot

on the splintered deck.

Steaming cup warming

her hands. A brown fleece

blanket wrapped about her when the chill

demands. She watches

southern tree line of box elders and mulberries

bird sewn in summer's end

along the unused track of the

old county lane.

Grown to eat the sun. Deer

track from the west

to mill about the base of the

crab apple tree apart from and older

than the tree line,

trunk leaning north. For this season

out of the reach of the scrub tree

shade. Almost horizontal

base for the upward reaching boughs

growing back to the light.

In spring, she smiles at the does balancing on hindquarters

reaching up for the flowers

or later tiny green bulbs,

front hooves running

in the air. Fawns

bounding between sun and shade.

Far from the starving of winter

Now, one boney limb stabs back north in October's wind,

an odd compass needle bobbing beyond the shade.

Bits of twigs standing out.

Static arm hair.

Leaves long fallen

from beneath the final fruit,

a dull maroon dab

absent this morning her waiting ends.

Before the groundhog begins

its daily search for windfall and the

deer return this evening,

she hurries inside for her long stored cache

and throws several apples under

the tree to keep herself from starving.

### Behind the Winds

November wind spins the tire swing from the unmoving firth of an oak branch. Grass has overgrown the gravel drive of the abandoned house. Covering the doors and windows on the lower floors, silvered plywood has begun warping. Deeper than the whispering of tall grass in the wind, the swing rope eats away the bark of the limb.

Outside Altoona, eastbound I-80, gouges in the snow lead from the shoulder to the crumpled road sign—Iowa City 98 miles. Yellow plastic emergency tape secures the cab, already blown over with snow. The driver would have had to climb out of his door like a submariner must emerge from a conning tower.

Along the bike trail at 7 am. A rabbit warms itself in the new sun edging into the opening of hedge branches. Night frost evaporating from its coat.

Sunset on the patio of Caribou overlooking the UHAUL sign—the light for 'A' has burned out.

In his garden, an old man turns his soil. Jamming a boot to the edge of the garden fork. Across one row and back, blackening the earth. Remnants of pepper plants, hoed and buried. Chopped tomato vines turned into the widening plot. He cannot dig deep enough. The earth does not feel the scar.

Sunday morning, a young woman enters the door of the coffee shop at 7 am. She wipes at her eyes smearing the muddied mascara. Patterned flats grind sidewalk salt into tile as she approaches the counter, orders coffee, pulls some bills from her coat pocket. She props her chin on the cup, warming her hands. Outside against the piles of snow, cars line up in the drive-thru, stop, and drive on.

In his back yard, near the budding crab apple tree, a little boy holds a Mason jar of fireflies up to the sickle moon to watch them disappear as they flash.

On a bed far into the night, a dog flinches in its sleep. Lying on his side, chest rising and falling quickly, pawing the air. A hand reaches out from under the quilt. The woman touches her dog's shoulder. Runs her fingers down his flanks until he breaths easer. She closes her eyes believing that dogs dream only of running in spring fields.

After an hour, the lights were switched on. He looked up from where he had parked to the shaded window of the apartment. Tire treads clapped across the brick lines of the cobbled street. Several people smoked on a dark covered porch. It was too early to call her. He could taste fall's coming.

Rain. A late spring rain at dusk, straight falling. Tender. A little girl with a backpack on her deck in rain boots making paths through the Silver Maple helicopters. A treasure map leading to the edge of the world.

### Reunion

The closest we got

was a 2 hour car ride to

camp at the lake

some Fourth of July after

I had dropped out of college

before I crawled back.

Sprawled in the seat of my LTD

Marlborough ashes blown in the

highway wind, he dozed

sweating tequila on my upholstery.

Camping meant sleeping

in the car at night

for an hour between bottle rocket fights

and water skiing

behind a fat-assed pontoon boat.

He worked double shifts for AMF

making more money

than my father ever would.

"Do you remember the day

our draft numbers

were first read on TV?

I would have died first," he told me.

We were only sophomores in high school

that day we watched

in 1971. We didn't follow

anyone to Asia.

Catholic school brought us all together. "No, Sister. I don't speak Spanish. I speak Mexican," he told his second 1st grade teacher. She was the only one who smiled. Together.

My mother warned me of them later, when we shared a little league team. He taught me to swear in his tongue. I shared the Italian version. Sister never knew.

An old aunt once told me that Disneyland opened the year I was born . . . the closest I would get to that world was watching Mary Poppins at the Paramount where mom sent us to avoid being blinded by the lunar eclipse. He couldn't afford to go. I met him later at the park to shag flies. Together

That Monday, we served early Mass for Monsignor. Latin Mass for the old women who spoke their rosaries in whispers, rising and kneeling in arthritic unison, accepting bits of host on shriveled tongues. Leaving the church with wetted fingers signing themselves in some hope.

He passed out in the sun on the 5th.

"My people don't burn," he announced

to the rising moon.

Sweating beer on my upholstery

heading home from our last road trip.

A woman loved him in Arizona

It shocked him, I heard.

She named their son after his father

so he cried in his pride, "Bless me Father

for I have sinned."

But Sister was dead then and the

Monsignor.

He came back one last time

We met at a bar so many of us

that August, where my own daughter,

working as a barmaid for the summer,

brought drinks to us. He didn't know

who she was until he

touched her cheek, her neck,

and she bent to his ear

whispering

while he looked me in the eye

until he could no longer stand it.

Even she knew he would be the first to go.

### Spider

I find you in the bathroom

watching the depths of the sink cross-legged atop the

counter beside your reflection.

"I don't want to have this conversation again," it tells me.

I wonder how you have folded the length of your legs into that bundle leaning forward, head tilted to hear the echo of the drain? The whisper of a May breeze circling the sink?

I expected tears.

You tap the sink with the end of a brush. It is a hollow sound. "Can we

talk about something else?" you ask.

Four of us, still as porcelain.

You unfold a leg. Stretching it to the yellowed tile floor. Like blowing out a

match, you exhale into the sink. "I can." I see the side of your face staring at me in the mirror.

"I hate spiders,"

And you blow again into the sink, forcing the spider closer to the drain.

You might kill it there, and leave it like the flies on your

Mother's walls so long ago.

Left them to harden, too insignificant to be fed upon. She could appease you in

youth. Now there is no one.

My silence

channeled you to sleep splayed over the couch, feet bared extending

beyond the worn blanket. Your face in its nightly pose, the color of lily petals

folded up for the night, the color of the empty sink.

### Standing on the Bridge

No sunrise yet. From the bridge rail

a lightening sky

reflects in the crawling river darkness

I wonder how streams of fog rise out of the waters

hugging the bank—a gauzy shawl

my grandmother wore on late summer nights

when she sat alone on her porch. I felt I could see

olive skin beneath it.

A solitary egret, shadowed in the darkness,

seeking breakfast, stands

one foot on the sand bar

the other in the river

with tiny twigs of legs

scratching drawings in the sand.

Her head, the hood of a cobra

unswaying as she waits.

Autumn nears with the coming sunrise

breathing cinnamon through the trees too low to

melt the fog. Looking down

the egret has flow. I missed its fishing story.

It saddens me

that the trees have yet

to turn and molt. I hope to notice that day,

and when the egret strikes.

Stephanie L. Harper

### Unvoiced

The words from the dream are

Wisps in the air like broken

Spider webs wrapping invisibly

About my face and forearms

The fake sunrise tarp draped before me

Ripples like a summer mirage

Half-soaked into the rural street

And then as if I were not supposed to

I step through and place my foot

Solidly into an evening of dark specters

Waiting outside of their existence

To become what I am

There

I am the cool turpentine

Wash of grays seeping over

A dusting of brown sand in the road

There

I am the night falling upon

Neglected pastures of weeds

Sputtering up about the silhouettes

Of tree stumps and old swing sets

There

I am the street lamps' sallow illumine

Peering out sensibly from between

Foolish tree skeleton embraces

There

I am still the child

Twisting acorns into the asphalt

With the soles of her shoes

Squealing gleefully into the night

### I, Your Progeny

I cannot get my mind

Around the meaning of your ninety years.

If I multiplied my age, my experiences,

My life's richness—

Math not being my strong suit—

I would be making your age, events, and richness

Quantifiable,

As if you were simply

A larger, scatter-plot version of me,

Your number and density

Increasing

With every cycle of rebirth and dormancy;

Repeating

Over acre upon acre

Of variegated shades and shade;

Each of your small, too-subtle suffocations

Receding

Into anonymity

By your sheer enormity.

Even if my calculations were viable,

I would be entirely lost

In the matrix of your possibility.

But here,

Where my roots have taken hold,

Where this slice of sun streaks in,

In this cross-section of you—

I cannot count the leaves

That glimmer golden,

Or burn blood-red,

Nor plot each point of light

That breaches the canopy and reaches

The dank floor.

I am not one-third, not one-thirtieth

Of your richness,

Not even a quantum speck

Of your boundless soul,

Yet, dazzled here,

Neither am I invisible.

I quiver, here,

In your engendering light.

### Wise at Thirty-five, Revised at Forty

Preserved like wax museum sculptures,

Erected in their own, obscure enclave,

These two, distinct ages pulled off quite the

Elaborate spectacle—circling

One another in yin-and-yang-fashion,

Gurgling and sputtering dramatically

Toward a crescendo of neurotic

Self-consumption—until the violent

Vortex of their fervent dance dissolved in

A brief instant into oblivion.

Still, I relish the living left to do,

While constantly reliving the living

That can't be redone, intently watching

Today's waterfall spill over into

The uncertain basin of tomorrow:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace . . ."

Shakespeare was wise to the relatively

Insignificant fact that tomorrows

Keep coming, regardless of how we spend

Or squander, mete out, or justify them,

Forgetting their order, or which ones were

Real and which were dreaming, or whether there

Is quantifiably a difference.

I have tried and failed to live up to that

"Mysterious," skulking _expectation_ —

Convinced it was my duty to perform

The scenes from a moral composition,

Which I now know I scripted for myself:

Whether I'd tried pink-nosed and dreamy-eyed

To face into an icy, winter wind

(To look like the cover illustration

Of the children's book, _Eloise in Moscow_ ),

Or to bound—stripped down to nothing but my

Bare disillusionment—through the fertile

Valley beneath a sun-streaked, summer sky,

I'd _always_ been shocked to discover the

Dance was neither beguiling nor beautiful.

How did I manage to cultivate and

Reap such a harvest of indignation?

For an age, I sulked in self-abasement,

Practicing absurd, measured detachment,

While swathed in a café's lulling morning

Warmth, huddling with coffee and crossword.

I once watched through the glass as a curled, brown

Leaf flapped fitfully in the street, as if

It were some willful creature with purpose

And life blood coursing through its wrinkled veins.

Though I feigned amazement, as it darted

In and out of traffic and leapt anew

With life after each self-orchestrated

Brush with tragedy, I all the while knew

(Though I may have started at its final,

Quick, clever tailspin, as the wind blew it

Out of sight forever), and _loved_ _knowing_

That on most days, a leaf _is_ just a leaf.

If once I rather resembled a rock's

Unmovable crest, emerging stubborn

And solitary, from a rushing stream,

My ceaseless shadow blotting out the sun

From the leaves cascading by beneath me,

I now glisten and shiver in the

Constant splash of cold humility.

Roger Desy

### anhinga

—feeding a brood

an anhinga knows

itself enough to know

the most important thing alive

is not itself—instead

being part—a part

of what it made

of what it was and is

—feeding nestlings

it feeds itself—

later—brooding done

apart from itself

nothing else matters

—after diving for prey

—flocking the shoals

to a single stone

roosting with its kind

it preens its own shadow

undulating in the mirrored glare

—napping on guano

its wings alone

drench dry in the sun—

—come winter—

alone—after its turn and time

—it dies unseen unknown—

no predator torments observing it

—nothing in particular seeks out

or notices

floating—or blowing sand

—feather—quill—or barb

—no calm—or fog—or squall—cirrus

or haloed moon disturbs

even submerged—weighed down by seas

— buoyant despite itself—it's gone

through the hurricanes

of its own migration

R. G. Evans

### Hangoverman

Every day an origin story—

an ordinary man swallows a potion

he knows is dire poison.

The change begins at once:

he writhes through blind bliss,

tears his clothes (and sometimes bleeds)

as the poison moves through his veins.

His strength grows great.

His strength remains the same.

His secret wears a mask.

Everyone knows who he is.

At last, eyes red, bottles emptied

by his superhuman thirst,

he enters his fortress of solitude,

wherever it may be tonight.

His bed. The floor beside his bed.

The sidewalk where he fell

on the way to find his home.

And all this just a prelude . . .

He awakes, having never really slept,

alter ego dead, home planet nearly destroyed,

the ability to suffer his only super trait, thinking

With great impotence comes great irresponsibility.

At least the Drunkmobile stayed in its dock tonight,

waiting where it's waited since the beginning,

and in the beginning was the drink,

every day an origin story.

### The Usual

In a faraway bar in a faraway town

the bartender thinks I'm someone

I'm not. She smiles, arches an eyebrow

and says _The usual?_

What would I get if I were this man

she thinks I am—a shot and a beer?

Somethng with more finesse?

I wonder how long his usual would last,

this man who looks and acts like me.

I remember my usual and the mileage it got me

though all the time I was riding on "E."

My usual was darkness and long draughts alone,

hairpin roads and a hand too light upon the wheel.

I pray this stranger's usual let him fit into his world

better than I fit into mine. The bartender's waiting,

a wall of bottles holiday bright behind her. _The usual?_

she says again. I nod and walk out of the bar

into this stranger's land where a lake as large as the sea

is drying up.

### After April

She spent the whole first weekend in the dust,

rummaging through clutter. _Animal_ ,

she'd say to empty rooms or to the mirror

as she passed. Beer cans and cigarette scars,

scraps of food and flies. She couldn't explain

the way some people lived. Memorial

cards and flowers came. Memorial

Day passed. The yard urned brown as dust

by Independence Day. She could explain

her sadness when she lost an animal,

her grief when surgeons left a puckered scar

in place of secret parts. And even mirrors

she found she could forgive—it wasn't mirrors

that tore her life. St. Jude Memorial

Gardens. Machines that turned the sod to scar.

a few brief words, some prayers to ash and dust.

That was the place that made her animal

softness hard to bear. And who would explain

how tears can burn as well as freeze, explain

there'd be no toothpaste-spattered mirror,

no piss-stained floor, no reek of animal?

_He won't come back_. Those words memorial

enough when she knew they weren't true. Now dust

had settled everywhere. She felt it scar

the house the way asbestos fibers scar

the lungs. All dust. All ash. She could explain

his leavings until he left this dust

behind and disappeared out of the mirror

of her life, left rubbish as memorial

of what they had. She mutters _Animal_

today—not him, but every animal—

and stubs out cigarettes to leave a scar

on desks, buffets and chairs. Memorial

beer bottles and cans sit for days. Explain?

What explanation can satisfy the mirror?

What explanation cuts a path through dust?

She is an animal who can't explain

new skin, new scars, or how the mirror

weeps in memorial, reflecting dust.

### Alucard

In the black and white universe

of 1943, any bad actor could hide

himself just by spelling his name

backward. In this way the son

of Dracula became _Count Alucard_

and no one was any the wiser.

In brains cursed by the love of

wordplay, a verb like _lives_ becomes

nouns like _Elvis_ or _evils_.

One of the evils of the Universal plan:

that the undead's sperm

could vampirize an egg.

The Son of the Man of 1000 Faces,

Lon Chaney, Jr., ill-suited in a tux—

and what kind of vampire

wears a moustache?—tell tale

droplets, a crimson confession.

Black and white logic: we see no blood.

We've seen plenty of blood in our day,

Stillbirth. Miscarriage.

Yet _Dracula / Alucard . . ._

What bride would ever provide

the ovum and the path

to let such palindromic birth proceed?

Late fetal DNA-land—

was it a bat I saw?

Dad,

don't nod.

Devil never even lived.

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It's so tragic.

Maybe that other undead son

was in on the joke when he said

The last shall be first and the first shall be last.

What kind of god—what kind of dog indeed—

grants the devil a son and drives stakes

through hearts like these?

### On the Battlements

There's a photo of a young girl and a man

on a fortress top in Old San Juan.

The meek clouds, the placid blue sky

seem like lies in the aftermath of storms—

_las tormentas_ —that rocked them all the night before.

The sea is calm and picture-perfect,

the picture itself a perfect kind of lie.

You see a father and a daughter

on the battlements of the old Spanish fort.

The fort is photogenic, a tranquil postcard ruin

of _conquistadores'_ might. The father's pose is casual,

grinning in the shadow of his cap.

The daugher's face is pinched,

almost smiling in the sun.

What you don't see is

the woman's hands trembling on the camera,

the daughter fleeing after the shutter's click,

screaming _I'm scared, Daddy, I'm scared_ ,

the father's face contorting, shouting

Come back here right now.

You don't see the blood stains

washed by centuries of storms,

dark clouds in the distance,

_las tormentas_ yet to come.

Frederick L. Shiels

### Driving Past the Oliver House

One day late in 1966 in quiet Hattiesburg,

Phillip Oliver, nineteen, shot

his step-mother four times

in the face and chest with a ten-gauge,

Drove what was left of her

in the back of the family's Ford pick-up

out to an empty lot

on the edge of town,

Unloaded her and emptied

a five gallon can of gasoline

on her and dropped a whole blazing box

of Ohio blue-tip kitchen matches

down on her and

backed away quickly.

He then drove to the police station

downtown and told everything. That's

how the newspaper reported it, at least,

that's how I recall it.

Funny thing though,

it was also reported that

friendly Phillip, cutting lawns and

doing odd-jobs, just out of high school,

Said he "didn't mind the lady,"

they had argued some that particular morning.

"His father had remarried a little quickly," he thought—"maybe,"

and that was that,

or so, I remember.

In any event, driving by what, for many years,

was the "Oliver Place," a non-descript brick Ranch

at Adeline Street and Twentieth Avenue,

and not favored by realtors,

was never the same.

Star Birth of the Word ULASSA

Just now, May 23, 2013, I have in my conceit

created a brand new word _, Ulassa,_

at 8:05 AM. As I write,

Ulassa is like an infant star that burns white hot hydrogen and

joins—who knows—988,000 English words or more,

As a new birthed star joins our known universe of—who knows—

22 septillion other stars,

give or take a few quadrillion,

150 billion galaxies

150 billion stars

Do the math humbly,

Ulassa—

The Oxford English Dictionary will say it means

"the short sense of escape we can experience,

when something really bad has happened",

like, a childsister has gone missing or

we hear we may lose a foot from frostbite,

so in those short escapes from ongoing pain,

We get will get ulassa,

from meditation or the bottom of

a rum cola—

or the red coals

of a summer campfire,

the molecules of carbon

drinking oxygen.

Ulassa in the dictionaries,

will have no real etymology

for a while,

Having first breathed air only

on this morning of

May 23, 2013,

Ulassa will enter poems

and maybe yoga classes,

will become a cocktail and

an expensive perfume, eventually

a breed of cat, or surely the

name of a racehorse,

even a minor crater on

the surface of the moon,

Ulassa will live for four hundred years.

104 languages, give or take,

will borrow and ingest it,

Before it burns out like a star or "odd bodkin"

from Shakespeare, just remember,

It started Here, on this day.

### Morningwriting

8:59 a.m. I know I need a poem'

so, fountain pen and pad at the ready

sitting slantwise view

on our tiny back deck

the morninglit green curve of my tall cinnamon fern

bold, bright, near-yellow the way

the sun insinuates itself on it

weaving through upward layers

of east facing trees

that let light shimmer this frond poised

as if it were a ballerina highlighted onstage

the hanging basket of mauve miniature petunias just above

almost obscure, that sun does not yet favor them

their moment on the stage will come soon enough.

And now I'm ready to think about that poem.

### Dedication

She breathed deeply, then wrote:

"This book

would not have been possible,

without both my slyness

and fortitude,

in evading the distractions of

my husband's badgering, drinking and

threatened suicide attempts,

and my children's sweetly

relentless neediness.

### Candles and Cathedrals

The many Notre Dames of France blazed

with candle constellations

nine hundred years ago but

that's just the start of it these

chiseled mountains rose from

Rouen, Chartres, and all over north France

Because candlemakers existed,

construction went into the summer nights

even if the project took two hundred years

Because carters, joiners, stone-masons, glaziers,

had to build, to move

Because butchers and greengrocers

had to feed the builders and movers

Because musicians, singers could not wait the decades out

to send their polyphonies not just up to God, but

to these early hardhats and townsfolk,

dragooned farmers working,

yes even by candlelight, but

That's just the start of it, we do forget

that string quartets, Erasmus, Luther, Dante,

lacemakers, servants delivering night toddies

and seeing to chamber pots—

this all was not squared away

before the sun went down, so

those slender tallow cylinders

topped by redyellow flames over

tiny halfmoons of blue heat

pushed civilization forward,

Not waiting for gaslights or Edison.

Richard Sime

### Berry Eater

He wears a belt around each leg crotch-high,

red hardhat, aviator glasses, chain saw on his hip

as he leaps from branch to branch, lightly

alighting from time to time to adjust his ropes,

when he'll grab a handful of those berries.

Mulberries—we've spent too many summers

slogging through the purple paste that coats

the stone stairs and iron railings of our

Villa Charlotte Bronte, a confection

of buildings linked by walkways and arched

bridges along the Bronx bank of the Hudson.

The berries come from trees, large trees that

grow like weeds, raining sidewalks with fruit

from June until September, but even so

I've never tasted so much as one berry.

"Are they all that good?" my neighbor

hollers up to the man as his agitated

husband, who'd just as soon have the tree

cut down, pokes his head out then disappears.

The man pops another berry in his mouth

while he scans the tree for more ripe limbs

to hack off and send crashing to the ground.

Wiping juice from his mouth with the broad

back of his sun-stained hand, he yells down,

"They're the sweetest when you're on top, man,"

then pins another victim in his thighs, and saws.

### Bitch

His ear is pressed to his Muse's

breast, but she coughs up nothing—

a few yelps of love from a dog

(his dog, female, a bitch they'd say,

yet gentle), love based on scraps

from the table, a dry place

to sleep, someone to untangle

burrs from her coat, to sit still

as she tongues toes, nose, any limb

unclothed—all just dog data, no

heart. To his Muse he says "Leave,"

then glances down: The dog sits

at his feet, marmoreal, front legs

stiff, back legs askew, belly bare

and hot, just as he remembers.

A full hour he stares. Not one

muscle moves. No, he won't write.

### Opera Night

They're all like that: Ruse, mystery

morals. I came to, pieces of it still

in mind, _Così_ something or other,

but the rest—the front, the exterior,

the unflappable—they're all here.

I'd say, _Il faut renoncer chaque syllabe_

if I spoke French. Why not Prussian?

Why not sub-American? Whatever,

evasion is essence. Nothing matters.

Everything's inconsequential, but . . .

All in its place. Your underwear's

in the laundry room. The ensembles

are breezy and serene. An affectation?

Mediterranean deceit? Turn rightside

out before dying. Lower the boom.

### Dog Day

My bed a raft. She's on it with me and her lamb,

black ears, dead squeaker. I'm resting my

fatigue. Damaged joints, inflammatory.

Used to be, I'd hang off to the floor, her lair

when she was underneath, anchor myself

with one hand, scratch her belly with the other.

Now I grab the lamb and launch it

across the room, out the door,

though she'll return it. Such gentle jaws.

The bed's head is elevated, two bricks

prone, a plank across, head

over heels: For my hiatal hernia, when too much

food is stuck inside. Today I'm full

of words, my friend's words, her folk voice.

"Feelings, bind," she writes. A wish,

a prayer, an invocation. Her words draw my thoughts

to the floor, the tilt of bed, the smell of stain

and wood down there, the cool, the cheerful shine.

It's been hot. Close, we used to say,

my room a stale, unventilated

sigh. Even the living room, double-height,

banks of windows on the Hudson.

Down there I saw a dog, my neighbor's

red and white Brittany, focused, focused

on his ball, panting, pacing, tongue lolling off his teeth

to the ground. She rose and limped to him,

lofted the ball again toward the river.

Mine's female. (Ah, these females.)

Once she crawled into my lap when I was filled with

I don't know what. Satan? She there

on my lap with this fury inside. We sat still,

the two of us, a kind of draining. Now her chin rests

on the lamb's white chest. Only the squeaker's

dead: The lamb's alive. Five summers in her jaws,

the quiet chewing, peaceful

and delicate, a song.

Jennifer Popoli

### Generations in a wine dark sea

Instead of fresh herbs, what I rub on my skin now

is nettles, I cry out and delight in the dramatic effect

The adolescent is standing before me, is not me,

his eyelashes pretty now he leaves them alone,

He's moved on to finger cracking. He ought to understand,

the age is right, is it not? to say to him, let's talk now

about travelling cumulous clouds, moon riding day sky,

hair falling in dust, cats brushing legs like foliage,

tropical night breeze, whirling, spinning maple seeds,

crunchy autumn leaves and one small lone blue feather, reappearing

in unpredictable places, pressed between the pages of books like forgotten

euros, Let's talk about damp yellow grass recently nourished, slumber, lotus-

eaters and opiates, acres of coconut trees, Let's talk about eyes sharp as a puma's

and moving limbs more precise in the darkness, a lifted curse, a shattering vase,

a slice of papaya, a still dark brown face, flapping through a sanctimonious night

and memories of many lives, let's talk about dirty quartz and the smell of

seashells while washing hair, flecked eyes that sparkled with a spice like

pimento, lips wet with fruit, the scythe that hacked the clouds into streaks of

plasma, the plotless story, the sequential paintings, your ticking hand that ruled

time and weather, the world splitting into a series of images, all times and

possibilities, in one unique frame, the ruffling of hair and heart possession that

echoes across the aeons.

### Lost fairy

They poisoned the Argentinian trumpet vine

because it got too comfortable, sprouted everywhere

like a weed, and replaced it with some other flowering vine

more white and well-mannered. I suspected them of racism

but it was their house. When I moved here, the flowers seemed

to be in my face like the advertising, although the convolvulus always

tended to remind me of Borges. No more discreet kangaroo paws, subtle

Geraldton wax, bedraggled wattle. Here the bedraggled wattle is me, amongst

those other belles, the saucy snapdragons, self-sufficient succulents, ubiquitous

petunias, spicy nasturtiums, whose population seems to dwindle in every suburb

where we live, along with the European dandelions, washed of residual herbicides and thrown in our soups. We are foragers, tribespeople

with little ones strapped to my front and my back, a stolen cumquat

or rosemary leaf perpetually between my teeth. How did dente di leone

translate to dandelion? The plant has teeth, it's rough, roughage.

I slurp the nectars, check the parallel lines on the leaves before

chewing native sarsaparilla, tear my sandalled feet to ribbons

in the sparse strips of bush between train stations, teach the kids

to hoist themselves over a tall rock. We run away here when we can't stand

being at home. I pretend for a moment that I haven't been domesticated,

pretend for one afternoon, I still have big, purple, feathery wings.

### Other lives

A staircase leading to a new continent

The smell of a man's body, never known

but so vividly imagined

Practising the words "I love you"

It's been some time since they were said in English

It's been some time since they were meant.

A child told to count windmills on her way to boarding school

A child about to be abandoned

Windmills and hair, windmills blowing hair

Watermelon carved and eaten

with plastic spoons because knives are forbidden

A paedophile uncle and a new pink A-cup bra

Raindrops on car windows

Imprisoned in a car

A game that gives identities and voices to each raindrop

Clusters of raindrops that join and separate

Massive drops that steamroll diagonally

separating families, drawing baby raindrops from their mummies

How they cried!

I can still hear their distraught voices

### Femaleness

There comes a time when you can look a man in the face

While he's doing something else, and instead of being

dazzled, by his phenomenal good looks...

nothing. You can live without him.

His track pants are too daggy

his toenails too long

his ears too greasy

his nose too bulbous

his penis too crooked

his glasses too big

It's those glasses and the way

he looks fixedly at the computer screen

It's the way men relate better to computers than women

It's their onanism (which is just a fancy word for masturbation)

which yes we all do, of course, but for me it's about sailing higher, higher

above apricot coloured clouds. For them it's about believing women exist only for them. Oh! Let me withdraw further, further into my inner worlds...

Let me see all colours behind my eyelids, especially bright green

Let me be a retreating dot in an enormous swimming

universe. Let me be cradled, floating in space.

Sustain me now. Sustain me now.

### Mastitis

Cinderella is on the stairs in a flurry. My story

hasn't been written yet. Nothing resolves.

Scientist are on the verge of a breakthrough

that may save us by destroying another world.

Metal drums full of fire. A dispersion of men in overalls

leaping for joy when they find the key, scissor kicks in the sky.

A knowing god looks down upon our treetops and sighs.

The time is now, it's running out, ça ira, ça ira,

I tingle. Nerves twinge. Something terrible may still happen.

My breasts are being milked for yet another hour

and I shiver endlessly in a feverish infected delirium.

Boys cavort and ignore me. They're used to this.

Downstairs you grizzle and mutter in your usual way.

Something smashes in a doorway. More curses.

Flat on the bed, making a leap fifteen years back in time

I am left with an upturned palm full of sperm and a decision to make.

Contributor Notes

 Born in 1926, Robert Barasch grew up in Alabama, moved to New York in 1952, and to Vermont in 1970 with his wife and three children. He worked as a newspaper editor and reporter before getting a PhD in clinical psychology, retiring in 1996 and writing poetry and fiction since that time. His poems have been published in several journals and he recently published a novel, Parallel Play.

 Michael Berkowitz was born in Michigan, raised in Maryland, and earned his degree in Classical Latin and Greek from Oberlin College. He now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts where he makes his living as a web developer and occasional musician while studying poetry and circus arts. He is delighted to have his poems debut in Sixfold.

 Mariah Blankenship received a Bachelors in English from Radford University and a Masters of Education. She currently teaches Creative Writing and English in Virginia where she lives with her tiny Yorkie and bearded boyfriend. She likes to read depressing feminist poetry and transcendental literature while watching trash reality television and war movies.

 Michael Brokos earned his MFA in 2012 from Boston University, where he received the Hurley Award. He has also received a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and his work appears in Hobart, Salamander, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore.

 Paul R. Davis lives in central New York State with his wife, parrots and cats Now retired, he enjoys operating model trains, philately, gardening, and preparing meals with his wife. His work has been published in Latitudes, Comstock Review, Comrades, Hot Metal Press, Georgian Blue Poetry Anthology, The Externalist, Centrifugal Eye, and others. He believes in a simple poetic philosophy: to wit, the joy of expression, the necessity of communication.

 Lisa DeSiro was among the featured poets of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project in 2013. Her poems have appeared in Commonthought Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, and Poetpourri (now The Comstock Review), and have been used as texts for acclaimed musical compositions. In addition to her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, she has degrees in music and is an accomplished classical pianist. She is also Editorial & Production Assistant for C.P.E. Bach: The Complete Works.

 Roger Desy For careers I taught literature and creative writing and edited technical manuals. My plan was to write. The past few years I've come back to short lyrics, where I began and continue to find myself. Poems are in Cider Press Review, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, The Pinch, Poet Lore, and other journals. Early mornings it's only the poem.

 Catherine Dierker studied English at George Washington University in Washington, DC and went on to earn a Master's Degree in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College Dublin in Dublin, Ireland. Her master's thesis was titled: "Joyce, Kierkegaard and Community." Catherine lives and writes in Chicago, IL. She is currently applying for admission to law school.

 William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Atlanta Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Worcester Review, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge.

 R. G. Evans's poems, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as Rattle, The Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Weird Tales. His original music, including the song, "The Crows of Paterson," was featured in the 2012 documentary film All That Lies Between Us. His first book of poetry, Overtipping the Ferryman, will be published in 2014 by Kelsay Books.

 Born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, Mike Fleming set out on a long, winding path: undergraduate work at Princeton, teaching English in refugee camps in Thailand, a graduate degree from Oxford, teaching high-school mathematics in Swaziland, work as a carpenter, hospice volunteer, and college composition teacher in California, living as a writer and editor in New York, New Hampshire, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. You can see more of Fleming's work at www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws

 John Glowney has practiced commercial litigation with a large Pacific Northwest law firm, Stoel Rives LLP, for over 30 years. He is a past winner of several Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan, a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest's Richard Hugo Prize, and the Poetry Society of America's Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. He's heard all the lawyer jokes and has repeated most of them. He lives in Seattle.

 Originally from Kansas, Anne Graue lives, writes, and teaches online from her home in New York's Hudson Valley. Her poems have appeared in Paradigm, Compass Rose, Sixfold Journal (May, 2013), and The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly. She was a finalist for the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award for 2013. She is a reviewer for NewPages.com.

 Henry Graziano Unless one would count a single effort my freshman year in college many decades ago, I am unpublished. I have spent most my years as a high school teacher, business owner, and traveler on the edges of Midwestern society. I am writing now after those many years of merely reading the work of others.

 Stephanie L. Harper resides with her husband and two children in the Portland, OR, metro area, where she pursues (among countless other interests) the following avocations: Home Schooling Parent; Poet and Essayist; 2-D Visual Artist; Soccer Player; and Promoter (together, with like-minded others) of social justice and of fostering the advancement and welfare of our collective human psyche. Stephanie aspires to become a positive literary voice in the global community.

 Karen Hoy lives in Bradford-on-Avon in England and has a Creative Writing Diploma from Bristol University. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Another Country: Haiku Poetry from Wales (Gomer) and My Mother Threw Knives (Second Light Publications). Karen works as a Development Producer in international TV documentaries. She also helps at With Words, co-designing writing courses. For each "difficult" poem, Karen aims to write at least one joyful one.

 Philip Jackey, a Midwest poet, was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. His work is heavily influenced by human trial and tribulations, as he strives to portray realism in everyday life. He currently resides in Elkhart, Indiana, with wife Stephanie, two boys, and a brand new beautiful baby girl. His work has appeared in journals such as Torrid Literature, The Write Place at the Write Time, Sundog Lit, and Agave Magazine.

 Christopher Jelley was born in Welwyn Garden City, England. Emigrating to Atlanta in 1968, he studied journalism at Georgia State University. Jelley has written scripts for instructional and travel videos, and commercials. His work most recently appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia.

 Mike Lythgoe retired as an Air Force Officer before earning an MFA from Bennington College. He has lived and worked in Washington, DC, Syracuse, NY, Miami, Key West, Izmir, Turkey, Madrid, Spain, and London, UK. His collection, Holy Week, is available as an e-book; his chapbook, Brass, won the Kinloch Rivers contest in 2006. Recent credits include Windhover, Santa Fe Review, Cairn: St. Andrews Review, Blue Streak, Petigru Review, Innissfree, Pea River, Christianity & Literature, and Sixfold. He lives in Aiken, SC.

 Rande Mack I live in Manhattan, Montana. I weatherize low-income housing for a non profit. I write poetry to keep the lights on inside my head. Occasionally a poem or two flicker in a small publication somewhere. "wild life" is a sample of even more wild life.

 Alysse Kathleen McCanna grew up in Wisconsin and studied Art History at Smith College. After graduation she moved to sunny Colorado and resides between the mountains and the plains. Alysse works for Colorado State University in Pueblo and is an MFA candidate at Bennington College.

 Michal Mechlovitz is a Brooklyn-based classical singer. A graduate of the Boston Conservatory, Michal served as Editor and President of the Boston Conservatory's literary publication, The Garden. She has returned to her native Brooklyn to further her singing and writing pursuits. She loves sundresses and iced coffee.

 Peter Nash has been practicing medicine for forty years in Northern California. He writes most mornings, occasionally helps his wife in the garden, boards two old mares, and wanders along the Mattole River with his dog Quigley. He has been published in numerous journals and anthologies; his chapbook Tracks won the 2007 Hot Metal Press chapbook contest and his book, Coyote Bush: Poems From The Lost Coast, was the winner of the 2012 Off the Grid Poetry Prize.

 Andrea Jurjevic O'Rourke's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Harpur Palate, The Rag, Barrelhouse, Raleigh Review, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere. She is the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize Winner. A native of Croatia, she lives in Atlanta now, where she translates, paints (oils on cotton paper and acrylics on canvas) and attends the MFA program at Georgia State University.

 Jennifer Popoli I grew up in Canberra and during adolescence wrote a lot of poetry, prose and unfinished novels and participated in the local writers community. At age seventeen, I met my husband and moved to Sydney. I gave birth to my first son at age eighteen and went on to have five children, then recommenced my degree in Spanish and Italian. Recently, my computer broke; I lost everything. This inspired me to begin writing prolifically again.

 Susan Marie Powers I live in the Connecticut woods with my husband, son, cat, dog, and ten chickens. I have a doctorate in psychology and teach psychology at Woodstock Academy in northeastern Connecticut where my students make me smile every day. As for writing, I have loved writing since I was a small child. I have a chapbook titled Break the Spell, and I have also published some nonfiction articles in psychology journals.

 Frederick L. Shiels, PhD, has taught at Mercy College since 1977. He has been an occasional poet for forty years and has written and published poetry in the Hudson River Anthology, Wicker's Creek, and The New Verse News. He teaches diplomacy, research, and self-presentation in classes on International Organizations, International Relations, American Foreign Policy and US history and politics.

 A native of North Dakota, Richard Sime moved to New York City in 1966 to work on a doctorate degree but soon drifted into publishing. He returned to school later, earning an MFA in fiction writing in 1994. Eventually he turned his attention to poetry, and his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Barrow Street, Salamander, American Arts Quarterly, Provincetown Arts, and Passager. He lives in the Bronx, NY.

 A graduate of the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program, David Sloan teaches in Maine's only Waldorf high school. He is the author of two books on teaching. His debut poetry collection, The Irresistible In-Between, was published by Deerbrook Editions in 2013. His poetry has appeared in The Broome Review, The Café Review, Innisfree, The Naugatuck River Review, Poetry Quarterly and Passager, among others. He received the 2012 Betsy Sholl and Maine Literary awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 Katherine Smith's poems and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, among them Mezzo Cammin, Unsplendid, Measure, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Ploughshares, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage. Her first book, Argument by Design (Washington Writers' Publishing House), appeared in 2003. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

 A psychic on the Long Island Railroad once told Alexandra Smyth she was "going to be like Sylvia Plath, but you know, without the whole suicide thing." She will earn her MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York in February 2014. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, PoetsArtists, and District Lines, among others. She is the 2013 recipient of the Jerome Lowell Dejur award in poetry.

 Gary Sokolow has an aging MFA (Brooklyn College) and has been published in Blood Lotus Journal, Up the Staircase, and Chantarelle's Notebook.

 John Wentworth received his MFA from the University of Michigan in 1991. That was a long time ago. Look for his upcoming novel in a box in an attic near you.
